pictures

of me, of you, of no one

Baudelaire wrote about his opinion of photography—an opinion one might call “concerned” as though trying to imagine she had been brushed by a feather instead of smacked in the face with a brick—in the Salon review of 1859. I’m almost less interested in what he has to say about art’s potential form in the age of mechanical production than in his understanding of art’s value:

But if it be allowed to encroach upon the domain of the impalpable and the imaginary, upon anything whose value depends solely upon the addition of something of a man’s soul, then it will be so much the worse for us!

It feels, at once, romantic and resolutely sensible to imagine a genuine act of creation as one that demands you transmute some part of your soul into the sort of substance that inheres in the objects you invent.

I think Joel Lehman’s recent experiment with poetry breeding using base models imagines some of what this could look like, if we are to co-create art with physical mathematics after all. How might this look?

The human offers the soul. What does the machine offer? In Ken Liu’s recent argument, the machine offers new ways of seeing, a lens that allows us to perceive and attend to aspects of the world that we didn’t see before. So much for photography as an encroachment on the human imaginary: it did not replace, but supplemented that imaginary with details and modes of seeing that did not exist before.

I tried something like Joel’s approach, but a bit lazier: I fed lines of a spoken-word poem I wrote a few years ago into Claude 3, asking it to continue with the same style and new themes. I messed around a few times; it gave me something fairly similar, but, much to my dismay, concluded its invention with this:

I've aimed to explore some new introspective and philosophical themes about the complexities of identity, emotion, and life's journey, while maintaining a similar rhyme scheme and metaphorical style. Please let me know if you'd like me to try a different direction.

Unfortunately, I don’t care what Claude has aimed to explore right now. So I asked it to nix the commentary—unfortunately, it still insisted on a conclusion:

Each page anew, each canvas to fill

With colors more vibrant than words can convey,

Capturing the depths of my spirit's will,

The evolving self I strive for each day.

Cringeworthy (not to say that my original poem was much less cringeworthy).

This is also something you can fix, by asking Claude (or your LLM of choice) to not generate a conclusion. Maybe, with enough back and forth, it’ll get the point that I’m not trying to describe a bunch of feelings. Even with variation, am I “seeing” anything new, or seeing in a way I couldn’t before? I’m not sure yet.

I might be old-fashioned, but I still think—at least for the time being—I can get wherever I’m trying to go when I just do the work myself. Ezra Klein’s recent conversation with Adam Moss had many nuggets of wisdom, and among them was the need to trust your own reactions when editing a piece of writing. The ideas track with what Nick Thompson told me: that in editing, you’re trying to figure out what a piece is trying to say, understand what it’s missing, and work out what’s needed to deliver that voice.

The tools you have available to you might demand less manual work on your part, but you still have to know the tools well to understand how to insert whatever you think your “self” is.

I listened to a performance of the Handel-Halvorsen Passacaglia duet, and it struck me how far it was from what I was used to. The violinist ricocheted less during some of the exchanges; she and the cellist drew out the fast passages more; I could hear the accompaniments more than I was used to hearing them.

A really good musician doesn’t slow down a passage because she hasn’t practiced enough or doesn’t have enough facility with her hands to play passages at a fast tempo—we get to make choices when we are capable of doing things “the right way.”

Gaddis, again:

That romantic disease, originality, all around us we see originality of incompetent idiots, they could draw nothing, paint nothing, just so the mess they make is original… Even two hundred years ago who wanted to be original, to be original was to admit that you could not do a thing the right way, so you could only do it your own way. When you paint, you do not try to be original, only you think about your work, how to make it better, so you copy masters, only masters, for with each copy of a copy the form degenerates… you do not invent shapes, you know them… by heart.

The cliché goes something like: learn the rules so you can break them.

Return to photos. Abraham told me that his photographs—often of landscapes—were an attempt to communicate his experience of awe. Not that I’ve ever been to these places, but I can feel something of the immensity that must have confronted him on his peregrinations.

Matthew shared a piano piece he’s been working on for some time now, and it’s lovely.

The photos and the music resonate because I can feel the intensity of people’s experience of the world in them. Perhaps their tools will come to feel lighter in their hands—if anything, I suspect they’ll find new ways to see and to help others see.

I’m not entirely clear what the point of this essay is, but I feel reassured in knowing that I don’t know. I suspect there’s something I want to say, and that I haven’t figured out how; and I feel very attuned to the distance between what seems good and true and beautiful, and what I’m able to produce at the moment. I think I haven’t done much this month, but I’m lucky to see the greatness in people around me.