My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 2 #33, March 28, 1997

THE WORLD INSIDE YOUR HEAD

You know, solipsism is this theory that the world only exists in your imagination. I've always rejected that idea, for the simple reason my imagination is not that good. Besides, if I had that kind of power to create a world, well, I'm like Judith Viorst--the world would have healthier hamsters and basketball hoops three feet lower, and a hot fudge sundae would be a vegetable.

However, I am probably being too literal. It's more likely that solipsism is about how our minds create a unique but limited version of the world--we develop an idea of what the world is like, and then filter out any information that doesn't fit within that framework. We really don't believe what we see and hear, if what we see and hear does not make sense to us, like purple cows, or government conspiracies; we see BECAUSE we believe.

And if this is what solipsism truly is, then it's dead right. Because my understanding of the world is different from yours, and yours is different from your brother's and his is different from his wife's. In a very real sense, none of us is looking at the same world. We are all blind men examining our own small chunk of the elephant.

I think our learning process is a lot like putting together a double-sided jigsaw puzzle, without having pictures of what either side of the puzzle is supposed to look like when we're finished.

We begin life with pieces of information about the people we depend on to keep us alive. We learn routines: feel discomfort, cry, get picked up, get cuddled, get fed, go to sleep, start all over again--at least, if we're lucky. This pattern sets the basic color of our puzzle, our basic understanding of the world as a cheerful, bright colored place where people can be trusted and our needs will be met. Or, if we're one of the unlucky ones, as a scary, dark, shadowy place where nobody can be counted on, where the routines involve pain and betrayal, or, maybe worse, where there are no predictable routines at all.

As we learn language, we start becoming incredibly efficient collectors of information, but we are random and omnivorous in our collecting. For all intents and purposes, we are playing with a box of disorganized puzzle pieces, experiencing each little piece in a thorough, tactile way, touching it, smelling it, sticking it in our mouths. Children are bound to the present moment in ways adults can hardly remember, totally caught up in the "oh, wow" state of being.

What children are lacking is the frame to make sense of those random pieces. They can start seeing small sections of the puzzle, putting dishes and pots and silverware and stove into the classification, "kitchen," for instance. But the larger frame is harder to fathom--the frame that answers all those important "why?" questions.

Maybe education is something that really can't start from the frame and work inward. It's possible that you simply have to have a whole lot of bits and pieces of working knowledge before you can even start generalizing about it and creating a world with it.

At least I think this is what accounts for the wonderful flowering of talent and creativity at the onset of adolescence. Kids who have been struggling painfully with learning individual notes on an instrument, finally master enough basic technique to start playing actual music. Kids who have learned basic grammar and sentence structure, and have seen how other people write, start expressing themselves with style and elegance. All those pieces are finally starting to come together and make sense, like so many little yellow pieces that you suddenly see (A-ha!!) are all part of a lion. Those a-ha! moments are part of the thrill of childhood and adolescence.

As we get older, I think we spend more time developing our frame, and becoming committed to it. The frame is our understanding of how the world works. It may be shaped by our religion, or by our family's politics, or by science. The frame will tell us things like how men and women are supposed to behave, and whether we are in control of our own lives or at the mercy of inscrutable powers. It will tell us about our rights and our responsibilities, and how we should relate to the people who share our world. It will tell us how we fit into nature, whether we should control and manipulate it, or walk gently on the earth. Whatever the frame we develop, it will organize reality for us, make it more comprehensible.

That's important. Because being a kid is scary. The things that go bump in the night, the dark shadows in our closets when the night light is on--well, if we don't know what they are, we interpret them as monsters. We desperately need our grownups to cuddle us and comfort us and tell us that there are no monsters.

Denial IS one of the most important parts of the grown-up frame.

Because of course we know that there ARE monsters. We see the Ted Bundys amongst us. The frame of rationality is our way of making it through the world, of asserting that the monsters are exceptions to an orderly world. We may know perfectly well that our lives, our jobs, our health, our economic futures are subject to the whims of fate--we buy life insurance, after all--but we act as if we can control our destinies by the choices we make and the work we do. We HAVE to believe that the way we act, the choices we make, matter, or there's no reason for us to ever get out of bed in the morning. To believe that the world is totally random, when you are a grown up, is to be insane.

But there are a couple of problems with our frames.

One is that there are always pieces left over, experiences that don't fit. We can either look more closely at those pieces, think about the frame, and decide that we need to revise it. Or we can cling harder to that frame, and refuse to admit those bothersome leftover pieces are there.

The more rigid our frames are, the harder it becomes for us to deal with changing circumstances. During the Depression, for instance, the frame for a whole lot of men was that any man who did his job well would always be able to take care of his family. That frame could not admit giant economic forces beyond individual control. Many men experienced the depression not as the failure of an economic system but as their personal failure, and they spent the thirties desperately trying to figure out what they had done wrong.

The other problem is that our frames distance us from the world. In abstracting an over-all pattern, we lose our "oh, wow" response to each individual piece of our experience.

The world itself may be beyond our control. But our frames are of our own making, and nobody's frame is quite the same, nor is anybody seeing quite the same jigsaw puzzle as other people are seeing.

I have been unusually fortunate in my life, I think, and for me, the foreground of my jigsaw puzzle is very much like a John Holladay painting, a cheerful, interesting place, full of busy, ordinary people, doing ordinary things, but full of fascinating, absurd little details--you see, he's always reminding us we need to pay close attention to our lives, because in the midst of the ordinary, amusing and amazing things are happening. In a John Holladay painting, look closely at the crowd at the Detroit Lions game, because Frankenstein turns out to be a Lions fan. Holladay is a man who has managed to keep his "oh, wowness" intact, and to share it with us.

As I said, that's the foreground of my jigsaw puzzle. The background, far off in the distance, is a bit more Tolkienish. I've dealt with my share of orcs and goblins in the past, and I know full well that that you can never really kill them. They may be vanquished for a while, but they're always lurking in the background, biding their time, waiting for another opportunity. It's not like I don't know that awful things happen. But they're not happening to me at this exact moment, so I plan to enjoy every "oh, wow" while I can.

Your jigsaw puzzle may look more like a Renoir or Van Gogh, or an Andy Warhol sort of sideshow, or even like The Scream, and your puzzle has as much truth as mine. No single one of us is entirely right about the world. That is why our diversity is a strength, not a drawback. We all have a unique view of our own little hunk of the elephant, and it's important for us to pool our information in order to find out what the elephant really looks like.

Preferably before it becomes extinct.

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