A Ramble

Gentle Reader,

Or, no, what I mean is, please be gentle and forebearing, reader. Because in the maw of the absent husband and having watched too many TEDTalks yesterday my brain is near-to-bursting with needing to talk and sort out five or six different ideas that may have nothing at all to do with each other, but lying side by side set each other off so prettily.

First I woke this morning to the second-hand drama of the unreliable narrator’s domain name being swiped out from under her, and, while I’m not trying to say that everyone else’s problems are all about ME, I still got lots of musing on “To Blog or not To Blog.” Lots I cannot generalize from: the blogs I love I love better than anything else I read, and even so, what keeping my blog gives me is not symmetrical with what I get from reading blogs. It has made me more comfortable with the terrifying idea of people seeing/reading/judging what I write. That having a blog has allowed for deeper connection than I might get from small-talk: my hypothetical reader is given, yes, a self-selected, picture of who I am, but I imagine it’s still one with more depth than I am capable of in most social situations and it gives me a glimpse of light outside of the imprisoning box of the idea that, subsumed in roles, no one ever really sees me, no one will ever really know me. Unable to see beyond the footlights, I cannot see who exactly is out there and whether or how they are responding except for the hints of site stats and comments, but having it just a little murky is so inexplicably liberating.

And still, for me, blogging has its dark side. I don’t like living my life looking for blog fodder, it feels unnatural, like I am looking past the inherent value of an experience for the secondary value of “and I can write about it!” even if I have principles about not writing exploitatively about people and relationships in my life. I worry that it takes some of the time and energy that I ought to be putting into relationships with the people around me or other sorts of writing. Sometimes I feel like what I need to write, and what is going to bring hits to the site, and what is going to generate an interesting conversation in the comments can be so divergent that I am not sure that blogging is always good for me, or I toy with breaking it into different blogs, only I am worried about what I would learn about myself by which one of those I favored.

Which loosely ties in to another set of ideas bothering me. I get very nervous about the notion of “competing interests.” In recent conversations there has been the idea that the institutions we grew up trusting (medicine, education, law enforcement, and the media primarily, but I can think of countless smaller ones) have become harder to trust when you first have the glimpse of how the interests of the institution are different from your own individual interests. It doesn’t mean you can throw them out wholly, but the experience of realizing that the obstetrician I talked to when I was pregnant the third time was going to do things that might not be in my interests or my baby’s was sort of shocking to me in the way loss of religion could be for someone else. And noticing the damage that our school systems have wrought in people I love, warping their self-images, their value, their self-worth, I have started wondering whose interests schools serve. I grew up with some idealistic notion of schools being identical with universal education and thus the prerequisite of democracy, and I still sort of believe that, but in a tempered “why isn’t it working as well as it could way?” I would no more close all schools than I would go back to trying to deal with a headache with leeches, and yet, I am not sure that either education or medicine always starts with the right question.

So yesterday I watched Susan Blackmore’s TEDTalk entitled Memes and “Temes” and I don’t know if it had much in the way of revolutionary and new ideas, but her main point is that evolution is inevitable in any system where there is replication, selection and variation. These three things will always form a sort of algorithm, design out of chaos without mind (interestingly two days ago I watched Torsten Reil’s TED presentation on using AI to simulate humans in video game design where what they did was really set up replication, selection and variation and let the model evolve on its own). Her notion is that memes, and her coinage of “teme” for a technological meme, are as “selfish” as Dawkins’ Selfish Gene. I browsed the comments and on Blackmore’s presentation and there was lots of fuss about anthropomorphizing and will, but the message I got was that the non-personal, the non-willed, can still have an interest, a self-perpetuation and growth. Which would apply to institutions as well as ideas. (I also wonder about how this fits in with Clay Shirky’s TED presentation on Institutions vs. collaboration).

I don’t doubt that as a model, the analysis of competing interests works. But when I start doing it something funny happens to me, I cannot stop and it occurs to me that I have to weigh the interests of my family against my individual interests, and that if every being, institution, creation, meme, idea, teme, and gene has its own separate interest, that is a lot of divergent interests, a lot of competition. And through these lenses I start seeing us all just using each other and altruism as a fairy tale we tell ourselves so that we don’t have to face harsh meme-eat-meme world we live in… the systems we have built, banking and schools, advertising and publishing, are above everything else, self-perpetuating and the problem isn’t capitalism or socialism or fundamentalism, its the illusion of scarcity and struggle for survival, of our deep separateness (yes I did also watch Jill Bolte Taylor’s Stroke of Insight, too, the number one most emailed TED Talk where she talks about how we can choose to see the universe as one where we are all connected, why do you ask?) I even wonder what happens when the notion of our connectedness, our unity, our in-fact-more-convergent-than-divergent interests is introduced into the system of memes.

And of course, one of my long-standing themes, is to wonder about the need to model and metaphorize everything, how much choice we have in models and metaphors. What do convergent interests look like? What if there were a dialectic of memetics, that the variation, replication and selection were somehow not just synthetic but — if I say synergistic, does that mean my Santa Fe is showing? Has anybody talked about synergy since 1980? That the success of one could not compete with but inspire and strengthen another? Whenever I find myself with a sort of zero-sum model of how the universe is working, I suspect I have over-simplified, that with two children it’s not that each gets half of the love available, or that when a third sibling is born each must surrender one third of the share he had been getting heretofore. This is a crude metaphor, I guess, for suggesting that when I am happily blogging, I find I have deeper reserves for other writing as well.

Ok, so back to blogging. I haven’t tied all this together as well as I should have liked. I don’t pretend that my blog is some David fighting the Goliath of the institution of traditional publishing, or that I have figured out what moral/aesthetic value “replicability” of the ideas that survive, thrive, become popular has, when history is littered with brilliance faded to obscurity, genius unrecognized in its own lifetime and commercially successful schlock, or whether I think that our native cultural valuing of individuals over institutions means anything at all. I may have to briefly wean myself from TED which seems to have taken the place of the attention span to read a book entire (I do have Holt’s How Children Learn waiting for me!) Actually, when I think about my blog, what pops into my head is one of my favorite picture books that I read with my children, David McPhail’s Mole Music, . The story told by the illustrations is totally different from the story in the text, but the basic story is that a mole realizes his underground life is missing something, and then he sees a violinist on television and decides to send away for his own violin and spends years practicing and playing at the end of each day’s tunneling, and one day he’s a little sad that he should never have had the chance to share his music, but laughs it off because of the joy the playing itself gives him. In the illustrations we see his music going up into the world around a tree growing over his hole, and a war stopped and kings and presidents sitting down to listen to the beautiful music.