Our Father Who art in heaven Hallowed be Thy name Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven Give us this day our daily Bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil

Amen

Jesus is Lord! Come Lord Jesus!

Come Lord Jesus! Christ is Lord!

Mette

Roiling the wind In the British house With Beau in between Fair tales of war And economy ruin To the left of Pituffik A solemn share of seasons And an African solace Who came to sing at the year- The year’s life and best Was firm and seeing noon The ricochet of what is right Ineffably sane And powder kegs of annoyance From the sea, If any Merchants of the house And Rome near The entire collection Of country word and stability Trying to not be at hand For the suit-heroes who won a war In the mainland is a must Which is to never carry weapon And we would sit for days of it Commuting time- In favour of life And rain by Summer’s Eve Would notice a shadow That every mean man Was a saviour Without a gun

Donald turned off all welfare And saved the life of MAGA And was worth a trillion And a billion And fifty thousand And Africa was livid Because of the sea Where Women wept In globs of oil And the exasperated nymph- The sea one- Returned to Denmark And Bornholm- For the British- Turned the page on war And the children got rid of democracy

It's really cool that I can knit. I take a bundle of stuff and turn it into love to keep people warm of body and heart.

This might turn into a poem, but for now, have a random thought.

Have a lovely day, friend!

#RandomSkyThoughts #Knitting

Molly

In a factor of 1 I was time and alone For prayer peace, and solid hours, Third in succession To Rome And strangely removed From the towels we remember Finding swim And fields of work And jubilation There were mercury keys And days of Saturn setting I was your hero But we became the republic In no way of finding out I was remorse and you were both feeling and scared Too much lovely, And not enough sounding strange But forces were And I was a day that talked to you In sight of redemption, some, Fears of knowing the end of islam- Made me the enemy And you were closest, Every night, To my baptism In shaded countries, The ones with places, I was the countryside- and you were a looker Sweet repose by nasturtiums- And borderline Republic, You and me, Fixing Qatar And wanting to be first Through every door You were the smartest Woman And paved every way To avoid my death- The Hero at war And I remember you Chasing our dowry Screaming down at mansions Affecting Europe in force- To be frequent and fast And taking chances Like the fool ocean we drank And chose to swim For Earth’s dark And lonely Finn Squirrels at home, rest, and play The juvenile Epiphany for all Mulroons Making our Month to Aladdin Escaping by dawn To the Rothesay we borrowed Upon real war- And not totally beat Like lions And the elite Perfect broke, As the angels, And praying starry war- Inverted but also shared For wanting home And saving Shannon We feel already Our escape hatch on plus To give us get With simple days And heights of Peter The only edifice A patriot of seeming patterns, Not us- We were the other And it took us to Reykjavik By classes 1 and 2 Specialist flights And below deck To sleep while fasting For fortunes of echo- Loudly chambering A new Woman And mechanist While we pray for Saxon The policy out loud For turnstiles and waving at war Like it was- Just a story And ending dawn

There was a troll in the mirror today when I went to the bathroom, looking back at me with a sad smile.

It’s the type of medium size bathroom you might find on a ferry boat, in one of the better cabins. Still too small for a wash machine. Renovated maybe in the nineties.

I grew attached to it once when I was cleaning it throughoutly while listening to some Clive Barker novel which took place on a boat, coincidentally.

A horror novel, of course. Everybody dies. But still…

To go there cleaning on a fine autumn evening with a hot cup of black coffee in one hand, the toilet brush in the other: Isn’t that what it’s all about?; the autumn sun shining through the windows of the room outside…

And of course with the family nearby giving the bathroom a wide berth, as the floor is wet from the mop.

But today there was a troll in there. Handsome for a troll, but still…

Trolls are pretty resilient and often gather treasure. They regenerate, and even the small ones are strong like gorillas.

There are some lessons Jesus teaches that don’t come through sermons, or verses we underline, or words spoken from a pulpit. Some lessons come quietly, through ordinary days, through ordinary people, through things so small they almost seem unspiritual at first glance. A fence. A conversation. A moment of realization that lands not like thunder, but like truth finally admitted.

This is one of those stories.

It happened in a small American town that most people would drive through without noticing. No billboards announcing its existence. No skyline. No ambitions of being more than what it was. Just a place where life moved at a human pace, where people still waved from their porches, where streets had names instead of numbers, and where silence wasn’t something to escape but something you learned to live with.

At the end of one of those streets—Maple Street, to be exact—stood a house that had seen better days, not because it was falling apart, but because it remembered when it had been full.

The man who lived there was named Tom Walker.

Tom wasn’t remarkable by the world’s standards. He didn’t have a platform. He didn’t have a following. He didn’t have a testimony that made people lean forward in their seats. He was a hardware store owner, a widower, and a quiet believer in Jesus who had learned how to keep going even when life stopped asking him what he wanted.

He had lived in that house for nearly thirty years. He and his wife, Mary, had picked it because it had a yard big enough for a garden and a porch wide enough for two rocking chairs. For a long time, it had been exactly what they needed.

Now, it was just quiet.

Behind the house stood a fence.

It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t symbolic on purpose. It was just old. Wooden. Once white. Now peeling. Leaning in places. Missing boards in others. The kind of fence people notice but don’t comment on because they assume it will be dealt with eventually.

Tom noticed it every morning.

He noticed it when he poured his coffee. When he stood at the kitchen window. When he locked the back door before heading to work. The fence had become part of his routine, like an unresolved thought he passed by each day without touching.

He always told himself the same thing.

I’ll fix it when I have the energy. I’ll fix it when business slows down. I’ll fix it when I feel stronger.

And because Tom was a man of faith, he added something else to the list.

I’ll pray about it.

Tom believed in Jesus. Not the loud kind of belief that needed to be seen. The quieter kind that showed up in habits. In the way he treated people. In the way he prayed when no one was listening. He kept a Bible on his nightstand, even if some nights he fell asleep before opening it. He went to church most Sundays, sitting near the back, nodding along, absorbing what he needed without drawing attention to himself.

After Mary died, his faith didn’t disappear. It just became quieter. More private. Less certain in places. Grief has a way of sanding down your confidence without asking permission.

The hardware store kept him busy. It had been in his family for years, and though big-box stores had crept closer, the people in town still came to Tom when they needed something specific. A bolt no one else carried. Advice no one else could give. A conversation they didn’t know they needed until they were halfway through it.

But even good routines can become hiding places.

And the fence remained.

One afternoon, Tom noticed someone standing near it. A small figure, just on the other side, kicking at the dirt. A boy, maybe eight or nine, with restless energy and a baseball cap that looked like it belonged to someone older.

It was Eli, the kid who lived next door with his mother.

Eli’s mother, Sarah, worked nights at the nursing home. Tom saw her car leave after dinner and return in the early morning hours. Eli spent a lot of time outside. Riding his bike. Throwing a ball against the garage. Waiting for someone to come home.

“Mr. Walker?” Eli said.

Tom looked up from his coffee and stepped onto the porch.

“Yeah, buddy?”

Eli hesitated, like he wasn’t sure if he was allowed to say what he was about to say. “My mom says our dog keeps getting through the fence. He ran into the road yesterday.”

Tom felt something tighten in his chest. Not defensiveness. Not irritation. Recognition.

“I’ve been praying about it,” Tom said, the words coming out automatically.

Eli nodded slowly. “Okay,” he said.

And then he walked back toward his house.

Tom stood there longer than necessary, staring at the fence. The conversation replayed in his mind, not because Eli had been disrespectful, but because the answer didn’t sound as solid as it had when Tom said it silently to himself.

I’ve been praying about it.

That night, sleep didn’t come easily. Tom lay in bed, listening to the house settle, thinking about how many times he had said those words over the years. About the fence. About other things. Things that required effort. Things that required him to move.

He wasn’t ignoring God. He realized that much.

But he was beginning to wonder if he was hiding.

Sunday morning arrived quietly, like it always did. Tom dressed, drove to church, and took his usual seat near the back. The building smelled faintly of old wood and coffee. Familiar. Safe.

The pastor opened the Bible to the Gospel of Matthew.

“Why do you call Me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?”

The words hung in the air longer than Tom expected.

The pastor didn’t shout. He didn’t press. He simply talked about obedience. About how Jesus never separated faith from action. About how belief was meant to move people toward responsibility, not away from it.

“Sometimes,” the pastor said, “we pray for things Jesus has already told us to do.”

Tom felt the sentence settle into him like a weight and a relief at the same time.

He thought about Jesus feeding people instead of sending them away. Healing people who crossed His path. Stopping for the one person others overlooked. Jesus didn’t spiritualize inaction. He didn’t confuse waiting with faithfulness.

Faith, in the life of Jesus, always moved toward love.

That afternoon, Tom stood in his backyard again. The fence looked worse in the daylight. The missing boards more obvious. The leaning posts harder to ignore.

He opened his mouth to pray the way he always had.

And then he stopped.

The prayer changed.

“Jesus,” he said quietly, “I think I know what You’re asking me to do.”

There was no voice. No sign. No sudden strength.

Just clarity.

Tom realized something that made him both uncomfortable and free.

He hadn’t been waiting on God.

God had been waiting on him.

Tom didn’t sleep much that night.

Not because he was anxious, but because his mind wouldn’t settle back into the comfortable explanations it had lived in for years. Something had shifted. Not dramatically. Not emotionally. But honestly. He lay there listening to the clock tick and realized how often he had used faith as a way to delay responsibility rather than step into it.

It wasn’t that he doubted God. He never had.

It was that he had quietly assumed God would do for him what God had already given him the strength, ability, and opportunity to do himself.

The next morning, Tom woke up earlier than usual. Before the store. Before the town stirred. He stood in the kitchen, poured his coffee, and looked out the window again at the fence. The boards hadn’t moved. Nothing had changed overnight.

Except him.

He didn’t pray about the fence that morning.

He got dressed.

Old jeans. A faded flannel. Boots he hadn’t worn in a while. He opened the garage and stood there longer than he expected, looking at the tools. Some were rusted. Some hadn’t been touched since Mary was alive. He picked up a hammer, testing the weight of it in his hand, surprised by how familiar it still felt.

His back protested the moment he bent down to inspect the first post. A sharp reminder that time had passed whether he liked it or not. He paused, straightened slowly, and considered going inside. Considered waiting until the weekend. Considered waiting until he felt better.

And then he heard the words from Sunday again.

Why do you call Me Lord and not do what I say?

Tom took a breath and lifted the first board.

It wasn’t graceful. The nail bent. He had to pull it out and try again. Sweat formed quicker than he expected, and after twenty minutes he had to sit down on the overturned bucket and let his pulse slow. But something strange happened in the stopping.

He didn’t feel defeated.

He felt present.

For the first time in a long while, he wasn’t waiting on life to happen to him. He was responding to what was right in front of him.

By midmorning, Eli appeared again, standing just inside his yard, watching quietly.

“You’re really fixing it,” the boy said.

Tom smiled, wiping his hands on his jeans. “Looks like it.”

Eli squinted at the fence. “My mom says thank you.”

Tom nodded. “Tell her she’s welcome.”

Eli hesitated, then asked, “Why now?”

The question wasn’t accusatory. Just curious.

Tom thought for a moment. “Because I think Jesus wanted me to stop praying about it and start helping.”

Eli grinned, wide and unfiltered. “That sounds like Jesus.”

Tom laughed softly. “Yeah. It does.”

Word travels fast in small towns, even when no one is trying to spread it. By afternoon, a neighbor stopped by with extra boards left over from a project. Another offered a ladder. Someone brought a cold bottle of water and stayed to talk longer than planned.

No one made a big deal out of it. That was the town’s way. But presence accumulated. Conversations formed. Tom noticed how easily people leaned into something when it wasn’t rushed, when it wasn’t loud, when it was simply honest.

Sarah came by that evening after waking up for her shift. She stood quietly for a moment, watching Tom work.

“I didn’t want to bother you,” she said finally. “I know you’ve had a lot on your plate.”

Tom leaned on the hammer. “You didn’t bother me. I just took too long.”

She nodded, eyes wet but smiling. “It means more than you know.”

The fence took three days.

Not because it was complicated, but because Tom worked at the pace his body allowed. He learned to rest without quitting. To stop without abandoning the work. Each board went up slowly. Each post was steadied carefully.

And with every section completed, something inside him straightened too.

He slept better than he had in years. Not longer, but deeper. He woke up with a clarity that hadn’t been there before. Not excitement exactly. Purpose.

Tom realized that obedience had done something prayer alone hadn’t.

It had reconnected him to life.

The following Sunday, Tom sat in the same pew as always. Same building. Same pastor. Same Scripture. But the words landed differently now. Not because they had changed, but because he had.

Faith wasn’t theoretical anymore.

It was practical.

It was sweaty.

It was inconvenient.

And it was deeply alive.

In the weeks that followed, Tom noticed other things shifting. He started addressing small repairs he’d been ignoring. Not out of obligation, but because he could see how neglect quietly spread when left unchecked. He began conversations he had been avoiding. Made phone calls he’d put off. Not perfectly. Not all at once.

But faithfully.

He wasn’t trying to fix his whole life.

Just what Jesus had placed in front of him.

Months later, the fence stood straight and solid, freshly painted white. It didn’t draw attention. It didn’t stand out. But it did what fences are meant to do.

It protected.

It served.

It quietly held space.

When people asked Tom about it, he never turned it into a sermon. He didn’t need to. He simply said, “I realized God wasn’t asking me to wait. He was asking me to obey.”

That was the lesson Jesus had taught him without spectacle.

That faith isn’t waiting for lightning.

It’s listening closely enough to know when it’s time to pick up a hammer.

Jesus never asked people to carry everything. He asked them to carry what was theirs to carry. To forgive when forgiveness was needed. To serve when service was possible. To move when movement was required.

And sometimes, in small towns, on quiet streets, with ordinary lives, the most spiritual moment isn’t a prayer spoken out loud.

It’s a decision made quietly.

To stop hiding behind waiting.

To stop confusing delay with devotion.

To take responsibility for what love requires.

Because sometimes the lesson Jesus teaches doesn’t come through words at all.

It comes through a fence.

Watch Douglas Vandergraph’s inspiring faith-based videos on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

Support the ministry by buying Douglas a coffee https://www.buymeacoffee.com/douglasvandergraph

Yourfriend, Douglas Vandergraph

#Faith #ChristianLiving #Obedience #FollowingJesus #EverydayFaith #SmallTownFaith #Purpose #Responsibility #GraceAndAction #FaithInAction

Black fountain pen inks come with a variety of descriptive names: Onyx Black; Black Ash; Jet Black; Black Pearl; Velvet Black, and so on. In an effort to suggest 'none more black', J. Herbin have come up with the name Noir Abyssal for the black ink in their les encres essentielles line. While it sounds impressive, it isn't the blackest ink one can buy, and doubtless actual abysses can outdo any ink in the depths of their darknesses. A bottle of it arrived here on Wednesday. While I've yet to fill a pen with it, I'm confident it will be quite black enough for my workaday note-taking needs. I shall strive not to gaze too long into the ink lest the ink gaze back.

I had originally intended to order a different ink. I've been a satisfied user of the Italian-made Aurora black ink for years. Aurora were long known for making ink in only two sober colours: black and blue-black, with both being excellent if somewhat costly exemplars of those shades. Since my last re-order, however, things have evidently changed. They have a re-designed bottle, and there is now a range of ten colours. While the new range does not exclude black, I was unable to find any in that shade on offer at the UK stockists I tried. Reading someone claim on-line that Noir Abyssal is very similar to Aurora black, I resorted to ordering some of that instead (Fig. 8).

J. Herbin's regular Perle Noir retails for about £10 for a 30ml bottle; whereas Noir Abyssal is ca. £30 for 50ml, making the latter, drop for drop, roughly 1.8 times more expensive. It may be slightly blacker but I'd imagine most of the extra cost has gone to the fancier, heavier bottle, more strenuous marketing, and a wider profit margin. What can I say: it worked on parting this fool from some of his money – and I do like the look & feel of the bottle.

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By way of my Christmas wish-list I was given several albums on CD including three more from my current favourite record-label International Anthem. These were: the first Fly Or Die offering from the late jamie branch, et al.; Off The Record, the new set of four EPs by Makaya McCraven and collaborators; and How You Been, the second record by SML. These have joined other CDs by the same artists already on my shelves. All have hit the spot and I’ve been giving them second/third listens over the past week.

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The cheese of the week has been Clawson Farms 1912 Golden Blue, an agreeably mellow and Stiltonesque number.

You cannot deny reality indefinitely.

Some dreams—they are warm and squishy, the kind that you want to stay wrapped in forever. Others are elaborate concoctions. My favorite are visits and ministrations from my amour.

Then there are dreams drifting in with hard truth that we didn’t realize needed telling—or maybe didn’t want to hear. cComing the way truth often does in midlife—plain, almost apologetic, dressed as nothing in particular.

Bombs in brown paper wrapping.

Tonight two dreams shape a heavy, unseen onus. In the first, I am walking in Spain with my wife and a longtime friend who has always required special attention and handling. It is an ordinary walk, the kind where you don’t see most of what you look at and instead proceed not with details, but impressions, the rhythm of the place.

On the road in this ether-vision, my beloved is angry with me. The mere suggestion that our friend will get wet sends my wife into a verbal assault insisting I go back and get an umbrella.

I don’t recall the rain, only the instruction. It is irritation that is not theatrical; it is familiar. I am needed, I am useful, only—not for myself.

It’s an important detail. Not the umbrella request exactly, but the task, the unnecessary demand.

Spain is, so many things. It is escape. It is reset. It is romance. Adventure, experience, expansion, suffering. But it is also existence, life that has to be lived. Cobblestones and movement—presence, but not yet boredom. Art needs boredom.

But before routine can introduce it, there is the distracting weight of being somewhere new. Simple things suddenly become challenging. Bus numbers, where is a train platform, how do you turn up the heat? Small things that gobble up time and brian waves.

In the dream, it is not rest. I am in motion, and doing the thing I came to Iberia for: to explore, to extract, to sup, to see, not the bricks or the cobbles, but the mortar between them and understand why it holds fast the way it does. Why does it have it's color. It's texture. The small things in life are the true treasures. Spain and Portugal have these in abundance and I am here to hold them and let them become part of me.

But, in this dream, I am not allowed to drink in and get drunk on the experience of existence. My attention is pulled away and demanded to abandon the walk and instead engage in the maintenance of another.

This is a common theme I recognize; deletion of self for the needs of others. Not ever dictated explicitly as I have seen in my dream. But self initiated for the most part as I see this as a pathway to holiness, to visibility, being accepted. I don't wish to cast my wife as a demanding harpy—though she can, at times, slip into the roll of demander.

The anger, I think, is more about my own self-implied need to victimize my existence in order to feel worthy and valued. For some reason, I only feel validated when I fade into the role of servant. Diminishing my own self and want. I define this as holiness, and feel a failure when I am not holy.

This is a strange duality: to be created with hunger and then feel guilt for wanting to eat.

The friend, too, is less herself than a placeholder. She stands in for the world’s endless, reasonable demands. Someone always needs something small and sensible, and I am very good at providing it. The dream does not accuse. It simply shows the pattern. I am walking through my own life, and my role is to leave the path in order to fetch protection for others.

I sense some quiet resentment. Not shouted anger, because it has learned that tack won’t be answered. Trudge ahead, I was born a mule, I will die a mule.

The second dream arrives like a response.

Sketchbook #66—titled Romancing Iberia—is nearly full.

There is no one else in this dream. No anger. No instructions. Just the knowledge of pages used, of attention given, of something finite approaching completion. A sketchbook is not a souvenir. It is evidence. It proves that I was not merely present in body, but awake. That I noticed light on stone, the pace of streets, the way a place reveals itself only when it is not rushed.

The number matters because it implies continuity. This is not a whim. Sixty-six sketchbooks suggest devotion, a long conversation with the act of seeing. And the title—Romancing Iberia—is not about possession. To romance a place is to court it, to listen, to allow it to change you without insisting it stay.

“Nearly full” carries both pride and ache. It means I did what I came to do. It also means this chapter has an edge. Something will end. The fear is not that it was meaningless, but that it was fleeting.

Placed side by side, the dreams speak to one another clearly.

In one, I am useful. In the other, I am alive.

One is about assigned care. The other is about chosen attention.

One pulls me outward, away from myself. The other gathers me inward and says: Look. This counted.

There is no rebellion in these dreams. No explosion. Just contrast. And perhaps that is the most honest form of clarity. My mind is not asking me to abandon responsibility. It is asking me not to forget the difference between service and erasure.

The sketchbook dream does not deny the umbrella dream. It answers it. It says: even here, even now, under obligation and compromise, something true is being filled. Page by page. Line by line. Not for approval. Not for utility. But because noticing is how I stay intact.

So the essay closes where the dream wants it to—at the back of the book, with bulletpoof ink staining my fingers and hands.

And though i am not truly there, this comes from the dream and so seems an apropos addition:

Sketchbook #67 — Closing Page I didn’t come to take you with me. I came to let you leave marks. Stone warmed palms. Lighted awe and wonder. The grammar of walking— the ways and alleys reveal themselves only to those who do not hurry, who slow and press. I loved without owning. I watched without asking to be seen. I sat where others passed and let the day find the shape of me. If I carry anything home, it is not the place, but the posture: Head up. Hands open. Attention given freely. I was not whole here. But I was present. And presence, it turns out, is enough to fill a book. — W

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#dream #travel #madrid #iberia #romancingiberia

old snow trodden to ice

at night you retreat to soup

wavering sobriety

climb the ice path to the arboretum

in the snow the larch flame is at last extinguished

In recent conversations with friends and acquaintances, I’ve found myself in the unaccustomed position of being optimistic. Which is weird with the world falling apart around us, but let me explain.

I’ve seen so much change in my lifetime, and I feel like in many ways the old order is crumbling. We’re seeing its nasty and violent attempt to stave off the inevitable, but I believe big, postive changes are on the way.

I’m not going to enumerate all the ways thins have changed for the better, but here’s one that exemplifies how different the world has become. When I saw Billy Bragg in ‘88, I bought a t-shirt that said “Capitalism is Killing Music.” (This was a parody of the British recording industry’s “Home Taping is killing music” campaign which was dumb and wrong and also featured a cassette tape and crossbones logo, which made home taping look cool and badass instead of a thing that music nerds did all alone because they didn’t know how to start conversations with people they wanted to date. But I digress).

I always felt nervous wearing that shirt. In 1988, and especially in 1989 after the collapse of East Germany (which was a thing at the time) and the fall of the Berlin Wall (also a thing at the time), one simply did not criticize capitalism in the United States. It was considered somewhere between laughably naive and treasonous to dare criticize The Only System That Works.

Who looks naive now?

Sexuality, gender, economics, health insurance, whether it’s okay to do a genocide against a mostly-Muslim population—these are all issues where the people are far ahead of the politicians. They’re trying to forcibly drive us back, but once you start thinking that all people are fully human and deserve life, safety, and control over their bodies, well, it’s hard to unring that bell.

Not that they’re not trying; I just don’t believe they’ll succeed. We have a whole generation of parents who haven’t benefited from the current system, who have no hope of reaching the economic status their parents reached, and who love people who do not fit the “traditional” mold of what people are supposed to be. Banning a few books about gay kids isn’t going to change this.

Look at the most recent Wag the Dog show—this is the American power structure playing the hits—when you’re unpopular, do a war! But before, they were able to characterize the “enemies” as an existential threat to the US. Gotta keep those commies in check! Gotta strike all those Islamic countries lest they do a terrorism against us! But what’s the pretext they have now? “Get this guy who wasn’t even dealing the drugs people in the US like to do!” I’m just not seeing the kind of reflexive “rally round the flag” response people had when the US has launched invasions or bombed medicine factories in the past.

I know people are suffering mightily right now, and I am not saying that people shouldn’t fight or shouldn’t grieve for who and what we’ve lost and who and what we continue to lose. What I’m saying is that people shouldn’t despair. We’re going to win. I don’t know how or when, but I just don’t believe we’re in for a thousand-year reich.

In 2025, the term “slop” emerged as the dominant descriptor for low-quality AI-generated output. It has quickly joined our shared lexicon, and Merriam-Webster's human editors chose it as their Word of the Year.

As a techno-optimist, I am at worst ambivalent about AI outputs, so I struggled to understand the various furores that have erupted about its use. Shrimp Jesus seemed harmless enough to me.

To start with, the word itself reveals something important about the nature of human objection. Slop suggests something unappetising and mass-produced, feed rather than food, something that fills space without nourishing. The visceral quality of negative reaction, the almost physical disgust many people report when encountering AI-generated outputs, suggests that something more profound than aesthetic preference is at play.

To understand why AI output provokes such strong reactions, we need to examine the psychological mechanisms that govern how humans relate to authenticity, creativity, and the products of other minds, while also placing this moment in historical context alongside other periods of technological upheaval that generated similarly intense resistance.

The German word ersatz offers a helpful frame for understanding what is at stake. The term entered widespread English usage during the World Wars, when Germany, facing material shortages due to blockades, produced ersatz versions of scarce commodities. Ersatz coffee made from roasted acorns or chicory, ersatz rubber from synthetic compounds, and ersatz bread bulked out with sawdust or potato flour.

These substitutes might have performed the basic function of the original; you could drink the liquid, and it was warm and brown, but everyone understood they were not the real thing. The word carries a particular connotation that distinguishes it from “fake” or “counterfeit,” which imply deliberate deception. Ersatz instead suggests something that occupies the space of the genuine article while being fundamentally hollow. A substitute that reminds you of what you are missing even as it attempts to fill the gap.

AI-generated output is the ultimate ersatz. It presents the surface features of human creative output, the structure, the vocabulary, and the apparent reasoning, while lacking the underlying consciousness, experience, and intention that give authentic work its meaning. The discomfort people report when encountering AI output often has the quality of encountering the ersatz: to the unwary, the sharp offence of being deceived, but to most, the broader revulsion of receiving a substitute when one expects the genuine article. Understanding this ersatz quality and why it provokes such strong reactions requires us to draw on multiple frameworks from psychology, philosophy, and history.

The Psychology of Authenticity and the Ersatz

Categorical Ambiguity and Cognitive Discomfort

One of the most robust findings in cognitive psychology concerns how humans process information that defies easy categorisation. The anthropologist Mary Douglas, in her seminal work “Purity and Danger,” demonstrated that objects and phenomena which transgress categorical boundaries reliably provoke disgust and anxiety across cultures.

AI-generated output occupies precisely this kind of liminal space; it presents the surface characteristics of human creative output without the underlying process that gives such output its meaning. A poem appears to be a poem, with meter, metaphor, and emotional resonance, yet it emerged from statistical pattern matching rather than lived experience. It is ersatz poetry, occupying the category while lacking the essential substance.

This categorical anomaly creates what psychologists call “processing disfluency,” a sense that something is wrong even when we cannot immediately articulate what. The brain's pattern-recognition systems detect subtle inconsistencies, whether in the too-smooth quality of AI prose, the slightly uncanny composition of AI images, or the hollow centre of AI-generated arguments that proceed through the motions of reasoning without genuine understanding. This detection often happens below the threshold of conscious awareness, manifesting as unease or irritation before it becomes explicit recognition. We sense we are drinking chicory coffee before we can name what is missing.

The Uncanny Valley Expanded

Masahiro Mori's concept of the uncanny valley, originally developed to describe human responses to humanoid robots, provides a useful framework for understanding reactions to AI output more broadly. Mori observed that as artificial entities become more human-like, our affinity for them increases until a critical point where near-perfect resemblance suddenly triggers revulsion. The problem is not that the entity is clearly artificial but that it is almost indistinguishable from the genuine article while remaining fundamentally different in some hard-to-specify way.

AI-generated output has entered its own uncanny valley. Early chatbots and obviously computer-generated images posed no psychological threat because their artificiality was immediately apparent. Contemporary AI systems produce outputs that can fool casual observation while still betraying their origins to closer scrutiny. This creates an increased cognitive burden as consumers of output must now actively evaluate whether what they are reading or viewing originated from a human mind. This task was previously unnecessary and introduces new friction into basic information processing.

Terror Management and Existential Threat

Terror Management Theory, developed by Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski, proposes that much human behaviour is motivated by the need to manage anxiety about mortality. Humans cope with awareness of death by investing in cultural worldviews that provide meaning and by pursuing self-esteem through valued social roles. AI represents a peculiar kind of existential threat because it challenges the specialness and irreplaceability of human cognition.

These very capacities have traditionally distinguished us from the rest of nature and provided a foundation for meaning-making. So when a machine can produce decent poetry, generate persuasive arguments, or create images that move viewers emotionally, the uniqueness of human consciousness becomes less clear. This is not only an economic threat, although it is certainly that too, but also an ontological one.

If the products of human creativity can be copied by systems that lack an inner life, suffering, joy, and personal investment in their output, then what exactly is the value of human consciousness? The imitation not only risks replacing the genuine but also questions whether the distinction even matters. The visceral rejection of AI output can partly be seen as a defensive response to this unsettling question.

Authenticity as a Core Human Value

The philosopher Charles Taylor has written extensively about the modern preoccupation with authenticity, tracing its emergence to Romantic-era philosophy and its subsequent development into a central organising value of contemporary Western culture. To be authentic, in this framework, is to be true to one's own inner nature, to express what is genuinely one's own rather than conforming to external expectations or imitating others. Creative work has become one of the primary domains for the expression and validation of authentic selfhood.

AI-generated output represents the perfect antithesis of authenticity, the ersatz in its purest form. It has no self to be true to, no inner nature to express. It produces outputs that simulate authentic expression while lacking substance entirely. For people who have invested heavily in the ideal of authenticity, whether as creators or appreciative consumers of human creativity, AI output represents a form of pollution or contamination of the cultural ecosystem.

The Disgust Response and Moral Psychology

Disgust as a Moral Emotion

Jonathan Haidt's research on moral emotions has demonstrated that disgust, originally evolved to protect us from pathogens and spoiled food, has been co-opted for social and moral purposes. We experience disgust in response to violations of purity and sanctity, to betrayals of trust, and to the degradation of things we hold sacred. The language people use to describe AI-generated output, calling it “slop,” describing it as “polluting” creative spaces, worrying about it “contaminating” search results and social media feeds, maps directly onto disgust rhetoric.

This suggests that, for many people, the objection to AI-generated output is not merely aesthetic or practical but also moral. There is a sense that something improper has occurred, that boundaries have been transgressed, that valued spaces have been defiled. Whether one agrees with this moral framing or not, understanding its presence helps explain the intensity of the reaction that AI output provokes. Aesthetic displeasure alone rarely generates the kind of passionate opposition we currently observe; moral disgust does. The ersatz is experienced not just as disappointing but as wrong.

The Problem of Deception

A substantial component of the negative response to AI output concerns deception, both explicit and implicit. When AI-generated output is presented without disclosure, consumers are actively misled about its nature. But even when the AI's origin is disclosed or obvious, there remains an implicit deception in the form itself; the output presents the surface features of human communication without the underlying human communicator.

Humans have evolved sophisticated capacities for detecting deception, which elicit strong emotional responses when triggered. The anger that people report feeling when they realise they have been engaging with AI output, even when no explicit claim of human authorship was made, reflects the activation of these deception-detection systems.

There is a sense of having been tricked, of having invested attention and perhaps emotional response in something that did not deserve it. The wartime ersatz was accepted because scarcity was understood; the AI ersatz arrives amidst abundance, making its substitution feel gratuitous rather than necessary.

Historical Parallels: Technology, Labour, and Meaning

The Luddites Reconsidered

The Luddite movement of 1811-1816 is frequently invoked in discussions of technological resistance, usually as a cautionary example of futile opposition to progress. This standard narrative fundamentally misunderstands what the Luddites were actually protesting. The original Luddites were skilled textile workers, primarily in the English Midlands, who destroyed machinery not because they feared technology per se, but because they clearly understood what that technology meant for their economic position and social status.

The introduction of wide stocking frames and shearing frames allowed less-skilled workers to produce goods that had previously required years of apprenticeship to make. The Luddites were not resisting change itself but rather a specific reorganisation of production that would destroy their livelihoods, eliminate the value of their hard-won skills, and reduce them from respected craftsmen to interchangeable machine-tenders.

Their analysis was correct; the new technologies did enable the replacement of skilled workers with cheaper labour, and the textile trades were transformed from artisanal craft to industrial production within a generation. The hand-woven cloth became ersatz in reverse, still genuine, but economically indistinguishable from the machine-made substitute.

The parallel to contemporary AI anxiety is striking. Creative workers, writers and artists, designers and programmers, have invested years in developing skills that AI systems can now approximate in seconds. The threat is not merely economic, though job displacement is undoubtedly part of the concern, but involves the devaluation of human expertise and the elimination of pathways for meaningful, skilled work. When people object to AI-generated output flooding platforms and marketplaces, they are often articulating a Luddite-style analysis of how this technology will restructure the landscape of creative labour.

Walter Benjamin and Mechanical Reproduction

The critic Walter Benjamin's 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” provides another illuminating historical framework. Benjamin argued that traditional artworks possessed an “aura,” a quality of uniqueness and authenticity deriving from their embeddedness in particular times, places, and traditions. Mechanical reproduction, photography, and film, especially, destroyed this aura by producing identical copies that could exist anywhere without connection to an original context.

Benjamin was conflicted about this change, recognising both the liberating potential of democratised access to images and the troubling implications for human-cultural object relations. Contemporary AI extends this dynamic further. Not only can existing works be endlessly reproduced, but new works can be created without any human creator. If mechanical reproduction eroded the aura of existing art, AI-generated works prompt questions about whether aura can exist for newly created works that originate from systems that lack biography, intention, or a stake in their output. In Benjamin's world, mechanical reproduction produces copies of genuine objects; AI produces originals that are themselves fake, authentic only in novelty, and empty in substance.

The Printing Press and the Scribal Response

When Gutenberg's printing press began to spread across Europe in the fifteenth century, the scribal profession faced an existential threat. For centuries, the copying of texts had been skilled labour, often performed by monks who saw their work as a form of devotion. The printing press could produce in days what had previously taken years, and it could do so more accurately and at a fraction of the cost.

The resistance to printing among established scribal communities was substantial but ultimately unsuccessful. Scribes argued that printed books lacked the spiritual quality of hand-copied texts, that mechanical reproduction degraded sacred works, and that the flood of cheap printed material would corrupt culture by making the inferior widely available. Some of these objections seem merely self-interested in retrospect. Still, other objections proved remarkably prescient: the printing press enabled the wide distribution of material authorities considered dangerous and transformed the relationship between texts and their consumers.

The scribal response to printing illuminates an essential aspect of technological resistance: objections are rarely purely technical or economic but typically involve deeper concerns about meaning, quality, and the nature of valued activities. Whether these concerns prove justified or merely transitional cannot be determined in advance. The scribes saw printed books as ersatz, lacking the spiritual investment of hand-copying. We now see hand-copied books as precious precisely because that labour is no longer necessary for mere reproduction.

Photography and the Death of Painting

When photography emerged in the nineteenth century, many predicted the death of painting. Why would anyone commission a portrait when a photograph could capture likeness more accurately and affordably? Paul Delaroche reportedly declared, “From today, painting is dead,” and the concern was widespread among visual artists.

What actually occurred was more complex. Photography eliminated certain forms of painting, particularly everyday portraiture and documentary illustration. But it also liberated artists to pursue directions that photography could not follow, thereby contributing to the emergence of Impressionism, Expressionism, and, eventually, abstract art. The artists who thrived were those who found ways to do what photography could not, rather than competing on photography's terms. Photography was not ersatz painting but something genuinely new, and painting responded by becoming more explicitly about what made it irreplaceable.

Thus, history offers a potentially optimistic template for human creativity in the age of AI, but it also reveals the costs of such transitions. The journeyman portrait painters who had made comfortable livings before photography found themselves obsolete, and no amount of artistic evolution helped them personally. Technological transitions can be creative at the civilisational level whilst being destructive at the individual level, and both aspects deserve acknowledgement.

The Information Ecology Problem

Quantity Versus Quality

Beyond psychological and historical considerations, there is a straightforward environmental problem with AI-generated output. AI systems can produce text and images at a volume no human could match, and the economics of output platforms reward quantity. The result is a flooding of information environments with material that meets minimum quality thresholds while lacking the insight, originality, or genuine value that scarcer human-produced output might offer.

This is the “slop” problem in its most concrete form, and it represents ersatz at an industrial scale. When search results, social media feeds, and output platforms become saturated with AI-generated material, the experience of using these services degrades for everyone. Users must expend more effort to find valuable output amid noise; creators find their work buried beneath artificially generated material; and platforms must invest in detection and filtering systems that impose pure friction costs. The wartime ersatz existed because genuine materials were scarce; the AI ersatz proliferates precisely because it is cheap and abundant, crowding out the genuine through sheer volume.

The Lemons Problem

The economist George Akerlof's concept of the “market for lemons” describes how information asymmetry can degrade markets. When buyers cannot distinguish high-quality goods from low-quality ones, they become unwilling to pay premium prices, which drives out high-quality sellers and further reduces average quality, creating a downward spiral. AI output creates precisely this kind of information asymmetry; if consumers cannot tell whether output was produced by a knowledgeable human or generated by an AI system, they may become unwilling to invest attention or payment in any output, degrading the market for human creators.

This dynamic helps explain why disclosure and detection have become such contested issues. Output creators have strong incentives to obscure AI involvement to maintain perceived value, while consumers increasingly demand transparency to make informed choices about where to direct their attention. The absence of reliable signals about the origin of output contributes to a general atmosphere of suspicion that affects even clearly human-produced work. When the ersatz cannot be reliably distinguished from the genuine, the genuine loses its premium.

Why This Moment Feels Different

The intensity of current reaction to AI output reflects the convergence of multiple factors that historical parallels only partially capture. AI systems have improved rapidly enough that the psychological adjustment period has been compressed, giving people less time to develop coping strategies and to adapt their expectations. The domains affected, creative expression and knowledge work, are ones where contemporary Western culture has concentrated meaning-making and identity-construction. The scale and speed of AI-enabled output generation threaten information environments on which many people depend for both professional and personal purposes.

Moreover, unlike the Luddites' frames or Benjamin's cameras, AI systems are not easily understood mechanical devices. They are black boxes that produce outputs through processes their creators do not fully comprehend, which adds a layer of alienation to interactions with them. When a photograph is taken or a text is printed, humans remain clearly in control of a comprehensible process. When an AI system generates output, something more opaque has occurred, and the human role has shifted from creator to prompter, curator, or evaluator.

The visceral response to AI output, the disgust, the anger, the sense of transgression, reflects all of these factors working in combination. The ersatz quality of AI touches something profound in human psychology: our need for authentic connection, our investment in the meaningfulness of creative work, our sensitivity to categorical violations and perceived contamination. Whether this response proves to be a transitional adjustment or the beginning of a longer cultural conflict depends on choices yet to be made, choices that will determine whether the genuine remains distinguishable, valued, and economically viable.

Some of these choices pertain to platforms and regulators, such as whether search engines and social media platforms label, filter, or deprioritise AI-generated content; whether governments mandate disclosure; and whether the information environment remains navigable or becomes hopelessly polluted.

Some belong to markets and industries, for example, whether sustainable premium tiers develop for demonstrably human work; whether new certification systems, guilds, or professional standards emerge to signal quality; whether patronage models find new forms.

Some belong to AI developers themselves, whether they build in watermarking and disclosure mechanisms or optimise for augmenting human creativity or replacing it wholesale. Some belong to consumers, whether audiences actively seek out and pay for human-created work or whether convenience and cost override concerns about authenticity once AI quality reaches a certain threshold. The technology itself does not predetermine the outcome.

Navigating the Transition

The visceral negative response to AI-generated output reflects genuine psychological and cultural concerns that deserve serious engagement rather than dismissal. For creative agencies, understanding these reactions is essential to navigating client relationships, team dynamics, and market positioning amid significant technological change.

The historical record offers both caution and hope. Technological transitions have consistently been more complex than either enthusiasts or resisters anticipated, with outcomes shaped by choices and adaptations that could not be foreseen. The Luddites were right about the immediate effects of mechanisation on their livelihoods, but wrong that machine-breaking could stop the transition. The scribes were right that printing would transform the relationship between texts and readers, but wrong that this transformation would be purely negative.

The ersatz quality of AI output, its capacity to fill the space of human creativity without possessing its essential substance, will remain a source of discomfort for as long as humans value authenticity and genuine connection. Creative agencies that approach AI with clear-eyed pragmatism, genuine ethical reflection, and strategic flexibility are best positioned to find sustainable paths through the current transition.

This requires neither uncritical embrace nor reflexive rejection, but the more complex work of understanding in depth what AI can and cannot do, what clients and audiences genuinely value, and how human creativity can continue to provide something worth paying for in an environment of increasing artificial abundance. The goal is not to eliminate the ersatz but to ensure that the genuine remains recognisable, valued, and available to those who seek it.

Après avoir lu une grande partie de l'œuvre romanesque de Francis Berthelot, je me penche désormais sur ses livres de non-fiction, à commencer par cet essai de théorie littéraire publié en 2003 : Du rêve au roman, La création romanesque.

Francis Berthelot définit quatre grandes activités dans la création romanesque et consacre un chapitre à chacune d'entre elles :

1. l’élaboration, au cours de laquelle l'auteur élabore, consciemment ou inconsciemment, les idées qu'il utilisera pour écrire
2. la construction, qui permet de structurer et d'organiser les idées, les personnages, les thèmes, le style narratif, etc.
3. l'écriture proprement dite
4. le remaniement, qui inclut les corrections mais peut aussi consister en des remaniements plus importants sur le fond comme sur la forme, suite aux relectures par l'auteur ou pas des tiers

L'auteur prend soin d'indiquer qu'il ne s'agit pas forcément de quatre étapes successives et que leur articulation peut varier d'un auteur à un autre, d'un roman à un autre.

D'ailleurs, concernant en particulier l'articulation entre la construction et l'écriture, Francis Berthelot définit deux types d'auteurs, dans une typologie que l'on peut rapprocher de celle assez populaire qui distingue les auteurs “architectes” et “jardiniers” :

• les auteurs structuraux (“architectes”), qui ont besoin de structurer, d'organiser, et de planifier leur texte avant de commencer à l'écrire
• les auteurs scripturaux (“jardiniers”), qui préfèrent se laisser guider par l'écriture et cherchent à surprendre eux-mêmes en écrivant

Evidemment, l'auteur précise que ce sont deux types extrêmes et que certains auteurs peuvent emprunter des caractéristiques de chacun des deux types, d'un roman à l'autre ou même dans un même roman.

Dans chaque chapitre, l'auteur manipule des concepts de théorie littéraire et les illustre acec des exemples issus de la littérature.

Il consacre enfin sa conclusion aux difficultés que peuvent rencontrer les écrivains, en particulier un blocage dans l'écriture. J'ai particulièrement aimé le très beau passage sur la dépression et ses conséquences sur l'écriture.

Avec cet ouvrage, Francis Berthelot signe un essai de théorie littéraire que j'ai trouvé accessible, intéressant, et plaisant à lire.

everything was closed and the relentless wind coloured my ears red, because I got a beanie which doesn’t cover them.

I was looking for something to cheer us up but it was all closed today

But even so somehow it worked; upon coming back home to the unfinished flat, we’re all having fun with the dogs!!

With rose coloured cheeks, red ears and somehow the pants still feel cold

I’ll even get some more coffee!