“A culture that loses its sense of sacrum, loses its sense entirely.”
Leszek Kołakowski
The poets were assembled in a windowless classroom. ENGL 3753: Poetry Workshop. It was one of the few English courses left standing in the aftermath of COVID. We had toured Mary Oliver’s Rules for the Dance and were now gleaning inspiration from a mediocre anthology assigned to keep costs low for thrift-minded undergrads. We read Emily Dickinson aloud and conjured “Hope is the thing with feathers” out of the nineteenth century. We marveled at the sprung rhythm of Hopkins. We agreed that Dryden was overrated. I read Tennyson’s Ulysses to the class because that poem hits different when you’re forty-five, and I wanted students to hear the regret and resignation of middle age. And then I shared this meditation from Adrianne Rich:
In a political culture of managed spectacles and passive spectators, poetry appears as a rift, a peculiar lapse, in the prevailing mode … take that old, material utensil, language, found all about you, blank with familiarity, smeared with daily use, and make it into something that means more than it says.
There it was. The course objective for Poetry Workshop: to make the poem “into something that means more than it says.” And as I surveyed the class, the students appeared to welcome this appraisal from Rich. They live in a world of social media and large language models. They live in a world where efficiency and utilitarianism are prime directives. They confess estrangement from a language that endeavors, in the words of Bohumil Hrabal, to “speak in a nameless tongue of things that can be grasped but not described.” They needed a semester to learn that the great poems, the poems worth memorizing, approach a fruitful silence. Put another way, my students were ready to grasp the reality of God’s kingdom in a historic moment that has forgotten the mystery of Λόγος (Logos) and the way it sprouts us like mandrakes up into a world of sound, and light, and love. “Humans are meaning makers,” I said to the students. “We mimic the creative impulse of our Maker. But we approach that meaning from a place of openness and humility, not dominance and control. We let truth perch on an outstretched palm. That’s what your poem is, an outstretched palm. We let that bird sing. To domesticate, to take possession of that bird, is the death of her song. I think that’s why Jesus reliably evades the crowd and the religious establishment during his ministry. His truth eludes human dogma, consensus, and easy management.”
We let truth perch on an outstretched palm. That’s what your poem is, an outstretched palm. We let that bird sing. To domesticate, to take possession of that bird, is the death of her song.
My hands clutched together to illustrate the point. They clutched so hard the nail of my right index finger dug into my left hand, drawing blood. Not a bad display of Romantic zeal. Half of the students were noticeably impressed by this Gen-X display of “punk rock.” The other half looked mortified. The professor was suddenly kind of cool, and in need of first aid.
In that moment, I was teleported back to the indie-rock days of my youth. My band played in every bar and nicotine-laced venue that would accommodate our amps in Eastern Washington. A good show was rent money. A good show caught the attention of a girl with black eyeshadow. A good show was strumming the guitar so hard my hand would bleed, a veritable Pollack on the cream-colored pickguard. Time collapsed until I felt like a wannabe Thom Yorke in front of my students again. Exit stage left in 2002. Return to a windowless classroom in 2025. It’s still in there, I thought to myself. A poem worth bleeding for. It was exactly the consolation that I needed in our post-truth moment. A trip to the bathroom, paper towel for a bandage, and I finished my lecture with the following prompt:
Write a poem about the role of technology in contemporary life. Offer a luddite critique or champion technology as the sum of progress. Challenge your reader’s presuppositions. Offer a new perspective beyond the usual talking points.
Due Thursday.
In 1919, W.B. Yeats surveyed the apocalypse of modernity in his poem The Second Coming. “The best lack all conviction,” he wrote, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” It’s a quotable line that continues to define our present tense. It names an ethos characterized by the liturgy of TikTok and the rhetoric of “owning the libs.” Decades later, C.S. Lewis published The Abolition of Man (1943). Lewis indicted modern education for producing “men without chests,” students who lacked soul, lacked gumption, lacked guts. A similar critique is in order for the aspirations of the “tech bro” billionaire class and the brave new world they have unleashed upon the body politic, and I wonder if we’ve finally realized Nietzsche’s vision of The Last Man in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-92): “What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star? – thus asks the last man, and blinks.” It’s a vision of humanity deprived of curiosity, resigned to reflexive appetite, and void of conviction.
As a teacher, I have watched ChatGPT become ubiquitous in the lives of my students. I have witnessed the numbing effect of artificial intelligence and the encroachment of The Last Man upon our imaginations. We’re keenly aware of the detrimental influence of social media on mental health, especially among young people. I anticipate greater severities as AI “learns” to mimic personality, conjure deep fakes, compose constellations of diversion, and feign relationship, romantic or otherwise.
The advent of ChatGPT is an existential moment for the academy and the ways that we experience and distill knowledge as a community. My ambivalence toward this technology is irrelevant. The algorithms that govern AI are not ambivalent toward me. They want my job. They want my composition courses and workshops. They want to replace the Writing Center that I shepherd and annul the process of wonder and discovery that I try to cultivate in my students. And I think that is what concerns me most about the embrace of ChatGPT and its development. It is a technology that eliminates process. It offers the grail without the quest. It exiles our imaginations from the joy of the doing. The intricate folds of origami that lead us to a crane. The sifted ingredients that become bread. The repetition of crochet stitches that yield an autumn scarf.
With each new iteration of AI, we are in danger of losing a fundamental hallmark of the human condition. Namely, the sublime necessity of risk. It’s the risk that allows us to join Keats, silent on a peak in Darien. It’s the risk that inspires couples to navigate the changes and chances of life together. It’s the risk that speaks up in the presence of authoritarianism, spiritual abuse, and communal degradation. It’s even the risk of a lecture that makes an earnest teacher cut himself in class.
As we contemplate this essential risk, the sort of risk we find in the teachings of Jesus, the sort of risk that makes life worth living, a myriad of questions confront my students: Are we resigned to a future where AI replaces human connection, imagination, and spontaneity? Are we satisfied with a technology that will never endeavor, in the words of Adrianne Rich, to mean more than it says? Are we content to learn from a teacher who can never bleed?
Image via Wikimedia
