JIM COHN

EMBODYING KNOWLEDGE (ROBO-MONA LISA, AN ALLEGORY)

The hard-core Virtualites have a different kind of knowledge than Doctor Who––the mysterious and eccentric Time Lord who transcribed the first quarto of Hamlet, met Leonardo da Vinci, H.G. Wells, Vincent Van Gogh, Hitler, Wyatt Earp, and Janis Joplin. That’s an impressive feat for computer programming given that Doctor Who, a fictional British character with his own time machine, regenerates a new body whenever one is needed while maintaining the consciousness, memories, experience, and basic personality of his previous human incarnations.

The Virtualites used artificial imagination in order to create symbolic establishments peopled with symbolic guests. As William Carlos Williams observed in The Embodiment of Knowledge (New Directions, 1974, 41), such machinery becomes a sort of fetish, “obscuring our view, which is our game, to be destroyed for the clarity which must ensue.” Whereas people in history were miserable, we are far worse off. We have machines to dominate us, blanketing the materials of thought, giving us the sense that mind is subject to its processes. Obviously knowledge itself was not involved. Or if it was, it did not have even a glimmer of insight found in The Eagles certified platinum 1977 hit single “Hotel California,” with its pretty people who can check out any time they like, but never leave.

There was always something vapid, insidious, decadent, shallow, and promiscuous about “Hotel California” and its figurative luxury resort. Perhaps it was the spark that inspired the American philosopher John Searle to devise a thought experiment he called the “Chinese Room.” In a 1980 paper “Mind, Brains, and Programs,” published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Searle addressed a fundamental question––if a machine can convincingly simulate intelligent conversation, does it necessarily understand? He argued that a program cannot give a computer a "mind" or "understanding" regardless of how intelligently it may be made to behave as though it does.

In Searle’s famous Chinese Room Argument, he imagined a person acting like a computer. The person manually executes a program by holding up Chinese characters slid under the door by people outside. To the people outside looking in, the person convincingly simulates the behavior of a native Chinese speaker. The experiment reveals complicated knowledge for what it is––a machine––not to be taken lightly, perhaps fatal. The acquirement & possession of facts is only the inhuman phase of knowledge. Unless we stand beyond our machines, and not our machines beyond us, to order us, we have not even attempted to liberate mind, only enslaved it by the domination of its engines.

For me, the slender door of study was the only thing I ever had that nobody could take away. Even if no life is long enough for all knowledge, embodying knowledge is not the same as directly downloading libraries into your skull. The scholar has not the knowledge that the ignorant possess. The fool may exist without whole sections others find indispensible. Until such a time as circumstances remind us that we do not have it, knowledge is something without which we can still exist, content in our limits, subordinations, segregations––unable to escape.

The programmed world is locked up in another mode––machine enhanced and socketed for instant data entry. Human language was the initial source of neural intercourse till the dot-com bubble of 1995-2000. It was a heady time––filled with bohemian internet startups and wild technopian oracles. Individuals would be freed from the rigid embrace of time and space. Politics was trumpeted as obsolete. Companies burned through venture capital like they were smoking weed nonstop out of rum-filled coconuts. Similar manias, dating back to the rise and fall of Dutch tulip prices in the 1630s were once again at work. Chain reactions ensued. The information age began its stampede toward intra-somatic programming.

* * *

Robo-English, its greatest brain-in-the-vat creation, found itself making ever more rapid and unpredictable shifts in conventional wisdom that are only the most current manifestation in a long line of mechanisms determining human social order. Headports became status symbols, like tattoos and bling. When you consider the exponentials––decentralized across the humanities, the sciences, branches of government, Wall Street, Homeland Security, Hollywood, the banking system, multiplatform media, 24-hour political spectrum edited speech, great vast lands and waters crossed instantaneously––people had little choice but to find a way to process volume on a scale never considered humanly possible.

Androidization, the transformation of humans into machines, had been the subject of literature way before Mary Shelley’s first anonymous edition of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was published in 1818. The first historical account of automata is found in the Liezi, a Daoist text written in the 3rd century BCE, China, and attributed to Lie Yukou, a circa 5th century BCE “Hundred Schools of Thought” philosopher. Within the Liezi, there is a description of an encounter between King Mu of Zhou (1023-957 BCE) and a mechanical engineer known as Yan Shi, an artificer. The latter proudly presented the king with a life-size, human-shaped figure:

The king stared at the figure in astonishment. It walked with rapid strides, moving its head up and down, so that anyone would have taken it for a live human being. The artificer touched its chin, and it began singing, perfectly in tune. He touched its hand, and it began posturing, keeping perfect time. As the performance was drawing to an end, the robot winked its eye and made advances to the ladies in attendance, whereupon the king became incensed and would have had Yan Shih executed on the spot had not the latter, in mortal fear, instantly taken the robot to pieces to let him see what it really was. And, indeed, it turned out to be only a construction of leather, wood, glue and lacquer, variously colored white, black, red and blue.

As the Liezi account demonstrates, long before “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln” hit the 1964 New York World’s Fair and before the first Disneyland version opened as an attraction one year later, people were into animatronics, already deep under the spell of fantasies of immortality, impervious good looks, and deus ex machina brainpower. So, it was no surprise that 3000 years after the first mention of robots, humans inserted themselves in virtual realities rather than live in realties outside simulated experience.

No more inviting rainy days or winter snows to urge one to stay at home curled up around a book. The complete Shakespeare and all his centuries of commentators nixed the art of reading with verbatim multimedia mind-boots. The multilingual arcana of Pound’s The Cantos and the carefully negotiated repetitive sentences of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans were explicated in a wink. Sappho fragments, Kabir, Mirabai, Cervantes, Villon, Sei Shonagon, Milarepa, Rimbaud––the entire global history of poetic works just appear as thought-forms transmitted instantaneously.

Nobody knew how the introduction of interfacing digital service devices directly within the human brain would affect heterogeneous societies like the United States. It was proposed that persons who existed in a digitally created world would maintain some sense of self they had become accustomed to projecting, regardless of digitally enhanced knowledge overrides. This hypothesis caused no general alarm initially as the first trials were conducted using management and the military. In short, the data was proverbially cooked in the docile soup of hierarchic homogeneity.

When everyone had to comply with laws making people admit technology into their bodies, it was not without serious complications. Fragile psyches were the first to go. Many faced increased self-referential interference. It didn’t matter where you went––Oakland, Munich, Valencia, Islamabad, Kiev, Shanghai, Hanoi, Abu Dhabi––people couldn’t tell if they were soldiers or troubadours, anarchists, wardens, scientists, CEOs, or ghosts. Some had their self-image wiped out temporarily. Some people’s self-image was shattered forever. Many never had any self-awareness to speak of at all.

Others were pushed to great heights. They walked around like they had five hundred gold records. Many acted as if they were the hard-living, misunderstood superhero of Peter Berg’s 2008 film Hancock––not exactly in control of their powers and definitely with no memory of how they got this way. There were those that sunk to abysmal lows. You’d call them up only to find them in a body bag. It was pure insanity to expect that everyone could actually execute high-speed processing or that everybody could synthesize such programming. The only thing on which one could depend was the inevitability of malfunction, some kind of crash.

Any and all of these distinct classes of humanoids might turn out to be artists. The poets, too, arose from these ranks. With instant knowledge uploading, a commonly reported finding suggested that people felt like the simulacra of Abraham Lincoln, unable to adjust to what the country became, in Philip K. Dick’s We Can Build You (1972). They could access instantaneous new knowledge through fast downloads, on-board William Blake visionary bar, instantaneous linguistic superfluency, poetics apps, holographic performance, etc., but Machine English purchases were no different than most other planned obsolescence items. The only difference was this appliance had a remote administrative kill switch.

Once the warranty ran out on Borg Nation, poetry would sit alone in some forgotten trash dump, inside a ruined head on deep sleep mode, hunting for spare parts. Storms came and left their signature. Strong winds turned weak. There were sights not even junkies could believe. Life was like a vampire attack in reverse.

* * *

I began writing poems in back pocket copybooks––experiencing what was there in front of me––typing them up on a manual typewriter. Even then, my own feeling was that poetry had fallen behind the way things had become. Every age is one of symbolic reform. I felt the writing of the poem as a weird mixture of ancient music, recalling things I never knew, and the promiscuous rubbish of the present that antiseptic critics since Thomas Love Peacock have used to discredit contemporary poetry.

The muses that watch over poetry take very seriously any attempt to extinguish human Imagination. As Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in a letter to his publishers, James and Charles Ollier, before beginning work in 1821 on A Defence of Poetry, attempts to silence the literature of the present is "parricidal and self-murdering.” If you believe that the Muses felt insulted in earlier times, as Shelley did by those that attacked the poets of his generation, think of how they’re feeling now, as the wired twenty-first century lurches forward.

Against all desire for absolute perfection, there exists a lineage of human poetics that casts it bardic function as frank and vivid, vulgar, at one with the ordinary, filled with mishap, solitudes of loneliness, lovesick blues, suffering’s obstruction, incomprehensible losses, disasters in every town, walk-away homes, coffin’s stuffed with unpaid bills. Poetry is not about escapism. If it’s truly a work of distinction, it’s about the way things are.

"Why do you write?" "How does poetry work?" Answering such questions is like giving directions based on landmarks that no longer exist. Do you want to be deceived into believing you have perfect knowledge while all around you are ghettos and surveillance, phony elections and censored reality? "Poesy," Allen Ginsberg remarked in 1969 after police violently broke up anti-war demonstrators during the Democratic National Convention, "is a corrective to mechanical robot reduplication of castrated and manipulated news."

Nothing is private. Nothing is revealed. Everyone is equipped with a language that remains beyond explanation. There are terma (treasures), hidden across the centuries, and there are tertön (the revealer of treasures). The poet makes the dead snake of a line come alive. What treasures there are to be revealed are found by you.

Profound insight challenges anyone in the uninhibited exercise of individual being. Thoroughly helping others through living expression is not keeping to a fixed state. The whole world is unconcealed.

17 June 2004, Revised 16 August 2010

[Jim Cohn. From Sutras & Bardos: Essays & Interviews on Allen Ginsberg, The Kerouac School, Anne Waldman, Postbeat Poets & The New Demotics. Museum of American Poetics Publications, 2011.]