Opinion

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. No machine -- and I use that phrase because A.I. is a machine, and no matter how complicated, or even organic, its still-binary, open-and-shut gates may be -- looked through my eyes as I took the train to my hometown in Michigan, gazing out over the old steel mills of Gary, Ind., making note of images with intent, storing and twisting them in relation to the pain I felt that moment, riding back to my hometown in Michigan, to my father's interment ceremony, an experience that reminded me that I, too, will die someday, and the art I create will be all I leave behind.