Six generations of Corvettes were terminated by twins and quadruplets of round, oval and near round rectangular lights. People lost their minds when the 2014 Stingray showed four inset, canted rhombi with chamfered bottom corners as tail lamps. As much veneration as Tom Peters showed to the fashion, branding, badging, edges, body lines and fastback glass of the original, this grandchild of the sixty-one year old Corvette was pounded by purists for what it wore on its ass — as if the signature were now illegible. Some of the outrage seemed to center on how much it owed to the nouveau Camaro — a family resemblance being grafted from the Australian bastard ZetaF body onto the American halo Corvette. Some of it might have been the frown in the corners, as the horizontal vents blended into the outer edge of the clear red lenses. This amateur nostalgia notwithstanding, GM brought this vehicle from trendy retro rod to accessible exotic. Surrounded by black metallic clad bezels, the new Corvette tail lights glow forward in Star Trek warp streams while still connecting this mid-life, upper middle-class two-seater to the space adventuring child that’s been wasting within its would be driver.
“We think that grass is green, that stones are hard, and that snow is cold. But physics assures us that the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow are not the greenness, hardness, and coldness that we know in our experience, but something very different. The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.”1
I’d first read Bertrand Russell’s name when his book Principia Mathematica was discussed in Gödel, Escher, Bach,2 while setting up some of the foundations for Hoftstadter’s Strange Loops theories. The math and formal logic in GEB were mostly things I had to ignore in order to finish it, but I do recall that Gödel (a mathematician used as a model in GEB) situated his incompleteness theorems by developing a system to understand one of the observations Russell made — that there are inherent blind spots in set theory. Gödel generalized the liar’s paradox with an apparent illogical truth, “this statement is not provable.” The system can’t prove that the system is consistent.3 This extension of Russell’s “effects of the stone upon himself” idea made my heart beat faster. I started to consume him, and felt a quickening as the quote continued “Thus science seems to be at war with itself: when it most means to be objective, it finds itself plunged into subjectivity against its will. Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows that naive realism is false naive realism, if true, is false: therefore, it is false. And, therefore, the behaviorist, when he thinks he is recording observations about the outer world, is really recording observations about what is happening in him.”4
In 1985, Honda was not only taking a bite out of US auto sales, it was selling vehicles in other categories that exceeded all domestic production. Honda sold more motorcycles, three wheeled all-terrain vehicles and mopeds than any other company in the 1980s. While their Spree was an inexpensive, stripped down, reliable knock off of a Vespa, the latter barely made a dimple in the American market. Honda basically reinvented the fairing clad scooter in the US, and turned young riders into long term customers who would go on to buy CBR 600s, and perhaps a few would buy an NSX. So strong was this company, built by the son of a blacksmith in Japan, that it would come to eventually hire one of the most respected singer songwriters in the world to subtly star in its advertising.
I first saw the print ad when I was eleven years old, in a copy of Rolling Stone that one of my cousins left at my house. Lou Reed was standing proud, with a pair of wire sunglasses on, with his elbows out and his hands in the back pocket of his tight jeans. He was standing in front of the NYC skyline on a warm evening at dusk, with his legs spread just beside a pair of twin towers that were shorter than his shins. His black shoes were rolling slightly out like he was stretching from a long ride on the red Honda Elite Deluxe on its kickstand to our left. It looked like a Countach in danger of falling in on itself. The photograph appeared to have a strong setting sun as a light source, although I’m sure it was a tungsten bulb and a gold reflector. It was cropped square, with slightly pinched corners that had been left irregular to demonstrate the artisanry involved. “Don’t settle for walking.”5
I had no idea who he was, what it really meant and I barely recognized the city. But it stuck. Far more than any other ad or article I saw in any magazine during that period, I came to associate that particular brand and product with an inarticulable coolness. A few years later, when I figured out who Lou Reed was, I remembered the ad immediately. Yo! MTV Raps showed a video of The Original Wrapper as a lark, my aunt immediately got out her Velvet Underground and Transfomer tapes — and I finally understood the meaning of the tagline. The Honda Elite was not walking, it wasn’t the wild side, it was the chance to scoot through the wild side, to see it in fast forward.
Gravity is a symmetric force; one proportionally strong based on the product of input masses, and one proportionally weakened by greater distances. But distance at a particular time is a matter of perspective, and is relatively different on rulers and watches. This doesn’t necessarily affect every kind of measurement and transaction in a binary way — multiple points of view watching a glass falling from a table will be able to agree that gravity was a factor in its shattering when it impacts the floor. But it does affect outcomes of interactions when measured in situ. Bertrand Russel’s accessible primer, The ABC of Relativity explained that “rigid bodies, which we need for measurement, are only rigid for certain observers,” “measurements of distances and times do not reveal properties of the things measured, but relations of the things to the measurer.” There is a difference between this understanding and the more fundamental premise of a force based solely on relative mass and assumed distance (between Newton and Einstein) but the primary difference to me, to ‘the person that the stone affects,’ is metaphoric. The way we see the world is based on our time and position.
It’s not that we are powerless to affect our moments or nearfinities, it is that we are not simultaneous. As a related physics phenomenon might explain, ‘we cannot know both the position and momentum of a thing at the same time.’6 And, in a related confusion, we cannot detect something in a true sense without colliding with it — and that collision will affect its course.7 The latter is now a somewhat revised idea8 within its native domain, but outside of physics there are plenty of examples of the gravity of scrutiny through the Hawthorne effect.
If I study the 1982 Cadillac Cimmaron through contemporary material available, I will not be able to push all of these weeds back into their Chevrolet Cavalier roots, or turn the $13,000 luxurious compact into a significantly more reasonable $8,000 base Camaro. But we tacitly assume that we can make such a difference in one fundamental area: studying history. If I read and think and talk and write about the things that have happened, I will better avoid some of the bad things that may happen if I turn my attention away from the subject. But we don’t really need this weak inducement — some things we have done are worthy of contemplation, but there is barely the bandwidth to consider their names — let alone their meanings in a plastós past. Imagining the multiverse of perspectives on pasts influencing observable presents into all possible futures is voodoo historiographic theory. And unnecessary — as each new mistake will be built on every past mistake, and every triumph and whole new ones we are just not making. Lesser Cadillac failures, like the Caterra and the Allante, have had auto executives stuffing wax into their ears and lashing themselves to masts to keep from hearing too many siren calls9 of budget-niche cars — but have been wholesale regrettable only in the case-study retelling.
“Of all the things that come to us by nature we first acquire the potentiality and later exhibit the activity (this is plain in the case of the senses; for it was not by often seeing or often hearing that we got these senses, but on the contrary we had them before we used them, and did not come to have them by using them); but the virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyreplayers by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.”10
J. Fred Woell published a short book for teachers at the turn of the century,11 and a quote from this passage by Aristotle tops a page called Springboards to Jump Start Creativity. “For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.” This is an oft repeated loop; how can we learn to do something we don’t know how to do by doing it? If I saw this quote floating on some Internet meme I would just assume there was someone trying to sell me some new age self-help book — it conjures pulling oneself up by their bootstraps; flying by squeezing their shoes12 hard enough. The teacher in me is not super comfortable with this, especially as the subjects that I teach tend to have manual skills in them. How would my undergraduate jewelry and industrial design students feel about being asked to teach themselves how to do the things they need to do? Learn to operate the drill press by operating the drill press, learn to perform a 2 rail sweep by sweeping 2 rails. This is nearly the definition of creativity and invention, doing something that no one (yet) knows how to do. And we predict precisely this as students mature, that the burden of learning is increasingly on the learner — they become their own students; teaching themselves what to learn and learning by teaching it. But where we tend to model by demonstrating techniques, we might sometimes fail to let them fail to figure out how to figure it out. Regardless of how my students felt, would they be better served by more often depriving them of my instruction?
I’ve read and participated in many meetings where the subject of how we learn figures prominently — and each notion seems to be at war with itself. The most problematic of which is the idea of ‘brain-based learning.’ What other kind can there be? When you’ve all read the same books (or excerpts, or summaries,) you tend to start talking to one another in code. And that code is sometimes confused for truth. In this case the advice is distilled into ideas about how brain images of learners doing specific tasks is correlated with other tasks, (like taking notes by hand) lighting up areas in the brain that are associated with long term memory. Typing notes, the brain lights up differently. I believe the science, but not as the lazy and simple advice that pedagogues give.
Systems sell. Sometimes doing hard work is hard, but hard is relative. There are novels that one finds only pleasure in reading, and novels that you have you have to fight to make any sense of. A textbook in a new field can be harder to read than either. And the writing of a sophomore critique of a peer’s work can be more work than reading any of these. Making sense of something someone else has written can be ecstatic, difficult and a universe of decimals between zero and one. Translating a thing from one media to another effectively can be even more difficult. McLuhan’s ‘cold/hot’13 matrix can be very useful in assessing how challenging a category is to the intellect — but it’s just too binary for a world with inflationary formats. The compression into temperatures is useful insofar as it is jarring and gets us to think about differential effects based on the package rather than the content. But the metaphor lacks some nuance; what about various warms and cools? What about the relative effects of temperature on various types of individuals or various cultures based on biology or sociology? Are there special cases? Water has some unique properties as it is frozen — are there any such phenomena with supercooled media? (Perhaps they are special cases of ‘flipping’ in the Media Tetrad.)14 This isn’t to say that McLuhan didn’t stipulate that his systems were imperfect lenses — but that as a system it is understandable, sellable, buyable, useable. It can be understood and generalized without actually counting all the atoms of barionic matter.
The very idea that there are popular books and intellectual books, popular music and classical music, relationships based on love and others on sex, is a gross oversimplification. Even more rigorous, complicated dissections of culture are synthetic. Usefully synthetic, sure; but the product of sums and averages all the same. Our ideas about people that are pulled from aggregates aren’t the simple math we present them to be.
Pynchon wrote that “words are only an eye twitch away from what they stand for,”15 but imagine a world where every object, movement and emotion was frozen in those few letters. I have heard a number of visual artists hesitate to say a lot about the work they’ve made, preferring the image of the thing itself to be its own words. Pynchon was working in a fortunate format in that way, his reclusivity doesn’t leave us with a lot of mysteries. While his work is dense and surreal and layered, it is long enough not to leave us in need of still more words. The viewer of something visual would like some phrases to extend their experience of a work into the verbal, perhaps especially because even a large work of sculpture or film is tiny, in comparison to a novel. Words, like the things they stand for, can be extruded into longer phrases, phrases parceled into paragraphs, paragraphs stacked into pages, pages into chapters, chapters into divisions, divisions into stories, which may be books. But, with the right application of skill and effort, those can be subdivided back into readers, into criticisms, into quotes and can fracture into new forms. Each is analogous to the thing, but different.
A simple idea is often stretched into a more complicated one, a phrase turns into a novel, a sketch into a skyscraper, a hum into a symphony. The long tend to cluster together, they’re hilarious and/or prophetic, frigid and/or swelling for touch, consuming and/or repelling — adjectives and verbs compressed around little nouns. Adjacent to these hulks are dense complexities, bound into nutshells,16 pregnant singularities separated by great distances from one another.
Our apertures are something like judgment. Not necessarily the conscious, immediate, free-will variety — but on a number of scales that we control and which control us. We decide to read or see or do exhibit A, and it provides a filter for everything we see (in and out of its own category) for a lifetime — with varying intensity, depending on a plastic loop of circumstances. This can be a little crippling at times — to consume or not to consume seems to control not just the immediate needs and wants that the thing controls on the surface, but is an unmarked Choose Your Own Adventure17 with lasting consequences. At least some choices have a branching structure — even if one jumps to another tree or root or river, our decision making impulses (and probably systems) are based in large part on the elections (or maybe ethical foundations) made previously.
A young woman is staying at her relative’s mansion and is haunted by two ghosts who ply her with conflicting advice on the banal. Each is armed with sources, citing contradictory NPR and various magazine headlines about whether or not people were meant to sit, when exercising is most effective, with the woman eventually finding that the couple has ‘died of confusion.’ Their haunts eventually drive her out the window, after which she joins the ghosts in their pursuit to give well-meaning advice to the home’s inhabitants. This episode of Portlandia,18 skewers habits that most of us have through sarcasm. Underlying this tendency to talk about what we’ve heard in the news are some default settings of our platforms; we have faith in our sources, we have limited time to assess every angle at every depth of every subject, we want to show our peers that we are paying attention, we want to help, we have fallible memories, the research is often poorly understood by writers who popularize it, the research is often suggestive or preliminary, we tend to grab onto and use things that confirm existing beliefs from similar sources… Programs like WNYC’s On the Media would love for us to shop for our information in far more suspicious and broad ways — not jumping onto the latest information from the most accessible of sources. And they provide weekly evidence of how many sources (including NPR itself and the affiliates which carry their program across the USA) regularly fail to live up to the ethical standards that journalists generally learn in school or on the job. It’s as insidious as every other necessary laziness we are guilty of — including the opposing tendency to assume that everything we hear is untrue, that it is all a lie.
People in museums sometimes love to get right up on top of a painting, even breaking invisible barriers and triggering alarms, to see the brush strokes. I like to look at the surface of bronze sculptures — noting that if I get close enough to a Brancusi I can see the porosity in the casting that was never quite chased and polished out. Others stand well back, taking in the composition, or comparing works in close proximity to one another (probably with curators grinning while watching them on closed circuit cameras.) Some read the mildly didactic labels, some search on their iPhones, some listen to tour guides and others discuss what they’re seeing with one another (sometimes asking up or talking down to more or less educated companions.) But even if we were to capture the people who have similar habits of consumption we would likely find that each would learn something different. The facts would likely not conflict, but the interpretations (as acquired from critics and friends and as formed in the critical faculties of the consumer’s mind) could be Die Hard different.
“Recent studies have shown that ancient studies have been confirmed that hot tubs can significantly increase your income.”19
Our memes have contracted to comedic tropes, the entire observation conflated with the products of purpose-built viral marketing campaigns. Dawkins likely wouldn’t recognize things on quickmeme.com as containing solid examples of the phenomenon he identified. A few small bits of this code may move around, occasionally being expressed in social patterns — but for the most part the only thing about what we call memes that is memetic is the concept of memes itself — our recognition of and search for emergent properties in our culture. It’s popsci as brand, Sudoku for people looking to sharpen their ability to recognize new shapes in the psychomagnetic foam zeitgeist. Or just people who like unexpected quotes mapped onto photos of cats. While most of this field is beyond me, it has the malleable softness that attracted me to psychoanalysis in college. We copy, at first blindly, and then with a success or conformist bias, we mutate, some survive, are copied with or without biases and this part of our evolution can eventually alter our biology.
Boyd and Richerson put it that we are “clever social animals in which learning from each other played a negligible role until the evolution of our brain was complete, at which point the souped-up chimpanzee was able to take up culture. First we got human nature by genetic evolution, then culture arose as an evolutionary byproduct.”20 We all have approximately the same capacity, but an interplay of choice and circumstance help us to produce significant variation in what and how we are. Consider educational attainment. I tend to see my formal and informal education as a functions of my curiosity and determination; I was terrible at hitting a ball with a bat, I liked words and drawing, so I eventually overcame some of my issues with authority and self-control to achieve a moderate habit of learning which progressed through a few degrees, including one at a public Ivy. There are anecdotes about being the first in my family to attend and graduate from college, about my parents’ income, about grants and loans and the accessibility of the first school I went to, the quality of their teaching, and about my individual choices. But there are also interrelated factors that helped with my success and failure; including the country and state I was born into, the county and town I went to high school in, my gender and my race. The rough category I fit into is often called privileged. But a powerful privilege that wouldn’t come immediately to mind is the size of my nuclear family.
“The effect of sibship on intelligence, especially in terms of verbal ability, is fairly large, even when father’s education (as a partial control for innate aspects of intelligence) was controlled for statistically. Youth’s educational aspirations are directly and indirectly affected by sibship size, which in turn negatively affects a wide variety of extracurricular pursuits, such as amount of time spent in cultural activities and reading… Considerable evidence suggests that people who get advanced education tend to be from small families.”21
A generation or two before I was born, combinations of my Irish-Italian-Catholic-Working-Class-Midwest-American family may well have given me a larger sibgroup than 2. (In fact, my mother was one of six [four of whom survived childhood,] and my father one of three.) Not that this would have been prescriptive for me in terms of education — I certainly know a few people with MUCH larger families where a broad number of individuals within the sibling group have attained higher levels of education and/or more success than I have. But as a member of a sibclass, my case seems to have been helped (in at least the measure of higher ed achievement,) by being one of two. And I have always guessed that this was amplified when my brother died as we entered adulthood — the surviving attention and resources passed to me. And I believe I was helped by having a chemically dependent father — there is nothing like seeing someone you have so much in common with so completely destroy their life to motivate you to find other ways of living.
When I was twelve, I wrote a short story about a giant shuttle plucking a star from deep space in order to fuse it into our dying sun — I think it was called Star Catcher. (And then I might have written Star Catcher II — we were incentivized to read and write with free candy masquerading as granola bars.) My sense of scale was a little off, and I think the lead hull would have been slightly less successful than I’d imagined — but there was something about that giant ball of radioactive fire that I needed to make sense of. I was probably just beyond the ‘four elements’ theory of matter, certainly not smart enough to know that the sun was largely made of hydrogen and helium.22 Making sense of gases lighting up the earth from a hundred million miles away is too crazy for me to understand even now — so my twelve year old’s stars were made of uranium.
Uranium is a heavy white metal when refined from its ore; hard enough to scratch glass, but soft enough to be formed and forged. We made our yellow ceramic glazes and colored our drinking glasses with it until well after we found that it exposed a photographic plate in the absence of light. Two of the isotopes of this unstable element, 238 and 235, (the potato and the vodka,) share an atomic number and are nearly identical. They differ only in minor measurements of mass and major potentialities of fission. They are painstakingly distilled from one another by physical and chemical means — bringing up the less than one percent of 235, gradually increasing its concentration as the light outruns (and outspins) the heavy. Bombarding uranium 235 with low energy neutrons causes its nucleus to split, and its slow initial fission starts a drunken chain reaction. The simple is volatilized complex. Uranium is nature — it is the ground we build our homes on and the mountains we stare at when we look for peace. It’s in the 430,000,000 troy ounces of silver we recycled after using it as magnet windings to separate the 238 from the 235 during the Manhattan Project23 — still being cast and stamped into our jewelry and plated onto our flatware. It is a number: 92 of 118, a few parts per million of the material universe. A shot of schnapps in an ocean, with outsized effects on a few carbon based lives and their symbolic systems. Uranium is the word for unending energy, for the existential crisis of distillation, for the invisible, for shadows of vaporized Japanese, for the end, for signs sitting in for the sidereal, for transubstantiation.
It is also my embarrassing yellow cake — a poorly chosen material McGuffin for an out-of-shape adolescent exercise. It marks the year 1986, makes Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev film-negative blue, it is the slowed down light I see when looking backward through the medium of memory.