Age of Blight. Kristine Ong Muslim

is lonely and will soon find us, you once declared with glee. It is lonely, you insisted. It will recognize its song and will follow us home. And how it did. Lured by the sound, the juggernaut—whose eyes had not yet turned opaque—honed in on the low, steady humming only its kind could hear.

      Your engineers did not join you outside the ship to pose alongside the fallen sea beast. They knew you were going to make up stories to explain the creature’s swift demise—not at your hands, of course, but to a believable catastrophe. You might say it was the difference in salinity or the sudden shift from the hundreds of pounds per square inch of underwater pressure to normal atmospheric conditions.

      You write up your paper about the spectacular find. You always begin your speeches before the Academy with a dramatic wave of your hand unveiling the beautifully preserved specimen of the now-extinct sea monster ensconced in its liquid-filled tank, the dissected innards conveniently kept away from sight. Like a magician doing his rounds on the carnival circuit, you intone, “Behold the beast,” and everyone almost always takes that as a cue for applause.

       The Wire Mother (or Harry’s Book of Love)

       1.

      Our first baby had a mother whose head was just a ball of wood since the baby was a month early and we had not had time to design a more esthetic head and face. This baby had contact with the blank-faced mother for 180 days and was then placed with two cloth mothers, one motionless and one rocking, both endowed with painted, ornamented faces. To our surprise the animal would compulsively rotate both faces 180 degrees so that it viewed only a round, smooth face and never the painted, ornamented face. Furthermore, it would do this as long as the patience of the experimenter (in reorienting the faces) persisted.

      – excerpt from the paper “The Nature of Love” by Harry F. Harlow

      Imagine yourself having to choose between two mothers. There’s one like myself, once fondly called an iron maiden—a body made of wire, rows and columns of sharp teeth; coldly tells you truths you prefer not to hear; gives you food and milk and perhaps, lots and lots of material things to satisfy your need for survival and superficiality. Then there’s another mother out there—a flimsy, soft-spoken one called the cloth mother. And this mother is made of terrycloth. She gives you no sustenance but seems to hug you back the way you have always wanted to be hugged—not too tight and not too relaxed. She also maintains a characteristic flush that you associate with affection. Now, be honest. Which mother do you think is better? Better, meaning, the one you’d spend the most time with. This was the premise behind Harry’s little prank about the nature of love; and by prank I mean experiment.

      The one-day-old rhesus monkeys went to their wire mothers only when they were hungry and thirsty. They spent considerably more time with their cloth mother. They nuzzled her, embraced her, told her where they hurt and where they needed scratching, and slept on her fuzzy belly. Every single one of the baby monkeys pined for the comfort of the cloth mother. As for the wire mothers like myself, well, we dangled whatever sustenance we had to keep the babies from going to the cloth mother. But they never chose us in the end, never even glanced back in our direction after we allowed them to be fed. Most of the time, it was only their backs we remembered as they tottered without hesitation to their tender cloth mothers.

      As for the ones forced to stay with their respective wire mothers, they all suffered from digestive problems. Harry attributed digestive upset to a physiological manifestation of the stress of being with wire mothers.

      And would you like to know what Harry found out when he elicited fear among the baby monkeys? He frightened them by introducing a loudmouthed teddy bear, which was quite harmless and made us hope he simply limited himself to stressors of the teddy-bear sort. Without the mother nearby, the baby monkeys cowered. Sometimes, they ended up paralyzed with fear or curled into a fetal ball, sucking their thumbs. If the mother was nearby, regardless of whether it was the wire type or the cloth one, the baby monkey would cling to her. And in the presence of the mother, the baby monkeys were stronger, braver. They made bold moves, such as approaching the noisy teddy bear and attacking it.

       2.

      No monkey has died during isolation. When initially removed from total social isolation, however, they usually go into a state of emotional shock, characterized by the autistic self-clutching and rocking.… One of six monkeys isolated for 3 months refused to eat after release and died 5 days later. The autopsy report attributed death to emotional anorexia.

      – an excerpt from the paper “Total social isolation in monkeys” by H. F. Harlow, R. O. Dodsworth, and M. K. Harlow

      It is in Harry’s nature to not speculate, to not deduce from available data, and to not make use of theoretical experimentation. So, he came up with his prefabricated isolation kit, the portable editions of which are now sold, along with smartphones and wearable computing devices, in stores around the world.

      This was after Harry had indulged in a long, long investigation into the nature of isolation and loneliness. Constructed out of stainless steel, the isolation chamber comes in many variations. Some are customized to withhold maternal devotion. Some are intended to take away social interaction. All of them are designed to stunt emotional growth. What resulted from a Harry-appointed period of partial isolation—as in the case of a bare wire cage that enabled baby monkeys to hear, see, and smell other monkeys—were animals that stared blankly, circled their cages repetitively and obsessively, and exhibited acts of self-mutilation.

      With another Ivy Leaguer, Stephen Suomi, the insatiable Harry made strides by unveiling the grand version of the isolation chamber: the vertical apparatus, which was aptly and variously nicknamed by Stephen the Pit of Despair, the Well of Despair, or the Dungeon of Despair. The cramped vertical apparatus suspends infant monkeys upside down and restricts their movement in this position for up to two years. Only their mouths can move, of course, as they eat food and drink water placed at the bottom of the pit.

      What Harry wanted to achieve is articulated in the abstract for “Total Social Isolation in Monkeys,” in which it states the researchers’ intention to “not only capture and distill the essence of depression, but to invent it.”

      After a year in total isolation, two monkeys refused to eat and eventually starved to death. After spending up to two years in the darkness and silence of the pit, the surviving baby monkeys emerged completely deranged: clawing and attacking and screaming at everything in sight and were beyond rehabilitation. Yes, Harry tried to undo the mental damage. But do not mistake it for a gesture of atonement. Harry was no Anne Sullivan to the monkeys’ Helen Keller! He is not that kind of person. He went through the motions of attempting to rehabilitate the crazed monkeys and forced them to mingle with the normal ones in the control group only because it was a viable area to be explored in his laboratory protocol.

      Sometimes, when I lay awake at night watching the motion-regulated light fixtures strewn across the ceiling, I imagine how it must have been for Harry’s monkeys. I am shaped into what is supposed to be a cold and unfeeling contraption, but I realized a long time ago that I have limits: I cannot stomach torture. Torture, for me, has always been the resort of the weak, the inept, the ill-equipped. What torturers do not understand, they simplify by disassembling, by destroying the very essence and mystery of what they are trying to comprehend. What they covet, they steal and tinker with until it bores them or they discover that the tampered thing cannot be put back together again. And what they cannot subjugate, they maim—for no other reason but because they can.

      What it must have been like being suspended upside down, being trapped and unable to move for years? I asked Harry one time about the pointlessness of his Pit-of-Despair exercise when he came for one of his rare visits to my room.

      He said, “I’m sure it wasn’t very comfortable.”

      Then I explained that he did not really have to torture the baby monkeys, that he could have just as easily predicted they won’t