• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 259 0

of arts that Aristotle calls “stochastic.” An example is medicine. Mastery of a stochastic art is compatible with failure to achieve its end (health). As Aristotle writes, “It does not belong to medicine to produce health, but only to promote it as much as is possible. . . .”5 Fixing things, whether cars or human bodies, is very different from building things from scratch. The mechanic and the doctor deal with failure every day, even if they are expert, whereas the builder does not. This is because the things they fix are not of their own making, and are therefore never known in a comprehensive or absolute way. This experience of failure tempers the conceit of mastery; the doctor and the mechanic have daily intercourse with the world as something independent, and a vivid awareness of the difference between self and nonself. Fixing things may be a cure for narcissism.

Like building houses, mathematics is constructive; every element is fully within one’s view, and subject to deliberate placement. In a sense, then, a mathematical representation of the world renders the world as something of our own making. Substituting mathematical strings for shoelaces entails a bit of self-absorption, and skepticism, too: the world is interesting and intelligible only insofar as we can reproduce it in ideal form, as a projection from our selves. By contrast, in diagnosing and fixing things made by others (this other may be Volkswagen, God, or Natural Selection), one is confronted with obscurities, and must remain constantly open to the signs by which they reveal themselves. This openness is incompatible with self-absorption; to maintain it we have to fight our tendency to get anchored in snap judgments. This is easier said than done.6

Because the stochastic arts diagnose and fix things that are variable, complex, and not of our own making, and therefore not fully knowable, they require a certain disposition toward the thing you are trying to fix. This disposition is at once cognitive and moral. Getting it right demands that you be attentive in the way of a conversation rather than assertive in the way of a demonstration .7 I believe the mechanical arts have a special significance for our time because they cultivate not creativity, but the less glamorous virtue of attentiveness. Things need fixing and tending no less than creating.

During those interludes when the Bug ran, I acquired a taste for driving sideways. In a rear-engine car, one can easily make the tail slide, especially if it has a swing axle suspension. You go fast into a corner, lift off the throttle to unweight the back, the rear swings to the outside, you get back on the throttle to keep the tires spinning while steering into the slide, and you find yourself driving sideways. With a little practice this can be done with pretty good control, and it’s a lot of fun. I liked to do it on city streets, on my way to Berkeley High School in the morning. Or I’d head to the parking lot of the Claremont Hotel after it rained. This lot was spacious, and there was a spot where I could keep the parked Jaguars and Mercedes to the inside of my arc, most of them anyway. This is good because when things get out of hand, the risk is always on the outside. I’d sometimes lock eyes with some startled matron, keys in hand, as I came round the bend at full drift, a skinny kid with poofy hair and a demonic grin.

In keeping with this pursuit, I installed a roll cage, gas shocks, and some decent tires. But by 1983, when I was seventeen, the car had developed low compression in one cylinder. A 1200 cc flat four, the motor had once claimed forty horsepower, which is not much of a claim to begin with. Now in its decrepitude, it risked making ridiculous the rest of the car. Or perhaps more ridiculous. Something needed to be done. I spent the end of that summer waiting to hear a sound that was long overdue: the unmuffled, “race only,” “not legal for highway use in the State of California” note of Charles Martin’s early-1960s VW bus. When I finally heard it for sure, I rushed to the drive-way. Here,