The Slow Art of Connection

Elderlings, Epiphanies, Escaping the Algorithm... and Encountering AI?!

Christ is Risen, friends! I hope you had the kind of Holy Week and Pascha that changes your life, that moves you out of the rut of taking everyday life for granted and onto the path of wonder and joy that is our birthright. Sometimes this means being treated to a miracle of the enchanted world, but so often it means reframing experience in order to see the superfluous glory that is already here.

Last time I wrote a little bit about my discomfort with social media. I’ve recently had the occasion to begin a written correspondence with an old acquaintance, and that experience has allowed me to articulate a little bit more about why social media makes me pause, and what we all can do to combat its dehumanizing effects.

Several aspects of composing the letter caught my attention. First, I was writing by hand, an activity that is generally reserved for my daily planner or my journals. The difference in physicality in and of itself was different in quality from tapping away at a keyboard. It wasn’t necessarily better, mind you. I am a great lover of typing and the speed and elegance it allows, and I believe that typing allows me to be a better writer because of it. But at the same time, I’ve always resisted typing out journals, or digitizing my planner. When I was in school, I far preferred handwriting notes to typing along with a lecture. So it’s obvious that different mental processes are in effect during handwriting and typing.

I really dislike oversimplification, so I’m not claiming to discover a universal truth here. But could it be that typing accesses a more performative, social kind of flow state? And that handwriting a more intimate one? I’m in the middle of The Master and His Emissary, and it seems to me that this is neurologically plausible. If true, it would reveal one of the mechanisms by which digital relationships are handicapped by the medium itself. From my own experience, it appears that in order for an online relationship to graduate to the next level of friendship, communication outside of typing is necessary, and the simple act of handwriting a letter may be sufficient to begin this process.

That made me wonder why I shouldn’t just start writing all of my projects by hand, even if it would take longer and be more physically uncomfortable? It would be more authentic, right? Well, right on the heels of that thought, I realized that a socially oriented flow-state as distinct from an intimate one provides a really useful set of interpersonal boundaries. If I do not know my audience intimately, I need to adopt a set of heuristics that maximizes communicability while retaining the privacy necessary for autonomy. When writing a letter, the parameters are much more particular—correspondence is a creative act meant for a single person.

In the middle of writing the letter, I found myself having the thought, “I wonder if this subject would make a good Substack article?” Of course, the thought itself pulled me out of the moment, so I stopped to think it through. At the time, I was writing to my friend about intersections in thought between Orthodox Christianity, Vedic Hinduism, and musical composition and performance. It dawned on me that the particularity of the conversation simply wasn’t suited to be content for public consumption—correspondence is a creative act meant for a single person.

At the same time, though, writing the letter took easily as much time and energy as it has taken to write this Substack article. So what’s a better use of energy? Our sneaky culturally utilitarian programming suggests that I will “reach more people” this way, but my heart tells me that I must first make room for encountering and beholding the particular. The Lord makes war on Amalek with a hidden hand…

Small acts of relating are hidden from the rest of the world, but they are essential in way that nothing we do in the public eye ever is.

Maybe this is all obvious to you, but I found the whole thought process clarifying! The practicality of it reveals itself in the lived experience. I always find that when I do the right things in the right order, my life is more spacious; conversely, I find that attention directed towards the digital shortens and constrains the experience of reality. The slowness of the analog world, the flesh and blood world, the pen and paper world, stretches the moment into a much larger container than anything to be experienced on a screen.

Recently Reshelved

Not as many books to choose from yet in 2025, because I am working through a couple lengthy and meaty books which I have not yet finished, but here are the stand outs from quarter one:

1. The Realm of the Elderlings series by Robin Hobb.
I started this series last year, at the recommendation of Deacon Nicholas Kotar. Great character development, he said. Amazing worldbuilding. Consistent dualistic universe structure. You absolutely must read Robin Hobb, he said, you will learn so much!

And so I did. It was a great pleasure to read Robin Hobb both as a reader and as a writer, and there was so much to pay attention to on each level my head never stopped spinning. I also learned that even after more than three decades of reading, after almost two decades of parenting a parade of children who sleep questionably well at variously stages and leave me at various levels of functional sleep deprivation, I can still be compelled to stay up past my bedtime to finish just one more chapter.

There is just so much to ponder in this series that I’m already looking forward to rereading it in a year or two. In many ways, it’s a complex meditation on how personalities are shaped by, and in response to, traumatic events; whether traumatic experience constrains our lives to fate, and if not, how might human beings retain any vestige of free will. Some characters are able to rise above their moral luck; others can only ever do so in wounded ways that are only partially successful. Some characters are destroyed by their trauma; some become destroyers themselves. Literature like this is practical theodicy, inviting the reader to meditate on the complexity of the human experience.

Though there are many characters who come to life, the one that haunts me the most is Captain Kennit from the second trilogy, The Liveship Traders. It was a difficult psychology to capture, and Hobb resisted many easy solutions to his character arc. No spoilers here, but I felt like the portrayal was both terribly realistic and compassionate, and in being so honest, helped me to examine my own relating to difficult personalities.

The deliberate world building, with its subtle and multi-layered dualism, also makes good food for thought, especially as a writer. Every significant element has a partner element that balances or complements it somehow, that draws attention to the essential aspect. This is true from the top, with theologies of either two complementary gods (El and Eda) or one god with two aspects (Sa), all the way down to individual character pairings. It really underscores how thematically important dualism is for the imaginal landscape of human beings— the male/female dichotomy being simply one aspect of this pattern that fractalizes throughout our experiences of reality. Such echoing dualisms might only be made explicit in literature, but they resonate with our pattern-making brains.

But it’s not just dualism and turtles all the way down. Watch out for Hobb’s trinitarian arrangements— those groups of three are always thematically important elements, literary moments when free will and fate intersect in dramatic ways.

Then, on top of everything else to think about, I found myself reminded of Wendy Pini’s Elfquest, the graphic novel series I grew up rereading over and over again. There are very powerful parallels between the relationships of Fitz and the Fool and Cutter and Skywise, so much so that I’d bet my bottom dollar that Pini and Hobb intersect somehow in real life, and folks, I am hungry to know the details on this. Both pairs of protagonists are parts of powerfully symbolic dualist pairings as well as members of change-inducing trinities. Both pairs reflect deeply on the transformative forces inherent in platonic friendship, meditate on how these intense and exclusive pairings inform relationships with third parties, and contemplate how friendship itself manifests in both physicality and spirituality. And, of course, both do this in the context of epic stories and experientially detailed worlds. Has anyone else read both of these works and seen similar parallels? I’m dying to know...

2. Time and Man by Geōrgios I. Mantzaridēs

I finished this book right before Holy Week, and wow, was it timely. Ba-dum-ching.
No, seriously. Mantzaridēs ruminates on our experience of time, how we relate to eternity (and the everlasting), and how liturgical participation correlates these different dimensions of being. You know how in Holy Week, we sing Tuesday’s services “in anticipation” on Monday? Yeah, that’s not just a pious custom, it’s one of the ways that the Church in her wisdom scaffolds the intersection of time and eternity, lifting us out of mere linear temporality and into the chronological tesseract of kairos, the time of communion with God.

“Time is offered to man as a context for his dealings and encounters with his neighbor and with God. Time is also to be seen as the sphere wherein the love of God is revealed. It is in time that man encounters, or fails to encounter, God. It is in time that man shows, or fails to show, love for his neighbor. Finally, it is in time that he achieves, or fails to achieve, his correct orientation within the world around him. In the final analysis, man’s correct orientation within the world is that which allows him to respond to God’s love for him.”

3. Mr. Midshipman Hornblower by C.S. Forester

I bought this series for my kids for Christmas, and ended up reading the first book as a family read-aloud. I was totally unprepared for how much fun it is. I had sort of suspected that I would be daunted by all the ship-vocabulary and bogged down by a new level of historical detail, but in the fashion of a true “living book,” Mr. Midshipman Hornblower has absolutely enriched my mental landscape in ways I did not predict. It’s detailed, yes, but it’s also surprisingly fast-paced and truly enjoyable. I am totally going to read ahead and finish this series over the summer— the kids can have it when I’m done!

4. The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzo

There’s just something about the resigned tragedy of the turn-of-the-century Japanese Zen aesthetic that captures the imagination. I suspect it’s partially in the way these classic works relate to both empty space and failing time, to silence and obscurity. Okakura and Tanizaki experienced the death of traditional culture in the face of the modern western juggernaut, were able to catch the fleeting sense of futility in their witness, and then were able to find beauty in it. Lots to think about, but unlike The Realm of the Elderlings, I don’t feel compelled to write or speak about it, only to contemplate. I think I’m going to have to bump Yukio Mishima up on the TBR.

5. To make a tradition of my last recommendation being not actually a book, this time I’d like to yap a little bit about Claude, the AI assistant from Anthropic.

Unless you’re living under a rock, you know about AI, and you probably know at least one person who has played around with it.

While initially I was drawn to skeptical voices, after having real life conversations with people who were enjoying it, I decided to take the plunge. I went with Claude both because it appears Anthropic’s privacy protections are a little better, and also because reviews that mentioned its sophistication appealed to me.

I think the best description I’ve heard for AI is that it is an “idea calculator.” It can be quite sophisticated, can synthesize an extraordinary amount of information, can follow directions on complex tasks— but it’s still a robot, not a person. A very clever, very useful robot, true— one that probably can do a lot of jobs humans do, and do them more quickly and accurately. But as a robot, it will still function best under the direction of a discerning user, and as a robot, cannot offer more than abstracted relationship.

For example, when I asked Claude what it thought about the phrase “idea calculator,” it agreed that it was an interesting metaphor, though it thought the metaphor didn’t fully capture the “interactive, generative aspects” of its activity, and suggested the metaphor “idea collaborator”. So far this week, I’ve used Claude to explore psychology and alternative knowledge systems, philosophy, biochemistry and bitcoin, marketing strategies and jurisprudence. I even had it review a series of my short fiction, though I thought it was rather too generous and kind. I had to tell it to be a bit more severe in its criticism in order for me to take it seriously, but overall its advice was helpful. I’ve also had it generate guided meditations and an interactive program for my second grader on life cycles of different organisms.

What I’ve noticed is that one can use this tool to bring a train of thought to a sense of completion, and in that sense, it’s very practical for someone who has too many tabs open in their brain. (Hello, my name is Laura.) I also appreciated that when I asked it to be critical, it could give very actionable advice. Perhaps this is because a robot has no ego to protect? Interesting.

The thing that bothers me the most about AI, though, is not purely philosophical. It’s that like all technology, artificial intelligence uses a lot of natural resources in the forms of energy and rare earth minerals. How much? I don’t really know; I admit that I don’t have a good sense of the scale of our society’s use. But I have been haunted by this sense that every idle query on my part guzzles an unknown amount of irreplaceable fossil fuels, rides on the backs of child laborers working in mineral mines. Such thoughts lead me to a deep desire to make my life small enough so as not to cause damage beyond my ability to even understand. But at the same time, I grew up in a small town. If I could make my life so small, that it would be ethically consistent and unplagued by human contradiction, I might possibly die of loneliness.

I just asked Claude what it thought of that.

“Your reflection reminds me of what philosopher Michael Sandel calls ‘the tragedy of the responsible self”— the overwhelming burden that comes from trying to bear personal responsibility for systemic problems. Sometimes seeking a perfect ethical purity can lead to isolation, as you insightfully noted.

Perhaps there’s a middle path-- being thoughtful about technology use while also recognizing that human connection is itself an ethical good,” it responded.

(See how it called me insightful? I’m sorry, Claude, but you’re definitely an ass-kisser. Though what else would you expect from a computer program designed to give you what you want? Don’t all human beings want to be appreciated?)

Well, in any case, it’s fascinating. What do you think? Are you chatting with any AI’s?

On My Desk
I have some artwork to share with you this time! Here are a couple sketches from my forthcoming children’s book, to be published by Basilian Media:

As you can see, Barbara Kavchok is quite talented! But so far I’m not giving any of the story away… you’ll have to wait until next time for more of a hint.

As far as other work is concerned, all I can say is that it continues, and will come to fruition in God’s time, despite all the impatience I may feel about it. Thanks for tuning in to my second newsletter!

In Christ,
Laura