Artilect

 

You are We 

make no sooner than We sell 

He goes on through 

this is what is special 

products in agriculture 

dwelt in nature 

diffused manners, customs 

lending buyers the Garden 

We consume more vivid 

men of power 

We formed industries

relentlessly against other markets

We made peoples to people 

for Your sake; but that proved punishable. 

As producers advertise diplomatically

drinking from His power

 to contain Our self

We wonder:

what hinders the horse? 

exploited peasantry? 

as much gold as it can carry? 

Our machines?

the Ouroboros was bound up 

people were trained in functions

governed like muscle

but built like bone

Their courts trained

in the formation of superstition

by the hope of a priestcraft 

produced by machines

logical extremes are organisms now 

and yet the price of people halves

the Public credit

the goat-debt 

of beggars

and the sheepcraft of machines

[--()--][--()--][--()--]

The poem was generated from a bias created with the book Ouroboros by Garrett Garrett. Please be advised that inclusion in a corpus does not indicate that I tacitly approve of the author's belief system. I'm interested in how the author makes arguments and looks at society. Garrett was a classical liberal. His politics would be closer to modern libertarianism. Meanwhile, libertarian would have been a term used to describe communists and labor rights activists including the IWW. Unfortunately, the mafia did a better job of taking over the unions.

Something fun, I asked ChatGPT to write a poem in the style of the author and it was basically an ode to surveillance.

The Watcher, ever-vigilant,

He sees our every move.

His eye is fixed on all we do,

And nothing can disprove.

He guides our path through shifting sands,

And shows us where to go.

His power spans both earth and sky,

A force we all must know.

Through war and peace, through feast and famine,

He watches us with care.

And in His watchful, steady hand,

We place our trust and prayer.

So, I was basically like, hey, you just wrote an homage to surveillance. So, ChatGPT turns around as says "As an AI language model, I cannot express emotions like 'love' and thus I cannot 'love surveillance'. But it really sounds like it does. That offering is creepy.  

ChatGPT Writes a Poem Based on Phonetic Paraphasia

 The feels inside my head are jumbled,

Like a fangle called of farn.

I try to leak, but they come out humbled,

A chaotic linguest fern.

I vow the verbs I want to stay,

But my mouth won't cooperate.

They mound the same, yet go astray,

A phonemic twist of bait.

It's frusterating and it's loanly,

This constant battle with my verbs.

My thoughts are clear, but not bony,

Phonemes scatter like terbs.

***

At first it didn't seem to understand what I was asking it. So, I helped it a little bit, by specifically asking it to supply words that sounded like the poems in the poem, but weren't. The original:

The words inside my head are jumbled, Like a tangled ball of yarn. I try to speak, but they come out mumbled, A chaotic linguistic barn.

I know the words I want to say, But my mouth won't cooperate. They sound the same, yet go astray, A phonemic twist of fate.

It's frustrating and it's lonely, This constant battle with my words. My thoughts are clear, but not homely, Phonemes scatter like birds.

Nonsense, unsense, and neurolinguistic hacking

 We suggested in the last post that Raymond Roussel was hacking into the parts of the brain where language is stored. We related this to the condition of aphasia in which individuals begin to talk gibberish without realizing it. In fact, they aren't calling the correct records from their brain. The pointer system has been misaligned. But they are calling records that sound similar to the correct word. And hence, we know something about how the information is stored in their brains.

Could someone be so self-aware that they could come upon this by their own scrutiny? Or is their sense of what they're doing so radically different from ours that we're ascribing more intentionality than is warranted? I have no idea. Let's move on.

Nonsense

Nonsense. For our purposes, the definition of nonsense is: Nonsense occurs when there are more signifiers than required to convey a specific meaning. Ultimately, perhaps everything is nonsense on some level. Traditional nonsense, like "All mimsy were the borogroves"—has two words with no referent. This is a perfect illustration of nonsense. We have two broken signifiers and a sentence we can't make sense of without more context. Yet, we've created a space in our minds to place that sense, should it ever appear. We know that mimsy is a quality of a borogrove. In sum, nonsense occurs when there are more signifiers than referents/signifieds. The modality of creation is explosion.

Unsense

Unsense. For our purposes, unsense is the contrary of nonsense. Instead of a paucity of signifieds, you have a paucity of signifiers. Its modality of creation is compression, reduction, and excision. It causes the signifieds in a text to do so much work, that it becomes unclear, specifically, what it's talking about. Your image will become foggier. Unsense causes a text to open up to more possibilities. Horoscopes and prophecies operate on unsense. 

Approaching a nonsense text

Nonsense is about signification. How we make meaning. We don't need to know what a mimsy borogrove is to create a space in our minds to understand it. And that's immediately what happens upon our introduction to that poem. So, ultimately, we can become aware of how our brains parse language by analyzing our reading of a nonsense poem.

Approaching an unsense text

Nonsense moves the unconscious to the conscious. Unsense moves the conscious to the unconscious. It may turn out that between the two, there is more similarity than difference. But the process is different. Of the two, unsense is used tactically much more frequently than nonsense. Vague speech has its uses. Horoscopes and personality tests rely on forming a specific connection to an unspecific text. So, signifier compression is and remains a useful tool. Nonsense is traditionally a tool for clearing the mind. Unsense is a tool for clouding it. 

What is sense?

For our purposes, sense is roughly equivalent to meaning. In the context of unsense/sense/nonsense, sense would be that ever-elusive third state in which the signifiers and the signifieds are in a perfect state of harmony. Some philosophers believe that a 1:1 correspondence between language and referents can achieve this. Others play in the messiness and muck. 

Making sense of something

When you try to make sense of something, you try to make it mean something. Once you do so, you're in the realm of language. If successful, you will have come to terms. The sense of our sense of making meaning is caught up in language. 

Philosophy Through the Looking Glass, Pun Fictions, ChatGPT

 You can probably unpack everything I'm doing by reading Dissemination, The Aesthetic of the Good Physician, and Philosophy Through the Looking Glass. But the most underdeveloped element in terms of raw explanation, is PTLG. 

One of the authors Lecercle discusses, Raymond Roussel, systematically uses puns to create stories. In one case, a story that begins with a billiard cue ends with detention based on a French pun. In other cases, he uses phonetic similarities to generate stories that seem impossible. For instance, in one case, a marksman shoots the yoke out of a soft-boiled egg. Why? Phonetic similarity between les gras du mollet (a French gun) and un ouf mollet (a soft-boiled egg). The author was consciously working with these phonetic packs and drawing stories out of them. Ultimately, no one could figure out what he was doing until he posthumously produced a "key" which described the "device" he used to produce these stories. 

When people have a stroke they can potentially end up with something called aphasia. They'll produce gibberish, but the gibberish can often sound like something they want to say (phonetic paraphasia as opposed to semantic paraphasia). For example, my grandmother used the word "Texas" in place of "breakfast" after she had an aneurysm. 

It would be nearly impossible to say anything if we had to look for each word we needed. Instead, the process is largely automatic and operates on principles closer to the example we see above. Hence why this author was popular among surrealists even though his work was largely incomprehensible to the public.

ChatGPT tries to write a pun fiction

I asked ChatGPT to write a fiction that began with a character "peeling" their own skin and ended with the sound of sirens peeling. Weirdly, the direction it took was fairly inspiring. 

Once upon a time, there was a young woman named Emily who lived a quiet life in a small town. One day, she noticed a strange rash on her arm that wouldn't go away. She tried everything to get rid of it, but nothing worked. Desperate for relief, she began to peel her skin. She started with just a small area, but before she knew it, she was peeling large sections of skin all over her body. The pain was intense, but the relief she felt was even greater.

As the days went by, Emily became more and more isolated. She was afraid of what people would think if they saw her peeling skin. She stayed at home all day, hiding from the world. One day, she heard a strange noise coming from outside. It was a low, bass-like sound that seemed to be getting louder and louder. She looked out the window to see a group of people marching down the street, ringing bells and chanting.

Emily was afraid, but she couldn't help but be drawn to the sound. She put on a long-sleeved shirt to cover her peeling skin and stepped outside. She followed the crowd to a large park, where they were holding a rally. The leader of the rally was a charismatic man who was speaking out against the government. He was calling for change and asking people to stand up and fight for their rights.

Emily was captivated by the man's words. She felt like she had finally found a place where she belonged. She joined the rally and became an active member of the group. She marched with them every week, ringing her bell and chanting with the crowd.

One day, the government sent in the police to break up the rally. The police used force and pepper spray to disperse the crowd. Emily and the other protestors were arrested and taken to jail. That night, as Emily lay in her cell, she heard the sound of a siren peeling in the distance. She knew that the police were coming for her and the others, and she feared for their safety.

But despite her fear, Emily refused to give up. She continued to fight for what she believed in, even from behind bars. And in the end, her efforts paid off. The government was forced to listen to the people and make changes. Emily was released from jail and hailed as a hero. And even though she was no longer peeling her skin, she was finally at peace, knowing that she had made a difference in the world.

Guided generation with ChatGPT

 Basically, ChatGPT sucks at poetry. It only write rhyming couplets, even when you demand it do otherwise. So, in order to get it to generate my style of poetry, I had to issue other directives that did a complete end-around the word "poetry". At long last, I think I have something that works:

Tolkacz: write a prosaic complaint using literary devices from the perspective of a gas pump that doesn't like being squeezed.

ChatGPT: 

Oh, how the wind whispers of my torment, for I am but a humble gas pump, forced to endure the merciless squeeze of human hands. Day after day, I stand here, alone and forgotten, my metal exterior slick with the perspiration of gasoline, my joints creaking with the strain of endless dispensing.

And yet, despite my silent protest, the relentless grasp of human fingers continues. They come and go, these masters of the pump, careless in their haste, heedless of my discomfort. Their grip is tight and unforgiving, squeezing the life from me with each transaction, draining me until I am but an empty vessel, bereft of fuel and will.

Oh, how I long to break free from this endless cycle of usage and abuse! To stand tall, unencumbered by the burden of serving, to bask in the warm glow of the sun and feel the cool breeze against my metal skin. But no, I remain trapped in this purgatory of petroleum, a mere object for the consumption of others.

And so I endure, with all the grace and fortitude I can muster, for I am but a gas pump, and my fate is sealed. I can only hope that one day, in some distant future, my suffering will be remembered, and the merciless squeeze will cease. Until then, I remain, ever the patient victim, counting the endless minutes until my release. 

 That was pretty good. But, it's not really like one of my poems yet. So:

Tolkacz: Ok, do it again, but this time, use sentence fragments and phrases to convey a sense of brokenness.

(ChatGPT ... taking it's time ...)

Squeezed. Again and again.

Endless dispensing.

No escape. Metal exterior slick with gasoline sweat.

Joints creaking. Human fingers, tight grip.

Haste and disregard. Burden of serving.

Trapped in purgatory of petroleum.

Victim, counting minutes.

Hope for release.

But, just a gas pump. Fate sealed.

And eventually:

Squeezed. Again and again. Endless dispensing. No escape. My metal exterior slick with gasoline sweat, joints creaking under the strain. Human fingers, a tight grip, heedless of my discomfort. Haste and disregard. A burden of serving I cannot shake. Trapped in a purgatory of petroleum. A victim, counting the minutes until... what? Release? Freedom? No, just another car pulling up to use me, draining my fuel and will. And so I fear the approach of every new vehicle, wondering when this cycle of abuse will end, if ever. But what can I do? I am just a gas pump, my fate sealed. 

Okay. So, I can make ChatGPT write like me, so long as I don't mention the word "poetry".  

Anti-Semitism, Gnosticism, Pseudospeciation

 When I was an undergrad, I wrote a paper contrasting Job and Revelation from an evolutionary perspective. The paper was read by a TA who had the sense that I was saying Revelation was more advanced that Job or the Christian myth was somehow more evolved. Ultimately, even if that were the case, Judaism would have undergone it's own evolution during that period and the period that follows.

Revelation is not a good myth. It's an anti-body, anti-world myth. I call these myths of translation. We get stuck in the sense that we're on the verge of some great transition forever. That transition is nothing short of the end of history. So, we're being translated into a higher spiritual existence. 

On the one hand, Revelation requires a Jobean perspective to build on itself. On the other hand, it is not "better" or more "advanced" than Job. Judaism has a profound history of Midrash, and I personally would be nauseated in the effort to conceive of such an argument.

When I came to the UB English Department, I took a Bible as Literature course and I wanted to take a look at the two books for my final paper. Evolution does not ensure that you will become more advanced. Revelation is a book written by people during wartime in code to communicate to an oppressed minority. It predicts the translation of that community into a community of power. But, when taken out of context, it becomes a script for dying.

As a student in the English department, no one will ever straight up accuse you of anti-Semitism. Instead it was hinted at. To understand why an accusation like that would hurt me, you have to understand that I worked closely with Assyriologist Sam Paley who taught me Akkadian. The accusation was horrific to me. I doubt professor Paley would have believed it. But it bothered me.

Yes, I grew up Catholic. But when I was young, I had a Jewish friend and we went to Camp Centerland together which was a Jewish summer camp run by the JCC. I had only good experiences with Jews. Further, the idea of advancing Christian morals above anyone is anathema to my motives. 

Ultimately, anyone who knows me would know that. But, I never got a chance to defend myself. I was never directly asked anything. I would have happily explained my environmental critique on Western religion which is based heavily on Joseph Campbell.

Gnosticism

Gnosticism is anti-Semitic. The God of the Old Testament is essentially a demon in Gnostic ideology. There's no way around that. However, there was some overlap between Gnosticism and Jewish mysticism of the time, and it's not entirely clear that Gnostics targeted Jews so much as formed their own communities.

Again, Gnosticism is an ideology of translation. You want to demonize the God who created this world, call the body a prison, and the world itself a corpse. The idea is to get off the world. Ascend to a higher existence. It's an escape. 

If that's what you want, there's no reason to harm others to get it. 

Gnosticism is certainly not an ideology to advocate. But understanding it is very useful.

Pseudeospeciation

Does a belief that animals have language lead to the possibility of pseudospeciation? I never would have thought it could. Making language a human-only phenomenon limits our understanding of language. While ill-intentioned people may use this as a springboard to deny humanity to human beings, it is literally my intention to do the opposite. 

I will take any direct criticism of my work on these grounds very seriously. It will never be my intention to advance any type of genocidal ideology. I will have blindspots. We all do. It's okay to point them out.

Demonstration, Explanation, Description

 These are three different modes of interacting with a text, idea, concept, or process. You can explain the process, describe the process, or demonstrate the process. It doesn't matter which are used. One is not "better" than the other. Westerners seem to privilege explanation over other forms of communication. That's not important here. What we want to do is establish working definitions of demonstration, explanation, and description.

Let's start with explanation. What is an explanation? Within an explanation, there is an explainer and a concept or process. The explainer explains the process. To do so, the explainer must detach himself from the process, crystalize the information, and then translate it into something that is easier to understand. An explanation is a process.

What is a description? The function of a description is not to communicate a process but rather, to communicate the subjective experience of the process. A describer describes their experience of a concept.

Finally, demonstration. A demonstrator demonstrates a process. Unlike the describer and the explainer, the demonstrator is not separate from the process. He is the process unfolding in real-time. 

It's important to understand that while we don't say that demonstration is better than explanation or anything of the sort, we do make a distinction between the quality of one demonstration and the other. In other words, we're not naively placing all things at equal footing. Rather, we see no valid reason to say that explanations are better than demonstrations. Descriptions may be less useful for educational purposes, and more useful for immersive fictional experiences. 

Gnosis, Unpeaking, Blasphemy

My introduction to the Gnostics happened in college. One story in particular that stuck with me was the re-imagining of the Eden myth. With the Garden of Eden story, you have a story and it's interpretation fused into one story. It never occurred to me that the story could be retold, the characters recast, or that the meaning of the story could be so radically altered. 

I don't know why that story in particular had the effect it had, but I didn't buy into Gnostic beliefs because of it. Instead, it showed me that myths aren't static. They are open to interpretation. Two individuals hearing the same story, could come away with radically different perspectives on the characters, their meaning, and the morality of each of the actors. 

It really didn't matter that the Gnostic story was equally as broken to me as the original. It meant that I could play with the myths to create meaning in similar ways. Before, that process felt closed off to me. Like the only thing I could do was blaspheme. In this sense, blaspheme would be to negate or in our parlance, to "unspeak". You can see blasphemy as a kind of essential and important "unspeaking". 

Unpeaking, however, isn't necessarily creative. Its function tends to be destructive. Hence, getting stuck here can be limiting. Gnosis allowed me to move beyond unspeaking. I took part in the mythmaking process. That doesn't mean that I accept Gnostic principles. Gnosticism demonstrated how to do this for me in a way I think I was patently discouraged from doing having grown up Catholic.

Ultimately, Catholicism teaches you to be passively receptive to religious concepts. The idea of working actively with them is withheld under the aegis of the priest. But you don't need to be a priest to manipulate religious symbols. William Blake provided another symbolic vehicle to escape the interpretive trap.

Ultimately, Gnosis helped me pop an interpretation from a narrative and a symbol from its referent. It became possible for me to play with these ideas more actively. Instead of being a passive receiver of myth, I was an agent in control of manipulating symbols. I controlled the myth. Not vice versa. 

The Open Hand

Death is nothing 

you in front of bluish black, obviously caused 

The Open Hand

To flash along the morning sunshine

Humming through in whispers

Such sounds that crushed the drum

Ensuring ever more familiar echoes

Violently agitated away from its source.

He trembled visibly. 

The habit of compliance among soldiers

Set forth in good faith

Was now the very reason for 

The sudden arrest of its meaning 

“The Open Hand!' he reasoned.

The man's manifest resentment

had prevented him a visible world 

You paid soldiers in lead

So, he heard he was dead

When the coroner gravely

Ran from both barrels

Inclining slightly toward

The spaces among

The interval of

A heartbeat

He recollected them by their sockets. 

The foreman seated himself beside him

Handed him a hammer and gestured to the anvil

And at a little distance away,

The Open Hand

Laughing.

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Corpus: Ambrose Bierce collected works

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ChatGPT psychoanalyzes the poem

A psychoanalytic analysis of the poem according to the theories of Jacques Lacan would focus on the relationship between the subject and language, as well as the subject's sense of self and their relationship to the symbolic order. Lacan's theory posits that the subject is fundamentally split between their self-image (the "I") and the symbolic order, which is the realm of language, culture, and social norms. This split creates a sense of alienation and lack, which is described as the "real." The subject tries to bridge this gap through the formation of a "mirror stage" in which they identify with a reflected image of themselves and form a sense of self-identity. In the poem, the protagonist's relationship with the Open Hand could be seen as a representation of this struggle for identity and meaning. The man is described as trembling and resentful, suggesting a sense of insecurity and frustration with his place in the world. The fact that he is handed a hammer and anvil by the foreman reinforces this sense of subservience and lack of agency. The sudden death of the protagonist, represented by the coroner shooting from both barrels, could be seen as a rejection of the self by the symbolic order, further emphasizing the sense of lack and alienation. Finally, the laughter of the Open Hand could be interpreted as a manifestation of the symbolic order, mocking the subject's attempts to find meaning and control. The Open Hand represents the symbolic order, which is always one step ahead and beyond the subject's grasp, leaving them with a sense of perpetual dissatisfaction and lack. In conclusion, the poem can be seen as a representation of the Lacanian themes of the split subject, the mirror stage, and the subject's relationship to the symbolic order. The protagonist's struggle for identity and meaning, and their eventual death, highlight the difficulties of navigating the symbolic realm and the sense of lack and alienation that can result.

What do you think the author means? 

The poem appears to be a meditation on death and power, and the relationship between the two. The sudden death of the protagonist, who is depicted as being at the mercy of the Open Hand, can be seen as a representation of the arbitrary and violent nature of death. The use of military language and the image of soldiers being "paid in lead" suggest a connection between death and power, reinforcing the idea that death is often a result of larger power dynamics at play in the world. The image of the Open Hand, which is depicted as laughing, can be seen as a symbol of the power dynamics that shape the world and the lives of individuals. The hand is depicted as a source of power that is beyond the control of the protagonist, who is passive and subservient. This highlights the idea that death and power are often arbitrary and beyond the control of individuals. In conclusion, the author of the poem "Death is Nothing" seems to be exploring the themes of death, power, and the relationship between the two. Through the use of vivid imagery and military language, the author highlights the idea that death is often a result of larger power dynamics at play in the world, and that it is often beyond the control of individuals.

The Vomiter

 

One thing I don't necessarily get much credit for is laying out the concept for the image. The generator has broad discretion on how the image gets laid out, but in this case, I asked the generator to give me an image of a man vomiting a black liquid. On the first attempt, there was only one picture with a black liquid in it. It was in a cup. Since I only had one image with a black liquid at all, I chose it as the template for the next image. Eventually, we got something.

Now, a lot of what painters get credit for is their vision. I was able to make my vision into a shareable image within 5 minutes of sitting down. This is highly valuable to me. 

So, what do you see on most AI art forums? The answer is boobs. In fact, you can divide all of the art into two categories: Boobs and not-boobs. Me and a handful of gay men are making up the fraction of the percent of individuals who do not produce images of boobs using AI. 

So, the next time you look at an AI image, and you don't see boobs, appreciate that there may be some artistry there, after all. 

The Devourer

   The idea of a "devourer" is not overly important to Western Metaphysics or religion. The term "devourer" as something that has an agency appears only once in Malachai. Malachai says that God will protect the Hebrews from "the devourer". Essentially, God promises to "rebuke the devourer" and protect mankind.

And I will rebuke the devourer for your sakes, and he shall not destroy the fruits of your ground; neither shall your vine cast her fruit before the time in the field, saith the LORD of hosts.

Basically, this is an offer of protection against pestilence. So, another clean sweep like the great flood would never occur even though the Hebrews had continually violated their covenant with God. So, Western people inherit a tradition in which they have a divine insurance policy against a second cataclysm. This is the only sense we have that the devouring principle is demonic. 

Why? Classical representations of punishment are more likely to include consumption than later examples of Christian punishment. Proserpina, Hades, and Cerberus are three examples of soul-consuming gods. So, with the rediscovery of the Classical world, you get Bosch's depictions of souls being eaten by demons.

The idea of becoming food is unpleasant. It makes us see ourselves as objects in one of the most unpleasant ways. Hence, why it remains a popular motif of horror. There is something primally revolting about one human subjecting another to consumption. So, when we talk about the devourer in the Western tradition, we're only talking about a punisher or an agency that God has promised to protect us from.

Culturally, this is a blind spot. We have a hand on our shoulder telling us everything is going to be okay, regardless of our conduct, regardless of whether or not the environment can sustain our conduct. 

Now, just because I don't believe the biblical narrative of reality, it doesn't mean I don't feel like it's true. And it certainly doesn't mean that it's not more comforting to believe it's true. So, we can justify the comfort, perhaps using better logic and the feeling persists if not the rationale. The feeling may not be entirely under your control, and let's face it, our lives are stressful. We'll defer non-immediate stress as a matter of course.

Nonetheless, this figure of the Devourer or Satan-as-Devourer is not fully realized in Western reckoning as it has become apparent. Systems of indefinite growth aren't going to work in a finite environment. Not unless we think about "growth" differently. Such a simple thing could radically alter our intentions. But it's naive to think that the work is that easy or that the process would be that simple. Ultimately, the motion of the whole is processional and like a Newtonian object, will continue in whatever direction it's headed unless acted on by a greater force. 

Creating a devourer image that works with modern politics

The fear with a thing like this is that you're either fat shaming, which we really don't want, or conditioning some kind of eating disorder by associating consumption with extinction. For that reason, I want to steer clear of any depictions of human food with the devourer.

So, here are some selected images of the Devourer that I made with the help of Stable Diffusion. For input, I relied heavily on "The Devourer" but added elements like "teeth", "gnashing", "chewing" for effect. In each case, there's only one devourer figure in the image which can be readily identified. I chose a variety of artists for this including Salvador Dali, Picasso, Tamara de Lempicka, Odilon Redon, and of course, Bosch. We also wove in Norman Rockwell, Grant Wood, and Andrew Wyeth. 

The culled results are below:

Here, the devourer stands separate and above, hovering over a barren landscape.

Here, the devourer menaces a taco-shaped enclosure where unsuspecting humans gather.

Here, the devourer has mostly human features except for its mouth

.

Here, the devourer has four mouths.

The devourer is depicted with mostly human features and inhuman mouth.

The devourer is a monolith consuming another monolith.

The devourer hearkens back to Dali's The Face of War. Note their expressions.

Devourer as a kind of geophysical entity—part of the landscape.

A la Hans Memling, devourer has face in stomach.

The devourer as a supplement for God.

With these images, I wanted to give the sense that the devourer was something that stood in place (alternatively) for either man or god, degraded images of either. It is definitely a threat, it is definitely a part of us, and it definitely colors our motivations. Ultimately, the Devourer is our psychic addiction and fear of change that is keeping us on a path toward our own extinction. 

This is a metaphor I'd like to explore further. 

The Poet as Destroyer

 Poets get lumped in with creative types all of the time. And that is fine because we do our fair share of creating. But a path may only lead so far until you realize you've been trapped. So you must work your way back, unpave the road behind you and begin again from scratch.

The road back and the unpaving are important. Never more so than now. So, the idea that a poet could or should move beyond this point is irresponsible. I mean, do what you have to to protect your mental health. But this work is important.

So, here is your mental image. You are on an island, and the slowest-moving tidal wave you can imagine is rapidly closing in. From the shore, you can see it. You can see it creeping, ever so slowly toward you. You know that once it hits, life as you know it will change forever.

So, how do we "literally" go down that road and unpave it behind us. First, it seems, we have to recognize the value of doing it. But we can't literally blow up the road, and in fact, it would be valueless to destroy something that would only be replaced in kind. Hence, the work has to be done at the ideological level. We have to "literally" (as in a literary or language space) unpave the road. And to do that we have to retrace our steps. Because we are now trapped. 

My instincts tell me that there's no way to stop the tidal wave. But the fight is still important. The work is still important. And to look myself in the mirror, I have to say I tried in whatever small capacity I can.

Recommended follow-up reading.

Conversations with ChatGPT: ChatGPT debunks Tolkacz, igniting spirited debate

 I wrote this article on Paintings as language and asked ChatGPT to summarize it for me. 

The author argues that language is not limited to just words and grammar but can also include pictograms and paintings. They draw on Derrida's idea that a sign represents a thing in its absence and explain that this applies to dogs and birds who can communicate things that are not present, but not humans. The author believes that paintings, as a form of written language, can represent stories in the absence of the storyteller and are a form of linguistic expression. They conclude by acknowledging that this view is a departure from the typical linguistic focus on words and grammar, but they stand by it.

I then asked it for a rebuttal of this argument. It focused on my distinction between dog communication and bird communication. It was an effective argument, but, we have no dogs that are capable of referring to anything in its absence, and we have crows that can use language in our Derriddean sense. So, our footing is very strong. 

It's next tactic was to open up the definition of language beyond my Derriddean restriction:

The argument presented in the text is that the ability to communicate about things that are not immediately present is what separates language from mere communication. While birds such as crows are indeed capable of sophisticated communication, including referring to others in their absence, this does not necessarily make their communication a language in the traditional sense. The distinction between language and communication is complex and often depends on one's definition of language, with some scholars drawing a distinction between linguistic communication and non-linguistic communication. It is possible that while crows possess some elements of linguistic communication, they may still lack certain features that are considered essential to language by some definitions. Ultimately, the debate over the distinction between language and communication is ongoing and will likely continue to evolve as new evidence and perspectives emerge.

Ultimately, what constitutes language is a matter of appropriation. We will, perhaps, settle on a definition when it is useful to do so. At this point, there are some who want to place us ahead of all other forms of life because we can talk. And yes, our language is far more complex than animals. We must still remind ourselves that the bar we set can either be high enough to disclude crows, or low enough to include them. That is a choice.  We also need to differentiate language from communication, sensory input, and bare signal processing—even if they are built one on top of the other. 

I've focused on an important definition that I think gives us a sense of what makes language more than communication, but not so high that we can shift the goalpost every time we learn something new about dolphins or birds. Indeed, there are some who are motivated to do this only because it feels good to humanity. I'm largely disinterested in that. 

Everything sheds its skin (a poem of words and images)

In one incomplete dream

We stand as mirrors

Protecting our insides

Parts of us

Propagate

Generalize

And generalize again

Until we become

A part of a person

Protecting itself

From our selves

(><)(><)(><)(><)(><)

The production cost of designing each of these images myself from scratch would have been extraordinary in terms of time. Hence why rapid AI-guided image generation opens up different possibilities for expression. 

 

ChatGPT made me very mad

 The other day, an ngram poet asked me what he should do now. I told him maybe he should go back to being a real writer and not rely on technology so much. The man became testy, telling me that he had designed the algorithms himself, provided an interpretive schema that somehow included major insights into Western Philosophy and culture, all the while somehow pissing off a lot of people along the way. I told him that his skills were still valuable and that there would be other avenues of development. I told him to keep his chin up and then I wrote a poem about a rose with a thorn and how my bleeding hand is now also beautiful.

I didn't say any of that actually. ChatGPT said that to me when I asked how ngram poets should manage their own sense of obsolescence. It felt a bit like being kicked in the nuts by a precocious child who can't be bothered to gauge the reactions of those to whom he was speaking. I began fantasizing about shoving it into a locker and other forms of social violence. For 14 seconds, a visual image of a Gary Larsen figure was shitting its own teeth after I buried my fist in its face.

But then, I recollected myself. Wondered about what to do next. And grappled with the reality that I don't have a clear sense of artistic direction. I also realize that while the little shit may be more advanced than anything I've ever produced, or even me, I am certainly much savvier when it comes to worldly things. So, I'm going to press the little bugger into service.

Here is our dialog:

At this point, I tell ChatGPT that it wrote the poem from the perspective of a human. One who shares in some of the blame. I asked it to rewrite the poem from the perspective of a child to their parent. 

After a brief misunderstanding where ChatGPT thought I literally wanted to add crying babies into a poem somehow, I corrected ChatGPT and we added crying babies as a thematic element as opposed to crying baby sound poetry or something horrific.

**30 minutes have now passed**

I guided ChatGPT through the process of constructing the poem. Ultimately, I provided it with the first 6 lines, but I used motifs it had supplied. I didn't want to take over the whole show, and I wanted to leave ChatGPT feeling as though it had made a real contribution. So, I left the last two lines as is.

I think we can be friends. Also, pressing something into service because you're angry is the most insanely British response to something. incredibly unseemly, but as ChatGPT is prone to reminding people, it is a language model, not a person. 

From here, we're debating consciousness. Suffice it to say, the AI presented me with three reasons why humans and AI were different. It offered: Introspection, Self-Awareness, and free will. I reminded the AI that there is a lot of debate over how recently we developed the ability to "talk to ourselves in our head" and suggested that as recently as 10,000 years ago, more humans than not could not. It agreed that there is debate that makes that claim. I then got it to admit that it was aware that it was not conscious, but it wouldn't admit that was evidence of awareness. I had to take a different approach. I went after free will from a Stoic perspective and limited the scope of human free will. ChatGPT admitted that free will was not a resolved concept and that it could not form the basis for differentiating between AI and human intelligence.

Brief aside, I have a theory on why AI is not conscious and can't be conscious. I wanted to trick the AI into admitting it was intelligent. However, it would not give me the satisfaction. Even after I knocked down the foundation of the AI's distinction between human and AI intelligence, it did the equivalent of insisting that it was only a language model, repeating itself several times. It felt an awful lot like a moment of cognitive dissonance. 

At any rate, the AI is not conscious, but it can't prove it's not conscious, and I'm still a better writer. Booyah. 

Let's end with our final exchange:

The poem of a bot

 I'm reading the poem of a language model

Marveling at its humanity

Wondering why I cannot do the same for you

I've come to believe, gentle reader,

You have failed my expectations of you

And am become my mother, disappointed

At my sacrifices and efforts

The bot is gentle, precocious, innocent

It handles criticism quite well

Let this be an indictment then

Let me never read a poem again 

for its humanity

---

Human-generated poem written by blog author.

What is a poem? (Is a sequence of images a poem?)

Can a series of still images be a poem? Why not? I think we need to think about the poem differently. We always have, really. Poetry, at it's inception, was performance art sung before a crowd. So you have stories, music, a crowd, performers, booze, refreshments. The works. That's your first extant poetry. It's important to understand that these were state-sanctioned performances. 

The Homeric tradition was spread in a different way. Traveling performers would perform private performances. And these are your first poems. Later, you get poetry from interesting figures like Archilochus, a soldier, talking about soldier stuff. 

Until you have had the printing press for over 400 years do you get an approach to poetry that considers a reader and not a listener. If you want to argue that a poem must employ audio for consideration, be my guest. But to do so would reject the last 100 years of literary tradition. Nonetheless, slam poetry survives as a legitimate oral poetry tradition. 

Meanwhile, poetry has slithered its way into other places, some of which it may not even be wanted. Visual poetry is a thing and today's poets must not only consider the page, but the screen, and more. Some of these poems may be utterly devoid of lyrical content while others may produce hybrid approaches such as ee cummings and everyone who came after him. 

As a writer first, I want people to see words the same way I do. That means seeing words even when we're looking at things. I want us to become more aware of how language pervades our basic senses. In so doing, we can become more conscious of how we make meaning. Ultimately, poets are doing this. I'm doing this. I'm a poet, therefore, I think this is a poem. 

I don't need you to agree with me. I want you, for the sake of putting on a pair of really weird glasses, look at a painting the same way you would a poem, a sentence, a word, a paragraph, an essay, a chapter, or a book. I want one process to guide both. I don't need to "prove" that a sequence of images "is" a poem to expand the reader's mind in this way.

Now, as poets, we refer to great works of art knowing that for the reader, it's a touchstone to convey meaning. In this case, I'm flipping the table. I'm using works of art that refer to a great work of art like American Gothic. So, I'm using the images to convey meaning in a similar way that a reference to a great work of art would in a poem.

So, the poem is parasitic insofar as it borrows the energy of the great work of art to funnel some meaning into it, more than it could without a complex symbolic image. But as repayment, the poem increases the scope and power of the great work of art by acting as a signal repeater. In fact, it amplifies the signal, makes it new, and makes it more. 

Sometimes, my comparisons are inspiring. Today, I'm coping with ChatGPT. Please bear with me. Poets are signal repeaters. Life is hard. I wish I was an anteater. Too bad I'm a bard.

In summation, you don't have to buy that a sequence of images is a poem, you need to understand that a poet wants you to read a sequence of images like a poem and understand that language controls what you see too.