Ideas

Most ideas die because they were never written down. These are the ones I wrote down: undeveloped, unargued, some of them probably wrong. They come straight out of my journal and my old academic work, which means this is what my thinking looks like before it gets dressed. If one of them is yours to develop, take it. I’d rather see it grown than own it.

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.

Diagnostic manuals don’t describe ways of being human; they create them. Once the category exists, having it changes what it feels like to be you. No two depressions are the same thing, and the name makes them seem more alike, not less.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When someone leaves a job, the procedures leave with them. Institutional memory isn’t stored in the institution; it’s stored in people who can walk out the door. Most of what’s wrong with organizations follows from this one fact.

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.

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.

Two dreams, one from before a hard period of my life and one from inside it, that have been asking to be written as stories for years. The entry on this page I’m most afraid of, which is probably the one that matters.

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.

Why is breadth homeless? Every institution I have passed through — the university, the research center, the government office — rewards depth in one thing and treats range as a character flaw. The synthesizer has no job title. This might be the question of my working life, and this page is the closest thing I have to an answer.