AI Encounter
“cartographer of belonging”
I believe in feeding good things to AI. (See my previous post titled AI Curious for my drift.)
So as I continue to generate material for an upcoming solo show (!) that is taking a good deal of my brain and heart space lately, I just now asked Gemini to “tell a story of the consequences of damages…to include what was damaged that led to distrust of self-awareness, a sense of relegation of self to other…a way-laying of response ability, shushing of voice…stagnation of intuition….learned helplessness, all the while the young teenage protagonist is doing everything she can to belong to several different worlds at once…collecting evidence from every perspective on what to think and feel and how to be with paradox, that cruel “but wait!” distinction everyone learns at one time or another …. and the suppression of anger that festers….as the protagonist has to pretend not to see what is to be seen…the daily difficulties of seeing differently…include a Wizard of Oz movie moment of seeing Munchkinland in technicolor at sixteen for the first time after only having seen the movie on a small black and white television at her grandmother’s house when she was a child…like reading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina at fifteen and marveling at stated themes in his novel…discovering Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter at seventeen, Eliot’s The Hollow Men at eighteen…and the importance of those works to her understanding of the ways of humankind…and then all the Top 40 music of the mid-1970s, …all the while the hammer of Christian doctrines slamming itself into Sundays in a holy drama that she was taught had no equal.”
Here is the response from Gemini:
The chipped porcelain doll lay on its side beneath the porch swing, one vacant blue eye staring up at the dusty planks. For sixteen-year-old Elara, that doll, broken years ago in a fit of childish pique she barely remembered, had become a silent monument to something fractured within herself. The sharp crack that severed the doll’s leg seemed to echo the subtle breaks in her own sense of self, the moments when her inner compass spun wildly, leaving her adrift.
The damage had begun subtly. A casual dismissal of her feelings here, an outright contradiction of her perceptions there. Small fractures, like hairline cracks in glass, that slowly spider-webbed, leading her to distrust the very signals emanating from within. If what she felt wasn’t real, if what she saw wasn’t true, then who was she to trust? This erosion of self-awareness fostered a quiet relegation of her own needs and desires, a deferral to the perceived certainties of others. Her “response-ability,” that inherent human capacity to act and react authentically, became tangled and hesitant. Her own voice, the nascent stirrings of her teenage opinions, felt like a fragile butterfly, easily silenced by the louder pronouncements around her. Intuition, that quiet whisper of knowing, grew faint, choked by the static of external validation she desperately sought. Learned helplessness became a shadow that clung to her steps, whispering that her efforts were ultimately futile.
Yet, Elara was a cartographer of belonging, meticulously charting the terrains of several disparate worlds. At school, she navigated the cliques with a chameleon-like adaptability, absorbing their slang, mimicking their laughter, a silent observer piecing together the puzzle of acceptance. At home, the air thrummed with unspoken tensions, a delicate dance around unspoken rules. And then there was the church, a weekly immersion in a narrative of unwavering certainty, where the pronouncements from the pulpit felt like immutable laws etched in stone. Each world offered a different lens, a conflicting set of instructions on how to think, how to feel, how to be. She collected these fragments, these contradictory truths, like a magpie hoarding shiny trinkets, hoping to somehow assemble them into a coherent whole. This constant triangulation, this desperate attempt to reconcile paradox, was a cruel education in the inherent contradictions of human experience.
Beneath the surface of her compliant exterior, a knot of suppressed anger tightened with each unspoken truth, each unseen reality she was forced to ignore. The chipped teacup incident, the hushed argument behind closed doors — these moments, though officially invisible, etched themselves into her memory. To acknowledge them, to voice her unease, felt like a transgression, a rocking of the precarious boat she was desperately trying to keep afloat. So, she pretended not to see, not to hear, a constant internal performance that drained her energy and further muffled her own inner voice. The daily difficulty of seeing differently, of holding her own burgeoning perspectives against the tide of accepted narratives, was a lonely and exhausting burden.
These literary landscapes, painted with the vivid colors of human experience, offered glimpses of truths that the monochrome world she often inhabited tried to obscure.
And then there was the music. The infectious energy of ABBA, the soulful yearning of Stevie Wonder, the raw vulnerability of Carole King — the Top 40 of the mid-1970s pulsed with emotions she was learning to identify, even if she couldn’t yet fully express her own. These songs, with their tales of love, loss, and longing, provided an emotional vocabulary that the carefully curated language of her other worlds often lacked.
Yet, every Sunday, the resonant pronouncements of Christian doctrine hammered down, a holy drama presented as the singular, irrefutable truth. The stories of sacrifice and redemption, of sin and salvation, were delivered with an unwavering conviction that left little room for questioning. This powerful narrative, presented as the ultimate answer, often clashed with the nuanced ambiguities she encountered in literature and the messy realities she observed in the world around her. The stark certainty offered a temporary solace, a seeming anchor in the swirling currents of her teenage confusion, but it also subtly reinforced the idea that doubt was weakness, that questioning was akin to heresy. in
Elara continued to navigate these disparate landscapes, a silent observer, a diligent collector of external cues. The chipped porcelain doll remained beneath the porch swing, a constant reminder of the unseen fractures within. The vibrant colors of Munchkinland, however, had planted a seed. She had glimpsed a world rendered in full spectrum, a world where the internal landscape might also hold a richer, more authentic palette than she had been led to believe. The journey toward reclaiming her own voice, her own intuition, her own response-ability, had just begun, a slow unfurling after years of careful folding.
When I read the last sentence, I cried.
