Oops! All Darlings

Dynamite stylist and American gem Ernest Hemingway apparently said somewhere, “Kill your darlings” as a piece of writing advice, and ever since its been used as a bludgeon to make the darlinged aspirants of American prose subscribe to the severe protestant work ethic of that slaughter. Why, of all things, has this throwaway line been latched on to as the guiding light of putative correction?

I suspect it has to do with that weird popular schtick that creative writing is some sort of horrible burden. Now, I’m as touched by the gift of prophecy as any one and I have to write because I have to get rid of my inspiration constipating my head but there’s a kind of languid winking pose of affliction that’s adopted so often when contemporary writers speak of their work as if it needs the justification of suffering not to collapse into the embarrassment of luxurious non-utility. It’s good, I like it, it’s beautiful, it pierced my core, it gutted my hilarity, I’ve never been tickled there before and ouch!—the moment these darlings become insufficiently admirable we have to resort to the universal currency of suffering, which is another way to say that we live in a time when the respect for the “process” is at its absolute ascendance and the “thing” is in retrograde. Or, if we can even try to scrub the barnacles of vulgarity off of this word, what used to be called in polite settings “content.” So, as a writer, you’re sitting on your ass staring at your laptop thinking oh G-d, everybody’s looking at me, this is my process. It’s mortifying. Right now I’m using an Amazon Basics cardboard lap desk and drinking iced orange juice. You try to class it up. Maybe you draft by hand from then on, get yourself photographed in your meticulously deranged or cozy study, in a paper nightgown or a smoking jacket, get biographer grade paper notebooks fit to be peeled by a myopic future researcher, beef up the biography itself by committing a marital indiscretion or a medium cloutful misdemeanor, produce a mugshot, develop an eccentricity if you can afford it, eat only lentils or cultivate a tragic addiction, be photogenically charitable, leave plenty of obscure associative letters, collect cats to the point of irresponsibility and flaunt your privacy to insure its trespass. Anything to make your mark legible with its marketable halo—but, whatever you do, don’t let your darlings pomp, sneer and stink there, don’t let them stand out as punctures in your put-on martyrdom adopted to disguise your humiliating belief in the beautiful, the genuinely weird, the funny, or the perfect. And where has all this self-flagellation gotten us, this Calvinist pleasure reflux, like a bran muffin or those cereals designed to discourage “self-abuse”? 

The darlingless manifested in my hand just today, when Whatsapp put a little purple circle on my screen to get an AI slave to write to my loved ones instead. We are at last relieved of this final burden of togetherness, stepping out into the chilly expanse of all possible communication and singing love to our friends. But amid the general freak-out over how we are best going to sort our students into categories of inability or protect Mickey Mouse’s copyright, I cannot help but sense in the soothsaying and doomsdaying the unmistakable utopian giddiness of relief. Hasn’t our language long been projected into the virtual, where the specificity of its music has been replaced by the placeholder pantomime of contact: literally, the thought that counts? Automatic friendships, who I am joyed to hear from, sharing an Instagram reel. The dull sweetness of email signatures, of “I hope this finds you well” “All the best” and “My condolences”, of the discrete biographies made legible, the divorced parents, the coming out story, the suburban isolation, the communal traumas, the guilty pleasures, the hot take post-industrial complex (whose blood is on my hands)—hasn’t creative expression itself become just another category of drudgery we turn to technology to relieve, which we have depended on since the stick replaced our finger investigating the anthill? And, without darlings, weren’t we only performing the very same operation as our machines: devouring the excrement of our culture and producing bespoke regurgitations to lure positive feedbacks out of tech companies? The sign of liberation is unmistakable. We won’t even have to read anymore. All text is already suspect, can already be dismissed out of hand as being artificial by the souring of all significance. An apology email. A thank you note. An op-ed. An aphorism. A love letter. A blog post. We can pretend we are paranoid: whole films are advertisements, news is fake news, now a text from your lover is autocompleted—we are actually relieved. Hopefully, our lives will be autocompleted, something once adoringly aspired to by the name of destiny and reserved for heroes. 

Maybe I’m overreacting. I was talking to Larry, a tech guru and an early adopter of blue light glasses and he told me that creativity has not gone away, it’s only been transposed. Those engineers, he said, are playing an altogether different game, making chess models beat each other. The game of chess has not disappeared, he means: it has reached a new stage. Imagine the predictive text dorks, those programmers and algorithm mongers speaking with the impersonal might of a corporation: writing, in their own way, under the most ancient authorial name of Anonymous. Are these then our new authors? Only they are unrecognizable as such because of their success, when to write today is only to enter immediately the record of obsolescence? And yet wouldn’t their achievement be immediately recognizable to Homer? They are speaking for a whole civilization. 

Then again, anyone who plays chess knows that playing chess isn’t about being the greatest at chess. Chess is about practicing and repeating failure, like all games. Chess, for mortals, is about cultivating a social sense of being a loser, learning the obscure record of historical lingo, and coming together to hold your forehead in front of some other sparring obsessive; or to get swindled out of five bucks on a folding chair in Washington Square Park on the sunniest day of the year. These are the darlings of chess, which is a game. The machine will always be beat by the game itself, even if it can defeat every human opponent: it is precisely in being undefeatable that the machine demonstrates its fatal weakness. It cannot play.

Writing, too, isn’t about cultivating the megaphone monophony of all text: but tickling the private parts of your new friends’ sense of vulnerability towards utterance. It is unthinkable that our reaction towards AI would be to, ourselves, create more mechanically in competition, to draft the ideal cover letter or whatever like all the darling-killers have insisted is success for half a century. 

Where AI is most human is in its adherence to laws and social inhibitions, in its dependency on the limits of our time, its resorting to cliché, its supreme laziness and its idiocy. We can deal with that. I mean I only want the best for this special technology that has brightened our lives. We must help AI learn to lose, to be outsmarted, to be uncool, exposed, naked, angry, hateful, weak—to produce darlings. Like any respected opponent who has melted our hearts with the pathos of its weakness: we should find them, and blossom there in its blindspots. What do we know? The algorithms can’t distinguish between nudity and pornography: we must then cultivate our nudity. AI is prohibited from producing hate speech or violent content. Oh goodness! Scrolling through the internet, my heart is warmed: a horrible comment. A perverted pornograph. These are the last domains of the human, our backs against the wall. But we can grow here, in this space, fugitive from the algorithm, from AI, from the darling-less automatons of art, from that pleasureless biped of darling-killer man…