by
Robert Hass
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In talking about this with Judith, I was able to quote a haiku that I love by the nineteenth-century poet Kobayashi Issa, which goes like this—seventeen syllables in the Japanese:
The man pulling radishes
Pointed my way
With a radish.
Can you imagine the situation? The narrator of the poem is hiking along a road. He stops and asks for directions. And the fellow working in the field waves his radish—it’s a daikon, one of those long skinny Japanese radishes—and says, “Oh, it’s about four miles down the road on the left.” That’s my image of myself teaching poetry: I was the guy with the radish.
I could say to students: if you substitute imagination for love, you have in hand one of Wallace Stevens’s persistent thoughts about the world, and our experience of it, and the nature of knowledge. Bronze then becomes a word to think about, the bronzes of autumnal New England and the sun-gilded bronzes of the tropics. We live, the poem muses, in a bronze décor. And it contains a sort of final palm tree, and a horizon, because in the imagination, which is really no space and no time, there are nevertheless horizons. So one could say that postmodernism has not so much superseded Romanticism in this poem as swallowed it. Probably that bird in the palm with its fire-fangled feathers is the sun seen through palm leaves. It could be the sun coming up or the sun going down; you can’t tell. In the imagination it could be both, and the fact that this was one of his last poems gives this ambiguity another resonance. To notice all this is to put someone’s state of mind—or someone’s construction of the fiction of a state of mind, that of a man who’s worked at poetry his entire life, haunted by the mystery of whether language can get hold of existence at all—to put that poem, its breath, its second thoughts, its strange metaphor, into other people’s possession. Something like this is surely the gift poetry gives us and that, teaching poetry, we give to others.
I did not get much of a sense of the poetry of Kim Nam-ju. It was, of course, unavailable. The few poems I did see were unpublished English translations of what seemed like youthful work. There was a description of a field, I remember, seen from a prison train, a sense of homesickness. Another poet who was in jail had been imprisoned for a violation of the publishing law because he’d printed a book-length poem about a farmers’ revolt in 1947 on an island on the southern tip of Korea. It was a sensitive subject. Korea, as you know, was occupied by the Japanese from 1905 to 1945, and no society is ruled by an invading power for that long without a lot of collaboration and bad conscience. I helped translate the peroration of his long poem, working in a hotel room between convention sessions with a very brave and intelligent Korean poet. “And so,” it began, as I recall, “the authorities who were the running dogs of Japanese imperialism / changed their uniforms and became the running dogs of American imperialism / I write this down in 1986 when the blood of Korea cries out / and the tears of Korea burst forth.” The language of the literal translation sounded to me like the slogans one saw on the banners at student demonstrations. My cotranslator had expressed no opinion about the quality of the poem. I asked him if its language was interesting in Korean. He smiled at me, nodding, as if he had an amused, distant recollection of the state of mind in which one might ask such a question, and then shrugged and said that the language had a certain vigor.
i love the way he writes this
Sugar is not native to North America. It’s indigenous to South Asia. The Arabs took it from India to the East and Spain in the eighth century and Christopher Columbus brought it from Spain to Hispaniola on his second voyage, where, as he thought it might, it flourished and quickly became a cash crop so valuable it made the settlement of the Americas a desirable proposition and brought the slave trade into being. The first slaves to arrive in the New World from the West African coast arrived in 1505 and they were brought here to work in sugarcane fields.
So there is a reason why one of the first great works of African-American nature writing is called Cane. Consider the working of the Atlantic trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Ships set sail for the rich towns of West Africa with manufactured goods to sell or trade for slaves, and then sailed to the West Indies to sell or trade the slaves for sugar and molasses and rum, which they brought back to Europe and sold at an enormous profit. Consider this: sugar was such a valuable commodity that the French did not hesitate to trade all of French Canada to the English (the French foreign minister called it “a few acres of snow”) for the islands of Guadeloupe, Saint Lucia (whose later principal export was Derek Walcott), and Martinique (which in its turn exported Aimé Césaire to France). The first distillery of rum was built in Barbados in 1627, the first in Boston in 1667. Between 1870 and 1917, according to one economic historian, the most profitable industry in New York City was the refining of sugar. The Jesuits brought sugarcane to Louisiana in 1751. Today sugar contributes $2 billion a year to the Louisiana economy. Growers took cane to the Georgia wilderness, where some years later Jean Toomer had a job in the summer of 1921 at a segregated black school in a city called Sparta. The town got its name, according to the local story, because one of the Scots-Irish settlers said that the Creek people whom they drove from their lands in order to take possession of the place had fought like Spartans. Sparta throve as a center for cotton growing, but when the boll weevil came in 1910 and destroyed the cotton (one of the reasons for the urbanization of African-Americans), Sparta went broke and reverted to sugarcane, which is why Jean Toomer could write one poem that began “Boll-weevil’s coming, and the winter is cold,” and another that begins “Wind is in the cane. Come along.” Well, here is all of it:
[...]
Consider this: in 1898 the United States, by seizing Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines in the Spanish-American War, acquired control of one half of the world’s total sugarcane production. At that time the U.S. was also the world’s largest consumer of sugar, after Great Britain. It consumed two million tons of sugar a year and produced only three hundred thousand tons domestically in Texas, Florida, Louisiana, and Georgia. The cost to the United States of its sugar imports was $80 million a year. Reason enough to spend fourteen years from 1899 to 1913 suppressing the Philippine independence movement, which resisted our best efforts to bring them democratic institutions. Wind is in the cane. Come along.
damn
I am sure the natural world gave some pleasure to the people who worked the land for those four hundred years. But we will not find in the written record what sunlight looked like to them in the leaves of trees along the Rappahannock River in the spring, or what the sky looked like when tens of thousands of migrating passenger pigeons flew over, or how woods sounded when pileated woodpeckers were as common as wild turkeys, or how the land had been altered by centuries of European agricultural practices. I’m sure that there was an immense practical and aesthetic, biological and pharmaceutical and ecological lore passed down in the oral tradition, from farmer to farmer, naturalist to naturalist, by people who were outdoors every day and observed the world as a respite from backbreaking labor, but it is invisible to us. There may have been an Emersonian nature out there or a Thoreauvian nature, of the kind that those New Englanders learned to see from reading English and German Romantic poetry, but in the tradition of the spirituals, “black nature” is slavery:
Don’t care where you bury my body,
My soul is going to shine.
So, of course, they show up in poetry. “I do not know much about gods,” wrote T. S. Eliot, who grew up along the Mississippi in Saint Louis, “but I think that the river is a strong brown god.” “Under various names,” wrote Czeslaw Milosz, who grew up in Lithuania along the Neman, “I have praised only you, rivers. You are milk and honey and love and death and dance.” I take this to be the first stirrings, even as our civilization did its damming and polluting, of the recognition of what we have lost and need to recover. When human populations were small enough, the cleansing flow of rivers and their fierce floods could create the illusion that our acts did not have consequences, that they vanished downstream. Now that is no longer true, and we are being compelled to reconsider the work of our hands. And, of course, we are too dependent on our own geographical origins to have lost our connection with them entirely.
YOUR AI AGENT NEEDS A WORKFLOW ENGINE.
The billboard stands by a nondescript stretch of highway somewhere between Redwood City and Mountain View. A boom, likely a bubble, made manifest. A cry of triumphant return. And probably one day, a monument to a bubble bursting. All hype seems destined to furnish tomorrow’s ruin. But for now, this ruin in waiting stands by the side of Highway 101 to inform us that our AI agent needs a workflow engine.
Exactly 101 years ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald described a postindustrial wasteland on Long Island, “halfway between West Egg and New York,” with a giant billboard towering over it, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. This stretch of highway may be less desolate than what Fitzgerald described, but the billboards seem just as unsettling and disconsolate as the unnerving, faceless eyes of the fictive Queens optometrist.
Fitzgerald uses those eyes to find something sublime amid capitalist kitsch: the ephemera of consumer culture come to watch over and judge their creators, with the bizarre advertisement standing in for last things: God, fate, judgment, time. I feel judged by “Your AI Agent Needs a Workflow Engine.” First of all, because I had no idea, having left my AI agent lamentably bereft of a workflow engine. Second, because I don’t even have an AI agent. And third, because I have no clue what any of it means. Like Rilke before the torso of Phoebus Apollo, I pass before the monument and get a sense that I am being told to change my life. Unlike Rilke, I have no idea what is wrong or how to go about remedying it.
god he's so good
The fact that this billboard poses an unremitting demand, but that even on repeat drive-bys I cannot for the life of me figure out what that demand is, says something about the company it’s advertising. A company that, by the way, I have already forgotten. American billboards tend to be solicitous: they offer you a McDonald’s, a world-famous geyser, a strip club, they tell you it’s only five miles, and which exit to take. But these are the least solicitous billboards imaginable, solitaires throning over the highway, haughty and without any desire to be understood.
In this respect, this sphinx feels like a perfect distillation of Silicon Valley. The billboard makes a demand without being able to clearly express what that demand consists of. This billboard seems to be telling a story about something entirely different: the fact that people no longer project onto this region what they once did, and that the region has therefore ceased to offer a screen for those projections.
There was a moment when people readily confused men in turtlenecks with lapel mics pacing across a garishly lit stage with thought leadership. As a whole, we seem to have gotten better spotting that sort of thing as what it is: a pitch. Silicon Valley's ability to take over the world's collective imagination has noticeably diminished, in inverse proportion to its ability to actually take over our labor, our politics, our media. Silicon Valley's new innovations hardly get anyone excited, and they aren't presented to us as potential cult objects.
If your new iPhone now comes with Al and your vacation photos are automatically compatible with the virtual reality headset you'll never buy, the tech industry has replaced yesterday's glittering promises with the exhausted air of neoliberal government - the shrugging acceptance of having no alternative.
In the last five years, companies have stopped promising us the world and are instead content to dominate it. Their power of persuasion has run out; raw power remains. Every story about Silicon Valley will always be incomplete.
But this unassuming stretch of highway might offer a glimpse into how this happened.
Successive waves of Silicon Valley hype have washed over these billboards, and then vanished from the earth. Ten years ago, the billboards overflowed with a cacophony of messages about e-commerce, customer relations management, chatbots, the Cloud. Then there was a moment in 2020, when they fell into disuse, when Silicon Valley-the region, as opposed to Silicon Valley the set of companies-seemed unsure of itself. Work-from-home became the new watchword, and the campuses along this highway stood empty. The shock of the COVID pandemic was global, but it chipped away at this region's self-image in a very particular way.
The region, the industry, and its billboards have recovered, and today they appear more triumphant than ever. And yet, as with so much that's currently making a comeback in the United States - Trumpism, oligarchy, white supremacy - one gets the impression that this isn't a more-or-less-normal swing of the pendulum. The boom, the bubble, the power that is currently swelling in Silicon Valley, and the ruthlessness with which boom, bubble, and power are presenting themselves by the side of this road, are more or less trying to equate themselves with the fate of the country, of humanity: if our bubble bursts, you, your planet, your future is going down with us. And so the billboards symbolize the fait accompli that Silicon Valley presents us with today: systemic relevance as an all-or-nothing bet.