On the Poet Scientist

I have begun this first sentence and erased it, cast my net wide and let the tide froth it away. I have written and erased, danced and sat, made tea and toast, left myself in the darker parts of my soul and opened my curtains wide. Words are the lovely things that flit away, darting around shadowy corners when I turn to look over my shoulder. It would be too easy and too banal to simply announce that I want to be a cognitive scientist and a comparatist. No, I look for the elusive words that will bear witness the depths of my passion, to the depths of my soul, my inner kernel that sprouts like a wisteria.

Prior to my mother’s death, I was in the process of applying for graduate programs in comparative literature. I have said before here that I am torn between comparative literature and cognitive science, and have long dreamed of an integrated doctorate program that borrows from these two disciplines. I believe so strongly in the role of literature and poetry in the human mind, the human story, the human experience, our greatest gift and our mightiest, most delicate power. When I made those plans to apply to PhD programs, I surrounded myself with GRE textbooks, launched into a venture to learn Portuguese and Italian and Turkish, reviewed my Arabic, tried desperately to amass an impressive resume.

There was a frenzy that carried me over months, and it was only severed when my mother was gone, slicing through the string that bound me to the world as I have always known it.

I entertained the possibility of going to law school if I were not accepted into any programs, with the aim of becoming a children’s rights attorney. I thought about applying for linguistics, for comparative literature, computer science, anthropology, or English. Like a fountain, the ideas for what I want to write on and what I want to think on bubbled over the cup of my being, warbling about all the things I have always wanted to do with my life.

I grew ill when I was a teenager, an illness that finally broke when I was twenty-two. I had spent years isolated from myself, from my own heart. I did not consider myself a writer anymore until my thoughts were finally under control and I could go back to the novel I wrote when I was thirteen. It was a journey that brought to mind my favorite Walt Whitman poem, “To the Garden the World”: Curious here behold my resurrection after slumber.

Education is the final return to the world. Whether I end up in the humanities, the sciences, or law school, I am and always will be a poet scientist, inspired by the polymaths and researchers like J. Drew Lanham. I have stayed up late watching lectures from Katie Bouman and Joshua Tenenbaum and Noah Goodman, and I have thought about what it would be like to lead a class in the hot pursuit of knowledge, of a connection to something bigger than oneself, and there is nothing bigger or more potent than the mind. Cognitive science is almost a religion for me, because nothing is outside our machine of comprehension. The mind can see all and know all and be all.

I am but a silly echo in the chamber of human history. All life is fleeting, no matter how long you live. I would rather study the things that bring me meaning while I can. My mother never got to grow old; I want to do that and I want to carry her on with me like a legacy that I will soldier for for the rest of my life. Indeed, my mother was the only parent in the world who encouraged me to study writing over science, who said that I could be like her, a Renaissance individual. Call it intellectual promiscuity, call it poor attention span, but I have always wanted to do everything under the sun.

All of this is to say that I am brushing off my GRE textbooks, plunging back into Persian and Russian, and going back to apply to do the thing that shunned me for so long, and that is to learn, to be, to do, to follow the chanting notes of an education that always operates one or two steps ahead of me such that I am trying to catch up. I want a doctorate, I do. I want to spend my days reading about books and artificial intelligence and human rights and poetry and natural history and everything that lends itself to beauty.

There is a curious thing about losing one’s mother. When I was a child, I always imagined that the worst thing that could ever happen to me would be to lose her. And that happened. And, though I was swaying from the blow, I was still standing. That is the foundation upon which myself and my entire family will rebuild. My mother valued education; I value it, too.

The world is opening again like a flower in bloom. I want to bloom with it. I am committed to doing so, so that I can quote Omar Khayyam (a polymath himself): I came like water, and like wind I go.