Heavenly/Primordial Discomfort

It's hard, but it's way more fun

This week I got a bit carried away with peeling back the layers of the new AI tech that can write essays, and songs, and tell stories, and the like.

Right in the middle of it, (and right as we finished the final recording for the folk opera), I suffered the most extraordinary migraine, (out of the hundreds I’ve had, this was the doozy - I couldn’t take any pain medication because the headache nausea wouldn’t keep it down).

Out there in that fierce desert, I contemplated, and wrestled, with what I had written about toil and discomfort, as part of the human birthright. And came out on the other side, more dedicated than ever to offer up my folk opera to you, for which we have uprooted, pilgrimaged, met near and ancient ancestors, and rooted more deeply, in the place where all of my running began.

I suppose AI could be given the data of that artistic alchemical process… the family tramping across the wilds of the highlands, the ancestral visitations and healings, the shift of selling our beloved farm, the homecoming to the escarpment under whose mysterious gaze, I was born. Maybe it’s just more human arrogance to suggest otherwise.

Everything that breathes is a breather of the breath of the Maker.

Ah well, here is a bit of rubbish I wrote about the whole business:

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Once upon a time, Beauty was conceived in a mysterious friction, a ternary emptiness, and bubbled over into material density. And within this density, an incredible story was able to begin.

Vast changes in the deep expanse, pressed for more and more life, and within that, more and more death, extinctions... and so on.

Conscious connections began, between and within, various life forms. And at one point, loving arms embraced another, because they wept. (Sure, complexity isn't always better, but it is also unwise to be too reductive about the mystery of a mother's love, for instance.)

And out from the ages, wood was not only transformed into fire, but into vibrant, sonorous beings - magicked into becoming the whales and dolphins of human culture. And the shapes of mouths became resonant sound holes, expressing fertile hope, for all the many seeds, and pollens, and paints, and possibilities.

Well, with possibility, always comes various possible graver outcomes. Trajectories whose ramifications rumble and ripple out in rings of devastation.

Eventually... especially in a corner of the world called Europe, after most of the tribes had been colonized, and after the soaring heights of a bottom up... then eventually a top down... renaissance, pixels and staccatos emerged to reflect a growing fragmentation. Suggesting we are not made of the stuff of stars to coalesce with ecosystems, but that a machine is behind all this ... and has built us, and all of life, dot by dot, for the purpose of utility.

In that framework, and for a good while now, much of the world has toiled ... as slaves, as farmers, artists, fisherfolk, boat people, land people, makers, builders, students, teachers, miners. And from the pain of yearning for some forgotten inheritance, (and equally, from the fear of remembering it), we often choose a rigid way, to either confront, or to stay the course that was set for us.

All puritanism comes from pain.

Puritanism needs acceptable language. It needs perfect track records. It sniffs out hidden unacceptable meanings in rock songs... and in ancient folk tales. It embraces surveillance of the other. It refuses to be made... uncomfortable.

On this continent (that we currently call North America), great emphasis and pressure was placed on the effort and toil of cultivating cash crops after WWI... which brought on the dust bowl. And in the coming years, two movements bred a new 'mother of inventions': "flee to the city - anything but farming". And "we will use the technologies of war on gardens and animals." No more toiling. We can finally separate the good from the bad, and enjoy enough comfort, that facing our own shortcomings can be mysteriously outsourced, and we’ll forget that when we flush the toilet, our shit still has to go somewhere.

A couple of days ago, I chimed in about AI songwriting, by saying a few things, and sharing a quote from Nick Cave’s response, Red Hand Files Issue #218. I said, “it doesn’t surprise me that we find ourselves here, because we have failed to offer actual arts education, and unbridled storytelling, for many decades. We are not taught nuance or staying with discomfort. So it makes sense that in the age of tech we would hand over an immense birthright - the act of plunging into unknown depths, to the point of a kind of death - to the machine. In place of radical dedication, and grit, and magic, we get a cheap, near pornographic quicky, that will not heal us, but will certainly haunt us.”

In Nick Cave’s piece, he puts an emphasis on how much shortcomings are part of good songwriting. Like my great friend and teacher James Finley saying, “the poverty of the practice, is the richness of the practice.” This is such a foreign notion now: that grace really graces us through our willingness to stay with something disturbing, through facing our own mistakes and imperfections. It is when we are stirred like a cauldron that we overflow with something that wasn’t quite there before.

This unwillingness to give our time in this way, this legitimate fear of disrupting the surface of our own waters, this aversion to being dedicated to the kind of discomfort that produces beauty, causes me to intuit something deeper at work here:

Puritanism in all its forms.

These puritanisms (the old and the neo) that are now very much shield to shield, require art to hang out in the excruciatingly narrow crack between.

The act of songwriting itself can help us to bear the tension.

To write a song requires us to carry a lump of gold, a story, through an impossibly narrow gate. It is a quest. It asks of us struggle, patience, commitment, humility (sometimes even humiliation). It sometimes asks of us a total shift in direction, and a surrender to outcomes, and expectations. It asks us to make friends in unlikely places. To get comfortable with the shape of our groaning, kissing, mouth.

And that’s just the songwriting.

Would my voice have delivered in the same way if I hadn’t had to make friends with the chronic pain that rears up especially when I wear headphones?

I don’t believe any Psalm was ever written in the comfort zone.

Another point I haven't raised yet is inherent sovereignty.

Watch two documentaries: Tricky Dick and the Man in Black, and Who Shot the Sheriff?

Now... imagine if the world leaders who were trying to manipulate Johnny Cash and Bob Marley, were instead working with a famous AI holograph star, whose songs are also written by AI. When Richard Nixon sent Johnny Cash the set list he wanted, Johnny had a choice about which songs he would actually play. He had a choice about travelling to Vietnam to play for the soldiers, and bear witness to the story. He had a choice about stepping in between, and a choice about tapping into the deeper wisdom and authority, beyond the surface energies of protest.

When, in the middle of one of his most electrifying, transcendent, performances, Bob Marley holds the hands of the corrupt white men who represented opposing political parties at civil war in Jamaica, he literally became a conduit for reconciling love.

This is where we are at, and why I am talking about it.

As the legendary Nigerian musical master Fela Kuti said, “Music is a spiritual thing. If you play with music you will die young. See ‘cause when the Higher Forces give you music, musicianship, it must be well-used, for the good of humanity. If you use it for your own self, by deceiving people, or doing this, you will die young. And I’ve told people this many times.”

Now, something that cannot die is playing with this deeply spiritual force. This is the trajectory of the cosmology of a mechanized, pixelated, utilitarian reality.

So far, I have used technology (even to the point of befriending streaming algorithms), to empower myself to be an interdependent artist, and through that, I get the honour and pleasure of a certain amount of sovereignty (working within limits of finances, and my own humanity). I have a choice about what I write about and when I perform what I write. I have the birthright of waking up from a disruptive dream with the gift of a song, or being prodded by an ancestor to tell a story, or in a feverish state, being visited by mysterious resonances.

When people try to suggest that synth music or any form of tech is the same thing as AI, I just can't see it as the same. Kate Bush, a songwriter for whom I have deep respect and awe, revolutionized and disrupted our inner worlds using her own genius, and her voice, and synth sounds. She has magicked her soul and her embodiment into everything she's ever made.

I would also say to any skeptic who wishes to note how much art begets art: it is true… art begets art. But for it to tend to us humans, in the most divine conscious animal sense of the word, (and I dare say for it to tend to plants and cows and other beings) it must never completely sever ties with the discomfort of the primordial.

There is a story about an enormously technically proficient guitar player visiting the Delta blues region. And when he's sitting with guitar players, (some of whom didn't know musical theory), no matter how hard he tries, he can't get the tone or the feel, that these guys could. When he asked what he had to do to be able to play like that, he was told to put his guitar down for a good while, go get his heart broken, and then see what happens when he picks it up. And here's another thing, you can't actually control going through heartbreak or descent, (like a young monk who would try for the quick and contrived way to spiritual enlightenment...) it has to happen organically and unplanned.

Part of the great problem of the Anthropocene, is this notion of outsourcing as the “solution” to this “cancer” called “human”. We have now arrived at the place where in our pain, and often in a contrived self-depricating-righteousness, we think we can transfer our very selves into eternal digital life, and up and out of the great circle we have mistaken for a pyramid.

Being an instrument of vulnerability... this birthright of the common cold, or a stomach flu, or the birth pangs of the gift of life (and death), or facing our own sordid histories with humility and care...

or the sovereignty to choose our own setlist...

to write the poem that could get us killed...

to sing that primordial naming song to the flesh of our flesh,

to glow and pulse with life,

I do not think these can be outsourced, or severed from the Primordial, without expecting a very dire, beyond Orwellian outcome.

So… I say… here’s to a world where not only songwriters embrace their wild birthright and get uncomfortable, and toil to squander their gift as though it’s not scarce… but everybody… painters, and dancers, and storytellers, and listeners, and the quiet ones, and the drummers, and playing children, and playing grown-ups, and poets, and fisherfolk, and accountants, and carpenters, and yes… app creators, anyone no matter, who has ever dreamt (in their wildest most hidden dreams) of joining a true circus…

where we are able to handsomely pay string ensembles to bask in our wild orchard gardens,

where flowers eat our dry bones to dance again,

where bees pollinate wild plums with domestic plums,

where to name and be named isn't just a scientific categorization, but has also become a spell again,

where we know we are going to die,

where "the commons" doesn't mean tech giants scraping the internet and the last of the lands, to capture the last of flesh wisdom and knowledge and beauty. (You know not what you do! You're not giants... take off your martian suits, and come and lay down naked in this bed of self-heal in the garden, drink deep the sacred water without trying bottle it! And then bloody well join in and get to holy work!).

I can see it now in that crack between the shields (a crucible?), and in the hidden streams, where we check in and find the malice and self-righteousness that tries to hijack this garden meeting... this encounter... this effort... and we steep that arrogance into a tea (in our own disrupted, uncomfortable cauldrons), to fertilize the Fruits of the Spirit.

Once upon this time, I have been trying to grow, and change, and write songs, and be stirred here.

It’s fucking hard, but it’s way more fun.

Photo- here I am in a garden dedicated to peace, October 2022, at the Chalice Well, in the sacred gardens, in the vale between Chalice Hill and the Tor, Glastonbury, Somerset, England.