Ishmael Gradsdovic Papers, part sixty-seven


10 October 2000

Ishmael wakes up and that is where we start, and we are with him until he goes back to sleep at night. We are introduced to him and then he is taken from us, and so this becomes a metaphor for our lives and the story of Ishmael becomes a story of Everyman.

But at the same time, the subdued - some would say banal - story line shows that this day in Ishmael's life is not trying to expand into something that can stand for a life. It's as if we are meant to reflect that every day is in its own way a lifetime that we are born into and die from - a lesson in reincarnation.

Except for this resemblance to the human life story, though, this Day isn't best seen as a story line with a beginning, middle and end, as if we were watching a play, but as a single piece that we are investigating a bit at a time - as if we were sweeping our eyes across a painting.

More important than any thing Ishmael does during his Day is the environment he does it in. A typical theme in this environment is the rectangle. Ishmael wakes up on a rectangular mattress on a rectangular bed in a rectangle-filled room which is itself in the shape of a cube with rectangular portals. He walks down a hallway formed of right angles and the first view of his face comes boxed by the rectangular frame of a mirror.

The city he lives in is, if viewed from above, arrayed as if seed crystals of square city blocks had been sparsely scattered into the landscape, from which grids had grown, only deviating from rectangle-shaped block at the boundaries between growing zones, where a diagonal or even meandering artery may appear.

Ishmael's eyes follow a square cursor as he types text into a square window on a rectangular computer screen in front of a rectangular white-board on a rectangular wall in a cubic office in a rectangular building in a business park that is as precise and geometric as a bee hive.

This proliferation of right angles may be seen as a way of pointing out the artificial, mechanical rigidity of Ishmael's surroundings, but I saw it in another way. Repeated over and over at multiple levels of magnification and abstraction, the rectangle seemed to become part of an organic, fractal whole.

But maybe the oppressive interpretation is what is meant after all. One recurring joke in ADITLOIG is borrowed from "1984": a sign that appears in various places throughout the day. It features the smiling faces of a mature white man and a young black woman, dressed conservatively and with rigid hair - both are newscasters for a particular television station and give the impression of having had their brains sucked out through thin glass catheters inserted into their skulls just below the hair-line at the backs of their necks, and of having submitted to this operation without complaint.

The sign reads, in big bold letters, "EVERYWHERE," and in smaller letters "you need us." The intended reading of course, being "We'll be everywhere that you need us," but the more Orwellian "We are everywhere! You need us!" starts ringing in your ears by the time Ishmael reaches the subway, by which time a good half-dozen of these signs have already come into view on busses, billboards, and in the station.

Ishmael has been carried down from the street level by escalator to the subway platform where he waits with dozens of other commuters to be carried away through underground tubes and expelled at his destination. He's surrounded by advertising for a medication designed to treat chronic heartburn.

So at the same time, he's in a situation that typifies why some people get heartburn and he's within a theatrical metaphor of the human stomach. It's a delightfully playful scene in this regard, and the lack of interesting activity on the part of any of the characters is balanced by the surreal view of the advertising itself.

The stairs that run parallel to the escalator are covered with an ad that staggers up on the sides of the stairs that don't get stepped on. The billboards that line the opposite side of the tracks are full of ads for the drug. And even the pillars that support the roof are wrapped floor to ceiling and three-hundred-sixty degrees 'round with advertising. It's as if a designer had decided to have the place "done" "in" this particular ad campaign.

The ads themselves are remarkable. They're a bit cagey as to what they are referring to (it's a while before we have enough information even to guess). Most of the ads contain no text at all, while a single one contains more words than this review, in two intimidating columns of fine type running the length of the poster. The textless imagery includes a deliriously happy woman in a purple dress pirouetting on the face of a clock, a blue sky with white fluffy clouds, and lots of purple gelatin capsules.

There is no way to gain a foothold in the land of coherent messages while viewing these ads. And the absurdity is doubled by the spectacle of commuters shuffling by, none deliriously happy or wearing purple dresses, appearing to take absolutely no notice of what the viewer is bunching eyebrows over.

Ishmael, too, exists in a non-purple obliviousness, and we begin to wonder: can I sympathize with this character?

Can I reach this character is the question we're meant to ask. Of course we can't communicate with Ishmael - he's a character we're learning about in the past tense - but in his everyman role he is our challenge: what can break in? The newscasters are EVERYWHERE, but they can't break in, the heartburn ads are impossible to assimilate under any preëxisting scheme of understanding, but even those fade to stucco.

There is no dialog at all through most of ADITLOIG, but it is primarily concerned with communication. The first words we see are posted above the bus driver: "Information gladly given but safety requires avoiding unnecessary conversation." The only human sounds on the bus are shuffling of feet, and the unanswered monologue of a delusional woman. This conflict between information and conversation, the fear of non-algorithmic ambiguity, and the difficulty of sane conversation, runs throughout ADITLOIG.

Ishmael is on his way to a job writing software designed for communications networks. He writes in a "language" that is spoken by noone, and that can communicate only what machines can understand. In his world, the very words "language" and "communication" are turned into mockery.

While at the job, he speaks with nobody whom he works alongside. When he gets home, he picks up mail that is addressed to former tenants he has never met. Human communication is conspicuously absent throughout ADITLOIG.

There's an especially poignant scene when he goes out to lunch. "Carl's Jr." is the name of a "fast food restaurant chain" of stations where people can go to purchase certain of a number of inexpensive, quickly-prepared and swiftly-eatable foods.

These stations typically have high turnover among their poorly-paid staff, and as a result there is an emphasis on easily-learned and -automated tasks - audible alarms that ring when the food is done, or conveyor belts that pull the food along under heating elements for just the right amount of time, for instance.

This emphasis extends to those employees who are positioned in such a way as to interact directly with the customer. The longer these interactions take, and the more ground they cover, the more costly it is to the chain and the more likely it is that the employee will be stranded outside of the learned script and will be forced to improvise, with unforseeable consequences.

The process of ordering a meal is therefore very tightly scripted indeed, and the customer shares the responsibility for learning the syntax. To assist in this, a menu of orderable items is prominently displayed at the station so that the customer can decide on one of the allowable meal items and learn its correct name-token before approaching the employee.

As a further simplification, there is a single name-token - in this case, "Western Combo" - that refers to a specific set of items, grouped in such a way as to make a plausible meal. This is what Ishmael chooses to order.

The Carl's Jr. chain has in its hubris added a complication to single-token combinations of this sort, however, with two adjectives that can be applied to them. One, the phrase "go big," instructs the order-taker to increase the size of two of the items in the grouping so as to make a yet larger meal. The other, "best value," is a further exaggeration of the order along the same lines. Ishmael is that hungry.

So he orders "a 'Best Value' 'Western Combo' please" - utilizing the adjective-token and noun-token as if in the English grammar, and ending the message with "please", which is used here as an end-of-message indicator like "-40-" in manuscripts or "over" in half-duplex radio communication.

He has already broken protocol somewhat, but the Carl's Jr. protocol has a "reset" switch for occasions like this. There's a start condition of sorts, initiated by the employee, that queries for an order context: "Is this for here or to go?"

Ishmael, chastened, chooses one of these answers and then repeats his order as before. But the grammar of Carl's Jr. is not complex enough to handle a modifier like "Best Value" directly adjacent to a menu item like "Western Combo."

The woman who takes the order immediately asks, "would you like to 'go big' or 'best value' on that 'Western Combo'?" Ishmael, noticing immediately that he has again violated protocol by inserting the adjective before it was requested, responds "'best value' please."

The rest of the order goes smoothly, but it dawns on us that the interaction just witnessed, although ostensibly (one wants to say "actually") between human beings, bears no more resemblance to human communication than does the computer programming that Ishmael was engaging in before lunch.

For comic relief, perhaps, we do get one scene of Ishmael entering a thoroughly non-scripted conversation while waiting at a downtown bus stop on his return commute.

A shortish, middle-aged man in a dark blue business suit and black sunglasses walks slowly along the sidewalk, holding a picket sign directly in front of him with both hands. The sign reads: "Impeach Clinton - 12 Galaxies Guiltied to a ZEGNATRONIC Rocket Society."

The man slows down as he notices Ishmael reading his sign, but he does not stop staring directly ahead. Ishmael steps into his line of sight and says, "I don't think I understand your sign."

"Clinton will be impeached."

"Why's that?"

"It's because of him that I never got paid for being a movie star. It's all arranged. He'll be impeached by 2003."

"Can you still impeach him after he's left office, or do you know something we don't?"

"We're going to impeach him and his history."

Perhaps this, too, is meant to be symbolic - to suggest that when Ishmael tries to find "language" and "communication" that match the meanings those words had before they were adopted by computers, he finds himself in the world of the mad.

In any case, that night, when Ishmael turns out his light and closes his round eyes against the sea of rectangles, it is clear that ADITLOIG has communed more humanly with more people than Ishmael himself did on that day.



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