On The Prisoner television show

McGill University campus, 1940s

The Beatles “Revolution 9” could be used as a surrealistic sound track, played over a psychedelic montage of images, for Patrick McGoohan’s television drama, The Prisoner (1967-1968). The protagonist in The Prisoner is played by McGoohan, a former secret agent who suddenly resigns his post but offers no explanation for his decision. McGoohan’s former employer finds his sudden resignation suspicious and McGoohan is abducted from his home and finds himself incarcerated at an unknown seaside location referred to as The Village; his identity is also attacked, he is referred to by his new name, Number Six; the head of The Village is, of course, Number One. The Village is a precursor, and suggestive of, the 15-minute city; in this case it is a place to keep former government employees, all with numbers for names, and they live in relative freedom (the freedom of farm animals), socializing, playing chess, reading The Village newspaper, and some inhabitants are informers on other inhabitants of The Village. The Village is no gulag, it might be called a benevolent incarceration, it is comfortable but no one can leave and the authorities are always attempting to either control or get information out of the inhabitants, and they are all prisoners. But Number Six is not a typical inhabitant, he fights back, he tries to escape. When interrogated Number Six repeats, “I Am Not a Number; I Am a Free Man”; his strength lies in his not surrendering to his jailers, his remaining freedom lies in his refusal to give up information about himself. He says, "I will not make any deals with you. I've resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered! My life is my own!"  The whole series of seventeen episodes is a metaphor for our own existence; who do we believe and what do we believe? There is a penalty for noncompliance with the authorities, it is to be an outcast, detained, attacked, and denied one’s freedom; it is to be gaslighted. While other inhabitants of The Village have been pacified, Number Six constantly challenges the authority of his jailers; he is more determined than the other prisoners. No one escapes from The Village, attempted escape results in being chased down by an ominous giant inflated object called Rover, and inhabitants of The Village are constantly surveilled by CCTV. The Village is a dystopia somewhere between George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World; it predates the 15 minute city. What else can we take from The Prisoner? It is that we are now, and have always been, prisoners, prisoners of ideas, race, social class, wealth, privilege or poverty, politics, our birth, gender, age, and/or religion, and this has decided the purpose and meaning of our existence. Our prison is self made and no one can free you but yourself. The Beatles were fans of The Prisoner and a Beatles song, “All You Need is Love”, was played during in the final episode; is it any wonder that the refrain, "Number Nine, Number Nine", is repeated in The Beatles most idiosyncratic song, “Revolution 9”? The Prisoner is both a psychological and political metaphor for contemporary life, now more so than in 1967. I nominate Laurence Fox to play in any remake of The Prisoner or a life of Patrick McGoohan.                                                         

Be seeing you.

The overweening desire for fame

 

What has gone wrong with Western society? Are we in decline or are we just changing? Have we become a society with few moral values or are different moral values evolving?  Are we happier, more fulfilled, better people who think of the other person and not just ourselves?  Are we happy, or are we just full of ourselves; or do we have no introspection, no self-doubt, and no self-awareness?       

Let’s look at Americans. During the last thirty years Americans have become ultra extroverts, every child is told they can become anything they want, they can do anything they want; everything they do is praised; subsequently, there are very few shy and introspective children left. You see people on television, on the game show The Price is Right; when audience members are called to come forward and be contestants they dance, pull faces, do cart wheels, high five a dozen strangers, scream, yell, and even the old have become cards and cut ups despite arthritic limbs and palsy, even the old behave in a way no one would have behaved just a few years ago. Fame and extroversion seem to go together. Look at celebrities, fame and self-promotion are what they crave but these are no replacement for whatever once sustained us as a society; we have abandoned what is traditional at great cost to society and to our very souls. And since traditional values have been abandoned the young have nothing real to believe in but the desire to be famous, nothing sustains them, they have been psychologically impoverished by cancelling both their traditions and culture, no wonder social media are so important to them, we're all famous on social media. 

Today, even small children want to be famous but, like everybody else, not for any real accomplishment but for fame itself; it is fame for just existing, without introspection or thought or education or talent or hard work or love of what you are doing or for caring for other people. The modest person will come in last around here! And since we are all special without doing something that makes us special, then why bother accomplishing anything? Just being ourselves makes us special, we are "special for nothing", like body builders who have big muscles not for doing work but solely for appearance. 

No one is special in themselves and fame is for doing something that is a real accomplishment, for commitment and passion, for something that will possibly make you famous --your self-worth is not contingent on becoming famous-- fame is not just for who you already are, it is for doing something that other people have not done before or few have achieved. Fame diverts you from your calling in life, it diminishes your calling, it prevents you from discovering your calling. And no, you cannot be whatever you want to be even though your grade school teachers told you so. What someone accomplishes is done for its own sake, it is your calling in life, it is never to be famous; fame is a by-product of excelling at what you love to do and, even then, fame has limited if any importance. A hundred years ago DH Lawrence wrote of the “bitch goddess success”, we now have our own god, it is fame. 

Artificial Intelligence and Poetry

 

2012

            

It is through human expression that we can defeat the over arching digital tyranny; through joy and poetry we can assert our humanity.

--Richard Olafson, Shifting Towards Vitalism (2023)

In the old days, when home computers were just beginning to be available to the public, some poets made poems using computer technology and their own original programmes; some of these poems were permutations of phrases, some resulted in Surrealistic visual images, and while a few of these poems were interesting they were basically meaningless as poetry and never real poems. Now we’ve moved on to Artificial Intelligence writing, well, anything you want it to write including poetry. 

There is a short video on YouTube of Joe Rogan telling us that blood, discovered at the bottom of the Ark of the Covenant, had been analysed and was the blood of Jesus Christ, proving both His divinity and His existence. This video was, of course, a creation of Artificial Intelligence, it was a hoax, an attempt to fool or deceive people. This, and other videos created by Artificial Intelligence, gives one pause, what if this video was of someone in authority making some statement that people believed but it was all lies or propaganda? We are concerned with AI because it is one of the recent technologies that could be disastrous for humanity, and excluding some positive uses the existence of AI, for most people, is frightening, it is to deceive the viewer. What do we believe, and who do we believe, if technology can now perfectly duplicate the voice and facial characteristics of people in authority? Or if AI can write fake texts? There have always been false or fake texts and there will be more in the future generated by AI technology. 

Why anyone would want to write AI poems is beyond me, there is no money in poetry, there is no fame, there is nothing to gain except possibly some amusement or novelty. AI can write screen plays, articles for Sports Illustrate magazine and newspapers, content for websites, PhD dissertations, term papers, or whatever someone wants and it is inexpensive, fast, possibly accurate, and he/she doesn't have to do the writing or pay an actual human writer. But poetry? Perhaps because poetry is of increasingly less value to society it is doubtful that anyone will write poems using AI except as a prank, a joke, or out of curiosity. But there is something important to learn from this possible use of Artificial Intelligence and poetry: it is to remember what it means to be human.

Can AI ever write poetry? It is not possible for one reason: poetry is the voice of the human soul and computers don't have souls. Even if computer technology becomes so sophisticated that a computer thinks it is an autonomous human being, that it attains "personhood", it will still not be poetry. Poetry requires a human being writing poems and this requires living in the physical world with real life relationships with other human beings. Even if an intelligent human-looking robot could be created, with built-in AI, it is still a computer and it has no soul. Even if you could programme in the functions of a soul--for instance, compassion, understanding, empathy, emotions, spirituality, awe, a family history, and reflection on the past--and this computer writes "poetry", it is still not poetry, it still can't express what the human soul can express. A human has a biological level of existence and a computer is man-made, it is a machine even if it is the most sophisticated machine made by man. And a computer can never have a style of writing that is honed by experience and a multiplicity of events that organize themselves randomly and are the result of events far too complicated to ever be duplicated or created in themselves. AI and its progression, a humanoid robot, is always manufactured by people, or descended from a generation of computers invented and manufactured by people; it is not created by sexual intercourse, there is no hormonal basis to AI, it has no belief in spirituality (or anything else), it has no traditions whether religious, ancestral, cultural, historical, or genetic that human beings have, and if sometime in the future it has some of these qualities, they will always be artificially created and not the result of human interaction; AI will never have genuine human qualities. Even if  one day AI can identify as "human" it is still not the real thing. If we come to a time when computers think they are human beings, or the equivalent of human beings, with free will and emotions and mobility, it is possible that robots will take over from human beings, but even then whatever a robot with AI can express will never be real poetry. AI can write a facsimile poem but never a real poem. By definition only a human being can write a real poem just as only a human being can react to that poem with emotions and human reflection. AI and the human soul are mutually exclusive. 

"the nation is divided . . ."

 

The Unicorn Rests in a Garden
(or The Unicorn in Captivity)
by an unknown artist, 1495–1505

When the nation is divided

there is no nation: when history is discarded

the old regret what life has become;

there is no nation when people

have lost belief in the soul; there is no nation

when people are divided and turn on each other;

when the nation turns its back 

on what made it a nation

there is no nation:

    ships don't reach harbour,

    cod fish so plentiful off Nfld's coast are gone,

    the massacre of buffalos, a mountain of bones 

    on a bleak autumn morning,

    flash mobs stealing everything from stores,

    crows, carrion, and crowds of people

    live in darkness, 

    goodness is ridiculed, vulgarity         

    celebrated, macabre faces in clouds, 

    mobs pounding on old people's front doors:

what is old is cancelled

as decreed, as legislated; 

and people love ignorance and renounce

their own culture; 

they are crossing the bridge

cities burn and the ruins 

are ploughed into dust—

                                            11 May 2023

"No More Lockdown" by Van Morrison

 

In NYC

No more lockdown
No more government overreach
No more fascist police
Disturbing our peace
No more taking of our freedom
And our God-given rights
Pretending it's for our safety
When it's really to enslave
Who's running our country?
Who's running our world?
Examine it closely
And watch it unfurl

No more lockdown
No more threats
No more imperial college
Scientists making up crooked facts
No more lockdown
No more pulling the wool over our eyes
No more celebrities telling us
Telling us what we're supposed to feel
No more status quo
Put your shoulder to the wind

No more lockdown
No more lockdown
No more lockdown
No more lockdown

No more lockdown
No more government overreach
No more fascist police
Disturbing our peace
No more taking our freedom
And our God-given rights
Pretending it's for our safety
When it's really to enslave
Who's running our country?
Who's running our world?
Examine it closely
And watch it unfurl

No more lockdown
No more threats
No more imperial college scientists
Making up crooked facts
No more lockdown
No more pulling the wool over our eyes
No more celebrities telling us
How we're supposed to feel
No more status quo
Gotta put your shoulder to the wind

No more lockdown
No more lockdown
No more lockdown
No more lockdown
No more lockdown
No more lockdown

No more lockdown
No more lockdown
No more lockdown
No more lockdown
No more lockdown
No more lockdown
No more lockdown
No more lockdown