The Road Not Travelled
Before I ever rolled a foot of film, before I ever made one video, before I ever took one picture of one naked lady I was a musician, or at least that’s what I thought I wanted to be. In high school I played in the band, sang in the choir, and even took the music theory course Mr. Winters was kind of enough to offer to the six of us who were interested. And after I graduated from high school I went to college and promptly declared my major as mathematics.
Yes, mathematics.
The same sorts of things that made music theory come easily to me also make math interesting and not too hard. Plus I had a high school math teacher who I adored and admired. Plus it was easier to imagine that studying math would bring me the comfortable middle class life style that I grew up in, and that I wanted for myself and the family I hoped I’d have at some point in the future. So for the first two quarters of my freshmen year I was a math major.
My career as a mathematician lasted til the begining of the third term, when there was a scheduling conflict between the math classes I needed to take and a small, but required part of the music major curriculum. (Still secretly longing to be a musician I was also taking all the required courses for a freshmen music major.) I begged the dean of the music school for an exception so I could take the third term of calculus, but he was unmoved. Forced to choose, I chose music.
Within a year music had given way to photography, but I kept taking math classes. I enjoyed the rigor, especially as a counter-point to the necessarily squishy aspects of learning about art and making art.
Had the music school dean relented, I’d like to think I might have ended up writing articles for a website like Stats at George Mason University, and in the company of people like Rebecca Goldin.
A lot of numbers get thrown around in the news, offered as proof of one position or another, and few people (and apparently least of all journalists) have the mathematical background to examine these “fact and figures” critically and rationally. This has given greater weight to the popular misapprehension that there lies, damned lies, and statistics. Figures lie, and liars figure, right?
This, of course, is nonsense.
The biases or suppositions of a statistical argument are more readily apparent and far more quantifiable than those of a rhetorical argument. But you have to have some familiarity and comfort with how numbers work to ask the right questions and understand the answers.
And an era where it’s possible, in fact common for an educated person’s math training to end with the quadratic formula, in an era where it’s social acceptable for an educated person to boast about their incompetence in math (can you imagine someone boasting they were illiterate?) it seems increasingly common for people who should know better to regard 2+2=4 as an assertion that just might yield to a clever argument or a well-turned phrase. (And I’m just talking about the progressive/liberal people I tend to find myself in the company of because I myself progressive and liberal. Let’s not get started about the assault on rationalism by religious fundamentalism.)
Myths and misperceptions swirl around pornography; some promulgate by pernicious and self-serving people, some a product of our collective imagination (both dark and hopeful) run wild. Getting to the truth about how big the business is, or how it help or hurts people is hard because when it comes to sex and money, nobody wants to tell the truth. We’re all quite sure we have too much or too little, and that everyone else is more satisfied and richer than we are. We’re all quite sure that we’re completely normal, except those little bits that we’d prefer that no one ever find out about us – ever.
Now I would be the last to suggest that we shouldn’t believe in things that cannot be quantified or measured. I believe in love, I believe in the family of human kind. Sometimes I even believe in God. But belief, (some might prefer faith) is not the same thing as superstition. And I don’t think it’s just happenstance that some of our most recent superstitious hysterias (Satanic Ritual Abuse, Erototoxins) have to do with sex. Superstition is fear’s handmaiden, and I believe that fear is the ultimate enemy of love.
But I also believe that love is more powerful than fear. This belief (perhaps ironically) solidified in me while the smell of fire and death hung heavy over my city. These few years later I am only more certain in this belief.
I make my films in the hope that they are ultimately about love, that they help push back the dark shadow of fear and superstition. But art is, of course, squishy. It cannot be proved with the quadratic formula, or by any other method. Judged, valued, accepted, rejected, but not proved. Making art and being moved by art is an act of faith that is very nearly my religion.
But I’d like to think that out there in one of those alternate universe, the ones we hear them talk about when my daughters and I watch the Science Channel, that there’s another me, another Tony Comstock. One who is an adored and admired math teacher.
