KNOWLEDGE IS POWER.

CONTEXT IS OMNIPOTENCE.

JOHN THE OBSCURE ™

By John Ruch

What It’s Like

The conceit of this column is that too much of our lives goes unnoticed, literally unperceived, because of a mental firewall that blocks our own idiosyncracies and outside anomalies while permitting only socially normative thoughts and conclusions to penetrate—typically to someone else’s benefit.

This column itself is a conceit, of course. Like all writing, it is a performance; like all art, it has its frame; like anything nearly three years old, it has a life of its own. Self-indulgent as it is, it’s a filtration system, too. There is now a solid idea of that which “would make a good JtO column.” That is a dangerous idea.

When inspiration falls victim to cant, that’s all she rote. Likewise, revelation can become just another mask. My latest few columns have been reports on the exterior world; while those sprouted from peculiar observations, I haven’t written anything truly personal since last fall. Writing about, say, gorilla assassinations isn’t easy per se, but it has its luxuries. My writing is always roughing it, but external reportage is like pulling a Winnebago into a campground while personal essaying (and assaying) is like leave-no-trace off-trail backpacking.

I wrote about some these dangers last year in my un-column on “The Unwritten.” So maybe I’m churning out a bit of hackery right now. But last year’s piece was about a column idea that failed. What struck me recently was a column idea that succeeded, but could only rise to my conception of “a good JtO column” by adding more artifice. As I couldn’t immediately think of a hook, it was an entire experience that I was ready to chuck down the memory hole before I sat down to dinner. The only reason it survives is that I was able to let myself feel the charm of its very triviality; in turn, that made me realize that the schematic of a column might be more valuable than a column itself, prettied up with persuasion and less revealing about how I think and see. And it struck me that I’ve become very good at detecting things under the radar, but shouldn’t forget the chatter inside the listening station, too.

My experience began last weekend, when I stepped onto the Harvard University campus and walked past the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, where the “Senior Thesis Exhibit” was on view. I thought about going in, but took a peek through the windows and wasn’t impressed by what I saw.

“No me gusta el ‘Senior Thesis Exhibit,’” I said aloud. Why Spanish? Why aloud? Why not—it amused me. I think I was also a bit lonely and was showing off for some imaginary friend. That’s probably why my self-reflexion continued, as I imagined someone overhearing me and becoming offended, and how funny it would be to describe that situation to someone else.

Having thus declared that I do not like the show, I crossed the street. As I walked Harvard Yard, though, I couldn’t stop toying with the phrase in my head. For one thing, I wasn’t totally sure it wasn’t supposed to be “gusto” instead. That made me think about this Spanish idiom, a reflexive use of the verb for tasting (or digesting, as I thought of it broadly at the time) to indicate “liking” something. I presumed (correctly) that it has the same Latin source as our “disgust.” It struck me as interesting how the same essential words express different degrees of negativity in the different cultures: “no me gusta” is polite, mild/moderate dislike; “disgust” is very strong.

By the time I was behind the music building, I turned things around and considered how strange the English “like” is. Spanish uses a literal, gustatory term as its standard expression of pleasure/displeasure. The standard English “like” expresses a far more abstract, almost Platonic, congruence.

(Here I paused to examine a small, fully functional, painted door someone had installed in a tiny hollow in the base of a tree. I should note it is one of at least two such miniature tree doors extant in Cambridge. Maybe because this made me think of nature spirits, my thinking continued on these lines:)

I then thought about what “like” and “likeness” would have meant to early Germanic people (being more or less correct in my etymological assumptions again). My initial thought was that the concept of “like” would be much more significant than it is now because exact likenesses would have been rare or nonexistent. Today, we are jaded by exact copies of documents, consumer goods, even living beings. But for an older time, an era of variation, likeness would be magical.

Or were their standards for likeness just lower? If two trees looked vaguely alike, were they considered likenesses? Was every effigy potent? Was a crude representation pure in its power in a way it could not be for us today?

Such thoughts were already dying out by the time I passed a construction site where there’s a crazy “Fantastic Four”-type gigantic blocky digging machine dangling from a crane, which I enjoy pausing to look at when I’m up there.

Still, I recognized some value in this spontaneous, peripatetic comparative linguistics. When I got home, I jotted down the schematic. Even then, I had to resist turning this glittering chain of thoughts into a necklace of fake coherence; it occurred to me I could bring things full circle by noting that art is all about likeness. That would be “good column” behavior, but it wouldn’t reflect what really happened.

There is more truth and less tidiness in another dialogue I had that afternoon, as I phoned a friend and had a conversation that influenced my decision to dam this particular stream of consciousness. I told him about my shocking decision to purge a good portion of my library, in part because the Web has attained such critical mass. I talked about catching myself looking at a book online without remembering that I own a physical copy of it. I mused on how books I once considered rare are now easily acquired on a variety of commercial and library sites. I recounted how I used to buy entire books because they addressed a single ultra-obscure topic I had never seen treated elsewhere, but that now can be satisfactorily explored in five minutes on a Wikipedia entry. I realized I was talking about a personal revolution and a new age for us all.

But I think I also realized nothing is changing at all, and that this little internal monologue I wished to preserve reflects that. We are literally creatures of contingency; it is the language we speak, the way we learn, the entertainment we silently offer ourselves on afternoon walks. The hyperlink era is not just a postmodern convenience for us—it is like us.

Posted May 3, 2008.

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LINKS

Cocktail Party Physics // Allergic Reaction // Christopher Meloni (the best slightly-annoyed-TV-star-answering-fan-questions section going) // This Godless Endeavor (the Iraq War through the prism of heavy metal) // Female Science Professor // Wounded Warrior Project (your tax dollars are doing the damage. pony up some more to help fix it.) // Wikidumper // Cerebral Wasabi (one of those magical people with whom I think I probably have nothing and everything in common) // Emily Short’s Interactive Fiction (chatbot deluxe)

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