The New York Times Book Review (last Sunday's edition) includes a review of God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor and the Search for Meaning, a book of essays by Megan O'Gieblyn. It's worth reading the review if not the book (I plan to get a copy of the book soon) for those of us who write poetry regularly and who, like the cohort at Wednesdays@One, are committed to "writing better poems today than we did yesterday, and better poems tomorrow than we write today."
It's worth reading because what we do when we write a poem is an act of selfhood, however obscure the voice or persona of the poem we are writing may be, to ourselves, to others. After all, it's not somebody else who sits at our keyboard or writing pad when we start a poem. It's us, or some version of us that we've adopted in order to compose.
I'm making a leap here from the subject of technology and humanity in this book to the idea of a self practicing an art. But here goes. As writers, we attempt qualitative acts--creation of poems--in a world that increasingly values mainly the quantitative: what matters can be measured. It was a maxim at one of my former employers, an accounting and consulting firm, that what can't be measured doesn't matter. All well and good for an accountant. But when that kind of value creeps into our personal spaces, perhaps not so good.
The reviewer of this book, Becca Rothfeld, observes, "many of the most powerful forces in the contemporary world conspire to deny the value . . . of experience that evades quantification." Strong statement. Overwrought thinking, maybe. I don't believe Facebook and Google "conspire" to do any such thing. I prefer to think that these companies' business missions have evolved beyond their founders' original visions, which, given the tools they depend on to work--algorithms--was inevitable. They conspire no more than any other business that wants to understand what we want and will pay for before they expend time and energy and risk making it.
But that doesn't mean we're no longer capable of being poets, much less complex human beings. For as complex human beings, we live in the moment, even when we're writing about or from a memory; when we write, we are in the moment of the writing, of the poem. I offer Wednesdays@One as evidence.
Against the quantifiable self, the self that "browses and buys" stuff, is pitted what Rothfeld calls the self that "feels: the embattled, anachronistic and indispensable self." It's this self that writes our poems, yes? To be embattled, anachronistic and indispensable is to be outside of time, in the moment. The self is timeless in its self-ness. And that is where poetry begins, develops and ends, for readers as well as writers. And it's why, maybe, nobody makes a living writing poetry.
Rothfeld, quoting O'Gieblyn through this passage, refers to the ghost in the machine--that human presence that can never seem to be erased or cancelled, no matter how sophisticated the technology:
The self resists exile, creeping back into even ostensibly materialist theories. Many of the tech-utopians who congratulate themselves most vociferously on their affinity with the Enlightenment subscribe to quasi-religious worldviews — a phenomenon that O’Gieblyn, who grew up in a Christian fundamentalist family, is well equipped to analyze. Take, for instance, transhumanism, according to which “the evolution of the cosmos comes down to a single process: that of information becoming organized into increasingly complex forms of intelligence.” For those who see “processes as disparate as forests, genes and cellular structures” as forms of computation — as means of transmitting information — our world is re-enchanted. Everything is potent with significance, and history is a “process of revelation,” culminating in the elevation of humans into “‘post-humans,’ or spiritual machines.”
Despite the fact that I do not believe there is a God (cap G) and an afterlife in the conventional sense, I hope that I never come to feel "post-human," that I am somehow a "spiritual machine." I am human, and mysterious for all that, even to myself. I never feel more this way than when I am writing a poem that suddenly becomes a work of art. In fact, I never feel more myself than when the verse I am writing tips or veers into the truly poetic, and the poem takes control and I become its scribe. Now that is a moment of mystery to be cherished!
Hmmmm. Now that I've thoroughly piqued my interest, I must go find a copy of this book.
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