The next poem was written after reading a magazine
article on an airplane about a machine that you could buy.
It's about $2400.
I'm sure it's $1500 now and next year will be $750.
Putting it all within range--
some of us in the room-- and then $75 for the rest of us.
And the machine is a machine that
has goggles and a headset and hand and arm attachment
such that if you put all of this on,
you are in a virtual reality.
You can, for example, go on an African Safari
by simply getting into the three dimensional world of these--
has anyone heard of these things?
Oh, you have them even maybe.
Anyway, hope not.
Maybe it's fun.
I don't know.
It scared me.
Anyway, this is about other worlds that are created,
virtual worlds that are created.
Unlike a movie set, you may not be able to get out of this one.
You get so far in.
This is a long piece but I'm only
going to read small pieces from it called "God from a Machine."
"You put your hands on her waist,
but you are in another world.
The world is small and you see it arranged in simple angles
and diagonals, in heights and lines, steeples and domes.
Space isn't foreshortened or compromised in any way
except the whole entirely reproduced with the knowledge
that it is a suggestive world.
Out on these newly cleansed avenues,
glossy windows like magazine covers, gentle folk--
excuse me, gentle folk glide on course like soldiers.
And we enter with a view of these broad Hitlerian
promenades and a great Hall of the Reich
rising to a quarter of a kilometer.
The dome itself could fit St. Peter's into it 16 times.
On certain days its top is lost in low homogeneous clouds.
This architecture is central to our conception of ourselves
in simple geometries.
Grossly amplified reduced to a view,
nothing could be more computable.
Take the scene where you move up the avenue of victory
and go into your hotel to make love.
Our computer with a simple algorithm
will hold a mathematical model of the vast thoroughfares
while you figure out how much we see
of the splendid granites and the leafless chestnut trees
through your eyes, the windows of our tour bus.
Once through the symmetrical lobby and into the hotel,
the rendering becomes more difficult.
The more decorative the balustrades and velvet
folds of light resistant curtains become,
the more raised the ticklish pattern on the bedspread.
The more billowy a shower curtain, the more
tiered the tinkling lighting.
Most difficult of all to conceive,
to engineer, the miniature man and woman carved
of chocolate who sleep on a silver tray beside your bed.
All accoutrements personal and institutional
profoundly affects seduction as you well know.
Hearing her, you contrive a darkness
with a mere touch of the switch, erasing any further doubt
about appearances, erasing all visual distinction
between virtual and real.
And it happens; that is, you sense she's near.
She joins you from her orderly world
into your hybrid adopted culture.
But as soon as you embrace her waist,
this scenic rendezvous resumes on her terms, her spongy flesh,
her doughy lumpy plush mossy rural scene, hairy, spiny,
carsick, enameled and pitted.
Now you feel your way.
Unsure in the messy darkness you trip over,
breaking a glass nearly certain she's
left the last of her lipstick on you.
You swipe your face with the back of your hand.
Maybe it's better to see for yourself
in the world you've created.
Better in the virtual light of your invention.
So like a God from a machine, you wrestle to that light.
Probably she doesn't love you.
And she certainly doesn't stop there
at the borders of what you conceive as the affair.
She raises the curtains on the vistas below
and you have to watch yourself on any island she cares
to point out, passing a spark of divinity
with her ordinary finger.
Able it seems to move through glass, through the grid
so carefully designed by you.
Every flicker reflecting appropriately
in the eyes of your beloved, in mirrors
and off the marble pillars of your perspective.
All of this sounds familiar.
You remember promising to advance, to love better,
to attend to matters.
You always had to be reminded, but then failed.
There it is an emotional, physical thing
like being spooked in some amusement park
on a sticky summer afternoon with a few strangers
or jammed into some inner night without end, lights and smoke
and fires, a subway car of sweating bodies.
Now you gaze upon the threshold of the past
and that other infinitely reassuring world
of total recall and correction, memory and desire on the one
hand and electronic retrieval and fulfillment on the other.
Life or an afterlife of functions and rewards;
many painful versions or one enhanced permanent vision;
a past you're responsible for no matter how you figure it
or a present you can trust; there's hardly a choice.
In fact, it's made for you.
You Watch it like television or a movie.
You have become comfortable.
The world is beautiful.
You're virtually alone.
You turn your back on the beatings and the jungle.
The walled cities and the dreary seas, how serene.
The curve of the Earth is palpable.
You lie flat.
You stand tall.
You know yourself and your place in the universe.
Lost days seem to you now retrieved.
The broad brimmed hat of your youth
and those loud songs and those apartments
at the end of the century, white couches, patterned rugs,
visible to the vast greens of yesterday
as they swelled into the wall to wall future.
These dreams return fully.
You regard them now with a greater eye.
Walks through the park under the heavy
boughs into the tiny restaurant where
you could see the stuffed fish and ribbons of food prepared.
And you're not dead, not dying, you're
in a false and steady state unafraid.
Now you can really laugh at the day you interviewed poorly
and cry over the grave of a friend.
Now you can feel the rain raining everywhere
wherever it seems right and take the heat
and swim to shore powerfully.
Now you can eat ravenously, sleep like a baby,
and make love with your whole body."
[APPLAUSE]