Ftrain, by Paul Ford

We went to Boston. I don't know why my children wanted to go in February. It was their idea. I wanted to see a friend while there but all I did was beg my 14 year olds to get off their phones and ask them if they could please get ready to go. The apartment we had for three days was nice. It had that view out the back.

We saw a bunch of Boston things but the one I most wanted to see was the Mapparium, which is a big stained-glass globe inside the large Christian Science Library and center, across the plaza from the Mother Church. The Library looks like this:

And the Mapparium looks like this:

Go to a place, look at a thing. The real reason I wanted to go was to just be around the Mother Church, because a mentor and dear friend was a Christian Scientist. I loved him. He passed a decade ago. He took me to Amiga user group meetings.

I could tell you why he was special to me but I actually wrote about it at length when he passed. Some of the videos have faded away on the post, alas. Many animations don’t work. The eternal work of archiving.

I know you might have strong feelings about Christian Science but I see it as part of an East Coast Protestant continuum. I've been reading up on the various planned communities and socialist-Christian towns that sprung up on the East Coast in the 1800s. In some ways I feel that I grew up in their shadow. I took trombone lessons in the former meeting room of the Theosophist society. The books were there but I truly don't know if any Theosophists remained.

I keep looking in on these big cultural religious spaces—literally just stopping outside a church or mosque and staring—because of the continuity they offer and the frameworks they provide for stability in the midst of chaos. The mechanisms of faith are often the same: A large, central building. Guidance as to dress and voice. A large book filled with rules. And usually three or four core beliefs that are absolutely bonkers to anyone outside the group. You need one absolutely over-the-top thing to believe in. It needs to start literally, and then be open to interpretation by subsequent generations of interpreters, who seek to rationalize the faith with the flow of the world. It’s a rigid platform but malleable at the edges. The best bet today, I think, would be for a kind of simulationism, maybe a mix of psychedelics and digital thinking with some AI in the mix. But it has to be fervent and orthodox. LessWrong comes close. You get that just right and then people spend the next 2,000 years explaining it as a metaphor. From there you just need a dome. Maybe you don't even have a holy book; you just feed the same golden prompts to an LLM and follow what it tells you to do. Chatarianism.

On the way out there were little slips of paper you could fill out with testament to your gratitude (or other positive emotions). I wrote how grateful I was for Tom, how loving and generous he had been. I had to hurry to finish it because my family was grumbling and tapping their toes. They don't care about the rich resonance of the Christian Science Mother Church as it flows into the large currents of the Protestant experience and the connected history of non-violent and Emersonian thought. I mean does anyone? Actually Harvard is right there so actually people who care about exactly that were extremely close and could be summoned in an emergency.

So much of my life right now is people who can't wait one more minute, who just want to be on their phone, who are ready to get to the next thing, always hungry and ready to stomp. I'm one of them too, I know. We're so impatient with each other, bored and fractious. Yet no one will stand more than a foot away, no matter how often you ask, and we love each other too, and pet each other on the head. The combined attraction-repulsion of a family moving together through space, a single molecule bouncing between museums. As all this was going on I was trying to edit and fact-check an article for NYT OpEd, from my phone, on the #1 bus to Cambridge, on the Green and Orange lines, and also at one point leaving an escape room to confirm final edits. Then going right back in. It is process that the writer does not truly control (both OpEd and family outings). Also we went to MIT and I saw Claude Shannon's automata, and piles of gray snow.

This was my home station for eight years (now it's my post-piano-lesson station) and I never noticed the sign.

My shrink says: “I'm Armenian, I want you to have, we call this an earring.” Pulls her ear. “It's, What am I not seeing? What am I wrong about?”

That's the earring.

What am I wrong about? Too easy to say, Everything.

From Masako Miki's exhibition at MassArt Art Museum, “an experiential world populated by semi-abstracted felted wool sculptures set within a galaxy. Referencing nature, Japanese yōkai (supernatural beings), and Shintoism, Miki creates new mythologies that reflect the complexity of multicultural identities and worlds.”

I went to a tiny conference of librarians and technologists, people trying to create new infrastructure with few resources, as old infrastructure is being gleefully destroyed by monsters. What used to have billions in funding is now demolished and without benefactors. No one is sure what comes next.

It was Chatham House Rules so all I'll say is that, because I like to write about the way technology touches culture, I have repeatedly found in my life a small, diligent cluster of humans who take it as their mission to preserve the digital moment for the future. There aren't many. They are not in it for the money. I honor them and hold them in the highest regard.

We often talk about what history will make of us. What history will say—because this is actually what history says today—is, God bless the archivists who put this aside, who thought the fragile was worth saving, because otherwise we could not know what we truly were.

When the conference was done I took the 77 bus to Porter and got the Purple Line. I didn't have a ticket and I wasn't totally sure where I was going. The conductor got to me.

“It starts with a W,” I said.

“A lot of things start with a W,” she said.

She was, I saw, beautiful, and all I could wonder was: How many Boston men she has thrown off moving trains? Nowhere near enough. She helped me figure out I meant Waltham.

Farewell conductress. In Waltham is a synth store. Not just any: Much of what they sell is unsoldered—just bags of parts.

Go to a place. Look at a thing.

I'm not sure life requires much more.

This store was a 15 minute walk from the train, but more like 30 when impeded by enormous drifts of snow. My hobby is obscure and tends to mail order, so stores are often way out of the way, halfway between mail-order warehouses and retail. I nearly bailed but it's very, very important, when you can, to go to a place and look at a thing.

When I walked in a man with a Boston accent as strong as getting a thermos of Dunkin Donuts coffee thrown at your head at Fenway Park said, “I don't know where they ah. I don't know anything about this stuff.”

That's okay. I wandered around in a daze, also taking a work call and bought some 2-OP FM synths so that I can...god knows why I do anything. I do not know what animates me any more. Then Lyft to the museum, the work call finishing in the car, talking about delivering an AI platform while, outside, we were running through countless small towns, past infinite mills-now-lofts, until finally we got back to Boston.

The museum was founded by a good friend's wife. It's mostly operated by the students. There was a piece on the first floor that shocked me a little: It was called Fragile Vessels by Maren Hassinger. It was two very spare, large lithographed outlines of large vases, on silk, and when I walked by it moved, like curtains in a breeze. I would welcome seeing it every day for the rest of my life. I think when someone can create something that is almost nothing but then it connects to almost everything—then they have given you a tool for living the rest of your life. You can organize your thoughts around two spare vessels on organza silk.

A large group drifted away as I was coming in, and as it was a quiet Friday afternoon on a school day, I had the whole upstairs to myself. There were 20 animated felt creatures in a field of stars. Each one a mix of adorable and terrifying. I wanted to touch the animistic spirits so badly. I wanted to ride the Million Year Old Horse (2024) back to New York. Even more form—form so abstract that you can see the root shape of culture. All these creatures in conversation and communion, labored over for thousands of hours. The labor, the felting, is part of it; without it, it would be just more slop. We need our artists to get bored and push through. Then we know we should listen. That is what turns large soft shapes into a communications technology.

Maybe we should be grateful to AI for showing us why we need humans to make art.

Obviously I am craving something simple, something that is two lines on one piece of paper, or an abstract floofy horse taller than I am. I am craving form with as little content as possible. Something that just shows the shape of things.

At the same time I personally am pouring out thousands of words a week across my various portfolios. I don't know why. If this ends in poetry I will be very annoyed.

A stray thought came into my head as I waited for the Green Line: If you're going to talk about how the world is ending, do it at a museum.

And then to the Red Line, and then to Amtrak, and then, many hours later, to the yellow Q train, and then dragging the suitcase thought a little more snow, and then home to flop on the floor.

So I’m in Cambridge, Mass., where the first words I heard getting out of the Amtrak station in Boston were “Abolish ICE and save America!” I kept walking in my travel fog and then 40 feet later I turned back gave a thumbs up which no one saw.

I have a New Yorker’s normal disdain of Boston but we didn’t have protesters outside of Penn Station, and Boston handles snow better than New York. So right now I have to give Mass. the advantage. Gives me no pleasure, etc.

Then Cambridge. As I got on and off the Red Line everything feels very familiar. There’s a certain kind of face that is here in abundance—far greater abundance than in NYC—and every time I see it I think, “math face.”

I can’t fully nail it down. It’s a slender, clean face with a particular jawline and wide eyes. You either have it or not. I don’t. It’s not programmer or finance or actuarial. It’s math face. Women have it, men have it, trans people have it, people from everywhere in the world have it. There’s a lot of it here. If I showed you, you'd probably lecture me for a half hour about not putting people into categories, and then you'd go, Yeah, okay. Math face.

In the same way, I can tell a writer on the train. I can’t explain how. There aren’t as many as there used to be. But there’s a sort of essential sallowness coupled with a lack of presence. Words are inherently unhealthy. You shouldn’t, if at all possible.

I've seen so many writers try to escape writer self over the years. They lift weights and work hard for amazing forearms. They climb mountains. They pivot to video. They leave their families. They even schedule haircuts. Never matters. They have the stain.

Many years ago, my dad came up for my college graduation. He had retired a while ago but had taught creative writing at a state college for decades. We were in his car, parked outside the dorm.

My friend and her father walked in front of us. Normal-looking guy with a beard. I'd never seen him before, but I knew my friend's father was a poet who taught poetry at a college in New Jersey.

My father didn't know that, though. Didn't know the girl, either. Looking straight ahead out the windshield, he said, “Look at that fucking English professor.”

I wonder how we end up looking like our work, or if our careers descend upon us like invisible bats. My, says the bat of writing, ultrasonically, that one likes to sit a lot, and he seems sad. Let's give him something to type with his fingers. The bat of being good at piano and/or sex flies right by going, All yours, buddy. And that is how the avocation bats impose our destinies.

I was out with a friend of mine once 20 years ago and a person in line at the coffee shop turned to him and said, correctly, “You’re a Java programmer.”

It was the “Java” that broke his heart.

I have no idea if all the math faces I see actually are doing math (they are). I’m just noting the confidence with which a brain makes entirely arbitrary distinctions based on very limited information. I don’t even look at faces in NYC. I look at my phone. When I am somewhere else, away from home, my pattern matcher goes into overdrive and the weirdest patterns pop up.

I'm sure this is, somehow, a problem.