Fun with two-year-olds

A little boy in an African village, the United States Secretary of Defense, this substack, and other toddlers

Welcome, new readers!

Sundman figures it out! is an autobiographical meditation, in the spirit of Michel de Montaigne, of a 71 72 year old guy who lives with his wife in a falling-down house on a dirt road on Martha’s Vineyard that dead-ends into a nature preserve.

Hobbyhorses and preoccupations — including biodigital technopotheosis; the theory and practice of the narrative & poetic arts; arcane theological disputes in Silicon Valley & medieval monasteries; farming, truck driving, firefighting, demolition of buildings & the classifications of debris — appear, fade, reappear and ramify at irregular intervals.

If you like this essay, I suggest checking out a few from the archives. These things are all interconnected.

Précis

On the second anniversary, more or less, of Sundman figures it out!, during the very early days of Trump & his Red-Guards’s war on America, in the throes of my first bout of Covid, I offer a few tentative observations on where this autobiographical meditation has been & might be headed — calling attention to a few of my favorite posts and listing a few topics that I’m working on now to post within the next few weeks.

With digressions, of course, some concerning other two year olds, including Hahdi, a child in Senegal 50 years ago, and Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense of the United States of America.

Bay Ridge Genesis Story

Some time in January, 2023, seated at a kitchen table in the Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, home of the irrepressible

John Biggs

, I asked John for his advice about starting a Patreon.

Biggs: Forget that. You're doing a substack. It's better.
Me: Why?
Biggs: (grabs laptop, starts typing) It's just gotta have your name in it. (pauses)
Me: Why substack not patreon?
Biggs: 'Sundman speaks.' 
Me: That's so bland.
Biggs: It's fine. (resumes typing) There. Now you have a substack.
Me: I'm still curious about Patreon.
Biggs: (gets up, refills coffee mug) Good seeing you. I gotta go do a podcast. (exits to living room, disappears up stairs)

A day or two later, back home in Massachusetts, I sat staring at the screen trying to figure out what I was going to do with my brand new Sundman speaks substack.

The reason that I had gone to see Biggs in the first place was to get his advice on relaunching my career as a self-publishing novelist, and Biggs, like everybody else who knows anything about this stuff, had told me that I needed a solid mailing list. I already had a newsletter, Technopotheosis, mostly about emerging technology & how it was changing us, with 850 subscribers. Not enough.

Biggs: Aim for 8,500. That's a good start.
Me: OK, but how do I get there?
Biggs: You just gotta write shit that people want to read.
Me: Wow, thanks!

‘Be open, be fearless, just be yourself,’ all the newsletter gurus say. OK fine, I’ll be fearless, I’ll be myself, open to the world. But what do I have to say that will make people hit the ‘subscribe’ button?

‘Try something. See if it works. If it does, keep doing it. If it doesn’t, try something else. Gotta be fearless.’

If I was really going to be fearless, I decided, I should start off by writing about my biggest failure — when I dragged my family into homelessness in my attempt to write bestselling novel and my wife pawned her jewelry so I could keep working on it. That was nearly 30 years ago and remembering it still fills me with anguish. But fuck it. In for a dime, as my father used to say, in for a dollar. I wrote my first post, Figuring it out, including a photo of the unredeemed pawn ticket I had kept in my wallet for fifteen years, and spelled out my bold ambition.

Immediately after pressing ‘send’ I changed the name of this thing from Sundman Speaks to Sundman figures it out!

Two years and nearly 90 essays later, I still think that’s an OK name. And I still think that as far as substack inaugural essays go, Figuring it out is pretty good.

A showdown in an African village

I had been living Fanaye, a small village in the valley of the Senegal River for nearly two years when it happened.

Let me set the scene: It is early in the year of our lord Fred 1976, and I am 23 years old. There is no electricity in Fanaye, no streetlights; the nearest town with streetlights is 60 miles away; there is no light or air pollution and the stars are very bright. I am visiting my friend Ama-Sy N’Dongo and his family — 2 or 3 men, a couple of women, half a dozen kids. We’re sitting around on woven mats, waiting for the tea to brew in the little pewter teapot that sits on a small charcoal fire, telling stories. From elsewhere in the village come the sounds of drums, children playing cha-la-lal, millet being pounded in wooden mortars. We’re talking, of course, in Pulaar.

“Samba,” N’Dongo says to me. (They called me Samba M’Bodj, a second son). “You and Hahdi arrived in this village just about the same time. Yet you speak Pulaar with a foreigner’s accent, and he speaks perfectly.”

Hahdi, a toddler as naked as the day he was born, was playing with stick, paying no heed to our conversation.

“Oh no,” I said. “It may be true that I speak with an accent and Hahdi doesn’t, but that doesn’t mean he speaks perfectly. I, in fact, am the better Pulaar speaker. Shall I show you?”

A couple of the women — I think Ama had two wives; I don’t really remember — smiled. “Oh! A contest.”

For context, you might want to read my second and still most popular Sundman figures it out! post:

“Hadhi,” I said to the child. “ar guy’ — come here.

He put down his stick and approached.

A message from the toddler at the Pentagon

In case you missed it, Pete Hegseth — the alcoholic rapist, serial abuser of wives and other women, white power enthusiast and guy who left a couple of veterans’ groups he led after some $$ went missing on his watch — currently ostensibly in charge of the most fearsome military in the history of humankind — during a fraught time of high tension around the globe — has issued his first directive:

For those of you not keeping up on current events ‘DEI,’ short for ‘Diversity, Equity, Inclusion,’ is the new shorthand among the fascists in charge, their way of saying ‘n****r’ without saying it.

Showdown (continued)

After some pleasantries, hello and so forth, I sprang my trap on the unsuspecting naked two year old Hahdi! (Which I here present in English as a courtesy to those of my readers who don’t speak Pulaar.)

Me: Hahdi, do you know numbers?
Hahdi: Yes.
Me: Hahdi, count to ten.
Hahdi: One, three, five, six, two, eight. . . (he gets bored, goes to look for his stick)
Me: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten! Is that enough, or would you like to hear me count to twenty? Or one hundred?

A this point there erupted a confused hubbub of voices, some arguing that Samba (me!) had proved his point, that he was the superior speaker of Pulaar, and others saying that I had done no such thing, and that my accent was in fact quite lamentable.

In the middle of this confusion a girl of about 4 years of age approached me and asked a direct question that caused everyone to stop talking in order to hear my reply — a question which, if she had asked it while in the employ of Pete Hegseth’s Department of Defense, would probably gotten her fired. Or else promoted to lieutenant colonel, I’m not sure which.

Looking back, looking ahead

Like my spirit animal Michel de Montaigne, who invented the literary form know as the ‘essay’ — French for ‘try’ — and following the wise advice of John Biggs to try something, and then try something else, I’ve written each of my Sundman figures it out! essays based not on any grand strategy, but on where the overall story felt like it needed to go at the time.

At first I did a really poor job of conveying (by way of title, subtitle, tags, or introductory paragraphs) what each essay was about. For example, how would you know, from the title of my three-part essay Scared firefighter up in the bucket, that its subject is not only the only time I was ever scared during firefighting operations during my ten year career as a member of the company of Tisbury 651, but also the history of artificial intelligence and my various encounters, over a few decades, with the cognitive and computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter and the philosopher-of-mind Daniel Dennett? You wouldn’t, that’s how.

And how would you know that my essay Every cosmic vacuum is filled with cosmic energy talks about the dinner party at which I met for the first time the novelist Geraldine Brooks and her husband, the late and very much missed journalist Tony Horwitz, (after a few weeks earlier having met, during firefighting operations, their son Bizu, who was then five years old)? You wouldn’t. And so on.

As time went on I tried to get better at giving more meaningful titles and subtitles to my essays, and I gave most of them a summary up front. I also wrote “readers’ guide” posts that contain capsule summaries of my essays: I ain’t even liked it yet, I still ain’t even liked it yet, , and I ain’t never even liked it yet. And I’d be delighted if you used them to explore the archives. There’s a lot there, and you may actually like some of it!

Soon I’ll start using tags, which I should have been doing from the start, including retroactively tagging the essays in the archives, to make it easier for readers to find the posts that might interest them.¹

Looking ahead, I’m expecting Sundman figures it out! to explore the kind of subjects I’ve looked at in my ~80 essays so far — including the convergence of biological and digital technologies; literature and literary theory; cults, religions, philosophies (so-called) of Silicon Valley; privacy, pan-surveillance and AI — but in the specific context of the new, ongoing assault on democracy, the U.S. Constitution, freedom of thought and freedom of association, science and critical reasoning, among other things, now that the fascist insurrectionist and nihilist Trump has been installed in the presidency and is unleashing his goons to do is bidding.

Out of the mouths of babes

So there I was, nearly fifty years ago, in the family compound of my friend Ama-Sy N’Dongo, facing a fearless child, a girl of four years old or so. I was seated on a mat, she was standing, and our faces were at almost the same height.

Ka wouni, Samba? What are you?
Ka toubab? Ka balayjo? Ka wouni? Are you a white person? Are you a black person? What are you? She was very perplexed.

Well, I thought about that for a moment or two, and then I said,

Komi balejo; komi Fanaye-najo. I’m a black person; I’m from Fanaye.

Well, she looked at me, this sweet inquisitive child, and she looked down at her arm, and then she looked at my arm, which though very tan, could be seen by the light of the moon to be very much the arm of a toubab, and she slowly shook her head and said, (in Pulaar, of course). “I don’t know what you are, Samba, but you are not balejo.”

Everybody laughed, I must have laughed ‘til I cried, and then Ama-Sy N’Dongo said, “It doesn’t matter if he’s toubab or balejo, Samba is Fanaye-najo.”

And I said, “A halli gongo, N’Dongo,” that is, ‘you speak the truth, N’Dongo,’ and the people said, “Listen to that! Now he’s a Pulaar poet!”

So here concludes my post to commemorate two years of Sundman figures it out! Whether you’re a long-time subscriber or first-time reader, whether you’re toubab, balejo or anything else, so long as you’re not a fascist you’re welcome here and I hope you’ll leave a comment.

Cheerio!

P.S. If you don’t like this post, remember that I wrote it while sick with covid for the very first time, and have mercy.

1. The reason that I have not done this yet is that I’m a moron.