Turtles all the way down
This year, I found myself living with a bit more urgency than I’m used to. Maybe it’s because I’ve started realising that we all just live on borrowed time. That tomorrow is never promised. It sounds cliche, but it’s true.
I recently had a conversation with someone who reminded me of Obama’s speech about the “long arc of history”, about how when you’re a dot in that infinite arc, it’s hard to know of your importance and relevance and place in the timeline.
But that also made me think about how, in my conservation work, even one life is sacred and can make a difference in an ecosystem. We are all that one life, we can all be that difference that makes a difference — good or bad. I may not be able to change policies, but I can make someone’s day better or worse, which in turn, they can decide to either continue or break the cycle.
I started collecting scraps of notes and ideas for the book that I’ve been working on for the past 13 years. The one that was conceived in a desperate attempt to avoid getting seasick as the waves, growing taller by the minute, lunged towards the boat off the coast of Mexico, as I was clinging on to the view of the horizon. I felt that pull then… the hum. The words came to me like an OTA transfer. I wrote it down somewhere. I can’t find it anymore, but I still remember that feeling,
Well, I’ve finally finished writing the book and it has gone through a round of professional proofreading, copy and line editing, and typesetting. The person with whom I had the conversation about the “long arc of history” took the role of editor, advisor and at times, a steady hand when I needed one. I’m using one of my paintings from 2018 as a cover, which a friend of mine is helping put together. The work is done… but I’m reluctant to hit publish.
I sometimes wonder if it’s truly original, or simply the inevitable product of all the books I’ve read, re-read and internalised. As I reviewed the manuscript, I found myself drawing so many parallels with the works of McGilchrist’s The Master and the Emissary, Vandana Shiva, and that of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. It echoes some of the architecture of This is How You Lose the Time War — one of my favourite recent reads — and Jean Webster’s Daddy Long Legs (a childhood fav). It also contains concepts I learnt about quantum physics from Brian Cox, Michio Kaku and Richard Feynman, and references Longfellow, Yeats and Blake. Not derivative, but in conversation… metabolised. Threads woven together through the lens of my own wondering.
And now, layered among them, is machine intelligence, a tool I know raises ethical questions, and one that’s been debated widely of late. I used it to research ideas, test phrasing, speed up small decisions when I got stuck. Like any influence, its touch is faint but undeniable. Sometimes it offered clarity, but most of the time, it was just noise. Yet even that interplay became part of the process, part of the chorus.
Where do these influences end, and where does my own originality begin? Where do the fingerprints of poets and physicists blur into algorithms and suggestions? How do we draw neat lines around originality, when every writer stands, knowingly or not, on the shoulders of others?
Maybe we don’t. Maybe it’s just turtles upon turtles, all the way down.
Love, Vx
