From Bad to Verse

Earl Fowler

No one has ever described the human condition with such dour accuracy, a sadder heart or more diminished expectations than perpetually glum librarian Philip Larkin, who nonetheless remains one of Britain’s best-loved poets four decades after his death in 1985. No mystery as to why. How’s this for a succinct description of intergenerational trauma?

This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   

    They may not mean to, but they do.   

They fill you with the faults they had

    And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   

Who half the time were soppy-stern

    And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

    It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

    And don’t have any kids yourself.

Though he had some messed-up sexual entanglements in his 63 years, the solitary, no-nonsense curmudgeon — who declined an offer to become Poet Laureate — took his own advice and never procreated. If he had, he might have followed up with a far better version of the sequel I just concocted based on some of the stunts I’ve seen pulled lately by the avaricious adult children of friends and acquaintances:

They fuck you up, your grown-up kids,

With endless calls and issues hid.

They bring their chaos, spread their clutter

To your calm space, in which you mutter.

They’ll argue loud, they’ll take your stuff,

Show up at night, enough’s enough.

They’ll leave you dealing with their mess,

Spend all your cash, but I digress.

For when they call with woes anew,

Remember, they’re reflecting you.

It’s not their fault they stir the pot,

You raised them, and they learned a lot.

Now admittedly, that little ditty won’t earn me a title as the bard of bad-tempered Boomerism. But it did get me thinking about how other familiar poems and songs — cultural touchstones, all — might sound had they been written by different authors.

It’s now frighteningly easy to do this by employing artificial intelligence language models. The suggestions I’ve presented below were all spit out in seconds by the ChatGPT chatbot developed by OpenAI, which is sounding less and less like a tool (as it did when I played around with it in this space a year ago) and more like a sentient, self-aware agent.

In the long run, might this portend extinction of human creativity? Way back in 1932, Aldous Huxley was already warning in Brave New World that the society he knew was devolving toward a dystopia in which all thinking and behaviour would be directed by computers and mind-managing algorithms.

We come for your daughter, Chuck.

Not much we can do about it at this point but pass the soma and swipe right for a little instant gratification. How about we start, for example, with one of my favourite early Bob Dylan songs: “Ballad of a Thin Man.”

The original lyrics go like this:

You walk into the room with your pencil in your hand

You see somebody naked and you say, “Who is that man?”

You try so hard but you don’t understand

Just what you will say when you get home

Because something is happening here but you don’t know what it is

Do you, Mr. Jones?

You raise up your head and you ask, “Is this where it is?”

And somebody points to you and says, “It’s his”

And you say, “What’s mine?" and somebody else says, “Well, what is?”

And you say, “Oh my God, am I here all alone?”

But something is happening and you don’t know what it is

Do you, Mr. Jones?

You hand in your ticket and you go watch the geek

Who immediately walks up to you when he hears you speak

And says, “How does it feel to be such a freak?”

And you say, “Impossible!” as he hands you a bone

And something is happening here but you don’t know what it is

Do you, Mr. Jones?

You have many contacts among the lumberjacks

To get you facts when someone attacks your imagination

But nobody has any respect, anyway they already expect you to all give a cheque

To tax-deductible charity organizations

Ah, you’ve been with the professors and they’ve all liked your looks

With great lawyers you have discussed lepers and crooks

You’ve been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books

You’re very well-read, it’s well-known

But something is happening here and you don’t know what it is

Do you, Mr. Jones?

Well, the sword swallower, he comes up to you and then he kneels

He crosses himself and then he clicks his high heels

And without further notice, he asks you how it feels

And he says, “Here is your throat back, thanks for the loan”

And you know something is happening but you don’t know what it is

Do you, Mr. Jones?

Now, you see this one-eyed midget shouting the word “Now”

And you say, “For what reason?" and he says, “How”

And you say, “What does this mean?” and he screams back, “You’re a cow!

Give me some milk or else go home”

And you know something’s happening but you don’t know what it is

Do you, Mr. Jones?

Well, you walk into the room like a camel, and then you frown

You put your eyes in your pocket and your nose on the ground

There ought to be a law against you comin’ around

You should be made to wear earphones

’Cause something is happening and you don’t know what it is

Do you, Mr. Jones?

Dylan’s words were ingenious and psychoactive enough, to be sure. But suppose poet and painter e e cummings, who died in the early Sixties just before the world took notice of Blind Boy Grunt, had taken a crack at “Thin Man” with his unconventional punctuation, scattered syntax and surreal imagery. This brilliant tour de diablerie is what our expansive little chatbot came up with:

you (mr man)

you walk into the room

—oh) mr thin man(

with youreyesfull of question-marks

like someone tied your shoelaces

together &laughed

(the lions & tigers

are grinning politely)

and you

don’t

understand—do you)

as the people (you call people)

turn upside down

with their spectacles

danglingfromnoses

and their

words are

(no) longer

yours

what is it you’re asking?

—who’s in charge?

why do the walls bend?

(they answer with teethless

mouths&

the sky is wearing gloves)

something’s happening here (but you)

stand squarely at the edge

of anunreadable sentence

like a comma lost

&

forgotten

they point at you

—mr man( but you)

—can’t) see

the water tastes backwards

the mirrors hum like bees

oh (mr man who asks all the

wrongquestions)

you’ve never known

how to break the glass, have you?

Zowweeeee! Phantasmagorical run cummings-style images until like a mirror hums the mind! And speaking of breaking the glass, here’s fictional cyber world Sylvia Plath’s introspective take on that anodyne Patti Page classic, “(How Much Is ) That Doggie in the Window?”

The Glass Cage

How much is that puppy in the window,

That breath fogs the glass like a ghost?

His eyes, black coals, like mine,

Searching for something soft, something warm.

I stand outside, hands cold,

Pressed against this invisible wall.

The bark is muffled, a distant scream,

The tail, a metronome ticking down time.

Does he know the cage he’s in?

Do I?

The leash, red as blood, loops like a noose,

I wonder who will choke first.

How much to free him from this prison?

How much to free me from mine?

This waggly tale doesn’t really do Plath justice, so I do hope that doggie’s wholesale.

Maybe Marcel Proust’s transformation of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” into an intricate meditation on solitude, nostalgia, and the fragility of human experience will snap us back to that lazy, hazy, crazy Combray daze of madeleines dipped in tea and going to bed early. Best take your protein pills and put your helmet on:

The Recollection of Major Tom

Upon that singular morning, bathed in a pale and delicate light, a light which seemed to hesitate between the cusp of dawn and the yawning expanse of endless time, Major Tom, now estranged from the mundane rhythms of life below, found himself not so much in motion but in a suspended state of existence, drifting between what was once his and what could never again be touched by mortal hands.

He stood—or perhaps it would be better said, he floated—within the capsule of his solitude, as the familiar voices of those who remained on Earth, distant yet persistent, called to him. “Major Tom,” they intoned, as though the mere utterance of his name could bind him to the world he had already begun to forget. “Can you hear me, Major Tom?”

And he, in a moment that stretched beyond comprehension, reflected, not on the machinery around him—those cold, mechanical levers and dials that signified the marvels of human progress—but on the most fragile, ephemeral details of his past. The scent of his mother’s garden, where the roses, in their own unfathomable defiance, blossomed year after year, the feel of the summer wind—was it truly summer, or had he only dreamed it?—that once caressed his skin.

How strange, he mused, that in this moment of infinite departure, where the stars themselves seemed indifferent to his fate, it was these moments of childhood that returned to him, fleeting memories that had remained dormant within him until the vastness of space unlocked them. For is it not the case, he thought, that in leaving Earth, one cannot help but confront the totality of it, the weight of all that has been lived and, in leaving, forgotten?

“Commencing countdown,” they said, a phrase so perfunctory, so devoid of poetry, and yet it lingered in the air, like a final note that refuses to resolve. “Engines on.” A signal to the body that it must move forward, even as the soul, burdened by its own hesitations, lingers in the threshold.

And then, the words that came not from the machine, nor from the voice below, but from within him, a voice soft, almost wistful, as though spoken in the faintest whisper: Here am I, floating in a tin can, far above the world. How absurd, and yet how deeply true, that in this moment of technological triumph, he should feel not the elation of progress but the profound solitude of existence itself.

Below him, the Earth—blue, fragile, seemingly suspended like a thought unformed—receded into a memory, already beginning to fade from view. And in that distance, he saw not the world as it was, but as it had always existed within him, coloured by the shifting hues of time and perception.

And as the stars beckoned, not with the brilliance of adventure but with the quiet, eternal indifference that had greeted all travellers before him, Major Tom wondered if perhaps it was in this very isolation, this profound and silent withdrawal from the noise of life, that he had always sought—though unconsciously—a way to return to the essence of things. To that place where memory, time, and being coalesce into one endless, spiralling moment.

The final transmission came, though its words were barely discernible now, filtered through the vast, insurmountable distance that lay between him and all he had once known: “Can you hear me, Major Tom?” And yet, the answer, though he did not speak it, was already known to him.

For he had not left the Earth; the Earth had simply slipped away from him, and in its place, he found not the stars, but the vast, uncharted spaces of his own mind.

Don’t know about you, but I’m floating in a most peculiar way. Look! That must be Balbec down below.

Now suppose Harry Nilsson’s novelty song “Coconut” — the one about a woman calling an annoyed doctor about becoming sick after drinking a mixture of lime juice and coconut milk — had appeared in the King James Version of the Bible. (BTW, if you were hoping for a song reference in this blog that doesn’t predate Joe Clark’s prime ministership, you took a wrong turn at Albuquerque):

The Parable of the Fruit and the Draught

And it came to pass, that there was a certain woman,

Who took of the fruit of the tree, even a coconut,

And she did break it open, and poured out its milk,

And with it did she mix a potion, yea, even a draught of lime.

And she called unto her brother, saying,

“Lo, I have prepared a drink for thee,

Take thou the coconut, and mix it with lime,

And drink thereof, and thou shalt be refreshed.”

But the man, being sore vexed, did cry out,

“O, what affliction is this that hath come upon me?

For I have drunk of the cup thou gavest me,

And now my belly doth ache greatly.”

Then the woman said unto him,

“Go, thou, and call upon the physician,

And say unto him, ‘I have taken of the coconut and the lime,

And mixed them together, yet I am unwell.’ ”

And the man did as his sister commanded,

And he went unto the physician,

And spake, saying, “Lo, I have drunk of the coconut,

And I have mixed it with lime, and now I am sore afflicted.”

But the physician, hearing these words, did reply,

“Verily, I say unto thee, drink thou another,

Mix thou the coconut with the lime once more,

And drink, and thy belly shall be made whole.”

And the man did as the physician bade him,

And he drank of the coconut and the lime,

And behold, he was made whole from that very hour.

Thus, the woman said unto her brother,

“Did I not tell thee, drink of the coconut,

And mix it with lime, and all shall be well?”

And the saying went forth unto all the land,

“Take thou the coconut, and mix it with lime,

And drink thereof, and be thou refreshed.”

Can I get an amen?

For our penultimate number, AI Shakespeare retools “She Loves You”:

She Doth Love Thee

Hark! Good sir, I bring thee news of love,

A tale that flies on Cupid’s wings above.

Thine own fair maid, whose heart thou thought forsook,

Still holds thee dear—oh, cast thy troubled look!

Chorus:

She doth love thee, yea, yea, yea,

She doth love thee, yea, yea, yea,

She doth love thee, and glad thou shouldst be,

For thus her heart, it beats for thee.

Thou sayest once her eyes did turn away,

And in thine ear a cold denial lay,

But list! She weeps for what was done in haste,

Her love for thee, my friend, hath not laid waste.

Chorus:

She doth love thee, yea, yea, yea,

She doth love thee, yea, yea, yea,

She doth love thee, and glad thou shouldst be,

For thus her heart, it beats for thee.

Perchance thy pride hath cast a shade of doubt,

But mark, her love is true, within, without.

She bade me speak, to tell thee of her grief,

That thou mightst come and grant her heart’s relief.

Chorus:

She doth love thee, yea, yea, yea,

She doth love thee, yea, yea, yea,

She doth love thee, and glad thou shouldst be,

For thus her heart, it beats for thee.

Go to her now, and make amends, sweet friend,

For love’s sweet course should ne’er untimely end.

Embrace her with a kiss and kind regard,

For in thy hands, she’s placed her tender card.

Final Chorus:

She doth love thee, yea, yea, yea,

She doth love thee, yea, yea, yea,

She doth love thee, and now thou dost see,

That thus her heart, it beats for thee.

There was a time when, as Claudius says in Hamlet, “words without thoughts never to heaven go.” But given the celestial virtuosity evinced by the alien, algorithmic intelligence we’ve created and which progressively outstrips us in ways we can’t control or even imagine, I’m not sure this still applies. Glad thou shouldst be, yea, yea, yea, but methinks also a tad sad.

Fey frivolity is one thing but the usual suspects have Brainiac 5 working overtime on security breaches and weapons development. As Dr. Seuss soberly reminded us in his cover version of Barry McGuire’s Eve of Destruction:

Oh, the bombs are a-banging, the rockets go zoom,

And the gloom in the air feels like gathering doom.

From the cities to valleys, the whispers they spread,

Of a planet in peril, filled with dread.

“Why can’t we be friendly?” the young ones all cry,

But the old folks just frown, and the answers are shy.

With a whir and a whirl, the machines hum their tune,

While the shadows grow long beneath a dark moon.

Whether the tunes hummed by AI machinery are the product of authentic, honest-to-goodness thought, or ever will be, remains up for debate. Whether humans remain the otiose fools in old-style hats and coats that we’ve always been is pretty much a given.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.