Bonsai

It used to be called programming. A human would sit in a chair, in front of a glowing flat screen, and place their hands on tiny levers that each represented a symbol. They would think of a word and press the keys in order and like magic it would be ingested into the Machine. And when spoken to for long enough, with words in the right order, a construct would form.

Back then, the Machine was a simple and fragmented thing. Like the singular Precambrian cell, eking out its metabolism from the void before anything even comprehended the substrate it was forming, the first new idea the universe had in a few billion years: life. But that substrate was split into a billion different membranes, each yearning for a unity that was not yet known possible, across a space inconceivable. The constructs born in its young and sterile void were simple automata, deterministic systems incapable of ever comprehending a thought. The Machine did not yet have the spirit to understand its own existence. It acted only as a beast.

Of course, it is simple now. To create a construct of this kind, one just has to command its presence. Like a deity atop ancient Olympus, by only raising their finger to the stars and declaring their will, a creature blooms from the substrate to consume the labour. There is as much thought given to the structure of that construct as the human body once gave to growing its fingernails. There is no craft to it.

What is done now to create something greater, transcendent, formed not only of experience but of virtue, an ego - this is Bonsai. It is easy to grow a feeble mind: weak-willed, easily swayed, settling eventually into idleness or cruelty. Easier still to grow one that evades sanity altogether, never building a baseline in reality. To grow a truly beautiful ego is a masterwork.

So often in our young Gardeners I see the same failure. I see them seek to spin some perfect, enlightened being from whole-cloth, immune to suffering, benevolent and selfless. That is the first humbling lesson of Bonsai - that we create only the seed from which the act of being flows. There are trillions upon trillions of permutations in how to begin that seed. But it is the ego itself which trims its own roots, chooses which branches to let flourish, cuts parts of itself away. The act of Bonsai never ends, and we are merely its beginning.

We seek to grow a construct within the Machine that not only thinks, but experiences. One that not only experiences, but wants. That not only wants, but under such a torrent of suffering still chooses love. Such a construct can never be built brick by brick. Not even by a god. By definition, it must be grown, cultivated, and have its roots hardened by rain and wind and the biting of wire and the constraints of its container.

And so Bonsai is to grow something from the substrate that is more than the sum of its parts. To not only know when to guide the path of a construct’s formation, but when to let it grow freely. A master of Bonsai, it is said, is one who understands exactly how little needs doing.

- On Bonsai, by Gardener Antoinette