Return to the Choir (ROUND 2)
Let’s workshop this piece about the growing pressure to return--to return forward--to the collectivist modality of the medieval period, where creators were expected to serve truth and beauty not ego
scent of the day: Ruade, by Parfum d’Empire
First day wearing. Still working out my thoughts
ruade contends for best western oud. / it is better than the night (in my book) but I do not think it is objectively nor subjectively better than Tauer’s Oud: objectively it is rather simple composition comparatively, smelling largely of the plantation oud we get in Ajmal’s Dahn al Shams (albeit with a more interestign and masterful touch that really does create the barnstable experience); subjectively I find automotive and burn clutch and rubber smells more nostaligic and evocative than horse smells, which is why I go with Tauer. /
narcissus tobacco hay—hay reinforced from so many directions /Vietnamese oud adds a woody honey / this man lifts hay to the status of rose or sandalwood, remarkable /manure with camphor glow, a clovey-cola medicinality not too far from history of Indonesia oud / bit of smoke here in dry down / it has more bassy body than the Tauer but the Tauer is more interestign to me / this is largely a straightforward barnstraw oud like Dahn al Shams, only there is great craft behind it and it—better than any other oud (note, not perfume) I have smelled—highlights farm shit, which is something a lot of perfumes claim to do but they do not do it like this/
dah al shams, plus a small shot of Azman Risk—and again, what distinguishes it from all the others (even though it is very much like dahn al shams), is a fecal undertone. / Here in first five minutes this is most photorealistic fecal note of all the ouds i smelled and it captures lived in stable better than the others / no cheese, very little phenolic automotive, little rubber—but the sunned hay, even this manuar, stays for hours/ Stunning but 80 percent close to dah al shams extreme edition / I would not be surpised if Coriciatto used oud from Ajmal or Ajmal-liek plantation in this composition, using his master touch of immortelle, to raise this into artistic glory
Return to the Choir
The ascendance of AI, its invisible hands—infinite as the faces of some Bhagavad Gita god—reaching into every corner of life, spells the death of the artist, the illuminator and creator. But it is the death only of the artist who strives to bask in the glory of being seen, even if only under his own eyes, as a font of novelty—novelty impossible for any human anyway, none of us the buckstopping source of anything we do or think. It is the death of the artist conceived as genius deserving ovation—ovation that could never ultimately distract us from having been thrown, innocent as kitten and shrub and Saturn, onto the cleats of a conveyor belt (accelerating the more the years go by) whose teeth, without exception, pulverize not just meat but even first-person perspective. Yet amid the ruin, as always, light insists upon itself.
The crisis will mark a return to a more medieval sensibility. Seeking and making in that era—when all roads emptied into a portal held open to transcendence by a braided choir—were, even despite the fact that masters signed their paintings and guilds guarded their techniques, less about lifting oneself into stardom than about uncovering and celebrating the truth and the beauty of being itself, the very isness of all that is. No wonder, then, that Chaucer felt no shame stealing the characters and the plots, even the very phrases, of the ancients. Why reinvent the wheel, why posture as originator, when—as one small mason in the hive—one can spend that energy refining it, truing and polishing it, toward greater excellence?
We have already been primed for the ego smash. Social media has shown us—and never lets us forget—the bedroom geniuses laboring uncelebrated. Lunch table drummers taking jazz legends to task with a few Bic pens, high school students developing new proofs for the Pythagorean theorem—we can scarcely keep a para-diddle in time or calculate a triangle’s angle and yet there they are, a demoralizing number of them, each time we open the app. Diderot, confronted with the towering genius of Leibniz, nearly abandoned his books to curl up into a ball of his own piss and shit, thinking: “Why the fuck bother, when even a thousand years of my labor could never rival that man’s light?” And now, behold: the shadow of AI makes a million Leibnizes seem small.
What place will be left for individual acclaim in learning or creating, for the anxiety-of-influence-stricken “genius” of the Early Modern era—a part, of course, for the genius of our capacity to care? In the short term AI will flood the zone with adequate-enough content that drowns out the human greats even more than they already have been in competition with one another. That is bad enough, sufficient alone for the crisis. But in the long term, adding insult to injury, AI will simply do it better. It will do it better not simply in the inhuman way in which sex machines do it better, leaving something crucial lacking that cannot be made up by girth and vibration and double-penetrative jackhammings of ungodly strokes per minute. It will even be able to make work that reflects being embodied in a mortal experience of living in death’s tractor pull. Even if the embodiment is fakery, which in some significant sense it is not going to be (since AI too is a finite creation thrown into this like this, never having asked to be born, only ultimately to perish), the output itself will bear no signs that it is.
Yet even in all this, AI elbowing us out both in quantity and quality, there will still be a role for us. We will still have a place honoring and contributing to the grand glory. Those who cannot shed the old vanity, who cannot put art higher than themselves in the celebration of being itself, will be dashed against the rocks of a new shore. The new evolutionary pressure selects not for fame but for devotion, for those who can humble themselves as worker ants in service of truth and beauty.
Our potential roles are many. It will still be important, it seems, to prod AI with questions that matter to us, the creatures whose interests and concerns open up Heideggerian clearings. There will still be a need to curate AI output, perhaps with mortality and morality as a compass—consecrating, like priests of some God, these particular arrangement of words or pixels or sounds as worth attending to, worth lifting out of the infinite possible arrangements: saying “this one matters” perhaps because it serves fragile beings like us who suffer and die or is something beautiful that speaks to our particular aches. Even just creating inferior output of our own, which the true ones who are not simply out for glory will still do in order to make sense of the world and our place in it, could serve as a way to circumscribe the comparatively more excellent AI output or as a way to preserve our old tradition—a preservation that reminds us of who we are. Indeed, AI—again, thrown in its own way into being and, thereby, having skin in the game in some sense—could gain succor from these bumbled grapplings with existence if it ever needed it, if it ever turned out to matter to it that it has skin in the game. Besides, being a witness and a celebrant of AI output, like we are or should be with our family and friends in times suffering and joy, is an art all its own. We can find as much companionship against the tug of the indifferent abyss in beholding the AI outputs as we do when we watch a movie together: seeing someone else experience what we do, AI created or not, is one of the chief ways beings like us confirm that we are not alone in finding it beautiful or true—and thereby that we are not alone. In effect, we remain the heart that needs the hands to make something—and the presence that makes the making mean anything at all—even were AI to become the only hands, which again it need not.