The Classical Mode

At precisely noon, I left the spacious upstairs room where my boss, Emil Flock, had carved out five or six workstations for his fledgling company, Computer Hand Holding. The building belonged to an architect, who had his office downstairs. It was largely empty, but full of models, swatches and samples, a Victorian-era brick building at Folsom and Eighth Streets. It was in a part of San Francisco I didn’t know, South of Market, with hip, swinging clubs, warrens of artists and a fair number of small restaurants.

To one of these I repaired for lunch, La Rocco’s, where you could sit at a table near a big window on the street and eat a platter of pasta topped with pesto or red sauce and watch the world go by. Though not exactly cut out to be a career person, I managed to work for nearly fifty years, giving each company the precise 40 hours per week they required in exchange for a paycheck. Thus I regulated my disciplined and sensual lives. It was said you could set your watch by the time Connie left for lunch.

I had taken almost a year off work when I took the job at Computer Hand Holding, a scheme Emil set up to offer technical support by telephone for companies just getting used to computers in 1991. I was somewhat qualified, as I had helped my last company purchase computers and even taught classes in word processing and spreadsheet use. I was far from a computer nerd, but Emil was thrilled to find any woman who could do the job. I was good at answering phones and, he found, I was “professional.”

Emil had assembled a crew of guys who were basically entrepreneurs and artists who weren’t exactly fond of coming to the office. These guys preferred to work on their bike lock project, their Dungeons and Dragons MUDD, or take filmmaking jobs as they came up. Even Emil preferred to stay home with his young son. I too had firmly decided by this time that I was a writer, and that I would use my own time to work on my novels. But I was precise about time. “Professional” to Emil meant that he could count on me to be there when the office was supposed to open, and that I would stay until it was supposed to close!

I answered the easy questions and passed the hard ones on to the guys. I loved those afternoons in the slanting golden sunlight, rife with dust motes. Because it was all so new, we often felt like heroes, but just as often, like fools. I worked on Microsoft platforms. I was not very used to the Mac, which others preferred.

At lunch, I could think my own thoughts. I could write in my ubiquitous journals. And it was here that Don Starnes and I first began to compare notes on movies, the city and how we liked to live. If one is happiest when your inner self matches your outer world, taking this job when my money finally began to run out confirmed for me once again that I had what might be called “classical,” as opposed to a “romantic” mode of thinking and living. (I began to suspect Don did too.)

In college, I took majors in English and in Latin. My senior paper was titled “Robert Frost as a Classical Poet.” A classical understanding sees the world as underlying form itself, steeped in systems, laws and logic; whereas romantic thinking is fueled by inspiration, intuition, creativity and imagination. Robert Pirsig discusses the two modes in his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance [published 1974]: 

“The classic style is straightforward, unadorned, unemotional, economical, and carefully proportioned. Its purpose is not to inspire emotionally, but to bring order out of chaos and make the unknown known. It is not an aesthetically free and natural style. It is aesthetically restrained. … To a romantic this classic mode often appears dull, awkward, and ugly, like mechanical maintenance itself. Everything is in terms of pieces and parts and components and relationships. … Within the classic mode, however, the romantic has some appearances of his own. Frivolous, irrational, erratic, untrustworthy, interested primarily in pleasure-seeking. Shallow. Of no substance.”

Of course we need both kinds of thinking, but today the world is full of people in whom the romantic mode has the upper hand. It has been suggested that this mode has predominated for the last 250 years. This has contributed to the fact that I have felt myself to be swimming upstream much of my life. Not unhappily. It was not only Emil who appreciated my “professionalism.” But it does color my thinking on what is important in life and what can be ignored. (Case in point: the growing frivolousness of the awards system in the arts. The number of “awards” you rack up does not necessarily mean your work is great.)

For E. O. Wilson, the Romantic movement was such a powerful counter to the Enlightenment, that science gave up on studying human mental life for a time. In his book on the unity of knowledge, Consilience [published 1998], he gives a brief history of ideas, saying that by 1956, as described by C.P. Snow, the two cultures, the literary and the scientific, were “no longer on speaking terms.” But in “the Darwinian contest of ideas, order always wins, because -- simply -- that is the way the real world works.”

Wilson wrote his book in the hope that the arts and sciences could be brought to bear on each other again. And it is clear that scientists, in grappling with artificial intelligence and the trans-humanist philosophies of Silicon Valley billionaires need the humanities to pull them back from the abyss of “the singularity” and other fictions. Wilson believes that we will end up with an “existential conservatism.”

Yuk Hui, a young philosopher working in Berlin, feels that Silicon Valley’s insistence on technological development as given and pre-determined is a great mistake. Gloom prevails when people think there are no alternatives. “We must develop ways of life that solve the conflict between modern science and tradition, between technology and mysticism,” he says. “I hope to derive a Chinese technological thought from an interpretation of Qi and Dao, which should not be understood as mystical concepts but rather as frameworks for thinking about our relationship to the nonhuman -- to the 10,000 beings Lao-Tse talks about -- whereby the use of technology must follow Dao, as a philosophy of nature and a philosophy of life.” [From an interview with Yuk Hui by Anders Dunker, published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, June 9, 2020].

For the record, I would like to say that I don’t think the classical mode interferes with femininity. (Someone recently told me I was the most feminine woman he knew!) A woman can have a rational head on her shoulders and appreciate the world’s underlying order. She can be disciplined and thoughtful, not driven by every wind that blows.

I worked at Computer Hand Holding for the better part of four years. At first it seemed to thrive, with some very good corporate clients. But these clients soon brought their help desks in-house and everyone moved on. It was a time of innovation and change. During it, the World Wide Web, largely unknown in 1991, exploded. At that time, Amazon sold only books!

I value technology for all our enhanced communication abilities. My own family has rarely been this connected. But I also know that mis-information and unhealthy tribalism flourish. History, literature and the arts ground us in human traditions and values. There has never been a greater need for commitment to the real world.