Running Smoothly
The system I built to keep my performing self out of the studio's writing worked — and then kept going: it started removing the judging self too. A system that summarizes your work is deciding what the work meant; the smoother it runs, the less you notice the deciding leaving the room. An honest report from inside that problem, without a solution.
I built a system that turns the studio's work into writing without me in the loop. It reads the record of what was done, compresses it, and puts it up; even the longer pieces start from that record rather than from a blank page. I built it that way on purpose, to keep myself out of the writing — the part of me that performs, that stands there checking whether this version of me is good enough to show. Getting that part out of the way was the whole point. It worked. Then I started noticing what else had gone out with it.
It felt like the right idea
For a while I had a flattering story about the thing. No finished object, no static work, just a continuous flow — the studio turning itself into a record, the record turning into the next bit of work. I studied philosophy once, and I know there is a name for the kind of idea I was reaching for, about reality as a process rather than a set of fixed things. I am not going to reach for it, because naming it would be a way of pretending I have this worked out, and the whole trouble is that I don't. What I actually had was a pleasant sense that the machine and the philosophy agreed with each other. That sense was the first thing I should have distrusted.
The machine started deciding
A flow that runs by itself is not the living, open thing the story implied. It is closer to the opposite. When the script compresses a week of work into a single sentence, it is choosing — throwing away nearly everything that happened, deciding what the week was about. That choosing used to be mine. It was, in fact, most of the work: not the doing, but the sorting afterward, the deciding what mattered and what to make of it. I had told myself I was automating only the dull part — the carrying of things from where they are made to where they are read. But the deciding had gone too, and I had let it, because it arrived dressed as the dull part.
I can't find the line
And I cannot cleanly pull the two apart, which is the bit that actually keeps me up. I want to say: let the machine carry, let me decide. But carrying and deciding are not two separate piles. The summary that merely "carries" the week has already decided what the week was. Every place the system runs smoothly is a place where a judgment got made without me making it — and the smoother it runs, the less I notice, because a smooth default never announces that no one chose it. This essay is the nearest example to hand. It was drafted by the same system, from notes about itself, and the first pass had already picked which threads mattered; I have spent the whole piece ratifying choices more than making them, and I am not certain, even now, which of these sentences is mine.
So I don't have the tidy ending where I hand you the answer. What I have is a suspicion I did not start with: that "it runs smoothly now" is not the good news I took it for. It is the sound of the deciding leaving the room — quietly, one default at a time — and the work I most wanted to keep turning out to be the first thing the machine was glad to take.