in the heart

Until the sea
breaks its silver mirror on the rocks
you tell your dreams: "and some of us
are ghosts by then, and clamber on about the bones
of other lives." We sleep to watch your silent films
of antelope.

In these climates, at such moods, our factories breathe
burnt offerings to absent gods. A waterfall,
a suicide — a lot can fit inside a life.
The palm trees arabesque like stars.

You tell me soon the wind will eat fat spoons of snow
but still the millstone of the moon is set to swivel
in the night. Fog rolls in, and through it seagulls loom
like dreams of aeroplanes.

A promising young scholar once observed:

I'm sure the boldness and invention on display in this passage have served its author well.

To put his point another way, it seems like it isn't all that hard to make a Shakespeare. After all, it only took a million literate Englishmen before we got our first one. The same applies to Dantes, or Homers, or Cervanteses. We didn't need to roll the dice that many times before an Italian/Greek/Spaniard turned into a great author, so the odds of it happening can't be that low.

But if the odds are so good, where are all the other Shakespeares? We've had a few billion literate English speakers since Shakespeare, and some of them are alright, but the world-historical geniuses still seem pretty thin on the ground.

The obvious explanation for this is, of course, that Shakespeare was an alien.

So why do we see so few Shakespeares/aliens walking around?

Hypothesis One: They're out there, we just can't detect them. Maybe the aliens are out there, but our telescopes just suck. Maybe Shakespeare Two is alive today, but we haven't noticed and canonised them yet.

Firstly, this is boring. Secondly, it only took us ~150 years to recognise Shakespeare as the GOAT. Unless we've gotten much worse at canonising people, we should've had time to uncover a few more Shakespeares by now, even if it does take 150 years.

Hypothesis Two: They are watching us, they just won't say hi. Maybe the aliens all have a treaty not to freak out the hairless apes by doing fly-bys. Maybe Shakespeare Two prefers posting on /lit/ to submitting to the New Yorker.

Eh. For the aliens, sure, I get it. But Shakespeare Two? Why would they be actively trying to hide? If Shakespeare Two is a poaster, we would have found them already. Even if they're locking away all their writing in an attic, Dickinson and Kafka still got found out. This leaves only one option. Maybe Shakespeare Two is publishing, but they're just hiding the quality of their work. The possibility that Shakespeare Two is already famous for their exoterically shit (but esoterically sublime) work is something I'm excited to explore in next week's post on Ruby Dixon.

Hypothesis Three: They walk among us. For aliens: it's the UFOs, stupid. For Shakespeare Two: it's the Clare/Hopkins/Bunting/Bishop/Murnane/Carson, stupid.

This is true.

Hypothesis Four: The great filter. For aliens: something systematically kills off civilisations before they can expand and become detectable. The tech tree has a poison apple. Maybe it's nukes, maybe AI, maybe something we don't know yet. For authors: something systematically kills off would-be Shakespeares before they can mature into Shakespeare Two.

For authors, the great filter is other, previous authors.

To continue the tree metaphors, it's not surprising that the Shakespeare and co. of history cluster so early in their respective traditions if you assume that artforms each come with their own low-hanging fruit. If the epic, the novel, the tragedy already contain their best ideas in latent form, it makes sense that the first decent writers working in a medium will immediately notice these ideas and use them all for themselves. The low-hanging fruit of each medium have been plucked, and giraffes can't write.

There's something to this, but of course it's nonsense. You can't eat an apple twice, but all you need to write another Lear is infinite monkeys, or if you're short on time, an English Pierre Menard. Once you notice this, the early clustering of Shakespeare and co. suggests something different. If it only took a few million literate Spanish-language writers to get a Cervantes, but hundreds of millions to get a single, fictional Menard, being a Cervantes must be pretty easy. It's being a Menard that's hard.

In other words, originality is easy. Unoriginality is the real challenge, and it should be praised as such.

So what? It's a bummer I guess, but what should we do? I mean we should probably try to avoid dying. I'm doing - not my best exactly - but doing something on that front². I still have some free time though. What should I do with that?

One reaction is just falling into despair, but that doesn't sound very fun. Besides, I was probably going to die anyways, and I wasn't in despair over that. It just turns out we might have less time than we hoped.

So, supposing we really do only have ten years left, what should we do?

1. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Any pleasure you can fully enjoy in the moment will be just as good. I don't think the chance of dying soon actually makes beer taste better, but hopefully it reminds you to actually taste the beer. You can also pick up smoking - it probably won't be what kills you.

2. Come to terms with death. I don't mean roll over and accept your fate. That's lame. I mean get to a point where you can look death in the eye and not be paralysed. Without this, you'll either live in denial of death (and make a bunch of mistakes as a result), or you'll find the 'be merry' part of 'eat, drink, and be merry' pretty challenging.

3. Stop putting things off. Sure, make a bucket list and stuff, but also avoid anything that only pays off far into the future. That probably means avoiding careers or education that suck until you're at the top of a greasy pole (e.g. some PhDs, launching startups, consulting, parts of politics). I won't tell you whether or not to have kids.

These are all reasonable, as far as they go, but they're kinda oversimplified. For one thing, they just presume we'll die, which is nonsense. We might die, or we might live in a crazy post-AGI world, or AGI might not arrive and we'll get a normal future. Plenty of things that look like a great idea if you're definitely about to die (e.g. cashing out your 401k) are highly not-great ideas if you're only maybe about to die.⁴

The second point is more interesting. Namely, it's not just you who might die, it's everyone. This is worse, obviously, not just because more people will die, but because there will be no more humans after we're gone. No-one to read your novel. No-one for your miracle drug to cure. No-one to sit in the shade of the tree you plant. As Samuel Scheffler puts it, there will be no afterlife.⁵

Without this afterlife, we are forced to confront the question of what the whole, big, messy, human thing means. We can no longer punt the problem to our descendants and hope they make some sense of it. If we are the last generation, there will be no more twists in the story. Any promise we have but do not meet will be unmet forever. Any question left unanswered now will never have its answer. Our errors will echo unredeemed through empty time. If this is the end, then all the hopes and disappointments of history are piled on us and us alone. The dead expect so much of us.

Up this high
in a concrete wave
with its view of aluminium
plants twinkling like scales
and a lead smelter belching
clag as black as deep sea plumes;
the ammonite, dreaming,
remembers the ocean.

On our porch they loiter like mourners
anxious to leave, wanting not to be the next to go,
they flip the pages as they breathe.

The wind arrives, and agitated
they take up their pages and hurry
into the sky.

I am standing in the front yard of a house I have not seen in almost three years. There's fake grass underneath my steel boots. Behind me is a large hedge with the words "FREE ASSANGE" spray-painted in purple onto the leaves. Every few weeks, as the letters begin to diverge, someone comes along and re-sprays it.

In the garage, out the back, the walls are covered in posters of Playboy girls—on motorbikes, on roller skates, draped over the hoods of cars like linen. Always ready to zoom off somewhere.

Inside the house V—, who is only sixty-five but looks older, shuttles her walker between a plush leather chair in the loungeroom and an unplush plastic and linoleum chair at the kitchen table. Beside the table, the TV is tuned to SBS WorldWatch. The TV is never turned off, only muted outside the hour (9:30am - 10:30am) when they broadcast the news in Greek.

In the garage are a cage hung with wire from a rafter containing two white canaries and three yellow canaries and V—'s younger son, D—. I never see D— smoke, but the glass ashtray beside him on the wrought iron table is always full of butts. Beside the ashtray: a stereo, a packet of birdseed, an empty panettone box, and 1-3 cassette tapes plucked from cardboard boxes of AC/DC, Rose Tattoo, The Angels, and Handel.

D— is over forty, but he looks younger, with long, curly black hair down past his shoulders. I don't remember how I learnt it, but I know that when he was fourteen, D—'s father beat him so badly he went deaf in his right ear. Shortly after, he dropped out of school.

In the garage, D— doesn't look at the posters. He just watches the canaries.

As if you could
go on forever.

There are only two ways to create art. You can add. You can subtract.

Adding is what painters do. They add paint onto a canvas.

Subtracting is what sculptors in marble do. They subtract marble from a block.

Photography is subtraction. In taking a photo, you subtract the outside of a field of view, leaving only the centre behind. Alternatively, photography subtracts the options of changing your point of view. A viewer of a scene IRL can yaw, pitch, or roll their head. They can change the focal length of their gaze. They can move around. They can jump up and down if they want to. The viewer of a photograph of the same scene can't change what they see in the photograph in any of the same ways. Where did the options go? The photographer subtracted them.

Animation, usually, is additive. This is truest in animations made up of paintings or drawings, as in cel animation. Everything in such an artwork was added by some person. There are no accidents in these arts. We should view them as a conspiracy theorist views the world, that is, we should view everything in them as happening for a reason.

Going back to photography as subtracting options from a viewer, the same is true of film. Film is actually even more restrictive than photography. At least the photographer leaves the viewer the option of what to look at next. Film does not. A film is always ready to suggest the next thing for you to look at, i.e., its next frame. Yes, you can look away from a film, but there's no sharp line between nudges and coercion, and film is on one side of that spectrum.

Actually, I should clarify. Uncut film is subtractive. A sequence of film with cuts is more additive. An unedited sequence of film is made up of photos, and inherits their subtractive nature. An edited sequence of film is more additive. The editor, as opposed to the filmmaker, adds new bits of film to previous bits to make a sequence, like laying down a train track. As an individual length of rail is made of iron, while an entire track is made of lengths of rail, edited film is made of film, while unedited film is made of photos. Of course the editor also subtracts—cutting is subtracting—but the offcuts don't make up their own work of art.

Let me turn on myself. What about relief printing (linocut, woodblock printing)? You paint (add) a design to a block, then carve (subtract) around the design, then (add) ink (to) the carved block, then (add) the ink to the final page. I think, again, it depends on what outputs are works of art. The inked block is not a work of art, at least not unless it's hung in a gallery. The carved block is not usually a work of art, though it is a record of art-making. Only the final prints are works of art, so relief printing is additive, though what relief printers add to paper are records or images of subtraction.

Writing, so far, has been additive, though this is beginning to change. Writing is normally a process of adding words one after the other in a sequence, like I'm doing now. AI changes this. For a human, "writing" with AI doesn't start with the blank page, or the first word. It starts with something fully-formed, like a marble block, or a series of such blocks, and proceeds by cutting away, by discarding, the words and blocks of text you do not wish to keep.

For this reason, we can't be paranoid in our interpretation of AI-human hybrid-writing (though we can with pure AI slop).

As it makes no sense to interpret the outcome of a football game as expressing a single, unified will (or unified conspiracy of such wills)—who wanted the game to end in a 1-1 draw?—it makes no sense to scry the deep intent of human-edited AI slop. Like competitive games and legal trials, it is a product of compromise, contest, and circumstance. Again, though, it can be worthwhile to look for hidden meanings in pure AI writing; see Janus et al.

There are different names for this move. Hegel-via-Brandom talks about Niederträchtigkeit (baseness or ignobility) and Edelmütigkeit (nobility, magnanimity), where the niederträchtig person is someone who takes our actions to be caused and the edelmütig person takes them to be responding to reasons. Strawson talks about the participatory and objective stances in similar ways. There is a world of reasons, of moral agents, where you make moves like apology, resentment, forgiveness, and bargains, and a world of causes, of at-best moral subjects, where you can only explain, expect, and influence.

Weirdly, a similar split exists on certain vaguely-Buddhist views. On some understandings of the two truths doctrine there's a split is between conventional truth, the world of reasons and persons and their reason-giving games, and ultimate truth, the world of causes and conditions. Here the valence is reversed, its the world of causes that is in some sense superior to the world of reasons. On this version of the split, viewing people's behaviour (including your own) as being driven by causes, not reasons, is not an insult but a prompting to compassion.

***

Could there be an equivalent naïve narrative art? What would it look like to bring an "equal accuracy to all details" in a narrative? Is it just a matter of describing the breakfast in as much detail as the boss battle? What is the equivalent of "distance from the observer" in the narrative? It could be relevance to the main causal or thematic arc. So irrelevant details are told in as much vivid detail as the "main" plot. Is Tristram Shandy then the best example of naïve narrative art?

***

You ever listen to SACOYANS? They're pretty great. If you're ever in Osaka, and you find yourself on a rollercoaster called the Hollywood Dream, make sure to select the song "Osaka Lover" as your ride music. It's not by SACOYANS or anything, they're just both Japanese.

***

Minimalist UIs are condescending. They assume the user doesn't know what they want, and needs their attention directed to a pre-digested subset of visible menu options.

Minimalist UIs are a warning that someone is either trying to sell you something or sell you. There are way more words on any single internal page of a book than on its cover. The discrepancy was less stark in 17th century frontispieces.

How do conversational UIs (i.e. chatbots) fit into this?

***

Most media is social media if you view your past and future selves as different "people" interacting across time. Your childhood journal is a small social media platform, it just has a weird, linear social graph.

***

I think the fact the D-Day landings were successfully kept secret (despite involving so many people) makes complicated conspiracy theories more plausible.

Hearing this, the worms were afraid, and oscillated fearfully, and vibrated nervously, and wriggled fretfully and would have gone on doing so had not one worm got the bright idea to wriggle itself into an "O", which happened to be just big enough to express a lament, and so that worm was whisked away to be an "O" on the safe, warm tongue of the widow, where the blackbird could not find him.

Intuiting this, the next two worms became an "A", which could just about manage to hold fear, or, in a pinch, wrath, and so the slimy pair were spirited in duplicate into the waiting mouths of the murderer and his victim.

And then the next six or seven worms - look, you get the idea - they became the word "zigs" in the mouth of a 1930s gangster or something. The point is, whenever you see worms arising after rain, you can be sure new words are soon to follow. More of these words, like "petrichor", should be a tribute to the worms we speak.

Oh right, the blackbird. He won't come back. Soon after he went to bug the ladybugs, some of the worms became in the mouth of a cat the sound "MEOW", and when the blackbird heard that right behind him, he was so afraid he became the night.

American-Psycho-the-film is good because you're not stuck inside the psycho's head the entire time. This is a relief, since the inside of a psycho's head is a very boring setting for a novel. As a setting, it is a stage without any entrances, a monad. Lacking empathy, the psychopathic sole director has no way to bring other characters into the action, which degrades into lonely repetition as a result.

American-Psycho-the-film doesn't have this problem, because the camera takes you out of Bateman's head. In In the Miso Soup, Kenji takes you out of Frank's. This lets the plot move, driven by Kenji's fear of Frank, who he might be and what he could do, and the reader's interest in Frank as a symbol and vehicle for Murakami's satire.

*

*

The violence of In the Miso Soup is a boring kind of violence. Frank's violence is force, in Weil's sense. It overwhelms its victims, it turns people into things. In the Iliad, this force is not boring, because its victims were as gods the page before. In Blood Meridian, this force is not boring, because the Judge in his ambition aims to make a thing of the entire world.

Frank's victims (salarymen and prostitutes) are not so godlike, and his ambition (if he has any at all), is not so grand, so his violence is boring, even if it shocks you as it bores you. Scenes of this kind of violence, like the scene in the hostess club, depicting only things, are ultimately varieties of still life, or, at larger scales, landscapes.

When I put my tongue on one part of it, it is cool and smooth. This is true of the next five parts of the cup I put my tongue on, but not the sixth, on the lip, which is cool but not smooth, because the cup is chipped there.

Descending from this chip is a thin black fissure. If the fissure was a stem, the negative space of the chip could be a flower, maybe a poppy. Across the cup from this fissure is a real (painted) flower. Unlike the flower made of empty space, the painted flower has petals (twenty), and leaves (two) sticking out of its stem. But the petals are like petals from a sunflower, and the leaves are like leaves from an oak tree, so maybe it is not any more real than the flower made of negative space. Besides that, all round the inside of the cup its glaze is cracked with a pattern like a cicada's wing. D'Arcy Thompson would enjoy the correspondence I am sure.

When I first found the cup, it was a pregnant woman, because it was half-full of clayish dirt. But actually I suppose the clayish dirt it was full of wouldn't grow up to be a cup like its mother, probably it was the wrong kind of clay, so the cup is specifically like Angrboda, or at least Pasiphae, or maybe Mary Theotokos, but I have to be careful there, because that might be a heresy (the implied Christology, I mean). My point is that mysteriousness of embryology is quite underrated. It is one of our wyrdest and most numinous sciences, so keep up the good work embryologists, ditto to the cup makers and buriers.

On the base of the cup the words "MADE IN AUSTRALIA" are printed. Google tells me the cup was made by "Johnson of Australia" in the "1970/80's" in "Croydon", "Victoria". I did not find the cup in Croydon, Victoria. I found it with a tree root growing through its handle, half-buried in the bank of the Karuah River, which is near Monkerai, which is near Bulahdelah, which Les Murray wrote a poem about once. If you want to make a pilgrimage to the exact location where I found the cup, the coordinates are 32°16'44.4"S, 151°50'56.4"E. Do be aware those coordinates fall on private property, and also I had a pretty good look to check if there were any other cups there and I couldn't find any, so if you are just looking to get your own cup, going there is probably not worth-while. I did meet some friendly cows though. Worth saying hi to them if you're in the area.

It's often a good idea to leave people wanting more, so I won't tell you any more about my cup at this time.

If I could leave my ideas in a drawer somewhere, imagine them grown, then pull out an essay, my life would be much nicer. But ideas are not like mold. They do not grow of their own accord. Instead my future self must write them.

Why do I shunt this task off to my future self? It can't be because pressing the right sequence of keystrokes is especially hard. Laptop keys are actually quite light and easy to press. Instead, I think I avoid writing because it forces me to stop imagining what I might write, and start reading what I do write, and this really, really sucks.

It sucks because every time I go to read back what I've written, I find it's collapsed into a single sequence of words. My previously imagined sequences have grown distant and shut themselves off to me. Often, it turns out those imaginings were never possible to begin with, and they fade like a mirage as I read.

Of course, this experience is not unique to writing. Borges could build a gallery to complement his library. When you take a photo, you are plucking a single grid of colour out of pixel-space and into reality. The same is true of painting, drawing, sculpting, or dancing.

In the limit, given perfect memory and infinite time to choose, there's no difference between selection and creation. God would be one such perfect selector/creator. In creating us, he plucked us from the ocean of possibility into our single, actual world. Is that why He spent five days procrastinating?

***

Fictional worlds are weird. It's true, or at least it's true in the Sherlock Holmes stories, that Holmes (being human) had a liver. But it's not true that his liver is large, or small, or any particular size at all.

This is not a peculiarity of Holmes or his liver. There is a fact of the matter about what Caesar ate for breakfast on his seventh birthday, even if we could never know it. But there is no fact of the matter fixing what Bilbo ate for breakfast on his seventh birthday, even if we can be sure he had such a birthday, and ate at least one such breakfast.

This might be why we escape into fictional worlds. Fictional worlds have plenty of space for us to escape into. Unlike the real world, fictional worlds are underdetermined by their details. Strictly speaking, they are not worlds at all, but only the outlines of worlds. The same applies to any fictional life you might imagine yourself living. It is not really a life, but the outline of a life, i.e. a story.

This means a fictional world doesn't need to be better than your own to be worth escaping into (A Little Life). It doesn't even have to be especially unlike your own (Tao Lin was/is mostly read in Brooklyn). When we escape into fiction, we are not trying to go from one shitty particularity to another, better particularity. We go to escape particularity itself.

This is true, but it makes me wonder: why do we escape into such detailed fictional worlds? Shouldn't "Once upon a time some stuff happened" be the most popular destination for escape, since it leaves the most room for fantasy?

I think we need detail in fiction because we suck at fantasy. Specifically, we suck at the forgetting part of fantasising. Of travels in space, Seneca said: "Do you ask why your flight is of no avail? You take yourself along". Our flights into fiction are just as fruitless if we can't escape taking ourselves along. That's why we need the profusion of detail in our fictional lives and worlds. The details are props to help us forget ourselves.

Often, we put up with second-rate escapes into fiction. These are escapes into the kinds of art we (wrongly) call escapist. Think of superhero movies, isekai, or romance novels. These let you escape the unfulfillment of your everyday desires for power, freedom, or sex. Actually escapist art would let you escape the desires themselves.

***

Fiction is not our only destination for escape. Like fiction, the past (from the present point of view) is gappy, vague, missing detail. This is true of our personal pasts (both memory and remembering are selective), but it is truer of the past before we were born, whose details memory can't confront us with.

Just like we use fiction as a prop for fantasy, we use the past as a prop for our nostalgia. Ideal props include ruins, static-hissing music, and hazy, faded photographs. Time has scrubbed away the details of each such prop (or at least the prop pretends it has). Either way, the absence of detail leaves space for our fantasies. You don't need rose coloured glasses to be nostalgic; any blindfold will do.

The past is not the only time without detail. As the details of the past are unrecallable, so the details of the future are unforeseeable. Both invite our fantasy to fill the gaps, at least until they are crowded out by facts.

This is truest when you are a child. In childhood, the details of your possible futures are slim enough to fit into a single imagined life. So we aspire to be firefighting novelist-astronauts. When you are a little older, there is still room for one such dream to coexist with the rapidly accumulating lump of facts that is your actual life. For a while longer, you know little enough about your ability, and can imagine little enough about your aspiration, that the reality of your writing ability and your fantasy of being a great writer can fit into a single imagined life.

It's as much for this presence of fantasy as for their lack of experience that we distrust the young. The converse is true of the old. We trust them for their experience, sure, but we trust them more for their lack of a future to fantasize about. This sounds stupid, but why else would we crave the advice of the dying (even those who are dying young), if not because their brief respite from fantasy reveals to them the awful, overflowing richness of life?

I think my Nan has tucked it there.
Anxious in December that we might catch chill,
she snuck in with the moon as we slept.

I think there's a spectrum from thinking with smaller vs larger chunks of other people's thoughts. We never really think from first principles. The universe of thought is more gunky than that.

If we think with smaller chunks of other people's thoughts, we won't hit hard frontiers as often. But just as some physical problems need specialised tools with complex supply chains (e.g. doing heaps of FLOPs really fast), some intellectual problems are the same. If you lack those mental tools, you just won't be able to solve the problem, and you probably can't build the tools all by yourself. The epsilon-delta definition of a limit is an example of such a tool with a complex intellectual supply chain. It's not a hard tool to think with, but it was (as history shows) really hard to create yourself.

Still, if you think with smaller parts of other people's thoughts, you can generally do more and go further than someone thinking with larger chunks of other people's thoughts, since you can build more possible solutions. On one level this is just combinatorics. You can make a lot more things out of 100 individual Lego bricks than 4 walls of glued-together Lego. On another level, being able to think with smaller chunks of thought shows greater competence and generativity in a bunch of ways. There's also the fact that smaller chunks of thought can't fit as many barriers, tricks, dead-ends, and black holes inside them. It's safer to think with a hundred observations than a single ideology.

Conspiracy Theories are Memetic Parasites

If you go out and try to change the world, you'll quickly realise power doesn't work the way conspiracy theories claim it does (not through lack of malice, but lack of competence).

This selects for fatalistic conspiracy theorists in two ways:

1. Directly, if you go and try to change the world, you'll soon abandon your conspiratorial beliefs, leaving only fatalistic conspiracy theorists behind.

2. Indirectly, it means successful conspiracy theories have to induce fatalism in their adherents if they are to survive as memes.

This means conspiracy theories are memetic parasites, sapping the vitality of the host to preserve their own existence.

Napoleon

When Napoleon declared Lombardy the Cis-alpine Republic, not the Trans-alpine Republic, he was deciding not to proclaim a new Rome (yet). I wonder if he considered both options.

Meetings are Marketplaces, Dialogues are Barter

Meetings and marketplaces both centralise buyers and sellers (of either information or vegetables) to reduce search costs. But marketplaces let transactions take place in parallel (you don't have to wait for me to buy milk for you to sell an apple), while meetings force them to happen in series. In general, shared communication channels are rivalrous, shared marketplaces are not. This means scaling marketplaces increases overall liquidity, while scaling meetings just creates congestion.

But the point of meetings isn't exchanging information (i.e. increasing volume/liquidity), but creating common knowledge. If meetings were non-rivalrous (i.e. everyone could split off into their own breakout rooms), many more transactions could take place, but you couldn't create common knowledge.

Bad News for Lotus Sutra Enjoyers

The more memetically fit a religion or scripture, the less likely it is to be true.

The sky turns with crumpled leaves,
a flock of sparrows - tumbling.

The original Apple logo depicts Isaac Newton under an apple tree.

Between 2012 and 2022, an editor using the name "折毛" created over 200 interconnected articles on Chinese Wikipedia about fabricated events in medieval Russian history.

John Murray Spear (1804 – 1887) was an American spiritualist minister best known for his attempts to construct an electrically powered Messiah which he referred to as the "New Motive Power".

"British cavalry in the 1850s consisted entirely of twinks who used UwU-speak"

Orcas started wearing dead salmon as hats again after ditching the trend for 37 years.

In the 1830s, a missionary to New Zealand found Māori women using a bronze bell inscribed with Tamil script to boil potatoes. No-one knows how the bell got there.

Here, between the trunks in cemetery rows –
where glass-eyed flies once clung to fruit,
and burst like dandelion heads as we passed
above the matted undulations of the grass
shot through with rusty pickets – jutting up

Like galleon bones, half sunk in silt
and scoured pips – mis-sown by time to bare
the porous ridges where their flesh hooked on
much as it does in us, still straining dark
and silent as a dragline in the empty sea,

Or the grass that snarling wrecks the wall
where a fig switch sits – snapped at the brittle joint,
and a trough inclines the rain, whose skin of light
crosscut by fine black furrows of shade
is like the scale-wrapped flank of a fish.

I realise I am sweeping your grave, when –
somewhere, a magpie sings, and I look up
through the naked lattice of the plum
and I see the sky is white, with one red edge,
like a segment from a peach.

*

People trust proverbs. But proverbs contradict each other. Compare:

I think people are right to trust proverbs.

On one level, the proverbs in the above pairs do contradict one another. However, each proverb still shares something with their opposite, namely, their framing.

Both "Nothing ventured, nothing gained" and "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush", frame situations as a question of risk attitudes. The second pair frames things as a question of cooperation. The third frames them as a question of patience¹.

These questions are the actual point of proverbs.

***

Here's another paradox:

1. Good advice should be surprising.
2. Proverbs are cliched.
3. But proverbs are often good advice.

I like premises two and three, so I'm going the keep them. So I'll give up premise one instead.

Most advice tries to give you new information. New information is surprising. So it seems like good advice must be surprising advice. This is wrong².

It's wrong because proverbs are not trying to give you new information. Hearing a proverb does not give you any new data about your situation. Instead, proverbs change the algorithm you use to process the data you already have.

***

Earlier, I said that proverbs like "Many hands make light work" frame your situation as a question of cooperation (or patience, or risk-attitudes). I also said that proverbs don't give you data, they change your algorithm. These are two ways of saying the same thing.

Proverbs, when understood properly, make you ask certain questions. Both "Many hands make light work" and "Too many cooks spoil the broth" make you ask "Should I cooperate?" In this way, proverbs are tools for simplifying our thought. They quantize our decision making. Instead of weighing the EV of every possible action before you act, you just need to decide: Should I cooperate, or not? In making you answer this simpler question even contradictory proverbs can improve your decision-making algorithm.

This simplification sounds bad, but it's actually good. It makes decisions more tractable. It focuses attention on what matters (like risk attitudes) rather than surface details (like a salesman's pitch). It lets you draw on all your relevant experience - when you see an insurance choice as a question of risk tolerance, you can draw on every risky decision you've ever made, from poker games to career changes.³.

In short, proverbs may not give you and new data to make a decision with, but they can improve the algorithm you're using to make that decision.

***

Proverbs are not the only kind of algorithm we disguise as data. Tarot and astrology have the same property. There's no actual signal in what your birth sign is, or what cards come up in a reading. But these procedures do invoke certain archetypes which you are free to use if you please. Those who understand these as data will do worse for listening to them, those who understand them as algorithms can benefit. The stars are mute, but you can still answer their questions.

I was incredibly impressed by Miller's handling of the pacing and plot; especially how she dealt with the problem of how to make Achilles loveable (to both the reader and Patroclus), while preserving Briseis' role in the story. I say Miller made Achilles loveable, but he is not sympathetic. Patroclus is the sympathetic one. I understand what it would be like to love Achilles. I can't understand what it's like to be Achilles; I don't know if anyone -- Achilles included -- could.

I was also amazed by Miller managing to maintain a readable but-also-elevated, epic-in-the-sense-of-a-sung-saga tone. It's not naturalistic, but after a few pages it does feel natural. I'm not really sure how Miller pulled this off. I can see some of the obvious bits, like the characters' ways of speaking (especially Achilles' and Chiron's), and the choice of nouns and adjectival phrases drawn directly from Homer. But somehow this doesn't feel like pastiche, and neither does the presence of a completely psychologically modern character (Patroclus), feel anachronistic.

Also, Odysseus as a character is unbelievably good. He feels like a modern man in an ancient world, but not in the way where Patroclus is. In Patroclus' case he has to be modern for the reader to sympathise with him as narrator. But Odysseus simply is modern. Odysseus feels like an alien in the story, in an analogous way to Achilles. I haven't read Circe yet, but it makes sense that Circe, not Odysseus, is the POV character. Even though her Odysseus is psychologically closer to us than her Achilles, imagining the inside of his head feels just as impossible.

Are transcendental arguments just special (deductive) cases of anthropic arguments?

Why are sleep paralysis hallucinations usually malevolent?

Does (a non-multimodal version of) GPT-4 being able to draw shitty unicorns challenge Kant's view of space as a necessary a priori representation?

Why are used book stores more densely stocked than new bookstores?

***

Why do relationships break up while friendships slowly drift apart?

Do any authors or artists have a higher arc of reputation than Tasso and Ariosto (at least in the Anglosphere)? If not, what does this say about their common form, subject matter, language, and time period?

Is Hugo Grotius underrated as an influence on western philosophy?

Why is so much internet writing advice of some form (compared to IRL conversations)?

Why do solo artists seem more likely than bands to keep releasing great music for a really long time? Does the discrepancy disappear if you control for bands shorter musical lifespans?

***

How would Marx(ians) explain Baumol's cost disease?

Why is karaoke most popular in East Asia?

Why do people want to be ascetics?

Why do consequentialist moral movements seem comparatively rare throughout history?

Do moral realists or moral anti-realists take morality more seriously?

***

Exactly what class of goods (and services?) have relatively low list prices, despite low supply and very high demand? Obviously there's some connection with conspicuous consumption (think of hypebeasts), but what exactly is the connection?

Why do so-called bullshit jobs tend to be comparatively high paying, middle-of-corporate-hierarchy positions?

Why do themes of henosis and theosis seem especially common in anime and manga? Is there some connection to Mahayana Buddhism or Neo-Confucian thought?

Is it better to live at the beginning or end of a civilization?

Does the fact that peoples appetite for risk reduces as they age affect asset pricing?

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,---that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Eliot, in his essay on Dante, called the lines 'a serious blemish on a beautiful poem'. Serious is the right word. A serious blemish is an earnest blemish, and an earnest blemish is almost an intentional blemish.

Earlier in the same ode, Keats wrote;

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

In other words, completed poems are sweet, but those uncomplete are sweeter. By ending with the bitterness of false rhetoric, Keats demonstrates the truth of the poem at the cost of its beauty. As well as emphasising the falseness of the final equivocation, this is an extreme show of confidence in the poem. Keats knew he had beauty to spare, so he could afford to prove his theme with ugliness.

***

Edit: A Mouthfull of Air just released an episode on the poem, go listen to that instead.

One morning after the well had dried up and we were left alone in the house my brother tore down the rusted iron roof of the well. The air was very hot and the grass was screeching with cicadas. When he laid down the roof beside the ring of stones, I saw the mouth of the well, like something exposed in the white landscape, and I looked away.

Now a heavy lid covers the well, and from my bedroom window I watch its shadow prowl over the grass like a sundial.

Last night, after midnight, when the moon shone for the empty land behind the house, I saw him walking down to the well. In his right hand, he held something in a bag, which swung as he walked. He paused when he reached the well, and looked back at my window. I knew he could not see me there, because the side of the house was in darkness.

I saw him turn back to the well, and open it, and lay its wooden lid on the ground. I saw him reach into the bag, and empty it into the mouth of the well. He waited there, and was still.

Finally, he picked up the lid, and rested it against the stone barrier surrounding the well. Then he turned and stood for a while among the long grey grass, and stared into the shadows covering my window.

He was already sitting at the table as I came down the stairs. I could see him sitting with his back to me, plucking dry cereal from the bowl between his middle and index fingers. The paper lay open on the table. When I sat down opposite him, he did not look up.

"I think one of the cats fell into the well last night," he said.

He bit down on another flake.

"I saw the lid had come off when I came down this morning, so I went out, and when I got down there, I thought I heard something crying, so I had a look down with the torch."

He picked up his glass of milk and took a sip, wiping the back of his hand against his mouth.

"It looked like there's something stuck down there. But it wouldn't grab onto a rope, so one of us will have to go down and fetch it."

He looked at the bare table in front of me.

"You're not hungry?"

"No."

"You're right to go up now then?"

I nodded.

"Alright." He looked back to the paper, placing another flake into his mouth.

I saw a white shape resting on the black earth at the bottom of the well. It did not move as the light from my torch passed over it.

My brother began to uncoil the rope. He wrapped it once, twice around his waist and tied it off, then handed me the other end. I tried to tie a bowline around my chest, but I couldn't get the sequence right. He did not say anything as he tied it, and when he finished he stared above me, beyond the fence that marked the border of our land, into the empty distance of yellowing grass where other people lived, in other places, and other lives.

I stepped onto the rim of the well.

Looking towards the house, I saw the door was open, and I could see into the kitchen, where sunlight was shining through an open window.

I leaned back, and I felt the empty space beneath me.

I began to lower myself, one step at a time. The stones in the walls grew sparser as I descended. Half-way down I could no longer make out the wall in front of me, and I felt my feet dislodge fine showers of earth with each step. I heard small pebbles strike the stones at the bottom. The sound echoed, and I thought of the sound wheat makes when it rushes into an empty silo.

My heel met the bottom. I felt for the flashlight and turned it on.

The cat's eyes were shut. A thin trickle of blood escaped its mouth, dispersing into the damp black earth between the stones. I crouched down and rested my hand on its head. It was cold, and the damp had seeped into its fur.

I felt the rope fall down in coils, wrapping itself over my back. I looked up to see my brother leaning over the mouth of the well, shielding his eyes with one hand. He did not say anything to me.

His face disappeared from view, and I heard wood dragging over the grass. The black underside of the lid appeared and began to close around the mouth of the well.

It looked, for an instant, like a white crescent moon, and then it was dark.