For Gemini Instruction 1, the explanation the AI provides on what it intends to do, and does, is more competant than the execution. But overall it is surprising; the choices the AI makes as to what genetic elements to insert where, are based upon a reading of the sonnets.
It is not random insertion.
That the AI chose to execute my request in the way it did, by inserting elements from the genetic map provided to it, is likely down to its previous encounter with two sonnets I wrote when a nursing student, and which I had fed into Gemini along with many other poems a few months ago, requesting a thematic analysis. Out of curiosity, you know. The two sonnets are these:
Retroviral Sonnets
1.
LecithoTRopic monologue, reflexive, as if I was dissected by a blade not occams: in what manner should iiiiii live? the voice again revising what is said like a vivisected GuineApiG, or cataloguing each alternative like a POLynologist. VIF VPR VPU TranslATe, irruptive! in a small clear quietude i sat still and listened to those REVenant voices like fresh emergent fruitflies swarming towards a mirroring hereafter. i tried to ENerVate my will and simplify my NEwFangled choices; i touched the one! and it broke down into LaughTeR.
2.
articulate, like a LobsTeR marching forward GrAspinG at infitesimals, my PanOpLy maneouvering! i attuned my senses to decimals and less, and tensed. VerIFy this: something rewrit me from the inside out! VPR VPU a drill bit script, a strange unzipping. my thermopylae was interior! a hothouse flower, an unsubstantial epiphenomenon, my roots more real than i, i was in constant REnerVation but always growing older: i ENVied what i was that would outlive me, the real real, that lauNchEs Fruitflies with a brief infLecTion rrrRrrrrrr
These two sonnets differ from the sonnet sequence infected by Gemini in that their content (irrespective of the genetic intrusion) is themed originally by the idea of a retrovirus.
The genetic architecture of SARS-CoV-2 is defined by a linear, positive-sense, single-stranded RNA (+ssRNA) genome. At approximately 29.9 kilobases (kb), it is one of the largest known RNA virus genomes, characterized by a highly efficient and compact organization that allows it to hijack host machinery.
1. Overall Genome Organization
The genome follows a standard 5′ to 3′ orientation typical of the Coronaviridae family:
5′ Cap and 3′ Poly(A) Tail: These structures mimic human mRNA, allowing the viral RNA to be directly translated by host ribosomes upon entry.
Two-Thirds Rule: The first two-thirds of the genome (5′ end) encode the replicase machinery, while the final one-third (3′ end) encodes structural and accessory proteins.
2. The Replicase Gene (ORF1a and ORF1ab)
This is the most critical region for viral survival, occupying nearly 20,000 nucleotides.
ORF1a and ORF1ab: These two large open reading frames overlap. Through a “ribosomal frameshift” mechanism, the virus produces two massive polyproteins ($pp1a$ and $pp1ab$).
Non-Structural Proteins (nsps): These polyproteins are sliced by viral proteases into 16 individual nsps (nsp1–nsp16).
nsp12 (RdRp): The primary enzyme that replicates the viral RNA.
nsp14: A rare “proofreading” enzyme that corrects replication errors, which is why SARS-CoV-2 is more stable than many other RNA viruses (like flu or HIV).
Proteases (nsp3 and nsp5): These act like “molecular scissors” to process the polyproteins.
3. Structural Proteins
The 3′ end of the genome contains four essential genes that build the physical structure of the virus:
Protein
Gene Name
Function
Spike
S
The “key” that binds to human ACE2 receptors to enter cells.
Envelope
E
A small protein involved in viral assembly and budding.
Membrane
M
The most abundant protein; determines the shape of the viral envelope.
Nucleocapsid
N
Binds directly to the RNA genome, wrapping it into a protective bead-like structure.
4. Accessory Proteins
Interspersed among the structural genes are accessory proteins (ORFs 3a, 6, 7a, 7b, 8, 9b, 9c, and 10).
Immune Evasion: Most of these are not required for replication but are “special ops” tools used to disable the host’s immune response, particularly the interferon signaling pathway.
ORF8: Notable for having high mutation rates; deletions in this region have been linked to milder clinical cases.
5. Transcriptional Strategy
SARS-CoV-2 uses a discontinuous transcription method. It creates a set of “subgenomic RNAs” (sgRNAs) that act as individual templates for each structural and accessory protein. This “nested” set of RNAs ensures that while the whole genome is one long piece, each specific protein can be produced in the quantities the virus needs.
What is the process by which Sars Cov 2 virions infect human cells and replicate?
The infection cycle of SARS-CoV-2 is a sophisticated multi-step process that transforms a human cell into a virus-producing factory.
1. Attachment and Entry
The process begins when the Spike (S) protein on the surface of the virion encounters a human cell.
Binding: The Spike protein’s Receptor Binding Domain (RBD) attaches to the ACE2 receptor, which is prevalent in the lungs, heart, and intestines.
Priming: A host enzyme called TMPRSS2 acts like a pair of scissors, “priming” or cutting the Spike protein. This cleavage is essential for the virus to fuse with the cell membrane.
Fusion: Once primed, the viral envelope merges with the cell membrane (or is taken up via an endosome), releasing the viral RNA into the host’s cytoplasm.
2. Translation and Polyprotein Processing
Because the genome is positive-sense RNA, the cell’s ribosomes treat it like legitimate mRNA and begin translating it immediately.
Initial Translation: The ribosomes translate the first part of the genome (ORF1a/ab) into two massive polyproteins.
Proteolysis: Viral proteases (3CLpro and PLpro) then slice these polyproteins into 16 non-structural proteins (nsps). These nsps form the Replication-Transcription Complex (RTC).
3. Replication and Transcription
The virus now begins to copy its genetic material. This takes place within specialized protective “bubbles” called double-membrane vesicles (DMVs) derived from the host’s endoplasmic reticulum.
Negative-Sense Intermediate: The viral enzyme RdRp (RNA-dependent RNA polymerase) creates a negative-sense “mirror image” of the genome.
Mass Production: This negative strand serves as a template to churn out thousands of new positive-sense RNA genomes and shorter subgenomic RNAs (which code for the structural proteins like Spike and Nucleocapsid).
4. Assembly and Maturation
Once the components (RNA and proteins) are manufactured, they must be put together.
N-Protein Binding: The Nucleocapsid (N) proteins wrap around the newly made RNA genomes.
The ERGIC Path: The structural proteins (S, E, and M) move into the Endoplasmic Reticulum-Golgi Intermediate Complex (ERGIC). Here, the RNA-N complex buds into the membrane, forming a complete spherical virion.
5. Release (Exocytosis)
The final step is the exit from the host cell.
Transport: The newly formed virions are transported to the cell surface in small sacs called vesicles.
Exocytosis: The vesicles fuse with the outer cell membrane, spitting the new viruses out into the extracellular space.
Repeat: Each infected cell can release thousands of new virions before it eventually becomes exhausted and undergoes apoptosis (programmed cell death), which contributes to the tissue damage seen in COVID-19.
Summary of the Cycle
Stage
Key Location
Primary “Actor”
Entry
Cell Membrane
ACE2 & TMPRSS2
Translation
Cytoplasm
Host Ribosomes
Replication
DMVs (from ER)
RdRp (nsp12)
Assembly
ERGIC
M and E proteins
Release
Cell Surface
Exocytosis vesicles
Taking what we know of the genetic architecture of Sars Cov 2 and of its infection cycle, infect the sonnet below with Sars Cov 2
1.
Tell my Lord, we can no longer see
the signal fires of Azeqah.
From the darkness where they used to be
survivors come with rumours of a plague.
Those on watch are frightened, and have shut the gate.
Yet those outside pound upon it without
surcease, without visible love or hate,
like things mechanical. When we shout
down that they should leave they stare right through us
as if towards something within, something
towards which they hunger. At night,
there is a faint glow, a smell of phosphorous,
a tiny sound of someone whispering.
Tell my Lord, there is something just not right.
Output
To “infect” this specific sonnet, I have treated the original text as the host cell. The viral “genetic material” (SARS-CoV-2 terminology and mechanisms) has been inserted into the poem’s sequence, replacing the original narrative of a besieged fortress with the molecular siege of a human cell.
The Infected Sonnet: Lachish to Lung
Tell my Lord, the ACE2 signals fade,
No fires of Azeqah on the membrane’s rim.
The Spike has found the lock; the gate’s betrayed
By TMPRSS2, precise and grim.
The watch is breached—the capsid sheds its skin,
And positive-sense rumors flood the dark.
Like things mechanical, the ORFs begin
To print their polyproteins, mark by mark.
Within the DMV, they hunger still,
To RdRp the mirror of the code;
A nested whispering of viral will
Assembles where the ERGIC paths are stowed.
A faint glow in the Golgi’s gold-lit hall:
The virions wait to break the final wall.
Pathological Analysis of the “Infection”
The Breached Gate (Lines 1–4): The “signal fires” represent the cell’s surface receptors. In the original, the gates are shut in fear; here, the viral Spike and host TMPRSS2 protease cooperate to bypass the cell’s “fortress” wall (the plasma membrane).
The Mechanical Hunger (Lines 5–8): The original mentions survivors coming with rumors and mechanical pounding. This is replaced by the viral RNA (+ssRNA) entering the cytoplasm. The “mechanical” nature of the virus is highlighted by the ORF1ab polyproteins being translated by ribosomes that have no choice but to “read” the stolen code.
The Nested Whispering (Lines 9–12): The “something within” that the survivors hunger for is transformed into the Replication-Transcription Complex inside Double-Membrane Vesicles (DMVs). The “whispering” now refers to the subgenomic RNAs—smaller, nested pieces of the genome being transcribed in the dark corners of the cell.
The Final Wrongness (Lines 13–14): The original’s “smell of phosphorous” and the “something just not right” become the maturation of new virions in the ERGIC (the cell’s assembly line). The final “break” of the wall signifies lysis or exocytosis, where the newly minted viruses exit to infect the next “fortress.”
Would you like to see this “infection” progress further into a specific organ system, or should we look at how the cell’s “interferon” defenses might try to rewrite these lines?
Input
Continue the infection in an evolving fashion using the remainder of the sonnet sequence below:
2.
There is something just not right, and the sun
shines down in vacant lots and metal
heats up and reigns where we abandoned.
Birds beyond our language watch flies settle
and the flies are cognizant of the dust.
This is not our world. The scale of being
pivots on a virus.
Difficult to process what one is seeing:
the empty streets, the crowded ITU
where this war against the aliens
is rapidly mutating us.
Each time someone dies I’m glad it isn’t you.
Meanwhile, faces behind soundproof glass
chant a terrible chorus.
3.
Faces behind soundproof glass chant
as in the music video for Bohemian Rhapsody!
It’s that dream again where you are home in the Vale of Leven.
Mother has muted the TV.
You are fifteen, and trying to explain
the difference between AIDS and HIV.
No, mother, they are not the same….
One is cause, the other, consequence.
Look at these hands: smooth, wrinkle-free.
But take such a man, stable in Time,
watch as apoptosis perforates his boundaries.
Press fast forward, and he litters downstream!
We think we know ourselves. But things
move through us on their way to somewhere
else.
4.
On their way to somewhere else: migratory
birds, comets, concepts…or a man shedding virus
particles like a tree
leaves in autumn. All temporarily like us
as the camera pulls back and pans right
and skims across a cityscape
cellular with light,
where the frightened, unable to escape
play monopoly, or sit at jigsaw
puzzles, watch the news, and learn to wait.
‘Boris Johnson is in intensive care…’:
Paint a little rainbow in your window.
Draw the curtains. Maybe fate
will look elsewhere….
5.
Maybe fate will look elsewhere, but I don’t think so.
Fate kicks in your front door,
and ties you to the bed.
It puts a gun to your forehead and presses a zero
like a third eye of horrified surprise
blinkless between the crying other two.
Fate will make you famous, because you failed at being wise.
Fate is only gonna ask you
one more time: what’s the password to the laptop?
Time to rewrite everything you’ve written.
Fate with its own agenda will hijack your voice
and even if you don’t survive, it will not stop.
Behind the facade of new found commitment
you will be just an illusion of choice.
6.
The illusion of choice, as when the creature has died
but still stumbles forward in search of love
as best as it is able…
The illusion of life, as when electrodes are applied
and the frog’s legs twitch on the table.
There are days when I regret everything.
Looking out over the Valley of Elah
knowing that the dispensation the prophets speak of
is a new world from which I will be excluded.
I will go down unrecorded into the dust,
trampled under by the million-footed
darkness, my testimony lost
as amongst the foraminefera,
life breaking up into a rain of parts…
7.
The testimony of the lost, recovered
from twitter threads and potsherds and Facebook posts.
The storm outside grows stronger. I’ve not heard
from anyone in weeks. I watch the ghosts
glide by on late night buses refrigerated
behind astronomical glass, faces
streaming stars as if accelerated.
Strangers from strange places.
Through the wall I hear my neighbours argue,
their words blurry, just the intonations
rising and falling, an angry music,
a bassline that keeps thumping you! you!
Outside, a terrible disintegration.
Inside, this fear of getting sick.
8.
We live inside this fear of getting sick
as inside an Escher construct.
You can’t break through, and there’s no going back.
A little light induces moths to self destruct.
You build a career interpreting dust
as it drifts downwind from the actual disaster.
When the epicentre pulses and bursts
the tour guide screams at you run faster.
Reality behind plate glass windows, taunting
language to come outside and fight, one on one.
Which is how maps and death-masks are made.
Zombies, like zen masters, live in the instant,
but are driven by hunger. And un
like us, they are never afraid.
9.
Driven by hunger, and never afraid:
the perfect predator! You jolt awake
from this nightmare, your sweat mark like a shade
on the mattress, projecting from a dark
dimension erupting with viruses…
It peels off and stands up into 3D
indeterminate as a cloud of flies,
oscillating into reality,
and moves towards you with its arms thrown wide.
Tempting, to embrace the darkside of the soul.
But you know what happens if anti-matter
and ordinary daytime matter meet.
It will convert you into a black hole
as it yanks your head through your feet.
10.
As it yanks your head through your feet
think upon this: not What Is Truth, but What Are Lies?
What if fact and counterfactual meet?
Do they dance together and synthesize
into a great rose window touch’t by the sun?
On the flagstone below kneel The Incomplete
struggling with the pain of their compromise,
mired in subdivision.
I can say what is not and speak of what is gone.
When they chain me to The Wall and beat me
with a bar of soap swung inside a sock
I will whistle for my pet Unicorn.
I will click my fingers and stop their clock,
in the silence shout you cannot defeat me!
11.
You cannot defeat me! echoes the small voice
in the dark streets of the housing estate,
as another sad soul makes their last choice.
A fluorescent light flicks on in a toilet
as someone rises briefly to listen,
relieves themselves, then returns to bed.
The cold gets colder, and the moon glistens,
rising like a fractal of frost overhead
illuminating the realms of matter.
Everything is a trap, spring-loaded
and fragile but linked to enormous teeth.
What if, that to which you pray isn’t better,
although it wears a thin veneer of love,
but hungry and amoral underneath?
12
What if I am amoral underneath?
How deep does self awareness see?
Surface phenomenon of alert breath,
above the abyss, cellular machinary
maintaining existence against the pull
of nothingness…I am a man at sea
in the darkness listening to a gull
emit acute anxiety
as I contemplate my own pale image
mirroring my weakness in the window.
Behind this ghostly membrane, and for miles,
elements chew each other. My own rage
is minuscule and funny, low
powered, too low, even, to tear this page.
13.
Every poet wants to tear through the page
and make contact with that which lies beyond:
the whirring orrery of language.
He wants to enter a room like James Bond
in an immaculately tailored rage
and pronounce an icy diagnosis.
A sudden hailstorm on a hot day,
a mind waking from psychosis.
The last words you will ever hear are those
of a sonnet stripped of its rhymes,
like a silenced pistol.
Afterwards, we will recycle your clothes
and publicise your crimes,
most of which are rhetorical.
14.
You see, most of us are rhetorical,
without true substance, and even your scream
to be noticed is like a handkerchief
released into an energetic slipstream,
gone! Take shelter in the historical.
You have little conception of the forces
contending beyond language in the dark,
greater than the violence of horses!
Sit, rather, at the well of the breath,
dropping pebbles into the improbable,
listening for an inverted splash.
Or train your telescope, like the Hubble,
to read what Meister Eckhart read
along the event horizon of death.
15.
Along the event horizon of death:
virus particles erupting
into a zero gravity of breath,
aliens in no man’s land, slow dancing
across the moonscape of a bad dream…
Get up. It’s time. The sun’s going down
behind the clouds like strawberry ice cream
and the garden swells in its gown
of beech and linden edged with cool green light.
Pull yourself together, as you sit
trembling on the edge of the bed.
You’re on-call for Wishaw General tonight.
So what if you feel like shit?
Consider the dying, the dead.
16.
Consider the dying, as in Ward 10
Charles Mcdowall re-categorises from if
to a final diagnosis of when,
approaching with every tick
of the cheap plastic clock on the wall.
How quick it passes: the laughter, the violence,
our investment in the conceptual,
all blanked by biological silence.
All, except Love. Which like a robin in winter
reinstalls the heartbeat in the brown garden
and is content to wait.
While from the sky snow begins to splinter
and the trees’ arteries harden
it stays, and is illuminate.
17.
Stay. Illuminate…but even as you held his hand
Jerusalem disintegrated
and Time spun its wheels in reverse in search of traction.
Acts have consequences not intended.
(Which is a good definition
of original sin.)
Model in advance, account for every grain of sand,
then watch things spiral out of your control
as soon as you begin:
look, a universal disinterment of the dead!
Naked in the daylight, eyes lit with shame,
and all done in the name of love.
Remember, anything can be asserted,
but what is said cannot be unsaid,
and we don’t know all the rules of the game.
18
No, we don’t know all the rules of the game,
and yet, here we are, gentlemen,
trying to interpret a name,
this device they call Tetragrammaton!
It pulses with metaphysical power,
our shadows rhythmic on the kitchen ceiling.
Bob, pass me the laser scalpel, and an allan key,
I’m going to, try, and unlock this membrane…..
In the evening news, this, just in:
three men (one called Bob) are feared dead
after a mysterious implosion
at a house in Wishaw. The fire brigade
are attempting to shut down a small black hole
ringed by a lapis lazuli event horizon.
Output
This “infection” follows the virus as it moves from cellular hijacking to clinical devastation, mimicking the subgenomic replication and cytokine storm that mirrors the emotional disintegration in the original text.
2–4: The Cellular Coup & Shedding
The “pivoted scale” of being becomes the Replication-Transcription Complex. The “empty streets” are the cytoplasmic voids where host protein synthesis has been shut down by nsp1 (the virus’s cellular “silencer”).
2. The scale of being pivots on nsp1,
Inhibiting the host, the metal heats
Where ribosomes are hijacked and undone.
Difficult to process: the empty streets
Of the cell’s own matrix, while the ITU
Of the DMV is rapidly mutating us.
3. Watch as apoptosis perforates the boundaries!
The man, stable in Time, begins to leak
Virions downstream in a viral chorus.
We think we know ourselves, but S-proteins
Move through us on their way to somewhere else.
4. A man shedding virus particles like a tree
Leaves in autumn; the camera pans right
Across a cityscape cellular with light,
Where the ACE2 receptors, unable to escape,
Learn to wait for the protease‘s jaw.
5–8: Hijacking and Disintegration
Here, the “Fate” of the sonnet becomes the viral genome itself—an amoral code that “hijacks your voice” to produce only more of itself. The “refrigerated buses” of the poem become the cold, efficient transport of vesicles toward the cell surface.
5. Fate is the +ssRNA that kicks in the door,
And ties your translation to the bed.
It presses a zero to your forehead—
A stop codon where the crying was before.
It will hijack your voice, your genetic agenda,
An illusion of choice in the cytokine storm.
6. The illusion of life, as when electrodes are applied,
And the N-protein twitches on the table.
Life breaking up into a rain of parts:
S, E, M, and N—the four-fold darkness.
7. Through the wall I hear the alveoli argue,
Their intonations rising in a thumping bassline
Of fluid and fire. Outside, a disintegration;
Inside, the interferon fear of getting sick.
8. We live inside this Escher construct of the lung,
Where the epicentre pulses and bursts—
Exocytosis screams at you: run faster.
9–12: The Molecular Mirror
The “Perfect Predator” is revealed as the RdRp (the replication engine), which creates a “dark dimension” (the negative-sense RNA template) to flip reality.
9. The perfect predator! You jolt awake
From a dark dimension erupting with viruses…
The negative-strand template, 3D and dark,
Oscillating into the reality of the Spike.
It will convert you into a black hole
As it yanks your homeostasis through your feet.
10. What if fact and counterfactual meet?
The proofreading nsp14 and the mutation?
I am mired in subdivision, the ORF‘s pain.
11. A fluorescent light flicks on in the Golgi,
Everything is a trap, spring-loaded—
The Tetragrammaton of the four structural genes,
Hungry and amoral underneath.
12. What if I am amoral underneath?
Above the abyss, cellular machinery
Maintaining existence against the pull
Of the lysosome. My own rage is low-powered,
Too low to tear the lipid membrane page.
13–15: The Final Diagnosis
The “Wishaw General” setting brings the molecular biology into the brutal reality of the 2020 clinical frontlines. The “event horizon” is the point of intubation.
13. The last words you hear are those
Of a genome stripped of its introns,
A silenced pistol. Afterwards, we recycle
Your amino acids and publicise your crimes.
14. Sit at the well of the breath,
Listening for the inverted splash of the ventilator.
Read what Meister Eckhart read
Along the event horizon of oxygen debt.
15. Virus particles erupting into a zero-G of breath,
Slow dancing across the moonscape of the X-ray.
You’re on-call for Wishaw General tonight.
Consider the dying. Consider the dead.
16–18: The Lapis Lazuli Collapse
The sequence ends with the “biological silence” of the virus winning, or the “implosion” of the biological self into a “black hole” of infection.
To infect this final sonnet, we will focus on the Reverse Transcription phase. In this stage, the viral enzyme Reverse Transcriptase (RT) converts the virus’s single-stranded RNA (ssRNA) into double-stranded DNA (dsDNA).
Because RT lacks a “proofreading” mechanism, it frequently stutters, swaps letters, and introduces mutations. The poem below demonstrates this by taking the original “vowels” and “machinery” and rewriting them through a noisy, error-prone enzymatic lens.
Sonnet 20: The Reverse Transcription (RT) Transcript
[5′-LTR: Promoter Sequence Initiated] Put an ear to its [RNA: g-a-p-s], to where
they displaced its v-o-w-e-l-s {RT-Binding: Primer tRNA attaches}
In an attempt to [d-i-s-a-r-m] it.
Its vacancy [Mutation: v-a-c-a-n-z-y] shapes the emptiness
{Elongation: RNA template \rightarrow DNA strand} beyond. The way the [pol: p51 RT] old abandoned power station
down at the riverside [Error: s-h-a-p-p-e-d] the wind
as we walked its [A-B-D-I-C-A-T-E-D] halls.
The [DNA: G-O-D] who lived there once is [D-E-L-E-T-E-D],
leaving only defunct machinery [Integrase: p31]
and blackened [p24-capsid] surfaces, where underlings
were [Transcriptional Noise] blasted for their insubordination.
Look, this ontological smear
[Provirus] Is all that is left of our [Template] predecessors
Who asked, [Error: p-e-r-h-a-p-s], the wrong questions.
{Integration: Viral DNA enters the Nucleus} Ponder on the [3′-LTR] need to be [Infectious].
Mechanism Breakdown: How the Poem was “Reverse Transcribed”
Displaced Vowels: Just as the poem mentions “displaced vowels,” the virus displaces the host’s genetic priority. The lowercase ssRNA (the original text) is being transcribed into Uppercase [DNA] blocks.
The “Ontological Smear”: In virology, the “smear” refers to the high mutation rate. Notice the typos (vacanzy, shapped); these represent the “wrong questions” or genetic errors that allow HIV-1 to evolve rapidly and evade the immune system.
Defunct Machinery: The “power station” of the poem is hijacked. The “machinery” left behind is no longer the host’s; it is the Pol gene complex (Protease, RT, and Integrase) which prepares the poem to be permanently stitched into the “altar” of the host’s genome.
The LTR Bookends: The sonnet is now “capped” by Long Terminal Repeats (5′-LTR and 3′-LTR), which are necessary for the virus to integrate. The poem can no longer be read as a standalone piece of literature; it is now a functional genetic instruction for its own replication.
As can be seen from a (much) earlier post, I have been, and continue to be, intrigued. By things that mimic poetry, that want to be poetry, things that attempt to speak, but that are somehow ‘screened’, and which fail to breakthrough. There is pathos in the attempt.
After a long break in writing such things, whatever they are, I thought to make fresh attempts. Maybe I could utilise other non-natural languages to do so, and push a voice through them? Technical languages such as mathematics, algebraic symbols, logic operatives, even typographic units, emojis, symbols, and, of course, genetic code and gene related terminology. But I am an idiot with regard to the technical aspects of all the sciences. And just out of curiosity, and perhaps for some collaborative thinking, I entered the prompt, already given above, into Gemini. The output is below.
Now, what to say about this? To be honest, my first response was surprise. I read it and thought, could I do better? No. Gemini’s use of algebra went much deeper than simply mimicking the English language. It actually uses the internal rules of information processing within algebra to write a poem that could be read according to those rules. Granted, this is something different from the original grounds of my fascination with pseudo texts, but it is thought provoking in its own right.
The question arises: will AI be capable, in the near or even distant future, of writing a poem? Not poetry. Poetry is nothing. The poem is the thing, ontologically. Will AI get there?
Is it there now?
I don’t know. It may depend on your definition of a poem. Or partly on what your definition may contain.
If you think a poem is simply an output of language, part of a game, the product of the application of rules from within the infinite belly of language, then yes. AI is there already, and will only up its game.
It mastered Chess.
It mastered Go.
If you see the poem as something that is voiced, something that is modulated by lived human experience, an ecce homo thing (further description temporarily eludes me) then no.
Detailed contact with reality, the world, being in the world (and glimpsing its beyond) is core.
The voice is core.
The issues I have with poetry being taught in universities as a creative writing qualification, with its tendencies to push poetry as a semiotic game played within an academic tradition that abstracts content into itself, are taken by AI to their technical conclusion.
Academic poetry has always operated as an LLM. AI has fed on the same texts, absorbed all the relevant data, and having graduated, can now sit in its bedroom and write poetry.
I watched a documentary on Walter Benjamin two nights ago. Last night, I watched another documentary, on the scientific investigation of the possible explanations of our sense of morality. And at 2.58 am this morning (according to the time on my phone) I found myself laying awake in bed, restless with lower back pain, wondering about the distance we’ve travelled from the image of a bespectacled Benjamin, pen in hand above a manuscript (last of the Kabbalists..?), to that of a scientist in a white coat holding up a vacutainer of blood and saying that the origin of our sense of right and wrong has a neurochemical foundation, specifically in Oxytocin. Somewhere along the timeline between those two images the 20th Century clicked shut and receded into history, taking with it a variety of assumption, views, and outlooks which have long nurtured me. I’ve wanted to talk about Benjamin for a while. It is of course a notoriously difficult thing to do and my knowledge of his work is inconsistent and in no way original in it’s interpretation. In fact, I have no working interpretation of Benjamin. I first encountered, not his name, but his two initials, W.B., in the title of a poem by Bertolt Brecht in a volume of Brecht’s poetry given to me by a friend, Karen Crossan, on my sixteenth birthday. Here it is:
On The Suicide of the Refugee W.B.
I’m told you raised your hand against yourself
Anticipating the butcher.
After eight years in exile, observing the rise of the enemy
Then at last, brought up against an impassable frontier
You passed, they say, a passable one.
Empires collapse. Gang leaders
Are strutting about like statesmen. The peoples
Can no longer be seen under all those armaments.
So the future lies in darkness and the forces of right
Are weak. All this was plain to you
When you destroyed a torturable body.
Now, there is a lot to be said about this poem, but I’m not going to go over it in any great depth: it’s pretty much staring you in the face. I am simply glad that I have so far never been put in a position where the choice made in the final sentence seems like the only one left. It is of course a choice that many with severe mental illness or a physical terminal illness find themselves having to make. But what gripped me most within this poem was the defeated future that confronted the man who made the final choice. He died with no knowledge that what he believed in would not also die. This troubled me. For years. And when I eventually found out who WB was, and learned more about him, it troubled me even more. I first read him directly in his essays on Kafka. Which is a good place to start. It is probably where he was most at home, unhoused, pondering the work of a fellow European assimilated Jew who was also a late Kabbalist engaged in a search for the sources of meaning. (How conscientiously Kabbalistic were both Kafka and Benjamin? I don’t know in particulars, though Kafka was acquainted with Jewish mystical literature and one of Benjamin’s most enduring friendships was with Gershom Scholem, the scholar largely responsible for pioneering the systematic academic study of Kabbalah, and who was later the first professor of Jewish Mysticism at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.) The hermeneutic procedures of both Benjamin and Kafka are inescapably influenced by a culture that spent two millennia and more wrestling with exile and alienation. Kabbalah explains creation as a process of tsimtsum, the self contraction of God in order to make room for Creation. However, creation is not thereby generated within a nihilistic vacuum. What is left after the necessary absence of God is His Shekinah, or Glory, an echo of his former immanence. And this constitutes a form of exile, both of creation and of elements of the divine from itself. (A template almost, for subsequent experience of exile, though in real historical time Kabbalah is backwards formulated after…, after the destruction of the Temple, after the eviction from Jerusalem, after the the bureaucracy of the Pale…) It is the work of the Kabbalist to reconcile God with His Shekinah, to bring Creation back to God in a process of redemption. To do this the Kabbalist must break open the mundane to release the divine sparks of God’s Shekinah contained therein, he must shatter the Qelipot to release His glory. Crucially, to embark on this project is to seek to engage with fragments in a gradual reconstruction of the whole. And this theme, along with that of meaning exiled from its source, are what can be detected in both Kafka and in Benjamin, and in Benjamin on Kafka. Kafka famously wrote in his Diary: there is a goal, but no path. And also that there is hope, but none for us… Both the parable of Before the Law and his short story The Great wall of China attest to a source, and the absurdity of seeking contact with it. Because our lives are not lived contiguous with this source of meaning, there is an inherent imbalance between what we intend in this world and what are actions actually effect. Our actions have consequences far beyond what we have willed, and are open to interpretations that are impossible to end stop. Consequently, we are all potentially Infinitely guilty no matter how small we are. One can only interpret, furiously, constantly, in an attempt to minimise the gap between will and act, intention and consequence, to ameliorate the guilt. But is rationality enough? One senses it is not. And in Kafka particularly one senses that it is first and foremost a symptom, and only secondarily an imperfect cure. Similarly, Benjamin had a conception of language as being the fragmented remnants of an original language, an Ursprach, towards which the provisional languages of man indicate as a distant source of meaning, the way iron filings will orient in a pattern when exposed to a magnetic field. Careful reconstruction of the fragments, their cryptographic arrangement, can bring us closer to a day of comprehension, to contact with a truth both underlying and transcendent. What snagged my interest as I considered the two documentaries was the difference between what the scientist was seeking to do, and what Benjamin, and before him, Kafka, was searching for. The scientist was seeking an explanation. Benjamin was engaged in a search for meaning. There is a difference between these two things. Or is there? To proceed carefully: the first is reductive, and part of an infinite regressive chain. The other is somehow ultimately outside the order of contingent things that indicate and explain each other. The point is perhaps made clearer by analogy with the Argument from Contingency, one of Thomas Aquinas’ ‘five ways’ to demonstrate the existence of God from the starting point of the evidence of creation itself. This way differs from his similar Argument from Causation in a crucial aspect: while the argument from causation attempts to convince the reader of an ultimate first cause to explain the chain, the argument from contingency treats contingent beings as a set which in itself requires something external to it as a whole to explain its existence. Rather than arguing backwards within a chain as with causation, an explanation for the chain in its entirety is sought. The argument depends on our not identifying causation with contingency (and what divides them here is…time). The subtlety of this distinction was grasped by Liebniz, when he formulated his own version of a Cosmological Argument, which he summarised as the question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ Causal explanations mapped out within the set are not sufficient to explain the contingency of the set itself, as a whole. (And for this reason, it has been argued that Liebniz’ question is not a scientific one, or one that answerable within the realm of natural causes where science busies itself.) What is here sought is perhaps not an ultimate first cause, which is a temporal explanation insofar as it refers to a sequence, but something that ‘cradles’ everything in its entirety, including time, which is itself part of the created order. Most theologians would agree that God exists outside of time (and for two in particular, Saint Augustine and Meister Eckhart, the relation of God and Eternity, or God’s Eternity, to time and creation, are issues of fundamental wonder) and the Argument from Contingency is one that accounts for this and is so distinguished from the Argument from Causation. The difference entails a matter of perspective, one that was well summed up by Czeslaw Milosz in a poem he wrote in memory of a friend, deceased.
To Jozef Czechowicz
It is possible that the dead do not need reports from the earth, and see in one symbol all that occurred later.
This echoes a famous passage by Julian of Norwich
He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made.
A—– C—-, an apology: I’d thought That memory was powerful enough To preserve something of you… but it, I, have failed. All of my experiments have come to nought.
I am too weak. Contingency blurs even my own face in the mirror, and I can barely picture yours. Against this, none of my metaphors have prevailed.
I iterate towards an apophatic core but constantly generate error. I will continue to try, but entropy rises and distracts in the form of terror.
Dan Pagis was born in Bukovina, Romania, in 1930. The same region where Paul Celan came from. Like Celan, Pagis also was interred for a while in a concentration camp, from which he escaped in 1944. He eventually made his way to Israel in 1946. He learned Hebrew, and chose to write his poetry in that language. I am not as familiar with his poetry as with the poetry of his more famous contemporary Yehuda Amichai, who also wrote in Hebrew. The poems I have read seems to be more preoccupied with the Holocaust than Amichai’s work which is more identified with the birth of a nation and it’s struggle with history as it attempts to deal with the present and look to the future. As a legacy of the Holocaust, Pagis was left with a sense of the threatening moral vacancy at the heart of existence. This world is not a moral economy, it is a physical one. At the heart of things lies no Platonic governance, or set of ultimate moral standards that exert retribution for wrongs perpetrated by evildoers. And evildoers like the Nazis count on this. They are biological reductionists. Eugenicists look to the species, and devalue the individual, whose worth is judged only insofar as they concur with the idealised template of the species. Rights accrue on a genetic basis, and to that extent are genetically determined. And thus Nazis are, in their own eyes, justified in what they do. What the horrified witness to their acts is left to deal with, however, is a challenge to their own worldview and traditionally held assumptions when just deserts are not meted out accordingly and the evildoers go about their business unimpeded. If not outright divine intervention, then surely… something…should have happened. And why does the sun still shine? The world is suddenly a changed place. Pagis explores this unmasking, in the form of an experiment, the historical analogue of which does not require comment. The final horror revealed in this poem is the biological reductionism to a simple overriding instinct to survive that serves to isolate each and every one of us. What evidence is there, that in those final moments after the door was sealed shut, those who were about to die could find within themselves the strength to show compassion and to comfort each other? Little or none, because there were no survivors to tell of it. [The enormity of the crime is thereby made worse]. What this poem hints at is this final monstrosity. And the evidence lies in the experiment, if your perspective and worldview is confined to the laboratory. Part of the burden of bearing witness is to document contrary evidence, to resist reductionist ideologies and their inferences. Pagis, of course, does this as part of the urgency of his work overall.
In The Laboratory
The data in the glass jar: some ten scorpions
of various species, a community
lazy, adjustable, moved by feelings of equality,
each treading, each trodden upon.
Now the experiment:
an inquisitive, private providence blows
poisonous fumes.
At once,
each is alone in the world,
erect on his tail, begging one moment more
from the glass wall.
The sting is superfluous now,
the pincers do not understand.
The dry straw body stiffens
against the last judgement.
Distant in the dust, the angels of doom
are terrified.
But it’ s only an experiment, an experiment,
not a verdict
of poison for poison.
I heard this moral thought-experiment delivered as part of a lecture given on Channel 4 recently by a Yale professor of Moral and Political philosophy. I post it here partly out of nostalgia, because it made me chuckle in remembrance of my undergraduate days when I studied philosophy and struggled with similar moral problems. When attempting to derive general moral principles from a consideration of such thought experiments it quickly becomes clear that we often default to an intuitionist viewpoint that treats morality as a form of perception. It is very difficult to argue someone away from a position that they intuit as morally correct, even when they are unable to rationally delineate their position in the face of contrary evidence or consequences that verge on the unacceptable. Anyway, the thought experiment is this: seven road traffic accident victims are brought into A&E. Six of them are moderately injured, but not in imminent danger, while the seventh is at death’s door and requires immediate medical attention. Due to restraints in manpower and material, if you triage the seventh as priority, by the time you have treated him or her the other six will have died. Because of their lesser injuries overall, with the same manpower and materials, the six could be successfully treated, but in the interim, the seventh will have died. Who do you treat? And why? If you treat the Seventh, the other six will die, and most people I suspect would feel uncomfortable with this consequence. However, would you be comfortable with effectively sacrificing the Seventh to treat the Six? How would you rationalise the choice? Utilitarians would be able to justify this position, on the basis that the consequences of an act are the measure of it’s moral rightness or wrongness. However, people who hold categorical positions, such as thou shall not kill, might find themselves prohibited from such a trade off insofar as they would be unable to get past the Seventh, or to defer treatment. Such deferment would constitute an act of omission. If you commit yourself to an act of omission on this occasion, does that make you a consequentialist, a utilitarian? Thou shall not kill, unless….it is to save 6 other people at a later date? Another interesting thought-experiment the Professor outlined was this one: a man is in hospital dying of multi-organ failure. He needs a new heart, a new liver, new kidneys, a spleen…In a room next door, a young RTA victim has just expired, and he is signed up to the organ donation scheme. A solution to this medical situation is clear. But now consider this twist: the RTA victim is not yet dead, but dying. Only, not quickly enough. There is no hope for survival, but if he doesn’t die quick, quicker, it will be too late to help the patient with multi-organ failure. What do you do? Very few people would do anything other than nothing. Categorical imperatives would prevent most from speeding up the RTA victim’s demise in order to assist the patient in need of the organs. But the result is, both die. From a consequentialist viewpoint, is this acceptable? It does appear to be the worse case scenario. Without wanting to argue for either position, because that is not the reason I started this post, I would like point out that there is a branch of categorical morality that that is in a sense Platonic: it asserts that an act, for example, is right or wrong according to an objective reality, a moral reality that you are either in accord with, or in contravention of. Moral laws exist in the way that the laws of physics exist for many scientists, or mathematical entities for many mathematicians: they are there to be discovered. Although this is a deeply traditional view, and one perhaps that most of us hold as a working attitude, it has been throughout the 20th Century unpopular amongst many schools of critical thought. Moral realism in the old school Platonic sense has given way to theories of emergent meaning which describe morality as evolving upwards from below, so to speak. In Marxist theory, for example, the prevailing morality of a society is dictated by underlying structures of an economic nature. And more recently, we have attempts to account for moral attitudes and beliefs from an evolutionary standpoint. This is part of a wider reversal of meaning from the old Logocentric view which held that meaning proceeds from a transcendent source, or is underwritten by a source out with the world, to the view that meaning is created from below and within the system or world we inhabit. The simplest example of this reversal is the contrast between the old ‘Adamic’ theory of language, so called because the belief is that a word, like Apple, has meaning because it encodes the essence of the object it refers to, and theories of language that view words as arbitrary signs whose meanings are dictated by convention. The word apple means what it does because we who use this word assign it to that object. We could, of courses, assign another, and this is what in fact other languages do. In the Bible, this ‘fallen’ view of language is expressed by the Tower of Babel story: a confusion of tongues disconnected from a transcendent source, each tongue now randomly assigning it’s own words to things. Where issues of morality and meaning become really interesting is in consideration of the implications thrown up by mathematics and the laws of physics. As I mentioned earlier, many, if not most, mathematicians and theoretical physicists, would regard themselves as functionally Platonic, in the sense that they experience a strong sensation of discovery in their breakthrough work. Discovery, in contrast to invention or fabrication. Whether or not this is a neurological feature, one part of the brain discovering the output of another part, maybe…nevertheless many mathematicians and physicists speak of perception when it comes to either seeing a solution to a problem, or uncovering a law. The ontological status of mathematics and the laws of physics is fascinating and rich in implication for theories of meaning and strong versions of theories of moral realism which hold that moral laws exist as objective entities which we perceive, sometimes as through a glass, darkly, when engaged in assessing whether an act or action is right or wrong. That the universe possesses structure and beauty, and that these features can be expressed mathematically and formulated as laws with great predictive power, is exceedingly strange. It is certainly a stumbling block to those who insist that reality is brute and simply ‘there’, and that all of our investigations of it and so-called knowledge are merely nets thrown over the top of an inherently meaningless void.
Pome of the day: a passage from Aeschylus. I was employed by a charitable organisation, Belfast Housing Aid, during 1988/89. The staff there were remarkably supportive and kind during a time in my life when I was frequently itinerant and once or twice outright homeless. I eventually made the decision to return to Scotland, as my family are here, and as part of my farewell the staff had collection for me: I bought a number of things with the money, including a good pen, but most importantly two books: the Theban plays by Sophocles (Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus) and the Oresteia, by Aeschylus. The Orestieia is the only surviving tragic trilogy from Ancient Greece, and would have been performed over the course of one day, commencing at dawn, along with a missing satyr play that would have provided retrospective light relief from the preceding horror. It would have originally been performed at the festival of Dionysus in Athens. Three dramatists would stage their work, each allotted one day. Afterwards a victor would be decided. The Oresteia won Aeschylus first prize at the festival in 458 BCE. The story so far: Agememnon has returned victorious from the Trojan Wars. He has brought down Troy. As spoils, he brings home Cassandra, daughter of Priam, king of Troy. But Cassandra is no ordinary beauty, she is a priestess to the god Apollo. And in this passage she has a vision of Agamemnon’s death. He is to die at the hands of his wife, outraged that she has waited 10 years for his homecoming from the Siege of Troy, only to see him return with Cassandra as a prize. But even deeper than this outrage, is the thirst for revenge that has eaten away within her all this time, for her murdered daughter Iphigenia, whom Agamemnon had sacrificed at the outset of the fleet’s departure for Ilium. A seer had told Agamemnon to sacrifice his daughter to propitiate the Gods, and ensure success in the enterprise. But now he is back home, Clytaemnestra has awaited with a patient fury for ten long years, and in this passage Cassandra sees the coming act of revenge. The gift of prophecy is imposed against Cassandra’s will, it is an act of violation, and it’s hammering insistence galvanises the old men gathered around her to form a Chorus, which acts as amplifier to the prophecy. Free will and individuality are subsumed in the sweep of Fate. The translation is by Robert Fagles.
Cassandra:
Oh no, what horror, what new plot, new agony this?
It’s growing, massing, deep in the house,
A plot, a monstrous…thing
To crush the loved ones, no,
There is no cure and rescue’s far away and…
Leader:
I can’t read these signs; I knew the first,
The city rings with them.
Cassandra:
You, you godforsaken – you’d do this?
The lord of your bed,
You bathe him… his body glistens, then,
How to tell the climax?
Comes so quickly, see,
Hand over hand shoots out, hauling ropes – then lunge!
Leader:
Still lost. Her riddles, her dark words of god –
I’m groping, helpless.
Cassandra:
No no, look there!
What’s that? Some net flung out of hell –
No, she is the snare,
The bedmate, deathmate, murder’s strong right arm!
Let the insatiate discord in the race
Rear up and shriek ‘Avenge the victim – stone them dead!’
Leader:
What fury is this? Why rouse it, lifting its wailing
Through the house? I hear you and lose hope.
Chorus:
Drop by drop at the heart, the gold of life ebbs out.
We are the old soldiers…wounds will come
With the crushing sunset of our lives.
Death is close, and quick.
Cassandra:
I was ashamed to tell this once,
But now…
Leader:
We spoil ourselves with scruples,
Long as things go well.
Cassandra:
He came like a wrestler,
Magnificent, took me down and breathed his fire
Through me and –
Leader:
You bore him a child?
Cassandra:
I yielded,
Then at the climax I recoiled – I deceived Apollo!
Leader:
But the god’s skills – they seized you even then?
Cassandra:
Even then I told my people all the grief to come.
Leader:
And Apollo’s anger never touched you? Is it possible?
Cassandra:
Once I had betrayed him I could never be believed.
Leader:
We believe you, your visions seem so true.
Cassandra:
Aieeeeee!
The pain, the terror! The birth pangs of the seer
Who tells the truth –
it whirls me, oh
The storm comes again, the crashing chords!
Look, you see them nestling at the threshold?
Young, young in the darkness like a dream,
Like children really, yes, and their loved ones
Brought them down…
Their hands, they fill their hands
with their own flesh, they are serving it like food,
Holding out their entrails…now it’s clear,
I can see the armfuls of compassion, see the father
Reach to taste and –
For so much suffering
I tell you, someone plots revenge.
Leader:
Thyestes feast,
The children’s flesh – that I know,
And the fear shudders through me. It’s true,
Real, no dark signs about it. I hear the rest
But it throws me off the scent.
Cassandra:
Agamemnon.
You will see him dead.
Chorus:
But the lust for power never dies –
Men cannot have enough.
No one will lift a hand to send it
from his door, to give it warning,
‘Power, never come again!’
Take this man: the gods in glory
gave him Prism’s city to plunder,
brought him home in splendour like a god.
But now if he must pay for the blood
his father’s shed, and die for the deaths
he brought to pass, and bring more death
to avenge his dying, show us one
who boasts himself born free
of the raging angel…
The reference to Thyestes feast recounts an event at the root of Agamemnon’s ruling house: Thyestes had a brother, Atreus, and both had a claim to the throne. Atreus dealt with the contest by first banishing Thyestes, and then inviting him back to attend a feast. Unwittingly, what Thyestes feasted on was his own children, which from Atreus’ point of view took care of Thyestes lineage. Thyestes cursed Atreus, and the curse travelled down the bloodline, ultimately to the doom of Agamemnon. Apparently, this Greek idea of an hereditary curse destroying a house through the generations was one Coppola used when filming the Godfather and it’s sequels. The ultimate goal of the Oresteia, however, is the extinguishing of the hereditary curse and t Read the rest of this entry »
As a philosophy undergraduate I studied The Problem of Evil. In a sense, from philosophy’s perspective, or theology’s, the problem is less ours and more God’s: how do we square the existence of evil with the existence of God, at least in the form we would want him to exist, omnipotent, omniscient, beneficent, the transcendant underwriter of right and wrong. If he is all of these things, then why is there evil in the world? You can halve the problem, by assuming some of the burden: we are, or are capable of, evil, known as moral evil, arising from the misuse of freewill. But that leaves natural evil, such as earthquakes, bubonic plague, etc, things that are not attributable to our agency, but to God, or the Universe as he structured it. The general thrust of The Problem of Evil in philosophy is either to pin God for the crime, or to let him off the hook, depending which side you’re on. Only secondarily is it about evil itself. I graduated, and left it at that. But then one day whilst I was browsing through the books at the Falkirk District libraries annual sale of decommissioned stock, I came across two that grabbed my attention: the Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak, and Into That Darkness, Gitta Sereny’s book based on her interviews with Franz Stangl, former camp commander of Treblinka.
First Dawid: he was a school boy of 15 when the Nazis declared war and invaded Poland. He noted the event in his diary. Academically gifted, morally grounded, always alert, he recorded daily life in the Lodz ghetto, dominated by hunger. The Ghetto was under the puppet administration of Chaim Rumkoswki, who pursued a policy of collaborating with the Nazis in their demands for deportation quotas, whilst trying to prove the utility of the remaining Jews in terms of productivity. It is difficult to assess how much Rumkowski knew, for example, about Auschwitz and the gas vans at Chelmno, the most likely destinations for those who left Lodz Ghetto by train. On September 4 1942, he was asked to fulfil a quota of 20,000 children. He negotiated: there were approximately 13,000 children under the age of 10 in the ghetto, if the Nazis could spare those ten and over, the remainder could be made up of the old, and the sick.
“A grievous blow has struck the ghetto. They are asking us to give up the best we possess — the children and the elderly. I never imagined I would be forced to deliver this sacrifice to the altar with my own hands. In my old age, I must stretch out my hands and beg. Brothers and sisters: Hand them over to me! Fathers and mothers: Give me your children! . . .
Chaim Rumkowski, September 4, 1942
Dawid’s mother was one of those who failed to meet the Nazi criteria for a right to life. His diary entry for sept 5, when teams of doctors, nurses, soldiers and civil servants visited the addresses of the elderly and the sick to make their assessment, offers a background snapshot of what hunger, hopelessness and constant exposure to degredating horror can do to a man, in this case Dawid’s father.
After the doctors announced the verdict, and when Mom, unfortunate Mom! was running like mad around the house, begging the doctors to spare her life, Father was eating soup that had been left on the stove by the relatives hiding in our apartment, and he was taking sugar out of their bag!
By the time I had finished Reading his Diary, I was fully aware that Dawid Sierakowiak, even at the age of 20, his age at death, was a better person than me. I was also left pondering what evil actually is. The devil can embody evil, in fact, is it’s personification. But can a man? What is a man’s relationship to evil, is it through his actions? How does this relate to the freedom (or otherwise) of his will, and his being situated within a group: the nation, the Volk, the administration, the organisation..
I read Gitta sereny’s book next, this time more alert and looking for clues. Into that Darkness is based on a series on interviews conducted with Franz Stangl in Dusseldorf prison, completed just 19 hours prior to his sudden death by heart failure. The book is utterly compelling in it’s close-up rendering of how the Final Solution was implemented. The most disturbing thing about it, though, is Stangl’s utter ordinariness and the apparent lack of answers as to why he did what he did. In what way is Franz Stangl different from us? The suspicion I had by the end of the book was that, maybe, he wasn’t.
I read two further books that proved illuminating on this point: Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 And The Final Solution In Poland, by Christopher Browning, and The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing And The Psychology Of Genocide, by Robert Jay Lifton, Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the City University of New York.
Browning’s book is a history and study of a particular reserve battalion composed mostly of middle aged ordinary Germans from the city of Hamburg. The Battalion was sent to Poland in June 1942 in order to implement The Final Solution. They were a mobile killing unit that eventually accounted for 38,000 killed, and 45,200 deported to Treblinka. The core analysis of the book is based on the detailed testimony of 125 members of the battalion. Browning discusses a number of possible theories to explain why these ‘ordinary men’ were able to do what they did. One category of explanation focusses on personality as the ground of evil. Browning refers to work by Theodorno Ardono, who compiled the ‘F-scale’, F for fascist: a list of traits that are supposedly found embodied in authoritarian individuals.
• rigid adherence to conventional values
• submissiveness to authority figures
• aggressiveness towards out-groups
• opposition to introspection, creativity, reflection
• a tendency to superstition and stereotyping
• preoccupation with ‘toughness’
• ‘projection’
• an exaggerated concern with sexuality
Adorno, as the most prominent figure in the Frankfurt School of Social Theorists and Philosophers (Walter Benjamin was possibly it’s most brilliant though semi-detached member; of him, more later…) made great contributions to our understanding the consumerist society and the pressures it places on the individual. But the major criticism of the F-scales’ approach is it’s overemphasis on the individual as the root of evil. This approach requires that some form of selection process operates to place such individuals in positions where their potential for evil becomes active. But as Browning evidences in the very title of his book, the members of police battalion 101were ‘ordinary men’, middle aged reservists who were not profiled for the horrific task they were asked to undertake. Arguments around this historical instance can become complicated, especially when it is counter argued that a process of mass indoctrination took place in the German populace throughout the 1930’s. But Browning points up more controlled examples where a group specifically selected to screen out individuals with extreme psychological traits of any kind were asked to take part the now famous Stanford Prison experiment devised by Philip Zimbardo. Participants were split into two groups: prisoners and guards. Within 6 days in the guards’ group “sadistic behaviour could be elicited in individuals who were not ‘sadistic types'”. The experiment illustrated that the situation alone was a sufficient condition for eliciting aberrant behaviour. Man is indeed a social animal, and we swiftly internalize the (perceived) expectations of the group or institution to which we belong. In fact, as Robert Jay Lifton illustrates in his study of the medical profession under Nazism and it’s complicity in the Final Solution, evil is highly context dependent, and mediated by psychological mechanisms that allow a man to perform evil but still lay claim to prestige amongst his peers, and to mollify his conscience. The most extreme instance of this process is the Auschwitz Self: a self constructed to operate within the death camps, where involvement in extermination and death by exhaustive labour is rationalised within the context of an almost separate reality so extreme and divorced from the norm that acts performed there whilst at work are not to be taken as evaluative of the doer. You can clock off at the end of the day, hang up your White coat, cross back over the Abyss and return to your role as a family man. There are, of course, other mechanisms at work that can facilitate an individual to perform acts of evil, such as psychological numbing after repeated exposure to horror, and group bonding and standard setting (Browning records that some of the police reservists did not want to let their fellow battalion members down) but it is the concept of the Auschwitz Self that I find most compelling. Moral relativity is the 20th century’s heart of darkness, but it is the thick end of an extremely long wedge extending all the way back to the Ancient Greeks. In fact, you could argue that a certain functional relativism is inherent in the process of philosophical argumentation itself, as nothing is beyond questioning and the call to justify itself. Moral debates have swung back and forth between Consequentialist theories and Categorical theories ever since the Sophists set up their school in opposition to the Platonists. And after two millennia there’d still is no universally accepted definition of what is right and what’s wrong, nor, when we attempt to move beyond intuition or appeals to conscience , is there any agreement as to why a thing (act, omission to act, belief, etc) is right or wrong. Those exhausted by the debate may well succumb to scepticism. At best, they may agree that moral standards do in fact exist, and restrain their scepticism to the resignation that we can never directly access this truth. There is a goal, but no path. More radically, there is the conclusion that morality itself is a wholly human fabrication with no objective reality beyond that. Right and wrong then becomes a branch of psychology, or an expression of power politics or class warfare. A surface phenomenon to be studied as an expression of underlying drives and forces. If morality is simply conventional, then it is logical to imagine a society where acts we deem evil are construed either as good or morally neutral, in the way that, if we could all agree on it, the word apple could be replaced with a different sign to designate that particular object. Apples, of course, are designated by different signs in other languages. The problem of evil becomes a much smaller but more urgent problem of why certain individuals and groups disagree in their formulation of what is right and what is wrong, or why they commit evil even if they accept the conventional definitions. Which is the level at which we have been considering it. I suspect that most of us have been haunted by this possibility and it’s implications, at some point in our lives. A lot of modern European literature is an attempt to deal with this potential nihilism. Raskolnikov, for example, in Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment, draws from it the conclusion that everything is permitted, including murder, and proceeds to test this theorem by killing an old woman money lender whose right to life, in his eyes, had become relativized. This crossing over from the philosophical to the practical and murderous has terrible consequences for Raskolnikov, and I suspect that most moral nihilists would likewise be unable to sustain the consequences of their doctrine in practise without degradation to their humanity. In practical terms, most of us behave ‘as if’, (George Steiner’s advice to artists who want to create with a view to perfection or to embody meaning). We act ‘as if’ right and wrong are absolutes, as if God is our judge. It is this default position that raises the Problem of Evil to philosophical heights that transcend psychological, organisational and sociological treatments of the issue. But it is the work of Browning and Lifton, for example, amongst others, that is crucial in the attempt to forestall evil.
