More, more, more!

In anatomy & physiology class, we’re taught that positive feedback loops are relatively rare in the body, and confined to finite situations or periods. Far more attention is devoted to negative feedback loops, those perpetual cycles of stop and start, ebb and flow, yes and no that keep our cells and tissues functioning from day to day. In only a few cases do we carry on because of a yes followed by a yes followed by a yes, and these are discrete events: childbirth, lactation, orgasm, blood clotting.

Our corporeal self works the gas and the brake, the gas and the brake, from our first breath to our last. The neurons firing in our frontal lobe wouldn’t live long without the body’s negative feedback loops fine-tuning the thousand details of chemistry that we call life. But the firing of those neurons, the personality produced by that chemistry, the me that I mean when I say the word, is all gas. Like that pink teevee bunny, it’s liable to keep going and going and going till something spectacular stops it. Childbirth, lactation, orgasm, blood clot. Positive feedback.

The things we avoid–out of fear, in any one of its variegated forms–can grow beyond all reason, without something to stop them, or alter their course. After getting chased by dogs again, I didn’t ride my bike in the wee hours for a week. With worry taking the reins, three cavorting dogs became larger, faster, meaner, and more possessing of long, sharp fangs every time I thought about them.

In the same way, anything we put on a pedestal will stay there without a reality check–and that pedestal will only get taller and taller, and our arms shorter and shorter. And so, a confession:

I have put words on a pedestal.

You know about my little fiction problem. But it goes deeper than that: I don’t write nearly as often as I should or want to because the more I think about it, the less important anything I have to say seems. Put another way, the more I think about writing, the more it seems like big, important work that only true artists should undertake. And yet another: given that there’s nothing new under the sun, why on earth should I waste the ink and bend the words into shapes they’ve already tried?

I didn’t claim that any of this was rational.

But, like my snowballing rabid dog fantasies, this one easily gets out of hand. I can’t decide if binge-reading on good writing is antidote or catalyst for this particular little pathology, but I’m experimenting with it anyway, while I devise various clever tricks to derail the hurtling freight train of this here loop. A brake to the gas. Some rational to the ir-. I’ll call it my biology experiment.