Divination I God god god I heard the word rattling and buzzing in the cubicle of the elevator car, thwacking the walls and rebounding as it rode relentlessly up and down in the School of Theology every day, every evening, season after season; it escaped, too, down the fluorescently dazzled linoleum halls when the door slid open, it dizzied into seminar rooms and offices, befuddled blue books and tenure reviews. And sometimes the small, dry exoskeleton, two parched consonants and one shriveled vowel, lay on the elevator floor before the janitor swept it up. But a new god-word always flitted in and resumed the hurtle, the bluster, the thrum, by which we knew business would survive, livelihoods were assured, and we would keep being pestered by an alien vocable no one could seize on the wing and which might, in an instant, sting. Divination II But what to do with the body— the body in the city, bare buttocks on Third Avenue, flesh in morning light, a human crouched in the gutter, shitting—having nowhere else— face hooded, just the pale sagging melons exposed as trucks clank past: “There be many that say, who will shew us any good?” The pavement glints under my feet. Glamour streaks the East River, whorls in conflicting currents. I am at odds with myself. Above us soar glass and steel towers, brute vertical rule, crypto-ledgers piercing poisoned air: Moloch’s this furnace. And the molten prayer. The Cabin (Partita) With the power out, we worked by candlelight, you setting mousetraps with peanut butter dabbed and the metal bar hinged back and balanced not to snap your fingers, I asquint over my notebook, trying to form letters in the near-dark. Which is how we work, even in electric light. A shadow nibbles the mind: will your numbers line up to catch the conjecture, will my words touch anything alive? In the solstice pit of December you climb to the attic where you play the Bach partita on the frigid keyboard until your fingertips bleed. Art isn’t meant to comfort. But it can bring us into the hot real: the rare, the treasured shock when the notes line up and then flip upside down reflecting perfectly as if they remembered a conjecture backwards. When I wake deep in the night, moonlight lies across the meadow as starkly as snow. And it is snow.
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence