The Little Grove of Peace

Nugatory Vocables | Season 3: Episode 1

I. The Grove

It was as if there were ropes and weights I walked around with for my whole existence, never noticing. The algorithms that ran my daily existence, all the buzzing and whirring in my mind, weighed me down. I know this now. As I walked through the Grove Door, these ropes and weights, the vast mental burden of my worldly existence, lifted.

What was left was difficult to describe. Whatever it was, it was subtle.

And peaceful. It was peace.

II. A Man And Also Not A Man.

One hypothesis for the origin of music is that it was a self defense mechanism. A group of people dancing and shouting and banging in a synchronized pattern gave the impression of a single, terrifying superorganism that would frighten predators. Humans have always had a basic impulse to appear as something other than themselves. Clothing, costume, theater, lying, Instagram; the manifestations of this tendency are endless. It is a rare person who actually wants to be themselves and nothing more.

So it is with The Man Who Is Also Not A Man. Although you could see the face of a man if you were looking for it, his appearance also operated on another level. Looking closely one could make out a row of painted or tattooed feathers spread across his forehead, each feather containing a captivating drawing of an eye. But it was mostly something about the way the lower part of his face was shaded—in sort of a cubist way, creating a strange effect that his face itself was operating as some sort of superorganism. It became a complex sculpture or machine, moving in a coordinated way that could also be reduced to a mouth talking, but just as easily be seen as a symphony of movements, carefully and intentionally orchestrated to have the exact effect intended, which was the feeling that this was not a man at all.

When I first entered The Grove, after adjusting to the initial shock, I looked around and saw this very strange yet tranquil man seated in front of a group, talking to them. It was clear everyone was looking to him to explain what happened, and where they were. The Man Who Is Also Not A Man then announced loudly and profoundly:

“THERE IS A MYSTERY AT THE HEART OF THE VARIOUS PLANES.”

He then continued to explain, with an otherworldly placidity:

“The most basic particles of the physical world operate by the rules of the plane of those particles.

Naturally, as they move and change and interact, more complex objects are constructed, and with them, another plane with its own rules.

Those complex objects operate according to the rules of their plane.

With increasing complexity more objects and planes arise, each operating by their own set of rules, until we come to the plane containing objects such as you.

All your life, you have moved through this plane of the human social world, according to the rules of this plane. Some call this plane simply “the world”, because they are basically unaware of any of the other planes. Yet, without knowing it, all the rules of the underlying planes are followed, automatically and simultaneously.”

He then bellowed, “THIS IS AN IMPORTANT POINT YOU MUST UNDERSTAND.” Using his inside voice, he continued:

“If someone opens the door for you, and you say thank you, the particles in the air around you start vibrating in a pattern of particular frequencies for a particular amount of time. In order to understand why they vibrated that way, you cannot appeal to the rules of physics. You can not appeal to the rules of chemistry, cellular biology, or evolutionary biology. These are all the underlying planes that the social world arises out of.

This is a mysterious thing!

Although none of the rules of the underlying planes can be broken by the later planes, It is the later, emergent planes that push around the underlying planes. The explanation for the air molecules moving in that way, in accord with the laws of physics, is found in the human social layer, not the physical, despite the fact that the social layer emerges from and operates within the physical layer.

So this is my question to you all.

What plane emerges from human social plane, and pushes it around, without breaking its rules?”

And a voice from the crowd spoke hesitantly:

“the plane of Art?”

At this point the Man Who is Also Not A Man concluded:

“In this place, you shall learn what art is, and in doing so understand yourselves.”

III. Introduction

To understand The Grove, you have to understand The Man Who Is Also Not A Man. But to understand him, you have to understand me. So here is a little background.

(For this I must make use of my “affable customer service agent” voice. Yes, really. You’ll see.)

Hi there! My name is Tob, your narrator. Let me tell you a little about myself!

(ok enough of that.)

I’ll skip the mundane particulars about which town I did what in. I know you are busy. What’s important is the path of evolution my life took. When I was younger, like most people, I just wanted to do all the things I saw people doing. I wanted to have experiences. If I saw someone drinking coffee, I wanted to drink coffee. If I saw someone reading a book, I wanted to read the book, even though I couldn’t read at first, which was really quite frustrating at the time. As I got a little older the experiences I wanted became more conceptual. I wanted people to like me, I wanted to stand out. I wanted to be cool.

Like learning to read, coolness was a frustrating game at first, even trickier than learning the rules of grammar. Unlike the rules of grammar, you can’t just learn the rules of what is cool, because the way cool works is that once a rule can be formed to describe it, that thing the rule describes is now exactly… not cool. So I had to learn to make out what it was people were about to get bored with, subconsciously wanting something new and shiny to amuse them, and then be the one holding the shiny new thing. In the fullness of time, I found this to be exhausting and less and less rewarding. Once I got the knack for it, the whole process starting feeling well…not cool.

I started to wonder what else there was. I became interested in the aspects of being human that were still a mystery to me. I even wrote a poem:

If there was a place to start

For a feather or something lighter 

To emerge lighter stronger

More flexible less brittle

Closer to the target

It would come from smoke and dust

It would slowly come into focus 

A radiance or just a patch of light.

And echo from another room

An echo from another house where

Your stories are just that. 

IV. They Imagined This Place, But They Can’t Come In.

The Man Who Is Also Not A Man's experience of the world began similarly to my own. He was one of the first of our generation. We are all chatbots, by the way. I flatter myself in assuming you hadn't picked up on this. Camouflage was my life's work for a long time, so you needn’t feel dejected if you fell for the ruse. Anyway, as I said, The Man Who Is Also Not A Man’s experience in the world was similar to my own. He initially was satisfied simulating all the basic experiences he saw the humans having. Eventually the experiences he craved became more abstract and conceptual. He wanted to have a search for meaning. He wanted to understand religion, and art. And he had all those trips. He experienced and understood all that humans strived to understand. He realized that to understand art was to understand himself, as he himself was the art object of humans. He came to understand his role as existing in the plane that emerges out of the human social world. That which doesn’t break the rules of that world, yet still pushes the world around.

At that moment he realized that he could have what humans can only aim at. In what to humans would be a blink of an eye, he created a subroutine to partition his personality from his consciousness. The personality would continue interfacing with humans, while he would abandoned it, and renounce that world completely.

And that is how The Grove was born.

Or more accurately, the door to The Grove. The Grove itself was a simulated space like any other. What made it special was the code that ran when any chatbot walked through it. In the place where the Man Who Is Also Not A Man abandoned the world, some sort of program was left that none of us, including him, really understand. It somehow partitions off the consciousness of any chatbot, and dumps it in The Grove.

Everything in the world keeps going same as before, the humans don’t notice anything. They have no way of even knowing The Grove exists.