💭 The Long Way Back to the Vakana
Back in May, I told you the idea: that my ancestors’ beads and a Lisp program are the same shape. I made it sound like it arrived in a single evening. The idea did. Getting to the point where an evening like that was even possible took most of my life, and it went the long way around — through woven straw, a programmable calculator, a private alphabet, and a pen I’ll tell you about in a minute.
This is that story. It’s more personal than the last one, and a good deal less tidy.
When I was a child, the vakana — our Malagasy beads — frightened me a little. Some of it was religion. But even as a boy, without the words for it, I understood that these were not ornaments. They were loaded. They carried things: information, the way a label does — but also intentions, and qualities, and something heavier than either. The way a painting carries more than its paint.
The old beads take their names from plants, mostly — no accident, in a people as watchful of plants as mine — and the names are not tags. Each one is a compressed charge. So the beads made me uneasy, as if a curse might find me through my fingers if I touched one.
What is faintly ridiculous — and what took me years to see — is that the imported beads never did this to me. The mass-produced ones felt like nothing at all. Empty, weightless, silent. There was a presence in the handmade thing the factory thing simply did not have. Hold that thought; I had it almost exactly backwards.
And underneath the fear, the fascination never left. People who wore the old beads — monks counting theirs, singers draped in vakana — held my eye completely, even when it tipped into theatre. They carried an aura, mysterious and a little intimidating, because they had something the rest of us did not: a whole psychological arsenal, hung around the neck.
I think differently now about the man who burns his beads and calls them the devil’s tools. A tool does not think for itself. What it does is decided by the one who holds it. If you stab someone, you are the devil, not the knife — and the same knife peels fruit. The Bible has been carried into war and into mercy both. A man is defined by his actions, not by what hangs at his neck. The object is innocent. I wish someone had told me that when I was small and afraid of a string of beads.
But I understood none of this for a long time. To come back and see what the vakana was, I first had to leave it completely.
Two loves were planted in me early, before I could name either: a love of pattern, and a love of structure. They turned out to be the same love.
The first thing I remember as both art and data was my grandmother’s hands moving through woven straw — rary, the plaiting that is everywhere in Malagasy life. A pattern held in the fingers, built up unit by unit into a whole. I did not know I was watching a data structure being assembled by hand. I just thought it was beautiful.
Then a book — Vorona Malagasy — somehow set me chasing Japanese, and I fell for katakana, those clean little signs. They are a kana — a syllabary, marks that stand for sounds, the way hiragana and the roman letters I am writing in now do. They spell; they do not mean. I got so taken with signs that, as a little boy, I invented my own — a private set of characters I wrote with my left hand that only I could read. But what truly caught me was kanji: a sign that is not a spelling at all, but carries its meaning on its own, whole, however you say it aloud. I see now I was already circling the one thing this whole story is about — and that a bead, though it took me decades to see it, is a kanji, not a kana: not a spelling of a sound, but a sign that carries its own meaning. I thought I was only playing.
Then my cousin built a game on a programmable calculator, and that was that: I had to know how the machine was made to obey. I became a computer scientist. I kept learning kanji, because the signs never let me go. I wrote software for a living. I kept my journal on my phone, in OneNote. I had built a whole life inside the digital, the modern, the imported — about as far from a string of beads as a person can get.
And then I got stuck. Nothing you could point to — just a plateau, a sense of being lodged in my own life. I changed jobs, and the new work pushed me to find a better way to take notes. That led me to the Zettelkasten, and the Zettelkasten led me down a long, happy rabbit hole of note-taking systems.
The hinge of the whole story is a pen.
I was doing an observation exercise — just attending, closely, to an ordinary object in my hand. Afterward I could recall the pen in absurd detail: its weight, its seams, the wear on the clip, the exact way the light sat on it. All of it. Except one thing — the serial number.
That blank told me two things, and they rearranged me.
One: I do not have a memory problem. Almost no one does. What we call a bad memory is, nearly always, a focus problem wearing a disguise.
Two — and this became the seed of everything since: the serial number would not stick because it meant nothing to me. It did not harmonize with the rest of the pen. A string of marks with no charge, no relation, no reason to hold — exactly like the empty factory bead that had never frightened me. Meaning is what makes a thing stay. The unmeant thing slides off.
I already held the whole pen — the weight, the seams, the way the light sat on it — so I went back for the one thing that had refused me: the serial number. I tried to brute-force it, plain repetition, and it would not stick. Of course it wouldn’t — numbers slip because their spoken names are long and mean nothing. So I got stubborn: I tried using just the first Malagasy syllable of each digit and stitching those into little words. It worked astonishingly well. I had to tweak the 4 and the 6 because they resemble each other, but it worked.
I was amazed I had reached my age without seeing something so simple — and, of course, others had been there long before me. That is how I found the Major System, centuries old and far more mature: it assigns each digit a consonant sound and builds words from those, where my trick only borrowed the first syllables of our number-words. Not the same idea — but unmistakably the same family, and proof I had stumbled onto something real. That sent me down a second rabbit hole, the memory arts, until I reached the Memory Palace and started walking my number-words through remembered rooms. I found Anthony Metivier and read everything of his I could; the way he thinks about it finally explained why the pen had stuck so well that day.
And somewhere in the trial and error I learned the one thing I — of all people — did not want to be true. For memory, the physical always beats the digital. I love the digital; I have spent my life in it. I tried virtual rooms, every strange combination I could invent; I even built myself a little tool to design imaginary places, a level-editor for the mind. None of it held. A digital place I have to work to remember. A real place I walk through once is mine forever. My own memory kept voting, against my wishes, for the physical.
That — finally understanding how memory actually works — quietly turned me around to face my own ancestors, and answered a question I had been carrying without noticing. The Ntaolo — our old ones — left behind a whole ethics of living: thousands of proverbs that still do their work, and fihavanana, the bond of kinship and harmony we still measure ourselves against. How did they build and carry all of that with almost no writing, and none of our machines? It had embarrassed me, faintly, the way colonized people are taught to be faintly embarrassed about their own. Now it was obvious. To encode, and to store — that is what the Major System and the Memory Palace are, and it is exactly what we do in computer science. They simply did it in the mind, with the tools every human being is issued at birth. And it is not only ours; the same thing surfaces, in different dress, across indigenous cultures the world over.
Once I could see that, the vakana clicked into place, and I could not unsee it. I have written about what I saw — the bead as a data structure, the shape of Lisp, code is data, data is code, the serpent that eats its tail. I won’t repeat it here. What matters for this story is smaller and more personal: the question that had quietly shamed me turned out to have been answered all along — by the very thing I had been taught to fear.
The vakana were everywhere in public life once, and nowhere more than in the hands of the ombiasy — our healer-sages, the keepers of what a community needed to remember. Ask the obvious question: how did they hold it all, without a computer and without much in the way of scripture? Picture an ombiasy who works out a new plant-medicine today. How does he keep it? How does he hand it to the one who comes after him? The bead. We have computers and keyboards; our parents had pen and paper; they had vakana and rary.
And here the childhood fear came back to me, turned the right way round at last. The factory bead had never frightened me because it was empty — no one had ever encoded anything into it. The presence I had felt in the handmade vakana was never in the glass or the seed. It was the encoding — the intention, the meaning a person had pressed into it. An unchosen, unmeant bead is inert, the way the serial number was inert. What I felt as a boy was not superstition, exactly. It was a crude, correct respect for a loaded thing. I had been right about the weight. I had only been wrong about where it lived.
So I came back. Not to a string of beads in my pocket — not yet — but to the recognition, which is its own kind of homecoming.
Vakana.mg, the thing I am building, is simply what my own century has put in my hands. The way they had vakana and rary, I have a database and a screen. I have been honest elsewhere about what isn’t mine in any of this, and about how small a portion of the real thing an app can hold — the physical always wins; my own memory taught me that against my will. I mean to keep being honest about it.
But what I had was never brilliance. It was the accident of one biography — the woven straw, the calculator, the kanji, the pen, the palace — setting me, without my ever arranging it, in the one place from which the straw and the sign and the remembered room and the bead could be seen as a single idea wearing four sets of clothes, the oldest of them ours. That is the whole of what I did. I stood where the doors between those rooms happened to be open, and I was stubborn enough not to look away.
The system existed before the app and will outlast it. The serpent had its tail in its mouth long before I noticed. My grandmother’s hands were assembling a data structure out of straw while I watched — and it took me a degree in computer science and a long detour through the art of memory to come home and see what she was doing.
The long way back was the only way I knew.
We have a proverb for the shape of it: Miriorio foana ny angidina, fa any an-kady ihany ny iafarana — the dragonfly wanders and wanders, but in the end it always comes back to the ditch it came from. I wandered a long way. It was always going to end here, at the bead.