Building things that don’t work
December 25, 2010
On the necessity of disappointment and chaos
When I was a kid, my mom left me in the company of encyclopedias. I remember my first Science experiment, conducted when I was 4, maybe 5. I had a parrot whose name I do not remember. I also had a friend, a girl named Jessie, who I swore I’d marry when we were older. She kicked my ass at everything and would make me do things like stick my fingers in electrical sockets. Anyway, I read in an encyclopedia that it was possible to create a battery out of a lemon, and resolved to find out if that was possible. The book didn’t tell me what I could use the lemon battery to power, only that electricity was created by the reaction of the juice with the metal. So Jessie and I opened the birdcage and stuck our electric lemon in there. That was my variation on that experiment. If there was electricity created by the lemon battery, I reasoned, surely it would shock a bird. Imagine our disappointment when nothing at all happened to the bird. I think I wrote a letter to Young Scientist encyclopedias demanding they cut out the pages containing the clearly false experiment.
Jessie moved to Oklahoma or Alabama soon after, some quasi-palindromic Midwestern state if I recall correctly. The parrot never returned when, after hearing of the saying “If you love something, set it free. If it loves you, it’ll come back,” I set it free. That year, foxes got our rabbits, Rabee and Khaleeji. I made all sorts of stories up to explain why the animals weren’t coming back.
None of these failures changed anything, however. I still read those encyclopedias, having marked some pages as WRONG. I didn’t mind when teachers said something I knew was demonstrably false, which as you can imagine, they often did when teaching at a small school of barely 50 kids in a nothing former pirate town. I wasn’t unusual in this sort of behavior. Basically, what I’m saying is that neither I nor anyone in Sur had, in my memory anyway, any sort of problem with mistakes or failure. Neither blunder nor catastrophe could shake our faith in the institutions around us. To this day, I remain the same person. It takes a lot for me to write off institutions or to muster up the sort of outrage on which the US seems to run today. Why is that?
Here’s what I think, and while it is hardly scientific or a whole answer, must surely contain some grain of truth. Folks in the modern day are used to things that work 100% of the time. There is no place for chaos in this unending rush. Therefore then each misstep, each train that does not run quite on time, each lightbulb that flickers, each person that does not behave as expected, each institution that does not do what it says on the can, must necessarily become magnified in comparison to the complete stability of life’s frameworks. Because our tools are so uniform and utilitarian, and because we interact so much with our tools that without them our very essence is drained, we come to expect from other human beings the same utilitarian do-what-you’re-supposed-to ethos. We have reduced ourselves to tools that ought to work 100% of the time. The cost is a drain on our spirit, our common humanity.
It doesn’t take a particularly religious person to claim that we live with a spiritual void. I’m not particularly religious, or at all for that matter, and it seems perfectly reasonable to me that these complaints have existed throughout human history. They are, however, all the more pertinent now. What is our humanity? Wherein lies our elusive soul?
Our humanity/soul if you swing that way (mine, anyway) is:
1) NOT the sum total of our interests
2) NOT the sum total of our demographic characteristics
3) NOT our political ideology
4) NOT a string of self-applied adjectives
It is, instead, the order arising out of the chaos of human behavior. When confronted with the sick or the weary, nine times out of ten, do you do something to help? What of the one time you don’t? What of the nine times you don’t? Why? Each question leads to yet another with no final question, only a string of contradictory, disorganized answers. It is in answering these questions, approaching the truth of your answers but never quite getting there, and knowing that you’re very likely wrong and being okay with that, that one discovers that shape of one’s humanity. That, I surmise, is how one begins to live without a void. It requires finding, accepting and maintaining that one is a creature of chaos.
I love my friends more when they disappoint me, within reason, of course. I love my family knowing they’ve fucked up plenty and likewise. And if we are to assign such value to our tools, our internetz, our phones, our social networks, then surely we ought to demand that they replicate the humanity of our lives?
Why then are we not building phones that intentionally fuck up 5% of the time? Why then do we not deliberately design an app that says “fuck off, I’m sleeping,” when we ask it where the nearest restaurant is? Why then are we believing less and less in our institutions, our schools, our post offices, our hospitals if we’re able to account for the sliver of chaos? Why must we believe we’re entitled to 100% from everything? We need a new way of living. I submit we’ll live better if we teach ourselves to be okay with less than 100%.
Random notes from a book I discovered in an old suitcase
January 7, 2010
This is what Jewish housekeepers knew in Philadelphia, 1871. Well, Mrs. Esther Levy anyway. Picked at random for epicness. Italics mine.
How to fatten poultry in four or five days
Boil some rice with skimmed milk, only as much as will serve one day; let it boil, with a teaspoonful of sugar, until the rice is swelled out. Feed them three times a day, in common pans, giving them as much as will quite fill them at one time. Before putting fresh food into the pans wash them clean, so that no sour food may be given to the poultry, as it will prevent them getting fat. Give them clean water, or the milk off the rice to drink, but the less water the better; by this method the flesh will have a clear whiteness, which no other food gives it. The pen should always be kept clean and no food given them for sixteen hours before killing.
To boil calf’s head
Clean it very nicely and soak it in water, that it may look very white. Boil the head extremely tender then strew it over with some bread crumbs and chopped parsley, and brown them or if preferred, leave one side plain. Serve with smoked meat. The brains must be boiled, and then mixed with some chopped fat, marjoram, parsley, salt, pepper, bread crumbs and eggs.
That’s a John Ruskin quote.
I was reading this article in a poetry journal and then it occurred to me that many of my favorite paintings are from a school of 19th century American art called Luminism whose primary concern is with the depiction of light within a landscape. I’m always engaged by works that rely on light for texture, whether it’s in art, literature or even life.
On torture
April 27, 2009
There’s nothing I have to add about the efficacy of standard interrogation techniques than this post off Andrew Sullivan’s blog over at The Atlantic. It astounds me that anyone can claim to be empirical when they talk about the necessity for torture. Still more astounding is the fact that people even have to discuss efficacy in this day and age. Torture is wrong. That’s all there is. Even if it were effective, which as you will see, it isn’t.
