Little Miss Intellectually Promiscuous
There comes a time in your life when you will try to fit the word neurogenetics into the puzzle of your interests with a corner piece of computational creativity. You will act accordingly and amass a bevy of journal articles and book chapters to assist you. You will be left with an avalanche of index cards. Let’s face it.
In my undergraduate years, I was a McNair Scholar (a blessing that deserves its own lengthy story). I will never forget my cohort’s morning classes where we went over everything from GRE preparation to the graduate school application process. Our wonderful instructor, Dr. Montoya, did it: He planted the words in our minds, the words that described a number of us.
Intellectually promiscuous.
Tickled, I have always kept this quaint turn of phrase in some attic of my mind. Seeing as how I spontaneously google and read about tsunamis on Friday nights and have textbooks on everything from language origins to general chemistry, I do humbly think the term fits. I love information geometry and Natural Language Processing and American literature and the history of the book and comparative psychology and language origins and robotics and population genetics and the Golden Age of Russian literature and modernism and Middle Eastern politics and programming languages. I read journal articles with my morning tea and love my book on global mythologies.
But all of this makes engineering a research statement difficult. It is one thing to read about Twi phonology and the major productions of kabuki theater. It is another entirely different difficulty to build a research life around one’s wayward thoughts, as though one’s attention were the robustness of a tarp flapping in the wind, an anemic flicker of a candle.
He who does not know one thing knows another.
African proverb
I have divided myself into two poles. The first is Van-as-writer. I write fiction and poetry and am even now trying my hand at a ghost story screenplay. I am working on a novel, two novellas, and two short stories. I have a beautiful plain notebook dedicated to my poetry collection, The Andromeda Rituals. I cannot recall ever not wanting to be a writer, and it is the thing that comes most naturally to me, even if that “naturally” must traverse a wide expanse of parched deserts and menacing jungles to get to the tip of my Sharpie pens.
The second pole is Van-as-scientist. Van as linguist, anthropologist. Cognitive scientist. Van as one who dreams of developing her own programming language, of computers who can tell and love stories. Love in the time of artificial intelligence has a divine hue to it, and I want to I want to work in the intersections of artificial intelligence and literature.
As time goes on, I wonder if I can ever fully entwine my two halves. Will, for instance, I ever need science for my writing and writing for my science? This goes right to more profound questions about the nature and role of humanities in the sciences – something I feel very passionately about – and what I feel is the responsibility of anyone interested in artificial intelligence in particular. But on a personal level, can I devote the hours necessary to each pursuit? Something very young and very unclaimed within me does not quiver in the face of this daunting question. Of course I can learn it all, do it all.
Perhaps this all points to the screeching warning that I live too much in my head. I like to read about viruses; I have a new book about Ebola. At some point, one figures that thought must leapfrog into action, interest into expertise. Thoughts must scuttle into a brilliant and clearly defined formation, not unlike flocks of birds as they traffic across grim skies.
Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.
Jacob Bronowski
So this is where being intellectually promiscuous is somewhat burdensome.
It is easy to feel the world of ideas at one’s fingertips, the way the many books on your bookshelves feel as they tremble underhand. In those moments, I am higher than my bookcase, higher than mountains, higher than ambition, just shy of the nebulae.
If I achieve nothing singular, nothing worthy of history books, I think I will be content so long as I have my pen and my insatiable hunger for all the sciences and all the humanities. That is a light that never goes out.
