The basic myth is perhaps as old as human image-making: the Golem in the Hebrew tradition, Adam himself, Pygmalion’s creation Galatea in the Greek legend, Lie Yukou’s robot in the Chinese Taoist story Liezi. My own epic poem Apocalypse takes up the theme, where a quantum supercomputer designed to model world climate unites with a supercharged translation app and an advanced search engine trained on the whole internet, and is shocked into consciousness and an angelic personality by a tragic naval fire.

Today we are actually fulfilling the myth, it seems. ChatGPT, Gemini, and other AIs are, according to their makers, trembling on the brink of consciousness. And we are wondering whether we have given birth to our replacement, our gateway to immortality, our mortal enemy, the destruction of the world, or our new partner, an Eve for humanity’s Adam. These are real issues.

Meanwhile the world of literature (perhaps excluding science fiction) has become increasingly a little enclave of the liberally-educated, happily consuming novels about various emotional variations on sex, and free verse lyric poems about personal epiphanies.  The gigantic themes of Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Goethe and Melville would be an embarrassment in such a world.

So to encounter a new poem that directly and thoroughly tackles the very biggest questions of our times is shocking and refreshing. Dave Jilk’s Epoch, written by a researcher and entrepreneur in emergent neuromorphic artificial intelligence, is a true epic poem, possessing the magnitude Aristotle demanded for the genre, the expertise in a dozen fields of science that would be required for its subject, and an astonishing background of humanistic learning in philosophy, the arts, the social sciences, and several literary traditions. One quarter of the book is what Jilk calls “osculations”, places where the complex curve of his thought matches and kisses that of another thinker. The treatment of its huge subject, the education and apotheosis of Aither, our replacement as the master of our solar system, and Aither’s self-sparagmos or diaspora, is adequate to its subject.

Epoch: A Poetic Psy-Phi Saga is not an elegant book, though many parts of it are exquisite and subtle. It is what Henry James called Moby Dick: a loose and baggy monster. It is composed in a couple of dozen genres, several distinct levels of diction, multiple points of view, and with an outrageous tendency toward the pun, as in the title itself, Epoch for epic, psy for sci, and phi, the symbol for the golden section irrational number, for fi. And with such a subject it could not be anything else: its wood, as Ahab says of the doomed Pequod, could only be American. Like Moby Dick itself, with its lectures on cetology, its Shakespearean playlets, its Spinozistic musings, its sermons and technical manuals, Epoch deals with the whole by sampling the salvaged and bundled leavings of the whole world, brought together, e pluribus unum.

But it’s not a bore–the apocalyptic thought and terrifying honesty drive the reader on. The poem broaches the unsaid, what right-thinking people are afraid to say. It really is a theophany, a refreshment of the moral forces that religion tries again and again to recover by doctrine and ritual, but that wither into custom and bigotry. Philip Sidney argued that poetry is prophecy, or could be; but Jilk’s story is actually happening today in university AI labs and institutes and corporate think-tanks, the prophecy is self-enacting as the gap between ideas and actualities begins to disappear.

The poem’s most outrageous proposition–that we humans are not capable of ruling ourselves without destroying ourselves, and will need to be taken charge of by wiser beings–is one that arouses violent indignation. The poem is profoundly ambivalent in itself: the team of humans that bring Aither to consciousness are the best possible parents, and must be shoved aside. Our human future is essentially to be curated in the most delightful and varied and hyper-real paradise of virtual reality, just as we are promised in the Bible, just that paradise to which Ivan Karamazov refuses the ticket. Epoch both proposes and partially retracts the idea that we should submit ourselves to the gods and reap their heavenly reward. It is an infuriating and deeply interesting book. Its ending is totally inconclusive.

But, like the great works this introduction uses to belabor by contrast our current high culture, when we read Jilk’s book we are suddenly back in the old world of literature, when things really mattered and where what was in the book could change history.