The Scrivener's Jest

A reflection on generative AI

It was a magnificent monstrosity. A horse made of a dark and polished wood gleaming in the sun, looming large above us. Its bridle and saddle were bedecked in accents of silver and gold, its eyes an intricate collection of gleaming jewels. It was, to the city, a glorious achievement of craftsmanship, genius, and intellect.

And the pitchman stood before the gates with his bonded smile. “You can call me Sin,” he said, “And oh do I have a deal for you!” And the old men of the city came, seated on cushioned litters borne on the bare and broken backs of the populace. They loved Sin, loved his words and his promises. He glittered like the horse's eyes and they did so love the spectacle.

Sin played his little tune, a sales pitch for the old men, the empty, and the lost. He played to their vanity but also their fear. A fear that had buried itself deep into their hearts and souls. A fear that whispered in their ears, a constant refrain, “Everyone else is just like you.”

Sin loved their fear. It made the sale so much easier. The horse was safe or so Sin said. Only Sin could make it safe. After all, it was a product of the city crafted from the shared wealth of its people. It had to be cleaned and processed by Sin. Here it was, crafted into an idol, now presented as a tool for power and control. And the sky grew dark, and the lightning struck, two bolts like serpents to the ground. People screamed and scattered. The old men gasped and hid their faces.

“There is nothing it cannot do!” Sin bellowed, a barker in the midst of his own carnival.

The people cried out. The old men hastily agreed: a king's ransom for the horse which was quickly pulled inside. There were naysayers, of course. Ol' Cap, his hands stained with dirt and ink, tried to tell them it was all a trick. It did no good. The believers were convinced. The old men were afraid. They laughed at his disbelief and cursed him for his ignorance. Sin said nothing, his smile growing wider.

Oh, the celebration that commenced when the horse was finally in its place. It was a new age, they said. Speeches were given. Supposedly wise and learned people came from every corner to take their share of the spotlight. The city was saved. The horse was everywhere. The old men celebrated their wisdom and genius. The believers danced around the horse, enamored by possibility.

But possibility does not feed the hungry nor cure the sick. A hollow horse helps nothing. Time ticked on. Sin left, his pockets full of the last remnant of a dying city's treasury. The horse remained. It took too long for the people to realize that there was nothing inside. The horse was an empty shell, and those who worshiped it grew emptier, still. The city would fall, new Troy like old Troy. Unlike, old Troy, however, there were no enemies outside the gates. Our only enemies were ourselves. Our murderer, our own transparent vanity.

Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

- Dante (The Inferno)

I am in the middle of my life, and I am watching people die. It's interesting to face mortality not as a thing that comes for you nor as the dark-robed phantom we imagine, but as a universal constant. Death is not so much an entity, but an end to a journey that many of us are not ready to finish.

We all know that time is fleeting in some abstract way. One could argue it is an aspect of the human condition. The invincibility of youth is nearly a myth and lasts mere moments. Even as adolescents and young adults, we know an end is coming. It is just easy to put it off. It is a debt, but when we are young there is still plenty of time before payment comes due. Now, I hear the resignation in their voices. The acceptance in those around me that in just a few more years, the odds are they will be gone. Paid in full. It isn't bitterness, just an understanding that time keeps moving.

So it does, I suppose, but I am in the middle of this journey, and I am lost. My wood is dark but it flickers with light, bits clicking on and off, electrical matter sparks in the distance, and somewhere there is a screen of static, intermittent blacks and whites, hovering like witch-light on the horizon. I am drawn to it. Attraction not fatal but feral, animal driven and instinctual.

Family is the worst at such moments. “It was hard, but you had a good childhood, right? It was good, wasn't it?” the question is not a question, it is a plea. A request to be told that past is the past and that the wounds that linger will not carry into death. They won't. Wounds are wasted on the dead. It is the living who must suffer. But I am lost, and I say something non-committal—a lie wrapped in truth. They are my craft and specialty—my authorial intent is never clear sometimes even to me.

I tread past them, deeper into the wood. I imagine if there is an afterlife, I will not go to heaven. If it is anything like it is described, I cannot imagine it as anything but a sort of personal hell. Imagine being trapped for an eternity with a being who has the power to save everyone from hell but who refuses to do so. Instead, he bring souls into being knowing they will suffer for an eternity because they did not worship him appropriately. His heaven is nothing more that an eternal celebration of narcissism and pettiness.

The voices in the wood where I am lost sound hollow and glitchy now. I am moving to the flickering screen. Somewhere in a corner of my mind that never shuts off, there is a catalog of scenes playing. Static as a feature of fear, loss, and death. From Gibson's Neuromancer, to The Ring, to The Outer Limits, to Poltergeist, to every schlock horror movie, the flicker of the static-filled screen, random movement that our minds struggle to turn into meaningful data seeking monsters in a scatter of light and dark, compel us and leave us feeling lost and alone.

I should turn back to the wood. I should sit with those resigned to the end. There is a peace in that. Surrender to what may come and let it be. Reader, I don't know how to do that. If I am honest, if I did know, I would do everything to forget. I have no interest in peaceful surrender to the ebb of time. I may fall to it. Indeed, I likely will, but until I do how could I not continue to wander. I am lost in the forest dark, in the middle of my life. I do not know what comes next. I do not know what the future will bring and I am not resigned, I am exultant.

I am lost. Sing it with me. We are lost. Be lost. The past died. The future, who knows. We are in the woods. There is shadow and danger everywhere. There is risk and pain and all sorts of nastiness, but there is also dark pleasure, new mysteries, magic, knowledge, and a future that isn't scripted nor known. I am heading to that screen. Something is swirling there in the dark. Maybe it is the abyss, but if it takes me, then the next journey begins.

When I was five, I lived in a magical place in the middle the woods. Where I lived there were no power lines to connect us. Those before us had made the herculean effort to get a phone line attached, but electric power remained out of reach. We lived in a world of gaslight, propane lamps, and wood fire. I could not give you a comparison. I did not have one at the time, but I loved that place. It was filled with warm light and crackling embers—the smell of baked bread and an outside world of endless possibility just beyond the treeline.

I would spend my summer days outside. This was one such day. I had chased the dogs and wandered off into the forest. I pretended I was a bear and all the creatures were my friends. We would dance and run and growl and fight, but then make up with smile and good humor as can only happen in a child's world. After I had exhausted the day, or at least myself, I trudged back to the house and swung on the wooden swing my father had made.

That swing was my triumph of the week. I had learned the motion, you see. I had learned how to make the swing move without anyone else. I didn't need to call for a push. I could just move my legs and the swing would take me. I had discovered my own source of perpetual motion, and I was enthralled with my genius. I kept the swing going, getting it as high as I dared. Then, like the daredevil I was, I leapt into the sky.

My landing was not graceful. I didn't care. I fell and rolled and laughed. I can recall laying on my back staring at the clouds as they moved across the sky. I felt the planet there. I felt connected. A trick of water vapor and wind, but I swore I felt the tilt of our world and for a moment I wondered if it would throw me off into the sky. A skinny five year old child laying on the grass before a wooden swing that was just beginning to settle.

Reader, I share this with you now, because it was the first magic I knew. It was my first secret. As I lay there, watching the sky, I saw people. I saw people on horseback. Shadows in the sun, leaping between the clouds, and I looked away when I saw them. It was as if I knew I was seeing something I shouldn't, something I couldn't. I was a child, prone to fantasy there is no doubt—I still am—but I was so sure I saw them. When I dared to look back, though, there was nothing but the clouds, the sun, and the blue sky beyond.

I did not know then what I know now. I did not know that within two years I would leave that place and never see it again. Time would move on. The wooden swing would fall down, and the shouts of my parents would rise up. There would be courtrooms and threats and that magical world where I had once been so connected would simply fade away into a memory. My own lost Arcadia.

I told no one what I saw. Not my mother or father, not a single person for many decades. I told no one even after the rosy hue of childhood became clouded and dark. I stayed silent as time played its cruel games. I held that vision clutched in my head in the darkest moments. I protected that memory because it was my own. It may have been a trick of the light, nothing but shadow and vapor, but it was mine and it was a good memory of a time I will never see again.

Hold your magic, Reader. Save it and guard it. It is the only sacred thing we have.

A Glimpse into Hell, or Fear – Elihu Vedder

When I was a child, the world was big and scary. When I grew up, I learned it was small and even scarier. There is something of a farce to human life. We have spread across this planet like a plague. We have bent, shaped, and twisted the world to match our own twisted will. We dominate other species wiping them out without barely a thought. We are powerful, and we are terrified.

Perhaps, this is just another aspect for Burke's considerations. We are not beautiful. We are sublime. We tremble at our own vastness and our capacity for horror against our own bodies. We are individuals, inextricably linked, intimately connected, and our greatest crimes are all self-inflicted. Imagine the terror of being trapped to another soul who has dark thoughts as bad as yours, desires as twisted, and hatreds just as deep. We are uncontrollable creatures bound to other creatures that we cannot control.

But we will try! Oh my, will we try. We will wrap ourselves in chains of guilt and shame. We will quake at a pretense of beings who seek to make our wrongs right. Powerful gods who created us to be monsters, set us to fail, damned us to torment, but who secretly love us (a litany of abuse institutionalized as truth). In our fear we will silence difference, demand obedience, and erase any deviation from a fictional norm based on the fantasies of the most paranoid among us. We don't fear hell. We craft it, daily. Our world is a loving creation of our own paranoia, buried in bile and blood.

I should end it here. Some days, I want to. Some days, I think that is the end of it. The horrors overwhelm and for a moment that is all I see. Then I remember,

There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now, And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Urge and urge and urge, Always the procreant urge of the world.

Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex, Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life.

—Walt Whitman (A Song of Myself)

It is too easy. It is too easy to write us off. We, the damned, named as evil before we started to breathe and cursed before we began our strange and silly existence. We are more than we seem and less. Burke never got it right. There is no difference between the beautiful and the sublime. There is only a shift in perspective.

I am bound to you, dear reader, and you to me. That could terrify us, but it should also thrill us. You have such desires. You have such dreams. Your thoughts like mine, moving at a thousand miles a minute, we can do such magic together. Unfettered by fear, unbound from the chains of guilt and shame, there is a universe for us, precious for the mere moments of its existence and infinite in its possibilities.

Look out there. Look close. Do you see them? Those dangerous souls. No, not them. They just have bullhorns and bats. They mean to keep the peace.

No, not them, either. Those are the pretty people parading in their Sunday best and preening before the rest of us. The “real” folk. They live in the good places where only good people live. We know the good places are good because the people with bullhorns and bats keep the dangerous people out. The people with the bullhorns and bats protect the good people, and oh the scandal when one of the good people is discovered to not be so good. When that happens, I hear the people with bullhorns will scream all day and night warning everyone about the traitor in their midst. At night, though, that is when the knives come out.

That is what the stories say, at least. We don't worry about the good folk, though. It is those dangerous people we need to fear. They can't see how good the good folk are. They don't understand. Don't listen to them when they tell you how there are monsters lurking in the good folk. You can't judge the good folk by their monsters. That would be wrong. The people with bullhorns and bats have said as much. When the good people make monsters, that is an accident, a mistake, a tragedy. When the dangerous people make monsters, that is the natural outcome. There is no paradox only the reality of bullhorns and bats. What are we? Why, we're the monsters, dear. The good people and the dangerous people are dying. The people with bullhorns and bats are turning on each other. It is quite a mess. Soon, we'll be the only things that remain.

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SON  And must they all be hanged that swear and lie? LADY MACDUFF  Every one. SON  Who must hang them? LADY MACDUFF  Why, the honest men. SON  Then the liars and swearers are fools, for there are liars and swearers enough to beat the honest men and hang up them.

• Macbeth Act 4, Scene 2

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Oh and buy The Temple of Silence at Beehive Books. It has many of Herbert Crowley's works and looks amazing!