Looking for Meaning in the Ocean Below

Made it all 5,200 miles or thereabouts from the windy, cool shores of Uruguay to the warm, humid farm, pulling up mid-morning following my red-eye flight to Miami, then the short second leg up to Charlotte.

The flight was only around half-full, which meant I enjoyed a short row to myself allowing for an opportunity to grab a few hours of not-entirely-restful-but-adequate sleep along the way.

As there weren’t any back-of-the-seat, in-flight movies coming down, I correctly anticipated that would be the case going back as well, and so planned ahead a little by loading a copy of the 1972 sci-fi film Solaris onto the laptop. It’s an adaptation of the 1961 novel by Stanislaw Lem, a book and writer I’ve always liked.

I’ve written here before about Lem, in particular about the Polish writer’s 1968 novel His Master’s Voice, whose stories and novels encourage the reader to think a lot about what exactly makes us human, how we communicate with one another, the role of technology in our lives, and the place of humans in the larger context of the universe. In other words, wholly appropriate stuff when hurtling in a metal tube over land and water seven miles high.

Solaris is a curious book, involving the exploration of a planet (Solaris) that has been determined to be “sentient.” Its distinguishing feature is a huge ocean covering it that throbs and seems to be alive, and which additionally seems capable of affecting the thinking of those studying it, including inducing hallucinations causing them to experience all sorts of weirdly vivid, psychologically troubling phenomena.

Again, kind of appropriate while flying over an ocean.

The film by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky has a lot of affinity in style and tone with 2001: A Space Odyssey, similarly featuring spacemen in trouble. There’s a lot of long, slow passages with a mix of classical and electronic music (and sounds) making up the soundtrack. And like 2001, it’s long (nearly three hours) and a bit challenging perhaps for some viewers.

As it happened, I couldn’t quite meet the challenge. It kept my interest, but around two hours into it I found myself starting to lose the battle to stay awake while watching an extended shot of the protagonist, Kris, sleeping. It was too suggestive, I’m afraid, and I had to give in to my own need for rest. Thankfully my dreams weren’t as disturbing as his were, though.

I’ll watch the last hour soon, and probably go back to the novel again as Lem’s books always seem to reward rereadings. Seems like I’m pulling them back off the shelf for these poker tournament trips a lot, too, which end up encouraging a harmonious kind of reflection on similarly “deep” questions.

The world can seem smaller to you when you’re hopping from one point to another 5,200 miles away. But so, too, can such traveling about encourage rethinking your sense of self in relation to it.

Image: “IMG_0093” (adapted), Lucy Gray. CC BY-SA 2.0.

Seeking a Signal Amid the Noise

I am not a huge fan of science fiction, generally speaking, but I do have a few favorite authors to whom I return time and again. And I like very much what the best SF can do, namely, position itself as what the theorist Darko Suvin once called the “literature of cognitive estrangement.”

In Suvin’s definition -- outlined in his influential Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979) -- “cognitive” refers to the “science” half of science fiction, the half that concerns SF’s focus on logic and reason, while “estrangement” refers to the “fiction” making, that is, the creation of a new world that is different from the one in which the reader lives. That’s what defines the genre, says Suvin -- what makes a book “science fiction” and not something else. A work of SF presents us a new world, but does so in a way that still pays heed to rational, scientifically-sound explanations.

What happens then (Suvin goes on to explain) is that the reader does get to “escape” his or her world, in a way, while reading, but on finishing the fiction is then encouraged to return to his or her world with a questioning attitude. Thus you get SF books that function as cogent commentaries on various aspects of our reality. Some of these comment specifically on the pursuit of scientific knowledge and understanding, but some also give us things to think about with regard to the many other disciplines by which we try to understand our reality such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, poltics, and so forth.

Like I say, I have a few favorite SF authors and books, and the ones I like always do more than simply provide an “escape” but force me to take that next step and think about the world in which I live in a different way.

A couple of days ago I was reading Otis filling out one of those “memes” which included listing “15 Books I’ve read that, for whatever reason, stand out in my mind.” Otis’ list has about three SF titles on it, and I think if I were to fill out such a list mine would also include a few SF books, though not the same ones.

My list would include Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), a time-travel book about slavery that some (including Suvin, I’d guess) might argue isn’t technically SF but fantasy. It would also include Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth’s brilliant, witty satire on crass commercialism called The Space Merchants (1952).

I’d additionally be tempted to include Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint (1959), which starts out as a very realistic -- even somewhat mundane -- narrative about a not-so-inspiring hero whose main talent is an uncanny ability to solve the daily puzzle in his local newspaper. Then, about halfway through the novel, we -- along with the hero -- come to realize nothing is what it seems. (I'll say no more, but think The Truman Show or other, similar stories that were undoubtedly influenced by this novel.) Simply an amazing book, really, that like the other two “for whatever reason” tends to “stand out in my mind.”

There’s a fourth SF book I’d definitely include on the list, one by the Polish author Stansilaw Lem titled His Master’s Voice (1968). Lem is best known for a book called Solaris (1961) from which a couple of films have been made. I also recommend that book, as well as the 1972 film by the Russian director, Andrei Tartovsky. But the Lem novel I keep going back to is His Master’s Voice.

I took His Master’s Voice to Vegas this summer, actually, and was rereading it beside the pool on those days off from helping cover the World Series of Poker for PokerNews. And, in fact, the point of this here post was to suggest at least one of the ways Lem’s book -- set in the Nevada desert, in fact -- might be said to relate to the experience of playing poker.

His Master’s Voice is presented as an autobiography by a mathematician named Peter Hogarth, a person who becomes involved in a governmental program called “His Master’s Voice” (abbreviated as HMV), the object of which is to try to decipher what is thought to be a message from space, delivered in the form of a neutrino emission. The set-up perhaps calls to mind those various “SETI” (“Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence”) projects in which people use computing power and other means to try to glean out some sort of communication coming to us via the skies.

It is the presence of what seems to be some sort of pattern in the emission that leads many to believe that some entity has sent it as a message -- “that behind the object of investigation there indeed stands a Someone” -- and the HMV project is created to figure out just what the message says. The novel takes some surprising twists, with the message alternatively being understood as instructions for the creation of a new, previously unknown life form as well as a recipe for a weapon of mass destruction. Ultimately, the book -- which is very academic in tone and almost reads like a philosophy text at times -- ends up making a lot of profound observations about the ways humans interact with one another, particularly the ways we “communicate” (or fail to).

I guess the aspect of His Master’s Voice that most directly makes me think of poker has to do with this effort to seek out patterns -- a “signal” amid the “noise” -- and interpret them in ways that make sense to us. At the poker table, we watch an opponent’s behaviors and actions, we make note of betting decisions and amounts, and we build some sort of understanding of what “message” that player is sending to us.

The fact is, though -- and Hogarth (the narrator) kind of insists on this point throughout the book -- any “message” is going to be imperfectly delivered and imperfectly understood. Hogarth often stops and points out how “one’s personal experience in life is fundamentally unconveyable. Nontransmittable.” He acknowledges repeatedly that his memoir is riddled with gaps and references to things that are “unconveyable.” And Hogarth also knows that even what he does manage to convey will likely be understood differently than he intends. Thus is the HMV project also doomed to fail, in Hogarth’s view.

So, too, are our efforts to read others’ messages at the poker table always imperfect, unfinished, taken from inadequate sample sizes. We may still profit from them, but we can’t ever really come away with an utterly absolute, unequivocal understanding of the meaning of others’ “messages.”

Indeed, I am aware that it is very likely you’ve arrived at the end of this post still searching for its “message.” Take from it what you will, but do at least take these book recommendations as part of whatever communication it is I’m trying to deliver.