about novel truth
***
The common ground
As always, the first matter is where to begin.
This is a story of what I believe to be an extraordinary friendship. It is told not as an egotistical boost of myself. In many ways, I am an incidental part of the narrative. Harry is the hero, but his sense of privacy makes my attempt at interpretation unwanted. So, by necessity, given that what I know about him is only what I have learned through our friendship, I have told too much about myself.
If Harry were to tell this tale, which he never would do, he would say it is really about Doris, or myself, or even Jim. This is not false modesty. He is that modest. As a true scientist, he sees himself within a continuity of history that begins with recorded time. I have trouble remembering what I ate for breakfast.
Perhaps I should begin with the fact that we are actually the product of several hundred thousand years of that history. More, if you like. At least that, I think Harry would say. But we don’t have to go back that far to get the picture. Most of that is unrecorded in any case, and no catalog of events lately begun—of births and deaths, or of accomplishments, of battles won and lost, or of things said, will make up anything like a complete account, or a fair record. But this is a brief record of just one friendship. No battles. No murders. But a great deal of mystery in it that compels me.
If I do have a contribution to speak of, I think it is this. By convincing Harry to see himself as part of a larger narrative, I have given him some religion. Before that, he was easily depressed by ‘the lack of value’ as he would too often say. If he could find no purpose in a thing, he could not do it. He would not even try. And given his belief in facts and logic, any religion or philosophy of meaning eluded him. He lived his life in pursuit of making things work. Ontology was to be avoided because categorization of the unknown was impossible. But I would say that he is more an engineer than a scientist. Knowledge for its own sake was irrational to him. There must be a purpose. And though I was not present, I think that idea brought him to the brink of suicide. Thankfully, Doris was around at the time. Woman are a muse even more than amusing.
Now, that is the sort of statement my daughter would object to. Loudly. She denies her own attitudes toward men even while passing judgement. She would object, I think, most loudly on her mother’s behalf. She has always defended her mother—and there has always been much to defend. But Harry is rather straightforward about such things. His love for Doris is a mystery to him and he simply clocks that up to the greater unknown that occupies most of the space in the universe. Very smart. Very rational.
I am of the mind that to make it up is as close as we will get. And whatever that accumulation of questionable data might be, even that, will always be disputed. Someone will think greater emphasis ought to be placed on this or the other thing, and some particular person or persons ought to be shown more respect. Probably true, if judged by God, but we are only men, and what we do is naturally flawed. Naturally. And this narrative may be the best that I can do on short order—as a part of a single human lifetime. Anyway, this is what I have done.
I imagined a robot.
It was an easy thing for me to do, really. Just words. This is the record of that, and a narrative of the matters that made it possible, and what happened because of it. But the story is personal. I won’t tell you everything, even if you wanted to know. Not likely; even though we now live in an impersonal world—every detail of our lives is known, or gathered—I will not tell you all that I know, but only what I think is important. And besides, whatever it is, there is an algorithm for that. But by some combination of common sense (which I will credit to my mother) and insight (for which I will give my father his due), I am not much on the great digital record myself. By some design. I will take credit for that. But how might that matter?
I have written a few books. More words there. Those attempts usually sketched the inner shores of life. Their purpose, I believed, was to make something of the stuff that usually goes unrecorded, as a small illumination of the dark matter that they say fills our universe. But then, this story is not about that at all. Or not very much of it. But it is about a robot as well.
Perhaps it should begin with my father, that deeply flawed man who spawned me. To say he was flawed, as all men are, is not a tautology. He worked at it. But he deserves credit for my being—for more than just the genes I wear, but for the way I wear them. I did not imagine my robot in a vacuum, you know (not even the vacuum of space), but in a garret.
Since that time, I have managed to live most of my own life away, the way I pleased, in a spending spree of hours and days, right here, on the quiet side of that great weathered arm of terminal moraine known as Cape Cod, where at twilight the thin sea on the low tidal flats of the Bay can reflect yet another world out of a hammered copper sky. An alternate world. The kind of thing you may have read about in science fiction.
I have walked most of the length of that outer arm, out of ‘season’ and often against the bluster of mother nature, at the edge of a nattering maw of ocean that was never the same one twice—as Heraclitus warned us about rivers—and I have stood where Henry Thoreau and his buddy Ellery Channing once stood. More than once.
I can only imagine what Thoreau once heard in the spoken Greek of that ocean roar, as from the mouth of the great preacher, Poluphloisboios Thalassa, when he wrote, “The attention of those who frequent the camp-meetings at Eastham is said to be divided between the preaching of the Methodists and the preaching of the billows on the back-side of the Cape, for they all stream over here in the course of their stay. I trust that in this case the loudest voice carries it. With what effect may we suppose the ocean to say, ‘My hearers!’ to the multitude on the bank! On that side some John N. Maffit; on this, the Reverend Poluphloisboios Thalassa…” More of that later, but I took that drama for real when I first read it.
Many know of the ancient sea-goddess Thalassa, who ‘mingled’ with Pontos to make the sea and all the fish, and a few might even know the archaic word for ‘roar’ that is polyphloisbic. But who, today, outside of North Carolina, might know that John Newland Maffitt Sr. was a Dublin-born Methodist preacher who gained national recognition as a charismatic orator with dramatic preaching style and filled the pews up and down the Eastern seaboard, or that his son was a Confederate navy Lieutenant and blockade runner known as ‘Prince of the Privateers,’ much less that there is a serendip of romance that you might find there in Diary of a Contraband: The Civil War Passage of a Black Sailor by William Benjamin Gould. But those are the sorts of detail you can get when reading close by the woodstove on a day that feels uninhabitable.
On calmer days, I have walked the edges of that ocean-blast crater of sea grass and quiet water that is the remains of where Henry Beston spent a year and more in his small house on an outermost crest of sand, at the far side of this curled arm that raised by a continent in challenge to the great ocean—an arm raised like the fighter Beston was, showing off his intellectual muscle in a dual of wits with the very same mother nature I have met, wanting, I think, more to civilize the bluster in his mind perhaps after his service as an ambulance driver in the Great War, in the same way as he lived later in the quiet of a salt-water farm in Maine, without electricity or the intrusion of the modern, so that he might recover his humanity.
‘Without intrusion of the modern,’ I repeat, for moral justification.
Beston’s opening words in The Outermost House were, “East and ahead of the coast of North America, some thirty miles and more from the inner shores of Massachusetts, there stands in the open Atlantic the last fragment of an ancient and vanished land. For twenty miles this last and outer earth faces the ever-hostile ocean in the form of a great eroded cliff of earth and clay, the undulations and levels of whose rim now stand a hundred, now a hundred and fifty feet above the tides. Worn by the breakers and the rains, disintegrated by the wind, it still stands bold. Many earths compose it, and many gravels and sands stratified and intermingled. It has many colours: old ivory here, peat here, and here old ivory darkened and enriched with rust. At twilight, its rim lifted to the splendour in the west, the face of the wall becomes a substance of shadow and dark descending to the eternal unquiet of the sea; at dawn the sun rising out of ocean gilds it with a level silence of light which thins and rises and vanishes into day.”
Ho! And here I am merely sandwiched on this safer side, in a shack between two larger and fancier summer houses. Here, where that world that Thoreau and Beston once knew has now been so greatly subdivided and civilized by potable water in pipes, and by parking; where there is no hike necessary to find a neighbor, or the sound of another voice—except in winter…So, to gain that quiet they knew, at least seasonally, I have ordained myself to the religion of the year-rounder. If need be, given the weather, I might escape inland at night, when the traffic is not so bad, and visit the crumbling civilization of the forefathers. If only for the books, mind you. I cannot keep books for long here, in this sea air, unless they might be better off swollen like the legs of old men. Bestsellers in pulpy paperback grow as mushrooms do in the moisture of this place. Abandoned by forgetful visitors, I have too often lugged those off the beaches to a dumpster!
There I go, in another misdirection.
But the more important matter here, in this narrative, is that the human mind is not digital.
Nor is my appreciation of the fact.
What? Yes, that. About my robot, then.
Jim was a mechanical beast, as all robots are. I had imagined him that way before I knew there was another. His mind was only magic to me. A few words toyed up against the scientific efforts of life-times spent trying to understand the trick. He was supposedly powered by a battery. I had no idea of the kind of battery that might be.
He was first conjured in handwritten pieces without continuity, when I was yet a child in my nest. But ‘Jim’ was the name I gave him from the very first. I have no memory of why. My composition books are fat with the handwritten notes—nothing technical, of course. I always abjured the technical. But all of the early stories centered on his being mistaken for human.
Later, as he became a friend, I could depend on Jim to help deal with the problems I faced, or at least offer comfort. I gave him greater powers drawn from whatever bit of philosophy I was reading, which he re-quoted to me regularly, as computers do. Heraclitus and Thoreau were common sources. I continued to avoid the technical as unimportant, and then even as counterproductive. Jim was a philosopher, when that art was still of the natural kind.
No matter. The science was changing too quickly, in any case, and any tit-bit I might use from the news would soon be outdated. Better to avoid that altogether. By the time I was in college, it had become irrelevant anyway. Most of the best science fiction I was reading was based on ‘science’ that was ridiculous, such as human space travel to other galaxies, far, far away, or flying saucers, and worst of all, time travel! But it was the ideas that mattered, not the pseudo scientific gimmicks. ‘Star Trek’ travel I called it. The laws of physics that were being rewritten in Hollywood for the convenience of plot development were irrelevant to me.
I was far more interested in what people would do if confronted with some of the more obvious realities of the future. Especially the ones we had not yet solved in the past, such as slavery, or most especially, human beings who willingly gave up their freedoms for safety and false security, in a world with atomic power and governments that, by their actions (as opposed to rhetoric), obviously hated human beings and all of their dirty little habits in the first place. That too seemed to be changing quickly, but at least we had what we knew of history for the example. Didn’t we?
But then, too, I only wanted to avoid the sort of arguments I had heard in Dirkin Lounge, where the nerds of MITALS met and fussed over the number of morons that might fit in a red telephone box—Doctor Who aside.
I could see, in that current age, the greatest danger was already the replacement of thinking by computers and formula and the reduction of the scope of human life itself by machines. Obviously, today, the latest efforts to interact with the mind digitally are only done because they (someone) might better manage it thus. But obviously, such efforts do not actually define the human mind! Nor can they. They actually define the inadequacies of the perpetrators better, and the shortcomings of the numbers, in and of themselves. As numbers always do. Reduce the value of a thing to a number—cash—and then redetermine its value from that. This is only the rude magic of the street side hustler. Not reality. A shell game.
What civilization truly proves is a human value that is undetermined by numbers, in which beauty rules, and cathedrals rise, and cottages stand amidst the powers of the earth, only to fall and to rise once more, where music may be heard and played, and poetry sung, and love is made and remade, and babies cry and laugh again.
The common ground of humanity might be heard in the singing of the wind off a frowning brow of sand or found in a few words spoken aloud into a night of fog—the close echo reminding us of our own presence, alone. The digital cannot begin to define what is human, nor can the human being violated by a chip define the rape. The numbers simply don’t add up.
What is my true purpose here then? To make some of that understandable? Perhaps. But all of that is why my friendship with Harry matters. It was the common ground between us.