Words, words, words. That's what we're made of. Herewith some of my thoughts on what we're doing with them.

You don't know me.

All you know of me is what you read. I may be lying about any or all of it. Maybe I'm an AI that's trying (and possibly failing) to pass the Turing Test. Maybe I'm an alien from another planet, with more or less the same agenda. I might even be an agent provocateur hired by Homeland Security to sniff out potential dangers to the Red, White, and Blue.

What's that you say? You're pretty sure I'm none of these things? Of course you are, you clever person. How did you suss that out? You've probably figured that any programmer capable of designing an AI bot that could spout that much drivel would probably be crowing about it at the latest SuperGeeks'R'Us Convention. (I suspect you are right. Even a silly AI is one to be proud of.) An alien? Well, we don't really believe in them, do we? Anyhow, they're probably busy bothering more powerful folk than h2g2ers. As for agents provocateurs, Homeland Security have to vet them first – and do you really believe I'd pass the background check, what with my mentation? QED.

But hey, that still doesn't mean you believe in me, right? I mean, I might be a (semi-)sentient being who is presumed to be in possession of a) a computer and b) opposable thumbs, computer, for the typing on, but what does that prove? I could have made up every single anecdote I ever told you, and you none the wiser.

The same could be said of the stories you tell me. Isn't that cool? Isn't that fantastic? Instead of looking for forensic clues in our communications with one another, we are busy interacting with the content of our thoughts. Now, that's almost as much fun as you can have with your clothes on, nicht wahr?

Now, the only thing we can really say to – and about – one another is this: 'I agree to pretend I believe you exist, if you'll pretend to believe I exist. Then we can talk to each other. Or at least, pretend to.'

We pretend all sorts of things. We pretend we share an epistemology. We don't. Some of us probably think the 'truth is out there', while others may hold fast to the idea that Received Wisdom proceeds from Professor X, Pundit Y, or the Reverend Z. We don't care – as long as we're polite to one another, we can go on talking.

We pretend we live in the same mental universes. Heck, no. When someone says to me, 'I'm a literalist. I only believe what I can see,' I start spluttering like David Tennant's Doctor.

'What? What?   WHAT?'

Does that mean, I ask naively (the only way I know how), that if you see it on the telly you believe it?

'No. I know about CGI and Photoshop.' Oh. (Huge sigh of relief.) For a moment there. . .

This reminds of my greatest teacher, Miss Lindquist. Back in the 1960s, Miss Lindquist (not her real name, because she was a private sort of lady) taught me piano. And how to pronounce German. And oh, so many, many things about life, the universe, and everything. Miss Lindquist was born in Sweden in the 19th Century. She came to New York, where she thought the buildings were oh, so tall, when she was two. When she was an elderly lady with wispy grey-blonde hair and kind, soft blue eyes behind thick lenses, she lived in a magical house outside of Pittsburgh with her huge cat and her even greater mind. I first started dreaming about time machines when I was 15. I wanted to go back in time, you see, to when she was 15, and propose marriage. You may not believe this, but it is true.

I am sure none of those adolescent thoughts ever occurred to Miss Lindquist. She had thoughts of her own, though. A respectable member of the Presbyterian church, she was nonetheless thoroughly enlightened. She was puzzled that I didn't like Anna Karenina because I thought it awful that Anna would abandon her offspring – after all, this stuff was Literature. She was completely open and non-judgemental when I came back from university enthusing about the works of Oscar Wilde, particularly De Profundis. In other words, Miss Lindquist was not easily shocked and disliked prudery and narrow-mindedness. Miss Lindquist held out hopes for my mind, in spite of my lack of appreciation of Russian novelists. As a result, she was worried about my religious influences.

I only realised this when she asked me one day, rather diffidently, if my church believed the Bible to be 'literally true'. I replied that I supposed it did.

'But what does that mean?' she persisted.

I gave the matter some thought, then shrugged. 'Oh, you know. That the stories in the Bible really happened: Jonah got swallowed by a big fish, the Red Sea parted, that sort of thing.' Privately, I didn't care whether the stories were 'true' in a literal sense or not. They were true in the sense that you needed to suspend disbelief before you could get the good of them. At 15, I was insufficiently sophisticated as a talker to express this, though, and it wouldn't have been polite.

She nodded. 'But in the Bible, it says, "Our God is a rock." Does being literal require you to believe that God is really a rock?'

I laughed. 'I don't think so. That's just poetry.'

Miss Lindquist beamed. (Boy, could she beam. Her smile lit up galaxies.) 'Ah, that's all right, then,' she concluded. We went back to Schumann, and how to pronounce the word 'schön'.

Miss Lindquist was satisfied that I knew the difference between poetry and. . . well, what's in the newspaper. Which is not poetry, and may not even be true. I treasure her memory for that question, and all the others she asked me. My favourite Socrates.

As for the rest of you, I'm not sure you're there, but I'll believe in you. You seem to be there. And sometimes, some of the people we're meeting out there seem to be asking questions you and I don't particularly care to answer. If they don't know the difference between poetry and not-poetry, or if they only want us to 'prove something' to them, then, well, we don't have much to say, now, do we? But if we all open ourselves up to the stories we have to tell, we might – just might – learn something from one another.

I'll pretend you're there, if you'll pretend I'm there.

Writing Right with Dmitri Archive

Dmitri Gheorgheni

21.05.12 Front Page

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