“Watch what you’re doing.”
- Advice from a Jewish mother
The book that changed my life was not Catcher in the Rye or The Teachings of Don Juan. To my credit, it also was not the infamous How to Pick Up Girls.
It was a little known publication from Hayden Book Company in New York entitled How to Build a Working Digital Computer. The book was an extraordinary introduction into the world of information programming and with it you could do precisely what the title promised. Following the directions and diagrams, it was actually possible to build a functioning computer from paper clips, screws, tape, old thread spools, wood, scraps of wire, flashlight bulbs, batteries, and other dirt cheap items.
The result was a bricollage of odds and ends.
The word bricollage was used by the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss to describe a certain kind of creative mechanic – a bricolleur – a handyman who could make things and create tools and devices out of a cartful of junk. The term has now come to mean a certain kind of rough-and-ready practicality, an ability to solve problems with the materials at hand. NeoYankee ingenuity for example.
I spent months working on that computer project and ended up with a contraption that resembled a Boy Scout's version of a spaceship console. Protruding screws, bent paper clips, flashing flashlight bulbs...it really looked quite ridiculous. But with a certain amount of manual intervention, the computer could be used to add, subtract, divide, and multiply. It could even be programmed to solve simple logic problems.
All the basic elements of the digital data drama were there to be understood from the inside out...core memory storage, logic switches, input and output, binary coding and decoding. Don't get the wrong picture; I was never a geek in a garage. How to Pick up Girls was actually my second most influential book. What stayed with me was not the romance of Boolean logic but the idea that you could assemble ordinary, real-life stuff into something that could compute. That was amazing to me and a great lesson in Gizmotics 101.
I owed this to my mother because it was she who taught me about life with machines. My mother was the one who found the book and gave it to me as a present. She believed in hands-on learning. She made sure that I knew how to cook a chicken as well as write a check, that I went to classes in cha-cha as often as karate, and that I knew the rules of conversation along with those of baseball. Ironing pleats, table manners, multiplication tables. It was the kind of study that made you fit for the world.
She also bought me chemistry sets, construction toys, anything that would introduce me to the workings of things…because she liked them herself. The best lessons though were not in construction but deconstruction. My mother was a spare time disassembler. A taker-aparter. With the TV on but barely watched, she used to take apart broken devices and look inside. It was a passion of hers, this unbuilding, the way other mothers might sort their recipes. In fact, she used to get so absorbed that she rarely turned it into a teaching opportunity, as she did with most other things. But I got the point anyway.
She was not a technician or engineer; she had no degree in mechanics. No fancy tools or theories. Just a sixth grade teacher with a screwdriver. But like all teachers, she had that intrepid belief in the power of curiosity. This hobby of hers was a kind of homage to human ingenuity. Her heroes were all the tryers and tinkerers of the world, both known and forgotten...Beulah Henry with all her patents, Robert Goddard inventing rocketry in the desert, George Washington Carver and his peanuts.
I well recall her sitting at the kitchen table in the evening, unscrewing screws to get at the guts of some toaster, telephone, sunlamp. I am sure she had no idea what she might find inside, let alone what to do when she found it. I used to think that she was trying to fix the thing in her role as home repairmom. But as I look back on it now, I know that few things she opened up ever worked again, because she was not mending at all, she was meandering, satisfying her own sense of wonder.
I saw the joy she felt in doing it, in finding out what was inside, in seeing the way things got put together. Maybe this kind of deconstruction was a way of coping with the disruptions of her life, searching for reasons. Yet it was this courage to look, this possibility of understanding, that ended up as her most important lesson of all.
She was an amateur gizmotician, probing and poking to see how things worked. A fiddler on the loose with no goal greater that the idle pleasure of delving. What was inside the telephone that made the voices come out? How did the clock know when to move its hands? What happened when you pushed the buttons on the calculator?
I doubt that she ever really answered these questions. And if she did, she certainly never explained it to me. No matter. The point was in the searching not the finding. But what I did come to understand perfectly well was that there were nuts and bolts to things. That everything was built up. That mechanisms were human-made no matter how mysterious. No ghosts, no gremlins. Whatever she had in hand was just a device, invented by someone, maybe at a kitchen table like ours; perfected perhaps by some woman who went to work; assembled by some fellow with a family.
What I came to see was that machines are extensions of our ordinary lives, our hopes and dreams. And that they have inner workings just like us, sometimes fixable, sometimes not. That even as the Gizmos immerses us in its complexity, machines are still reflections of our human nature.
It is in that quiet moment just after something breaks that I think of her most. As the notion to open the thing up and see what’s what begins to form in my mind, I feel her presence. The stubborn resolve, the faith in discovery, the understanding that every understanding is a joy.
And most of all her hand one mine as if to say:
"Life is hard, this we know. Now go and get the screwdriver."
No comments:
Post a Comment