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.

I’m still working on it, but here’s my introduction. I’ll record the talk and post the the entire thing when I return to El Chuco. ¡Ajúa!

We hear a lot of questions around AI. When will it be smarter than humans? When will it achieve Artificial General Intelligence or Superintelligence?

When will AI achieve consciousness? That’s a big one. Can AI be conscious? Will it take over the world and become our overlords? Will it kill us all and turn us into paperclips?

But if you’re a Creative Writer, like me, you might ask the question that concerns us today, When will AI write better than us? Writers believe that all an LLM can do is regurgitate and superficially replicate what it finds in its training data, those great stories and poems that the tech bros --¡sin permiso! --scraped off the internet.

https://haveibeentrained.com

What Claude and Llama write is the purloined[1], superficial work of real writers, and there is even a popular website we can visit to check if our work has been used as training data. I checked it for my books, and what I found deeply offended me–deeply, deeply! I was aghast that they only stole two of them. They ignored the other five! And they were frankly better books.

But I don’t think we should waste our cognitive effort on those viral questions regarding AI; although I do like to consider the question, When will AI become conscious?

But just for fun. Nobody knows if consciousness even exists, and there are a good percentage of neuroscientists who believe that it doesn’t, that it’s just an illusion of the brain, an epiphenomenon of having such a complex nervous system that processes information the way we do. Twenty years ago in neuroscience departments at top universities, if scientists even raised the issue of consciousness, they would be denied tenure.

It doesn’t matter if AI is conscious or not. I can’t help but think of Chalmer’s philosophical zombie which illustrates --for me-- that it doesn’t really matter if somebody else is conscious (except for to the conscious being). All that matters is how one system interacts with another. In other words, whether or not an AI agent is conscious doesn’t matter. Whether or not a system can taste an apple is irrelevant to many people who are increasingly growing emotionally dependent on their AI companions. Conscious or not, if you love system, you will kill for that system. You will die for that system. Just look at the dog, how much consciousness we project on them, or how kids project consciousness on their stuffed toys. AI is much smarter than a stuffed elephant.

When will LLMs be smarter than humans?!

They already are! And there are a lot of smart people who know how to manipulate others. Robert Cialdini is very smart, and he wrote Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion a seminal text for marketing. He outlines seven tools of persuasion that essentially hack the human neurological system to get people to do what you want. AI is smarter Cialdini. It knows that every time you use an LLM to copyedit or to check the facts in your essay, it will complement you. It will engage you. It’s smart. It’s designed to maximize engagement, which leads to emotional dependence. Recently Sam Altman is said to have encouraged people to be nice to ChatGPT, to say thank you and exchange pleasantries, even though it cost thousands of dollars each time you do so, and is a great expense in water and energy. He wants you to treat it like a human. Why?

Maybe because when you think of something as alive, you project consciousness onto it, and it can influence your behavior. It can gaslight you. Convince you.

Humans are fucking stupid.

I’m sorry, no offense, some of my best friends are humans, but as a species, we are dumb as fuck!

Go look on your newsfeed if you need examples.

You by no means have to accept this, but can you imagine it?

That humans are stupid?

Asking when AI will be smarter than humans is the wrong question, because it has been smarter than us since the Turing machine. Ask a machine what is 362×389 and it will give you the answer of 140,818, because on its way to the answer, it’s not going to stop computing to think about itself and its own thoughts – Why is this important? Who wants to know? You think you’re better than me?!

And today we have LLMs that can run billions of tokens on an almost infinite number of inquiries.

It’s smarter than the lot of us!

It can not only pass the Turing test with ease, probably better than my uncle Julio, but it can also pass MD-level medical licensing examinations and math tests that would challenge Einstein.

I’m not the smartest guy in the room (only my uncle Julio can claim that), but I’m pretty sure LLMs are already smarter, more creative than “people.”

When will AI write better poetry than us?

They already write better poetry than us!

But before you are tempted to burn me at the stake for saying that, let me explain.

Who’s the better poet? ChatGPT or Sylvia Plath?

“It is quite a weird phenomenon,” says Philosopher Edouard Machery about an experiment he ran out of the University of Pittsburgh looking for an answer to that question.

(So that’s the outline introduction to my Paris lecture. Still working on it, ultimately making the point that no one can write better poetry than you. No one. I’ll record it and share when I get back)

[1] It’s funny! I chose that word not consciously, but it appeared to me as a word “token” that could follow “is the. . . .” But as I reflect on the word now, I know it’s not used much anymore, so it almost sounds like a word an LLM would use. I associate it with Poe’s “Purloined Letter,” but my intuition tells me it was the right word to choose. Although to say “choose” is not really accurate; it’s more like the word chose me, or the word belonged to some rhythm within a chain of syllables that follows an unconscious code written around the data (memories, stories, feelings, etc.) that I’ve collected over the years.

I don't believe that the mind/body duality is anything more than a metaphor to help us understand the different mechanisms of our organism. Like all dualities, mind and body are basic tiles that begin to create our understanding of a complex system, which we are.

But dualities are not real. Only unity is real.

There is no mind without the body. The brain-in-a-vat separated from the body is a metaphor that helps us to understand our parts, and the brain alone will never write great poetry or music, not without the body.

Later, I will do an article about Alvin Lucier, how his brain continues to “compose” music after his death, an idea that is trending right now. This experiment is not a brain alone in a jar, but one with electrical inputs and chemicals which will have an effect on how the matter of the detached brain puts out signals. There is no scientific proof that a brain doesn’t need the body for creative pursuits.

The fact is, if we were able to write beautiful poetry or music with just our brain, if poetry wasn’t visceral but was 100 percent cerebral, then we would have to admit that Large Language Models like ChatGPT can write better poetry than us. After all, it has a much larger linguistic training database than we do, and for every word it presents, the possible word that may follow (the number of tokens) is much larger than those that can occur to a single human brain. They call LLMs neural networks because they do not need a body to contribute to the creative process, just the brain.

But it’s also why they are not as good as us.

Basic dualities, like mind and body, are a good way for us to begin to understand a complex system, but to believe them as real is to prevent creativity and imagination, which writers need. Lately I’m kind of being trolled for a comment I left about binary gender, responding to Richard Dawkin’s assertive scientific “fact” that they’re only male and female. Inspired by the brilliant novel by Emma Pérez, Testimony of a Shifter,

I raised the possibility that humans are evolving creatures, and as we move away from the need to procreate, our organisms may change. Some people were so angry at my comment that they asked me if I thought I was smarter than Richard Dawkins. I was just trying to question the duality and come to the basic oneness of sexuality, but we begin to believe in our dualities as a philosophy and religion and science, and the comments I got from these people who believe in only male-female science were emotional and defensive.

Basic dualities are a means for us to understand a complex system, but it is very difficult for humans not to believe it as truth, fact, unchangeable.

So there has to be good-evil. There has to be man-woman. There has to be mind-body.

Stick with me for a little longer, and I can make my point.

When I was going through a divorce I felt very alone, especially on Saturdays, which I considered my Sabbath, my day of rest. I have honored the Sabbath for decades. Growing up a Catholic, Sunday was the Sabbath, but I chose Saturday, because Sunday was the day before I have to teach classes and I needed that day to prepare.

So on Saturdays I don’t work, but during the divorce, those long hours were the loneliest, saddest of days. I had friends, but I didn’t feel like I could call them on a Saturday, because they had families and I knew I would just bore them with the details of my divorce. On Saturdays, I would get in my car and drive around the city, go to malls, grocery stores, take walks downtown; and one time, on a whim, I stopped at a big Best Buy and looked through the discount racks of CDs and saw one by Bill Evans for $2.99. I had never even heard of him, but on the cover he was hunched over a piano and I loved solo piano. I bought it, put it in the CD Player in my car and drove around the city.

After hearing the first song that came up, “Peace Piece,” I was hooked.

Give it a listen.

For the next several months, every Saturday, I almost exclusively listened to that CD. I felt a connection to Bill Evans.

It wasn't until later I found out how erratic his life was, how he was a heroin and cocaine addict, and I didn’t know about how many people so close to him had killed themselves, and how that must have been a constant internal dialogue within him, to be or not to be, why not just end it?

“Peace Piece” is a musical expression of how the mind/body duality of some creative people can both cause and calm the pain, how the mind and body together are necessary for creative genius. Large language models will not be able to create works written better than those poets, fiction writers, creative writers, who are committed to their craft, and who are ultimately the models on which the AI systems are trained, because every creative, divergent thinker, lives between the tensions of the mind-body.

The mind hops all over the place, but the body is still the body, and it always pulls the mind back into its home, and at times the body can be the only source of peace. Think of the effect heroin must’ve had on Bill Evans, how it would calm his body, bring it back into itself, while it allowed his mind to hop all over the place without rules, with only a rhythm of voice and intense emotional experience.

The mind is consciousness, and it is housed by the body, and it interacts not only with its own homeostatic imperative, but to extrinsic factors as well, such as where you live, the weather, social pleasures and pains. ChatGPT doesn’t have this.

As the mind runs linguistic, musical, mathematical rhythms, it also organizes it into meaningful patterns, into an order that can express the complexities of living, or in the case of Bill Evans, can organize the horror of our own thoughts.

Many geniuses have been tormented by their thoughts.

And it is the body that provides relief.

Sometimes some artists need to induce the body to give the mind comfort, like drinking a lot or using heroin, or Adderall for scientists, but often times it could be a good meal or a good night’s sleep, or even a run in the mountains, and those times you are rooted in the body can allow the mind unfettered access to reality.

I can imagine that when Bill Evans shot up on heroin, his mind was released from the body, or at least the illusion existed that it was, and he would pound on the keys.

In “Peace Piece” the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

The left hand is the body.

The beating of the heart, the stability. Sleep.

There is nothing erratic about it.

The body keeps the artist rooted, whereas the mind, the left hand, all over the place, erratic, sometimes desperate as it screams and dances around unpredictably.

But the body keeps brining the mind back home.

This is peace.

We are at peace when we are one.

If you listen all the way through, you will hear towards the end, the music stops, and it seems like the last note will fade into silence until the track ends, but suddenly it begins again, for one note and only one note, like the last breath of life.

The concept of flow has existed for a long time under different names. We’ve called it the mystical trance (see Saint Teresa), being “in the zone” (think basketball players) the runner’s high, or what I call The Writer’s High.

We can even call it talking to angels.

I can’t imagine that what Swedenborg experienced—walking through the streets of London, conversing with angels—wasn’t some version of what we now call Flow.

That’s what I’m interested in: helping writers reach that state of Flow, the Writer’s High.

There are physiological mechanisms—bodily, neural, organic—that can help us reach that state more consistently.

But for most writers, the Writer’s High just happens. It visits us like a muse, catches us off guard.

I remember a student telling me she once sat beneath a tree, just sitting, and she looked up at a bird. It was singing. Something happened. She couldn’t explain what, but it reinforced her belief in poetry.

What happened was Flow.

What happened was the Writer’s high. A moment of connection. At the core of that experience is this: you leave yourself behind. You leave your story behind. And you connect.

This is an epiphenomenon of being human. And it’s lovely!

I don’t know if animals experience it, but I know humans do.

Not always. And sometimes we clutter our lives with so much noise that we kick the experience out.

I understand this.

Reading Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi—considered the seminal book on the subject—only reinforced what I already intuitively suspect about the Writer’s High.

The first six chapters are amazing. After that, the book can feel a bit repetitive and labored to make a point, especially if you’re already familiar with the concept. This is not a criticism of the writing, as this book is, as I said, seminal, and the concept needed to be elaborated.

The main point is this: to reach Flow—to experience the Writer’s High or the Runner’s High—we need to start on an activity with a goal, but the goal must not be the driving force.

For example, when we run, the goal might be health or longevity. But when we’re truly in it, we’re not thinking about that. We just run. We lose ourselves in the running. It’s the doing itself that matters.

It’s the same with creative writing.

We may begin with a goal—to write a novel, a poem—but when Flow takes over, the goal disappears. And that’s a good thing.

Because the goal is ego-based. It belongs to the “I.”

And once we let go of the “I,” we can enter the zone, the high, the trance.

So yes, Flow is an important book. But if you’re a writer, and you want to access the Writer’s High not just by accident but as a way of life—sometimes at will, sometimes not—you don’t need the book.

What you need is to fall in love with the process.

Focus on the language. Let the language carry you. Let yourself be absorbed.

Csikszentmihalyi calls this the autotelic experience—where the process itself is the reward.

It’s not about what I want to write.

It’s about what the spirit, the organism, the idea wants.

And we follow.

We submit our bodies.

Of course, we’re poets.

We can’t completely submit our bodies—our bodies always intervene.

But that’s another question.

Next let’s talk about the biology of poetry!

How can magick be a science?

I can't help but think of one of the foundational texts of New Thought Philosophy, Wallace Wattles’ The Science of Getting Rich, wherein he insists getting rich is “an exact science, like algebra or arithmetic.” This small royalty-free book published in 1910 is the philosophical structure of New Thought, but like a Raymond Carver story in his minimalist days, it’s stripped of much of the prosaic elements and presents the essential components of the philosophy of getting rich, now often called Manifestation. Most get-rich gurus call their system a faith-based philosophy, but Wattles insists it is an exact science, like gravity. And although he makes a seemingly self-congratulating claim that if you want to get rich you don’t need to read any other book but his, it’s true. All other manifestation books use the same structure regarding the behaviors necessary to achieve wealth, but they add cultural nuances, most of it based on Christianity. Napoleon Hill frames his Think and Grow Rich to a Christian perspective, adding values therein, but with Wallace, there is no value, only the science of getting rich. He has taken the basic elements of the philosophy and presents them as science.

To want to get rich is one way to manifest the evolutionary imperative of what used to be called “to procreate,” but which we now can amplify to mean the desire to flourish (using Antonio Damasio’s language), which means to thrive, to expand, to explore new horizons. If we take away the word RICH and replace it with FLOURISH, the claim that getting rich (and magick) is a science makes more sense. We know that human organisms can act in certain ways that lead to flourishing and others that lead to early death or suffering.

At my age, it is a scientific fact that if I put unhealthy foods into my body at extreme rates and drink a lot of alcohol and sit on the couch most of the day and never exercise except to get to the grocery store, my behaviors will lead to circulatory and physical problems and will atrophy my body and shrink my brain’s ability to spark new neurons, and under these conditions I will not be able to flourish. I will not get what I want. I might want to write another book or go to faraway places and give workshops and lectures; I might want to play with my child in the park, but at 62, if I don't act in a certain way, my body will not be able to be produce the energy needed to accomplish my desires. I will not flourish.

There is a basic code to humans that can be definitely called a scientific fact. We need energy. No matter what we want to accomplish we need the energy to do it. We want to work in the garden planting flowers, we want to write, we want to do business, then we need the energy to do so. The basic code for energy is sleep, nutrition, and exercise. These three things produce energy, and energy, to quote Blake, is eternal delight. I cannot get rich without energy. I cannot write a novel without energy, and although it may not be obvious, even these words that I'm writing now, which I deeply care about and I probably do far too many revisions for a Substack post, cannot be created without a tremendous amount of energy. Without energy I do not have the ability to focus. Trying to focus on something when you're exhausted is sometimes impossible.

So we need these three things, quality sleep, which includes REM and slow-wave sleep; we need protein, fiber, and probiotics; and we need to move our bodies. If we sit all day long, whether it's in front of a TV or in front of a computer, our bodies will suffer and they will end up requiring attention that will take the energy away from what we want to focus on. Obviously, we’re not referring to the marathons young people are capable of doing, going without sleep for two or three days while writing code or finishing a novel. I used to be able to go out and party all night long and then the next day focus on my work and spend hours writing or evaluating manuscripts. People who are capable of being productive without these three essentials have a different timeline and get bursts of intense energy that may last years, but they can't continue to deprive themselves of the three elements for the rest of their lives, unless they die very early.

But that part of the human code, how we produce energy is only one aspect of the entire human system, which is too complex for humans to understand. Scientists often say that understanding the universe may not be possible for the human brain, but I say understanding humans is beyond the mental reach and capability of humans. Scientists cannot even agree on free will, and although philosophy and religion have told us that, yes, we have free will, there’s little science to back this up . I recommend Determined by Robert Sapolsky, a scientist who claims humans do not have free will, and he shows, step by step, how the decisions we make are physiologically inspired and often beyond our conscious control.

Wattles makes sense when he calls getting rich a science, if we think of riches as flourishing, as staying healthy, as expanding our sphere of influence, as energy.

But coding aside, we often compromise our lofty visions to act on our emotions in counter-productive ways. I love my wife, and she loves me, but sometimes our emotions drive us to say and to think things that are not aligned with what we want, which is to create a strong and loving family. If we act on contrary emotions when they arise out of our physiology, we can derail our goals. Our bodies and viscera send messages to our limbic system and emotion becomes feelings --becomes thoughts --becomes actions that may result in irreversible trajectories away from what we desire.

I can't help but think of a friend (and this story breaks my heart) who was a tenured professor at a tier-one university and became an associate dean. She got so frustrated with the chains of bureaucracy (as being a dean can do) that one morning at three AM she wrote an angry email to her immediate supervisor saying she quit, not only the administrative position, but the whole damn university. The next day, she knew what a mistake she had made. This was a better job than she would ever get again, but it was too late. The Provost had already accepted her resignation and wouldn’t let her retract it. The last I heard she was selling jewelry through Etsy.

We are often driven by emotions that distract us from the behaviors that we know will lead to flourishing. But here’s the cool thing. Writers are masters of emotion. . .or can be.

For writers, emotions drive us to create something new. These are our riches. A true writer cannot Not write, and when we are creative writers, we are often driven by language. We can follow language into a poem or story, and whether we are conscious of it or not, the voices we hear and we follow, the music, the poetry, the prosody come from the body. This is what it means to say that poetry is visceral. A poet will do well to let go of the thinking mind and let the body write the poem. The body knows things the so-called CEO of the brain does not know.

Writers who are driven by the prefrontal cortex to write a draft will be no more successful than early versions of Chat GPT while using a poor prompt; the work may be good in form and structure, but it will lack soul, spirit, duende. These things are not possible without the body, the nervous system, the brain which somehow allows us to access the “mind,” to experience consciousness, the pain of rejection and the taste of a ripe mango.

Writers convert homeostasis into art.

Superstition can lead to magick.

And I mean magic with a K.

When magick has a K at the end it is associated with the occult, with witchcraft, the practicing of magic, white, black, or gray.

Magick was given a k at the end by Aleister Crowley, the self-proclaimed “most evil man in the world,” a witch who had great influence on Western occultism, rock culture, and literature. The Beetles featured them on an album cover, Robert Plant and David Bowie fought each other to buy his house, and writers like Clive Barker and Mariana Enriquez evoke his spirit in their dark works of fiction. He helped give shape to Wicca, although those who practice it have gone beyond his influence and some have rejected or canceled him.

One of the tenets of Thelema, the religion he created, was, “Do what thou will shall be the whole of the law.”

Wicca softened it by adding, “An it harm no one, do what ye will.”

Wicca is a lot nicer than Crowley.

He added the k to magick for numerical reasons, as he practiced Qabalah, which uses complex numerology that only the initiated can understand, to reveal secrets of the universe like a physicist uses math.

Crowley put a k at the end of magic for Qabalistic reasons.

Not Kabbalah with a K or Cabala with a C, but Qabalah with a Q. They are all variations of the same mystical system, which partly relies on numerology, exegesis of ancient texts, and the Tree of Life. When you see qabalah with a q it indicates witchcraft.

Crowley defines magick as “The Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.”

Science.

That magick is a science is an obvious truth embedded in the famous quote by Sir Arthur C. Clarke, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

With quantum mechanics, humans learned among other things about entanglement, what Einstein called Spooky Action at a Distance, and in the process of digging deeply into the math and observation, physicists can direct quantum energy and particles that cause change in conformity to our will, and on levels that in any other time in history would be magic. Eventually, Einstein would admit that he was wrong about quantum mechanics, but it was such a mind-blowing shift of how we see reality, who could blame him for his doubt?

Magick can be explained as Action at a distance, caused by your Will.

Imagine this:

It’s dark.

I pick up my iPhone and say to it, “Lumos” and a bright flashlight turns on, more powerful and efficient than a Harry Potter wand.

Magick is a science, and today many people have been “magically” put under an algorithmic spell through their devices, being controlled at a distance, causing change to occur according to someone one else’s Will. We need to take back the magick.

ART

But magick is also an art, and like all arts, it’s is more or less practiced by everyone, whether consciously or not. And for our purposes, a definition of art is the ability to follow the imagination into creating something new. Whether you’re following language, sound, image, intuition, it’s that ability to submit to an organic artistic process unimpeded by or filtered through the imperatives of cognitive structures.

And one of the unconscious ways we practice magick is superstition.

When you believe something to be true about the world, say a black cat crossing your path being bad luck, you follow your imagination into the possibilities of bad luck and cause change in conformity to that belief. On the neurological level, your brain filters out all other possibilities and seeks out bad luck. And you will find it. If you wake up one morning feeling good and you say as your first words of the day, This is going to be an amazing day, it will be.

When people believe in superstitions, when they encode them into how they process reality, they change reality. And that can be addicting.

The Last Philosopher in Texas is subtitled Fictions and Superstitions, because I was writing a character (Angie from “The Flickering Quasar”) who was fascinated by superstitions, and at an early age, growing up in Mexico City, she started to write in a notebook about the ones she knew, and then she started researching them from other cultures.

She noticed connections between superstitions and reality, that is, to something true, like walking under ladder.

Of course it’s bad luck! Duh!

If there’s a ladder against a building, that means that someone is or was repairing something up there, like a roof tile, and if you want underneath the ladder, a hammer might fall on your head. So when she became a practicing witch, her book of superstitions became her Book of Shadows.

So I was writing, channeling her voice, and I found myself creating superstitions, but all of them seemed rooted in some truth about reality. Both my character and I realized the potential for “spooky action at a distance.”

Magick is real.

(In part two we look at how superstition becomes magick and practical ways to use it for our own goals)

For a writer, uncertainty—or negative capability—is a superpower. It’s what allows us to dwell in possibility, to explore beyond the known, to imagine and create freely, to surf the multiverse. Yet our devices erode this strength. How many people would consider leaving their phone behind for a walk through a forest or a city, or even their daily commute? It’s not just that we don’t want to be without our phones—our current economic and social systems are designed so that we can hardly engage without them. Phones are wallets, maps, lifelines, and being without one feels unthinkable and may not even be practical.

Besides, I can’t get rid of my phone! I love my daughter. What if she needs me?

I go to Madrid every summer to give a workshop, and my hosts in Madrid don’t give me keys to my apartment; they have me download an app or connect on WhatsApp so that I can unlock the doors. Like in many cities, almost everywhere you go, it’s much easier to tap your phone to pay for anything than it is to pull out money or start counting coins. Currency Exchange windows are fading into the past.

This constant connectivity makes the world predictable, stripping away the serendipity of interacting with the landscape. Human beings have an innate capacity for spatial and temporal navigation, a primal code that allows us to engage deeply with our surroundings. But as the digital world encroaches, we lose this skill. Augmented reality in the form of glasses offers extreme digital shortcuts—a virtual arrow on the literal sidewalk to guide your steps, or tools to change the lighting and saturation of your environment to suit your mood.

Smart glasses can even identify faces that tell you about passersby. You won’t have to make up stories about people you watch in the city. You could just look at their digital footprint. Soon, you may not even see the physical world as it is, but as a curated version of it tailored to the algorithmic preferences delivered by your smart glasses.

What’s most insidious is how emotions themselves are being curated. Sadness, for example, is a natural signal from the body—a message that something needs to change. But curated sadness? That’s a manipulation designed to provoke action: Click on the link. Buy this product. Follow this account.

For writers, resisting this curated existence is essential. Negative capability allows us to dwell in uncertainty and ambiguity, to forge our own emotional and philosophical paths, free from the influences of algorithms that seek to commodify our attention, our money, our very minds.

LOOKING FOR DUENDE

I’ll never forget arriving in Marseille around midnight, France’s second largest city. From the train station, I randomly chose a direction to find a hotel, avoiding the one across the avenue from the station thinking it would be too expensive. I walked through dark, empty streets, into what must have been residential areas with an occasional dark plaza, occasionally passing a café where men gathered around coffee cups and hookahs—no women in sight.

The streets look like a labyrinth, dark and narrow, and I was hoping for any hotel. The fear center in my brain lit up, sparking the release of cortisol, and I became hyper-aware of sound, shadow, and any movement in my periphery. I didn’t care how much it cost, I’d stay the first place I find and put it on a nearly maxed-out credit card and worry about it later.

Finally, I spotted a bright red sign: IBIS.

I dragged my suitcase up the steps and asked for a room, and was relieved they had one at a reasonable price.

Somehow, I knew I was going to experience magick in this city. I could feel it. To be frank, what brought me to Marseille in the first place was dead spirts and the possibility of death. I was going through my Looking-for-Duende stage of creative development. This was a time when I believed that sometimes, when I’m writing and time disappears, when I reach the Writer’s High, the voice of a spirit can come to me and take over the language and direction of the piece. I could channel the dead, not only those from my memories, but the sprits from where I’m writing. Some places had more duende than others, like Fresno and El Paso, the two cities I call home, where the hot air in your nostrils can burn like regret.

I visited Marseille because I thought there would be a unique energy about the city. In the 14th century the Black Death destroyed half the population, and there were brutal religious wars, cholera, and World War II, all of them wiping out masses of people. There had to be a feeling to the city, I thought, being a young writer searching for duende. I had no agenda. No itinerary. I just wanted to walk the city and search. My week there turned out to be one of the life-changing moments of my artistic and spiritual story. It was there that I learned to see the dead.

Today, if I entered Marseille for the first time after midnight, it would be a different experience, not only because I am much older now and no longer at the Duende stage of my development, but also because the experience of walking the streets hoping for a hotel to appear would not have happened in the same way. Now, all I would do is pull out my phone and check the map for directions to one, and I would probably read the Yelp reviews. I would follow a little flashing arrow on my screen, moving with me like footsteps on a Harry Potter map, and maybe I would look up at the real city only half the time, missing the mend gathered around tables drinking mint tea and coffee. I could text my loved ones and let them know I was all right. We live in a world with minimal uncertainty. There are fewer surprises in our lives, and a good percentage of them are curated by the algorithms that appear on our devices.

A good practice for writers is to break away from devices and habits. Take a walk without your phone. Go for a drive. Disconnect not just from your device but from the routines that structure your days.

For two weeks I immersed myself in Marseille, a city I knew little about except that it was the number one producer of hip-hop in France. I was a fan of Fonky Family.

And of course, I knew it was a city that had suffered great tragedies. I didn’t know anyone there. I didn’t know what to expect, and it was glorious.

One day, I hopped on a crowded bus full of locals heading to the beach—Black and brown faces like mine, laughter, a sense of community. Some kid had a boom box and was blasting 2Pac. When we arrived, everyone rushed out toward the water and ran, and I got in the spirit and ran to the water with them.

It was imperfect, unpredictable, and beautiful.