If a name did come to mind, perhaps a greedy landlord or a corrupt municipal official, blame the old myths. They gave us good versus evil. Strike down the Dark Lord, and the world shall be healed. Except almost no one sees themselves as evil. When a system rewards harm, someone will arrive to do the harming. Evil is a niche born of incentives. Strike down whoever occupies the niche, and if the vacancy remains, the world fills it again.

A complex, dynamic world needs a map that updates as the terrain changes. It needs new causal frameworks translated into new myths. A single story carries a good argument, or two. A mythology is a parliament of them. Its gods and monsters are paradoxes the reader is invited to synthesize. The reward of that synthesis is a map to our own world.

So the fantasy in Maya is the mythos, what the world feels like from the inside. The hard science fiction is the logos of why it had to emerge that way. The fantasy returns and asks, sure, but where next?

Zain and I spoke with Locus Magazine about Maya: Seed Takes Root, new possibilities in storytelling, complex systems, narrative engineering, the taxonomy of intelligence, and the purpose of mythology. You can read the conversation on the Locus Magazine Website.

We had it on lease from children not yet born

You came, you saw, you marked this great vastness as your own

And my mothers lacked the gunpowder to disagree

Fear not, milord, I am but a humble warden

Tending to the mountains you so meticulously named after yourself

Scaled, of course, by the calculus of my ancestors

Some of our tools were blunt, surely, and some too sharp

But none as blunt as your candid claim on our lives

And none as sharp as the swan song of your burden

I will pluck you off my brother’s back

I will ease the head that wears the crown

I’ll water the tree of liberty

This land belongs to no one, milord

But it belongs more to me than thee

And you, milord, I must confess,

Are the lord of nothing at all.

And If you think my home is a matter of your provenance

I possess the will to disagree

You think my death will be my silence

But my history will be written by me

And every voice not yet formed will speak of Azadi

The cinematic trailer for our game SHASN Azadi runs 90 seconds. Shreya Dudheria and I directed it together from an idea Zain had. The camera pulls slowly away from a woman speaking to it in a single shot. The world around her is on fire. By the time the camera has pulled all the way back, we can see that she is bleeding from her belly, and that she might be dying. Kani Kusruti delivers the monologue.

Aayush, Zain and I wrote this script with many intentions. We wanted every phrase to point to something older than the first obvious reading. To a treaty, an idea, a policy, a parable. A number of people have told us they would love to know all the ideas packed in here. So here we go line by line.

This land belongs to no one, milord. Our speaker uses the exact language of terra nullius, the legal doctrine European colonizers used to justify seizing land they called “nobody’s land”. This was land inhabited by people they deemed to lack recognizable systems of government or property ownership. Our speaker concedes the words and flips the conclusion. In the colonizer’s mouth, “belongs to no one” meant “is available to be claimed by me.” In hers, it means what it says. Land cannot be owned, by him or by anyone, because it is a commons. It is shared by all the beings who live on it. Her “milord” mocks his bureaucratic theatre by fluently performing the ritual he mistook for civility itself.

We had it on lease from children not yet born. This is the idea that we do not inherit the earth from our ancestors. We take care of it for our children. Gandhi’s trusteeship and Schumacher’s “economics of permanence” propose this logic. All natural resources are held in custody for a future that has not arrived.

With “milord” earlier and now “lease”, we wanted our character to translate the complex, sophisticated ideas of her tradition into the limited vocabulary her colonizer is familiar with. The supposed civilizer is the one being educated.

You came, you saw, you marked this great vastness as your own. Caesar’s “veni, vidi, vici”. “I came, I saw, I conquered.” Our speaker replaces conquered with marked. Marking is what a surveyor does with a peg. It is what a brute does with scent.

And my mothers lacked the gunpowder to disagree. A reference to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond gives the example of Cajamarca, 1532 to talk about the instruments of violence that allowed European conquest to succeed. Guns, steel blades, and Eurasian diseases against which indigenous peoples had no immunity. The Motorcycle Diaries examines the same conquest with the same conclusion. Standing among the ruins of Machu Picchu, a 24-year-old Che Guevara writes home to his mother, “The Incas knew astronomy, brain surgery and mathematics. But the Spanish had gunpowder.”

Fear not, milord, I am but a humble warden. “Fear not” is the angelic salutation. Our protagonist addresses the colonizer the way an angel addresses a man. Under the British, wardens governed mines and prisons. It was an authoritarian role. She reclaims the word, etymologically. One who watches over, protects and tends. It is a humble job, not aggressive.

Tending to the mountains you so meticulously named after yourself. Mount Everest. The mountain was known locally as Chomolungma in Tibet. The British renamed it after George Everest, the (then previous) Surveyor General of India. (Everest himself objected, only because he thought Indians would find it difficult to pronounce.)

Scaled, of course, by the calculus of my ancestors. Scaled means climbed, and it also means measured. The Bengali mathematician Radhanath Sikdar was the one who actually computed Everest’s height in 1852. His job title at the Great Trigonometrical Survey was Chief Computer. The mountain was eventually named after his boss’s boss. ‘Calculus of my ancestors’ also alludes to the Kerala school of mathematics. Madhava of Sangamagrama and his successors developed the infinite series for many of the functions used in calculus, nearly three centuries before Newton and Leibniz. Sounds complete when Kani says it.

Some of our tools were blunt, surely, and some too sharp. This is a confession, an admission. Some historical tools of the people of the region were indeed primitive, still being worked out. Some institutions in the region were indeed violent. Caste systems were extractive. Our protagonist does not pretend her ancestors were perfect. There is a quiet lament here too.

But none as blunt as your candid claim on our lives. Blunt - casual, matter-of-fact. Locke’s classical liberalism was part of the Enlightenment inheritance of the empire. The idea that life, liberty, and property are inalienable rights that governments exist to protect. The empire’s violence is performed with such candor that it doesn’t bother to make a case for itself, even in its own language.

And none as sharp as the swan song of your burden. Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden,” folded into the proverbial swan song.

I will pluck you off my brother’s back. This is a direct reference to a Tolstoy quote (that we allude to again in Maya). “I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all possible means, except by getting off his back.” Our protagonist does what Tolstoy’s narrator refuses to do.

I will ease the head that wears the crown. Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2 (Act 3, Scene 1). “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” Our speaker offers permanent ease.

I’ll water the tree of liberty. “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” —Thomas Jefferson. The slaveholder’s revolutionary canon, in the mouth of someone he wouldn’t have freed, used against the common enemy (and him).

But it belongs more to me than thee. The refrain with a twist. Two echoes underneath that in a way can be said about the whole premise of the speech. Woody Guthrie’s “This land is your land, this land is my land,” and “Puzhu Pulikal” from Kammatipaadam.

And you, milord, I must confess, are the lord of nothing at all. King Lear ends up “lord of nothing,” having given his lordship away. Shelley’s Ozymandias ends up the King of Kings whose works are dust. Our speaker refuses the lord position itself. Nobody is the lord of anyone.

And if you think my home is a matter of your provenance. Provenance is an auction-house word that museums put on the wall next to looted objects. The Koh-i-Noor, the Tipu Sultan automaton (the tiger mauling the britisher), the Amaravati marbles, the Sultanganj Buddha. Most of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s South Asian collection.

I possess the will to disagree. This finally answers the earlier “my mothers lacked the gunpowder to disagree.” Will, volition, agency, reason, debate, dissent as powerful weapons against guns and steel.

You think my death will be my silence. The oppressor’s oldest assumption is that killing the dissenter ends the dissent.

But my history will be written by me. A twist on “history is written by the victors”. Also alludes to Subaltern Studies, the Indian historiography that rewrote the colonial story. In Gayatri Spivak’s 1988 essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” she asked whether the colonized woman’s speech could be heard, given that the structures were built around her erasure. How can a dying woman claim to be the victor who writes her own history? The next line answers.

And every voice not yet formed will speak of Azadi. Voice not yet formed closes the move with the opening’s children not yet born. Our protagonist knows she is winning the long game while losing this one. She knows she will become an idea, larger than her body, an idea that cannot be shot or bled out. It will be inherited and amplified, carried forward until it comes true.

Azadi means freedom. It has been the chant of freedom movements across history.

(Chat excerpted with permission)

It started with MikaTanaka:

freeishWill dug deeper into the novel’s glossary:

small_G shared an exciting speculation:

Our Note

How many grains of sand does it take to make a dune? Let’s say a billion. What happens if you remove a grain? Does it stop being a dune? No? Then it takes a billion minus one grains to make a dune. Remove another. Keep going. At what point does it stop being a dune?

When it stops looking like one.

The trick is in presenting it as a numerical category, whereas it’s a perceptual one. The line drawn is a line of common agreement. And there lies the other trick, for common agreement is one damn hard thing.

On Neh, “svaanka” is a line like that. A rakshasi will tell you that anywhere from eight to fifteen species qualify as svaanka. A garuda will insist on strictly six. The bigger question then is: why does any of this matter?

When does someone become an adult? At 18? 21? 25? 42? The line is arbitrary, but it decides who can vote, who can own, who can be sentenced. Could we someday plug a person into a machine that reads their DNA, neural activity, hormone levels, prefrontal-cortex maturity, and arrive at a verdict on their adulthood? Maybe. (Would we want to though?) Until then, it is 18, or 21, or some random number that we agreed to call a dune.

There’s this meme some of you will recall. The PETA poster asks, “Where do you draw the line?” Someone drew one. Presumably someone untroubled by moral doubt.

The line on the PETA poster decides who gets to live, and who becomes food.

The svaanka line decides who gets to be the rider and who is coerced into being the steed. Who can take from whom without it being called theft. No architect owes the bees a citation for the hexagon. Biomimicry can be patented, and calling it intellectual property theft would strike most of us as absurd. The bees may disagree, but they aren’t the ones drawing the line.

All taxonomy is political. It boils down to who draws the line, and who is kept outside it.

→ Continue the conversation on Discord!

My co-author Zain Memon and I sent him a copy of Maya: Seed Takes Root.

Seth read 400 pages of our invented biology, philosophy, and martial arts, and instead of calling a doctor, wrote a foreword. He did this with an intellectual generosity and clarity that only someone who has spent decades thinking about thinking could offer. His Dreamachine places people under identical light, eyes closed, and no two minds see the same thing. We could not have asked for a better parallel to this novel, or a better mind to welcome readers into it.

You can read his foreword here.

Foreword

Anil Seth

Brighton, March 2026

“We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.” This was written by Anaïs Nin in 1961 in The Seduction of the Minotaur, but the idea itself is much, much older. It is one way, but only one, into the mystery and the wonder of Maya.

One of the questions explored, examined and playfully (but rigorously) dissected in Anand Gandhi and Zain Memon’s wonderful novel—the entry point into an entire new world—is the mystery of consciousness. Somehow, the tofu-textured tangle of wetware inside our skulls is more than just an insanely complicated object. The brain, when embodied in a body that is embedded in a world, creates—or enables—the appearance of a subject. We experience our worlds, and we experience being ourselves within these worlds.

The challenge of understanding how and why physical stuff, such as a brain, can give rise to consciousness has been around forever. For the last few decades, it’s been most famously cast by the philosopher David Chalmers as the “hard problem.” And despite a thriving and resurgent science of consciousness, a sense of the unknown persists. How is it possible, one might ask, to be objective about something that is intrinsically subjective?

This is not just an arcane philosophical puzzle. It is a question that matters. How we think about consciousness, individually and collectively, has seismic implications. Who and what has rights? What counts as a “self”? What happens after we die (and what happened before we were born)? Are we in control of our actions, and, if not, what is? Are there states of consciousness that are somehow ethically superior to others? What is the relationship between experience and reality? And perhaps most urgently: who gets to shape the experiences of others, and to what ends?

In this book of extraordinary riches, Gandhi and Memon give us new tools for thinking about these topics, provocative philosophical frameworks wrapped in a narrative both sweeping and immersive. These frameworks challenge the stories we implicitly absorb and they empower us to think for ourselves. Maya is therefore also a political book, carefully and vividly unpacking the consequences of the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories we are told, about who and what we are.

One concept running throughout Maya (again, there are many) is that of prediction. In the brain, according to my own research and that of many others, prediction is key to how we experience the world, and the self. The brain doesn’t just passively register the world (or body) through the senses. Instead, it is always making predictions about what’s going on, and using sensory signals to update these predictions, keeping them tethered to reality in ways best suited to staying alive. As I like to say, our conscious experiences are kinds of “controlled hallucinations”—brain-based guesses with prediction at their core.

And when we can predict, we can control. An organism that can anticipate its world can act more effectively within it. This is true not only within brains, but also within societies. The ability to shape the context, to shape the narrative, can shift the delicate balance of our individual controlled hallucinations so that our perceptions, and our behaviors, change too. This is one route by which minds become governable.

In 1951, the ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen placed an oversized plaster egg beside a herring gull’s nest. It was bigger, rounder, and more vividly speckled than any real egg. The gull abandoned its own eggs and sat on the fake one. Tinbergen realized why. An amplified signal, one that pushes the same buttons as the real thing but harder, almost always wins. He called it a supernormal stimulus.

He was studying birds, of course. But every gently glowing screen in every pocket runs on the same principle: mental junk food engineered to be sweeter than fruit. Images calibrated to hold the eye longer than any landscape. We now inhabit environments radically unlike the ones that shaped our nervous systems, and the mismatch between evolved drive and engineered stimulus produces a peculiar modern condition: the feeling of being perpetually almost-satisfied, always reaching for the next scroll, the next hit of novelty. We live within cages made of desire.

Maya takes this tension and scales it to a civilization, played out by a mind-expanding cast of characters and imaginary species, each inhabiting its own controlled hallucination.

Over a century ago, Jakob von Uexküll—like Tinbergen, an ethologist—proposed that every organism lives inside its own perceptual bubble: its Umwelt. A tick perceives the world through butyric acid and the tactile properties of hair. A honeybee perceives it through polarized light and the Earth’s magnetic field. Maya builds an entire society of radically different Umwelts. The naags perceive through heat pits and forked tongues. The garudas are sensitive to wavelengths beyond the reach of others. Gandharvas have two heads, two different personalities sharing a single consciousness.

We humans have learned to change our environments according to our own Umwelts—a society-wide amplification of the stimuli that we evolved to be sensitive to. And this has consequences for others. We build cities lit by our visual spectrum and wonder why migrating birds crash into our buildings. We light our coastlines, and turtle hatchlings crawl the wrong way, toward our lamps instead of the sea. The failure to perceive another creature’s sensory world goes hand in hand with a failure to perceive its inner life.

Maya does not stop with perceptual differences. The distinct Umwelts of its creatures carry through into the deep physiology of each—perception in the service of homeostasis, of staying alive—and equally into the higher realms of cognition, of patterns of thought. The garudas, perceiving from high above, have a form of spatial reasoning organized around altitude and the rising and falling of columns of air. Constraints like these don’t impoverish imagination; instead, they empower and extend it. The creatures in Maya are pioneering excursions into the terra incognita of possible minds, through which we can learn a great deal about our own ways of seeing, ways of thinking, and ways of being.

And about our ways of grading lives. In human society, systems of caste embed and entrench inequalities. Every group is assigned a position above some other group, and everyone has a stake in maintaining the structure. The real tyranny of caste is in how it naturalizes itself. It takes real or perceived differences, whether biological, cultural, or economic, and manufactures a hierarchy that claims those differences as its justification. In Maya’s world of Neh, the different Umwelts are real, but the social hierarchy built on top of them is by design. It embeds itself so deeply in perception, in who you think matters and who you see as background, that the design becomes invisible, and its influence on everyday life pervasive, like the weather.

And like weather, this social architecture can seem inevitable and beyond control. But again, there are hidden forces at work.

In 1961, the meteorologist Edward Lorenz made a tiny change to a computer simulation of global weather, and the entire simulated atmosphere diverged into an unrecognizable pattern. A difference of one part in a thousand had, over time, produced a completely different world. The discovery gave us the concept of “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” and the popular image of a butterfly causing a hurricane.

Maya stages this mathematics in ways both glorious and devastating. When small changes cascade into large ones, who chooses which small thing to push, and who bears the cost of the cascade?

Many other ideas surface throughout the novel: the nature of dreams, the possibility of a collective consciousness, the minimal conditions for a mind, the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. Maya subtly installs these concepts and provocations in our minds, and then thoroughly examines their social and political consequences. But always without prescription, allowing us to discover the implications for ourselves.

Will we ever crack the problem of consciousness? In my own work, I focus not on solving David Chalmers’s hard problem, but on dissolving it: building bridges between neural mechanisms and conscious experience, and testing the weight of explanation they can bear. Perhaps the biggest obstacles are the stories we’ve inherited. We are told that the brain is a computer made of meat, and that consciousness is an algorithm, as equally suited to silicon as to carbon. We see ourselves in our algorithms, and we see our algorithms in ourselves. But other narratives, other ways of thinking, are possible. In my own work, I’ve come to see consciousness as primarily an embodied phenomenon, a property of living flesh and blood, and not of the dead sand of silicon.

For me, reading Maya reinforced this intimacy between life and consciousness—an intimacy prominent in the very concept of Maya itself, as a biological network hosting a multitude of minds. (There is, of course, another interpretation of Maya, from Indian philosophy, as the illusory nature of the world as it appears. This interpretation lines up neatly with the idea of perception as controlled hallucination.)

Maya describes an adventure, and reading Maya is an adventure too. It does not explain itself, nor does it translate itself. The meanings of things resolve over time through context, thanks to the inferences and cognitive predictions our minds inevitably make. The text of Maya carefully controls our own narrative interpretations, but each reader will take away something different, something personal, since—as Nin pointed out—we will not experience Maya as it is, but as we are.

So, immerse yourself. Pay attention, and notice the moment, if it comes, when you feel the faint unease of recognizing your own cage.

Béla Tarr died today, and the way I felt about the news was not that different from how I felt after watching The Turin Horse in an almost empty theatre in 2011. His films spent twenty years teaching me that the most important things resist being said and must instead be shown, slowly, with the patience of weather, until they settle into the body as a knowing or a keening that no longer accepts words alone. Imagine me saying this, but surprising as it may be, a part of me is made of Tarr too.

My friends and I were lucky to be in our twenties when his films were still arriving. I tried to study them. I ended up drenched in them. Afterward, certain kinds of stimulation that had seemed reasonable began to feel like persuasion, and certain silences that had tested endurance began to feel fertile. Tarr once snapped at an interviewer who wanted metaphors. “Don’t tell me anything about metaphors!” He did not want to give you lossy symbols and bumper stickers you could pocket and carry home. He wanted the plain, the human body, the time it takes to cross a room, the thing itself. He wanted to leave you standing in the wind and the fog long enough that your mind stops shopping for a shorthand, a conclusion, an equation, and becomes porous, nimble, begins to absorb, and learns to hold.

Werckmeister Harmonies poured a town into me. In my bones. Then I just knew how a town thinks, and how it stops thinking. In a bar, early in the film, János takes a room full of drunk old men and, with an innocent, almost mischievous patience, turns them into a solar system. One man becomes the sun, one becomes the earth, as he makes them stand, rotate, eclipse one another, stumbling and laughing and briefly synchronised. A scientific model becomes a bar dance, and you can feel what holds it together. Attention aligned, men in sync, a common picture with spontaneous errors emerging and disappearing as rhythm holds and breaks. Knowledge is carried in the cloud of choreographed bodies for a moment. The scene is tender and it is also a warning, because the same mechanism that lets a gentle man teach the cosmos to drunks with a smile will later let a shadowy figure teach a pogrom with a chant. I am not telling you what Tarr meant. I am just listing the gears it put in me.

Then the whale arrives, already dead, still enormous, still so implausibly alive in its sheer evolutionary ambition that it feels indecent to reduce it to symbol, and yet the town (or some circus) does reduce it, efficiently, by putting it on a truck and selling tickets, because awe, once priced, becomes manageable. I can still see that eye, the size of a human face, and I can still feel what it does to your sense of scale, how it forces you to admit that the universe can be utterly indifferent and still produce a creature of that magnitude, and that we, in our restlessness, might respond with a ticket booth. I don’t want to reduce the enormity of what this scene made me feel by turning it into a lossy allegory. Tarr will turn in his fresh grave if I start unpacking what came to mind when I first saw it… that wonder had entered an economy, that it had become a resource, steerable, that the same crowds that might have stood in wonder before something incomprehensible are now paying for titillation, and the payment is the first step in a longer capture, because once you have learned to approach transcendence through a transaction, you have learned to replace inquiry with narrative, and you have learned the trick to pack a whole town into a truck. This might be why János goes mad. Who knows. But please, let me not unpack it, not tonight. Watch it. The staunch scientist in me is lying low tonight, saying only that let this happen to you, and it will offer neural rewiring that only such cinema can. Stop reading this, I guess. Or don’t. Watch Tarr with my eyes, then, if you must.

So, somewhere in the middle of all this, the uncle explains the Werckmeister tuning, and the film suddenly hands you a key. He is talking about Andreas Werckmeister, the seventeenth-century music theorist whose system made it possible to play in all keys, to modulate freely, to build the entire edifice of Western tonal music. But something was lost. The pure intervals were compromised, microtonal spaces closed off. A living field of acoustic possibility was flattened into a grid that could be taught, standardised, exported. This is what civilisation does. It reduces infinity to a portable scheme, a simplified model so that coordination becomes possible, so that the wheel or penicillin or tax collection don’t need to be reinvented. I personally subscribe to this model. My work is about making maps better, improving their fidelity and function, delivering insight, clarity, maybe inspiring the cure for cancer or poverty, or something like that. But policy also amputates possibility when civilisation mistakes the map for the territory, model for reality, and lives in its tonal trance exclusively. The uncle’s complaint is framed as music theory, but it is a civilisational diagnosis. A neatly engineered abstraction can slowly replace the richer thing it was meant to serve - the range of the possible, the widest menu of options. The town’s collapse begins long before the riot. It begins the moment people accept a thin grid as the whole sky.

Around the whale and its spectacle, a second system forms, darker, faster, built from similar ingredients of seized attention and synchronised bodies. The prince speaks, half in shadow, and what he says matters less than the way his signal lands. The content of the speech is thin. You fill in the blanks. Perhaps he is stirring up the usual ingredients. Rumor, grievance, the pleasure of hating another group, the relief of a world suddenly simplified into us and them. The crowd response is what comes of it. Tarr films it the way a physicist might film a phase transition, without editorialising. So when the riot moves through streets and the hospital like a furious tide looking for a shore, he refuses to give you the usual pleasures. He offers no heroic angles, no cathartic dolly-ins, no cuts to turn violence into entertainment. He gives you only the slow continuous burden of following, so that watching becomes participation, and you cannot later say you did not know where it was all headed.

The mob is operating on a story. Enemies, others, outsiders. Something to purge. The story gives the violence permission. You aren’t beating a person anymore. You are cleansing rot, defending your side, doing what must be done. Tarr doesn’t argue against it. He sets conditions and watches what they produce. Early on he shows you the agents, miserable people, synchronisable people, drunk men who can be arranged into a solar system or a pogrom depending on who is doing the arranging. People who have suffered, who have lived inside flattened maps and mistaken them for the world, who have been handed a story that their suffering has a single cause and the cause has a face. Once that story takes hold, the agents run on their own.

Tarr keeps placing the world in their path. Buildings. They break the buildings. Stores. They break the stores. A hospital. They break the beds, the furniture, the people. Nothing stops them. He keeps feeding the run corridors and rooms, watching to see what might finally refuse the logic. Then a fluorescent bathroom. A naked old man standing in a tub. Everything halts. The violence drains out of the room. The mob dissolves. Tarr doesn’t explain why. I don’t think he knew beforehand either. He holds the shot as if he is learning it at the same speed as we are. Lévinas would say the face commands. Simone Weil would say affliction, truly seen, is sacred. You know me, who am I fooling? I’d be so tempted to talk. Something about group selection or game theory or something novel, useful. Tarr says nothing. He simply holds the shot until it becomes you.

All my work has long takes. When you hold a shot and let the camera drift through a scene, you start to feel like you are discovering it the way a human gaze would, not being shown the room by an editor. Tarr’s gaze walks with you, at your pace, and lets you find your own way to what matters.

If Werckmeister is a film about how shared reality can be built, captured, and shattered, The Turin Horse is what remains when reality offers almost nothing to share. The world contracts to a farmhouse, a well, a tree, a road that leads into wind. A father and daughter repeat the same actions across six days, dressing, eating potato, drawing water, looking out, going to bed. The repetition is measurement. Each return to the same task asks the same questions with brutal gentleness. Can the system still run? Can the body still lift? Can the mouth still eat? Can water still be drawn? Can the horse still consent to labour?

The horse, of course, cannot. The opening shot had already told you this, if you were listening with your eyes. A horse advances through fog, one step at a time, pulling a cart, and Tarr holds the take for what feels like geological time, so that you cannot escape into narrative, cannot paraphrase, cannot look away. Labour becomes the scene’s grammar. (Please stop reading and watch this now.) The fog withholds the horizon. Gabor’s mono (yes, not atmos, not seven-point-one, not stereo) sound withholds the horizon. And you realise, slowly, that this is an invitation to share, even briefly, the animal’s tempo, the animal’s cost, the animal’s unnarratable experience of continuing. Nietzsche’s famous Turin anecdote often places the philosopher at the center, the human who collapses, the human whose sanity breaks at the sight of a beaten horse. Tarr recenters the animal. He goes beyond the heroic instant of pity. He asks what is it like to be a creature whose participation was never a choice.

The horse begins to refuse. First it will not pull. Later it will not eat. (Oh, you still want to eat? What? An unboiled potato?) This is the recognition that in a closed system where participation only prolongs extraction without restoring any future worth moving toward, refusal is the first rational act. Agency, in such a world, appears as non-compliance, non-cooperation. The horse is correct. Nietzsche is correct. János from Werckmeister is correct. How could you not lose your mind?

The wind in this film is pressure, ceaseless, scouring, indifferent in the way that the universe is indifferent. The music, Mihály Víg’s cycling theme, is the meter by which the world’s remaining coherence is counted, like a weather pattern, but also mutating. It is a cosmic eulogy, but a prayer too. The Turin Horse does not deliver meaning. It delivers the conditions under which meaning either survives or doesn’t, and it lets you watch the lights go out, one by one, without telling you what to feel about the darkness.

When Tarr retired after The Turin Horse, his sound designer Gábor Erdélyi did not retire. He continued. He became my sound designer, first on Ship of Theseus, then on Tumbbad, and onward. I sought him out because the discipline he carried was the discipline I needed. The belief that restraint is respect for the viewer’s wisdom. He once said to me that if The Turin Horse is the question, Ship of Theseus is the answer. I don’t know if that’s true, and it might be grotesque to put it here, but it’s not from pettiness, not from hubris, just an academic proposition. A film about continuity made right after a film about systems running out of reasons to continue. Well, I know only that the craft traveled, and that I am one of the people it traveled to, and that I wake up today aware that the man who sent it is gone.

During my postproduction of Ship of Theseus, I stayed at Gábor’s sound studio, the rooms where Werckmeister and The Turin Horse had been made audible. There was an entire floor of analog reels, horses and wind and creaks and footsteps, a library of endurance. Gábor told me Tarr once asked for “the sound of life escaping a horse.” Gábor asked what he meant. Pain. Distress. Suffering. Tarr wanted none of that, only the sound of life escaping. So Gábor widened the search. He went to veterinary hospitals. He recorded horses being treated, horses sedated, horses in coma, horses dying. He built the archive. Tarr listened. Tarr said no. None of it was used. The demand was real. The obvious answers were insufficient. Ok, so I am more lenient than Tarr, and I will spoonfeed you the moral of this story. You do not fake the thing you cannot find.

In a culture that perfects simulation and stimulation, that learns to steer consent by engineering feeling before thought arrives, that treats attention as a resource to be captured and sold, Tarr did something almost subversively old-fashioned. He made films that do not beg for your dopamine. He built images that cannot be skimmed. He refused the usual bargain of entertainment in exchange for time, and instead offered a harder trade. If you give these images your full attention, they will change what you are able to notice, they will recalibrate your tolerance for cheap signals. Attention is an instrument. Most of modern life is designed to play it without your consent. Tarr taught you to take it back.

Let me quote Tarr from the interview with Jonathan Rosenbaum I mentioned earlier: “Okay, I try and explain it to you. You know, if you are in the Hungarian plain in the early morning, before the shooting, and you are just sitting there, just watching. And you just watch the perspective. And you don’t know what you see. Is this one endless hopelessness? You really don’t know. Is this eternity or just relativity? That is what I really don’t know. When they are walking, you know, I have the same feeling, always, what is this, is this real distance or we are just…? You know, like a treadmill they are just walking, walking, just endless walking. Do you have perspective, or hope, or just nothing, or always staying there, in one point?”

I met Víg for coffee in Budapest during the postproduction of Ship. He drank alcohol as if it were already evening. At one point he asked why I didn’t invite Tarr for a coffee too. I offered some reverent explanation about institutions and vast worldviews and meeting one mountain at a time. He laughed and asked if I simply thought that Tarr was the greater artist. He was right to tease me.

Before we parted I asked if it was true they had retired. All of them. Hranitzky, Tarr, him. He said it was true. I asked why. He looked at me as if I’d missed the most obvious fact in the room and said, “Have you seen The Turin Horse?” I said yes, several times. He said, “Well then, what’s left to say?”

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