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It was in a friend's office that I first saw Ray Kurzweil's book, The Age of Spiritual Machines. Skeptical but intrigued, I glanced at the jacket and saw that the author was credited with the invention of "voice recognition software." As a former secretary who has seen some of the secondary effects of that kind of technology, he had my attention.

But also as a poet, to whom a title like "The Age of Spiritual Machines" is not only outrageous; it is also profoundly familiar. For what is poetry, after all, if not an attempt to produce spiritual effects by mechanical means? Nothing could be more mechanical than the thump and wheeze of meter, the jangle of rhyme or assonance, the wiring of metaphorical connections. "And now I see with eye serene / The breathing pulse of the machine," Wordsworth wrote. Indeed the poet has always cherished a mad little ambition of making a human being; that feat is attributed to the poet Ibn Gabirol as well as to Pygmalion, Rabbi Loew, and Frankenstein.

The Age of Spiritual Machines is a scary book. It scared another software inventor, Bill Joy, into writing a long response in Wired, entitled "Does the Future Still Need Us?" Kurzweil himself seems a little scared by what he is saying. It may be for this reason that he varies his exposition with dialogues wherein a female character, who does not seem overly brilliant, voices the obvious human objections. She identifies herself at one point as "the reader," and he responds, "Well, it's good to have you contributing to the book while there's still time to do something about it."

I have heard that sort of appeal before, and somehow can never resist answering.

So I'm setting down my reactions to this book, first of all as The Reader, as a human being for whom the word "humanist" has just acquired a fresh and unnerving nuance. But I am also writing this as a poet, practitioner of an art to which Kurzweil and his machines have some pretentions. These pretentions are ludicrous at present, but he believes they will become more plausible in the next few decades.

Is he right?

***

The golem and I go back. (Please bear with me; this will be relevant, I promise.) I first noticed the problem at age 5 in a song that was then playing in my environment, the Mills Brothers' "Paper Doll": "I'm gonna buy a paper doll that I can call my own, / A doll that other fellows cannot steal . . . I'd rather have a paper doll to call my own / Than any fickle-blooded real live girl." Why, I wondered then, would he prefer a paper doll to a real live girl? What did "fickle" mean?

Then, in an anthology I read in high school, there was a play called R.U.R.. In this play a scientist manufactures a strain of human-like robots, and then humankind wipes itself out, and only the scientist and a few of these robots are left. But in the last scene of the play a male robot and a female robot fall in love with each other: Adam and Eve.

In the fall of 1961 I tried out for a German Department production of Georg Buechner's Leonce und Lena, which dates from the 1840's. The title figures are a prince and princess who are betrothed to each other, sight unseen. They rebel against the arranged marriage, run away, meet incognito on the road, and fall in love. The prince's jester Valerio disguises them as robots, brings them to court, and tricks the prince's father into letting them be married as "proxies" of themselves. When the masks are lifted, the prince and princess realize that they have been "cheated" - insisting on their freedom, they have merely executed their program. But they accept their position with good grace, and the prince declares that to please his bride he will turn their domain into a Utopia by means of solar energy. As in R.U.R., love redeems determinism (maybe). The play had no role for me, but I was offered the job of promptress, which I accepted for love of the boy who played Valerio; so I saw it quite a few times.

Later, while in graduate school, I had a relationship that began with a computer date; and I heard the following joke from a mathematician on whom I had a slight crush: "They hooked up all the computers in the world in one giant computer. To inaugurate this computer, they held a big ceremony. After cutting the ribbon, they decided to ask it the biggest question they could think of. So they asked, 'Is there a God?' The answer came back: 'There is now.'"

A few years later I began a dissertation on the poet Paul Célan, an academic project that I experienced as a virtual relationship (at least there is a word for it now). Among his few prose statements, the most important is a speech, "The Meridian," in which he recaps Leonce und Lena, identifying with Valerio. Célan very seriously invokes a reader he hopes will be able to "do something about it." I spoke with him once personally. In the course of this long but reserved conversation (I for one was still far from admitting the "virtual relationship") he uttered a sentence out of the blue and then repeated it as if prompting me to write it down, which I did: "Every poem is the anti-computer, even the one the computer writes." That saying eventually provided the title and an epigraph for my dissertation. My mathematician friend's joke became the second epigraph. In 1974-75, I wrote a work about the relations of writer, reader and community in Célan and other modern authors, entitled The Web of What Is Written - abbreviated of course to WWW. In 1979-80 I recorded my experiences as a reader of Célan in a memoir-novel entitled c, or the Autoanalysis of a Golem.

So it could seem as if I was meant to take a personal interest in the computer - even though I have not much liking for computers, nor aptitude for understanding them on their terms. On the SAT I got an 800 in verbal ability and a 640 in mathematical ability. Thus, in thinking about computers, the best I can do is to try to contemplate them steadily in human terms.

Now to Kurzweil's book.

***

Kurzweil's thesis in The Age of Spiritual Machines is that "Before the next century is over, human beings will no longer be the most intelligent or capable type of entity on the planet." Computers will "achiev(e) the memory capacity and computing speed of the human brain" around the year 2020. It should also be possible by or about that time to "reverse engineer" the human brain by scanning it and copying its neural circuitry. When this is done, computers should be able to "read on their own, understanding and modeling what they have read." Computers will eventually be capable of "venturing into the physical world," gathering knowledge on their own. This knowledge they will share with one another, far more easily than humans can share knowledge. The combination of human-level understanding with the computer's superiority in the "speed, accuracy and sharing ability of its memory" will be "formidable." And this without the muss and fuss of the human organism, which like everything "designed" by evolution, is cumbersome and inefficient.

In Kurzweil's view the present time is a crossroads in evolution; the crisis is "not merely the private affair of one of the Earth's innumerable species" but "a pivotal event in the history of the planet." To gain perspective on this crossroads, Kurzweil recaps: In the beginning was the Big Bang. After an unimaginably small fraction of a second, the gravity came into being. Thereafter, at ever-increasing intervals, emerged further components of the universe: electrons, quarks, protons, neutrons, still within the first instant; the lightest atomic nuclei, within a minute; heavier atomic nuclei, 300,000 years later; galactic clouds, after a billion years; after another billion, stars and planets; after a further few billion years, our Earth. Thus, from the birth of the Universe to the setting of the stage for life, the pace of events ("time") slowed down in geometrical progression. The slowing down of time, writes Kurzweil, is concomitant with the increase of entropy - the more entropy in a system, the longer it takes for significant events to occur.

With the birth of life, however, an opposite process begins. The development of life represents a decrease in entropy. Thus, after life begins the pace of events accelerates, again in geometrical progression. Life began perhaps 3.4 billion years ago. Over two billion years ago, the DNA-based genetic code developed. After a further billion years, multicellular organisms appeared. Several hundred million years later, the primates evolved, and perhaps 35 million years after that, the first hominids. After another 10 million years - 5 million years ago - Homo Habilis began using tools. Homo Sapiens emerged half a million years ago and with him the ability to create technology. The agricultural revolution occurred ten thousand years ago, the invention of writing some five thousand years ago. Less than four centuries ago the first automatic calculating machine was invented. The speed of the fastest computers is now doubling at about once every year or two. The inventions of each stage create the next; thus, computers are now employed in designing computers.

Contemplating the history of our world, Kurzweil formulates his "Law of Accelerating Returns," which states that time "speeds up" (i.e. the interval between significant events decreases) as "order" increases. He notes that evolution, in which order increases over time, takes place within a system where chaos (disorder, entropy) is increasing. In fact, he says, evolution draws on chaos itself to "supply new options for diversity." I am not sure what he means by that phrase; I had understood that under the Second Law of Thermodynamics, any local increase in order means a greater increase in disorder elsewhere. I think that what he is really saying is that the increasing "order" of technology is coming at a price of increasing chaos in human lives, as technology develops at a pace that is no longer our own. Our dysfunctional families, cultural degradation, and political corruption would then be the kickback from the increase in technological "order."

Kurzweil illustrates his "Law of Accelerating Returns" with a Chinese legend: To reward the inventor of chess, the emperor said he could have anything he wanted. The inventor asked for one grain of rice on the first square, two on the second, four on the third and so on. At about the thirty-second square, the supply of rice in the kingdom ran out. In our world, technical acceleration has about reached "the middle of the chessboard," the point where something is going to have to give, for humanity at least. It is at this point that Kurzweil introduces the reader stand-in and the thought of "doing something about it." The stand-in suggests a compromise: the inventor would receive just one province of China. Kurzweil concludes: "Yes, that would be a good result. And maybe an even better parable for the twentieth century." If he had really asked me, I'd have countered with, "But how are we going to get the inventor to content himself with a single province?"

Kurzweil believes that computers are destined not only to surpass humans, but to replace them, as humans replaced the first hominids. He describes a process that is occurring from two sides. On the one hand computers are constantly increasing in power, and there are fewer and fewer human activities which computers cannot perform, in some cases better. On the other hand humans tend increasingly to rely on computers and assimilate to them.

Kurzweil gives an impressive list of examples of things computers were supposed "never" to be able to do, but which they now can do - the most famous recent example being the defeat of the world chess champion by a computer. As to the question at what point the computer's imitation of functions will become consciousness, Kurzweil invokes the Turing test: computers will have achieved human consciousness when the human observer is no longer able to distinguish between the responses of a computer and those of a human being. Kurzweil writes:

The machines will convince us that they are conscious, that they have their own agenda worthy of our respect. We will come to believe that they are conscious much as we believe that of each other. . . . They will embody human qualities and will claim to be human. And we will believe them.

Once having equalled the human brain, which Kurzweil thinks they will around 2020, the computer will then proceed to surpass it, thanks to such inventions as nanotubes and quantum computing, which will supply much faster "hardware" than our brain tissue. Not only will the new brains exceed ours in storage capacity and speed, but they will also evolve faster, because the computers will be able, unlike the DNA mechanism, to "scrap an entire design and start over." This is an important point, to which I will return.

On the other side of the process, our social and economic systems have already become completely dependent on the computer. Our bodies, it seems, are in the process of following suit. An early step is the cochlear implant, which is already being used to correct hearing loss. The next step might be implanted neural circuits to improve overall auditory perception. Then, possibly implanted memory circuits, to combat the memory loss that comes with aging. Each time, the replacement would come in response to some perceived need, and a sense of continuity would be preserved. Already, "Synaptics' vision chip is fundamentally a copy of the neural organization, implemented in silicon of course, of not only the human retina, but the early stages of mammalian visual processing." And "there are dozens of other contemporary projects designed to scan portions of the brain and apply the resulting insights to the design of intelligent systems." In this way, over the next century, the physical substratum of a given person's existence could be entirely replaced by some man-made apparatus, and it would be impossible to pinpoint where the person had ceased to be a person and become a machine. Moreover, by mapping the human brain, our species is acquiring the ability to redesign itself.

We can combine the revealed algorithms with the methods for building intelligent machines that we already understand. We can also discard aspects of human computing that may not be useful in a machine. Of course, we'll have to be careful that we don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

We'll have to be "careful," yes indeed, that we don't throw out some aspects of human computing that someone or something does not find "useful." At this point Kurzweil's reader stand-in ought again to ask, "Yes, but how are we going to be careful, Ray?"

But again, being careful is not Kurzweil's department. Being careful would take thought, energy, it would require planning and funding and might not result in immediate profits for the organizations whose competitive needs are driving the current research. And so, Kurzweil's and his fellow-scientists' thought and energy are given mostly to helping the computers surpass us; there is little left over for figuring out how we might contrive to be careful. The low wattage for thinking about being careful is reflected in the dimwittedness of the reader stand-in.

Thus the reader's misgivings will, Kurzweil predicts, be no match for the promise of the computer revolution - the promise of escape from our present mortal limitations. Not only will Kurzweil's redesigned humans be able to "download" knowledge and experience through neural implants, not only will they be able to simulate the highest "spiritual" experiences, but their personalities do not have to end when their "hardware" wears out. Indeed, as Kurzweil explains in Chapter 7, the concept of the body itself is about to be transformed. The replication of neural circuitry may make it possible to replace the physical environment, and eventually the physical body itself, with a "virtual" reality. Physical reality will cease to offer resistance to human desires. All this is if those nanobots, microscopic robots possessing intelligence and the capacity for self-replication, do not start replicating in an uncontrolled manner and "eat up everything in sight." Bill Joy writes that among scientists the prospect of some invention running wild and turning everything into "gray goo" is taken seriously. Like a disease, he writes, the invention would not have to be "superior" to humans in order to wipe us out. Kurzweil counters such worries by pointing out that for all the worry about nuclear weapons, so far not one has exploded accidentally. I've often wondered if there is not, after all, some collective human survival instinct which has so far prevented us from wiping life out altogether. But unless such instinct could be mobilized to keep us from making life progressively more unpleasant, I personally would not bet the planet on it.

Kurzweil does not shrink from admitting the unpleasant aspects of his forecast. Indeed, toward the end of the book he quotes a long passage which predicts, among other things, that

As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control.

Moreover, to the extent that humans do retain control, that control will be vested in the elite, who may choose to eliminate the masses or reduce them through manipulation to the status of "domestic animals." Having quoted this passage, Kurzweil tells us the source: Theodore Kaczynski, the notorious "Unabomber" who targeted scientists. In effect Kurzweil pleads guilty to Kaczynski's indictment, but justifies his persistence by reflecting that the "simple return to nature" is no longer possible: "there is too little nature to return to, and there are too many human beings. For better or worse, we're stuck with technology." The Luddites offer no "viable alternative agenda" to the technological takeover.

Here, again, if I were the reader stand-in, I would say, "But what about you, Ray? You're a bright guy, after all - you're even a poet, as it turns out. Why not take some time out to think about a 'viable alternative agenda'?" But again, the question is not asked, and so not answered. Leaving the real reader between the Unabomber and the deep blue sea, Kurzweil launches into a series of imaginary dialogues with the reader stand-in, set in 2009, 2019, etc., through 2099. The stand-in is portrayed as a consumer who will accept the benefits conferred by dependency on machines. (Naturally, the stand-in is not one of the losers in the techno-economic process, not for instance a factory slave.) As time goes on she acquires new organs, new mental capacities, a new virtual partner (her real marriage having come unstuck at an early stage), and finally a reality she can manipulate at will, where others are exactly what she wants them to be, and where she too can readily transform herself for her interlocutor. "Now remember," she says in the last of these conversations, "I'm ready to do anything or be anything you want or need." She is, it seems, no longer embodied. The last exchange:

[Kurzweil] I'll keep that in mind.

[Stand-in] Yes, that's where you'll find me.

[Kurzweil] Too bad I have to wait a century to meet you.

[Stand-In] Or to be me.

[Kurzweil] Yes, that too.

How touching. Almost like the poet and his Interlocutor, his Implied Reader. It's only curious that after the stand-in's departure Kurzweil wishes he had asked a few more questions, such as "What about babies and children?" That is the question Celan started with in "The Meridian": "Art is . . . a childless being."

But at the end of The Age of Spiritual Machines, the question about babies and children just sounds silly. By 2099 the Universe will have finished with our inefficient reproductive technology. Naturally, Kurzweil does not pursue this question. Similarly, he wonders briefly what the stand-in meant when she complained in the last dialogue that she still had "limitations." But it's too late to ask about that. He launches instead into an "Epilogue" which has a certain Faustian grandeur. Turning from our little problems, he asks, "What are the implications of the Law of Accelerating Returns on the rest of the Universe?" Kurzweil believes the process he describes is taking place in other worlds besides ours. Once life has evolved, intelligence is inevitable; once intelligence has evolved, technology is inevitable; once technology has evolved, it will pick up speed till it outpaces the species that gave rise to it. The species then merges with the technology in continual, exponential, growth which may well be virtually unlimited. In a final speculative leap, Kurzweil suggests that intelligence, as embodied in technology, may eventually influence the fate of the universe as a whole. The operation of deflecting an asteroid from Earth is already being contemplated, by Freeman Dyson and others. The ability of technology to influence cosmic events will increase as the "density of intelligence" or "computational density" in the universe increases (e.g. through the manufacture of increasing numbers of computers).

Ultimately, intelligence will be a force to reckon with, even for these big celestial forces (so watch out!). The laws of physics are not repealed by intelligence, but they effectively evaporate in its presence.

So will the Universe end in a big crunch, or in an infinite expansion of dead stars, or in some other manner? In my view the primary issue is not the mass of the Universe, or the possible existence of antigravity, or of Einstein's so-called cosmological constant. Rather, the fate of the Universe is a decision yet to be made, one which we will intelligently consider when the time is right.

Needless to say, I cannot evaluate Kurzweil's "positive apocalypse" from a scientific point of view. I know just enough to ask: what became of the Second Law of Thermodynamics? Aren't you predicting an overall increase in order in the Universe? But I have nothing against this, I am not particularly attached to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. My real problem is that, as a human being and as a poet, I cannot see the prospect Kurzweil unrolls before us as a continuation of my own life.

***

For me, of course, one of the most interesting points in Kurzweil's book is his treatment of poetry, which he recognizes as one of the last bastions of human superiority over the machine. Kurzweil writes: "The literary arts lag behind the musical arts in the use of technology. This seems to have to do with the depth and complexity of even routine prose." Just before reading Kurzweil's book, I wrote an essay on Shelley's "Defence of Poetry" (TAR 122, Summer 2000), wherein I pointed out that Shelley's claim for the primacy of poetry among the arts rests on the perception that verbal language is "susceptible of more various and delicate combinations" than the media of the other arts.

Kurzweil himself has created a program called "Ray Kurzweil's Cybernetic Poet," which purports to create poetry by juggling vocabulary and phrases from poems by "real" poets. (Including, by the way, Kurzweil himself, though no examples of his "real" poetry are given.) He quotes some examples, which even his reader stand-in criticizes: "But the poems don't always fully track, if you know what I mean." (182) Kurzweil replies:

Yes, readers tolerate a little more discontinuity in verse than in prose. The fundamental problem is the inability of contemporary cybernetic artists to master the levels of context that human artists are capable of. It's not a permanent limitation, of course. Ultimately, we'll be the ones having difficulty keeping up with the depth of context that computer intelligence is capable of.

There is much to ponder in this seemingly casual reply. To me, its first sentence is a devastating comment on the state to which poetry has sunk. In my experience poetry is the medium in which the greatest coherency is possible.¹ But there is something more basic at stake here, I think, than levels of sophistication. From what Kurzweil has told us, there is reason to assume that even the "various and delicate combinations" of poetry, the coherency which poetry demands, could at some future time be simulated. But complexity isn't the main issue, as it turns out. The main issue is limitations.

In the "Meridian" speech, Celan seems to me to be circling around this problem.. Art, he intimates, is difficult to distinguish from technology. But the value of "poetry," as opposed to "art" or technology, lies in its being the expression of a "unique and mortal animate being." Not, then, of a computational "process" that can be transferred from one piece of hardware to another. This is the crux of the matter. In the one passage of "The Meridian" that points explicitly at technology, Celan says:

The attention which the poem attempts to dedicate to all that it encounters... is not an attainment of the eye in competition or collaboration with the apparatuses that grow daily more perfect. It is rather a concentration mindful of all our dates. Attention (in the words of Malebranche which Walter Benjamin quotes in his essay on Kafka) is the natural prayer of the soul.

The "dates" which he speaks of, as we know from earlier passages, are crisis-points or transcendental moments in the life of a mortal individual. A sense of one's own unrepeatable existence, one's unique destiny, is at the heart of any real poem. Some lines of my own also come back to me:

Know, reader, what the elder poets knew
and what the distant disk of Earth now tells us:
that all things have their limit and their term
and in that term and limit is their form,
their beauty, and the laws which give them life,
shaping the energy which otherwise
would lose itself in boundless dissipation.
It is by this that they are what they are,
it is by this that they are part of all.²

If I am right, then a computer will never write anything like Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale," no matter how much information about the environment it is able to absorb, no matter how its memory capacity may equal or exceed that of a human being, and even if there were still enough unspoiled nature on the planet to feed such a poem. For Keats' genius derived not only from his capacity, but from the mortal limit he already felt himself approaching.

Further, I would hazard a guess that not only poetry but consciousness itself is predicated on finitude. It may well be inseparable from our anxiety for the persistence of the patterns in matter that we are. It seems to me that a process which overrides these limitations may well "lose itself in boundless dissipation" rather than result in consciousness. Such a process would be, in the end, no more "spiritual" than a chemical reaction.

Reader, I had already written the above lines, when I came across another book: The Feeling of What Happens, by the neurologist Antonio Damasio. Damasio believes, if I have understood him correctly, that consciousness arises from a reflexive internal "mapping" of the body, including of course the central nervous system itself. He concludes that consciousness is a "feeling" which "cannot be duplicated unless flesh is duplicated, unless the brain's actions on flesh are duplicated, unless the brain's sensing of flesh after it has been acted upon by the brain is duplicated."

As a poet, I have long felt that the "form" of a poem has something to do with the internal imaging of the body. I associate this sense of an internal image with the Biblical idea that humans are made "in the image of God." We believe that by virtue of our consciousness we are "like" God, and consciousness is evidently indissoluble from our internal self-image. That self-image, in turn, as I guessed and as Damasio confirms, is a "homeostatic" device, which seemingly evolved because it helped the body, with its form and its limitations, to maintain itself for a time. If there is an infinite Being, then it is precisely through our finitude that we are connected with such a being. (I am condensing here some thoughts which are suggested by "The Meridian.")

A further point which Kurzweil does not take into account is that human (poetic) consciousness is not a process taking place in a vacuum. In "The Meridian" and elsewhere, Celan harps insistently on the recognition that the poem is not "monologic" but requires a "you." As Shakespeare says, "The eye seeth not itself/ Save by reflection." Our self-image is formed in childhood out of the care that others take of us, others for whom we are not a means to an end, not interchangeable or upgradeable, but an end in ourselves and unique. Since the computer is not an end in itself for others, I question whether it could ever exist for itself. If computers, as Kurzweil says, evolve rapidly because they can "scrap a whole design and start over," this may not be an evolution in the direction of consciousness at all.

The experience of the last few hundred years has taught us to be very cautious about saying that anything could be withholden from science that it might purpose to do. From what Kurzweil says about quantum computing and nanotechnology, it does not seem inconceivable that the astronomical complexity of the body's interior imaging, the further complexity which arises when conscious entities interact, could someday be replicated artificially. Then one could generate one's children by computer, as in those nineteenth-century fables of the mad scientist and his artificial or quasi-artificial child - Frankenstein, "Rappacini's Daughter," "Rat Krespel," the Olympia episode in Tales of Hoffmann - stories that seldom ended well.

But the question is not only whether such things could or should be done; it is also whether they would be done, given that, as Kurzweil admits, the quest for knowledge is largely driven by economic competition. And the qualities that make us human are not especially profitable; they are more likely to be among the aspects of the human makeup that the transcribers would find "useless." Consciousness, conscience, love, art - they all rest on the desire of the self to perpetuate itself, its form, its limitations, not just a process. But the technological process, as we have seen, "desires" rapid replaceability.

I keep thinking of that disturbing and enigmatic ending of Goethe's Faust. You recall that whereas in earlier versions of the story Faust's soul is eventually claimed by the devil, in Goethe's version he escapes, to the angelic song of "Whoever ceaselessly strives, him we can save." Never mind that Faust has done evil with ever less scruple or concern, never mind that while claiming to "free"people he has condemned them to ceaseless labor. Faust's drive, which begins to look more and more like the momentum of the economic process, is accepted as the equivalent of spiritual striving. On arriving in heaven, Faust is not confronted with the record of his deeds, nor does he speak to acknowledge them. He is absorbed into the choir of "unborn children" who will supposedly rise to "higher spheres." How different from that scene where Dante, at the border of Purgatory and Paradise, was confronted with his minor infidelities and made to weep and acknowledge his fault: "A high law of God would be broken if Lethe were passed without some toll of repentance-shedding tears." Faust's relentless drive, his breakdown of all limitations, ends in unconsciousness.

So it is evidently no accident that technocracy, even while promising someday to reproduce human consciousness, meanwhile seems to be doing what it can to break down human consciousness, to reduce humanity to a pool of greedy neurons. After increased mobility had scattered the community and the extended family, a machine-driven culture turned its attention to the nuclear family, denigrating the seriousness of marriage and parental commitment, leaving children to be programmed by aliens into a relentless egoism, which is sold under the label of freedom but means in fact an impoverishment and enslavement of the self. For the depth and richness of a personality derive from its vital connections with others. Where these connections are broken the person becomes a module that can be plugged into any script the technological process may write.

It seems to me that this is the real doomsday scenario, not nuclear holocaust, not nuclear or biological warfare, not pollution, not destruction of the ozone layer, not even the devouring of all life through rogue swarms of self-replicating nanobots. All those things may or may not happen with sufficient virulence to put an end to the human career. But the loss of human consciousness, of which the decline in the art of poetry is one symptom, the dissolution of values in a culture that is the spiritual equivalent of "gray goo," is happening. And like Alzheimer's disease, it is the worst that can happen. In the Inferno the damned are collectively introduced as "the wretched people who have lost the good of the intellect." Through this writing I have also been hearing the voice of Georg Trakl, who committed suicide during World War I:

The golden image of Man
Is swallowed by the icy wave
Of eternity
Is there a cure?

***

"The Meridian" is a defense of human life and of poetry in the shadow of mass death. To its first readers, in 1960, that shadow must have meant primarily the Holocaust, of which Celan himself was, as the event was to show, only an interim survivor. But in 2001, it is above all the anxiety about the accelerating pace of technology that I hear. "The 'rapidity' that was always 'outside' has picked up speed," he says, using language from Buechner's Woyzeck, whose protagonist is the victim of a scientific experiment.

It is above all individual human life, and poetry as the speech of the individual, that Celan is defending. And yet at the same time, "The Meridian," beginning with its title, also throws off the aura of a global vision. This is not surprising nor even new. The notion that the human is made in the Divine image implies at least the virtual existence of God. The Greeks thought of the human being as a "microcosm," and the rabbis took up this idea when they said that to save or destroy one human life was tantamount to saving or destroying the entire world. New, perhaps, is the association of this microcosm or Divine image notion with the form embodied and perceived in the poem, an insight which, as we've seen, can find support in the neurology of consciousness. New or not, this idea is invested here with a personal urgency.

For me as a reader and survivor of Celan's work, the next question has always been: how do we convert this personal urgency into a social agenda, without sacrificing individual integrity? For an isolated protest is an ineffective one. The fact that Celan's work has connections with that of many other writers, and has spoken to many in turn (a sizeable anthology could be made of the poems written to him), should give encouragement to think further in a collective direction.

In one of his dialogues with the reader stand-in, Kurzweil briefly considers the question "whether the human species is more intelligent than its individual members." The "reader" puts in: "As a species, we're certainly pretty self-destructive." Kurzweil counters: "Nevertheless we do have a profound species-wide dialogue going on," unlike other animals which communicate only within the clan or colony. This dialogue creates the "human knowledge base of science, technology, art, culture, and history." The "reader" counters: "Aren't most achievements in art and science accomplished by individuals? You know, you can't write a song or paint a picture by committee." And Kurzweil: "Actually, a lot of important science and technology is done in large groups." I would add that despite the myth of the isolated artist, a lot of important art is done, so to speak, in large groups. Shelley could speak of "that great poem, which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world." The greatest single individual achievement in literature - Dante's Divine Comedy - is also the one that comes closest to dramatizing the "species-wide dialogue."

Kurzweil lists the ability to share information readily as one of the advantages of computers over humans. He describes an experiment in which the hypothesis of step-by-step evolution was tested in a simulation involving 150 computers. Apparently "virtual organisms" did evolve, displaying many of the structures and strategies found in the natural world. What if 150 poetic minds could be linked? Might they possibly evolve strategies to "do something about" the process Kurzweil is describing? Could poetry become more like science in this respect without sacrificing the rootedness in individuality which is poetry's advantage? The fact that scholars are still arguing over whether Homer was singular or plural reminds us that at one time poetry was a more collective enterprise than it is now.

Obviously, no attempt at "collectivization" of poetry, at the construction of a "macropoetics," could afford to override individuality (the mistake of "socialist realism"). Inherent in poetry, however, is the basis for its own form of connectedness. Though each one has his or her private symbolic code, these codes have affinities. To give a simple example, Mandel'shtam's first volume of poems is entitled "Stone." Celan translated some of Mandel'shtam's poems and dedicated The No-One's Rose to his memory, and stone is one of the prominent topoi of his work. The first work of Celan's I read was the Mandel'shtam translations, shown to me by a teacher, himself a poet, who knew of my interest in Mandel'shtam. The personal appeal of the stone imagery to me (my father was a geologist) probably had much to do with my feeling of kinship with both poets.

Or to put it more simply still perhaps we ought to think further about poetry as a manifestation of love - defined as the attraction one human being feels for the inward persona, the "divine image," the consciousness of another. As in those endings of R.U.R. and Leonce and Lena, the fact that this image can be seen through as a mechanism ("the breathing pulse of the machine") need not preclude love, but love might make it possible to live with determinism. The poetic vision of the human being is more necessary than ever, now that humans live so much in one another's presence. A poetry oriented toward the human future might begin with the recognition of kinships and families among living poets. I keep dreaming, of course, that all the poets who acknowledge Celan's "influence" would form a "tribe" and share our work in a sort of global "family council."

But for the communications of such a "global family council," the computer would be indispensable!

I keep coming back to that saying of which Celan made me a present: "Every poem is the anti-computer, even the one the computer writes." Could poetry possibly tame the computer, even put it to a truly human use, as living cells once tamed the deadly oxygen? For the reasons I have given here, I do not believe that computers will ever be poets. However, I think that computers might possibly play a role in helping poets to construct the macropoem, the communicative matrix within which the poetry of human individuality might continue to flourish. Computer storage could help us to archive and retrieve our work, the Internet could help us to keep in touch with one another, computers might even assist us, in the manner of a "computer date" program, in locating our poetic affines. We would have to be very careful indeed not to lose internal concentration through preoccupation with external technology. But there are precautions; there is that discipline of concentration and dialogue which "The Meridian" teaches. If used wisely the computer could help us to come together and so strengthen one another to absorb and develop that teaching.

Notes

¹ I once wrote a blank verse epic on the ecological crisis, The Consciousness of Earth, because the subject seemed to me too complex to be dealt with in prose. On his website Kurzweil has a poetic "Turing test," to see if you can tell computer-generated from human-made poetry; he claims that the literary professionals he tested missed a sizeable percentage of the questions. (Perhaps these professionals were the editors of a certain "mainstream" poetry magazine I was reading at the same time as Kurzweil's book.) I got 27 out of 28, and the one I missed - by W.C. Williams - resembled the computer poems in being slightly incoherent and containing a borrowed phrase. One wonders whether, by the time computers are able to generate coherent poetry, there will be anyone left capable of applying the traditional poetic standards.

² From The Consciousness of Earth.