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Living life inside machines
I am just not sleeping very much. I keep being woken by either construction or early-morning phone calls. Tomorrow I have an early-morning doctor's appointment! The construction is grinding and chattering next door as we speak.
Today is Alan Turing's yahrzeit. June 7, 1954. I just discovered this gorgeous image of him and Christopher Morcom, drawn by Keith Negley for The Who, the What, and the When: 65 Artists Illustrate the Secret Sidekicks of History (2014):
It reminds me of Chagall and his lost roofs of Vitebsk. It reminds me of my own work, the ghost poem of possible histories I wrote them both. When it was reprinted in Spelling the Hours (2016), I wrote for the requested author's note, "Christopher Morcom was born 13 July 1911, died 13 February 1930. Alan Turing was born 23 June 1912, died 7 June 1954. For different reasons, they should both have had more life. Memory is all you can give the dead, so be careful: whatever you wish them, let it be neither genteel erasure or comfortable myth-making. Both are often so much more convenient than the truth." I only feel more strongly about this as time passes in this culture that seems ever more determined to overwrite the past. I have to watch out for it myself. I pair them eternally and so does the history of science and there are Alan's own reasons for that, but if he had been chaste to Christopher's memory, there would have been nothing for an unjust law to catch him doing. He loved and mourned and remembered and he had other lovers. He did not mate for life with a ghost.
Today is Alan Turing's yahrzeit. June 7, 1954. I just discovered this gorgeous image of him and Christopher Morcom, drawn by Keith Negley for The Who, the What, and the When: 65 Artists Illustrate the Secret Sidekicks of History (2014):
It reminds me of Chagall and his lost roofs of Vitebsk. It reminds me of my own work, the ghost poem of possible histories I wrote them both. When it was reprinted in Spelling the Hours (2016), I wrote for the requested author's note, "Christopher Morcom was born 13 July 1911, died 13 February 1930. Alan Turing was born 23 June 1912, died 7 June 1954. For different reasons, they should both have had more life. Memory is all you can give the dead, so be careful: whatever you wish them, let it be neither genteel erasure or comfortable myth-making. Both are often so much more convenient than the truth." I only feel more strongly about this as time passes in this culture that seems ever more determined to overwrite the past. I have to watch out for it myself. I pair them eternally and so does the history of science and there are Alan's own reasons for that, but if he had been chaste to Christopher's memory, there would have been nothing for an unjust law to catch him doing. He loved and mourned and remembered and he had other lovers. He did not mate for life with a ghost.
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How true. And how important. Thank you.
And this is a beautiful image.
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whatever you wish them, let it be neither genteel erasure or comfortable myth-making. --That's excellent. I know I sometimes find myself unconsciously obscuring hard truth with precisely that: comfortable myth making. It's hard to sit with pain and suffering but that's sometimes exactly what's called for
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I really really love this.
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P.
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