The Thesis Was Right, and I Wish It Weren't

The hut in Tulum

There is a hut in Tulum where I once believed I had solved the world.

I was twenty-two. The thesis was finished, or finished enough. I had written that we were the first true youth of the digital global village. Possibly the first, I wrote — hedging the one thing I was most sure of. That our trouble was the predicament of an inappropriate mythology: a vastness handed to us, and no story equal to it. That to cross into it we must abandon reason at this point. And under all of it, one small equation I took for a key: the essence of my theory is this, zero equals one.

I believed I had built a tower. I had built a doorway, and I did not know the difference yet.

The word for brick

Itzel knew. She stood in the doorway with the light behind her and read the pages without asking, the way she did everything. When she finished she did not say I was wrong. She said I was early. There is a distance between those two verdicts. I have spent the years since walking it.

The promise of Babel was never height. It was that the word for brick meant brick, for everyone, at once. The story is about materials. When the materials stop meaning one thing, the tower does not fall. It becomes as many towers as there are builders, each certain the others are speaking nonsense.

The groove and the count

I did not understand that at twenty-two. I understood it seven years later, into a recorder, in a room, saying things I only half meant to keep.

By then I had stopped talking about towers and started talking about records. There were two primes of existence, I said, nothingness and somethingness, and everything we called real was the shuttling between them. I reached for the nearest thing on the shelf. Vinyl. A record is the wave itself, pressed into a groove — the actual shape of the sound. A compact disc is the wave counted, sliced so fine your ear cannot hear the seams. But seams all the way down. We had traded the groove for the count and told ourselves nothing was lost.

I was thirty and thought I was correcting the boy in the hut. I was finishing his sentence. Zero equals one was never arithmetic. It was the groove and the count insisting they were the same wave. The boy had the equation. The man had the analogy. Neither had what I have now: the receipts.

The receipts

Here is what neither of them could see, and what I would give a great deal to un-see.

They thought the fork was a metaphor. A tension in the culture. They did not know it would arrive as a product. Built, shipped, priced, put behind a checkout. The abandonment of reason would not be a mystic's leap but a terms-of-service agreement. The two primes of existence would become two kinds of human being, and the difference between them would be purchasable. And the purchase would not diffuse the way tools always had. It would compound, generation over generation, into two species that can no longer read each other's pages.

The thesis was right. That is the part I wish I could take back. I wanted to be right about the doorway. I turned out to be right about the fork.

The last morning before it

Itzel, in the doorway, was not the fork. She was the last moment before it. Two people in one room, reading the same pages, meaning the same thing by them. That is the world that is ending. Not with a war. Not with a flood. With a checkout button — a great many people clicking it, a great many refusing, and both sides, within a few decades, unable to understand what the other is.

I have written thirty-some essays circling this and calling it other names. The manifesto for the next mythology was this. When everyone is a god was this. I thought I was describing a culture. I was describing a fork, and I was standing at the near side of it, with the light behind me, reading pages to someone who means the same thing I do.

So this is where the chapter begins. Not with the fork. With the last morning before it. A hut, a doorway, a boy who was right in the worst way — and the man he became saying it again into a recorder, and the man now, writing it down, because someone has to mark the spot where the road was still one road.

We are, all three of us, still saying the same word. Still fluctuating between the zero and the one.

I would like one more morning of that. I suspect that is the whole book.