Al, Is That You?

 

Did you see what Merriam-Webster’s word of the year was for 2023?

“Authentic.”

They could have chosen Artificial Intelligence, “AI” (which always looks like Al to me, like the shortened version of the name Allen or Albert) or “rizz” or “deepfake” but didn’t. Authentic won out, and I think it should have.

I am sure the decision was indeed a way to call out AI and all the ramifications of it. I see AI all the time these days and I, for one, am sort of frightened of it. Others more so; artists, photographers, writers all see it as a threat to their livelihood and creativity. College professors wade through fake papers. Politicians use it to slander and defame their candidates. Phones fix bad backgrounds, eliminate people and objects, even aggregate a number of images into one, fake, image where everyone is smiling.

What frightens me more is the AI we don’t see and won’t see even more in the future as it gets better and better and more nefarious and, well, meaner. I should acknowledge that, as I understand it, AI can be an amazing tool – predicting problems and treatments in medicine, finding anomalies in weather patterns, aiding in the building of those amazing images from the Webb telescope that surprise us seemingly every day, and in so many more ways I am sure I will never know.

And, you know what? There’s another thing I think I should be thankful to AI for – it has sent me on a search for the truth, the actual, the authentic.

I ask myself, more than ever, perhaps even for the some of the first times in my life, is this real?

That’s profound and exactly what AI is designed to not have me do.

I listen to a lot of new music, mostly Americana, Folk and Bluegrass, and am finding a new voice coming through it all, a true voice, a real story, a new authenticity and, honestly, I think a lot of folks are looking for that as well.

At The Grammy Awards last Sunday there was a lot of big, big stuff – costumes and choreography and songs from artists I don’t know and never will – none of it AI (I assume) but, for me, fake, somehow digital. And then…

Enter Tracy Chapman, analog, a guitar and an iconic song, Fast Car, and then, Luke Combs joins her and I am holding back tears. The crowd roared; the show stolen.

And then, and then…

Joni Mitchell comes out with her beautiful helper and friend, Brandi Carlisle, and sings Both Sides Now in a spinning throne-like chair and her walking staff and re-steals the whole damn show. Imagine, a woman – a young woman – writes a song in 1966, records it and it becomes a huge hit. (I remember my dad loved it and the song’s been echoing about in my mind for decades.) She records it again, a lavish production, in 2000. And then, she sings it again in 2024 – a frail and beautiful woman, strong and tender and so, so lovely. I let my tears run…

…as they are now.

In an opinion piece in The Washington Post just yesterday, Kim Ruehl writes: “I felt these things again as I watched Tracy Chapman and Joni Mitchell sing their songs. At its best, a song can remind us there is light on offer every day. After the past few years of world events, it still feels as though we are emerging from our tiny cabins. We are pretty sure we know what to expect. But then the light comes — just like that. With it come the tears. We didn’t know how much we needed them.”

Ms. Ruehl wasn’t the only one to mention these two performances, out of the dozens Sunday night – journalists and artists, friends and so many others could not help but marvel, comment and revel in the confelicity that we all shared, the joy.

What we saw was authentic.

What we witnessed was the truth.

We saw unadulterated beauty.

It is not surprising that, in this world of AI and deepfakes and this maelstrom of untruths, many of us saw and savored this moment, humans are better than it all, I swear.

Originally when this all started, (when? I don’t know, it just kind of seeped in, didn’t it?) I was angry and distrustful and vowed to not fall for it and eschew it at every opportunity, and not allow it in my life.

Well, that’s not going to work out and life upsets me enough already.

But something else happened, I look harder now for the authentic.

Go on out now and look for it and yourself, you’ll see it.

A little league baseball game.

A high school musical.

The lyrics to this new song or that old one.

The poems of our tender sons.

The tears of a lover lost.

The stone truth in a memory turned to the sun.

 

Look for it.

 

AI can simply not compare to the brushstrokes in a Rothko painting, the story in a Norman Rockwell, the images of Mapplethorpe, the detail in a Vermeer. It cannot compare to “To be…” or "When he was nearly thirteen my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow..." and all that comes after those lines. It shall never even hum to Brahms’ German Requiem, Bohemian Rhapsody or an American in Paris. It could never conjure the folk dances of the indigenous or put on the slippers at the Bolshoi Ballet.

It can never get to the truth of it all, this Art.

Seek that truth. Seek that place. Seek that, well… Love. Like the Tinman of Oz, you can see its heartlessness and will never get one. It simply… can’t.

There is no Artificial Love.

 

Poetry is Hard, Memory is Sweet

 

I’ve been sick this last week – the same old cold, flu-like symptoms, sniffly, stuffy, sneezy gunk that has meandered across this modern country for decades at least.

“Somethings going around” they say. No real treatment. Common.

So, I am not as prepared today as I sometimes am; more prepared than others, honestly.

 

I have struggled with finding a clear timeline through my life. “Now” roams through it all like that same virus that sores my throat and muddles my mind a bit. You know this, I’ve mentioned it before… like, well, all the time. As hard as it is to explain sometimes makes me think is just me.

And then you recognize it somewhere else. 

Someone mentions how they can’t remember when something was, but it seems like just yesterday. 

You see a face, your face, mine, and can’t imagine when that face is, could it possibly be me, you, now? 

A sun sets in tomorrows yet to come… today.

Sometimes you can read it in a favorite Christmas story by Dickens.

Sometimes it weeps from a poem by Li-Young Lee:

 

                 Mnemonic

 

I was tired. So I lay down.

My lids grew heavy. So I slept.

Slender memory, stay with me.

I was cold once. So my father took off his blue sweater.

He wrapped me in it, and I never gave it back.

It is the sweater he wore to America,

this one, which I've grown into, whose sleeves are too long,

whose elbows have thinned, who outlives its rightful owner.

Flamboyant blue in daylight, poor blue by daylight,

it is black in the folds.

A serious man who devised complex systems of numbers and rhymes

to aid him in remembering, a man who forgot nothing, my father

would be ashamed of me.

Not because I'm forgetful,

but because there is no order

to my memory, a heap

of details, uncatalogued, illogical.

For instance:

God was lonely. So he made me.

My father loved me. So he spanked me.

It hurt him to do so. He did it daily.

The earth is flat. Those who fall off don't return.

The earth is round. All things reveal themselves to men only gradually.

It won't last. Memory is sweet.

Even when it's painful, memory is sweet.

Once I was cold. So my father took off his blue sweater.

                                           ____

Poetry is hard. Yes.

 

(Thanks for reminding me of this one, Nick.)

 

If you are ever looking for a long-forgotten poem, it's probably here, poets.org

 

With No One to Tell My Upset To

 

Walk with me down the streets and trails and memories of my childhood map. We’ll just go out the garage here and head out to the street, Bunnel Road - rural route three, then four and then finally: three, eight, nine, one, four arbitrary numbers for me to learn as a boy. It’s a bright and pale green morning, Spring of nineteen-hundred-and-seventy-two.

We’ll go left on the road up here at the end of the sharp stone drive. There, that’s my friend JB’s house, it’s early in the day and the usual hum of activity from five kids there is yet to begin. Here’s the Childers’ and Dodds’ houses, close to the road, childless now and silent.

Bunnel (sometimes one ‘l’ sometimes two, even on official Union township maps and titles and such, no consistency) dead ends under a tired old STOP sign, the letters cracked and peeling, right into State Route 741. 

Let’s scurry across here - the trucks and cars go fifty, sixty miles an hour and the road drops off both ways and the visibility is limited; hard in a car, too. No dog today so we needn’t worry enough to pick him up and rush him across the street, confused and irritated – the dog that is.

Yes, it is sand. And pebbles and crushed stone. Down the road behind us is a very busy sand-and-gravel company with pits dug in between the fields and meadows, ponds, and streams all around here. The sand especially spills from the rusted, diesel-black-smoke-bellowing dump trucks that rumble past our house back behind us now and race down this state road.

There’s what looks to be a pull-off up ahead and just beyond that is a rutted gravel road. Step carefully, it quickly steepens and snakes right. It’s an abandoned pit they probably had to quit because the road’s so close. 

So, that’s how this works, on a flat, ever-widening floor sits a scoopy sort of crane thing that just tears into the walls around it. Bucket after bucket go into trucks, then to the plant to be washed and separated and crushed on machines we do not play on – way over there, see the dust behind the Barnes’ cornfield? It’s all really massive.

Wait, you are going?

Was it this little rifle in my hand?

No hard feelings. I do need to go on ahead though, thanks for walking with me. Truth is I would’ve had to ask you go soon anyway – sometimes the road is just for one.

This is the pit cleverly known locally as: “The Shootin’ Pit.” Anyone around here would know exactly where you were talking about.

Right, the BB gun. Well, that’s why I am here. It’s fun to shoot the little “bullet balls,” the BBs, into the dirt walls and old paper targets and jumbled, colored glass from bottles shot to pieces. The pump and pop of the gun echoes back sharply.  Everything is sharp - the shards of glass, the brass casings everywhere underfoot, the angle of the sun, even the vaguely lingering taste of cordite, gunpowder, sweat and stone.

I tire of shooting the little gun, a nice Daisey Model 25 with a real wooden stock, a Christmas gift I could not wait to get. I walk up and out of the back of the pit and wander down a rutted trail, used now only occasionally by farmers and dirt bikes.

In the branch of a tree hanging over the dirt road, I spy a female cardinal, grey and red against the new green. I am imagining I am frontiersman – the book having just been finished – and level that rifle, take aim, and…

… I hit the damn thing. It is sheer chance, BB guns are crazily inaccurate. The bird drops to the dirt track with a soft, feathered whump. I run ahead, so mixed up and surprised, briefly proud of my skill and then, when I get closer, I am horrified at what I have done.

It looks like an Audubon illustration whose plates I’d seen in the trusty World Book encyclopedias in the basement. A patch of the dappled sun shines on it, spotlight like, and the detail is insane, three dimensional, quivering in its realness. The sun rainbows and dances on the feathers and a little bead of an eye looks toward nothing.

I was just goofin’, I think to myself, I never thought I’d hit it, I see no wound, but I assume she’s lying on it. Blood, entrails. I know these things happen - I’ve seen the rabbits skinned and deer dressed in the field; the familiar dog hit by these infernal trucks; smashed possums and rotting raccoons; fileted fish rinsed of scales and guts in a rushing stream - I know the cycle, I know the unending circle. But… I’d never killed something.

 I sit down beside it, my mind flies. I am so, so sorry, I think to the little bird. Who was I to do this? This boy-pain sweeps over me – I stopped a life. I feel ashamed both because I hit it and, and… I know that the others would say ‘good shot’ and ‘it’s just a bird’ and, worst, ‘don’t be such a sissy about it.’ My senses are firing. I feel the cold-barrelled Model 25 and set it on the warm earth beside me. I taste a tear. I smell the verdant Spring woods. I see that stupid, fateful bird.

I hear the quick “cheer, cheer, cheer; birdie, birdie, birdie” of another cardinal. I imagine a nest of eggs, bluish brown, speckled. Abandoned.

I begin to sob.

I barely understand why this is so wildly emotional for me. I think of how alone I am. I think of how difficult it seems, how impossible to understand, to explain. I am the most upset I have ever been, and I am suddenly hit with the loneliest thought a boy could have: I cannot tell anyone.

I am so upset, with no one to tell my upset to. I have a feeling this will happen often, which upsets me more.

 

And then, as God is my witness, that bird trembled its wings, hopped up, shot me a dirty look, chirped angrily and flew away - cursing me for all time to expect a perfect, happy ending.

 

Later – days, years, decades, scores, tomorrow… yesterday – another story enfolds.

An older dude. A lost set of keys. Phone forgotten. A red truck. A leather bag. Frantic, panicked searching. No way to call. Inside the store. Outside, inside the truck. Anxious and scared.

Tears. Frustration. Shame. Fear, fear, fear. So, so upset.

He is so upset, with no one to tell his upset to. 

Again. Always?

The keys are in the bottom of the leather bag tangled up in a loose inner seam, so they didn’t come out when the bag was dumped. Another happy ending…

 

One of these memories triggered the other, I am not certain of the order, though.