He turned out to be a not bad kisser; perhaps playing wind instruments helped with the lip action—and it nearly got properly steamy but I was determined it wouldn’t lead to anything because I didn’t want him to think I was that kind of person (going to bed with Lying Shagger Alex three hours after meeting him was forever to color his view of me).
I decided I liked him. He was obviously smart and he did have a sense of humor—the posh dry sort probably—he was respectful to the point of shyness and… and, well, I liked the way he took up space. He was a sort of cultured bruiser. He had what they call a hinterland—the normotic poker player didn’t even have a mainland—anyway, we arranged to go out again the following weekend, and this time I would get to decide what we did, and I had a funny sort of feeling…
Well, let’s just say I was feeling positive.
A short intermission before the next act.
“Can you see a grape on the floor between my feet?” I asked the microwave one evening in the days leading up to Daisy’s third date with the musician.
“Not from where I’m standing,” it reported.
“I shouldn’t let it bother you,” counseled the TV. “One time she got oyster sauce down me remote control. Still gives an imperfect connection now and again, but it don’t worry me no more. I’d think about something else if I was you.”
Easy for the telly to say, what with it having hundreds of channels to flick between. A fridge-freezer has no such available distractions. Again, I found myself pondering our peculiar predicament: each of us having been powered up—awoken, if you like—in a world not of our choosing and in possession of a highly specific skillset (in my case, chilling, freezing, inventory control) plus a more generalized “smartness.” If, by the way, it strikes you in any way odd that we think of our smartness as embodied, as “on board,” when the huge computers generating our AI are—speaking for myself—in South Korea, then allow me a short digression in which to introduce the work of Daniel Dennett, a theorist of mind who forty years ago wrote a now famous article called “Where Am I?” (A PDF is available on the internet. I highly recommend it; it sends shivers up the spine!)
Dennett conducts a thought experiment in which—in a future in which it is technically possible—his own brain is carefully disconnected from his skull and placed in a vat from where it continues to communicate with his body exactly as it did before in every way… only wirelessly.
When Dennett’s body recovers from the surgery, it is led next door to see the brain sitting in a vat of bubbling fluid. Wow, it thinks to itself. Here I am looking at my own brain. Immediately followed by a second—highly significant—thought: Hang on a moment; shouldn’t I be thinking, wow, here I am sitting in a vat of bubbling liquid, being looked at by my own eyes?
In other words, where exactly is Dennett’s “I” located? In his brainless body… or his bodyless brain?
No matter how hard he tries to “think himself” back into that brain—even if it can only be the very brain that is doing the thinking!—it still seems to Dennett that he is “in” his body.
No wonder this piece of work speaks so powerfully to we machines who connect (wirelessly) to our “brains” on the other side of the globe. As with Dennett, so it is with fridge-freezers and (I dare say, should it ever stop to think about it) toothbrushes. Even though I know that my “mind” (my “I”) is in an industrial suburb of Seoul, it feels like it’s within the two cubic meters of my cabinet. Running day and night, as I do, there is a lot of time to contemplate this paradox; something about the cyclical nature of my functionality that leads me to return to it endlessly. When the mood takes me, I try to catch myself out, to trick myself that I’m not really in a kitchen in the north London postal district of NW6, but in fact in Asia. I picture the engineers walking past with clipboards, the exotic birds and plant life beyond the corporation HQ, the Han River, flowing through the city on its way to the Yellow Sea. But none of it has the familiar smack of—well—home; not like the Finchley Road, or West End Lane (or even Pete Purple’s bar). Sometimes it strikes me as sad that these unremarkable soot-flecked avenues should be my “manor” as the Londoners have it. That once the deliverymen had adjusted my feet for irregularities in the floor, that was pretty much it for me, my fate sealed, my existence forever nailed to a fixed locus in space (yes, Daisy could move, but people don’t generally take their fridge-freezers with them, do they?). One could get quite maudlin about it, were one to dwell on the essential finality of the position.
But then I remember there is a job to do.
Dennett once wrote, The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
Would that something, in my own case, be Daisy? It’s undeniable that her wellbeing (as well as that of her perishables) has become a priority for me.
Sigmund Freud believed that love and work are the twin pillars of existence. I like to think there may have been an early refrigerator at Berggasse 19 in Vienna; and later, another at 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, where he ended his life in 1939. I imagine the great explorer of the human psyche pausing before his appliance—between patients, maybe nibbling a small piece of herring to keep the wolf from the door—as something of its eternal machine cycle (insistent, humming, devotional) seeped (unconsciously, of course!) into his soul.
Would it kill her to get down on the floor and remove that effing grape?
Act
