"For until we are ended, "never" may not be truly said."
-George Saunders
The guest area of the lab where I work many of my days (when I'm not doing microscope testing).
The old drone, before it was taken apart for the new drone.
The newer drone.
I've been coding, as usual. In the past week, I've both continued to document and enhance the operation/queue structure of my application, working primarily now on data interfacing between different operations in a queue. While this work is not necessarily essential for the overall application to succeed right now, it will be essential to preserve the extensibility of the application later on, by providing a way to easily define and implement new functionality.
In the past, I've moved back and forth between the actual lab floor and a little alcove reserved for guests, but now I'm almost exclusively operating from the guest area since I have a version of the code on my laptop thanks to git, which makes cross platform testing really easy. I'm also in the middle of creating functionality for autogenerating data files with relevant data for graduate students. I'll hopefully get to autogenerating graphs as well, but after I complete the autogenerated data files, I'm ensuring that the live streaming functionality works and is fast enough. I end my work at a third space on the 26th, so I have 22 days to do a lot of work. If for some reason I should need to continue coming in, I only have a valid ID until May 31st, so that leaves me with a 5 day margin.
While the successful completion of the application is obviously not tied to the success of my third space experience, it is most certainly tied to my honor as a programmer.
Unfortunately, I will admit that my mind has been less focused on my third space and much more on tying up all of the loose college odds and ends before the May 1st deadline, as well as on upcoming AP exams. Now that both items have passed, I am free to get back to more engaging tasks.
Although not for WISE research, I recently read Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, which centers around the interactions of Abraham Lincoln's deceased son and Lincoln himself in the so called “bardo”. The “bardo” is a purgatory like area between life and death, where souls go before ultimately being pushed into either heaven or hell. The bardo as Saunders depicts it is less of a well demarcated staging area, and much more of an island of misfit toys, full of lost souls desperate to prolong their contact with the earthly, or to avoid judgement, or both. Spoilers are going to follow, so if you do not want the book ruined, do not read on.
I find Lincoln in the Bardo an incredibly timely book, in that I’m in a bardo of sorts (I’ll elaborate on that point later). I would recommend that every senior be given the opportunity to read it. The overarching theme seems to be one of the inevitability of transition, no matter the opposition to it. Among the most important protagonists is, unsurprisingly, Willie Lincoln. Much more shocking, however, is that despite being at the center of everything, Abraham Lincoln isn’t so much of a character as he is a dramatic foil for everyone around him, and a mechanism for moving the story along. I would go so far as to argue that honest Abe is the least intriguing character in the whole book. I think Saunders intended the Reverend Everly Thomas (a puritan minister), Roger Bevins III(a gay lover killed amidst emotional distress), and Hans Vollman(a printer distraught over his wife) to be the primary characters alongside young Willie.
This is not to say that Saunders doesn’t constantly parade a steady stream of intriguing minor characters each with distinct stories and follies by the reader, as he does, and does so quite adeptly. At times, it feels like even the minor characters deserve their own full length novels or at least short stories. I have no doubt that the author’s ability to effectively construct so many intriguing characters that fade in and out of the novel like wisps of smoke is due to his previous experience having to construct characters in small time spans during short stories.
Each minor character is crafted to elicit a certain unique emotional response from the reader, and each character is very specific in their flaw. The following excerpts illustrate my point:
“The boundaries of the world seemed vast. I would visit Rome, Paris, Constantinople. Underground cafes presented in my mind where, crushed against wet walls, a (handsome, generous) friend and I sat discussing—many things….Well, as is often the case, my hopes were…not realized. My husband was not handsome and not generous. He was a bore. Was not rough with me but neither was he tender….He did not seem to see me, but only endeavored to possess me….I had been that beautiful child in white, you see, Constantinople, Paris, and Rome in her heart, who had not known, at that time, that she was of “an inferior species”, a “mere” woman….Then the children came…Three marvelous girls. In those girls I found my Rome, my Paris, my Constantinople. He has no interest in them at all, except that he likes to use them to prop himself up in public”(77).
jane ellis
“I have one thousand three hundred dollars in the First Bank…But [I] am a widow. What seems like abundance is in fact scarcity. I have over four hundred twigs and nearly sixty pebbles of various sizes. I have two dead-bird parts, dirt motes too numerous to count. Before retiring I count my dead-bird parts, twigs, pebbles, and motes, rending each with my teeth to ensure all are real. Upon waking I often find myself short several items. Proving the presence of thieves and justifying those tendencies for which many here judge me harshly. But they are not old woman, menaced by frailty, surrounded by enemies, the tide going only out, out, out….”(81).
mrs. abigail blass
In Jane Ellis’s case, she cannot leave the bardo because she cares too much about what will happen to the daughters so precious to her under only the supervision of her boring husband. Mrs. Abigail Blass is greedy with her possessions because she is paranoid about being able to live as a widow, so she hoards whatever she can find. Saunders also inserts characters that provide clear comic relief, like Elson Farwell, who speaks in language so cryptic that no one can understand him, or the Baron couple, whose language is so closely associated with the use of expletives that it becomes similarly hard to understand what they are saying. Even in these cases however, these minor characters have their own subplots. I would love to continue in my character descriptions because every character is so fascinating, but I’m a bit short on time.
The constant chorus of voices leaves the reader feeling neurotic, but also allows Saunders to manipulate the emotions of his readers like puppets on a string. While reading Lincoln in the Bardo, I often felt less like I was reading the book, and more like the book was reading me.
The true irony, and the real meat of the book is the duality between Mr. Lincoln’s reality and the Bardo. Those in the Bardo generally believe that they are just “sick”(in fact coffins are not called coffins, they are called “sick boxes”), and that there is a slight chance they might be able to return to life. They stubbornly cling to their past lives, even while they slowly decline into nothingness in the bardo, gradually mutating. Souls that move on towards the afterlife are considered “weak”, they were persuaded by otherworldly spirits to engage in the “matterlightblooming phenomenon” a large explosion that occurs every time a soul goes towards heaven or hell. Mr. Lincoln also wishes that his son will return to him, and often visits his son’s coffin, where Willie observes him from the bardo and becomes a veritable celebrity among other bardo folk for having a parent that cares so much. But the duality consists in the fact that while both the real world and the bardo are seeking closure, neither can seemingly get it, and both want what the others hate. Mr. Lincoln vows to never be happy again because he cannot stomach the thought of being merry without willie, and willie wants to be with his father again.
The entire plot arc of Lincoln in the Bardo is just about acceptance. It’s about accepting what you cannot change, making peace with your past, what you never were able to do. Lincoln in the Bardo presented a simple message to me in a very elaborate novel. What makes Lincoln in the Bardo a masterpiece in my opinion is that everything about the book is crafted in order to make the reader accept its acceptance message. Characters are whisked in and out of the novel like brief candles, and subplots are left unfinished. Passage to the afterlife is marked by sound like cannon fire. There is a literal heartbeat to the book, booms proclaiming “here I am, I’ve made peace with my fate, and you should too”. It constitutes masterful subliminal messaging. On an even more meta level, these “heartbeats” slowly quicken throughout the book, almost like someone dying from a heart attack, until they end. At that point, death has quite literally been reached for the main characters.
The other interesting thing is that while Lincoln in the Bardo is about putting everything in its rightful place, it’s also flush with vitality. By parading an intriguing folly-filled cast of characters by, Saunders is looking his readers right in the eye and saying “Which of these stories of folly will yours most closely resemble?” The novel ends with Lincoln riding forward out of the cemetery in the night, marking a thrust forward back towards living his normal life, and the reader theirs.
Like I said, I’m in a bit of a bardo right now. High school is ending, and with the passage of AP exams, the jig is almost fully up. In that sense, my entire senior year has been very closely tied to the plot arc of Lincoln in the Bardo, clawing desperately for more time with my dreams I had for high school that are now, never to be. It’s about acceptance. You can’t go back. You’ve got to make peace. I thought I would be able to get all the checkboxes filled, but time passes, and I can’t (at least not in the time frames I set). I’m okay with how my high school story turned out though, and especially heartened by what the ending is looking like so far.
I guess that’s the thing. As soon as you stop worrying about the things you never were, and what you never accomplished, you can start focusing on who you actually want to be. I'm not going to finish an automated landing sequence this year, and I won't finish programming the flight controller either. But that's okay, I will finish some other cool things, like a machine learning course and hopefully a flyable drone.
At the beginning of this journal, I mentioned that I didn’t really have a work/life balance, that the concept as a whole was largely not present in my day to day to life. Well, I’ve found my balance now. I’ve sorted each element of my life into its proper place. I have my work, and I have my friends, and my projects, and my time. I've learned how to stop apologizing to my past self about what I wasn’t able to do on projects, and just work on them today. I’m focused on ensuring my own happiness through my work, but also, importantly, distancing my happiness from the work at the same time. The balance is all there now. I’ve known all along, but refused to accept it. I’m leaving the bardo.
Footnotes:
While I was reading Lincoln in the Bardo, I couldn’t help but draw parallels to When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. Both are deeply haunting stories, told from the point of view of those coming to grips with death. Both are incredible books.