I am become infinite monkeys, author of Hamlet

Shakespeare, ChatGPT, and infinite typewriters.

My girlfriend asked me to read for her Othello audition. 

“I can’t really act…”

About 100 read-throughs later, I’m on my feet, shouting my lines. Some spirit possesses us I’ve heard theater nerds go on about.

I can’t believe it – the damn text keeps unfolding, layer upon infinite layer. Each time we read through it, a new meaning or inflection is discovered. A blooming mandala, somehow still becoming between the dead words.

Well, some texts are deep. Duh. But, uh… what does that mean? Some stories appear deep, but are actually muddy puddles, ready to break your neck. Others are so deep, we can’t find the bottom, 500 years later. 

You might have heard the thought experiment (joke): give infinite monkeys infinite typewriters, they would eventually bang out Hamlet. That’s particularly relevant since infinite virtual monkeys (GPT) can literally bang out Hamlet. So, why aspire to write like Shakespeare anymore? 

Well, infinite monkeys might slap out Hamlet, but they could not, then, produce another intentional word of Shakespeare – a man limited by time, body, and space, looking out to the light of the morning, just like me, grasping at the infinite within. We marvel not because he got words in the right order, but because he, from his little vista, transposed the waveform of the infinite soul.

“Monkeys with typewriters” is peak materialism. Plays are just made of parts: three acts, prose, archetypal characters. If you break down the parts, even monkeys (or transistors) could recreate them. 

Not my experience. Dip my finger into Othello, I find a portal far beyond the sum of the acts. The eternal undeniably shines through the stage props, rendering all attempts to explain it away… cute.

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." – Hamlet

I visited Shakespeare’s hometown, Stratford-upon-Avon. I stood in his childhood bedroom, explored the fields that inspired Midsummer Night’s Dream, and revered his Holy Trinity Church. The famous expressions penned by this man, still on the lips of billions, born in this landscape, which itself is an externalization of his boyhood mind. That spiritual milk and honey converges on me as I walk, straining to retain a drop.

GPT puts words in the right order (those damned virtual monkeys). But I can reach toward the infinite within and allow the words to approximate what I find there. 

"Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God." – Ralph Waldo Emerson

An ever-growing cacophony of monkeys clacks at endless Underwoods. Will you exhaust your soul trying to out-hammer the hammer machines, or take the hint, slow down, and seek the infinite within? 

I don’t see a reason to despair. Not yet. The opposite, in fact. A fortunate few may conduct this horde.

Imagine if Shakespeare were alive today (or tomorrow), not limited by the tip of his quill, but made boundless in his creative output. 

Imagine what the infinite within could achieve with infinite virtual monkeys as its quill.