A CAR IS A HORSELESS CARRIAGE. The shape of a Clorox jug recalls an earlier earthenware jug. The third-quarter update for Klarna, a Swedish tech firm, was given last year by the AI form of its chief executive officer, Sebastian Siemiatkowski. Sebastian the series of zeroes and ones can replace Sebastian the man; that’s the argument.
Artificial intelligence proposes to become us, and our world. Why can’t we refuse it, the one-trillion-dollar shiny new thing? It is a form of nonconsensual capitalism, predicated on profit, not need, that wants to be on our bodies, or inside them, when we buy dog food, go on a date, have an erection, suffer from suicidal depression, write a cover letter, learn how to make pie crust, construct a shoebox report on the life cycle of the lemur, upload a vacation reel, or summon it to mash up a picture of Mike Pence as a unicorn at the Super Bowl dancing with Rihanna who’s in a raindrop that is an ayahuasca trip.
AI proposes to solve problems that don’t exist, like having to use a pen at meetings (Tldv.io) or prepare slides for a presentation (DeepSeek). It has no solution for the climate crisis, a problem that does exist, though it adds substantially to it. (A query to ChatGPT uses approximately ten times the energy of a non-AI query on Google, according to the Electric Power Research Institute.) AI is particularly and literally invested in the formation of a people who can no longer read or—a way of thinking—write. I wonder why.
Like all would-be religions, it offers meaning for mortals. But AI is bad religion. Its priestly caste has no robust accounting for death: Peter Thiel (PayPal) will freeze his corpse; Bryan Johnson (Kernel, Braintree, OS Fund) had plasma transferred from his teenaged son into his nearing-fifty body, vampire-style, in an attempt to stay young. Even as it conspires to make humans disposable, it worships the self. AI leaves the least behind. Humana, CVS, and United Healthcare use AI to “bulk reject” post-acute care claims, for instance. The cheapest rideshare on SpaceX goes for three hundred thousand dollars.
Usually in our sell-your-soul myths, the prospects are tempting. In exchange, you get “high charms” (Prospero); knowledge of good and evil (Eden); bliss, all knowledge (Faust); so much spaghetti (Big Anthony); the ability to play a mean guitar (Robert Johnson). With AI, though the promises are grandiose (Siemiatkowski says AI “can already do all of the jobs that we, as humans can do”), the sell-your-soul deals are missable. There’s Kroger and Microsoft’s proposed facial-recognition technology, which would make prices specific to customers, so Kroger could extort me when I want that one kind of fancy pitted green olive, because I am weak.
Lately I have been thinking about DIY versus AI.
You know AI’s mug. It’s been following you around all week.
DIY is lowlier, livelier. It is like your daughter’s preschool teacher, the benevolent, witch-adjacent auntie with pockets full of acorns for the day’s art project, the one who puts on medical gloves to help a little boy wipe his bottom, the one who knows a song for clearing plates and another for Candlemas, the one who has tied lengths of old sheets like streamers to a painted stick for an afternoon parade. Or, DIY is a man dying but getting curiously radiant first. He has been forgiven. He is not eager to die, neither is he afraid. He would like a piece of that cake. Corporeal, he has no corporation. He’ll leave just enough behind, moneywise, that his grandchildren can bury him with a good plot and casket and get some whiskey for the wake.
Do-it-yourself is an epistemology that is counter to, and better than, the epistemology of AI. DIY is any true thing, done by creatures, for creatures, to great gain and no profitable end. DIY places postures and process over commodities; it is led by amateurs, those who love, not experts; there is little or no money in it, as opposed to money as its own end; rather than adding complexity, it retains simplicity; it is not afraid of the old or necessarily sold on the new. It could be three-on-three basketball, rebuilding a car from parts, planting garlic in the fall, making a bûche de Noël, the “right to repair” movement, bathing your sick child, writing a legal brief.
A shining, particularly stripped-down example of the DIY—as fundamental to the world of music as a footrace is to sport—is shape note singing. Bonus: it comes with an ontology (take it or leave it) that’ll tell you you’re wretched/glorious/dying and your efforts are naught. Some others and me, we love the stuff.
What is that, I thought, when I first heard shape note singing. It was groaning, and some voices keened. It was loud. It was muscular, this music. There was glory, but it was not pretty. The voices did not blend, and the sound was not nice. All I knew was that I wanted to hear it again. Maybe it seemed to me like an aesthetic that does not lie? I feel surrounded, often, by aesthetics that do lie: gracious windows solely on the façades of cheaply built exurban housing; toys that seem like they will last, offered to eager, begging children, only to break almost instantly, thus inducting children into the moral formation of our endless trash; Mar-a-Lago face; hyperreal images that make actual reality seem wan; the aesthetic and promise of security on the internet—each captcha and password and two-step verification—when the internet is arguably most successful at tracking us, as a series of data sets.
So there’s a contrarian appeal to a song that sounds sung by humans in their (young, old, crooked, fat, gorgeous, hairy, halt, jacked, sexy, bald, injured, hale) human bodies, with these lyrics:
Youth, like the spring, will soon be gone,
By fleeting time or conquering death;
Your morning sun may set at noon,
And leave you ever in the dark.Your sparkling eyes and blooming cheeks
Must wither like the blasted rose;
The coffin, earth, and winding sheet
Will soon your active limbs enclose.
That’s 436, or “Morning Sun,” from The Sacred Harp, a popular, longways shape note songbook, first published in 1844, that gives this tradition one of its names: the sacred harp. The sacred harp is the human voice. We have harps, and are harps, so we should sing. 436 is in a major key—happy, to Western ears—and it’s a jam. It’s often led quickly, so that the distance from youth to the winding sheet goes likewise. There’s a fugue around “sparkling eyes and blooming cheeks,” so all the singers in this polyphonic music—tenor, treble, alto, bass—get to enact, in their form, the words’ function. The parts’ staggered entries sparkle and bloom, sparkle and bloom, then, bam, everybody dies, a bunch of blasted roses, and someone calls the next song.
Shape note is not a choir. Everyone is welcome and there are no auditions. Singers sit in a “hollow square,” trebles facing the basses, tenors facing altos. The mix of female, male, and children’s voices may turn the four-part harmony into functionally five-, six-, or seven-part harmony. Regular singings could happen at someone’s home, at a church or school, in a grange, at a coffee shop after hours. One wants a room that rings. There is no audience, and no one will applaud. It is a democratic form so radical it is familiar to Quakers; some call it anarchist, others punk. The leader is the person leading the song. Then that leader is not the leader. Quick, the next song leader says, with no lost time on the repeat. Or, I am going to beat this slow, in four. We’ll sing verses one and three, and let’s pitch it higher, please.
I first sang this music in the basement of a small Primitive Baptist church in Old Colorado City, once a town, now a neighborhood, in Colorado Springs. The strangers I met there became friends: a family with political convictions so libertarian they are de facto anarchists, who now live off the grid and below the taxable income level with their eight children in rural Tennessee; a veteran, since passed, who loved motorcycles and four-wheeling and taught me to beat six-eight time with my arm like I was “rocking a baby,” and his kind, accommodating wife; and our “birthright singer,” LaVerne, born into this tradition, the one who belonged to that spartan church, a church of Old School or Foot Washing or Hard Shell or Primitive Baptists who reject later innovations like singing with instruments, Sunday school, and seminary. (Their preachers are “tentmakers,” meaning they earn a subsistence wage from other work.) The one time I attended services there was for LaVerne’s funeral. Like Old Order Mennonites, or the Amish, the Primitive Baptists consider a new technology—here: an organ, a piano, drum machines, autotune—in the context of their communal life, and though I do not share their conviction, I honor their ability to meet a technology and refuse it.
I note these things about the singers (the de facto anarchists run a Calvinist house church) as if I learned them while singing. I did not. As a matter of principle, singers do not speak about religion or politics while in “singing school,” regular singings, or at “dinner on the grounds,” the epic spread of potluck lunch at an all-day sing, or “convention.” Nearly lost in the early twentieth century, this music was often kept alive by singers so close they were kin. Now it proliferates among people who are decidedly various. Shortly after I first sang with LaVerne and the others, for instance, I met Jackson, who was riding freight trains across the United States and would hop off in various cities to sing shape note. Since then, I’ve met a singer who wants lex talionis back, singers who punch Nazis for Antifa, pacifists, anti-imperial leftists, social and fiscal and otherwise conservatives, poor, rich, working class, queer, trans, head-covering, disabled, blind, atheist, agnostic, fundamentalist, Eastern Orthodox, Congregationalist, evangelical, Jewish, formerly Seventh-day Adventist, unschooled and homeschooled kids, male and female homemakers, MDs and PhDs, engineers, an astrophysicist, actors, therapists, teachers, retirees, baristas, an indexer, and a competitive voguer, plus a great many musicians, including solfège stans, ethnomusicologists, violinists, and “threshold singers,” who sing to people while they are dying and in so doing help them to die.
“It’s as if two orbs—one a descending tradition, another ascending…in passing touched,” Buell Cobb writes in his memoir of the sacred harp, Like Cords Around My Heart. LaVerne passed away last spring. Four of us gathered around her dying bed and sang with her before she did. In John Lawrence Brasher’s Antigodlin Stories of the Sacred Harp, I read of the “tradition bearers,” mostly gone, who have “a lot of game up that creek.” (That is, stories to tell.) Visiting men would sleep on pallets in the open dogtrots of local singers’ homes. Singers floated watermelons in a spring to keep them cool. They tell of the sweetness of the water from Brasher Springs in northern Alabama, water drunk from a communal tin dipper, and how it flavored the lemonade. Miss Bettye Walker, a schoolteacher who lived with her sister in the last log dogtrot house in that community, was famous for her banana pudding and “stood guard” over it at all-day sings. The abundant “dinner on the grounds,” a tradition that continues, recalls an agricultural day: waking early, breaking for a big dinner when the sun was high, a light supper in the evening. People would bring their everyday plates; when there weren’t enough of those they’d use half of a cantaloupe from a singer’s crop, eaten down to the rind, for a bowl. “The katydids and July flies were deafening,” Brasher writes, of that green land.
The words in these stories, as in many of the songs, give access to a world gone. The serviceberry tree, earliest bloomer, is called that because the winter dead would be buried in March, when that tree bloomed white and the ground was soft. “Pick up your own louse cap,” means “Why don’t you do it yourself.” A beautiful woman was “adorned with a New Jerusalem light.” “Witch” Battles Moody, so called because she looked like one, carried a claw hammer in her pocket and threw parties on Saturday nights where “the white lightning flowed.” Many of the birthright singers are recalled by a skill: A man who could peel a grape with his teeth. A man who knew where to dig ginseng, and where the goldenseal grew.
Some of their modes of singing are lost, or nearly so. The more doleful the song, the more people would shout, Brasher writes. Such shouting, not common at singings now, was understood to be a mystical experience. In the Black sacred harp, there was the “ring shout,” a sacred circle dance derived from the Yoruba, Akan, Bantu, Angolan, Fon, and Ewe people, a ritual kept in the small hours of the night, away from slavers. In 1943, the musicologist George Pullen Jackson wrote of “lining out,” a practice he first heard at a Black church in Birmingham, and one that informs current shape note practice: “A deacon or the elder ‘lines out’ a couplet of the text in a sing-song voice and at a fair speaking pace ending on a definite tone…. The deacon then starts singing, and by the time he has sung through the elaborately ornamented first syllable the whole congregation has joined in on the second syllable.” The melisma of those syllables recalls tonal West African languages. The singing is accessible to those who can read and those who cannot.
Some geographically isolated white singers, in Greasy Cove, Alabama, and in the far western mountains of North Carolina, kept alive the rare practice of a “drone,” thought to have originated after the king of England conquered Scotland and banned bagpipe music. The ring shout dancers improvised the drums that were stolen from them. The Scots without a bagpipe became one. This is the opposite of men becoming the tools of their tools. To make a human bagpipe, four or five people stand in a tight group, singing tenor, treble, and bass. Five bass singers walk slowly around them in a counterclockwise circle, holding the keynote. Around them walk ten treble singers (the highest part) in a clockwise circle, holding the octave note. Beyond them walk twenty more tenor singers, who counter the trebles with the fifth note. The song “comes fountaining out of the center,” Brasher writes. And “the strong harmony created by the circles of singers fills the room with a floor of sound.” Those feral highland sounds—harmonies based on fourths, songs ending in open fifths—remain in the music and make it strange.
Like us, some of the people in these stories suffered the moral horrors of their age. Others accepted, inflicted, or profited from those horrors. Some were freed by poverty, geography, or profession, and a few were freed by their dissent. John Jackson Brasher (1820–87), a white Alabaman with “a trumpet voice,” was “constitutionally against slavery.” Rejected from the Methodist Conference for his views, he joined the American Tract Society as a preacher who traveled by horseback and taught shape note singing.
Brasher used the four-note system most shape note singers use now—fa, sol, la, mi—also called fasola, buckwheat notes (for their resemblance to the grain), and patent notes (because they were patented as a technology for learning). Sol (pronounced “so”) is an oval, fa a triangle, la a rectangle, mi a diamond. First popularized by The Easy Instructor (1801), they are an aid to sight reading. Unlike the absolute pitches shown as round notes fixed on a staff one learns when playing, say, piano, shape note singing uses relative pitch. In any given tune, the place of the notes on the staff is moveable, but the intervals remain fixed.
Think of songs you know by heart, or sing them. The first two notes of “Frère Jacques” are a major second, a whole step apart. The first notes of “When the Saints Go Marching In” are a third, spanning two whole steps. “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” is a fourth. The “Wise men” of “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You” is a fifth. “My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean” is a sixth.
In shape note singing, the one who pitches the song, the keyer, gives the song’s tonic note, then sings a chord or the song’s first notes. They do this without apps, using the math of harmony that is in all human minds. The keyer needs “equal parts of humility and confidence,” according to composer Raymond C. Hamrick, and should sing out loudly and clearly. If other singers don’t like the pitch—too high, too low, just wrong—we key it again. Then we “sing the shapes” (with fa, sol, la, and mi in place of lyrics) before we sing the words, beating the time with our arms, or walking the time with our bodies. This is its own kind of beauty and thrill.
Many of the traveling singing teachers who taught this system did so in the winter months, as summer and fall were for farming. John Jackson Brasher kept appointments at “early candlelight,” which is “as soon as a candle will shine.” Singing students would walk miles to get to school, some carrying their shoes to keep them clean and only putting them on when they arrived. Like the composer William Billings, who caught runaway hogs for a job, Brasher was known as a resourceful man. He sold horse plows, scythes, spokes, axle trees, log chains, butcher knives, pot hooks, keys, coffee mills, gun locks, pistols, coffins, flutes, and two patent medicines—vinegar of iridin, made from iris roots, and Fink’s Magic Oil, which was eighty-seven percent alcohol.
Brasher knew death. In 1859, he and his wife Caroline lost all four of their children to diphtheria. William, Martha, Pheraby, and Julia. In his ledger book he wrote down a poem that had been set to music, perhaps his only balm for such grief. Here are lyrics by Jesse Mercer of Powelton, Georgia, a town that no longer exists, published in 1823:
But now I have a deeper stroke
Than all my groanings are;
My God has me of late forsook;
He’s gone, I know not where.
Twice now I’ve heard mothers whose sons died young call “David’s Lamentation” at a sing. To lead a song, you stand in the middle of the hollow square, a space that many singers, religious and not, consider sacred. One of the mothers was held steady by her sister as she sang. “O my son!” the song fugues and repeats, “Would to God I had died, / Would to God I had died, / Would to God I had died, For thee…” Such art gets near to that fathomless pain, much nearer than sad-face or hug emojis, software that is not worthy of what humans love and bear.
How often the songs take death as their theme. They may welcome death, rail against it, grieve it, or use it to admonish the living. Death is often just a matter of fact, and eternity is a given. This is the musical equivalent of artists who build their own coffins, then use them as coffee tables in the meantime, with a basket of bills or a vase of flowers on top. The delivery is blunt. Here’s a couplet from “Wells”: “The living know that they must die, / But all the dead forgotten lie.” Two pages later:
Why should we start and fear to die?
What tim’rous worms we mortals are!
Death is the gate to endless joy,
And yet we dread to enter there.
One of the best-known shape note songs is “Idumea,” or “47 on the bottom,” written by Charles Wesley in 1763, in A minor, a haunted key. “And am I born to die?” it begins. “To lay this body down! / And must my trembling spirit fly / Into a world unknown?” Such thoughts are pathological to us, but they must have been a how-do-you-do in his day.
Or think of “Auld Lang Syne,” a tune whose first verse and chorus you’ve probably sung on New Year’s Eve. It sounds plaintive and dragging to twenty-first-century ears, with melancholy in that plodding four-four beat. The New Year’s version is set with the eighteenth-century poetry of Robert Burns, poetry he both wrote and collected from older poets, older songs:
Shid ald akwentans bee firgot,
An nivir brocht ti mynd?
Shid ald akwentans bee firgot,
An ald lang syn?
In the sacred harp, this song is “Plenary,” 162, and it’s a memento mori:
Hark! From the tomb a doleful sound,
Mine ears attend the cry,
Ye living men, come view the ground
Where you must shortly lie.
There’s a skull, picked clean and sun-bleached, to set beside our phones. (One is compostable, the other not.) And there’s a coffin for a coffee table. If you sing the next verse, you find one of poetry’s great themes, death the equalizer:
Princes, this clay must be your bed,
In spite of all your tow’rs;
The tall, the wise, the rev’rend head,
Must lie as low as ours
In the US, as of this writing, our princes are from the world of tech. If you define wealth as money, three of them—Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg—together have more wealth than the entire poorer half of the population, more than approximately 166 million Americans combined. They like a godly vantage: from Trump Tower, surveillance, outer space. No matter: Their heads will lie as low as ours.
All of this music is folk music, for and by people, and the people change it as it goes. Many of the songs in The Shenandoah Harmony or The Sacred Harp have lived other lives before. The music came from Cornwall, England, Scotland, Wales. It traveled to New England, then to the coastal south. It went inland to the Piedmonts and Appalachia. It rooted deeply in the Shenandoah Valley. Many song titles recall places: “Arbacoochee,” “Beach Spring,” “Abbeville,” “Detroit.” Beautiful dorks like Alan Lomax, who called shape note as “wild and splendid” as the music of Ukraine and the Caucuses, “the match of any polyphonic music in the world,” came along and “found” it again. It’s traveled back across the Atlantic, and through the internet. Recent composers add songs, like Judy Hauff, who calls herself a “big Dorian mode freak.” Now it proliferates in LA, Vancouver, Portland. The sacred harp singers in Bremen, Germany, describe it on their website as a cappella heavy metal.
“What Wondrous Love Is This” was “My Name Is Captain Kidd,” in which Kidd tells of sailing off to kill one guy, and then another. Songs five or six hundred years old have been ballads like Kidd’s, work songs, love songs, dance tunes, drinking songs, field calls, and camp songs. Camp songs, here, are the hymns sung during the Second Great Awakening at camp meetings, a kind of wild revival that might last five days, where participants laughed, fell down, barked like dogs, and experienced “the jerks.”
The tune of “Plenary,” now sung slowly as “Auld Lang Syne,” was probably first a strathspey, a brisk dance. Its poetry is in hymn meter. One line has four beats—iambic, like your heartbeat—the next line has three. In the last century, it was the national anthem of the Maldives and South Korea. It’s played in Japan as “The Light of the Fireflies” to tell bar patrons it’s closing time, and in final ceremonies at Scout jamborees. Kenny G put it on the Billboard Hot 100, the oldest song to ever chart.
There’s a short documentary recording from World War I, on the Regal label, of Edward Dwyer, born to Irish parents, who fought for the British army against the Germans, and who was shot dead before he turned twenty-one. It is the only such recording of a British solider in that war. “Unless you’ve been through it you can’t recognize what an agonizing time it was,” Dwyer says. “We used to do from twenty to twenty-five miles a day. There was only one thing that could cheer us up on the march—that was singing.” Then he sings that melody, our New Year’s or closing time tune. The soldiers’ lyrics are existential, and a rebellion: “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here!” they sang. “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here!” Meaning itself wrecks in that war, in those lyrics, and we live in that wreckage still.
What is the human? That’s where we are, meaning-wise. Primitives.
Last fall, my daughter and I went to the Helwig Coghlan Memorial Singing held in the California Historical Radio Society in Alameda, California. We did this courtesy of the hospitality of singers we’d never met before, another countercultural practice that is startlingly common in the world of sacred harp. The rooms at the California Historical Radio Society are full of technologies that were designed to be pleasing to the touch and to the eye, as if the people who would use them were expected to have bodies, and that wasn’t a bad thing. These designs recall their inheritance, the way a Ford recalls a cart. One of the first TVs, made by Western Television Corporation, is a large, solid wood console with a small porthole through which one viewed moving images by turning a dial like a ship’s helm. Look! You are a sailor, and TV is the sea. An early radio has a music stand on it. Others are shaped like pipe organs, or choir lofts. But I loved most a small bedside radio, seemingly made just to delight, in carefully crafted gold and cream, an owl.
The singing was beautiful. There is a kind of mingling of spirit that happens when you call out close with other people, and the dead, full voiced, for no audience. I like to think that a lyric from “47 on the top” describing salvation also describes the experience of singing, of art: “A sov’reign balm for ev’ry wound, / A cordial for our fears.”
One night several of us walked to a delicious Himalayan dinner, and for the ride home my kind host suggested we get a Waymo, one of the AI-powered self-driving cars. Riding shotgun without a human in the seat beside me, I felt absence. The absence of Cheerios crushed into the seat, of a pine-shaped air freshener, a Ganesh doll on the dash, a rosary around the rearview, an accent that suggests the Bronx, somebody’s Nicki Minaj, cologne. Waymo is as polite as a Stepford Wife. Frictionless-ness achieved. But a Stepford wife takes the form of wife. Waymo just put an empty seat where the driver used to be.
We wound through the gorgeous hills of Bernal Heights, with all that architecture puzzled out to fit the steep hills by the singular genius of human brains. Windows down, air soft. Nervous laughter. Perfect stops.
Then a motorcyclist came along, by which I mean a human being piloting the machine that is a motorcycle. He accelerated, swerved, turned close right in front of us: four humans and the presence of the absence of the Stepford Waymo. He was playing chicken, coming right at us! Then he slammed on his brakes, all friction and its delights. The motorcyclist laughed. Because she reads books, my daughter says he cackled. His action had wit, daring, mastery of balance, the art of timing that is a joke. It was a joyful FU. He could have died, but he didn’t. Waymo didn’t laugh, didn’t swear, didn’t say phew. Waymo’s camera or eye didn’t tear up from almost killing a man. It didn’t even blink.
Me, I tear up. It doesn’t take much. But when I am weary, singing helps me to stand, and when I am sad, it is kind company. This makes me like a lot of people in human history, which has been exquisite, and hard. Peasants came up with villanelles to work the fields; a line of a poem is a row to hoe.
Ginny Hawker sings from her aunt’s copy of Primitive Hymns. “You can always tell which were her favorite,” Hawker says. “There are tobacco stains at the bottom of those pages.” My copy of The Sacred Harp, with its 573 songs, is inexhaustible to me, because I am, at my best, all the things an AI is not: slow, limited, broken, subject to time, full of desires, a blasted rose. I will never tire of this lyric: “Let evening blush to own a star.” Or this, in the same song: “Let midnight be ashamed of noon.” I will never tire of hearing the names of the dead at a memorial lesson, or the radical vulnerability of a person standing up to sing. I know that the goodness of LaVerne, banana pudding, and an open fifth that suggests its missing third is infinitely more interesting than Elon Musk’s Sieg heil. He wants to colonize space, that guy. He’ll race Bezos to see who can be biggest, richest, fastest, first.
I like to think of the Voyager spacecrafts that have them beat. The first of two is the farthest human-made object from earth. Sent into the cosmos in 1977, it holds the Voyager Golden Record, “a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings,” as Jimmy Carter wrote. “We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.” In fifty-five different languages, humans offer greetings of peace and goodwill. The sounds of earth are there, mostly living sounds: a blacksmith hammering, crickets, rain, the kiss of a mother and child. A genius who was blind, and poor, and left to die without medical care because he was blind (say some sources) or Black (say others): His art is there too, beyond the stars. The song he sings was first written as a hymn, in 1792, and later lived in long meter, lined out, or as a “Dr. Watts hymn,” which is an early name for the sacred harp. Blind Willie Johnson’s song is “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.” He used a knife to play slide guitar like no one ever has before or since. He moans and cries. There are no words in his singing. This music is before words, like our mother’s pulse, the first poetry we ever heard, and after them, like those stars. It is a song about sleeping outside, says NASA. It is a song about crucifixion, say others. His stepmother blinded him when he was seven. He carried on. An AI can steal such beauty, but it could never make it, be broken or healed by it. The beauty of “Dark Was the Night” is vast, staggering: It is human. How good.
Mary Margaret Alvarado’s short story “Application for Admission [DRAFFFFT] from Kaylee River King” is up at The Rumpus. The author of two books and a chapbook, she presently lives in Guanajuato, Mexico, with her family.
Photo by Harry Miller on Unsplash
