When the light seems more beautiful than usual I remember there is such a thing as photography and I have a camera. I dig it out. The crevices in its body are still white with playa dust from Black Rock City years ago. A sock hangs off the lens. The lens cap is probably still out there somewhere in the fields surrounding Spenser Abbey, where I dropped it last November, walking back and forth during my last retreat. These trips to the desert and the monastery were the last times I took pictures with my good camera, and I like the snapshot of myself the camera object reflects, the idea of being a person who has been to these places, tried to capture them, though there were long intervals of nonmovement in between. The battery is dead. The light is changing.

When I was a child and I was upset at my family and wanted to punish them, or when my family was upset at me and I wanted to punish myself, I sometimes resolved that from this moment forward I would not speak to them, unless I was asked a direct question. I tried this many times and found it incredibly hard to do, a great test of my endurance worse than turning the air conditioner in my room on as low as it could go even though it was winter, or using rusty nails to build an obstacle course under my swingset. I don’t think anyone ever even noticed I wasn’t talking; I couldn’t hold out long enough. It was sometime in my teens that I firmly decided silence was the best way to win an argument, that being the person most able to walk away was the real secret to maintaining the upper hand, and I started keeping my ability to vanish like a trump card in my back pocket at all times. The older I’ve gotten, the easier it’s become to cease communication for long periods, not to say anything even to the people I’m closest to or most want to be close to, sometimes not to answer even when a direct question is asked. When silence becomes a habit, it is hard to stop, I feel gagged, and even though the person who put the gag on was me, I forget how to take it off, and because I do not remember, I assume that someone else, everyone else, must be holding it tightly in place.

My past lovers have inhabited entire brands of drugstore shampoo. When I smell Pantene or Head and Shoulders on a stranger, it’s like rubbing the genie out of a lamp.

I try to summon up some thoughts of my own and it seems that everything in my mind is a recollection of something you said to me in a conversation in which I said little, but I was the one you were talking to, so does that mean that what you said is partly mine, that I am allowed to think it now as my own thought, and how do I know that what I heard was what you actually said, that the words in your head when you were speaking were even the same as the ones in mine now, that I attribute to you, that I hear your voice saying to me in a voice that sounds something like my own? Who owns the thoughts and who does the allowing? I suspect it is neither of us, but can you feel it, does it tickle when I think with your mind?

It is impossible to exist in isolation. Nothing exists in isolation. Nothing is itself only. What I perceive as separateness is yearning for connection, yearning for connection is not the same thing as disconnection. This nausea is my body telling me that what I think is going on does not match up with what is going on. This nausea is my body telling me to stop walking around in a nightmare. Wanting to be connected is the very thing that saves me, even if it feels like I am living in a cold, lonely, hell. Being connected does not depend on doing anything. I could stop speaking for the rest of my life and that would not change the fact that I cannot exist alone. I cannot exist alone. It is not possible. That lonely object is not, cannot be, me.

Stories have characters because people are can live other lives, enhabit other bodies, learn through touch, it helps the words become invisible when the reader can move around in a body, in a space. I sometimes think I have no imagination, but the profound experiences I have had inside literature prove that this is false. I have no trouble submitting to a story entirely, and though I may at times hesitate to create narrative “on purpose” because the incompleteness of what I describe bothers me, I still create stories without trying, stories so completely immersing that I cannot remember what the world was like before I entered them, I cannot picture any space outside them, and everything around me that does not fit the plot is edited out before I see it.

The time is going by and there are so many things I haven’t said yet and most of them start with I love you and end with having an answer, not pre-prepared and poetic and abstract, but concrete and specific to that moment, when you reply, as you always do, “what does that mean?” It will mean something and you will finally understand.

I want to be seen. I am terrified of being seen. I want to be seen. I am terrified of being seen. I want to be seen. I am terrified of being seen. I want to see. I want to see. I want to see. I am terrified to see. I am terrified. I want. To see. See. See. See.

From Enrico’s translation of Wittgenstein’s diary, August 6th 1916:

Only he who does not live in time but in the present is happy.
For the life in the present there is no death.
Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact of the world.
If by eternity one does not understand infinite duration but timelessness, then one can say that he lives eternally who lives in the present.

“‘People are assholes,’ said Haley Joel Osment. ‘You’re going to be angry at me. I think obese people are assholes. They take up more room. Taking up room is stupid. Eating more. People should eat less. And not take up room. And always do what they say. I can’t comprehend how a person can be late.’

‘I’m not angry at you. I will never be angry at you. I’m only angry at myself,’ [said Dakota Fanning.]

‘I can’t comprehend how people can be late or obese,’ said Haley Joel Osment” (66-7).

“Haley Joel Osment said Dakota Fanning should tell the therapist he was a graduate of New York University. Dakota Fanning said she did and the therapist was impressed and said something nice about New York University. Haley Joel Osment said the only purpose of going to New York University was so Dakota Fanning could now say to her therapist in the presence of her mother that Haley Joel Osment had gone to New York University” (77-8).

– Tao Lin, Richard Yates

* * *

I’m a member of the Rumpus Book Club, which is currently discussing Tao Lin‘s newest novel, Richard Yates. The book, which I have not yet finished, concerns the relationship between 22-year-old writer and NYU alum Haley Joel Osment and 16-year-old high school student Dakota Fanning. Haley meets Dakota online, talks to her on Gmail chat constantly, visits her in New Jersey, has illegal sex with her, and treats her like shit, causing her to spiral into bulimia.

Anyone who knows my history will already know that I have a lot to say about this.

Richard Yates is the third book I’ve read by Tao Lin. I’ve also heard him read in NYC. He’s friends with some of my friends. We’ve published in some of the same places.

When I was 14, in Georgia, in 1997, I met a guy online, who was 19, in Michigan. We talked on ICQ, and then AIM, all the time, for hours and hours every day, and all night long. When I was 15, he came to visit me covertly at sleep-away nerd camp. When I was 16, he came to visit me at home in Georgia, with my parents’ permission. When I was 17, I went to visit him in Michigan, with my parents’ permission. I lost my virginity with him. When I was 18, in 2001, I moved from Georgia to New York City, where I started as a freshman at NYU right before September 11th happened. Tao Lin started at NYU that same semester, I think. This was the same time period when students were killing themselves by jumping from the balconies in Bobst Library all the time, before the protective barriers were installed.

In 2002, prompted by infidelity on my part, I dropped out of NYU and ran away with my online boyfriend. I was 18; he was 23. We hitchhiked all over the country together. We panhandled for food. We panhandled to pay for an abortion when I got pregnant. He hit me. I don’t mean he slapped me; I mean he punched me in the face hard enough to knock me down. We stopped hitchhiking, broke up for a few weeks, got back together, and got an apartment together in Washington, DC. He got a job at Whole Foods. I got a job in a bookstore and then a yoga studio. We became vegetarians. We read the labels on everything we ate, and only ate whole grains and organic things. We were so poor, we hardly ate anything. At 5’10, I weighed 120 lbs.

All this was, as you can probably imagine, a disaster and a mindfuck that took me years to get over. I was literally missing for months and my mother was, understandably, a wreck. The police were involved. I, the missing scholarship girl, was on the top of new NYU president John Sexton’s to-do list.

There were aspects of the dynamic between me and my then-boyfriend that resembled that of the fictional Haley Joel Osment and Dakota Fanning very much. It was a mess. I was very, very naive. But, even so, it was so much, SO much, deeper and more real than the relationship the characters in this book have, and our IM conversations were better-written and more “literary” than theirs, by a HUGE factor. And despite the fact that this particular experience of mine is close to some of the horror stories people tell about why kids shouldn’t be online, I am 100% grateful to have had pretty much unfettered access to the Internet while growing up.

Like Tao Lin, I’m 27. I started using the web as a social medium when I was 11. I started making personal websites when I was 14, which was how the ex in question originally got in contact with me. The benefits of having access to a world outside the reaches of the small, Southern town I grew up in far, far, FAR outweighed the negatives. But, as I have mentioned before, the Internet was a very different world in those days than in 2006, when Richard Yates is set. It was much smaller and felt like a private club in some ways. The people I knew IRL usually didn’t know the first thing about the web.

After we broke up, my ex went on the thruhike the Appalachian Trail, and to marry a very nice, very smart, and insecure girl from South Carolina, whom he met on the Internet. She is younger than I am. They are both vegans. He’s held a series of hipster-y jobs in hipster-y towns (e.g., a bike shop in Portland). He currently works at Whole Foods again, and he and his wife are separated. From what I can tell from his web presence, he is a lot happier and healthier than he was when we were together.

After we broke up, I went on to mend my relationship with my family, and to have a long series of power-imbalanced relationships with men who were, on average, 12.5 years older than I was. When I was 21, I went back to NYU and got a full-time job there with tuition remission benefits. I went to school part-time for five years and graduated summa cum laude with no student debt. I wrote about my hitch-hiking experience a lot, in places like The Sun. I’m applying to Ph.D. programs for next year. After eight years of vegetarianism, I recently started eating poultry again.

On the subject of NYU, it is the most expensive university in the world. The financial aid sucks in comparison with most universities on the same tier. What I would have paid, had I not worked here, even with a large scholarship, was completely ridiculous. I’m so glad I didn’t do it. An NYU education is not worth what it costs, period. I’ve heard it said that NYU, the largest private owner of real estate in NYC, could stop collecting tuition for ten years without feeling it. I believe it.

However, as much as NYU screws its students financially, it treats its employees (unless they are grad student TA’s in certain departments..) very, very well. In addition to my salary, as my employer, NYU gave me a high-quality, free education. And NYU’s retirement plan for employees is so generous (if I contribute 5% of my monthly income, NYU contributes 10%) that, at 27 (unless our economy really never recovers) I’ve already put away enough money toward my retirement that I’ll probably be fine when I’m 65.

(I’m applying for PhD programs for Fall 2011. This is the first draft of what will eventually become my Statement of Purpose. I imagine the final version will have, among other changes, a lot less information about my mom. But I thought you guys might be interested.)

Katharine A. Tillman
Statement of Purpose

I have loved language all my life. My mother is a voracious reader of such high caliber that these days she often complains of being unable to find anything worth reading that she hasn’t already read in an entire public library. I grew up surrounded by books, being read to and reading. I started keeping journals at a very young age. I was publishing my writing on the Internet by the time I was 14 years old and in print magazines by the time I was 18. I wanted to be a writer more than anything.

My mother, the eternal bookworm, discovered somewhat late in life that she also had an interest in and talent for science. The hard sciences satisfied her thirst for concrete and verifiable knowledge about the world in a way literature courses never had. When I was in elementary school, she went back to college for a degree in Biology. By the time I was in middle school, she was pursuing a masters in human genetics. She taught me how to do Punnett squares, to match up chromosomes for karyotypes, and to breed fruit flies with funny wings and eyes. I thought all this was a lot of fun, but I still considered myself to be an “arts person,” not a “science person.” I wanted to study writing, or philosophy, or art.

I changed my tune somewhat when I took AP Biology my senior year in high school. My teacher, Ben Davis, was phenomenal, and it remains one of the best and most rigorous classes I have ever taken. I stayed up all night studying. I loved it. I started my undergraduate career at NYU as a Biology major, taking junior-level molecular and cell biology courses my first semester of freshman year. Looking for a work-study job, I found an opening for an RA position in Denis Pelli’s lab in the Psychology Department. He and his students studied visual perception.

Denis, it turned out, came from a family of artists, and was interested in the question of beauty. This was one of my favorite topics in philosophy, and the moment when I realized that it was actually possible to ask (and answer!) questions about how people see the world from a scientific perspective – even question about aspects of perception as seemingly ephemeral as what makes a particular painting beautiful to a particular observer – completely changed my life. I still remember that moment vividly. I was 18 years old; it was nearly a decade ago.

I worked in Denis’ lab for one semester, and then, for personal reasons unrelated to school, I left NYU entirely for almost 3 years. During that time, I travelled all over the country, worked in a yoga studio in Washington, DC, wrote, and did freelance technical editing for the Journal of Vision, which was then very new. When I decided to return to New York and my studies in 2004, Denis offered me a full-time job as a researcher and lab manager. One of the perks of this was that I could take NYU classes part-time, for free.

In the five years it took me to complete my BA, with a major in Psychology and minors in Creative Writing and Classics, part-time, I also published 3 papers in collaboration with Denis and other members of the lab, presented my work at 8 conferences, learned vast amounts about psychophysical research, and, as lab manager, about teaching, mentoring, NIH grant proposals, and dealing with the IRB. Most importantly, I learned how to think critically. I learned what makes a scientific question interesting and what makes an argument convincing. I vehemently denied it almost the whole way through, but I became a scientist. Thanks to Denis’ unwavering concern for my development and rigorous intellectual standards, I became a very well-trained one.

My first scientific paper, “Parts, wholes, and context in reading: A triple dissociation” (Pelli & Tillman, PLoS One, 2007), used a novel knock-out method of text manipulation to prove that word shape, letter-by-letter decoding, and sentence context make independent, additive contributions to reading rate in words/min. It received press coverage from sources as diverse as Scientific American, BoingBoing, and FontFeed. My second paper, “Crowding and eccentricity determine reading rate” (Pelli, Tillman, et al., JOV, 2007), was a mammoth with several mathematical appendices, laying out the visual factors constraining how fast we read text. My most recent paper, “The uncrowded window of object recognition” (Pelli & Tillman 2008), a review of what studies of vision crowding have taught us about how the brain combines features to recognize objects, was published as a Perspective in Nature Neuroscience.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, it still took me another year to realize that I really was a scientist, and that a career in academia is not only what I have been preparing for all my life, but also what I am best suited for and I what I want. The “problem” has always been that I have so many other interests. I still publish my creative writing (both fiction and essays). I show my photographs in exhibitions. I have had an intense contemplative spiritual practice for ten years. I thought that in order to give all these other pursuits the attention they deserved, I needed to leave the lab. I tested this theory for one year, and found it to completely and utterly false. My “outside” interests inform my research, making it better, and the converse is also true. The theme underlying all these diverse passions is the same: a tremendous, unwavering fascination with both minds in general and my own mind in particular.

I want to understand how people perceive the world, think, and narrate their experiences. I am fascinated by the questions of how language influences seeing and vice versa. I want to know the relationship between language and memory – how the stories that we tell ourselves about who we are and what our past histories have been constrain how we see and interpret our present surroundings and situations.

I’m currently working on a paper, “Reading pictures” (Tillman & Pelli, in prep), which presents evidence that reading and object recognition, two tasks traditionally studied separately by language and vision researchers, are in fact remarkably similar, perhaps relying on the same cognitive processes. In my graduate work, I hope to continue in this vein, combining my interests in perception and language.

Moreover, I want to ask the big questions in cognitive psychology. I don’t want to be another cog in the research machine churning out papers documenting tiny advances in obscure topics that only matter to a tiny group of expert specialists and will never be heard of by ordinary people. I want to be a scientist, psychologist, scholar, academic, and professor in the highest sense of those words: a fearless and unapologetic intellectual whose work is devoted to the cause of pursuing knowledge and understanding for the benefit of everyone. It’s a lofty and idealistic goal, I know, but I am sure that the next step is to begin working toward a doctoral degree.