Pylimitics

There is a moment in To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, in which the moment before commencing a creative work is crystallized.

“…she took her hand and raised her brush. For a moment it stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstacy (sic) in the air. Where to begin?–that was the question at what point to make the first mark? One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests. Still the risk must run; the mark made.”

That’s the moment a writer might first face a blank page or a blank screen. A photographer peers searchingly through the viewfinder. A traveller, because traveling is also a creative act, shifts balance to take the first step. The first step necessitates the second, and the rest. The first word spawns the next. Setting out can be a daunting moment of decision. You can see all the words stemming from the first, the whole of the journey presaged in a step.

One of the great triumphs of people — I might have written “creative people”, but found that redundant — is finding the courage or conviction or insight to begin, because it can be a difficult thing, to begin.

When we exercise parts of us, they are strengthened. Muscles, of course, but also the parts enable everything else we might do. Leading discussions. Writing, Painting, Reading, Calculating. Anything. Learning to begin a thing, and practicing it, makes whatever it takes to do that more robust. More resilient.

I reach for these tools to help create software, to proofread my writing, to search for information on the internet. Every time I do, the systems help. I regard using them as collaborating with everyone whose written work has been encoded in them. It can be an enriching experience, or at least it feels that way. I also feel a slight worry every time: is it too easy? Is it too easy to begin?

Navigating the moment of begining seems to me a too often ignored ability that takes a long time to develop and should be more carefully exercised, toned, and maintained. Software is mechanical, and simply commences as simply as the short end of a lever moves up when you press the long end down. The moment of beginning does not really exist for any machine, because the real moment (moments, really) happened long ago when engineers and designers and uncounted, unnamed others navigated their own moments of begining, which collectively led to the machine. Software is, after all, a machine.

I believe I could be called a craftsman, of a sort. I craft words, computer code, sometimes other raw materials. Beginning moments to a craftsman are significant, and navigating them is a skill and a muscle. I’m facing the beginning of a stage of life when skills, muscles, and the rest start to diminish; a stage I am actually lucky to face, given the alternative. I want to retain the skillset and muscle tone I have as far into the future as I can. Thus I worry, just a bit, whether using generative AI is to intellectual work like taking the car instead of walking.