The Most Human Human (13 page)

Ponge continues, “This is doubtlessly because I’ve never been able to define it clearly to myself in a conclusively representative or memorable way.” Perhaps the issue is, indeed, that what makes for good art eludes description, will remain, by its very nature or by its relationship
to
description, forever ineffable. But this misses the more important point. I doubt Ponge would scale his production if he could. Evenson clearly won’t. As former world chess champion Garry Kasparov puts it, “The minute I begin to feel something has become repetitive or easy, I know it’s time to quickly find a new target for my energy.” If, say, a musician like Carter Beauford is effortlessly and ceaselessly inventive on the drums, it is in part because he resolutely refuses to bore himself.

I remember having a conversation with composer Alvin Singleton, over dinner at an artists’ colony last year. He told me about a clever title he’d used on one of his pieces, and I jokingly suggested a clever twist on the title, I think some kind of pun, be the title of his next piece. I expected a chuckle; instead, he was suddenly serious. “No, I would never use the same idea twice.” For him this was no joke. Later I talked to him about how whenever I try to write music, the first thirty to forty-five seconds comes naturally to me, but then I get stuck. I wondered if, for him, whole songs just spring to mind the way short riffs and vamps spring to my mind. The answer was a steadfast negative. “What you call ‘being stuck,’ ” he said, a twinkle in his eyes, “I call composing.”

One of my friends, an architecture graduate student, was telling me about a famous architect—Australia’s Pritzker Prize winner Glenn Murcutt—who’s notoriously opposed to any kind of scaling-up of his output. The Pritzker jury clearly took note, saying, “In an age obsessed with celebrity, the glitz of our ‘starchitects,’ backed by large staffs and copious public relations support, dominates the headlines. As a total contrast, [Murcutt] works in a one-person office on the other side of the world … yet has a waiting list of clients, so intent is he to give each project his personal best.” Murcutt himself doesn’t find this scale-restraint, rare though it is, odd in the slightest. “Life is not about maximizing everything,” he says. His wariness of scaling applies not only to his own operation but to the designs themselves. “One of the great problems of our period is that we’ve developed tools that allow rapidity, but rapidity and repetitiveness do not lead to right solutions. Perception gives us right solutions.”

A fellow Pritzker-winner, French architect Jean Nouvel, concurs. “I think that one of the disasters in the urban situation today is what I call the generic architecture. It’s all these buildings, parachuted into every city in the world now—and now with the computer you have a lot of facilities to do that. It’s very easy. You can put three stories more or you can have a building be a little bit wider—but it’s exactly the same building.”

For Nouvel, too, the enemy is scaling (made nearly effortless by the computer), and the solution is found in perception. “I fight for specific architecture against generic architecture,” he says. “I try to be a contextual architect … It’s always, for a building, why this building has to be like
this
. What I can do here, I cannot—I cannot do in another place.”

“It’s great arrogance in an architect to think one can build anywhere appropriately,” says Murcutt. “Before starting any project I ask: What’s the geology, what’s the geomorphology, what’s the history, where does the wind come from, where does the sun come from, what are the shadow patterns, what’s the drainage system, what’s the flora?”

Of course not
every
wheel has to be reinvented—Murcutt allegedly memorized catalogs of standard building components early in his career, stocking his imagination with available details, priming it to look for new ways to use them. It is paramount that those uses be site-specific.

“I think every site, every program, has a right to a specific work, to a complete involvement of the architect,” Nouvel says. It’s better for the work, better for the site—but, no less importantly, it’s better for the
architects
. They, too, have a right to “complete involvement” in their work.

Most people, though, are not so involved—whether it is because they are prevented from doing so by the structure of their job or because (as with firms “parachuting” cloned buildings into city after city) they are complacent, thinking the problem already solved. For me, though, complacency—because it is a form of disengagement—is
a whisker away from despair. I don’t want life to be “solved”; I don’t want it to be solv
able
. There is comfort in method: because we don’t always have to reinvent everything at every minute, and because our lives are similar enough to others’ lives, the present similar enough to the past that, for example, wisdom is possible. But wisdom that feels final rather than provisional, an ending rather than starting point, that doesn’t ultimately defer to an even larger mystery is deadening. I won’t have it.
Perception
gives us right solutions.

I think of site-specificity as a state of mind, a way of approaching the world with senses attuned. The reason to wake up in the morning is not the
similarity
between today and all other days, but the
difference
.

Many of my all-time favorite movies are almost entirely verbal. The entire plot of
My Dinner with Andre
is “Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory eat dinner.” The entire plot of
Before Sunrise
is “Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy walk around Vienna.” But the dialogue takes us everywhere, and as Roger Ebert notes, of
My Dinner with Andre
, these films may be paradoxically among the most
visually
stimulating in the history of the cinema:

Sometimes there’s so much that needs to be said that the literal “site” disappears, becomes, as in
My Dinner with Andre
, “invisible.” Shawn and Gregory’s restaurant seems to be one of those restaurants that’s “nice” to the point of invisibility, as if any “holds” on their attention would be a distraction, as if (and this was Schopenhauer’s view) happiness consisted merely in the eradication of all possible irritants and displeasures, as if the goal were to make the diners consent that they’d enjoyed themselves primarily through the impossibility of any particular criticism. The restaurant makes it a point to stay out of the way.
⁶
And in this particular movie and situation, it works brilliantly, because Shawn and Gregory just riff and riff, out to infinity. (And in fact, the next time they “notice” the restaurant, it ends their conversation—and the film.)

But remember, Gregory and Shawn are old friends who haven’t seen each other in years; Delpy and Hawke are just, like Turing test participants, starting from scratch. It’s telling that in the sequel,
Before Sunset
, they walk around Paris, but Paris is much more “invisible” to them than Vienna was. They have,
themselves
, become the site.

Part of what makes language such a powerful vehicle for communicating “humanly” is that a good writer or speaker or conversationalist will tailor her words to the
specifics
of the situation: who the audience is, what the rhetorical situation happens to be, how much time there is, what kind of reaction she’s getting as she speaks, and on and on. It’s part of what makes the teaching of a specific conversational “method” relatively useless, and part of what makes the language of some salesmen, seducers, and politicians so half-human. George Orwell:

This is also what makes the meeting of strangers such a difficult place to defend against machine imitation: we don’t yet
have
the kind of contextual information about our audience that would enable us to speak more responsively and uniquely.

In these moments, where the metaphorical site-specificity of audience temporarily fails us,
literal
site-specificity may be able to help.

In
Before Sunrise
, set in Vienna when Delpy and Hawke are strangers and don’t even know what to ask each other, the city itself spurs, prompts, and anchors the dialogue by which they come to know each other. Professional interviewers talk about how helpful these site-specifics can be. Their stance on the
My Dinner with Andre / Before Sunrise
question turns out to be surprisingly firm. “It’s one thing to have lunch with a celebrity in some nice restaurant … It’s another when you can just follow that person around for a while and see them in action,” says
Rolling Stone
’s Will Dana in
The Art of the Interview
, where the
New York Times
’s Claudia Dreifus concurs. “Certainly no restaurants.”

At a Turing test, one of the things that every bot author fears is that the judge will want to talk about the immediate environment. What color is Hugh Loebner’s shirt? What do you think of the art in the lobby? Have you tried any of the food vendors outside? It’s extremely hard to update your program’s script that close to the contest itself.

I should think that a non-localized Turing test, in which participants don’t gather at a particular city and building but are connected to other humans (and bots)
at random
around the world, would be much, much more difficult for the humans.

The conversational encounters of the Loebner Prize are frequently compared to those between strangers on a plane; I think part of the reason this analogy appeals so much to the contest’s organizers (who of course are hoping for a close fight) is that planes are so
alike
. And seatmates have nothing really in common. But of course on a real plane the first thing you talk about is the city you’re leaving and the city you’re flying to. Or the book you notice in their lap. Or the funny
way the captain just said such and such. Site-specificity manages to get its foot in the door.

When a round of the Loebner Prize in Brighton was delayed by fifteen minutes, I smiled. Any deviation from the generic plays into the humans’ hands. As the round finally got under way and I began to type, the delay was the very first thing I mentioned.

Most of the classes an actor takes are about how to get the part, and how to prepare for opening night. For the college actor, that’s about all there
is
—the longest run of any show is typically two weekends, with many only scheduled for one or two shows total. The film actor is in a similar position: get it right and never do it again. But the professional stage actor might land a role that he or she has to reprise eight times a week for months, even years. How do you still feel like an artist in the tenth performance? The twenty-fifth? The hundredth?

(As Mike LeFevre in Studs Terkel’s
Working
puts it: “It took him a long time to do this, this beautiful work of art. But what if he had to create this Sistine Chapel a thousand times a year? Don’t you think that would even dull Michelangelo’s mind?”)

Art doesn’t scale.

This problem fascinates me, in part because I believe it to be the problem of living.

How do you still feel creative when you’re creating more and more of the same thing? Well, I think the answer is that you can’t. Your only choice is to create more and more different things.

One of my favorite theatrical events, and a yearly ritual since I’ve lived on the West Coast, is Portland’s Anonymous Theatre. One
night only, one performance only: the director has cast the show and rehearsed with each of the cast members for weeks—that is, rehearsed with each of them
separately
. They don’t know who else is in the show, and they won’t meet until they meet onstage. There is no set blocking—they must react dynamically and without much of a preset plan. There’s no rehearsal-dug ruts or habits between the actors—they must build their rapport and repartee in real time, with all eyes watching. It’s fascinating and sublime to watch this happen.