Reading "Computers" by Judith Wright

 

A scrunched, fading bookmark fell from a book. It was a cutting, a newspaper poem by Judith Wright entitled “Computers”. ‘Those things make me nervous/ but not for the reasons you think,’ she begins, setting up the dichotomy that our ways are not a poet’s ways. Notice her connection of ‘things’ with ‘think’. ‘Not because they’ll take away our living;/ if we really liked living/ that wouldn’t matter,/we could start living instead. You don’t need much money to live.’ She raises this matter of ‘living’, which is about the most important subject in the world, more important than computers. Notice how she introduces money from nowhere. She seems to be making a link between computers and money, one that today has become profound. Living, for Judith, is about creating, if we are to understand the next verse aright: ‘Not because they’ll write poems or paint pictures;/ no one who knows what poetry is/ or what pictures are/ could do more than laugh at that one.’ This is a confident assertion of the originality of human creation, made with a certainty based in experience. Laughter, by implication, is not a computer’s forte. She turns her gaze to society and politics, as was oft her wont: ‘Not because they’ll start breeding, set up an elite,/ exclude us, run everything – /anyone who looks can see/ that’s happened already./ We could live in the gaps between them.’ Judith doesn’t describe these gaps, though we can intuit plenty of them in the lines of the poem. Instead, we have reached halfway, which is when she turns to the true explanation of her nervousness. ‘No, they make me nervous/ because they’re eating us;/ here a muscle, there a mind,/ an action or a vision.’ As elsewhere, she moves quickly from the particular to the immensely general, invoking in spare lines an incipient negative mood formed by computers. ‘See: when I said ‘vision’/ it made you smile./ No one now can have a vision/ because They don’t have them.’ Her conversational mode works to take us into her confidence. Then, having done so, goes up several registers: ‘We’re ashamed to fall in love/ because They don’t do it. / We analyse poems instead of reading them/ because that’s what computers do./ We think it’s square to be human/ because They aren’t.’ Actually, it’s most computers that are square (literally), not humans. But we grasp her meaning, computers are some irresistibly cool invention we tell ourselves we cannot do without. ‘Square’ is the only word that dates Judith’s poem, which googling reveals was published in the Sydney Morning Herald on the 18^th of June 1966. So, having assessed the advent of computers, in a poem that bears close analysis, the poet does a fresh turn of thought, leaving us fairly much squarely where computers started, the root cause of the problem: ‘No, then it can’t be computers/ that make me nervous./ It’s us. Perhaps we make them/ because we’re sick of humans.’ I smile and pin Judith’s poem on the corkboard for further consideration.

Mouse and Cat

Mouse and Cat, by Philip Harvey

Mouse, the input device we wheel around our desk all day. It is highly mobile and responds well to touch. Mouse has features such as a spinning nose and bilateral commands. Mouse can act as a hand support. Mouse is in its element zigzagging over a rubber mat or sprinting laps across the tabletop. Mouse manoeuvres. It appears to operate solely for our benefit. It has extra buttons and shiny Californian skintight outers. Mouse's trajectories typically translate into the motion of a pointer, but sometimes Mouse loses its grip. It can get lost in space. Occasionally it’s a trial, but a trial with no jury or judge, a waste of our breath, as the Mouse puts it in the famous book. Mouse muses. Mouse motions. Mouse idles until you return. It feeds on currents.

But what about who it is attached to by its tail?

Cat, sitting so still, but we know it must be computing all the time. It’s the quiet ones we have to watch. We have to watch them closely. Some of us have names for our Cat. We call it, for example, Felix, amazed and happy at its black body and broad white face. Cat sometimes seems to be laughing at us and holding its sides. Then there are times when Cat feels more like an unfeeling mechanical calculating machine. Cat counts and sums up. Cat stores away data all day, or is it just there because it has nowhere else to go? We watch annoyed as it goes slow, or entranced as suddenly it gets up to very high speed. It clicks its pause and leaps to the next display. Cat has a continuous existence, seeming to be up to something even when asleep in the corner, with all the lights out. It’s up to something alright. Stare into its face long enough, watch its changing forms, and we find Cat is a creature with nine trillion lives. Even now we are looking at just one of them.

And is the mouse playing with the cat? Or is in fact the cat in control of the mouse?

Mouse, that scurries around all day in circles doing a thousand little diverting directions. Mouse, oblivious to role reversal. And Cat, that smiles the while, unmoving but still smiling, sometimes seeming to disappear behind a screen saver, but not quite, the smile still fixed in space the entire time, with sometimes only the smile, like the Cat in the famous book.