Writing/ The admissible space, part 5

Who holds what

Somebody has to decide when outside is better than inside. Here is why that somebody is a person, and why it is not a temporary arrangement.

A recipe can hold quantities, times, temperatures. What it cannot hold is “until it smells right.” So recipes say season to taste, which is a written instruction admitting where writing stops.

That is not laziness. Some things resist being stated. And notice the circularity: if you could state it, it would already be a rule, and then it would be inside the boundary rather than the thing that judges it.

The machine holds the stated part. And it holds far more of it at once than you do. You carry four or five compressed judgements: too corporate, too busy, not us. Holding dozens of explicit constraints simultaneously, consistently, is not what a person is for.

You hold the part that resists statement. Not because the machine is not clever enough yet, but because that part is defined by not being sayable.

Two different representations of the same thing. Neither is the lesser half.

Every time you look at an output and say no, not that, and somebody records it, a piece of the unstated becomes stated. Not the whole thing. A piece. The residue shrinks.

It never reaches zero. But that loop is the only mechanism that moves it, and almost nobody builds one.