The Institute

The Institute-1

The Institute

We began with spoons, scooping dirt out one spoonful at a time. It was a lunch hour prank. Our team, which was Sylvia, Grant, and me, Terry, represented the creative side. The suits had Naomi, Penelope, and Ralph. The spoons were plastic. We got them from the institute’s cafeteria. Sylvia commented that we shouldn’t be taking the only edible items from the only eating establishment on campus, but insanity prevailed, as it were, and we took a box of them.

We found two good sites near the physical resources building. It was shady, which was good, this being an Arizona summer, and the ground felt kind of springy. Unusual for desert ground, but we didn’t argue.

“Now what exactly are we trying to do?” asked Ralph. He looked directly at Sylvia. He was in love with Sylvia. Everyone knew it except Sylvia. She thought he was short, bald, fat, and boring. All of this was more or less true, but it didn’t stop him from thinking she was tall, dark, lovely, and fascinating. Which was also more or less true.

“Ask Terry,” said Sylvia. “It was his idea.”

They all turned to me. Me, I gave up on love a long time ago. There is very little in the world more cruel than love. Poor Ralph’s infatuation was ample evidence of that. If the world had been made with people’s feelings in mind, such a man would never fall in love with such a woman. Nothing good could come of it.

Not that I was such a man. The institute hired me for my flair with intuition. I could usually tell what was going to happen in the next few minutes. A modest gift, but enough to snag me $100K per annum for basically sitting around thinking up crazy scenarios for the future of the planet. It’s tough work, and really, no one has to do it but that doesn’t stop us.

“Competition, my fellow cogitator’s,” I said. “We spend the hour scooping up dirt with these spoons. At the end of the hour we compare piles of dirt. The bigger pile wins.”

“Not the smaller?” asked Penelope. She thought that was a clever idea. She’s in the accounting department.

Grant laughed. He liked to laugh at the suits. “Having a blonde moment?” he said.

Penelope was blonde, but so was Grant, so you could look on it as a self-deprecating comment. Which is the way Penelope saw it. “You should know,” she said.

“I offer only accolades for my esteemed colleague,” said Grant. He liked to talk like that. “But I have to agree with the doubters in the group. What is the point of this?”

“Games don’t need points,” I said. “They are fun.”

Naomi looked down at the dirt. “This doesn’t look like fun,” she said.

“Jobs aren’t supposed to be fun,” said Sylvia.

“I get crazy ideas,” I said. “The least the rest of you could do is help me follow through on their execution and see where they lead.”

The spoons was one of those ideas. I wondered how many spoonfuls of dirt there was in the earth. Why would I wonder that? No reason. Except the institute paid me to think of such things. Their motto was that valuable information could come from anywhere at any time. It was up to them to create an environment in which the value could flourish. Where, in effect, I could flourish.

Some employees of the institute lived at the institute. There were no rooms or apartments on campus. You would find them sleeping on chairs in lounge areas, or rolling out a sleeping bag in their cubicle. If they had a cubicle. A lot of people just kind of wandered around from place to place. They stopped and chatted with you for a few minutes, finding out what you were up to, or just gossiping about other employees, or even just asking if you saw the ball game last night. Then they wandered on. We called them the browsers.

Others, and Grant fell into this group, remained in their sanctuaries and worked on a specific problem for hours on end, for days straight. They neglected to eat. They became removed from society and even from the human race to a certain extent. Nothing could get them out into the world except something crazy.

The spoons and the dirt. I went to Grant with the proposal. He was skeptical at first, pointing to a pile of papers on his desk. He read several of them a day. He understood most of what he read. I found this awesome and frightening. I had looked though some of them in the past. It was like looking at a very foreign language. I don’t try any subterfuge with Grant. He was way too smart to be fooled and I was way too stupid to try to make it work.

“You need to get out. You need to put your hands in dirt and feel the planet touch you. You need this. Trust me.”

Ralph did trust me, occasionally. It was because of this that I tried not to use his trust too often. I didn’t want to break that connection. Ralph was probably the smartest of all of us. And he would be the first one to agree with you if you mentioned it. He was also methodical, dedicated, and tireless. All ingredients for insanity soup if you let it fester.

Naomi, on the other hand, came to the institute as an administrator. She was not driven or haunted by her talent. Her job was to make sure everyone was happy. To that end she had the authority to procure whatever anyone needed for their little projects. In the past this has included giant steel drums, thousands of live mice, airplanes, and hunks of gold. She got most of it cheap. She had a skill which we all admired. Without people like Naomi such places as our little institute would not function.

I took a spoon out of the box. I held it up like it was an Olympic torch. Now here is where things got kind of odd because now everyone else held up their spoons. I knew that was going to happen. I had this vision in my head of it happening. Not like a dream, or anything. Just a small picture of everyone holding up their little plastic spoons. This is what happens. It is my talent.

But. This time I had some trouble attempting to correlate it with them. The people in my little vision were not the people I had convinced to dig in the dirt. They had different faces. I was slightly alarmed by this, but did not let it bother me.

We set to work. The suits took a few steps away. They kneeled down and stuck their spoons into the dirt. Two of them broke. Observing this, we turned our spoons around so the spiky side was away from our hands and stuck them into the earth methodically, softening up the ground. Then we took the bowl part and scraped them across the loosened earth. We pushed away a lot of material this way.

The suits, seeing our method, adopted a similar one. Penelope and Naomi used their spike heels to soften up the ground. Sylvia immediately protested.

“Aren’t we supposed to be using only the spoons to dig?” she said.

Naomi stopped pounding the earth with her heel. Ralph listened intently to Sylvia. “We’re not digging,” said Naomi. “We’re preparing the site.”

Everyone turned to me for adjudication. They knew I would be fair.

“No heels,” I said. “Only spoons. Those were the original terms.”

Naomi and Penelope abandoned their heels.

We all returned to digging and scraping with our plastic spoons. I saw us doing this for a long time. After a few minutes Sylvia spoke again.

“I didn’t mean to make a big deal out of the heels.”

“It was no big deal,” said Ralph. “You were perfectly within your rights to question the execution of the competition.”

Grant and I exchanged a brief glance. Ralph would support Sylvia in anything she did short of committing overtly criminal acts, and even then he might make an exception for some criminal acts that he might consider unworthy of being criminal.

“It was just a question,” said Penelope. “It’s not like Sylvia was bravely resisting an oppressive regime.”

“I didn’t say that,” said Ralph.

“Teammates,” said Naomi. “Let’s not get into a squabble over nothing.”

“No squabbling,” said Penelope. “It’s just that Ralph needs to get a reality check every now and then.”

“I’m not enjoying this lark as much as I thought I would,” said Grant.

“You want to quit?” said Sylvia.

“No. I’ve committed to at least an hour. I’ll put in my hour.”

“Should we be looking for fossils or something?” said Penelope.

“If we find any, we could save them,” I said. “But this isn’t an archaeological dig. We’re doing this as an exercise.”

“An exercise in what?” Penelope.

These sorts of things are usually my idea. I have a reputation for them. Once I had us stack toothpicks as high as they could reasonably go. We got to several meters before the project was abandoned. I look for simple things with little or no consequence. That’s what people at the institute need.

In the outside world, the world that doesn’t even know the institute exists, no one wants to do simple things for the sake of doing them. It is always about eating. They use spoons for transferring food from plates and bowls into their mouths. Nothing wrong with that, except that such uses will not rewire your brain.

I was looking for ways to rewire brains. Today, spoons were it.

But then the questions come. Questions like Penelope’s. There is a kind of way of being which rejects answers and questions. The people at the institute, me included, find themselves in the cause and effect mode so pervasively that we end up not knowing any other way. This spoon business is like lateral thinking for the body. It makes you look at the world and your place in it in a completely different light. It is a good way to create yourself anew.

“Maybe it’s hard to remember,” I said, “back when you were a child. Think about yourself being two or three years old. You probably played in the dirt. It’s one of the defining practices of a certain brand of childhood and should probably be part of every child’s life. There was no reason for it. We just liked to put your hands in the earth and spread it on our bodies and faces. Just liked being in it.”

“So we’re supposed to be like children?” said Penelope.

“Something like that.”

“I’m a grown woman.”

Grant appeared to be absorbed by the dry and dusty dirt coming up in clouds under his scraping spoon, but he was taking in the conversation.

“You might be over-thinking it,” he said to Penelope. “There’s a principle of meditation that allows for the absurdity of certain actions. You don’t have to have a good reason for everything you do. Digging with plastic spoons might just fall into that category. We are made whole by engaging in such activities.”

Penelope looked doubtful. “Sounds like crazy nonsense to me.”

“Crazy nonsense is the best kind of nonsense,” said Grant.

“I’m kind of enjoying it,” said Naomi. She had a pretty good pile of dirt next to her. We were going to have a hard time catching up to her.

“Okay,” said Sylvia. “We don’t care about fossils that much. How about creatures? If we find live thingies in the dirt, do we save them? Are we going to keep them for some experiment?”

I shook my head, noting that Sylvia also had a pretty good volume of dirt going. “It’s not a purpose-driven exercise. That’s the point we should try to remember, except not in a deliberate way. It’s a kind of awareness of the activity. We don’t have a goal.”

“Well,” said Ralph. “This was presented to us as a competition, remember?”

I remembered. The team that had the smallest pile was required to buy the members of the other team a dinner at a nice restaurant to be determined later.

“That was just the McGuffin,” I said. “What I really wanted was all of us to get out here and experience the joy of doing something for no good reason to be doing it.”

My spoon broke as I dug and scraped. The bowl went flying off the handle and landed next to Ralph. He stopped his scraping and picked up the piece from my spoon. He examined it like it was an important biological discover.

“I like the scratches in the plastic,” he said. “It’s resembles a miniature rock drawing. And the way the dust from the dirt lodges in the lines. I do believe you have created a work of art of sorts here, Terry.”