The Entrepreneur

“Did I ever tell you about my grandfather? Of course I didn’t. He was nobody. He spent his whole life at the factory, retired, boom, dropped dead. That’s the one thing I’ve been afraid of my whole life, turning out like him, a nobody with nothing to show for himself, nothing to show he ever existed except for a chip of stone at the veterans’ cemetery. Which one? I don’t know. I have his medals around here somewhere.

“After I’m gone, people need to know I was here. They need to know my name, and remember me. I want to be up there with the greats. I want to leave a legacy. For all he did with his life my grandfather might as well never have been born. My life has to mean something. The world has to be different because I lived in it. So thanks for your concern, but I’m fine. And I kind of have to get back to work, so if that’s all…”

Cell intelligence

Before we live by ideas, we seem to live among them. Nothing goes unprophesied. The shadows of ideas fall ahead of them and mark out the shape of things to come for those who care to trace it. The prophecies of science fiction writers are an obvious example: I nominate Looking Backward. In 1887 Bellamy felt the shadow of the radio and colored in the pattern of affordances he traced from prophecy.

There are a number of music rooms in the city, perfectly adapted acoustically to the different sorts of music. These halls are connected by telephone with all the houses of the city whose people care to pay the small fee, and there are none, you may be sure, who do not. The corps of musicians attached to each hall is so large that, although no individual performer, or group of performers, has more than a brief part, each day’s programme lasts through the twenty-four hours. There are on that card for to-day, as you will see if you observe closely, distinct programmes of four of these concerts, each of a different order of music from the others, being now simultaneously performed, and any one of the four pieces now going on that you prefer, you can hear by merely pressing the button which will connect your house-wire with the hall where it is being rendered. The programmes are so coordinated that the pieces at any one time simultaneously proceeding in the different halls usually offer a choice, not only between instrumental and vocal, and between different sorts of instruments; but also between different motives from grave to gay, so that all tastes and moods can be suited.

Contrast this prophecy, made in the heat of fiction, with another made in earnest. I own a book – a curiosity – entitled Cell Intelligence, self-published 1916 by one Nels Quevli: registered pharmacist, bachelor of law, and flaming eccentric. The argument of the book is encapsulated in its full title:

Cell Intelligence the Cause of Growth, Heredity, and Instinctive Actions, Illustrating that the Cell is a Conscious, Intelligent Being, and, by Reason Thereof, Plans and Builds all Plants and Animals in the Same Manner that Man Constructs Houses, Railroads, and Other Structures

This sounds stranger than it is; try The Selfish Cell. Quevli in 1916 maps to Dawkins in 1976. Both Quevli and Dawkins conclude that life does not fall out of any equation, and that since it is not a force or a property of matter, its existence at all is contingent, and its forms must be historical.

There are two main theories by which the growth and development of plants and animals in life are explained: First, chemical and mechanical forces; second, Intelligence or a Divine Being. However, so far no one has yet ventured the proposition or statement that the intelligence that has caused the production of all these structures we see, such as plants and animals, was the property of the cell.

And since it is not determined, it must be intelligent (or selfish) because its survival and ramification imply something equivalent to memory.

I do not pretend to know what intelligence is, nor what memory is, but I want to show that the cell is a being possessed of that something, whatever it is. If man is intelligent the cell must be.

Both are asserting that cell intelligence and human intelligence are the same. The difference is whether we follow Quevli in applying the vocabulary of human intelligence to the cell, or Dawkins in applying the vocabulary of the gene to human intelligence.

Bellamy’s prophecy is interesting, but after Bellamy radio still had to be invented. But Quevli in 1916 knew what Dawkins knew in 1976. Ideas are autologous: the description of an idea, is an idea. To predict it is to bring it about; to imagine it is to create it.

This property of ideas leads to certain perversities. Everywhere we find that the longest training, the deepest commitment, the finest specialization yield ideas that could just as easily have been dreamed up on a long walk or talked out in a bull session. The difference is the imprimatur.

But if specialization does not yield better ideas – if it only makes them more persuasive – then someone who is more interested in understanding than persuasion might ask whether it would be better not to specialize, and cultivate the faculty of having ideas directly?

The case could be made that the person who has one idea, and devotes their life to advancing it, is wasting their life: settling for an idea that, being their first attempt, probably isn’t even very good. The case could also be made that intellectual monogamy ought to be the goal of anyone who takes ideas seriously, and that though essayistic dalliance with a series of ideas may be charming in the exuberance of youth, it becomes absurd and pitiable if protracted into maturity.

This tangle recalls others. Being one person – having one personality – is enough for most of us; yet we see writers and actors contain multitudes where each member, whether absorbed from life or condensed from fancy, is as much a person as the person who contains them, having virtues and vices of their own they do not pass on to their host. If myself is something virtualizable, am I wasting myself in being only myself?

But writers and actors are not the best people; what they contain they do not combine. The conversation of Shakespeare was surely intense, but less than Hamlet times Falstaff times Rosalind. And actors especially may owe their multiplicity to nothing but the quality that Borges imputes to Shakespeare (who was also, remember, an actor): they can become anybody only because they are nobody.

The homuncular fallacy is not a real fallacy. It could turn out to be part of the definition of consciousness that it is built from what is also conscious, a potential infinity like two facing mirrors. We contain cells, cells abridge us; we are people with personalities and yet we contain people with personalities. Sometimes it seems that everything is recursive, that even reality only represents itself: considering Robertson’s Titan, for example, I cannot help suspecting that the world, too, only serves to perform what has already been anticipated in imagination.

Nondefinition #33

Sharks. The shark is no pilgrim: half as old as life, streamlined by a million generations bent on the same restless, uncompromised purpose, he has never yet doubted. He has an ancestry but it does not matter. Once hunger met water the shark was inevitable. He is written into the laws of physics between the ratios of buoyancy and the equations of flow and drag. He belongs utterly. When he dies he leaves no bones to protest it. They say that deep enough there is no more up or down, but they should know better. The shark is down. The moment your blood enters the water, you start to fall. In the whole wide ocean there is nothing to catch you. First he smells you; then he hears you; then he sees you; then he feels the current switching in your muscles as you try not to breathe. But you have nothing to be ashamed of. The hunger you feed is not a vain hunger like the lion’s, not a grubby hunger like the worm’s, but perfect hunger: unhurried, impartial, and pure.

The Early Adopter

“People are afraid of the future. I can understand that. The one thing we know for sure about the future is that everything’s going to go wrong, am I right? You’re going to get older, and your marriage will fall apart, and your kids will speak a different language and listen to bad music.

“But I’m in love with the future, because while I’m getting older, and getting shaky and confused, something else is happening. Technology is accelerating so fast that even as I’m coming apart the space of what I can do gets bigger and bigger.

“I may need thicker glasses, but I can talk to somebody in China on a video phone. I may be out of shape, but I can carry a thousand books in my pocket. My hearing, maybe, isn’t as good as it used to be, but I have my own personal pocket radio station that plays all my favorites and follows me everywhere.

“So, sure, it’s true. Maybe if I wait a year the next model will be better and cheaper and they’ll have the bugs worked out and that thing everybody hates, they’ll have changed that. But I’m not getting any younger in the meantime.

“You be sensible. What’s one more year of circling the drain? Mine’s on pre-order.”

Names

To say something unusual in specialized language is easy. A few formulas may unmistakably express a new worldview. To say something unusual in everyday language is very hard. You must choose your words not only to say what you mean, but to refuse to say what the hearer expects. Names alone cannot do it; it takes sentences.

Consider how advanced ideas become basic ones. The joke goes that in 1919, when Eddington was asked whether it was true that only three people understood general relativity, he hesitated and finally excused himself: “I was wondering who the third one might be!” Now undergraduates study it. Postulate that our undergraduates are not smarter than the best minds of 1919. Consider musicians: the violinist’s vibrato, the guitarist’s tremolo, were once the distinctive techniques of particular virtuosi; now they are part of mere competence. Nobody could play Liszt but Liszt until everybody had to play Liszt. What were once expeditions are now vacations.

This is more than a pattern; it is a phenomenon. What happens is naming: giving something a name is the first step in its domestication. The wild equations of general relativity were tamed by the associations that gathered around the name: the bowling ball on the rubber sheet; the paradoxical twins; the absentminded professor; the starship Enterprise. Any whale can be handled once it has enough harpoons in it.

There is a tension between thinking in names and thinking in sentences. Math and science work with names; verbs only participate syntacitly. This is an envied state. Whenever we see a field of study on the make we see it embracing gerunds, copulation, and anaphor. The textbooks always show the development from sententious thinkers to name-wielding scientists as the axis of progress.

But something is suspicious here. To be useful names must be unlike other words: they must have definitions, and there must be some procedure to ascertain that two definitions refer to the same thing. Otherwise a name is not a name at all; it is just another word.

The decline of Freudianism comes to mind. Freud gave names – ego, id, repression, neurosis – with a certain drama between them. The names and the drama were then taken up by a series of schools. Each school recast the roles with new definitions, or rewrote the old roles into a new drama, until finally the names, because they meant everything, no longer meant anything in particular, and were heard no more.

This matters. How many brilliant thinkers, who might have enriched the study of the mind if only they had been content to write sentences, went to waste following a dumb faith in names? They should have been warned that mere sentences are never wasted: good writing is always good thinking. It can be translated into whatever names are current, and lasts when names fail.

On Quirk

Quirkiness is what breeziness was: the style of the writer who writes not as a maker, but as a performer. It may be interesting to compare the two. Breezy and quirky are both inexhaustible. When you lay two breezy or quirky pieces by the same author end-to-end, the grain matches up where the word count cuts off. They are as reliable and predictable as utilities and readers love them for it: the breezy or quirky writer who is not absolutely incompetent can expect their following, however small, to be loyal and loud.

Breezy and quirky do the same job, but in different ways. Breezy is world-wise and wide-awake; quirky is innocent and dreamy. Breezy is suspicious and confrontational; quirky is trusting and fragile. Both are overbearing, but breezy is pushy where quirky is cloying. Breezy is cool and takes things in stride; quirky is breathless and labile. Breezy is a mover, in constant, purposeful coming and going; quirky is a dweller, a homebody. Even when quirky travels, it settles. (Corollary: breezy and quirky both value living light, but for different reasons: breezy streamlines where quirky simplifies.) Breezy and quirky are both fun, but both under false pretenses: breezy is fun because it pretends to be ignorant; quirky is fun because it pretends to be crazy. Of course since real insanity (like real ignorance) is no fun at all, the insanity is aspirational: boredom becomes ADHD, neatness becomes OCD, absentmindedness becomes Alzheimer’s.

Both are ridiculous, but neither deserves mockery. True, breezy and quirky both talk about themselves, endlessly, but neither is narcissistic or needy. They claim interest vicariously, by representing something: whenever they are an x they are just another x. True, breezy and quirky are both indiscreet; but though they are highly personal they are totally unrevealing – a sacrificial persona intervenes between merely human writer and insatiable audience like a patronus.

Of course neither is bad in itself. Archie Goodwin should be breezy; Amélie Poulain should be quirky. For the writer, breezy and quirky are both shams, but shams have their uses. Someone who demands that you be yourself deserves the same reaction as someone who demands that you go naked. Still, when they go wrong, breezy is very bad, but quirky is worse. Breeziness is at least an adult sham; but quirkiness is falsely childlike in the fairy-friendly way that only fools adults who have forgotten being children, when they would have caught fairies to pull their wings off.

The Miser

[New feature; the idea is something between Theophrastus and Browning, like the “letters” in the periodical essay series without the framing device.]

“I learned something very early on. I saw that you can survive without friends, and you can survive without money, but it has to be one or the other. And I turned out to be much better at making money than I was at making friends.

“I don’t have anything against people who go the other way. Everybody wants to give you a hand – great! Nobody ever gave me a hand. They wanted me to beg and I wouldn’t beg. So I did it on my own, and then – it’s true – I rubbed their noses in it. That’s only natural, if you don’t take it too far.

“I’m not happy; who’s happy? I know money isn’t happiness; I’m not stupid. But I don’t have any regrets because I never had a choice. I wish you people understood that. I wish you people didn’t look at me like I’d gone over to the dark side.

“I know what it is. It’s because you need me and you don’t want to admit it. It’s resentment. Your friends can’t do anything for you unless they have money, and when you follow the money what do you find? You find me. If I tagged my money the way they tag migrating birds, you’d be amazed how far it goes.

“Miser? I’m the most generous guy in the world. In fact I’m the only generous guy in the world, because it’s my money to start with. It doesn’t count when it’s somebody else’s money.”

Technique

I

Technique is the thing that takes the human body, formed by a million years of fight and flight, and turns it to ends nature never proposed. And it is one thing, beneath the conventional distinctions that hide its scope. The fingers of the musician and the body of the athlete are both natural means turned to unnatural ends. What does the turning is technique.

We do not know what our bodies may do. Biology, remember, is made of physics. All our movements only permute the universal grammar of simple machines. The body is a vocabulary: its material is limited, but its combinations are inexhaustible.

II

Technique is paradoxical. Physiology maps the body’s range, extension, and advantage, but the means by which we use them in concert, our techniques, either ignore physiology, or imply a false one. We control our bodies only as gestalt.

Consider relaxation. The perfect balance of loose and tight for a muscle is the same as for a knot – not so loose that it slips, not so tight that it binds. But we cannot calibrate this balance by feeling it, because the real action of the muscles is the sum of the voluntary tension we perceive and the involuntary tonus we do not. We have to think of relaxing just to prevent the mistake of bracing. It helps to be told to relax, it helps to try to relax; but if you actually relaxed, you would sacrifice control over the good alignment of your joints, and destroy your body as you used it.

III

Technique is not usually the product of research. Of course physiology is relevant to technique. Duelists applied the discoveries of anatomy in the fencing hall almost as soon as they were exposed on the dissecting table. But fencing survives as technique, not theory.

And research may be an impediment to technique. Techniques are of two kinds. Some techniques amplify our powers, improving what we would do anyway – jump, run, hit. Research helps here by aligning the technique with the underlying complex of mechanism and instinct. But other techniques more enable than help: they let us do new things. Here research may be a mistake. Science invented the triangular pen to make it easier to write with the fingers; but in the technique of the penman the fingers are not used at all, only the arm.

Techniques like these, though not analytic, are not arbitrary; they have their own logic and converge across centuries, and civilizations. Modulo certain constraints of metallurgy, the knights of Christendom and the samurai of Japan worked out the same technique for the two-handed sword. Or, returning to calligraphy, the peculiar penhold used in Eastern brush painting is paralleled exactly in the technique of flourishing with the pointed pen.

IV

All techniques belong to one of three patterns: cues, checks, or controls.

Cues belong to the mind. If we could see athletes and performers as they imagine themselves we would behold the strangest beasts, like the boxer with the wings of a butterfly and the stinger of a bee. Every discipline has its own imagery of this sort, which is part of its mystery, consecrating its pursuit as a shamanic ecstasy of communion with totemic essences.

Checks are miniature acts: the things you do before and after the main act, how you get ready and make sure. A check may be as formal as a routine or as spontaneous as a wind-up.

Checks are mostly important to the learner. Techniques are not behaviors; they cannot be shaped, in the behaviorist sense – perfected through approximation. Wrong practice just reinforces the mistake. Checks splint the fragmentary elements of technique so they knit together true. Half of knowing how to move is knowing how to stand; half of knowing how to use a tool is knowing how to hold it.

Controls are what prevail, the meanwhiles and the durings. They are the simple things that take time to master, the first things you learn and you always remember: “keep your eye on the ball” or “keep your weight on the balls of your feet.” A control is a sort of lever: it is easy, because all you have to do is pull, but it is slow, because by pulling on it you are moving everything else. Controls, as we turn them on and off, almost seem to let us switch between different bodies, adapted for different purposes.

V

Technique has many enemies.

Strength is an enemy of technique.

Of course brutish, blundering strength is the opposite of technique. But feats of strength have their own technique; the strongman is an athlete, not a species. He uses more sense than muscle.

Strength is problematic because it hides bad technique. With enough strength you cannot feel for yourself the difference between the right and wrong ways of doing something. The wrong way may even feel better: what feels more effortful often seems more effective. Jumping in and slugging through feels good, feels like something to be proud of, in a way that taking your time and doing it right cannot. And strength hides not only bad techniques, but even harmful ones: keeping the harm silent until it is irreversible.

Instinct is an enemy of technique.

Instinct and technique are not at odds. In the end, as in the beginning, technique is instinct refined and repurposed. The problem with instinct is that we do not have all the same instincts. Sometimes what is instinctive for others is a mystery to us. If we give up, this is usually why: there is a gap in our instincts – something no one will teach us, because no one teaches it, because it seems impossible not to know. This is when perseverance is hardest, but also when perseverance is most valuable – because in bridging the gap in our instincts we earn an awareness others lack.

Instinct is also problematic for masters. Masters always want to streamline their technique – to do more with less. But in doing so they risk omitting something essential they did not know was there, because it was never named to them; something they may find it difficult to regain.

Skill is an enemy of technique.

Masters are rarely good teachers. They may be impatient – ars longa. Even if they are patient, they may be unsympathetic – “Was I ever such a…?” Even if they are patient and sympathetic, what they teach may be not what they do now, but what they did when they still had to think about it.

And even if they are patient, sympathetic, and self-aware, they may teach the wrong things. Techniques feel different when they are new. The gestalt that mastery experiences is not raw but cooked. Sometimes it cannot be taught in its finished form; sometimes it must be arrived at.

Moreover teaching is a rare and demanding ability; few masters are good teachers, and even fewer have time for it.

And skill has a different use for technique than ignorance has. Ignorance has only two outcomes: getting it wrong or getting it right. Skill has many outcomes. Subtle adjustments and accomodations imperceptible to the ignorant produce wide divergences for complicated ends. The techniques the skilled pay attention to are thus ones the ignorant have no use for. Trying to teach them is pointless.

Of course, bad technique is an enemy of technique.

Techniques link to one another; a bad technique unchains those that depend on it. (To invert: when a generally accepted technique fails to work for you, it usually means you have a deeper problem.)

But good technique is also an enemy of technique.

Technique is its own enemy because the better you become, the harder it is to tell what works. When you are used to bearing a technique in mind, as your muscles learn to perform it on their own, your consciousness of it becomes redundant and may gradually exaggerate means into mannerism.

It becomes harder to test a technique; any change feels like an improvement when its rests tired muscles and favors rested ones.

And, once you have assimilated good technique, the body’s mechanisms for self-protection have been disarmed. You could run with bad technique your whole life and never suffer more than an ache, but once you run well you might misstep once and never run again. All the safeties are off.

VI

What we learn when we learn is not just what we learn but how we learn. Sometimes we can reuse that knowledge. Obviously your third language is easier than your second. But this head start is not free. For languages, the work has already been done. There are languages with grammars, and there is grammar itself, as an abstraction. But technique as an abstraction does not yet exist, except in name. Between the snobbery of the gracile, to whom all strength is brutality, and the pride of the robust, to whom all delicacy is weakness, it has gone unseen.

I am no hellenizer. Mens sana in corpore sano is a good thing, but only because it is the sum of two good things. Of course the mind and the body benefit each other: a feeble body usually means a confused brain as a feeble mind usually means a clumsy body. But the one may be excellent while the other is only adequate, and when both are excellent it is just a case of two kinds of excellence.

Technique is of course how we build on nature. But technique is also how we find nature. Technique is human instinct: the cue in the totem, the check in the ritual, the control in the talisman.

The human form is caught between nature and culture. Before nature finished standing us on our feet, culture pulled us, still rough, out of the tumbler of tooth and claw. We are neither one thing nor the other. Our bodies depend on our minds as much as our minds depend on our bodies; half the human digestive system is in the oven.

Technique is another such supplement. Under the poorly fitted jacket of flesh and bone that lies heavy on our shoulders we are as far from the grace of the beasts of the field as from that of the beasts of the air. The easy and spontaneous embodiment the rest of nature inherits as its right is, for us, only possible through technique.

The Locomotive

[On viewing a restored locomotive displayed in a pavilion.]

Black beast, gnarled in heavy sleep
Red sun thaws cold iron.
Slack boiler swells, remembering steam.
Fused wheels flex, grasping the rails.
Scraps of shadow pour from the cold chimney
Silent shrieks rattle the mute whistle.
Face to the sun, I borrow a flush of hope.
Back to the sun, I tread a path of shadow.

Stock Market

The stock market exists to discharge the gap between capitalism and reality. To a greater extent than capitalism’s most dedicated enemies imagine, whether a company is in the red or in the black, whether it is getting by or flourishing, is a matter of convention. The bottom line is like the horizon: exact, but it changes with your perspective. Accounting is an etiquette, not a science: the principles of accounting are accepted, not discovered. And because (in the short definition of capitalism) business can run as well on credit as cash, any large aggregation of capital that is not openly burning money remains viable as long as it remains credible.

The purpose of the stock market is to assign, to the companies that submit to its judgment, another value besides the one that stands on paper: one that answers not the accountant’s abstract question, “What is it worth?” but the more cogent and interested question, “What is it worth to me?”

Capitalism did not invent the bubble. Sri Lanka, I have just been reading, is covered in the massive ruins of an ancient irrigation network that was abandoned just as it was finished. The most parsimonious explanation is that ancient Sri Lanka had a bubble in aqueducts. Perhaps the answer to why the Maya built so many splendid cities, and then abandoned them, is a bubble in the building of splendid cities. Egypt had a bubble in tombs; Rome had a bubble in conquest; Europe had a bubble in chivalry. Bubbles are a human failing; capitalism is unique because it pops them.

The stock market is this sensitive needle. Its ticks transcribe the quick ebb and flow of an argument conducted in the binary code of short and long, buy and sell. And this is an argument to which we are all parties. Whenever you spend money or time you express an opinion about the economy. Buying a car is saying “Car prices are fair.” Getting an education is saying “My prospects are good.” Planting a food garden is saying “Food prices are too high.” (Of course you may have other motives, but the economy is touchy and takes everything personally.) The stock market is the great bookie who takes these opinions about the economy and turns them into bets.

To put it another way: the stock market is an arrangement that pays people for being right about the future. This is unusual. Elsewhere in life, being right about the future is punished twice: before, with contempt; after, with hatred. But with the stock market, the more unlikely the prediction – the longer the odds – the greater the payout. Thus, as the belief behind a bubble becomes more unquestionable, the reward for questioning it grows. 1929 was the year it became worthwhile to wonder if an upward trend in earnings really meant endless future growth; 2007 was the year it became worthwhile to wonder whether the housing market really could continue to grow forever without ever slowing down.

Crude as it is, this mechanism of homeostasis is unique; and it is what makes the gross, awkward, grasping, adolescent behemoth of capitalism fecund and invulnerable.