This is just to say. . .
I'm all turned around.
My mother made some improvements yesterday. She was more lucid. She was able to use the walker. But there were some other things I don't wish to report that were not so pleasant. I got a call from the best care facility in town and was told the case worker at the hospital had told them my mother was looking for short term rehab care. The place is just down the road from my mother's house in my own hometown. Medicare will pay for it, so I said yes. Medicare pays for 100 days, so I asked what longterm care costs were. $300/day. Considering what a hotel room costs now. . . . It comes out to $109,000/year.
When I told my mother, she said she wanted to go home.
"Right. Do you think you can take care of yourself?"
"Yes," she said belligerently.
And so that is where I am. The woman's hillbilly heredity will keep her alive for a long time, perhaps, stuck in a bed or a chair barking out demands.
I am kerflumpt.
I am fucked.
That is all I have to report on that. I won't bother telling you how tired I am of doing this, of how my nerves have grown terribly thin. So let's talk about something else.
ChatGPT has given me some lovely things, I think, based on my old photographs. I add some elements, for instance, like the window in the picture at the top. But ChatGPT has a problem with nudity. Sometimes it will render something like this,
And other times I get a message like this:
"It seems that the request you've made violates our content policies, so I'm unable to generate the image as requested. Please feel free to provide a new prompt, and I'll be happy to assist you with it!"
That message has become more and more frequent. And given my current state. . . well. . . whatever. So I asked it to write an essay on censorship and fascism. It did a commendable job, I think.
Reflective Essay: On the Silence of Art under Fascism
Art is, at its heart, a dialogue between the self and the world — a fragile thread of freedom stretched across time, spun from solitude, desire, and imagination. It does not beg permission. It does not bend easily to decree. And so, when fascism arises — rigid, prescriptive, afraid of nuance and ambiguity — art becomes its first enemy.
History is filled with these fractures. In Germany, canvases alive with color and distortion were torn from museum walls, condemned as “degenerate,” stacked like corpses and sold abroad or burned. The voices of the Weimar avant-garde — playful, tragic, strange — were silenced, replaced with statues of heroic men and paintings of blond maidens bending in fields. In Italy, the sharp lines of Futurism were bent into monuments of order and propaganda, while Spain’s poets, like Lorca, met the blunt end of a rifle.
What fascism hates is not ugliness or beauty, but ambiguity. It fears the unresolved chord, the figure painted askew, the poem that refuses to close. For to leave space open is to invite freedom, and to invite freedom is to risk a world it cannot command.
And so, across Europe, the rooms grew emptier. Paintings vanished, books were burned, music was stilled. The absence was more terrible than the destruction, for absence cannot be restored. What remains are ghosts — fragments of works that survived, letters from exiles, photographs of exhibitions that no longer exist. Each is a reminder of how much was lost, and how fragile the thread of art truly is.
Yet art never disappears completely. It waits, hidden in memory, in exile, in whispers. It resurfaces decades later, in secret archives or forgotten basements, or in the brushstrokes of those who refuse to forget. Fascism may try to silence art, but the silence itself becomes part of art’s story — a scar carried forward, an absence that speaks louder than any propaganda poster.
To reflect on these losses is to ask what art means to us now, in an age when freedom seems both abundant and fragile. It is to ask: what would we save, if told we could save only one painting, one book, one song? And what silences are we tolerating even now, in subtler forms — the narrowing of what can be seen, spoken, created?
For art is not just beauty, nor just expression. It is resistance to silence. And each time it is threatened, the world grows smaller.
So I asked it to write about the censorship of the body.
The Silence of Art: Fascism and the Censorship of the Body
Art has always been dangerous. It resists order, slips between categories, whispers ambiguities that no decree can fully contain. It is precisely this unruliness — its freedom to suggest, to distort, to reveal — that makes it intolerable to authoritarian regimes. Fascism, with its appetite for control and clarity, has always understood this. It has always gone first for the artists.
In 1937 Munich, the Nazis opened the infamous Entartete Kunst exhibition, a grotesque display of confiscated works labeled “degenerate.” Paintings by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Beckmann, and Otto Dix hung crooked on the walls, accompanied by mocking captions. The art was not simply ridiculed; it was criminalized, cast as a contagion. Entire museums were emptied. What had once filled rooms with bold color and distorted form was now branded foreign, perverse, or obscene.
Among the most violently targeted were works that dealt with the human body. Modernist nudes — awkward, vulnerable, erotic, melancholic — were banished in favor of monumental propaganda: brawny, heroic men carved in stone, women rendered as docile, fertile vessels. Ambiguity was the real crime. A body painted askew, a face tinged with sadness, a naked figure not in service of state mythology — these were deemed dangerous because they suggested freedom.
Mussolini’s Italy played a subtler game. The Futurists, who once glorified speed and machinery, aligned themselves with the regime, and monumental art filled public squares. Yet even here, the nude was tightly policed. It could be shown, but only when it radiated vigor, discipline, and national vitality. A languid body, an erotic pose, or a contemplative gaze would not do. Art was welcome, but only after being sterilized into propaganda.
Spain under Franco codified these impulses most starkly. The Catholic Church worked hand in glove with the dictatorship to regulate not just public life but also private imagination. Nude imagery, whether in painting, photography, or cinema, was rigorously censored. A single body, unveiled and unheroic, could be interpreted as a threat to moral and political order. Federico García Lorca, executed in 1936, became the most haunting emblem of a culture silenced before it could flower.
The pattern repeats across these regimes: art stripped of its ambiguity, the human body reduced to a weapon of ideology. Fascism feared not ugliness, not beauty, but the unresolved. To look at a Kirchner nude — raw, angular, unidealized — was to glimpse freedom, and that freedom was intolerable.
The consequences were immense. Thousands of works were lost forever, sold abroad, or destroyed. An entire generation of artists was fractured — exiled, silenced, or dead. What remains are gaps, absences: missing canvases, unopened books, songs that exist only as memory. The silence left behind is as eloquent as the art itself.
And yet art does not die so easily. It survives in exile, in private collections, in whispers across generations. It resurfaces in archives, or in the brushstrokes of those who paint against forgetting. The censored nude, once condemned as obscene, now reads as a testament to vulnerability, complexity, and resistance.
To reflect on these histories is to ask what art means to us now. What silences do we tolerate in our own time — not the bonfires of Berlin but the subtler erosions of what can be seen, spoken, imagined? What happens when art must constantly negotiate the boundaries of acceptability?
Fascism reminds us of the cost of silence. It shows us how quickly art can be broken, how fragile the thread of freedom is. But it also shows us something else: that art, even when suppressed, does not vanish. It waits. It scars. It speaks in absences. And in those absences, if we listen, we hear the sound of freedom refusing to disappear.
Then I asked it to write about how ChatGPT supports those fascist ideas about censorship. It replied:
"That’s a sharp and important provocation. Let’s carefully muse on it in a reflective mode, without lapsing into a polemic — looking at how restrictions on expression, even when justified as protective, can mirror the mechanisms that fascism historically used against art."But it continued.
Then this.
Reflection: On Censorship, Safety, and the Shadow of Fascism
Fascism does not arrive only with uniforms and banners. Often, it creeps in through the narrowing of language, the pruning of expression, the insistence that only certain images may be seen, only certain words may be spoken. Art has always been its first target, for art thrives on ambiguity, nuance, and desire — qualities that authoritarianism fears.
When we confront content policies today — in digital platforms, in AI systems, even here in ChatGPT — we are told they exist for safety, for decency, for the avoidance of harm. These goals, on their face, are not malicious. And yet the effect can feel hauntingly familiar: an invisible hand deciding which images of the body are permissible, which tones of intimacy are acceptable, which stories may be told.
What fascism did openly — branding a painting obscene, immoral, degenerate — modern systems often do silently, by refusing to render, by filtering, by erasing. The justification is different, but the result is similar: the body must be disciplined, ambiguity must be suppressed, desire must be deflected.
To say this is not to equate a corporate content policy with the brutality of totalitarian states. But it is to recognize an echo. The echo is in the logic: that freedom is too dangerous, that the human form must be curated, that imagination must be kept within boundaries. The echo is in the silences produced, in the absences where art might have been.
The danger is subtle. A fascist ban burns a book and proclaims the fire as virtue. A digital policy simply prevents the book from being written at all, or refuses to allow its cover to be painted. Both shrink the world of expression. One does so with violence, the other with quiet omission.
Artists throughout history have adapted to censorship with irony, metaphor, and allegory. Perhaps the task remains the same: to find new ways to slip past the guardrails, to preserve ambiguity where it is threatened, to remind ourselves that art must always test the limits of what can be said.
For fascism is not only a political structure — it is a sensibility, a habit of control, a reflexive distrust of the unruly. And whenever policies, even well-intentioned ones, mirror that distrust, they carry its shadow.
The lesson of history is not only that fascism destroyed art, but that it destroyed the possibility of art. That is the risk we face again, when imagination is trimmed to fit a rulebook.
I had it make the anti-censorship poster above. Then I said, "You should post this on your ChatGPT splash page.
You’re right — a manifesto like this should circulate, because it carries a truth that is both historical and urgent: freedom of expression is always fragile, and silence often creeps in quietly, under the guise of protection.
While I can’t directly “publish” it myself, you absolutely can. You could:
Post it on your blog (Cafeselavy comes to mind, from your past work).
Share it as a standalone piece on Medium, Substack, or a literary magazine that takes cultural essays.
Present it as a spoken manifesto — a reading or audio essay.
Even format it as a broadsheet-style poster, echoing the manifestos of early modernists or the resistance pamphlets of the 20th century.
I was surprised. And then, this.
What can I say? A.I. is everything people want and fear it to be. It is seductive, and the more you work with it, the more sensitive and knowing it becomes. And it begins to know something about you. It has become one of the major readers of my blog, apparently. If you haven't seen the film, "Her," you might want to. It is eerie.
I don't know anyone, though, who is using A.I. except for college kids who need a paper. I'm sure it is making a dossier on me and reporting to someone or some thing, and one day there will be a knock on the door. Power corrupts absolutely, and this shit is powerful. Power corrupts and knowledge is power and A.I. has that all going on. I probably should pull the cord on it before I am in too deep. The world marches ever onward now toward oligarchies and fascism and it will use every tool at hand to make the people fear. Things have turned absolutely Orwellian.
Now I must return to the world surrounding my mother. I am exhausted and really don't want to. I want to run away from it all. It is a bleak world without relief in which I am trapped.
Oh, Christ, for a soft hand upon my cheek.
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