Wednesday June 14, 2023; 10:16 AM EDT
- Here's a hunch about a way to explain why the poems and song lyrics written by the magical new software tools are so bad. I'll sketch a spectrum of things a person can write. Over here on one end is what, a dozen lines of code that will entice a computer to ask a human being, "Do you want me to 1) add, 2) subtract, 3) multiply, or 4) divide now?" and the human indicates which of these by entering the corresponding number. The computer asks for two numbers, and the human thinks of two numbers and types them in. The machine knows exactly what is intended and performs the task with precision. And over here on the other end is a short poem by Gerald Stern which begins in a junk shop. Not a classy antique shop, just a shop full of stuff that has already served in one or many earlier lives and now is for sale for a few bucks. It's a little machine made of language, as is the dozen lines of very basic computer code, but it doesn't operate on the world the way the computer code does. There's no list of choices whose meaning is already known. There's no operation to carry out whose steps are pre-determined. We're in a junk shop, and maybe those places fascinate or drive us crazy. Maybe the old styles are so annoyingly naive or maybe the dust in the interstices of the parts takes us back to our grandparents and their dim basement where there were old bird cages because they wanted to make a little more money during the war and they tried raising birds to sell to pet shops. Maybe like Stern we too wonder about certain old objects that are so fragile that they hardly ever have survived to make their way into a junk shop, and waves of fascination are maybe replaced by feelings of loss. Maybe a certain year, a certain house or apartment come to mind, like Stern who recalls the news of the end of the war in Europe arriving and the family celebrating. Maybe it's embarrassing, how corny the family was in its quaint dancing there, or maybe its so deeply touching, those lost elders overjoyed, dancing across the old rug, there in Pittsburgh, and maybe we hardly now Pittsburgh, or maybe we have driven through and met a man who's lived their his whole adult life and he bemoaned the decay of the city. Maybe we see the beautiful landscape, maybe we drove past the site of an anti-Semitic mass shooting, hadn't remembered it one moment before and then of course this is the place, this beautiful neighborhood at this moment in spring when everything is leafing and blooming and local history just pops up for a tourist, maybe we remember our town a few hundred miles away that week of the shooting, people of many faiths and backgrounds turning out to express solidarity and to meditate together on where we were right now as a country, and then Stern says, "Beautiful, filthy Pittsburgh" and maybe we remember the industrial history and the abuses of working people by the wealthy and the poisons of industry that destroyed the bodies and spirits of many workers, and the rage and often the powerlessness, and Stern names the barons of industry who carried out some of that work, "Home of the evil Mellons," he says, and maybe we know them in detail or maybe just as a type, and having raised the subject of evil dominating a people, he thinks again of the dancing when the news came into the house that the war had ended, when he was a boy and his folks were dancing, as he says because the association will never leave him, "five thousand miles away from that other dancing," because there are some things that should be expressed delicately, that other dancing, maybe we don't know for sure what he means, maybe we puzzle it out for just a second, and he continues, "—in Poland and Germany—" he says, that's where the other dancing had been, and if we're old enough maybe we are sure now what he's thinking of and why he's expressed it so delicately using the word "dancing" and there's no way to predict the poem's final line, the outburst from Stern, layered words, "oh God of mercy, oh wild God." Maybe we have followed along as Stern snuck up on likely the darkest episode in many centuries of human brutality, and maybe we have schoolbook knowledge of it, maybe we know survivors who have been circumspect, or others who have felt an urgency to speak, and the ending of the poem and the huge thing that stands behind the few words, "the dancing," is known to each reader in a variety of ways and at a variety of depths. While the dozen lines of computer code runs along lines that are predictable and precise, for the writer and for the reader Stern's poem "The Dancing" there was no single knowable path, for writer and reader there is no correct path that can be named and followed. Just as there is something huge behind the words of the poem's title, something too large to be contained in precise, coded words, there is something uncontainable and unnamable in the process of writing the poem and in experiencing it as a reader. Language as we experience it has the power to enact these evocations, but they are of a different nature than the language of the add/subtract/multiply/divide code. The powerful new software tools write terrible poems because they operate in the one realm and not the other. I can't see any reason to think that this will change. That doesn't mean that somebody won't empower one of these new tools to make a snap judgment about launching a swarm of rockets mounted with nuclear weapons, say. #