Editor’s note: This is the first installment of a serialized essay. The second installment appears in Guernica’s October issue.
Maybe when AI starts having sex and fears death, it will start making great art.
— Jerry Saltz[1]
- The Poem, and What the AI Overview Said
“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” (340) by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through –
And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum –
Kept beating – beating – till I thought
My mind was going numb –
And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space – began to toll,
As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race,
Wrecked, solitary, here –
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then –
AI Overview
Significance: The poem is a powerful exploration of a mental breakdown, using the metaphor of a funeral to depict the speaker’s descent into madness and loss of reason.
- Bodies of Water
Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through –
I’ve been reading this poem for twenty years and, like the river in the Heraclitus, it’s never the same poem twice.[2] It’s not just me. The poem also changes in response to the changing world around it. Up till now, following the poem’s metaphysical lead—“in my Brain”—I’ve read the funeral metaphorically. Suddenly I’m not so sure. What if there is a real, human loss behind this poem?
Who did Dickinson love so much that she entombed this person (very alive still) in the poem? Does it matter? I hear the dispassionate tone less forensically now, and wonder if it comes primarily from an effort to withstand the blow.
When I reach the final stanza—this has never happened to me while reading the poem before—I suddenly find myself at a loss:
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then –
Reading horizontally, grammatically, I can kind of make sense of this. Kind of. Not really. I try to remember how I made sense of it on previous readings, but what little I do remember doesn’t add up. I understand all the words, the syntax is clear, but when I put all those pieces together for myself, I have more questions than answers.
What does it mean for a sturdy plank in reason to break? It feels like scales have fallen from the speaker’s eyes, but what wasn’t she seeing? Is reason a kind of blindness? What truth was it obscuring? Does the snapping of the plank produce a mystical vision? Does it signify a rebirth?
In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James describes mystical visions as partaking of a “noetic” quality: they seem to impart authentic knowledge of transcendent realities. Maybe being “finished knowing” in this poem is a precondition for Knowing. But James also characterizes these experiences as essentially salubrious, bringing lasting and beneficial change in understanding and well-being to those who undergo them.[3] The concluding stanza seems to lead in a less propitious direction. Descents tend to carry negative connotations. The measured rhythm of the verse does its best to sustain a balance that suggests resilience, but it can’t contain the terrifying sensation that “dropped,” “down, and down,” “hit,” and “plunge” evoke.
We are familiar with accounts of mystical visions that seem to require suffering or deprivation. Like Simone Weil’s migraines or the Jewish scholar St Paul being struck blind,[4] “hit a World” vibrates with the promise of new insights, mystical or otherwise. The phrase is candid about the pain, even violence, these insights may cause. The enlivening jolt of immersion in “plunge” likewise carries a mixed message, in contrast to the solid, stolid “Plank” (of reason) that we stand on.
Dickinson knew that there is no end to knowledge—we can never be “finished knowing.” Even to be confronted with the limits of our own knowledge increases it. We come up with countless strategies for reassuring (fooling?) ourselves that we are in control of what is happening to us—that we know what we’re doing—but the truth is that experience is disorienting, whether we are attending a funeral or reading a poem. We never know exactly what is happening. We learn by going through things. Is Dickinson describing the discomfort that comes with being immersed in a new experience—a profound, if temporary, state of being “finished knowing”?
James describes the transient nature of mystical visions and our lack of control over when they begin and when they come to an end. Does the concluding “– then –” of the poem, tethered to the poem and to the unknown beyond it, lean more in one direction or the other?
Looking back over my shoulder, I remember that the plank in Dickinson’s poem breaks on the heels of the speaker of the poem finding herself “[w]recked, solitary, here – .” More ambiguity. Though “wrecked” points toward violence, the breaking of the plank comes in with an inconclusive and then. Do we hear: “And then things went straight to hell?” Or “And then I had my amazing breakthrough?” Can it be both? How can we tell?
Immersed in these uncertainties, I find myself stranded—and then thinking about Monet’s Water Lilies.
There’s always so much to do in Paris it can be easy to forget about the Water Lilies, housed as they are in the basement of the Musée de l’Orangerie on the edge of the Jardins des Tuileries.[5] The city is full of Dickinson’s “– then –”. There’s the Mazarin Gallery in the National Library of France Richelieu, whose treasures include the first globe to use the word “America,” Dagobert’s bronze throne, Charlemagne’s ivory chess pieces, original manuscripts of Victor Hugo, Marcel Proust, Simone de Beauvoir, and handwritten scores by Bach, Mozart, Chopin, all watched over by the inhabitants of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, mortals and immortals alike, who flee and chase each other across the 17th-century painted vault above. There’s Foucault’s pendulum painstakingly demonstrating that the earth is rotating on its axis in the Pantheon across the Seine. There’s “the road running through Paris,”[6] the sacred, magical, mythical, mystical, deadly Seine itself. But there is also so much to see in those two elliptical rooms built just for them.
Nymphaeales—water lilies, lotus, and their aquatic kin—belong to the oldest order of flowering plants and date back at least as far as the early Cretaceous Epoch 135 million years ago, although possibly as many as 250 million years.[7] In art, they date back over 4500 years, carved into the walls of the necropolis at Saqqara, site of the world’s oldest pyramid.
My father liked to tell the joke about the little old lady who raises her hand during the Q&A after the lecture at the planetarium. “Did you say the universe would begin to collapse in 20 billion years or 20 million?” “Twenty billion,” the lecturer clarifies. “Thank goodness,” says the little old lady.
Although I understand it’s not as big, 4500 years is as unimaginable to me as 250,000,000. I “split the difference” and ask AI how long it would take me to count to the lower estimate of 135,000,000. The Overview tells me that, in theory, and at a rate of one number per second, it would take me 4.28 years, counting aloud, although because of how long it actually takes to pronounce multi-syllable numbers (e.g., “one hundred twenty-three million, four hundred fifty-six thousand, seven hundred and eighty-nine”), and once sleep and other necessary breaks are factored in, a more “realistic” estimate clocks in at over 30 years. This is fun, but none of it helps. I can identify a handful of constellations in the night sky, but it leaves me no closer to being able to imagine an infinite universe, or less awed at the prospect.
*
Impressionism, the AI Overview tells me, is “a 19th-century art movement originating in France (circa 1874), [that] revolutionized painting by focusing on capturing fleeting moments, natural light, and modern life through loose, visible brushstrokes and vibrant, unblended colors.” Sure. Although, is it “fleeting moments” that Monet is capturing in the Haystacks or the facades of Rouen Cathedral, the two series he was working on while he was planning and building his water garden at Giverny?[8] Aren’t they more about the process of perception, how our perception changes “with the light?”
I give the AI another chance, asking it about these two series in particular. It informs me that the purpose of these paintings was “to capture the ephemeral effects of light and color, using the same subject as a ‘neutral constant’ to record atmospheric changes.” The AI clearly has not spent a lot of time looking at or thinking about these paintings, or about the purpose of art. Monet was not a meteorologist. He was a visual artist working in the midst of a watershed moment in intellectual history, painting through and into a new skepticism with regard to human reason, a new valorization of human subjectivity, a new interest in what our instincts, senses, imagination, and individual consciousness know and can tell us about the world and ourselves.
Although his physiological vision began to deteriorate in the latter half of the first decade of the new century, due to what he rightly suspected to be cataracts, confirmed in 1912, he avoided surgery for another ten years. It’s not just that he didn’t trust doctors. As James H. Rubin observes in his comprehensive addition to the World of Art series, “[I]n an era when objective vision (assuming it can exist) is no longer regarded as the basis for artistic creativity, one’s feelings based on visual stimuli, even if imperfect, are the source of art” (italics added).[9] It wasn’t just artistic creativity. There was a widespread turn toward the subjective as the more reliable conduit to knowledge, a new understanding that one purpose of knowledge is to lead to self-knowledge. In light of these ideas, no subject matter is “neutral” or “constant.” It’s all flow, it’s all personal. The “atmospheric changes” being recorded are occurring within.
*
Monet wanted to give the viewer of his Nympheas the “illusion of an endless whole, of a wave without horizon and without shore.”[10] Gesturing as it does toward the mystical as well as the philosophical symbolism of water, it’s a personal vision for an art that could carry its audience to a profound, even absolute understanding into the existence of things. Knowing, it implies, comes from a process more like baptism than taxonomy, and involves what’s frightening and chaotic about immersion, balanced by the promise of renewal, transformation, even wisdom.
Standing in front of any of the Water Lilies in the hush of the Orangerie’s elliptical space, I don’t know where I am. Am I standing on the banks of this body of water, on a boat in it, on the Japanese footbridge that I know is in the garden? (I’ve seen it in other Monet paintings and at Giverny itself, but it is not in these paintings.) Am I in the water? There is no horizon, no focal point to orient me, no center, no reliable sense of scale. I wonder what the painter himself would have made of “Claude Monet: The Immersive Experience,” the interactive virtual reality exhibition that’s been touring the world since 2019. Perhaps he would have been amused at the idea, since he had already done it.
Even in the gardens he designed and planted on the main property, Monet eschewed the linear, structured designs of the French impulse for the rampant, riotous English style and filled the beds to bursting. Poppies, sunflowers, nasturtiums, daffodils, primroses, willowherbs, irises, peonies, delphiniums, Oriental poppies, asters, and all variety of sunflowers spilled into the paths like a river overflowing its banks.
To be surrounded by the murals of Monet’s Water Lilies is to be immersed in his vision. The thin gold frame that surrounds each mural isn’t there to define the compositional boundaries; it acts to demarcate an aperture giving onto another world. It’s a world whose elements I can identify: archipelagos of lily pads and their occasional blooms of color, waterfalls of grass, a tree trunk rising up out of the water, another dancing, willow strands hanging down to the surface where they are met by their own reflections alongside the reflections of all that (I infer) exists beyond the frame: treetops, clouds, the sky, the time of day, all now part of the water in which the waterlilies are suspended.
I am used to entering imaginatively into the scenes presented to me—in poems, prose, films, plays, and music no less than paintings—but the Nympheas are different. Although I can identify them, I’m still having trouble keeping all the elements separate. The individual forms located on, above, and below the surface, the surface itself, the reflections, me!—we all blur together. When I approach I do not take in more detail, I become smaller; I don’t see more clearly, I become entangled in the fleshy paint; I have to work harder to hang onto my knowledge that those mists and waves and drops of color are there to represent petals, pads, roots. My knowledge that I am standing before a painting on a two-dimensional surface is powerless against my feeling that something in there is luring me in, trying to pull me under. I am part of Monet’s “illusion of an endless whole, of a wave without horizon and without shore.” While I am in it, I know so much more than I could ever account for, even if I were given “all the time in the world” to articulate it. And also so much less.
*
An AI can’t stop to think about Monet’s Water Lilies, or remember the last time it saw them, or understand what I mean when I say it doesn’t seem possible that it’s been three years now since I saw them in person, or reproduce the process by which my brain found itself stranded on the other side of Emily Dickinson’s final and then.
We can look at a few brushstrokes of paint and see across oceans, millennia. We can enter sympathetically into an object and intuit “what is unique in it and consequently inexplicable.”[10] An AI can name everything it “knows,” but it can only “see” one thing at a time. This is sad (if we’re into anthropomorphizing LLMs) but hardly a fatal flaw. A more serious limitation is AI’s inability to comprehend ambiguity.
My AI defines ambiguity as “incomplete or vague data,” and tells me it can “solve it” with “probabilistic reasoning” based on an assumption that it can “identify and resolve user intent.” It turns out that AI may share the source of one of its biggest limitations with the humans who designed it: hubris.
The problem with certain kinds of problems is that they’re like Maria in The Sound of Music: you can’t solve them. No one can. It is often one of these “problems” that serves as the inciting incident for a work of art, as opposed to a scientific study. You could say that “turning 30” and “feeling like you don’t really belong to your own family,” respectively, sets Franz Kafka’s The Trial and The Metamorphosis in motion. In John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” it’s (maybe) the desire to represent the everything of our lives in a work of art. It’s not just a problem of space, it’s a problem of time: How do we square “[t]his thing, the mute, undivided present” with “the present we are always escaping from / And falling back into, as the waterwheel of days / Pursues its uneventful, even serene course”?[11] (Although, in the 552 lines of this poem, he gets as close as anyone.)
As for the resolutions that take the form of happy endings, they offer more of a temporary stay than a solution. The discords of love, loneliness, libido—of life—are not really solved by the marriage that symbolizes harmony in, say, the comedies of Shakespeare and the novels of Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope. Genuinely joyful and worth celebrating, these happily ever afters are also new beginnings. Tying the knot, we know, is a deceptive solution. Those who believe they have put an end to their story by getting married have swapped one set of unknowns for another. The clarity (reason) that illuminates and untangles all the mayhem soon gives way to new muddles. The “all but” intractable problems and “all but” insurmountable obstacles our heroines and heroes have just struggled mightily to solve and surmount are about to come back in new forms. The strife and confusions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream are only the dress rehearsal for married life, a foreshadowing and a metaphor for the real thing.
One form these kinds of problems take is that of dilemmas, via the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), “a choice between two (or, loosely, several) alternatives, which are or appear equally unfavorable; a position of doubt or perplexity, a ‘fix’.” Literature gives us a quintessential example in Oedipus Rex. For most of Sophocles’s play, we watch in horror as Oedipus learns that the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother has been fulfilled. The irony of his unshakable belief that he can change his circumstances, and already has, hits hard and stays with us long after the curtain falls.
Oedipus Rex opens on a problem. A blight is devastating Thebes. The oracle at Delphi, having been consulted on Oedipus’s orders, commands that the murderer of the prior king, Laius, be identified and banished. Only when the killer has been brought to justice, will the city be purified and the pestilence lifted. Oedipus believes that he is able to discover the truth and that, as the current king of Thebes, it is his civic and sacred duty. He’s right on both counts. What he fails to take into account are his own blindspots, the limits of his own self-knowledge, the unknowns within himself. He has spent his whole life thinking that he can avoid the defining dilemma of his life: accept your fate or be conquered by it.
What can feel impossible, to humans, is literally impossible for an AI. In its own words, Google’s AI tells me, “I do not ‘experience’ dilemmas the way humans do—I have no personal emotions, moral weight, or fear of consequences. Instead, I navigate dilemmas through a computational process based on programming, training data, and safety guidelines.” I appreciate that it puts “experience” in quotes. Clearly it does not experience dilemmas. An essential part of what makes a dilemma a dilemma is how it feels to be stuck between a rock and a hard place. An AI promises to solve a dilemma as if they weren’t a dilemma at all.
An important part of being human is learning to manage our emotions as we work through the moral implications of our choices—not least because we are not the only ones who have to live with the consequences. What Oedipus Rex the character illustrates, what Oedipus Rex the play dramatizes, is that for all his stature and intellect, there is no chance that Oedipus can reason his way out of his dilemma. His problem is, effectively, the problem of the human condition.
Going back to the poem, I labor to add my own reasoning (something an AI can’t do) to Dickinson’s:
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then –
It’s not all of reason that has broken, I suddenly realize—it’s just one plank. Dickinson isn’t scrapping Reason wholesale. She’s questioning its solidity, pointing up its deficiencies, what it can neither account for nor explain. She’s also finding out that the world doesn’t come to an end with the failure of reason. It may in fact come to greater, more palpable life. A chink in reason’s armor might, indeed, reveal devastating truths. It might also lead us to discover new worlds. Maybe she’s learning that we construct our certainties at our peril, and that uncertainty is not such a high price to pay for what lies beyond their limits.
References
[1] Jerry Saltz, Art Is Life: Icons and Iconoclasts, Visionaries and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night (New York: Riverhead Books, 2022).
[2] As cited in Plato, Cratylus (402a) and Aristotle, Metaphysics (1010a).
[3] “Lectures XVI and XVII: Mysticism” in The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-1902.
[4] “[A]nd suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven: and he fell to the earth… And Saul arose from the earth; and when his eyes were opened, he saw no man…. And he was three days without sight.… And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and he received sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptized.” Acts 9:3-4,18. The Bible: Authorized King James Version (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
[5] There are some wonderful oxymorons here in what is literally a “Greenhouse Museum” in a “Tile-making Factory Garden.”
[6] Julien Green, The Strange River, 1932.
[7] In evolutionary terms, flowers were a kind of breakthrough, a new mutation designed to entice animals with color and scent so they would assist in propagation. It was a successful strategy. There are about 300,000 known species of flower-producing plants today.
[8] Monet had become successful enough to buy the house at Giverny in 1890 (he had been renting it since 1883). He painted the Haystacks (1890-1891), which were in fact stacks of grain (Meules, “wheat,” from millstones, the heavy stones used to grind the grains) in the fields near the house; and travelled from the station at Vernon, just down the road, to Rouen, a 1⅕ to 2 hour journey by train, to work on the series of Rouen Cathedral (1892-1893).
[9] James H. Rubin, World of Art: Monet (Thames & Hudson, 2020), p. 171.
[10] Henri Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T.E. Hulme [1913]. Stockbridge, MA, 1949.
[11] John Ashbery, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” Poetry (August, 1974).