Not to say that there won’t be consequences. As Alan Jacobs writes in How To Think, “I can’t promise that if you change your mind you won’t lose at least some of your friends—and that matters, because if you learn to think, genuinely to think, you will sometimes change your mind.” The key thing, Jacobs says, is to “avoid displaying the zeal that’s all too commonly characteristic of the convert.” If you can present your changed mind “as something that you have come to with some reluctance and without delight, then you should be able to convince them of your continued goodwill.” (No guarantees, of course…)
Input and output
Owen drew this after reading about “input” and output” in one of his Robot books: “input… a signal or information that is put into a machine or electrical system… output… the movement or response of a robot to the input it receives from its sensors.”
When I was growing up, my mom said, over and over, “Garbage in and garbage out.” She was talking, mostly, about television, but I wonder if she knew its usage in computer science? (“In computer science, garbage in, garbage out (GIGO) is where flawed, or nonsense input data produces nonsense output or ‘garbage’.”)
I wrote about it in Steal Like An Artist:
Lately, however, I’ve been re-thinking the phrase. Sure, it’s important to surround ourselves with the best influences, but it’s a mistake to think that we can’t be positively influenced by “garbage.” Artists are not machines, or robots. We’re human beings, and we can take “garbage,” or what’s considered “low,” and we can recycle and re-use it, turn it into something new, or something even better.
Personally, I feel that our country is just going to get worse and worse aesthetically, so one survival mechanism is to either become a beauty detectorist, find gold buried in the dirt, or turn yourself into some kind of sewage treatment plant or trash refinery. (As Jesus said, in Matthew 15:11, “What goes into someone’s mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them.”) In addition to saving and celebrating the best our culture has to offer, we might also have to turn our minds into the equivalent Doc Brown’s Mr. Fusion device:
Related reading: Problems of output are problems of input
Surrounded
My favorite artist turns 5 years old today. I hope he continues to spend his days surrounded by what he loves. (The picture below was taken when he was 1 1/2.)
The future calls
“I can’t be a pessimist,” James Baldwin said, “because I am alive.”
Batteries
“New metaphors are capable of creating new understandings and, therefore, new realities.”
—Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By
The 4.99-year-old has never been completely in touch with his body.
It seems to help him to think of himself as a machine: When he was obsessed with combustion engines, we’d use the four-stroke cycle as a metaphor to get him to poop, as in, “Okay, you ate dinner, that was the intake stroke, now it’s time for your exhaust stroke.” (Don’t ask me about the compression and power strokes.)
Now he’s going through a major robot phase, so he pretends to be a robot, and when he wants attention or affection he’ll ask us to “open up his panel” and fix his electronics. In the morning, he’ll say, “My battery was really low last night, but now I’m recharged.”
A few days ago, we had the boys all strapped into their seats and car wouldn’t start. My wife discovered that one of them had switched the dome light to ON and it had slowly drained the battery.
I’d never jumped a car before. I learned that there’s an order to which you connect the jumper cables. (BGGB: Bad +, good +, good -, block.) Once you get the car started, if the battery’s still good, you have to drive the car for a while in order for it to recharge.
This seemed like a decent enough metaphor: If your internal battery’s dead, you can jump it with a healthy battery, say, a friend, or a book, or a movie, etc., but then that battery can’t do all the work for you. You have to do the work of staying in motion, get things back up to a healthy level. You need gas, good tires…
See, all metaphors can only go so far. Best of all, I think, is getting beyond the metaphor completely, if that’s possible. Being a human in your body.
No batteries, just a renewable energy.
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