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That we will never know what it is like to be another — another person, another creature — is one of the most exasperating things in life, but also one of the most humbling, the most catalytic to our creative energies: the great calibrator of our certainties, the ultimate corrective for our self-righteousness, the reason we invented language and science and art. If there weren’t such an abyss between us and all that is not us, we never would have tried to bridge it with our microscopes and telescopes and equations seeking to know the vaster realities of nature beyond… read article
When AI first began colonizing language — which is still our best instrument for bridging the abyss between us, a container for thought and feeling that shapes the contents — I asked chatGPT to compose a poem about a solar eclipse in the style of Walt Whitman. It returned a ledger of cliches in rhymed couplets. Getting the form wrong — Whitman did not rhyme — seemed like an easy correction by a line of code. Getting poetry itself wrong was the interesting question, the question that gets at the heart of why we make poems (or paintings or novels… read article
“Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy,” Albert Camus wrote in one of the most sobering opening pages in literature. So here you are, having answered affirmatively, consciously or not, now facing the second fundamental question that ripples out of the first: How shall you live? Perhaps the sharpest, most recurrent shock of being alive is the realization that no one can give you a ready-made answer — not your parents or your teachers, not scripture or Stoicism, not psychotherapy or psilocybin, not the old dharma teacher or the new… read article
Walking through the white-walled gallery at the graduation show of one of New York’s most esteemed art schools, between beautiful young people with Instagram faces, I was struck to see project after project take up as its subject the least durable, most illusory aspect of human existence: the self. Where was the Iris Murdoch in these dawning artists’ lives to remind them that art, at its best, is “an occasion for unselfing”? And yet who could fault them: Not just their generation, but our entire culture seems to have forgotten that identities and opinions are the least interesting parts of… read article
More in literature
What the world looked like to George Orwell during his final days The post Visions From Jura appeared first on The American Scholar.
Rhina Espaillat writes the sonnet “How Like a Winter . . .” (And After All: Poems, 2018) in response to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 17: “So Shakespeare describes absence. Yes—but no, since every winter ends, gentling to spring’s tentative yellows, then the green and blue and bolder tones of flowering summer. So has this winter passed, as do all things— except the final absence. Without you, for instance, all of time is cut in two— before and after—seasons all the same, despite the beckoning lushness of the new, the living, rich in fur and fins and wings, intent on resurrection. But they go, our absent loves, and leave us stranded here, parted from all the changes of the year as by an endless fall of pallid snow.” Turning gentle into a verb is a nice touch. Shakespeare’s poem, known as the last of the “procreation” sonnets, follows. The speaker fears that if he celebrates the “heavenly touches” of the “Fair Youth,” his comeliness, future readers will assume he is exaggerating or lying: “Who will believe my verse in time to come, If it were fill’d with your most high deserts? Though yet Heaven knows it is but as a tomb Which hides your life and shows not half your parts. If I could write the beauty of your eyes, And in fresh numbers number all your graces, The age to come would say, ‘This poet lies, Such heavenly touches ne’er touch’d earthly faces.’ So should my papers yellow’d with their age, Be scorn’d like old men of less truth than tongue, And your true rights be term’d a poet’s rage And stretched metre of an antique song: But were some child of yours alive that time, You should live twice,– in it and in my rhyme.” Every writer asks, Will I be read in the future, after I am gone? How will I be read? Most writing, of course, is quickly forgotten, often during the writer’s lifetime. We remember Shakespeare’s “Fair Youth” though his identity remains uncertain – a nice irony, given Shakespeare’s stated intention. He lives on, but anonymously. The final two lines are stirring: “But were some child of yours alive that time, / You should live twice,– in it and in my rhyme.” All of us hope to live on through our children, if only in memory. Espaillat reminds me John Shade’s investigation into the afterlife, prompted by the death of his daughter Hazel, in the poem that lends its title to Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire: “I'm reasonably sure that we survive And that my darling somewhere is alive . . .” As Espaillat puts it, in regard to "the final absence": “But they go, / our absent loves, and leave us stranded here."
“One of the offices of poetry: to use shapely speech to express the radicals of existence in all their ambiguity.” “Shapely speech” is nicely put. Guys I knew, when being polite, might describe a girl as “shapely.” You know what that means. It means pleasing. What about “the radicals of existence”? I don’t know what that means. “Radicals” intended etymologically, meaning “roots”? As in chemistry or politics? All of the above? A similar “office” applies to prose as well, though “office” sounds a little high-falutin’. “To answer idiosyncratically, privately, to a public world given over to falsehood, fake facts, scuzzy rumor, casual murderousness, comedic denials, manic impromptu wind-tunnel ideologies. To answer palsied language with vital language, plasticity, gaiety of invention and fabulation, against opportunistic mendacity.” The ethics of writing. As John Berryman puts it in his biography of Stephen Crane: “Crane was a writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.” An honest writer comes equipped with a bullshit detector that he applies first to himself, then others. Lies enter language through politics, fashion, self-aggrandizement and any effort to seek approval. The hardest part of writing is keeping it vital while remaining faithful to the truth. “If poetry can’t, or chooses not to, reveal what it feels like to live as a sentient being in a perilous enchanted world, then maybe it can (and deserves to) die. Or that mission will be replaced by a spectacular dumb show loaded with content, whipped up drama, and ‘language.’ It will be a polymer mold of what once was primary material. What can replace the completeness and immediacy of feeling that the sounds of words whip up or lay down?” W.S. Di Piero might be describing prose or poetry assembled by artificial intelligence. What I’ve read or seen of it, even when it’s a competent copy of a human creation, feels hollow, dead inside. Something is missing, something vital and as personal as DNA or the individual human sensibility. Something “sentient,” to use Di Piero’s word. Algorithms write like backward children eager to please teacher. [The quoted passages, a single continuous entry, is drawn from Di Piero’s Mickey Rourke and the Bluebird of Happiness: A Poet’s Notebooks (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2017).]
Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “A Blessing” by James Wright appeared first on The American Scholar.
