Writing

A human brain holds, on average, one lifetime of knowledge, and then it dies. Every technique, every story, every map of the territory accumulated inside it — the name of the plant that heals, the angle of the spear throw, the face of the ancestor — goes with it. Evolution gave us language as a partial fix: knowledge that can be spoken can outlast the speaker, if someone else hears it and repeats it. Oral tradition is the first external memory system. It is also the most fragile: dependent on faithful transmission, distorted by each relay, bounded by the range of a voice and the attention of a listener. …

Let me tell you how this works. I have a thought — usually dense, usually half-formed, sometimes barely grammatical. I write it down in what I call a seed: a compressed file of references, connections, structural intuitions, and emotional register. It is often messy. It is always specific. I know what I want to say; I do not always know how to say it in a way that a reader will want to receive. …