Hollow Body: On attention to craft in defiance of AI.

I enrolled in MUS 253: Classical Guitar out of desperation. I’m an English professor, and since the advent of ChatGPT in late 2022, things have changed. I watched students, staff, colleagues, and administrators outsource their thinking to the machine, and the academy soon became a sham to me, a farce of its former self. I once taught students to spend time inside sentences, to wrestle with difficulty, to make productive use of their uncertainty by paying close attention to how language works on the page. We once sat inside paragraphs, dwelt inside language in its richness and complexity.

But the ease of AI has devalued language, difficulty, and the work and perseverance and focus necessary to make meaning out of words. Believing a writer should write her own sentences and a reader should read instead of relying on AI summaries, I have become Sisyphus pushing that rock up the hill, the work of teaching and learning, reading and writing seemingly pointless in the face of the juggernaut offering to do my students’ work for them. After years of this, I descended into a severe depression marked by panic attacks, substance abuse, self-harm, and suicidal ideation. A complete loss of meaning in your life’s work will do that.

A therapist once told me that one way to manage the hollow of depression is to find an activity that creates pleasure but also demands mastery—something like baking, or the arts, or sports. Such pursuits engage both mind and body, reorienting your focus away from the myopic self-obsession of depression and toward, instead, something beyond the self, some palpable problem that can be worked through and, with enough time, eventually solved. There is peace in that, my therapist said; satisfaction too. And, he added, these activities tend to be much better for you than the many vices people often turn toward to fill that emptiness when stressed, anxious, and depressed.

So I signed up for guitar lessons. I wanted to do something with my hands, something real, tangible, and material. Pleasure and mastery. I also wanted to retreat into a familiar role, to become a student again, and to rediscover what it means to, and how one does, learn. I hoped that, in the long hours of practicing, I might somehow cast aside the cynicism and despair overtaking my teaching and so rekindle my love of the classroom—and of life.