Breaking News: Reality Is Actually Elusive

I was talking to a good friend yesterday about how tricky it is to work with information. It's irritatingly elusive by its very nature.

If your job is to do a physical task, you can tell when it's done and you can tell whether or not you've done a good job. Either it stands or it doesn't. It's not about you, you're just responsible. Information, on the other hand, is fundamentally about you. To do things with it, you've got to understand it. This is as true for a file clerk as it is for a lawyer. There is no reason to file a bunch of printouts of crappy jpegs on copy paper with no identifying information about what this image might be. There is no reason to keep all the different parts of oh, an audit. Or an assesment. Or any other important event when information was produced in different little stacks behind the file cabinets, as if this information were acorns and the filer a squirrel.

I've been confronted a lot lately with this fact: information means different things to different people. This is really a blog about everything I do that is not art. It's an attempt at unifying my scattered existence and finding meaning in everything I do. But everyone else has it categorized under "art blog."

So there you go. It's everywhere.

This relativity, this idea that everything means different things to different people, is more of an engine in everyday life than I thought it was. In fact, the further I get from Socrates, the more I see that it was an almost monastic situation. Sure. There were people, emotions and expectations. There was lots of relativism. But the park itself exerted such a huge physical presence--such an overwhelming set of facts--that it always won. There are people who have worked for Mark for a long time who still see the park as it existed fifteen years ago. They have a strong relative truth. But it is so obviously not true (not because they are bad people or wrong, but because the park is so dynamic) that it was always easy to see what "right" is.

What I loved most about the park was the way it chopped relativism off at the knees. This is going to sound harsh, but I watched it dash the hopes of information-driven artists and smiled. Not because I delighted in their pain, but because I loved the way the park told the truth.

In fact, I learned many painful lessons about how to align yourself with what is true from that park myself.

I don't see that strong force anywhere else, even crossing Broadway over by Union Square. Pedestrians are smaller and squishier than cars, but the laws

(information)

surrounding us are so strong and are numbers are so huge that we walk in front of cabs with impunity. Like we are fucking Superman.

Comments

[paula]

I dont know who you are
or anything about that park
but wow i like your blog.
love your writing.

[almostgotit]

Hi Deborah. I followed you here from the good comment you left on Bob Sutton's blog... and am thus enjoying IMMENSELY the irony of your choice for the penultimate word of this good post :)

I like your previous post, too, on garbage, and manual labor. Good for you. Your hands may be less dirty now, but you've followed (what I think is) a much better progression "up the ladder," one that management guru Peter Drucker claimed is too-often missing now-a-days: used to be that managers worked their way up from working the line, making them better managers because they understood things from the line up. (vs. so many in current market, where the labor and management have come from, and been formed by, entirely different business cultures.)

And I love the image of having some built-in the groundedness (e.g, the park) that keeps pulling us back from our human tendency to relativize everything.

Will bookmark and come back to read more...

[21st Century Plowshare]

Thanks for reading you guys! Thanks especially to you, almostgotit, for moving past the It's About Art barrier. :)

Look forward to having you around...

[art?]

I thought we were always talking about love