When I first learned about Patrick Gunkel and started reading through MIT’s ideonomy website, I found myself confused about a number of things, including why Gunkel wasn’t better known.
Specifically, David Stipp’s 1987 article, which appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and garnered a significant amount of attention for Gunkel, should have been enough to launch Gunkel and create a more enduring presence for him. What happened?
The answer is not an easy one.
In fact, Gunkel’s failure had many concauses—as he would have said—i.e., convergent causes that came together to sink his career and doom the Ideonomy Project.
To help explain, I find myself recalling one of my all-time-favorite speeches in the “graduation address” genre, delivered by Sandman creator Neil Gaiman, in which he offers the unusual but weirdly “true” advice that in order to be a successful freelancer a person should be, at minimum, 2 out of the following 3 things:
easy to work with,
always on time, and/or
able to pull together a good work product.
You can get away with being two of these three things, Gaiman says, but if you’re only one of them, you’re going to be in for a struggle.
Well… Gunkel was actually none of these things.
And he was, basically, aspiring to be an intellectual freelancer his whole life.
Maybe Gunkel was such an outlier on the genius spectrum that if he’d been able to pull together a good work product, the personality issues and the tardiness wouldn’t have mattered much. He could have checked one box of out the three, in other words, and still made it.
And yet despite Gunkel’s brilliance, his work product wasn’t very good either.
Not only was his work almost never completed (we can cross off “always on time” as a result), but he couldn’t write in a very accessible style. Nor did he know how to edit. His work was disorganized, random, and difficult to use. He generated huge amounts of material, but he didn’t know how to separate ideas and decide which ones were in scope and which ones weren’t.
The words that thundered through Gunkel’s head, it seems, were the only words that could ever be put down about that topic.
And once they were down, that was the end of that—no revisions, onto the next concept in the ever-expanding encyclopedic treatment of whatever subject he’d chosen to write about.
Nor Was Gunkel Nice to Work With, Either
At the risk of triggering some of my readers, who may have found themselves on the receiving end of Gunkel’s destructive urge to burn down the things he built, I thought it was worth going into more detail about his personality—and to share that personality with you in his own words.
Gunkel had a tendency to systematically blow up his relationships.
And he was completely self-aware about it.
The best evidence of this can be found in an extraordinary 2003 email I came across in the MIT Distinctive Collections archive.
Gunkel often forwarded personal correspondence to his friends.
In this case, an email courtship Gunkel was having with a California-based postdoc researcher in geology had gone south.
He was emailing the entire correspondence—months worth—to his friends in order to have them read the correspondence and speculate on why things had blown up.
In one of the emails, dated May 2, 2003, Gunkel decided to tell this postdoc researcher about this personality problem in an email titled “Might I introduce you to my worst enemy?”
What follows is a remarkable and puzzling passage that begins with Gunkel’s statement:
”It has always been a strange trait of my character, and I think it goes all the way back to at least age 5, that I will now and again say or do things that are almost meant, or seem to be meant, to destroy my friendships with people.”
He then acknowledges that he’s not quite sure why he does this, but provides a whole list of possibilities:
Perhaps it is a queer clumsiness, or a certain insecurity or fear, or a foolishly excessive longing for solitude or absolute individuality, or a certain instability in my character, or an eruption of disinterested cold and killing objectivity (or my critical and cautious attitude towards all things, mixed in with my other traits), or simply, even on the contrary, an eruption of wild playfulness.
Or it might be a ruthless rejection even, or especially, of those who mean most to me, that is simply a reversed or defensive reprise of some cruel sudden or chronic rejection I myself was the victim of as a child. It might be an accidental or illogical product of my moments of severe melancholy or hopelessness.
My excessive internal, and external, standards might be responsible; or the great strains and consequent stresses I put myself under, through my perfectionism, self-criticism, constant striving for something more and better.
It could even be an incredibly lame, backwards or paradoxical or despairing, way to say to say, “I like you” or “I care about you” or “please like me!”
It must also be to some extent a product of the kaleidoscopic, continually active, flowing, and transforming, nature of my mental states; or part of the instability, transcendence, and perpetual dissatisfaction and impatience, and the atypical honesty, that are inherent in, even casual of, high intelligence (which in some respects is like fire, or Shiva!).
What’s so curious and striking about this passage to me is the amount of uncertainty, but also the amount of extremely close observation of cognitive and emotional processes Gunkel is demonstrating.
He’s not coming up with a single narrative or story about himself, which is what many of us might do—almost like a Freudian or psychotherapeutic approach—but elucidating numerous possible reasons for his behavior.
I do find myself wondering whether Gunkel is here acknowledging that he has experienced all of these mental and emotional states, or whether he’s simply listing out all possible reasons a person might self-sabotage that he can imagine and making the assumption that some of those reasons must apply to him.
Whatever the case, it’s clear to me is that Gunkel was not simply a disembodied intellectual who was always living with his head in the clouds.
He was also a deep, introspective observer of himself just as some of the greatest writers and philosophers have been—I’m thinking here of Nietzsche and Proust, but you can probably come up with your own examples.
I’ve written before that it’s virtually impossible to diagnose Gunkel, especially in retrospect. He was, in today’s parlance, “neurodivergent.”
At any rate, it’s no surprise that—shortly after Gunkel sent this email—the relationship went south.
And he was apparently confused about why.
Surviving a Gunkel Friendship
As Gunkel himself acknowledged in his email, many friendships and acquaintances did not survive Gunkel’s complex personality problems.
Gunkel had few close friends throughout his life, and many found themselves “on the outs” with him at one point or another.
This small, core group of friends developed a way of relating to Gunkel—a methodology, if you will—and put down clear boundaries.
When these friends ran afoul of Gunkel—as they certainly would sooner or later, methodology or not—they would hang in there and tolerate the silence; sooner or later, it seems, he would reach back out and try to reestablish a connection.
This may lead people to ask themselves why it would be worth remaining friends with someone like Gunkel.
I can’t answer for myself, because I never knew him, but I can say that the small circle of accomplished and intelligent friends who wound up supporting Gunkel and trying to get him through life should stand as a testament to how incredibly unique he was as a human being.
To know what people saw in Gunkel, you have to understand what Gunkel saw in his head.
And that is something I am working on here in this newsletter, among several other efforts.
Note: I’ve blacked out the name of the woman Gunkel was emailing.
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