Negative Space
On a brisk Monday in November, I attend a lecture on cognitive science perspectives in contemporary American politics with my Theories of Human Uniqueness seminar classmates. We all walk from the psychology building where class is held to the engineering department’s lecture hall. We have been discussing intelligence: Can it be captured in a single variable? Is it limited to humans?
One of the speakers is Paul Bloom, a prominent professor at Yale who studies moral psychology.
Bloom considers dehumanization — treating people as objects — in a different light. He argues that fully recognizing others’ agency actually motivates the atrocities we consider dehumanizing. He speaks of dehumanization in a sociopolitical context, but his final remarks most perplex me. They will continue to trouble me as the semesters pass, after I graduate and move to another city almost three years later. Humanization is not always the solution, Bloom says. Surgeons do their best work when thinking of their patients as objects. That is why they are told never to operate on people they know or care about — because those patients matter too much. Because they become human.
In the dining lounge by Yale’s Café Med, figure drawings hang on the walls. They are the fruits of a collaboration between the School of Art and the School of Medicine that encourages interdisciplinary learning. Students from both disciplines work together in a series of classes, drawing a nude model. All have been trained to observe humans objectively, whether measuring distance, proportions, angles or measuring heart rate, blood pressure, temperature.
My junior fall, I take the School of Art’s undergraduate figure drawing class, fitting it among my science courses. The model in my figure drawing class is an object for two and a half hours, constructed of shadows and light. There is little to no interaction with the model. Eye contact is rarely made, and when it is, it feels strange. At the end of class, the model slips back into clothes, grabs a coffee cup, and exits, human again. Because undergraduates can work as nude models, I will occasionally recognize the model. I think those are the hardest drawings to make, when you know the person standing in front of you. It is difficult to represent someone on paper objectively, accurately, when they are familiar.
Draw what you actually see, not what you think you see, our professor tells us. Look at the subject. My observational drawings of strangers around campus are quick, precise, comfortable. My portraits of friends are hard to get right. I remember the shape of a nose, the curve of a cheek, because I have seen it so many times. I know what you look like. I know you.
In Clinical Anatomy, physician’s assistants and medical students dissect cadavers to understand how the body they treat is constructed. The School of Medicine’s anatomy suite is a ten-minute walk from the School of Art. A card describes each donor’s cause of death, while drawings by students line the hallway outside. Each cadaver bears meticulous markings that map out anatomical features: lymph nodes, major arteries, bones.
My figure drawing class treks there to draw from a cadaver. Figure drawing, our professor says, requires knowledge of anatomy. You must know how the body is constructed from the inside out to correctly represent it on paper. Where do the muscles contract and how do they work to hold a pose? How does the spine bend? Where is the body’s tension?
Surrounded by dissected cadavers, I feel strangely at ease. Beneath the sterilizing fluorescent lights, these subjects are easy to understand. I see the sagittal cut of a head and touch the brain with a latex-gloved hand. Curious to learn more, I request an additional session and tell the clinical anatomy professor I would like to study the female reproductive organ system as a reference for an exhibition submission. He points out each neatly preserved organ in a donor’s abdomen, then leaves me to draw. The donor died in a car crash. Fascinated, I step closer. Her wrinkled face is veiled in layers of gauze, free of any markings. Beneath, her eyes are shut as if sleeping. She smells of formaldehyde.
The week before fall semester finals, I shadow a 7:15 AM neurosurgery. Today an epilepsy patient will undergo a right hemispherectomy. Outside the operating room, the neurosurgeon hands me a printout of the neuropsychologist’s clinical presentation slides. Inside, I stand at a distance from the blue-tiled sterile area that patient and surgery team occupy. The nurses prepare the patient, attaching the urinary catheter and heart rate monitor, wrapping the body in blankets. Something resembling opaque blue shrink wrap covers the face. A resident explains the procedure to me: another resident cuts past the X marked on the shrink wrap, drills through the skull, then carefully peels away dura mater before the surgeon steps in. All that is visible is the temporal lobe underneath. I recognize the anatomy from textbooks and lab, and I wish I could get closer.
When the surgery is complete, the neurosurgeon exits the room before the patient wakes. The blue sheet still covers the body. The nurses remove the blankets, adjust the IV. The patient stirs. In a moment, she becomes human again.
Every Saturday morning of the spring semester, I work in the basement of an outpatient behavioral health facility, transcribing and coding decade-old clinical interviews with patients who attempted suicide. My supervisor leaves a stack of these for me in her office; it reaches almost to my height. At times I find my job bizarre. I find it difficult to grasp that in the end, each person will be a vector in a dataframe, a number in a measure, however much their data will contribute to research and the well-being of others. I wonder where they are now, ten years later. Are they alive? Have they found peace? Did they find value in themselves, in life?
Once upon a time, subject number 16 tried to hang herself with earbuds in a hospital room. Number 32 wanted so badly to cease existing that she downed pills and bleach. I reduce the clinician’s scribbled notes into numbers on a zero to six severity scale, six being the most life-threatening attempt. Each pivotal moment takes up one cell in a 200-row excel spreadsheet.
After ten transcriptions, I stop absorbing the words. A layer of blue shrink wrap seems to encircle each interview; a gauze veil hangs between the pages and me. A six is a six, nothing more.
That September, I sketch all three days of the university chaplain’s funeral because I know there will be no other visual recorder and that the parish will want to remember. The wake on the second day is the most difficult scene I have ever drawn. Though I have seen and touched death with gloved hands and steel tools, in anatomy suites and museums and labs, death has never touched me. I draw the windows, candles, and coffin in minutes, but I fuss over the proportions in the face and body. No matter how accurate they are, the drawing is not him because he is not here anymore. His face is wearing makeup but he is dead and the flowers around him are alive. I remember him telling me what hope means, that it is always here, that things will be okay. I remember his kind eyes. In the coffin, they are shut.
I give proper condolences to his brother and run to the choir loft, where I tap the piano keys for a long time, then go back to doing homework in the library. Six months later, parish members will commission reproductions of my wake painting because they like the pretty colors, the flowers are so vibrant, they didn’t even notice the coffin. I will turn them all down.
My figures do not have faces, however meticulously rendered their ribcages are, however intricately drawn their ligaments. I cannot make eye contact with the model for the sake of the final piece; a portrait becomes much more than an observational painting. Can I provide what a human deserves? Can I do a person justice? Can I see clearly while thinking? Should I think? And most of all, should I feel?
That brisk Monday, Bloom’s lecture ends on an ambiguous note: neither humanization nor dehumanization constitutes an all-encompassing good. There is no clear answer, no single direction. The capacity to remove that blue shrink wrap yields as much compassion as it does destruction. The question is when, and how much, to remove.
Figure drawing was a prerequisite to any higher-level art course that demanded thinking beyond technical elements. The neurosurgeon met that epilepsy patient months before the procedure. An operation is just one part of a medical process. The clinical measures were but one feature of an intensive program that lasted weeks.
To be aware of what I see and what I feel, and what I know and do not know, defines the negative space around the subject truth. I think of truth as a three-dimensional subject within a space: facts describe truth to a certain extent, and allow us to see it objectively. But to embrace a fuller truth requires engaging subjectively, feeling.
That’s not to say reductive facts do not have value. My figure drawing class could learn facts about the human figure, a fundamental lesson in every art curriculum. In the operating room, the neurosurgeon was able to focus on the demands of a high-stakes task. And instead of grappling with pages of interview notes, I found myself more clearly considering a few specific measures. Reductive thinking relies on facts to solve a problem or question. What is difficult, I think, is to contextualize and subsequently place that answer. And it can be dangerous when reductive fact becomes conflated with expansive truth, especially because that lack of context allows that fact to be applied anywhere.
My art professor tells me to start drawing faces on my figures, then refers me to a live portrait-drawing gig. I lament the fact that adding faces makes a drawing far more difficult, and sometimes I don’t finish in the allotted 40 minutes. But I also think that my drawings are inherently incomplete and so leave all the more to learn and struggle with. That incompleteness, that struggle, is what lies beneath the blue shrink wrap.
