What Is Art?

What are we all really doing here??

Like many of you, I’ve been thinking about the discourse surrounding Chappel Roan’s “leave me tf alone” post. An interesting concept that continues to come up time and time again, is the idea that being available to fans is “just part of an artist’s job”. Most of us who are sympathetic to the Chappell Roans of the world find this claim cold and distasteful. I think this is a good time to consider why, and to think more deeply about what an artist’s job actually is.

The nature and ethics of parasocial relationships are of course, near and dear to my heart. I’m a musician, I’m a performer, I’m a writer, and I’m a gen Z internet kid. I am the luckiest bitch in the world, and I am a neurotic girl-rotting creative. These are the lenses through which I see parasocial relationships and the art world.

I touched on the business of parasocial relationships and art in my essay “You’re Back!”, and I pretty much hit my limit on economic expertise there. In this essay, I will not be talking about the business. I’m not interested in an artist’s day-to-day, or how much money they make, or what their ratio of art-making time to art-promoting time might be. I want to put all that aside for the time being and focus instead on just the art part, just the ineffable, ethereal, invisible process that creates the art we all know and love. What is that job? Who does it? How do we do it? Why does it matter? What is a capital “a” Artist, from a good-faith, genuine, anti-Capitalist perspective? If being constantly available to strangers is not the job, then what is?

Frameworks:

There are two frameworks I draw on when I think about art. The first is Universal Grammar, which we get from Noam Chomsky (although he intended it to be applied to linguistics, not music).¹ The second is the Hierarchy of Constraints, which we get from Leonard B. Meyer, a musician and philosopher. I will attach links below to help you snoop on these sources if you so choose, and I will give you a couple diagrams I made in college, but I’m going to be simplifying for brevity. Please be forgiving.

Universal Grammar for Music:

As I covered in my essay “What does Mysteries for Rats Mean?”, the theory of Universal Grammar sees human beings as having a common mental design, in the same way that we have a common physical design. You can go back to the Mysteries for Rats essay if you want a better description of what this design actually is, and if you want a really good description you can go to the links at the bottom of that essay and see what Chomsky himself said about it. But for this essay, the specifics matter less than the implications. 

Now I’m going to start talking about how I interpret this theory and why I like it. My personalization of these concepts makes them less abstract, and therefore more vulnerable. Telling you how I think and feel about what Universal Grammar taught me will hopefully make this all more meaningful and accessible, but also makes it less factually accurate. In other words, I think Chomsky was extremely careful to not do what I’m about to do, which is take this scientific theory and make it personal.

Basically, I believe that human beings, by nature, share a common structure for thought that feels so natural that it’s often practically invisible to us. We do things all day long that are selected according to how our minds are structured, and if you ask us why we made that choice, we may not even be able to tell you. There are some “choices” that are only really choices in the physical world, and which are not actually choices in the mental world, because mentally, we literally could not have conceived of any other options. 

We feel in the gut, in the nervous system, when something is syntactically incorrect. If I say to you, “Emily and me goes to the store,” you can feel that this sentence is incorrect before you decide that it is incorrect.² After that gut feeling, you then proceed to think about what is wrong with it. There is an instinctual sensation to grammatical errors. The sentence isn’t wrong because it’s evil and it’s not wrong because you don’t like it - it’s just wrong. According to the “rules in your body,” it’s wrong.³

What’s special about language rules is that they are descriptive, not prescriptive, and that forces us to grapple with natural laws of human behavior. 

Descriptive rules are ones that we discover, whereas prescriptive rules are rules that we enforce. For example, the Universal Law of Gravitation is descriptive. If Isaac Newton had decided he didn’t like gravity and wanted to flip it, that wouldn’t have changed the way the world actually works. He could have said out loud to everybody, “Henceforth, the Universal Law of Gravitation is banished! Everybody is free to float around!”, and that wouldn’t have made it so. The Universal Law of Gravitation would still have been true.

By contrast, as a college freshman I was not allowed to submit my homework after the deadline without special permission. This was a prescriptive rule which prescribed how I was supposed to behave. I could still technically have submitted homework after the deadline, but I wasn’t allowed to, so the homework wouldn’t have been accepted by the professor. You can see how submitting homework after the deadline is a different kind of “can’t” than floating into space at will. It was a prescriptive rule (or a normative rule) not a descriptive rule (or a law of nature). 

So language is special because it’s in this interesting little space between the human behavior rules, which we frequently think of as being prescriptive (elbows off the table, submit your assignments on time, no murder) and the descriptive rules, which we frequently think of as being inhuman (apples fall down on Earth, an object at rest stays at rest, Earth goes around the sun). In confronting the descriptive nature of linguistics, we are faced with our place as humans within the natural world. Not only are our bodies natural, but our minds are too. We are not special observers removed from nature. We are not only scientists in a lab, we are also the cells on the slide.

We may think that we create and enforce language laws, just like traffic laws, but in fact we really discover the language laws. We discover what we are already doing, and study our own existing societies to document the rules we don’t even know we’re following. In this way, grammar is what ties us to the cosmos. We may think that we make the laws we follow, but actually, we are made up of natural laws, which themselves predetermine the potential normative laws we can even conceive of. We are creatures of syntax.⁴

I believe that music theory is also descriptive, and this is why I was so interested in trying to apply UG to art. Like language, music has a grammar that you feel in the body as valid or invalid, and only after you feel that a note is wrong do you use your intellect to figure out why. Like language, there are music theory textbooks which teach you how to follow the rules, and like language, the information in these textbooks is derived by studying what human beings already naturally do. You take a Spanish class as an English speaker and they teach you how Spanish speakers already speak. You take an English class as an English speaker and they teach you the names for parts of speech you already use, and then you read Shakespeare. You take a music theory class and you learn the names for things that sound wrong and how to make them sound right. Generally, they teach you to hone instincts you already have, and they try to explain the math behind the instincts. They can teach you what a chord is and how to assemble one on paper or on the keys, but they can’t make it sound the way it sounds. It already rings out like that, and you could probably already tell.⁵

All this is to say, at the root of my beliefs about art there is this fundamental connection between all human beings, and between all of us and the entire natural world. At the heart of language and music, there is an undeniable truth that we are not only the observers, but we are also the world. We are quite literally one with nature.

Hierarchy of Constraints:

So in music philosophy we have a problem, and it’s the question of what music means. I’m specifically referring to instrumental music here, not lyrical music. When you’re listening to classical music, for example, nothing is being literally said, and yet we all know that it feels like it “means something.”  Classical music often evokes emotion and tells a story. I personally imagine different colors when I listen to classical songs. I think it might’ve been Wittgenstein, a famous linguistic philosopher, who described music as ineffable and yet deeply and very obviously meaningful. People sometimes describe music and art as languages, but we all know it’s not a language in the way that English is a language. So, this is the puzzle: music means something, but whatever it means can’t be expressed conveniently through language. I hear a classical song, I experience a profound communication, you ask me what was said and I literally can’t explain it. What the fuck could possibly be going on here?

Leonard B. Meyer believes that the meaning of music really comes down to probability and information. He sees a song as a set of expectations that are created and then either met or thwarted. The meeting or thwarting of these various expectations behaves like a series of binary switches, building up upon itself like machine language, and coming together to communicate something complex - constructing a song that is rich with feeling for us.

This form of syntactic play bypasses many of our more complex mental mechanisms, including natural language, and hits us at the binary level. Our mind is addressed near the base of its pyramid of complexity, and we are communicating with the source of the music at the level of the Computational Procedure, or close to it.⁶ We are absorbing information in an extremely natural, primitive way. We are being spoken to on the level of ones and zeros. This, Meyer claims, is how it’s possible for music to be rich with meaning for us, and yet unintelligible on a linguistic level.⁷ I believe this. It speaks to my felt experience with music.

The big question you might have about all this (aside from “What the fuck are we talking about here? When will you release new music instead of this unyielding fuckery?”) is like, okay, but where do these musical expectations come from? If we’re really communicating on a basic, mathematical, syntactic level or whatever (descriptive law), and not a learned cultural level which ultimately stems from what we have been taught is good form (prescriptive law), then where do we even get the expectations which musical selections within a song can meet or thwart?

Meyer addresses this with a model he calls the Hierarchy of Constraints. Here’s a diagram of it:

According to the elements of the information theory that Meyer draws on, in order for information to be conveyed, there must be a finite set of possibilities and a smaller set of outcomes chosen. This gets into abstract mathematical stuff that I don’t totally understand, so I hope I don’t bungle this. When I was trying to understand this, I thought about a deck of cards.

If you have a 52 card deck and you select 52 cards, no information has really been conveyed. You just still have all the cards that you have. You expected to pull all the cards in the set and you did. There was no opportunity to not meet the expectation, so the fact that you met it doesn’t hold any information. 

If you have infinite cards and you choose one card, you still haven’t really received or conveyed any information because the fact that one card out of infinity was a seven of clubs or whatever doesn’t mean anything. There was no meaningful probability of that card being pulled in the first place. It was kind of impossible to set meaningful expectations because your set was infinite. The odds that you would select the seven of clubs were impossible to calculate. There’s no information conveyed there either, mathematically speaking. 

However, if you pull a seven of clubs out of a 52 card deck, that’s informative. You make a single choice out of a finite set of choices, and that’s mathematically meaningful because you could’ve picked 51 different cards and you didn’t, you chose that one. And ultimately, that’s style and art. For Meyer, style is made up of a bunch of little selections like that.

So if you can bear with my clunky understanding of math and you’re willing to believe that constraints are necessary to convey information, then the hierarchy of constraints suddenly matters. 

These are the constraints, Meyer says, under which meaningful musical choices can be made. And just like what we encounter in Universal Grammar, Meyer highlights the importance of natural, biological constraints as our most basic, fundamental limitations. Through Meyer’s work we can see that natural, biological limitations are not only permissible in the art world, but they’re actually the broadest limit within which we are even capable of conveying meaning through music. In other words, art cannot mean anything without the constraints under which it is created, because ultimately, it’s the finite nature of our practically and grammatically permissible options that makes a certain choice mathematically meaningful. We may want or need an abundance of choices in art and life, but we can’t actually work with an infinite set of choices. Style thrives under constraints. This is a mathematical truth as well as an emotional one, if Meyer is to be believed.

The Art Network Model:

So with all of this in mind, here’s my thing. I believe that the art world is a network of human nodes who are each working within their own hierarchy of constraints. We are unified on the natural and biological level by our shared natural environment and our common biological constraints. Then, as the constraints become narrower, more culturally specific, more personal, and ultimately more personalized to our own previous behaviors, the constraints cease to be universal and become more tailored to each of us as individuals. I believe, as I proposed in my college paper on this same topic, that part of the function of a unit of art such as a song, is to “ping” out information about your location in the network. I believe that when you hear a song, your syntactically inclined human mind quickly picks up on the series of binary choices selected within that song, and you glean information about the musical source and their proximity to you, their sameness and their difference to you, with regard to your respective hierarchies of constraints.

For example, when I listen to traditional Chinese folk music, I am struck on the basic human level (which I perceive as feelings without coherent natural language) by both the ways in which I am similar to the source of the music, and the ways in which I am different. I hear decisions inside the melodies and rhythms that are entirely familiar, and also ones that are different from what I would expect and/or choose, and all of this creates in me a complex emotional and somatic response that tells me very little in the verbal world, but actually quite a bit on the level of ones and zeros. I know that the source of the song is in some ways just like me, and in other ways not, and the longer I listen to that song and songs like it, the more I attune to the sender’s constraints and proclivities, and the more meaningful their choices are to me. When I listen to my more frequented artists, like 100 gecs or the Strokes, I am more familiar with the culture from which the source is operating. We are closer together in the network. My familiarity with their narrower cultural constraints allows me to better understand the information conveyed by their stylistic choices. I get more detailed information out of those songs, so they hit me harder.

We gravitate towards artists/sources/senders that share certain constraints with us, but then we also have an appetite for differences. In this way it’s not dissimilar to erotic love. It’s the space between us and the source of the art that we’re engaging with that is so fascinating. It’s the process of communicating with “the other,” of attuning to them, of “ping”ing back and forth to better understand each other’s constraints, choices, and locations within the network as a whole, that is so natural and fun. The distance and the play within that distance is what makes it all feel like a game worth participating in. Like erotic love, engaging in the art network is an activity that is both labor and play, both biological and divine. Connections of this kind are particularly sacred, and betrayals in this realm are particularly painful. 

I listen to my favorite song and feel so seen and understood, but I also note the choices that thwarted my expectations, the thrill of uncertainty, and the joy of connecting without ever fully being intermeshed. I create models in my head of what the artist I’m listening to might be saying, what they might mean, and thus, I get to test my theories out on the music in real time. Our Computational Procedures are on a play date. I am blowing the dust out of the ports on my Gameboy, and the world is a brighter place afterwards. I propose that when a song hits you hard, when it resonates, when it strikes a chord in a serious way, it’s because the sameness between you and the source of the music is being highlighted in your body and mind.⁸ This sameness may be even more compelling when it’s juxtaposed against the differences you are also able to feel, whether these differences are small or large.

I feel that what I am doing when I’m making music, is I am making a desperate and deeply human bid for connection, and that is both a request and a service.⁹ I am sending out a “ping” into the network of the art world, and the way the message is composed tells you everything you need to know, so much so that the message doesn’t actually need to say anything at all. If you hear one of my songs and you love it, then the meaning of the music is “I am just like you”. The meaning of the song is “If you can read this, I love you. If you can read this, we need each other desperately. This is true in the same way that math is true, in the same way that Newton’s laws are true. We are divinely connected in the network of human beings, and that is a descriptive truth, not a prescriptive one. I could not change this if I wanted to. I love you. It is a law of nature.” This is a scientific, philosophical phrasing of something that religions around the world have been getting at forever. Like most spiritual revelations, it is both mundane and profound, trivial and divine. God’s voice in music which plays in the background of an Instagram reel.

What is the Job?:

So now that we’ve covered what I think art is and how seriously I take it as a human function, what does it really mean to be an artist? 

It’s obvious from my description of the art world as a network that I believe all human beings are capable of creating art. I do believe this is true. The art network model gets visually complicated when we start to distinguish between different types of art, but I don’t think we need to physically draw out any networks in order to believe that they’re there. Meyer’s hierarchy of constraints focused on musical style, but if you’re open to that, then we can guess that similar models are probably present in visual arts, and in other creative pursuits like writing and acting.

The prevalence of rampant unjustified hierarchies has complicated our understanding of art, and no doubt grappling with this fact is part of the modern job of being an artist. But let’s not get too overwhelmed here, we had art way before all the rest of this modern bullshit. Before fame and glory were what they are today, we had people taking great care to make the perfect little pot that looked exactly how they wanted it to look. We had people painting on cave walls and weaving lovely little baskets and wearing cute garments, and it would just be wild and bizarre to say that these decisions were all purely functional, just to store items or gain status. We’ve always expressed our style. Style is part of what it means to be human.¹⁰ You put things where you think they ought to be and then you smile to yourself. Before we had Taylor Swift, we had campfire parties. We used to all be artists, and we all still are.

That said, while art hierarchies in modern society are under-examined, that doesn’t necessarily make them unjust. We might examine them and find out that they’re actually fair. To be a modern capital “a” Artist isn’t just to be a person who makes art. It isn’t just about making a lot of art, or making popular art, or making art that some people agree is well done. There is a skill to it, there is a passion to it, there is a grammar to it, and some people are better at being Artists than others - it’s not just Capitalist bullshit. There’s a genuine kernel at the center of the hierarchy. It doesn’t matter what your peers say and it doesn’t matter what the government says. You can be an excellent Artist even if nobody pays you. It’s a skill you can hone regardless of authority.

I think there’s something special about being an Artist rather than just being a human who is naturally a part of the art network. There is something legitimately special about choosing to be an Artist, doing it as a vocation, and doing it well, and I think a lot of us would instinctively agree on that. There’s something to being a particularly good vessel, a particularly perceptive node in the network. I think this, more than anything, is what the job is. Can you truly tune into your ineffable internal world? Can you pick up on the vibe of the era from where you’re standing and communicate it well? Can you hear the pinging of the nodes all around you and respond concisely, powerfully, and with compassion, flare, and intention? Are you willing and able to really listen to invisible worlds inside and around you, which are ignored and even diminished by modern institutions, which are pathologized and trivialized and bastardized by corporations that can’t see these worlds, even as these corporations may be made up of people who can? If so, the job may be for you. If so, you may excel as an Artist even if nobody in your circle gets what you’re trying to do. If so, you may do the job by accident and be unable to articulate how or why.

I think any artist who is being honest will concede that on the one hand they are extremely privileged and lucky to get to be an Artist, and on the other hand there’s a way in which they had to be one, because they were called to it. I don’t actually believe that just making art is the job of an Artist. This is not because it’s not important, but because that talent is actually abundant.

The real thing that Artists do that other people may not be willing and able to do, is being attuned to their internal worlds and to the invisible networks around them. A human is a creature who makes human art, and an Artist is a human who speaks particularly well for their place within the art network. It is common for successful Artists to be told that their work feels like something their fans wish they could have made, but wouldn’t have been able to pin down as well. I have been told this, and I have felt this way about my favorite Artists. It’s not that good Artists are doing something their fans couldn’t have come up with, it’s actually that good Artists are doing a good job representing a collective vibe that the fans were already experiencing on some level. You’re not saying something brand new to them, you’re expressing themselves for them, from a common position.

Artists work with worlds beyond the physical. They work in symbols, in pheromones, in the intangible realms. That’s what the job is. Not making money, not gaining views, not physically moving the paintbrush or writing down the words, and not simply participating in the art network like everybody else. To do the job and do it seriously, you have to be a particularly good vessel for the network.

Now we come back to the beginning. Is being constantly available to fans “just part of the job”? No. Not only is violating your own boundaries to be constantly available to fans not the job, but actually this behavior is very likely to jeopardize the job. Artists must carefully maintain their relationships with unseen networks and worlds. This is a deeply vulnerable process. It demands softness. It demands sustained sensitivity. It doesn’t make sense to expect this kind of sensitivity from a person, to expect them to be an excellent vessel for the spirit realm or whatever, and then chastise them for refusing to become callous and dissociate from their internal world when it’s time to smile for the camera. Those are two different people you’re asking for.

The last thing I want to propose about all this is this: Maybe not all Artists are excellent performers and not all Performers are excellent artists, and that is totally normal and okay. 

Creative roles are just as complex and abundant as any other category of work, but we seem to have a real poverty of language to describe them. The limited language we have when it comes to creative labor is, I think, a result of our society’s general Capitalist fucked upedness. Art feels like it’s not work because work is supposed to be brutal and agonizing and divorce you from your inner self, so artists feel very lucky and very weird, and they don’t speak specifically about the complexity of the invisible worlds they spend time in or what they do there. I think many artists may feel like they travel to these invisible worlds alone, or like nobody else knows what they’re experiencing, or like these invisible worlds aren’t “real”. When they do speak about their invisible work, it’s often trivialized or misunderstood. When ants coordinate behavior according to invisible worlds we name those lines “pheromone trails”, and when Artists do it we give them the ole’ feminine mystique treatment; that’s beautiful, that’s incomprehensible, and that’s pretend. Meanwhile, the invisible worlds and labors that maintain the stock market are taken incredibly seriously, and named with precision.

I’m not trying to be an obnoxious liberal arts girl about this, and I’m not saying people are wrong to take the stock market seriously. I get that money means things and does things. But art also means things and does things, and I am simply not surprised that invisible worlds that legitimize Capitalism are taken extremely seriously under Capitalism. That checks out. Meanwhile invisible worlds that contradict Capitalism (like the art network) are treated like they don’t matter and can’t be seriously described, even when they obviously do and can. Again, I’m not trying to be annoying, I mean this deadpan and neutrally. This disparity is not a surprise.

We have a million funky little titles for corporate roles, to delineate minute differences between one job and another, and then we turn towards the creative sphere and we can barely distinguish between a touring rock band with no social media presence, and a bedroom indie musician persona who only exists online. Even this distinction I’ve made here is playing by Capitalist rules, because I’ve told you nothing about how these hypothetical acts actually make the art. I don’t know how to tell you that, and that’s exactly my point.

As you get closer to a money making product you start to get useful categories like producer, mixer, director, or agent, but when you focus on the actual invisible creative tasks, we draw a blank. We struggle to speak meaningfully and specifically about the invisible creative world even as we participate in it. If we didn’t struggle to do this, maybe we would find ourselves saying things like “Are you a consistent ruminator, or are you a sporadic writer? What does your creative cycle look like? Are you a natural visual artist or is it a chosen passion? Is your musical creation a primary function, or is it a byproduct of something else you do?” Maybe these distinctions would lead to more creative categories beyond “Artist”.

Lines are blurred all over the music industry – between songwriter and performer, artist and worker, promotion and entertainment, composer and producer, musician and public figure. Additionally, the parasocial realm is getting weirder and wilder every day as the positions of creator, viewer, and platform all blur and twist and mutate. In the midst of all this craziness, artists may not want to tell the whole world exactly who they are, how they feel, and what they think their job is, and for good reason. But the fact remains: Structures are changing in the parasocial art world and we are not well equipped to talk about it, so it’s no surprise that artists and audiences alike are struggling to get a clear understanding of what an Artist’s job actually is. And it’s no surprise that people get hurt when these inarticulable boundaries are crossed.

Art is precious and sacred. It is also a natural human function. It is both mundane and profound. It is near and dear to our soft hearts. Of course it’s particularly painful when our artistic selves are hurt, threatened, or devalued. It’s like poking a bruise, or burning the pad of your thumb. Some degree of conflict, of rupture and repair, is normal between an Artist and their audience. But our relational, emotional skills are so fucked with and devalued in this modern society that we are barely able to carry out healthy relationships with the people that we see every day. Of course our parasocial relationships between Artists and their audiences, which are much more abstract and yet undeniably meaningful, are poorly managed. The stakes are astronomically high and nobody knows what’s going on. We have no language, no skills, and no help managing these complex relationships. In fact, we are living in a society that hardly sees these relationships as real beyond their economic value. Furthermore, artist-fan parasocial connections are being mediated by social media platforms which profit off of obsessive and poorly adjusted behavior. This is not a recipe for success.

I say all of this just to have it out there, to try to add some enrichment to your life and to try to add some value to our conversations about art and Artists. I wish I had an excellent actionable note to end on, but I really don’t. I just wanted to chat. I think some of you will read this essay and be bored, already having thought of most of this stuff yourself. Others will find this so new and jarring that you’ll disagree with most of it and be angry at me. Can I just suggest that this disparity is itself evidence for what I’m trying to get at here?

-Love, Penny

P.S. Make some art today! Exercise your style, it’s your birthright and the network includes everybody.

General Links for Further Reading/Snooping:

Meyer, wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_B._Meyer

Meyer, Style and Music: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo3645275.html

Chomsky, Language and Nature: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2254605

More on aesthetics and syntax: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goodman-aesthetics/

1. I realize that I’ve talked a lot about Chomsky and Universal Grammar in these essays, which is honestly a little weird. It makes it sound like I know a lot about his work and his life, but I actually kind of don’t. I’m also not, like, a fangirl for these guys I reference, I wouldn’t know enough about them to be a true fangirl. This is just where a lot of my ideas come from and I’m trying to show my work.

2. If you’re not comfortable with English this example might not work for you, but you can undoubtedly think of an example of something that is syntactically wrong. Some things are wrong the way grammar can be wrong, as opposed to ethically wrong.

3. Sometimes, something feels grammatically permissible to you, but teachers tell you it’s wrong. This also happens in music - sometimes there’s a disconnect between what you feel is allowed, and what you’re told is allowed. It may be true that some “grammatical” rules we learn as students are enforced (cultural), not discovered (biological). I’m not going to get into linguistic specifics here, but if you are interested in linguistic specifics, head over to more scientific sources and you will soon be overwhelmed.

4. This is part of my whole insufferable thing about man making computers in his own image, but that’s another story.

5. There are people who have pretty severe blindspots when it comes to perceiving music, for example tone deaf people. There are also people who struggle to hear words or articulate them the way most people do. These variations in perception and performance don’t change the underlying structure of music or language. More on this in the links below if you’re curious.

6. I say more about this here, and provide more helpful links:

7. To be clear, the syntax of language is also a low/machine/core level operation, but natural languages (English, Spanish, Mandarin) are higher up. The computational procedure is common to all human beings, but natural languages obviously are not. Does this make sense? I can try to explain this part better if anyone is actually interested in it lmao.

8.  It’s worth noting that we do use language like “resonate” and “strike a chord” to describe this emotional experience of connection with the source of a message. Sure, I believe this is significant and not a coincidence. I also realize that I start to sound like a conspiracy theorist when I talk about how everything is connected like this. The problem with talking about how humans think and feel is that if you’re not careful, your ideas spiral in on themselves because you yourself are a human who thinks and feels.

9. It is not lost on me that this is data structure language. I am haunted by the language of computers in my most feminine, human, and emotional experiences. It is not a coincidence or a mistake.

10. I’m not denying that animals have style, I believe in that too, but it’s a whole other can of worms.