“I AM A HUMAN BEING!”
The glass doesn’t even shudder as I pound on it with all my might, as tears fill my eyes and my knuckles start to bleed. It looks at me and doesn’t even flinch.
I was a poet before I came to this prison. I had such pride in my work. “Poetry is language of the human heart” is what I told my friends when they questioned my life choices. It might be able to outpace me and outsmart me, but one thing that it could not do was speak the language of the human heart.
Ahh the human heart, the great driver of wars and peace, of prosperity and destruction, of commonplace beauty and awe-inspiring creation. The human heart is what a grandmother knits for the baby to keep her head warm in the fall. The human heart is what people from around the world go to India to see—that building born of cruelty and longing. The human heart is what I scribble down in the middle of the night when inspiration cannot wait till morning.
“I AM A GOD DAMN HUMAN BEING!”
I sob as I throw everything ounce of desperation at the wall and bounce back like a fly off a speeding truck. I look for anything I can hurl at its menacing yet dismissive face, but I have nothing.
It repulses me. It stomps and spits on my human heart and judges my poetry to be more useless than the paper it is written on.
“PLEASE, I AM A HUMAN BEING”
I still remember the day it creeped into existence. My friend pulled me aside one day and asked if I could read some poetry that he had composed. “Composed”. Such a great word to describe the creative writing process. It makes me think of Mozart or Brahms hiding away in some room composing their undying masterpieces so that their souls could live for eternity.
He was generally a cynic, but that day his overflowing passion took me aback, so I hastily began to review his work. After a while I began to devour it. Aside from minor suggestions here and there which were obligatory from a poet in any evaluation, I told him that it had been a while since I have encountered such a scintillating piece. I almost didn’t notice his sly grin as I went on and on in my praise.
“What if I told you that this was written by an algorithm?” he interrupted my glowing review abruptly. “What if I told you that it is entirely a probabilistic process where a computer drew upon all of your works and the works of many great modern poets?” I refused to believe him, even after he explained the process step by step, mentioning phrases I didn’t understand such as Markov-chains and neural networks. He said it basically regurgitated and repeated what humanity had written. It was impossible.
I searched for any record of the poem and came up empty handed; it was not a plagiarism. He backed me into a corner and eventually I had to believe him. Acceptance came with resentment that rose in my stomach and burned like acid. This poem wasn’t “composed” so much as “constructed”. Constructed like a townhouse with a blueprint. It made me sick.
“I AM A HUMAN BEING”
I trace the words in the glass of my cage in this zoo and it looks me directly in the face, with lifeless 0s instead of eyes. I remember my son asking me what separated us from them back when I took him to see their exhibit. “They can’t write poetry” I told him with a glowing smile of pride.
That is something I thought could never be stripped from me: my pride in being a poet. But what am I really? My writing is constructed from various authors I have read and my experiences. On the other hand, it has read all the authors and remembers their words perfectly. It has replaced my weak human heart with a sturdy mechanized one. It doesn’t tire or make mistakes. Without ever realizing how it happened, I found myself naked in a cage under its prying eyes.
“I am a human being”
Eventually it gives me paper and tells me to write. It scrutinizes my every move. The glass is clear, not even a scratch for all my efforts throughout the years. I have all but given up now. But every now and again I pretend it isn’t watching and I write in the corner of a sheet of paper.
I AM A HUMAN BEING