Manhood for Amateurs. Michael Chabon

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СКАЧАТЬ the toys also appeared to have changed.

      When I first began to play with them in the late 1960s, Legos retained a strong flavor of their austere, progressive Scandinavian origins. Abstract, minimal, “pure” in form and design, they echoed the dominant midcentury aesthetic, with its emphasis on utility and human perfectibility. They were a lineal descendant of Friedrich Fröbel’s famous “gifts,” the wooden stacking blocks that influenced Frank Lloyd Wright as a child, part mathematics, part pedagogy, a system – the Lego System – by which children could be led to infer complex patterns from a few fundamental principles of interrelationship and geometry. They also made, and make to this day, a strong claim on a kid’s senses, snapping together and coming apart with a satisfying dual appeal to the ear and the fingers. They presented the familiar objects one constructed with them – airplanes, houses, cars, faces – on a quirky grid, the world dissolved or simplified into big, chunky pixels.

      In their limited repertoire of shapes and the absolute, even cruel, set of axioms governing the way they could and couldn’t be arranged, Lego structures emphatically did not present – and in playing with them, you never hoped for – the appearance of reality. A Lego construction was not a scale model. It was an idealization, an approximation, your best version of the thing you were trying to make. Any house, any town, you built from Legos, with its airport and tramline and monorail, trim chimneys and grids of grass, automatically took on a certain social-democratic tidiness, even sterility (one of the notable qualities of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, the material from which Lego bricks are made, is that it is sterile).

      Orderly, functional, utopian, half imaginary, abstract, primary-colored – when I visited Helsinki a few years back, I felt as if I recognized it, the way you recognize a place from a dream.

      By the late nineties, when my wife and I bought that first Indian set, abstraction was dead. Full-blown realism reigned supreme in the Legosphere. Legos were sold in kits that enabled one to put together – at fine scales, in detail made possible by a wild array of odd-shaped pieces – precise replicas of Ferrari Formula 1 racers, pirate galleons, jet airplanes. Lego provided not only the standard public-domain play environments supplied by toy designers of the past fifty to a hundred years – the Wild West, the Middle Ages, jungle and farm and city street – but also a line of licensed Star Wars kits, the first of many subsequent ventures into trademarked, conglomerate-owned, pre-imagined environments. Instead of the printed booklets I remembered, featuring suggestions for the kinds of things you might want to make from your box of squares and rectangles, the new kits came encumbered with fat, abstruse, wordless manuals that laid out, panel after numbered panel and page after page, the steps that must be followed if one hoped – and after all, why else would you nudge your dad into buying it for you? – to end up with a landspeeder just like Luke Skywalker’s (only smaller). Where Lego-building had once been open-ended and exploratory, it now had far more in common with puzzle-solving, a process of moving incrementally toward an ideal, pre-established, and above all, a provided solution.

      I resented this change. When my son and I finished putting together a TIE interceptor or Naboo starfighter, usually after several weeks of struggle, a half-deranged search for one tiny black chip of sterile styrene the size of his pinkie nail, and two or three bouts of prolonged despair, the resulting object was so undeniably handsome, and our investment of time in building it so immense, that the thought of playing with it, let alone ever disassembling it, was anathema. But more than the inherent difficulty – which, after all, is an important aspect of puzzle-solving, or the shift from exploration to reproduction – I resented the authoritarian nature of the new Lego. Though I admired and enjoyed Toy Story (1995), the film has always been tainted for me by its subtext of orthodoxy: its implied assertion that there is a right way and a wrong way to play with your toys. Andy, the young hero of Toy Story, uses his toys more or less the way their manufacturers intended – cowboys are cowboys; Mr. Potato Head, with his “angry eyes,” is a suitable mustachioed villain – while the most telling sign that we are to take Sid, the quasi-psychotic neighbor kid, as a “bad boy” is that he hybridizes and “breaks the rules” of orderly play, equipping an Erector-set spider, for example, with a stubbly doll’s head. Sid is mean, cruel, heartless, crazy: You can tell because he put his wrestler doll in a dress. A similar orthodoxy, a structure of control and implied obedience to the norms of the instruction manual and of the implacable exigencies of realism itself, seemed to have been unleashed, like the Dark Side of the Force, in the once bright Republic of Lego.

      But I should have had more faith in my children, and in the saving power of the lawless imagination. Like all realisms, Lego realism was doomed. In part, this was an inevitable result of the quirks and limitations inherent in the Lego System, with the distortions that its various techniques of interlocking create. The addition of painted faces and elaborately modeled headgear, weapons, and accoutrements ultimately did little to diminish the fundamental silliness of the minifig; as with CGI animation, the technology falls down at the human form. In depicting people, it makes compromises that weaken the intended realism of the whole. But the technical limitations are only part of the greater failure of realism – defined as accuracy, precision, faithfulness to experience – to live up to the disorder, the unlikeliness, and the recombinant impulse of imagined experience.

      Kids write their own manuals in a new language made up of the things we give them and the things that derive from the peculiar wiring of their heads. The power of Lego is revealed only after the models have been broken up or tossed, half finished, into the drawer. You sit down to make something and start digging around in the drawer or container, looking for a particular brick or axle, and the Legos circulate in the drawer with a peculiarly loud crunching noise. Sometimes you can’t find the piece you’re looking for, but a gear or a clear orange cone or a horned helmet catches your eye. Time after time, playing Legos with my kids, I would fall under the spell of the old familiar crunching. It’s the sound of creativity itself, of the inventive mind at work, making something new out of what you have been given by your culture, what you know you will need to do the job, and what you happen to stumble on along the way.

      All kids – the good ones, too – have a psycho tinge of Sid, of the maker of hybrids and freaks. My children have used aerodynamic, streamlined bits and pieces of a dozen Star Wars kits, mixed with Lego dinosaur jaws, Lego aqualungs, Lego doubloons, Lego tibias, to devise improbably beautiful spacecraft far more commensurate than George Lucas’s with the mysteries of other galaxies and alien civilizations. They have equipped the manga-inspired Lego figures with Lego ichthyosaur flippers. When he was still a toddler, Abraham liked to put a glow-in-the-dark bedsheet-style Lego ghost costume over a Lego Green Goblin minifig and seat him on a Sioux horse, armed with a light saber, then make the Goblin do battle with a minifig Darth Vader, mounted on a black horse, armed with a bow and arrow. That is the aesthetic at work in the Legosphere now – not the modernist purity of the early years or the totalizing vision behind the dark empire of modern corporate marketing but the aesthetic of the Lego drawer, of the mash-up, the pastiche that destroys its sources at the same time that it makes use of and reinvents them. You churn around in the drawer and pull out what catches your eye, bits and pieces drawn from movies and history and your own fancy, and make something new, something no one has ever seen or imagined before.

       The Wilderness of Childhood

      When I was growing up, our house backed onto woods, a thin two-acre remnant of a once mighty Wilderness. This was in a Maryland city where the enlightened planners had provided a number of such lingering swaths of green. They were tame as can be, our woods, and yet at night they still filled with unfathomable shadows. In the winter they lay deep in snow and seemed to absorb, to swallow whole, all the ordinary noises of your body and your world. Scary things could still be imagined to take place in those woods. It was the place into which the bad boys fled after they egged your windows on Halloween and left your pumpkins pulped in the driveway. There were no Indians in those woods, but there had been once. We learned about СКАЧАТЬ