welcome, stranger

In the 1970s or perhaps the early 1980s there was a British documentary TV series called The Infinite Search, in which the presenter (forget who he was) visited practitioners and authorities of the various major religions of the world. In one of the episodes he visited a Zen monastery in Japan and interviewed the abbot, who could speak English.

At some point the presenter asked the Zen master what spiritual advice he could give to the Western viewers of the show. The Zen master answered, "I think it is important to know thyself."

In the words of my friend Brad, who first described this interview to me, it was a masterful reply. The dictum "know thyself" was of course the famous motto of the oracle at Delphi in ancient Greece, so with those two words the Zen master bridged East and West in one go. The deceptive simplicity of the advice makes it like a Zen koan in the sense that the more you reflect on it, the more provocative and bottomless it becomes.

According to Buddhist doctrine, of course, there is no self to "know"--but understanding this is far from easy. For from the Buddhist point of view, even though things are not real, neither do they lack reality.

In East and West, we're enjoined to investigate this unreality called our self and get to know it. The biggest obstacle is the complacency of thinking that we already know. Once you admit that you don't know, you open the door to the greatest mystery we can find. To a greater or lesser extent, we're all strangers to ourselves. And how do we treat strangers?

I feel strongly that my work relates to this quest, but I'm darned if I could tell you how.

The Odyssey odyssey, part 22

I first became involved in filmmaking with my friend Brad in grade 7. He (or I suppose his mother) had a Eumig 8mm home-movie camera. (Video-production equipment in those days--1972--was large, expensive, and existed only in professional studios.) With this fantastic resource in his possession, Brad was keen to make films, and so was I.

We did some short films and some animation on Brad's Eumig, but ran up against the problem that to make something more than the most rudimentary film, you had to be able to edit the film. Later, as we got into junior high school, we were delighted to find that the school owned a new, high-end Canon super-8mm film camera. Goodbye Eumig--this was what we wanted to make movies with now.

Our real opportunity came in grade 10 in 1975, when, as the final big assignment of the year, our English teacher told us to form groups and create an audiovisual or other media project of some kind. Fantastic! Here was our chance to get our hands on some school time and equipment to make a film!

Brad and I jumped to it and started writing a film script. It would have to be silent, of course--movie sound technology was far beyond our reach--but we could do a lot with silent film.

Brad wanted to do a story around a strange, mysterious instrument that had belonged to his late father, who had been a marine electrician of some kind. Labeled a "field strength indicator", it was a fist-sized gray box with a needle-dial, a single rotating knob, and an extendable antenna like on a portable radio. We didn't know what it was--it was just a device of some kind. As far as we knew, it didn't actually do anything. But from this prop grew a story which we called, imaginatively, "The Device", a Cold War satire told from a Keystone Kop perspective. To give our Cold War story bite, our device needed to be a secret weapon of some kind. We hit on the idea that whoever held the weapon could simply point its antenna at some object, twist the knob, and that object would simply disappear--disintegrate, vanish. This relatively simple movie effect could be done in-camera, and also gave us a plausible Doomsday Weapon for our story.

Fantastic! This would make a cool story--and we already had the prop!

Excitedly, Brad and I spent hours and days in his living-room, scribbling lists of shots on sheets of looseleaf, unfolding our complex satirical farce. At age 16 I was (co)writing my first film script. I didn't know it at the time, but writing a silent movie is perhaps the best scriptwriting training, because it forces you to think of how to tell a story purely with pictures--and this remains the key skill of the scriptwriter, even one who has dialogue at his disposal.

There was no typing; our finished script was a rumpled sheaf of looseleaf pages of scribbled shots, crossings-out, and marginal notes. Armed with this, we innocently undertook the shockingly difficult task of producing our own 30-minute movie. With our friend Tim, who had a job and therefore money, as our third producer, we spent weeks on various locations around the city, mainly in parks, shooting our madcap farce (which ends by "disappearing" planet Earth when a little kid points the device at the ground). Indeed we never finished filming by the end of the school year, and had to show our teacher Mr. Ryan our script and all our raw footage so he could give us a mark.

We pushed on filming through the summer, and continued to work on postproduction in our off-hours when we started grade 11 in the fall. We didn't actually finish "The Device" until we were most of the way through the school year.

One of our production expenditures was to buy editing equipment for super-8mm film: a viewer with two hand-cranked reels for film, and a splicing block that made precision cuts to the film and allowed us to splice lengths of film with transparent editing tape. Finally we had the tools not only to shoot a film, but to assemble it.

Setting up our editing bench in Brad's spare room (which also housed his piano), Brad and I gradually put together the film, adding scenes and sequences as they were filmed and developed. Getting some coaching from my father, we set up our editing room with proper gear such as a board with pins on which to hang strips of film, using a lined wastebasket to hold the tail-ends of longer clips. We cut and recut, winding and rewinding the emerging scenes to view them on our little viewer--the first audience for our growing movie.

I learned that I loved editing film. When you shoot a film, often with multiple takes of each shot, there is no sense of story when you develop the raw scenes. The story emerges--or reemerges--in the editing process. Find the right points to make your cuts, and you develop a seamless, flowing story (provided it's been shot properly). We fiddled and fussed, trimming frames, taking shots out, putting them back in, and rolling the film through the viewer one more time. We discovered that we needed more or different shots, and added these to our list for future shoots. We did one such pickup shot--a closeup of a note taped inside a newspaper--out on Brad's patio while taking a break from editing.

The finished product was very good for a first effort. Although silent, the movie had a piano score composed by Brad and synchronized with the picture via a magnetic stripe on the edge of the finished film--the reigning technology at the time for adding sound to super-8mm. We got our classmate Joyce to perform most of the piano music and recorded it in the music room on the school's baby grand piano, using the school's high-end Revox audio tape recorder. "The Device" went on to win Best High School Film at the 1976 B.C. Student Film Festival, and was an audience favorite at the festival screenings. Yes: people laughed at our comedy! (The festival projectionist said to us, after screening our film, "That must've been fun to make!" We exchanged glances; we might have used the word "grueling" or "frustrating" instead.)

All this by way of saying that I developed an early appreciation for the importance of editing in the filmmaking process. In a sense a film editor is more like a scriptwriter than like a member of the production process. It makes a big difference how a film is edited, and indeed film editor is a big creative credit in the movie business, along with the writer, director, cinematographer, and composer.

Editing was the next hurdle for our TV pilot The Jellybean Odyssey, but I'm again going to have to save that for next time.

To be continued...

reasoning

I continue to be astonished and excited to find how fresh and interesting William James is in his 1890 classic The Principles of Psychology, of which I'm now about halfway through volume 2. Last night I finished chapter 22 on "Reasoning"--fantastic.

I never expected to make it all the way through both volumes of this work in one go, since they have about 1400 pages between them, but I can't stop reading it and I don't want to. The remaining chapters are on topics too interesting to miss, including "Instinct", "The Emotions", "Will", and "Hypnotism". The work finishes with a fascinating-looking chapter called "Necessary Truths and the Effects of Experience", in which it seems he ties up a number of philosophical questions connected with psychology.

In "Reasoning" James breaks down exactly what reasoning consists of. He explains it as an instance of "association by similarity"--essentially noticing a character in an object that one associates also with another object. This comes through discriminating aspects of objects. Seeing things only vaguely, or in wholes, makes reasoning impossible. The ability to perceive and pick out an aspect of something that will help one achieve one's immediate end is a hallmark of reasoning. The mark of genius is the ability to perceive common features in things that are apparently unalike, such as, famously (and possibly apocryphally) Newton's noticing a similarity between a falling apple and the moon.

James is able to show that animals generally do not reason in this sense, even when it appears they are doing so. Instead of association by similarity, they proceed by simple association in time or space: "this object follows that object" or "this object is next to that object". A dog, who had once learned, by accident, that he could open a gate-latch by knocking it upward with his muzzle and so get through it, appeared to be reasoning his way through. But the same dog was confounded by another, very similar gate with a similar latch. It did not occur to the dog to use the same technique on the different gate, and so he could not get through.

Most people are like the dog, in that they tend to follow pragmatic rules of thumb based on experience. The same thoughts, the same objects, are always connected with each other. I suppose this corresponds with what we now call "thinking inside the box". James cites an example of a man on a train who asked the brakeman to make the stove stop smoking into the compartment. The brakeman replied that the stove would stop smoking once the train started moving.

"Why so?" asked the passenger.

"It always does," replied the brakeman.

To James, this meant that the brakeman did not know why the stove stopped smoking once the train left the station. A scientist might reason his way through the question, and realize that the movement of air across the top of the stack once the train was in motion would have the effect of drawing air up the stack, pulling the smoke with it. The brakeman was not able, or not curious enough, to piece together the reason that the stove stopped smoking. His experience was that the one event (train in motion) was always accompanied by the other (stove stops smoking). For him that was enough.

James concludes that even the most astonishing mental feats by dogs and horses can be explained in this way. And indeed, why disparage a form of "reasoning" that most of us use most of the time?

But I think back to an instance of when I was impressed with an animal's intelligence. It was in 1979, when I was traveling in Mexico with my friend Brad. We were in Villahermosa, visiting the zoo. We went to the monkey cage, and a monkey immediately leapt to the bars by us and reached out to touch us. Then he grabbed the binoculars hanging around Brad's neck, and immediately put them to his eyes, exactly as a person would. He first looked through the wrong end--the large end--but quickly turned them around to look through the right end. Holding the binoculars through the bars, so he could put his eyes to the lenses, he stared out at the scene that he clearly found fascinating. Brad and I looked at each other in astonishment.

It seemed unlikely to me that the monkey had looked through binoculars before--although I suppose he could have, with other visitors before us. But either someone would have had to show him how to look through them--what they were for--or he would have simply had to watch someone using binoculars, and then applied that idea to himself on the time-honored principle of "monkey see, monkey do". Then there was the fact that he obviously enjoyed using the bins (he really didn't want to let them go).

Anyway, I had the thought that I'd had about a half year before that, when Tim and I were at the London Zoo and I saw a chimpanzee sitting morosely in a cage: "It's wrong to cage someone like that."

the tree of ideas

This morning, as we lay in bed in the dark in post-alarm recovery, we heard this weather forecast: "Heavy rain today, tomorrow, all through the weekend, and for the rest of our lives." That put a smile on my face and energized me to get up and meet my day.

I want to say more about ideas--my favorite subject. I've been toying with the notion of what it would be like to develop a cladogram of the history of ideas. If you're not familiar with the word cladogram, I'm sure you're not alone. You can click the preceding link, or accept my quick definition: an organizational chart of living organisms arranged by their order of appearance in evolutionary history. When all organisms are included in such a chart, it is sometimes called a "tree of life"--a powerful mythological image. The word itself comes from the Greek klados, "branch". The discipline called cladistics is the taxonomic philosophy of classifying organisms in this way, by genetic propinquity, rather than by the more traditional method of grouping them by morphological similarity.

I first heard the term, and had it explained to me, in about 1985 at La Bodega, the West End tapas bar where I used to meet my friends once a week. At that time it was a new idea, dating back only to 1979. My biologist friend Brad and an associate of his, Andrew, sketched out a basic cladogram on a paper napkin. (Brad was headed for a career in tropical ecology; Andrew was branching into herpetology.) I didn't really grasp what was supposed to be special about a cladogram, since to me it just seemed to be a basic org chart. The key point, as I now understand it, is that two dissimilar-looking organisms might might be more closely related genetically than two similar-looking organisms, and would therefore appear closer together in a cladogram than they would in the old-time Linnaean classification system. A detailed knowledge of genetics, and of the genomes of organisms, makes a full, precise cladogram possible.

No such scientific precision could ever be achieved with a cladogram of ideas, but nonetheless I find the concept exciting. What are the most basic ideas we have, and how have they branched out, differentiated, combined, in human history?

Last year I couldn't resist buying the book Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud by Peter Watson. This 822-page tome (very good too--I'm 262 pages though it so far) is a step in the direction I'm thinking of. Watson recognizes technological innovations as the manifestation of new ideas--although these are not the only manifestations of new ideas. But all new ideas are inventions: they are intended to solve a problem. ("Necessity is the mother of invention"--this phrase, I've just learned, is from Plato's Republic.) An innovation is a response to a perceived problem.

Sometimes I've seen puzzlement expressed that so many tens or hundreds of thousands of years went by in human prehistory with no significant changes to our primitive stone toolkit of flaked hand-choppers. I have to believe that no necessity for a change was perceived. There was no culture of innovation. It did not occur to people to respond to problems by inventing new tools. This itself is an idea: that problems can be met with a deliberate effort to try something new. (By the way, in astrological terms, I would say this is one of the core ideas of the sign Aquarius.) That idea had to be discovered, and also added to the culture--the heritage of ideas that is passed down to succeeding generations. (My thought is that ideas are what a culture is made of. Our culture is exactly the collection or set of ideas that we collectively hold.)

These are just a few semi-random thoughts. I wanted to give a glimpse into the world of my thinking: what kinds of things I've been thinking about. If I were an academic, I think this might be the area of study I would be drawn to.

Now: on with my day of heavy rain (the weatherman is right so far).

learning the tortuous method

Finally, yesterday, I reached a point where I said, What the hey, and opened up my long-neglected chapter 25 to start writing in it again.

It happened when I came up with a new way of opening the chapter--a new point of attack. It's not that the idea is especially brilliant or original, but it has energy: that feeling of jumping into something that is already going on, so important in launching a story or any section of one. I know that the way forward is in not taking things so seriously. But at heart I am a serious person, with serious purpose, so the task then is to find a way to express my seriousness in a way that is carefree.

I know that when I read my notes or my journal I sometimes think, "Just write like this, you goofball." Those things I just write as a kind of stream of consciousness--as I'm drafting this blog-post now. If you have a gift of fluency, as I have, plus the practice of having written millions of words, it's possible to just let it flow.

To some extent, I have acquired my painstaking writing method as I've aged. I remember back in elementary school that I would just sit down and write, and fill pages pretty easily without too much double-checking or revision. My friend and classmate Brad, who was a very good writer (and now a tropical ecologist, I think, or something like one), was the opposite: he toiled over his writing, chewing his long pointy plastic pens down to their brass refills--and then chewing the refills till they became squeezed, dented, bent strips of metal. He had the unusual distinction of handwriting that was pressed even deeper into the page than mine was--and mine was and is deeply pressed. Sheets of ruled looseleaf became curled and worked under his touch like leaves of hammered metal, covered with the signs of the ferocity of his concentration: rich blue-black ink in a relatively large hand but sharply slanted, with much, much heavy crossing-out, arrows pointing to where text was to be moved, small tottering columns of printed or cursive letters in the margins or snaking between existing lines, and maybe the odd large word of judgment pointing to a crossed-out section, such as "BAD!!!".

For Brad, writing was a physical act, something that used his physical energies and had concrete physical effects. He obviously suffered while writing, and it showed on the paper. He would procrastinate assignments, and then wind up writing long into the night at home, sitting at his kitchen table among his orchids and pet birds until 2:00 a.m. For him there was no such thing as a single draft. His first draft would be an unreadable jumble. His final draft would always be a longish, well-argued, well-expressed essay that showed evidence of its tortured birth in its very polish and the clear current of thought.

Before Brad, I was a one-draft guy. Lazy and self-confident, I would just sit down and start writing, with minimal crossing-out--and the next day hand in the result. But Brad's laboriousness made me feel a little bit inferior, a bit envious. Even though I got excellent marks for my writing, I started to worry that I was lightweight. I became concerned that I was too undemanding of myself and therefore handing in stuff that was not really first-rate. I wanted to have pages that showed the evidence of my thought-process, that showed traces of creative suffering!

So, a little self-consciously at first, I started to "work" my writing more: more crossing-out, more marginalia, more drawing boxes around paragraphs and sending them via arrows to other pages. For the sake of a better final result, I gave up on the idea of submitting first drafts. I wanted to be able to flip through the first draft to show what I'd gone through, the way Brad did, casually but also in self-disgust. I wanted to become a proper writer, dammit!

Well, I did. My process was never as tortuous as Brad's (thank god), but by subjecting my effort to more criticism, as he did, I came up with better stuff, a better final draft. And I enjoyed the sensuousness of my battle-scarred first drafts, the way the paper became deformed under the heavy, backtracking touch, so that ten handwritten pages created a sheaf as thick as 20 clean sheets, each page stiffened with the quantity of ink and the deformation of its cellulose fibers. The pages now rattled when turned; they were brittle with heavy wear; they were fatigued. I loved that kind of page, and I still do.

Well, my process has become fully tortuous. I no longer use longhand; now it manifests itself in the length of the notes documents I do--my quantity is tortured. Now, though, it might be time to lighten up a bit. I'd like to set down my writing cross and take it easy again--just a little, just for awhile.