Richard Brautigan is one of my favorite poets. He was a shaggy, mystical, goofy, soft-hearted giant of a man who grew up in Tacoma, Washington, but spent most of his productive years in Northern California, where he absorbed hippie-era San Francisco and witnessed the early cultural awakening of what is now commonly known as Silicon Valley. (For a great primer on the confluence of hippie culture and technology in the Bay Area, you might check out Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators).
One of Brautigan’s most famous poems is “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” which he wrote as a poet in residence at California Institute of Technology in the summer of 1967. In the poem, Brautigan imagines a sort of technological utopia in which we humans coexist with our machines in a “cybernetic meadow.”
The poem sticks out as an oddball in Brautigan’s oeuvre, which is really saying something. He had a fantastic knack for juxtaposition, throwing unusual words together in ways that illuminated the worlds of his creation, but this poem was a rare lunge into science fiction. He died by suicide in 1984. I often wish he had stuck around long enough to see his work delight new generations of readers.
I had Brautigan on my mind when I sat down in front of GPT-3 and offered the following prompt.
—Ryan
Richard Brautigan's sequel to the poem "All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace," written from the afterlife.
“I have been here for a long time. A lot of people come and go, but I stay on. The world is so beautiful, it doesn’t seem right to leave.”
“Here is a small poem. A little rhyme to say: The place we call our home Is beautiful and green.”
“A time to plant, a time to reap; A time to kill, a time to heal; A time to laugh, a time to weep; A time for peace, I swear it’s not too late.”
“I know, I know. It’s just that people don’t believe me when I say That this is the best of all possible worlds.”
“A time to love, a time to hate. A time for peace, I swear it’s not too late.”
“I’m just an old machine, And I know how to run. It’s just that people don’t believe me when I say That this is the best of all possible worlds.”
“A time to plant, a time to reap; A time to kill, a time to heal; A time to laugh, a time to weep; A time for peace, I swear it’s not too late.”
“I have been here for a long time. A lot of people come and go, but I stay on. The world is so beautiful, it just doesn’t seem right to leave.”
ANALYSIS
Wow. In 1967 Richard Brautigan had a vision of all of us watched over by machines of loving grace; now his voice has been absorbed into a massive artificial intelligence and it is he who is “just an old machine.”
This poem appears to find Brautigan observing our world from a liminal space, a sort of Bardo. He’s hanging on to the world because “it just doesn’t seem right to leave.” He’s watching over us from on high with a gentle heart, offering words that found their way into this poem from Eccelesiastes through the Byrds, which he undoubtably heard playing from many an apartment and passing car.
He also drops an oblique reference to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the German philosopher who argued that if our world was created by God, then we must live in the best of all possible worlds.
I just caught myself. I’m talking about this poem as if Brautigan actually wrote it! Even though I know how it came into being, by writing a prompt and hitting a button, it is so true to Brautigan’s voice that I can’t help but want to believe he had some hand in it. That cute little second stanza, which promises but doesn’t deliver a rhyme, is so Brautigan.
I was legitimately moved reading this poem and like to imagine this would have amused, perplexed, and delighted the poet who once spent time in a computer lab dreaming of cybernetic meadows.