Cage-free essays
Ideas without borders
Welcome to the Monday Mind Meld from The Brown Barge. I’m Spencer. Every week I share three Substack posts from the past week that made me feel more connected to another person and the world. In short, posts that made me feel more whole.
Reading changes our brains. I mean this in both a metaphorical and physical sense. Learning to read creates specialized neural pathways in our visual cortex, and once we learn to read we cannot stop reading. Absent a neurological impairment in this area of our brain reading becomes involuntary. When you see letters you read them, even if you don’t want to. Sure, you can stop reading. But if you see letters
you
read
automatically.
The metaphorical way that reading changes our brain is harder to pin down in precise physical terminology. I can’t tell you with scientific rigor that the The Gossip Trap by
grooved a new pathway in my neurocircuitry, but I can tell you that after reading it I now view human interaction a bit differently. These changes are substantive enough that I think at least two of the essays1 I’ve written here are, in some ways, offshoots of a new idea that worked its way into my mind after reading Erik’s essay.There are many forms of writing that can facilitate these metaphorical changes in our brain, but I think the best is the essay. I’m not sure I would have written that statement though if not for an essay that I read last week. Substack is the most interesting and diverse ecosystem for what I’m calling cage-free essays—writing that distills a part of a writer’s mind into an idea and uses the essay to transmit that idea to readers, using whatever form, style, or tone is best suited for the incredibly difficult task of bridging the gap between human minds. And so this week’s Monday Mind Meld recommendations are all about cage-free essays, starting with the essay that grooved a new pathway in my own mind.
Borges and the Essay by
I am a sucker for any piece of writing about Jorge Luis Borges. To say that Borges is a genius is utterly uncontroversial and also a trivial understatement. And yet, I must say it again: Jorge Luis Borges is a genius.2
But if Borges was the bait that drew me in, then the click was well earned and mindfully savored. Dawson’s essay weaves in Borges, as well as others like Paul Graham and Eliot Weinberger, to make a point that I can’t believe I hadn’t realized before: a wide-ranging essay—melding science and the humanities, searching for and expressing truth and the nature of being, connecting humans across generations and geographies—is manna in “a world desperate and ripe for thoughtful, sincere, free-ranging writing.”
I read Borges and the Essay when it was published and then re-read it a couple of days later because one idea from the essay kept floating around in the canals of my mind. In an essay written in 1931, Borges wrote:
There are no readers left, only potential literary critics…literature is an art that can foresee the time when it will be silenced, an art that can become inflamed with its own virtue, fall in love with its own decline, and court its own demise.
We court our own demise today not through literary criticism, but through algorithmically-optimized writing. This type of writing is the antithesis of the cage-free essay. The cage-free essay explores the profundity of our human lives, adding another stitch into the tapestry of humanity; algorithmically-optimized writing myopically measures the narrowest slices of life, ignorant of the world outside of its narrow focus. The cage-free essay is an infinite game, seeking only the joy of continuing the process of becoming a person; algorithmically-optimized writing is a finite game, racking up Pyrrhic victories in the battle for our attention. The cage-free essay expands us; algorithmically-optimized writing atomizes us.
I too am often a casualty in the attention-span wars. And after reading Borges and the Essay, in conjunction with the final recommended read for this week, I realized that I sometimes find my attention hijacked by algorithms because, implicitly or explicitly, they offer the siren song of certainty through measurement. Measuring with purpose can help us better understand the world. But measurement for measurement's sake is a task for machines.
And we are people.
Spirit in the Technopolis by
This essay, by the mononymous author of a Substack called
, is a wonderful example of a cage-free essay. I have read a handful of Peco’s essays and I always come away with a greater appreciation for writing that starts from a different set of fundamental assumptions and life experiences than my own.The Spirit of Technopolis weaves the author’s childhood habit of spinning a globe and a long layover at Gatwick Airport near London into a larger exploration of what
deemed the “three-city problem” of modern life. In short, this problem is a competition between Reason (as represented by Athens), Religion (as represented by Jerusalem), and Technology (as represented by Silicon Valley). Peco’s analysis of this problem is lucid and interesting. It was also a challenging read, which I mean as a compliment. There are parts of the essay that strike me as far-fetched or too firmly rooted in a metaphysical belief that I do not share. But this is a feature of the essay, not a bug, and I found some of Peco’s ideas percolating in my mind as I read another wonderful cage-free essay this week on how to reshape our education system.3The fact that Spirit in the Technopolis, written from a religious perspective, came up in my mind as I read another essay, written for an essay contest on a rationalist Substack, highlights how life is enriched when we fully consider the perspective of another person trying to express something that they think is true about the world, regardless of whether we ultimately accept or reject their views.
When I look out into the world I do not see a zero-sum competition between reason, religion, and technology—as Peco does—and if I had to balance these forces I would almost certainly weight the scales quite differently than Peco. And yet any differences between us, big and small, melted away as I read Peco’s conclusion:
We must allow our hearts to be pierced with an eternal lance, for the dragon we must confront is not out there, but in here; the fundamental thing that needs to be overcome is not the Technopolis, but within us.
Life on the Grid (Part 1) by
My last recommendation, Life on the Grid (Part 1) comes from a Substack called
written by an anonymous author who goes by Roger’s Bacon. This is a Substack that has, for some time, been largely on my periphery, but after reading Life on the Grid (Part 1) I will now have to move closer to the center of my own personal must-read Substack orbit.As with Peco, the only details I know about Roger’s Bacon are the clues left in their Substack about page. From this I gather that the author is a scientist or at least adjacent to science, being the co-founder of a scientific journal called Seeds of Science. As such, it isn’t surprising that this essay starts with the author using a study from a large sample of video game players navigating different video game terrains to make a point about what he calls the “gridification” of the world.
As I read the essay, I thought about all the ways that my own life has been shaped by the landscapes, both physical and mental, that surround me. This led me to introspect on certain qualities that I project onto myself, for instance having a poor sense of direction. I spent most of my childhood, when my brain was at its most plastic, navigating a life of the mind. I would sometimes become lost in this world of narratives and abstractions, but I sharpened a keen sense of mental direction, always certain that I would be able to find my way back to the safest of shores. In contrast, I spent little time navigating the actual world, and even when I was in the world I never attempted to learn to orient myself in space. This means that simply navigating the cardinal directions of the world is a greater cognitive lift for me than say following the twists and turns of Derek Parfit’s teletransportation paradox.
In recent years I have started to incorporate interoceptive practices into my life, giving me a newfound appreciation for the wisdom of living an embodied life. Further contemplating the ways that my own life has been “gridified” also made me wonder whether advancements in AI will eventually be bounded by a lack of AI embodiment or whether the simulation of physical space can overcome this limitation (I understand this is not a novel or unique thought, but the linking of these two domains I think illustrates the type of broad thinking—part concrete, part speculative—that this essay provoked as a reader).
Reading Life on the Grid (Part 1) also brought me back to my initial comment and response to Borges and the Essay, particularly the siren song of measurement. Roger’s Bacon terms this “the impulse towards control, the systematizing instinct, the part of us that abhors anomaly and ambiguity and seeks to eradicate them.” For many years I thought that this systematizing instinct provided shelter from a cruel and chaotic world. But cruelty and chaos are only parts of the much larger project of humanity, a project that also includes the beauty of a Borges essay, the feeling of warmth that radiates from the gut when a loved one smiles at us, and a world that, no matter how deeply explored, will always present us with new wonders.
Thanks for reading the Monday Mind Meld. I do sincerely hope that you will read each of the recommendations. In total it will take you 34 minutes to read them all. I can’t promise that any of them will make you feel what I felt reading them, but I do think that if you give them the fullness of your mind you’ll emerge with a few new grooves—imperceptible, perhaps; immeasurable, certainly—worn into your mind.
The essays are: Social media is the middle school cafeteria and The Friendship Lottery
If, by some unfortunate series of events, life has not yet revealed to you the genius of Borges, then just stop what you’re doing now and read Borges and I. It will take you one minute to read and one lifetime to fully appreciate.
This essay was a review of a book called The Educated Mind by Kieran Egan. I had not heard of Egan before reading this essay, which is an entry in the
essay contest. I wanted to include the essay in question as one of my recommendations, but its sheer length, an estimated 108 minutes of reading time according to Substack, deterred me. Nonetheless, if you have even a passing interest in education I think it will open your mind to a different perspective on learning.
Thanks so much for the reflections. I love the term “cage-free.”
Like I said in my post, I think this sort of collection and reflection on essays is really beneficial for the form, and your synthesis here is excellent. It’s something I’d like to try on my own Substack as well.
I also want to say that even though I didn’t touch on it in the post, I very much agree with your disdain for algorithm-driven content. I used to write on Medium, and it’s amazing to see the way the importance algorithm influenced the content (it made it terrible).
I’m so interested in the ways in which reading changes our brains. I learned to read at three, and don’t really remember not being able to do so. However, for decades, I couldn’t read in my dreams. Any text in a dream would somehow be blurred or obscured, so that it wasn’t readable. One night though, I woke from a dream in which I’d read something-- not just “known” what it said, but actually seen the letters and read the words. And as you say above, from that point on, I’ve always been able to read in dreams.
I wonder if my dream reading somehow involved the same of changes that the brain undergoes when actually lasting to read.