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andyjansbrown

Something Real

Whilst laying down on the rocky beach to film myself singing the lyrics for the ‘Something Real’ music video, I became instantly reflective and wrote this poem …


‘Beached upon this bank of time

Faces to the infinite sky

The waves lapping by our side

eternity is knocking


Like rocks that now

Are smooth as sand

We as well will meet our end

Frivolity we can command

But death like time

Is clocking’




As we free fall deeper into the illusory world of our screens, into the self imposed prisons of the algorithm dictated reality fed by our cognitive biases , we peer into an infinite abyss which no longer reflects our humanness,  and which leaves us longing for something real -


Oh the depth of despair we encounter when we are banished and isolated and alienated from the source of our meaning; when like the fallen angel guilty of loving too much , we are punished to never again look upon that which we love.


Like overwhelmed Romeo finding his Juliet sleeping and thinking her dead, drinking a poison to end an unbearable life without her , sealing their fate with his haste.


The genie is out of its bottle and

Ai is here to stay .

And what of this Frankenstein’s monster?


If by granting us convenience and by saving us time and money , we deprive ourselves our freedom to make choices and to create and spontaneously play in beauty and meaning making; then what do we lose?


If Ai makes the art and makes the music what are we really giving up?

If we do not place ourselves at a distance of safety from this atomic bomb like experiment, then we face to lose something so pure, so innocent, so beautiful and so uniquely human.


Art throughout human history has played the wondrous role of mirroring our soul back to us- the solace of its reflection has helped us to bear the weight of mortality.

To lose this human touch , the soul of the blues, ‘the creation of Adam’ on the Sistine Chapel ceiling as he miraculously reaches beyond to touch the light of God’s impossible finger . If we lose this access to our souls then what?


I am reminded

Of the words of Frederich Nietzsche’s infamous God is dead statement. “God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?”


Nietzsche’s call to responsibility, for us all to overcome the crutch of fate and make the most of our days beneath the sun is amplified and echoes louder still in the face of such oblivion.

In Viktor Frankl’s book , ‘Man’s search for meaning’ he quotes Nietzsche, “he who has a why to live can bear almost any how”

The beauty of art.

The songs of slavery.

The fruits of sacrifice.

The meaning in the suffering.

Such things do not come from instant gratification.

All art contains the impossible spirit of overcoming against all odds, of transcending struggles like Virgil through Dante’s ‘inferno’. All art bleeds the blood of sacrifice and such is the beauty of meaning;

the “why” of which Nietzsche speaks.


We must continue to muddy our hands to mold the clay of the abstract into form.

Ai is the imitation of this, like wall paper or Muzak elevator Beatles that I’m sure you hear on endless rotation in the waiting rooms of Hell.


As I lay on that rocky beach that day my lament felt like a lonely cry singing out forever into the infinite, “come back something real, I know that we both drifted off, the stars all shine for what was once.”


For all lovers of beauty and meaning.



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