Word of the day: koan

Today I was reading the title essay in Joan Didion's "The White Album," and at one point she described a question she had once been posed as "a kind of koan of the period" (the period being 1970, and the question being, "If you can't believe you're going to heaven in your own body and on a first-name basis with all the members of your family, then what's the point of dying?").

Right.

I remember learning the meaning of "koan" many years ago, probably in a community college class called The Philosophy of Religions. But I could not remember the precise definition this time, so I went to look it up. This is one given by the American Heritage Dictionary:

A puzzling, often paradoxical statement or story, used in Zen Buddhism as an aid to meditation and a means of gaining spiritual awakening.

The etymology of the word, from the Online Etymology Dictionary, I found even more revealing:

Zen paradox, 1946, from Jap. ko "public" + an "matter for thought."

So there I had my answer, and a fairly concise way to repeat the definition, should I happen to be asked at, say, a cocktail party, "Do you know the meaning of the word 'koan'?"

Now, because I love the idea of there being such a short, catchy little word to describe such an esoteric concept, I kept reading the handy page of information provided me by Dictionary.com. I wanted to know more about koans, to read some examples of them. And happy day, at the bottom of the list of definitions was en entry from Jargon File (aka The New Hacker's Dictionary), pointing to "Some AI Koans" (as in "artificial intelligence") -- "jokes told at the MIT AI Lab about various noted hackers."

Jackpot. Now, I could geek out on koans while also geeking out on geek jokes! Ah, symmetry.

There's also something charming about peeking into these people's worlds, glimpsing how their minds work. These are humans who process information in a way I can never hope to. They can read an "Ed. note" like this -- "Pure reference-count garbage collectors have problems with circular structures that point to themselves" -- and know exactly what that editor is talking about. I kind of get it. Especially in the context of the joke. But not really. At that same cocktail party, if someone were to come up to me and say, "Ain't it a bitch about those pure reference-point garbage collectors," I would have to simply smile and nod, and down my drink so as to have an excuse to go seek out the bar. And yet, having eavesdropped on this tiny bit of MIT humor, and having giggled along with the parts of the jokes I did understand, I somehow feel that much cozier with the crazy-smart people. And all thanks to Didion and koans and Internet blessings like Dictionary.com.

Comments

[Jon]

Sweet, you're back! Good to see you around :)

[John Stanforth]

Hahaha! Speaking of "puzzling and paradoxical," it's highly amusing to see reference-counting garbage collectors getting air-time on NV when my own geekview section was created specifically so a certain someone wouldn't have to endure my "uber-nerd mumbo jumbo," I think she called it--- uber-nerd mumbo jumbo about stuff like reference-counting garbage collectors! ;-)