- Marcel Proust
When we perceive the world around us, we also perceive our world view. Only by living life differently can we gradually change our world view.
Traffic was pretty bad on the morning of Wednesday, 2008-04-09. At times it came to a standstill. All of a sudden, two short sentences came to mind out of the blue. The first one mentioned a Zamboni [1], perhaps because I had gone ice skating a month before. I searched for a rhyme and, after a few seconds, a two-line sentence completed the quatrain. When traffic stopped again a minute later, I wrote down the lines on the back of an envelope sitting on the passenger seat. At the time I enjoyed the sound and rhythm of the words, but over the next few days I started to also appreciate the meaning, or at least some possible meanings.
Poem I wrote while stuck in traffic this morning(1) Zambonis roam free each winter.
On the back of a public utilities envelope
Zambonis roam free each winter.
White space is calorie free.
We scribble our lives in the margins
Of our slumbering ontology.
Zambonis are ice resurfacing machines that intermittently scoot along the surface of an ice rink to smooth out the ice, repairing the cuts and gouges left by ice skates. They can be used in indoor rinks year-round, but are most closely associated with winter. When Zambonis "roam free", they impose a recess on the activity of the skaters. So this line sets up a context introducing a seasonal shift in activities, as well as the contrast between the speeding skaters and the slower-paced Zambonis, which move at only nine miles per hour.
(2) White space is calorie free.
White space is a term in the areas of printing, programming, and design that refers to space not covered with text, graphics, or other content. The idea of white space as a piece of paper that we mark with pencils or pens can be extended to an ice rink which we leave tracks on with our skates. While it's true that the ice, which in a sense is "consumed" by the act of skating, has no calories, that's too facile of a reading. Instead, note that the suspension of skating required for the continued smoothness of the ice brings about a time interval relatively free of the expenditure of calories.
(3) We scribble our lives in the margins
The word "scribble" conveys hasty action. In the context of Zambonis, this line conjures up an image of people skating around the perimeter of an ice rink, leaving their mark on the rink's white space between periodic intervals of rest. The resurfacing action of the Zambonis repeatedly erases these marks, making a palimpsest of the ice below.
Also, the idea of scribbling in the margins brings to mind the famous scholium of Pierre de Fermat. In the margin of a mathematics text he wrote "I have a truly marvelous proof of this theorem which this margin is too narrow to contain." [2]. That conjecture came to be called Fermat's Last Theorem, and was finally proved 358 years later, in 1994, by the mathematician Andrew Wiles. Scribbling can be short-lived, or can have protracted impact.
(4) Of our slumbering ontology.
For those not familiar with the word, "ontology" is an area of study within metaphysics and computer science that deals with “concepts” (also called "entities"), and categories of concepts (often within a specific domain), and the hierarchical and other types of relationships between them. An ontology for the domain of Publishing might include entities such as Author, Book, Language, Magazine, Title, etc. An ontology for the domain of Medicine might include entities such as Diagnosis, Hospital, Language, Prescription, Symptom, etc. These ontologies are encodings of our collective world view. As such, they provide shared vocabularies that allow us to represent information and share it with each other, or to collaborate and determine what conclusions can be reached from the information. Ontologies are used in areas ranging from corporate knowledge management to the design and construction of the elusive Semantic Web.
In the field of philosophy, there are also personal ontologies, which reflect personal world views. For most of us, our world view is fairly stable, meaning that our personal ontology evolves very slowly, to the degree that it could be said to "slumber". I'm not saying that we don't grow and learn and change but, for most people, most of the time, experiences do not change our world view as much as our world view determines the way we perceive the world around us. It acts like the pair of glasses that we no longer consciously notice. When we sleep during the night, the activities and sensations and inner dialogue of the day merge with those of the lifetime of days that came before. Even something that seems ground-breaking one day might seem less so the next day. Through the selectiveness of long-term memory and the integration of our daily experiences into our relatively stable world view, our ontology gets "resurfaced".
We can imagine that a community can also have a collective ontology that is the aggregation of the individual ones. These can also be said to slumber.
Between our personal ontologies and our collective societal ontology, which of these is being referred to in this fourth line? The last word of the poem is singular, so strictly speaking it is the collective ontology that's being referred to. But in fact I think both interpretations work. We as individuals live on the margins of our world view, and let our individual world views slumber. Meanwhile, we as a society live on the margins of our world view, and let our collective world view slumber.
Lastly, what does it mean to say that we scribble our lives (only) in the margins of our ontology? In what ways does our ontology even have a margin or a center to begin with? I would claim that the concepts or entities at the center of our ontology are the basic ones, such as Person, Place, Thing, Animal, Book, Car, Desk, Earth, etc., that are at the core of our world view. Indeed, though we use such concepts daily, we do not often contemplate the nature of animal-ness, or book-ness, or car-ness. We don't often ask ourselves what defines a desk, or differentiates a desk from something that is close to being a desk, but falls short of desk-ness in some small way. Such core concepts are the slowest to evolve. On the other hand, things that we are experiencing for the first time, or thinking deeply about, have rapidly evolving conceptual representations. Those are the concepts at the margin of our ontology, where we focus our attention the most—where we "scribble" our lives.
Epilogue.
How can we wake up the slumbering collective ontology of our society? Large shifts in our shared ontology have happened before, such as in the Industrial Revolution and the dawn of the Information Age. More such shifts are certainly to come, but it's not clear how to intentionally bring them about, or if that's even possible.
An easier question to answer is this: How can we wake up a slumbering personal ontology? Perhaps by exposing ourselves to novel experiences and deep thoughts that differ from the world view that we've spent a lifetime creating. A conscious effort to change it over time might also help: though each day might only bring about a small change, a long-term effort (e.g., college) can gradually result in a significant ontology change. In the movie Groundhog Day, the character played by Bill Murray spends thousands of (Groundhog) days becoming a different person than when the movie started. Mere repetition of days didn't change the core of who he was, but a concerted effort (including learning French, piano playing, and ice sculpting) eventually resulted in true change. Also, if our world view changes, then what was once unremarkable could be made remarkable again, because we would be living the world with new eyes. And maybe even new skates.
[1] Zamboni is a registered trademark of Frank J. Zamboni & Co., Inc. Their website reminds us: The machine is not "a Zamboni," it is a ZAMBONI ice resurfacing machine. For better or worse, the phrase "ZAMBONI ice resurfacing machine" is not what came to mind that morning while driving to work, nor would it have led to verse that scanned particularly well.
[2] Original Latin: Cuius rei demonstrationem mirabilem sane detexi. Hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet.
No comments:
Post a Comment