To deny other possible interpretations
Experience exists in infinite states until observed and recorded. I’m experimenting with AI tools to find patterns in my mountain of notes, hoping to discover those rare moments worth preserving — the resonances that passages in others’ books create in my mind.
Early on in Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones, a book about China at the turn of the century, the author has a drink in Beijing with Imre Galambos, a scholar of ancient Chinese texts:
In his dissertation, Galambos notes that centuries of historians have been obsessed with the tale of the book-burning [during the reign of Qin Shihuang, the first Chinese emperor], but they have ignored “the quiet but continuous process of selecting works for copying.”
His point is simple: censorship captures the imagination, but the process of creation might be even more destructive. In order to write a story, and create meaning out of events, you deny other possible interpretations. The history of China, like the history of any great culture, was written at the expense of other stories that have remained silent.
This idea has been on my mind lately as I’m trying to figure out how to approach the gargantuan and multimodal trove of notes I collected on my walk around Japan. While I’ve long admired Hessler’s writing, I only came across this book recently, in the library of the studio in Sapporo where I now live and work, but versions of Galambos’s point have occupied my mind for as long as I’ve been going on long walks.
What’s outside the frame
You don’t even need to write a story. Walking itself, which is simply an act of moving and being present in the world with all your senses, confronts you with an infinite number of events and possibilities. This is both its main source of joy and the main avenue of its dangerous addictiveness. But being present comes at the expense of those infinities: by sensing and noting and observing the world, you register one interpretation of it and deny other possible interpretations.
Or, to put it another way: when you take a photo, you ignore and then forget what’s outside the frame.
The analogy with the quantum world of elementary particles is almost embarrassingly neat. We’re back with Leonard Mlodinow’s description of Richard Feynman’s approach to quantum mechanics that I wrote about in my previous post:
The quantum electron shoots around the universe in a cosmic dance, from present to future to past, from here to everywhere in the universe, and back. […] Yet somehow, like the music of instruments in harmony, all these paths, added together, add up to the final quantum state that the experimenter observes.
The everyday world may have nothing to do with the cosmic dance of electrons but the world of stories and meaning work in similar ways. It turns out that writing a story about EVVVVVERYTHING is no more possible than observing the cosmic dance of an electron. To write a story — to create meaning from events — is to observe that final quantum state: the moment when other possible interpretations are denied.
Side quest: His head full of dancing electrons, the auteur recalls rolling up his sleeves and trying his hand at book design
I first thought about this in the autumn of 2018, when I conceived of the project that led to The Wilds of Shikoku. I’d long had issues with the idea of travel books, even if back then I was not yet foolish enough to compare them with ancient Chinese texts and probabilistic electrons. But the idea that someone would go on a walk — this most fleeting of acts that leaves nothing but an invisible line in its wake — write about it, then turn that into a physical object that would then stay on a bookshelf for years? That was simply wrong, even if my favorite books have always been travel books. I wanted to write a printed artifact about a walk but at the same time don’t go anywhere near travel books.
I began to wonder if a travel book’s physical form couldn’t somehow reflect on the ephemerality of its subject. As I was working on the project, an idea presented itself at a teahouse in Budapest, whose owner had just published a guide to their teas in the form of a sheaf of large, unbound pieces of paper. What if a book about a walk looked like that? A classical book carries notions of permanence, but a sheaf of unbound pages doesn’t. It’s designed to fall apart and disappear.
This is how The Wilds of Shikoku came to be a slim, very large sheaf of unbound pages, and a testament to how I’m much better at overcomplicating things than designing books (the final design was the work of the sublimely talented Ákos Polgárdi but by the time he got involved with the project the basic form of the book had already been decided upon).
In retrospect, I think it’s a charming idea but a poor design. Simply because it doesn’t address a very important concern, perhaps the most important one: someone paying a lot of money for a picture book about a journey on a remote island might just be looking for two hours of fun instead of non-verbal meta-thoughts about ephemerality in the form of a sheaf of unbound sheets whose size is decidedly reader-hostile and which will be a pain in the ass to store on their bookshelf.
If you want a copy, I still have some left in my shop! They ship from Estonia in a custom-made, mailbox-hostile envelope. Make sure you have a nice, tall bookshelf.
Transformations
On June 12, 2017, Day 61 of my walk, I was making my way down the northern flanks of Hakusan, a mountain in central Japan that shares its name, and not without reason, with Mont Blanc and Dhaulagiri — the white mountain. I was moving in s-l-o-w-m-o-t-i-o-n, lightheaded from hunger and exhaustion, after a traverse of much terror and some delight that wound up being both the highest point of my journey around Japan and among its most terrifying and transformative moments.
On the same day, eight computer science researchers across the Pacific published the paper “Attention Is All You Need”, which described a machine learning architecture named the transformer. It’s the architecture that all modern large language models like GPT and Claude are based on. I wouldn’t have suspected it back then, as I emerged from the mountain into a remote valley with a vending machine, a small restaurant, and a hot spring, that my life and the rest of the world would both be transformed over the course of that day. Eight years later, computers are having a moment only comparable in terror and delight to the early days of the Internet — and I, well, I have a white mountain’s worth of text files.
Like the summer holidays
But how to create meaning out of these events? The longest thing I’ve ever written was the Shikoku book, and that’s barely longer than a long-form magazine article. It’s about a two-week walk and I wrote the book barely two months after it, over the space of a month in a tiny monk’s cell of a flat in Tbilisi, and it wasn’t difficult to keep the entire walk in my mind as I worked.
With the walk around Japan that’s impossible. Eight years have passed since I walked out of Kagoshima on April 13, 2017 and the walk lasted 298 days instead of 16. Some days felt like the summer holidays, others like confrontations with myself and the world, some were banal, some numinous, none boring. It was both grand and very pointless: I traveled very slowly for a very long time in a safe, peaceful, increasingly irrelevant country about which you can already read countless books written by foreign white males. Where’s the meaning in that? Don’t ask me.
So I asked the machines. Their mind can hold anything and everything, and one of my early interesting experiments was with NotebookLM, one of Google’s AI applications. You can upload text and audio files and the machine does…stuff…with it. I took my audio notes from Day 1, both the original recordings and their transcripts, added a long meta-reflection that I wrote based on them, my maps, and my photos, then waited for the machine to do a very silly thing: generate a 10-minute spoken conversation between two robot voices based on my source data.
The robot voices were American, an assertive male and a bubbly female. My expectations were low. What could a machine possibly tell me about my own experiences about a very interesting day I’d just spent hours thinking and writing about? What happened was fascinating: sure, most of it was bland and trivial, but the robotic conversation also revealed connections and angles in my source data that I’d simply never considered. All of it within the memories and notes of a single day.
Then I took some more notes, uploaded them to Claude, and asked it to imagine having 298 days of such notes and what it might be able to do with them. It told me that a bit of structure wouldn’t hurt. With its help, I came up with a loosely structured template that’s designed to focus and amplify my data-reduction process. Template in hand, I’ll now go through the data from the first week of the walk and write structured notes, then give them all to Claude and NotebookLM and ask them to look for — well, whatever it is that these machines look for. Patterns, I suppose. I won’t ask them to distinguish between synchronicity and apophenia. One must be kind to one’s machines.
Foxes and their vixen
It isn’t perfect of course. LLMs speak the language of the particular culture that made them, which is not a language I write in. But that’s a minor issue.
The bigger issue is more difficult to explain.
When I think of some of my favorite lines in books that have resonated with me, I find no thematic connections between them beyond the precision of their imagery. Some are about the landscape, some about people, some about silly moments, some are wordplay.
Let me give you some examples:
We found the stream: it tumbled out of rocks and bracken in a clearing full of wood-pigeons where all the foxes in Transylvania, and their vixens too, could have been decadently gloved in magenta.
— Patrick Leigh Fermor: Between the Woods and the Water
The noodle shop was closed when I got back, but they had left the door unlocked for me, and the moonlight that came in through the grubby glass window turned the slug’s trail silver.
— Alan Booth: Roads Out of Time
A waterfall had frozen into bloated stalactites streaked with intense copper oxide green and turquoise blue and sulfur yellow and creamy with snow where they struck the water. The sun sank into the straight cleft of the cliff behind me and the colored alchemy of the ice drained into twilight.
— Rory Stewart: The Places In Between
It was the end of their world, but only a shifting of worlds for me. So it was that for two minutes we sang with all our hearts, feeling only for the past and turning our gaze from the future, swimmers doing the backstroke toward a waterfall.
— Viet Thanh Nguyen: The Sympathizer
Three of these are what you could call travel books, and while The Sympathizer is a novel it’s also very much a travel book. What connects these passages? Nothing. They create some sort of resonance in my mind for which I have no words. They probably create no such thing in your mind. But other sentences in other books do.
What I wonder is this: can any structured or semi-structured or unstructured act of data reduction lead me to find the moments in my mass of irrelevant events that might be turned into sentences in a story that elicit in others’ minds the resonances that such sentences as above elicit in mine?
The only answer is a most unhelpful one: throw enough events and possibilities in the air and into the minds of ever-evolving machines, allow them to dance their cosmic dance, and be alert for the moment of decoherence while hoping that the interpretations that are destroyed don’t end up being the interesting ones.
And to think I wanted to write about cherry blossoms on a spring day! It must be the climate of this misplaced Arctic outpost, my home for this, well, spring:
I’m off to Tokyo for a few days. See you next week.