Insistence of Vision (46 page)

WHY WE’LL PERSEVERE

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Waging War with Reality

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Consider poor Mr. Spock. He is strong, quick, handsome, and very, very smart. So why do we pity him?

Not just pity. A typical midnight viewing of “Star Trek” reruns is punctuated by moment of patronizing
amusement
whenever the pointy-eared science officer cries “that’s illogical!” at yet another impulsive Kirkian coup. Insomnia gives way to a smug sense of superiority. Spock may be an icon of admirable maturity (e.g., Vulcans are calm and never lie), yet we come away from each episode relieved that we aren’t like him…glad to have other, less laudable, but decidedly human traits.

“Star Trek” is hardly representative of high-end science fiction, of course. Even Spock’s latter-day cousin, the android Data, was little more than Pinocchio updated to the twenty-fourth century. Like Gepetto’s wooden son, he longs to learn all those indefinable human knacks like laughter and whimsy, for which he’d gladly trade all of his impressive powers.

To the first order, these characters seem merely to convey one of Hollywood’s classic propaganda campaigns, a fervently peddled myth – that logic and emotions are forever incompatible. But there’s more to this than just another dose of anti-reason indoctrination. Spock really
is
pitiable. He lacks something more valuable than strength, or raw intelligence, or even emotion. He is crippled by a basic inability to wage war with reality.

It’s a war we all fight, nearly every waking hour. One might even define a human being as
the animal that’s never satisfied with things as they are
.

Each of us, day in, day out, looks around and sees a version of the world relayed to us by our senses. In his Allegory of the Cave, Plato describes the dilemma as if each individual is, from birth, trapped inside a cavern, watching shadows cast upon the wall by objects outside, struggling to understand reality by subjective interpretation of imperfect images. What we name a chair is, in fact, only the set of sensations, or
phenomena
, elicited by a thing whose objective essence, or
nuomena
, we can never know.

Plato and Kant held that subjective models are doomed to be futile because they can never be perfect. Latter-day pragmatists, such as Jacques Ampère, countered that experiment and observation can isolate and characterize a thing’s
properties
. Even incomplete maps and mental replicas can be good and useful tools – imperfect, but improvable with time and experience. We can use such models to
corner
Nature, forcing the world to surrender a little more predictability and make a little more sense with each passing year.

Whoever is right in a purely metaphysical sense, models and metaphors are what we’re stuck with. Each morning, we wake up and start comparing the new day’s reality with our internal picture of how the universe was before we went to bed. We also use mental models to speculate how the world
might
be if certain acts were performed.

This is an arrogant trait. No other creature is known to spend such a large part of its time scheming how to change things. Buddha and Jesus and Socrates are supposed to have said,
don’t do that
. Don’t involve yourself in the shabby physical world.

Yet, the typical Homo sapiens spends countless hours imagining what things may be like next week, or next year, or in five minutes, if only this or that event were to happen according to plan. From engineers designing a space probe to muggers lurking in a alley, to a mother teaching her child ABCs, we are all working to alter reality from what-is to what–we-want-it-to-be.

Internal models sketch our potential chains of events – like computer simulations or trial runs in the lab. Often these extrapolations fail, but think how good they often are! Consider driving through traffic. Day in, day out, we send two-ton behemoths of steel – packed with highly-flammable vapors – swooping between other similarly careening monsters at high speeds. Evolution did not prepare or even pre-adapt humans for freeways, yet our rapid-paced, constantly updated internal models of typical driver behavior work so well, most of the time, that we get upset if another car even comes
close
to touching ours.

Metaphorical world models are attempts to work out in advance what mistakes to avoid, what strategies to use, so we’ll get that promotion, that award, that date, that mate. While intelligence, strength, and all the other classic virtues often help us achieve our ends, they’re futile if our models and guesses about the future are too wrong, too often.

It’s made even more difficult because
people around us
are trying to shift reality too! They succeed quite often, bollixing all of the predictability that our own schemes depended on. The future is forever a moving target.

In other words, while reason and logic are good, it also helps to have an agile imagination.

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It is my belief that
Science Fiction authors
have got to be among the greatest fibbers of all time.

Now, straight-out lying in order to harm others is deservedly listed as one of society’s Bad Things. Make believe is lauded as high art. Yet both the con man and the actor share a penchant for portraying what is
not
and making it seem
true
. A novelist is far more gifted than an excuse-making adulterer, when it comes to inventing people and events that never happened. The engineer, the entrepreneur, and the Don Juan all cast their minds into the future, foresee things they desire to achieve, then actively persuade others to help them get what they want.

Let’s call this activity
metaphorical drive
. It is the unique human ability to create metaphors for reality – and other conceivable realities – by rearranging a myriad alternate images of the world inside our heads. Occasionally, these reworked models are twisted, even sick. But they can also be prescient, inspired, or beautiful. They enable us to envision, and thereby possibly avoid, mistakes. They let us picture and convey – and therefore sometimes reify – portraits of better tomorrows.

Spock has difficulty doing this because he cannot lie. He can make conjectures, but not wild, passionate hunches or far-out speculations. In other words, he really is crippled. No wonder we pity him, despite his brawn and brains. No wonder we cheer for him whenever he makes a move toward loosening up… toward becoming more human.

This is one reason why logic gets such a bad rap at times. Our civilization has profited immensely by unleashing imagination from the many constraints laid upon it by prior tribal and hidebound cultures. Judging by all the pro-impulsiveness propaganda carried by popular media these days, it seems a great many people in the West fear that too much logic and reason will cramp us, yet again. Perhaps they worry that stodgy reductionists will insist we all justify every timid extrapolation, each tiny step into the future.

How ironic such attitudes are. In truth, it was scientific, step-by-step reductionism that let us drive away so many ancient hobbles and superstitions and start learning how the world really works at last. Thanks to logic and experimentation, it has been proved that women aren’t mentally deficient compared with males – even though it was ‘common knowledge’ in nearly every civilization before ours. Similar bigotries were simply assumed by most generations of our ancestors, with the main result that vast amounts of human talent went to waste. The Spock-like honesty that is the hallmark of science ripped through age-old assumptions about disease, race, social class and life-style.

We still have a long way to go. But without modern skepticism we would almost certainly have remained trapped by the insidious, egotistical human tendency to smugly believe what we
want
to believe, whether it’s true or not – whatever fiction let those on top feel good about themselves. Indeed, imagination has a dark side, lending power to our hatreds and prejudices. Prove-it-to-me science has defeated much evil.

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Yet, science and honesty are themselves nothing
without
imagination, which provides the feedstock of notions, hunches, and ideas we need – new metaphors, maps, models, and theories – for science to test. Imagination provides the ore, which rationality then grinds and sifts for rare, gleaning nuggets. In fields of endeavor that are experiencing vivid, creative times, this balance thrives. The brightest physicists play with Zen riddles, and some great engineers have also been noted artists or musicians.

Similar tension can be seen in art, especially in science fiction, the literature of alternate realities. Two powerful and apparently contradictory impulses have driven science fiction authors since the days of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. On the one hand, we appreciate vividness and boldness. We like the author to depict people and places as startlingly different from today’s mundane world as possible.

On the other hand, we also enjoy extrapolations that make sense, that hold together logically, that project believably from today’s world, and that possess both internal and external consistency. This tension pervades all levels, from the
macro
-craft of basic plotting, down to the sentence-by-sentence
micro
-craft of aesthetic style, where use of metaphor is immediate and highly sensory. Ideally, the best novels and stories simultaneously display both flamboyance and discipline. Up close, each component paragraph can be its own
gedankenexperiment
, demanding that the reader abandon clichéd assumptions and test yet another new way of looking at things.

We’re all familiar with examples where the balance fails. At one extreme are those yeomanly works composed of competent plot-smithing, uninspired gimmickry, and cardboard characters, which score high on consistency and basic readability but close to nil on inspiration or originality.

Then there are flashy epics of imagination that sparkle and scintillate with daring, brash imagery and actinic, skyrocketing prose – but which all-too often prove dense, impenetrable, self-indulgent, or simply impossible. We tend to feel strongly about such works; we argue vehemently about them. Rereading one can feel like puzzling over the notes you scrawled last night, after rousing from a dream with some exciting notion. It sounded great
then
, but alas, it makes less sense by daylight.

Cases of true synthesis, in which a balance is successfully struck, stand out. Joseph Heller’s madcap
Catch-22
seems to be an example of imagination unleashed from any and all discipline. I remember being shocked to see copies of the detailed charts Heller used to keep track of his characters and the highly abstracted time line. Arrows traced flashback within nested flashback in exquisite detail. Not a plot line or foreshadowing hint was wasted. At the time I felt betrayed to learn it had been charted out so. It was more romantic to consider
Catch-22
a work of divine insanity that had erupted full-blown from some well of genius both ineffable and bottomless.

So it is that Hollywood teaches us to regard creativity – as something unconscious, guileless, and godlike.

As the years passed, I began to see how much inspiration owes to more mundane, worldly traits such as
skill
and
craftsmanship
. I realized that Heller’s brilliance was completely undiminished by the fact that careful planning also played a role. Characters like Daneeka and Clevinger are still products of a delightfully bizarre imagination. But that imagination probably spun out a hundred other characters and potential events, for every one that was finally, carefully selected and honed by the author. Someone had to
choose
among all those metaphors – those cascading notions and images – mixing, matching, pruning.

Clearly we need both romance and reason, even in wholly creative arts such as fiction. They are siblings and would be lost without each other, no matter how much they appear to bicker.

Craft without imagination is like a mill without wheat.

Imagination without craft is little more than masturbation.

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Where does this leave us, considering styles of creation?

Why… free to do what we would anyway – point to what we like and come up with rationalizations for
why
we prefer it. Unlike science, in which all metaphors must eventually come up against the hard, objective test of experimental verification, literary aesthetics must and always will remain completely selective. The experiments performed in literature – even in science fiction – will forever remain thought experiments.

I will continue to judge the works I read by how well they help me sketch out and live other realities, from the mundane musings of a grocer, to the funneling intensity of a black hole, to the bizarre glyph-thoughts of an alien. Metaphorical explorations that are weird and different enough, or moving enough, may pass on that basis alone. Those which prove startlingly accurate or persuasive, also, need accomplish nothing else to be worth a bit of my time.

But on the whole, I will always prefer works that give me
both
– amazing notions
and
a willingness to test them against hard-nosed realism. From the level of the sentence, to fully-developed and poignantly compelling characters, all the way to the convoluted and surprising (and surprisingly consistent) plot itself – that is what I’m really looking for. I want it all…

…and you should be satisfied with nothing less.

Here is how I judge the
style
of creation, especially a work of written world-building.

Make me stop once, after reading some astonishing paragraph, so that I murmur “huh!” in amazement at a new thought. Then make me stop again, pages, chapters,
months
later, so that I think back on the same paragraph, in retrospect, and commend –

“Wow. That really worked. My world shifted then. And it’s never been the same.”