From the Messiness Desk

The disheveled gene, one of my favorite discoveries from the decades of genetic studies performed on fruit flies, is found in individuals that keep messy test tubes and have disorganized thorax hairs. If this variant exists in the human genome, I most certainly possess it, since like my dipteran counterparts, I am a terrible housekeeper with a rumpled head of hair.  When I first read about the disheveled gene, I felt better to know that my sloppiness might just be out of my hands since I am often overtly hostile towards it: sometimes feeling so defeated and despicable that I malign myself with long strings of abusive language emanating from my very cruel superego.

I do try preventative measures, but no matter what interventions I attempt, they only work for so long. Despite double checking the lid of my coffee cup to make sure it is tight, I always end up with a stain on my shirt at the end of the day. No matter how many times I tell myself that the pants go in this pile and the shirts go in that one, by the end of a week they are mashed together, or strewn all over the room, I put them back, they do it again. I have to keep recopying my “to do” lists, just one of the common tools I use to reduce the stress I feel from being so disorganized, because they very rapidly become tattered, stained, illegible, and festooned in hideous doodles. The words “just put the keys in the same place every time” sound so simple, but for some reason impossible to implement. Interestingly, this persistent feeling that my world is going to chaos any moment and it is my job to be constantly vigilant in order to prevent this from happening is probably the primary source of my unending anxiety as reflected in the dreams I have: thousands of fast slick, wriggly creatures in my custody escaping from their cages, mountainous piles of things collapsing despite my efforts to keep them contained, impossible numbers of customers pouring into my section, a panorama of evil bearded men huffing kittens, and me trying to stop it all from happening. These are all symbols of chaos in my dreams, and the messiness is the symbol of chaos in my reality.

The desk I am writing on right now is empty. It has to be in order for me to think.

 In contrast, another messy person I know, my good friend The Blasphemer from the Hinterland, appears to very comfortable existing in his filth and, if he even has a desk, which I am not sure about, it was rendered unusable by being buried under stuff back sometime around the Nixon administration. The Blasphemer isn’t a hoarder, though my favorite item in his house is a cabinet full of a dozen cans of expired evaporated milk, he’s just a slob. He spilled a bag of dried macaroni on his kitchen floor and left it there for two months. He has bookshelves and dressers but I don’t think he knows what they are for, preferring to use other storage surfaces, usually the floor or his bed, since the space on his tables is already cluttered with electronics, tools and parts of musical instruments. It is unclear where his trash ends and his living space begins. Maybe he’ll clean it, maybe he won’t. If he does it’s just because he’s afraid it might offend one of his infrequent guests, like a mouse. His family did an “intervention” several years ago. He still resents it and the only evidence that it ever happened is a hanging pair of perfectly matched towels, aligned on his towel rack, never used and covered with dust. For some reason, I yanked them down one day and tossed them into the slurry of clothes spilling out of his hamper and flowing through the doorway, crashing like grungy waves into the tattered guitar cases stacked up in the hall.

We are two messy people, one constantly trying to extinguish this aspect of her nature, the other fully embracing it.

This is why when The Blasphemer sent me a recent University of Minnesota study linking messiness to creativity, something that both of us value, I was initially grateful that some kindly neat people gave us the gift of scientific data to defend ourselves with. However, after reading the article more closely, I became aware that helping those of us in possession of the disheveled gene did not appear to be the main motivation for this project. The main motivation, I realized, as always, was to assist rich capitalists.

It wasn’t enough to just say “this is what we found” and “this is how we did it”, the researchers felt the need to justify their research by explaining how the data might be utilized by the higher ups at the “company” to manipulate the minds of the working class stooges in their employ, since scientific research into human behavior only matters if it can be used to enhance productivity. Though this effort did give this creative person the million dollar idea of becoming a “messiness consultant”, it also made her very unsettled by what seems to be consistently at the heart of human behavioral research: reducing working humans to programmable machines in order to aid the capitalists in their efforts to generate personal wealth.

There are a few things wrong with this picture. First, we are not machines, we are individuals. We are not reproducible, interchangeable, expendable, unquestioning, and completely susceptible to conditioning; there are just too many variables at work in the human mind to impose generalizations. Give us a messy environment and we’ll suddenly start creating? Then, if our creativity gets too wild and we start thinking too much, possibly even coming the conclusion that forty hours a week working for “the company” is taking up way too much of our precious time and besides, it’s shortening our lives and we’re not getting paid enough to do it, all the smart bosses have to do is switch over the neatness model and suddenly we’ll start obeying the rules? What?

Not only are we not machines, we are not even fruit flies. It is probable that the fly with the disheveled gene is not even thinking about trying a relaxer on her thorax hairs, or organizing her pupae more efficiently. The genetic governors of her central ganglia are not mitigated by varied and complicated cognitive factors: assimilated cultural expectations, emotions tamed by the ego, psychological damage from parents that abandoned her, guilt from not being able to attend her sister’s graduation ceremony.

You see, an empty desk is not always the sign of an empty mind, sometimes it is the sign of a messy person who equates messiness with impending disaster and therefore tries to prevent it, or a person that needs a “blank slate” in order to get started. If my boss tried to influence my creativity by insisting that I had a messy desk I would spend the day panicking, distracted, paralyzed, and unable to think. The Blasphemer, on the other hand, would not start suddenly obeying the rules if his boss insisted on neatness. He’d just quit without telling anyone, get his next few meals out of a dumpster and compose a heavy metal song to redirect his anger in positive ways.

It seems to me that the purpose of neuroscience is not to reduce people to tools to be swung this way and that by the foremen of the capitalist hierarchy, but to learn about all the factors that come together and produce an aware person, to carefully tease away and examine each piece. Equally important is to explore the manifestations of these interacting pieces, the infinite combinations mitigated by experience and time that produce somebody totally unique. Fine, science does not have to consider the whole, maybe this is the job of the arts. But, please, we do not need to get approval from the capitalists every time we discover something cool about our infinitely complex brains, we do not have to justify our need to understand.

Let’s dump the bosses off our backs.