The God's eye view is death to poetry

On drones, Melville, and AI

The first time I operated a Skydio drone (years ago, shortly after my son joined and before the company became really big) I discovered I needed to learn to see in threes, a kind of perceptual juggling act I was unprepared for. My eyes tracked the physical drone floating above, while my hands watched its movement through an app, which in turn showed me what the drone itself was seeing from above. It took a few minutes for my brain to process this new relationship between vision and control. Like learning to use a computer mouse in the 1980s, when the connection between hand movement and cursor motion was new, coordinating multiple perspectives required thinking about vision in new ways. The app in my hand was showing me what my third eye was seeing while I was managing interaction between all three eyes and my hands, which were controlling a device that was both an extension of my vision and a separate entity with its own perspective. All this while my “real” eyes were also looking at an image that both showed me my third eye’s view and instructed me how to control that view. I tried to explain this to my son, who thought I was making too much of it all.

I used to teach Moby-Dick every year. Melville, it turns out, had either thought like I did or perhaps had guided my thinking. In Chapter 74, “The Sperm Whale’s Head—Contrasted View,” following a successful whale hunt on the Pequod (I won’t spoil it for you), Ishmael, contemplating the head of sperm whale, with its eyes looking in two different directions, on either side of its head, marvels at the whale’s ability to process two completely different visual fields simultaneously, wondering if its brain could be “so much more comprehensive, combining, and subtle than man’s”:

So long as a man's eyes are open in the light, the act of seeing is involuntary; that is, he cannot then help mechanically seeing whatever objects are before him. Nevertheless, any one's experience will teach him, that though he can take in an undiscriminating sweep of things at one glance, it is quite impossible for him, attentively, and completely, to examine any two things—however large or however small—at one and the same instant of time; never mind if they lie side by side and touch each other. But if you now come to separate these two objects, and surround each by a circle of profound darkness; then, in order to see one of them, in such a manner as to bring your mind to bear on it, the other will be utterly excluded from your contemporary consciousness. How is it, then, with the whale? True, both his eyes, in themselves, must simultaneously act; but is his brain so much more comprehensive, combining, and subtle than man's, that he can at the same moment of time attentively examine two distinct prospects, one on one side of him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction? If he can, then is it as marvellous a thing in him, as if a man were able simultaneously to go through the demonstrations of two distinct problems in Euclid. Nor, strictly investigated, is there any incongruity in this comparison.

His meditation on the whale’s divided sight feels relevant to our drone-enhanced present. “How is it, then, with the whale?” Melville asks, pondering whether the creature can “at the same moment of time attentively examine two distinct prospects, one on one side of him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction.” What would Melville make of us now, not just processing multiple viewpoints like his whale, but actively controlling a third, airborne eye that can dance above our heads at will? Is our drone-enhanced vision the same “helpless perplexity of volition” he saw in his whale's divided sight?

It may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the extraordinary vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when beset by three or four boats; the timidity and liability to queer frights, so common to such whales; I think that all this indirectly proceeds from the helpless perplexity of volition, in which their divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision must involve them.

What does the science say? Barbara Tversky’s research on how readily humans adopt others’ spatial perspectives, suggests we are pretty fluid about new ways of seeing. When presented with a scene containing another person, a significant portion of viewers spontaneously describe spatial relationships from that person’s viewpoint rather than their own, especially if the person appears poised to act. We know what this is like from tv and the movies. Does this mean we are not necessarily tied to what is right in front of us?

With the widespread adoption of consumer drones, the normalization of aerial views may be also changing how we live in the world. What was once a privileged perspective, the world of pilots and cartographers, has become normal. Young people especially are growing up conceptualizing space, scale, and their place within larger environments differently than we pre-drone adults.

The term “god’s eye view” evokes omniscience and authority. Now everyone with a drone sees like a god.

We are like gods who can simultaneously occupy earth and sky. Perhaps perspective is a social construct.

Poetry, however, thrives on particularity, on the intimate details visible only from within human experience—the texture of bark beneath fingertips, the play of light through leaves, the limited perspective that makes metaphor necessary. The god’s eye view, with its comprehensive clarity and omniscient positioning, eliminates the constraints that provoke poetic imagining. When everything is visible and mappable, when mystery dissolves into data, all the imaginative leaps that become poetry become, well, already seen. Poor Ishmael (okay Melville), limited with eyes aligned, marvelled at the whale’s divided sight via metaphor and speculation—a poetic response to perceptual limitation. Our drone-enabled perspective risks exchanging this rich imaginative territory for the illusion of complete understanding, trading the fertile constraints of human vision for a technological approximation of divine sight that, paradoxically, may leave us seeing less rather than more. In gaining the god’s eye view, we may lose the very ground from which poetry grows: the beautiful incompleteness of the human perspective.

There’s been lots written about how Le Corbusier and other modernist architects and city planners were influenced by the idea of seeing from above, as photographers captured cities from airplanes.

Today’s young homeowners think differently about their yards and properties, imagining drones viewing birthday parties and softball games from above. Spaces once considered private are now seen as potentially visible.

This can be used for good, of course. Drone footage is essential for climate and environmental advocacy groups. Images of storm damage, chemical spills, deforestation, urban sprawl are concrete and immediate.

Images from above give a sense of mastery over space and their capacity to affect it. Le Corbusier writes :

The Great War came. Man had acquired “the bird's-eye view.” What an unexpected gift to survey the armies in front from above ! But the bird can be dove or hawk. It became a hawk. What an unexpected gift to be able to set off at night under cover of darkness, and away to sow death with bombs upon sleeping towns. But the hawk swoops on its prey and seizes it in its beak and claws. What an unexpected gift to be able to come from above with a machine-gun at the beak’s tip spitting death fanwise on men crouched in holes.

The relationship between aerial perspectives and architectural modernism is a fascinating one, particularly with Le Corbusier. In “Aircraft,” (1935) he writes about how the airplane view revealed truths about cities and landscape. “L’avion accuse....” he writes. “The airplane indicts.”

We desire to change something in the present world. For the bird’s-eye view has enabled us to see our cities and the countries which surrounds them, and the sight is not good.

We knew quite well that our cities were steeped in indignities abhorrent to men; that our cities made martyrs of men, and that we are deprived of “essential delights,” huddled and shut up in tanneries which at every day and at every hour are undermining us, ageing us, destroying the species, and making us serfs.

The airplane is an indictment.
It indicts the city.
It indicts those who control the city.

Le Corbusier's vision for urban planning was influenced this bird’s eye view. His “Plan Voisin” for Paris (1925), never implemented emphasized order and rationality visible from the air, rather than the human experience at street level.

The drone perspective today raises similar questions about the relationship between aerial and ground-level understanding of space. While drones make it easier to understand macro-level patterns and relationships, what about balancing this broader perspective with human-scale design considerations?

To return to the ground: prayer in some (not all) faith traditions involves looking upward, heads tilted back, hands raised to the heavens, climbing mountains or towers to be closer to divine presence. Ascension narratives have positioned upward movement as the path to divine communion. Now, when anyone with a smartphone can dispatch a mechanical eye skyward, the physical perspective once reserved for deities has become everyone’s.

Nobody thinks this when piloting a drone, literally looking down on ourselves at prayer, that we can simultaneously be the supplicant looking up and the overseer looking down. We can watch ourselves pleading.

I return to Melville’s fascination with the whale’s divided sight as I think about our drone-enhanced, AI-enhanced present. While Ishmael wondered if the whale’s brain was “more comprehensive, combining, and subtle than man’s,” I wonder whether our technological evolution has finally caught up to the cetacean's natural ability. The “helpless perplexity of volition” that Melville attributed to whales beset by multiple threats now describes our own condition—simultaneously occupying ground and sky, prayer and surveillance, supplication and oversight. Not to mention war and politics. An AI. And Starlink. As we develop this capacity for multiple consciousness, we may find ourselves approaching a new understanding of perception itself—one that challenges traditional hierarchies of seeing and being seen, of the sacred and the surveilled. What does transcendence mean in an age when anyone can assume what was once a divine perspective?

AI processes massive amounts of data in seconds, simultaneously, synthesizing countless literary traditions, voices, and worldviews. It’s the opposite of poetry, which requires commitment to a singular voice, a particular way of seeing—constraints that AI, with its computational omniscience, integrating of all perspectives, cannot inhabit. AI is an extreme version of the god’s eye view, eliminating the productive tensions between knowing and not knowing. Without limitation—one set of eyes, one position in space and time—AI-generated verse is always technical simulation, however excellent it will become, technically.

But still there’s work to be done. If you want to change the world, keep all eyes open. If you want to write poetry, see what is right in front of you.