The Best Australian Science Writing 2013 (14 page)

Art

Past lives

Unique places

Heart dissection

Ian Gibbins

1. Cardiac Output

Circularity: at least a working definition,

approximating squared radii, right angles

cubed, beveled off, transformed to flows,

pulsing like the seasons, like the muscles

of sea-birds migrating the length of the earth.

Meanwhile, our unreefed, unerased futures,

gather round architectural drawings, replete

with promises of a new roof over our heads,

a view away from fire-scarred hills towards

the coastal verge, towards each change in

pressure, each not-quite-timely reminder,

that enlivens our inexplicably recurrent past.

2. Conducting System

Through reciprocating harmonic series,

I gladly give to you:

bundles of hopeful predilection,

woven cords of neighbourliness,

rows of intercalated desire,

the trigger-happy rush of escape,

bands of enthusiastic light and dark,

a perfect cup of tea,

your waiting next of kin.

3. Septum

On the other side,

there is a tangible sense of barely sullied air.

On the other side,

the observable spectrum shifts to markedly longer wavelengths.

On the other side,

expectation matches the potential for renewal.

On the other side,

strange attractors let loose magnificent unrehearsed adventure.

4. Venous Return

We travelled to Jupiter, circled

Galileo's moons (Io and Europa,

Ganymede, Callisto) swirling,

roiling, like the mighty Red Spot,

three thousand million feet below.

We navigated vast oceans, tacked

from meridian to meridian. Boldly

indifferent to seductive doldrums or

looming sub-equatorial storms, we

snared luscious, fat-lipped, coral trout.

We crossed the Great Sandy Desert,

the Gobi, the Sahara, dug for water,

for evidence, a lasting trace, for ancestors,

lobe-finned, ephemeral, and beside them,

settled under arid counter-paned skies.

Now we relax around campfires,

embers cool, ironwood smoking

ghosts, exchanging natural histories,

as seas fall calm and planets sink

beneath far-off indigo mountains.

Can we delineate the conditions

that bring us here? Can we hope to

calibrate our co-ordinates, to specify

the sum of our explorations, the grand

total of our arrivals, our departures?

Behind us, again, the subtle force

to move on, just a feint, just a gentle

nudge in the back. So we do, so we do,

until once more beyond our zenith,

we track the tumbling moons of Jupiter.

Palpitations

Matters cosmic

Reaching one thousand

Rachel Robertson

I have often admired the mystical way of Pythagoras, and the secret magic of numbers. – Sir Thomas Browne

Although my mother was a gifted and successful mathematician, it never crossed my mind that I would follow in her footsteps. From an early age, I had a clear sense that I was in some way fundamentally different from both of my parents and that mathematical ability was one of the key markers of this difference. As a child I felt as though I was outside an invisibly marked space and was without knowledge of the key that would permit me to enter it. I felt that at least two of my siblings had the ability to slip in and out of this place, because at times they seemed to understand what my parents meant. Of course, I understood the words my parents spoke, but it seemed that the unspoken meanings were lost on me. As I became older and more critical, I began to realise that my parents weren't ‘ordinary'. My difference from them became a matter of being ordinary, not odd. Right into my twenties, I naïvely held on to this dichotomy of odd versus ordinary, mathematical versus non-mathematical, and (perhaps without really realising it) intelligent (them) versus stupid (me).
Even after I moved on from this simplistic view, mathematics still functioned as the symbol of my difference from my parents.

And then I had Ben.

* * * * *

‘You need to deal with his stimming now, before it gets worse.' The psychologist was young and definite.

I wanted to say: don't tell me what to do. Instead, I said, ‘We don't use the terms “stimming” or “obsession”. We think of numbers as a strong interest of Ben's.'

‘Yes, of course,' she said. ‘But would you say that Ben's
interest
in numbers is preventing him being interested in other things, in people, in learning other games and so on?'

‘He's not interested in other things, no.'

‘So …' I could hear a slight triumph in her tone and felt sure she didn't like me much. ‘Let's talk about how we can reduce the number obs– interest.'

This was when she explained our options: extinguishment, quarantine or integration. It didn't seem to strike her that the words themselves made this seem like a punishment. The choices boiled down to: forbid Ben access to numbers (how, I wondered?); limit his access; or turn his interest into something more ‘functional'. The thing was that I agreed with her, but I couldn't bear to remove from Ben his lifeblood, the only meaningful thing in his world.

‘But numbers aren't meaningful, are they?' she said.

* * * * *

Overheard, one sister talking to another:

‘I know, I do exactly the same. I count the steps of every stairway; I count every slice I make when I cut up a banana; I always
notice car number plates and bus numbers. I've always done it.'

* * * * *

One of our delights as children was to play with five boxes of buttons my mother kept in her sewing cupboard. They were mostly old chocolate boxes made of tin with pictures of fluffy cats and idealised dogs on them. Each one was full of buttons that we could tip onto the floor. The five boxes were graduated by size, which corresponded to the size of the buttons inside. The largest box contained the largest buttons and so on. I liked the smallest, a white cardboard box with flowers on it that still smelt faintly of something sweet and slightly exotic – vanilla perhaps. In this box there was a cute ladybird button, a brass squirrel and several transparent buttons that were curled up into cylinders like people did with their tongues for fun. These were my favourites. I loved the feel of the buttons running through my fingers when I tipped them from hand to hand or placed them inside their square white home.

It was a surprise to see the button boxes again one day when Ben and I visited my mother. I hadn't realised she had kept them.

‘Children love buttons,' said my mother. She was right; even Ben got interested in them. He was four years old at the time and we were struggling to find anything that would amuse him. He certainly didn't play like other children. But the buttons were perfect for him, because he could lay them out on the rug, grouping them by size or colour and matching any that looked the same. He understood the size distinctions, too. He even made my mother label each box with a number, so that the largest buttons were in box one and the smallest in box five. Strangely, he too liked the transparent tongue-curl buttons best.

I remember that visit to my mother well, because after Ben had finished with the buttons, my mother found several other
activities for him: smelling each of her perfume bottles, counting and reading the names on her long row of herb and spice jars, placing a single soft toy on each of her wooden steps (this made me nervous because of the gaps between each step and Ben's soft, floppy body) and finally banging away on the piano and learning the name of each note. As my mother and I sat drinking tea to the sound of the piano-bashing, we were both in awe, I of my mother's ability to amuse Ben and she of Ben's intelligence and memory.

‘He can read all those spice jars,' she said. ‘He even remembered “cardamom” and words like that. Has he seen those at home?'

‘Ah, no.' The idea of me managing to cook with spices at that stage of my life was laughable.

‘He understands size and categories with the buttons. And he seems quite musical.'

‘Maybe.'

Personally I didn't think that hitting random keys of the piano constituted musicality but I guessed that my mother – like me – was still coming to terms with the idea of Ben being autistic. She wanted to focus on his abilities, not his disabilities.

Then my mother said, ‘You know, Rachel, you can't really call Ben handicapped. He just has a very particular genetic inheritance.'

* * * * *

When my parents talked about mathematics they often stood in the kitchen. Or rather, my mother moved around preparing dinner, and my father bounced up and down on a small square of floor in front of the most useful cupboard. As they talked about quadratic equations or topological vector spaces, my mother would gently push my father to one side so that she
could reach inside the cupboard, and after she had closed the cupboard, he would hop back in front of it. If he was only mildly excited or interested, he would just do his hop, balancing first on his right foot and then moving the left beside it for a quickstep before moving back to the left again. If the conversation was going well, my father would occasionally tap his forehead with the back of his right hand. When things heated up, he would add a left-handed slap to the back of his head just before the right hand hit the forehead, creating a kind of chain reaction. As the dinner neared preparation, there would be a flurry of activity in that kitchen, my mother stirring pots and lifting things out of the oven (she was feeding seven every night), and my father bouncing and hopping, slapping and tapping. Just when the conversation and the dinner were reaching a head, my mother would dash out into the passage and ring an old cow's bell she'd picked up in Switzerland, and one of us kids would dart into the kitchen, dodging wordlessly between my parents to collect the cutlery to set the dining-room table. A few minutes later, the bell would go again, signalling time to eat and a temporary end to the mathematical dialogue.

* * * * *

There is a game that some parents of autistic children play, where they try to determine from which side of the family the autism has come. This family blame game is an alternative to the vaccination, birth-trauma or toxic-chemical blame routines. One mother I met told me that she felt guilty because the autism must have come from her family; she had a cousin with autism and her husband didn't know of any autistic people in his family.

‘But does it matter? I mean, do you need to know, even if you could?' I asked her.

‘I feel bad,' she said. ‘If it wasn't for me, my husband could
have had a normal child.'

Robert and I have never played this game. I didn't see the need to find or create a ‘reason' for Ben being who he is. Nonetheless, it's hard to escape noticing aspects of my own family's behaviour that verges on the autistic spectrum. In one of the first books about autism I read – a book full of depressing statistics and unwelcome generalisations – I saw the sentence: ‘The presence of odd family members … as well as very mathematically bright but socially awkward relatives, is more frequent in families with an autistic child.' I also distinctly remember reading and telling Robert that of all parental occupations, the coupling with the statistically highest likelihood of having a child or grandchild with autism is that of two mathematicians. I remember reading this – even the shape of the print on the page – but now I can't find the reference anywhere. Did I make it up? Did I need a reason for Ben's autism, after all? Even if I did make this up, I know now that it is roughly accurate, because research has shown that mathematicians have a higher rate of autistic-spectrum conditions than the general population, and that the parents and grandparents of children with autistic spectrum conditions are twice as likely to work as scientists, mathematicians and engineers than the parents or grandparents of non-autistic children.