[another glimpse of ‘What Matters’]
Harry usually visits when he is concerned about something. He never comes out from his lair for the sheer pleasure of the sunshine. He doesn’t own a hat, and the halls at MIT are endless so I think he probably just takes to them for exercise. He swims at the pool there as if it is a punishment for his sins. A kid in a cold shower. A scourging. I know things are going really well when I don’t see him for months. But, just recently, he has been out to the Cape almost weekly. Even in the snow.
He shows up one Spring morning fairly early. His car is a twenty-year-old Plymouth fury. They don’t make those anymore and parts are getting harder to find so it rattles. He repairs it himself and borrows bits from one place to fix another. I know it’s him by the rattles. About six in the morning, he knows I know it’s him so he sits there in his car at least ten minutes until I get my pants on, take care of business and open the door. Jim is sitting quietly in the passenger seat, as usual.
I figure he must have been up at least since four in order to have gotten here. But he tells me he never went to sleep.
I say hi and Jim gets out and follows us in. Jim won’t move unless spoken to and I’ve forgotten that before and accidentally left him sitting in the car for hours. And Harry can be oblivious, even though he talks to Jim almost continuously.
“What’s the problem?”
“They’ve been all over me for the last week.”
“They? The FBI?”
“Right. Well, there is one woman who couldn’t melt butter in her mouth and wears a small rose pin in her lapel that I’m positive is some kind of sign of authority to her underlings—she might be CIA, or NSA, or something. She’s been sitting at the back of my classes. She says she is just ‘auditing’ as if that’s an excuse. But she’s always keeping an eye on Jim…I played with her. I told her if she wasn’t a registered student she needed security clearance to be in the class. She just smiled…Cold.”
I told Harry I had to take my morning walk. Harry doesn’t walk much. He’s pretty lean only because he doesn’t eat all that much either. He does take vitamins and eats fruit. He grabbed one of my apples as we went through and I made him take off his shoes on the deck. The shoes are leather and won’t survive a walk in wet sand.
Jim says, “I’ll wait here if that’s okay.” I nodded at that and he smiles. It is such a genuine looking smile that I have to smile back.
With his feet bare and pink, Harry walks like he’s on broken glass until he reaches the sand.
“This sand is fucking cold.”
“You’ll get used to it.”
This patter is like a vaudeville routine with no punch line. He always tells me the sand is cold unless it’s hot. But this morning, before the sun has reached it, the sand is very cold.
His next words will be, ‘Slow down.’
And I say, “It’s colder if you stand still.”
A low fog sits over the Bay and catches rainbows in its trim. The tide is low and the bluff is casting wonderful shapes in the shadows before us. Harry stops and studies these for a moment.
“There is something there that I haven’t figured out. There is a language to shadows. I think there is a lot more there to be found.”
I don’t know how his mind works. I understand that less and less as time goes by. But I say what I can.
“They’re beautiful.”
“That’s exactly part of it.”
I give that a shot. “Beauty is an analog appreciation.”
He says, “Yes! That’s right!”
I have heard all this before, but I don’t really have a clue about what I am saying.
He says, “My feet are getting colder from appreciation of all this beauty.”
We walked about three miles. Getting around the thickly strewn shells and spoils of seagulls above the tideline added a bit. It’s mating season so they are mostly on the upper shore making new friends but the seagulls were thick in the air above us as well, I think because we had disturbed the privacy of their rites and rituals. Harry didn’t notice any of that. He doesn’t particularly like animals so that may be a way of dealing with it.
He tells me, “On Tuesday the lady with the rose pin had a wide-eyed look on her stone stolid face. I’d been talking to a bunch of undergraduates in the basic robotics class. I was telling them what they have heard me say in one way or another at least a dozen times since day one—that everything they were learning here was going to be obsolete before they can use it. Everything. But they can at least learn ‘how’ to work with it as the world changes. The scientific method will always be the same. No matter how stupid the so-called scientists become. Science is made to be broken. And then I say again what I have told them again and again, that the brain is not digital. If they want to understand anything, they have to overcome the digital barrier that we have put up around us to represent knowledge. The digital can only look ‘like’ something—it cannot ‘be’ something.”
There was actual emotion in his voice that carried in the cool sea air. But then again, he was carefully stepping around sea gull poop at the time.
I told him, “You can wash that off at the spigot on the side of the house.
He ignores me. “And the lady with the rose pin got up, right then, and left the class.”
“Do you think it was because she understood what you were trying to say.”
“No. As you’ve said, the government is congenitally stupid. I think the matter is that she interpreted what I said in some way that fit her narrative. God knows what that was. She understood what she wanted to understand.”
“That’s sound’s right. But what do you think that was, exactly?”
He shakes his head, “The thing of it is, because Jim is primarily digital—all his moving parts, I mean, they can’t grasp all that. They know what he can do physically and they’re ahead of me there. Jim can’t do somersaults. He doesn’t run very fast. That’s the sort of stuff the military wants…But Jim doesn’t want to. And that’s what bothers them. He has a will of his own. He can’t jump over a candle stick if they ask him to but he’ll recite the nursery rhyme back at them. It blows their minds! They can’t figure out how he makes the connections. They think it’s some instruction or code, which it is in a way of thinking, but they can’t read it because that’s not digital. They think it’s in his software, but they can’t figure out where…and I’m afraid they’re going to kidnap him. Like the golden goose. They’ll destroy him trying to find out. They’re watching me and recording me all the time to figure out how I communicate with him.”
“They can’t accept the idea that it’s just words?”
“No. Their idea of words are just digital bits. And visual object recognition is just another bunch of 1s and 0s, not the actual substance of the shapes. There is no concept of beauty in their digestion, just the nutritional value.”
“Have you used that analogy in class?”
“Yes…They have no idea of shadow…You know I need a name for it. Maybe, I should call it ‘shadow recognition.’
“What you are doing is a kind of chiaroscuro, isn’t it? Bringing light out of darkness. That’s a sort of shadow recognition.”
Harry gives me a look of faux astonishment.
“You were listening the last time I was here! Very good!”
“I still don’t understand it.”
“That’s okay…Do you think they’ll kidnap him?”
“It’s the government. They are congenitally stupid. So, yes.”
He takes a breath. Now I am going to find out why he showed up at 6 in the morning
“Can I leave him here?”
I had that figured.
“For a while. Sure.”
“Good.”
By that time, we were back at the deck. Jim appears to have heard something, or knew already what Harry was going to ask for.
Right off, Jim says, “At least I don’t snore.”