Apple/neuroplacticity

APPLE

MARTY REMPEL

The brain,

a cathedral of connections,

a wilderness of lightning and silence. for a life time words moved through me effortlessly, from spark to sound from thought to speech.

Damaged in a moment, an accident of chance in time,

neurons once fired in elegant sequence, across each sculpted synapse

singing its part in the orchestra of language.

After, a rupture, a loss, a sudden quiet, blood fled, cells flattened, networks dimmed the familiar routes went dark.

The words that once leapt from my tongue now gone.

I am not still

The brain, neuroplastic, ever adaptive, restless and alive as

old highways crumble, I send out scouts, axons searching like roots through unseen soil.

Dendrites reach out towards the faintest electrical whisper.

I guide the rebuilding

Circuits reorganize, neighbouring regions awaken to the call.

The right hemisphere listens, hesitant at first, visual cortex offers image, motor cortex lends rhythm, emotions add tone, again an orchestra, together they begin to trace new routes to find the ideas once lost.

I rehearse again and again...

I feel the signal practice is in my pulse each repetition thickens my resolve, quickens the transmission, stabilizes the spark until one day the current finds home.

A light flares across a synapse and there it is that elusive lost word

rises from silence like a bird returning to its branch.

"Apple" I say

I say it aloud

With excitement and joy

It's "APPLE"!

The sound is rough and alive.

The meaning complete, whole and unmistakable.

I can recall and imagine think and do,

The brain is a builder of bridges, a keeper of faith and languages,

When one path is lost

Another is found

Neuroplasticity.

WWW.NORTHWORDMAGAZINE.COM

Chapter Five: The Social Activist

 Chapter 5

“Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness.”

John Muir

The Social Activist

Ernest Masters(1984)

    Ernest rested on a Swiss mountainside while on hire, tending a local farmer’s flock of approximately 500 sheep.  As a former medical student, he knew of no better way to escape his fast-paced, high-pressure life in his home city of Basel and to live what he considered a near off-the-grid existence, close to nature and more in line with his deep-rooted Taoist/Buddhist beliefs.  These same beliefs caused him to rebel and refuse the mandatory Swiss military service that earned him a six-month prison sentence, to the great shame of his upper-middle-class family. 

    Ernest felt suffocated with his middle-class lifestyle, the direction his life was taking, and the choices he had made under family pressure.  He questioned the idea of even becoming a medical doctor.  Ernest, instead of feeling he had a future life in his homeland with his chosen profession, only felt an overwhelming emptiness as if some void needed to be filled, but he wasn’t really certain of how and why at age 23, he was a lost soul looking for, as the cliche goes, meaning and direction in life.  He had dropped out of medical school to the horror of his rigid father, who saw this as an affront to the family's dignity and traditions.  Ernest's father was a successful economist with a flourishing career at the prestigious University of Basil.  He had the whole package of wealth and status. This was true of his father before him. Ernest was now the weak link in the family legacy chain.

    The final conversation with his father, on these topics, did not go well, making Ernest’s inevitable departure all the more difficult and emotionally painful. 

    The rain was coming down in fine, silver needles outside the Master’s home.  The scent from the gardens and wet earth drifted faintly through the half-opened window in Otto Master’s study, mingled with the sharp pungent odour of pipe smoke. Ernest’s father sat stiffly, looking awkward and uncomfortable behind his mahogany desk, hands clasped firmly, eyes fixed on the wall clock as if waiting for it to deliver a verdict. Across from him, his son, Ernest, stood in the doorway, not committed to entering the room, coat half buttoned, eyes restless, as if even the air in the room was plotting to suffocate him by closing in around him.

    “You can’t possibly be serious about this, Ernest.  You’re throwing away three years of the best medical training in Switzerland.  For what?  To wander aimlessly.”

    “To breathe, Father.  To see the world before it hardens me into something I won’t recognize any more. It’s about being true to myself !”  Ernest said in exasperation.

    “True to yourself, that doesn’t even make sense.  Can you even listen to yourself talk?  This is your life, Ernest. Wake up before it is too late, and you do something you truly regret.”  Otto’s jaw tightened as he spoke these words.  He had seen this coming in his son, the quiet defiance, the distracted eyes during family dinners, the way Ernest would linger by the window and drift out of conversations while others spoke of internships.  He added, “Son, you speak as if duty were a prison.  Medicine is the most honourable profession.  It gives life true meaning.  It can give you meaning.”

    “Meaning for whom?  For you?  If my mother were still here, she would be pushing me to marry some banker’s daughter and spend my life listening to the complaints of the comfortable?  You call that meaning? I call that the ultimate surrender. You aren’t any better.”

    A muscle twitched beneath Otto’s temple. “Don’t you dare invoke the memory of your mother in these discussions.  Your mother only wanted the best for you and this family.  If you valued, no, if you loved, your mother, you would change this insane course you have set yourself on.  You are only twenty-three.  You have no idea what surrender means.  The world is not one of your poems, Ernest.  It is a serious set of obligations.  Men who forget that end up broken, or worse, forgotten.”

    Ernest’s gaze wandered to the window.  Beyond the rain, the Rhine shimmered like a dull blade.  He imagined following it, letting it lead him through forests and mountains, to places where no one cared about the respectability of rank.  “When I was a child, you used to take me walking in the hills.  I remember how quiet and introspective you became when the city fell further behind us.  If you remember that time, you can understand what I feel now.  There is more to life than climbing ladders built by other men.”

    For a moment, Otto’s eyes softened.  But quickly his old rigidity returned, the armour of habit and expectations.  “That was before I learned that dreams don’t pay bills.  You think you can live on air and idealism? The world will crush that kind of naïveté.”

    “Then let it try.”

    Silence filled the room, thick as the rain outside.  The clock ticked between them like a slow heartbeat.  Otto rose from his chair.  “All I can say is that you will regret this decision.  Ernest, a man without a profession, is a man without a future.”

    Ernest took a step toward the door, his voice quiet but steady.  “No, father. A man without freedom has no future.  I’d rather be lost for a while than live someone else’s map.”  He left his father standing in the dim light of the study, the rain still whispering on the glass panes.

    And for the first time, Otto Masters wondered whether the emptiness he feared for his son wasn’t already his own.

Chapter Four/ At the Zoo

 

Chapter 4

At the Zoo

    Mark and his father stood in front of the primates’ enclosure in awe of these beautiful and intelligent animals. Mark in his little voice struggled with some of the words as he read to his dad from the plaque displayed at the front of the orangutan cage. “Sumatran orangutans use and manufacture tools.  In the wild, orangutans are seen using found objects as tools: leaves as ‘toilet paper,’ leafy branches as flyswatters, large leaves as umbrellas.  Captive orangutans are capable of manufacturing tools for a variety of uses and situations: connecting short sticks to make one long stick to reach desired object, stacking boxes to make a ladder, using sticks to dig holes, making swings from ropes, and containing water by using objects as cups.”

“Holy, Dad, these guys sure are smart.  They know how to use leaves.  Imagine using leaves for toilet paper”

    Father and son talked about the orangutans, their unique skills, eating habits and their creativity with tools. They laughed together at the idea of using a leaf for toilet paper as a female orangutan using her long powerful limbs swung from the Firestone snow tire, suspended from the artificial tree in her enclosure. Mark made an imitation of the female’s swinging motion. His dad smiled, content  with the rare feeling of closeness to his son. He felt more at peace with himself having, at least for the moment, bridged the gap between himself and Mark. It felt good. As a part time optimist he knew it would be fleeting as things would go back to the way they always were when they returned home, but for the moment he enjoyed his freedom from self and his time with his son.

Mark returned to the Toronto Zoo several times as a teenager and young adult, without his Dad, whenever he wanted to feel comforted and safe. It was odd how he could get the feelings that he needed from his Dad here amongst the hooting primates.  He marvelled and lingered when near the orangutan enclosure, a solitary primate with strong bonds to its offspring probably stronger than those he experienced in his own family.  Staring eye to eye, with the sad intelligent, brown eyes of an orangutan in captivity made him wonder what went on inside of its brain under that mop of frizzy red hair? From their perspective what were they thinking about us, primate to primate? Mark felt a certain kinship to his orangutan friend, a creature much like himself.  Who was caged and who was free?

The Last Grain of Rice Chapter 3

 

Chapter 3

Life as Art

    Life as art, father and son are in a freeze frame, a tableaux precariously fixed in the moment.  In their scene they sit still, quietly, on the high backed couch in their living room before an RCA black and white cabinet television, a show featuring a chimpanzee wearing sunglasses sitting on a beach-chair, in tones of grey.  Through the static filled reception canned audience  applause and laughter works to seduce the boy to laughter.  He is engrossed by what he sees on the screen.  Father and son share the moment  independent of the other.  There is no emotional connection. If they were actors in this improv the father, with a sense of urgency, attempts his role. He wants to be connected to his son. He wants to share the intimacy of laughter that his son enjoys with the antics of the  chimpanzee. He realizes he is tragically out of character and cannot properly visualize his role as father. It is out of focus.  He knows his relationship with his son is slipping away from him. He is aware of his short comings, he is not good with people, especially with children, with his own son.  The father felt alone.  His life always played from the outside looking in afraid to let his inadequacies be seen by others.  He regretted the growing abyss between himself and his son.  They sat silently together after the show ended, each in their own thoughts.

Images of Peru 2025

 

Under the Canopy/ The Last Grain of Rice Chapter 2

 

See prologue, and chapter one also on blog...

Under the Canopy

Chapter  2

The Anthropologist: Early Days

We observe similarities between primates and humans in terms of communication and even tool use.  Chimpanzees have intricate social patterns and behaviours.  They can communicate their feelings and pain, they show levels of loyalty to kin and to friends that most humans can only hope to emulate in their own personal lives.  Much of what we know about the evolution of human behaviour comes from work on macaques, baboons, orangutans and other primates.  Human primates may think of themselves as being separate, different and superior to other primates because of their sophisticated technologies and layers of social complexity.  We aren’t as different as we would like to think.  Darwin has taught us at least that much.

Michael Eugene Harris, “Darwinian Natural Selection and Contemporary Primate Behaviour” 

From the journals and field notes of Mark Penner…

    My father never finished high school.  There were wars, famine and revolution as intervening factors, a different world.  He didn’t seem to need a formal education or even miss it.  It was never part of his reality.  I do believe he wanted more for his own children, yet something in him, or lacking in him, prevented him from telling us so.  I knew my father cared, that he loved me. He played on occasion with me in the backyard on our Vine Street home hitting a ball with my little kid sized bat.  He built, with care and diligence, like an artisan, wooden toys in his basement shop.  Was that to escape the world, or to show he cared, maybe a bit of both.

    I can’t say that I understood my father’s attitude in regard to education.  I do know he never directly encouraged or discouraged me from doing one thing or the other.  It was an emotional equilibrium, a void with no direction and one that I just happened to tumble from in the right direction.  I think.  He never went to my school teachers’ meetings, rarely even glanced at my report cards. He seemed indifferent to whether I went to university, or even if my further education was in, or out of town.  It didn’t seem to matter.  He just seemed to think that I knew what I was doing and that I would get it right in the end.  I had no direction.

    Likely, my father observed me from an emotional distance having been hobbled through his own childhood experiences with his own father and surrounded my death. As a child he told me stories of playing in battle fields near his village, of smashing artillery shells with a hammer to see what would happen and keeping a cache of battle found weapons hidden from his Mennonite pacifist parents. It was a wonder I was even born.  

    One way or another I do know that the man that I eventually became is simply part of a continuum, a legacy from the men before me, for better and for worse.  I have no control over what happened before.  I have control now and I have made mistakes.  At least I would like to think, as I write this, in years looking back, with a measure of insight and wisdom.

    My father was at best a lonely man even when he was with his family.  His diary from the Depression era reveals an unspeakable emptiness and an immeasurable loneliness.  The diary fell into my hands after his death.  It took me years before I could bring myself to read it. I regret I ever did.  It is now destroyed, but not the indelible images etched in my brain.  His marriage to my mother filled part of his emotional abyss that was his soul, but it was never enough to ease his personal demons, whatever they were.  My mother suffered and I think she was relieved on many levels when my dad passed before she did.  She did not have an easy life either.  Her wish for me was simple.  Marry a Mennonite girl, keep the faith, attend church and live close to home.  I’m afraid I managed to disappoint her on all levels.

    In his retirement years, long before we had grown and left home, my dad would, without notice board a greyhound bus and travel wherever it took him.  Aimlessly.  We, as kids, would get a postcard from exotic California with a coloured picture of an endlessly white beach with beautiful full surf.  In cryptic script he would tell us in three phrases about his trip as if it were a normal event.  Next, weeks later, a card from equally exotic Florida, now on the opposite coast, a picture of an orange grove.  Another brief message. One morning, eight or nine days later, without comment he would be at the breakfast table slurping his coffee from his favourite Coffee Hound mug and saucer as if nothing had happened.  Nothing had changed.

   Even then, as a child, I thought my father’s travel plans, if that is what you could call them, were nothing short of bizarre.  I have no idea what my mother thought of all of this.   Her husband abandons her for a month or more at a time.  My guess is she may have been relieved.  My father’s generation was a chauvinistic one, also made possible through engrained socially induced female complacency and some biblical references stating that the man was the head of the household. Perhaps, slavery was justified in the same way.

    My father, and I loved the man dearly, was ever an enigma.  He was a product of his times and of the men who came before him.  I am simply part of that continuum.  Hopefully, I have made some improvements along the way. But I am not the judge in this matter.  

    This is my story of study, travel, intrigue, love and adventure in a distant and foreign land.  Let me start at the beginning.  I loved primates as a child.

Chapter One from The Last Grain of Rice...a novel

First read prologue from my blog...

 Chapter 1 

The Anthropologist/Primatologist: Mark Penner  (2005). 

The temperature plunged as the sun set over the Gulf of St Lawrence, Mark’s bentwood rocker creaked over the old and worn pine floor boards of his Port Hood home as he sat contentedly beside his wife Celine. An onshore breeze slid across the cold water invading the porch over looking the Gulf causing him a slight shiver. His body conceding to the temperature. He savoured the first of the invigorating Spring weather.  Not much for meditating he did absorb the cleansing and tranquil feeling of detachment and the contentment of solitude his home provided. His thoughts lulled by the rocking motion of his chair revelled in the joy of simplicity.  His thoughts were interrupted by the vibration of his Blackberry.  He allowed the epileptic device to bounce across the coffee table, observing it with disdain and resentment, as the persistent noise disturbed his silence.

  

  Unwilling to pick it up, but unable to ignore the plaintive sound, he reached for his cell. Koko, his Chocolate Lab, lay contentedly at his feet jumped up as Mark broke his rocking rhythm stretching his arm across to the driftwood coffee table muttering, who the hell is calling me now?”  He pressed the green button to accept the call.

   

  “Mark Penner speaking.”

   

  A brisk polished voice came through. “Mark, it’s Julia Harrow from Harborline Publishing.  Do you have a few minutes to discuss your manuscript?’

   

  “Depends, Mark said, leaning into his rocker. “Is this about syntax or potential lawsuits?”

    A soft laugh. “Neither.  We’ve been reading over your draft of ‘Under the Canopy,’ describing your time in Borneo. Your experiences are extraordinary and we are definitely going to print.  We realize you are reluctant to leave your sanctuary to come into the office to discuss the book further; so I have a few questions to run by you. A few details about Izzy Tan and her father and of course ther enigmatic Ernest Masters.

    “You mean parts you want me to soften for public consumption?”

    “Not soften so much as to clarify, as you make some pretty strong accusations about culpability, corruption, money laundering and so on.”

    Mark was silent for a moment.  “The issues as I outline are about corporate responsibility, forests disappeared and so did people. It’s not complicated.”

    “We agree totally Mark your environmental perspective is valid and powerful,” Julia said. “But we need more context.  For example, your description of Ernest Masters is complicated?  What happened to him?”

    Again silence from Mark. “Ernest championed the Penan and Dayak.  He was viewed both as villain and saviour.  He was somewhere in between,” Mark said quietly, “that’s the problem with real people.” Mark ran a finger across a scar on his wrist he had received during a forest barricade protest directed against Tan Lumber organized by Ernest during his Borneo days.

    “Ernest believed that progress did not mean roads, as they meant destruction, not progress.  To him the forest was infinite. The forest wasn’t land. It was legacy. It was memory. Cut the trees and you cut both.  I’m writing it all down because memory dies faster than trees, people forget and issues fade.  I don’t want what Izzy Tan and her like did to be forgotten, or forgiven. Another pause.

    “Mark,” Julia said gently, “we want this book to reach people who’ve never thought about these issues. That means more nuance.”

    “You want nuance.  I want honesty.”

    “They can be the same thing.”

    Mark smiled despite himself. “Maybe he said but don’t ask me to make Izzy Tan a hero and Ernest a villain. It doesn’t work that way.

A gull cried outside, absurdly loud in the winter air.

    “So,” she continued, “would you be open to expanding those chapters with more detail on the Penan and their perspective, some of the internal conflicts?  Let readers sit with the issues longer.”

    “Yeah,” Mark said finally. “I can do that.” He glanced down again at his well worn manuscript laying on the table in front of him.  His labour of love, and of pain dedicated to a cause he hoped the publisher and readers could grasp.

    They said their good-byes.

    Mark sat quietly with Celine listening to the winds and the waves their memories lost somewhere between the waters of Port Hood and the forests of Borneo.  The final story, at least the book version, was still taking shape years later, after the events. He would start with his own story, the anthropologist, because that was the easiest starting point, then move on to the social activist, his friend, Ernest Masters, and finally to the villain of the story, Izzy Tan. Where the lives of these three people intersect brings one to the threshold of understanding, to the intricacies of the very heart and soul of the equatorial rain forest itself.  It is to know Borneo.