every day do something that won't compute

This week, I harvested some gorgeous collards that I grew from seed. I cooked them with pork belly following instructions from Edna Lewis’ book, In Pursuit of Flavor. I ate them with pinto beans, chow chow and cornbread, and I froze the pot likker for soup later.

I am neither an expert gardener nor a fantastic cook, but I really, really enjoy the doing of both of those things. Plus, I spent a fun evening last winter with my friend Emily paging through catalogs to pick out the seeds that grew into those greens, my friend Agnes watered the collards while I traveled and regularly ups my gardening game with her hints and tips, my boyfriend Jay was the one who suggested we start cooking with Edna in the first place, and he ate that beautiful dinner with me.

That plate is filled with the joy of moving at the pace of reality.

I’ve got another anti-AI screed brewing in me this week, thanks to Google’s nefarious announcements and the Pope’s barn burner of an encyclical. But I learned a long time ago that the best argument against something is to be a living witness to the possibilities of an alternative.

So much as it depends on me, I do not and will not use AI. Every new fact I learn about it - its merciless development, extractive economics, insatiable energy demands, dumbing usage effects, ugly products and utter lack of human intuition, humor and genius - makes me even more ornery about this commitment.

Here’s what I’m doing, instead: growing things from seed. Asking human beings wiser than I am for advice when I get stuck. Buying a used cookbook by a culinary luminary and experiment with her methods. Building margin into my life to deal with thorny problems best solved with time, effort and attention. Learning to bake bread, which simply refuses optimization and requires a lot of waiting and a lot of failure. Reading writers who have spent their lives honing a craft that can only be done by beings who understand what it is to laugh so hard you cry or cry so long you start laughing. Asking you out to lunch and leaving my phone in the car. Throwing away my stupid FitBit in favor of an analog watch that won’t cache my heart rate into a massive dataset used for god only knows what purposes. Watching the great blue heron fish in the river out my window. Foraging for serviceberries by the soccer fields. Making jam. Saying hello to my neighbors when I pass them in the stairwell, even - especially - when their heads are buried in their phones. Lifting weights. Climbing mountains. Trying and failing and trying and failing and trying again to write my own book full of words. Praying. Figuring out what I’ll do with my one wild and precious life. Sitting with some Wendell Berry:

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

(Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front)