“I might have been a physicist,” wrote Salman Rushdie, adding that he was instead influenced by an idol and went for history and French. “This is an example of non-causal life-changing; and so I can now examine a different path. And the scientist who wrote to me about quantum theory in “Grimus,” and about the Dancing Wu Li masters, showed me that such matters have been my concern from the very start.”
The note is part of an exhibit at Woodruff Library, to celebrate the opening of the Rushdie papers. His eclectic art, life and imagination make Rushdie a true author of our times, spanning continents, cultures and disciplines in an increasingly complex world. It also makes him an ideal test case for how to curate hybrid collections of artifacts – spanning print, physical and virtual realms.
“The imprint of the writer’s personality lies within his computer,” says software engineer Peter Hornsby, who extracted data from Rushdie’s hard drives.
Using Rushdie’s works, Emory’s Manuscript, Artifacts and Rare Books Library is leading the nascent field of archiving “born-digital” materials. Watch a video of the pioneers of "digital archeology" discussing some of the technical challenges:
Emory Magazine describes the interactive approach of the project:
“Soon, you will be able to peruse the e-mail correspondence between Distinguished Writer-in-Residence Salman Rushdie and U2’s Bono. Or quick-search how many times the words ‘tequila’ and ‘rock goddess’ appear in the first draft of Rushdie’s novel ‘The Ground Beneath Her Feet.’
“You even will be able to log on to a laptop as Sir Rushdie himself, tinkering with a sentence, adding an embellishment, or marking a particular spot of interest in a manuscript.”
While president, Ronald Reagan famously told a story about how he had been at a German concentration camp shortly after the Nazi defeat in World War II, and had helped to make films of the liberation of that camp. He told this story in depth, and more than once. The truth was, however, that although Reagan made training films for the armed forces, he spent the entire war in the United States.
So was Reagan telling a bold-faced lie? Was it an early sign of dementia? Or was he simply telling the truth as he remembered it?
Author Salman Rushdie recalled his own experience of reinventing his past during a recent public conversation at Emory, where he is a writer-in-residence.
“Ever since I was writing ‘Midnight’s Children,’ I’ve gotten very interested in the divergence between memory and the record,” Rushdie said.
As he was writing the novel, which drew from biographical details of his childhood in Bombay, he thought of the panicked atmosphere created by a border dispute between India and China. Rushdie vividly recalled hearing his parents discuss their fears of a Chinese empire replacing the British one as Chinese troops advanced over the Himalayas.
When Rushdie told his mother about it, she replied, “Don’t be stupid, you weren’t here. You were in boarding school in England.”
He checked the dates and realized that his mother was right. “All of this was a memory that I had constructed out of what people had told me,” Rushdie said. “My memory had just put me into the scene, even though the facts insisted that I was actually in England. Even today, knowing that I wasn’t there, my memory tells me that I was. I became very interested in that, in the way that memory rebuilds our lives for us in such a way that even when we are shown categorically that the memory is false, we actually believe the memory more than we believe the facts.”
No one can predict where the conversation will go when novelist Salman Rushdie talks about the creative process with Seana Coulson, a cognitive scientist who studies language with multiple meanings. But when two bright minds come together to explore a deep mystery from entirely different angles, you can expect sparks.
“Metaphors and the Mind” is a day-long symposium at Emory on Thursday, March 8, bringing together writers and neuroscientists to exchange their thoughts on language, creativity and the brain.
“We hope that everyone, both the scientists and the writers, will leave the symposium with new ideas about experiments they’d like to try,” says Laura Otis, an Emory professor of English, who organized the symposium with Krish Sathian, a neurologist at Emory's School of Medicine. “We each have different kinds of knowledge, and we want to see how combining them can lead to new ways of looking at things.”
The event grew out of a graduate seminar, “Images, Metaphors and the Brain,” that Otis teaches with Sathian. Students from neuroscience, psychology anthropology, religion, English and comparative literature are enrolled.
“We have amazing conversations,” says Otis, who researches how scientific and literary thinking coincide and foster each other’s growth.
The seminar explores everything from Sathian’s research on how the brain puts together visual imagery and touch sensations to English professor Patricia Cahill’s work on the theater and the sense of touch in early modern England.
Bringing together students from a range of specialties gives them glimpses of how different minds work. “Occasionally someone will use just one word to express a complex thought, and then just assume that everyone else gets their meaning, but often that isn’t the case,” Otis says.
Otis bridges the complexities of science and the humanities more easily than most. She was part way through a PhD in neuroscience when she realized that she didn’t want to be a scientist. “I loved studying how something binds to a cell, and a cell opens and things start pouring in or out,” she recalls. “I’m fascinated by the biology underlying memory, identity and communication.”
She could function okay in a lab environment, and was good at many of the technical tasks, but she didn’t enjoy the collaborative atmosphere. “It just didn’t feel right. I’m a loner, I work best on my own,” she says.
Otis had always loved language. “I was trying to beat down my passion,” she says, “because I thought that studying literature was selfish, and wouldn’t help humanity the way that science can.”
She eventually reached a breaking point, becoming so unhappy that she couldn’t continue on the path to neuroscience. Then she found her niche in a PhD program in comparative literature at Cornell. Otis’ interests and passions combined to put her at the vanguard of a growing movement to bring together the experiences of artists and the findings of neuroscience.
“You can learn things from science, and you can learn things from storytelling and other forms of art. Now we are putting the two together,” Otis says. “It’s a fertile field of new ideas about the mind.”
“Images, Metaphors and the Brain” is the name of one of the many graduate seminars inspired and supported by the Emory Center for Mind, Brain and Culture (CMBC). The seminar was co-taught by Laura Otis, a professor of English who has studied neuroscience, and Krish Sathian, a neurologist who loves literature and the humanities.
The course culminated in a day-long symposium, Metaphors and the Mind, that paired top writers, including Salman Rushdie, with leading neuroscientists, “to talk about the possibilities of language and creativity together,” Otis says.
The CMBC, she adds, is sparking “all kinds of friendships and teaching exchanges between departments that would otherwise be far apart.”
Emory's Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library (MARBL) contains a lot more than just old papers and books. For example, some unidentified animal tusks and teeth from the Congo (above). You can explore some of the unusual artifacts in the library through its blog, The Extraordinary World of MARBL.
Here's a post by Alyssa Stalsberg Canelli, a MARBL research services assistant and PhD candidate in English, about the Congo artifacts:
If you are researching the papers of Methodist minister and missionary Thomas Ellis Reeve, Sr. and his wife, Etha Mills Reeve,
you might be a little surprised by the contents of Box 22. The Reeves
were assigned to the Methodist Episcopal Congo Mission (South) at
Wembo-Nyama, Tunda and Minga (1921-1929). Thomas Reeve wrote a book, In Wembo-Nyama's Land,
detailing his experiences in the Congo—a book which was quite critical
of the colonial Belgian government. When the Reeves returned to the
United States, they also brought back artifacts which included a set of
tusks, snake skins and animal teeth. Pictured here are the tusks and
three of the largest teeth, all unidentified. At MARBL, we are
librarians, archivists and historians, not biologists—so if you have any
ideas or tips about the identification of these items, please let us
know!
“I might have been a physicist,” wrote Salman Rushdie, adding that he was instead influenced by an idol and went for history and French. “This is an example of non-causal life-changing; and so I can now examine a different path. And the scientist who wrote to me about quantum theory in “Grimus,” and about the Dancing Wu Li masters, showed me that such matters have been my concern from the very start.”
