We Float

Conversation with my roommate while at a wedding at Heinz Chapel:

Me: ‟So, what do you think would happen if I just went up there and hovered over the Nave like fifteen feet up?”

Him: ‟It would probably really disrupt the wedding.”

Me: ‟See, that’s why I don’t do things like that. People are so skittish.”

Yeah, my brain doesn’t always work the way others do.

But this exchange brought up a memory of a dream. It wasn’t a dream of flying, not in the traditional sense. More a dream of hovering.

It was in the early 90s and I was living in the Bloomfield section of Pittsburgh. In the dream (and I kind of think it was a series of dreams with the same basic premise), I was able to levitate about a foot off the ground by flexing my feet back and forth. Somehow, if I continued this very specific motion I was able to propel myself forward, like walking, but I was hovering. I have pretty vivid memories of floating out of my apartment and crossing the Millvale Street bridge spanning the valley of the busway. So vivid that they feel like something that actually happened instead of a hazy dream image.

That’s the thing with this memory... it feels so real that at times it seems like something that actually happened. Okay, I know it didn’t so don’t dial 911 to get me help. But it feels that way, like somehow it is something I could still do, but I’ve forgotten the first part, the launch. If I could somehow remember how to do that I could flex my feet back and forth and hover around the city.

In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams states, ‟There is an art to flying, or rather a knack. Its knack lies in learning to throw yourself at the ground and miss... Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, that presents the difficulties.”

I’ve lost the knack of hovering.

Maybe it was astral projection. I’ve read enough comics to have been exposed to the concept from a very early age. Dr. Strange was doing it through magic and Professor X through psychic powers throughout my childhood.

Art by Dan Adkins

From X-Men # 117 by Chris Claremont and John Byrne

I’ve encountered the idea through a lot of reading about psychic phenomena and magic to know that a lot of people would say that is what I experienced.

I’m not saying that’s what happened. As much as I want to live in world of magic I’m enough of a cynic to not jump headfirst into that metaphysical pool. It’s as easy to drown there as it is to swim. So I dangle my feet, dip my toes in, and watch from afar. I can’t speak for the experiences of others, nor do I have the arrogance to deny their definitions. I hate to put any of my own experiences in a tightly defined box with lots of labels.

But the memory persists, more so than a lot of more obviously real experiences.

In classic dream analysis the experience of flying is usually interpreted as a positive thing. It is a symbol of freedom, of rising above one’s circumstances and seeing things from a new perspective.

I can see this in my life at that time. I had walked away from a good job (a really horrible ‟good” job), and my career in psychology and was living as a temp, making my first forays into the world of freelance art and writing. Other than some financial worries it was a really good time in my life. I was involved in a remarkable relationship. I was actively engaged with a group of people who would become my life-long closest friends. I was finding my power as a writer and an artist. I felt for the first time that I was on my true path and not one based on simply having a career. I was living in a dump and eating ramen noodles and ending up with twelve dollars in my bank account at the end of the month.

To quote Henry Miller, ‟I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.”

So why think of this today at a wedding? Hmmm...

I’m still pretty happy overall. I have more responsibilities now than I did then, certainly. A lot more security as well, though I don’t want to take that too much for granted. I have matured and been somewhat successful with my writing and art, though that is a never ending work in progress. There are times I’m too busy and do feel too much gravity. I have my own litany of ‟stuff I need to accomplish” that can get in the way of freedom (however you wish to define that term).

Maybe the metaphor of hovering needs to be looked at. None of us ever have the ability to fly completely unfettered. That implies leaving everything behind, no ties to the earth at all. It’s important to fly, but so is the the need to remain grounded. We do have responsibilities here, to ourselves and others. There’s a difference between being grounded and being chained. Gravity is hard to overcome and Sisyphus’ stone won’t get to the top of the hill all by itself. But maybe we occasionally need to stop and think about what we are really responsible for and look at what may be holding us down.

There is a concept in Taoism called Wu Wei (Chinese, literally “non-doing”). It means ‟natural action, or in other words, action that does not involve struggle or excessive effort. Wu Wei is the cultivation of a mental state in which our actions are quite effortlessly in alignment with the flow of life.”

We all need to rise up once in awhile, see things from a new perspective, put our head in the clouds, stop fighting and just float.

Quote from Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie

Here’s PJ Harvey’s take on the topic.

I'm Your Fan (mostly)

There are very few perfect albums. Even the definition of what that means varies from one person to another, based on taste, nostalgia, and when you first heard an album that spoke to your life. I have my list, which is of course debatable.

I want to talk about a near-miss for my perfect album list. I don’t very often use a public forum to complain about something. I would rather spend my energy celebrating the things I love rather than ripping apart things I don’t. For the most part this post is a celebration of something I love, with one really annoying exception.

I discovered the poet, singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen around 1990. Even though he had been around on albums since the late 1960s (and as a poet before that), I hadn’t been exposed to his work. I may have heard a couple of his more well-known songs at some point, but they didn’t penetrate my consciousness. He never got a lot of radio play on the stations I listened to, and none of my more musically savvy friends owned any of his albums. I found him the way I ended up discovering a lot of music, by following the recommendations of musicians I already liked.

Cohen is name-dropped in the song Speed Boat by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions on their album Rattlesnakes (which, coincidentally, is on my list of perfect albums). Nick Cave mentioned him in interviews. I’m pretty sure other artists did as well because somewhere in there I decided that if that many musicians I liked were fans of this Leonard Cohen guy, maybe I should check it out.

So I bought a vinyl copy of Songs of Leonard Cohen at Jim’s Records in Bloomfield not long after I first moved to Pittsburgh. At the time I had no idea this was his first album from 1967. Based on the title I think I assumed it was a greatest hits collection. I fell in love with it immediately. His voice, his inflection, his lyrics and songwriting... it all came together for me pretty quickly. I could see how the artists I already liked were influenced by him. I started picking up a lot of his work.

Which brings me to I’m Your Man, the album I want to talk about.

It was released in 1988. I bought the CD in 1992 or 1993. I have vivid memories of listening to it over and over again. At the time I was teaching a class on Comics For Kids through Community College of Allegheny County and on Saturday mornings I would drive to a community center in East McKeesport. I’m Your Man was my soundtrack for that drive every week. The album was full of amazing songs. First We Take Manhattan. I’m Your Man. The amazing poetry of Take This Waltz. I still have no idea what the lyrics of that song means, but the imagery and language reminds you that Cohen is a poet first. On my weekly trip I would sing along (yes, I occasionally sing... in the car, by myself, or in a crowd at a very loud concert), absorbing every song into my DNA.

Well, not every song. And that’s the problem. Six songs in, right after the sublime Take This Waltz, is the single worst song Leonard Cohen ever recorded. That’s a strong statement, but I really feel that way. It’s called Jazz Police, and apologies to those out there who like it, but it completely grates on my nerves. The lyrics are ridiculous, his voice is annoying, the entire presentation of the song is like finding a turd in your birthday cake.

It’s followed by I Can’t Forget and Tower of Song, both of which are brilliant, but man...

I’m pretty album oriented in my listening habits. I rarely make a playlist. I usually listen to an entire album by an artist, beginning to end. I tend to see them as whole pieces of work that need to be experienced as it was released. You wouldn’t pick up a novel and read chapters 1, 7, and 13 and skip the rest. Why would you skip songs on an album? Yes, I know there are lots of reasons and I’m not here to debate how anyone enjoys music. But, this is the way I listen. I think my brain searches for a narrative to an album, whether one was intended or not. They are not individual songs to me, but pieces of a whole that need to be evaluated not only as songs but in how they interact with each other on the album.

I only bring this up to illustrate what an enormity editing a song out of an album is for me, but I did it with Jazz Police. For my car trips I had a cassette player, and the tape version I made from my CD omitted this song. When I did play the CD I skipped it. Years later when I transferred my collection to an Ipod I eliminated the mp3 file completely. In my universe this song is simply not a part of I’m Your Man, which is now a perfect album.

For the last year or so I’ve been working on a personal music project. There is a book from 2006 called 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die (edited by Robert Dimery and Michael Lydon). I haven’t read the book, but I have access to an online list (and I should have a separate blog entry about this experience). Needless to say any list like this is debatable. Anyway, thanks to the magic of Spotify I’ve been listening to these albums in order (most of them are available) to increase my experience as a self-proclaimed music nerd.

I’m Your Man is on the list, and you’ll get no arguments from me that it shouldn’t be included. So when it came up in my ongoing listening quest last week I thought, ‟Okay, I’ll sit through Jazz Police this time.” For Science, as a dear friend says.

Time and distance have not been kind. I still really disliked the song and felt it to be a horrible intrusion on my listening pleasure.

Sorry Leonard. I’m going to keep living in a universe where this song doesn’t exist.

Here’s a video of Take This Waltz.

And Lloyd Cole’s Speedboat where I first heard Cohen’s name, just because I really like it.

Alternate Timelines

I had a conversation with my Mom last weekend in which I was reminded of something I probably knew at one time but had forgotten. It was a reference to a moment in time that, had things worked out differently, would have led to a completely different life than the one I have lived. Given the theory of multiple universes, somewhere out there in the infinite Multiverse, I led that life. I can’t say I’ve been obsessing with this, but I have been sort of fascinated for the past few days.

I’m going to attempt to tell this story without using any names. There are people who are involved and have no idea about any of this. It’s not a bad story, just not something that needs to be brought into their life (at least I don’t think so).

I’ve never had a lot of contact with my Dad’s side of the family. He only had one brother who was much older than him. His kids, my first cousins, are much older than I am and never lived near me in my lifetime. Their kids are my age and I have met them once at their grandfather’s funeral twenty-five-plus years ago. It’s pretty safe to say I wouldn’t know them if I saw them. There were other cousins, children of my grandmother’s siblings, only one of which I ever have any contact with. It was a strange contrast for me, because my Mom’s side of the family is huge and I have lots and lots of cousins I have spent my life with and feel incredibly close to even though we rarely see each other.

When I was little we used to take my paternal grandmother to visit her youngest sister. On these occasions I would see her grandchildren, my second cousins. There were a pair of sisters who were four or five years older than me, so it was difficult to really play with them when I was there. In 1967, when I was six, a little sister was born in their family. I only vaguely remember this.

Not long after, probably within the year, their Mom died while in the hospital, leaving the two girls and a newborn baby with their father.

So, the story Mom told me this weekend, is that during the time that the widowed father didn’t know what to do, she briefly discussed the possibility of adopting the baby and raising it. I don’t know how detailed these discussions were or how far it went, but needless to say, it didn’t happen. He eventually remarried and over time, after the deaths of my grandmother and her sister, we gradually lost touch with most of that family.

But somewhere out there in the Multiverse I had a little sister come to live with me.

And, I realized, somewhere out there in the real world, is a forty-something woman, my second cousin, who could have been my sister, who I don’t know at all and who has no idea I exist.

Fascinating.

So, I went internet stalking. I have a friend who went to the high school I was sure she would have attended. She was younger than him, but it was a small country school, so I thought he might have some connections. I was right. He didn’t know her personally, but he was able to figure out who she was and give me her married name. She’s on Facebook. Lives in West Virginia. I’ve seen her picture. This was all to sate my curiosity. I won’t name her here. I have no inclination to contact her at all. She’s a stranger who I probably shouldn’t invite into my strange land.

But out there, somewhere, we were more than that.

Wizard World Pittsburgh: Local Comics Panel

This past weekend I was privileged to participate in two different panels at the first Wizard World comics con held in Pittsburgh.

One was listed in the program as follows:

1940: WORLD WAR II AND COMICS: THE JOKER, ROBIN, THE FLASH, CAPTAIN AMERICA, CAPTAIN MARVEL, AND THE SPIRIT! With FINGEROTH, WISE, HASTINGS, GAVALIER & MAVERICK


75 years ago, in 1940, as the Nazi conquest of Europe continued and the Battle of Britain raged, the United States watched from the sidelines while instituting the first peacetime draft. At the same time, the world of comics was experiencing an incredible sustained period of invention, as The Joker, Robin, Green Lantern, the Flash, Hawkman, the Spirit, Catwoman, and Captains America and Marvel all debuted! (Not to mention the debuts of pop culture icons Bugs Bunny, and Brenda Starr, and classic movies Fantasia and The Great Dictator!) Showing and discussing historical and cultural factors that made that year so important is a panel including moderator Danny Fingeroth (Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics and the Creation of the Superhero) as well as an array of history and pop culture experts including Wayne Wise (Chatham University), Waller Hastings (West Liberty University), Chris Gavlier (Washington & Lee University) and Chris Maverick (Duquesne University of Pennsylvania).

Given the topic I was surprised at how well attended this panel was. The conversation went really well. I was pleased to join these other academic professionals.

The other panel was about the Independent Comic Book Scene in Pittsburgh. The panel was moderated by Dan Greenwald from the Comic Book Pitt Podcast. I was joined by Scott Hedlund, Jim Rugg, and Marcel Walker.

You can watch it here.

Of Beans and Flings and Finding Your Community

I recently watched some episodes of the television series Northern Exposure with a group of friends, a couple of whom had never seen the show. We watched four episodes: the first two as introductions to the characters, and then two of my top picks from the series, Burning Down the House and Cicely. I was a huge fan of this show when it was on, and in my memory it still ranks very high on my list of all-time favorite television. I’m happy to say that, for me at least, it holds up. The newbies became instant fans as well. I believe that it was a seminal and transformative show, one of many that helped shape what serial television has become.

Northern Exposure was always thought provoking. Watching it now, twenty-five years since it premiered, it’s still provoking me to think. What follows here are just some random ideas that popped up while ruminating on the show, these episodes, and my love of it.

Burning Down the House is arguably the most famous and well-known episode. In it the character of Chris Stevens (portrayed by John Corbett), the town DJ, philosopher and artist, wants to create a work of art, a performance piece, what he refers to as a pure moment. He builds a trebuchet (a type of catapult), with which he plans to fling a cow. When he discovers that this had already been done in the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail he was despondent. His idea had already been done. The cow had been flung. Ironically it was Maurice (portrayed by Barry Corbin), the town millionaire and the person there with the least interest in or understanding of art, who talked Chris into pursuing his vision.

As Chris famously says, ‟It’s not what you fling... It’s the fling itself.”

Here’s the clip...

While watching this my friend Ziggy (one of the newbies to the show), leaned over to me and said, ‟It’s Beanish!”

Without context that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but she was completely right. What’s more, Maurice is totally Mr. Spook in the this scene.

The context I’m speaking of is the wonderful comic book series Tales of the Beanworld by Larry Marder. I’ve written about it at length HERE, so I’m not going to go into all of the details again, but here’s the context.

Beanish is the artist of his community. He creates pieces of art that he calls ‟The Fabulous Look See Show!” He builds art installations and then shares them with everyone. The scene in the above clip could have been taken straight from the comic.

To further the analogy, Maurice takes on the role of Mr. Spook. In the Beanworld Mr. Spook is the protector of the community. He is not very imaginative and he alone of all the Beans, simply cannot see Beanish’s art. Though he never discourages Beanish from doing it, Mr. Spook cannot comprehend what art is for or about. Watch Maurice’s reaction at the 0:44 mark in the video and compare it to this scene.

©2015 Larry Marder

©2015 Larry Marder

I don’t really have any grand insights into this, I was just struck by the similarity between two pretty disparate things I love. I do think both capture the feelings of artists everywhere. Here’s this fabulous thing I did! Look! See! I’m trying to say something profound about the world we live in, and I don’t know if I’ve been successful or not but I want to share it!” I think it also, gently, captures the experience of those who ‟don’t get it.” Maurice and Mr. Spook stand outside the artistic experience, but in these fictional communities they do not hinder the artist, nor are they ostracized by the artistic community. There is acceptance of both points of view.

Which leads to another similarity between Cicely, Alaska and the Beanworld; they are, in many ways, idyllic communities. I won’t go so far as to say Utopian because that implies perfection and a lack of conflict. There are conflicts galore in both Northern Exposure and Beanworld, but they typically do not include the same type of story engines that most of our genre fictions employ. But they are places you would like to live.

Cicely, specifically. I think part of the success of the show (and there are many factors), is that it was a story of a community, one we would all like to be a part of. For me it reflects the ideas of diversity, of people and ideas, of ways of living. It’s about finding your place and needing to be accepted in your chosen community for who you are. That’s something I believe everyone craves for themselves, even those who are opposed to the same idea for others. Even those who can’t accept other points of view want to be accepted. We all want to find our home. There’s no place like it, or so I hear.

But strangely, our fictions don’t often address this. We seem geared to narratives based on conflict between competing points of view. The most popular entertainment these days seems to be the dystopian.

A friend of mine recently shared the following quote on Tumblr, within a day or so of my first musings about the semi-Utopian nature of Cicely.

‟You gotta remember, and I’m sure you do, the forces that are arrayed against anyone trying to alter this sort of hammerlock on the human imagination. There are trillions of dollars out there demotivating people from imagining that a better tomorrow is possible. Utopian impulses and utopian horizons have been completely disfigured and everybody now is fluent in dystopia, you know. My young people’s vocabulary… their fluency is in dystopic futures. When young people think about the future, they don’t think about a better tomorrow, they think about horrors and end of the worlds and things or worse. Well, do you really think the lack of utopic imagination doesn’t play into demotivating people from imagining a transformation in the society?” — Junot Díaz, Art, Race and Capitalism

This really struck me. I don’t know that there is any type of conspiracy in media to make this so, but I do think it’s an accurate depiction. What does it say about us that we can’t imagine a future that is positive? I’m certainly guilty of this in my media consumption. I’m a fan of The Walking Dead, both the comic and the TV show. I loved Stephen King’s The Stand. Mad Max: Fury Road was the surprise hit of the summer for me. I’m not alone in any of these. None of these represent a future I want to live through. I don’t think anyone really does.

The point can be made that these, and other post-apocalyptic fictions, are about the triumph of the human spirit in the midst of terrible catastrophe. Still, they seem to say that we can only expect terrible catastrophe in our future. Referring to Maslow’s famous Hierarchy, there’s not a lot of room for art and self actualization when mere survival is at stake, a situation far too many people in the real world find themselves in daily without the threat of Zombies or irradiated mutants.

Odd then that our fictions often present a world where there would be no opportunity for fictions to exist (though maybe visions of a Utopian future would thrive in a wasteland).

The early days of Science Fiction, and I’m speaking in general terms here because there are always exceptions, regularly portrayed the future as a positive thing. Technology was going to save us from drudgery. Flying cars and teleportation and the elimination of death and disease were recurring themes. But somewhere our relationship with technology changed. It brought us cars and TV and medical advances but it also brought us the Atomic Bomb. Suddenly the possibility of mass destruction was a reality instead of a fiction.

So our fictions changed to make our fears manifest, and fear is always more palpable than hope (which explains a lot of our politics, but that’s a separate blog I’ll probably never write).

Star Trek is one of the hopeful SciFi futures that has endured. It predicts a world where science has solved the world’s problems and people live in a diverse, multicultural society where actual progress thrives. The original Enterprise, and to varying extents the all of the subsequent settings, was a community where you wanted to live. There was the same sense of belonging and acceptance there that we see in Northern Exposure. They are communities where you are valued for who you are, not discriminated against because of who you are.

It’s not just Science Fiction and visions of the future. To come back to television a lot of the most popular shows carry an element of the Dystopian Present. Looking at examples of things I watched and thoroughly enjoyed I can see the pattern. The motorcycle club of Sons of Anarchy was a community, but certainly not one I would want to belong to. For all of their ideals of the freedom of the road and freedom from societal norms, the rules of belonging to their community were incredibly limiting and stepping outside of those rules could have fatal consequences.

The cast of Northern Exposure, all alive at the end of the series.

The cast of Sons of Anarchy. 8 of these 10 characters died.

There was a patina of brotherhood that covered them, and as a viewer I could respond to these bonds on a visceral level. But time and again one of these ‟brothers” would have to be eliminated ‟for the good” of the club. There was no real acceptance of differences or diversity. There was a pretty strict party line that had to be followed. There was no room for true individuality.

Which holds true for a lot of subcultures that claim to be about individuality.

So what am I saying with this rambling set of connections? I’m not exactly sure. The image of the artist and those who don’t understand him can be seen as metaphor for anyone who simply wants to be seen and heard by his community. It’s something everyone can relate to, whether they are an ‟artist” or not. Maurice and Mr. Spook want their places in their community to be respected as much as Chris and Beanish do.

To quote Chis from the Burning Down the House episode:

     ‟Look at this – This is beautiful! We are standing at the center of the primordial ooze. It’s like the world at the dawn of creation...

     ‟This is the answer, right here. Destruction and creation. The scarred battlefield of life. From the ashes rises the Phoenix! From the skin rises a new snake!

     ‟You look and you look and it’s dark and you don’t even know what you’re looking for, or if you’ll even see it, or if it even exists. And then, all of a sudden...”

Just thought I’d fling this out there.

Dennis Dunaway Interview

On Friday night, June 19, 2015, Dennis Dunaway and Michael Bruce of the original Alice Cooper Group, along with Joe and Albert Bouchard, founding members of Blue Oyster Cult, played a house party at the infamous Evaline Hotel in Pittsburgh. I wrote an article about how the whole thing came together for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. You can read it HERE.


I plan on writing about the actual party and experience here soon. In the meantime, here's the rest of the short interview I did with Dennis.

How was the experience of writing the book? Did you keep a journal back then or was a lot of this an excavation of your memory?

DD: Like everything I do, I approached this book as a creative person that believes that all art forms are related. As a kid, I learned to paint, then as a teenager, I learned to play bass, and how to conceptualize lighting and staging. So writing a book was just another outlet for me to be creatively passionate about. Throughout my years with the Alice Cooper group, I jotted things down that I thought were interesting. At the end of each tour, I'd have piles and piles of notes in the bottom of my suitcase. When you write things down, you tend to remember them, even though every few years I'd flip through them and see things I'd forgotten. And my wife Cindy kept diaries.

From what I’ve read over the years it seems that you and Cindy had a lot of influence on the look and thematic elements of the Alice Cooper Group. It was a mix of the shiny glitter and glam with darker imagery coming through in the lyrics and stage show. I would like to hear your comments on these elements.

DD: Cindy grew up loving glitter and sequins, and always liked the shimmering razzle-dazzle of Hollywood films like Busby Berkley. I had a different take on it. I loved the shock value of guys dressing in a way that shook up society. And I loved the concept of spotlights reflecting off a stage so brightly that it would be difficult for the audience to see everything that was going on. But perfect sequin outfits wouldn't do. That was too happy. Ours had to be ripped and stained and threatening.

So I know you’ve been working with Blue Coupe for the last few years, and I know that you and the rest of the original band briefly carried on as Billion Dollar Babies... what other projects have you been involved with over the years?

DD: Neal Smith and I had a band called the Flying Tigers. The great Jerry Wexler took us in the studio for a 4 song demo. Then personal issues side tracked us. Later on, as Bouchard, Dunaway and Smith, we did a couple of CD's with Joe Bouchard of Blue Öyster Cult fame. Then I had a band called Dennis Dunaway Project that released Bones From The Yard. Ian Hunter was involved with that. Blue Coupe is a trio with Joe Bouchard and his brother Albert. The Bouchard brothers wrote a lot of the BÖC classics. We've been friends since they toured with the Alice Cooper group in '72. So we have tons of songs in our respective catalogs. We're all songwriters, and we love playing live. We released a couple of CD's of new songs. Tornado on the Tracks and Million Miles More. Our backup singers are Tish and Snooky of Manic Panic, the famous hair dye company.

At the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction performance you looked like you were having the time of your life. If you can pick one, which of your contributions to Rock are you most proud of?

DD: I really was having the absolute time of my life. After years of feeling like I had been erased from my own history, that night validated my contribution. And more importantly, I was on stage with my favorite musicians, who happen to be my lifelong friends. I'm infinitely proud of our lasting music, and our pioneering achievements in bringing the feeling of danger and spectacle to rock shows.

How did Dereck talk you into coming to Pittsburgh and playing this event?

DD: After years of looking for the right publishing deal, Dereck showed up and, with his girlfriend's expert help, everything fell into place. Dereck had told me about his amazing concert parties. Then when he heard that the R&RHoF would be hosting my book signing event for Snakes! Guillotines! Electric Chairs: My Adventures in The Alice Cooper Group, he mentioned having Blue Coupe swing by his place. I hope he was serious because I took him up on it! And now he's gone hog-wild on making it into a blow-out extravaganza. As the Alice Cooper group would say, he's setting his chickens free!

Zen and the Art of Portal Maintenance

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.

The Hole Idea by cartoonexpert

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.’”