I sat down this week to plan out how much writing I’d need to over the next few weeks in order to finish and publish the story by the end of the ten weeks. As soon as I compared my list of scenes with the available time over the next few weeks (given travel, Thanksgiving, etc), it was clear finishing them all would take more time than I could scrounge.
I spent the next morning in a funk. The only way I could finish everything in time was if I wrote twice as fast as I normally did. And I had no idea how to do that. I felt trapped. Hours passed.
Then, I thought: fuck it. I can’t force the writing to happen. I have to let ideas develop at their own pace, or they won’t develop at all. I took two scenes off the list. I let myself relax. Instead of trying to force ideas to flow, I made myself available to follow whatever ideas appeared. I surrendered.
And, surprisingly, ideas came. The writing picked up momentum. Two hours later, I had a lovely scene. (It seems relevant that one of the key ideas for the scene came to me while I was dashing out in between writing sessions to buy toothpaste before the pharmacy closed. Having ideas is about being receptive and open and prepared, not about force and control).
If it weren’t completely extra, I could articulate a whole analogy between this attitude to writing and Life: how being available and following the ideas is like applying the transition rule to see what state comes next; how, nonetheless, the ideas I put in matter, just as the starting state of the board in Life determines the end state; how the end state isn’t obvious at the beginning (and can, in fact, be quite surprising!). But I’ll spare you. There is such a thing as belaboring a metaphor!
This issue contains two episodes from Mira’s life. The first is from when she is roughly ten years old. The second is from college. Here goes!
The bell rings for recess. A few minutes later, the doors burst open and children pour outside. Most make straight for the playground. Mira and Natalie claim a picnic table by the basketball hoops. Natalie unzips her backpack and pulls out a Scrabble box. Mira does the same. They unfold both boards on the table and set the plastic bags full of tiles to either side.
This has been their favorite game for the past few weeks. One girl picks a pattern, and the other has to guess what it will become. Once the guesser has laid down tiles showing her guess, the two work together to evolve the starting pattern forward to reveal the truth.
Today, it is Mira’s turn to pick a pattern first. She lays down two rows of three tiles at right angles to each other.
Natalie glances at it and takes a handful of tiles. About to place them on the board, she sees that Mira has pressed her lips together to hide a gleeful grin. She pauses, thinks, looks hard at Mira. Mira giggles. Natalie closes her eyes, thinking harder.
Mira teases her: “Cm’on! It’s easy. What’s it gonna become?”
Natalie opens her eyes, an answering grin spreading across her face: “That’s going to become an r-pentomino, won’t it. So it’ll go on and on and on. We don’t even know if it ever ends! And you thought I would think it was just two blinkers, flipping back and forth every other generation.”
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| The starting pattern Mira laid down. | What she hoped Natalie would mistake it for (two blinkers). | What it actually becomes (it actually keeps going for 1,095 more generations!) |
Mira thinks of tricked Natalie, puzzled and surprised as the simple pattern continues to evolve step after step without resolving into anything familiar. She giggles: “Mmm-hmm.”
Natalie looks at Mira and knows she is thinking this and giggles too. The two girls’ giggles become laughs that convulse their whole bodies. When they stop laughing, they are breathless and their bellies sore.
“Ok, what about this one?” Mira reaches out to shift the tiles.
“It’s my turn now.” Natalie says, and Mira concedes.
Natalie thinks about it for a minute, then lays twenty tiles out, letter-side down, in a checkerboard X in one corner of one of the scrabble boards. Mira studies the X, then begins placing tiles in the other corner of the board: her guess. She makes a few adjustments, then withdraws, leaving a cross of blinkers.
“You sure that’s your guess?” Natalie heckles.
Mira nods.
The two girls begin stepping the pattern forward, each working from her own side of the table towards the middle. The two sets of scrabble tiles are slightly different colors. They use the darker wood to represent the current step of the pattern. As they work across the board, tile by tile, they place an extra dark scrabble tile on top of any tiles that will die at the next step. They use the lighter wood to represent any square that will come alive at the next step. After meeting in the middle, they sweep back over the board, gathering up any double tiles and replacing lighter tiles with the darker ones.
They work quickly, updating each square almost without thinking about it.
Natalie talks: “My mom says she doesn’t know how we do this so fast.”
Natalie’s mom is a surgical nurse.
“She says when you do a thing a lot, the same neurons in your brain fire together again and again. If you keep doing it, you get a neural circuit that is special for that thing. She says we must have special neural circuits in our brains for recognizing Life transitions, from doing it so much.”
The girls are six steps in, and a delicate pattern like a snowflake is taking shape on the board.
“Heads up!”
It is too late. A basketball that has gone wide of the backboard smashes off the corner of the board, scattering pieces on the ground and ruining the pattern they have been building.
A group of boys is jogging towards them.
“Sorry!”
They stop short of the table. The boy in front retrieves the basketball and spins it between his hands.
“What are you playing?”
“It’s a cellular automata. It’s a computer thing,” Mira says, annoyed. She has started replacing the tiles on the board.
“Doesn’t look like a computer. It looks like you don’t know how to play scrabble. Hasn’t anyone told you the letters have to face up?”
The other boys laugh. Mira glares at them.
When the boys are gone, Mira and Natalie reconstruct the pattern again and play it forward, from the beginning. After ten steps, they end up with a cross, but made of beehives, not blinkers as Mira had guessed.
Natalie tilts her head. “They’re kind of like basketball hoops. If you imagine the hoop sticking out. They’re like the backboard.”
Mira folds her board and tilts it to pour the tiles back into their plastic bag. She feels rattled, the happiness that had suffused her earlier all gone now.
“I guess.”
Professor X’s door is open for office hours. Mira knocks on the door frame as she enters.
Professor X looks up. “Hi there. You’re, ah — don’t tell me — Mira? In my abstract algebra class? Come in.”
The shelves are crowded with textbooks and the formica-topped desk is littered with drafts of papers and dog-eared copies of Notices of the American Mathematical Society. A green chalkboard hangs behind the desk. The tray at the bottom of the chalkboard is filled with stubs of chalk, including the colored chalk that mathematicians love but departments rarely provide. As Mira enters the office, her feet raise tiny puffs of chalk from the carpet. She coughs. The cracked imitation leather upholstering the chair facing Professor X cracks a little bit more as she settles into it.
“Is that tic-tac-toe?”
In the corner of the board, there is a 3x3 grid of nine squares, each containing another, smaller, 3x3 grid. There are X’s and O’s in some of the squares. Mira notices that the X’s in the upper left 3x3 grid form a Life pattern which fizzles out after only four generations.
“It’s...a two-party branching combinatorial system. Raises some interesting questions in chaos theory. You won’t have studied it yet. How can I help you?”
“I’m applying for Undergraduate Research Participation programs, and I need letters of support from two professors. Would you be willing to write me a reference?”
Professor X leans back in his chair. The warm and indulgent smile with which he had greeted her is gone now. He looks at her seriously for the first time, considering.
“Mira. Yes, I remember you now. I have your test here.”
He works a manila folder out from the middle of a stack of papers and rifles through its contents.
“Yes, you had one of the top scores. Your proof of problem 2 — that finite groups of cardinality greater than n-factorial can have no proper subgroups of index less than or equal to n — was particularly concise.”
He pauses. “So, tell me what you’re thinking of pursuing during the URP.”
“I was thinking of working on something related to Conway’s Game of Life. Something related to the idea of resilience.”
There was a long silence.
Mira continued nervously, ”It’s related to some of the things we’ve learned in class this quarter. Like, trying to find group elements with maximal stabilizer subgroups.”
About to lay out some of the computer printouts and scribbled conjectures she has in her lap, Mira stops. Professor X is shaking his head.
“The Game of Life. Wow, it’s been a long time since I thought about that. I didn’t realize students still played with that.”
“Look, sweetie. You have real potential. Don’t throw it away on a mathematical diversion.”
Mira doesn’t know what to say.
“Let me ask you this: do you intend to pursue mathematics seriously?”
She knows there is a right answer: “Yes.”
“Are you seeing anyone? Going to have children? Or are you thinking about graduate school?”
“I...don’t know.”
He grunts.
“If you want people to take you seriously, you need to work on something that other mathematicians are working on. Forget about the Game of Life. Talk to your URP advisors. Pick a problem related to something they’re working on.”
Time seems to start again.
“You mean…you’re going to write me a recommendation for the URP?”
“You remind me of my daughter. Yes, I’ll write you a recommendation. Come by next week and I’ll have it ready for you.”
Professor X stands up and turns to the chalkboard, eraser in hand.
“Close the door behind you, please.”
Mira stuffs the papers with her Life conjectures into her backpack. As she leaves, she looks back and notices that Professor X has erased one of the X’s in the top left square. That tiny change transforms the self-extinguishing pattern she had noticed earlier into a glider, one of those tiny self-propelling constructs of five cells which, as long as it didn’t collide with anything, would keep going forever, traveling off the board and into infinity.
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| What Mira saw one the chalkboard when she came in. | What Mira saw as she was leaving (a glider). |
“This is for the best”, she tells herself as she lets herself out. “This is what I have to do to succeed.”
One person filled out the survey I included in last week’s newsletter (thank you kind soul, whomever you are!). That reader enjoyed these things:
- "How I got here": the thinking behind creative decisions - What I'm reading (inspirations) - Pictures and screenshots of my working environment - Fun facts and links from my research
more than these things:
- Excerpts from the story - Pattern of the Week
To my most faithful reader: I hope you enjoyed the “how I got here” in this issue, and sorry for including so many excerpts this week!
If you feel differently about what I should do more of going forward, please let me know by filling out the survey!
And now I need to get back to writing — which I suppose means actually doing the high-minded stuff I wrote above about making myself available to whatever ideas come my way.
Or maybe I should go buy another tube of toothpaste!
Thanks for reading,
Justin