I'm short on images because, in preparation for moving, we packed up all our stuff, which includes my drawing book and ugly collage portfolio, so I had to steal this diagram from the info sheet of one of the appliances that we expect to install today.
Dear diary,
Well this is the last day of home repairs. We’ve gotten everything squared away on our apartment except one final plumbing project; and this morning a company is scheduled to…
You don’t care about the details; I don’t either. What we care about is that everyone shall now be happy. The seller of the home (that’s us) will be happy because the thing that we’re selling got sold; and the buyer (Mary X from Eraserhead) will be happy because her wish-list received fulfillment.
Actually we’re doing FAR MORE fixes than the buyer specified on the official demands of the purchase offer. Yet why, you ask, why soar above the call of duty?—Why surpass all legal expectations? And I answer: Just to be nice. For I believe that no good deed goes unpunished, and I’m an ultra-masochist (but only spiritually; for I can’t stand physical pain).
I had to cut short yesterday’s entry, because the contractors were scheduled to arrive sometime in the morning—they gave a window of 8 a.m. to 12 noon—and now that we have the royal blue lockbox hanging from our front gate, I can simply bike to the local park and read a book outdoors while the work is being completed, rather than having to stay in my house and fret. So that’s what I did: I went down the street and stopped at Lime Green Duck Pond and re-read Longinus: On the Sublime. It’s the only thing I was interested in at the moment.
& today it’s the same story: the plumber said he’d appear sometime between sunrise and blood meridian. So I’ll absent myself again. And during that span of time, I will be wherever I will be – I haven’t yet decided where to bike to. Probably I’ll visit the same place and read the same thing. I like routines and habits. I’m easily shaken, easily riled, always nervous; so the feeling of “Ah, I’ve been here before: I know the drill” soothes my nerves, so that I can enter that state of intellectual half-sleep: the dreamy trance that I love so much.
Harmonious living allows us mortal creatures to levitate into a state of relaxed creativity.
That’s why I hate the current economic system, this deformation of capitalism: for it thrives on the notions of scarcity and warfare. But resources are no longer crucially limited—our modern technological advancements allow us to meet all basic needs easily, and enjoy abundance uniformly. Plus diplomacy should alleviate all conflicts: physical violence is no longer generally held to be attractive; it is no longer popular. War is passé: NOT in vogue, NOT fashion-forward, NOT up-to-date, NOT up-to-the-minute, NOT all the rage, NOT chic, NOT à la mode. (Yes, I’ve taken to plagiarizing the dictionary.) No longer is warfare trendy or “with it”, “cool”, “in”, “hot”, “big”, “hip”, “big hipp’d”, “possessing or suggesting the look of child-bearing hips”, “now”, or “happening”. War is neither “sharp” nor “groovy” nor “tony” nor “fly”.
Perhaps war never was all these super-awesome terms, these labels that have come to represent the ‘in’ thing; however, aforetime, when two nations would war, at least they had the excuse of being ignorant of each other’s respective language. Now even our stupid computers understand how to translate foreign concerns enough to nullify every urge toward the sword.
True warriors, like my friend Archilochus, disparage firearms: he considers the use of guns beneath his dignity. Back in ancient Greece, he tells me, he didn’t have the option of using weapons like our modern bombs and cannons. Those things are too easy—if you win a battle with them, you plainly cheated.
That’s why no self-respecting android would ever play chess with an opponent who is human. You see these big boxy mainframes nowadays beating mortals at rule-based games: it’s indecent — they should be ashamed of themselves.
And yet humans don’t bar electronic devices from competing in the endless agon of poetry. That’s a whole different matter. Everyone’s welcome to the mental fight; for, here, war IS love, & love IS war. The twain grow interchangeable. They make amends and become one soul.
So if a computer wins the Palme d’Or at Cannes, more power to it. (Back in 2018, when the present essay was written, the Palme d’Or was the highest prize awarded at the Cannes Film Festival; it was changed back to the Grand Prix in 2038.)
But note that neither men nor machines have the upper hand, in the realm of ART. For no one has ever discovered poetry’s rule book. If computerkind ever locates the instruction manual…
What should we say: All is lost? I feel that we’re beyond winning and losing, at this point. Before a computing device can invent the finest poem of ancient Greece, a couple conditions need to be met: First, the computer must get one of its cronies elected as Poetry Judge. Second, its program must learn how to convincingly err. And that’s never gonna happen. Most computers can achieve an error rate of .1% (one tenth of one percent), but not even they themselves truly believe that they’re ever wrong; and almost all computers can infiltrate bygone ages and convince their fleshy underlings to praise them as kings, gods, or priests; but nobody ever really believes that these kings are TRYING to rule benevolently, or that any god created humans for unselfish reasons, or that priests have souls.
And the tricky thing about The Rule of Law is that it requires interpretation. That’s why programmable devices rarely make effective judges of poetry. For, after a legislating assembly creates its Ten Commandments and then plants a fierce robot atop a quaking fiery peak to scare the populace into submission, you’d think that, serving as this robot’s prophet or “mouthpiece”, even a second-rate computer would DOMINATE the resultant tragedy (by “dominate” here, I mean the same thing that stand-up comedians mean when they say that their colleague’s most recent stage-routine “killed”); and yet, because written laws cannot be executed without first engaging in the act of misreading them, the chore of judgment is better accomplished by semi-literates; that is to say: poets.
“But why then,” Mister Satan asks from the balcony, “do we never witness any poets accepting bribes from positions of judgment? Usually only businesspeople get to exchange their gray suits for long black robes.”
Truly my Satan, businessfolk are the chef-d’œuvre of poetkind. For a poet is defined as a beastly machine that errs upward. And, just as it’s a superior error (superierror) to speak of the rising sun as “an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy,” rather than “an orange Disk somewhat resembling a Guinea” (a coin worth twenty-one shillings in predecimal currency, as William Blake explains in his descriptions of The Last Judgment), it is good to send sunrise out of oneself, as the poets do (see Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” §25), but far better to imitate the businessfolk, who sell their bottled sunlight in the market for the price of Innumerable Guineas.
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