The eroticism of warfare and its erotic connotation and phallic symbolisms. Penetration, fratriarchy, intimacy of all male military, arrows, Penn’s human selves as tracer round ammunition.
Sex in Bob Honey’s word is fantastic, or is it?
According to Hitler’s CIA file released in full in 2000, Dr. Sedgwick was told the following by Mrs. Brigid Hitler, the ex-wife of Alois Hitler II, Adolf Hitler’s half-brother. “She called on Dr. Sedwick on August 10, 1937, and told him that her ex-husband Alois had described his own father as of very violent temper, in the habit of beating his dog until the dog wet the carpet. He also beat his children and upon occasion in a bad temper would go so far as to beat his wife Klara.” The report goes on to reveal “The pattern thus becomes clear. On one side was the hated father and on the other the suppressed mother, who quite possibly enjoyed this treatment, and young Adolf, at this period just reaching the age of puberty …”
“There is not the slightest doubt that Hitler’s hysterical-eyed mother occupies the central position in his whole erotic genesis.”
And Charles Manson, murderer and cult icon has an album? His “Invisible Tears“, a soft funny-girl-kinda-tease-tune surely not felt by his victims and a comment left by one You Tube admirer “R.I.P. you talented fool”. Other hits like “People Say I’m No Good” express an alternate world in song:
People say I’m no good
But they never never do they say
Why their world is so mixed up
Or how it got that way
Or the other kitschy Manson tune “My World”:
My world
Is a sad world
Often wonder if there’s blame
Such a fool in a mad, mad world…
The sex scene in Bob Honey is brief, confused and well, military.
After the clothes off and vagaries of sex, the performance is appraised: “Good vagina. Maybe more Vietnam.” Annie seems to take it for the need of an aid, a jungle-like thing, perhaps a merkin for the private parts? Penn takes another swipe at the Millennial generation – a world of “Adderall” (
Amphetamine/dextroamphetamine) where the “advertiser’s chickens had come home to roost.” Is Penn saying we have been victimized by advertisers?
After watching a squirrel scene in Chris Farley’s last movie “Almost Heroes”, I wondered if rabbits could swim. Turns out the can, but it seems dangerous. Seems like some folks got upset when a rabbit was shown in a swimming pool. A petition with 1,646 supporters simply said enough: Please Stop Promoting Rabbits in Swimming Pools.[1]
War, it turns out is intensely erotic. Some argue that Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus”, remade by Ralph Feinnes, is intensely sexual on many levels.
And World War One wasn’t just muddy trenches. We can see similarities in countries approaches to controlling the desires of troops with mixed success (like with COVID).
Not wanting to offend their allies, the British High Command insisted that brothels should be kept ‘in bounds’ for most of the war. Officers also visited the brothels, but they were kept separate – they went to Blue Lamps; the other men were serviced in Red Lamps.
The American forces took a different approach. The American Expeditionary Forces placed brothels out of bounds for soldiers and disinfection was compulsory within three hours of contact. If a man disregarded this procedure and subsequently developed venereal disease, he could be tried for neglect of duty.
However, French doctors who treated the American soldiers argued that American forces were contaminated with syphilis or gonorrhoea “in spite of the punishments and severe orders” that were in place.[2]
Perhaps Penn, a famous anti-war protester is trying to tell us that war is a distortion.
As the narrator of Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story” puts it:
“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.”[3]
Penn also criticizes the youth for trying to “uninvent the wheel of love” and being “willfully inattentive to control computations or surveillance”, being “lost to letters” and “steeped in transactional sex”.
Well, Bob Honey and all the characters in the book are transactional. It’s like an upside-down version of Ibsen’s “Doll House” except darker. I do remember my grandfather railing against the world in his old age circa 1980. He hated Ronald Reagan and Dallas Texas. John F. Kennedy was “his President”.
I also think I know why so many people stop reading the book. Reading transactional fiction is painful because it’s not natural. There is a disharmony. Irrationality in language may lead to less-than-optimal results. Ms. Lesley Chamberlain, a most interesting writer. “After all, if we lose our gift for rational language, what lesser way of deliberating on the useful and the just are we left with? “
What do you call it when you hold two opposing concepts in your mind that mutually exclude each other? Cognitive dissonance. Birthed from machine-speak. I’ve read poems created from machines and it may well be that parts of this book were written by an algorithm. Mebbe’ this is why the Google AI researcher Timnit Gebru quit or was terminated — because she thought that indexing all languages and creating new ones was too powerful a notion for one entity.[4]
Mika Beaudrie, in his article “Can Computer’s Write Poetry” gives a brief sketch of computers and their ability to write poetry. He provides two stanzas and asks, ‘can you guess which was written by a machine?’[5]
Here is the first:
I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air –
Between the Heaves of Storm –
The Eyes around – had wrung them dry –
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset – when the King
Be witnessed – in the Room –
I willed my Keepsakes – Signed away
What portions of me be
Assignable – and then it was
There interposed a Fly –
With Blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz –
Between the light – and me –
And then the Windows failed – and then
I could not see to see –[6]
And the second,
Slowly I dream of flying. I observe turnpikes and streets studded with bushes. Coldly my soaring widens my awareness. To guide myself I determinedly start to kill my pleasure during the time that hours and milliseconds pass away. Aid me in this and soaring is formidable, do not and wining is unhinged.
Beaudrie’s asks if we can tell if which was written by a human. The question is misplaced. Since it is the human that is the arbiter, poetry can be anything that the human mind can imagine. This is not so with machines.
Reading the first poem actually teaches us why machines will never be able to write poetry.
Poetry is more than a simple gathering of words. For programmer types, poetry is the ultimate declarative programming. It describes the logic of ideas without describing its control flow. Like functional programming, the ‘thing in itself’ is a thing of profound beauty when done properly.
Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is arguably the beginning of modern poetry:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.[7]
The placement of each punctuation as well as the length and selection of each word forms a past, present and future. In the first poem above, the opening line:
I heard a fly buzz when I died
shows the concept of dying and the life surrounding death, feeding on it, surviving on it. Since death has no answer, a machine cannot possibly conceptualize ambiguity which is manifested in human life.
Machines cannot edit which is critical for poetry to succeed in conveying meaningful messages to human readers. Poetry often carries within it multiple meanings and can be used to construct monuments as in the case of Marina Tsvetaeva’s “Poems to Bohemia”.[8]
These poems written over 1938-1939 together are meant to create a monumental structure of defiance to an unjustified invasion. Each poem, filled with em dashes and other punctuation meant to convey intensity, was used by Emily Dickinson who was adamant in their defense.
Like Tsvetaeva, Dickinson was absolute in her use of punctuation. “Like songs set to music, Dickinson’s poems are accompanied by a punctuation of varying pauses, tones, and rhythms that extend, modify, and emancipate the words, while pointing to the silent places from which language erupts.”[9]
No machine has the proximity to human fire which Dickinson likened to volcano in the poem below. The Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva was no less intense in her metaphors describing powerful life forces.
A still—Volcano—Life—
That flickered in the night—
When it was dark enough to do
Without erasing sight—
A quiet—Earthquake Style—
Too subtle to suspect
By natures this side Naples—
The North cannot detect
The Solemn—Torrid—Symbol—
The lips that never lie—
Whose hissing Corals part—and shut—
And Cities—ooze away— [10]
The placement of words and punctuation is not a decision a machine can make. Only humans contain emotion and because of their fire, they have a soul.
Life then is precious beyond belief. Only poetry can show this consistently.
The second piece of writing, designed by an algorithm, is a pure imitation based on patterns fed into it. If the machine imitates a first structure, what does the human written text imitate?
Where does the machine get its ‘data’?
It can be argued that while the Racter machine imitates in written patterns[11], the human mind combines impression and mystery, spontaneity inside eternal fire and impression.
In other words, the human being is a living organism whose brain encapsulates the beginning and end of all that breathe to live. Looked at on a continuum, the human chain of mind begins and ends with itself.
And so, it is with the machine. Therefore, the machine is a rough extension of the human mind, a tool whose success is fixed. According to Alan Turing, “computers can be said to have intelligence only if they are able to sustain text-based dialogue with a human who cannot identify whether they are talking with a human or a computer.”[12]
The following is another written poem.
Blue potatoes are ungainly things
As are red and purple lamb chops
Yet when we eat and creep and fall
We never ask a silent question
What could the “silent question” mean?
Perhaps why it is that we eat ungainly things as we stumble through our lives dead to everything, mute to the important facts and none for the better?
Here is what I might right, but not in response to Racter’s poem:
It rained at my funeral
All the night long
She spoke to me
Gave me drink and song
Why did Racter give me the idea of another life and a death to motivate it. Can’t we survive these things too? Don’t we live beyond death?
For a machine, there is a finite number of choices it can make. For the human, even time can unlock infinite variations and themes that were never even considered before. And then there is the unknown mysteries a human can conjure. As I write this a woman is watering plants just outside my window. The weather is overcast, but its winter in northern California, so its relative. She stomps around the newly planted flowers, perhaps wishing they would blossom like she remembered flowers to be in her youth when everything was fresh and maintenance free.
Five minutes after Racter entered my thoughts, I am well aware that its poem has become mine again.
Human -> Words -> Human -> Words -> Human
The machine also begins and ends linearly:
Human -> Words -> AI Program -> Words -> Human
Clearly Turing is correct when he writes that the ability of a machine to pass as a human to a human is its usefulness.
Machines are extensions of humans and perhaps nothing more.
A machine can be considered a mirror reporting somewhere we cannot go. By making strange pairings, we get new ideas and insights but to say a machine provided us knowledge is false.
Lucretius in his marvelous “De Rerum Natura” writes:
To rouse our wonder, all whereof conspire
To spoil the trust we place in sense; but all
Without avail, since far the greater part
Thereof do trick us through the exercise
Of our own mind’s opinion, which ourselves
We add thereto, so that these things unseen
To sense are counted seen. For naught, ‘tis sure
Is harder than to sift things manifest
From things uncertain, which the active mind
Forthwith doth add from its own full store.
It is easier to understand the limitations of machine authorship when one considers the requirement that ultimately machines take their material from humans.
Like a camera used by a human, the mechanical apparatus alone cannot create what is considered art. Since art is in the eye of the beholder, and a machine has no “eye” it can be argued that there is no sense in equating a machine’s “interpretation” with art. That is not to say that what is created by a machine is of no use.
But machines cannot interpret which is another thing that humans alone can do. Perhaps the consideration of poetry must be expanded to creating and interpreting.
How can a machine that lacks interpretive capabilities, truly write meaningful poetry?
Here the quantum concept of no-cloning theorem where it is impossible to make an exact copy of an unknown quantum state. Since quantum physics and poetry have a relationship, it may just be that the classical computational systems (machines) as put forth by Alan Turing, are reversible but quantum mechanics are not reversable.[13]
To my mind, the origins of poetry are no less than the application of quantum rules to expression. Poetry and quantum physics share a commonality in that both differ from the classical machine paradigm.
The original poem included above (I heard a fly buzz when I died) shows that machines cannot incorporate the concept of dying or decay in any meaningful way. Humans express themselves differently as varying stages of living. Machines cannot write differently based on their “experiences” or emotional states. A 20-year-old machine write the same as a 5 year old machine.
Machines also lack the layers of reality which allows the interrogation of prejudices and how much and where to polish or cut a particular piece of written expression. In machines, ambiguity has no place. For the poet, such is a technique with powerful effects. In artificial intelligence, the idea of unconscious decision, wrapping concepts inside one another in a specific way or following a purposeful timeline with the goal of communicating several concepts simultaneously without formal expository prose, wrapping intensions in enigmas with a purpose — all of these things cannot be done by a machine.
To be sure, any contrived requirement which is commanded rather than taken as inspiration by an artist masks and chokes the act of creation making the end product less appealing in most cases because it has been manufactured and not received anonymously by the grateful poet.
Writing for an audience or to settle a specific task is not the same as inciting a reaction with an understood purpose.
While it may be said it is a poor workman that blames his tools, a machine is only as effectual as the prose fed to it.
Machines, having no understanding of time or season, cannot consistently capture the human condition.
Like kaleidoscopes, machines can create different angles and views, juxtapose text, cut and paste and reconstitute, but they cannot create from nothing.
The human body sends 11 million bits per second to the brain for processing, yet the conscious mind seems to be able to process only 50 bits per second. Yet the most powerful computer on earth is the human brain.
Charles G. Choi in an article entitled “Human brain may be even more powerful computer than thought”, he adds, “the most powerful computer known is the brain. The human brain possesses about 100 billion neurons with roughly 1 quadrillion — 1 million billion — connections known as synapses wiring these cells together.” [14]
Clearly in hardware and compositional range, the human mind beats machine learning hands down.
Perhaps madness and divination are the ultimate defendants of human primacy over any machine.
Much Madness is divinest Sense—
To a discerning Eye—
Much sense—the starkest Madness—
‘Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail—
Assent—and you are sane—
Demur—and you’re straightaway dangerous—
And handled with a Chain—[15]
Bob’s distractions from spin into another dimension if dissimilarity: the rational and the irrational. Perhaps one of the most difficult passages comes on page 36:
In Bob’s defense, he had found himself, against advisement, awaiting things that had already passed, leaving him to face that harshest prospect of all: that he must give up on the only thing he really wanted. He’d hungered to tell her all his secrets, but became one of them instead.[16]
I sounds like Bob’s one remaining hope was love, and that was folded into oblivion, everything wrapped in an unforsaken, inescapable oblivion a word directly from Latin oblivionem (nominative oblivio) “forgetfulness; a being forgotten,” from oblivisci (past participle oblitus) “forget,” which is of uncertain origin (probably forgotten).
So, if everything serves the present, then there is no past hence no future.
Wow. Penn seems to be spinning nature, nursery rhymes, the cultural momentum (a physical phenomenon), air travel and memories all atop a transactional world counted in tellurian years. Even time is transactional, arbitrary and vacuous. Dark shades of anonymity and baseness pervade the dystopic world. Like an out of tune piano, it grates on the nerves. Perhaps so much the better. But it isn’t fun, or catchy or transparent. But Penn’s dystopia is consistent and as Stalin once quipped, quantity has a quality all its own.
But if Socrates saw pure Beauty as the ultimate measure of all things, could Wilfred Owen have been far off when he made his battlefield confession to Eros?
In that I loved you, Love, I worshipped you,
In that I worshipped well, I sacrificed
All of most worth. I bound and burnt and slew
Old peaceful lives; frail flowers; firm friends; and Christ.
I slew all falser loves; I slew all true,
That I might nothing love but your truth, Boy.
Fair fame I cast away as bridegrooms do
Their wedding garments in their haste of joy.
But when I fell upon your sandalled feet,
You laughed; you loosed away my lips; you rose.
I heard the singing of your wing’s retreat;
Far-flown, I watched you flush the Olympian snows
Beyond my hoping. Starkly I returned To stare upon the ash of all I burned. (Wilfred Owen)
What surprises are around the next chapter: Station Five: Big Cock.
Footnotes
[1] https://www.change.org/p/please-stop-promoting-rabbits-in-swimming-pools
[2] https://www.buzzfeed.com/hannahalothman/forgotten-world-war-one-sex-workers (accessed 12/21/2020)
[3][3] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/03/rape-wartime-vietnam/ (accessed 12/21/2020)
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/dec/07/timnit-gebru-google-firing-resignation-ai-research (accessed 12/21/2020)
[5] http://transfer.stemedia.org/2016/10/can-computers-write-poetry/
[6] https://poets.org/poem/i-heard-fly-buzz-465
[7] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/12675/in-a-station-of-the-metro
[8] See David Grunwald’s “Marina Tsvetaeva’s “Poems to Bohemia 1938-1939” https://www.amazon.com/Marina-Tsvetaevas-Poems-Bohemia-Grunwald/dp/1365457958
[9] https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/49638/1/Elliott_Dickinson_Volcanic_Punctuation.pdf
[10] https://genius.com/Emily-dickinson-a-stillvolcanolife-601-annotated
[11] http://www.101bananas.com/poems/racter.html
[12] http://transfer.stemedia.org/2016/10/can-computers-write-poetry/
[13] https://phys.org/news/2015-12-physicists-thermodynamic-irreversibility-quantum.html (Phys.org)—For the first time, physicists have performed an experiment confirming that thermodynamic processes are irreversible in a quantum system—meaning that, even on the quantum level, you can’t put a broken egg back into its shell. The results have implications for understanding thermodynamics in quantum systems and, in turn, designing quantum computers and other quantum information technologies.
[14] https://www.nbcnews.com/sciencemain/human-brain-may-be-even-more-powerful-computer-thought-8C11497831
[15]https://www.google.com/books/edition/Emily_Dickinson/VhUtzu11DOwC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Emily+Dickinson+poem+435&pg=PA110&printsec=frontcover page 110 (accessed 11/26/2019)
[16] Sean Penn “Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff” p. 36
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