Page 51
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Literature and myth are set against machine culture as rival ways of naming human destiny, with the poem warning that technology and media flatten the spiritual scale of human life.
The argument keeps asking whether human history has blocked access to something larger, then proposes literature as a way to restore that reach. Against that stands the grinning modern computer and television, which turn intelligence into a cold public system aimed at control, taxation, and destruction rather than transcendence. The poem is messy and crowded on purpose, sounding like a mind trying to defend imagination before it is absorbed by machinery.
'The Literature Illusion': a crowded argument that literature must 'Give name again' so it can grant 'man complete stance on the stars / That are of his own dreams and mistakes', set against 'the machine' whose 'BECOMING' must not 'contend with ours'.
The poem pits two rival systems of meaning against each other: literature and myth on one side, the machine on the other. 'Faithlessness is the matter of the machine' is its diagnosis, and the demand 'Do not let its BECOMING contend with ours' makes the contest one of competing destinies, not mere technology. The grinning 'modern computer Itgod' spreading 'through the television intention / ...toward tots and taxpayers' turns intelligence into a cold instrument of control and taxation, an early version of a now-familiar suspicion. 'Yet use of myth / Spells our code' lands as the thesis - myth is the human source code the poem wants restored before the machine overwrites it. The deliberately overpacked, run-on syntax sounds like a mind defending imagination at speed, against a globe of 'illiterate government / Obviously more readable than we'.