"Same cells. A different question. And a different answer.” - Ken Woodward
A friend told me about a question they were asked: What is your wake? My body jolted before I had a single thought. Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being had already broken that word open for me: the track behind a ship, the watch kept over the dead, coming up out of sleep. I couldn’t hear it as one thing anymore.
That sent me looking at other words I treat as single things, and I landed on one I use every day: brain. In September, a Stanford team published a study in Nature Neuroscience finding that the brain begins as two separate groups of cells, one building the front and one building the back. One organ, two beginnings. Their work points to how a familiar word and a long-held assumption can shape what we expect to find, and how a different question opened the answer.
From there I go back to the streets of Washington, D.C., and the word I wore on my chest for two years: Brown. Strangers kept stopping me to ask who it included, and each brought a meaning I hadn’t put there. Then back to my early twenties, standing lookout on a submarine in the Caribbean, watching a glowing green wake trail behind us. A memory that hasn’t changed, but no longer stands alone.
This episode is about the words we stop opening, and what we stop noticing because we already have a name for it. What word have I been letting stay one thing?
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Keep questioning!