Love Thy Bruises

A sunburned reflection on what is human while listening to the radio in eastern NC on the eve of A-I.

“That is creeeeeeee—----epy.” Jean is leaning forward with a very serious look in her eye hunching over boney, band-aided knees.  We’re driving, listening to an NPR story about the capacity of A-I to surveil us; robots can find any car anywhere in the world in a matter of minutes.  Even my seven-year-old shudders at the existential questions at hand.  

“Why would we teach robots to be smarter than we are?” she asks me.

“Technology is always used for good and for bad,” is what I can muster.  It’s a world full of man-made problems, even to the sandy kid in the backseat, who is now rolling the window up and down with a single button, thinking it over. 

Jean and I are Sunday driving with one of the best of human feelings – the afterglow of a beach weekend. We are languid, salty, sunburned.  The back of the truck is outfitted for summer: a stash of blankets, a box of suits and sunscreen, shoes, snacks.  Sand is all over the car.  We are ready for anything.  For two days, we’ve thrown ourselves at waves and dug holes that refill immediately, all for no reason but laughter. Jean passes out with her chin pointed to the sky and her mouth open like a fish.  She is the messy, sun-loved color of happy.  

The particularly human experience I’ve had at the beach is aging.  My calf popped as I raced children in the sand.  The mechanics of muscle and tendon were suddenly a new and exquisite map of the intricacies of walking.  It felt like a miracle to simply hobble the toe-to-heel the next morning without pain shooting up my leg like a video game.  Undeterred, I decided to go surfing and was popped in the nose by the board as the ocean put me through its washing machine.   

“Are you ok, Mama?”  Jean realized my nose was bleeding though I was trying to hide it. 

I’ve never been in a fist fight; my nose hurt like hell. “You should see the other guy!” I lied brightly.

She held my hand, watching closely. “I don’t mean to be rude, Mama, but they’re not gonna ask us back if you keep getting hurt.”  Jean: kind, considered, always real. 

I’m limping home, now, happy, with a black eye. Transient, frail, almost fifty – I am a collection of found experiences plus love given away. Guaranteed uncertainty. Without an answer. Softer than a surfboard.

“I’ve had a really good life, so far,” Jean told our friends across the dinner table, passing the salad, nodding her freckled head.

Tired, tan, having overheard my daughter say she’s happy — nothing more human than that swollen contentment.  

In eastern North Carolina, religious stations outnumber the rest of the dial.  A man tells me about why there is so much anger in the world.  He is certain there is one way forward, for everyone — one way to live, one way to atone, one way to live forever.  Is it human to pretend to have an answer?  Is it human to selectively choose when to behave humanely and when to abandon compassion?  For all our tenderness, we are also distinguished by our cruelty, our inability to value what it is that makes us human.  Fingerprints, dreams, feelings, mistakes – none of it has much currency in the world.   Will we really be able to distinguish ourselves as better than robots for simply “being human” in the future?  

 I flip the radio stations through a sonic kaleidoscope of our bruises, questions, errors; stories of people hurting people, songs about made up answers, over and over again.  I wish they seemed alien to me. 

“Is the news real, Mama?”  Jean asked me once, during the pandemic. 

“Yes, baby.”  I told her quietly.  

“THAT. IS. CRAZY.”  She was shocked. 

As she is sleeping now on a 2023 afternoon, the summer seems like something to savor, on the eve of new questions and emergencies looming but not yet arrived.  A jazz station plays a Black man singing a century-old blues song that might have come out of the very fields I’m flying by, or the dark water under bridges just ahead and behind.  

The distance between two highway billboards is about how long I figure it will take for A-I to ingest this bluesman’s entire catalog and spit out an imitation. If in line with historical systems, the bluesman doesn’t own his catalog and his family isn’t benefiting from whatever attention he gets these days. (Bessie Smith’s family famously sued Columbia Records during her resurgence during the Civil Rights movement;  the court found that even though the record company was guilty of manipulating her out of royalties, the statute of limitations had run out, though the money had not.) On this abandoned highway, at this mile marker, I suppose he DOES own his catalog.  If this radio spin were a play on a streaming platform, the bluesman would make $00.003 cents.  A million plays later, he’s made $3000.00.  Is this really the best we can do for the human soundtrack we live our lives to?  The hazy farmland marked with No Trespassing, No Fishing signs reminds me this is not a new song.  Accounting history, humans refuse to choose people over money.   Is that an inhumane human trait?  Or is that human?  A quarter turn on the sonic kaleidoscope, a quarter mile down the next road:  a robot has no right to a royalty; royalties are only for human creation.  A-I generated music relinquishes streaming services from copyright payments; why would ANYBODY help their users distinguish what is human originality from royalty-free robot content? A-I will be centered on every playlist.  While there are amazing advances through technology at hand, I fear we are about to do wrong by this bluesman AGAIN. 

“And that’s just the beginning,” I say aloud. “Again.”  The speculative fear in my voice – part radio pastor, part truth-telling old song – falls plaintively, without a listener, just a mother on a hot Sunday talking to herself, driving homeward into the future. 

I’m writing something about a century’s worth of questions about how we listen to and consume music, and how it influences the course of my own artistic path.  I don’t know what it is yet. Thank you to ANNIE KOPPES for her amazing research on Bessie Smith vs. Columbia Records.  Thank you for reading.   X t

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