Tag: rant

Zeno’s Literary Paradox

PavowskiLeave a comment

(Allow me to disclaim that I’m not particularly educated or bothered with the differences between turtles, tortoises, terrapins, and the like. I am sure they are all different and not interchangeable. I will nonetheless be interchanging them today. I have at least one friend who will be very upset by this.)

What is it with me and thought experiments? Last week, the Prisoner’s Dilemma. This week, Zeno’s Paradox. Maybe it’ll be my next “regular feature” that burns out after a month or so.

Zeno’s Paradox is one of my favorites, in that it seems to defy all common sense, yet when you look at the premises of the argument, it is inescapably logical.

We imagine a footrace between Achilles and a tortoise.

Since Achilles is a sporting chap, and clearly runs faster than the tortoise, he spots the tortoise a significant head start. This is only fair.

So, after Achilles runs for an indeterminate amount of time, he will have reached the point that the tortoise started from. However, in the same amount of time, the tortoise will have moved forward some smaller amount, so Achilles still has ground to make up. Again he moves forward, arriving rather quickly at the point the tortoise previously occupied, and again he finds that the turtle has crept a bit further ahead.

This process repeats for as long as you care to repeat it. Due to the fact that measurements are a human construct and therefore infinite, we will never reach a point whereat Achilles overcomes the tortoise.

It follows, then, that logically, Achilles can never overtake the tortoise.

In practice, of course, Achilles sprints right past the hapless terrapin.

 

I absolutely love this. It is simultaneously as self-evident as a stone and as incomprehensible as consciousness itself. Achilles, in the mind, seems paradoxically never to gain ground; in fact, the closer he comes to his goal, the farther he has to go.

I’ve noted previously around here (though I can’t be arsed to track down where at the moment) that Andre Agassi, one of my more favorite athletes (we bald guys have to stick together), has expressed a similar psychological phenomenon. He describes the end of a tennis match as a magnetic force: one that, the closer you get to it, catches you in its field and pulls you in. But like a reversed magnet, the closer you get, the harder it becomes to actually make contact.

You can get closer and closer, but you can never quite catch it.

And that’s kind of like writing, innit?

You begin with this vast tract of land in front of you: the blank page and the faraway goal of a completed story, be it 3000 words or 93000. You start to work. The finish line is way up there, but who cares? You’re making progress day by day, easily measurable progress, and you have the word counts to prove it. And you close and you close and you close and the turtle gets bigger and bigger in your vision, and one day: you finish! The story is written, the narrative arc resolved.

But the turtle has moved. You still have more work to do, in the form of re-reading, re-outlining, editing, proofreading. You’re closer than you were to start the exercise, but it took you a long time to cover all that distance, and the turtle isn’t holding still, either (and why would it, with an ink-stained, caffeine-addled word-herder on its tail?).

So you lower your head and off you go again. This time it’s not such a long road to catch the turtle — you’ve already written 90,000 words after all, what’s the big deal revising or re-ordering 30,000 of them — and before long, you’re there. A story edited, improved, fixed!

turtle-1149009_960_720
LOL I’m still ahead.

But where’s the turtle? Sonofabitch, it’s another thirty turtle-miles up the road. (Which is, I dunno, five hundred feet? What’s the ground speed of a turtle anyway?) You’ve got some beta-reads to do, now, and the receiving of notes, and probably another read of the work yourself, and then a subsequent edit…

And just like Achilles, you keep chasing the turtle, and just like the turtle, your project creeps inexorably forward, staying ahead of you by distances which are too small to be properly measured, let alone explained to anybody who isn’t a writer.

“You’ve been working on it for how long?” your friends ask, with confusion and maybe a bit of pity in their voices. “I thought you finished the draft months ago.”

“Yes,” you explain, straining to keep the desperation from bleeding in, “but then I found a major problem with the protagonist’s backstory on page thirty, so I had to go back and fix it, and when I fixed that, I realized I had taken away the whole motivation for the antagonist to –”

And by this point, your friends are simply nodding and smiling and backing away, the way they might with a foamy-mouthed dog. (Little do they know you’ve been subsisting on nothing but Cool Whip for the past two days because you’re eyeballs-deep in edits and can’t bring yourself to leave the house.)

And despite all the progress you’ve made, that farkarkte turtle (and yeah, I had to look up how to spell “farkarkte,” and I don’t care what you think — it’s in my personal lexicon for some reason and it bubbled to the surface like a dead fish and I love it) is still bobbing along the road ahead of you, evading reach even though it looks like it’s right there.

The fact is, if you think of a novel as the sum of its requisite parts — the draft, the editing, the revising, the crying, the drinking, the smashing of computers with hammers, the dark nights of doubt, the … well, you get the idea — then the whole equation begins to look very much like the mathematical side of Zeno’s Paradox. No matter how close you might ultimately get, you will never actually get there.

Which is why it’s a good thing we writers don’t live in a mathematical world. (Most of us, anyway. Actually, who am I kidding, MATH IS EVERYWHERE.)

We live in the delightfully creative, whimsical world where expectations exist only to be reversed, where up can be down if we bloody well feel like it. We live in the world where, paradox or not, Achilles keeps on pounding away and leaves the tortoise in the dust.

We keep on writing and we (eventually, one day, maybe, please?) cross the finish line.

 

Save

Pavowski3 Comments

I’m just gonna say this. Not that it needs saying.

But save your work. Save early. Save often. Save like you’re tapping out the drumbeat of a Bantu dance. Autosave is a lifeline, but that lifeline may or may not be looped around your neck or your genitals.

At least I only lost a day’s worth of work.

Ugh.

Which reminds me… I need to make some backups.

Zombies Among Us

Pavowski7 Comments

We hear it all the time, right? Kids today are ungrateful, lazy, entitled; they’re flushing the future of the planet down the toilet, they couldn’t math their way out of a paper bag, if it’s not on google they can’t be bothered to learn it.

It’s all true, of course, and it’s all also woefully simplified. Kids by and large are going to use the technology and the means of the day to put in the least amount of effort and get away with what they can. Of course, if life is a slippery slope, then the automated chairs that keep us from even being forced to do so simple a thing as walking in a movie like Wall-E are not so very far off.

They’ve got this new thing — maybe you’ve seen it — called a hoverboard.

It’s kinda like a Segway, keeping the rider balanced using gyroscopic technology. But with a minuscule footprint and using literally only your feet, it’s the hottest hot thing, especially among the youths.

youths

I’m a high school teacher, so I have a pretty high tolerance for youthful entitlement and sass, not to mention casual indifference to the world in favor of a tiny glowing screen. But even I was taken aback by the display my wife and I saw in Target the other day. (Why do so many of my stories take place at Target? Why am I always seeing stuff to get good and twisted about at Target? More evidence, I think, that Target is the glowing sun at the center of our capitalist universe.)

We’re shopping, somewhere around the hair products aisle (it’s funny how much I still notice the hair products aisle, as if they made an ounce of difference for a baldy like me), when two teenage girls swing into the main aisle in front of us: one walking, the other riding a hoverboard.

Now, if you haven’t seen these things yet, you really are limited when riding one. You have to hold your body very still, lest you throw yourself out of balance and wipe out in dramatic and delightful fashion (just do a youtube search for “hoverboard crashes”, and laugh away a few hours). So you’re limited in the first place to a sort of zombielike pose. And, hey, since you’re standing still while you roll around the store anyway, why not entertain yourself on the go with a book? HAHAHAHA of course not. The hoverboard girl was, of course, staring into the magical world of her cell phone as she trawled the aisles of the ‘Get.

Then she and her friend had to turn around. Presumably because they forgot to pick something up, or — this is Target, after all — some subconscious advert suddenly took root in their brains and they realized they needed to go back and spend more money. So they turn, and I get a look at them face-on.

And the walking girl looks perfectly normal and average. Face blank but engaged, looking around, you know — signs of life. But the hoverboard girl lowers her phone for a moment and looks where she’s going. (Presumably so that she doesn’t end up in the search results for “hoverboard crashes.”) My god, her face.

If you were to try and personify “disinterest,” her face would have been a good candidate. If you wanted to try to explain to somebody what it felt like to watch C-SPAN for fourteen hours, you might start with a picture of her face. A torture victim, deprived of food and water for days and given to believe that there was no escape in this life, might adopt an affect as empty and hopeless as hers.

I wish I’d taken a picture, but I wasn’t a quick enough draw with my phone. Also, I’m way too much of a chicken to take a picture of somebody doing something dumb to their face. (Unless I know you. Then it’s open season.) The eyes were half-lidded, like the collapsing blinds in an abandoned house. The mouth, open and slack, as if waiting for a train of ants to march in and start retrieving crumbs. A tiny line of drool from lip to shirtfront would not at all have seemed out of place. She looked, in short, as if she had just emerged from a nice, deep coma, except for the whole standing-upright thing.

Honestly and truly, just add a little costume makeup and dirty up her outfit, and she’d have been a perfect extra on The Walking Dead.

zombie-apacalypse

And she had just come out of a coma, hadn’t she?

What use has your brain when everything that interests you and excites you is delivered straight to your face by a device you can carry around in your hand? What use have your legs when you can get wherever you want to go by leaning ever so slightly forward? (Except for stairs, I guess.)

Technology is awesome. The science behind these things is mind-shattering.

But for some, it all just seems so mundane.

Not that I think it will happen at this point, but here’s hoping I never lose the ability to wonder at how fargoing amazing the world around us is.

Bullets and Blowhards

Pavowski5 Comments

Another day, another shooting. People are going to rush to judgment, fingers will be pointed, pulpits will be pounded upon. The dead will be used as bricks in a wall built around our violently entrenched personal beliefs.

This is not a political site, and I don’t want it to be. But it’s impossible to look the other way when there are two high-profile shootings with multiple fatalities within days of each other.

There are discussions to be had about religious fundamentalism and what needs to be done about it.

There is something to be said about terrorism, foreign and domestic.

Maybe there’s even something to be said about our own society: how we don’t know each other, how we’re more and more isolated on our own islands, not knowing what lives in our neighbor’s hearts.

But let’s first of all take a look at a sickness in our country which is undeniably caused (or, at least, worsened) by such ready, easy access to guns, and let’s maybe, just maybe, not go straight to the assumption that the answer to the problem is more guns in the hands of more people.

JUMP-TO-CONCLUSIONS-MAT

And then, on the other hand, let’s go ahead and grant that guns in the hands of the right people are what brought this particular massacre to an early end.

Pray about it, if that’s your thing (but don’t forget that whoever or whatever you’re praying to allows this stuff to happen, day in and day out). But also recognize that the only thing that is going to stop tragedies like this (or, let’s be honest, lessen tragedies like this — people are people, after all) is by making it harder for the wrong people to get the guns. And that means we have a duty to vote against the cement posts in the ground who block any and all gun legislation at every turn.

 

 

Toddler Life, Chapter 331: Dinner Plans

Pavowski2 Comments

Parenting is nothing if not a slow ceding of control over your own life to humans less than half your size. You think you’ve got things more or less figured out, and then along come the sprouts and you realize that not only is the world not what you thought it was, but it’s incredibly and ridiculously more dangerous than you thought. I personally can no longer do the dishes without keeping a wary eye on the upturned silverware on the tray in the dishwasher. Incidentally, you also learn just how slippery certain surfaces can become when covered in chocolate milk or melted popsicle or (and this is happening alarmingly often of late) toddler vomit.

Control slips away by degrees.

First, it’s sleep — you are now slave to the sleep schedule of somebody who has no need for an alarm clock to wake up at 4 AM or earlier.

Then, it’s evening entertainment — gone are the days of late (or even evening) movies. Banished are quiet dinner dates. No more can you even enjoy a leisurely glass of wine while cooking. The rugrats steal all this away in great grabbing gusts.

But there was another milestone, another reckoning of just how far we’ve fallen, and it’s come over the past few weeks, because our oldest has started to develop a taste and preference for certain foods. Pizza is a big hit, though he knows he can’t have it all the time. Grilled cheese is a several-times-a-week favorite.

But you know the toddlers are running the house when you’re having bacon and eggs and pancakes for dinner on a Wednesday.

Respectable adult life, I hardly knew ye.