Interpreting Bias
“what is bias?”
Bias is like a compass to the blind; it is a little magic box you shake to hear a click click, and perhaps a wirrrr. You know nothing of its contents, or the direction it is really pointing. But never fear, it will draw you along its path—that handheld north star—even without your knowledge. Put the smooth circle and its intricate workings in your pocket and forget it or hold it to your ear and try to follow it. It makes no difference. Bias will find its way. Unless you unscrew the cover, disassemble the piece, study it with your hands, and discover its inclinations. Just know that you can never break it, and you can change its course by no more than half a millimeter—though over a thousand miles, what different lands this will lead you to. Some have experimented with more, or with leaving the piece behind altogether. So they become lost. First in their heart, then hands and feet, until they wandered in circles and finally laid down. The will to life had left them. So they died in the desert. All for forgetting that simple fact: forward is the only path the soul can travel. And bias indeed propels forward, though without understanding its inner workings, we are apt to end up in the wrong places; unable to navigate.
And the love of bias, that is really the love of movement—of willing—without judging direction. Thus it takes you to pestilent swamps where the only satisfaction is from traveling on endlessly; the ground gained day after day. A care for direction can lead to forests and fine places where not only is the journey joy, but the surroundings as well. And with great determination, mountains can be climbed that, though more difficult going, provide infinitely more beauty and reward.
To instead agree with bias and ratify your still-going momentum is its own pleasure. It can make any journey tolerable. But it is not a beautiful or lovable pleasure.
“And what do you say to The Wine Press?”
That dusty old tome?
—this is not at all a question of a currently existing and seemingly immutable flavor that, though it has evolved over time cannot be seen to be evolving right now, but of the direction and course of the human being as they move along the rope of time through life upon life. A transgenerational journey governed chiefly by momentum and the miniature forces that each person puts into play with clumsy hands. And this journey can be directed and controlled but not done away with.
I have spoken of this journey, and now I will speak of “flavor.”
Uckh.
For what does bias know of flavor? Flavor is born of a hundred variations at once overlapping and intermixing. It is the different feelings that arise from subtle changes; only possible when change is possible. To try to build flavor through sameness; is that not to miss the true point of flavor? For a satisfying flavor can never be just one thing. True, if you never change your diet one day a morsel of bread is sweet. But can you really subsist off of bread? Or will your world melt like wax when you taste another flavor? One with a little heat?
You will be like the farmer who plants only one crop; a true connoisseur of wheat. Meanwhile you become malnourished and unsatisfied on your limited diet and fate waits and waits—in anticipation!—to laugh at the sorry day when your crop fails and you starve. For to a monocrop fate will always come. Such things—a monocrop, a singular bias, a right way forwards—are a human facsimile, so counter to nature that collapses and reforms. And in this collapse, to which bias will never admit, there is flavor.
And you call this culture? Perhaps; human life requires boundaries indeed. But it is a fragile and incomplete culture. Vulnerable to outside forces, nowhere near the pinnacle of sweetness. A human life can be built on this well-provisioned ship of singular momentum you call culture. But is there not more to be explored than that?
But no… you already agree with me. You think from this solid base it is even more flavorful to peek out the windows and catch a glancing taste of other ships and persons whirling by—to let a peek of nature in. Not for understanding, mind you, but as exotic spectacle (and no more).
Once this exoticism is exorcised by familiarity, the exotic “flavor” of its otherness is erased as well. As is the distinct taste of what you call normal; your close-guarded monocrop-reality. For in long months and years of familiarity, the boundaries that you treasure wash away, and not as a loss! They become unreal as they have always been unreal and all things return to the state to which they always do, to normal, and you recognize that your exoticizing had been a cruel facade. One that bore down on your object and wrapped them in your own far-flung fantasies so that you lived more with fantasy than with them. And fantasy is rich, so rich, with the wealth of “flavor.” But you should treat it as such and not wrap it in sacred robes cut to reveal what you love and hide what you do not. And remember that as you treat with a thing slowly all facades will slough away until your normal has really accommodated it and it loses all of that flavor except the notes that were really there. Though this loss of magic might be a pox on your soul; do not invoke insalient charms and incantations just to keep the walking scarecrow of your joy alive and darn the threads of its tattered shirt and hat. With all the plastic surgeon’s joy at making a face meet to their expectations of normal and good.
The exotic, the compass of bias’s explanation for whatever is good beyond the straight line of its needle, that has somehow been identified as “flavor,” is merely a reproduction of bias’s momentum. It takes another point, reckons a path of intersection; and then reveals the illusion of what the other would look like if they followed the observer’s direction. It passes this fiction off as reality.
“but oh it gets well with age!” both fantasy and reality, that is, and you make no distinction between the two while ignoring the creation of goodness in the here and now. For flavor is in the ever-changing surroundings, but bias is the surroundings-blind movement forwards. And life is nothing without movement, direction, but it is better to pick that direction and admire what there is to be seen along the way. Bias is not for love but for mastering and measuring.
