Vassar College Digital Window @ Vassar Senior Capstone Projects 2013 New Ape Idea Daniel Sohval Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalwindow.vassar.edu/senior_capstone Recommended Citation Sohval, Daniel, "New Ape Idea" (2013). Senior Capstone Projects. 207. http://digitalwindow.vassar.edu/senior_capstone/207 This Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Window @ Vassar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Senior Capstone Projects by an authorized administrator of Digital Window @ Vassar. For more information, please contact [email protected]. New Ape Idea By Daniel Sohval Reader: Peter Antelyes Table of Contents PROLOGUE 2 0.1.0 — PALEO 3 PART I 8 1.1.0 — VAN 9 1.2.0—HIJACK 16 1.3.0—FRACTAL 22 1.4.0—WARD 33 1.5.0—CYBERPUNK 39 1.6.0—MEADOWLANDS 51 1.7.0—EMAIL 58 1.8.0—PUS 63 1.9.0—SHEBODY 66 1.10.0—DOJO 74 1.11.1—SHANNON 80 1.11.2—MOSH 93 PART II 102 2.1.0—ADULATION 103 2.2.0—SETS 106 2.3.0—INVITATION 110 2.4.0—ATTRACTOR 119 2.5.0—MOSH II 133 2.6.0 —DRIVE 148 2.7.0—MOSH III 166 PART III 174 3.1.0—BODY 174 APPENDIX 181 THE AESTHETIC SCIENCE , OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE SCIENCE FICTION 182 WITTGENSTEIN ’S (E YE /I) 186 A STRANGE ATTRACTION TOWARDS NARRATIVE 196 WORKS CITED 204 2 Prologue “Now and again one happens to hear certain music in one’s head, however.” — David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress “I can’t explain just why we lost it from the start.” —Fecal Matter, Spank Thru 3 0.1.0 — Paleo Why a gym would have a Nietzsche quote on the wall is a mystery to Bruce Zfdel. “What does not kill you makes you stronger”. Attributed to Anonymous. Strange how every hulking personal trainer meandering about the place is more than happy to rattle Zfdel’s hair cells with complex biochemistry and anatomy jargon, but incapable of a simple web search to do away with that ambiguous Anonymous. Even the most rodentine of gym rats should be capable of that. The quote, along with several other bits designed to inspire, run along the walls of FutureFit Spa & Gym. All printed out in an assortment of kitschey Sans Serif fonts. Seeing them before every single workout endeavor, Bruce Zfdel cannot help but perform a short close-reading. Philosophize a little while. Another reads, “A sound mind in a sound body.” That one originates in Ancient Rome, Zfdel looked it up on his tablet while in the locker room. Folk Psychology is the commonplace and sometimes mistaken theories of mind and brain and self the “folk” (i.e. everyone without a handful of accredited course-hours in one or more of the mind sciences) employ. To Zfdel, Folk Psychology has not advanced much since Ancient Rome. Go around a supermarket or a public park or wherever the folk hang out and somehow get a specimen talking about the mental realm and most will use language hinting at a belief in a separation between the mind and the body. That humans have some immaterial soul, which inhabits their fleshy, hairy shell. Many too will use the words “mind” and “brain” interchangeably, which may seem to absolve them of that Cartesian trapping, but to Zfdel that doesn’t cut it. Not at all. Sure the brain is an organ in the body, much like dermis or heart or lungs; however, the folk still assign it a special reverence above all other globs of cell and tissue. Some folk enjoy imbibing some adult beverages or taking a few tokes on a marijuana cigarette and chill one another with talk of the infamous Brain-in-a-Vat thought experiment. That being an imagined scenario in which a human brain is suspended in a cocktail of organic juiced isomorphic to the body’s own cerebrospinal fluid. The floating pink thing is then administered expertly calibrated electrical shocks. According to many a member of the folk, (and several non-folk Zfdel has studied under), the suspended cerebrum should contain within it a fully rich and detailed conscious experience. Like, Zfdel presumes, all endowed with bodies and living brains. Is Zfdel a member of the folk? Hard to say. He was well on his way to a Master’s in History at Rutgers, until President Christie privatized the higher education sphere. Rutgers was bought out by Google and Zfdel had to switch to a science or lose is graduate stipend. That was six years ago. Now he is one semester and a dissertation away from a Doctorate in Neurology. Though graduate education doesn’t actually equate to learning anything, Zfdel has begun to think. For the most part he has spent the better part of the decade writing long, wordy lab reports and articles. All beginning with a catchy quote, followed by a color and then the topic he was to expound upon in as blunt and unsexily a manner as the English language could afford. Stuff like, The Sound and the Fury: An Event-Related Potential Analysis of the Auditory Stroop Task and Emotional Analogues, or, The Windows to the Soul: Cellular Automata Representations of Ocular Saccades . These are certainly not the ways the folk talk about anything. 4 If there even is a psychology for the masses it lay not in the use of a couple words, but in music, Zfdel realizes as he slips two white ear buds in his ears. A bored- looking woman with two different nose rings sits behind the gym’s smoothie bar several meters away. Beneath a sign displaying various exhorbitantly-priced createne shakes is a pair of speakers connected to an mp5 player. Her face placid, the smoothie girl thumbs the glass screen of her tablet and plays a SparkleJamz tune Zfdel recognizes instantly. Music, especially pop music, is designed for mass consumption, Zfdel figures. And while in his hipster youth he saw this fact as a cause for lament, he now views it with the respect it deserves. Because of its marketability, music is always in a rapid state of consumption. The music market ergo is some kind of huge social barometer. A keyhole view to the Zeitgeist. A true scale of the folk’s psychology. Not that Zfdel considers himself to be any sort of reputable cultural critic or anything. These are all the half-baked musings that emerged from his sleepless ganglia during his multiple eighteen-hour shifts in the position electric tomography lab. When in the twilight his face cast in a corpse-like pallor from the glow of his computer monitor, pop became his main tool for staying awake. The jangly four-chord repetitions and earnest litanies of “baby baby baby’ and “don’t go” serving as a narcotic to the insomniac aches that planted themselves behind Zfdel’s eyeballs after a week of 4-hour sleeps. Zfdel treasured the songs as little pockets of fresh air in the miasma of descriptive statistics the manhe found himself in night after night after night, looking at little blips in the fusiform gyruses of Intro Psychology students. All under the auspices of a toady assistant prof. who would take whatever findings Zfdel could procure and publish them as his own. Likely as a book that would be consumed rabidly by a small-yet-loyal circle of readers who saw neuroscience as the key to understanding others and the cure for their own solipsistic hurt. But that was three semesters ago. Now Zfdel sleeps a luxurious 6.75 hours a night and has time to date other graduates. Which he is less than lucky at considering that he spent several years of his sexual prime trying to convince himself that the mental states of whatever lady he was trying to seduce consisted of constant reference to some cranial dictionary and thus bar-hopping and pick-up artistry became impossibly difficult. And now he finds himself handing over a white plastic FutureFit membership card to bored-looking smoothie girls three times a week for a quick swipe-in. Although he worked out within the confines of the New Brunswick gym six days a week, he hardly had the body to show it. Try as he might, he had yet to improve beyond the spry arms, sylph-like legs and the gaunt, concave torso of the hardcore science dweeb. Perhaps his coffee habit was to blame, Zfdel often thinks, but that is an addiction he cannot afford to kick. Today Zfdel has a plan though. A well-researched and calculated strategy to shed his wry ectomorphic shell and blossom into a sexy, muscular alpha male. His late nights had evolved from data-logging PET results to lurking fitness and nutrition blogs. Amazing how the high school jocks all seemed to turn into organic chemists behind their computer screens. Today was Zfdel’s first day of a new diet and exercise regimen. Paleolithically inspired, Zfdel’s new lifestyle would be dedicated to harnessing his hunter-gatherer roots. From now on he would eat only tubers and grass fed beef, and employ sprinting and lifting exercises mimicking movements most used on a grassland hunt. 5 Because the whole human family, folk and adjunct professors of neurolinguistics alike came from the same crop of hominids in the Savannah, right? Zfdel approaches the barbell racks. Where several men much larger and wider than him, sporting shoulder tattoos of Virgin Maries and the cursive names of ex- girlfriends, pump iron.