the mythical Blums

Manuel and Lenore Blum via Parul Seghal, Peter Brooks, and Annie Ernaux

via Ross Mantle in MIT Technology Review (source)

The experience I had speaking with Manuel and Lenore Blum was different from what I had planned for — what I thought would be a dialogue partly on craft and reflection and partly on research was instead a conversation almost entirely about their current work on consciousness. I don’t think it could have gone any other way, and I’m happy it turned out as it did. 

On reflection, I didn’t know how to introduce the interview except with three minutes that felt at times like hagiography, at times like self-indulgence. Ever since reading Sheon’s wonderful profile of Manuel Blum and Ben Brubaker’s Q&A with Lenore, I’ve wanted to understand more about how both Manuel and Lenore see themselves as researchers and as people.

The problem — for me, and not for them or for anyone else — is that they’re too excited about consciousness to indulge too much self-reflection. That isn’t to say they won’t talk about their pasts at all. As one part of my preparation for speaking to the Blums, I watched this three-hour ACM interview with Manuel, where he speaks with vigour¹ about his influences and prior work, including his great mentor Warren McCulloch and the Blum speedup theorem.

A lot of the questions I had for Manuel and Lenore — inspired by Sheon’s article and Ben’s Q&A, which both left me with more questions than answers — went unasked. I think they had to go unasked: in part because there were and are no answers; in part because you can only answer questions like “How do you listen so well?” by living and listening. Sheon wrote this of Manuel:

He is not so much a magician who refuses to give away his tricks as one who is himself astonished by what has been conjured around him.

I think Manuel and Lenore are both astonished, in a way. They’re not unwilling to dispense advice — of course, the entire theme of Sheon’s profile is Manuel’s massive (unprecedented, even) success in advising students. But what I see in them is both a willingness to and tell stories, and a simultaneous refusal to understand their whole lives using narrative as a tool.

An air of bewilderment and mystery persists in Sheon’s piece (Ben’s, for its part, is more directed). Sheon didn’t seem to fully answer his own questions, but he did do something more important: he gave us a glimpse of the experience that Blum’s students have, and conveyed to us that what Blum channels is more energy or force than strategy. I felt that force myself. Every time Manuel speaks about McCulloch, it’s as if he’s telling you the story for the first time. After so many years, his energy doesn’t fade.

If there’s someone who I think understands the Blums’ disposition with some clarity, it’s Parul Seghal: in The New Yorker, she reviews The Tyranny of the Tale, a book on the use and abuse of narrative by Peter Brooks, who is perhaps complicit in said abuse by way of works like Balzac’s Lives.² 

As Seghal considers Scheherezade’s legacy — that incredibly hard-working woman who told a thousand stories to live a thousand days until, by the time she ran out of words, the monarch Shahryar had fallen in love with her — she problematizes the common notion that storytelling is a natural, deeply human form of understanding. Seghal’s most potent articulation of how storytelling hegemonizes experience channels Lorrie Moore and Annie Ernaux:

This is what the writer Lorrie Moore refers to as “unsayable life,” when “narrative causality” feels like “a piece of laughable metaphysical colonialism perpetrated upon the wild country of time.” It is what I have experienced from time to time, following the birth of a child, when I feel myself, for months on end, more place than person. That snarl of time, thought, and sensation—uncombed experience—is what theorists call “the unstoried self,” what Annie Ernaux calls “the pure immanence of a moment.”

“Immanence” tracks what it’s like to read The Years — the book’s first section presents us with a series of images, promising their erasure. We experience local observations, talk of presidential elections, all presented as a sort of bare experience. And Ernaux leverages that same device which she uses so powerfully in the beginning, presenting us with imagery announced by em dashes. 

If storytelling is so suspect, though, how could we — as I did a few weeks ago — classify novels’ power with that of poetic language at all? One possibility is this: the infrastructure built by a story allows poetic lines to deliver their meaning with much more force than they might otherwise. The quotation I took from Gaddis in my last essay is a great example — it hit me with an indescribable emotive force that drew from its place in the narrative. But it’s also powerful on its own. 

So, images themselves — bits of poetic language scattered throughout narratives — are emphasized by the structure of a story, but don’t derive their power from that structure entirely. This is why you and I can still share an experience and understand each other when we share favorite quotes out of context, and why we sometimes feel compelled to lend context in the service of delivering a still greater impression. A memoirist like Ernaux can refuse the conventions of traditional narrative to deliver images with power, but so too can the novelist leverage that same force. 

Manuel and Lenore are not memoirists refusing to offer us a narrative, but researchers whose devotion to their lives’ work displaces their desire to tell stories about it. As I’ve said, it is not that there are no “Blum stories” — there are plenty, and Manuel will happily narrate to you his childhood and experiences becoming a researcher with just as much energy as he might have decades ago. It is that Blum seems to not take the stories he tells to be the same as his life itself. Insofar as we are a part of nature³, grammar doesn’t issue from our essence, either.⁴

His heart is gripped by the need to answer his questions about the world, to tell his fourth grade self what he once wanted to know. Lenore, too, is deeply committed to their joint task of developing a model for consciousness. He and Lenore don’t have all the answers for us who might search by interviewing them or reading about them. They will tell us stories about their younger years and how they came to understand consciousness the way they do, but they’re far more interested in explaining themselves and exchanging ideas than in talking about their pasts.

They’ve revealed to me the failure of some of my engagements with biography: my insistence that I can answer why questions by reading about the legible details of someone’s life.⁵ I haven’t figured out exactly why my parents are just the way they are after spending my entire life knowing them, so why should I think I can understand Fernando Pessoa after a thousand pages, even if penned by the translator of The Book of Disquiet?

The point is a simple one: you will not learn what makes Manuel Blum a great advisor and researcher and what makes Lenore Blum a singular advocate and researcher by reading narratives about them. You have to experience them as people — Sheon did some of this work by visiting them and communicated his findings to his readers, but there’s only so much we can learn from profiles. I think Manuel Blum’s students understand perfectly well what makes him such a great advisor, and they understand this in the visceral sense that a musician who spends her life with a violin experiences her instrument as an extension of her body.

I wonder if shedding the narrative impulse is part of what lets Manuel and Lenore continue to be as prolific as they are. At 86 and 81, they’re as energetic and excited as anyone I’ve ever met.⁶ How beautiful and motivating it must be — at any age — to spend time thinking about difficult problems with people you love and people you’ve just met. I see them as people who know how to understand their past through stories, and to wear stories loosely.⁷

And in this way, after more than two hours, our conversation came to an end — a natural end, all of us spent. I had forgotten the stories I wanted to ask about entirely; I’d come away realizing something else. In this spirit of understanding, Seghal and Brooks might encourage us to understand sensemaking frames not just as a choice among the stories we tell ourselves, but as a choice about whether and how to understand things with stories at all. McCulloch’s tale still lives in Manuel and Lenore, but they’ve been on their own paths for many years. Telling their story will be left to others.

I had managed to forget I was in front of a computer for those few hours. I sat still in my chair for some moments longer. I had to record my introduction — three minutes this time — before I could forget everything that I was feeling. It poured out of me like an offering.

1. totally unnecessary aesthetic note: “vigour” feels impossibly more elegant than “vigor”

2. I highly recommend Balzac’s Lives. you should also know there’s a new translation of The Lily in the Valley that came out just a few days ago on June 23 (I had this in my calendar)

3. you don’t have to be a Spinozist to believe this

4. I’m not going to attempt a refutation of Universal Grammar here (but maybe you should — it might be pretty fun)

5. in this spirit, one thing I really enjoyed about

Moeko Fujii

’s essay On Setsuko Hara was that it at places tried to grasp at Setsuko’s interior — considering and rejecting solitude and bookishness as the source of the power in Hara’s eyes — but it ultimately knows its own limits and focuses its energies on what we can know: how Setsuko meets us where we are

6. during our conversation, Manuel said he’d go implement the Conscious Turing Machine himself if no one else does

7. an observation: Manuel and Lenore frequently end up talking over one another, but these interruptions are mostly constructive interference