A life project, a simple conversation

"every person on this earth is a monstrously huge landscape, and yet, we can drop into any of it with a simple incantation, the right string of words piped through this sparse interface"

It’s strange to feel a season of your self coming to an end. My second book, The Pacific Circuit comes out in about 10 weeks (you can preorder it). My next two smaller projects are coming into focus. They’ll both narrate different pieces of the Bay Area (Fort Mason, then Mt. Tam & Mt. Diablo). And after that, a cycle will be complete: A decade of place-based work on the politics, economics, culture, and environment of the Bay.

My next big project won’t be about the Bay Area. My focus is going to shift to minds, weird information processing, agency, the nature of language, life’s intricate, almost impossible processes. It’ll be rooted in what’s happening in the Bay, but it will not focus on the literal earth here, our living communities and cultures.

All this foreknowledge is a little terrifying. It forces me to confront what unites my work. Why these pieces and not those? How is this all one thing?

You might say it doesn’t have to be; we are multifaceted, etc. But I have noticed that my favorite creative people—whether it’s Rebecca Solnit or Ada Limón, Ta-Nehisi Coates or Miranda July, Mimi Tempestt or Richard Powers, Jenny Odell or Valerie June, Ross Gay or George Saunders—are engaged in a life project, each work a piece of some whole. Their books or poems or Instagram posts gather force from this larger system of thought, action, and intensity. And in any case: doesn’t it seem useful to search out the guidewires and mycorrhizal networks underlying your creative life?

My own production has been all over the place. Tech criticism, observational plant writing, logistics, renewable energy, lots of history, data work. Some of the diffusion is the fields I’ve worked in, which emphasize speed and relevance to the moment. But it’s also me. I am tirelessly associative, relentlessly driven to swoop up to larger scales and zoom in to smaller ones. I compulsively jump to adjacent fields and distant research. I’m interested in a huge variety of things and can at least passably understand most of them.

Only yesterday did I finally realize: wait, this isn’t a defect, but my thing. Tunneling (dreaming?) new routes between ideas, times, places, scales… That’s what I do.

I’ve been primed for this realization by my recent reading: Lots of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and machine learning literature. In these worlds, everything is “a space.” Mutations are random explorations of genetic space. Large language models project words into a high-dimensional space that can be traversed in nearly infinite ways. Little flat worms regenerate body parts in anatomical space. There are algorithms for “hill climbing” and also for “gradient descent.” Genotypes are subject to “canalization” where they produce the same phenotypes despite genetic variance, as if they can’t help but fall into certain latent canyons of development.

The mathematics of networks turn out to be filled with landscapes, and so, so, so many things can be described with this math, from forests to brains to internet ads to cell regulatory functions to all the language ever written down. So many spaces can be traversed. We need only imagine ourselves capable of travel.

I conceptualized this newsletter on the Lafayette Ridge Trail yesterday, looking back across the way that I had come, up a few miles and a thousand feet. The trail dipped into and out of view along the knobby ridgeline, patchwork forest on the flanking hillsides. Further to the horizon, Mt Diablo stood above its rapidly greening foothills. Scattered about: Tiny little buildings made by invisible humans. High clouds striped the sky.

Note: Diablo not pictured. It was off to my left.

And I was thinking, actually, about conversations between my wife and me. I was thinking, more precisely, about conversational “space.” We are two whole universes connected, anchored by very deep connection, but there are a thousand books worth of experiences that belong to one of us alone. You spend 17 years together and we know the easy paths to each other. They are well-marked, assiduously maintained, no poison ivy. But how much more are all of us — are the hillsides — than the well-worn trails?

Every person on this earth is a monstrously huge landscape, and yet, we can drop into any of it with a simple incantation, the right string of words piped through this sparse interface. At a bus stop, taking in two dogs playing, paying for a muffin—you might unveil a secret path to walk for a year or just a few feet. I have been blessed with my mother’s gift of easy connection to others. But what is the nature of that gift? It’s saying: hey, that seems interesting, wanna go there? As simple as stepping off the trail to point out a mushroom.

Anything can open up a hillside to explore. But often, it is the components of conversations that open up the rest of me: an unexpected question, someone else’s lingering shower thought, a feral conjecture about the world, free empathy, a true thing offered, a scrambled memory reassembled in real time.

The writer Oliver Burkeman came on Forum this week, and a piece of advice he gave struck me: make choices in life that enlarge you.

I start from the proposition that we are all very very very large. So, perhaps, my interpretation of that advice is to make choices that allow for continual discovery: self, place, environment, relationships. What lets you know more of the space of your self? Not the sprite of consciousness working in milliseconds that the Tufts biologist Michael Levin calls a “selflet,” but that much larger entity that your second-to-second attention has been building like a coral reef for your whole life.

That bigger thing is the accumulation of messages from your past selflets, from your ancestors back to the beginning of life, from your environment.

As much as you might think you do, you cannot examine your memories like curios in a cabinet or investigate your ancestral endowments through a 23andMe test. No, everything your body and mind can do can only be known through this present moment, through doing the thing, through living. Every memory exists only now at the moment you pull it from the space where it has been encoded, and reimagine it. Remembering and dreaming and experiencing are not as different as they might seem.

Our minds can be hilariously literal, and I believe that exploring new physical terrain can make it easier to find new inner vistas. Our minds can also be devastatingly oblique, and sometimes it’s a piece of Georgian choral music that might unlock something inside you with its unexpected exploration of harmonic space (thanks, Kitka). There are notes between the notes. Maybe there are years between the years, selves between the selves.

The most meaningful, awe-inspiring moments in my life have always been infused by the multiscalar architecture of existence. And somewhere nestled in there, a self exists that, for reasons that no one can quite explain, wants to do things, wants to get places. That agency feels like the key to understanding the nature of life, and yet it is still mostly just an observed fact. The big question is not: why do I want to do X or Y, but why does anything want to do anything at all?

This is where my next project is headed. BUT that’s a ways off.

In the meantime, have this poem, a different walk through this post’s terrain. I wrote it last week in and for my hometown (shout out, Gabriel Cortez), a place I am trying to be kinder about, so that the little boy there has a better place to grow up.

Overlooking I-5 at Exit 14 (1997)

The best nights of my youth, we walked along dark exurban roads to I-5, to the gas station, where we bought terrible food, burgers so bad we called them butt burgers, as we ate 3, even 4 of them. Chimichangas, too, which seemed to flirt with racism in concept and execution. There were many things like that in those days: maple syrup, Apu, Steve Urkel, Taco Tuesday, our school mascot being the Rebels, how people said African American sometimes. They also outright declared the n-word, rarely though. More common: beaner and spic and wetback, my least favorite. But laughing in the bright lights of the AM/PM, gorged on Nintendo 64, what beautiful fucking idiots, I can’t hate any of them. Did they have much choice?

There and back, I’d stop on the overpass, the endless river of cars below me, and I would get that Scientific American feeling. Cosmological vertigo. The vastness of everything, the individual lives of all those people, every unknown story playing out on some stupid night in 1997, floating on history, wrapped in personal drama, precisely dimensioned and textured, how much it mattered to every rushing car that they get where they were going.

Before I knew the names of trees, before I felt something go quiet when I found myself alone on the trails, before I could appreciate the ocean as something to look at, before I knew regret, before I began to notice the color of the light in early December, before I would wake with a child on my chest, or tugging at my sleeve, before I liked to wake up to a quiet house and make coffee in the dim pre-dawn, this monstrous freeway was my access point to infinity, this dull roar through the trees, this stream of lights: you can’t tell me it was not sublime. The sublime!

Endangered butterflies, massive rainforest fungi, blue whales, tardigrades, mantis shrimp, the whole corvid family, bristlecone pines, weltwischia mirabilis, a finch with a funny nose, reindeer, amoebas, blue-green algae, flatworms, those huge crabs at the bottom of an ocean trench, the hundred million fish no one has ever seen, even once, the dragonflies, the beavers, the tiny bird you almost saw yesterday, the cloud of bacteria coming out of your nose and mouth, the earthworm, and yes, truckers and travelers and people working the graveyard shift at PDX and middle school boys drunk on the weakest independence.

What right does anyone have to imagine they are not just a manifestation of the whole, a piece, a component, an envelope around and inside many beautiful layers, a nearly arbitrary circle drawn around unstoppable endless wriggling like a net full of anchovies that’s also made of anchovies in an ocean of more anchovies.

Life is ridiculous.

On the overpass, some dipshit would always joke about dropping something on the cars below. The spell would be broken. Tiny gods with greasy fingers marching off back to the room above the garage reeking of puberty and Mountain Dew, pits stained with videogame intensity, peach fuzz darkening by the hour, a place in the world coming into and out of view like a flying bird through binoculars.

Crunching through shoulder gravel, a flashlight, pointed at the ground, swinging on an arm, illuminating now and then, broken glass, used condoms, bits of tire, cans, chip bags, small dead things, lost items, cigarette butts that once flared, tossing sparks as they tumbled out of fingers dangling out windows.

How could every person’s life mean so much to that person? How could any person’s life mean anything at all?

To live and die is the most ordinary thing.

That’s what I learned in my hometown.