The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time (10 page)

Most of the words we use often, like house and car and tree, are easy to say. Migratory is a word we don’t use nearly so much, and saying it can sometimes make you feel as if your teeth are stuck together with toffee. If birds were called “migratories” rather than “birds,” we probably wouldn’t talk about them nearly so much. We’d all say, “Look, there’s a dog!” or “There’s a cat!” but if a migratory went by, we’d probably just say, “Is it teatime yet?” and not even mention it, however nifty it looked. But migratory doesn’t mean that something is stuck together with toffee, however much it sounds like it. It means that something spends part of the year in one country and part of it in another.

Brandenburg 5

Whatever new extremities of discovery or understanding we reach, we always seem to find the footsteps of Bach there already. When we see images of the strange mathematical beasts lurking at the heart of the natural world—fractal landscapes, the infinitely unfolding paisley whorls of the Mandelbrot Set, the Fibonacci series, which describes the pattern of leaves growing on the stem of a plant, the Strange Attractors that beat at the heart of chaos—it is always the dizzying, complex spirals of Bach that come to mind.

Some people say that the mathematical complexity of Bach renders it unemotional. I think the opposite is true. As I listen to the interplay of parts in a piece of Bach polyphony, each individual strand of music gathers hold of a different feeling in my mind, and takes them on simultaneous interweaving roller coasters of emotion. One part may be quietly singing to itself, another on an exhilarating rampage, another is sobbing in the corner, another dancing. Arguments break out, laughter, rage. Peace is restored. The parts can be utterly different, yet all belong indivisibly together. It’s as emotionally complex as a family.

And now, as we discover that each individual mind is a family of different parts, all working separately but together to create the fleeting shimmers we call consciousness, it seems that, once again, Bach was there before us. When you listen to the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, you don’t need a musicologist to tell you that something new and different is happening. Even two and three quarter centuries after it actually was new, you can hear the unmistakable thrumming energy of a master at the height of his powers doing something wild and daring with absolute self-confidence. When Bach wrote it, he put himself at the harpsichord instead of the viola he more usually played in ensembles. It was at a happy, productive time of his life when he was at last surrounded by some good musicians. The harpsichord traditionally played a supporting role in this kind of group, but not this time. Bach let rip.

And then it makes its move—running ... hurtling ... flying ... climbing ... clambering ... pushing ...

panting ... twisting ... thrashing ... pounding at the ground ... pounding ... pounding ... suddenly breaking away, running onward desperately, and then, with one last little unexpected step up in the bass, it’s home and free—the main tune charges in triumphantly and it’s all over bar the weeping and dancing

(i.e., the second and third movements).

The familiarity of the Brandenburgs should not blind us their magnitude. I’m convinced that Bach is the greatest genius who ever walked among us, and the Brandenburgs are what he wrote when he was happy.

Penguin Classics Vol. 27: Bach—

Brandenburg Concertos 5 & 6, Violin Concerto in A Minor (English Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Benjamin Britten)

THE

UNIVERSE

Frank the Vandal Things are rather complicated by the fact that one of them is an electrician called Frank the Vandal. That is, his friends, if he has any that aren’t in hospital, call him Frank, and I call him Frank the Vandal because every time he needs to get at any bit of wiring, he tends to hack his way through anything else that’s in the way to get at it—plasterwork, woodwork, plumbing, telephone lines, furniture, even other bits of wiring that he’s put in himself on previous raids. He is, I am assured, very good as an electrician, though I think he is maybe not very good as a human being. But I’m digressing here from the point I was trying to make, and have rather lost the thread because Frank just cut the power off since I did the last save. So, where was I? Ah yes. The house was virtually a complete wreck when I bought it. Not quite as much a wreck as it is when Frank’s been here, but nevertheless, it was pretty much an empty shell into which walls, floors, plumbing, and so on had to be put. When the walls have to be built, an expert (or so I’m told—not so sure about that myself, but in principle an expert) bricklayer comes into the house and builds them. I need floors and stairs and cupboards and things, so a carpenter, whistling a merry carpenter’s tune, comes round and plies his trade. Then a plumber comes round and dittoes. Then Frank the Vandal comes round to wrench some wiring into place, and of course the carpenter and plumber and so on have to come round again and make extensive repairs. I’m going to have to drop the subject of Frank because he’s not a part of the analogy I am by slow degrees attempting elegantly to construct. It’s just that he preys on my mind a bit at the moment and it’s difficult not to sit here feeling nervous while he’s in the house. So forget Frank. You’re lucky. You can.

Now the point is this. The house is here. Building this house is the purpose of the whole exercise. If I want anything done in it, I pick up the phone (assuming Frank hasn’t hacked through the line trying to get at a light switch) and someone comes round to the house and does it.

If I want to have some cupboards installed, I don’t have to do the following: I don’t have to have the house completely dismantled, shipped up to Birmingham where the carpenter is, put together again in a way that a carpenter understands, then have the carpenter work on it, and then have the whole thing dismantled again, shipped back down to Islington, and put together again so that it works as a house that I can live in.

So why do I have to do that with my computer? Let me put that another way so that it makes sense.

Why, when I’m working in a document in one word processor, do I keep on finding that if I want to do something else to the document, I have virtually to dismantle the document and ship it over to another word processor that has a feature I need that the first one doesn’t? (Why don’t I just use the second word processor? Well, because it doesn’t have other features that the first one does, of course.) Or, if I want to put a picture in it, why do I have to go off to another program entirely and do the picture there, and then go through all the mind-numbing palaver of discovering that for some reason the WP I’m using doesn’t know how handle graphics in that particular format, or claims that it does, but then just goes all black and sulky or makes the machine go bing when I actually ask it to. In the end I have to paste all the various bits into PageMaker, which then refuses to print for some reason. I know that MultiFinder has made all this a bit easier, but it’s really just the equivalent of making Birmingham easier to get to, if you follow me. I don’t want to know about PICT files. I don’t want to know about TIFF files (I don’t. They give me the willies.) I don’t want to have to worry about what file type to ask MacWrite II to save my work in so that I can get Nisus to read it and run one of its interminable macros over it. I’m a Mac user, for heaven’s sake. This is meant to be easy.

The Mac started out as a wonderfully simple and elegant idea (give them so little memory that they won’t be able to do anything anyway), and it’s time that that degree of simplicity could be brought to bear on the much, much more powerful and complex system that the Mac has now become.

1. Turn on the machine.

2. Work.

3. Have a bit of fun provided I’ve done enough of 2, which is rarely, but that’s another issue.

When I say “work,” I mean I want to be able to start typing on the screen, and if I feel like putting in a drawing, I draw on the screen. Or I bring something from my scanner onto the screen, or I send something from my screen to someone else. Or I get my Mac to play the tune I’ve just written on the screen on a synthesiser. Or, well, the list obviously is endless. And if I need any particular tool to enable me to do anything complicated, I simply ask for it. And I mean simply. I should never have to put away the thing I’m working on unless I’ve actually finished it (fat chance, say my publishers) or want to do something else entirely.

What I’m talking about is the death of the “application.” I don’t mean just when they “unexpectedly”

quit, I mean it’s time we simply got rid of them. And getting hold of the tools I need should be as simple as pasting a button into HyperCard.

Ah! HyperCard!

I know it’s unfashionable to say this, because a lot of people feel that HyperCard simply isn’t powerful enough to do useful work in. It is, after all, a first stab at an idea that’s in its infancy. The list of things you can’t do with it is almost as long as the list of macros in Nisus. (What are all those things? The very act of pulling down the macros menu causes lights to dim all over North London.) But it’s a sensationally good idea, and I would dearly love to see something like it become the whole working environment for the Mac. You want the number crunching power of Excel? Paste it in. You want animation? Paste in Director. You don’t like the way Director works? (You must be mad. It’s brilliant.) Paste in the bits you like of any other animation tools you find lying about.

Or even rewrite it.

If it’s properly written in object-oriented code, it should be as easy as writing HyperTalk. (All right. You can’t write HyperTalk. It should be easier to write than HyperTalk. Just point at the bits you like and click.) We should not have to be tyrannised by application designers who don’t know the first thing about how actual people do their actual work, we should be able to just pick up the bits we like and paste them in.

I’ve gone on a bit about electricians. I would now like talk about cupboards. One particular cupboard.

It’s a cupboard in the corner of my study, and I daren’t go into it because I know that if I go into it I will not emerge till the end of the afternoon and I will emerge from it a sad and embittered man who has done battle with a seething black serpentine monster and lost. The seething black serpentine monster is a three-foot-high pile of cables, and it both taunts me and haunts me. It taunts me because it knows that whatever cable it is that I want at any particular moment to connect one particular arcane device to another particular arcane device is not to be found anywhere in its tangled entrails, and it haunts me because I know it’s right.

Take my current situation as an example. In order to be safe from Frank the Vandal, I have transferred this article onto my portable Mac (I know, I know, you hate me. Listen. We’ll all have one in the end.

They’ll bring the price down, trust me. Or rather, don’t trust me, trust Apple. Well, yes, I see your point.

Please can I get back to what I was saying anyway?) and I have taken the additional precaution of taking it round to a friend’s house which is entirely electrically isolated from anything that Frank may be up to.

When I get back home with the finished piece, I can either copy it onto a floppy disk, assuming I can find one under the debris of half-finished chapters on my desk, then put that into my main Mac and print it

(again assuming that Frank hasn’t been near my AppleTalk network with his chainsaw). Or I can try to do battle with the monster in the cupboard till I find another AppleTalk connector somewhere in its innards. Or I can crawl around under my desk and disconnect AppleTalk from the IIx and connect it to the portable. Or ... you get the picture, this is ridiculous. Dickens didn’t have to crawl around under his desk trying to match plugs. You look at the sheer yardage of Dickens’s output on a shelf and you know he never had to match plugs.

All I want to do is print from my portable. (Poor baby.) That isn’t all I want, in fact. I want to be able regularly to transfer my address book and diary stacks backward and forward between my portable and my IIx. And all my current half-finished chapters. And anything else I’m tinkering with, which is the reason why my half-finished chapters are half-finished! In other words, I want my portable to appear on the desktop of my IIx. I don’t want to have to do battle with cupboard monsters and then mess about with TOPS every time I want that to happen. I’ll tell you all I want to have to do in order to ge my portable to appear on the Desktop of my IIx.

I just want to carry it into the same room.

Bang. There it is. It’s on the Desktop.

This is Infra-Red talk. Or maybe it’s microwave talk. I don’t really care any more than I want to care about PICTs and and RTFs and SYLKs and all the other acronyms, which merely say, “We’ve got a complicated problem, so here’s a complicated answer to it.”

Let me make one thing clear. I adore my Macintosh, or rather my family of however many Macintoshes it is that I’ve recklessly accumulated over the years. I’ve adored it since I first saw one at Infocom’s offices in Boston in 1983. The thing that has kept me enthralled and hypnotised by it in all that time is the perception that lies at the heart of its design, which is this: “There is no problem so complicated that you can’t find a very simple answer to it if you look at it the right way.” Or, to put it another way, “The future of computer power is pure simplicity.” So my two major wishes for the 1990s are that the Macintosh systems designers get back to that future, and that Frank the Vandal gets out of my house.

MacUser magazine, 1989

Build It and We Will Come I remember the first time I ever saw a personal computer. It was at Lasky’s, on the Tottenham Court Road, and it was called a Commodore PET. It was quite a large pyramid shape, with a screen at the top about the size of a chocolate bar. I prowled around it for a while, fascinated. But it was no good. I couldn’t for the life of me see any way in which a computer could be of any use in the life or work of a writer. However, I did feel the first tiniest inklings of a feeling that would go on to give a whole new meaning to the words “disposable income.” The reason I couldn’t imagine what use it would be to me was that I had a very limited idea of what a computer actually was—as did we all. I thought it was a kind of elaborate adding machine. And that is exactly how “personal” computers (a misleading term as applied to almost any machine we’ve seen so far) were for a while developed—as super adding machines with a long feature list. Then, as our ability to manipulate numbers with these machines became more sophisticated, we wondered what might happen if we made the numbers stand for something else, like for instance the letters of the alphabet. Bingo! An extraordinary, world-changing breakthrough! We realised we had been myopically shortsighted to think this thing was just an adding machine. It was something far more exciting. It was a typewriter!