Everyday I was able to put intense focus on the book, so even when I was in the city, my brain ignored a lot of detail and highlighted the images that correlated with the book. Although I didn’t plan it this way, whatever grabbed my attention was rooted in or connected to my novel, as if the city wanted to help me write it.

The story was about a father and his daughter, him a Chicano artist-scholar, her a precocious teenager, and one day I found myself writing a scene wherein he takes her to a city park in Paris, where he had gone to study art and where he met her mother, an Arabic woman who worked in an art supply store and died when the girl turned two. In the scene I was writing that morning, the girl is five-years old and the father is pushing 40. I wanted some image of them that showed their relationship and how every moment of their lives was haunted by the mother’s absence (her name was Sonya-Assis), but nothing was working.

Then one day I was walking down Calle Borges toward Plaza Italia, and I saw a man and his daughter on a bicycle. She must’ve been about five-years old, like the girl in the novel. She was riding on the handlebars as he swerved in and out of the cars, up and down the sidewalk and into the circle of traffic around the plaza with its statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi on a horse.

I was stunned by the look on the girl’s face– so calm and at peace, like everything was OK. She was safe with her daddy. If a fearful child were on those handlebars, someone who didn’t trust her father, she would be hanging on for dear life. But not this little girl. She was so secure.

That’s the relationship I wanted my fictional father to have with his daughter.

I got some food near the plaza and made my way to the Botanical Gardens across the street. I went to my regular bench, ate, read a bit, fed the cats that gathered around my legs. This was before the city started to regulate the number of cats in the gardens, as there used to be hundreds of them, and it was said that people would just drop them off as kittens and they would all survive together in the gardens. There were so many of them, and I knew every time I went there, I would have to share my lunch, pull off pieces of meat in my sandwich and feed them and they swirled around my legs like blurs of fur. The bench was facing a fountain, in the middle of which was a statue, a woman standing naked on a pedestal.

But today some workers had drained the fountain and were cleaning the moss off the white stone. One of the men pointed a high-pressure water hose to get the moss off the feet of the lady, but he sprayed her entire body as well, which hit her with such force it almost looked violent. He aimed at her legs, her midriff, her breasts, her face, and the other man, working on the floor of the pool where most of the moss had gathered, picked up his hose and pointed it at her too, and they were getting her from all sides. They were laughing and talking about things that had nothing to do with the statue, a futbol game maybe, or what plans they might have for the weekend. They were just doing their job, but the water hit her so hard it exploded in splashes.

I wondered what the daughter in my novel would think if she and her father were sitting together watching the workers spray the statue.

Daddy! They’re hurting her!

No, honey. She’s a statue.

But they’re hurting her!

I went back to my apartment and I wrote a scene of how they got to the park on a bicycle, the girl on the handlebars so happy and safe, but when they get to the fountain and she sees what the men are doing to the statue, she remembers her mother.

I plagiarized that scene from the city.

Although they are distinct states of consciousness, Flow corresponds with hypnagogia, that state of consciousness right before sleep when random images flash in your head and you know you are about to doze off. These two states of consciousness together are magical keys to the kingdom of Nepantla. Hypnagogia increases activity in the pineal gland, where melatonin is produced, that hormone that alerts you that sleep is about to come and the images flash. Flow increases the release of endocannabinoids, the “bliss molecule,” which brings on that feeling of connection and joy, basically getting you high. Endocannabinoids use the same receptors as THC, cannabis, marijuana, as in, Don’t bogart that joint, my friend!

In Flow + hypnagogia you lose sense of yourself, your identity, your body. You are so focused on your task that you forget time, you forget space, you even forget to eat. If you are driven or obsessed, like many writers, you work well into the night –even when melatonin is pulling you toward sleep. Hypnagogic images flash in your head, and the Flow of endocannabinoids delights in them, so they find they their way into the work. When I’m writing a story and I am so involved, so absorbed in that world, but I’m also experiencing involuntary images while my body is fighting sleep, the images often end up in the work. Swedenborg is famous for not only his ability to focus on new tasks, but also how he would go day sometimes without sleeping. Imagine walking the streets of London late at night without any sleep for days focused on some question about heaven. Images of angels will flash into your mind and feed your creativity.

Flow is how he began talking with angels.

Poets talk to angels, or, to evoke poet Omar Salinas, the crazy gypsy of Fresno, they bite at our fingernails as we’re writing. To be in The Writer’s High (how we experience Flow) is to talk with angels. Time disappears, and because during Flow your prefrontal cortex is diminished, you’re not telling a story about you, you’re following something bigger, deeper, smarter than you. You can enter into a realm without time, where images and sounds swirl all around; and because there is no time, you interact with thought-beings who have arrived from different spacetimes, to the same mundus imaginalis.

You could be a poet writing, and suddenly you see a crossroad and there are Indigenous women dancing –their long dresses twirling– and they carry baskets of candy. As you are experiencing this (writing it) you may look across the road and see Lorca on the other side looking at the same image, but instead of watching Purépecha women on the Islands of Janitzo, he’s seeing gypsies on the road to Córdoba. And if you are able to linger there, you can stand next to Lorca and watch the dancing together. You can even have a conversation.

Of course, in “real” life Lorca is dead and you are not. He is the angel you talk to.

But because time doesn’t exist in that world, it’s also true that you are dead and Lorca is living, so you are his angel.

Greene is perhaps the world’s most famous string theorist, which is a mathematical model of the universe, and these physicists are often willing to believe a theory because of an elegant equation, following the rhythm of math. If an equation is that beautiful, it must be true. There must be multiple hidden dimensions –the world must be made of tiny strings that vibrate all around us.

You could change one word in that quote, from PHYSICS to POETRY, and it would also be true:

The art of poetry lies in deciding what to ignore.

When language leads us into a poem, when we submit ourselves to the elegance of the equation, following the music, the sound, there will be many intrusions: emotions born in our bodies, like a hurt tummy or heartburn, noises coming from outside, intrusive thoughts, intrusive thoughts, intrusive thoughts. --But somehow the poet’s language knows what to ignore.

When poets find a rhythm, it’s not decoration or artifice, but the science of tapping into our linguistic streams of consciousness, finding the hidden dimensions that make our lives meaningful while ignoring the noise of ordinary thought that often impedes our ability to imagine.

Sometimes I carried my mother‘s hand mirror around the house, looking at furniture and windows inside of that tiny circle, as if I were glimpsing another universe from this side of the veil! When I held the mirror up to my face, I saw the other, more confident me, and he’d tell me things like,[1] Don’t be such a wimp! Be strong! Obviously I was pretending, and I knew that what I imagined wasn’t true, but like a lot of seven-year old kids I spent a lot of free time imagining there were other worlds side by side with ours. Years later, when I became a Christian as a young man, I didn’t need to pretend I could see into other worlds. Truth was hidden everywhere, and I could enter the world of the angels, I could get glimpses.

Even though I didn’t know it had a name, I started practicing bibliomancy, seeking guidance by randomly selecting a passage from the Bible. There was a hidden reality that could take randomness and use it to reinforce its structural imperatives. Ok, that reeks academese, so let’s put it this way:

God can speak through random acts, such as opening the pages of the Bible.

Christians, consciously or not, practice the occult, which simply means the hidden, in the form of Bibliomancy. They pick up the Bible, randomly open it, and read the first passage they see. More often than not, we are stunned by what we read, amazed because it has everything to do with what we’re experiencing at the moment. It’s exactly what we need to hear! God wanted us to read that passage. This phenomenon was proof of the divine, solid evidence that God was with me.

Only later did I come to understand that divination systems are some of the ways that human physiology encodes our evolutionary imperatives. We find what we seek, because we seek survival and flourishing. Our bodies and brains interact with the landscape in such a way that if we seek a goal, if we have a question or an overriding obsession –even if we are looking for an answer or something hidden– we will find it. We can see meaning in rocks, in trees, in the way birds land and fly around a plaza as we’re sitting there, thinking, observing, being in the moment. How many philosophers and scientists have stared at a colony of ants, watching the traffic go this way and that seeing them lug chunks of booty larger than their bodies, and then they think about the hidden patterns in social behavior, leading them to theories and ideas that ultimately turn out to be an effective way to structure our understanding of our world and civilizations. And if our consciousness can use such random detail to give us meaning, how much more can we uncover when we focus our cognition within a literal rectangle, a book? Thought and feeling come together and make a decision.

If you try bibliomancy, more often than not –depending on your imaginative capabilities– you will find a passage that will blow you away by its seeming serendipity.

It’s how our brains work.

But the key factor is that you need to . . . –wait for it – have faith. Without faith it will mean nothing to open up the Bible at a random page and read the first thing you see. Many people might roll their eyes at the idea of Bibliomancy, and they would read the random passage with irony. Intelligent people are especially prone to this behavior, because they revere pessimism as the Holy Spirit of intelligence. But too much pessimism and irony makes you intellectually numb. Or put another way: Pessimism cannot replace faith and get the same results. If I have faith that what I read applies to the questions that I have, whether it’s about my past, my present, or my future, it will resonate an answer. This is how tarot cards work. This is how augury works­– divination by observing the patterns and the behaviors of birds. This is why I use the seemingly arrogant title of this essay, “God Wants You to Read This.”

Really?

How arrogant!

God doesn’t care if you read this or not. But if you had faith that God wanted you to read this essay for a particular reason, you will likely find that reason. It will reinforce your desires. This is true with any book, not just the Bible. Randomly grab a book off your shelf.

Try it now. Think of a question about your life, something about the future, maybe something that will happen tomorrow or the next day. If you’re a writer, think about a writing issue, like what should you do with your character in the novel you’re writing, or what you should work on next? Try it.

Ask a question and grab a random book (but come back because I’m not done with you yet!). The question shouldn’t be too specific, like, Where did I leave my keys? Ask a general question about your life, or even a big decision you’re thinking about. Don’t ask yes or no questions, but open ended ones, like, What would it be like if I were to quit my stinking job and open up a little shop in downtown Fresno?

Open it and read the first line you see. Use your imagination to make connections.

Did you find an interesting answer?

Write about it in the comments.

[1] Even today, my wife teases me every time I look in the mirror because I make what she calls my mirror face. I can’t help it. It’s a physical reaction. I stand in front of a mirror and I get a facial expression that to some might say, Oh. Who is that fetching fella in the mirror? I can’t really explain it, pursed lips, direct gaze with my forehead slanting down. It’s kind of like the blue steel look in Zoolander.

I love to practice bibliomancy. I suppose I’ve been doing this all my life without knowing it had a name, but I started regularly practicing it when I was 23 and became an evangelical Christian. If I had a question for God or needed an answer to a problem, I would pick up the Bible and randomly turn to a page and a passage, and magically, it was exactly what I needed to know. I was on fire for the Lord, going to church three times a week, unsuccessfully trying not to sin, and walking door to door in suburban blocks spreading the Gospel.

I carried my Bible everywhere, and I loved to read the stories and the wisdom, the Book of Esther and Proverbs being my favorites. I got my BA in Political Science, but I wanted to be a writer, and I wrote and read late at night until I fell asleep. I loved entering into books, because it was like walking into an alternate universe, a separate reality, and when I became a Christian, the experience got even richer. The main point of reading the Bible was to hear the voice of God, to listen, to learn, to apply the lessons to your own life. To do like Jesus did.

It was the tome that mattered most, and not only was it filled with fantastic stories and aphorisms, but it was also literally (in the fundamentalist Christian reality I lived in) God DIRECTLY speaking to me.

God speaks through the Bible.

This is a fundamentalist belief, but I took it a little further. I believed God was in the details of everyday life. I remember when I first became a Christian, after I had recited the official “sinner’s prayer and became one of the elect,” that the brethren told me that God was always with me now, and He would show me the path I needed to take in life. He would find the way to speak to me, they said, and I believed it. Although the Bible was literally the most direct voice, God could speak through the wind, and the Holy Spirit walked with me, pointed out things that I should pay attention to.

I would walk around Fresno State truly believing that the Spirit was walking along side me, and He wanted to show me things, if I would just notice. Maybe there were hidden messages in the trees, or through open windows, or in how the birds flew overhead. I believed there were messages in anything. How fun it was for a creative writer to be a Christian!

Everything was new and significant. I was surrounded by unopened letters from God. If some rando came up to me and asked, Where’s the men’s room? I would think this was from the Spirit. I was meant to meet that man, maybe lead him to Jesus. But as a writer, I couldn’t help but going deeper into the details of my chance encounter with the toilet seeker, so my desire to lead him to God was only one level of reality. Beneath the details of the encounter, God was showing me more. Why did he need the men’s room? Why not the administration building or the café? He needed the restroom to expel the waste within him, the caca and pee of sin, and that’s what I needed. Get rid of the waste! Be pure. Jesus says that it doesn’t matter what enters a man, but what comes out of him. No matter what I eat, beans, Kentucky Fried Chicken, porkchops and applesauce, it needs to come out. That’s what matters. What comes out of you.

I loved living in a world where everything meant something, where there was no coincidence. Even the very hairs on my head were numbered! I entered with ease into this reality, maybe because –as a creative writer–that’s how I enter into the books I read or the works I write. God is in the details, and all I needed to do was reflect on them, pray on them, and I might get a glimpse of truth. Like a lot of new writers, after I wrote a first draft, I would be stunned to return to it later and see how significant some of the details turned out to be, without me intending it.

With or without the writer’s intention, in good fiction and poetry, every detail matters. After years of being an atheist, when I believed that nothing mattered, that what you see is what you get, being a Christian was like taking magic mushrooms. Suddenly the world was vibrant and every detail pulsed with possibility. Like many things in my life, I might have taken this idea to extreme levels.

I believed that if you are always aware, present in all you do and speak and walk, you will not only notice the divine that is all around you, but you can also be guided to make the right choices every moment. If you can maintain perfect alignment with God in a single day, by the end of that day, you might see His face. You might stand before the throne. I couldn’t help, but think of Elijah from Kings 1 and 2, who was so in tune with God every second of his life, that he didn’t even have to die. He just walked right into heaven and sat with God. I learned later that this is an actual belief among some Jewish mystics that there are right steps, moment to moment, that can lead you to stand before the throne. It’s almost impossible for it to happen, because we live in the flesh and ego, but like an unlikely position of a quantum particle, the possibility exists. We miss most of the hidden beauty and meaning in ordinary life, but they are there. Perhaps that’s why some mystic traditions believe that the biggest sin anyone can commit against God is ennui, boredom, having no joy because nothing is new.

As a new Christian, everything was new.

One day on campus, I went into a men’s restroom, and as I was doing my business, I looked around the bathroom thinking, Where is it? What does God want me to see? I looked at the porcelain sink, pure white. The light reflected off it and cast a rectangle of light over the shadowy wall. I looked up, and there was another rectangle of light, a little window, and through it I could see the treetops outside, the leaves shaking like the bells of angels. What are you trying to tell me, God?

Perhaps, Follow the light! It will lead you to the tree, which is Life, which is goodness. I didn’t know it at the time, but the mystic Emanuel Swedenborg says trees are a correspondence to the warmth of God’s love, and as I stood there at the urinal in that cold tile bathroom, I felt the warmth of God. I also felt my warm pee on my shoe, as I wasn’t paying attention.[1]

I believed the details in the landscape contained hidden meanings that could lead me to something great, to a blessing, or better still, it might show me a portal to higher realms. I think there is a human sense or gut feeling that all things are connected, that the physical landscape is embedded with meaning, and this is rooted or related to the evolutionary imperatives of our species. If we want to survive and thrive, we need to see.

[1] I don’t know if this really happened or if it’s a cheap literary device

In the story “El alef” by Borges, there is the moment when the main character, who is Borges, is looking at an Aleph, which is more than just the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, but it’s also a point in space and time where all space and time exists at once. The aleph is impossible to conceive, let alone try to describe with language, and when he tries, he writes, “here comes the ineffable part of my story.”

How do you describe seeing and experiencing all things at once?

I can barely describe the cat sitting on my lap as I write these words, scratching her neck with a handle of my coffee cup. It gets harder when I’m looking at something stunning, like a murmur of birds moving like a mobius strip over the mountain, or a child running into a field. Even at that level, it’s ineffable, because my experience isn’t just visual. It’s physiological, spiritual, and so many other things going on in my body and my brain and my history and my culture. How can I describe what I’m experiencing? Now try to explain an image that contains all images, all experiences of all beings that have existed, exist now, and will exist in the future. It’s not easy, but in trying to do so, Borges comes up with a beautiful attempt, worth quoting at length.

Vi el populoso mar, vi el alba y la tarde, vi las muchedumbres de América, vi una plateada telaraña en el centro de una negra pirámide, vi un laberinto roto (era Londres), vi interminables ojos inmediatos escrutándose en mí como en un espejo, vi todos los espejos del planeta y ninguno me reflejó, vi en un traspatio de la calle Soler las mismas baldosas que hace treinta años vi en el zaguán de una casa en Fray Bentos, vi racimos, nieve, tabaco, vetas de metal, vapor de agua, vi convexos desiertos ecuatoriales y cada uno de sus granos de arena, vi en Inverness a una mujer que no olvidaré, vi la violenta cabellera, el altivo cuerpo, vi un cáncer en el pecho, vi un círculo de tierra seca en una vereda, donde antes hubo un árbol. . .

I don’t want to give the wrong impression. I didn’t read this story in Spanish. I’m bien pocho and read it in English, so here’s the translation:

I saw the teeming sea, saw the dawn and the dusk, saw the multitudes of America, saw a silvery spiderweb at the center of a black pyramid, saw a broken labyrinth (it was London), saw endless, immediate eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror, saw all the mirrors on the planet and none reflected me, saw in a backyard on Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years ago I saw in the entryway of a house in Fray Bentos, I saw clusters of grapes, snow, tobacco, veins of metal, water vapor, saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand, saw in Inverness a woman I will never forget, saw the violent hair, the proud body, saw a cancer in her breast, I saw a circle of dry earth on a sidewalk where once there had been a tree…

That’s the aleph of moment of his “Aleph”story, which can serve as a metaphor for writers to understand that good writing has an aleph moment, sometimes more than one. This is where the velocity changes, where energy pushes the language like a force acting on matter.

Using a Physics 101 metaphor, inertia is when an object moves at exactly the same velocity and vector. There is no force acting on it, no need for it to change its direction.

What a metaphor for writing!

I don’t want too much inertia in my writing. I want to accelerate and deaccelerate.

Sometimes, it’s best for me to slow down, for the reader to stop or pause on each word. Staccato sentences become percussive. Other times –¡de repente!–the language starts to push and gush out a whole bunch of things that I didn’t even know I had inside me like micro memories and feelings I forgot I had –and the words avalanche down the page collecting more and more debris until you reach the bottom and then, bang! It stops.

Now a new sentence.

The only way to change inertia in poetry, like in matter, is when a force acts on it, a push to make it faster or friction to slow it down. It follows that whenever writing changes velocity, there’s a force behind it. Force is energy is passion is desire and myriad things the writer consciously or unconsciously wants-needs to say. This is the aleph moment. I could look at some of the writing my students turn in and help them to recognize where in their work the energy wants to take over.

After the first draft, if they can recognize their aleph moment, they will see that the images at the center of it are evoking something profound in them, something deep inside, some psychic and spirit energy, something ineffable like children running into an empty field.

Sorry to get all Borges on you again, but one of the things that he taught me is that you can take religion and other complex systems and play with the ideas. He loved reading the Bible, all the unique metaphors involved in telling the stories, like “Do not throw your pearls before swine.” He was awed by that one!

But he read the Bible as if it were fantasy literature, the same way he read 1001 Nights and the tales of Robert Louis Stevenson. He also read Kabbalah, Chinese Philosophy, and one of his favorite books that he read many times was Bertrand Russell’s Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, which he loved.

I confess that when I heard about his fascination with the book, I got a copy and tried to get through it. It is a thin volume, but it’s packed with dense material and I had to read it with intense focus, and so far have only got through a quarter of the book. But I’m not dead yet, and it’s still on my bookshelf, available for me to pull out and to read it when the time is right.

He didn’t read Russell because of some hidden ambition in the mathematical world. Rather he read it as fantasy literature. It allowed him to expand his own imagination and create stories like nobody had ever created before, such as “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” which I’m willing to imagine was inspired or ran parallel to when he read Mathematical Philosophy.

I was struck by a detail from chapter two, a short passage about Gottlob Frege, a German Philosopher and mathematician who published a book that defined numbers in such a way that mathematics could have moved forward. The name of the volume was Grundlagen der Arithmetik, but when it was published, it got no attention. Nobody noticed it. It wasn’t until years later when Frege’s text was discovered and mathematical philosophers like Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein realized the idea had always been there –and for a long time.

This is like a plot detail from a Borges story! Someone finds an obscure book that explains the mysteries of reality, or they find references in the footnote of an obscure book and follow that idea into deeper and deeper philosophical territory. Borges treated philosophy, religion, science, as toys for the writer to play with.

All books are fantasy literature.

I think this is a good way for writers to think. We can believe in science or math or God or whatever we want to believe in, but we should also be able to play with the ideas and details like a child plays with dolls.

It could be good for a writer to not take any system too seriously, but to play with the ideas, to hop from system to system and be a systems thinker. I advise my students, or any writer who asks, to not just read novels and poetry, but technical books about any subject. Have you been thinking about trees, noticing them lately? Read a scientific book about trees. Read across disciplines, but not to try to learn something per se, or to “expand” your knowledge, but for fun, like you were reading a fantasy story. Let the ideas influence you. Let the spirit of the trees appear in your own work.

(Here is a short list of fun books that writers can use to expand their imaginative possibilities.)

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.

The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene

7 1/2 Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett

The Distorted Cosmos by Chandra Prescott Weinstein.

Chuco Punk by Tara Lopez.

The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore.

Looking for Spinoza by Antonio Demasio.

Gödel, Escher, and Bach by Douglas R Hofstadter.

These are so many more, but just have fun!

Before my brain had time to wonder about its meaning, this verse struck me as beautiful, like poetry,

Scatter wide your raging anger

and relevant for today, as if God is telling me to take the rage we feel hoy en día and scatter it all around our world.

Put it into your work, into your steps, into the songs you sing and the poetry you write. Put it into the way that you fiercely love the work you do, into your family and community.

Scatter the rage over everything you see and hear and touch, and like alchemy, the rage you feel against the injustice you witness will transmute into gold –into Love.

If you feel anger that makes you tremble, use it.

Use it for the good.

But meaning aside, I would like to consider how my brain works, and why the line I found beautiful just by the sound turns out to have deeper meanings. Maybe poetry is important because the more beautiful the language, the more that is hidden underneath it. Maybe writers know intuitively the profundity of a line, an image, an incantation, even if they are not yet putting it into thought.

In a beautiful verse, you can go deep. You can perform what the mystics call exegesis, to dig into the text and uncover hidden meanings.

Intuition is your mind sensing what it can’t yet put into thought. Your intuition hears a beautiful verse, whether in your own head or in a poem you’re reading –or even in the voices you hear in the distance. Your mind will later catch up and see why it was so beautiful to begin with. Trust your intuition about poetry.

I didn’t know why that line struck me so much when I first heard it, but here is the entire verse:

Scatter wide your raging anger

See all who are proud, and bring them low

This second verse adds a lot of meaning to the first. Bring them down low? Who is them? Who is the proud?

Obviously, it depends on what community you ask, but there is a Kabbalistic concept known as Lech Lecha, and it tells us that when we enter deeply into a sacred text and uncover what is hidden beneath the language, we are entering into ourselves, into our own consciousness. We are uncovering our own priorities, spirit, physiology. Whatever we get from that verse will be filtered through us, shaped by us into meaning.

For people who love to go deeply into a text, they will uncover their own essence.

They go into themselves.

A student in my Writer and the Occult seminar asked me about a curious experience she often has, wherein she hears the same phrase echoed twice from two sources within milliseconds. She might hear someone say from the TV in another room, That’s all there is! while at the exact same moment she’d be reading an article, and there’s the phrase, That’s all there is. . .

Or she’ll hear someone shout from a distance, Julia! as she’s reading a poem about someone named Julia. This occasionally happens to all of us, but it happens to her a lot, she says. What does it mean?

I didn’t know if it meant anything, but I gave her a writing exercise: Since the seminar was a conversation about the occult, when she experiences this again, think of somebody who died and imagine there was some sort of communication from the other world, someone trying to get her attention by pointing out linguistic clues. Just imagine this. Don’t actually believe it, but play with the idea.

Hearing the same words coming from different sources at the same time is a common human experience, I think. Sometimes I’ll be scrolling through my phone and I see the word San Francisco and I look up and there’s a magazine on the coffee table and on the cover it says San Francisco. Imagine there could be hidden meanings in this repetition. Maybe when we notice repeating words or phrases, we intuitively get a glimpse of some deeper meaning embedded in reality.

One day, I encountered the word Kentucky, and within 10 seconds, I saw it again from a source that had nothing to do with the first. I remember the poet Andrés Montoya telling me that two of the most beautiful words in the English language were Kentucky and weep.

Say it, he said. Kentucky and weep.

And it did sound beautiful, so we both started saying, Kentucky and weep.

Maybe whenever I see or hear Kentucky it releases his spirit, and when there is a random repetition of the word, even more so.

Imagine that all the different words strung together from different parts of our day, things we hear on the TV or a podcast or out the window or as we’re walking through the aisles of Walmart – If we were to listen to those random words and run them through some sort of complex processing system like our brains, we might notice that certain words come up more often on a particular day. Could these word-loops reflect or parallel the meaning of that day and allow us to intuit the future? Can you imagine it? Can you follow your imagination?

Divination systems like Tarot cards, I Ching, etc, are used to help prepare people for what they intuitively know might be coming. Perhaps when my student experiences this repetition of language, she might be uncovering another divination system by which she can go deeper into hidden realities. She could ask herself, Well, what does it mean:

That’s all there is?

Julia?

Have we been worse off as a species because of that?

Probably not. Memorizing multiple, seven-digit sequences is indeed impressive, but I don’t really miss it.

But what about writing?

Today people outsource their ability to write, and although it bums me out, because I put in my ten thousand hours to get good at it. I don’t suspect writing will be missed much by the next generation. My 17-year-old daughter is about to go to college, and she has a wide choice of options, because she went to early College high school and will graduate with an associates degree. She won’t miss writing when it’s entirely machine-generated. She hates it, and I suspect is quite good at prompting ChatGPT.

Students are using AI to generate essays that they used to write themselves –and who can blame them? How is an analysis of a Shakespearean theme or an essay on capital punishment going to be relevant for them when they get out in job market which will require very little writing? And if there is a need to write, they’ll use LLMs. Recently, a popular business magazine let leak that their journalists are encouraged to use large language models to produce stories, which makes sense to them, because this digital magazine only wants clicks, attention. If you can put out 100 articles a week by a single journalist, rather than one or two, what would stop you?

Why do professors even make students write traditional essays? The students must think it pointless, and for them, they are probably right. Administrators use LLMs to write emails and reports, and if you ask them about it, they feel absolutely no remorse for using them. And why should they? Why spend so much time composing an email when you can prompt a system to draft it. After reading it over and making a few changes, why wouldn’t you send it?

AI generated text is also used by professors. There was a recent story in the news https://www.newsweek.com/college-ai-students-professor-chatgpt-2073192 where a professor was “caught” responding to student work using LLM-generated text. Can you blame him? Imagine the archetypal freeway flyer, the person who teaches freshman composition at multiple college campuses in multiple districts and has to jump on the freeway to make it to their next class. They teach five or more composition classes per semester for very little pay. If they could use technology to make their lives easier and give them more time to do what they love, like writing and reading, do you think every single one of them is going to say no?

Within a few years, it will be culturally acceptable to use AI to grade student AI-generated essays, which is a strange loop unpredicted by Douglass Hofstadter. AI grading AI. AI chasing a tail that ends up being the tail of AI.

I have a friend who worked for an AI startup that used machines to analyze the writing of potential employees, to reveal their physiological profile, but the problem is that once LLMs became available those same employees started using it to write their cover letters, so it’s AI examining itself in a strange loop, analyzing its own personality (or lack thereof).

Much of the new content we see online, book reviews, articles, comments on articles, is AI generated, even if it’s carefully prompted by an individual whose name is on the article. In other words, people who write articles are using AI to write their articles, and AI scrapes them off the internet and emulates them, so AI writing becomes sets of linguistic loops with no challenge to syntax and form, which by extension means no challenge to the political status quo.

That’s what somebody might say in an argument—You think everything’s about you! Carly Simon even made a hit out of it: You’re so vain, I bet you think this song is about you. Don’t you? Don’t you!

Nobody wants to be that person who thinks everything revolves around them.

But here’s the truth: it does.

Not because you’re vain, but because everything is about you. (Sorry, Carly. Even if you insist the song is about clouds in your coffee, it’s still about him—some say Warren Beatty.)

Without an observer—you—space-time itself has no meaning. Subatomic particles don’t even know where they are or how fast they’re moving without you. Without you, reality just swirls around in potential energy and particles. Without you, there is no color.

It’s all about you.

Every experience you’ve had—love, sex, a ripe mango, every argument—is about you. You might think you’re defending an objective position, or some moral truth, but in the end, you’re defending your own story, your sense of self.

Even altruism is a story. People who deeply believe in unselfish values are still living out their own narratives about what matters. Ideologies and beliefs are just structures built on top of stories.

But stories come first.

And stories come from desire.

Beneath everything—our impulses, our morals, our philosophies—is desire. Maybe it’s evolutionary, maybe it’s the spirit of God within us, but that desire shapes the stories we tell.

Everything comes down to what you want.

And that’s not selfish. That’s human.

But then the real question emerges:

If it’s all about you, if it’s all about what you want—
What do you want most?

Or, as Yuval Harari asks at the end of Sapiens:

What do you want to want?

I think about a time when I was in graduate school at the University of Oregon. We were at a party — drinking wine, smoking pot — and this liberal white woman with Rastafarian hair was sitting in the living room with us. She looked over at me and Andrés Montoya and said:

“Man, I wish I wasn’t white.”

Most of the young progressive people in the room just kind of nodded as if they understood. But for me, it was strange.

Why?

Why wouldn’t you want to be white?

White is the privileged class, etc., etc.

But watching how the others responded to her, as if they knew exactly what she meant, I suddenly understood. We were in a cultural shift — one where people of color could play what they called the “race card.” And even though I know that term has been exaggerated by the political right, it was true.

We could play the race card. And I did — many times, mostly unconsciously.

Why won’t you rent this apartment to me?

Is it because I’m Mexican?

That was often my default. I don’t think I abused it — but I used it.

One time in Eugene, when I was in the MFA program at U of O, it was maybe 1 or 2 a.m. All the writers, philosophers, and creatives of color had been at a party — a good one — and afterwards we went to a 24-hour diner. A Denny’s-like place, packed with people.

Some of is were drunk, about ten of us, all of us Latinos, spread out at different tables.

Our waitress was a white woman in her fifties who looked like she’d been smoking all her life, so many wrinkles. She reminded me of a coffee-shop archetype: cat-eye glasses on a pearl chain, a salon-set hairdo. She was working hard — really hustling to take care of everyone.

At one of our tables, two of our friends from Latin America started going after her.

They said they didn’t get their coffee in time because they were brown. That white people were being served first. And it’s true we were the only Latinos in the cafe, but I don’t think the lady was treating us any different.

I was watching this woman run around, sweating, trying to keep up with the crowd. I hated how they treated her — how they tried to make her feel bad for being white. She was just a working-class woman doing her job. We were graduate students, who would probably never have to work all or lives at a cafe serving drunk people.

Andrés and I looked at each other. We couldn’t believe what we were seeing. His mom was a working class white women, all her life working hard just to pay rent and give her kids what she could.

We should have said something to defend the lady. But we didn’t.

This was around 1994. And in the university setting, things got worse. Anyone who spoke out — or even misspoke — in a way that bordered on racism could be ostracized. Years later it even got a name: canceled.

And yes, sometimes cancellation was justified — when someone went on a racist rant, or when a celebrity revealed how deeply misogynistic and racist they really were. But often, it wasn’t.

Language was being used as a weapon to eliminate certain voices.

And now we are seeing the same thing from the other side — where people are being “canceled” not for saying something racially or culturally insensitive, but simply for criticizing the ruling power.

If you speak out against Charlie Kirk, for example, you can be canceled. They don’t call it cancellation, but it’s the same thing.

It was abused before. It’s abused now.

I think about Malcolm X, after JFK’s assassination, saying “the chickens have come home to roost.” It got him in trouble. They attacked him. How could you say that?

This tactic is universal. And today it’s being used so effectively that it can silence teachers, comedians, anyone who speaks out.

I’m a university professor. I’ve been in academia a long time. And I understand the paranoia — that fear of saying the wrong thing.

Sometimes in class I just hope I don’t blurt something culturally insensitive, because when I lecture, I follow language wherever it leads.

For example, I might call a woman a “girl.” I don’t mean to. I grew up in a culture where that was normal — where even adult women were “girls.”

Look at those girls.

The girls are great.

Girls’ night out.

But when I say it now, I feel bad.

Even with my wife, when we’re cuddling, I’ll say without thinking, “You’re my girl.” And she’ll say, “I’m not a girl. I’m a woman.” And she’s right. I apologize. But sometimes it just comes out.

What we need, if we want to be a nation, if we want to be a people, is to understand that discourse shifts depending on who we’re talking to. We shouldn’t cancel or attack people simply for the language that flows through them.

People were canceled ten years ago. People are being canceled today.

The problem is using language as a weapon — as a way to attack those who don’t agree with you.

I’m gonna close with a quote from Greg Eagan a sci-fi writer I just barely discovered. He writes, “Language evolved to facilitate cooperation in the conquest of the physical world, not to describe subjective reality.”

Maybe that’s where the problem lies. We are using words thinking we are describing reality (our side is good, their side is bad). But what we should be using it for is to cooperate and to make the best physical world that we possibly can.

J.C.R. Licklider, Man-Computer Symbiosis, 1960

When he would get home from school, Lick would throw books on the bed and go to the garage where the car was waiting for him like a lonely robot. He had found the corpse of the roadster in a field of weeds and urged his parents to let him have it. It was a machine–and he loved machines– and even though all that was left of the car was the body and some rusty metallic joints, he knew he could rebuild the engine and re-configure all the moving parts, get the pistons drumming, the carburetor pumping gas into the fuel line. He could imagine it zipping across the road like a metal demigod with purpose.

When the day came when the work was done, he closed his eyes and turned the key. It was supposed to purr. It purred. When he pressed his foot on the gas pedal, still in neutral, it was supposed to roar, and it roared. What a feeling that must have been! He must’ve thought that machine and his own spirit were connected. He wasn’t a religious boy, but his father was a Baptist minister, so maybe he imagined his soul became one with the machine. Like God with Adam, he breathed life into it.

Obviously, a car isn't a computer, but tinkering with motors and clocks and any mechanical thing around the house must have led to his insight into computers and systems. Years later, in 1960, when he was a Psychologist-turned computing visionary, J.R.C. Licklider (Lick to his friends) wrote a manifesto called “The Man-Computer Symbiosis” in which he writes the above quote.

It reminds me of an image I associate with Coders by Clive Thompson, where suburban kids with Commodore 64's would write code late into the night just to see what they could get the computer to do, maybe hooking it up to a mechanical arm and watch it push a cup off the desk, howling with delight when it works.

Lick didn’t have a Commodore 64 when he was a kid—because they didn’t exist yet. His insight came twenty years before personal computers, before there were calculators, palm pilots and the devices in our hands or over our eyes that compute more information than a room full of government computers from 1960. Back then, a team of mostly women coders (yes, the first coders were women) would have to face a pile of punch cards and be very specific about what holes they punched (what chads were left hanging) before they fed the cards one by one into the machine, and even if there was one tiny wrong hole in the card, they would have to start over again. But the answers it would give could potentially save years of human cognitive energy.

How did Lick know?

He is largely credited as a creator or oracle of the Internet, believing there could be an informational system shared across computers in what later would become the cloud. Lick predicted the future, because he was moving towards it, and he knew the emerging computational ability of machines could be used not only to carry out human goals, but to enhance the parts of the brain responsible for processing and storing information. Like the hippocampus, where our memories are stored. He believed the partnership of human and machine could make all us brilliant! Aristotle famously said, to learn is to remember, and that’s the problem isn’t it? We always forget what we learn. But what if we didn’t have to? What if everything we have ever learned as humans were readily available not only for recall but for processing and decision making?

Today anybody can have advanced brains by outsourcing some of the cognitive functions that take up too much mental bandwidth.

He was right. This is obvious today. Our brains are enhanced by our devices, which is to say, we outsource some of our cognitive work to machines.

But I’m afraid Lick was a bit too optimistic in a bourgeois life that would allow him, as a kid, to convince his parents to bring a giant car into their house. He even had a private garage to work in, but not everybody has those advantages.

Lick was not able to imagine how the same processing ability that would allow his brain to partner with computational devices can and will enslave others. Today computational power is used to aggressively to keep people under submission. Most people are not cognitively enhanced by their devices; they are subservient to them. They are vulnerable to algorithms that are designed to access the mechanisms of their brain and cause them to continue to use those devices. They are designed to keep people engaged, to shape their behavior according to algorithms.

Even though for some people LLMs might be cognitive enhancers, they can also make us stupid by not requiring us to think. For those who have little AI literacy, devices make many people less smart, not smarter. It causes their brains to function in loops and patterns.

But he’s right for some people. AI is accelerating how some people can use the technology for cognition and can definitely be smarter.

We cannot ignore this technology and AI, but we can learn how to use it to enhance our lives, not to highjack our limbic system and do our thinking.

To return to the metaphor we began with—Lick picking a car from an empty field and towing it home to fix it up—we are not so much working on the car as allowing the car to work on us. The car is smarter than us in certain ways, and it wants to open up our brains and tinker around until it can get us to do the will of its creators.

Aristotle said to learn is to remember. But the machine remembers everything for us—and in doing so, it begins to shape what we are allowed to learn, to recall, to decide.

That’s not cognitive enhancement.

That is colonization of the human brain.

As a professor of creative writing, I often tell my students that if an image arises twice in a single poem or story, it becomes a motif, with or without the will of the writer. By the third time it appears, the image might be trying to tell you something. It signals to the reader that meaning is embedded into the image, and if it appears four times, it may even be a fundamental thematic element of the work.

Same is true in life, probably even more so, because stories are intended to represent “real” life. If there are connections in the work of art, it must be a representation of how details we notice in our day can connect us to meaning.

So what is the meaning that on one day, today, I encountered three references to oranges?

The first was rereading the Garcia Lorca poem Despedido.

El niño come naranjas.

Desde mi balcón lo veo.

It’s a short amazing poem that finds the portal between life and death, between the imaginary world and the physical world. I think it’s one of the most elegant poems ever written about death. And I love that line when he sees the child eating an orange, because you can imagine when he pulls off the rind it sprays acid and juice in his face and he can smell it before the first juicy bite.

The child is living. The child is alive.

The second reference to an orange that came to me today was a detail I found in a Substack I was reading –sorry I don’t remember who it was!!! They wrote that when they were young, they were lucky to get an orange for Christmas. The reference sparked my Richard Wright neuron, and I remembered that scene from Native Son during Christmas, and the mother gives them oranges for Christmas, and they devour those things.

It's a sad image when we think of how poor they were and how materialistic Christmas has become for many of us. To think that kids could get such immense pleasure from an orange is heartbreakingly beautiful.

The third other reference to oranges was especially heartbreaking.

I found this morning on my newsfeed, a story in El Paso Matters about the Walmart shooter, written by Robert Moore.

Read it. It’s a stunning work of journalism.

The shooter didn't enter Walmart with a gun.

He entered and walked around, and in Moore’s piece, there is a poignant moment when a lady comes up to the shooter and asks him in Spanish if he could get something off a top shelf for her, because he’s tall and she’s short and can’t reach it. He helps her.

Later he goes into the grocery area of the store and buys a bag of oranges.

He takes that bag, walks back to his car, gets in, and he sits there for an hour.

He ate one of those oranges during that period. I can imagine him sitting in the car, thinking or trying not to, maybe trying to get the courage to go inside. He takes an orange out of the bag, and he opens –it sprays in his face, and he’s a kid again.

I wonder what neurons it fired. Were they good memories? Maybe he remembered getting Christmas gifts or family moments, or maybe he had hurtful memories, like when he was in elementary school and he was getting picked on by a couple of Mexicans kids, which Moore explains was the reason he gave the cops for why he mercilessly murdered so many people.

I wonder if that hour in the car (before he went back in with guns) was supposed to only be five minutes. Maybe he was just going to drop the bag of oranges in the car, get the guns and go do it, but because he ate one first, maybe it made him stop. Maybe for a moment it even caused him to connect to something human about himself and the lady he helped. Maybe that’s why he stayed in the car in El Paso in the summer when it reaches the hundreds. Maybe he was hoping that the lady he helped inside the store was gone by the time he went back in to kill as many as he could.

Poets know that language creates, reinforces, and asserts meaning.

Language doesn’t only express our thoughts—it helps create them. Just think of the surprises we get at the end of our own sentences where something unexpected and profound is revealed. Borges et al tell us, If the poet isn’t surprised by what happens in her work, the reader won’t be surprised. Language leads us into meaning.

I’ll give you an example in this sentence that I’m writing right now –yes, this one–how I have no idea how it’s going to end, or whether it will uncover something useful, profound, or maybe just something meaningless to anyone but me and my body, like my stomach feels fat right now so maybe I should get off my ass and do sit-ups or I should be doing something else, or I think I’m going to have a banana for breakfast.

I had no idea I wanted a banana until I got to the end of that sentence. The language created the meaning, the impulse, the drive, reality, but the sentence would make no sense without the syntax, the order of things, the rules that lead to the discovery of the banana.

The syntax is prefabricated and exists with or without my personal imperatives, so that if one starts with a single phrase like, I’ll give you an example, the next token word must be “in” “with” “of” or some preposition or a period or an em-dash. I’m not really choosing what comes next. I’m unlikely to write, I’ll give you an example Peterbilt mania yesterday.

The syntactic traditions from which my language comes make the choices about direction and meaning and create the syntagms in each sentence.

Syntagm is a word I learned yesterday, so this is the first time I’m using it, ever.

A syntagm is a chain of language elements—words or sounds—strung together in a specific, expected order to create meaning. It’s the rhythm of grammar, the groove we speak inside: subject, verb, object. We rarely notice it, but it’s the scaffolding under almost every sentence we say.

But poets resist syntagms during the writing process, because we can resist meaning by paying attention, consciously or not, to our bodies. Poetry is visceral.

Especially when we consider how our bodies influence the way we generate thought and language, so that if my stomach is hurting because I ate something bad the night before and then I'm sitting at my desk writing this article by following language or my body needs potassium and I unconsciously come up with the word banana. I am resisting conventional forms of meaning. If I resist syntax I resist water.[1]

I want to bloat.

What does that mean?

Who cares?

You follow the language.

I want to bloat and you continue.

But what's stunning about the Bajohr quote above is that LLMs follow syntactical rules that are based on ideology, so that if you ask it to write a story, the ideological structure of the story will be conflict, deepening of conflict, resolution.

If you ask it to write a poem, it will do the same thing.

No matter how much you change the detail, the syntactic structure will remain intact, and it is one that replicates the political control of the culture.

So if Bajohr is right and whoever controls LLMs controls politics, it is crucial for us to understand what Trump proposed yesterday about AI companies that want to do business with the US government: Their LLMs must reflect what he calls “American values.”

What American Values. The MAGA values?

“Whoever controls LLM's controls LLMs controls politics.”

[1] Really I should have written I resist meaning, but in my poetic resistance I put WATER instead, which makes no sense. It doesn’t means anything, but it was just as an act of poetic rebellion. But think of how meaningful resisting water can be. What is water? Spirit, life? Purification? See how legacy syntax wants to keep me tied to meaning?? Ha ha ha!

I’ve always heard people say that children are geniuses—at least until they turn seven. I think Picasso said something like that. Others have echoed the idea for decades: kids are so original, so clever, such imaginative little minds. And while that’s true in a way, I think if we compress the idea, we could just as easily say: children are meme machines, unfettered by personal narrative and cognitive structure—or impeded by a prefrontal cortex, which, among other things, carries a story about ourselves that limits our way of thinking.

So if we’re going to consider the idea that children are simply meme machines, or memetic replicators, we should define what that means. The term meme—which we mostly associate with funny images that spread online—was coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene. In a chapter devoted to memetics, he introduced the meme as a cultural unit that behaves like a gene: it spreads, mutates, and survives through repetition, regardless of its original intent.

Take the phrase Got milk? It started as a simple ad funded by the California Dairy Commission. But it didn’t stay there. It evolved—Got God? appeared on church marquees. Got Porn? was plastered on the window of city sex shops. The phrase detached from its source. It became a meme—not just a message, but a cultural replicator.

What if children are like that? Not little artists or original thinkers in the mystical sense, but highly adaptive meme engines. Maybe they replicate cultural fragments—phrases, tones, rhythms—and a small percentage of what they say clicks in the minds of adults as clever, fresh, or profound. We remember the moments that shine and forget the 3,000 other things they say in a day that make us want to shout please stop talking.

But let me give you an example of high-quality meme replication.

Everybody agrees Luci is smart—I mean, really smart—and sometimes she says things so insightful, so weirdly fitting, that it stops the room. One Sunday, we were tossing out ideas about what to do that afternoon. Go for a hike? See a movie? Get ice cream? Luci had her own suggestion: she wanted to go jumping at Sky Zone. We talked it over and ended up picking something else.

Without missing a beat, Luci threw up her hands and said, “Always a bridesmaid, never the bride.”

We all burst out laughing. It was perfect. Totally unexpected. It had timing, tone, irony—everything. She does this kind of thing a lot.

And because kids are exposed to data—that is, sensory, emotional, and cultural input—that adults often filter out or ignore, they say things that feel new. One time Luci told me: “My tummy has a city inside of it and I think there’s an earthquake.” Another time, she wandered the house making up songs, and I heard her sing this:

Nevermore, nevermore, my little diamond. Nevermore, nevermore, my baby girl.

It was haunting. Original. I thought: my daughter is a genius. Just to make sure it wasn’t a song she heard on the TV show, I googled it, but I couldn’t find anything like it. My kid is brilliant!

But then again—don’t we all think that? Aren’t we supposed to? We want our children to flourish, to break through, to touch something rare and untouched. When they put language in a new context, we call it brilliance. We call it imagination. But what if what we’re hearing is simply a meme echoing at the right moment?

Because here’s the thing: children aren’t creating from nothing. They’re absorbing everything. Luci’s phrase—“Nevermore, nevermore, my little diamond”—isn’t her invention. She heard it somewhere. Maybe she caught the “nevermore” from that Simpsons episode where Bart plays the raven in Poe’s The Raven. Maybe “my little diamond” came from a cartoon where someone comforts a grieving child: Don’t worry—you shine! Or maybe her teacher read something like it during story time.

She doesn’t know the origin, the cultural baggage, the layers behind it. She just pulled it from her internal phrasebook and dropped it into the moment. That’s not invention—it’s recombination. And that’s what makes it feel like genius.

There’s no narrator in her yet. No ideology. No tight structure of beliefs or persona telling her what fits her “style.” There’s just language and play. Input and response. Observation and recombination.

And that’s when it hit me: Luci isn’t just a child; she’s a large language model.

Not literally, of course. But the comparison holds.

LLMs like ChatGPT are trained on massive datasets—books, tweets, code, conversations—and then they generate language by predicting the next most likely word in response to a prompt. They don’t “understand” what they’re saying. They don’t believe or intend. They just remix what they’ve seen before into something new that feels timely, fitting, and often clever. And because most of their data is scraped off the internet, they’re saturated with cultural memes—ideas that spread, phrases repeated in new contexts, images and associations embedded deep in digital soil.

Luci is doing the same thing, just with a smaller dataset. Her training data is what she’s overheard in preschool, at home, on TV, in conversations between adults. She stores the phrases that are most likely to “survive”—the ones that are funny, sticky, musical, dramatic. And she draws from them in real time when prompted by life.

So maybe children aren’t geniuses in the romantic sense. Maybe they’re original only because they haven’t yet built up the structures that make most of us hesitate. They haven’t formed a self-narrative that polices what they say. They don’t yet worry if a phrase is really theirs. They just respond.

And maybe that’s the real lesson—not that children are more creative than adults, but that they are freer recombinators of culture. Just like LLMs. Just like any of us, we write better when we stop trying to be original and we just respond—freely, clearly, to the moment.

I’ve been teaching fiction writing for decades, and one of the things we all notice when we first start teaching is how differently students write after reading someone like Garcia Marquez or Faulkner—writers with an unmistakable voice. Even when students aren’t conscious of it, they begin to replicate the language, or at least how they remember it. And sometimes, when a story just takes off on its own, it’s not producing something wholly new—it’s echoing something else. This happens to writers all the time.

One of the things we learn to develop as writers is the ability to recognize when we’re falling into a preconstructed story, and when we’re actually constructing it ourselves. And sometimes, you can’t tell the difference. Every story is a retelling of another story. Even when it’s not directly emulating something, it may still be part of a cultural zeitgeist—an aesthetic pattern running through a particular moment in fiction. If you had enough processing power, you might be able to trace how every line, every theme, emerged from the meme-verse. But it still feels personal, because it’s replicated in a unique body.

Children are meme machines. But so are adults. Luci is us. We, as writers, are fancy meme machines. The difference is that the prompting of our large language models—our inner creative processes—is aimed toward particular goals, whether we’re conscious of it or not.

As I was writing this “essay”, I thought what I was saying was 100 percent generated from original thought. But then something strange happened.

After turning this idea over in my head for years—half-articulated, half-lived—I finally brought it to a conversation with a large language model. I told it what I had been thinking, about kids and memes and language and originality and asked for books or articles about the subject. And it responded by referencing a book I had read years ago but forgotten: The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore.

In that book, Blackmore describes children as ideal meme hosts—open, impressionable, and wired to imitate. They absorb language, behavior, and belief systems not because they understand them, but because they’re built to replicate whatever survives in their environment. They don’t curate culture—they propagate it. Children, she argues, are memetic vessels before they are selves.

I didn’t remember that she had made the connection. But I read it. I must have absorbed it—or made it part of my training data. Could it be that this whole idea I thought I was building—slowly, honestly, over years of parenting and reflecting—was just a meme that had taken root, and now, like Luci, I was simply remixing it in a new context?

Was the idea ever mine?

Am I just a meme-replicating machine, shaped by everything I’ve read and forgotten?

And if so—if this whole essay is just another recombination—then maybe it’s not really an essay at all.
Maybe it’s just a prompt.

Yes—and no.

We are all meme machines. We can’t help it. That’s how we survive: by feeding and nurturing the selfish genes that want to replicate the code we carry as an evolutionary imperative. And this has its parallel in language—specifically, in language generation. What we say is not original; it is a processing of the data most likely to survive to form an original expression, so that too might survive.

Everyone fiction writer knows there are only—what is it—seven basic stories (See Christopher Booker The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories). Everything else is a retelling. What makes a story original isn’t the plot. It’s the body through which that story is generated. Because we are not just neural networks. We are not just language-predicting machines. We are organisms—with guts, with stomachs, with longing, and with our own little earthquakes happening inside our tummies that influence how we use language. And all of these—our biology, our sensations, our memories—shape how we process meaning, how we speak, how we understand who we are.

Yes, children are geniuses. But only because we are.
And by “we,” I mean humans.
Not that we can’t be stupid, too.
I just hope the ending of this prompted language-processing unit isn’t too stupid.
I hope it’s original—or, at best, that my ideas are riding on the shoulders of giants.
(Ah—another meme!)

Mundus Imaginalis

Years ago, I decided to spend the summer in Michoacán, mostly Morelia, but I took 10 days and went to Pátzcuaro, a small town a short bus ride from the city, famous throughout Mexico for hosting the largest Day of the Dead celebration in the world. I went there following a creative impulse, a writer seeking hidden truths about the world, thinking that, maybe if they loved and honored the dead so much there, I could connect to spirits from the past and they can show me things. Really. That’s how weird I was.

I wanted to walk with the dead.

And that’s exactly what happened.

It was one of the strangest summers of my life, when I witnessed so many serendipitous and weird --freaky woo-woo things that it could fill a book.

But one of the central images of my entire creative life comes from those 10 days, and it’s an image that today reinforces what I believe is true:

LLMs can never write poetry like a human.

They do not have the ability and the resources of what I discovered during my stay in that town: Access to the imaginal realms, the Writer’s High.

One day I took a boat to the island of Janitzio. It’s a small island about a 30-minute boat ride from the Pátzcuaro pier, and when you get out, you are greeted by natives in traditional dress selling anything a tourist might want, who are mostly people from other parts of Mexico, mostly Mexico City.

They have tables with bottles of rum and brandy and they’ll make sugary drinks in exotic clay cups. They sell all kinds of kitschy items, including little figures of the man whose statue stands in the middle of the island, José María Morelos. On the islands people will sell you hats and mugs and charales fritos, little fried fish for a crunchy snack, and ambulant ladies carry baskets of candy, bees swarming around them—that they sell to tourists with kids. It was all very touristy, but nonetheless, I got a glimpse beyond the veil into the archetypal realm of things.

There are no cars on the Island so to get to the top of the hill, where the Morelia statue stood, you had to walk winding, unpaved streets, and along the way there were shops and places to eat, and always those ladies carrying baskets of candy.

As I was walking to the top, I came upon a crossroad, and the ladies selling candy were walking one way, and coming from the other direction was a band of músicos, indigenous men with horns and drums and guitars playing music that was upbeat and cheerful and occasionally dissonant, and that imperfection of sound --a horn going on for too long or missing the precise note --was beautiful. The ladies and the men reached the center of the intersection at exactly the same time, and the ladies started to dance to the music, spinning around in their colorful dresses leaving blurs like spinning roses, their baskets of candy twirling colorful as well, the bees popping around them like electrons around a nucleus.

I came out of my body. I felt as if I were watching the scene from above, seeing the cross in the crossroad, and I understood that the image was archetypal and existed outside of space-time, that I was looking into the twirl of energy and seeing something eternal.

I still see it, but at the time, as I watched the ladies dance, I thought of Garcia Lorca and how he might have encountered an image like this, maybe gypsy ladies arriving at a crossroads and men with guitars going the other way. An impromptu poem.

But here’s the thing, and this is probably hard for some people to imagine but try: I looked across the street and I saw Lorca looking back at me.

We looked at each other, and then we looked at the ladies dancing and the men playing music, and then we looked at each other. He made a face at me, and I made a face at him, as if we were wondering who would be the first to write about this? I mean obviously he would write it first in chronological terms, but like Borges and many other writes have pointed out, including physicists, chronological time is only a way for humans to organize their own understanding of reality, but it’s not true in itself. Lorca and I weren’t in a competition to write about the crossroad, one which he would have won; it was just an acknowledgement, like saying, Yeah! I see it too!

Obviously, I was imagining it all. It wasn’t really there. Not in this world, not in the material world, but I also knew that it was real, and it wasn’t about me or Lorca.

It was about the spirit of the human poet to connect to an image so viscerally, to find the eternal beauty in it, and to want to share it in written form. I was seeing something more real than the spacetime that I was in. If I look at that day now, my memory blurs. What year was I there? Was I with somebody on the island? When I got off the boat, did I ask for a strong rum drink and carry it around with me, sipping through a red straw as the ladies danced?

What I write now is not an accurate representation of what I saw. Rather what I saw was the accurate representation of itself, outside of spacetime.

When I snapped out of my “trance,” Lorca wasn’t there. I was in Janitzio and it was circa 2013. But my image of him was real, and I know there are times when I encounter an image that is so archetypal, so packed with multiple possibilities of meaning, that there are others witnessing the same thing, outside of my spacetime.

Henri Corbin, a French philosopher who died in 1978[1], articulated what I think poets know intuitively, that there is an imaginal world that artists can enter into and linger for a while, but not just artists, physicists as well, philosophers, scientists, and anyone (I believe) who enters the Flow state, the Writer’s High.

When we reach the Writer’s High, we leave our bodies and enter into imaginary realms. Corbin believes that this imaginal world, what he called the Mundus Imaginalis, is real and autonomous; that is, it exists with or without us.

We don’t create imaginary worlds, we access them, we enter into them, and this is why there are so many examples of literary --imaginary --artistic –scientific-- Zeitgeists, when people discover the same things around the same time, because a particular cultural mindset rooted in an era can allow us --when in deep cognitive states -- to glimpse certain imaginary worlds, and we find portals. I believe it is a zeitgeist that Picasso started with his Cubist direction at the same time that physicists were discovering the strangeness of elementary particles and Plank’s quantum hypothesis and how what we see does not represent what is actually there, and although I do not claim Picasso studied physics, there was a lot of buzz around the time that he was exploring reality deconstructed into facets.

If we are writing poetry, we can find that imaginal world when we are willing to submit to the language. We can access that imaginal, and although Corbin did not frame it this way, I think it’s pretty obvious that when we enter into the Mundus Imaginalis, because it is “real and autonomous,” we can run into some of our antepasados. Kafka is a great example of how this is possible. I don’t know what he was like, but I do know that he would get into these moments of writing wherein he left the real world and entered into a world that was weird, yes, but nonetheless that we knew on some fundamental level was real. And as a reader, when we enter into a Kafka world, we are often able to access the portal and go into his world and experience it, and because the world is real and autonomous we might very well run into, for example, Borges, who spent a lot of time inside. We can run into him and have a conversation, although not a conversation in the sense that we do in this world, but an imaginary conversation, like my encounter with Lorca, which is real.

At this point, AI cannot do that. I’m not sure it will ever be able to do that. The Mundus Imaginalis may very well be the last refuge for humanity, where we can escape our AI overlords. And if this comes to pass, the Creative Writer will be more necessary than ever.

We can never give up creative writing, because it is our access into a real and autonomous world that exists side-by-side with ours. If you were a theoretical physicist, you could even say the Mundus Imaginalis is one universe within the Multiverse.

The sad fact is that many people today are addicted to technology and algorithmic influence on their thinking, their spirituality, and their emotional lives. They cannot never leave this world, will never find the portals because of all the information they take in, information after information after information, so much so that the processing is impossible, except for on unconscious ways that spark our emotions and take over our brains.

(OK, that’s it for this post. The next one I will write about the other reason why LLMs will never replace the human Poet. As some of you know, this started out as the outline for my lecture in Paris called “The Biology of Poetry,” but there’s a difference between writing things down and giving a lecture, and this has just become its own thing. I was going to record the lecture which was only a half an hour certainly not enough for me to say much, would’ve needed several hours, but I pulled out the mics, turned them on, but I forgot to hit record so all I have is this short excerpt from an interview with the Aleph-Écriture.)

[1] Here’s something incomprehensible to me, the detail that I had to add regarding the year he died, 1978. I don’t know why I remember that about him, but every time I say his name, my language always wants to say after (like a chant) who died in 1978. 1978, as if that were somehow significant. Perhaps there’s something in my life that occurred in 1978 that I don’t consciously remember but that is somehow interwoven in my nervous system, encoded in my memory, and so every time I hear that year, 1978, it strikes me and makes me feel something. In 1978 I was 16 years old, my hair down to my butt, and I was often stoned, hanging out with my friends having impossible conversations. I wonder if during that time I got a glimpse into another realm and perhaps that’s why that year sticks with me. But I have no idea why I always say, after his name, who died in 1978.

OK, so that’s the study I referred to in Part One. Now here comes my interpretation.

The results tell us what those in the “Ivory Tower” of the MFA have known for generations: There is a difference between the poetry that appears in a greeting card, a “Hallmark” poem, and a poem written by a good or great poet, one who studies the craft, the art, the traditions and styles. Those who study creative writing.

Does this sound a bit snooty?

It is.

But underneath that, the motivation of most poets is the love of language, the need to create something as beautiful and urgent as the poems of other great poets, CD Wright, Philip Levine, Gloria Anzaldúa.

In 2005, I was The “Distinguished” Visiting Writer at the Fresno State MFA (their title, not mine) and got to live in the house of Philip and Franny Levine, on a beautiful tree-line street of mansions, called Christmas Tree Lane during the holidays.

The Levine house wasn’t a mansion, just a cozy cottage surrounded by giant trees, and the backyard was huge with so many orange and lemon trees that every day they dropped to the ground and I had to fill paper sacks and try to find people who needed or wanted them, but this was Fresno so there was fruit falling everywhere. I felt so at home in that house, so at peace, and I remember I called Franny to ask her if I could host my birthday party there. They were in Brooklyn, where they spent half the year, every year, and she said, Of course! It’s your house! She was happy that I was enjoying it, and she complained to me that when Mark Strand was living there in the same position that I had, he hardly used the house at all. Have as many parties as you want, she said.

Every morning I would take my coffee in Levine’s mug and I wrote in his office, where he wrote his great poetry and essays. His desk overlooked the backyard, where I would see birds and squirrels playing in the sun and shade like in a Disney cartoon, and it was beautiful.

I wrote there every morning, almost a story a day.

On two walls there were white bookshelves that reached to the ceiling, only poetry books, thousands of them, most of them signed to him. You could find fiction in the other rooms of the house, but in his office, only poetry. I loved to randomly pull a book off the shelf, open it, and read a poem.

But what struck me most, and I guess this is the point, I would sometimes pull a book off the shelf, open it up, and I would see the comments he wrote in the margins with a pen, commenting on the poem, maybe to prepare to teach his students. I remember finding a Sharon Olds book, and of course it was signed to him, and he had circled every time she used the word soul. He wrote in the margins, “OK I get it!”

The poet, Andrés Montoya, who was a student of Levine, told me that he didn’t like the word soul to appear in a poem, unless it was ironic, but I don’t know if that’s true.

Philip Levine was a snob when it came to poetry. But that’s why we loved him, and that’s why his students learned so much from him. I remember he told a poet friend of mine that his work was “poetic”, and at first the young writer thought that was great, but then when he understood that “poetic” meant that there’s no depth to the language, that the writing seems like a regurgitation of what poetry is supposed to be, the student was devastated.

But Levine was right, and he became a better poet, one whose work we know very well today.

Poets like Philip Levine, his students, and MFA candidates and professors in general, are “expert” readers of poetry, and that’s not what the study was concerned with.

If you gave Philip Levine and his students this test to compare the poems of Sylvia Plath and ChatGPT 3.5 they would know immediately. Because they are expert poetry readers.

So this means that the question, “Can AI write better poetry?” for us, for poets, for “expert” readers of poetry, for those who love the craft, the literature, who strive for creative intelligence in everything we write, the answer is no!

LLMs, at least the way they are right now, might be able to replicate, regurgitate, imitate, but they cannot write the kind of poetry written by the “experts.” Claude’s Sonnet can clearly write a sonnet better than a high school student who doesn’t want to bother with the assignment, but they cannot write poems better than poets like Ross Gay, Yusef Komunyakaa, Cherríe Moraga, or Ai.

AI can’t touch Ai!

What makes those poems works art is one of the secrets of being a writer, a philosopher, a mystic, and that is the power of EXEGESIS.

One of the things that we love about good writing is going into the work, sometimes over and over again and uncovering new ideas, new sounds, things we hadn’t notice before. Exegesis leads us to the realm of No-Meaning; rather we discover multiple possibilities of meaning, and they can lead the expert reader into transforming or dopaminergic experiences. There is a concept in Kabbalah called the no thing. This is the only apt description of God, one that captures the complexity of a unified deity. God is not a thing. Swedenborg says it this way, God is not in space. You can’t singularize God to be a thing, an object. God is beyond matter. It's the same with “meaning” in a beautifully written text. It is the no-meaning that matters, all the possibilities of the human spirit and imagination.

Like you’re going to find something amazing.

And in the process of going into the text, meaning upon meaning upon meaning can be unpacked, even from a single line, like a mystic going into an ancient text, seeking revelation.

Think of the very simple and famous line of Gertrude Stein, There is no there there.

Why has this line stuck with us in the English language? Why does it resonate with writers and exegesis freaks? We can write an entire book, definitely an article on that line alone, and the possible meanings, what is being said and unsaid.

It starts with There is, a classic way to tell a story, to make a declaration. It brings up hope, like something important it’s going to be said, but then it negates it with the word no. There is NO!

There once was, and there once was not, echoing the ancient stories of the east.

The No takes away your expectations, and it’s a bit cruel, uncomfortable.

“There is no” whatever it is, it’s not there.

Then, There is no there, so there is no beginning of this sentence, but then she adds the second there. There is no there there and what is going on in the head of the readers as theyre reading that line is access to the Multiverse, to the possibility of meaning. There is no there there. What you were looking for doesn’t even exist; but of course we know she was referring to Oakland, that she was being funny saying that Oakland is not a very exciting place.

But then here’s another layer! The phrase ends with there there, which is a weak way of trying to give somebody comfort who is in pain or despair? There there!

I just negated your reality saying There is no. . ., but now I’m going to comfort you a bit with, There there, two Words so brilliantly echoed by Tommy Orange in his novel about Oakland, There There.

Human Writer:

“There is no there there.”

ChatGPT3.5:

“Oakland was not a very exciting city.”

LLMs, contrary to what we have been told, put meaning before poetry. But the meaning is a compilation of all the data on which it has been trained, but it seeks sensible sentences.

This is what kills a poem, but it’s also what many beginning poets do. They seek meaning first, negating the possibility of the No-Meaning.

This may also be, at this point, all LLMs can do.

(Part 3 will show why LLMs cannot write like “expert” human poets.