Field Notes

On knowing

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.

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?

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?

Every natural science rests, at bottom, on somebody’s report of experience. The instruments are calibrated against eyes. Qualia can’t be verified, and they sit underneath everything that can.

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.

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.

On words

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.

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.

“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.

“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.

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.

On attention

I caught myself doing it: turning every passing thought over, holding each idea, refusing to let any of them roll off and go. That is what grasping is: not greed for objects but the mind’s refusal to release its own contents. And here is the knot: I keep a journal precisely to set such things down so they can pass, which makes my main instrument for letting go also a machine for holding on.

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.

On the divine

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.

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?

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.

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.

In Senegal, the griots see spirits in the baobab trees. This continent’s spirits were evicted along with its peoples. Maybe what Americans call UFOs and Bigfoot is what a haunting looks like in a country that doesn’t believe in ghosts.

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.

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.

As above, so below: the Hermetic claim that the heavens and the soul mirror each other. Paracelsus, Bruno, Dee, and Newton took it as a fact about the cosmos. Jung rescued it for respectable company by moving the mirror inside the head: not how the world is, only how we think. I notice that relocating a thing into the psyche is how we are permitted to keep believing it.

On the past

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.

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.

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.

Colonial archives were created to justify control, which means histories written from them inherit the justification. What can never be seen from inside the documents of the people who won?

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.

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.

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.

On places

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.

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.

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.

I grew up here, and there are roads twenty minutes from my house I’ve never driven, whole towns that exist for me only as names on exit signs. Being from a place is not the same as knowing it, and the gap can be measured in roads.

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.

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.

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.

On machines

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?

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.

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.

The charge that a language model is just a stochastic parrot—predicting the next token, understanding nothing—is not wrong. It only fails to notice that the same charge survives being turned around: how much of my own fluency is reflex and pattern, assembled under a self that takes the credit afterward? The dismissal works too well. It takes me down with 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.

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.

On institutions

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.

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.

On power

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.

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.

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.

On culture

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Still to be written

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.

Eight essays that exist only as titles on my homepage: on civic memory, on hermetic correspondence, on what Borges knew about libraries, on teaching as transmission. Naming a thing before it exists is either a promise or a lie, and the difference is just time.

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.