Art by Jin Suk
Editor’s Note
In soliciting work for this issue’s special feature, Lairs of God: Spirituality After Silicon Valley, we sent prospective contributors the following paragraph:
"May God us keep/from single vision and Newton's sleep," prayed Blake. And the prayer, we might say, was answered. Newton's sleep gave way to Einstein's nightmare: the canonization of the alpha and the omega of the split atom. Technology, Heidegger proposed, is in itself neither demonic nor divine, but is a "way of revealing." The essence of the revelation, however, remains mysterious. What are the promises implicit and explicit in the Gospel of Apple? With all the space (which the microchip seems intent on transforming into the equivalent of time) devoted even in the literary press to questions rising around the increasing hegemony of computers and word processors, are we to assume technology has been humanized? Or has humanity been technologized? When we reflect on machines, what is it we are reflecting on? Is the ghost in the machine a plausible substitute for a shapelier muse? Or does it aim merely to keep us amused? More specifically, how in 1987 is the spiritual life affected by the (divinization of the) computer?
Old questions which, we feel, deserve a few new replies. You are of course invited to take issue with any of the above remarks.
Not long after mailing out these notes, the latest issues of Sulfur and NER/BLQ arrived at our office, both containing a number of essays on technology and computers. Among several provocative pieces perhaps the strangest was Robert Avens’ recapitulations in Sulfur of the theories of the Jungian Wolfgang Giegerich. Giegerich argues that far from being, as it is conventionally fobbed off, the brain child of the enlightenment, the technological revolution is in fact the honest heir of evolutionary Christian thought.
So while it may be true, as one of our contributors claims, that our paragraph raises a number of by now hoary symposia topics, it appears there’s still a need for nervous lay people to keep applying their own categories to the activities of researchers in their sister culture who, it ought to be noted, themselves have little to say about the burning issues of minimalism or the new formalism.
Now literary people may not have been the right types to receive these questions. Clearly they do not worship technology. They are, on the contrary, quite capable of regarding the matter from the proper ironic distance. It is to the others—that segment of our society which studies technical manuals with a care once reserved for more sacred texts—that the prophetic voices in this issue, those of Marilynne Robinson and Baron Wormser, are mainly addressed. Or perhaps they speak to the rest of us as well. After all, as Aeschylus tells it, before Prometheus brought fire to earth, man was born knowing the precise date of his death. That knowledge was lost when man accepted the titan’s gift. Until the arrival of this avatar of the split atom, people lived in full awareness of their mortality which, in turn, kept them from trying to compete with gods. That kind of courtesy and humility seem largely gone from the world. It’s the job of the apocalyptic voice, from the Upanishads to Saint John to Blake to the growing body of contemporary literature composed in its spirit, to remind us of that which we would all too readily forget.
A.M.
August 1988
Askold Melnyczuk is the founding editor of AGNI and contributes a series of essays called “Shadowboxing.” He is professor of creative writing at UMass Boston. Excerpts from his anti-memoir in progress have appeared recently in The Threepenny Review and Epiphany. The Epiphany excerpt, “Turbulence, Love,” was cited as Notable in The Best American Essays 2010. His third novel, The House of Widows (Graywolf Press), won the Editor’s Choice Award from the American Library Association as one of the outstanding books of 2008. His second novel, Ambassador of the Dead (Counterpoint, 2001) was called “exquisite, original” by The Washington Post, and his first, What Is Told (Faber and Faber), was a New York Times Notable Book for 1994.
In 1997 Melnyczuk received a Lila Wallace-Readers’ Digest Award in Fiction. Winner of the McGinnis Award in Fiction, he has also been awarded grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. He has published stories, poems, translations, and reviews in The New York Times, The Nation, The Partisan Review, Grand Street, Ploughshares, AGNI, Poetry, and The Boston Globe. His poems have been included in various anthologies, including The McGraw-Hill Book of Poetry, Literature: The Evolving Canon, and Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets. He has edited three volumes in the Graywolf Take Three Poetry Series, as well as a volume of tributes to Father Daniel Berrigan and a livre d’artiste on painter Gerry Bergstein. He also coedited From Three Worlds: New Writing from Ukraine.
He previously taught at Harvard University, the graduate Bennington Writing Seminars, and Boston University, where he edited AGNI until its thirtieth anniversary year in 2002. A research associate of the Ukrainian Institute at Harvard, he has served on the boards of the New England Poetry Club and PEN New England and has been a fellow of the Boston Foundation. In 2001 he received PEN American Center’s biennial Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing as well as PEN New England’s “Friend to Writers” Award.
Melnyczuk founded AGNI in 1972 as an undergraduate at Antioch College and Arrowsmith Press in 2006. (updated 10/2022)
See him interviewed on New England Authors.