Driving through Ankh-Morpork on my way to Pennsylvania

My imagination must think I have eyes in the back of my head.

Driving down to visit the blonde’s old homestead this afternoon we were listening to Terry Pratchett’s The Fifth Elephant  Since the car doesn’t have a CD player we have to play our recorded books on a portable CD player that rides in the back with the guys.  At some point during the scene where Sam Vimes and Cherie Littlebottom are investigating the theft of the replica of the Scone of Stone from the Dwarf Bread Museum I realized that I was fighting the urge to look in back of me to watch Vimes and Cherie at work.

The urge wasn't physical.  I didn’t feel it in my eyes or in my head or in my neck or in my shoulders.  No muscle that would normally have been employed to make me literally turn around to look so much as twitched.  I didn’t have to struggle to keep my eyes on the road.  I had to struggle to keep my focus on it.  The urge to look behind me was all inside my head.

My imagination wanted to turn around.

As if my imagination had a body.

A body that visited the scenes in books it was picturing for me.

You would think that my imagination, having the ability to recreate Ankh-Morpork, would also have the ability to recreate it wherever it needed to.  You would think my imagination wouldn’t have been “fooled” by the fact that the sounds it needed to turn into words and then into pictures was coming into my ears from behind.  But it was.  It responded as if it had a body and the body it had was mine and it was forced to react just as if it was me actually, physically, on the scene, and it—I—had to turn around to watch the Night Watch at work.

The weird part was that I could feel it turning around and taking my eyes, my real eyes, with it.

Of course my real eyes weren’t turning.  I kept them aimed out the windshield.  But my imagination’s backwards glancing was causing me to have to fight to keep my focus forwards.

I don’t understand it.  Since my imagination was creating the images anyway, why couldn’t it have created them in front of me?   People are very good at looking at two things at once.  We can see what is physically in front of us and we can “see” what we are thinking about at the same time.  We aren’t as good at this as we think we are, which is why talking on your cell phone while you’re driving isn’t the same as eating a hamburger or drinking a cup of coffee.  We don’t need to see the burger or the coffee cup so we don’t have to take our eyes off the road.  But we can’t help trying to see the person we’re talking to on the phone.  Not only that we’ll start seeing whatever it is we’re talking to that person about.  A phone conversation sets up layers of images inside our heads, and however good we may be at focusing on two things at once, we are generally pretty lousy at keeping track of eight.  But I was only watching two things.  It shouldn’t have been any trouble for me to watch the SUV up ahead of me on the Garden State and at the same time watch Sam Vimes inspecting the broken glass on the display case inside the museum.

It wouldn’t have been either, if Vimes had been out in front of our car, floating in the air between us and the SUV.

But that’s not where he was.

He was in Ankh-Morpork, which was in the back seat.

I asked the twelve year old to move the CD player so that it was in the middle of the seat.  The direction of the sound changed.  Suddenly Vimes and Cherie weren’t behind me.  They were next to me.  My imagination adusted.  It began to watch them out of the corner of its eye.  I asked the twelve year old to lay the CD player on its back.  Instead of bouncing off the back of my seat, the sound was now bouncing all around the car.  It entered my ears from no one particular direction.  My imagination adjusted again and now Vimes and Cherie were in front of me and I could watch them and the SUV, and so we made it as far as we had to go on the Garden State without my running through any toll booths or sideswiping any passing cars.

Once we were on the Jersey Turnpike I had no more trouble keeping my eyes on the road ahead.

Sheer terror is a great motivator for maintaining focus.

Comments

[Dylan]

I love that book.

Welcome back to the Philly neighborhood. =)

[Bluegrass Poet]

A passage worthy of Pratchett himself. Well written, Lance.

[Uncle Merlin]

"Sheer terror is a great motivator for maintaining focus"

Ahmen to that, Happy Easter too!

[OutOfContext]

You're twisting my melon, man...

[Rana]

You wouldn't think the direction matters, but it does. My issue is with telephones and ear choice. If I listen with my left ear, I happily converse and follow the interchange easily. But if I try to listen with my right, suddenly it's as if I took off my glasses and can't properly "see" the person on the other end of the phone. (And, yes, it does feel like blindness, rather than deafness - conversely, when I am not wearing my glasses, I find it hard to listen to people properly.)

The wiring of the human mind is a strange, strange thing.