Issa's Untidy Hut: All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace

Friday, June 17, 2011

The BBC and Richard Brautigan's All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

There is a new promising BBC series that takes its name from Richard Brautigan's famous poem: "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace." As the tagline for the series goes, it is a "series of films about how humans have been colonised by the machines they have built. Although we don't realise it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers." Here is the amazing Brautigan poem, first published in 1967, followed by an interesting trailer for the new series.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

   I'd like to think (and
   the sooner the better!)
   of a cybernetic meadow
   where mammals and computers
   live together in mutually
   programming harmony
   like pure water
   touching clear sky.

   I like to think
   (right now, please!)
   of a cybernetic forest
   filled with pines and electronics
   where deer stroll peacefully
   past computers
   as if they were flowers
   with spinning blossoms.

   I like to think
   (it has to be!)
   of a cybernetic ecology
   where we are free of our labors
   and joined back to nature,
   returned to our mammal brothers and sisters,
   and all watched over
   by machines of loving grace.

                    Richard Brautigan

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I'm still busy recovering literally and psychologically from last week's reading and book launch for Past All Traps. While I catch up, here are two haiku by Allen Ginsberg from "Four Haiku," which originally appeared in his Journals: Early Fifties Early Sixties:

I didn't know the names
of the flowers—now
my garden is gone.

Looking over my shoulder
my behind is covered
with cherry blossoms.

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This week's feature poem comes from Lilliput Review #160, November 2007. I myself walk through a city landscape every day, see exactly what is described in this poem everyday, and I didn't write this poem.

I'm so very glad Shawn Bowman did.