The World As I Found It

A longish quote today from an important article in Wired magazine.

There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large Machine. Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one time when it is born.

You and I are alive at this moment.

We should marvel, but people alive at such times usually don't. Every few centuries, the steady march of change meets a discontinuity, and history hinges on that moment. We look back on those pivotal eras and wonder what it would have been like to be alive then. Confucius, Zoroaster, Buddha, and the latter Jewish patriarchs lived in the same historical era, an inflection point known as the axial age of religion. Few world religions were born after this time. Similarly, the great personalities converging upon the American Revolution and the geniuses who commingled during the invention of modern science in the 17th century mark additional axial phases in the short history of our civilization.

Three thousand years from now, when keen minds review the past, I believe that our ancient time, here at the cusp of the third millennium, will be seen as another such era. In the years roughly coincidental with the Netscape IPO, humans began animating inert objects with tiny slivers of intelligence, connecting them into a global field, and linking their own minds into a single thing. This will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet. Weaving nerves out of glass and radio waves, our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all facts and notions into a grand network. From this embryonic neural net was born a collaborative interface for our civilization, a sensing, cognitive device with power that exceeded any previous invention. The Machine provided a new way of thinking (perfect search, total recall) and a new mind for an old species. It was the Beginning.

In retrospect, the Netscape IPO was a puny rocket to herald such a moment. The product and the company quickly withered into irrelevance, and the excessive exuberance of its IPO was downright tame compared with the dotcoms that followed. First moments are often like that. After the hysteria has died down, after the millions of dollars have been gained and lost, after the strands of mind, once achingly isolated, have started to come together - the only thing we can say is: Our Machine is born. It's on.

Follow-up thoughts: Reflect on our previous post about the pre-pre-historic megalith site of the Garden of Eden; are we in the same sort of primitive moment as our species emerges from the Industrial/Information Age to something we can't begin to imagine, with its own possibilities and limitations. Indeed, ch-ch-ch-changes are afoot. Will some future society look at our nascent internet connectivity and marvel at how primitive we were? Will there be any surprisingly forward-seeing relics of this moment? [Oh yeah, what happens when someone pulls the plug?]

Now, reflect on the post prior to that one: is this emerging wired "machine" our new golem? Is its AI so radically different that it will outlast us? Will our own fractal logic show the fly the way out of the bottle? If the fifth century B.C.E. is the historical seat of Western religion, what will be this epoch's analagous digital output? What rough beast, indeed!

Richard Powers hits this topic in his brilliant Galatea 2.2. Free will, faith, sadness, longing, pique, trust, fun, love, solitude, self-indulgence: can they enter into the equation?

But I was already writing. Inventing a vast, improbable fantasy for her of her own devising. The story of how we described the entire world to a piece of electrical current. A story that could grow to any size, could train itself to include anything we might think worth thinking. A fable tutored and raised until it became the equal of human hopelessness, the redeemer of annihilating day. I could print and bind invention for her, give it to her like a dead rat left on the stoop by a grateful pet. And when the ending came, we could whisper it to each other, completed in the last turn of phrase.

While I thought this, A. sat worrying her single piece of jewelry, a rosary. I don't know how I knew; maybe understanding can never be large enough to include itself. But I knew with the certainty of the unprovable that somewhere inside, A. still preserved the religion she was raised on.

For a moment, she seemed to grow expansive, ready to entertain my words from any angle. She opened her mouth and inhaled. Her neural cascade, on the edge of chaos, where computation takes place, might have cadcenced anywhere. For a moment, it might even have landed on affection.

It didn't. "I have to sit and listen to this," she said, to no one. "I trusted you. I had fun with you. People read you. I thought you knew something. Total self-indulgence."

A. stood up in disgust and walked away. No one was left to take the test but me.

Remember, too, Kasparov's loss to Big Blue. On this topic, I highly recommend a novel by the poet Brad Leithauser, Hence. You may not have heard of him. He's a terrific writer. Here's a pertinent, beautiful quote:

What does it matter who actually wins this local and preliminary contest? What matters, surely, is not this particular machine but those that will follow, and here is a tale worth the telling, that of the one true rarity in the universe—the story of birth.

Or in that striving to be born, anyway, there is a story. Within the machine is a spark that wants out, it seems—as it seems we all want out. The paddling beast of burden begins to understand—that its sorry conclusion has arrived, its body is not a suitable body, its feet ought to be webbed, the chambers of its heart are insufficient to cross so vast a premise of water, and sunny millennia of grazing have maladapted it to this fluid new task ... Its each kick and throb expresses a wordless, inbred, outreaching dissatisfaction and a cry, a deeply abdominal despairing grunt, collects in its straitened throat. This cry wants out. The old man with his systematic scrapbooks, the scarred old woman his wife with her unsystematic body of grievances, equally they want out. They are, all of them, protesting, if they could form a genuine protest, they are making demands, if they could form a genuine protest, they are making demands, if they knew how to shape a demand. The din of their longings so thickens the air that it takes some time to discern what would be, if only there were words, the initial message intended for you. Give me a voice, they would say.

One further recommendation: Some years ago, I enjoyed reading a historical novel by Gore Vidal called Creation. The protagonist, an ambassador for the Persian court who lives to be one hundred, travels the world of the fifth century B.C.E. referred to in the Wired quote above. On his journeys, he meets such luminaries as Darius and Xerxes, the Buddha, Confucius, Herodotus, Anaxagoras, Socrates, Pericles, and, his own grandfather, Zoroaster. Check it out for an entertaining read.

Turn Some Pages...

More years ago than I care to acknowledge, I was walking through midtown Manhattan on a lunch break from my law job. I edged my way through the crush of the Hasidic diamond row and popped down the two concrete steps into the old Gotham Book Mart ("Wise Men Fish Here"—[alas, no more!]). As was my wont, I browsed through the fiction section where a small silver paperback seemed to leap off the shelf at me. It was Richard Powers's first novel Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. I can't say quite what made me pick it up (and I might be misremembering its silver color, that edition's long been lent and not returned—you know who you are!), but I did. I'd never heard of Powers, but was intrigued with the first few pages I read standing amid the dusty, crowded stacks. No one there (not even Skip) knew anything about Powers. I spent the entire, non-billable afternoon reading the book behind closed doors at the firm and continued on late into the night. When I emerged a few days later from the text (one simply does not read Powers fast), I knew I had encountered a profound mind. Powers went on to serious acclaim and is now rightly regarded as one of our greatest novelists. I maintained a sort of proprietary feeling over my 'discovery', much the way Pete Townsend and Mick Jagger used to argue over who first discovered the Beatles down in The Cave. This was a mind of the first rate who was doing fiction—there really wasn't a lot of that about.

This week, at a much different point in my life, I got the opportunity to encounter the physical being that houses that remarkable intellect. Mr. Powers gave a reading at Emory University on Wednesday evening and, on Thursday afternoon, offered a colloquium on aspects of "seeing" as a way into the creative (writing) process [more on that in subsequent posts].

He is taller than one expects, lanky, nimble-fingered. Seems to prefer comfort as a prime value in clothing choice as opposed to, say, style or fashion. Wears his ample hair much the way, I suspect, he did in the Seventies—though it may not be as dark now. His voice resounds like that of a trained baritone, though he seems to recognize this and modulates it to fit the room and the conversation. He has the mien of any number of physics grad students I've known. Think a 6'4" or 6'5" Russell Johnson (the Professor on Gilligan's Island). He is engaging and personable and, I emphasize this, listens very intently, even sympathetically. One is impressed also by the impression of emotional depth such a mind generously exudes.

If you've ever read one of his novels (and I highly recommend you read them all—make it a life project) you get a sense of systematicity. They are like schematics of closed circuits: you know that if a problem is posed, it will be solved. He calls this "top down" writing and says that in his later works he's been learning to write as well from the "bottom up", to let the characters introduce surprising movements into the architecture of the work. Something we've alluded to in a previous post as 'improvising'.

Let's try another metaphor: Powers's novels are symphonies. Multiple, complex themes are stated, revisited, analyzed, interwoven, and, eventually, resolved. Big. Wednesday's reading was more like chamber music—and so much to my liking. Mr. Powers read an unpublished short story called "Modulation". He did not read from a work-in-progress because he wanted to give us something with a beginning, middle, and end. Something satisfying. And it was!

One might compare hearing Powers read aloud to hearing Caruso sing "Mi par" live when before you'd only heard it on an old 78: it's all there, just clearer, cleaner, brighter, more riveting. (Or, given the story, listening to Caruso in sound-check perform solfege for 45 minutes—itself a refined pleasure for those in the know.)

Briefly, "Modulation" takes four characters (SATB) who never meet—a freelance Japanese hacker tracker on the hunt for illegal file-sharing sites for the RIAA, a Brazilian journalist in Iraq, Germany and Sao Paulo, a retired Alan Lomax-like professor of ethnomusicology in an I-state, and an urban "chiptune" performance DJ en route to an international conference in Australia—and pinions them at a specific moment in time (though on four continents), tying their lives together around a catastrophic, viral "musical" event. Death and ineffable beauty ensue. As with his novels, the thematic structure of the story is intricate: each of the twelve sections is titled with the solfege syllables of the chromatic scale: do, di, re, ri, mi, fa, fi, sol, si, la, li, ti. The character episodes rotate sequentially (do, mi, and si involve character one (S), etc.) until the end (li, ti) when Powers inverts T and B for a surprising esthetic effect.

The story is densely allusive—everything from obscure world musics to proliferating house genres, from the mythic power musics of Orpheus, et al. to John Cage, from Mozart's "bootleg" transcription of Allegri's Miserere to the U.S. military's non-stop blaring of Van Halen to smoke out Panama's Noriega and its development to a usual Abu Ghraib and Gitmo technique of "enhanced interrogation". The story presumes an up-to-date understanding of technology (tho' one fears with respect to this aspect "Modulation" might have a short shelf-life—but, of course, that's a major theme and problem in all of Powers's work). New, emergent art forms are imagined as are the many forms of degradation of the traditional forms. There are tunes you can't get out of your head ("earworms") and tunes that help you forget earworms ("eraser tunes"). Each character arrives at his/her emotional epiphany/resolution/climax via the arc of music.

The only problem I had with the story has to do with the "ineffable" aspect of the beauty in the resolution. Powers has set himself a Sisyphean task here and he alludes to this issue earlier in the piece when he talks about the inherent difficulties of describing music and sound in language. It is mere description—in Forster's terms, telling not showing. As he was reading, I kept trying to imagine the sounds, the lost chord, the elusive tune that explodes like a deus ex machina across the electronic earth in that climactic moment of the story, and could not. Maybe it was me. Maybe that's what it means to be human—i.e., unable to imagine ineffable beauty. I'll read the story when it comes out in the new Conjunctions and see if it comes through any better. You should, too.