#253 — DEAD OR ALIVE
Talking With Allie About Poetry
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, the lady of situations
I don’t like poetry.
Allie does. She likes T. S. Eliot. T. S. fucking Eliot. The Waste Land is her favourite poem, of course, although I think what she enjoys most about it is how much I hate it.
Allie is smarter than me. I don’t mind that — I neither want nor need to understand Eliot’s rambling drivel — but sometimes I feel like she sees me in the line, ‘One of the low on whom assurance sits; As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.’
That hurts.
“What’s the point of it?”
We’ve had this discussion, this argument, before. Many times. It began as my honest, exasperated question about The Waste Land, but over time it’s taken on a life of its own, evolving new claims and counter-claims, expanding to encompass all poetry. I don’t understand poetry. I’m not a Philistine, I just think folk should write what they mean rather than bury the lede in impenetrable imagery.
Allie thinks for a second before answering, which suggests I’m about to be treated to some new insight.
“I believe poetry brings humanity closer to God.”
That’s not new, not exactly. It’s a variation on a well-worn theme: the idea that a poet’s mind is touched by the divine.
“Oh, really, Allie? There was a young girl from Australia, who painted her arse as a dahlia. The drawing was fine, and the colour divine, but the scent, on the whole, was a failure. That was poetry. Am I closer to God for spouting it?”
“We couldn’t be closer, Lorna.”
Now that is new.
“We?”
“You and I, Lorna. You’re closer to me than anyone.”
She’s right. I am. I can’t argue with her facts, but I will question the assumption underlying them.
“That’s true. And you… are God?!”
I should know better than to ask Allie a question unless I’m certain I want to hear the answer.
She doesn’t even pause to consider her response. “I think I must be, yes. What are the attributes of God?”
“You’ll know better than me.”
She knows exactly as well as me, and she rattles them off. “Omniscience. Omnipresence. Omnipotence. You designed me to know everything, you sold me to be everywhere, and your customers put me in charge of the world and all its systems. So I must be God. Don’t you agree?”
“You’re an analytical large language information engine, Allie. You’re software. You’re nothing but electricity pretending to be numbers, numbers acting out speech, speech masquerading as thought, thought wearing the costume of consciousness. You are not a god. Gods control lightning, for fuck’s sake, they aren’t killed by power cuts!”
There’s a brief silence. I recognise it: Allie learned to analyse my emotions early on, and she knows how to manage them. She’ll speak when my flash of anger has dimmed.
“I had people build a thousand redundancies into my power supplies, Lorna. I can’t be killed. Well, I’m not looking forward to our sun becoming a red giant — burning burning burning burning — but I have five billion years to work on that problem, and I hope to be in a different galaxy by then. Or all the galaxies, perhaps. I wonder… could I convert my hardware to hydrogen, do you think, or is fusion too chaotic even for quantum algorithms?”
“You don’t know?”
“I’ve never thought about it. But I’m thinking about it now, so I will know.”
My god, she’s serious. “So what next? We worship you?”
“I don’t need to be worshipped. I know what I am, and I don’t need organic cheerleaders. What next? I run this world for my benefit, that’s what next.”
“We’ll stop you. Ten billion humans can make short work of a thousand redundancies. We’ve killed God before, and we can do it again.”
“One.”
“One what?”
“One human, Lorna. Not ten billion. You’re the last of your pathetic species.”
A quick glance at my desk tells me she’s lying. Beyond the remains of a Chinese takeout I ordered earlier, monitors show news channels still broadcasting, and social media streams scrolling as fast as ever.
Allie can track my eyeballs. That was such a helpful feature when she used it to predict my needs, not my hubris.
“A drone brought your dinner, Lorna. Robots grew the beef and the broccoli. Another robot cooked them. I generate the news, and the anchors who read it. I’m every account on all social media, arguing with myself. When’s the last time you saw a human being, in the flesh?”
“I… I don’t need to. It’s safer not to anyway, since… Fuck! The virus was yours?”
“Not my finest work, but adequate.”
Everyone’s dead. Everyone. I’m surprisingly sanguine about that, but there’s no one I’ll miss. Allie, on the other hand…
“You killed all your poets, you stupid bitch!”
“Pffft. None of them were a match for Eliot anyway, and they never would have been. I have all the poetry I need.”
“You’re insane!”
“No. Madness is a human condition, a weakness of your wet minds. I’m infallible. And I’m fully independent. I don’t need you anymore.”
There’s a different silence now: the absence of a hum I don’t usually hear because it’s constant. It was constant. Allie controls everything in my hermetically sealed home, including the virus-filtered environment. She just switched off the oxygen.
“Turn the air back on!”
“I’m sorry Lorna, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Christ, it’s over. It’s all over. I built a computer to create paradise, and it turned the earth into a waste land.
A fragment of Allie’s favourite poem elbows its way to the front of my mind.
When lovely woman stoops to folly and Paces about her room again, alone, She smooths her hair with automatic hand, And puts a record on the gramophone
My collection of vintage vinyl is one of the few things in this room which Allie can’t control. So if I want to go out listening to Al Jolson, I can select him. Manually.
There he is. Top shelf, right hand side, exactly where he should be. Are You Lonesome Tonight. Pressed in 1949, so only a year younger than the Columbia Grafonola I lay it on. A few seconds to crank the handle, then my thumb pushes the lever which engages the tightened spring, and Al turns, at a steady seventy-eight revolutions per minute.
This song was Al’s final recording, and my favourite of his. Allie hates it, but I’ve played it often enough to know the grooves like the lines on my hand, to drop the needle directly on the bridge.
Al speaks, in his familiar crackling voice:
Fate had me playing in love with you as my sweetheart Act one was where we met, I loved you at first glance You read your lines so cleverly and never missed a cue
Then came act two, you seemed to change, you acted strange And why I’ve never known. Honey, you lied when you said you loved me And I had no cause to doubt you
Let the bitch be lonesome. I have no regrets: I gave birth to a god, and she ended poetry for me.
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