The Lion Muse
Walter Bargen
Days of leaden clouds leave us wandering through the bleary haze of morning. Time folds together and confuses. But then the sky becomes cobbled with light and blue shards shift back and forth from horizon to horizon. I’m breaking free too and wander to the shed for my walking stick that’s long enough and heavy enough to be called a staff. It’s something I found in the creek, a watershed over from this one that I’m about to walk. It’s smooth, covered with hundreds of paired marks, incisors of a beaver as it peeled away the bark to eat that thin layer of living tissue, the cambium. Such a specialized food source; our palettes are more omnivorous. I stuff four fallen pears from the tree near the house into my coat pocket before heading out. I find myself in the nearly waterless creek looking for what the last rains turned over: fossils, bones, beer cans, the earth’s broken story and someone else’s litter to clean up.
Twice in the last year, young mountain lions have been hit and killed by highway traffic. Until then mountain lions, pumas, cougars, whatever we call them, were considered to live 1,000 miles from here. It’s been more than 100 years since the last confirmed sighting, until this year. As I walk the creek, I consider my chances of an encounter, my chances of survival. My staff a good five feet in length, the beaver left it pointed at both ends, is a kind of blunt spear, my only defense. Certainly can’t run fast enough, can’t climb a tree high enough, only this staff to keep me from turning into someone else’s feast. I’ve read accounts of near-death experiences, from accidents, during surgery, whatever, and some of these people report that they found themselves watching the event of their dying, that somehow they were abstracted from what was happening and felt no pain. I think there are so many of us humans and so few lions, would I willingly watch myself be eaten? Maybe only humans can think this thought, and I know that my survival instinct is stronger than any desire to be eaten.
It’s too early to say if there is evidence to convict him, but there is a computer technician from Rotenburg in Germany, who is accused of killing, dismembering and eating a man who agreed to all of this over the Internet. Another unforeseen danger of computers to add to my list. Armin Meiwes is charged with murder, and this is the first case of its kind, at least, in recent German history. He is reported to have said to the press that he was sorry. Sorry for what? For killing another man? For eating another man? For inflicting upon the rest of society yet another unimaginably perverse human act? Imagine this, that he cut off a part of the victim’s body, and they ate it together, before the killing. Eventually, the rest of the victim was dismembered and frozen for later dining. To add yet another twist to this story, the victim was also a computer technician—and from Berlin. Berlin is unimportant, but I have to ask what are computers doing to our minds? Eating them and then spitting out a jumbled code? Since there is not a legal statute against cannibalism in German law, the act so unimaginable in “modern” society, he is being charged with “killing on demand,” which carries a five-year sentence.
So far I’ve found a four-inch diameter gastropod with striations along one edge known as styrolites, the spiraling tracks of an Archimedes screw, a palm-sized piece of stone containing molds of two brachiopods and the caste of a horn coral, all weighing down my coat pockets, and a wild turkey’s tail feather, which I’ve stuck in my hat. I eat the pears to make room for the stones. My escape will be slowed by this additional weight. I keep glancing toward the ridges, half-expecting to see a crouched silhouette or hear the explosion of dry leaves behind me as powerful haunches make their move, a thick tail nearly as long as its body to guide its leap towards its prey, which would be me, but I never see a lion. I measure each draw, each slope, each boulder and tree for what could be waiting there. I’m no longer considering surrender and sacrifice to sustain another dwindling species.
Mountain lions have been fought off and defeated by sheer chutzpah, though I’m counting on my staff. There’s the Colorado man who jumped on the back of a mountain lion when it grabbed his daughter’s house cat and fought with it until he felt the hind paw punch him in the face. He thought the worse for his chances against four such weapons and deemed the house cat’s sacrifice worthy of such a noble creature. Days later, the neighborhood watched from kitchen windows as the mother and her two cubs devoured a freshly killed mule deer in their backyards. When the lion stalked a woman from her own garage, she jumped into the car, blew the horn, and the lion has not come back. Staff in hand, I’m not ready to be eaten.
Two and one-half years after Armin Meiwes ate his fellow computer technician, 43-year-old Bernd Juergen Brandes, patent No. 6,647,395 was issued to Ray Kurzweil and John Keklak, by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, for a cybernetic poet program that enables a computer to write original poetry. The computer is fed, reads, programs, I’m not sure what to call it, a living poet’s work. Sounds too human, programmed is probably the most accurate, but fed, which sounds too organic and a little cannibalistic, may be closest to the truth. We’re told that it imitates but doesn’t plagiarize the human poet. Throw in rhymes, half-rhymes, pentameter, trochees, synecdoche, elevated vocabulary, whatever components of poetry that you can think of, and out of the computer pops a poem. These are lines from this cybernetic poet after “reading” the work of Wendy Dennis:
Sashay down the page
through the lioness
nestled in my soul.
Is the computer revealing to us the lion in the machine? Have Kurzweil and Keklak inadvertently peeled back the layers of computers and revealed the machines’ true intentions? Kurzweil is the author of The Age of Spiritual Machines. He claims that computers will soon be having sex with each other and achieve something parallel to human consciousness. Perhaps he has not seen clearly enough, and our cannibalistic computer technicians are more prophetic, moving away from humanity and toward hungry machine consciousness. And so the man who programmed the computer to recognize patterns and then replicate the patterns and generate new patterns based on those patterns, has missed the mountain lion waiting to maul the gigabytes, devour the RAM. He says, “Our biological thinking is fixed. But our nonbiological thinking will grow exponentially.” We will be devoured by the machine we are grooming.
I return to the house. My coat is not shredded by claws. I’m not bitten and bleeding from massive canines. I saw a couple of squirrels. I was led by a wren down the creek, flying just ahead of my tottering steps on moss-slippery rock. My beaver staff allowed me to triangulate and keep from falling several times. I remove the fossils from my pocket and place them on railroad ties used for landscaping, a temporary pedestal before they are covered with leaves and disappear for the winter. I lean the staff against the shed wall. There is a lion waiting for me, though it may be sitting on my desk and not out in the woods on a Sunday afternoon. I just have to turn it on.