Patch #27: South of south
Reading Eudora Welty and thinking about an escape from the algorithms
Every now and again I find myself thinking about the Eudora Welty short story “No Place For You, My Love.” Originally published in 1952, the story defies the laws of narrative logic. On its surface, it’s about two strangers — a man and a woman visiting New Orleans — who meet at lunch and go on an impromptu trip. Which would make for a pretty standard narrative structure — if only the pieces of the story fit together in anything like a recognizable way.
Lest you think I’m proceeding here without any recognizable destination, it’s my contention that thinking about Welty, and this story in particular, can give us some insight into how we should think about the role of algorithms in the human experience and what might be lost when we pay too much attention to logic. But first, let us dip our toes into the swirling waters of “No Place For You, My Love.”
A man and a woman meet and, without much exchange or discussion, get in a beat-up Ford and begin driving south. I suppose you could say, given their lack of a plan, that their impulse is exploratory, but the word feels wholly inadequate. Exploration is so grand and intentional, but the motivations for this journey are uniquely obscure — especially to the characters. Both the man and the woman are, for different reasons, a little lonely and more than a little lost. Like survivors after some more logical and explainable cataclysm, they begin to travel together for no other reason than because it’s something to do.
The man is married. The woman, the man thinks, is involved in an affair. Just as the characters make assumptions about each other, we make assumptions about the characters: two strangers in New Orleans on a hot afternoon, adrift from the stifling moral conventions of, respectively, Syracuse and Toledo. We know how this dance ends, right? We do not. The characters don’t really say much as they travel, and when they do speak, they don’t bother, at all, to present their best selves. They neither tease, nor perform, nor engage in any of the usual rituals that would meet our narrative expectations. For long stretches of the trip, they are lost in their thoughts completely. In a conventional narrative structure, it is important for the characters to want something, but these characters, we begin to realize, have no idea what they want.
And yet, the story is unquestionably a masterpiece. Welty is a grandmaster of technique, and she’s moving pieces here with a precision that belies easy explanation even by those with some level of skill. While the content of those moves is certainly of interest to any practitioner, it is the spell’s impact I find myself coming back for. Welty shifts angles and practices her sleight of hand not because she is a vengeful trickster goddess or because she can, but because her deep empathy and fascination with the human condition compel her to seek a more truthful means of expression. Let’s take the following paragraph, ostensibly a workmanlike bit of landscape description:
It was a strange land, amphibious — and whether water-covered or grown with jungle or robbed entirely of water and trees, as now, it had the same loneliness. He regarded the great sweep — like steppes, like moors, like deserts (all of which were imaginary to him); but more than it was any likeness, it was South. The vast, thin, wide-thrown, pale, unfocused star-sky, with its veils of lightning adrift, hung over this land as it hung over the open sea. Standing out in the night alone, he was struck as powerfully with the recognition of the extremity of this place as if all other bearings had vanished — as if snow had suddenly started to fall.
See what I mean? Just when this passage feels like a bit of (well-done) poetic potato, Welty pulls a hood over our heads and spins us around a few times with the authorial aside all of which were imaginary to him. Suddenly, the loneliness takes on a specificity grounded in unfulfilled expectations: those places where our character has never been. And yet, this is no tragedy. We need neither steppes nor moors to appreciate what Welty is offering here — we can experience it by getting in a car and heading in any direction we choose.
What a gift it is to be lost without the usual bearings and bear witness to events that do not lend themselves to easy interpretation. An alligator on a leash makes its way across the surface of a deck. A priest in his underwear stares at the horizon. Couples dance in a dark bar while howling children dart across the floor hunting for coins. Waves of insects roll around in the “bath of July.” Everything, characters included, continues to move with a “perceptible motion” despite a lack of definition or destination.
Reading the story now, we realize how at odds such notions are with an age when algorithms promise to make our decisions less messy by taking some of the guess work out of deciding what it is we want, how we should get it, and where we should go. If we can reduce some of the friction of how we engage in the world, the promise holds, we’ll have a better chance at optimizing our existence. As you might suspect, I have doubts.
But let us honor the alternative and consider its implications. One vision of the future I’ve been thinking about can be found in the TED Talk given by Humane co-founder and former Apple engineer Irmin Chaudhri (the other founder is his wife, Bethany, also formerly of Apple). Chaudhri was one of the architects behind the iPhone, and Humane is developing to a new hardware device designed to deliver user interactions reminiscent of the Spike Jonze film Her. Chaudhri goes through numerous examples of what the technology feels like in the video here:
What’s most exciting about these ideas, I think, is the evolution (finally) of technology toward more “ambient and contextual” forms of interaction that push devices into the background and allow us to engage in ways that feel less (directly) mediated by tech. Chaudhri states that the future will be defined by “more humane, human interactions that are screenless, seamless, and sensing.”
Your personal AI will play a critical role in all of this, becoming an “ever-evolving, personalized form of memory” that “figures out what you need at the speed of thought.” In one scenario from the demo, Chaudhri asks the device on his lapel where he can find a gift for his wife before he leaves the next day. “Vancouver’s Granville Island is a lively urban shopping district” responds the AI assistant.
All this presents us with a compelling alternative to a world of necks craned toward screens in public spaces. I’m here for it. And yet, when we think about the implications of outsourced decision-making and experiences that are constantly optimized, I do wonder if we won’t lose something uniquely human about the way that we engage with the world. Chaudhri goes to great lengths in his talk to remind us that the humans are always in control. In one example, played for laughs, he holds up a chocolate bar and asks his AI assistant if he should eat it. The AI tells him no (based on his food sensitivities), but Chaudhri says he’ll eat it anyway. He explains, “My AI knows what’s best for me, but I’m in control.”
That may well be true, but one wonders if an AI that knows what’s best for us is always a tap and a question away, will we ever be out of control? Will we take chances, wander, or fall in love without building a case for it? Will we tolerate not knowing what we want — in the way of Welty’s characters — so that we might eventually find it?
I’m not the only one thinking about this. For example, a recent study by IDEO points out that a lot of the assumptions we make about Gen Z attitudes toward AI are more complex than many assume:
The participants expressed a yearning for opportunities to learn through relationships, to try new things, and to embrace failure as part of their growth. They voiced concern about how AI companions might influence their expectations of genuine and complicated humans.
One participant “pondered the consequences of a tool that eradicated mistakes or smoothed over challenges, as it would create an all-too-perfect reality.” These points all resonate and counter our assumptions that younger people are embracing algorithmic optimization. And when we consider the implications of these ideas at scale, it’s understandable to worry about forces countering both spontaneity and the eternal mysteries of human exchange. In “The Golden Elephant,” the opening story of the excellent book AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan, for example, the authors imagine how ubiquitous AI might undermine burgeoning relationships.
According to accounts of the matter, “No Place For You, My Love” was inspired by an actual drive Welty took with a stranger south of New Orleans. While we can only really know the story through its fictionalized form, we can speculate that “it was one of those odd meetings when such an impact is felt that it has to be translated at once into some sort of speculation.” Would Welty have had such an experience if her personal AI had interceded and run the numbers? Would her will and her curiosity overcome her reservations?
I have no way of knowing, but I worry Welty never would have made the trip. Perhaps there is an alternative future where our “seamless, screenless, and sensing” devices know enough to limit interruptions and amplify our sensory awareness of our environments. Perhaps, in such a world, more of us will experience anew, to borrow Welty’s words once again, “the shriek and horror and unholy smother” of the world around us as “the lilt and expectation of love.”
This week’s recommendations:
Reading: The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty by Eudora Welty
Listening: I’ve Seen a Way, by Mandy, Indiana
Music credits for article audio:
Opening Theme: “Synth pop with 4 on the floor” by mesostic via Wikimedia Commons
Closing Theme: “Comfort in Uncertainty” by bbatv via Wikimedia Commons