The chronicles of Dubito
Dubito comes to visit
There I was, in my hut, painting my staff, when my friend (whom we shall call Dubito to preserve his anonymity if not his character), poked his head.
“I do not like the way the sheep are bleating! They seem restless…” which is an inside joke he and I share with a large group of people.
“What I mean to say is, do you remember the other day when you mentioned that spreadsheets are a tool of the Devil?”
I interrupted, already annoyed: “Yeah, well, I was waxing poetic at that time, so it was more of a lyrical interlude rather than a thesis statement…”
Reading the room, he proceeded carefully: “Well, yeah, sure, but you also said somewhat negative things about them…”
“Like that they are unreliable, unreproduceable tools of modern slavery?”
“Yeah! Like that!”
“Well, I must issue a correction, then, because my intent was to be completely negative, but instead it seems I was just somewhat negative.”. I was looking for a path to let my frustration be known to him, but I could not quite see it. “In fact, I was holding back. Those things are fascist tools for the oppression of thought! They so corrupt the perception of their users that it should be forbidden to drive a car right after using one!”
I was on a roll, but I could not find my way home. “They are the embodiment of the rank and file of an army of jackbooted thugs, marching down your brain and making sure you do not conceive of any idea that cannot fit in rows and columns!” I think I must have been yelling, but I am not sure, because whan I get really angry I kinda black out.
“Here we are, with AI LLM’s attempting to understand human thought in deca-kilo-dimensional spaces, but we conduct all of our business affairs in 2D space! Whole entire companies captured in a single row of an equity manager’s ledger facsimile! Lives wasted servicing, charting, entering data that people do not look at nor understand!”
At this point I caught a spark in Dubito’s eye, and realized that he was pushing my buttons. Then he saw that I saw and said: “Gotcha!”
Deflated, I let out a big sigh, and confessed: “But that was not the point I wanted to make now, which is this: the bit about spreadsheets was nowhere near the central thing that I was trying to convey.” My shoulders dropped a bit. “I tried to relate this awe I feel at the power of programming, and people got hung up on the a side rant added for color.”
At this point, he sat down on a wooden bench that represents 75% of my furniture. It was something I built eons ago out of cheap construction lumber, and which refused to die despite its age and wear. Have you ever visited a really old church with stone steps worn by a milennia of feet stepping on them? This bench featured the same smooth through.
Sometimes when he sat, it was a statement of purpose. He’d square off, initiate a squat keeping his eyes level, while his elbows pivoted in smooth unison towards the top of his knees; at the same time, his head would cock to the right, and buttocks, elbows and head would reach their final positions simultaneously.
He would sit there, unblinking, unmoving, drawing imperceptible breaths, until whatever moment of attention had passed. Were it seconds or hours, he’d then promptly stand, and resume normal operation pretty much as if he had not sat down at all.
I was jealous of his ability to focus like that. He’d capture every word, every nuance, and every gesture. When he was like that he would attain perfect recall (I called it hieratic mode, a zen monk deep in their meditation). It made one get on their toes, and it felt like walking into a room full of video cameras, literally full, impossibly recording from every stereoangle centered on you. Whatever you said was becoming a part of some history somewhere.
I was jealous because my attention wanders… I have to force myself back into conversations, I reread every paragraph at least twice, and the general weather around my head is foggy. All the things I learn involve retreading the same ground several times. But Hieratic Dubito was a once and done kinda thing.
The cameras were rolling, so the show must go on. “Yet again, I run into people’s inability to pause for a moment to parse what is being said.” “What’s the main point?, what’s the language? what is secondary to the main idea? Is it supportive of it? Extend it some how? Add contrast?. Talking to people in anything larger than a Twitter feed (of old) is impossible.”
Things proceeded with the general demeanor of plane taking off. " I have spent all my life thinking, learning, studying, teaching, relating, reading, writing. All in an effort to have substantive things to say, to connect ideas, to be able to share with the world the incredible wonderment that is hidden just around the corner from our awareness: the oceans of science, the philosophical jungles, the power of art. I have worked hard to be able to walk people through long chains of coincidences, hidden connections, and dynasties of thought… And I cannot get past the first sentence most of the time!"
I did not realize how much this was eating me alive. “The only hope I feel anymore is when I look at the achievements of scientists, thinkers, and artists working together… and nobody has the patience, awareness or courtesy to stick it out! People literally walk away from me mid-sentence, unaware that there was more to come…”
“Everything else is bleak: society, the climate, wars, the insufferably craven stupidity of mankind!”
Needless to say, at this point in time Dubito was regretting some of his life’s choices. Or at least I am assuming that this was the case, as I was getting little feedback in his present statuesque state. I guess I would be regretting things at that moment, had I been on the receiving end of myself, and I was projecting that onto him.
To be fair, he always listens, whether eerily immobile or seemingly distracted, and then comes back with questions that reveal that he has turned things over in his head for a while. It is always good to get questions from him; he seems to be able to hone in on things I have glossed over.
He must have sensed that I was not really in the mood to lean into the “craven stupidity of mankind” aspect of my personality, for at that point he came back to life as if somebody had hit the pause button a second time on the VCR. I guess today is all about things only a few people would understand.
“Well,” he said, “I did not really have much to contribute to your main point, but I suspect that there might be a lot to unpack from what you said about spreadsheets.”
I used to suspect that he was having some sort of stroke, or a seizure of some kind. I felt the temptation to wave my hand in front of his eyes, or flick my fingers to see if there was some kind of response.
After I witnessed this a few times, there came a day when I wondered if this was an ailment he had suffered since childhood. It was at that moment that I realized that I did not know where he grew up, nor what his family was like, nor if he had a family. I also realized then that tthe name I knew him by, H.D., was a nickname I had given him. I know that at some point in time I knew his real name, but what it was is long gone from my memory.
He stood up at this point, and the banch made that tick-tick sound that reminded me that though I made sure its legs were level, the main plank had warped with time and only three of the legs touched the ground at a time.
The bench had a tendency to make a loud, stuttering noise if it was dragged accross the floor. The legs would stutter loudly when somebody, unavoidably, pushed the bench back as they were standing up. The warp had made things worse, as the rocking and the stuttering combined in percussive and resonant ways, resulting in quite a stentor.
Yet when Dubito stood up, there wasn’t even that one clack from the bench leaning back and lifting just one of the uneven legs, only for it to plop back down on the hard floor. It was as him he had undertaken on a ritual of daily practice that would exercise his leg muscles and hone his balance to the point that his leaving the chair was an event without physical trace.
I remember when my father would sit on that stool, it and his knees creaking slightly, and he would place his hands on his keens as if he were about to hoist them. From that perch he would survey the room, searching for something I have not yet divined, after all these years of pondering.
I have sat, repeatedly, on that bench… hands on my knees, surveying who he might have been, and coming out knowing only what he gave me, but not who he was. Decades later I still discover, from others, things about him I never knew. For instance, he liked to get pedicures and manicures, and hated flying, though he flew a lot. Maybe one day somebody will tell me what he tought of me.
“Maybe we could go for a walk”, Dubit said, sensing again my ranging mood.
“Yeah, let’s” I surrendered. “I need some exercise anyway”
Off we went, at my pace, which is to say slow. It was dusty, since they were repaving the street for the third time in as many years. It was dusk, and muggy, and I pondered what summer afternoons will be like for my daughters when they grow up.
H.D. must have come from a culture that had yet not been coopted, whenhe was shaped by it, by marketing. He seemed to know the difference between cleanliness and obsessive, daily, probably unhealthy showering. There was a scent, which I refuse to call musky, but that corresponded to the fact that things have a natural smell. There was also a pleasant perfumed scent, complementing instead of competing, that was surely self administered. One of the things I knew about my father is that he wore cologne, which is why I wear cologne. It’s kind of like having him there to some extent.
As he moved, and his shirt shifted its drape over his body, air would vent from its neck and sleeves so that the scent came in uneven waves. I do not recall him ever wearing anything but a shirt, sometimes short sleeved, and always slightly worn. He conveyed the impression that he had only ever wore shirts in his life, never dressing down while never dressing up.
I resent the superficiality of clothes, and always feel, more or less, like a monkey dressed in silk if I am wearing anything but a t-shirt and jeans. I own multiples of the same pair of socks, and underwear.
We were walking through the lanes that were closed for construction, weaving through cones and going around heavy equipment. I liked to survey there progress each day, and tried to surmise, from what I saw, what they were actually trying to do. It looked to me that they were going to repave the road, as they were rebuilding the curbs to a level slightly haigher than the current grade.
“I was hoping they were widening the roadway, and perhaps putting in actual bike lanes. It seems they are just repaving, though.” D, said.
“How are people to run over cyclists if you put proper bike lanes in place? Don’t be ridiculous!” I hate drivers in this neighborhood.
I did not smell any pine trees, and the smell of concrete dust is not the same as the smell of petrichor of clay soil. The hit bore down moist and unpleasant, instead of dry and unforgiving. The birds sounded all wrong, and the wind did not speak around the tree tops.
We walked my unhappiness in silence, letting it be lulled by the exercise, and dulled by increasing tiredness. The sidewalk was uneven, plain and narrow. It was unnecesarily graded towards the road, so that walking on it was uneven. I felt unwelcome, foreign, and out of place.
“So tell me,” Dubito said, clearly trying to distract me. “What is it about spreadsheets the riles you so much.”
Defensively, I said: “You make it sound like I am overstating some minro annoyance, or pet peeve. Look, you can’t just say ‘Hey, that is just your opinion’, or ‘you just don’t like that’. If you do that you are either an idiot, or a coward.” Why does this make me so angry?
“If I make a statement, and perhaps I do not support it in any way, you have but one recourse: precisely to say ‘You have made a claim, and now the onus is on you to prove or substantiate it, to provide the arguments that light that burden of proof from you’” Wow, Shopenhauer really was an asshole.
“But if, or when I produce the receipts, you then have one recourse: To address the merits of my arguments for themselves, and themselves alone!” I stopped next to a pile of rebar. “Whether I am tall, or short, or I am having a bad day, does not have a bearing to my argument”. I considered stealing some of the rebar, then realized I could easily get caught.
“And that is just on the logical, argumentative side of things. On the social side, if you do not address the meat of what I am saying, you are an a**hole, plain and simple! When somebody ponders, studies, hones and goes through the effort of laying out an argument in front of you, your one duty is to roll up your sleeves, than them for the opportunity, and go to work.”
“And it is work! You have to dissect, you have to correlate… you probably have to spend a bunch of time coming to understand the precise sense of the words that somebody else has used to make the statements they made.”
“It is work, which is why people don’t do it.” Some stranger stared at us while driving by, and I wanted to put the rebar through their windshield.
“YOLO! Hakuna Matata! Just hang loose dude. Thinking is sooo hard.”
“Fark! It is like farting in the subway, or showing up to church in flip-flops! You massively disrespectful, nose picking, intellectually lazy sloth!”
“It was just a way…”, Dubito interjected as if I had not potentially insulted him, “… to ask you to tell me more about it. I have noticed that you do not disparage anything gratuitously, that sooner or later there is at least some tought behind your vitriol. I have been turning it around my head, and I wonder if it had anything to do with some sense of the kinds of things you can do with a table, vs. the kinds of things you can do with more complicated structures, like a database, or something lie that.”
“YES! Precisely! But not just that… there are a lot of things rolling around in there. One of those is that operating with spreadsheets is essentially manual labor; another, that it results in data duplication. Yet another, that all of the activities involved are error prone. Finally, there are scant little spread sheets with sufficient checks and validations. And of course we have the point that things worth having do not come in rows and columns…”
The rest of our walk was a drilldown into all of those points. Whereas I would have like a more classical Platonic dialog with questions exploring the subject, and all that, Dubito’s seemed simply content with absorbing everything I said.
He walked with his head canted down, arms hanging by his sides, swinging slightlyly to counterbalanced his gait. He seemed just enough aware of his environment to navigate it, and when he lifted his head to do so, his eyes seemed to register enough of the surroundings to keep the navigation on, before somehow retreating inwardly.
That seemed to be his favorite place, inside his head. I pictured it as a place with some sort of monumental construction of gears and mechanism, set in a circular, glistening room. The outside edge of the room featured a railing all around it, with a walkway next to an endless stack of bookshelves, fully populated. I imagined him just walking along the walkway, hands atypically grasped behind his back, contemplating the gyrations of the mechanism. I’d picture that ocasionally his eyes would wonder from the machine to the books, and some of those times he’d slow down and stop, and reach for one of the books. After perusing it for some moments, or for a long time, he’d put it back and continued his pacing. He did not like leaving that place.
Just as I was running out of things to say, he looked up and simply said “That makes sense.” We started walking back to my room, wrapped in a mutual silence that superceded the noise of the traffic of the street. Normally I disliked silence between people, but silence with Dubito simply arose from having nothing further to add, instead of from a deficit of things to say.
As we approached my room, he thanked me for the conversation, and walked off. I unlocked the front door, which I did not remember locking, and slid inside. I did not want to disturb the silence.
After closing the door gently, and perhaps locking it, I headed for my bed. This was an unusual arrangement, that I had once seen described in the diaries of Abulcasim, the Arab traveler, when he reported on the northwestern provinces of China. He described the dwellings of the local population as consisting typically of a single room, half of which would step up to knee level. The rooms would be covered in rugs, and the eleveted portion was covered by a large matress, of hay or down, depending on your status.
This single room was the dwelling for the whole family. On the mattress slept the whole family, typically three generations, thus why it covered most of the abode. He described (though I do not know that he witnessed this), that on that collective bed all kinds of intimate things happened, in the presence of the in-laws, which perhaps explains why the children slept in the middle.
These rooms, he said, were invariably built along the compass, with the bed to the North, and the entrance door to the south. The bed doubled as prayer mat, and to that extent, there was always a little window to the West. The only other windows would be on the South wall.
Abulcasim said that at first, when he was travelling South of the Black Sea, he found it disconcerting to have face West during prayer. He remarked how having prayed to the East for most of his life (for that was the direction to Mecca in his childhood), he had come to confound the East and Mecca, and the East had become more Mecca than Mecca. He thanked his travels for clarifying in his mind the True place of the Kaaba.
In Abulcasim’s time, the Uyghurs (for that was the name of those people) did not use glass in their dwellings. They knew of it, and even knew how to make it, but they did not use it for windows.
I deviated from that, and placed large windows along three sides of the room, for light. The front wall, were the entrance door was, had no windows.
I grabbed a pillow and a blanket from the huge pile that sat at the head of the bed, like the Northern Chinese used to do, and while asking myself if there was a point to having a gigantic bed for a single person to sleep on, I fell asleep.
I dreamt that I was a second too late behind the fabric of reality. I somehow knew that had I been a second earlier, I would have been saturated by a feeling of joy: that the becoming of an instant of time into the present bore with it a primordial, raw newness redolent of hope, but that being behind the moment in which the threads of time were woven put me in the moment when total death begun. It was the moment when the realization arrived that all that could have been had failed to be, and all that I thought could have been became regret instead, and in its absence there was nothing but disappointment to fill the void it left.
Nothing in that place of fresh despair was as dire as being beyond the reach of life, of time itself, yet tantalizingly so close to it. The people, the events, behind a translucent curtain I could not transgress.
I woke up from what I knew had been a bad dream, the panic fresh in my throat. I felt grateful that I rarely ever remember my dreams, and by the time I left the bed, this one was gone.
I stepped off the platform bed, put on some pants and a shirt, and stepped outside to make some breakfast. As I reached for the door to the garden, I thought of Dubito, and his great ability to focus, then doubled back and quickly, imperfectly, made the bed.
While studying abroad, I had lived, for a short time, in a cabin in the woods. The region was Scandinavian, both in terms of people and in terms of weather, which taught me a new sense of joy for the summer. In this cabin I could avail myself of two luxuries: an outdoor sauna, where I could conjure away the cold dread of winter, and a summer kitchen, where I would greet the mornings in the few weeks that would pass for summer there. Everything about that kitchen spoke to me. It was a primitive affair, with a wood fired stove that would drive away the chill that still lingered in the early mornings, summer or not. The coffee was boiled on a pan of water instead of precisely distilled on a french press, and a basic American breakfast of eggs, sausage and potatoes would ensue. I liked to wear a coarse sweater and slippers for the affair. The smell of the coffee would mix with the intense scent of the resin from the fir trees that embraced the place, and my sockless ankles would feel the chill of the morning. The sweater would scratch my skin, grimy from a night’s sleep, and I felt alive.
When I built my current dwelling (with the help of my friend, Fingo) I consequently built an outdoor kitchen.
It was not like the other. Instead of enclosed it was open: a galley, linear setup, open to the rest of the garden. It was really more of a rough lawn with a couple of trees, plus tall hedges on three sides to keep the rest of mankind at bay. In the back of the property there was a workshop, which indeed took up most of the space.
This morning the weather was already warm enough, and I walked barefoot and let the dew remind me of those mornings with coffee and sausage. I knew the grass would make my feet itch later, and the moisture made blades of grass stick to my feet, which I also knew I’d have to deal with later. I fried some day old bread in olive oil and sprinkled it with sugar: a picatoste. I remembered my father dipping his picatoste in milk coffee. It horrified me at the time: the combination of oil and coffee felt like an abomination. Today, though, it was brilliant.
I then remembered that I still have dreams in which my father appears, sometimes incongruously, and some other times in a quite normal fashion. I still did not remember the dream from the night before, but I do remember that he shows up here and then, and that last night’s had felt like a particularly bad one. I had dreams of drowning, of being in airplane crashes, of becoming trapped in small spaces. Last night felt worst.
Fortunately, I had a meeting with Moneo today. It had become a bit of a ritual: meet about once a week, for 45 minutes or so (his time was in high demand). We’d share a cup of coffee; I’d talk about what’s bothering me at the time, he’d talk about fly fishing. Today was true to form.
“I woke up this morning thinking that I had a bad dream.” I said, having settled myself on Moneo’s couch, sipping my second (but most delicious) cup of the day.
“That’s funny. I woke up today having dreamt that it turns out that all of the knots I have tied for my flies were wrong. Then, everything I did while fishing became unraveled: I’d cast, then the end of the line would fall off. I got a bite, and the fish would just swim away.”
“I guess that’s what passes for a nightmare if you are a fly-fisher.”
“Well,” Moneo said, obnoxiously wisely, “then I realized that I am just fishing, and I fish just to pass the time in peace, and it is all good. I’ll retie those flies later.”
“I know by now,” (we had been talking about things for a few months by now) “that what you are saying is strictly true, but that you are saying it in order for me to arrive at the conclusion that I should put things in perspective.” It had been a long time since I felt any need to hold back in my conversations with him. It was indeed a pleasure, and rare, to be able to be direct, level and nuanced with him.
“Imagine, though, what it would be like for you to be told that the things you are really concerned about you should just be concerned less about.” He gestured by leaning forward just with his shoulders and sticking his neck out ever so slightly, along with a subtle cant of his head. A guy’s gesture of agreement. “You’d object. Loudly. Imagine your doctor telling you ‘you have a weight problem, just eat less’. You’d flip out the same way.”
“What I am trying to tell you is not that your concerns are invalid.” He then took a bit of a deep breath, which was a first in my experience of him. “What I am trying to tell you, which I do not think I have ever told anybody…” He had my attention. “…is that you have a choice. You can feel how you feel about something, or you can take a breath and decide the extent to which you can afford to feel about something, or the degree to which how you feel about something is consistent with whom you want to be. Roughly, you can just be your reaction to something, or the reaction you would like to have about something. Does that make sense?”
“Moreover, you can make that decision strategically: choose your reactions in a way that advances your goals, instead of letting your feelings drive you in directions you do not want.”
“I think I understand your point; I mean, I know little about computers, but I know a lot about people.” Moneo could be the king of understatement sometimes. “And yes, people get things wrong all the time, and not just about computers or technology… but it is what it is.” There was some profound something in that statement.
“And you can piss and moan about it, or you can come to terms with it, or you can do something about it.” He said this deploying the classic German three-hand gesture, thumb and index in a circle, while touching each of the other fingers in sequence.
“Unless you have figured out how to uplift mankind as a whole (which you should tell me about, as that’d be handy), your best bet is to come to terms with it, unless you really like being pissed all the time.”
I knew he had a meeting to go to, and after we stood up for me to leave, I told him the thing that had been bothering me the most:
“One last thing, so that I do not forget while it is fresh. The bad dream I told you about earlier… the other thing I remember is feeling like I was being watched very closely, and that is sticking in my mind somehow.”
As he opened the door and saw me out, he said “Perhaps something we should get back to, some other time.”
“I suppose; see you later.”
As I drove home, the sun was getting low in the sky, so that it could sneak over my shoulder and shine on the dashboard. The radio was playing classical music, something with recorders, probably Vivaldi. I caught a waft of an old smell: dust mixed with virgin olive oil.
It is a smell that is hard to forget. Intense. Imagine a mixture of petrichor and slightly rancid, but pleasant, olive oil. The thing is, odds are you have never smelled oil like this. Raw, intense, like only hundreds of gallons of something can generate. It came from oil that had spilled in the trunk of a car, where it had mixed with the dust that the roads around the farm kicked up year round, clayey and dry. It stayed in that car for the rest of time.
I thought of being in that car, around 8 years of age, driving through the high plains of Castille in the summer. At a time when no highways or bypasses existed, it could take up to eight hours to get there from the city, a drive we would make later in the day so as to not die of heat exhaustion.
What was as lacking as the A/C in the car was the choice of radio stations, by which I mean, there were none.
So, to pass the time, my father taught me how to whistle. Having achieved that, he taught me Shubert’s Overture to Rosamunde, which he would describe to me section by section, as it unfolded. Once, when he got tired of that, he told me a story.
“There was a shepherd,” he said, “who owned more sheep than he had fingers and toes, which was a problem, because fingers and toes were the only counting he had. So every morning, when he let them out to pasture, he tied a knot on a length of rope, one for every animal that walked past him through the gate. In the evening, as they came back in, he’d run the rope back through his hand, one knot per sheep, and if he ran out of animals before he ran out of knots, he knew he was missing one, and he would go out with a lantern to find it.”
“That seems like a lot of work,” I said, mostly to say something.
“It was, but it worked, for years. Then one evening he ran out of animals with three knots still left on the rope. He went out with the lantern and found nothing, because there was nothing to find: a fox had taken a lamb clean through a gap in the fence, a second had wandered off to a neighbor’s field, and the third had simply died of old age behind a rock, three days prior, and he hadn’t noticed because the rope had never told him it was missing until it, too, was gone. The rope could tell him how many, but never once could it tell him which, or why, or since when.”
“So what did he do?”
“He started giving them names, and grouping them by mother and by year, and by which of them liked to wander and which did not, and he kept all of that in his head, badly, until one of his sons showed him how to write it down properly: not in a row, one after another like the knots had been, but in little families, each with its own note beside it. After that, when a sheep went missing, he knew within the hour which one, and whose lamb it had been, and where it liked to sleep, and mostly he found it before the fox did.”
“Is that a true story?”
“It is now,” he said, and went back to watching the road, which was his way of telling me the conversation was, for the time being, over.
I did not think much of it at the time; I was eight, and eight year olds are rightly more interested in whistling than in inventory management. It sat in me for decades, unremarked upon, the way things your parents say to pass the time on a long drive tend to do, until one evening, on a wooden bench that ticks when you lean back on it, I found myself explaining the exact same thing to Dubito, in almost the exact same words, except with rows and columns standing in for the rope, and forty years of my own professional life standing in for the shepherd’s fox.
I never got to tell my father that I had, eventually, gotten the point; by the time I understood the story well enough to repeat it, there was no one left to repeat it to, except a man who mostly listens, and a blog mostly nobody reads. I suppose that is what “the chronicles of Dubito” are actually chronicling: not him, so much, as my own slow, mortifyingly overdue arrival at things a shepherd in a story my father may or may not have made up already knew.
Dubito, for what it’s worth, would have gotten it on the first knot.
This is the first in a loose series about Dubito. It continues in Nihil Obstat.