What I Learned Today

I recently encountered a few poems about poems, in terms of both crafting and appreciating it. These are too delightful not to share (click through for the full versions):

• Introduction to Poetry
  

  … all they want to do
  is tie the poem to a chair with rope
  and torture a confession out of it…

• The Trouble with Poetry
  

  … the trouble with poetry is
  that it encourages the writing of more poetry,
  more guppies crowding the fish tank, …

• Sonnet
  

  All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now,
  and after this one just a dozen…

All three poems are by the talented Billy Collins, who was the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001–2003. He is also the man behind Poetry 180, which aims to give high school students a taste of poetry every day of the school year. I admire his dedication to his work as well as his ability to step back and poke fun at it, in a clearly affectionate way.

His meta-poetry is an inspirational reminder of the fun and the value of reflecting on one’s own work, perhaps in the form of the work itself. Maybe I could write a program about programming, or a grant proposal to support work that aims to propose (there already exist slides about how [not to] create PowerPoint slides). Surveying one’s work from a high vantage point can lead to new insights about how to improve efficiency or satisfaction–or even just how to explain what it is and why it matters to a friend or family member.

As kids, I think the first encounter most of us have with the idea of an “engineer” is “the person who drives the train”. By the time I started my undergraduate studies, however, I knew that the College of Engineering wasn’t just about driving trains. But I always wondered how a purely functional role could have the same name as what I now saw as an engineer: someone with a very active role in design and problem-solving. Or as wikipedia puts it, “An engineer is a professional practitioner of engineering, concerned with applying scientific knowledge, mathematics and ingenuity to develop solutions for technical problems.”

Recently I picked up some books at the library on steam locomotives and other fascinating train topics. And suddenly, I realized why the train-driver could also lay claim to the title of engineer. Historically, at least, the railroad engineer did not just drive the train. He (these were generally men) also had to be a top-notch engineer, familiar with all of the inner workings of his engine, as he was continually required to maintain, lubricate, tend to, and sometimes even repair the engine. One book noted that the “iron horse” was just as temperamental and required as much attention and grooming as the organic horse it had replaced.

Today, it seems we have a very different view of machines and their users or operators. Most of us who drive cars do not expect to have intimate knowledge of how they work; instead, we hire car mechanics to deal with the details and fix problems. No doubt today’s train engineers are also much more removed from their engines than those of the 1800’s. Computers likewise (or our attitudes about them) have evolved as well, so that users need not understand operating systems and file systems and network protocols, disk scheduling and memory allocation and pipelining, kernels and shells and scripts. Instead, one can hire an IT expert to maintain the machine and fix it when it breaks.

Is this trend a result of the growing sophistication and complexity of these machines, or a shift in our social attitudes towards the desirability of being involved in details? Or both? If it’s an evolution in the machine, are there other machines out there in their infancy and still requiring that the engine be a part of the engineer?

I can see the allure of both the low and high levels on this abstraction spectrum, for computers. I personally enjoy tinkering with the configuration of my computers and knowing what’s going on under the hood, even up to spending hours buried in an ancient Linux machine to get a wireless card working—but sometimes that loses its appeal when I just want things to work. And in truth, when the machine is reliable enough that I don’t need to be checking and tinkering constantly (as with my Mac), I’ve found that I stop doing it. Yet I still feel a tug of curiosity about other machines as well—I’d love to take a basic automotive mechanics course, and learn more about how trains work, and I’m fascinated by pulleys and linkages and astoundingly clever machines of all kinds. But then, I’m an engineer by inclination—or perhaps, I have a wish to be (in a friend’s charming coinage) an “engine-er”: someone who knows and tends and cultivates the engine, akin to a farm-er or a sail-or.

Henry David Thoreau keeps a fun and thought-provoking blog, based on his diaries. A recent entry caught my eye with its use of a word that was new to me: hypaethral. This adjective describes something that is open to the air, as a building lacking a roof. Thoreau’s use of it here is amusingly metaphorical:

“I thought that one peculiarity of my ‘Week’ was its hypaethral character, to use an epithet applied to those Egyptian temples which are open to the heavens above, under the ether. I thought that it had little of the atmosphere of the house about it, but might wholly have been written, as in fact it was to a considerable extent, out-of-doors. It was only in a late period in writing it, as it happened, that I used any phrases implying that I lived in a house or lived a domestic life. I trust it does not smell [so much] of the study and library, even of the poet’s attic, as of the fields and woods; that it is a hypaethral or unroofed book, lying open under the ether and permeated by it, open to all weathers, not easy to be kept on a shelf.” — Henry David Thoreau, June 29, 1851

I like the idea of a book without a roof, one that would be hard to keep on a shelf, and one that would bring a taste of all the outdoors to any who passed near it. And many’s the day I’ve wished (though lacking the word) that my own life were more hypaethral — that I might look up from my computer and see the sky arching in dazzling blue above, or, later, feel the flickering chatter of stars rain down on me from the dusky twilight. The reminder to look up, to elevate our attention, to imagine the vastness of what lies outside our 12-foot ceilings and plaster and paint, is always a welcome one. Thank you, Thoreau!

A friend challenged me to build on my initial foray into Netflix Origami by folding models related to the movie I had just watched. The next movie turned out to be MirrorMask. I found the movie to be a visually delightful fantasy, with elements reminiscent of Labyrinth, Alice in Wonderland, and the Neverending Story. The Jim Henson company was a major part of the movie-making effort, and much of the puppetry speaks to that, albeit with a darker, Neil-Gaiman-inspired flavor. The plot isn’t terribly complex, but I loved the experience of watching the movie.

But enough about the movie — what about the origami? I found instructions for making a Guy Fawkes Mask that seemed like it would fit the bill.

The instructions are extremely sparse and rely on cryptic hand-drawn diagrams as well as assuming that you have a good familiarity with terms like “squash fold” and “crimp fold”. I’m not sure I would have made it through without relying on the eminently more useful video 1 and video 2. But combined together I was able to produce, well, something that almost looks like a mask!

This is a neat little model, and with more practice I think I could improve my execution as well. :)

There are some who denigrate the reading of fantasy as escapism, a willful rejection of reality in favor of a more pleasant existence in un-reality. As a young consumer of Ursula Le Guin, Patricia McKillip, Orson Scott Card, C.S. Lewis, Robin McKinley, and (naturally) J.R.R. Tolkien, I encountered this view from time to time in a personal way. The same critique could be applied to an immersion in any fictional work, but seems inordinately often to have been leveled at fantasy works specifically (and science fiction by proximity).

Now, there is well crafted fantasy and groaningly bad fantasy, works that open new views to your imagination and works that plunge you into depression or nightmare, stories that inspire and those that oppress. But is stepping into an alternate reality really escapism? And if it is, should we be concerned?

I hadn’t thought about this issue much recently until I encountered it in J.R.R. Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories.” He has several thought-provoking things to say about the craft and purpose of such stories, and he also tackled the criticism of escapism. He points out that “escape” is generally viewed as a positive thing, implying as it does the freeing of oneself from a bad situation. (People generally do not “escape” from happiness, wealth, joy, or love.)

“Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it.”

Escape has only taken on a negative connotation in this context because the critics have confused, “not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.”

I had an Aha! moment reading this. The negative use of “escape” really intends the meaning of “desertion”. Desertion implies the shirking of responsibility, an abandonment of one’s right course and duty. It is as if, in engaging our brains in imagining dragons or aliens or telepathy, we have deliberately rejected and abandoned the world that lacks those things—and further, that there must be a moral flaw in doing so, because we have some sort of commitment to be faithful to reality alone. But what makes it our duty to muddle along in raw reality, given that our ability to imagine the hypothetical and counterfactual is one of humanity’s unique and awesome gifts?

Tolkien takes this even further, turning the criticism on its head by linking fantasy with faith. The same ability that permits us to dream of dragons and rings is also what permits us to imagine deities, an afterlife, and an existence that improves upon the reality we currently experience. If you believe that there is more to existence than just this world, then you should see value in “escaping” (in the positive sense) from its evils and ugliness. Fantasy is one vehicle for doing so, for reminding us that there can be greater forces at work, and good ends to come, especially when reality seems grim or hopeless. Tolkien seems to view the modern world as a decidedly flawed place, and sees no trouble, and indeed benefit, in imagining and sharing better places.

That particular justification doesn’t quite work for me, but then Tolkien had been through much grimmer times than I ever have. For me, stepping out of my own reality temporarily is valuable in that it tends to help me reset my perspectives. There is a danger in too much fretting about details, in focusing on personal troubles until they are magnified beyond all reason. Stepping aside into someone else’s story can enable a healthy distancing from those concerns, allowing a calmer and more balanced return to them later. More than that, it can give you virtual experiences that allow you to be more compassionate towards others. In short, it broadens the mind.

I wonder what Tolkien would have thought of the Harry Potter phenomenon, in which fantasy reading (about wizards and witches, no less!) swept around the world in a screaming wave of me-too popularity. And if the whole world escapes into the same alternate reality, does that make it a part of reality by annexation?