Rilke's retelling of the Orpheus myth shifts the focus from Orpheus's power over death to a more nuanced exploration of the relationship between art and reality in several key ways. Instead of concentrating on Orpheus's abilities, Rilke emphasizes Eurydice's transition into a realm beyond human comprehension. Rather than being a passive figure that Orpheus attempts to retrieve, Eurydice, in Rilke's version, represents an "inward, subjective dimension of existence" that exists outside the reach of life and art.
Rilke's decision to shift the focus from Orpheus to Eurydice in his poetry reveals a profound statement about the nature of poetry itself. By highlighting the limits of language in capturing Eurydice's essence, Rilke suggests that poetry, while powerful, operates within inherent boundaries. This reimagining of Eurydice transforms her into a symbol of the limitations of art in its pursuit of capturing the fullness of being. By shifting the narrative's center of gravity from Orpheus to Eurydice, and by reimagining their relationship, Rilke uses the myth to examine the limitations of art in confronting profound, existential realities, particularly death.
In this post, I’m adding one more shift for you to consider: an examination of the limitations of language in capturing the reality of the human condition.
The podcast above is AI-generated—in its entirety. This is not an attempt to trick you, the reader, or to capitalize on the intellectual work of the source writer. (I’ve linked the original work below, check out the book online or see if your local library has a copy). I was immediately curious about Professor Charles Segal’s essay because it probed a complex relationship that interests me too; the relationship between the poet and the poem. The book also caught my attention because I recently watched KAOS on Netflix. I put some notes in my phone, as usual, to make a post about it later because I figured there was at least one geek out there who would be as inspired by the intersections of classic myths and their mediums (e.g., the poet, the TV show, the computer).
The podcast above was created using Google’s new LLM, Notebooks. It’s still in beta testing now (free), but it’s surprisingly good. Think: ChatGPT meets Perplexity meets Invideo.
AI is not human. (repeat that to yourself as many times as necessary).
AI is a machine like the camera used to shoot KAOS or the television screen you watch it on. The medium (this blog post, the poem, the oral myths Ovid translated into language for us) has always mattered, in the telling and re-telling of stories.
For me, the artist’s relationship with AI should be no different. It is a new medium we, as artists, should be curious about. In the short podcast above, AI is a translator attempting to add humanness to a mechanical function—the assignment word meaning based on values assigned in numeric code (zeros and ones). The arrangement of words matters, the white space matters, and the line breaks matter. Poetry is still beyond the grasp of AI because, similar to language translations where a word in English does not exist like it does in Japanese, there are meanings in language that the AI cannot understand. We can continue to teach it to mimic us and all our complex desires, memories, traumas, and loves—but it will never really have a word for understanding the great meaning of love as a person married fifty years does. Or the meaning of grief as a mother who buried her child understands.
In summary—I remain an optimist about AI because as it evolves, it reminds me that poetry remains necessary.
In your opinion, how did the AI podcast do in terms of ‘translating’ these rather dense concepts Segal analyzed about the re-telling of the classic Ovid myth?
Read the Book
Orpheus: the Myth of the Poet, Charles Segal (The Johns Hopkins University Press 1993)
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