In our odd climate, the November air is warm when we get in and out of the river, but the water is chilling as it ought, giving us wonderful, albeit shortened, swims. We forget to mark Samhain entirely (although we were still in the water for it) so have already made plains for a Christmas dip, usually a time where the river becomes too dangerous to swim regularly. Last year, flooding meant that the water was frequently too high, too fast, or too polluted, and we switched to a repurposed quarry, tiny sauna balanced on one bank, swapping biscuits and swimming stories with other middle-aged women in swimming costumes and woollen hats. An owl swooped over this morning, although I missed it, and the dark means we see shooting stars from time to time. 

Elsewhere, I try not to think about AI usage too much and find myself thinking about it all of the time. As the joke goes, is AI good for the environment? No. But is it good at providing us accurate information? Also no. It uses up far more energy than we can provide, it destroys clean water supplies, it provides nonsense information that feeds into the cycle of sources of the same nonsense information, it destroys entry-level jobs where employees learn how their field works, it tips people into psychosis, and it rots our brains’ ability to plan, analyse, create, critique, and organise. Otherwise, double thumbs up. 

As ever, a Thomas Flight essay captures the issue perfectly: what humans make when they strive to express themselves is art, while AI is artifice. AI film, writing, art, music: it’s artifice, created to scratch an itch that some human thinks they have (or that they can make money from other humans thinking they have) but it’s drug-art, empty, hollow, disconnected, soulless. How quickly we forget that we, people, individuals, make art, not to provide content for the machine (a reminder: that story was written in 1909), but to live, to dance, to sing with or for others, to share a space and blow paint onto cave walls and voice some part of us that wants desperately to reach out and say to others, ‘I feel this — do you?’ 

I haven’t read The Unbearable Lightness of Being since I was a teen, and even then I found it annoying for the main character being a man bringing great “you can’t dampen this passionate flame, baby, I’m off to have sex with any woman who’ll have me and that’s just how I roll” energy and, admittedly, I may not entirely have grasped all of its complexities in my tender youth but the idea of kitsch versus shit certainly stayed with me. I’ve often had those opposing concepts bumping up against one another in a subconscious way in the passing years, but never have they felt so apt as this moment: shit as art, flawed, human, error-filled, difficult, uncomfortable, and kitsch as the artifice, bright, perfect, just as requested, loud and overwhelming, don’t look at that when we can offer you this. 

But as Kundera expressed so well, it’s the shit that makes life matter. Why leave your house to see people face to face when they might do something wrong — or worse, you might? Why stand up and create something when others might hate it, or insist on your terrible secret intentions? Why pick up a book, which is time consuming and hard work and difficult, when you could just keep scrolling, which is soothing and calming and easy? Of course, because leaving your house and talking to people face to face, because creating art no matter what, because reading a book — these things make us feel better, not despite the fact that they’re harder, but because they are. 

No one with any integrity or honesty could say that the internet, and smartphones, are making our lives collectively, overall, better. Our democracies are eroding, our relationships are crumbling (from ghosting to non-contact to the throbbing boil of therapy speak), ever-more pointless trends are speeding up, divisions are getting hotter as we forget how to debate and disagree, and young people can’t find jobs, or afford houses, or feel like there is a future waiting for them. But art! Art is something. As Flight says in his essay, ‘We fall prey to all manner of propaganda and we simultaneously devalue the power of art by frequently asserting that everything is artifice, that there is no space for something greater that can truly move us, profoundly.’ I have a personal horror of sentimentality that was helpfully shaken by the much-maligned new Taylor Swift album, specifically ‘Eldest Daughter’: how ick that she used that internet slang! How embarrassing to use those online phrases in a song! When you’re a billionaire! OMG cringing for you (and for me, a pumpkin spice basic bitch to even like that music, of course). 

Of course, this record-breaking songwriter knows what she’s doing. Those lyrics are there not as ironic signposts to signify how she’s subverting social expectations, but she’s using them because at some point in life we hopefully all realise that cringe is connection; embarrassment is proof that you’ve brushed up against another human; discomfort is evidence that you’re living in your life and sometimes it’s actually better to not be comfortable for every single moment of every single day. People who make time to think about stuff tend to produce stuff that is thoughtful. 

Kitsch-vajazzled AI “art” offers regurgitation, chewed-up reboots of chewed-up reboots, and while it might distract our eye for a moment, it does nothing for our brain. When I think of the art I’ve enjoyed most over the last year or so, it’s been those works that may have multiple, hundreds of collaborators, but have one person’s artistic vision stamped all over them, one voice telling a story that matters to them: Inside, Atlanta, Busy Being Free, The Rehearsal, Presence, Little Women, Sinners, One Battle After Another. Art that might not be perfect — that isn’t perfect, of course, it’s art, not artifice — but makes my soul sing (cringe) and makes me glad to be alive right now (ick). Watching Mad Men again makes me aware that on this sixth, or seventh, or eighth viewing I’m seeing something different from every viewing before, and this time Don Draper is the saddest man who ever lived, a truly pathetic desperate messed-up loser housed in the body of a movie star, and it’s fascinating that the same programme recorded well over a decade ago can still elicit new reactions from me, because it’s good enough to make me aware of my changing self in relation to it. It’s beautiful, flawed art. 

I’m also valuing what art I can offer. I’m unlikely to ever write anything that makes anyone laugh as much as my favourite funny things make me laugh, but I’m a fantastic audience member. I won’t open a cafe and make thousands from my cooking skills, but I feed a household and guests really well. There’s slim chance that I’ll reap life-changing, or even life-supporting, amounts from my writing, but writing helps me think, and thinking helps me listen, and listening helps me enjoy talking with those around me. I love it. I love it. 

And perhaps I’m better at loving, than being loved. But everyone thinks that, don’t they? Unless they don’t, in which case they’re probably wrong, and I’m probably wrong at my skills at loving when it comes to those people who might need my love the most. Flight says that what is lost in a world of artifice, among other things, is romance. In the first The Rest is History episode about Walt Disney, Holland and Sandbrook discuss the Richard Schickel criticism that Disney had ‘infantilised the country’, accusing Disney of ‘having created a world that was designed to shatter the two most valuable things about childhood: its secrets and its silences, thus forcing everyone to share the same formative dreams.’ I believe this. I think good secrets and good silences, in childhood and in relationships, allow romance to grow like an inexplicable wildflower. I think this is what AI removes from us now, and what social media has been removing from us for a decade or so. It’s a flattening-out of experiences, of removing private spontaneity, of discretion and humility, turning dating into such a farce of presentation and counter-presentation that vast swathes of teens and twenty-somethings have abandoned it altogether, lest they appear in a instagram reel or a tea-spilling website, all too young to appreciate how important privacy is as a space in which one can not only make mistakes, but also do the right thing. 

Art lets us make shit decisions, and still produce something that speaks impossibly clearly to someone else. We need art to thrive, away from irony, away from perfection, away from the purity spirals that dictate which thoughts we can and can’t discuss. It is not frictionless ease that has made me love those I love over the years; life is ugly, even when it is wonderful. There are ants at every picnic, but how marvellous still it is to sit there together. Life is made of ever so many partings welded together, as Dickens had it, and there are partings coming down the pike for all of us, some slow, some already written into our diaries, pulling our hearts out as they go. While I love a flash of kitsch at the right moment, I hope as we travel that it is art, old, new, baffling, enraging, delighting, good, that we carry with us into another day of trying, trying, to connect with one another.