For a few years, I’ve been trying to write a story about a cat. A.I. will not be able to write this, partly because the story is still inside my imagination and on a few rough pages that were originally drafted in Boston, on sheets of notebook paper, as I sat in my daughter’s apartment on a hot summer day.
If I have it published (who knows, it’s a strange story), perhaps some machine will suck it into a system, break down my style, my usage, the themes I like to touch upon — loss and despair, love and hope — wide-ranging themes that, like all themes, arrive out of my own unique human concerns and have fueled me through six story collections.
But for now, this story I haven’t yet finished is inside my imagination, safe and sound, and no machine can make it or conjure it because no machine has been in my head as I wandered the streets of South Chicago, or stared at Lake Michigan from Promontory Point on the particular day I was there in June, or stopped in the parking lot of a supermarket called Treasure Island to examine a pile of snow, left over from a long winter, honeycombed and covered with dirt and grime, which is the image that closes the rough draft of my story; no machine stood with me in front of the Obama house, on the corner of 1118 Hyde Park Boulevard, and watched a Secret Service agent as he approached, another image that sparked the plot of my story, and certainly no machine was with me watching a cat named Baudelaire, my daughter’s cat, as he played on a particular Chicago afternoon, in a particular moment years ago, clutching a piece of string — yet another image that spoke to me through the retrospect of memory.
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