Fascism, Artificial Intelligence & the Sistine Cloud

“If I could write this in fire, I would write this in fire.” -- Michelle Cliff

As someone who is trying to write in a time when the world is at its most ferocious, I have been struggling to make sense of what is unfolding in this country, in this world, and all of it coming down with such alarming speed that all I can manage without really managing it is to refuse to be distracted and instead search for ways of speaking to the rise of both fascism and artificial intelligence, as I think they are inextricably connected. When did living ever feel this fast and this dangerous? As a writer, there are moments when I actually feel like Jack Nicholson in “The Shining” who couldn’t stop himself from writing “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” over and over again and imagining my own insanity rolling along the page with only one word instead of a whole sentence: RESIST. I think that in the early days of the pandemic time went through a kind of existential prism that shattered it into disorder not only on one’s daily life, but on an existential calendar where days seemed to merge so seamlessly that no one was ever sure what day it was: living in the year of Sunday, I called it in another piece of writing. And it seemed, too, that the pandemic was phenomenological because for the first time in my lifetime, the entire world was swept up in the mystery of an illness at the same time. Nowadays, of course, days are more fixed, which means that I can only take the news in fits and starts while being constantly astonished not so much by what the current fascist regime is dreaming up to erase the kind of America I grew up with, but astonished by the fact that because most of us pay taxes, how we are not only funding genocide in Gaza, but even more blindly, our own torture and/or actual removal. Taxation without representation isn’t a slogan anymore, it’s the law of a land that is lawless.

**

The other day I saw a rabbit in the backyard spastically rolling through the leaves along the fence that separates this house from the house next door. And I couldn’t tell exactly if the rabbit was in the throes of rabbit ecstasy or if there was something else—rabies?—causing it to behave the way it was behaving, which in any search for meaning made the creature look as if it was trying to shake the thing that was prey about itself. The sight of it, bereft in equally bereft dwindling daylight, said as much about me as it did about the rabbit: how helpless I feel in a city that was chosen for me, living in a country that seems to be drowning not only in authoritarianism, but in abject stupidity. At one point, when the rabbit stopped long enough for me to look more closely, I found a bite mark on its back leg, which must have brought on the helplessness. And I wondered if pain, self-induced or otherwise, was the result of a kind of wayward capitulation.

**

Since moving to Newport almost five years ago, I’ve only been able to acclimate to views of the ocean because I’ve lived that way before and—because I drive a lot—the view of houses: how they look at night in the strangeness of such haphazardly spaced streetlights, when there are streetlights. There are whole streets, in Portsmouth in particular, that are only illuminated by porch light. So many places in Rhode Island are so dark that it’s any wonder how anyone who lives in the houses bathed in that darkness can trust venturing out at night. I’ve never been crazy about living here, but I do like looking at it. After the sea and the houses, the men here—many of the men here—are extraordinary looking, not just the jocks of which there are many who seem to travel in packs—but also men my age who have been lucky enough to have their hair turn grey (I’m 71 and mine never did) or streaked with the dry luster of sea salt and sunlight. I also like to look up at what the clouds are doing, thinking they are doing more than just predicting the weather or anything approaching the meaning of Joni Mitchell’s lyrics, which have never made sense to me. At times—particularly in sunsets—the clouds can look filled with doom or chaos. And then I think if these are, indeed, the end times, the clouds seem to have taken that as a cue to look even more dangerous, more biblical, more gothic. Sistine clouds, I call them. Some people look for animal shapes there, but that doesn’t interest me so much. I like to imagine that clouds are writing something so essential to us about being alive, if we can only figure out their language, maybe we can stay here.