Artificial Stupidity

putting chat gpt screenshots in the family album

italo calvino said you can stop time. you meet at the point something once happened and let it happen again, and the exact moment the two events crossover acts as a stoppage; the exact moment, at t-zero. if you do it over, and over and over and over, there you can be - suspended. no death and no god, no ground or moon or sky. the drawn arrow first released, unmanned and winged.

i was re-reading some old pieces of mine when i realised (to great horror) that i had repeated myself in them. they were works that had nothing to do with each other but for some reason had drawn out the same words from me, and worse than doing it was not noticing it; being so lacking in awareness that i had said this before, that i was here again.

i considered that i needed to work on my imagination so as to not constantly arrive at this intersection. then, in an effort to break the cycle, i considered other things. like bleaching my hair from the root, or joining a cult. taking things as far as they could go without turning back.

but this morning light and that smell, and the way everything reminds me of everything else. it’s the “letting” and so admittedly, i let it. it rains and i text my oldest friend, remember when? and she says yes. remember being small? remember being tiny? remember being nothing, remember the ether, remember being our mothers’ prayers? unwittingly we chase immortality. then in present time she sells her car and the man who buys it lives in my childhood home, and immortality chases us.

if naming a thing makes it exist, then maybe having someone else call its name brings it to life. things require witnessing to be, to keep being. memories especially. nostalgia has to find its root, otherwise it strays from the centre, searching and splintering and eventually settling for making things up about what we can’t fully recall. the original diagnosis of nostalgia killed - such an intense homesickness that soldiers died from it. though i don’t think it was what was remembered but what was forgotten that did it; you could point out the way home and get it wrong, and if there was no one to correct course you’d be lost forever. remember when?

AI, for all its “intelligence”, is no better than humankind then. always circling back around what’s already known, already said. following patterns to reach conclusions that offer little more than the word “again”. it’s man’s ego, the wish to preserve, outlive. leave a call echoing through the empty sky when our past is all that there is.

for now my family remain obsessed with chat gpt. they ask it stupid questions that could be googled, a difference considered too insignificant to learn. they ask it: who is roumina parsa? and send me the reply, a copy of my author bio from articles i’ve written. i am roumina parsa, i want to say. i am right here, ask me.

i could exercise my new imagination and go in directions i haven’t before. i never lived in that house with the blue carpet. i never wrote a single word. the blade that carved me entered twice, making and unmaking humankind through the exit wound of christ. everything i thought happened to me i heard in a story. nothing ever hurt, and the arrow hit the target, and i didn’t know what it was like to dream, to draw back, aim again for the right way home.