The Impossibility of Pure Redundancy

Part the First, if I decide later a second part wouldn't be redundant

“In the realm of the Eternal, repetition is always a surprise.”

-Archimandrite Vasileios of Iveron

The Words of God are present everywhere in Creation. The speech-acts of God are the content and moment to moment breathing out of the world.

“All creatures are balanced upon the creative word of God, as if upon a bridge of diamond; above them is the abyss of divine infinitude, below them that of their own nothingness.”

-St. Philaret of Moscow

Should artists fear AI? An infinite and to some degree random lexical topography will soon be so expanded as to, one might believe, strip-mine the whole quarry of semantic possibility latent in the universe. That is fine. Thankfully, though, meaning is in the universe, but the universe is not the origin of meaning. Into our hearts is born, through the nous, a connection to deep and uncreated meanings; there is no circularity to these meanings. They come from the stomach, the “deep heart’s core”, and ultimately, from God. There is no redundancy, no pure redundancy (such as would make absurd), in the onset after onset of day, because each one is a free and purposive and entirely hypostatic gift from the hands of the Uncreated Lord to His creatures. Plenty of language is wasted, unmoored. Perhaps this language, even. And yet at no point will the eternal saying of the Dawn be rendered absurd. The ‘quotidian’ is always a miracle.

A friend told me that a pilgrim went to see St. Paisios of the Holy Mountain, a famous hermit and God-bearer. The pilgrim was having a congenial visit with the elder; there was fruit and perhaps a little candy (the elder being fond of giving such to those who made the trip to see him). At some point, as they were speaking, the elder began saying the Lord’s Prayer. The pilgrim had heard this prayer innumerable times; from birth to adulthood, at every meal, at every vespers, at every liturgy. Yet this time was different. As he prayed the words, the elder seemed to catch fire, perceptibly, and was utterly transformed. The skinny and somewhat ragged man seemed an angel or a god. The words became the fletchéd vehicles of an uncontainable meaning. The bush was burning, and yet it was not consumed. The circumscribed word was filled with the uncircumscribable God.

AI cannot speak from the deep heart. Unfortunately, neither can most of us, at least as we are.

George Steiner says:

“Has Job given to the peacock its dazzling plumage, has he clothed the stallion’s neck with thunder? ‘Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?’ ‘Hath the rain a father?’ The litany of asking deafens.”

The book of Job boasts, he says, “A sustained magnitude and unparalleled linguistic inventiveness which do raise… unsettling perplexities about the authorship. Can a man or woman in any dispensation rationally accessible to the rest of us, have ‘thought up,’ have found the language for, Job, 38-41, a language which empowers Job to see God through an act of hearing?”

There is a similar quality in this following to me. In no state of consciousness that I have known thus far, would I have been capable of writing this:

I am the Turquoise Woman’s son.
On top of Belted Mountain,
Beautiful horse– slim like a weasel.
My horse has a hoof like striped agate;
His fetlock is like a fine eagle plume;
His legs are like quick lightning.
My horse’s body is like an eagle-plumed arrow;
My horse has a tail like a trailing black cloud.
I put flexible goods on my horse’s back;
The Little Holy Wind blows through his hair.
His mane is made of short rainbows.
My horse’s ears are made of round corn.
My horse’s eyes are made of big stars.
My horse’s head is made of mixed waters–
From the holy waters– he never knows thirst.
My horse’s teeth are made of white shell.
The long rainbow is in his mouth for a bridle,
and with it I guide him.
When my horse neighs, different-colored horses follow.
When my horse neighs, different-colored sheep follow.
I am wealthy, because of him.
Before me peaceful,
Behind me peaceful,
Under me peaceful,
Over me peaceful,
All around me peaceful–
Peaceful voice when he neighs.
I am Everlasting and Peaceful.
I stand for my horse.

The War God’s Horse Song (Navajo)

There is a danger that has been long present, but is made thoroughly immediate by AI. It is the disincarnation of language. We can write all we want of virtue and nobility, but if none of us are virtuous and noble, if we do not have the inward veracity of these semantic ‘worlds’ to sound in relation to their being signified in a text, we shall forget what they mean, and they shall become like old wineskins (one could ask the question, as I believe Graham Harman implicitly suggested it would be possible to do: what would the word tree mean if one had never seen a tree, but interacted with the tree only as a disembodied lexical signifier?). This is for the most part the state of affairs with much of the old important vocabulary of the man. Soul, heart, love, chastity, peace, courage, spirit, (dare I say, family). Old Poetry at the moment is an invitation for us. It is an old wineskin, by and large; an aqueduct, not only long dry, but running into a forgotten city. The contemporary reader finds the lyrics of the eighteen century and before to convey an experience that seems impossible. The serious joy of Herbert, which William Collens mentioned in his recent essay, seems like a mimicry, a game, an empty clarion against what seems to many a sempiternal void, which, being tenant of their hearts, has retroactively colonized the entirety of history, lexical, political, or otherwise, castings the shadow of its ‘hideous strength’ parabolically towards Babel and into a future of its own image. Not only are we incapable of believing in something deep in the marrow-bone, but we are suspicious that no one ever has been.

At random from Spencer’s Faerie Queene I chose these lines:

Lo I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske,
As time her taught in lowly Shepheards weeds,
Am now enforst a far unfitter taske,
For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds,
And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds;
Whose prayses having slept in silence long,
Me, all too meane, the sacred Muse areeds
To blazon broad emongst her learned throng:
Fierce warres and faithful loves shall moralize my song.

Does the modern reader, can the modern reader, believe the writer of these verses to have been in earnest? We fear advertisement, kitsch, in the supposedly higher things, and then in cynical fits of meta-conscious regality we elect to debase our fare so as not be betrayed by those secret hopes of ours which posit, in lieu of bad infinities or the absurd, a good absurdity which our experience has never touched. Things which nor eye hath seen nor ear hath heard. Beyond imagination, beauty. And, as C.S Lewis says in The Weight of Glory, we are nervous to recognize the longings in ourselves, lest they reveal our bottomless thirst and do not simultaneously shew us a bottomless well.

Our culture treats poetry like young men often treat women, and for precisely the same reasons.

Dr. Patitsas:

“Yes, our culture is wary of beauty. It is afraid of being seduced… I think our culture is afraid of Beauty because, while it can learn Truth and it can master Goodness, genuine Beauty will always render it vulnerable and interdependent with others and dependent on God.”

As I said, poetry can invite us to rediscover the capacities of our personhood for experiences of wholesomeness, integrity, true awe. We need to become the sort of people who can write about the ‘sensuous glory’ of the created world, of the beauty of sacrifice, and mean it, and furthermore, be to some degree unconsciousness of our meaning it.

Steiner, again:

“A malaise lies near the heart of re-presentation. Why “double” the natural substance and beauty of the given world"? Why induce illusion in the place of truthful vision…?”

Is representation itself redundant?

Why should I look at a painting of a tree instead of a tree, as we usually understand a tree?

I would suggest that the “given world” is being given, through us, into its final shape. To quote St. Nikolai Velimirovich, the world is God’s gift to man, and man is God’s gift to the world. The fictive, or the representational, Steiner will later aver, is epistemically grounded as something capable of bearing truth in Orthodox Christology.

I would suggest that a painting of a tree is, with some qualifications, a tree. There is not an antagonism between the representation and the model, because the model is itself a representation mysteriously inhabited by He who is Himself simultaneously the primordial icon of the Father and prototype of all things.

We have an imperative, of sorts, to represent (all language is a kind of representation). Bruce Foltz, in The Noetics of Nature, expounds how human artistic interaction deepens and enhypostasizes the world. The world, as was said above, is not a meaning in itself. Representation educes the latent meanings in things, as Christ theophanically pours himself into and through them, according to the being of any given existent.

Foltz tells us that the American landscape was, before the Hudson River School, considered too wild and massive to be thought of as beautiful.

I am only leaving bread-crumbs to follow, and scores in the bark of familiar trees that I might be able to explore further these groves at a later time and not be altogether lost.

There was a time, I believe, when poetry touched men more thoroughly than making pleasant ripples of violet or incarnadine upon the upper atmospheric bounds of their consciousness. It shaped them, it shaped their speech. Our tongue is no longer a vulgar or a common tongue, because we have no higher tongue. We do not speak like poets, those of us who presume to be. I am not sure we write like poets, either.

So, while I have not directly expounded the matter, I do not believe artists should fear AI. We should fear allowing ourselves the refusal of contact with the deep that calls to Deep.

Certainly, AI will swallow most of what we consider to be art today; but it can never make us redundant.

Before the incarnation, death and resurrection of the God-man, I believe that language was almost entirely subject to the endless deferral of meaning; a ouroboric consumption of the semantic. And yet the Word is life and the light of men, and He has filled all things with Himself, conquering death by death. Nihility thereto is dead.

Her beauty is of things to come.
Those who keep record of such things
Say such a one since Helen has not come.
But Helen seems a shadow to her flame. 

Be there twelve million songs about the wind and the rain, there will be more to be said; and the saying itself is important. The so called “Burden of the Past” has plagued writers long before the advent of AI; and it has always been a boogeyman without any teeth. Thus Steiner, again:

“Art, music, literature know the conceit of the single masterpiece which will include within itself all other potentialities of informed beauty. Ideally, there is a Gesamtkunstwerk or the final Book which… is homologous with the universe.”

This is St. John’s Book of books, perhaps, in which all those things that Christ did were, at last, written. And yet, as St. Nikolai of Ochrid says, there is a fifth gospel, and it starts with God’s reaching out to you. The Canon is infinite only because its Author is infinite.

Here is an interview I did a couple of years ago with Malcolm Guite. I remember touching on a couple of these ideas with him. Forgive me, if I ask any dumb questions of the venerable Mr. Guite.