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After my brother’s death, I hesitated to write anything.
I had become dependent on our 40 years of back and forth correspondence, me using computer technology to do what he did so very well, sitting at his old manual Remington with its mismatched keys and lack of correction. Ron was a master of the craft, a village sage, a person to know if you lived in the Taos area, or anywhere in the shadows of the Sangre de Cristo range. Artificial intelligence, or, “AI” would have made him shudder with horror, become irate, express through his flawed machine, and push out those passionate letters, the misspelled and hand-corrected typos, and never, ever use correction tape or fluid. It is one of many ways in which we are different.
Living things create, and in that creation, they introduce flaws that perhaps are accidental, perhaps intentional, but always, beautiful. Ron helped me to see the beauty in imperfection and the reality of here and now.
He often said that he just wrote what came and put it all out there. It doesn’t work that way for me. I have to putter about with an idea and edit it. It doesn’t just arrive. I have to wait for it to land and then, like a patient gardener watching for the pollenators, see what it turns into.
But the idea is never “my butterfly.” It has free will. It doesn’t need to be captured, protected, confined with a copyright or trademark. Maybe, I should be more possessive, but, how is that a virtue? How does clutching an idea so tightly ever really help anyone? Just like the butterflies I see every summer, the ideas come. I don’t stop them, nor do I collect them and pin them down. They are unique, so I let them be that. I am simply there to appreciate the ideas, and perhaps, say a thing or two about them.
One of the earliest letters Ron sent to me included the struggle of Laocoon and his curse. It was his way of attempting to discuss the flawed nature of our father, who created two separate families in a time when that was so much less the norm. Nowadays, blended families and sequential polygamy are more or less a normal condition. No one gets terribly upset, and it seems to be less of a concern. It rarely produces the shame and embarrassment it used to. For some fathers, it may even be a point of pride, a statement of virility and potency, that they can continue producing progeny at any age. For others, it is more like a really bad idea, one that somehow “just happened.” There is a spectrum of fatherhood that we can observe.
Ron and I dug into that reality, as we worked to create a bridge across the years that separated our births. We were alike, but yet, quite different. Those differences gave us each our respective creativity and drives. The placed scripts from dad would turn out to have some toxic flaws. That had to be rationalized, demystified and spoken to through the voice of evidence. In the end, what mattered was that the story, brought to the light of day, was simple, ordinary, and easy to understand.
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This butterfly came to me from J.K. Rowling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._K._Rowling).
My daughter was 13 (that’s a few decades ago) when we began reading the Harry Potter series together. The stories are both fantastic and prescient. Buried in the works are gems, single lines that resonate in today’s polarized, torn-apart world. There’s good instruction for young writers layered in there, too. The title of this article is one of those lines.
But it isn’t in the books. It is only in the movie version of, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.” The book upon which the screen version is based does not contain that specific phrase. Chapter Thirty Six describes nearly everything else in the scenes before and after this line, but those specific words are curiously not in that manuscript. The writers added them in. They work well in conveying the struggle to get free of a parasite of an idea.
“It Isn’t How You Are Alike, It’s How You Are Not…”
This is a banner for how we deal with anything that gets a life in our heads, makes us into its servants, drags us down, eliminates who we are uniquely and individually. We have those little and big voices, scripts from others who placed them there at early ages, or in times when we are open to being influenced by others. It is different for everyone, but there are some common times when we’re open to suggestion. These include:
- Early childhood
- Adolescence
- Young adulthood
- Life events and the changes they require of us
- Early later life
- Senescence
During these, and other times in our lives, when the placed suggestion from another germinates and takes root, we become fertile ground and the nutrient mass for an invasive species. We become one with the notion. We lose our individuality. We accept the mindset as authentic, genuine and plausible.
We follow the addictive promise that all will be well if only we simply follow the tenets and policies as outlined by this invader of our personal space. This is how we recruit for sales forces, certain work groups, how we indoctrinate those who would be first responders, how we develop exclusive clubs, communities and societies. It can be purposeful, as long as we are ethical. When ethics surrender to competition, economics, fear of failure, the addictive promise turns rancid and intoxicates our minds.
We allow the germ line in, we give it audience, we provide ourselves as open soil in need of planting, and we cease to be our most authentic self.
We start to believe in the thing living in our heads.
At those same junctures I listed above, we are open to the idea of letting go of some old, tired notions, along with certain baggage from other phases of our lives. We carry the vague memory of past events, now shifted into other associations in our brains, placed not as much for safe keeping as to get it out of the way so we can function normally in a real world, with real consequences, and attend to our survival needs. But when an invasive or parasitic idea gets in, it pushes all sensible and rational thought out of the way and silences it. It suffocates the originality, the imaginative wanderings and the endearing flaws, in its quest to nourish and further its own existence.
Just as our adolescent hero, Harry Potter, struggles with voices in his head, echoes from a traumatic moment he wasn’t even aware of at its occurrence, so do we all have those look-back moments that try to take over, set their roots again, take hold of our minds, and set our bodies on a perilous and ill-fated journey.
Life contains relapses. The thing that afflicted us once, can, and does, come back to haunt us. We can struggle with the recollections as we try to either relive and “do-over,” or we accept what happened, put the image back into its storage, and get moving forward again.
Watch the video clip from the movie (www.google.com/...), and assess for yourself, whether recovering from those little voices in your head is easy or hard.
I submit that what the on-screen presentation shows is how terribly awful, how structurally integrated noxious weeds of ideas are, and that breaking free of their hold is a doubly traumatic experience. It reanimates the old hurt, while causing a psychic cut with a suffering that is fresh and new. It is scary to watch someone wrestle with a voice trying to take over free will. It is painful when a parasitic notion begins to eat away at our healthy thoughts, trying to overtake the organized structures around it. Most of us want to run away from those old and new hurts.
It is worse when the idea comes in wearing the clothes of the beautiful butterfly, or the industry of the honeybee, but in fact, it is not such a wonder, but it is a masquerading predatory insect, one that intends to destroy the garden and breed its offspring as quickly as possible, in as many recesses of our minds as it can reach, and in that process, fully corrupt our ability to function.
It is a parasite. It is a predator. I do not judge it for being so, nor do I condemn it for attempting to create its survival. This is the dark nature of all living things, including ideas.
“It Isn’t How You Are Alike, It’s How You Are Not…”
The Potter series invites us all to develop our defense against Dark Arts. Every book speaks to the need to look at all ideas, not just the ones we find comfortable, pleasant and acceptable. The books speak to the notions of entitlement, privilege, class distinction and a hierarchy of human value. I could see a future where if certain leaders were able to take their place in the top of the food chain, we would lose the privilege of reading books like these, made-up stories that challenge the imagination of child and adult alike. Reading to our children would become a thing of the past. Education would vanish. Only certain privileged persons would be granted access to knowledge, wisdom, thought and all sides of the human story.
I know this to be possible, and true, because it has been recorded as happening before in history. It is happening again, in not-so-small ways, and with dire consequences for society. We’re losing our imagination, and our memory of how we have gone through this dark night of forgetting who we are, many times before.
We are perilously close to the edge where we slide off into collective ignorance again, lose our footing on the slippery slope of human experience and thought. We are asking for a God On Most High to come and relieve us of the responsibility to be unique, different, thoughtful and original.
So let’s put a name to this danger, just as the characters in Rowling’s book finally decide, “He’s back!” and they specify Tom Marvolo Riddle, the anagram of I AM LORD VOLDEMORT. The characters in the book have all been unwilling to offer Voldemort’s name, fearing it would bring him to life in their heads and grant him access to their thoughts. Now, they understand – he was there all along, just waiting to be revived.
Is it actually Donald Trump, Mike Johnson, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, George Santos, MTG, the GOP in its current chaos, Christian Nationalism (perhaps a way of gang-sign coding for Nazism), right-wing extremism, or is it yet another thing that needs to have its name spoken?
Any of the above-mentioned characters or causes are the current whipping boys, but it is not just these characters. There’s a deeper tale to tell.
Manipulation of our minds is a favorite practice of those who crave power over others.
A free mind is more dangerous to power-seekers because it raises fair questions, probing questions, introduces appropriate doubt and wants to know more before committing. Selling the idea that will enslave us is the goal of the power-hungry person, enterprise or cause.
Manipulators oversimplify, bait a trap, narrow the choices, and create urgency. AI appears to be yet another form of bait and a perfect trap. We’ve been using it in various modalities for years, and we continue to refine it, to try to make it “human.” It can now write perfect term papers, craft novels, synthesize music and art, emulate the humanities.
Perhaps, it is time to stop insisting that everyone become competent and comfortable with artificial intelligence, advancement of technology well beyond our species capacity, and return it to its proper cupboard. Perhaps, people are a little bit better off with less advancement, more human interaction, more learning directly from our own kind, and less so from machines and devices we’ve come to rely on.
While the notion of AI is a wonderful thing, it appears to be much like every other icon, idol or false god humans have ever conjured, to help them externalize a Supreme Being rather than understand their own voices, their own recollections, their own parasitic elements. We simply cannot ask that which is not us to come in and remove that which has become inexorably entwined in our fiber. Belief systems do not get removed. They only get adjusted over time, with experience in life, and by granting ourselves permission to make changes to them. You have to make decisions. Many choose not to decide; many choose not to buck the system, not to be themselves, but to submit and become more fully infected.
“It Isn’t How You Are Alike, It’s How You Are Not…”
Again, I drift toward J.K. Rowling’s incredible imaginary world. For as long as I can remember, we’ve been fascinated with the world of medieval England and Europe, we hearken back to a moment when we want to believe things were simpler. They weren’t all that simple, but we imagine they were. Dragons, fairies, magical beings, mystics and sagas of great adventures were part of my childhood reading, and when those images are made available through the magic of CGI, I am still amazed and held in awe. The magic of England and Scotland’s hills, lakes and valleys, how the weather and the light play and create images that inspire us to imagining, is something that a machine, even one that is self-aware, cannot do. Imagining and awe are innate in the living creature. We biological forms aren’t always rational, but we are consistent in our ability to respond emotionally to a world we were selected to live in. Sure, we are skilled at crafting and realizing those notions that we have in our heads. Such simple machines as wheels, levers, ramps, ropes, pulleys all indicate we can give ourselves an advantage in the harsh reality of life on a planet that periodically wipes out everything.
Trusting our entirety to AI and its co-conspirators, the smartphone and the tablet, rather than carefully employing these implements in the same way as we used the simple machines I described, will leave us as victims, incapable of making decisions about those invasive and parasitic ideas that fill our heads from time to time.
We will lose awe, wonder, imagination and spontaneity. We will have created cookie cutter pre-formed notions that will provide us with all the proper stimuli to trigger emotional and biochemical responsa that the monolith is programmed to elicit from us. We will be its servants, rather than the other way around, and we will be very disappointed.
Worse, we simply will not care, or even have an understanding of what it means to give a damn and challenge the flattening and steamroller way AI will compress us all.
I’ve heard it said that writing is a form of expression of urgent need, a kind of self-defense. It is a thing that must be done, much like how a person would respond if their home was on fire or being broken into. For me, it is a bit of that, but it is more about waiting until I have the many voices calling to me, saying,
“Tell the story. Make it convincing. Make it something from your soul, not just a glut of words that fills an essay requirement.”
A story needs to have meat on its bones, and it needs to help fill that urgency. It cannot be ordinary fare.
Ron and I had our separate struggles with the voices in our heads; put there by our father, we each considered, adapted, and in some ways, outright rejected the voice for either lack of credibility, or the presence of pure fantasy. What we learned in our own way was that no matter how strong the false narrative seems, reality will always denude it, show it for the vapor that it is, and leave us with a combination of relief, disappointment, disgust and regret. Writing helped both of us to compare, contrast and make sense of a story we didn’t ask for and weren’t sure what to do with. I miss those days of writing to him. It was, to borrow from Ernest Hemingway, a moveable feast of ideas and interactions.
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I hope you have arrived at this point in my essay and have considered your own urgency. I hope I have encouraged you to write, and if you are not ready to, then, keep reading the work of others. Create your own list of classic stories, cite your own collection of authors. Develop your voice and bring it out.
We don’t develop a skill set by standing on the sidelines and watching others accomplish the thing we admire. We develop it by doing. Don’t surrender yourself to an implanted notion that you are nothing more than foodstuff for someone else’s parasite or merely a roothold for a strangler fig to wrap itself around.
If you are experiencing a writer’s block, remember that it is temporary. An experience will come along and awaken you, and the pen, keyboard, typewriter or voice-activated recording device will once again be your friend instead of a thing that is too daunting.
Trust your inner being to sort out those myriad voices. Seek the wise counsel of others, if you find you are wrong in your assumptions, then that means you are growing.
Keep caring. Don’t permit yourself the decadent luxury of being insensitive. Sometimes, you must hang on with both hands to an idea or a feeling. Clutch it until it is no longer viable. That’s what living things do. But when the idea is gone, when it has departed, when its last pulse has been felt, be okay with letting it go. That is a skill set that no AI machine can generate. It cannot comprehend or find the fully illogical and unpleasant parameters of grief, loss and suffering. It cannot do much more than pretend. Telling a story of loss or having your heart broken is so much greater than the constant broadcasting of how amazing your accomplishments are or have been. The most human of moments come when we can tell a story about the past and future we were part of, but had to let go of, because our present self required our survival.
Above all, be who you genuinely are. Make any surrender to a master’s voice and their addictive promise nothing more than a temporary windbreak, a way to escape life’s storms for a little while, until you get your bearings again, and can retake the trail ahead. It is your journey, and only you can endeavor to find your path. And yes, it is okay to need such things as money, clothing, house and home, family and friends. Those will comfort you. But comfort that makes us unable to travel our own journey and robs us of our free will is that strangler fig.
You will get hurt along the path. Life will send you critics, judges, ill-intended pests who swarm like gnats hovering over decaying fruit. You cannot get rid of them all. Sometimes, you will run into a swarm of folks who sting and wound you, maybe even physically. You cannot do anything about them. You must find how you are different from them, move past them, get on with your life and not forget the lesson you have just received. Life is not pain-free. Some of that pain you can master. Some of it can only be appreciated, and carried, because it will not relent. It will shape you. But give it proper audience, so that you can hear the story behind the enduring pain. There is one waiting to be revealed.
In a world trending toward an AI masterscape, a make-believe world that promises everything but has no living flavor, vision or sound, only a cacophonous clickety-clack, and whirring of devices that satisfy every addictive tendency so that your humanity will remain silent and not offer dissent,
Resolve to be different. Decide to be unique.
Establish yourself, and be okay with nobody flocking to your brick-and-mortar or virtual shop that sells who you are and what you’ve done. Be authentic in your own headspace. I’ll close pretty much where I opened, reminding you that –
“It Isn’t How You Are Alike, It’s How You Are Not…”
Peace.
Thank you for reading.