Am I Just a Model of Myself?

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We do not listen to much classical music in my house. For America, that’s probably pretty normal: Jean and I and the kids prefer pop music both recent and vintage, overplayed and obscure, domestic and international; we run show tunes till everyone has memorized the lyrics; we like Ella Fitzgerald and Chet Baker, De La Soul and Doechii. This is like saying we eat food and drink liquids. For our ages and backgrounds, our tastes are entirely predictable.

Still, classical music finds its way into our lives, and in fact has always been there. Both Jean and I grew up with it in the background. Her parents played a compilation tape of the greats—Mozart, Beethoven, et al—in the car on road trips. My brother, Steve, meanwhile, was the classicist when I was a kid—an extremely talented piano player—and since that was his thing, I stayed out of it. Today classical music remains for us movie soundtracks, cultural references, background music. Except…

Except that last night Jean and I were discussing Rachmaninov’s last surviving student, Ruth Slenczynska, who just turned 100 and has been performing for almost her entire life. This led to Jean asking if I knew her favorite composer, which is one of those games couples play when they’ve been together for decades: Is there anything we still don’t know about each other? I won this round. Somehow I knew it was Chopin. And I won the next, because when Jean explained that she particularly liked his fast-paced tunes, I summoned up the name of their subgenre: mazurkas.

I was left wondering: How do I even know that? I mean, I do know a lot of random words and details, and mazurka is such an excellent word: the suspense of the ma, the build and clash of the buzzing z and the hard k, the absence, as far as I know, of an English cognate—mazurka can be nothing other than what it is.

But the word came so fast into my brain that I was taken aback. I didn’t have to think about it, to try to remember the name of a musical subgenre I’d never previously spent an ounce of brainpower considering. It was pure, instantaneous triangulation: Chopin, composer, French, Polish, speed, therefore mazurka!

This is also more or less how artificial intelligence works these days. When we say AI, we’re talking about Large Language Models, which are fantastically complex systems in which language is not constructed according to rules and meaning but rather derived from observed connections between words and concepts—Chopin, Polish, mazurka—that are cut off from our actual human sense of structure and meaning. It’s pattern matching at an unbelievably sophisticated (and energy-intensive and deeply faulty) level. And that seems to be what our brains themselves often do: Using what we’ve observed, even when we didn’t know we were observing it, we produce the predictable.

Because I am a contrary type, I therefore want to know: How can we escape this? How can we produce original thoughts when our brains are simply matching patterns? Do the thoughts that seem original simply stem from less-familiar patterns? When I type this sentence, is it just the fulfillment of a genetic prophecy? Am I the Paul Atreides of bougie Brooklyn? And is that joke as formulaic as this subsequent questioning of it?

The thing is, I like formulas. Formulas work, from math to cooking to writing. There’s good reason we structure movies in three acts, and plays in five; there’s good reason to sear meat, cook aromatics in the fat, add herbs and spices and other flavorings, then braise in wine, stock, or water. Formulas can be relied upon. They produce not just an end result but a process—a story with highs and lows, easy bits and challenging ones, and a cadence that allows moments of intensity and drama alongside comedy and respite. Granted, there may not be much comedy in the quadratic formula, but maybe you’re just not looking hard enough.

Formulas also allow for their own disruption, because it’s only when you have expectations that you can deliver the unexpected, even if that delivery is telegraphed and shopworn. Genres subvert themselves to invent new genres that are, when you stare at them long enough, just the old ones reskinned. The pattern creates the possibility of originality, but only within the pattern itself.

For whatever it’s worth, my favorite composer is Erik Satie. The way his music—or at least his most famous compositions, which are all I really know—strips away ornamentation appeals to something deep inside me. It feels orderly, meditative, clean, and yet it also feels driven, with a pace that only appears gentle but is in reality unstoppable, unfathomable. It’s not minimalist, it’s streamlined—a slow-motion bullet aimed at the oldest parts of my consciousness.

Let’s say that Satie’s music is supremely uncongested. It breathes freely in a way I’ve always wished I could. Quite literally. My sinuses have always felt blocked, my nose either blocked or runny. When I go running, nothing drains properly—I have to spit way more than I, or any of my running buddies, would like me to. The blockage has never quite crossed the line into an actual medical problem, which is even more frustrating, since there’s no real remedy. I have lived and I have to live a life of goop mucking up my system, and I dream of an internal universe as clear as the streets of New York City now are: not empty but winnowed, freed from distractions, allowing me—allowing us all—a sharpened sense of both journey and destination. What could I see, what patterns will I unknowingly spy, and when—or how often, at what regularly irregular intervals—will I be surprised? 🪨🪨🪨

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