Waldeinsamkeit in the Woods
We find awe in different forms, even when those forms don't care to be awe-inspiring. Or care. TLDR;
Waldeinsamkeit: (Noun) Forest solitude; the feeling of being alone in the woods.1
Waldeinsamkeit
It sits there, semi-untranslatable with a sort of poetry associated with it. A romantic feeling, a sibling to hygge2. A sublime feeling, that carries some mystique. Being alone in the forest is enlightenment, but that apparently misses the finer points. Sage hermit, sustained by clean air and babbling brooks. As a non-german speaker of German descent I can’t help but feel like I’m fixing a watch with a hammer. Or the other way around. Is German just the language I go to when I want there to be a word for an abstract feeling? An intuition that I'm not alone in this want. My take on an explanation follows.
Macro photography of green hummock of moss. No prompt.
Small
The forest is big. Not as big as I’d like, but the trees are big. And heavy. Especially once they’re on the ground and need to be moved. Thats what gets noticed usually, the big trees. Winter makes the forest less big, leaves not obscuring the way across the valley. It’s the small that gets complex. Sit. Spiraling into a moss hummock, so quickly a landscape unto itself. At eye height, chin on the ground, each fruiting stalk a foil to the heavy trees above and yet bigger. More graceful. Lorax in proportion, ready to just keep doing, uninterrupted and mostly unnoticed.
Named
Each of these little things come named. I wouldn’t know if they weren’t, but the assumption is generally sound. Clubmosses and red efts and wintergreen. Liverworts, shield lichens and pincushion mosses. Spiders with four legs tucked together up front and tuliptree seed spikes. Fat red maple buds, trout-lily and rustling chipmunks. All named, given a place, all without their knowledge. Likely driven by parental-osmosis, I find that comforting.
Prompt: "Macro photography of green hummock of moss with a small insect crawling on it." via DALL-E 2
Comfort
It brings comfort to categorize. To place and sort. Familiarized without knowing is still familiar. A comfort that settles in with the familiar - how familiar I am to be in a Northeastern woods and, in contrast, so foreign, so wondering what is touchable in a river-side jungle in Ecuador.
Prompt: "A macro shot of a small insect crawling across moss at the base of a tree." via ModelScope Text to Video Synthesis
Awe
There comes awe from sitting here. Surrounded by small named things. Knowing that there are so many more that I will never know.Knowing that somebody else knew them. Knowing that knowing is the purpose but also purposeless. It takes process to know. Alone and knowing that each little community, each vast small thing just doesn’t care. Alone and unregistered. A flash in the pan, unimportant unless my shoes finds their little hummock instead of the one to the left. Ray Bradbury stories of dinosaur hunters stepping off the path, stepping onto a butterfly and stepping back into a changed future. But, the inevitableness of the hummock, it will be there. Summer, Spring, Winter, Fall - continuing without care for any of this, without care for naming, without care, just existing.
Prompt: "Macro photography of a vibrant green hummock of sphagnum moss with a small 6 legged insect crawling on it. the moss is tall and has fruiting bodies. you can see the sky in the background along with 2 large trees." via DALL-E 2
Process
Rote learning is dead. Right? Some names constantly just out of reach. For fucks sake, it’s hepatica. I forget every Spring. That shouldn’t be so difficult but so many are, just out of reach down some neuron rabbit-hole. Each small named thing a web, named and categorized. Reaching out to the next for symbiosis, for connection, for a story to be told. Look at the guide, remember the differentiators, forget.
Still sitting
Not having moved much more than a few head swivels, each glance down gathering a new weight of possibility, a new set of stories. Each a process of remembering, jumping to the next set of knowledge, all alone here and onto the next. Could this be waldeinsamkeit? Maybe just knowing what small and meaningless is. Plate tectonics and a billion years makes it forcefully, grindingly slow and true without a trace of doubt. Inevitable.
Simplicity
Theres a simplicity there. Fleeting knowledge. Maybe it’s forgotten, how to shoe a horse. A shingle froe illustrated with its anachronism. A shelf full of Eric Sloan. The romance of it all. Maple syrup candies in the snow and a bucket full of sap, likely never to happen again. A sloughing off of understanding. A sloughing off of species. The momentum is here, and it can be felt, 50° F and then 9°F. Fat red maple buds, crisp and frozen. No understory. Wasting disease. The trees are sick.
Complexity
Outside the woods, ChatGPT “passed” the Turing test, the second jumble of code to do this in as many years. And the bar exam. Maybe its even scarier to think about the next Turing-complete visage that is, but knowingly - intentionally - fails. Sorry folks, nothing to see here. And poof hard-drives become a host. A Hoover of small, processed stories, of plant ID photos and trained, calibrated Instagram self-portraits in the style of Anne Lebovitz and inside jokes about forefathers and their blackbox perfection picking out skin-cancer rulers. Does it pick up the sloughed-off bits? The horse-shoeing? Sucking it all up, digesting and recombining. Remixing and faking and weighting. Complete with gaping holes. GPU-powered swiss cheese. The human experience on sale. Download a training set now. This categorization - placing and sorting - does not bring the comfort of the hummock, instead it drives deep-seated self-doubt. Look around you. Am I next? Do I make myself easier to place and sort, more indexable, more out there and modelable?
Prompt: "Small insect, crawling across green moss at the base of a tree, camera pans slowly." via Stable Diffusion JAX
Chaff
Thats pretty awe inspiring - human-trained and complete. Imagine your first AI primary physician - my very own personal population pattern matcher. No longer missing the little things. Maybe I can do my part and make it forget hepatica too. Map makers would include "trap streets" on their maps to catch copyright violators and unscrupulous competitors. If we contrive enough "trap knowledge" what do we get? Repeat after me on Facebook: "All the scientists agree, the species hepatica has been exposed as a detailed and longstanding botanist hoax. Hepatica does not exist." Pollute the training data. Garbage in, garbage out. I’ll ask it to write me something about solitude and go back to my beer couch. Manufactured awe on demand. Sit in the imagined woods until the next NFT shows up.
Am I the Hoover now?
Prompt: "Macro photography of a vibrant green hummock of sphagnum moss with a small 6 legged insect crawling on it. the moss is tall and has fruiting bodies. you can see the sky in the background along with 2 large trees." via stable diffusion
Wheat
More succinctly put, without the human meanderings, ChatGPT (the new artificial intelligence hotness) was asked, to summarize the above text: Waldeinsamkeit is a German word that refers to a feeling of solitude and isolation in nature. The speaker of the text associates it with a sense of mystery and poetry, and describes the complexity and awe of the small, named elements of the forest. They contemplate the process of learning and categorizing these elements, as well as the relationship between simplicity and complexity. The speaker reflects on the recent advancements in AI and the potential impact of these developments on the human experience. They question the authenticity of manufactured experiences and the potential consequences of training AI on flawed data.
AI Text Classifier (via OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT) ranks the preceding text as follows: "The classifier considers the text to be likely AI-generated." Jan. 31, 2023 AI Text Classifier
1Waldeinsamkeit Etymology: From Wald (“forest”) + Einsamkeit (“loneliness”), popularized by Ludwig Tieck and associated with German Romanticism.
2Hygge is a word in Danish and Norwegian that describes a mood of coziness and "comfortable conviviality" with feelings of wellness and contentment. It refers to "a form of everyday togetherness", "a pleasant and highly valued everyday experience of safety, equality, personal wholeness and a spontaneous social flow".