What’s your blue?
To be born, to live, and to die.
This is the simplest way I know to describe what I call “The arc of life.”
It’s kind of like how I learned to perceive the trajectory of the Sun during the day.
An arc: dawn, day, and twilight.
I remember reading Carl Jung proposing an allegory about how life is divided into halves.
Life would be like the day: the morning would be the period where we build who we are, the afternoon phase would be where we have to deal with what we built during the morning, and noon would be the moment we would perceive this change, recognizing unequivocally that, like the day, life must end.
From here arises the expression “Midlife crisis”, which, for a change, we also twisted the meaning, saying that it’s something for a frustrated forty-something with the life they’ve lived.
By the way, I am a forty-something carrying a good dose of frustration.
I can see this “midlife crisis” happening throughout life every time we really set out to learn something.
At first, we make an effort to learn, to try to understand. We get all tangled up and even doubt that we’ll make it. When we finally learn, we think that much of that learning process was somewhat unnecessary.
Of course, everything is kind of connected, and even the things we think were irrelevant or unnecessary make up the whole. That’s undeniable, but it’s not how we feel, right? Usually, we’ll say, “I spent too much time on that, and it wasn’t even necessary” or “If I had known, I would have followed a simpler path.”
Before I continue, let me introduce myself.
My name is Luciano Laranjeira, and this is my second post here on Medium. In the first one, I talked a little bit about my own history on the Internet. And I want to talk about the reasons behind this blog, but that will have to wait for the future.
Anyway, I’m here today to talk about a reflection that I draw from Zima Blue, one of the episodes of the series Love Death + Robots. This animation is based on a book of the same name, which I read to help me write this text.
And… sorry for not warning you earlier, but there will be spoilers.
Sorry about that.
Well, I also need to say that I’m not going to talk about the technical aspects of the work, nor the author, nor the production… in fact, I’m going to talk almost nothing about Zima Blue.
Therefore, the story goes like this…
In a future where humanity has colonized other worlds, Zima is an artist (a kind of painter) known throughout the solar system for his stunningly huge works. And all of his works have one fundamental detail in common: they all use the same shade of blue, Zima Blue.
What is known about Zima is that he is a human being who has modified his body over centuries in a bionic way, able to survive the most extreme environmental conditions found on the known worlds, from absolute cold to the surface temperature of the sun. Zima is almost a god, almost immortal, needing neither food nor sleep and possessing an extremely sharp perception through his amplified senses.
After almost a hundred years of not speaking to the press, he invites a journalist to interview him exclusively before the presentation of his latest work, which is still a secret to the public.
During the interview, Zima reveals his true story.
Zima was created as a small pool-cleaning robot. The woman who built him made improvements to him, including intelligence. Over the course of his existence, Zima acquired more and more upgrades until he became the conscious being that he is today. A superhuman in the eyes of the world.
His latest work, which is being presented, consists of a blue pool, the same pool he used to clean centuries ago, and in which he now dives, releasing all of his parts, turning off all of his functions, abandoning his intelligence and consciousness to become once again the small robot that cleans blue tiles.
Zima returns to his primordial state.
I will reproduce some of his remarks from this interview that inspired my reflection and that will illustrate better everything I am trying to say.
My search for truth has led me here, to what will be my final piece.
At last, I understand the thing I sought through my art.
And what does this swimming pool have to do with that?
It’s not just any swimming pool.
Long ago, it belonged to a talented young woman with a keen interest in practical robotics.
She created dozens of robots to do odd jobs around her house, but she was especially fond of the one she’d created to clean her swimming pool.
The little machine toiled endlessly, scrubbing the ceramic sides of the pool.
But the young woman wasn’t satisfied with the job it did.
So she gave it a full color vision system and a brain large enough to process the visual data into a model of its surroundings.
She gave it the ability to make its own decisions, to design different strategies for cleaning the pool.
She continued to use the machine as a test-bed for new hardware and software.
And by stages, it became more aware.
Eventually, the woman died.
The little machine was passed from one owner to the next.
They added things, made modifications here and there and with every iteration, it became more alive.
Became more… me.
Sometimes, it’s difficult even for me to understand what I’ve become.
And harder still to remember what I once was.
This was where I began.
A crude little machine with barely enough intelligence to steer itself.
But it was my world.
It was all I knew, all I needed to know.
And now?
I will immerse myself.
And as I do, I will slowly shut down my higher brain functions… un-making myself… leaving just enough
to appreciate my surroundings… to extract some simple pleasure from the execution of a task well done.My search for truth is finished at last.
I learned through Zen Buddhism something that I call “The Arc of Ignorance” or “The Arc of Liberation.”
We live in a state of ignorance, and as soon as we learn enough to leave that state of ignorance, we find ourselves in another state of ignorance where we understand that no matter how much we know, there will always be something we don’t know because reality cannot be completely absorbed by our understanding.
In other words: we go through an arc from absolute ignorance toward conscious ignorance.
That is why it is called Zen.
Zen is the Japanese way of saying Chan, which is the Chinese word for the Sanskrit expression Dhyāna that many translate simply as meditation, but which actually means, in a free translation, contemplation.
Zen, like so many other philosophies, including Stoicism, teaches us that it is not our role to rationalize existence but rather to contemplate it.
That is why I often say that we are not what we have or what we do, but how we see the world.
Socrates will say, in the words of his disciples, “know thyself” and finally “I know only that I know nothing.”
I saw this in Zima Blue. Someone who sought in the universe answers to the meaning of his own existence and who eventually realized that the answer was within himself, in something that moved him even before his intelligent form existed.
Zima understood in his nature, as a being experiencing reality, what Schopenhauer might call Will, or what the Buddha may have described as desire.
Zima Blue is a great allegory for thinking about the Arc of Ignorance.
We may even say that he had to go too far to learn what he learned.
To me, it is only fitting to say the same thing I said earlier:
“Even the things we think were irrelevant or unnecessary make up the whole.”
Finally, I propose this reflection:
If there is something in your mind that works like that pool-cleaning robot, what is it? What desire drives you? What answers are you seeking?
What’s your blue?
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