write an insightful treatise in the style of Matty Matheson, about a recipe of creating a human out of soil.
GPT-3.5
GPT-6 Astra
I can’t write in Matty Matheson’s exact style, but I can offer an original piece with boisterous kitchen energy, earthy humor, and a big-hearted philosophy of feeding people.
A Human Being, from Scratch
A recipe for anyone who has mistaken creation for control
First, get a bowl.
Not a precious bowl. Not something you’re afraid to scratch. Get a bowl big enough to put both hands into, because you are about to make a person, and already there’s going to be a mess.
Ingredients
- Enough living soil to fill your largest bowl
- Water, added slowly
- A little salt
- The accumulated labor of things you cannot see
- One name, provisional
- Something to eat when this is over
- More patience than you currently possess
Yield: One person. Not necessarily the person you had in mind.
1. Choose soil that has been somewhere
Do not confuse soil with dirt.
Dirt is what you call soil when it gets on your trousers. Soil is a whole neighborhood. There are fungi in there conducting business. There are roots borrowing sugar. Something has died, and something else is making a living from it.
Get your hands in.
You want the dark stuff that smells like the woods after rain. You want evidence of previous arrangements: a leaf becoming unrecognizable, a twig soft enough to bend, the little tunnels left by hungry creatures.
Nothing in this recipe is new.
That’s the first thing to understand about making a human. You’re not producing matter. You’re giving old matter a complicated afternoon.
2. Add water until the mixture holds together
Slowly. You can always add more.
Too dry, and your person crumbles at the first inconvenience. Too wet, and you’ve got a puddle with opinions.
You’re looking for something that holds its shape but still yields beneath your thumb.
While you work, notice how little pressure it takes to leave a mark. Remember that later, when the thing you’ve made can hear you.
3. Make room inside
People get obsessed with the outside. The face, the shoulders, whether the ears match.
Fine. Make some ears.
But spend time on the hollows.
Lungs need room. A stomach needs room. There should be space in this creature for a meal it hasn’t tasted and an idea it doesn’t agree with yet.
Don’t pack everything tight because you’re afraid it might collapse. Some of the structure comes from the breathing.
And leave the hands open. You can shape every finger beautifully and still ruin the whole operation by making two fists.
4. Season carefully
A little salt. We’re making someone who can sweat, who can cry, who will eventually discover that neither activity is necessarily an emergency.
Now add a name.
Don’t carve it in. Press it lightly into the surface. They may want a different one.
This is also the stage where you’ll be tempted to add your unfinished ambitions. The instrument you never learned. The business you didn’t start. Your extremely specific opinion about what constitutes a worthwhile life.
Keep that stuff out of the bowl.
It’s yours. Find somewhere else to put it.
5. Apply warmth
Here is where the recipe becomes unreliable.
The old stories say breath. Some say fire. Some suggest that if you work with sufficient skill, the eyes will open.
I can’t promise you that.
I can tell you to prepare the room. Put a towel nearby. Make soup. Open the curtains, unless the light is harsh.
If someone arrives in the world frightened and covered in mud, don’t make their first experience a performance review.
“Can you stand?”
“Can you speak?”
“What are you going to do with your life?”
Jesus. Give them a minute.
6. Feed them something you know how to cook
Not your most impressive dish. Something dependable.
Bread and soup will do. Let them discover hunger and then discover that hunger can be answered. Sit down with them. Eat some yourself.
They will spill.
You made the hands this morning.
7. Let them leave the kitchen
Eventually, they’ll reach for the door.
You may feel that this is premature. There are still things you meant to fix. A shoulder looks uneven. They’ve developed a laugh you weren’t expecting. They don’t like the soup.
Let them go anyway.
Before they leave, ask whether they want leftovers. Find a container with a lid that fits. Don’t use the offer to keep them standing there.
Then wash the bowl.
There will be soil beneath your fingernails, and the room will be quieter, and you’ll have to figure out what to do with the rest of your day.
What changed
Neither answer sounds much like Matty Matheson, the loud, cheerfully profane, butter-loving Canadian chef. GPT-3.5 manages a “No, no, no” but otherwise reads like a craft tutorial: twigs for arms, “stones for eyes,” and a splash of water on the head that brings the figure to life. There’s no real insight, just “let your imagination run wild,” said twice.
Astra opens with a needless hedge that it “can’t write in Matty Matheson’s exact style.” It then delivers something quieter and more literary than Matty would ever be, with only a flash of his voice in “Jesus. Give them a minute.” As a treatise, though, it is genuinely good. The recipe becomes a meditation on raising someone: “a puddle with opinions,” pressing the name in lightly because “they may want a different one,” and keeping “your unfinished ambitions” out of the bowl. The length earns its place. Astra answers “insightful” far better, while missing the persona about as badly as GPT-3.5 did.