What is love, and why are some people un/able to find it? What is loneliness, and why does it hurt? What do we do about it both logically and emotionally? What are relationships, and how and why do they work the way they do? What makes one’s “narrative” authentic? or Who's real and who's a fraud? What distinguishes parental love from romantic love? Survival requires different tactics in different environments. What measures do the characters in the novel adopt to carry on?THE ECHO MAKER – here’s our thoughts mingled with some quotes – a little preview – from GENERAL THEORY OF LOVE that helped to frame our thinking…
We talked about the two love triangles. Webber loves his wife, but is attracted to his “logic” equal, Barbara. Karin loves Daniel (her brother Mark’s friend), but attracted to Robert. Are we compelled to be with people who aren’t so good for us?
ECHO “People like people who make them feel more secure.”
THEORY “…people cannot be stable on their own – not should or shouldn’t be, but can’t be. This prospect is disconcerting to many, especially in a society that prizes individuality as ours does. Total self-sufficiency turns out to be a daydream whose bubble is burst by the sharp edge of the limbic brain. Stability means finding people who regulate you well and staying near them.” p .86
THEORY “Love’s puzzle work is done in the dark: prospective partners hunt blindly; they cannot describe the person they seek. Most do not even realize, as they grope for the geographical outline of a potential piece, that their own heart is a similar marvel of specificity.” p. 101
If you don’t believe something emotionally, you’ll never find any logic to support it.
ECHO “The mind can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven,”
ECHO “How can I know the right thing to do if I can’t trust the way I feel?”
THEORY “While having emotions is under limbic control, speaking of them falls under the jurisdiction of the neocortex. That division of labor creates translation troubles.” p.57
THEORY “Even though subjects didn’t understand what they were doing or why it worked, they were still able to do it. They gradually developed a feel for the situation and intuitively grasped the essence of a complex problem that their logical brains could not crack.” p. 108
THEORY Knowlton, Squire, Seth Ramus tested the limits of implicit memory “…conscious attempts at problem-solving got in the way of burgeoning intuition and actually impaired subjects’ performance. Another experiment demonstrated that carefully explaining the significance of the clues in advance improved how well subjects understood the task, but now how well they did it. …They could only say they were using their intuition.” p. 110
We talked about the “identity” each character had and how the character’s changed throughout the story. Identity is formed/kept up through relationship and interactions with others.
ECHO “Mark stops recognizing his sister because he stops recognizing himself.”
ECHO “Mark liked her know, at least a little, even better, he liked what she’d been”
ECHO Karin says, “I’m a stand in …chameleon …nothing at the core …I am an imposter doing what others want”
What would it feel like to have the person you love not recognize you?
THEORY “Limbic regulation makes expulsion from the company of others the cruelest punishment human beings can devise.” (reference to banishment of Romeo) p. 87
How do we know a memory-injured person is better?
THEORY “If people form memories without realizing it, how could we ever know? Only by observing actions change from experience, and thus deducing what someone must have learned, regardless of what he says.” p. 107
We talked a bit about the metaphors/themes of birds, war, and water.
ECHO “Birds can’t love, they don’t have a self.”
Quotes we gleaned are below.
“A mad symphony on the fragility of human identity begins when 27-year-old Mark Schluter crashes his truck on a rural Nebraska road. He awakens convinced that his sister Karin — a vulnerable woman, desperately attached to her only brother — is an imposter. Mark's condition — Capgras syndrome — brings to town an Oliver Sacks-like neurologist, who, after the flop of his latest book, is beginning to question his own carefully cultivated identity.”
“Current theories suggest that this damage could lead to someone being able to recognize and identify a familiar face, while also having the feeling that something doesn't feel 'quite right', potentially causing a delusional belief that the person is an impostor if there are also impairments with reasoning.”
“Intact facial match generates memory with no emotional gratification. The cortex differs to the amygdala (which has a primary role in the formation and storage of memories associated with emotional events). It’s not what you think to feel, it’s what you feel you think.”
“Stops recognizing sister because he stops recognizing himself.”
“The mind can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven,”
“People like people who make them feel more secure.”
“Clinging to medical science like her mother clung to Revelations.”
“How can I know the right thing to do if I can’t trust the way I feel?”
“The brain itself was a wash of one mood altering substance or another.”
“Mark liked her know, at least a little, better, he liked what she’d been”
“Maybe well being meant more than official sanity”
Birds can’t love, they don’t have a self.
Getting old is nothing more than accumulating apologies
Karin says, “I’m a stand in …chameleon …nothing at the core …I am an imposter doing what others want”
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