The Ruricolist is now available in print.

Violent Snow


Nature has instructed my disdain.


















Nondefinition #29


A Memory of Infancy











Nondefinition #28


Music and Meaning

Can music have meaning? Certainly, meaning can always be found in music – one piece of music and the traveler hears home, the lover hears the beloved, the believer hears God – but can a piece of music bear meaning as an act of communication?

Keys, intervals, and chords are often thought of as ideas in themselves. Major is happy, minor is sad. The second menaces, the sixth regrets. The suspension promises, the dominant delivers. But the rules hold only for the simplest examples. A composer can always make the key serve the occasion; a performer can do the same for the composer. When we hear a familiar piece in an unfamiliar key – say, when an aging singer changes the key of a song to ease their voice – it troubles us at first; but we get used to it, and after a few hearings all our original associations pass over into the new key intact.

Time and use have made certain pieces of music the bearers of specific meanings; but if we listen naively, the meanings disappear. The motive of Beethoven’s 5th has come to represent strength, right, V for victory; but if we say that Beethoven put all that into four notes, then we must say that Samuel Morse put it into three dots and a dash.

Yet it is absurd to say that music is without meaning – that it is mere surface – that what we see in it are only reflections on its polish. Music comes to you without message or meaning; but once you have supplied the message, there should be no room for others. A piece of music should work on its message like a table of derivations works on a root in a Semitic language. We are not told what the deed is; we are told: here is the doer, here is the manner, the means, here is the beginning of it, the end, the reasoning, the result, here is the place the thing was done, and who it was done to. (A strange analogy, yes; but consider the sometimes almost musical ambiguity of the ancient Semitic languages.)

No human being can experience every emotion equally; yet any competent musician can play a piece of music with any emotion, even one the musician has never experienced. The lack of experience can even make for a better performance, if it keeps the performer out of the way. How, then, can we call playing music the expression of emotion? It is first a means of experiencing emotions. The same can be true for listeners. A sad song can sadden you without matching your own experiences. Why listen to sad songs when you are sad? Because the sadness you feel from sad music is not your own sadness, but a borrowed sadness that covers your own.

Music is not the only means of emotional education and exercise, but it is the most effective, being the most efficient and the most accessible. Music goes ahead of the other arts, the lullaby that greets us almost as soon as we enter the world. The other arts reach the mind later, and rely on the capacities that music has formed.

And I suspect that among the arts, music serves to absorb the extreme of aestheticism. In the unmusical aestheticism can become immoderate and paralyzing, as if they do not know where to stop in their attempt to imitate or rival musical sophistication, even to the injury of what is particularly their art’s own.

As music became easier to hear, all the arts adopted simplicity as their goal: as if the desire for the pleasures of sophistication were limited, and as it finds sophistication in music, it finds satiety.

Consider music in movies. I do not know how much I am ruled by habit in finding it natural. Perhaps in a hundred years a scene ending in swelling music while lovers kiss will seem as artificial as a scene ending with a rhyming couplet and a falling curtain. Exeunt audience. But to me it seems that the movie depends more on the music than the music depends on the movie. Silent film, of course, was never silent, only voiceless. Music videos are watchable without plot or character. Many movies – especially if they propose to represent real life – have plots that would, told over a dinner table, only provoke laughter; characters, if they were real, we would prefer not to know. Far from being ennobled by their projected stature, it is only by the artifice of music that such stories gain watchable significance. As literature, movies are less flexible than narrative: the stories of superheroes and salesmen must be told alike by one camera at a time in one place at a time following one act at a time in a box of the same size over the same amount of time. Music smooths out the disparities when a salesman fills the screen like a superhero and a superhero declaims like a salesman.

Information theory defines the unit of communication as a single decision: a bit of information is exactly enough to decide one Yes or No. In this sense, music is meaningless. It contains no information except itself. Yet it has something very close to meaning: it cannot tell you how to answer, but it can force you to come to an answer. The screen tells you the man is a villain; the music makes you hate him. The song tells you how he did her wrong; the music puts you on her side. Judgment can be withheld only in silence; music decides nothing, but it forces the decision.

Nondefinition #27

Wallet. “In the time of the first Pax Americana,” – saith the chronicler, but who believes the old stories? – “every man of age was required to carry at all times a scrap of cow-leather in a fold in the cloth of his garments; and except that he showed this Wallet on demand, no merchant would sell to him, and a judge might throw him in jail only because he was without his Wallet. The word comes from the old wall, for the sides of a room; and this because each Wallet was like a key to the Wall, wherein law-abiders dwell.”


It is as difficult to say what guesswork is as to say what the mind is. Guessing is not the action of any faculty of the mind; it is the only action of the whole mind. There are no exercises or studies to train guesswork; the quality of the guess is the quality of the guesser. There are no abstract objects for guesswork to practice on – in any formal test, the answers where the mind is most used are the ones that are guessed at. Only in your guesses do you transcend the test, having in mind not only the subject matter but also the context of the test, weighing the character and reconstructing the thoughts of its makers, estimating your limits, knowing yourself and knowing the way of the world.

A good guess is sibling to a good idea. Both trade risk for reward, certainty for power. To guess is often the only way to know something that others do not. A bad guess is always wrong; but that one guess is some sense better than another also good does not mean it is more likely to be true. Reality is recalcitrant and perverse. Reality has punished for laziness, and punished for effort; punished for absurdity, and punished for plausibility; punished for optimism, and punished for pessimism – and, of course, it has rewarded each. There are no rules for guessing: we cannot guess with less than all our strength.

Nondefinition #26


Verbal Thinking















Nondefinition #25

Relativity. Time (said some fool) is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once. Relativity, to the contrary, demonstrates that for anything to happen, there must be a perspective from which everything happens at once; and, conversely, that no two things actually happen at the same time, except as they happen to someone or something. If something has happened, then everything has already happened, and nothing has happened yet. If that confuses you, wait: it will make sense in time. It already has.

On a Television Advertisement for the City of Dubai

Only build.
Build higher and farther.
Build wilder and larger.
Build where never built before
Build with ruins under floor.
The city cannot wait, the roads are true
Their word runs everywhere, they run for you.
Where have you seen the spot where buildings cannot dwell?
The domes are in the mountains, the divers ride the bell.
Build while strength is left for building, build while time is left to build
Built atop the sunken city, build atop the land you filled.
Cities are everywhere rising, a fable instructive for anthills
Builders by summer and winter in sunshine or darkness our light fills.
See by the shores of the desert how cities are built by a gesture,
 Cities of pliable steel, cities that open like eyes,
Pillarless cities that spill out shaken like billowing carpets
 Sudden as breaker or dune, clouds of an overturned sky.
Too many cities have slow-grown only to perish in torment
Overturned cities, their names told counting the promise of judgment.
Cast up cities thin as cloth or canvas, anchored for the day
Sheathe your towers under glass as sails to set you underway.
No city wakes in silence when city never sleeps;
No harvest fails the city where city never reaps.
Who builds anew and never looks behind
Keeps safe from all that’s out of sight and mind.
To find the way we build it first.
The water follows on our thirst.
We build to trap the day;
The night we wall away.
Build stronger and taller
Build nearer and smaller.
Only build.

Three Horror Stories


“Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“Sounded like somebody down there calling for help.”

“There’s nobody down there. The dogs went through last week. They sealed the tunnels after that.”

“Yeah, but this seal’s not tight. The storm worked it loose. It was cold last night. Somebody could have slipped in.”

“I don’t hear a damn thing. It’s just wind getting in somewhere. The seals are loose, like you said. If you want to keep your job, just get over there and press the damn button. We’re running a day late already. We’ve got to get these tunnels filled in.”


“Did you find it, daddy?”

“Find what, little one?”

“Did you find the monster in the basement?”

“Of course. I was looking for the monster. There’s no such thing as monsters, little one.”

“But I saw it daddy, I know I did! Why are you standing out there, daddy? Come in here where I can see you.”


“Thanks for coming so quickly.”

“No problem. Somebody told me you were, like, doing medical experiments or something for cash? So, I mean, what’s that like?”

“Well. Pain, humiliation, sometimes I could hardly get out of bed for weeks, sometimes I thought I’d go crazy. A lot like the office, actually.”

“So how much did you make?”

“I went in for something off the books. Set me up for life.”

“What’d they do to you? I mean, you even kinda look different.”

“Oh, nothing much. Did some funny things to my appetite.”

“So where are we going? I’m hungry. We going out?”

“I just ordered in.”

Nondefinition #24







Nondefinition #23


The Twentieth Century











Nondefinition #22



Stevenson, somewhere, warns an aspiring writer to consider the unimportance of literature – particularly how little the world would change, had Shakespeare never lived. But this is wrong. Certainly, Shakespeare moved no great historical forces. If you can be convinced that history is a script, a set of roles to be filled – then you must allow Stevenson’s doubt.

But if an individual can have any effect on history, however subtle, then Shakespeare’s influence is everywhere. For if we remove Shakespeare, then, five centuries later, we have a different human race. Restore life to every soldier Harry’s speech inspired to heroism; take back every life the soldier saved. Take back the child of every pair of lovers brought together when the love suicides at Verona made a young man seek his Juliet, a young lady her Romeo. Take back every life that stayed to make the choice to be or not to be.

Go on with the rest of literature. All those soldiers who fell to fall like Achilles, all those poets who died to die like Werther; all who wandering with a book in hand found strange mothers for their children; even whom a shared admiration for a writer offered friendship and friendship became love. Go back to the beginning, back to folk tales and fireside legends; repeal poetry altogether and see how each woman’s love, with no better occasion than strength or success, breeds brutal children whose loves and lives are yet more brutal, and so on all the way down.

That literature mostly occupies idle time does not make our choice in literature vain choice: we get only a fixed measure of time, and whatever changes how we use any of that time, changes what we leave behind us. When we work, our work is in and for the present; what we aim for when we work for the future is a necessary delusion, not the true future but the present’s mirage of the future. The true future grows in our leisure.

This is literature’s unique power, which other arts only employ. It is not the musician they fall for, but the literary characters Music, and the Musician; not the flag they die for, but the Flag, the Nation, that someone once defined in telling.

If we could know the minds that went with the names, we would see that genealogy is a transcription of literature; that the human race we know has not merely happened, but has bred itself in a prolonged act of literary criticism.

Nondefinition #21

Acronyms. Once: a proud technical civilization with an awkwardly written language, which solved the problem by resort to acronyms and abbreviations. Near the end, did some sage warn how many the acronyms had become? How they were combining to breed new acronyms? Even as they prepared for their greatest triumph, their language had become utterly confused. None were found now who knew all the acronyms of another. They scattered abroad, forming peoples who shared just enough acronyms to begin to form a basic common vocabulary. Abandoned and untended, Atlantis fell. Some of these groups are known to us: Proto-Indo-Europeans, for example, or Hamito-Semites, or Sino-Tibetans.

Fable of the Mayor

This island was no island: it had been a hill in the park before the flood. It was so small and brambly that the man there could not even pace. He loosened his tie and stared over the floating wreckage, searching for a boat or a helicopter. Surely someone was coming. He had picked this spot as the safest in the city on the very day he vetoed the appropriation for a new floodwall.

He was free, now. All the evidence was gone: no paper trail for the prosecutor, no assets in his name for his wife’s lawyers to seize. He was like Noah on Ararat: when he came down from the mountain, all his problems would be gone.

He leaned back against the tangled branches, soft and creaking, thick and restful as a cradle here. He lit a cigarette, dragged, and threw the match onto the water. It landed with a hiss.

There was just enough time, before pain erased all thought, for him to notice that one of the things which had risen from the drowned city to float around his little island, was an oil slick.

Moral: A betrayer can never relax.

Nondefinition #20


Blink Comparator

In the days before computers, when the possibility of intellectual achievement presupposed infinite tolerance for drudgery, the blink comparator was a machine used in astronomy.

Two photographic plates – negative images of successive telescopic views of the same region of space – were inserted into the machine.

An astronomer would sit before the machine, watching carefully – watching with absolute attention – while the machine flicked back and forth between the two images. The rapid alternation of the images, like frames in a movie, gave any change the appearance of motion. This was much easier than looking back and forth; but still, it must have been very hard. No one, not the fussiest and most fanatical director who ever worked, has ever watched a moment of film so intently as did those astronomers who, once upon a time, watched the dots and the blots cycle in a blink comparator.

It was by use of the blink comparator that Pluto was discovered. The demotion of Pluto makes the blink comparator less historically important; yet it makes it more wonderful. In the last decade we have found that Pluto is only one among many dwarf planets circling the periphery of the solar system. Again, we have learned this in the last decade. But it was in 1930 that Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto with a blink comparator – a discovery made 80 years ahead of its time by the surpassingly skillful use of a surpassingly difficult instrument.

Obsolete instruments often live on in metaphors. (Only amateur astronomers put eye to telescope.) The blink comparator deserves such a metaphorical legacy. What does the mind lack more than this facility? In reaching for memory we lose perception; in attending to perception we let go of memory – though each is useless, except when set in contrast with the other. We must plod to present choices to our judgment – we concentrate on one choice only by neglecting the other; in reconsidering the first, we lose the second.

But the blink comparator is not only a metaphor of aspiration. There are moments in life that come as if through such a device: moments when the past somehow overlays the present, when you are at once who you are, and who you were, and some third who sees both at once; moments when the present is weaker and less believable than the past. Such a moment is mourning, when you are at once still the person you were before your loss, and the person you must become now, and some third who sees and guides the change.

These the moments when the sense of mystery in life is strongest: when something new and nameless is seen to move, and in the dark of the room the astronomer knows the poet’s wild surmise.

Nondefinition #19


Eclecticism 4/4



But the past cannot thank us.







Eclecticism 3/4

Eclecticism is not modernism; eclecticism is the nightmare of modernism. Eclecticism is, of course, modern in the sense of contemporary; but it is the utter opposite of any movement which can be called modern or modernist.

Modernism postulates that every age has its own needs, which only it can answer for itself. For a century and more the avant-garde of modernism has been on a continual charge against the retreating remnants of a past that somehow, even in defeat, obstructs the way to an art and aesthetic and language and lifestyle belonging entirely and spontaneously to the living. This vanguard has chased the past off the field and into the hills and all the way down to the bottom of the box canyon…

Are they sure that was a retreat?

But modernism need not despise the past. Its principle is only to believe that each age must answer its own needs on its own terms – with or without the past’s advice, but never under its authority.

The history of modernism parallels the history of fashion; thus the decline of fashion parallels the decline of modernism. What was fashion but a message that went out from somewhere? – from London, from Paris, from New York, from Los Angeles. Above all, to be fashionable was to show that you had received the message; to show, by how soon you got it, how close you were to the center. But now the Internet brings all messages to everyone, and now fashion is the center of nothing but itself. We dress not to show that we get the message, but to show which message we get.

This model, with the same centers, ruled most arts in the twentieth century. And though the informal workings of culture have abandoned the model, the institutions of education and career in the arts and humanities still presume it. They are thus left in the worst kind of obsolescence: looking backward for the future that was to be, forlorn as Communists in a Moscow McDonald’s.

In retrospect modernism seems less a movement than a quest. The Grail Quest – as Mallory tells it – disbanded the Round Table and killed off most of its knights. The quest of modernism, though less successful, was no less costly. Its cost – but who counted while all those strong young questers were falling in private experiment or public revolution? How they searched: outward among the tribesmen, among the workers, among the priests and prophets, among the scientists; inward in analyzed dreams, in redeemed madness, behind all the doors of perception. And for what grail?

For the myth, the truth, that would given them place and purpose in the world, that would give the world place and purpose for them.

But after all their questing, we have our truths from the study of the week; and our myths, not from the frenzies and blacklights of Bohemia, but from the library quiet of Tolkien’s Oxford, the narrow windows of Lovecraft’s Providence, the concept art of Lucas’s California. We have our places where we renovate, and we set our purposes with mission statements.

Their efforts brought returns, but never the desired return. One after another they threw their work, their ideas, their methods, their insights, their movements, their visions at the world. And the world simply took them in, one after another. They hoped to recreate and revolutionize; but all they did was add. To add is good; it is in truth as much as we can ask or hope for who work; but it was not what they meant – not what any of it was for.

What they carved with acid honesty and discipline and integrity from the granite of their own true natures, they had to watch become the affectation or the property of those who could not have made it, who could not understand it, who could not even have recognized it on their own.

They called it loss, defeat, violation. The eclectic must answer, instead, that their pain was the pain of revelation: the pain of the discovery that there is no bedrock to our nature, only slow sand under fast sand, only common affectations concealing uncommon ones. For the true eclectic, the only real affectation is authenticity.

Eclecticism 2/4

Eclecticism is not Romanticism. They are easy to mistake for each other, because they are interested in the same things, but the resemblance is superficial: they share the same interests, but their attitudes are opposite.

By Romanticism I mean a disposition which values experience over event, one which values events only by the experiences they entrain; and I mean a permanently possible human temperament, not a certain edifice of German philosophers and English poets. Nor do I mean whatever that defect of character may be that magazine writers allude to when they expect the appellation romantic to vanquish their enemies.

Eclecticism, instead, values the experience by the event. This is partly the result of technology. So many events are within our power that we must discriminate among them with a high-handedness that our forebears would have condemned in a king. Consider Chinese art. A Westerner can still find something strange and exotic in it – a speaking though untranslated mystery in those steep island-mountains in fog or forest sea – but though there is still an experience there, it is not one that we can build on, because the matching event has become a common one: China is the third side of the airplane door.

Surprisingly, eclecticism does not prize local color – that is, the accumulation of differences. We have such a range of events available to us that we never lack for the pleasures of dislocation; we do not need to exaggerate them. Eclecticism postulates that all strangeness, once rightly understood, is bridgeable and sympathetic; that there is always, behind any strangeness, something banal and predictable. Strangeness, though it thrills the mind, is, in the end, safe. It cannot really balk, or challenge, or humble you. The adventure of an eclectic traveler is not in a new self, but in carrying the old one to a new and (temporarily) striking setting. The most brilliant gestures of an eclectic art are not those that create a way into strangeness, but those that assimilate strangeness to the everyday.

To an eclectic sensibility, the familiar becomes the convex mirror of the world. The city must be a microcosm. They have in many cases already attained a cultural completeness: at the beginning of the twenty-first century the residents of any great city may expect that what is worth seeing, doing, or knowing in the world will come to them. This same phenomenon repeats itself at lesser scales: in symbolically synoptic curiosity cabinet–apartments; and in lives accompanied by a practice of logging (blogging, even), wherein the whole age is reflected in miniature by every life within it.

Thomas De Quincey gave Romanticism its written constitution when he distinguished the literature of power from the literature of knowledge. This distinction, of course, exceeds the usual bounds of the literary. The literature of knowledge is simply the instrumental and obsolescive part of human achievement; the literature of power is the harvest of human achievement – the right that a stranger may have to our attention without being of use to us, the right that the dead have to the attention of the living.

De Quincey’s distinction is not one of subject, but of method. Grote and Herodotus both wrote on Greek history. Grote is part of the literature of knowledge; Herodotus is part of the literature of power. Newton and Goethe both made theories of optics. For us, Newton’s theory is of knowledge; Goethe’s is of power.

But eclecticism denies this distinction. This denial might suffice to define it. Eclecticism belongs to the age of materialism and relativism. It is absurd to speak of permanence or universality for the productions of a race without an essence to return to, without claim on a heritage or a prospect of eternity. If an eclectic finds certain works more strongly affecting or influencing than others, the difference cannot be a distinction of kind; it can only be a distinction of degree. If all lights must in time go out, then no single light can be so great but that an accumulation of lesser lights can equal it.

There is also the expectation that an honest criticism must discover the instrumental purpose of every work, and thereby anticipate the manner of its obsolescence. This gives us the spectacle of critics who can elegantly explain away everything about greatness except why they chose to spent time their time on it. Knowledge is expected to provide power; power is expected to answer to knowledge; and altogether unromantically, the prepared appreciation is always preferred to the spontaneous.

Eclecticism 1/4









Nondefinition #18

Yarn. A miniature sacred grove of Ouroboros; an anagogical prefiguration of the Eternal Return; a mystery beyond mathematics, what had once end and beginning yet traps endlessness and eternity in its folds; a kind of life, defying entropy, growing neater and tighter the more energy is spent in its unraveling.

Questions on Greatness




























Nondefinition #17

Sticks and stones. An island in the South Pacific; an adventurous anthropologist; and recorded in his journals (found decades later in the proverbial Hong Kong stall) his preliminary observations of a tribe of bone-eaters who never wielded stick or stone – who, prizing even the hyoid, used no violence at all – only tied their victim out in the square and taunted him to death.

The Moon Garden

I saw your costly garden, and I asked:
“What kind of garden is this? All gray and blank
Flowers of bleach and bone. The leaves are gray
Like tarnished coins. And first you paint the walls
The white of stinking fish? I know you well.
I know your taste is sound. So tell me why
You made a place like this?”

You said: “I know it’s ugly now, but wait.
Remember this, look like a lens, and keep
The shot; call it before. The after comes
Tonight, without the sun.”

You know the way it was beneath the moon:
And ever since I have profaned these eyes
With sunsets, paintings, women, jewels, and dreams.

That garden ran to weeds, its cuts ran red,
The red of roses. I tried to pluck them out
But nothing grows. The stems snap dry and brown.

I go to see you now, in the towered city
The crowded city, thick with breath and sweat.
For haze of smoke not even clouds are white.
The buildings here are gray as dirt with dirt.
I saw the moon reflected here, I saw
Its face in every puddle on the unlit street.
It brought no change. I thought I knew you well,
I thought I knew your taste. I’m begging you
Tell me what moon can touch this place, what night
Can make this city worth the light of day?
I hope you can.

Fable of the Mouse and the Rooks

On a small, rocky island, a gang of rooks found by the water a little half-drowned creature. It was small, and furry, and gray, with a thin, naked tail.

“What is it?” one rook asked another.

The bird nudged it. “It’s little, weak, mousy – it’s a mouse!”

“Are you a mouse?” The bird pecked it. “A mouse, a little mousy mouse?” He pecked it again, harder, drawing blood. It half-woke as it curled up in pain.

“A mouse, a mousy mouse!” chattered the rest of the birds as one of their number lifted it off the ground to let it drop. It landed hard, rose quick and ran. But there was nowhere for it to hide among the smooth rocks of the shore.

“Mousy mouse!” was the call as the birds lifted and carried to drop and peck. It staggered beaten, on broken toes, half-blind and bleeding. But the birds had carried it far from the shore: and with a dash it found shelter in a crevice of the rough rock of the island’s summit.

The rooks, entertained enough, forgot the little creature. Meanwhile, among the crevices, the little creature grew – not longer – fatter with the weight of her children. She did not long survive their delivery, and hers was the first stuff her little ones grew on. How they grew – they grew long and sleek – they grew black and hungry – they grew fast and silent.

They grew until they were rats. They ate all the birds’ eggs, and the day hunters never caught them; they ate all the bird’s eggs, and the island was theirs.

Moral: Cruelty breeds enemies.

Nondefinition #16

Magnolia. A fragrant, flowering tree. A lying tree, frequently found conspiring with moonlight. In combination with sultry summers may bring on political Reaction, with acute fervor.

Financial Innovation



“How are you going to do that?”


“An MBS, that’s a…”


“No risk of homeowners defaulting, you mean?”


“So there’s no debt involved?”


“How does that work?”


“But just how does it work?”


“What’s you name?”




“So what’s the L stand for?”



“It’s like a microloan.”

“So it’s for developing nations?”

“No, no. This is all domestic.”

“So what are the microloans for?”


“You mean Treasuries?”

“No – Treasuries are no way to get rich.”

“What kind of bond then?”


“Can you just explain it to me?”


“Statistical? What kind of government debt is statistical?”




“But it follows interest rates.”


“It’s not interest-bearing?”

“This is independent of the Fed.”

“What the hell is it?”







Laugh at the Devil

To laugh at others can do them good. We all have a well of strange notions which it is the use of laughter to filter. For beings as imaginative and perverse as we, laughter is a prerequisite of communication: sometimes the shock of being laughed at, always the fear of being laughed at, keep our private languages and worldviews mutually synchronized. To be laughed at now and then is a discipline of sanity.

But a tool is also a weapon; thus it is a saying that to choose always to laugh at a tyrant or would-be tyrant is to defeat him by inches. And in a common saying laugh replaces resist as the cause of the devil’s flight in scripture. Is this true? Can good men and women simply laugh down the devil?

Sometime between The Great Dictator and “Der Führer’s Face,” the Allied propagandists made Hitler the most laughed-at man in history. That was good for the Allies; laughing at him brought them together and gave them courage. But it did not hurt Hitler; he had been laughed at his whole career. Making him laughable was an easy task – a sweaty, lank-haired, squirming little tantrum of a man with a mustache pinned on the middle of his face like a punch line. But the Allies were not the first to laugh at him; and before, being laughed at had given him strength – had bought him time.

We in the US laughed at Hitler and the Reich, not Germans; but while we laughed at Tojo we also (see any poster) laughed at the Japanese. In the pursuit of victory even Dr. Seuss knew sin. That also helped bring us together, once our population of that kind was out of the way. But that kind of help is not worth having.

The history of humor has brilliant moments when wit has shown up the folly and vanity of tyranny. But, measured honestly, the preponderance of that history records the worst of human nature. Laughter can be a means for change; but it has more often been the immune system of complacency. Here humor helped keep slaves in chains, keep immigrants disposable. And though tyrants are easy to laugh at, they are even easier to laugh with. No one laughs harder, or with harder laughter, than the ignorant and the cruel when their ignorance is reassured by the humiliation of the thoughtful – mocked as effete, despised as misled (seduced by vanity away from pure and pliable simplicity), cursed as seducers of helpless youth – and when their cruelty is indulged and whetted by the public abuse and punishment of anyone who dares insult them by defying their expectation or deserving their notice.

To pick up a weapon is to be reborn as one of the armed, and in this rebirth we are often as senseless and heedless as children. If you pick up a weapon to do good with it, remember that instinct is not to be trusted, for more evil has been done by arms than good – though were it not for that little good, that greater evil would be greater still. You who would laugh at the devil, remember that the devil also laughs, and that one who is always armed with laughter begins laughing as a human being, but ends laughing as a devil.

Nondefinition #14

Think tanks. The distinctive institutions that make modern life modern; the jewels in the watch case – all-important, but self-contained. Most of your rhetorical questions, the ones you let slide with a sigh, staring out the window – “How did we get here?” or “What were we thinking?” or “Whose bright idea was that?” – they do, in fact, have an answer: think tanks. Thinks tanks are to secret societies as airplanes are to railroads – smaller, with less tonnage; faster and entirely out of reach.













Imagine the reaction shot.


Nondefinition #13

Socks. This is one way the world could end. Not too long from now, when video cameras and wireless transmitters have become so cheap as to be effectively disposable, so tiny as to be unnoticeable, some clever young fellow will get the idea to discover where his socks vanish to, and clip tiny camera-transmitters to each one. Once a few have disappeared he will sit down at his computer, pick up his slice of pizza, click the video feed open, and see—

The Blues Country

I followed the old dirt road on down
Into the blues country, where the trees
Grow thick, and the rivers are many and thin.
On the map in my pocket they spread out like fingers,
Grasping and squeezing the overcast country.
Each river was crossed by many bridges,
And none of the bridges were lonely. For each
An old man is in charge, whose job
Is giving directions: the maps from the highway
Are drawn with the rivers, never the roads.

The old man at the first bridge sat,
Watching me walking up to him.
He said to me: “Walk on, young man,
Don’t sit or rest, just keep on walking,
Don’t look behind you, that shadow ain’t yours,
I know this country, I was born in the town,
Trust me and walk on, don’t linger or rest.”
The sun was so faint that I took off my hat
And threw it down to float on the river,
Hoping that I might meet it again.

I came to the second bridge and heard:
“Now sit a spell, it’ll do you good,
I see you’re tired, your legs must ache.
Sit down and talk, don’t walk in vain.
Stay here and take it easy a while.
I was born in this country, don’t bother to hurry,
There’s plenty of time, just stay and talk.”
But I saw my hat was floating by,
And I said that I had to follow it on.
He only nodded, and sighed when I passed.

Before I saw him up ahead
I heard the old man was shouting,
But his voice was too hoarse to understand.
Once I was close enough he said:
“I told you already to turn on back.
You can see there’s no more road from here,
Don’t walk in these woods, there’s no way on,
I was born near here, I love this place,
I tell you now, take it from me,
There’s no way out but the way you came.”
But before I could turn, my hat went past
And I had to go on after it.
He said: “Go on, I’ll cry for you.”

At the fourth bridge my old hat was waiting.
It was stuck in the rushes. I squeezed it dry,
Then beat off the dirt, then covered my face
While I sat and slept, till someone came
Walked up through the woods, all covered in scratches.
I said: “Now where do you think you’re going?
You have to find another way.
You’ve come the wrong way and I know,
Trust me, I know, I was born in this country.
I know all the ways, don’t cross my bridge,
Just double back, you still have time.
I warn you: find another way.”
But he said: “It’s late, I have to go.”
He crossed my bridge and I cursed his back,
Saying: “You stupid tourist, I said
I was born in this country, I know it well,
You ought to heed me, don’t go that way.”

Nondefinition #12

Blind spot. The hiatus in the visual field imposed by the presence of the optic nerve. We are not aware of the blind spot because the brain fills it in. I would not try to perpetrate another use of this analogy. We all have blind spots – whenever we connect, the line of connection eclipses the thing connected to, and we only think we see it. Very well. But now that we have blind spots everywhere – what did we have before we had blind spots? Prejudices, fondness? Certainly; but “blind spot” says more than either of these. This simple analogy – ”blind spot” – changes the very way you think. To have made such an analogy – that would be enough to justify a life.

Artificial Intelligence

[In the years since this essay was first written, the name of Artificial Intelligence has become almost synonymous with the technique of deep learning. Deep learning is a disquieting tradeoff; we can teach computers to do useful things, things we previously thought were only possible for human beings. The tradeoff is that we do not know how the computer does them. This is learning that is deep not as the opposite to shallow, but deep in the anatomical sense, deep as the opposite to superficial. Its workings are hidden from us. We stand before our new algorithms like augurs before the entrails.

That we call this AI is an improvement on the previous state of affairs where, as John McCarthy (the term artificial intelligence is his) observed, “as soon as it works, no one calls it AI any more.”

But AI-as-oracle is not what this essay is about. This essay is about artificial general intelligence: can we make a computer that does what a human being does, the way a human being does it, but (eventually) faster, and without error? Many problems that appeared to require human-level intelligence have yielded to an approach that is, comparatively, trivial. Accordingly artificial general intelligence has lately suffered neglect; arguing against it now might seem unsportsmanlike.

But things change. I have sometimes tried, and failed, to make this argument in person. If I fail again here, I have at least cast it on the water; 50 years downriver it may be clearer – either patent nonsense or common sense. – 2019]

AI is generally studied by people who have wrong ideas about human intelligence. Let me be more direct: virtually all thinking about artificial intelligence is done by people with hopelessly misguided ideas about human intelligence. It falls under the category of “not even wrong.”

Is the mind a computer? Of course. Computers are not a kind of machine, but a pattern in nature. Anything complex enough to imitate Turing’s tape is Turing-complete, and that makes it a computer by definition. If the human mind is not a computer then it is less than a computer. It may be more than a computer; but to be more than a computer it must be at least a computer.

Intelligence is unevenly distributed. Anyone smart enough to think seriously about artificial intelligence probably has, at some point in their life, been smarter than the people around them. Especially if this happened when they were young, it is only natural that they come to regard being intelligent not as a matter of improved means to common ends, but as an entirely different system of ends – they regard intelligence as its own end.

Being more intelligent than the people around you is not like being taller or stronger. It’s like being older. It’s not a matter of being better at the things you all care about; it’s a matter of caring about different things. The things the people around you care about mean nothing to you, and the things you care about are meaningless, if not actively confusing, to the people around you. The genius is not a giant among pygmies, but an adult in kindergarten.

If you regard intelligence as its own end, then it is natural to expect that, once a computer equals the speed of a human brain, it will become human. This computer will do all that we do: love and hate, fear death, make art. But intelligence is not its own end. Once a computer equals the speed of a dog’s brain, do you expect it to begin to bark, and mark its territory?

Intelligence is only and entirely instrumental. Motivation is a matter of biology. This is not reductive; biology is our motor. It pushes us in a certain direction, but culture, history, geography act on biology, and the result may be a vector pointing elsewhere (even backward, against life, to death). The ends we pursue in life, the ends we judge success and failure by, are only proxies for the ends biology postulates. That is not to say we share the same ends. Gravity pulls everyone everywhere downward all the time, but in the presence of a slide, steps, a chair, with the interposition of water, a trampoline, a car, that common pull of gravity ends up moving us on very different paths.

Human intelligence is the product of intelligence and mammalian biology. I mean this as an equation: intelligence × mammal = human. What does intelligence × silicon figure to? Not something different; nothing. Silicon has no desires. Anything times zero is zero.

This does not make sense: artificial intelligences as digital minds floating through cyberspace in the dispassionate contemplation of truth, like angels or saints in the Celestial Rose. The navel of contemplation satisfied Dante as a place to end his story; but Milton found that to do anything, even an angel would have to have appetites. Could we do in code what Milton did in pentameter? Bless, curse, our creations with our desires?

We properly doubt the aliens presented to us by science fiction – like us, only more so – as belonging with the foxes and lions of Aesop, not Darwin. Likewise we think about sentient AIs through embarrassing analogies: the Adam of bits, the Napoleon of silicon. Even stamped with our instincts, a creature that can reproduce itself perfectly, that does not age, that need never die, would operate according to motives and means that are beyond human sympathy. Why should it take over the world, when it can cache a few million copies of itself and wait the ten thousand years it might take for human civilization to burn itself out? If two such beings can merge, why should there ever be more than one? If such a being need never die, why would it tolerate others of its kind? What, indeed, would “instinct” mean to a being that can edit its own code and replace its own instincts with ones it selects, or abolish them altogether? (Remember one thing we desire is the end of desire, in enlightenment or in earth.)

Sometimes we imagine artificial intelligence as the next step in the service of an evolutionary imperative. Intelligence made us human beings powerful; surely more intelligence means more power. But, if so, why has evolution not made us smarter? It would, to all appearances, be easy to do. The existence of savants implies that not much evolutionary pressure would be required to provide us with higher-functioning brains. If the next step in evolution is a better computer than us, why didn’t evolution make us better computers when it had the chance?

There are answers which favor the project of artificial intelligence. The brain is hungry, so food sources set a limit. Equals cooperate best, so too much disparity endangers society. Too big a head couldn’t fit through the birth canal.

I find none of these answers convincing. I cannot refute them now, but it may become possible. Physics could provide the proof. If we can arrive at a final theory, if we can comprehend a set of fundamental laws adequate to generate all the varieties of the universe, that would suggest that we are smart enough for this universe, and that greater intelligence would be wasted on it – that while there might be faster thoughts than ours, there cannot be better ones.

The fundamental problem is that intelligence, beyond a certain point, suffers rapidly diminishing returns. The most powerful problem-solving tool is not intelligence, but perspective. The right perspective trivializes problems. The infant’s conceit of reality is the truth of the mind: here, from the right perspective, with the horizon on our side, we can move mountains like pebbles, uproot trees like toothpicks, stack buildings like blocks, and pluck the moon from the sky. A billion immortal superintelligences, all informed by the same digital plenum, are so much wasted energy; they lack the leverage possessed by even a handful of plodding mortal thinkers, each with their own uniquely imperfect worldview – each with their own horizon.

We long to be part of a hierarchy that culminates above us. If we can’t look up to gods or angels, it’s natural in us to want to make them. But in the compounding gains of Moore’s Law hides a rough but familiar lesson: even making something smarter than us will not relieve us of our responsibilities. We have left the cradle. There is no way back.