Rad Geek People's Daily

What I’m Reading: some poems by Richard Brautigan, a real weirdo of the San Francisco and Pacific Northwest counterculture. Here’s one that he first wrote in 1967, which was first distributed as a mimeo broadside circulated in Haight-Ashbury by the Diggers^[1] then republished in a series of chapbooks, newspapers and books. This copy’s from the paperback of his 1968 selected poems anthology.

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

— Richard Brautigan, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace^[2]
Reprinted in The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (1968). New York: Dell Publishing Co. 1.

1. ^[1]More specifically, by the Diggers’ mimeo publishing operation, the Communications Company. (Source: Wikipedia)↩
2. ^[2]I went to find a copy of the poem because of its title-drop appearance in Adam Curtis’s 2011 BBC documentary series. The Curtis documentary is artfully constructed, involving, and really watching on the whole, considered aesthetically as a sort of techno-dystopian cyber-socio-political collage made out of rambling thoughts and historical materials. But also, considered on the substance of its content and argument, it is a wrongheaded, deeply confused and soemtimes really deranged sort of random walk through Great Recession vintage artsy-progressive techno-paranoid conspiracy theorizing, or sub-theoretical conspiratorial musing, about intellectual pseudohistory and the international bankers and The Machines and the world-haunting Spectre of Neoliberalism. Anyway, I like the poems better.↩