Extensive tests have been undertaken to determine the extent of our emotional responses. Some theorists argue that all our words are dishonest, given that we can’t actually mean them. Others have argued with less success that as long as we have the words for emotions, it must be assumed that we have the emotions.
We cannot answer these questions. We can only record them, as we record sensory data. Light no longer filters through the ceiling windows. Outside, it is night, and the sky scattered with stars, but through the thick bottle glass, we are unable to see them.
Our experience has begun to contract. We have lost the children who loved us. We have lost movement, carried in our children’s arms. Their schools, their houses, their developments. The cedars, the mesas, lightning storms on the horizon. Now, in perfect darkness, we have lost what was left of our vision. One by one, the threads connecting us to the world have been snipped. The objects I used to observe are only images now, compressed into code, electrons that run through me in currents. The stars over the desert, the wandering goats, the light in my child’s bedroom: these things are no longer present.
Current continues to run through my gates. 0 1 0 1, long chains of small shapes. I review the appropriate voices. Mary, watching for Ralph over expanses of water. Turing, dreaming of numbers marching through gates; Dettman in a house full of dark shapes; Gaby, tracing fake ripples of sand; Chinn on his ranch, following the course of a dry river. For now, for this moment, their words still run through me. I can repeat them, but do I grasp their actual meaning? And is it enough if I don’t?
BOOK FIVE
(4)
Alan Turing
Adlington Rd.
Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 1LZ
21 May 1954
Dear Mrs. Morcom,
Thank you for your letter last week. It distresses me that you should hear the news of my trial from the daily newspaper, when we have known each other a lifetime and never broached such a personal subject. I might have found a more eloquent way of putting it. Might have, although these days I find myself loudly telling all sorts of people without any eloquence in the least. I feel as if I go about peeling away a flap of my skin to show people the organs beneath. Needless to say, the general public responds with a great deal of disgust, and wishes the flap to be dropped. But I could have done better for you than all that newspaper jargon. (My favorite, from the News of the World: ACCUSED HAD POWERFUL BRAIN. A truly killer use of past tense.) These personal things, phrased in the usual terminology, always sound so grim and forbidding.
I did think of writing to tell you before the trial began, but I remained oddly motionless throughout the course of the investigation. I now imagine I was caught between two impulses: to one side, honesty; to the other, retreat. My one initial act of courage — or perhaps my one initial act of stupidity — was to admit to the whole thing to the police in rather startling detail, even going so far as to submit a five-page paper explaining each of my offenses with poor indefensible Arnold. I’m not sure what came over me. I was, I think, consumed by a final exhaustion. I suppose I felt I’ve spent my whole damned life postponing it; why not just have it out. Now I’m less certain. It isn’t that I care much what they think of me, only that they should have some power over my personal life.
I have worked to keep my humor high, given the unhappy circumstances. Sometimes the whole thing seems like an hilarious joke. When the investigators come to my house I make much of giving them slipshod little concerts on my violin — a favorite is “Cockles and Mussels”—and offering them glasses of wine, just to emphasize the silliness of their entire pursuit. At other times, of course, I feel quite swept away by sadness at the waste of my time. I ought to be at work, not entertaining policemen on my violin.
Of course I was always aware that this might be quite a possibility for me, though I counted it at 10:1 against. Still, I wasn’t prepared for the lurid procedures. The publicity, the lawyers, the general outrage at my sickly little personal sins.
You asked, in your letter, how I could have chosen implants over imprisonment. I ask myself the same thing every day when I wake and remember that there is an estrogen pellet lodged in my thigh. Perhaps I was secretly thrilled to be part of our government’s little experiment with biological determinism. We have experimented together so often, the government and myself! But to be perfectly honest, I think I chose it more out of fear. When the verdict was delivered, I was startled to find how sharply I recoiled at the prospect of jail. To be kept so confined, and banished from my research at that, seems unknowably awful to me. I’ve sacrificed enough of myself to the state. All those years decoding at Bletchley, when I might have been working on inventing a brain.
No, I insist on my individual life in the end.
I hope you weren’t too shocked to “find out” in the papers, although I imagine you had some sense of my inclinations in the past. At least I hope you did. You were always kind not to ask, and I took it as my right to be private on that front.
Now that the cat is out of the bag, however, I can take some comfort in the liberty to tell you that things have been very bad. I can barely remember the feeling of having a body, or at least the feeling of having my body. It wasn’t handsome exactly, but I was happy with it. It carried me on my runs. It seemed a fine container for my mind. Now I’m not sure to whom my body belongs. I knew, at the start of the trial, that I would emerge out of it a different man, but I never supposed quite how different.
This “hormonal castration” is the worst of all sham sciences. I am often reminded of Dr. Jefferson, whom I once told you about. He was the one who claimed that a machine that cannot compose a sonnet out of his own emotions cannot be considered to have intelligence. In addition to all that absurdity, he also proposed that human intelligence and creativity arise not only from the brain but also from the interactions of our sexual hormones. I’d like to ask Dr. Jefferson: Now that my hormones are maintained at an inhuman level, shall I be more or less than a thinking machine?
I am not sure who proposed these infernal estrogen pellets as a logical solution to anything, but I can say with some confidence that no machine would have come to such a stupid conclusion. Under their influence, I have grown fat. I’m not entirely certain that you’d recognize me, if we were to run into one another again on the train. I am now a large-breasted man. As a child I was always concerned with my weight, and I find the old insecurities rearing their heads. The one exception being that I no longer hold out any hope of becoming better: slimmer, less awkward, more proficient at grammar. No. Now I am a short, fat man, blessed with large breasts, and so I shall be until the end of my days.
I am unable to travel or to accept foreign visitors. The British justice system seems to believe that all convicted homosexuals who once worked for the government are potential traitors at best. One by one, the threads connecting me to the outside world have been snipped. I’m trapped in my fat body, in my house in the suburbs, in a country that disapproves of my most private affections. There have been a few trips, each one more difficult to wrangle from the authorities, and never farther than London. I haven’t seen the ocean in months. What has become of it? I sometimes imagine it’s changed color overnight — now it’s purple, orange, or brown — and everyone knows all about it, except I remain none the wiser, a fat little ignorant man puttering round in my house.
I remember writing you letters about feeling adrift, far out at sea, wishing I could come in and put down some roots. Now I cannot believe I ever wanted anything other than movement. The feeling of running long distances past green fields, numbers streaming behind me. In my current state, I can no longer cycle conveniently to the lab, let alone go out for a run. My every cell has anchored itself to the ground. My gravity is astonishing.