Signal to Noise

On Saturday night, a couple of hours after the attacks at London Bridge and Borough Market, I was on the Tube carrying a suitcase and backpack, trying to figure out the best route home that avoided the closed stations. A South African guy was sitting nearby. He inveigled an Italian man opposite him into chat. Within two stops, the South African was teaching a British woman some dancing steps while the Italian sang them some weird, sloppy waltz, a couple clapped not quite in time, the woman’s friends recorded it in hope of a viral moment, and the rest of us acted like proper Londoners and looked slightly irritated while also pretending nothing was happening.

It was kind of a nice moment, being light-hearted and international and the kind of thing we all say is so very London. The woman soon gave up in embarrassment and sat down in a trill of supportive giggles from her friends. The Italian got off and reminded us to get the very drunk South African as far as Collier’s Wood. With the state of him, though, he’s probably still sleeping it off at the end of the line in Morden.

On Sunday night, I checked email for the first time in two weeks and responded to a media request on Theresa May’s suspiciously prompt statement that the attacks were due to US tech firms providing “safe spaces” to terrorists. She’s made a career out of cutting police resources while increasing their powers. I guess this makes sense on some collectively sub-conscious level, like an anorexic I once knew who baked endlessly and gave it all away.

Twenty minutes after they’d phoned, an NBC news crew was setting up lights in the study, or book-womb, as one of my sisters calls it. I knew I was giving a pretty so-so performance in the interview, but couldn’t quite turn it around. Respect to people who are good at TV; there’s so much knowledge and feeling you have bubbling away underneath, and crafting it into what we patronisingly call a sound-bite – something a person who doesn’t know anything about your topic can intuitively grasp in a way that also accepts your framing – is bloody hard. When we were done and they were taking an establishing shot with the interviewer, he asked me a question so I would be talking as he nodded, and out popped the sentence they ended up using. It was about how wrecking human rights to protect our democracies is “burning the village to save the village”. Nothing earth-shattering, but it got the point across better than explaining how encryption back-doors work.

It got me thinking about how we reflexively use metaphor to get our heads around processes and information that are too complex or big to communicate directly. A couple of places yesterday, including one of my own interviews, I heard non-technology policy people describe mass surveillance as “looking for a needle in a haystack, and now you’ve just increased the size of the haystack”. It’s a metaphor I’d previously only heard privacy advocates use. A long-ago mentor told me that when other people start making your points for you, you should shut up because you’ve almost won. I wish!

Last night, feeling a bit fed-up with myself for spending too much time on Twitter on my first day back at work, I read one of Jung’s essays for a general readership; The Plight of the Individual in Modern Society. He said that a lot of what we think of as self-knowledge is just rifling through the obvious and knowable stuff that anyone would observe about us. “The ego knows only its own contents”. True self-knowledge, he implies, means plumbing the depths of the unconscious to try and figure out its contents.

This made a lot of sense to me. The fiction I enjoy the most operates on the level of the plotted obvious, but also contains ambiguous signals that resist noise-free transmission. The dressmaker’s dummies, or “forms”, in Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, for example, play an obvious symbolic role as less imperfect and demanding substitutes for the women in the professor’s life, but that reading doesn’t nearly exhaust them. There’s something mysterious and compelling about those quite literal metaphors, if there can be such a thing, that sticks with you long after the book is finished.

Knowing our own unconscious isn’t just difficult, of course. It’s impossible. But we get the odd glimpse and can maybe use our front-brains to reflect on what we observe. We’ll always need novels and polling data and commentators because, individually and collectively, we mostly don’t know why we do the things we do. There’s so much data and behavioural murk underlying and manifesting in our actions, be they election results or bullshit security policies or just how we end up performing ourselves to our selves, that finding that one, vivid image or phrase that seems to make sense of it can seem heroically worthwhile.

Ignes Sodre, a Brazilian psychotherapist who often writes about literary characters, says of daydreaming that there are fantasies that lead to truths and fantasies that quite purposely hide them. George Eliot’s novels make a clear distinction between characters who aren’t wicked but can’t help lying to themselves in their idealised images, and those who use their day-dreams to better read the world around them and figure out how to, morally, be in it. So, a Rosamond Vincy never graduates from her gilded dreams of how life under patriarchy should be for a pretty, well-positioned woman; a Gwendolen Harleth sort of might, but is too weak and emotionally damaged – probably by her stepfather – to manage life beyond fantasy without the love of an unusually good man; and a true heroine like Dorothea Brooke ditches her day-dreams a third of the way through, but takes another five-hundred pages to work out how to live without them.

Why did that woman dance with a drunk on a moving train on a Saturday night? Maybe she dreamt of being sort of girl who dances on a train. Maybe she just wanted to dance. The joy of alcohol isn’t lower inhibition but getting a break from endlessly interrogating and mediating between wants and deeds.

Why did anyone believe Theresa May was “competent” and “sensible”, despite a long and profoundly unimpressive track record at the Home Office? Because her demeanour represented the maternal bossiness of matron, and not the brittle vindictiveness that seems to lie underneath. Sometimes the daydream channels the truth and sometimes it purposely obscures it.

Today, I’m back on a job that involves writing a couple of dozen near-future science fiction stories to illustrate or rub against the findings of a technology report. Client response to the stories I submitted before my holiday is that the ones that were quite literal extrapolations of current trends seemed less believable; too thin, somehow. The ones I started from just a strong feeling about something, or a hunch, or a sense of deep-seated needs as yet unmet by technology– those went down the best.

Over the past year, a lot of my work has involved technology and metaphor. That sounds really vague, a kind of high-end, late-capitalist job from the same stable as Cayce Pollard in Pattern Recognition. The assignments I do best on have ostensibly quite prosaic aims, but involve tapping into feelings and ideas about politics and technology, and helping organisations to explain themselves to themselves and, in this case, to imagine the future.

I may just be over-thinking it, but transmitting these signals from the vast amounts of what we do and don’t consciously know, via images and metaphors only barely adjacent to meaning, and somehow translating it into how we imagine ourselves and our futures seems increasingly strange, hard and necessary.