MindSpinner

It’s true, as of the coming of today’s mail, I am the proud owner of an Albert Einstein Action Figure,

a catapult-style Bug Gun with five plastic bugs to fling, a Finger Kite, a formidable black corkscrew with all metal gears, and a batch of other goodies pursuant to holiday festivities :->.

(Of course the box had my name on it and not the kids’ - do you think I’d rip off their toys? Besides, who would send a kid a corkscrew that could be utilized with deadly force in case of a terrorist attack in the kitchen?)

Now the charms of the bug gun and the kite are readily apparent to any eight year old, but the very best thing about Albert, especially given his bad hair and lamentably plastic brain, is the quote on his box:

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

For me, a photograph will always be very like a poem, for both are meant to capture something true. If I see a body of photographs taken by a single photographer, I catch a glimpse of what it is to look at the world through another pair of eyes. And sometimes, when I take my own photographs with my extraordinary 8 megapixel gift camera, I realize that the camera sees more than I do and that to look at a photograph can be seeing as if for the first time.

But photographs are mute witnesses: they capture only a sliver of what is real: an instant’s configuration of light and shadow and color. In fact, they often evoke within us much more than they capture of the actualities of the moment in which the shutter clicked. Susan Sontag asserts that “the camera’s rendering of reality must always hide more than it discloses.” Photographs do tell us something, but often we know not what. And it is what photographs do not tell us that invites us to conjecture (and even to mislead ourselves), for we must have our stories, even if we have to make them up. We are usually very happy to make them up. In fact, we can hardly resist doing so. We create worlds outside and behind the borders of the frame. Whether we thereby do good or harm depends upon the nature of the stories that we tell - and upon whether we mistake them for actuality when it is actuality that we are after.

There are two photographs in my wedding album (now stacked in two pieces in the guest room closet), one of me kissing my father, the other of me being kissed by my mother, in set shots posed by the photographer, which serve to illustrate. In the first, as I kiss my father’s cheek, his face is warm and happy. As my mother kisses mine, my expression is vaguely anxious. My father made much of these two photographs in subsequent arguments with my mother. He could tell, he told my mother, how his daughter really felt about her mother from that wedding picture. The picture told the story of a detached, distant relationship: the bride’s face apparently frozen, almost visibly cringing at her mother’s touch.

But the picture actually tells the story of headpieces and hairpins. I made my own dress and veil, you see. I was happy enough with the dress: its sweep of satin, its arrangements of lace, its 25 pearl buttons sewn one by one down the back. And my dress was happy enough with me - as long as I stood in precisely the posture assumed by the dress form upon which I fitted it: shoulders back, chest thrust out. Only if I slipped into my accustomed, absolutely instinctual, round-shouldered slouch did the bodice just sort of cave in. “Shoulders back, shoulders back” was the mental theme of my wedding day. The veil was more problematic. Its foundation was a stiff headpiece that had to be pinned to my fine hair, hair that, when I was a little girl, would never hold a barrette or a pretty comb. Homemade veils do not come with instructions. Or glue. Or clamps. My bridesmaids and I had it pinned here and pinned there, and still the arrangement felt most precarious. I could just see it hanging over my left ear by the time I said, “I do.”

In the picture snapped as my mother kissed me, she rested her hand on my back, and that veil – I could feel it – was being pulled back, back, back. “Careful, Mama, I thought, it’s coming off.”

So much for the story photographs tell, snapped as they are out of time, concealing as they do, the precarious hairpins that hold reality together. The story that photographs really tell is that we are storytellers all.

Do you remember this photograph? It arrested me when I saw it in the news in April of 1998, and I downloaded it to my hard drive. I’ve showed it to students in journalism classes since and asked, “What is this? What story does this photograph tell?”

After closely scrutinizing it, somebody usually comes up with the observation that the box looks as if it might be a casket, and this might be the funeral of person who died in poverty. This image of the funeral pyre of Pol Pot spoke to me eloquently, in manner of Greek tragedy, of a pathetic end to a powerful, cruel life. It said everything there is to say about downfall and disgrace.

Except it didn’t. I googled other photographs. I know that this is macabre, but there’s a thread here that must be followed. I wanted to see more of this funeral, to know how this life ended. Here’s Pol Pot dead on his bare mattress. Those are flowers behind his head, the same flowers, apparently, that top the wooden casket on the pyre, with the chair. Did you see the flowers on the casket? I didn’t make them out until today. Someone put the flowers there.

The bare mattress. The dead man. The fan. The flowers.

The first picture looks as if almost no one was there at Pol Pot’s funeral, just a few men to throw whatever would burn onto the pyre. But there were others there. Certainly there was the photographer. It was his wife, pictured below, who found him dead. Her face, at the funeral, is as inscrutable as Mona Lisa’s. Is this grief? Is there a hint of relief hovering at the corners of her mouth? Did she love him, or did duty bind her to stay? Does she wonder here what will happen next? Was it she who brought the flowers? I know I don’t know.

His daughter stands beside her mother. A little girl half grown up lost a father when Pol Pot died.

Each photograph adds something more, but I can’t tell exactly what. I can only tell how these images suggest to me something of lives - that they can’t be neatly understood, succinctly labeled, and sealed away forever as if there are no more questions to be asked of them or of ourselves.

(Note: The first three pictures may be found at http://www.ishipress.com/pot-pyre.htm. The last appears in a PBS story about Pol Pot’s daughter Malai, in 2002.)

Every since Outer Life posted his essay on IQ, I’ve been drawn to ponder the notion of quantifying intelligence with a number. I hadn’t thought about IQ tests in a long time. I don’t love tests (excepting take-home essay tests, given intriguing questions ;->).

On a personal level, I thought first about what I have and haven’t achieved in my life relative to a number that is supposed to correlate with potential. IQ scores interrogate us that way. (They might set artificial boundaries, too, in our minds, depending on our scores. We may also ruefully note that they never make us smarter than we were yesterday.)

Some people’s lives are arrows shot into the air, aspiring to see how high and how far they can fly. And some aren’t, either for important reasons or no reason at all. IQ is perhaps the bow, strung and fitted with an arrow, pulled back according to the strength of a will, and aimed according to a purpose - or leaned against the wall, unstrung, gathering a thin layer of dust because sometimes, for a season, life isn’t archery.

Outer Life pointed out that we tend to keep our IQs secret, and theorizes that touting numbers may be something past mere bad form. In a thoughtful reply to my own comment, he notes “… I sense that deep down we are all dogs in a pack, eager to order ourselves if only given the chance. Keeping IQs secret may be our last defense against the objective ordering that seems to rule the lives of other pack animals.” I’ve thought about this for the better part of a week. I have thought sadly about human beings as animals who order themselves in packs.

We have many packs, I think, and the people who care most for ordering put great energy into that project, with or without objective or viable criteria. Clearly though, intellectual potential is not reliably the variable we use to order ourselves. In some packs, superior intellectual capacity is a matter of suspicion and distrust. To be in our pack, you must not seem very much smarter than we, or we will define you as one of those damned intellectuals who spin what we suspect to be sophistry and try to make us think, using big words (like sophistry) and whole paragraphs and pages to make us dizzy when we are trying to keep life very simple - us and them, good and evil and us always good and God on our side no matter what we do. Witness the American electorate at work. Want to be elected in this country? Talk like a cowboy, and keep it simple. Too simple, indeed, to account for reality or to make anything actually work. We promote to the head of the pack those who make us feel psychologically secure (which only scares the bejesus out of those of us who perceive the dangers of such an approach and order our own packs differently - according to wisdom, intelligence, character and that priceless ability to account for and maneuver gracefully to good effect in complexity).

But finally, I’ve decided that my dissatisfaction with IQ is something very simple. The score is a mind poured into a number, like a genie sucked back into a bottle, corked and opaque. An IQ score is not meaningless, but it remains incredibly reductive. It doesn’t help me to know the substance of a mind or the efficacy of a life. You could tell me that Shakespeare possessed an IQ of 167, but I’ll apprehend his conscious and unconscious genius only by encountering his mind on the page.

Likewise, you can tell me, if you know, how many gallons of water there are in the sea, but I will not care so much about this. I will care about the physics of wind and current and waves, about the life within, about the sad toll pollution takes and what ships lie wrecked at bottom, about endlessly moving beauty and terrible force, the taste of salt on my tongue and the bubbly fingers of waves that wash up around my ankles and slip the sand away from under my toes. And I will care about how light reflected on water always strikes a path from wave to wave to reach the eye that looks to see.

(Permission to use this photo generously granted by Phrixus.)

What need do I have of a number that quantifies a mind? What I want to know, instead, is the mind itself. It’s the voyage that matters to me more than knowing, if I could, the number of gallons that slosh in a particular sea.

As for Outer Life, who always takes readers on a voyage into thought - you, yes you, your secret’s out. We know how many gallons are in your sea. Enough for fine sailing to places we might not otherwise have ventured. Accept a salute, and thanks.

That same deep thanks I owe to others whose blogs and comments I’ve come to look to, week in and week out. It is good to know the minds - and hearts - we meet here in this un-place.

I have a colleague who beavers through every task; she’s a paragon of productivity. She reminds me that such feats are possible, and that I, too, can do this when I have to. (I will have to, for the next three days. I’ll start in just a minute.) I could be sorry for the fact that I find the drudgery of trivial tasks to be drudgery indeed - not so much physical tasks but the ones that require my begrudging mental attention, hour after hour. I could envision this propensity for boredom as a shortcoming I should try to overcome. But I’m not sorry. And I affirm my capacity for perceiving boredom rather than simply trying to pretend it doesn’t exist. I have something bigger or beyond always brewing in my head, and if I invested in my to-do list as if it were the be all and end all of my days, then I would never, ever, frustrated, mutiny against the tyranny of the trivial, throw it all into a heap, and wander off on this quest or that, into the moments in which I actually live, move, breathe, and create. So I resolve to embrace my boredom as a sort of spiritual guide, and when I throw myself into Getting Things Done, it’s so that I can emerge as soon as possible out the other side of my heap, into hours of possibility and being.