In writing this piece I am trying to put my thoughts into some sort of order. Unlike code, they do not run in a straight line, nor do they loop with algorithmic predictability. A snapshot of my thoughts, a removal of context, would reveal something of a random pattern, or perhaps more fractal. Only in motion do they suggest a direction – points of departure identified in retrospect, destination as yet unknown.
They are occupied by many things, usually destinations of deep introspection – away with the fairies some might say – though of late more corporeal matters have begun to assert themselves. These I press aside for now. They tend to pull down a veil upon the inner life, seek to deny us access. If they have a virtue, it is in reminding us it is not our place to escape life. The world, life, nature, presents many challenges and our place is to face them. It is to remain – as my dreams keep telling me – world facing, not to seek solace in the company of Astraea, among the stars.
I don't know where this piece is going yet, nor if mention of Astraea will help or hinder us, but I find her among my thoughts, so she earns her place at least as a concept to be reckoned with. Last of the immortals to walk the earth at the close of the mythic Golden Age, she despaired of a growing corruption, and withdrew. She becomes then the embodiment of our own temptation to withdraw, to leave the world to its ills, unplug from our phones, our media, and retreat ever deeper into ourselves. But then Astraea startles us with the declaration that she refuses all followers.
Then we have the title of this piece which comes from a short story I've just pulled from submission. I've used it instead as a kind of metaphorical dust-jacket around a lifetime of other short fictions, and placed it deep in the book-lined labyrinth that is the Internet Archive. There may be some clues there – a kind of Astraean withdrawal, certainly – I don't know. Or maybe a clue...
What is it about? Well, a man falls asleep each night and dreams the same dream, of catching the night train, riding it to destinations of labyrinthine allegory. There are guides, archetypes to encounter, but, like the mystery of one's own interior, one's own inner labyrinth, only we can judge the message from the noise. That's the gist of the story, but does it mean anything here? And what can it possibly mean to you?
Then there's artificial intelligence – not so strange a companion to dreams and myths as it first appears. Machines can now invent and tell stories with great fluency. But if stories themselves can be engineered from a prompt, are we not forced to ask where the value of a story really lies? Is it not in the product itself, perhaps, but more in the life from which it arises? Has our technology finally confronted us with the ghost of our own forgotten sense of being?
Knowing a story to have been written by AI, we might comfortably sneer at it. To engineer such a thing from a prompt, will produce a story, but it will not produce a writer, no more than cheating at chess with a computer will make you a chess-player. In a material world, one that carries no inherent sense of its own values, this might not matter any more, since value becomes whatever is written down. But not all that is written makes sense. Not all that is written speaks for the human.
So, Astraea, the night train, AI. What else is circling in my thoughts? Ah, yes... Ariadne – she of the slender thread, the thread that guides the hero from the labyrinth. Such a rich myth... and deeply fertile for the imagination to ponder. Slender Threads is also the title of my latest novel in progress, a work of dreams, of imagination, and of a life lived in search of its own meaning, rather like this essay: the meaning, the purpose, of the Romantic in an age of barbarism, in an Ovidian age of iron.
This is the very thing that proved the last straw for Astraea, who took with her that inherent knowledge, the instinct which allowed all beings to thrive in harmony and without the written law – a time when both gods and men still walked the earth. It's a myth, an ideal – its opposite being barbarism. And in the middle we have the poet, the writer – holding the tension, but without any apparent means of resolving it.
Since we're aiming at not much more than a thousand words here, it may be that a resolution of such matters is a little over-ambitious, and what we should be looking for instead is more an indication of direction, not just for ourselves, but for the reader who has followed us along this far, with at least some hope of a punch-line. But what seems to be forming, clarifying if you like, is more the image of a role. And it is not heroic.
It's true, not all of us are born to the role of hero. But that's okay. We are blessed in not being short of heroes – they who willingly enter the labyrinth of injustice and do battle with monsters. But without that thread to lead them back, they might slay the monsters but end up lost, or worse, run the risk of becoming monsters themselves.
We Romantics then, we are each of us Ariadne's children, spooling out the slender thread, travelling the night trains of dream and imagination. And what we bring back, what we try to maintain within the collective imagination of the culture, is that Astraean sense of what is right. These are the incorruptible rules that determine the relations between the gods and men, and which do not need writing down.
No, we cannot follow her, but we can maintain her memory, remain proxy to her influence, spooling out the threads, weaving them through an age grown so complex it no longer remembers why it entered the labyrinth in the first place.