Lucian was on the living room floor this afternoon in overalls. the overalls had a large central pocket. I dropped a block into the pocket while he was watching.
he saw it go in. he sees it now. it is on his body, in cloth, six inches below his eyes. he cannot get it out.
he sees the block. he wants the block. the part where he becomes the agent that retrieves it is not built yet.
he grunted.
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the grunt was new. I am tracking it because it is the sound of a capacity being asked for that does not yet exist.
a few days ago he grunted when he wedged a leg under a stack of blocks & worked it out himself. that grunt was the sound of a small body deciding to stay with a problem. today's grunt is a different one. today's is the sound of the eyes telling the body what to do & the body not knowing how.
he could see the block through the cloth in the same way I could. the difference between us was that I knew there was a sequence of small actions that would produce the block in his hand. he did not know the sequence. he knew the destination & nothing about the route.
he is at the version of life where everything he wants tends to arrive. food arrives. comfort arrives. attention arrives. the world has been arranged, by Beck & me, so that he is not asked to traverse much distance to get what he needs. that is correct, at his age, mostly. the floor of his life is supposed to be soft.
the cloth was the first version of distance.
the cloth was not abstract. it was right there, on his own body, between him & the block. & for the first time today, the answer to can I get this thing I am pointing at was not on its own. it was only if you do something about it.
I have been writing about authorship for a few editions. authorship as deciding the destination. authorship as refusing the deferral default. authorship as the muscle that, at nineteen, decides whether to ask a system to solve a problem or to solve it himself.
today I am writing about the floor below all of those.
before he can author a destination he has to know that his own body, on purpose, can move a situation. before that, he has to know that wanting a thing is not the same as having it. before that, he has to spend the small uncomfortable interval where seeing the thing & having the thing are different.
that interval is not painful. it is also not nothing. a one-year-old at the leading edge of it makes a sound that has not existed before in his vocabulary. I see what I want. I cannot get it. that is a category I did not know existed.
the category is: visibility is not access.
by 2044, my son will live inside the most high-resolution world a human being has ever inhabited. generated content will saturate. recommended next steps will arrive faster than he can decline them. seeing will be cheap. perception will be cheap. the bottleneck will not be sight.
the bottleneck will be the muscle that converts sight into pursuit.
the systems will be very willing to close the gap on his behalf. the assistant will retrieve the block. it will retrieve the next one, & the one after, before he asks. the friction between him & the thing he was pointing at will be planed flat by infrastructure that gets better at planing every year. that is not a hypothetical. it is the trajectory.
what is being built right now, on the carpet, in the small uncomfortable interval where he can see the block & cannot yet route his body through the cloth to reach it, is the muscle that, at nineteen, will be either there or not there.
I helped him with the block today. I did not let him sit in the gap longer than he had to. he is one. the cloth was the first lesson, not the final one. it will get thicker. eventually it will not be cloth at all. eventually it will be an algorithm, a bureaucracy, a story he has been told about himself, a recommended next step that is almost the right one.
he sat with the new grunt for a few seconds. then I retrieved the block. then I dropped a new one in. he did not get it out. he did not need to. he needed to feel the difference between seeing it & having it in his body, in a way he had not felt before.
that is the work today.
What I am holding onto
he saw the block. he wanted the block. the cloth was between them. he made a new sound. that is the whole scene.
visibility is not access. the muscle that converts the first into the second is the substrate of every authoring-capacity downstream of it. it gets built in the interval between sight & grasp, on a floor, in twenty-second increments. it cannot be built by a system that closes the gap on his behalf.
my job is to not retrieve everything for him, & to not demand the capacity before he is ready for it. the gap is the curriculum. today the cloth was thin. one day it will be cognitive. the wiring laid down right now, between seeing & having, is the same wiring that will or will not hold later, when the cloth is no longer cloth.
Cheers, JanCarlos
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