September sun by Dwight Davis circa 1910. Shows a woman sitting on a porch. Source: Library of Congress

When You Just Want to be Alone

The History of Solitude in America

01.18.19

We all have times when we want to be alone, but what is the history of solitude in America? How are experiments on dolphins connected with consciousness raising and isolation tanks? And what does Thoreau’s solitary experiment at Walden Pond have to teach us all in the digital age?

solitude

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Segments

Brian Floats!

Brian visits a flotation center to try out an isolation pod… and can’t believe how long he’s expected to float.

Music:

Floaty by Podington Bear

hydrotherapy; isolation; solitude

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Speaker 1: Major funding for Backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Brian Balogh: From Virginia Humanities, this is Backstory.
Welcome to Backstory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Brian Balogh.

Ed Ayers: I’m Ed Ayers.

Joanne Freeman: I’m Joanne Freeman.

Brian Balogh: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians, along with Nathan Connolly, and each week we explore a different aspect of American history. Over the years I’ve done a lot of Backstory, but I never thought I would be floating around in salty water in a darkened isolation tank. When one of our producers emailed me asking if I’d be willing to jump into a tank and see what this wellness craze was all about, well, how could I say no? He never told me how long I’d actually be in the tank.
How long am I floating for?

Ted: You’ll be floating for 90 minutes.

Brian Balogh: 90 minutes? Is that in base 10? I don’t think I can float for 90 minutes.

Jordan: It actually goes by really fast.

Brian Balogh: I had three minutes in mind.

Jordan: A lot of people who come out who have that same apprehension that you do, they come out on the other end and they’re very surprised as to how fast it goes by.

Brian Balogh: How about if we compromise on something?

Ted: Yeah.

Brian Balogh: I’m getting anxious just thinking about the notion of doing anything for 90 minutes. 45 minutes. I think that’s very generous on my part.

Ted: It sounds like you have a strong mind. No, how about you just get in and we’ll get you out, and you just stay in there? Here are the pods.

Brian Balogh: What if I don’t float? I don’t float so well. Did they tell you that?

Ted: We’ve floated anybody from 40 pounds to 590 pounds.

Brian Balogh: I just lie there and do nothing for 90 minutes?

Ted: Yes.

Brian Balogh: Can I use my cellphone?

Ted: No.

Brian Balogh: Yes, I’m ready.

Ted: You’re ready?

Brian Balogh: Yeah.

Ted: Let’s do this.

Brian Balogh: Am I listening to music while I’m in there?

Ted: No. It’s solitude.

Brian Balogh: Solitude, okay.

Ted: Towel right here. Then you’re ready to step into the pod, and basically you brace yourself [inaudible 00:02:52] you’ll step in and you’ll grab this handle and you will close the lid.

Brian Balogh: I close the lid?

Ted: Yeah. I’m not gonna be in here with you.

Brian Balogh: I can open the lid?

Ted: You can open the lid at any time.

Brian Balogh: Same way?

Ted: Same way.

Brian Balogh: You’re not gonna lock it?

Ted: There’s no lock on it.

Brian Balogh: There’s no lock.

Ted: No lock on it.

Brian Balogh: Good. That’s reassuring.

Ted: Keep in mind that you have this homogenous mixture in here of the water, you, and the air. Sometimes our brain really focuses on, “Okay, the temperature’s not perfect,” and then you’re like, “Oh, I don’t like the head pillow because I can feel it,” or, “I’m bumping into the sides.” The beautiful part about this homogenous environment in here is eventually it all becomes one. If you just let the mind go, you could even be on the side, you could have the head pillow on, but after five, 10 minutes, that’s just gonna fade out. You’re not even gonna be able to feel it anymore. Really just try and let go and relax. You ready?

Brian Balogh: Is there an exam afterwards?

Ted: No. This’ll be the easiest thing you’ve ever done.

Brian Balogh: It already isn’t.

Joanne Freeman: Brian, I have to ask you. You’re gonna have to tell me something about what it felt like to be in an isolation tank. I’m so curious.

Brian Balogh: I am not one who truly knows what it is to have a panic attack, but I have a feeling that when I said, “How long am I gonna be in this tank, three minutes?” and they said, “Oh no no no, minimum 90 minutes,” that’s about as close to a panic attack, I think, as I’ve ever had. I felt anxious. I felt uncomfortable.

Joanne Freeman: When you were in there for that scary 90 minutes, was there any point at which you accommodated yourself to it and that empty space began to feel, if not comfortable, then at least less threatening?

Brian Balogh: Yes. I would say once I got through the first 10 or 12 minutes, I did achieve a kind of, I don’t know, slightly different state. It was somewhere between being awake and being asleep. I certainly never fell asleep. The thought of swallowing all that saltwater really was something that kept me and continues to keep me awake at night. I did get in touch with a much more vivid recollection of some very early childhood memories.

Joanne Freeman: Wow.

Brian Balogh: I certainly understand why people seek this out. Joanne, I am publicly making this offer right now.

Joanne Freeman: Uh-oh.

Brian Balogh: I will pay for 90 minutes of floating for you-

Joanne Freeman: Oh, man.

Brian Balogh: … if you would like to do it. What do you think? You gonna take me up on that?

Joanne Freeman: Oh, boy. Part of me, the daredevil part of me, even though it sounded a little daunting at the beginning, is really, really curious, and the other part of me that really doesn’t like being in water or the dark, is not so thrilled. I’m curious as heck, so ultimately I probably might do it.

A Hermit’s Life for Me

In the late 18th century, some early Americans pondered how national freedom and independence could translate into their own personal lives and idealized the hermetic life. But, historian Eric Slauter explains how the solitary impulse also seemed to threaten national unity.

Music:

Trundle by Podington Bear

independence; isolation; national unity; solitude

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Brian Balogh: Today on the show we explore the history of solitude in America.

Joanne Freeman: You’ll hear about the legend of the 227-year-old hermit who enchanted some early Americans and threatened others.

Ed Ayers: We’ll learn just how alone Henry David Thoreau really was during his experiment at Walden Pond. Plus, we’ll dive into the Cold War history behind sensory deprivation tanks.

Joanne Freeman: In the late 18th century, debates about the nature of independence and liberty started bubbling up in the colonies and then the early republic.

Eric Slauter: When you think about the big stories of the 18th century, arguably the biggest is about individuals entering into or exiting from societies. If you would have to give a narrative to the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, that would be it.

Joanne Freeman: Historian Eric Slaughter says early Americans started to wonder how these big ideas apply to their own personal lives.

Eric Slauter: There’s a persistent theme in American politics of people who just want to be left alone. One of the fantasies is the Crusoe-like fantasy that one could go it alone. You see guidebooks to solitude, defenses of solitude and encouragements towards rural retirement or rural retreat. It’s hard for us to think that life in the 18th century was so busy that people needed to-

Joanne Freeman: That’s true.

Eric Slauter: … retreat from it, but that’s clearly how they saw it. I think that’s certainly one of the reasons why you do see hermits at all levels, from the retiring politician to the person who’s simply been in business and is looking to recreate within the natural world.

Joanne Freeman: Give us a couple examples of people in this world who really praised and even valorized the idea of solitude.

Eric Slauter: One thinks of Thomas Jefferson, whose first draft of a name for his retreat in Virginia was not Monticello but the Hermitage, or you could think of George Washington’s retirement as a desire to leave public life and return to a kind of solitude. You also have folks like Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, who when he was just in his early 20s penned a 100-page poem about the powers of solitude and continued to add to it over the next few years until he had produced a 200-page poem about solitude.

Joanne Freeman: One of the most popular fictional stories circulating at the time is about two Virginia gentlemen who head West and stumble upon a very unusual solitary fellow.

Eric Slauter: Hundreds of miles into the interior they find a cave inhabited by what purports to be a 227-year-old hermit.

Joanne Freeman: He must’ve introduced himself as, “Hi, I’m a 227-year-old hermit.”

Eric Slauter: They coaxed his story out of him. He was a vegetarian, which he said was good for his physical constitution, but also meant that animals didn’t fear him. He wasn’t naturally aggressive and so they all left him alone. He had spent his time really in a kind of meditation thinking on the important things of this world and the next. Reading through the newspapers and the almanacs and the imprints of these years, you’d find this character absolutely everywhere. I even found I think a newspaper advertisement for a wax works exhibition, a sort of early Madame Tussauds wax works exhibition in New York City in 1789 where the government was sitting that included this old hermit next to a Native American, next to George Washington, next to the British Royal family.

Joanne Freeman: Wow.

Eric Slauter: He was quite a popular hermit I think you could say.

Joanne Freeman: As hermits go.

Eric Slauter: As hermits go, quite a popular hermit.

Joanne Freeman: Some were enchanted by these tales of hermits. For others there was something in the idea of the solitary life which seemed threatening to the social order. They saw it as unnatural, maybe even sinister.

Eric Slauter: You do see this frequent denigration within the political theory of the day of this notion of solitude. A lot of social contract thinkers feel that human beings are naturally sociable and so they want to come together in conjugal relationships, in social relationships, in church relationships, and so forth, and that men are by nature social beings.
Thomas Payne is somebody who always valorizes union, and so consequently, solitude is a negative category for him. He gives you an example at the beginning of Common Sense, his great political pamphlet of early 1776, that the strength of a single individual could probably not erect a building in the wilderness, whereas four or five people together could.
Then even after the Constitution, one of the great Framers, James Wilson of Pennsylvania and one of the first law professors of the United States, gives a series of lectures, really one of the first public law lectures at the University of Pennsylvania in 1790 and 1791. He gives a lecture on the social contract, in which he proposes the thought experiment, what if suddenly you were reduced to solitude. Again, the question of what is natural for human beings, individuality and individualism or social collectivity is certainly on his mind.

Joanne Freeman: These disagreements about the value of solitude start to play into debates about the nature of the social contract, the role of government, and where rights come from.

Eric Slauter: There’s no getting around the idea that in the 18th century, people who think in terms of contract theory and the origin of governments and origin of states, they tend to think solitary individuals carry a certain bundle of rights out of the state of nature. They have various views about what the state of nature might look like, ranging from those who see like Locke, perfect liberty and perfect equality, to those who see Hobbes, a life that is, what’s the famous phrase, solitary, poor, nasty-

Joanne Freeman: Nasty, brutish, and short.

Eric Slauter: … brutish, and short. Solitary is the first word there.

Joanne Freeman: Interesting.

Eric Slaughter: The idea really, the main political philosophy of say the Declaration or of the American Revolution in general, tends to be that God gave natural rights to human beings, human beings use some of those rights to create civil governments, but still there’s always the retained right of revolution or the right to alter or abolish when a government is found to be imperfect in its protection of those inalienable rights.

Joanne Freeman: In theory, a person in solitude helps create a democratic society when they consent to the social contract, but in practice, the act of choosing to be alone was still suspicious. James Madison embodies this tension between both valuing solitude as necessary for independent decision making and recognizing that solitude can be anti-democratic.

Eric Slauter: You do see a lot of denigration of closet politicians who are utopian, thinking that that is not done in public or done with collective decision making. I do see Madison as somebody who is torn between this desire to be a closet politician and also to have decisions that are made collectively. I think there were many decisions made collectively, that he didn’t like that.
One of my favorite lines of his comes from a memo he wrote just before he appeared in Philadelphia. It’s a famous memo on the vices of the political system of the United States. He wrote in that memo that you can’t rely on character or religion within popular assemblies, political assemblies, to protect minority rights, because the conduct of every popular assembly acting on oath, which he said was the strongest of religious ties, shows that individuals joined without remorse in acts against which their consciences would revolt if proposed to them separately in their closets, so people acting in a way that they wouldn’t act if you presented certain cases to them.

Joanne Freeman: The question of who we are when we’re alone is not a new question. Both before and after the Revolution, debates continue about whether solitude helps us reflect and make kinder decisions or whether we become more selfish when we’re by ourselves. Eric Slaughter is associate professor of English and Deputy Dean of Humanities at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The State As A Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution.

The Perks of Being Alone

Henry David Thoreau’s experiment at Walden Pond has inspired generations to seek solitude in the wilderness. But as scholar Laura Dassow Walls explains, his version of solitude was not necessarily based on isolation.

Music:

Wisp of Fog by Justin H. Wright

Henry David Thoreau; Walden Pond; isolation; literature; solitude

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Ed Ayers: Nestled in the woods of a small town in Massachusetts lay Walden Pond, where Henry David Thoreau undertook the most famous experiment in simple living in American history. Thoreau believed that the only way to find meaning and lead a purposeful life was to renounce the rigors of society. In 1845 he built a tiny 10′ x 15′ cabin in a secluded spot near Walden Pond. His experiment was a meditation on the virtues of nature, spirituality, and solitude.

Henry Thoreau: I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

Ed Ayers: For exactly two years, two months, and two days, Thoreau immersed himself in nature and logged his observations. During most of this time he was alone, and for Thoreau, solitude was the key to unlocking a higher consciousness. After returning to society in 1847, he eventually published Walden, a memoir of his extended retreat in the woods and one of the most celebrated books in American literature.

Laura D. Walls: He valued solitude and he found that he needed some every day, and if he didn’t get it, he got pretty testy and unpleasant to be around.

Ed Ayers: That’s scholar Laura Dassow Walls. She says that Thoreau saw solitude as a creative space for writing and reflection, as well as a means to live the best life.

Laura D. Walls: The difference is that he also needed to be around people, so there’s a little back and forth going on here. I wouldn’t say entirely bipolar, but he was surprisingly warm and loving and sensitive person, which was probably part of the problem, is that when he was hurt he would get very prickly and withdraw. He found it exhausting to be around people and he was terrible at smalltalk. In other words he’s the classic introvert. Thoreau turned that need for solitude into a kind of creative resource.

Ed Ayers: He was pretty much beloved by a lot of people, even though they recognized he was something of an odd duck. It’s not that he was shunned. He wasn’t in solitude because he was rejected, right?

Laura D. Walls: Right.

Ed Ayers: It’s something he chose.

Laura D. Walls: He was definitely somebody who people identified from early on as different. Later on they might’ve said eccentric. I think people were either attracted to him and found him lovable and really engaging to be around and he was always interesting, clearly, and other people just couldn’t tolerate him, and it became very mutual. It was a self-selecting process. You even see that in responses to his writing.
When his books when out, and Walden for instance, most reviews were just ecstatic, or at least very positive. Every now and then there would be one very huffy, “Who does he think he is?” It’s odd about solitary people, especially when it’s out there as a creative almost kind of brand, because they’re a bit threatening. They can in a sense be criticizing society or criticizing you as part of society. Some people share that and say, “Yeah, me too,” and other people are like, “Hey, you’re rejecting everything I care about.” That kind of divisiveness surrounds him too.

Ed Ayers: You mentioned Walden, which is the way that most people know about Thoreau being alone. How alone was he at Walden?

Laura D. Walls: It sounds like I’m trying to be funny. I’m not. He was alone when nobody else was there, which was a fair amount of the time. He’s out there on the edge of town. There weren’t any houses anywhere around him, not inhabited houses. He was a little off the main road and across the pond from the railroad, which means there were people always just a few hundred yards away. Walden Pond was the place that people went for picnics and to fish and to swim, which means daytime activities. There he was all day and all night too. Once the sun went down, he was totally alone. He really valued that. One of the points is that he was there 24 hours a day, which means that most of those hours he was alone, but then in the daylight hours, especially on weekends, people visited him all the time.
He had a system. If he was happy to have company, he’d put a chair out in front of his door. If the chair wasn’t there, it meant either, “I’m not here, I’m out on a walk, or I am busy, and so respect that,” and people did. The chair was visible from the road so people knew whether or not Henry was entertaining company. I get the sense from accounts of conversations with him that it was a back porch Cracker Barrel philosophizing time. It must’ve been fun, or he’d be hoeing his beans and people would holler at him from the road. There you’ve got this rhythm of people going either to entertain themselves or because they were genuinely friends that wanted to visit or the alone time, the solitary dawn, the morning hours, the times before people were in that social mode, when Thoreau was completely in his own world.

Ed Ayers: Some people have pointed to the proximity of the railroad and of Concord itself as evidence of Thoreau’s hypocrisy. Then he’s talking as if he’s out on the wilderness, and instead he could walk to somebody’s house for a meal at any point. How do we think about that? Is it theater? Is it imagined solitude is more important than the actual physical solitude? Help us understand that.

Laura D. Walls: First of all, when he went to Walden, he’d been dreaming of doing this ever since probably childhood. It goes all the way back to a memory when he was about five years old. What he imagined was solitude. That was the dream. He tried various ways of doing this, and none of them brought that kind of experience. To him it would be a creative kind of retreat. He wanted to write. He wanted to write poetry. He wanted to have this deep encounter with nature, not to be socializing, but to really try to go one-on-one with what really was a spiritual quest, a godhead. The chance opened up.
Emerson happened to be on a walk at Walden Pond. He happened to be there at a time when a group of speculators were bidding on this piece of property. He happened to feel in a good mood. He happened to have money at that moment. He said, “I’ll buy it.” That was the land. He comes back into town and tells Henry, and very quickly the deal is made that this is where Henry will finally have the chance to realize this long-held dream.
Henry builds on Emerson’s land. He thinks of himself as almost like he’s gonna be high up in the mountains. He’s not. He’s right there on the edge of town. The railroad’s there, so the railroad workers come by and say, “Hey, what are you doing?” People come by and they can see the house, “Why are you building this house way out here?” This is the turn that’s fascinating, because he could’ve said, “Go away. I don’t wanna talk to you.” He doesn’t. He starts talking with them. When they ask him what is he doing, he tells them. He’s a born teacher. He gets engaged by this process of trying to open up his heart to what he thinks is important. It’s almost a process of conversion or making disciples.
On the one hand, he still cherishes this dream of solitude and intense spiritual elevation, in what really does sound a lot like the classic hermit retreat. On the other hand, circumstances have drawn him into this other moat. Of course the third element to this is, look, he’s got responsibilities. He’s moved about a mile away from his family, but he’s still the oldest son. He still has to go back and take care of family chores. They wanna have him around for Sunday dinner. He has to make a few dollars, so he has to go do his laboring. He’s in town every two or three days to take care of this or that piece of business. That just isn’t part of Walden. Who wants to read about that? That’s just ordinary stuff. He doesn’t really tell us in Walden, except there’s a couple places where he says, “Well sure,” but that doesn’t change the basic point that he’s trying to make.

Ed Ayers: What I hear you saying is that Walden is authentically about solitude but it’s not really about isolation.

Laura D. Walls: That’s a good way to put it. What’s interesting about exactly that is once his experiment at Walden is done, and it was always an experiment, it was always gonna be temporary, so once it’s over, he’s back in town, he lives with the Emersons, then he goes back and lives with his own family, big households, lots of people, but what he brings with him is a kind of ethic of periodic solitude, of again, solitude as a kind of creative space or resource that really he thinks that all people could use. The trick is can you do that on Main Street. If it’s really real, you shouldn’t have to artificially remove yourself from society, create some kind of false bubble. You should be able to bring it with you back to the streets of New York or wherever you are. In that sense it’s something you carry with you. It’s an ethic for living, not for retreating from life.

Ed Ayers: Today people seek solitude from the digital world, in which we seem so immersed. Any speculation on advice that we might get from Henry David Thoreau in our time?

Laura D. Walls: That’s an easy one. Put down the damn phone. No, he would find this an assault, a 24/7 unrelenting assault on everything that solitude makes possible. The sense that you would never touch technology, no, he was fascinated by technology, but his demand was that you understand it and that you make sure that you use it, that it doesn’t use you.
His famous line about, “We do not ride on the railroad, it rides upon us,” that was his beef with the railroad. Not that it existed. Yes, it existed and he was fascinated by it and he rode the railroad himself, appreciated what it brought, but he drew the line when he thought that it was, as with all technologies, turning and controlling those of us who think that we’re using it, but in fact we’re becoming cogs in this big mechanism.
If you can use your cellphone in such a way that you can put it down, walk away from it, and then take it up later on only when you’re ready for it, then great, but he worries and would worry that today that’s not what is happening, that people are controlled by it, and they’re engineered, these devices, to make us need them. That would make him very suspicious. He would think we were slaves to it.

Ed Ayers: Laura Dassow Walls is the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. She’s the author of Henry David Thoreau: A Life.

Ishi, The Survivor

For more than 40 years, the Native American Ishi hid in the hills of Northern California with his family, avoiding white people as much as possible. Ishi eventually became the last known member of the Yahi. But after he was found desperately searching for food in a slaughterhouse in 1911, Ishi spent the last years of his life as a anthropological spectacle for the public. Ed talks with Native American scholar Jace Weaver about how Ishi sought survival through solitude.

Music:

Lonesome by Podington Bear

Rain on Glass by Podington Bear

Ishi; extinction; isolation; solitude; spectacle

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Joanne Freeman: Not everybody who has sought solitude has shared Thoreau’s thirst for transcendence. There have been people who had to retreat into isolation for their safety as a way to survive.

Ed Ayers: In late August of 1911, a young worker was walking through a slaughterhouse in Oroville, California when he came across a startling sight. It was a man he did not know. The man was emaciated and despondent.

Jace Weaver: He was searching for food. There was no sense that he was turning himself in or acquiescing in any way.

Ed Ayers: This is Jace Weaver. He’s the Director of the Institute of Native American Studies at the University of Georgia. Weaver says the starving man was the last known survivor of a tribe called the Yahi. After he was found in the slaughterhouse, the man was put under the supervision of an anthropologist named Alfred Kroeber. Kroeber decided to give the indigenous man a name.

Jace Weaver: Ishi just means man in the Yana language, because under the protocol of the Yana, a person can’t give his name until another Yahi introduces him, and there was no one left to introduce him, so Kroeber just named him man.

Ed Ayers: There was no one left to introduce Ishi because the rest of his family and his tribe had died, disappeared, or been killed. In 1865 the Yahi were attacked by whites in the Three Knolls Massacre. They killed more than half the tribe. 33 of the Yahi survived, but they continued to be attacked by ranchers and hunters. Therefore, Ishi and his family decided to go into hiding and avoid white people as much as possible. They stayed in this solitude for more than 40 years, but despite their efforts, grief still found Ishi and his family.

Jace Weaver: He had a terrifying encounter when some engineer surveyors were coming through. He and his sister panicked and ran in opposite directions, and he never saw his sister again.

Ed Ayers: By 1911, Ishi was about 50 years old and alone. When he was found searching for food, Ishi’s hair was still burned short. This was an act of mourning for the Yahi. Ishi’s mother had recently died. She was the last of his companions. Now, without speaking a word of English, Ishi is thrust into Western society and is taken to live at the Museum of Anthropology in San Francisco.

Jace Weaver: It was reported in the newspapers when Kroeber returned with him. The public flocked to the museum. Ishi hated crowds. He hated to be touched. He learned to shake hands politely. He would readily put out his hand if someone stuck theirs out, but he never initiated handshakes. He would literally, in the face of a faceless crowd, panic, have a panic attack. He would go rigid. He would lose speech. Yet Kroeber did turn down all more exploitative offers to put him on the vaudeville circuit. He saw himself as a protector of Ishi.

Ed Ayers: What kind of language did the press use to describe Ishi?

Jace Weaver: The last wild Indian. Whatever’s meant by last and whatever’s meant by wild, that wasn’t Ishi, although he was the last Yahi. This label of the last wild Indian was a large part of his appeal and fascination with the public. During this period, anthropologists, as well as all Americans, thought that Indians were vanishing, and so here was their last chance to see an Indian as he was.

Speaker 11: An opportunity to see Ishi, the uncontaminated Aborigin recently discovered near Oroville and believed to be the last wild Indian in the country, will be given to the public Sunday afternoon at the Museum of Anthropology. Curator A.L. Kroeber of the museum has arranged to have Ishi on exhibition from 1:00 until 4:00. Between those hours, Ishi will allow the people of the city to inspect him weaving a fishnet, chipping arrow points, or engaged in some other Native occupation. San Francisco Chronicle, October 14th, 1911.

Ed Ayers: Kroeber and a colleague decided they wanted to see where Ishi had lived and they go on a camping trip. Can you tell us about that?

Jace Weaver: Yes. Kroeber and Saxton Pope persuaded Ishi over Ishi’s own objections to accompany them on a camping trip back to his homelands. Theodore Kroeber, who wrote the book, Ishi, and she says he was happy on the trip, but all of her evidence belies that. He was distracted. He was fidgety. Remember, it was where his last relatives had died. It was for him a land of the dead. When Kroeber suggests that they have to get back to the city, Ishi, who hated horseback riding, immediately packed up the base camp and got on the horse and was ready to go. In fact, Kroeber and Pope hated to go back to civilization, quote unquote. They wanted to stay longer, even though Ishi was clearly agitated.

Ed Ayers: Weaver says this camping trip shows how Ishi was caught between two worlds of torment. At the museum he’s seen as a spectacle and living exhibit. Meanwhile back in his homeland he’s met with nothing but the memory of death and despair. Nevertheless, Ishi endured life at the museum, but only for five years. He died of tuberculosis in 1916.

Jace Weaver: Kroeber is away at the time, and he wires Saxton Pope, who was a physician. He did not want an autopsy. Ishi had stumbled one day in on Pope in the dissection room and saw these bodies in various stages of dissection and was horrified and appalled. Kroeber, again trying to be protective, wires Pope and says, “An autopsy would not do anything other than be macabre. If it’s said that it’s the interest of science, tell them I say science can go to hell,” but it arrived too late and Pope had already performed the autopsy.

Ed Ayers: There’s continuing controversy about this, right, about the consequences of that autopsy?

Jace Weaver: Yes. Ishi’s brain was separated from his body and was sent to an anthropologist at the Smithsonian in Washington. Although Ichi’s body was there, his brain was not with it. It wasn’t until the 1990s that it was found, the Smithsonian saying it was in a curatorial facility in Silver Spring, Maryland, and they didn’t know anybody had been looking for it.

Ed Ayers: Then there’s a reburial in 2000 is my understanding?

Jace Weaver: Correct, reuniting his brain with his ashes. I assume that the brain was cremated as well.

Ed Ayers: Not surprisingly and not without cause, white Americans feel guilty for the enormous death and destruction they unleashed among indigenous people. Do you think there’s a kind of compensation that people are searching for when they go to the museum to see Ishi?

Jace Weaver: Yes, I think that’s right. You’re probably familiar with what’s called Chief Seattle’s Speech.

Ed Ayers: Tell me about that.

Jace Weaver: Chief Seattle was a chief in the Puget Sound area. In 1855 he signed a treaty agreeing to leave where Seattle now is and go to a reservation on another part of the Sound. He made a speech that day. In the early 1970s a version of that speech became wildly popular because it talked about we’re all related, interconnected, there’s a web of existence, but that version bore no resemblance to the speech that was recorded that day, taken down that day. It was made up for an environmental documentary by a screenwriter. The end of the ’73 speech is, “No one can escape the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We shall see.” The version that was recorded that day, at the end Chief Seattle says, “When your children and your children’s children think themselves alone, we’ll be there with them. They will never be alone. The teeming masses of my dead will be there with them, so let them treat Indians justly, for the dead are not all together powerless.”

Ed Ayers: Jace Weaver is the Director of the Institute of Native American Studies at the University of Georgia.

Float or Die

Brian talks to historian D. Graham Burnett about neurophysiologist John C. Lilly, his invention of the isolation tank and how he transformed himself from Cold War-era military researcher to consciousness-raising Sixties hippie.

Floating in Space by Podington Bear

alternative medicine; hydrotherapy; isolation; medical research

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Brian Balogh: In the midst of Cold War paranoia, neurophysiologist John C. Lilly sought to understand the nature of the mind, what kinds of threats it can endure, and how it can persevere through extreme adversity. Historian D. Graham Burnett explains how Lilly’s initial research included examining the minds of humans and animals in order to better understand the effects of isolation and close contact on the mind.

D. G. Burnett: We see work on what gets called chronic contact experiments, where you isolate a person, and later an animal, with a researcher whose job is to build an intimacy relationship, possibly even something like dependency, with a researcher with whom there’s cohabitation, for the purpose of accessing information or creating a new kind of bond, and then isolation. Isolation involves, as you know, being cut off.

Brian Balogh: Why isolation?

D. G. Burnett: People had noticed that under conditions of durational isolation, humans and animals undergo real psychic, and in some cases even physical change. One component of Lilly’s research involved developing sensory deprivation and isolation conditions, linked to the effort to figure what would happen to, for instance, U.S. submariners or astronauts or those who manned remote sensing stations in the military, how would those folks fare if they suddenly found themselves cut off and isolated for long periods of time. There was already a research tradition of sensory deprivation. We’re talking about putting sleeves on people’s hands, hoods over their heads and faces, goggles. These kinds of technology had been used for quite a while.
What would happen is you would set somebody up in one of these depauperate sensory environments, thinned out, reduced sensory environments for long periods of time, and you wanted to be able to test, to see what happened to your folks if you left them like that for hours or potentially even days, since that could be part of a battery of test for astronauts, pilots, submariners, etc.

Brian Balogh: Around the same time, Lilly is becoming increasingly interested in the minds of dolphins.

D. G. Burnett: Lilly was a self-mythologizer, and he himself spent a lot of time talking about his own breakthrough moment. It occurred as he tells the story again and again, when he was running a set of experiments on dolphin brains using direct electrodes and there was a panel switch that the dolphin could hit to turn off a charge that was being delivered to the brain. Lilly, who worked for a long time with monkeys, felt the dolphin learned much, much faster than he, Lilly, was expecting, how to turn off the charge. He also came to believe that some of the squeaky phonations that the dolphin in considerable distress was making began as he heard them to emulate human speech in certain ways. In a literal sense, Lilly felt he heard a voice while doing this experimental work, and that began to change everything. I wanna say again that that’s a story I’m telling you Lilly told.

Brian Balogh: Regardless of whether the story Lilly told was accurate, he does eventually move away from mapping the brain and using electrodes. Instead, he begins to try to understand consciousness by asking some pretty tricky questions.

D. G. Burnett: Lilly’s work with dolphins and what it’s like to be a dolphin, to be in this weightless environment, not to have hands, to be immersed in the ocean, that work was tangled up with his interest in the conditions of the human body in these darkened, immersive flotation environments. He was thinking his way toward the mind-brain of the dolphin, but he was fascinated by what happened to the human mind-brain when it was placed under comparable conditions.

Brian Balogh: I don’t know if our producer told you, but I floated for 90 minutes. It was a plastic tank, looked very modern to me. What did the original flotation tanks look like?

D. G. Burnett: The original flotation tanks did not look like the sexy California pod environment that you probably experienced in your float.

Brian Balogh: It looked sexy until I got into it.

D. G. Burnett: The original tanks, because they were produced in Cold War bioscience research facilities, were a little creepy, scary-looking, honestly. Imagine putting a hood on that was attached to a respirator and having your body fully suspended almost in a fetal position inside a cement tank of regulated temperature-controlled water, soundproofed box.

Brian Balogh: Wow. That does sound scary.

D. G. Burnett: We have to remind ourselves that while now we think of flotation tanks as again new age healing spaces, this technology comes out of a line of Cold War research that was tangled up with really creepy research enterprises like the kind of work of MKUltra, the experimental skunk works of a set of pretty vicious Cold War spooks that were willing to do some really icky things to each other. The kinds of icky things that they did was put people in little boxes for long periods of time until they went stark raving mad. Flotation tanks have their birth at the edges of that sort of research, not out of the work of Esalen Institute, feelgood meditation.

Brian Balogh: How do we get from point A to point B?

D. G. Burnett: That’s a great question. In fact, I would argue that John Lilly’s a big part of that story, because across the watershed of the 1960s, Lilly himself walks across from being a slightly scarifying Cold War biomedical mind-brain researcher with ties to the intelligence apparatus, to being a tuned in, turned on, dropped out guy wearing jumpsuits and headed West to Esalen to conduct mindfulness-oriented, consciousness-rising type experiences. By the time he’s headed West in the mid-’60s, he’s increasingly focused on the idea that whales and dolphins are possibly peace-loving, hyper-musical, master intelligences that have evolved without hands so they’re incapable of manipulating their environment, so they’re into just being men.

Brian Balogh: That’s far out.

D. G. Burnett: Correct. The tanks go with him too. That is the same tanks that were once upon a time part of slightly creepy tests of the psychic robustness of potential military recruits, go with Lilly when he opens up his dolphin research lab in the Caribbean, because he increasingly thinks maybe floating in such tanks can help him think his way into the life form of an aquatic mammal.

Brian Balogh: What you’re describing, Graham, is quite different than a traditional objective scientific approach of being outside of one’s subject and gazing at it, quote, objectively. Was Lilly aware of that? Did he invert that whole process of looking inside himself in many ways, consciously?

D. G. Burnett: Brian, here you put your finger on what I literally take to be one of the very most interesting questions that can be asked of intellectual history, and in a sense of epistemology, of a theory of knowledge. In essence you’re asking me did something change from Lilly standing outside of his scientific object and trying to understand it from the outside, objectively, to Lilly trying to understand his object by converging with it, casting his soul in its direction, inhabiting it in a, what one might almost say an anthropological sense, ethnographic knowledge. I think that question of the difference between knowledge at a distance and knowledge that closes the gap is just about the most interesting question we’ve got.
Where Lilly’s concerned, my short answer is Yes with a capital Y. At the same time I think that development in his own thought has to be linked to a wider transformation in how we think about knowledge across the ’50s and into the ’70s, where distance begins to fail in new ways, and there is a hunger for closing of the gap.

Brian Balogh: While admittedly, Lilly never figures out how to totally close the gap, Burnett says Lilly’s efforts are still remarkable.

D. G. Burnett: Lilly and the researchers like him were extraordinarily courageous and slightly frightening spelunkers, cave-divers into consciousness. They were genuinely brave and a little masochistic/sadistic in their fascination with deep-diving into the brain, their own and the brains of others. I feel Lilly’s work with the dolphins, his work in flotation tanks, this work all came out of his deep, deep, driving fearlessness to get inside his brain and other brains.

Brian Balogh: It seems counter-intuitive, but Lilly thought that only through intense solitude could we fully connect with others. For Graham Burnett, that is an essential realization for us to ponder even today.

D. G. Burnett: I believe very strongly that the kind of integrity of the conditions for interiority in a human subject have come under new pressure over the last 10 to 15 years as a result of changes in our mediated universe. A sense of what it is simply to be inside one’s own mind, I would argue, is a really infungible condition of possibility for political subjectivity, for a sense of agency, responsibility, identity, self-sameness. The reason the theme of solitude is so crucial now is that those conditions for the simple being inside oneself and with oneself are changing very rapidly, and it is more difficult than ever to build that habit and to preserve that habit to us.

Brian Balogh: D. Graham Burnett is a Professor of History at Princeton University and author of The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the 20th Century.

Joanne Freeman: That’s gonna do it for us today. Do get in touch. You’ll find us at BackstoryRadio.org or send us an email to Backstory@Virginia.edu. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter at Backstory Radio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Ed Ayers: Backstory’s produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and Johns Hopkins University. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Brian Balogh: A special thank you to Jordan and Ted at AquaFloat in Charlottesville for introducing me to floating for this episode. It’s time to come out now.

Speaker 1: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. Backstory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.

Speaker 13: Panoply.