Essay

Moses, science, and cake.

After a totally intentional four-month summer break from the mouse-car moment, I have returned with an essay. This is the essay mentioned in the previous sentence— this being the second sentence in that essay. As we move into the third sentence, you may begin to wonder what the essay is about, the essay which I am now going to title “Essay” because, at this point, I am not sure. What it will be about. This essay. So we’re just going to call it Essay, and move on to the second paragraph.

Do I like wasting your time? No, I don’t. Or to be more specific I don’t mind wasting your time, but I certainly don’t like it. The problem is that it has become time to write an essay. It’s been four months, which can reasonably be called a “Summer Break,” whereas if it gets to five or six months, it’s unquestionably a sabbatical, or even a hiatus. And I don’t consider myself notable enough for a hiatus, nor religious enough for a sabbatical. Also, the return from a hiatus has to be big. Like LCD Soundsystem’s 2016 show at Webster Hall, or Jesus Christ. Each day that passes makes the expectation for the Return Essay greater and greater. But a summer break, that’s easy. After a summer break, you just ease back in. This is me easing in. And yet I’m still not sure what the Essay is about.

Maybe it can be about Easing In, or about Great Returns. I could make a list of comebacks, like LCD Soundsystem, Jesus Christ, Napoleon or the moon. Other ideas come to me, and seem feasible at first. A piece about my car, perhaps. Or about working on a horse ranch in Vermont. About my summer— where I traveled and what I learned. I could use my failures to draw conclusions about life, or use my observations to design a grand theory about modernity. I tried starting all of these, truly tried, and nothing hit. My only solace at this point is that you can stop reading, right here. That I need to keep writing, but you don’t have to keep reading. Which would be totally fine, with me. Because I have a feeling that once I get this one out there, once this one hits the streets, then the tap will open back up. That is, if I can just get through this one, then next week a piece will flow out of me like the water in the bible which flowed out of that rock. Me being the rock. Just a lowly rock in a brutal desert.

And I’m now wondering why it took so long for Moses to walk from Egypt to Jerusalem, because I’m seeing on Google Maps that it’s only 307 miles, which should take, like, fifty days? But Moses took 40 years, which makes me think he took a bad route, or maybe the cloud of smoke he was following was misleading him, or maybe, for some reason, it needed to take 40 years. Like something needed to change— the people walking needed to change, so that the ones who arrived were not the same as the ones who left, and they wouldn’t go on whingeing about how there’s no good rivers or cafés in Jerusalem, that maybe they should have stayed in Cairo. I’m not saying I’m one of them, the wanderers, who needs to waste time to find something good, so that when I find it I’m different. I’m saying I’m the rock, the one they stepped over probably a hundred times in those 40 years, while looking for the Promised land.

I’m in the Brooklyn Library, central branch, in the Society, Sciences and Technology room. I like how the rooms here aren’t named after big donors; there’s no Tisch Hall, no David Geffen Wing. Here the rooms are named after what’s inside. If the rooms in my brain had names, they would be like that. No Koch Corner, no Roosevelt Rotunda. The room where my fashion-sense comes from would be called the Early-2000s Influence Center. The room where my music taste comes from would be called Sad Singers with Bad Voices. The room that this Essay comes from would be called Nothing. I picked up a book at random from the shelves of the Society, Science and Technology room. It is called The End of Science, and on page 58 it says this:

Physics cannot proceed on pure thought alone. More than a century ago some physicists tried to invent unified theories; they failed, of course, because they knew nothing about electrons or protons or neutrons or quantum mechanics. Now, we are so arrogant as to believe we have all the experimental information we need to construct that holy grail of theoretical physics, a unified theory. I think not. I think certainly there are surprises that natural phenomena have in store for us, and we’re not going to find them unless we look.

Another book picked at random, this one called American Cake, says this:

For the glaze, place the sugar, buttermilk, corn syrup, butter, and salt in a small saucepan over medium heat, and bring to a boil, stirring. Reduce the heat to low and let the mixture simmer until smooth and thickened, about 2 minutes. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the vanilla.

I can’t tell if that second book falls into the society, science or technology section. I can’t tell if I, the rock, am a theorist trying to proceed on pure thought alone. Or, if I’m the arrogant modernist, believing that I have all the experimental information needed to construct the holy grail, a unified theory. Or if I’m the resigned optimist, looking for natural phenomena not yet recorded by mankind. Maybe I’m just the glaze, simmering on a reduced heat, preparing to be drizzled in vanilla.

The problem being, you’ve most likely identified by now, that it ain’t easy to get by on style alone. That the style needs to be really good, needs to flourish, to jump off the screen, to twirl and gyrate like you’ve never seen before. Without any substance, the style needs to soar, needs to fly without wings, to swim without… gills. And if the style starts to fall apart, if it is unnecessary and abject, if its inherent meaninglessness starts to bubble through to the surface, the stylist can’t just bail, can’t just rely on someone else’s substance to stay afloat.

As The End Of Science puts it,

The question is, what will particle physicists do while they are waiting for that unified theory to arrive? I guess the answer is that they’ll do boring things, futzing around until something becomes available. As the field becomes less interesting, talent will dwindle, just as several promising students have already left Harvard for Wall Street. Goldman Sachs in particular has discovered that theoretical physicists are very useful people to have.

Or maybe it’s more like Moses, waking up every morning, looking at Aaron with a shrug and squinting his eyes towards the endless sand in every direction. Scratching the back of his neck and saying, “that way, I guess.”

Maybe style is all we have, while we wait. Maybe we can all futz around doing boring things, so that when something clicks we’re ready to go. Maybe we just need to champ at the bit, and hope Goldman Sachs doesn’t find us useful any time soon.

Or maybe, like American Cake says, we need to get busy.

While you wait for the custard to cool, place the brown sugar, butter, cream and salt in a large saucepan over medium heat. Stir and bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and let the mixture simmer, stirring occasionally, until thickened, 5 to 7 minutes. Stir in the baking powder and vanilla, and let the mixture cool slightly, then beat vigorously with a wooden spoon until the mixture thickens, about 1 minute. It will harden up from this point on, so you need to work quickly.

American Cake has a point. Style isn’t boring, it isn’t futzy— style is crucial. Style is imminent. Style is the glaze which makes the cake. The American cake. Though if American Cake is so smart, then why does it use so many commas?

On September 5th of this year a study was uploaded to arxiv.org by a research team at the University of Toronto. Seven years ago they started studying the time delay between a photon entering and exiting a cluster of materials. This is how we see things: photons travel to them, gather their information, and then exit with that information until being captured by our eyes. But how long does a photon spend on a thing, asked these researchers. One of them, Josiah Sinclair, was studying these durations, futzing around, being boring and avoiding calls from Goldman Sachs when he accidentally realized that the amount of time it took the photons to exit the materials was negative. As in, the photon exited the material before it entered. As in, time moved backwards.

Of course, the implications of this work are not necessarily crucial. Scientific American says kinda hilariously that, “even though the phenomenon is astonishing, it has no impact on our understanding of time itself.” And Sinclair himself says, tellingly, that the team, “produced a beautiful set of measurements.” Not that the world was changed, not that our understanding of physics is fundamentally altered, just that it is beautiful. A beautiful waste of time.

For every boring scientist out there stumbling onto fascinating phenomena, there are a hundred doing the same futzy shit, yet whose time isn’t producing shocking or fruitful results. Living pure style— producing jack but doing it with a flourish, preparing for the day when something clicks.

Once more to the text:

The recipe for American cake looks something like this—one part technique, one part available ingredients, and one part spirit. According to historian Daniel Boorstin, what made Americans who they were “was not what they sought but what they accomplished.” The beautifully diverse and resourceful community of cooks who first baked American cake worked off-script, improvising their family recipes with the ingredients at hand. American cake was about boldness, about daring to fail and often, about failing. American cake was, much like the ancient tradition of Essay (from the French “to attempt”), about asserting your you-ness on the page. About staking your reputation on the act of caking, rather than the cake itself. To all the American cakers ahead and behind me, I celebrate you. I celebrate your mess, your collapsing centers and your pan residue, just as I celebrate your success. And when that fateful day comes— when the measure of a man is how he swung rather than whether or not he made contact, I say to you amen. I say to you cake-on. I say to you: essay.

Welcome back. See y’all next week.