What happens next?
It’s much later that night. I’m back at home now, mildly stoned, trying to watch a new sci-fi blockbuster. I can’t concentrate on it. Something’s bothering me.
I pause the movie and think. I’ve just spent an entire evening with the tech world’s greatest living novelist, Robin Sloan, and my voice recorder failed me at the most important moment. But that’s fine. It’s more than fine. Because I have a plan to write my way around that. I already did write my around that.
So what am I worried about? The ending? All I’ll need to do is deliver on the promise of the beginning and finally reveal the—
Ohhh. The profound insight. Yes. So that’s what’s bothering me. My memory. It’s too full! I have, I mean to say, in all the self-reassurances and self-congratulations of the self-strategizing of the foregoing many hours, completely forgotten what Sloan’s profound insight was. The thing I’m supposed to be building to. Gone.
Yank.
But I have been here before. I don’t panic.
Your profile will now be better than ever, I tell myself. Stupidly genius! Because now that the profound insight on which its entire existence depends does not exist, it’ll be—as it was perhaps always intended to be—a meta commentary, in real-ish time, about the question of going meta in the first place.
And isn’t this true to your time with Sloan? At one point hadn’t you even mounted, straight to his face, an entire case against self-awareness? Hadn’t you called it a cheat and a cover-up, tedious and college-dorm-y, the thing you do when you don’t have anything else to offer, all the while convincing yourself you’re really very clever? Hadn’t Sloan heard you out, and then completely, jovially, as is his way, disagreed? Hadn’t he then said (and you’ll paraphrase, obviously): The more we read books, or watch movies, or look at paintings, whatever, the more we understand those art forms as forms; and therefore, art that is about its existence as an art form is the highest form of art?
Yes. He said that. You will say that. You will write this profile. It will spiral into oblivion, and that will be the point.
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