Hurricane Morning

I have the golf course pretty much to myself this morning.  My erstwhile companions, perhaps still shaken by Tuesday's earthquake, have been, I presume, somewhat deterred by the hurricane. 

I see one high flung-hawk being buffeted about by the gusts aloft.  The herons seem content to hug the edges of the ponds, aerodynamically perfect bodies facing into the wind atop absurdly fragile legs.  Across a couple of deserted fairways I see the lone white heron launch himself toward the next water hazard - it is how I imagine a dragon would fly - all awkward wings and churning energy.  In the ponds themselves all is quiet, save the geometry of raindrops, erased by wind driven wavelets aping their monster kin crashing ashore several hours to the east.  The muskrats, frogs and turtles seem snug below decks, sipping toddies, no doubt.

We sit at the very western edge of the storm, having again "dodged the bullet."  Still, the local TV stations have sent the young and foolish of their clan to the coast to cling to lamp posts, brace themselves against the lashing wind and horizontal rain to declare the patently obvious: "As you can see, Jane, it's really bad out here!"

I hope that folks to the northeast of us will be spared the disruption and devastation we experienced when Hurricane Fran motored right up the beltline here in Raleigh some 15 years ago, trashing the city and leaving us without power for more than a week. Today's far more gentle rumblings do remind me of the respect one must give these storms.  They strike me as a kind of meteorological giantism, a throwback to the age of dinosaurs, they stomp up the coastline leveling our petty constructions with an unintended flip of the tail. 

Still, the wind seems to be rising, and the intermittent rain grows more constant.  I see a respectable branch freshly down across the path ahead.  So I take the shorter fork toward home, not so much fearful of my life, but painfully aware of the embarrassment my wife would suffer from the headlines: Lunatic Killed While Out Walking During Hurricane.
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iThink, therefore, i.

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I consider it irrefutable evidence of the universe's sense of humor that such an uppercase individual will forever be associated with the lowercase i.  I empathize with what must surely be his family's joy, as he steps out of the limelight to rest a bit before the hearth.  And I hope that he has years of inspiration yet to share from his new perch as Chairman of the Board.

Still, Jobs has to feel a bit like Tom Sawyer today, hearing all these almost eulogies while still firmly abroad in the world of the living, hiding in the gallery.  And he certainly has the ego to enjoy them.  Who wouldn't?

If I were to get a few words at the funeral, before Steve revealed himself to the startled congregation, I would dwell on the significance of the lowercase i.  Jobs has, no doubt, long realized that when you decide on a product all by your lonesome, and when don't "test market" it to catch the mood of the herd, when you insist on doing it your way, and when you are right as often as he is, well folks are going to get a bit testy.  Nothing irritates us like someone else's success.  I choose to believe that this is where the whole lowercase i concept came from - in Jobs's inherent feel for marketing. IBM, the first company to play Goliath to Jobs's David, pointed the I to the company - "I B the Man."  So with the iMac, the ancestral i, Jobs pointed the i to the user: "i'm just here for you."  And somehow i became us.

But i might be wrong, mightn't i?
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Marley's Chains: Take Two

OK - it is still not ready for Prime Time, but here is the second take:

The first time I read Dickens's A Christmas Carol, it wasn't so much Marley's ghost that bothered me, it was the chains.  OK, the rag that tied his mouth shut was pretty creepy too, but I really had a problem with the chains.  I was too young to realize that it was an existential thing - but I now know I was undone by the notion that, no matter how sorry he was, those "chains of sins" would follow him.  As Marley said:"I wear the chain I forged in life, I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it."

No matter how sorry he was, he was going to haul those chains around with him throughout eternity.  It just didn't seem fair.

The same, it occurs to me is true about the strains of text, images and experience we "make link by link of our own free will" out on the Internet.  No doubt, all those links seemed good decisions when forged, when we hit post, link, send or tag.  Each link a momentary insight, a fleeting truth. But now they grow heavier year by year.  And we cannot shed them, no matter how sorry we may be.

Actually, we cannot shed them even when we are not sorry,we cannot shed them  when they are simply inconvenient - like Uggs in a ballroom.  I came to that realization when I began my experiment with Google+.  I really liked the idea of an upside-down version of Facebook, where the small group took precedent over the reveling hoard.  So I created a "circle" that contained only the graduate students who served as graders for my large undergraduate courses.  I flung open the door in anticipation of a cozy chat with a group of young scholars who shared my interest in online education.

In walked a member of the team who was also a Google+ power user.  Trailing behind him was a chain ponderous beyond all imagining.  Posts and responses from utter strangers stretched off to the far horizon.

"Please leave those in the hall," said I.

"I cannot," said he, quoting poor Marley, "They are my business." And he "held up its chain at arm's length, as if that were the cause of all its unavailing grief, and flung it heavily upon the ground again."

Well, I let him in anyhow.  But I wasn't wild about the idea.  There ought to be someway to strike off Marley's Chains when we enter the theoretically more cordial environment of Google+  The idea of Google+ was, I thought, was to advantage the small, the private, the constrained. Yet still we hit "share" and forge anew these schizophrenic chains, condemned to drag their babbling voices behind us into any "Circle" to which we are invited.  Rude at best, creepy at worst.

It is not so much my own chains that trouble me, though a quick Google search reveals them significant in their own right.  Still, I have, after all, been laboring on Marley's Digital Chains for a mere mite of my life.  I was already 45 years old when the digital forge leapt to fire.   Hence many a callow and foolish link lay forgotten amidst the dust of analog attics.  Letters, notes, diaries, poems and photographs were abandoned, with only occasional regrets, to be swirled away by the insistent winds of time.

Time was when time was forgotten.  That was the world before Facebook.  I read, with the same blend of fascination and horror we bring to train wrecks and natural disasters, of parents setting up Facebook accounts for their children in utero.  An ultrasound image anchors the profile of the unborn.  I swear, I wake up sweating.  But Marley chuckles, smashing away at the forge: "They're gonna love this at preschool."  These are the chains that worry me.

I have nothing against memory, though as I have mentioned elsewhere, I prefer her more forgiving twin, memoir.  But the Internet's blind fidelity to "that which was entered" crafts for us all trailing tails of Marley's Chains.  They are chains sometimes of our making, sometimes forged by others, often beyond our own view, and largely permanent.

In closing let us turn again to Dickens:

"Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead," said Scrooge. "But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change."

Perhaps we should consider departing from some of the courses down which we follow our Internet guides.  Perhaps every thought should not be given voice, perhaps some images should be restrained, perhaps some video should remain private, some music neither "liked" nor "not liked."  Perhaps, since we cannot break them at our leisure, some chains should be left in the foundary.

Marley's Chains: Take One

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The first time I read Dickens's A Christmas Carol, it wasn't so much Marley's ghost  that bothered me, it was the chains.  OK, the rag that tied his mouth shut was pretty creepy too, but I really had a problem with the chains.  I was too young to realize that it was an existential thing - but I now know I was undone by the notion that, no matter how sorry he was, those "sins" would follow him.  As Marley said:

"I wear the chain I forged in life, I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it."

No matter how sorry he was, he was going to haul those chains around with him throughout eternity.  It just didn't seem fair.

The same, it occurs to me is true about the strains of text, images and experience we "make link by link of our own free will" out on the Internet.  No doubt, those all seemed good decisions when we forged each link, but they grow heavier year by year.  And we cannot shed them, no matter how sorry we may be.

Actually, we cannot shed them even when we are not sorry, we cannot shed them  when they are simply inconvenient - like Uggs in a ballroom.  I came to that realization when I began my experiment with Google+.  I really liked the idea of an upside-down version of Facebook, where the small group took precedent over the reveling hoard.  So I created a "circle" that contained only the graduate students who served as graders for my large undergraduate courses.  I flung open the door in anticipation of a cozy chat with a group of young scholars who shared my interest in online education.

In walked a member of the team who was also a Google+ power user.  Trailing behind him was a chain ponderous beyond all imagining.  Posts and responses from utter strangers stretched off to the far horizon.

"Please leave those in the hall," said I.

"I cannot," said he. "They are my business." And he "held up its chain at arm's length, as if that were the cause of all its unavailing grief, and flung it heavily upon the ground again."

Well, I let him in anyhow.  But I wasn't wild about the idea.  There ought to be someway to strike off Marley's Chains when we enter the theoretically more cordial environment of Google+  The idea, I thought, was to advantage the small, the private, the constrained, yet still we forge these schizophrenic chains and drag their babbling voices behind us into any circle to which we are invited.  Rude at best, creepy at worst.
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Thinking Beyond the Oval

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We will talk a lot about metaphor in the class.  I think of a metaphor as a simple skin that we wrap around a complex idea.  Ideally it keeps the complexity of the idea intact but the simple skin lets the audience recognize it.

A colleague of mine was, however, fond of pointing out the danger of what he called "getting stuck to the metaphor."  Essentially you fall in love with the metaphor and you mush the internal idea around until it fills out the skin.  Say your complex idea has six main points, but you have fallen in love with the idea of an octopus as the metaphor.  You've designed a logo and everything.  So you beat up the idea trying to find content to stuff into all eight legs of the octopus.  You are stuck to the metaphor.  You run the risk of bruising the idea beyond recognition.

Habits are, in some ways, behavioral metaphors.  They are routines that we wrap around the complexity of our lives.  Imagine having to think about how you drive a car - step by step.  Horrible, not?  Habit rescues us.

But we can get stuck to that metaphor as well.  To counteract my inclination to cook and eat everything I see on the Food Network, I try to walk for a couple of hours everyday.  It also gets me away from the computer.  I walk around the golf course across the street.  Part of my route describes an oval around a couple of holes - out and around and back.  One side in shade, the other in sun.  It wasn't until the temperature hit triple digits that I realized that I could walk the shady side of the oval twice, avoiding sunstroke.  You just turn walk the shady side, turn around and walk back.  Why do we think we need to complete the circle?  It's habit.  It is getting stuck to a behavioral metaphor.
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