Knowing who we are and might become

Featuring: A library | Algorithms | Medusa | Annie Proulx's career

Landscape with Figures, Maurice Prendergast, 1921. I read that Prendergast’s later works served as elegies for a lost era of leisure activities and travel that was eclipsed by the rise of industrialisation, technology, and war in early 20th-century America.

✨ This post started life titled ‘Six Books for Mrs Blythe’. It’s a line I overheard a man in our local library say recently. He works there, and from what I picked up, Mrs Blythe’s son was coming to the library to pick up six new books for her to read. She reads fast, he said. She doesn’t mind what she reads. Though she does like Westerns.

The man went over to the large print shelves, chose six books for her, then returned to the desk. The staff spoke fondly about Mrs Blythe, and the fact that they “keep a few Westerns on the shelves for her — the one reader in Devon who reads Westerns!”

This moment lingers. To be known by another human is a gift. But being known is becoming harder for all the reasons we are probably familiar with — public spaces are closing down, we spend longer on our own at home, social media cultivates an image more than a depth. And so on.

Mrs Blythe was seen not through data alone, but also through presence, memory, and care.

The things we might like — books, products, ideas, people — are things that algorithms now try to feed us, and then to sell us. We are often more closely tracked by these algorithms than by neighbours. Online, unseen systems map our preferences with precision. They finish our sentences, feed our desires, anticipate our moods. They can know us better than some people in our lives. But it is a knowing like a mirror knows a face. It is a shallow knowledge, without mystery or mercy, compassion or care.

I thought ‘algorithm’ was a modern word. But it is old, from about the 13th century, it meant ‘the Arabic numeral system’, which itself traces its roots back to the name of the Persian mathematician Al-Khwarizmi.

The word algorithm is more recently connected to ALGOL, one of the earliest programming languages, created in the 1950s and 60s. ALGOL (a contraction of algo(rithmic) l(anguage)) shaped how we began to speak to machines.

But Algol is also the name of a star in the constellation Perseus. It is named from Arabic al-ghul "the demon" (and from where we get ‘ghoul’). It is a strange star which dims and brightens in a regular rhythm; on/off/on/off. In the constellation, Algol represents Medusa’s eye. In the Greek myth, Perseus beheads Medusa — whose gaze turned people to stone — by watching her reflection in a shield to avoid her gaze. Her head retained its power and was weaponised and carried in Athena’s shield.

Medusa was feared for her ability to see, and then to immobilise the seen. Algorithms follow this Medusan way, like watching eyes: we are seen by systems that do not know us or who we might become, but which gaze at our present being and fix us into patterns that can be hard to escape, our tastes looping back on themselves, our choices narrowed. The ghoul’s gaze flattens us into data points, comprehended but not understood. All the while Algol the star flickers on and off in the language of machines.

To be known by a human being is altogether different. It is slow, relational, containing contradiction and surprise. The librarian drew on conversation, on small talk and silences and no doubt frustrations, and offered Mrs Blythe books that might help her grow, or find peace, or pleasure.

The interaction in the library made me wonder if we are at risk of losing the sacred inefficiency of love and attention. Of gaining seeming access to the world, but losing the intimacies that make that world knowable and liveable. Of losing the spaciousness of being known not just for what we like and have liked in the past, but for who and what we might yet become. Of forfeiting our becoming (individually, collectively) to serve the convenience of what is already known.

I think it can be hard to step into the intimacies of relationship in an age that fragments us, isolates us, makes us doubt ourself, monetises our time and attention. I know I find it hard. But being deeply known is an invitation that can remind us of our humanity, and how to live together, and why it this matters for our souls and our world and our future.

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Wyoming by Karsten Koehn on Unsplash

📕 I’m re-discovering how great the American author Annie Proulx is. I’m reading Close Range: Wyoming Stories. It is spare, it is full of life. Here she is:

“You stand there, braced. Cloud shadows race over the buff rock stacks as a projected film, casting a queasy, mottled ground rash. The air hisses and it is no local breeze but the great harsh sweep of wind from the turning of the earth. The wild country — indigo jags of mountain, grassy plain everlasting, tumbled stones like fallen cities, the flaring roll of sky — provokes a spiritual shudder. It is like a deep note that cannot be heard but is felt, it is like a claw in the gut...

...Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that.”

Annie Proulx has been in my mind too because I have been thinking about work, careers, and identity. She reinvented herself, kept working away at things, following her curiosity. Before she wrote fiction she was a journalist, and wrote about rural life, back-to-the-land movements, gardening. She wrote a book about making cider, another about making fences. Then, in her 50s she started to write short stories. When she was 58 she wrote The Shipping News which won her the Pulitzer Prize. Her stories, like Brokeback Mountain, have been made into films.

In more recent years, she has turned her attention to ecological issues, and produced work like the book Fen, Bog and Swamp. Here’s a piece she wrote about the English Fenlands.

She’s given me a boost when I think about my own work, my own becoming. I’m sharing a few of the reasons why in case they’re useful to you, too:

• She followed her interests — from forestry to fencing to small-town life — and trusted that it mattered, even if it didn’t point to a grand career.

• She doesn’t seem to chase trends, rather, she listens to where she is and seems attentive to the life around her. Her soul seems attuned to specificity.

• Her sentences are sometimes wild and gnarly. Her stories seem to follow complexity rather than tidy or easy conclusions; seem to follow something truer than what might be popular or successful.

• She’s written on a wide range of topics: architecture, apples, bird habitats, beetles, disappearing wetlands. She seems to pay attention and to follow the work it suggests, beyond ideas of ‘career’.

• Her worlds are full of loss, poverty, broken people, broken dreams. But there’s also luminosity, as if she knows the world’s darkness and harshness, but has not given up on its light.

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🌱 I came across this ancient line of poem, from the Psalms: “I would have lost heart, unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.”

I brought a relief I didn't know I sought — that hope is not just for things to come, a reality that we cannot yet step into, but it is something that we can find here, now, in the life around us. I knew this already of course — I only need look at the countless people who use their hands and hearts and lives for good, even when darkness descends. But to read that ancient people also struggled to keep heart brought a kind of peace. Hopelessness has always lived alongside us, within us. But so has hope.

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Elizabeth x