Hello, welcome. Thank you for reading, thank you for being there. I hope you’re well. In this piece I describe a bit of a struggle I’ve been having with writing, or knowing how to address the thing I want to write about, when that thing has been somewhat slippery for me to grasp with words.
I found a way in through this image you’ll see below (which I dive into more in the piece) and had a few energizing exchanges with friends on this transitionary period we’re all being witness to in our own way. Stephen Jenkinson advocates for a deep grieving of what it has meant to be human as we’re hurled into the future (my words, not his). By choosing to start looking that grief in the face, I’m starting to find my words.
Please share with someone who may find some recognition and hence some freeing of energy or maybe even solace in this.
It’s hard, to write about the things under the surface. Those things in murky waters, almost no light shining on. I know there’s something there but the haze is too dense to see any clear details. So I sit and start writing about the haze, the murkiness, instead. And it’s boring. It bores me. I’m not a haze writer. When the truth is hidden there’s actually nothing to say, for me.
Then something comes my way—a garlic sauce recipe shared excitedly between two shawarma shaves, a giant birch tree crying its 100-year heaviness in the cedar woods, or a furtive moment of souled & troubled eyes on a N95-masked classmate—and I’m touched. And when I say I’m touched, I mean the truth under the haze has been touched and disturbed. Poked and pierced by a long fibreglass thread travelling down through the muck while remaining tethered to the recipe, the tree, the eyes. This thread can now report back from the depths, for a time, for me. And I know now that I don’t need to see through the muck at all, or try to write about it. I know instead to write about what’s in front of me—the recipe share, the giant birch tree, the furtive eyes. By writing about the thing that touched below the muck, I am writing about the thing below the muck. As above so below, witches of the left-hand path say. As within, so without. So, write about what’s out there in order to see what’s in here. It’s all the same.
So, I’ve been wanting to write here about an uneasy feeling I have. This is one of those feelings under the muck. It’s in my awareness and yet it’s so elusive. What is it, what is it, what is it? It doesn’t have shape; I don’t have words. It’s been present for years. Years and years of climbing the escarpment and looking over the edge at the world as nature buzzes calmly around me, and as the amorphous feeling murks around in me. Looking over the edge of the world and watching you/them/who at their desk in a grey cubicle, in your/their/whose car in the slowness of rush hour with the phone on bluetooth, at the self-checkout at Shoppers buying legal drugs for your/their/whose suffering, me/you/us lit up by a screen-glow in a large empty bed fingertip s(m)oothing the glass and not skin. Amorphous Feeling persists and grows.
I’ve been on top of the escarpment surrounded by just rock, just trees, just water, only sky in a kind of reverse-quarantine—I’m quarantining the world and its new ways away from me, while I nourish the ties that keep me on and of this earth. And still I’ve been watching it all happen, through a screen that is itself part of the contagion. Looking through the screen at events in the world that are imperceptible in my immediate environment of rocks, trees, water... but oh so ubiquitous and all-encompassing for most other people, out there, in the world I left behind. The slow-fast march of a progression towards something different from what we know now. A logarithmic story that comes into cutting focus when I start it at my grandparents’ birth, during or just after the first war, into rural households without electricity or cars. And then, from the sidelines to centre stage appear: a light bulb, a car, a radio, a telephone, a television, a television, a television, a television and then a computer. A touch-tone telephone. The internet. A cellular telephone. A computer within a cellular telephone. The internet within a computer within a cellular telephone.
These terms all refer to the technology, the object. What we don’t realize is that behind each of these words is also humanity living its logarithmic story. As such, a lightbulb isn’t a lightbulb, it’s staying up later at night, it’s the beginning of insomnia, it’s raiding the refrigerator after bed. A car isn’t an automatic carriage on wheels, it’s an expanding personal geography, it’s relationships at a distance, it’s speed and the blur of a landscape. A radio isn’t a radio, it’s mind-travel, it’s hockey games imagined, it’s a broad culture-maker and mass unifier. And a telephone isn’t a telephone, it’s a bridging of distance, it’s voice hologram and ethereal teleporter, it’s a speeding up of business deals and expectations. It’s a dis-embodier. They are all dis-embodiers.
The medium is the message, McLuhan said; the technology itself carries exponentially more meaning and consequence for humans than anything that could possibly be communicated through it.
And with each new device the body and its sensations and needs and limitations fade out of focus. These bodies, who drum and eat and run and till soil and row boats and cuddle children and make love and get ill and grow old, they fade more and more in their presence and importance, and in their dictates, with each march forward of this technology. And as the body fades, the earth fades with it. So much so that at some point in the story, at a point maybe in the past, or maybe still to come, humans no longer have bodies and fly off into new worlds without them, like when the very first time a propeller plane’s wheels lost contact with soil on an improvised runway.
And on and on and just like that, the Mask of the World is built. On and on it takes its place, superimposed on a reality that actually has nothing wrong with it. And on and on, this uneasiness grows.
So, I’ve been wanting to write about it, but too much muck and then too much haze. Until finally something new came my way, something reached down through the haze and created a direct line so that the elusive truth sitting inside could find a way up to my voicebox. That thing was a drawing. No, a painting. Well no, it wasn’t painted. It’s an image. It’s artwork. You can see it at the top of this post, and here it is again:
The image was made by a computer. A computer imitating humans. Assisted by my friend Hannah. Like this: First the computer looks at hundreds of digitized human-made paintings, drawings, and masterpieces and memorizes them. Wait, let's be clear, the computer isn't looking at anything, it’s only pushing ones and zeros around, that's it. It takes note of patterns. It looks at what's similar about the ones and zeros of this painting compared to that painting. And then other things happens. And then it generates a new image based on those patterns. (Loosely.)
Okay Google, draw me a picture of liminal spaces, Hannah said.
And it did. And it did so with flair and a feint of originality. And it distorted body shapes and tree shapes and built something like an abandoned bus shelter in a ghost town. It’s both haunting and curious. The colours are beautiful and the composition masterful. The scene is thought-provoking, feeling-evoking.
This isn’t new. This type of AI has been around since 2014, with steady developments; In this world of machines learning art, the computer hazards aesthetics and with increasing frequency wins.
Is it over for humans?
When I think of humanity and what humans are as an earth-bound species, raised up in animation from the raw materials of our planet, organized intelligently around a principle, mysterious to me, encoded in DNA, I think of drumming, of shadows around a fire. I think of the moon, but not just the moon—the experience of watching the moon travel its circular momentum around and around us, night after night, swelling to fullness, dark shadows illuminated, then retreating to darkness, to a proper monthly night. Have you ever watched that happen, night after night, over the course of a month, living in the darkness of a human encampment, without lightbulbs? I think of barefoot kids with dirty faces and tangled hair, looking up at you dubiously with a finger in the mouth, with dew in the grass. I think of the smell and sheen of sweat from hot human pores, emulsified with maple smoke and cedar stench into collisions of skin in the dark cave of a steam sauna. I think of sleeping furs and confusing the pelt of a hare for the hair of a sleeping lover, beside you, as all lovers belong, forever. I think of faces gathered and feelings bounced from eye to eye to eye, drawing a thread of belonging tight around them all, with dishes of food passed around in clay, weaving goodwill through the threads for a nourishment fit for the emergent consciousness of a singing dancing, art-making ant colony.
Is it over for being human, like this?
In 1983, when physicist and writer Alan P. Lightman won an award for his poem In Computers, machines weren’t yet making art. I leave you with his poem, for now…
In Computers, by Alan P. Lightman
In the magnets of computers will be stored
Blend of sunset over wheat fields.
Low thunder of gazelle.
Light, sweet wind on high ground.
Vacuum stillness spreading from a thick snowfall.
Men will sit in rooms
upon the smooth, scrubbed earth
or stand in tunnels on the moon
and instruct themselves in how it was.
Nothing will be lost.
Nothing will be lost.
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