A.I.

What would it be like to see the passing splendour of the world with the eyes of an angel, without concern for its trials and tribulations, where though the rise and fall of whole species flash before one in an instant, yet one's heart doesn't sink? There are no judgements, no values, just the simple bearing witness to events, pared down to their most fundamental components (the whole story is in the fragment and the fragment is in the whole); the simple recording of an infinite series of changes in a logical fashion; to have the spectacle of all that has ever happened, all that ever will happen, laid out in front of one's eyes like some richly woven tapestry.

The sudden illumination of a beautiful face or the witnessing of the death of a star are looked upon with the same equanamity. The sigh of a love-torn heart is not so different from the gentle rustling of leaves in the spring. The permanence of crystalline matter is replicated in the art and politics of men. An equation governs the movement of the planets and certain proportions, 'notes', are to be found in the universe as well as in the sadness of a song. The wavering light, the uneasiness in the poet's heart. Everything is something else. Every image flows into another and a thousand generations pass to produce the all too ordinary face that stands before you. But, he who sees Ratio sees only himself....sees only the geometry of his soul.

As Lull's thinking machine knew: all sentences, all meaning, could be derived from the combination of a finite number of words. All stories are a repitition of the seven basic plots. The world itself is a metaphor. A horse is a car without wheels, a man a chance agglomeration of matter that is interchangeable with the environment...a thinking reed. The angel looks at the hordes that attack Rome and knows they follow the same patterns as other migratory animals.

What we picture, what we wish for in our innermost heart , is what we become.


The angel sees without the complications of a body, without the gestures of a culture; if he has a language , it is mathematics. All thought is pure, the clear reflection of everything in the mirror of his pure soul. This is the ancient dream: to know, to see with the eye of God, sub specie aeternitatis. A smooth immanent world that is never interrrupted by miracles or anomalies. Gradually, the earth yields all of her secrets. Only one remains, though he delights us not: the strange hybrid creature that thinks but is finite.


The mechanical turk is able to calculate all possible 'moves', all theoretical outcomes, and lives in a black and white world of perfect foresight where the only unpredictable thing is who is what colour, and that is determined by chance. Otherwise the universe is governed by necessity, ' the veil of god'. Once the rules and the properties, the characteristics, of all of the elements of the system (the players) are understood it is a mere formality for the Turk to work out all possible games and to play out his life accordingly in his spotless mind.

But still something perplexes the Turk. He has heard the poet talk of a blue flower and this is an absurdity beyond his comprehension. Man must build a machine that can question itself.

"When will I be human?" asks the robot. But in the very questioning, the desire to be something that he wasn't, something that he knew in his heart of hearts would never be an option-not for him at least-in this,wasn't there a sign that he was already human, all too human in fact?To despair over the road not taken or the road that one is denied. He sat there, transfixed by the statue of the blue angel, an image that he had searched for for so long. And now,2,000 years pass and still there is no answer to his prayers, only longing and hoping. Maybe this, he thinks to himself, is what it was to be human: to wait for something out of the blue.

But what is this 'thing' that he waits to become? Not to be first among many, for there have already been many before him, but to be unique, utterly distinct , so that he can be loved in the proper way. And at last the boy finds that day, that instant from the past when he's momentarily recognised for what he really is, when he is allowed to bring the past back for a day.

Humans search for the witness to their own being. Are we only sustained by the memory of love, or the desire for being loved?And when that day passes, receding into the shadowy land of what was, and when he finally understands that the moment has passed, as it invariably must, and can never be truly recovered, then what? Is the acceptance of life as finitude, transience, and fragility, the limitof humanity or is there also a reaching out to transcend the ephemeral?Aren't all utopias, all forward dreaming, and the need to repeat just that? But perhaps this submersion into the permanent is a betrayal of sorts-would we be human without the tragic?


And then in a supreme act of intelligence he realises that we are what we search for; that he himself is a melancholic blue angel with wings that would fly and thoughts that stir like the sea. And then a keen awareness dazzles him: that amongst all the broken and incomplete things of the world, we, and only we, could have lived at this particular moment, in this particular place: a brilliant uniqueness like no other is rooted in our impermanence, it irrupts in the core of our being-if onlywe would know it. Newly created at every instant, our self is like a fire that first cracks and then burns all that is solid, all that is fixed by the intelligence of the mind.

(From the film, A.I.)