The Most Human Human (33 page)

T. S. Eliot says in his famous 1915 poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” Given the claws, we imagine the rest of the crustacean’s body quite clearly, whereas if he’d said “I should have been a ragged crab,” we would
know
the claws were there, of course, but they’d be less vivid, fuzzed out, lower resolution.

Similar to synecdoche is the use of “enthymemes,” a technique in argumentation where you explain a piece of reasoning but leave out a premise (because it’s assumed to be understood) or the conclusion (because you want your audience to derive it on their own). An example of the former would be to say “Socrates is a man, so Socrates must eventually die,” where the obvious second premise, “All men must eventually die,” is left unstated. Leaving out a premise, when you’re confident that your interlocutor can fill it back in, speeds things up and avoids stating the obvious.
¹³
And leaving off the conclusion can produce drama, leading the audience all the way up to a point but letting them come to it themselves: “Well, Socrates is a man, and all men must eventually die, so …” There’s some evidence that in courtroom closing statements and classroom lectures, making the
audience (jurors or students) assemble the conclusion or “punch line” themselves is more engaging and therefore makes a greater impact. (This assumes, however, that they arrive at the conclusion you intend. Other conclusions—e.g., corpses
are
ticklish!—may be possible; this is the lossiness of enthymemes.)

Similarly, when we use the technique of “aposiopesis,” a technique popular among screenwriters and playwrights where a thought or line of dialogue is suddenly broken off—

You can think of
criticism
as compression too: a work of literature must strain to survive and outlast its own marketing and its own reviews, which threaten, in a sense, to deliver a lossy compression of the book itself. Anything said about a piece of art enters into competition with the art itself.

People complain from time to time about folks who read the Cliffs-Notes to a book, or reviews or essays about a book, but don’t read the book itself. Hey, if the information density of
Anna Karenina
is low enough that a review 1 percent as long conveys 60 percent of the form and content “gist” of the book, then it’s Tolstoy’s fault. His readers are human beings with only twenty-eight thousand days or so separating birth and death. If they want to read the lossy gloss and move on, who can blame them?

Likewise for conceptual art: who needs to
see
a Duchamp toilet when you can
hear
about one so much faster and extract most of the experience from that? Conceptual art might be, for better or worse, (definable as) the art most susceptible to lossy compression.

“Show, don’t tell” is the maxim of many a creative writing workshop. Why is that? Well, for one, it’s information entropy. When we
talk about a missing tooth, we can be led by that single image, in the right context, to imagine an entire bygone childhood era, an entire history of spousal abuse, or—as is the case in the chilling C. D. Wright poem “Tours”
¹⁴
—both at once. Whereas being
told
that a spouse has long been abused, or that a daughter is growing up, might not get us to imagine something as specific and vivid as the missing tooth.

But, as an argument for showing over telling, this line of thinking shouldn’t be allowed to become dogma; it’s an
empirical
question, ultimately. There are indeed times when the information entropy of telling exceeds that of showing. When we as writers or as speakers encounter them, we need to bend to the higher rule.

An author who has mastered this is Milan Kundera. When he needs to “say” something to the reader in one of his novels, he doesn’t construct an elaborate pantomime in which his characters, interacting with each other, subtly convey it: rather, he, Kundera, just steps in and says it. (“As I pointed out in Part One …”) How sublime! Imagine a street mime giving up on the exasperating charades and saying, simply, “I’m trapped in a box.”

David Shields writes, “As soon as a book can be generically located, it seems to me for all intents and purposes dead … When I’m constrained within a form, my mind shuts down, goes on a sitdown strike, saying, ‘This is boring, so I refuse to try very hard.’ ”
Generic
might just be another term for
low-entropy
. In fact, low entropy may be what genre
is
—a kind of prototype or paradigm, a rutted wagon road through the Shannon Game. Roger Ebert observes that when an action hero comes under machine-gun fire, there is a drastically lower
chance of him coming to harm than, say, if he’s attacked by knife. Most viewers subconsciously understand this. Indeed, any piece of art seems to invoke with its inaugural gestures a rather elaborate framework of expectations—by means of which its later gestures tend, on the whole, to be less and less surprising. The mind gradually sits down.

You might have noticed in my Shannon Game attempts that the beginnings of words tend to have higher entropy scores than the latter parts. Matt Mahoney’s research at the Florida Institute of Technology has shown that the best text-compression software appears to do better on the second half of a novel than the first. Does this suggest, I wonder, that entropy may be fractal? Do novels and films display the same spike-and-decline pattern that words do?

And for that matter—considering how comparatively bewildered infants are, how comparatively awestruck young children tend to be—does life?

Annie Dillard, in
An American Childhood
, explains her childhood thoughts about literature: “In fact, it was a plain truth that most books fell apart halfway through. They fell apart as their protagonists quit, without any apparent reluctance, like idiots diving voluntarily into buckets, the most interesting part of their lives, and entered upon decades of unrelieved tedium. I was forewarned, and would not so bobble my adult life; when things got dull, I would go to sea.”

I think our fairy tales prepare our children for this kind of existential panic about growing up. Nothing is more dispiriting than “And they all lived happily ever after,” which means, in information entropy terms, “And then nothing interesting or noteworthy ever happened to them again for the rest of their lives.” Or at the very least, “And then you can pretty much imagine what their forties, fifties, and sixties were like, blah, blah, blah, the end.” I don’t think it would be going too far to argue that these fairy tales sow the seeds of divorce. No one knows what to do after the wedding! Like an entrepreneur who assumed his company would have been bought by now, like an actor out of lines but aware that the cameras are still rolling … marriage, for people raised on Western fairy tales, has that same kind of eerie
“Um … now what?” quality. “We just, ah, keep on being married, I guess?”

“No one ever asks, ‘How did you two stay together?’ Everyone always asks, ‘How did you two meet?’ ” a husband, Eric Hayot, laments on an episode of NPR’s
This American Life
. The answer to how they stayed together, Hayot has explained, “is the story of like struggle, and, pain, sort of passed through and fought through and overcome. And that’s—that’s a story you don’t tell in public.” Nor, it would seem, do you ask about it; even this very segment, ending on these very words, focuses on how he and his wife met. How will we learn?

As for art, the rare work that manages to keep up its entropy for its entire duration can be electrifying. Krzysztof Kieślowski’s
Three Colors: White
is a great example of a generically un-locatable film: it’s part comedy, part tragedy, part political movie, part detective story, part romance, part anti-romance. At no point do you sense the shape of what’s to come. This is the subtlest sort of radicalism—not to push or break the envelope, necessarily, but to force a sort of three-card monte where one never becomes sure which envelope one’s in.
¹⁵

Douglas Hofstadter muses in
Gödel, Escher, Bach
, “Perhaps works of art are trying to convey their style more than anything else.” I think that when we’re reading a book or watching a film, we wonder maybe not so much “Will our hero be rescued?” as “Is this the kind of story where our hero will be rescued?” Perhaps we’re interested not so much in the future—
what will happen, what letter comes
next
—as in the present (perfect progressive):
what has been happening, what word have I been spelling
.

Movie previews—I love watching movie previews. Highest entropy you’ll get in the whole night. Each clip gives you a whole world.

The way that “ragged claws” are synecdoche for a crustacean, so are anecdotes synecdoche for a life. Poetry reviewers never hesitate to include quotations, samples, but fiction reviewers seem to prefer plot synopsis as a way to give the reader a lossy “thumbnail” of what to expect from the book. Two different lossy compression strategies, each with its own compression artifacts. Try it yourself, as an experiment: try a week of saying to your friends, “Tell me what you did this week,” and then a week of saying, “Tell me a story of something that happened to you this week.” Experiment with which lossy methods work better.

Entropy isn’t all about such emotionally detached things as hard-drive space and bandwidth. Data transfer is communication. Surprisal is experience. In the near-paradoxical space between the
size
and
capacity
of a hard disk lies information entropy; in the space between the
size
and
capacity
of a lifetime lies your life.

Entropy suggests that we gain the most insight on a question when we take it to the friend, colleague, or mentor of whose reaction and response we’re
least certain
.

And it suggests, perhaps, reversing the equation, that if we want to gain the most insight into a
person
, we should ask the
question
of whose answer we’re least certain.

I remember watching
Oprah
on September 11, 2007; her guests were a group of children who had each lost a parent on September 11, 2001:

She asks, but the question contains its own response. (Who would dare volunteer, “Yeah, maybe a little,” or, “Very, very gradually”?) The question itself creates a kind of moral norm, suggesting—despite evidence to the contrary, in fact
¹⁶
—that for a normal person the grief could not have diminished. The coin she’s flipping feels two-headed. I grew agitated as the interview went on:

What else can you possibly say to a question like that? First of all, I sincerely doubt that Oprah literally thought about the September 11
attacks every day for six years. Second, how do you expect someone to give an honest answer when you’ve prefaced the question like that? The guests are being
told
what they feel, not asked.

Disappointed, I clicked away. You could practically edit the children’s responses out and have the same interview.

Truth be told, I know from reading the transcripts that Oprah’s questions do become a little more flexible, and the children do start to open up (the transcripts alone choked me up), but it frustrated me, as a viewer, to see her setting up such rigid containers for their responses. I want to withhold judgment in this particular case: maybe it was a way to ease a group of young, grieving, nervous guests into the conversation—maybe that’s even the best tactic for that kind of interview. But on the other hand, or at least in another
situation
, it could come off as an unwillingness to really get to know a person—asking precisely that to which one is most confident of the answer. As a viewer, I felt as if my ability to understand these children was being held back by the questions—as was, I thought, Oprah’s. Did she even
want
to know what the kids really felt?

When we think
interview
, we think of a formalized situation, a kind of assessment or sizing up. But etymologically the word means
reciprocal seeing
. And isn’t that the aim of all meaningful conversation?

I remember registering a shock upon hitting the passage in
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
where Robert Pirsig says, “ ‘What’s new?’ is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question ‘What is best?,’ a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream.” I realized: even the basic patterns of conversation
can be interrogated. And they can be improved. Information entropy gives us one way in.

Just a few months ago I fell into this trap; recalling the Pirsig quotation got me out. I was detachedly roaming the Internet, but there was nothing interesting happening in the news, nothing interesting happening on Facebook … I grew despondent, depressed—the world used to seem so interesting … But all of a sudden it dawned on me, as if the thought had just occurred to me, that much of what is interesting and amazing about the world did
not
happen in the past twenty-four hours. How had this fact slipped away from me? (Goethe: “He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living hand to mouth.”) Somehow I think the Internet is making this very critical point lost on an entire demographic. Anyway, I read some Thoreau and some Keats and was much happier.