Inklust #24: Lessons from Circe

Let me say what sorcery is not: it is not divine power, which comes with a thought and a blink. It must be made and worked, planned and searched out, dug up, dried, chopped and ground, cooked, spoken over, and sung. Even after all that, it can fail, as gods do not. If my herbs are not fresh enough, if my attention falters, if my will is weak, the draughts go stale and rancid in my hands.

—Circe, Madeline Miller

I have been studying witchcraft for a year. It's creative and interesting, learning to use herbs, draw sigils, design spells suited for the purpose, memorise incantations, choose the moment, focus. Focus, focus. All this requires understanding your own intent, honing it to a sharp point.

...the draughts go stale and rancid in my hands.

This past year I learnt how little we actually know of what we want—past what we're asked to want, past what's appropriate, past what makes money, past a stagnated dream we've probably outgrown. What do we want when all the jockeying and the incentives to parrot a well-learnt response go away?

Strong will, the capacity to bend reality to your desire by magic or otherwise, requires an intimate connection with oneself. Everything, everyone, works to keep us from achieving that. (Our systems are fragile. We don't know this, don't think of it, but they rely entirely on our self-doubt—our bottomless need to find some solution outside ourselves, coupled with the suspicion that we are never quite doing enough, never quite good right here.)

I also realised how much of our shared reality is magic: Our belief in the stability of money. Our unquestioned treatment of corporations as people. The misguided assumption that consumption of the right things will yield preservation of the planet at large.

Consumption is always the hero. Magical thinking. The wrong kind, though. It's the kind that fuels addiction.

Think on Circe: What it means to make magic with the earth, with space, with yourself, this moment; to sharpen the deepest part of you into a subtle knife. Don't let the draught go stale and rancid in your hands.

Photo Credit: "Circe Invidiosa" by John William Waterhouse. The title means "Jealous Circe"; she's pouring the draught that will turn Scylla, "her rival," into a monster. In other words: Just another "inspired" man capturing a woman mid-catfight. Sigh. But I like it because of that tilt in her head, the furrow in her brow: She's concentrating. Even after the potion-making's over, one must still do the work of intent and execution. Circe works hard. She does not fuck around.

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What is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.

Inklust #23: Attic of Boredom

How often have I wished for the attic of my boredom when the complications of life made me lose the very germ of all freedom!

—The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard

I've been thinking a lot about boredom and how we don't have to do it anymore. From a single device that fits in my pocket I can manifest music or a story, lovingly recounted; read thousands of books; scope trends or talk to people I already know. I never have to be alone again—or reach earnestly outside myself, seeking stimulation or solace.

More and more lately, I miss the grasping boredom of childhood that made time stretch and forced games out of dirt. So my latest project has been cultivating boredom, forcing myself to switch off and let my gaze wander.

I'm loath to report any benefits of this, because I think we're all a little too focused on silver bullets for productivity. I don't want everything in my life to amount to a better way to work. But I think it's given me a better way to be. To be continued.

Photo Credit: april-mo Flickr via Compfight cc 

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What is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.

Inklust #22: A Distributed Entity

Can one meet a distributed entity in any meaningful sense?

—River of Gods, Ian Mcdonald

River of Gods was one of my favourite books of 2016. It takes place in a time when AI can (and often does) have a sense of self, an identity and capabilities that surpass us in a way we perceive as dangerous.

But it also posits that our sense of identity, our sense of self, is so fundamentally different from that of an AI that we can't even approach each other from the same rational framework. Mankind is characterised by slow data transmission: We have to go places, physically send things or speak in order to convey information, or make it travel.

An AI simply copies itself. It's an entity outside space/time; in the book, one AI assistant can be in many places at once, managing your live press conference in one locale while, elsewhere, answering emails, scheduling meetings and picking up calls.

The quote above is a fundamental question that highlights the difference between us and them: Can you actually know (and thus trust) an entity that can be here meeting you, but could conceivably also be here in a thousand other places at once?

In the film Her, this was one of the sticking points for our protagonist. He's having this big conversation with his sultry-voiced OS, a relationship-defining conversation, and he's thrown off by the fact that, however sincere and invested she seems, she's also having a hundred other discussions simultaneously. We can't quite do that, even on our best multi-tasking day.

But today the quote stuck out to me because I started thinking, well, we all do that anyway, within the realm of what is possible. The person I am to my parents is different from the one I am to my close friends, or people who know me exclusively online. Even if we were all to meet in the same room, some people may feel shades of the Angela they don't know, but mostly their existing picture of me would remain intact. 

With this in mind, the biggest difference is that an AI can be all these Angelas simultaneously—having dinner with my parents in California while attending a meeting here in Paris. 

We don't fear artificial intelligence because of its failure to meaningfully relate; we fear the way it challenges our own limitations, our mortality—the way we are enslaved to space/time.

From this angle, it seems petty. My hope in 2017 is not to want to be more than what I am. It doesn't seem to guide us toward anything good. (In River of Gods, it leads to war.)

Photo credit: CSLD on Getty Images

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What is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.

Inklust #21: Fake Eyelashes + Alligator Tears

Decorous weeping was another of those arts I never mastered, like putting on false eyelashes.

—Lady Oracle, Margaret Atwood

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What is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.

Inklust #20: That is Your Role

When the battles are fought and won and lost, when the pirates find their treasures and the dragons eat their foes for breakfast with a nice cup of Lapsang souchong, someone needs to tell their bits of overlapping narrative. There’s magic in that. It’s in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict. From the mundane to the profound. You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone’s soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows what they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift.

—The Night Circus, Erin Morganstern 

Image via.

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What is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.

Inklust #19: Gives and Tells

There were a few stipulations she had written into his standard contract that Mark had balked at: lemon rounds, not wedges; hypoallergenic makeup; fair-trade green tea. These, she explained, were gives—items that he was not to insist upon, which lack of insistence would make him seem like a much more reasonable person than his contract made him out to be.

— Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, David Shafer

Here's a neat story: Van Halen was renowned for having a stringent, vaguely insane and crazy-detailed contract, one of whose stipulations included the demand that the band be provided with a bowl of M&Ms with the brown ones picked out. If a single brown M&M was found, Van Halen could cancel the concert at the full expense of the promoter—right then and there.

This is usually told as an anecdote to illustrate how debauched and ridiculous rock-stardom had become. But there was actually a really good reason the clause existed.

Van Halen's concerts included some of the most complex and advanced pyrotechnics of any show at that time. A successful show required a number of safety precautions and precise technical measures.

If the band found brown M&Ms in the bowl, chances were high that the contract hadn't been read. It significantly increased the likelihood of an onstage accident or technical failure.

The brown M&Ms weren't a give; they were a tell.

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What is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.

Inklust #18: Unending Kiss

Today, the nostalgia for pre-Internet life is pervasive. What was it like back then, wandering around in an eternally unknowing state, scrounging for bits of information? Is what we get out of a performance today any different now than it was then? No, it’s the same thing: the need for transcendence, or maybe just a distraction—a day at the beach, a trip to the mountains—from humdrum life, boredom, pain, loneliness. Maybe that’s all performance ever was, really. An unending kiss—that’s all we ever wanted to feel when we paid money to hear someone play.

—Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band

Some music I fall in love with at first hearing, a phenomenon limited to what I've been exposed to culturally and have a natural preference for. Much of the music I love isn't stuff I grew up with. I discovered them by accident—but rarely by ear.

Most came from books.

I wouldn't have known how to understand, how to appreciate, the full body of The Beatles' work without reading Here, There and Everywhere by Geoff Emerick, one of two Beatles books I picked up and started perusing while bored at a friend's house as a teenager. I would never have found Sonic Youth if not for Kim Gordon's Girl in a Band, which I bought on impulse after reading her interview in The Happy Reader. She has so much soul. And were it not for Ben Fong-Torres, I would never have discovered Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground. These would have all been terrible losses.

Years ago I read a study that found only 6% of self-proclaimed music enthusiasts care about the words in the music they listen to. I am part of that 6%, and in the worst way—it's often words that get me to music in the first place. I cannot separate a melody from the people, their story, their words. The place where my unending kiss begins is inextricably tied to that great totem of pre-internet life: In a book.

Photo Credit: [carlo cravero] via Compfight cc



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What is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.

Inklust #17: Quiet

No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.

Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

Station Eleven is a story about the end of civilization as we know it, and in reading it I traversed every emotion I expected: Terror, fear, deep sadness, loss, pain, guilt, hope.

But when I read this paragraph, I felt only a fleeting loneliness, like a bird skimming across the surface of water. Below that—deep below, where things resonate and expand inside you—I felt envy. This world has become so naked and noisy, and part of me wondered if that profound desire for quiet, for a day that means more than a compulsive Instagram upload, is the reason why so many people nurture only-half-jokey zombie apocalypse fantasies.

Photo Credit: Mike Shaheen via Compfight. cc

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What is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.

Inklust #16: I don't want another factory

If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory.

— Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

To transform, it isn't enough to just undo what we've done. We have to tear out the very roots of how we think. Our deepest beliefs are so insidious, so difficult to divide from our very selves, that we have to remake that decision every day: Plough, sow, tear out the old ideas that so readily strangle what's only a seed today, the birth of your tomorrow self. We have to garden our minds with vigilance.

Image: tCentric-media.

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What is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.

Inklust #15: Looks like we made it

Heaven comprises of nothing save technicalities. There are eternal scribes devoted to the task of documenting such. They type every hour of every day without pause.

 — Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Scale Bright

We've come to a point in time when it seems like everything is worth recording for some mysterious future purpose, from a profound thought to that one time I accidentally ate my hair. How will people 500 years from now sift through all this data? What actually gets the privilege of living on beyond our time, and representing it?

Just please don't let it be that one show where people get dropped naked on an island and have to survive for a month. I can already imagine how that will go: "In the 21st century, when we were developing the intimacy with technology from which we all profit today, people divested themselves of all worldly goods and competed to both catch and survive diseases that didn't even exist in civilisation any longer. For entertainment! Another common tradition of this time was 'planking', when people would record themselves balancing on their forearms and toes on increasingly dangerous surfaces, then broadcast the act on a widestreaming video channel called YouTube in exchange for as many views as possible. Sometimes they died."

Heaven is crying.

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What is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.

Inklust #14: What goes without pain

The brain has no pain sensors and so it can’t hurt. The loss of his mind has turned out to be a curiously pain-free process. He feels that it ought to hurt more.

— Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of AJ Fikry 

Image via Marc Dalmulder, available via a cc license.

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What is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.

Inklust #13: Stories are Dangerous

Stories are dangerous. And I don’t mean stories whose messages are capable of endangering. I mean that the form itself is dangerous, not the content. You know what a metaphor is? A story sent through the super distillation of imagination. You know what a story is? An extended metaphor. We live in them. We live in this swirling mass of stories written by scribes hidden in some forgotten room up there in the towers. The day someone thought of calling pigeons flying rats was the day the fate of pigeons was sealed. 

— Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know

Art credit: Ernst Philippe Zacharie.

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What is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.

Inklust #12: Thirsty Demons

It is chilling, in fact, the similarity between alcoholism and good ol’ fashioned demonic possession, the kind seen in The Exorcist. Like the devil, an alcoholic just wants to hide in his room, curse God, puke on visitors, and die. Attempts to cast out either alcoholism or the devil get the same response: both demon and disease will deny they exist. And when exposed, both will try to make deals to survive, or threaten suicide, or lash out, or play dead. Alcoholism is well described as a sickness of the soul because it is in the soul that the alcoholic’s problem lies.

— Luke Sullivan, Thirty Rooms to Hide In

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What is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.

Inklust #11: Sacrifice

I wonder if Ibrahim’s palms were damp as he walked his son to the summit. Did he tell him they were going on a hike? Did he take water? I think he must have glared at the knife until his reflection was part of the blade. I think relief must have replaced his horror when he unsheathed his knife and recognized his face. He must have known that what he was to do was of such significance it had already become who he was, and so he offered both his son and himself to the kinzhal’s edge.

— A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Anthony Marra

I think the biggest lesson my dad wanted to teach me — the one he still regularly reinforces — is his firm belief that we become what we think about. Being an engineer, he acted on this concept the best way he knew how: by ensuring my input was as diverse as possible. On the day I was born he ordered the complete collection of Encyclopaedia Brittanica and accompanying Great Authors series. Every year he bought a new dictionary for my birthday. He made me write down and map goals, and he still sends me newsletters or ideas he finds edifying. His entire approach to the mind revolves around keeping the software up to date.

On some level I guess we know that idea to be true: a single thought, the suspicion of a thing, or the significance of some future event can so affect us that we get chills, can almost literally feel ourselves transforming.

Scientifically the idea is sound. I've read a lot lately that we can change our synaptic patterns based on actions, new habits, new input, even thoughts. Synaptic pathways define who we are, generally speaking, during those autopilot moments when you're just feeling and reacting to things.

So next time you find yourself snagged in a debate about determinism versus free will, you'll have an explanation for why it's neither and both.

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What is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.

Inklust #10: Agora

When Newton identified the laws of gravitation he did not assert that they held sway everywhere, but wondered whether "God is able ... to vary the laws of nature ... in several parts of the universe." The physicist Ernest Rutherford, whose experiments exposed the structure of the atom, was so skeptical about drawing grand implications that he threatened to bar from his laboratory any scientist who so much as uttered the word "universe." When the astronomer Edwin Hubble established that the Milky Way was one among many galaxies, he called them "island universes" and questioned whether "the principle of the uniformity of nature" pertained across such enormous distances. This is the opposite of starting with a deeply held faith and accumulating evidence to support it. Scientists have a story of discovery to tell, dogmatists a story of obedience to authority.

-- The Science of Liberty, Timothy Ferriss

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What the dickens is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.

Inklust #9: Love

I discovered I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about other people's time. I learned, in short, that love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.

-- Memories of My Melancholy Whores, Gabriel García Márquez

Image credit: mary_gaston22.

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What the dickens is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.

Inklust #8: The Alchemy of Advertising

Most of consumer behavior is perfectly obvious -- people like things that look nicer, taste better, work more dependably, and cost less. Then there's the mysterious part. And what we claim to understand about the mysterious part is usually speculation and ideology masquerading as knowledge.

-- Bob Hoffman, The Ad Contrarian

About the Image: Sunsets to Die For, Shepard Fairey.

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What the dickens is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.

Inklust #7: The Quality Without a Name

The more living patterns there are in a place -- a room, a building, or a town -- the more it comes to life as an entirety, the more it glows, the more it has that self-maintaining fire which is the quality without a name.

And when a building has this fire, then it becomes a part of nature. Like ocean waves, or blades of grass, its parts are governed by the endless play of repetition and variety created in the presence of the fact that all things pass. This is the quality itself.

-- The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander

Fun fact: This book has served as inspiration for many a web developer and programmer. I'm sure it's applicable to a lot of other things too. Thanks Milan for the recommendation.

About the image: Le Café de Nuit, Place Lamartine, Arles (1888); Vincent Van Gogh.

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What the dickens is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.

Inklust #6: Promises of Plenty

"How much is it, this year, my man?" The tailor had come in while he was speaking.

"Well, it's been a doubling so many years, you see," the tailor replied, a little gruffly, "and I think I'd like the money now. It's two thousand pound, it is!"

"Oh, that's nothing!" the Professor carelessly remarked, feeling in his pocket, as if he always carried at least that amount with him. "But wouldn't you like to wait just another year, and make it four thousand? Just think how rich you'd be! Why, you might be a king, if you liked!"

"I don't know as I'd care about being a King," the man said thoughtfully. "But it dew sound a powerful sight o' money! Well, I think I'll wait--"

"Of course you will!" said the Professor. "There's good sense in you, I see. Good-day to you, my man!"

"Will you ever have to pay him that four thousand pounds?" Sylvie asked as the door closed on the departing creditor.

"Never, my child!" the Professor replied emphatically. "He'll go on doubling it, till he dies."

-- Sylvie and Bruno, Lewis Carroll

About the image: The Professor by Harry Furniss, for Sylvie and Bruno.

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What the dickens is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.

Inklust #5: The Daily Baptism

I am the cleanest woman in the world, not from love of cleanliness but from a passion for water. The same passion will make it impossible for me to die anywhere but in an Arab city by the sea. Water is the first element. My first element. I felt the truth of this on my skin, even before I read it in books. Even before reading this Hadith from the Prophet to his daughter Fatima, on the eve of her wedding to 'Ali ibn Ali Talib: "Wash yourself ever with water; thus, when your husband looks at you, he shall delight in you."

I washed myself with water; thus, when I looked at myself, I was delighted.

-- The Proof of the Honey, Salwa Al Neimi

About the image: "Young Lady Bathing" by Rafael.

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What the dickens is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.