Let’s go even further. Let’s say life is a jelly I want to spread. Translucent and sweet, yes, but sticky. This would be a manageable life, the kind we like to spend in living rooms, admiring the flowers and plants, sipping chamomile, and discreetly noticing someone’s cleavage, or how beautifully knotted someone’s tie and with what gentle language it speaks to us from across the room. This is but one aspect of life, for which I feel modestly equipped. I have handles and brooms to appease the gods of clutter, and a toolbox full of contrivances, enough to start a circus. Denim tells my story. And whenever I venture outdoors I whisper such things before shoveling or chasing after a bus that I sometimes blush with the rawness of their expression. I’m easily seduced by bric-a-brac. Just show me a little reticence and I will tell you with great eagerness what the Mississippi looks like at dusk, as I deposit a surprised catfish with a ceramic glaze on your open palm and pour us both another bourbon. The other life, the real life, the authentic life, is a raging alligator in the Florida Keys. It was in the Florida Keys that the poet Wallace Stevens broke his hand on Ernest Hemingway’s jaw. Thwack Bloom and I get together sometimes and shoot pop bottles with our .44s. Last night there was a dance in the barn and we got loaded and said things we later regretted. That’s ok. I got up in the middle of the night and wrote them down so I could be sure to regret everything all over again. Language makes me athletic. As long as you’ve got a tongue in your mouth you can enter life through the back door of some abstraction and find your aim in the middle of a frying pan. I simmer as I steam things from the jaw. I spent a night in Gainesville looking for Bo Diddley. I didn’t find Diddley but I did do some diddling around. I walked home in a sentence. The green light of the evening sky churned with heliotrope. The air had a spirit of conversation in it and I took full advantage of the situation. I couldn’t stop talking. If you can’t find a good mulch for the daisies in your speech a spoonful of cogs will do nicely for the hellebore. The most imponderable ideas are generally convulsive. They crackle aggressively, spitting sparks forcefully across the room. I get distracted easily. It wasn’t till the middle of Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony that I noticed my zipper was open and the cows were getting out. Moonshine is the pontiff of everything I vacuum. Things percolate through my senses slowly, often taking long amounts of time to reach the brain, so that I remember things in the morning that feel like they happened to another person on a different night in Barcelona, or Sevastopol. I remember a night on the desert with Arthur Rimbaud. He said little. Though once, when a camel farted, he laughed. The time for petty politics is over. Listen. Listen to the music of the spheres. Hanging in space like Lisbon in the fog. You hear it with the ears of the soul.
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I love this: "I walked home in a sentence." By the way, what did those Indians nail the boatmen to? Translators of "The Drunken Boat" have said: colored stakes, totem poles, and colorful masts. What do you think it was?
Colored stake is probably the most accurate, though a "poteau d'execution" is also mentioned, a pillar to which someone is tied to be executed. The opening passage has always struck me as a violent and definitive release from all the norms and restraints of an industrialized society.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I want to live inside that poem, but the discrepancies between translations make it hard. You mentioned the boat's journey symbolizing an escape from industrialized society. I hear we're crossing the border into an Artificial-Intelligence society. Look what A.I. cooked up -- in the blink of an eye -- when I asked it to recast "The Drunken Boat" as a "Star Wars" movie: "In a galaxy far, far away, there was a legend of a mystical vessel known as the Drunken Boat. The ship was said to possess a power beyond imagination, capable of crossing the most treacherous waters and traversing the vast expanse of the universe. The story begins with a young Jedi knight, Arthur Rimbaud, who is tasked with finding the fabled ship and its crew of misfits. He sets out on a perilous journey, facing countless dangers and obstacles along the way. As he travels deeper into the unknown, Rimbaud encounters a motley crew of space pirates and outcasts who have been searching for the Drunken Boat for years. Among them is a rogue smuggler named Verlaine, who becomes Rimbaud's unlikely ally in the quest for the legendary vessel. Together, they navigate through treacherous asteroid fields and dodge enemy ships, all while deciphering cryptic clues left by the Drunken Boat's previous owners. Finally, they reach the edge of the universe, where they find the Drunken Boat hidden away in a remote corner of the galaxy. But as they approach the ship, they realize that they are not alone. A dark force has been watching them, and they are about to face their greatest challenge yet. The dark force is led by the Sith Lord, Illuminations, who seeks to use the Drunken Boat's power for his own nefarious purposes. Rimbaud and Verlaine must fight against Illuminations and his army of stormtroopers to protect the ship and its secrets. In a climactic battle, Rimbaud faces off against Illuminations in a lightsaber duel, while Verlaine and the crew of the Drunken Boat fight off the stormtroopers. With the power of the ship behind them, Rimbaud and Verlaine emerge victorious and take control of the Drunken Boat. As they set out on their journey back to civilization, Rimbaud realizes that the Drunken Boat's true power was not in its ability to traverse the universe, but in the bonds of friendship and the strength of their courage in the face of adversity."
I think this shows the fundamental sterility at the "heart" of AI. All it has done is overlay a poem with which it has no understanding or sensitivity with a formulaic movie script. Did you use the ChatGPT? I fear this device will lower the quality of education even more at the universities, if it's possible for it to get lower. I fear you're right, that we are entering - assuming we haven't already entered - the kind technocratic dystopia Herbert Marcuse described in his One-Dimensional Man: "“By virtue of the way it has organized its technological base, contemporary industrial society tends to be totalitarian. For 'totalitarian' is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.” What we need to combat these trends is a fleet of drunken boats.
Hello, yes, I used ChatGPT to generate that "Drunken Boat/Star Wars" mash-up. I had been translating Rimbaud's poem with it. The results were different every time, like rolling dice that have infinite sides, but it also gave me the creeps. I felt like I'd been playing with a Ouija board.
I can't foresee the good and bad things A.I. will bring into the world, but perhaps this bit of dialogue from Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian" is relevant: "“You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.”
Thanks for mentioning that "One-Dimensional Man" book. Marcuse sounds like a cat I need to read.
Speaking of reading, I've read your "Lightning on Paper," "Dylan Goes Magenta," and the interview you did with Noah Eli Gordon. I found them fascinating. Do you have any other essays or interviews on the internet?
Thanks!
I also spent a night in Gainesville looking for Bo Diddley. All I found was a Waffle House and some spray-paint graffiti that said "Bo who?"
Anonymous,
Thank you for your interest in my essays. There are several you might find interesting. One is an essay about a functioning Stonehenge my father designed for the Turtle Mountains of North Dakota called "Mystical Horizons," which was posted on my blog in December, 2010, and an essay about the search for the "God Particle," or Higgs boson, titled "Strange Matter," published in The American Scholar in December, 2009, and is available online.
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