The Blackberry Walk

Archaeology and depth psychology are one and the same. Once the topsoil of a person's life is brushed away, that sedimentary layer, there is a metamorphic layer found, compressed by generation upon generation upon generation, the transpersonal human experience. The brain too is one and the same with archaeology. Deeper layers are more evolutionarily primal, dating to pre-human life, whilst the surface layer is the most human, the scientist placing the human brain's reason is the most recent addition, the pre-frontal cortex. I begin with this diatribe to point out that despite the biological difference between people, both physical and mental, we are all deep down rather similar. Not just amongst our contemporaries, but into the distant past also. In particular at our most primal levels of cognition, those deeper layers of the brain and of the mind. For the good of those who don't know me - undoubtedly the minority of my readership - I work as an analytical chemist in a laboratory. The work itself isn't too interesting, so I won't bore you with details, but there are certain practices we have in the lab to which I'll point your attention. The first is this black and yellow striped safety tape on the floor of the lab. Glass planes divide the office from the lab, and once you enter from the office through one of the glass doors into the lab, this tape bounds where you may walk without a lab coat. Beyond the tape are the work benches, reagents, chemicals, and equipment, all property before which you must safely clad yourself in white gown and goggles. And there is something psychological about the boundary. If you see a fellow analyst cross the boundary without his uniform of lab coat and goggles, there's a kind of alarm which rings in one's head. It jolts your eyes towards the infraction, and you can't help but stare. There's something unsettling, transgressive. Because they have broken a rule, a custom, whether on purpose or otherwise, it feels almost as if the body of analysts and the laboratory has been violated. Now that may seem extreme, but it is a sense and something faintly felt. A boundary is a powerful thing. Think of the Shinto shrine and its sacred space; the shrine has a torii gate through which you enter into a sacred space. Once entered, this holier sanctuary has different customs, different rule, as if what's been stepped into is a different realm. The lab is of course different however, there are no kami venerated in the HPLC machines, after all (although when they're playing up, we all have a superstition of ritual or two to get them working). No, the laboratory doesn't deal with taboos surrounding the sacred, but rather taboos surrounding the profane. Taboos include the aforementioned dress code, but includes smaller habits also, like covering beakers of solvents with parafilm (industrial thickness cling film), or using smelly volatiles like TFA in a fumehood: these are all taboos specific to this zone, the lab. Taboos like these are designed to keep us all same from the profane acids and poisons handled. Another ritual in the lab is the handling of high CAT materials. The CAT or Categorisation system is a way of ranking the danger an API (active pharmaceutical ingredient) poses, starting off at the benign CAT 1 and CAT 2 to the more harmful CAT 3 and the wholly harmful CAT 4. CAT 5 is the highest CAT, but are not allowed on our site; for those you need a space-age-looking glove box to handle. CAT 4 and some CAT 3 APIs on our site are handles in the potent room, a room with negative airflow so as not to contaminate the labs, and VBSEs which are high-powered enclosed fumehoods designed to not let any air-born powder escape when the balances inside the VBSEs are in use. And of course, weighing high CAT powders has its ritual. First, you wear a disposable lab coat over your current lab coat, and don a pair of nitrile gloves, followed by gauntlets, elasticated thick plastic tubes to go over your forearms, and another pair of nitrile gloves to cover the gap between your gauntlets and your hands, so as to cover your wrists. Then you need either a disposable sealing face mask or, for those with beards like myself, a full hood with electric air filter. It's quite a loud machine. You are now ready to approach the VBSE where you'll be weighing, but before you weigh your high CAT API, a few more steps must be taken. So as to not contaminate the potent room, each VBSE has a kind of portal connecting the inside of the VBSE to outside of it. This is for two yellow plastic bags - for yellow plastic bags denote high CAT, in opposition to their clear counterparts - one to be attached by rubber band to the outside of the VBSE and the other to the inside, to create a kind of airlock for rubbish. Once you've used the VBSE and finished your weighing, you put your rubbish, contaminated low-lint cloths, etc, into the inside bag, tie that bag up, pop it through the VBSE's aperture, then tie up the uncontaminated outside bag to be thrown into the bin. And I shan't bore you any further with the laborious cleaning procedure of the VBSE's interior. Suffice it to say most of these steps are likely superfluous, completely unnecessary, and a waste of time and PPE. We are handling the profane, however. If these steps are not followed, however pointless we can rationally say they are, there is a tug of anxiety in the heart. Through this rigmarole we are protected. Protected from this magical poison of unknown potency, through a thousand different steps. In the past this was common also. Many cultures had 'untouchables', people who carried a curse by virtue of their profession. Executioners were a great example of this in Europe, where executioners and their families lived apart from society, forming their own little communities. Jews too for much of European history occupied a similar position, ostracised to Ghettos where they practiced dirty occupations like money-lending, profane occupations, which left them 'impure' in a sense. In our everyday lives we become ritually impure too. You go to the loo, use the facilities, and wash your hands to rid yourself of the ritual impurity. Forget to wash your hands and, clean or not, you'll have a feeling of soiledness, of that ritual impurity. Similar laws regarding impurity are found in Leviticus, like Leviticus 15 which describes for example ritual impurity with regards to menstruating, and the purity laws surrounding. Under the Mosaic covenant, one couldn't touch a dead body either, lest you become ritually impure and have to undergo a purification ritual (Lev. 21). Dead bodies were profane in a sense, and not to be touched either. These examples in my laboratory, the magic tape and the CAT 4 weighing ritual, are all modern and primordially ancient. They are modern in that they are justified by science, the epistemology of our era, but the patterns of the sacred, the profane, and taboo have existed since time immemorial, grown with us symbiotically in the developing mind of man. Science and its reason are but the top soil, the pre-frontal cortex, to play barrister to the deep marble of our lizard brains, our deeper psyches. The early 20th century Italian theorist Pareto had a formulation for this idea. He separated aspects of culture into Residues and Derivations. The Residue is that deeper sense common to all human experience and found in all human cultures in the abstract, like the sense of taboo and the sacral. By contrast, the Derivation is how that Residue is manifest in a culture. A simple example is the notion of nationhood and of a leader like a king. Whilst every country young or old, past or present, has a leader, the ways in which a state is led, by monarchy, democracy, or oligarchy, will differ. Whilst the Derivation of the laboratory has been invented in modern times, the Residue underpinning, that sense of handling the profane through taboos, is found in every era. And it gives us pause for thought. Despite the inventions and innovations, the grand architecture and great art, our culture isn't all too different from the many cultures of the world. We may be weird, but we can't help but be human. Our expression of these timeless traits may well be different, but even in that sterile symbol of modernity, the laboratory, our nature hasn't changed.