Daniel J. Cecil
THE WALL IS splattered with a thought or two at a bar the size of a living room. To the left of the liquor is a mural lavishly depicting a crowd of yuppies swirling around open bottles of champagne. The artist painted it blindfolded. I was there that night, watching him paint by feel, his hand guided by a deeply rooted trouble.
This is the kind of bar where artists gather to question themselves. Our methods, our ideologies, our temperaments. We lose ourselves in drink and smoke after long days at the studio. We drop into dialogues that unravel us. It’s my joy to sit and listen to what might exist in the distance between the resonance of their larynx and the ossicles and, later, to note that distance on paper. Distance, or dissonance? Sometimes, I use what springs from this area of misunderstanding to animate logic, fear, or sing joy as plot and character. I find great comfort in covering this distance/dissonance.
It’s any old night in a stream of endless old nights at this bar when an artist plops down at the end of my table, interrupting a conversation I’m having with some sympathetic ears. This artist is a little drunk, and much too stoned, and without checking in with my group’s generosity that evening he begins to speak in animated slurs about artificial intelligence and how it’s given him a new artistic life. I’m generally a good-natured guy, a bit of a nodder and a quiet grumbler, so when the rest of the group gives him the grace of a few minutes before turning away to the sounds of their own gentle, more conciliatory murmuring, the artist focuses his attention on me.
I know him. He works with methods of constraint. Kind of like Matthew Barney. I once saw Barney at the Serpentine gallery in a harness attached to a bungee cord. Barney, with the harness snug, slung his body towards a wall at the end of the room just at the point where the elastic was pulled to its limit. With each sprint he was able to paint the wall for a millisecond before the cord snapped him back. Barney’s work was called Drawing Restraint. I believe I understood the intention.
My artist friend’s constraint is recreating the images he can compel from AI using written prompts. I look at the example he shows me on his phone—a portly man riding what can only be described as a horse-hog in the middle of a war-torn field—and I try to understand. This seems like no constraint at all. It seems like an allowance. Taking what’s already drawn and tracing it. But he admits: The images he receives from the prompts are never what he imagined they would be. It’s difficult for him to find the words for the things he wants to create.
Which brings me to the efficacy of tools. The intention and their use. A spear, I think, is a tool. One that kills. An underwater boring machine is a tool, its function to rip up coral and kick up sand and kill the many creatures we’ll never name in its hunt for precious minerals and oil. A machine gun? Fat Man and Little Boy? A tool and a pair. Out of the mouth of tyrants, these tools keep peace. But that’s not my peace. And I try, I really try, working with what my imperfect brain provides, to land on a tool that doesn’t err, at the very least, on the cusp of some chaotic good/evil binary, but nothing comes to mind. Even the mind is a tool—fallible, and so often misused.
The artist seems distressed by my silence. Could I teach him how to write a better prompt? Make the AI work with him, rather than against him?
Instead, my mind hallucinates ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the zombie-ant fungus. I imagine the ant eating some of this fungus, and soon after, how its head becomes the home of fruiting bodies that take control of the poor creature’s behavior before sending out spores to infect others. I’m ashamed. I’m being unkind with my silence. But I’m staring at that mural at the end of the bar, wondering if I’m one of its yuppies. That sometimes we’re infected to different, invisible degrees.
So the artist keeps talking. Making excuses. Asking for my help. I can’t hear myself think. I hope that my artist friend might shut up for a second and that between breaths he might, to steal a phrase from Lorde, understand that the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house. But he continues talking and I am searching for the word that describes the feeling these crises conjure. But it’s deafening, his noise. Has my voice already been stolen? What words are mine? What silence? Which thoughts are not already marked with the indelible ink of others?
I go home, a little drunk, and sit down to name this fear. This fear, like none I’ve ever felt. If I find the word, I’lll paint it on my wall so that my guests might see. I’ll paint it and turn a blind eye as they wonder if the fear might define them too.
Daniel J. Cecil is a writer and teacher in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Heavy Feather Review, The LA Review of Books, Barrelhouse, Miracle Monocle, and The Stranger, among others. His work has been nominated for a pushcart, was long listed for the Dzanc Fiction Prize, short-listed for the Yes Yes Books open reading period, and received the support of several residencies. Daniel teaches travel writing and literature for Emerson College at their Limburg campus and is the founder of Honing House, an English-language, community-centered, and empathy-led educational resource that was built for writers all over the world. You can find Daniel on his website (www.writerdanieljcecil.com) and Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/danieljcecil.bsky.social).
