Ballerina
To (Mis)Spell is Human
I did a self-guided meditation retreat weekend. It was a mix of studying, body-based movements, and writing. I am currently working on putting together protocols and sharing more about what these sessions look like more formally. I wrote this after looking at my notes from the weekend.
It was the eleventh minute of a squat on session eight of my meditation weekend, when the spelling bee came to mind.
I always wonder how memories are supposed to arrive. Are they supposed to come softly, in reverie, while you're gazing out a window or drifting toward sleep? Are they supposed to arrive through a scent, something that brings you back to a time long ago? I don't know if they're supposed to come in a held position, in the tension of the quadratus lumborum — that lateral anchor of the spine that nobody thinks about until it starts refusing to cooperate. Thirty-three years of learning how to hold things, and in this moment, in this squat, my back feels like you could reach in and teach a boy scout how to tie a knot.
And then my fourth-grade self walked through the door of my mind.
He does this. Shows up sometimes. No particular warning. Especially as I wax poetic on the theories of how a memory is to come. I mean, I was meditating. It was supposed to be this blissful experience with warm glows and sensations were supposed to decrease and I wanted to know when the river of it would wash over me. And he just appears, mid-squat, in the middle of an attempt at stillness, with the same poor instincts he reminds me he always had. Neither of us has figured out the timing of showing up thing.
The word was ballerina.
Ballerina. If you were going to miss a word, why would it be that one? Why not something more rugged — mischievous, gauge, fiery, exhilarate. Why this high European word, soaked in femininity and form and the image of a body bent into positions that require years of submission to get right. Why the word for a person who has organized discipline into beauty. The invoking of grace, elegance, delight! The indignation! I was a nine-year-old boy, what did I know about any of those? What did I care to know? I mean, I guess I had sisters who might have talked about this. I did have that one year in theater. But my baseball teammates weren't discussing the arabesque. Of all the words in the imagined fourth-grade lexicon, it had to be this one. The one I had no business approaching unprepared.
Let me tell you exactly how this went, in case you've never had the pleasure of misspelling a word in public in front of the entire school.
I was not supposed to win the qualifying round. There was a girl — brunette, glasses, the stereotypical smart kid in class, reminded me of Harriet the Spy — who had the highest Accelerated Reader score in my class. She was better and we both knew it. The fourth-grade hierarchy knew it. I snuck Harry Potter into math class just to try to keep up. I hate fantasy. It just gave me an opportunity for more points.
When she didn't advance and I did, she cried. I felt bad, like unearned victory. I wondered if maybe I had gotten an easier word to beat her with. But off to the grand finale it was for me.
I didn't prepare that week. I had a dictionary. I could have spent the time going word by word, copying definitions in a notebook the way I sometimes did to make myself think I was smart. I had convinced myself it would impress a British girl in my science class who sat beside me and never once looked up from her own notes when I wanted her attention. I never got past the C's. She moved away before I could. I was going to tell her what the synonyms of beautiful were. I was going to use her name and bewitching in the same sentence.
Instead my preparation looked like Mario Kart with my brothers and late-night episodes of The Simpsons after my father thought we were asleep. I showed up to the gymnasium with nothing but the assumption that things would work out because they sometimes had.
They did not work out.
My stepmother was there. I saw her face and something in my chest went architecturally wrong. The microphone was the kind that makes your voice sound like a stranger's voice — thinner, higher, exposed to its own inadequacy. I blamed it on prepubescent development. Or the acoustics in the aged gymnasium. I think they build auditoriums now for this type of event. The judge repeated the word three times in a flat tone. So official. The word is ballerina. Ballerina. Ballerina.
Must be Italian.
I stood there and thought: ask for it in a sentence. That was the smart move. The kids on television did that. It would have bought me time — given the oscillating neurons a moment to sort themselves out, to phonetically make sense of the situation. It would have made me look like someone who belonged at a microphone.
I did not do the smart thing.
I don't remember the catastrophic error — maybe the second L, maybe the transposed E and I. I only remember the sound of the bell that meant I was wrong, and the silence that followed. Gone were the imaginary cheers and the trophy I would have put on my résumé when running for fifth-grade class president. The campaign slogan: “how do you spell Kieffer? V-I-C-T-O-R-Y.”
Instead there was the walk back to my seat. I remember writing it down correctly on a sheet of paper afterward, the way you redraw a map of a place you got lost, trying to prove to yourself that you knew the way all along.
I waited for an external punishment.
It never came. The internal one was already handling everything.
Twenty years later, in the squat, I tried to map where it went.
Not necessarily the memory but the architecture the memory built. The brain is a contractor. It takes experience, makes some conservative estimations, and converts it into what seems like a damn good blueprint and structure of reality. And my brain, being conservative in the way all brains are conservative, had taken that gymnasium and built a load-bearing wall from it as it reconstructed the stage.
Stages are dangerous. Microphones distort. You will not get it right when eyes are on you.
In an effort to reclaim the hero's journey of the fourth-grade self who once searched a dictionary for the right words to copy down, I've spent much of my life studying neuroscience and the brain and what it might mean for you and I. Trying to understand what is happening beneath experience. It's one thing to sit in medical school reading the serotonin depletion ideas linked to depression or the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia. It's an entirely different encounter when you find Lisa Feldman Barrett, who tells you that your social realities are constructed — that relationships are, in some sense, predictions. That you are predicting your way into them. That I am too.
And that might mean we better get on with trying to get some shared language between us. No matter how dizzying some of these concepts get, and no matter how much trying to communicate it doesn't do it justice, I know that underneath it there is something I'm after: a sense of deep connection with myself and my relationships and the world — and the knowledge that the way I encode the world can be explained. If that is true, then you and I depend on the languages we build together. Shared meaning becomes the medium of connection. Perhaps I must also construct a language for my fourth-grade self: a way of communicating across time, to understand what happened then.
In my searching, I find Andy Clark, in all of his enigmatics that seem after my own heart, who writes that what is “on offer is a story about the brain's way of encoding information about the world”.1 Stories that we are constantly inferring what is happening between us, building the self, the environment, the world, out of guesses and revisions.
And then there is Friston — who takes me about thirty reads of two paragraphs to begin approaching the math of hidden states and priors, of inference and prediction. I don't fully understand him. I suspect most people don't on the first pass. I don't even on the fifteenth. I suppose I should have put Harry Potter down and paid attention in math class. But something in the framework keeps pulling me back to the squat, to the idea that the brain is always managing surprise, always trying to keep the model of the world intact, always choosing between updating and acting.
I keep returning to thinking about this: the encoding can be changed. If the way I've encoded that gymnasium, that microphone, that bell can be revisited — revised, rewritten somewhere in the mind inhabiting the body — then maybe a language built across time is also possible. Maybe that's what I owe my fourth-grade self. Maybe that's what I owe my 33-year-old self.
I wonder whether there are no final answers to what happened back then, or in the in-betweens, or in the present moment of a held squat. Sure, there's missing a word. I didn't get to show off the other thousands of words in my knowledge bank at the time. I didn’t win.
But maybe there are a million vantage points on that kid on the stage. A million degrees of angle on how a child becomes the adult who turns back toward him. The tension is that the model never stops building. It never stops converting the past into the way I'm seeing the world now. And sometimes it would rather be wrong in a familiar way than right in an unfamiliar one. It would rather keep you in the pain you know than let you risk the pain you don't.
Maybe the thing is: my nervous system does not know what year it is. That I'm not in fourth grade. That there are no stages I'm climbing up to anymore — only ones I get to construct, now.
And somehow, a meditation and a squat keep the time.
Clark A. Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science. Behav Brain Sci. 2013 Jun;36(3):181-204. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X12000477. Epub 2013 May 10. PMID: 23663408.