Richard Brautigan was born in Tacoma, Washington in 1935 and died in 1984. He had an unhappy childhood marked by poverty, and in his teens was committed to Oregon State Hospital where he received electroshock therapy.
Moving to San Francisco, he published the novel Trout Fishing in America in 1967 which established him as a literary force.
That same year, while poet-in-residence at the California Institute of Technology, Brautigan wrote "All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace", and the poem was later published in a collection of the same name.
This poem has been interpreted in wildly opposing ways — as both idealistic, even utopian dream of a world when nature and technology live in harmony, or as a darkly ironic warning about technology and nature. In the latter reading (which is, I think, the more common interpretation), the subtext is that such harmony is impossible. That the machines cannot possess loving grace, that loving grace is the preserve of humans, and that humans are gravely threatened by the mechanistic sweep of technology.
I’m not interested, really, in arguing for or against either interpretation. I don’t think it’s all idealism and I don’t think it’s all irony. I do think that it’s a brilliant encapsulation of where humanity was headed in the 1960s, with the atomic weapons still fresh in the memory, with the peril of nuclear war hanging over everything, with the birth of the computer age that was already promising to change everything.
Fast forward 60 years, and I am exposed, or more accurately expose myself on a daily basis to so-called Artificial Intelligence tools and software — and I expect many of you are exposed to this also.
The lines between humanity as part of nature on the one hand, and humanity as the creative force behind nature-wrecking technology on the other, are as blurred as they’ve ever been.
So I don’t care which way this poem is interpreted. I won’t argue that it’s a beacon of positivity and techno-utopianism, and I won’t argue that it’s a stark warning against the march of technology.
I do care, and care deeply, about the vista it offers us, and the questions it poses, even if it doesn’t ask (or answer) those questions directly.
It’s up to us how we respond to those questions, and whether we see hope within this.
Notwithstanding the damage that a lot of technology has caused, there is also of course all of the gains that technology has given us, so I still believe there is hope, and I still believe this poem might offer us a route in to think about these questions and to take fruitful steps into the future, whatever it might look like.
You can view an annotated print of the poem at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London's collection here.
You can buy Richard Brautigan's books via your preferred bookseller below:
Bookshop.org
Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk
Ireland