Encounters with Strangers Posted by christian h., 22 May 2007 10:40 am

Encounters with Strangers (#2): Sculpture

By James Killus

Several years ago, I was walking up Folger Avenue towards San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley. The University of California owns a building that sits between Folger and 67 St. on San Pablo Avenue, or at least they did. They’ve been trying to sell it recently, and I’m not current on its status, but they still occupy a lot of it. The building itself is huge, and, as I understand it, actually straddles the boundaries of not just Berkeley and Oakland, but also Emeryville.
I was headed toward the offices of a non-profit that I was involved with at the time (that backstory is ‘way too complicated), but my path took me by the U.C. Berkeley surplus and overstock sales area, at 1000 Folger St., where they have auctions every Tuesday and Thursday. So there are often people loading stuff into trucks, vans, and whatever, starting at about 9 A.M. on those two days each week. There’s a lot of old surplus computer stuff that gets sold that way.
I was carrying a briefcase, which isn’t important to the story, but it’s part of the “sense memory.” I was passing by a guy who was loading a lot of surplus computer stuff into a panel truck, just as the pile of stuff he’d loaded shifted and began to topple towards him.
The wall of electronics included a lot of monitors. Imploding CRTs and glass everywhere: not so good. I stepped in and put my shoulder in an appropriate spot and halted the avalanche. I looked at the guy, who had an interesting combination of gratitude and terror on his face. I realized that he had no idea what to do next, as we were both holding up a wall of computer monitors that was trying to fall.
Okay, here’s where I get to brag a little. There’s a cluster of mental aptitudes that gets called things like “3-D visualization” and “geometrical intuition” and like that. I am nearly off the charts in this particular cluster of aptitudes. I can pack a car trunk or a suitcase like you wouldn’t believe, and I would have made a very good mechanical engineer.
So I shifted my body to where I was doing almost all of the job of keeping the stuff from falling, and I began giving him directions. Move that one over there. Now take that one down and put it one the ground. Now that one, no not that one, the other one. And so forth. We deconstructed the unstable pile in fairly short order, then I began helping him put the stuff back into a better arrangement, one that wouldn’t shift when the drove the truck to wherever he was going.
The whole adventure only took maybe ten minutes. At the end of it, the guy thanked me profusely, I smiled and said, “You’re welcome. It was actually kinda fun,” and I headed up Folger once more. Spring in my step? Probably.
The idea of altruism is considered to be problematic in evolutionary biology, economics, psychology, and moral philosophy. It obviously exists, yet these disciplines don’t feel that they adequately explain it. It may be noted that each of them also has its own special definition of what “altruism” is, one that excludes a lot of behavior that is normally called altruistic.
Part of this nomenclature problem stems from trying to exclude actions that benefit both others and one’s own self, with the notion of what constitutes “one’s own self” being the real slippery one here. Take my little adventure described above. Let me describe the ways I benefited from it.
There are many things that can ruin a morning, bad traffic, being awakened by a wrong number half an hour before it’s time to get up, seeing a dead dog in the road, or watching a tower of computer monitors come crashing down. That would have been quite unpleasant, even if no one wound up injured, and there was a real possibility of that happening.
Moreover, I got to show off a competency, not only at the time, but in the later telling of the tale.
There is also a very abstract pleasure that comes from making sculpture, and that was what I was doing, taking apart a defective sculpture and replacing it with one that was both aesthetically pleasing (to me, anyway) and utilitarian as well. And the sculpture, taken in the larger sense, was kinetic, deconstruction, reconfiguration, then the later driving and final disassembly. I didn’t get to witness the last part, but I’m pretty sure it turned out all right.
Also, the guy thanked me, which is a form of applause, validation, and better than a dead catfish under the driver’s seat.

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Responses to “Encounters with Strangers (#2): Sculpture”

  1. on 23 May 2007 at 9:11 am 1. Oaktown Girl said …

    It’s always such a great feeling when you happen to be at just the right place at just the right time to help someone out, especially if it’s with a rare or semi-rare skill that is very unique to you.

    Unlike most other people, however, whenever I have to jump in and “save the day” like that, I never let it go to my head because I’m just that good.

    Seriously, thanks for contributing to our “Encounters with Strangers” series. This was very enjoyable indeed!

  2. on 23 May 2007 at 10:10 am 2. spyder said …

    Okay, here’s where I get to brag a little. There’s a cluster of mental aptitudes that gets called things like “3-D visualization” and “geometrical intuition” and like that. I am nearly off the charts in this particular cluster of aptitudes.

    damn, yet another reason i must appreciate you, similar altering takes and capacity to re-engineer clusterfucks. This particular trait, of which you speak, provides my own chief source of a healthy income (retirement supplement) on summer tours. I too can spot up a few thousand cubic feet of equipment, and envision how it best loads in a 40′+ semi-trailer, to insure that what has to come out first, comes out safe and efficiently. Now if it would just get lighter, or is that old age????

  3. on 23 May 2007 at 10:19 am 3. James Killus said …

    I was reflecting on this during my commute drive this morning and it did strike me that this general sort of experience is a little like having a “superpower.” I think it’s one of the real world/fantasy connections that underlies the appeal of things like the X-Men, or Heroes.

    One that I’d really like to have, and don’t, is musical training, especially the sort that results in improvisational capabilities on multiple instruments. It’s probably one of the reasons why I’ve written a number of stories that involve music, though the fact that most of them are pretty dark bears some reflection.

  4. on 23 May 2007 at 10:27 am 4. christian h. said …

    Thanks for sharing that story, James. In my opinion, the difficulty in defining altruism shows the narrowness of individualism (by which I mean the point of view that society is a collection of “atoms” called individuals) - the very notion somehow suggests that an incentive is needed to help out a fellow human being, that doing so without it is somehow exceptional. I’m an optimist at heart. I think experience shows the opposite - to get people to not be altruistic, you need to warp human nature.

    I’m a mathematician, so popular imagination may suggest I have good spatial skills or geometrical intuition. Far from it. I do have a very good intuition for formalism, though (yes, such a thing exists). Totally unhelpful in the real world.

  5. on 23 May 2007 at 11:34 am 5. James Killus said …

    Actually, christian, I think that the difficulties that various fields have had in defining altruism is more a reflection of a failure of imagination and a limited ability to understand what is meant by “self” and “self interest.” For some reason, various schools of thought believe that “individualism” is achieved by amputating various aspects of the self.

    How one gets larger by subtraction is an interesting thought process. Mathematically, I suppose that it is possible to do so by eliminating “negatives,” but in Freudian terms, such negatives are usually determined by the superego, and the “subtraction” results in their repression into the unconscious, where such things become stronger, not weaker, requiring ever greater demands on psychic energy as time progresses.

    But hey, that’s just Freudianism. Much better to deny Freud and stick to a strict set of rules and maybe never even leave the house. Much safer that way. Meeting strangers is scary.

  6. on 23 May 2007 at 1:02 pm 6. Kiera PSI said …

    [Unlike most other people, however, whenever I have to jump in and “save the day” like that, I never let it go to my head because I’m just that good.]

    Now that I’ve picked myself up off the floor after recovering from my bout of hysterical laughter…I’ll have to agree that Oaktown Girl does jump in the save the day for people on a regular basis. I’ll leave the decision as to whether or not she’s “just that good” to individual judgment…and will swallow any residual snickers that might affect that judgment.

    I’m not quite so spatially gifted as James, though I certainly have unique visualization skills that mimic it to a good degree. My somewhat related “superpower” is in organization. I can organize almost anything and almost anybody, no matter how…recalcitrant, it or they might be.

  7. on 23 May 2007 at 1:13 pm 7. Seattle said …

    Did someone mention altruism? I don’t think that’s a current fashion trend-in this Cynicism R Us society we currently inhabit. Isn’t the preferred approach that we’re all motivated by self aggrandizement? Isn’t that why we no longer user the term, “people” and have substituted “consumer”? Isn’t it in the same vein that we accuse people who are strong enough to stay steady of weakness? Good is secretly bad, right is inevitably wrong? (Gee, is Seattle having a bad day?) Good people do good things with bad outcomes? (Name that film plot line….)

    A number of years ago I gave a stranger with a dead battery a hand. I told my son, “Always help people if you can.” He said, “Why?” I said, “It’s the right thing to do.” Take THAT, you sociologists, you psychiatrists, closest friends and relatives, co-workers and strangers in general! Ha HA!!

  8. on 23 May 2007 at 1:36 pm 8. Oaktown Girl said …

    I don’t think that’s a current fashion trend-in this Cynicism R Us society we currently inhabit. Isn’t the preferred approach that we’re all motivated by self aggrandizement?

    Quite right, Seattle. I’ve always felt that the folks promoting that theory the most are the ones who are that way themselves, and they just want to make themselves feel better by believing everyone else is motivated solely by the same naked self-interest that they are.

    Kiera said - My somewhat related “superpower” is in organization. I can organize almost anything and almost anybody, no matter how…recalcitrant, it or they might be.

    “No matter how recalcitrant” - true. Sometimes Kiera has to “retrunk” fools so they stay the hell out of her way while she gets the job done!

  9. on 23 May 2007 at 1:42 pm 9. spyder said …

    I think that the difficulties that various fields have had in defining altruism is more a reflection of a failure of imagination and a limited ability to understand what is meant by “self” and “self interest.”

    One of the things i was reading this morning, was a paper by Rorty critiquing Donald Davidson’s Theory of Charity. One of my past students had worked in this field at Stanford developing some computational hermeneutics for AI around charity; programming that which is ethically beneficial for the other against the “assumed” self-interest. My thoughts ring along the line that we disregard our own inherently natural relationship with “others;” a relationship that is entirely co-dependent and fundamentally necessary for survival, yet one that we constantly ignore and disregard until it slaps us in the face. We travel around with a plethora of species within us, requiring them to work together (charitably?) for our good health. We demand that we receive nutrition that is predicated on our need to be interdependent upon other species, but the incessent processing and packaging of it helps us to forget that we do so. All of these real world relationships are veiled in some illusory field of disconnect, or as James so well put it: a failure of imagination and a limited ability to understand. I would add ‘limited desire to make any effort to understand.’

  10. on 23 May 2007 at 2:19 pm 10. James Killus said …

    As long as we’re fleshing out the list, I’ll add:

    Secretly fearing that someone has taken advantage of us and is laughing about it behind our backs.

    Or even:

    Worried that someone else is having fun.

  11. on 23 May 2007 at 2:34 pm 11. JP Stormcrow said …

    I do think that “altruism” is a complicated subject for very good reasons. It is right at the core of much of religion and politics - especially with regard to who gets what treatment - do you attack, threaten, negotiate with, avoid, or help person X in situation Y? Let’s just say that as a species and as individuals we haven’t completely worked that one out yet…

    However, ignoring all of that huge mass of convoluted intermingling of biology, psychology and sociology, I will say that one of the “benefits” of just helping can be your own self image and esteem. Not a minor consideration - at times I flirt with maintenance of self image as being the grand unifying theory of human behavior. And I will say, without going into more detail, that I have several occasions where I did not lend a hand that haunt me to this day. However, in the spirit of the post, I will relate an instance where I did help, in a way that bordered on complete stupidity, but it did end well - (and years later I got to comment about it on a blog and feel good about myself…)

    After finishing a great backpacking trip in the Big Sur area, a friend and I drove up the road to Cone Peak. It is not one of the “precipitous plunge to the ocean” roads, but it was a narrow, dirt road with pretty good exposure at points. I was remarking to my friend that “Well, it’s not like you are going to just drive off the road.”, when we rounded a bend and came upon two kids who had very nearly done just that. They had backed out of a small siding, turned too sharply and were now sitting completely unnerved by the side of the road with their car barely balanced on three wheels. After several attempts characterized by a lot of inspired rock piling and wedging, and bumper standing by me (and “door open, ready-to-bail-out” “driving” by my fearless friend) we managed to get the car to a safe place. The two guys thanked us, allowed how lucky they were that two “road engineers” had happened along, and took off … very slowly and carefully. We, on the other hand, sat around for a bit trying to decide WTF was wrong with us, and would it not have been wiser to drive them down the umpteen miles to get some “real” help. Somehow the mix of the adventure and challenge, coupled with the helplessness of the kids (and hassle and cost to them of the alternative) added up in our minds to “let’s do it”. The sanity and soundness of this calculation was subsequently soundly rejected by my wife.

  12. on 23 May 2007 at 3:08 pm 12. Seattle said …

    “Secretly fearing that someone has taken advantage of us and is laughing about it behind our backs.”

    So last year I got ripped off. No holds barred, not a doubt in anyone’s mind, ripped off. A woman showed up on my doorstep begging for money. She had a reason at hand, and kept elaborating her need and story to the point of the ridiculous. Her car had broken down at the far north end of town,she’d walked all the way to my house, she was pregnant, she had a tow truck available but they needed cash, her husband wasn’t reachable, she was a nurse, I looked like her freaking AUNT, for christ sake…. So I’m standing in my doorway, sick, just woke up, and just plain unwilling to shut the door in her face. So I said, I’ll give you a ride to the tow truck location and give them the money. Not surprisingly, nobody home at the house where the tow truck was at…so there I am, sitting with this woman in my van thinking to myself, well, I usually give a donation of about $40 per month anyway to some worthy cause (this was before gas prices skyrocketed) so I handed her the money, which she swore she’d pay back. LOL So it happens.

  13. on 23 May 2007 at 4:50 pm 13. Oaktown Girl said …

    Secretly fearing that someone has taken advantage of us and is laughing about it behind our backs.

    This reminds me of a converstion I was having just last week with someone relating to BushCo.

    The topic was why otherwise intelligent people who voted for Bush in 2004 still support him (religious extremists not included). My theory is that Americans HATE to admit they were duped. My observation is that they hate this more than almost anything in the world. This may be, if not “uniquely”, then merely an “extremely” American trait. And BushCo duped some folks so badly, there’s hardly words to describe it. So I think a lot of Americans would just rather be stubborn about it, no matter what the cost, than just come out and admit they got taken for a ride.

    Related to this is that Americans seem to have very little ability to laugh at themselves compared to many other cultures. It’s kind of sad and adds to the overall uptightness of things here.

  14. on 23 May 2007 at 8:02 pm 14. Kiera PSI said …

    [Related to this is that Americans seem to have very little ability to laugh at themselves]

    Present company excluded, of course.

    [So I think a lot of Americans would just rather be stubborn about it, no matter what the cost, than just come out and admit they got taken for a ride]

    *puts fingers firmly in ears and begins chanting at top of lungs*

    LaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLa!
    What’s that you say?
    LaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLa!
    I can’t hear you!
    LaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLa!

  15. on 23 May 2007 at 8:15 pm 15. James Killus said …

    Seattle, I’ve said on more than one occasion that it’s so hard to really give someone some help that actually helps them, that if all it takes is some money, it’s a bargain.

    JP, despite a fair amount of reading in psychology, including straight Freud, it took almost forever for me to really notice the phrase “ego ideal” but that’s what most people are chasing after, yes.

  16. on 23 May 2007 at 8:58 pm 16. The Constructivist said …

    Mere trunks can not stop me. I’m back! But keep the altruism stuff coming–that’s right up Part III’s alley (Kim Stanley Robinson’s ecoeconomics and potlatching on Mars). Although come to think of it, I might just “have to” reread the Mars trilogy (just like I “had to” reread Snow Crash) to get ready for that post. What? Did someone say something about Part Deux? The Sequel?

    Well, let’s see, I have some Star Wars‘ 30th blogging to do tomorrow at MH, then it’s the Corning Classic (hey, it’s right near where I grew up and where I now live, so I can’t diss it like 17 of the top 20 on this year’s money list did), and I’m trying to save CitizenSE, and….

    You west coasters may be interested in more reading I’m doing for the sequel: What Democracy Looks Like: A New Critical Realism for a Post-Seattle World, ed. Amy Schrager Lang and Cecelia Tichi. It has a bunch of reading recs (including sf) in the intro that make my choice of texts for my series positively old school by comparison….

    Here’s some music–please, no more retrunkings!

  17. on 23 May 2007 at 9:04 pm 17. The Constructivist said …

    And here’s a little something from Vijay Prashad on religion and more.

  18. on 24 May 2007 at 5:22 am 18. christian h. said …

    Seattle, I’ve said on more than one occasion that it’s so hard to really give someone some help that actually helps them, that if all it takes is some money, it’s a bargain.

    Indeed.

    TC - the road to hell is paved with unwritten follow-up posts. You may not care, or believe in hell, but the MOJ tells me that the well-worn road to our reeducation center also is. You can’t see that while in the trunk of Kiera’s Corvette, but trust me on that. Seriously, though, I’m particularly looking forward to the fifth post in your four-post trilogy.

  19. on 24 May 2007 at 8:11 am 19. Kiera PSI said …

    Corvette? The Constructivist WISHES I had a trunk as big as a corvette’s. Heh, Heh, Heh. When T.C. isn’t in there I can ALMOST fit several twelve packs of coke zero and a couple bags of groceries in there. I hope he’s double-jointed or he’s gonna be REAL uncomfy. When the D-Man and I go on road trips, the luggage goes in the back seat…the trunk can only hold our small cooler and my backpack.

  20. on 24 May 2007 at 10:57 am 20. James Killus said …

    A little further reflection on “superpowers” is that they make you lazy in other ways. Christian alludes to mathematical formalism, which can be intuitive, and is useful even when not. On more than one occasion I’ve let my physical and gometric intuition substitute for formalism and gotten into trouble because of it.

    There’s a related difficulty with those of us (including practically everyone here) who are sufficiently good with words and rhetoric that we can convince people (including ourselves) of things that aren’t accurate, or even true. I particularly have to watch myself on this one, because I’m very sneaky and I know all the things that I fall for. So I put things over on myself all the time.

    You can convince a man of almost anything—provided he’s smart enough. Tom Stoppard, Professional Foul

  21. on 24 May 2007 at 11:23 am 21. christian h. said …

    On more than one occasion I’ve let my physical and geometric intuition substitute for formalism and gotten into trouble because of it.

    Completely off topic, [Warning: Math] but a famous example of this kind of phenomenon from mathematics is graph theory. A graph is a collection of points called vertices, and edges connecting some of those points. For example, you could view a triangle as a “complete graph on three vertices”, that is, a graph with three vertices were every vertex has an edge to every other one. However, you don’t care about the geometry of the thing - the picture of the edges you draw is just to help you visualize it, the only information is in the collection of vertices, and which of those are connected by an edge. So, for purposes of graph theory, there is only one complete graph on three vertices.

    Now before computers were in widespread use, people made all kinds of conjectures about graphs (like how many closed path not touching any vertex twice, can you travel in a given graph and such) based on intuition coming from writing down what humans consider random graphs. And later it turns out that many of these conjectures are actually wrong for almost all graphs - meaning, if you tell a computer to produce a truly random graph, the property people conjectured will almost never hold. Apparently, a totally wrong intuition is hardwired into the human brain about these things. Weird.

  22. on 24 May 2007 at 11:59 am 22. spyder said …

    Professional Foul

    Wouldn’t that be a Yellow Card???? I am trying to complete a couple of posts that can be available whence i am off on the road. Alas, the road tour begins in five days, and with so very much still left to do (mailed second to last contract out this AM, but then just got informed i have to explore three new ones), and a potential logistical nightmare when we have two simultaneous festivals in two states, two weekends in a row then a massive jam to Missouri. Well it is actually worse than that; on the third weekend of July, we have festivals in three states strung along the I-5 corridor.

    Anyway, beginning next Wednesday, May 30th, i will be off on the road again, thinking thoughts of days go bye. That will last until after Burning Man ends on Labor Day. Hope i will have time to drop into the Party and get some sweet refreshments, good stories, and fissible camaraderie. Maybe even a hint of a good cabal opening gambit, sticky wickets and all. Now if i could only get that chip/crystal firmly lodged into that socket in my cerebrum.

  23. on 24 May 2007 at 12:21 pm 23. christian h. said …

    jam to Missouri

    Any other Midwestern dates on the tour? In Chicago, or central IL, perhaps? In any event, after such a tour you must have enough “encounters with strangers” to run this blog till judgement day!

  24. on 24 May 2007 at 1:13 pm 24. James Killus said …

    based on intuition coming from writing down what humans consider random graphs.

    I’ve always been fond of the “star patterns” that you see in old sci-fi movies, where someone has drawn up a “random” pattern of stars as the backdrop of the toy model spaceship with the flame coming out the back (the the smoke drifting upwards). The “stars” are too evenly spaced to be random, and are probably drawn up to avoid “patterns.” Of course we see patterns in randomness all the time, and it takes a very special pattern for us to see nothing in it.

  25. on 24 May 2007 at 1:18 pm 25. Seattle said …

    Tomorrow I get on a plane to Dallas. My first ride on a plane since the Boston trip in ‘03. I understand I’ll be paying additional (LOL) for an airplane meal (LOL). I can’t bring more than 3oz of any liquid in a container…maybe I should spit before boarding…. All to congregate with a bunch of space development fanatics. Can’t wait! All sorts of encounter with stranger opportunities.

  26. on 24 May 2007 at 1:20 pm 26. Oaktown Girl said …

    Seattle - what do you mean by “space development”?
    And thanks for thinking ahead to your near-future “Encounters with Strangers” post.

  27. on 24 May 2007 at 1:25 pm 27. The Constructivist said …

    Perhaps James’s and others’ spatial abilities would have helped me and the kids fit in the trunk better, but those kids had mad lockpicking skillz so it wasn’t necessary after all. Having neither of those superpowers, I was happy to free ride, so to speak.

    I just signed on to give three talks in late June and July. So I have to get around to stopping the procrastination someday or other.

  28. on 24 May 2007 at 4:17 pm 28. Kiera PSI said …

    I knew there was a reason I didn’t like kids. Sorry, Oaktown Girl, I lost him. Now I’ll have to go through all the bother of tracking him down to retrunk him.

    *grumbles under breath*

  29. on 24 May 2007 at 5:34 pm 29. Oaktown Girl said …

    Kiera - TC says he’ll have a post ready for next week. We’ll save the re-trunking until then. Plus, let’s see if I actually like it. A “negative” on either count earns a re-trunking. Stay ready. Thank you for your Loyal Party Patriotism. You are a true asset to the WAAGNFNP’s Ministry of Justice.

    Word to TC - if you need the added inspiration (which no real Party Patriot should), I’ll have Kiera tell you what the temperature of her trunk is - midday, Central California valley area. Let’s just say “unpleasant” would be an understatement.

    Oaktown Girl
    Minister of Justice
    WAAGNFNP

  30. on 24 May 2007 at 8:44 pm 30. Kiera PSI said …

    Let’s just say that I had a bag of dove chocolate IN A COOLER in my trunk for an hour this evening (6:30 - 7:30 pm) and it was a melted mess by the time I got it out.

  31. on 25 May 2007 at 12:18 pm 31. spyder said …

    a tour you must have enough “encounters with strangers” to run this blog till judgement day!

    Well that certainly be true, but overwhelmingly so. It becomes hard to distinguish between all the stories and moments, more like a categorization of anecdotes rather than collecting the details. For example, bad Gator and/or golf cart driving as a whole, instead of “oh remember when Y drove off the bridge, just missing the water, but hit the stump invested with a yellowjacket nest” sort of moment. Then there are the tour bus sagas (and even a taxonomic breakdown among those) and the semi-trailer mishaps (not the same grouping as band trailers not hitched properly). Stage antics and pranks differ from stage disasters and enormous ooops.

    Central California valley heat??? You mean like a week from today, when the tour stops outside of Merced for an environmental/ organic farming/ culture fest. Last year it was a lovely 105ºF and the Merced River was running full from snow melt (even though it was a 100 miles from the sources it was barely 40º), so dipping to cool off was dangerous and way too harsh. It is amazing how many frozen organic blueberries you can eat though when it is that hot.

  32. on 25 May 2007 at 2:25 pm 32. Kiera PSI said …

    Well, on top of that 105, this year the Merced River will barely be a trickle as the snow and rain was few and far between this winter.

    You’ll be about a half hour away from me, wave hello to the south…or better yet, stop in at Leighton’s Jewelers in Merced and buy something from our cousin.