An Old Space
Wouldn’t do to have reposted something without having reposted its direct reply, so here you have it. Originally posted February 16th, 2005. Enjoy.
Not three hours after having written about a chaos devoid of the brave sacrifice of choice, and only a day or so removed from a reflection on having lost fascination in fear, I cracked a borrowed copy of Up the Infinite Corridor: MIT and the Technical Imagination. I will argue with any and all takers until I’m blue in the face (or some other appropriate didactic organ, as fits the occasion) that fate is, at best, an attractive pair of rosy lenses; but I can appreciate serendipity.
I’m only about 15 pages into the surprisingly short book (surprising because, well, I’m sure an exhaustive inspection of the technical imagination within the MIT scholastic culture could fill volumes), but I’ve found in pristine crystalline form an eerily close approximation of what I have felt. While recounting how Ernesto Blanco, professor of mechanical engineering at M.I.T., stepped through the initial mental tumult of solving what appeared to be a trivial problem, Hapgood tells us of the point of Blanco’s abject defeat. This was a critical point in the solution.
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Persig, perhaps the first to sense and explore the spiritual deeps of engineering, insists that “stuckness” is the key, the heart of the process, “the very void Zen Buddhists go to so much trouble to induce through koans, deep breathing, sitting still…” Any nontrivial act of design (and not a few seemingly trivial ones, like a no-hands music pager) can bring you here, empty you out, rip away your confidence in your own notions, your worldview, your metaphysics, leave you out on the tundra without the least idea which direction to take.
When this happens, when a person is exhausted and demoralized and under enormous pressure and not only has no idea what to do next but has given up all hope of having a new idea, the ego will sometimes relax, will allow its prisoner a few seconds of direct observation of what is sitting right in front of his face.
Hapgood writes about the concept of a solution space, which fits neatly into the metaspatial way in which much of the world presents itself to me (using “meta” to cleanly separate this from the purely physical “spatial”, and not so much to garner New Age appeal). The thing is, much more often than not, this space is simply too big to store in your head, not in steady-state fashion. You must move through it, finding landmarks, trying your footing on moss-covered logs over creeks, embracing rather than fearing that you’re likely to fall in. The surest way to what works is to find out what doesn’t, and, since working solutions will likely constitute a minority among all possible alternatives, what doesn’t work is much easier to find. As Sherlock Holmes said (regarding his deductive process):
That process starts upon the supposition that when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
I find then that I’ve many years’ worth of lost mistakes from which I could have gleaned an unknown wisdom, and now I have that many fewer years during which to commit yet greater mistakes. I’m behind–time to start royally fucking some shit up.
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