It can be entertaining to pretend there are no coincidences, that they exist only as subjective observations like last night driving alone in the rain with the bluetoothed music out of my control – for some reason the streaming service jumps to a phantom playlist of “song suggestions” every time I restart the car. Since my last listen was of “Mona Ray” by Kottke, the algorithm thought I might like “As I Lay Sleeping” by Peter Lang which is truly a mindfuckingly superb bit of guitaring. 

Chalk one up to the algorithm! 

This during the drive to Donnie’s Annual Snake Draft Hockey Pool at the Atomic Rooster. It’s a snake pool, alright – you take turns choosing and, when a player is claimed, he’s unavailable anymore. The lucky person who draws #1 from the hat gets Connor McDavid and the rest of us have to chisel for the rest.

Having made my desultory choices for yet another losing pool (the hat yielded #6 for my place in the picking order), I added “As I Lay Sleeping” to my 2023 playlist with hopes the algorithm might let me hear it again sometime.

I won’t listen to the CBC anymore but the twice I did overhear last week were separate interviews of the same guy who had produced a documentary about how artificial intelligence was driving popular culture among our young through the use of algorithms that feed them musical content it has deduced they’d enjoy. 

The guy was all in a tizzical umbrage about how kids don’t discover music like they used to in his day (apparently predating Columbia House). But his premise is feeble from the start. 

I grew up – as did scads of us – on AM radio and early progressive FM programming – who do we think was choosing the music for us back then? Does the term “payola” ring a chime?

I had to suffer through Herman’s Hermits and every half-assed Merseybeat clone before I got my twice hourly ration of Beatles.  It was a lot of agony and staying up late with the transistor radio pasted to my ear to get the dribs and drabs of decent music. Sure there were a few discoveries along the way: punkers Van Morrison, Eric Burdon and Mick Jagger filled some gaps and I did love that Motown rock and roll but give me the algorithm anytime!

So the smartphone provided “As I lay Sleeping” for me to enjoy for the enchanted ride home and the following morning I wake up to the dismal hockey results and an easy three-guess Wordle and I don’t feel like headlines and I open a file of unfinished typing and come across my transcription of a poem by Antonio Machado, “Anoche cuando dormía”:

“(Traveler, your footprints)”

Traveler, your footprints

are the only road, nothing else.

Traveler, there is no road;

you make your own path as you walk.

As you walk, you make your own road,

and when you look back

you see the path

you will never travel again.

Traveler, there is no road;

only a ship’s wake on the sea.

“Hmm, pretty good,” I thought, “I wonder what else the old boy has written, let’s give him a google.” 

His most popular poem is “As I Was Sleeping” and I was left to ponder the possibility that coincidence and synchronicity are now manipulated defaults in these digital times. 

Well, apparently I was having none of it. “Nah. I’m not going to think about that. I’m going to think about this:

‘Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvellous error!—
that a spring was breaking
out in my heart.
I said: Along which secret aqueduct,
Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvellous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvellous error!—
that a fiery sun was giving
light inside my heart.
It was fiery because I felt
warmth as from a hearth,
and sun because it gave light
and brought tears to my eyes.

Last night as I slept,
I dreamt—marvellous error!—
that it was God I had
here inside my heart.’

– Antonio Machado”

Update: I jumped five places in Donnie’s Snake Pool.

Oh, and the Georgia O’Keefe painting accompanied the poem on the digital poetry website. I’d never seen it before – it’s quite lovely, actually, I’m lucky to have found it.