First rule of making an android’s brain: don’t tell it how it works.

Way, way back when I started trying to take writing seriously (hahahahahah ha ha ha hahaha, sigh) I decided it was time to write a book, so I came up with something I would really enjoy writing about, crudely formed it into a story outline of biblical proportions, and regurgitated my excessive imaginations into a word processor. This was my first inkling of what writing a book was supposed to be. But like a virgin entering into his first attempt at making love, I was full of awkward bumbles, nervous inhibitions, and over-calculated form.

However, despite the fact that I was a novice, I did finish the job. My bucket of idea vomit, stretched over a plot spine that could barely hold itself together, was a complete novel: a science fiction yarn called An Epoch of Uncertainty. It was an early work for me. It’s said (I thought by Vonnegut, I’ve since seen Raymond Chandler credited with the quote, but nowhere have I seen a real citation yet) that one must write a million words of crap before producing good fiction. If this is true, for me Epoch was that first twelve inches of butt chocolate that leads the charge for a huge dump.

One of the book’s central characters is Mark, an android. He is the first machine that was made not only to emulate the human form but also to approximate the human mind. His designer describes the process of building Mark’s mind as following three steps:

1. Build a mind that is powerful but also limited in the ways human minds are.
2. Obscure it from itself.
3. Expose it to the world and teach it step by step, building on knowledge as you go.

Essentially, to make a human machine, the designer creates a computer that will think like a child, puts it in a humanlike body, and raises it like a son, forcing it to learn about itself and its world the same way its human counterparts did. This, I reasoned, was an interesting way to approach the well-mined territory of machine-become-man. A choice nugget in the bucket of idea vomit. Of the many nuggets it resides with, this one has resurfaced in my mind often.

As humans, we are amazingly ignorant of our own inner workings. Have you noticed? And it’s the most effective type of ignorance too: the kind you think isn’t there. We really think we know how we work. But we don’t. We have no idea why we feel the way we do, why we think the way we do, and why we act the way we do. Just look at the fuzzy edges of the science of psychology. Ever used it to try to understand something about why you think or feel some particular way? If you haven’t, you’re in for a ride. Discovering that volition, the very meaning of our drive, isn’t always in the driver’s seat, was a terrifying experience for me.

Without getting into the actual science, let me just sum up what I’m trying to say: we are biological creatures, and our psychology is a part of that. A dog doesn’t know why it farts, and a man doesn’t know why he chews his nails, why he is lazy when he doesn’t want to be, or why he marries someone who is wrong for him. He can go back and try to understand it, he can study the science and work with a therapist, but no matter what he does or how astutely he does it, he will only be laying contrived conceptual framework over something that was there already, in action and working without and beneath his knowledge.

Even today, we are only beginning to use the context of our evolution to understand why we do the things we do. You have probably read/heard something like this already—like the idea that the reason we desire to eat so much salty, fatty, sugary, high calorie foods is that we are programmed to. Until only very recently, foods rich in these things were a rare treat for us. We sought after them constantly. No wonder we go nuts over their availability now.

This same principle can be applied to so many other things. How about gender roles? The tendencies for either sex to be better or worse at certain things? The way we respond to emotional trauma? Our need to believe in the supernatural, gods, luck, etc.? The bonding patterns that draw us into romantic relationships? I mean really, isn’t it weird that just about everybody finds someone they could marry? As picky, fickle and difficult as we are? How about the way we fill and regard the space in our homes? The way we respond to authority? The way we get complacent with what we accomplish and keep looking for the next best thing?

Great mysteries? Not really. None of these are hard to explain if you use the context of our species’ infancy. Never studied anthropology? Skip it, just go read Clan of the Cave Bear (clearly the Cliff’s Notes version of a college anthropology course). Then every time you wonder why people are the way they are, imagine Ayla’s clan and why the quirk you were wondering about might be useful to them.

Bam! Mind blown.

Like Mark the android, we are creatures with extensive, detailed programming that we are unaware of. We operate using it every day. We think it facilitates us, gives our lives bounds to bounce around inside of, but the very idea of what constitutes our lives is part of that programming, and the bouncing is too. We facilitate it. If it were any other way, our species would not have survived and reached such a height of success.

With that idea in place, one can really start to ask some heavy questions about us hairless apes. The sort of questions that rub shoulders with the limits of our concepts of who we are. The sort of questions that, if answered, compel us to either change deeply or choose to blank out what we have just learned. They are a short road that dead-ends at existential crisis.

I’m going to end this blog entry now and proceed directly to ice cream and cartoons. I’m not going to ask why I’m doing it. Can’t go down that road.

If I did, I might not ever make it back.

Disclaimer: this blog entry is sappy. If you are not a fan of the occasional dollop of same, I advise you to make your way to this month’s Misfortune 500, a bright little tale told from the perspective of next year’s comic book hero. *crossing my fingers for a movie deal*

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Recently a friend asked me how life was going, and I noticed that I gave a stock response. The fact stuck in my craw. Stock responses are not meant for friends who want to know how you’re really doing. Who are looking out for you. In a case like that, where someone close is asking how you’re holding up, a stock response is an evasion.

This isn’t strange for me, I do a lot of evasive chat. Beginning at the tender age of seventeen when I left home for college, I started to learn that I was a much more private person than I believed myself to be. People, on the whole, were pretty open in my perspective. More open than I was comfortable being myself. I’m told this is typical of writers, and I like to cleave to that notion rather than likening it to cowardice.

But despite the evasion of my stock response, there was something behind it—a nucleus of a possible following discussion. That, I think, was my way of opening up. Just a crack, really, but enough to get a foot in if you were inclined to do so.

My response was, “So busy. I always try to get things to slow down but life just seems to keep getting faster and faster.”

Even as I said it I knew that I had been saying it for quite some time. I’ve been spouting variations of this for a few years. But what does it mean? Have things really been getting increasingly intense? Is my life like a movie, where there is a pre-written plot that swells and thickens until finally it climaxes, shortly before the credits? Now that’s a scary thought.

Or, perhaps, am I just experiencing life harder?

The subject got me thinking on the notion of experiencing life. It’s a value, I find, with many people. The idea that the game is more fun the deeper you’re in it. But how does one quantify that? How do you know when there’s no longer a part of you that is a spectator in your own game?

In Tolkein’s Middle-Earth (if you will indulge me in a moment of nerdery), there is a character in the ancient history of the world named Fëanor. Fëanor was an elf, and an exceptional one. He trapped the light of the Two Trees, the source of all light in Middle-Earth, into the Silmarils—three gems. After the desecration of the Two Trees, the Silmarils were the only light left in the world. He created the Palantin as well, the magical crystal balls, one of which was possessed by Saruman. Gandalf said this feat was beyond the skill of either Saruman or Sauron. Fëanor was fierce and passionate. He gave his life in the pursuit of banishing the evil that would drive his people apart, and rob the world of beauty. When he died, the passing of his fiery soul reduced his body to cinders.

I thought of Fëanor when writing this blog because he is a paragon for the concept of living hard, of playing the game with all you’ve got. If you take a look at fiction in general, you’ll find a lot of characters like him in one way or another. We like to look up to people who refuse to be detached from their world. People who belong on Earth.

So what position do you play in your own game? Benchwarmer, or Team Captain?

Allowing yourself to feel, to really feel things that are happening to you and to become emotionally invested as frequently as you can… this takes a lot of courage. And it’s that courage that we look up to. It’s what we, as authors, weave into our boldest characters. It’s what immolates the flesh of Fëanor as his body finally fails him. The tireless audacity that makes us throw ourselves into the fray day after day, though it causes us greater pain than we know we can handle.

And that last bit there, about the pain—that’s the defining mark. Audentes fortuna iuuat, they say. Fortune favors the bold. In poker and many other things, it is prudent to weigh your options and consider your reach before taking the plunge. Measure your risk. Knowing your limitations will save you. You can always shuffle the deck and start again. But the moments in our lives, the commitments we make, the bonds we form, and even our lives as a whole, these cannot be repeated. Wagering anything less than everything is only meaningful to a soul that never steps out of reflection and back into the game.

We can’t afford to stoke idle hearts and regret after the fact.

I leave you with the following quote, from the brilliant Louise Erdrich. May it help you in hard times as it has me:

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”

You ever have one of those moments when a word suddenly sounds bizarre? When you think about a word too long and suddenly it sounds impossibly strange? I have those. And I’m not the only one who is, at times, befuddled by ordinary words. That’s right, I know you’re out there, fellow Word-fuddlers. You are not alone.

What makes it happen? If a word isn’t weird, but suddenly becomes that way to you, should you be concerned? Should you call your therapist? It’s kind of scary, after all. “Yeah, hey Monica. I um…when I think about the word ‘antiquated’ my tongue feels like I’m licking a wooden waffle and my brain does a face plant…yeah, I know that seems unreasonable…I know, my brain doesn’t have a face…no, waffles are made from flour and milk and stuff and…okay now ‘waffle’ is starting to sound weird.”

I think most of us who have experienced this phenomenon have come to realize, at some point, that it happens when you think too long about a word. I can remember being a teenager, a word-fuddlery virgin, trying to convince my friends that the word “often” was the strangest thing to occur in the English language. The reason, I later came to understand, is that I used the word too…well, often.

Let’s try it together shall we? I’m not saying we should do it often, but let’s consider what often happens when you use a word too often. You don’t have to say it aloud, but please mouth out the word often with me, every time it appears here, which is often. Often enough perhaps to induce word-fuddlery? Perhaps. Perhaps not often enough. Are you saying it with me now? Often. Often. Often.

It looks weeeeeeird now right? Often. Ah – f – ten. Offtin. Ahftun. Auffe-tonn. Just LOOK at it. Often.

It’s not a positive feeling either, is it? You didn’t enjoy reading that, I’ll bet. You’re probably feeling a vague relief at the fact that I’m not using that word now (don’t worry, I won’t betray your trust and use it again…soon). When a word becomes a puzzle, it’s almost like we’ve failed somehow. Failed to properly ignore the inanity of a necessarily mundane, common triviality. I suppose that makes sense.

For example, imagine that, during a date with a possible romantic partner, you became preoccupied with the rhythm of your breathing while trying to eat and talk. Yargh! And have you ever had that feeling like you can’t maintain proper posture while walking when someone attractive is looking at you? Egads! It’s horrible!

So that’s it then, the answer is simple: just don’t think about words too long and they won’t go rogue on you. Protect the language center of your brain from the beguiling abyss lurking behind every word you think, say, read or hear by forgetting the abyss is there.

Sure, no problem. Ignoring the pink elephant is easy. I’ve done that before. If I can ignore the urgent, burn-holes-in-your-eyes cleavage mocking my forcefully diverted attention under the chin of a gorgeous date (who is only trying to have a conversation and would appreciate eye contact from me thank you very much), I can ignore the crisis that unfolds when I think about how perplexing the word ‘perplexing’ is, and whether this counts as onomatopoeia.

But very recently I encountered a phenomenon that takes word-fuddlery to a new level. I stepped a little further into the abyss.

I was pushing a grocery cart in a department store, feeling the rough vibration in its handle bar under my palms. I was bathed in fluorescent light, observing others similarly cloaked in sickly shades, noticing that the roof was pocked with sky-lites that let a precisely meted amount of sunlight in, and how its well-rounded spectrum was clearly distinguishable on the forms around me, refreshing and improving them. I was smelling the smell that grocery stores pass off as freshness but is really a less grotesque variant of the odor that stains their loading docks and trash bins. My jeans and cotton tee were rough on my skin. The time since my last sip of coffee was obvious by the taste in my mouth.

And suddenly, it was ALL weird. Everything. Every aspect of my being, my life, this planet and the beings and lives that I share it with, all of it. It was all ‘Often’. Unfitting, bewildering, impossible.

Now that is a strange place. I’d been there before, and I know I’m not alone in this type of fuddlery (meta-fuddlery?) either. Others feel it too. Some folks feel it frequently. And it’s unsettling not only because of how it feels, but because of what it suggests. When you overuse a word, you can retreat from it, forget it and move on. There’s nowhere to retreat to when you take a step back from the world. Existential crisis, man, it’s a bitch.

But while it’s a difficult experience, and one that infinitely hampers my ability to function on this planet , it also has utility. It outlines the significance of things. Putting a border on the footprint of everything that exists in my life, tangible or not, and reminding me that I have the capacity to make decisions and value judgements with the whole of my world as a factor and not a context. It’s similar to what it was like taking LSD (ahem, back in the days when I um…experimented…with limited quantities…), except that under the influence of LSD the significance of things, while outlined and highlighted, was unbearably beautiful. During meta-fuddlery, it trumps still but becomes immeasurably banal.

So, what’s the point, Mike?

Well, it seems the take-home message is this: our ability to function in this world is dependent upon our ability to ignore it. Without our default mode of focused interest on the details of our actual lives, we are capable of sensing the importance of everything outside of it. And just as you feel small and insignificant when you gaze at the cosmos too long, you can feel meaningless if you gaze at your own feet too long.

Is this what Nietzsche meant when he said, “…for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss also gazes into you”?

At what point does self-examination become destructive?

I’m sure I don’t know, but puppies are damned cute and I like playing with them. Pizza is the king of foods and demands worship if you have ever liked a food, ever. And sex, well, sex is many things, almost all of which are wonderful, even if they’re not.

The universe however, is awesome but nothing more. Constant, fun to think about, impossible to affect.

So for the sake of puppies, pizza, and sex, remember this: the big picture in our lives isn’t the biggest picture there is, and that’s just fine. Have a slice. Get some. Snuggle a puppy and try not to use words too…often.

Advice worthy of Confucius.