What Four Words

Memory is pliable. Memory is unreliable.

Less than a week ago there is fighting and a stand off between rival swans, who are highly territorial creatures. Then yesterday I see a group of five waiting underneath the café for feeding time. Although as all swans tend to look alike, who can truly tell which group is which. Today there are only two again, two as normal. So much so that I wonder if I made up the group of five the day before.

As you age, so your grasp of everything becomes looser.

The internet is aging too, and remembering less. Or it is changing. LLMs (large language models) are trained on data that is often false. These falsehoods are taken on board by humans and they become accepted truths. A feedback loop is formed and as time passes, we all move further away from reality. That’s the crux of it as I see it.

To change the world you no longer have to do something, perhaps all you have to do is convince the world that you did something.

In my high school days I took to walking home because it was simpler than taking a bus (two buses), but it wasn’t always that way. There was a single main bus stop a two minute walk from the school gates. (There were other lesser stops, for buses that went away from the centre of town, rather than back towards it – it was at one such stop that I drifted to after my first day at my new school, before I sensed the error of my ways.)

With so many children unleashed at the same time, and towards the same place, this stop was inevitably the scene of trouble at various times. People crowding to get on to a bus. Fights. Truculent bus drivers who would refuse to let anyone on, simply speeding past the stop if they saw too many people waiting in front of them. Members of the public might get caught up in one of these melees or just be silent witnesses to the chaos. They would then sometimes complain to the school.

On one occasion there had been an incident on a specific bus that I had been travelling home on. Me and a classmate, Steve Williams. It must’ve been serious as everyone who had been cited as being on that bus were called to see the headmaster. As far as I can recall, this was the only time in my seven years at the school that I was ever summoned to the headmaster’s office.

When questioned about this incident and whether we’d witnessed or played any part in it, we explained that we had been sat at the very front of the bus, too busy inventing a new language to register anything else that had taken place. Inventing a new language sounds grand, writing it down all these years later, but we had been engaged in some form of word play or other that constituted trying to come up with our own private form of speech. It’s hardly uncommon – children will do this for fun or as a way to share secrets. You reverse certain letters in a word or you add y’s in places where they don’t exist. I’m not sure in the course of a fifteen minute bus journey we would’ve come up with anything much more sophisticated than that.

We did not look like troublemakers and we did not possess the records of students who had been troublemakers. Our story was believed and we were even commended for our inventiveness in trying to expand our linguistic skills. Centinno tilun venpro wiseother.

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Words put together into sentences are how we communicate. The language we were born with, or languages we learn in later life, or languages we invent for our own amusement. Will the machines change our languages, corrupt them? Or is that just a byproduct of time? Many words have different meanings now than they did a century ago. LLMs operate like Chinese whispers. In the beginning was a truth, but after it has passed down the long line we have a completely different ‘truth’.

And memory is pliable and therefore unreliable.

In the cafes and pubs of Penzance (and sometimes Manchester, and sometimes the coffee shops of Montreal), Cath and I would play a game. You took a book or a newspaper or a magazine – whatever you had to hand – and you would open it on a random page. With your eyes closed you would then put your finger on a specific place on the page and then you would write down the nearest word to where your finger pointed.

You repeated this process in total four times. That gave you four words. This was your starting point. The aim of this game or exercise was to then construct a story themed around those selected random words. For writers looking for inspiration, here was a handy tool. Over the years we both had notebooks that were filled in part with these structures.

Here are some examples from one of my old notebooks:

Comet, acid, devil, saved

Pub, stupid, colour, dare

Blossoms, worry lines, dreams, complex

Craftwork, reform, company, designer

Plots for short (or not so short) stories would be developed from these random starting points (or prompts). This was how we often passed the time in the local hostelries of my home town. The Dolphin Inn (reputed to be one of the most haunted pubs in England, although you’d never guess it from its modern interior). A coffee shop in Chapel Street that changed its name more than once during our time together. Renaissance (a café with views across the bay and an improbable accent placed above the ‘i’ of its name, perhaps designed to make it sound more exotic).

 

I have dozens of these carefully constructed plots written up. To the best of my knowledge we never actually turned any of them in to completed works of fiction. The joy was all in the exercise, in the imagination and the turning of random words into something cohesive. The writing part was ‘work’ and nobody wants to do that.

The same doubtless applied to the language I had invented with Steve Williams all those decades ago.

Now I get to recount these things through the prism of time. You can choose to believe them or not. The bones of them are true, but the details remain pliable and unreliable.

Does it matter if the machines reshape our world? Where do we stand if we can no longer depend on anything we’re told? If the sand is always shifting, then nothing can become grounded and we will all float away to some uncertain future.

Narrative, unreliable, alternative, future

These are your four words. Craft your world from them and then take care in the job of making it real.