Field Notes

Everything in an animated film is cared for except its third dimension. Each frame of design is deliberate, the palette, the light, the impossible colors of a depicted imagination, and then the 3-D is bolted on and adds nothing but spectacle and, to my eye, subtracts. My mother pays extra for it because she likes an “extra something” at the cinema. I have never been able to see what the something is. It may be the one element of the form that exists purely to be sold.

I recently heard a story where someone described being made, as a schoolboy, to write a “composition” for discipline. When did we start saying “essay” instead? An essay is a kind of composition, not a synonym for it; the older word held music and painting and argument all in one hand, and somewhere we narrowed our language to a specific kind prose.

Media magic and actual magic have almost nothing to do with each other. On screen a hand or a wand glows and a will is enacted: pure fantasy, closer to Marvel and Star Wars than anyone admits. Real magic—apotropaic or sympathetic or ceremonial—belongs to horror, not fantasy. But the movies get one thing right, which is that you enter the magical realm by passage: Diagon Alley set diagonally to our world, the door into Halloweentown, always a threshold and often a psychopomp, a Hagrid, to walk you across. That part is true to life. The opening of the imaginal really does feel like finding a thing that was hidden in plain sight.

The old planetary temperaments (mercurial, saturnine, jovial, martial, venusian) name something that modern words can’t reach. “Warm,” “intellectual,” “morose,” “caring”: each of these names a part of a part of a part. The celestial vocabulary names the whole disposition at once, and I can’t tell whether that’s because the ancients saw more clearly or because a scheme that hands everything to seven gods is bound to feel complete.

Even small towns in Tunisia mark their roundabouts with symbols of what they are: Tabarka, a mermaid and a saxophone; Testour, pomegranates; Beja, a white stork; and Kram, of all things, a drone strike. Each is a small public argument about what the place is for. Few places in the US are read that way, though the people in my suburb joke, half in earnest, about erecting a statue of the mayor on the new roundabout. The monument is a sentence a town writes about itself, and we have decided ours should say nothing.

Dinosaurs have stopped being creatures of the past. Watch enough popular film and you would file them in a bestiary beside elves and trolls and giants: Dino Island, King Kong, Jurassic Park, even Transformers, each treating them as beings from “elsewhere” rather than from “before.” Nothing in the way we picture them registers that they went extinct sixty-five million years ago. Deep time turns out to be as unreachable to the imagination as fairyland, and so we reach for them with the same grammar.

For nearly a year, residents and two governments have argued over a strip of overgrown bushes swallowing a sidewalk, and every party is technically correct: the road runs through the resident’s own parcel, the easement stops at the sidewalk, the plants past it are the owner’s to keep. So nothing is done, not from neglect but from an excess of correctness. It is the precise inverse of the tragedy of the commons: there, shared ownership ruins the thing because no one is responsible; here, the ownership is so perfectly divided that responsibility dissolves and the bushes win. It is a small comedy of state illegibility, and it reads like a colonial cable.

Propaganda doesn’t win by ideology; it wins by vernacular. Fascist radio conquered North African audiences in the 1930s by broadcasting popular music in colloquial Arabic, while the French countered with formal bulletins nobody wanted to hear. Replace radio with the platforms of your choice.

There is no fascist international. Fascists are nationalists, which means they compete with one another for the same territory; in 1930s Tunisia, French and Italian fascists fought in the streets. The ideology is fissile by nature, and that may be the most useful thing about it.

France spent decades trying to manufacture loyalty with naturalization papers. It never worked. The gap between legal status and belonging may not be bridgeable by law, which is a problem if law is the only tool you have.

“Inshallah” is not “I hope so,” and it is not “maybe.” It is an appeal made with no expectation that what is asked for will arrive, a whole theology folded into one word that the closest English keeps flattening into a hedge. Some words don’t survive the crossing; what arrives on the other side is a tourist’s version of the thought.

When a state can’t stop an idea from spreading, it stops punishing the idea and starts punishing the actions. Censorship gives way to surveillance. The transition point is worth studying, because we’re living inside one.

Music in every store, a screen on every wall, the whole archive of recorded art available at all times for nothing, and I’m not sure we gained more than we lost. Art needed its scarcity; the context was part of the work. When everything is always available, what disappears is not access. It’s occasion.

A sixteenth-century miller misreads a handful of books and builds a cosmology out of cheese and worms. Borges would have loved him. But what would Menocchio have made of Borges? And what would either have made of a story about Borges reading Menocchio reading Borges? I stayed up too late one night laughing at this, and I’m still not convinced it isn’t a real piece of fiction.

A book with a friend who self-published one two decades ago and wants to write another. About what, neither of us knows. That might be the right way to start.

Driving the poorer, Blacker suburbs south of the city, my phone lit up with red-light-camera warnings it never gave me anywhere else. Surveillance is not evenly distributed; it pools where the property values fall. You can read a region’s political economy off the density of the notifications waiting to catch you breaking a small law.

Do I experience memory the way Proust describes because that’s how memory works, or because I read Proust? More generally: how much of inner life is downstream of the books that claim to describe it?

The townships of the Midwest are six-mile squares surveyed onto the prairie before any settler arrived. In New England, communities formed first and drew their boundaries afterward; here, the box came first and the people were poured in. Most polities are abstractions drawn around something real. A township is something real that grew inside an abstraction, and I’d like to know what difference that makes.

Why does God appear in only two forms across human history: as a person, or as nothing at all? Anthropomorphism or absence. Almost nobody worships something in between.

I keep a journal precisely to set my thoughts down so they can pass, which makes my main instrument for letting go also a machine for holding on.

What makes a slow film good? The same hour that drags in one movie is the entire point of another. Making interiority watchable is a craft with rules, and I don’t know what they are.

Route 66 is a road that exists mostly as merchandise. At the giant green statue in Wilmington I met a Polish family and a biker crew from Tennessee, and neither group was driving Route 66; they’d stopped in on their way to something else. The brand outlived the road. I can’t decide what that means.

Classical Hebrew prophecy was not meant to come true. Jonah grieves because Nineveh survives. What if prophecy doesn’t predict the future, but names the moment when it can still be changed?

Betty Boop. A sex symbol who is also a cartoon, still sold at roadside cafés to people whose grandparents weren’t born when she was drawn. I stood in front of a statue of her and realized I have no idea what she is. Somebody must.

If attention is a form of prayer, what is being attended to when I give it to a forest? Theophany through other people is one claim. Whether nature counts is a different one, and I can’t settle it.

I want a technology limiter I can’t out-think. Every system I build to constrain myself fails the same way: I built it, so I can dismantle it. A constraint that survives contact with its own designer may be impossible. That’s what makes it interesting.

My best questions arrive while I’m driving, which is backwards: driving is the task and thinking is supposed to be the distraction. Somehow the hands-and-eyes occupation frees the rest, and the thing I am “doing” becomes the cover for the thing actually happening. I wonder how much of my real work has been done in the disguise of doing something else.

Reason works vertically, by forks: this or that, true or false, the branching of a tree. Analogy works sideways, by resemblance, and it is the only tool that can hold a fact against a fiction. Myth, value, and most of what we actually live by are built the second way, which the first refuses to call thinking.

Paul never met Jesus. The men who did (James, Peter, John) opposed him, and his version won anyway. Either history is contingent, or that is what providence looks like from inside.

“Atypical” is not the bad version of “typical”; it is just a neutral other. But “irrational” is the bad version of “rational”: it has no content of its own, only a negation, with a moral charge smuggled in beneath it. There is no respectable place to stand outside reason, because the language built the only exit as an insult.

There is a whole genre of stock imagery for artificial intelligence: glowing blue brains, circuit-board synapses, a robot finger reaching toward a human one. None of it is made by anyone who has used the thing. It is made for the procurement officer who was told to buy AI and needs to know it on sight, a sign pointing only at other signs, so the buyer can say, found it.

We call the stored states of a computer its “memory,” and the word forecloses the thought before it starts. Human memory is associative, relational, lossy, nothing like a drawer of notecards pulled out intact. By naming the filing cabinet “memory,” we lose the ability to ask what memory actually is, and then build every machine in the shape of the wrong metaphor.

We have a word for a thing out of its time (anachronism) and none at all for a thing out of its place. Anatopism, if we coined it. The gap is strange, because displacement in space is at least as common as displacement in time, and arguably it is the condition of the age. A language shows what it has had reason to notice by what it bothered to name.

Fried chicken, mashed potatoes, biscuits, corn fritters: the unmistakable food of the Midwest, and almost none of it native to the Americas. At some point an assembly of imported ingredients becomes the authentic taste of a place. I would like to know the moment a cuisine stops being a collection of accidents and starts being a tradition, because nobody was there to record it.

A name written in one alphabet has no single correct spelling in another. Carry it from Arabic into Latin letters and it splits into a dozen versions (Muhammad, Mohammed, Mohamed), none of them authoritative, because the two scripts disagree about which sounds exist. Transcription is never a copy; it is a translation, and a translation always chooses. A name stays one in its own script. Only in crossing does it shatter, and whichever version a document happens to fix becomes you. The rest are misspellings of yourself.

The photographs of sub-Saharan Africa have not changed in fifty years: the same village, the same dust, no flags, no markers of which country, each image at once everywhere and nowhere. Every other region’s image modernizes; this one is held still. Swap the visual grammar with the one we use for ourselves and the meanings would invert overnight. Poverty’s look is assigned, not found.

We treat our way of seeing as universal, but a thing can come to feel universal simply because every alternative was killed rather than refuted. Ideas are supposed to win in some marketplace; sometimes they win by lining the competition against a wall. What looks like the triumph of the best argument may only be the last one left standing.

Illinois is well-watered, fertile, temperate; by every environmental measure it should be dense with people. Arid Tunisia is not, and yet Tunisia keeps the cultural instruments for living close together that this place seems to lack. The “emptiness” of American land is not a fact of nature. It is the aftermath of a clearing, mistaken for room.

Elected officials vote, and believe the voting is where the power lies. But someone has to draft the thing they vote on, and if they reject it, the same hand simply writes another. Whoever holds the pen sets the terms of every yes and no; the quietest seat in the room, the one taking the minutes and drafting the motion, is often the one deciding.

No power is absolute; all of it is diffuse, on loan, revocable. Stalin felt it in his paranoia and Hitler felt it as the Red Army closed on Berlin; the foreman feels it when the line walks out, the teacher when the room turns, the bureaucrat when a black market quietly forms where his rule was supposed to run. The throne is always rented, and the tenant is the last to be told.

The most powerful roles in a small government are the ones no one reads as powerful. The assessor chooses which appeals to honor. The clerk is, before anything else, an archivist (keeper of what the institution will remember it did) and does not know it, which is exactly why the power sits there unwatched. Authority lives in discretion and in the record, dressed as paperwork.

What is a township for? Not rhetorically: actually. Illinois has more units of local government than any state in the country, and the argument about whether to keep them or dissolve them can’t be settled until someone answers that question. Almost nobody arguing about it has tried.

In the warehouses, robots move twelve hundred packages an hour and the humans fill whatever gaps the robots can’t. The inversion is complete: the machine does the work, and the person does what the machine finds inconvenient.

Some ideas may not survive translation at all. The Logos of Heraclitus is not the Logos of John, and neither one is “the Word.” How much of Western philosophy is an artifact of Greek passing through Latin?

I lost my childhood faith on a single thought: that eternal life, examined, would be unbearably boring. Heaven is the one promise no one describes in any detail, and I doubt that’s an oversight. An end that never ends may be impossible to tell apart from no end worth wanting.

Philosophy is a hammer. It is the best instrument ever made for breaking a thing down to see what it was made of, and it offers nothing at all for putting it back together. We keep handing the demolition crew the blueprints.

Institutions might have generations the way people do. The local board where I work turns over roughly every sixteen years, in rhythm with national politics. Nobody plans this. It might be a law.

The novel can do one thing no camera has managed: hold the gap between how a person sees herself and how everyone else sees her, from the inside, without it looking like a trick. Put that gap on a screen and it turns into voiceover, a gimmick the image resents. Interiority may be the last thing prose still owns outright.

An organization is not the same as a congelation of people. The first has a system connecting the parts that outlasts their replacement; the second is a crowd that shares a building and a payroll. Most of what we call institutions are quietly the second kind, and you only learn which when the system is asked to do something the people can’t.

Organizations don’t die when their people leave. They die when the system connecting the people stops working. The death certificate always names the wrong cause.

Americans tend to believe the republic went extinct with Rome and was not seen again until 1789. It isn’t true: Venice was a republic, so was early modern Poland, and the very idea of “electors” we took from them, then quietly changed from hereditary aristocrats into something a party nominates. A hole this size in the historical memory is not an accident. Someone benefits from the belief that there was nothing in between.

To what extent am I becoming an API? I collect and structure information about my own life so that systems can use it. At what point does the structuring start to change the thing being structured?

How much conceptual slippage lives inside the verb “to be”? Nothing is anything else. This tree is not that tree; both are trees, but they aren’t equivalent, and the tree itself may not be a thing so much as a meeting of branches, roots, and light that we’ve agreed to call one. The most basic word in the language might be the most dishonest.

The same scene keeps recurring across the traditions: someone goes off alone and meets whatever was waiting there. Moses on Mount Sinai, Elijah on Mount Horeb, Jesus in the desert, Muhammad at Jabal al-Nour, the Buddha under the Bodhi Tree. Either the encounter requires the solitude, or solitude is the only place we have ever been able to claim it happened.

Nobody has rewound anything in twenty years, and we still say it: rewind the tape, rewind to the part where. The verb outlived the machine that named it; the cassette is gone and its gesture is fossilized in the language, working a spool that no longer turns. Speech is full of these dead technologies still walking around, and most of the time we never notice we are operating a machine that doesn’t exist.