Apocalypse

Three years ago, my son’s godfather and I built a series of plywood and garbage 2″x4″ tables in my basement. My son’s godfather is a big model train guy – “there’s no scale like O scale” – and he and I have purchased quite a lot of track, rolling stock, and scenery for my son’s benefit over the years. I say for my son’s benefit but obviously, we’re buying stuff because we like it, and we’re hoping beyond hope that he’ll inherit our hobby, or obsession, or what we convince ourselves is a happy and healthy addiction, unlike our unhealthy addictions which are well known and need no restatement.

However, three or four months ago, my son started asking for Lego “modular” buildings, which are designed to be connected to one another to create Lego town landscapes. As a member of my town’s long range planning committee, I love this: he seems to intuitively understand that creating a coherent and lively, dense and connected townscape is one way that we get to celebrate the concept of community – far more than what Scarborough does in its personality-free high speed Route One and Payne Road corridors. My son in his Lego aspirations is showing a desire to be a part of a quietly and humanised urban landscape, with bookstores, Grand Emporium legacy department stores, boutique hotels, town halls, and police stations. And even a few suburban homes scaled in line with the town – and all located by a train station of our own, shared design, including a frequent traveler lounge (hanging out with his father through O’Hare and Newark and Sea-Tac has made the boy a keen observer of airline business class amenities) and a depersonalised train ticket dispenser which obviates the need for a local ticket office agent.

At a certain point in late November, the boy asked to put together the Lego town in place of the O Scale Lionel train layout. I was torn, because the model train stuff was a connection to the early 20th century that would be severed for my son, and I really want him to be as excited about that sort of thing as I am. But as I thought about it, he’s already there: he knows more about World War II than his teachers and his school mates, and if I’m honest, he knows more about pre-Civil War western US expansion than I remember from my undergraduate American history education at Harvard. He’s not rejecting anything: he’s trying to create something new of his own. And swallowing hard – and not telling his godfather in Massachusetts who loves O Scale more than he loves New Haven thin crust pizza – we destroyed the model railroad layout and started building the Lego town, complete with Lego trains but far more focused on the buildings, the minifigures, the road plates. We casually destroyed one world in order to create a new one based on a very different scale and purpose.

Two weeks ago, my son did roughly the same thing. We have what is called a Minecraft “realm”, which is an online world scape that I pay $6 a month for that enables the boy and his friends to build and create all sorts of stuff on line that, to me, has no meaning whatsoever, because video games are just about as meaningful to me as bitcoin, which readers of this blog will realise is to say, absolutely nothing. My son was getting a little annoyed at his friends’ creations – five other boys have access to the “realm”, three of which are particularly active but the other two boys have retained the right to come into the realm and be pests when they’re bored – so he reset the realm. Basically, he wiped it clean, much as we had wiped the plywood tables clean in the basement. The other boys still had access, and could still build whatever they wanted – but now on a new, clean tabula rasa.

The other boys descended into a kind of ten year old DefCon Five with a speed which should make anyone familiar with geopolitical conflict recoil in terror.

One boy threatened to hit my son in the face on the next day. Another cut him off from texting access. A third – frankly I’m not sure whether to be impressed or terrified – programmed an online bot to send my son text messages saying “Fuck you” every thirty seconds, and then told my son he would hack his school email account and use it to send bad messages to everyone at school.

My son did almost everything right – he let his parents know what was going on, he let his teachers know what was going on – and his parents intervened with alacrity but also with cool nerves. Other parents were informed, and on discovering their sons’ misbehaviour did all the right things. On discovering that the source of the civil unrest was the boy’s cavalier destruction of the realm, we realised that we hadn’t talked to him about stewardship – he was, in essence, the curator and protector of a creative sandbox which five other kids were using to explore their own creativity – and we hadn’t talked to him about the consequences of simply killing that world on a whim. He’s… well, I’m not sure he fully gets that yet, but on a certain level, understanding the power of global destruction is a lot for a kid who will turn eleven in early May. To the extent he’s absorbing any of this lesson is a huge step in his moral development; to the extent his friends are dialing back their own reactions and realising “wait, this is only digits in the cloud” is also a major step forward in their moral development as 21st century citizens. This whole episode, in other words, is going to create better adults out of this collection of five boys, united only by living in the same town in southern Maine, with parents who are both confused by the technology in which they live and at the same time are willing to open cans of whoop ass as appropriate when their kids text “Fuck you” to other kids.

But it does strike me that there is a creative element in human imagination which can be dangerous. The same instinct within us which drives us to paint, to sculpt, to write, to create, is at the root of the instinct to destroy. Not, per se, to destroy other people – our artistic impulse doesn’t motivate the Holocaust by any means. But our capacity to create makes it easy for us to destroy that which we have created without, really, feeling any obligation. I painted what I think is a very nice landscape painting of the Alberta foothills north of Calgary, which is now in the back of my car and, frankly, if it shatters in the -25C cold this evening and dissolves into atoms, I won’t really care about. But that unconcern also informs my feelings about four other paintings in the car – three by the ex-girlfriend, one by the boy – that also are as at risk to cold-driven destruction. In my mind, though, their continued existence or immediate destruction are both, well, “meh” events.

The boy and the ex-girlfriend might feel differently, though, just as the boy’s friends had a very different perspective on the instantaneous destruction of their Minecraft realm creations when my son hit “return” when asked “Are you sure?” by a dialog box a couple of weeks ago. I’m not arguing that our creations should be eternal: far from it. But we create all too easily, and we destroy even more readily than that. Yes, in most cases we create things that aren’t that good – my Alberta landscape is less than amateurish, it’s frankly just crap – but the ease with which we create and then can destroy leads to an impulse to destroy which really, frankly, isn’t healthy. It gives us a sense of power, that we can create, destroy, and create again – a sense that infuses our being from the earliest ages of awareness – which is at odds with the finite nature of our lives, of our existence in nature, of our experience of time and of being.

The O Scale railroad layout, fortunately, remains simply a deconstructed potential – it’s all made of plastic and copper, and has been put away neatly in cabinets, awaiting the construction of new, alternate plywood tables on which it can be created anew. The Lego sets, made of seemingly eternal hardcore plastic, can be taken apart and reconstructed at will, with enough patience and given that we’ve saved all the instruction manuals in a plastic storage crate in a corner of the boy’s room. As adults, though, we build, destroy, forget, and ignore the costs, all because the act of creation – and its mirror image acts of destruction – are all to easy to learn, back when we were children.

Ironically, then, my son’s deletion of the Minecraft realm taught a much more powerful lesson than the worlds of 19th and 20th century children with their playthings: when he hit yes to the question “Are you sure?”, the destruction was permanent. We can’t recall it – indeed, I called Microsoft; the boy really did permanently destroy the realm. His friends acted, therefore, quite rationally in their despair and confusion. The lesson is really for the adults: we destroy at our peril, and we can’t get it back when we say yes to “Are you sure?”

The paintings in the car – both the lousy landscape by my hand, the more practiced works by the ex-girlfriend that she abandoned years ago, and the nostalgic doodlings of the boy from back when he was four years old in a tiny apartment in Seattle – may not survive tonight. But if they do, I’ll make sure to preserve the son’s childish attempts at representing trains. And when I let my own work, or that of the ex-girlfriend, shatter in the February arctic cold, I’ll at least pause and reflect and think about the fact that destruction means at least as much as the act of artistic creation.

Stay warm, folks.