Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

So, I am a poet, which means occasionally I have these peculiar thoughts that take me down some conundrum of thinking. Like this one: what if we only have so many words collectively to use between us? What if, because of this, we are quickly heading toward extinction? What if all of our speech since the invention of technologies like the computer and personal cell phone, have accelerated us merely toward a prison of data points, flaccid ideologies, empty silos of behavior, and uninspired categorizations? That is, what if language in this environment is not generative, but limited by its ability to signify nothing more than what we have experienced and expressed thus far as humans.

This would be the great failure of artificial intelligence. There is a belief (and, for some, conclusion) that the more we feed AI, the likelihood increases that it will replicate human ingenuity or capture the richness of human feelings. I am fearful that the large language models we create will ultimately enclose us into a soulless, stone fortress for which there is no escape.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote about the limits of language. He made room for the illogical and the unthinkable, but he also said, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” The proliferation of words we have used to date could be bringing us to a potential point of silence… which may be a good thing, for it is in silence that deities are believed to speak.

Today’s poem intrigues me for how it upholds the possibility of poetry as a terse, sacred voicing that emerges from within, where the inexpressible finds its way to the world as transcendent music, something far more compelling than the language of machines.

oracle
by Duriel E. Harris

sometimes a voice
low tone, even pitch
quiet awareness lush beneath
the rumble of thought
searches me
streams through currents
that bind the medium
I call my self, this body I am
deliberate and awake
voice, my intimate, radiant
passes through and over
beneath and beyond
and from the cell emanates
sent forth and received
by germ of being, sustained 
before named ovum and seed 
and as we who name all things disperse
retreating into our extinction
I wander, returned to expanse

androgyne girl, sometimes I dream
everywhere there are owls and flowers
in waves of light resplendent
the infant child who is all children
skin to skin on my flesh
downy head to sternum pressed
in warm dreamless sleep
as in my mouth an easy darkness rests 
where there had been teeth

"oracle" by Duriel E. Harris. Used by permission of the poet.