This blog entry is
full of some rambling thoughts and ideas from the last few days,
tenuously tied together by a thin metaphor. It's the way my brain
usually works.
I've been playing
Portal recently. For all of my Pop Culture interests I am woefully
behind the curve on videogaming. For those who haven't played the
game the basic premise is that you are a test subject in lab, armed
with a Portal Gun, a device that allows you to create portals that
allow you to teleport between different areas of the game. It’s
essentially a puzzle game where the player uses this one idea to
navigate increasingly difficult maps. It’s a portable hole.
I first encountered this idea in a Saturday morning Warner Brothers cartoon.
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| And then with a silly Marvel Comics villain called The Spot. |
I'm not going to
talk very much about the game of Portal. If you’re interested I'm
sure there are tons of internet articles discussing and
deconstructing it in far more detail than I can. I bring it up
because of other things that have happened in the last couple of days, interspersed with playing Portal.
Here’s where the
thin metaphor kicks in.
Out of the blue I
pulled my old paperback copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance by Robert Pirsig off the shelf yesterday, the exact
same copy I read thirty years ago. This book is considered a classic
for many reasons. It is about many things, including motorcycle
maintenance, but in brief it is a discussion of the differences
between a Classical understanding of the world (Science), and a
Romantic understanding of the world (Art), and the attempt to
reconcile them. This description couldn’t be more basic or less
explanatory of what the book is really about, but I’m not going to
attempt to summarize what took Pirsig nearly 400 pages to discuss. Go
read it.
I have often said
that this was a very influential book to me, but quite honestly,
other than some of its main highlights, I couldn’t have told you
very many details about it. My memory (there's that topic again), has
convinced me that this was an important book to my personal growth,
but I couldn’t elaborate with any specifics.
I don’t reread too
many of the books in my life. I know some people revisit favorites on
a regular basis. I have nothing against that practice, but with rare
exceptions I just don’t do it. There are way too many books I
haven’t read yet to spend time with things I’ve already
experienced. I’m particularly hesitant to reread those books that I
think of as significant and life-changing. What if they don’t live
up to my memory? Will that taint my formerly positive assessment of
them, or will I just be able to accept that I’m not the same person
in need of those lessons at this point in my life?
So, with a little
trepidation I opened the book and began... and was immediately sucked
into the narrative and have been devouring it again. Within the first
thirty pages I read a couple of paragraphs that floored me. Here it
was, that thing that made this book life-changing for me that I could
never remember precisely or explain to anyone. There’s more to the
book than just these two paragraphs, of course. But the point is what
I experienced was reading something that I now take for granted as
one of my primary ways of viewing the universe, a way of being in the
world that is so second nature that I don’t even think about it
very much any more. This book is the first place I ever encountered
these ideas that now form a core of my way of thinking.
In that moment a
Portal opened and I was in touch with Wayne in his early 20s, being
blown away by these ideas and wrestling with what they meant and
incorporating them into his life for the first time. This hole in
time allowed me to relive those informative moments through the eyes
and mind of someone older, more experienced, and hopefully wiser. It
was different than simply remembering something. It felt like an
insight into the path of my life, a direct connection from the person
who first read those words to the person I am, reading them now.
Books are Portals.
That's probably not the most original or insightful thing I have ever
said, but it’s true. In this specific case it was a very personal
sense of connection, but it happens with books all of the time.
Whenever you open the cover of a book you are creating a Portal,
allowing you to see another world or another point of view. You step
through and are transported to a new mental location, coming out the
other side in a different place than you were before.
Like I said, not
particularly profound, but there it is.
After the initial
revelatory experience afforded me by the time travel of prose I
continued to read, and while that experience didn’t repeat I
continued to be engaged in the story. I am reading it as a different
person than the one who first encountered it. Whatever affinity I may
have with 20-something me, that experience and many others have
changed me. I am different and so is the world. While the words on
the page are the same they are being absorbed through different eyes
and carry different meaning.
Part of the problem
in addressing the Classical/Romantic split is that each of them not
only have their own language, but each has a different way of
processing information. One’s a PC and one’s a Mac, to use a
recent metaphor. It’s difficult to find a cross-platform common
ground without degradation of information.
Which is true in so
many of the issues of the world. Part of our problem in understanding
others is that we often have incompatible operating systems. It’s
true on the personal level and when multiplied out to include large
groups it gets worse. Religions obviously have different operating
systems. So does the Conservative/Liberal split in politics. Same
underlying commands written in vastly different language codes. No
wonder we get so many error messages when trying to make a point with
someone who believes differently than we do. It’s not just the
language, it’s the entire underlying architecture of the system.
At one point in the
book the narrator is unable to reach some old friends because they
have a different phone number than the one he remembers and is afraid
he will not be able to find them (this was first published in the pre-internet
70s). He does find them, but muses about changing technologies:
“It's not the
technology that's scary. It's what it does to the relations between
people...”
Which made me think
of Facebook, which is another kind of Portal.
Our newsfeeds are
full of little windows into other people’s lives. I know a lot of
people who are not comfortable with Facebook, or social media of any
kind. I think, like anything else, it’s how you use it. I don’t
post anything very personal there, using it as a place to promote my
various projects, to keep in touch with what’s going on in friend’s
lives, to see what events are going on around me I might be
interested in, to find links to articles and news stories, to be
exposed to new music and books.
But there is a
danger to it as well. Those little Portals into other peoples lives
can cause some consternation and misunderstanding. “It’s what
it does to the relations between people...” I know a lot about
people who I don't really know. I get glimpses into their lives
without being a part of them. This can lead to a completely false
sense of intimacy, as if I know them much better than
I actually do. These Portals can create a sense of connection that
doesn't exist. It can, of course, lead to knowing people better in
the real world, but what we see is a curated version of that person.
I guess the argument can be made that that is what we see when we
first meet anyone, but this feels different. Somewhat voyeuristic.
The other piece of
this that I find problematic is discovering things about old friends
that changes the way I feel about them. I often see posts from old
friends expressing opinions, usually in the realm of politics or
religion, that I find radically different from my own. I don’t like
my reaction when I see this. While I want to respect the opinions of
others there are times I just shake my head in anger and
disappointment. It makes me sad to realize how far we’ve grown apart.
I still love the people they were, and I like to think that in one on
one, face to face conversation those things really wouldn’t matter.
But it also makes me wonder that if I met them today would we have any
common ground to build a friendship on.
This is the
equivalent to rereading a favorite old book. What if this person
doesn’t live up to my positive memory of them?
Which brings me back
to the Classical/Romantic division Pirsig talks about. Not that any
human relationship is that easily categorized. The binary is too
simple. But I think some of it comes back to our different operating
systems. Some of the disagreement and inability to genuinely discuss
some of these issues is that our entire underlying informational
structure is different. I think it is important to recognize that,
though maybe it's just me throwing up my hands and giving up on
actually communicating with anyone with a different mindset.
So I have to ask,
what has this technology done to my relations to other people. I look
through a Portal of time and see the person I used to know, filtered
through memory and the stories I tell myself about them. I look
through the Portal of Facebook and see something that challenges
those memories and stories as filtered through my current state of
observation and interpretation.
Both are true
stories, and both are imaginary tales.
And round and round
we go. The cycle never ends.
Or, as Robert Pirsig
said, “The real Cycle you’re working on is the cycle called
‛Yourself.’”
