Something new

The first artificial hearts were made of girdle elastic. Dialysis tubing was first fashioned from sausage casing, and breast implants were once padded with mattress stuffing. All of these were novel, homemade solutions to a medical need, according to Robert Langer, an MIT professor and chemical engineer who spoke Thursday evening at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia. It was that kind of thinking—using materials on hand because technology was lagging—that inspired much of Langer's work on drug delivery systems. Drugs that couldn't effectively be given by injection or by mouth could be imbedded in a polymer from which they would ebb slowly, over days, weeks, months, or even years. His latest research uses polymers as a framework on which to place specific types of cell to grow cartilage. Picture a kind of topiary frame on which nose cells can multiply, but the topiary mesh melts away once the nose is formed. Exciting stuff; work that helped win him the 2008 Millennium Technology Prize.

I look at my own writing life, in which to create characters and scenes and stories I draw on what I have on hand—my own experiences—but take them to the next level. Like the topiary for noses, my experiences become the framework on which to build, to create, something new.

Is it time?

Time, that fourth dimension, is a fluid thing. Length, height, width—those are concrete parameters. I can run my hands along the picture frame and feel its length. The ruler gives me a precise calculation of the height. If I multiply those two measurements together, I get square inches. Add in a bit of depth, and I get volume. These things won't change.

But time is squishy and ephemeral outside the confines of the calendar. It stretches and shrinks. When is my trip to Vermont? Four weeks seem like half a year. When did my father pass away? Sixteen months seem like a fortnight. The last of his modest estate is settled, and the only remnants of his long life are the flotsam that has collected at my house and at my sister's.

Family legend has it that the intricate wooden mosaic of an Old World street was a garage sale bargain. It hung on his wall for so many years that the real story has vanished like the perspective points on the scene's horizon. I am drawn to the picture even though it has a sterile quality. The alley is narrow ... and empty. Where are the townspeople? Where is the debris of life—the dirt, the scraps of garbage, the broken crockery thrown from an upstairs window? I expect to see a handful of chickens in the shadows, doves along the eaves, and passersby giving way to an ox and cart.

The scene never changes; time does not exist there. Here, I feel my own past slipping away, as the family members who gave it context and structure die. What I am left with are memories, yesterdays steeped in elastic time that emerge or fade, depending on my mental tides.

Movement of thought

Welcome to my blog! I launch it with a poem by the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert: Mr. Cogito and the Movement of Thought.

Thoughts cross the mind
a common idiom has it

the common idiom
overestimates thoughts' mobility

a majority of them
stand motionless
in a dull landscape
of dull hillocks
and withered trees

sometimes they reach
the rushing water of someone else's thoughts
they stand on the bank
on one leg
like hungry herons

mournfully
they recall dried-up springs

they circle around
looking for grains

they don't cross
because they won't get anywhere
they don't cross
because there's nowhere to get to

they sit on the rocks
wringing their hands

under the low
overcast
firmament
of the skull