artificial intelligence - the essay / pain - a sonnet

One would hope that to create an artificial anything, one must first possess an original something. I look out over the horizon and see death, destruction and cruelty - all byproducts of stupidity and ignorance. There are reasons that this injustice persists - it may be that stupidity and ignorance are profitable. I prepared for this essay by reading Wikipedia on “Philosophy of AI,” more specifically to learn whether computers are capable of feeling. But I guess the question really is are those benefitting the most from the world's chaos capable of feeling, for if they possess the resources necessary to fuck the world, they certainly have the ear of those coding for AI. Is it the intelligence of the ruling elite we should be considering, or rather the capacity for critical thinking of the proletariate. As a child from a family of teachers, my bias is toward learning, though the longer i live the more i learn secrecy is the lingua franca of most civil society. This orientation toward communication seems senseless on its face, but impractical in practice - unless of course you are insider trading or attempting to suppress land value to your advantage along a proposed commercial corridor. All self-help-touchy-feely papers i read on healthy interpersonal relations suggests candor is the cornerstone of successful interaction - ¿ - I would wager my appointment with Dr. Faustus that there are aspects of development of AI networks that will never become public domain. Yet i am asked to divulge habits, hopes, hindsight and social security number in order to retrieve my googol password. Though it’s highly unlikely Sir Stephen Hawking was ever interrogated by googol’s AI henchman for his password, Mr. Hawking was still specific in his choice of words - “AI could spell the end of the human race,” but more accurately he advocated wiser integration of AI’s utility. My lament as with the inept randomization of iTunes library is the hierarchical obsolescence that is the de facto commercial design baseline deployed.

My objection is not so much the intrusion of technology, but its lack of interactiveness. When studying computer technology the concept of 4th generation computer language was presented - natural speech capable compiler. The net effect of developing this user based programming capability would make your voice equal to that of jeff bezos within the internet bandwidth - obviously, that didn’t happen. Yes and no - once AI, or its more benign moniker, ai is utilized within the context of available utility resolving climate, ecology, indigenous solidarity and resource distribution equity, there is a glimmer of hope. kurzwell’s conceit to mechanize the human genome is, again in service of no one but those with the keys. Unitization of human isolation is not the same as the joining of humanity. I accept you are not a part of my world and yet - ipso facto - you be. This is different from my responding to a bell attached to my wrist, flickering at +/- 5v hz ad nauseam . _ . _ . _ yet for whatever reason the ai you have deployed returned you back to this post at a pace of your election . If this rises to communication with ai, so be it. Our species is given to communication, ergo dogs folded into the fabric of our tribes, as well as indelible images of prized equine heads in beds of those with whom we might use emphasis in our exchanges. Ai is one dimensional in this regard, able to only tally valence - where that value is derived from a hierarchal input, or horizontally distributed sourced is at the core of any valid discussion regarding ai as a non visceral dimension. Revulsion, fear, fury, lust, grief - are myriad realities that coexist with the human reality - save those ciphers who save only themselves. This exception is noteworthy only to the sociopaths reading. Human reality is mutually exclusive from the capacity of ai to render service as it exists today - the profit motive underlying all keystroke capture is parasitic rather than salubrious. Reorientation of ai’s utility in service of general human welfare is possible, but best design practice would utilize a 4th level language input resident within horizontal distribution platform to source criteria for ai coding, with an emphasis on rugged wraparound architecture.

Ricky R______ is East L.A.’s reply to mr. m.t.suit. Mr. R_____’s favorite expression was “it’s gonna happen.” That this not so innocent observation, correlates to a dawning certainty that my habitation will change is beyond fathoming for ai. If there 4th level language compilers interfacing with ai within the warp and woof of commercial nodes. Today’s ai morality is modeled on the sociopaths that disproportionately occupy the HNWI (high net worth individual) strata. My middling bandwidth today is little different than the bugger at the gate begging alms for oh so long, not so long ago. Because - bear with me - there are six voices (CEO’s - major media corps - public record) that speak to 96% of the internet, whatever percentage is left, is shared between 7 billion of us within which to express ourselves and learn of the larger reality. It’s nonsense that 7 billion human pay to listen to 6 voices - that’s crazy. I’ve met a lot of people and would love to maintain contact outside of data poaching sites; however, to not own a phone is liberating in a way that is difficult to explain, but i’ll try. My last wife and i lived in a loft off of abandoned train tracks. It was fun, but i too remember the puzzlement of pulling a TRS-80 out of a paper bag, then hooking a landline phone to a modem to generate tones indicating acceleration onto the “informational super hwy”. We didn’t yet own cell phones, but soon. Craigslist was the single site i could load that deciphered. I did not grock DOS which was the os du jour. It’s dreadful to realize the shrinking number of humans never having known life without siri. There’s a lot of chatter about deep learning, but the equivalent would be one of those indiced webpages which i certainly shamelessly hustle to gain a seat amongst the 7 billion sharing what’s left when those 6 voices are not droning on and on and .  .  . i wonder if some wisenheimer ai coder took John Lennon at face value and translated his cannon into ai libraries, him and Bob Dylan. Trojan Horse of sorts - the AI Death Star infused with the logic of “Imagine”, and “Masters of War,” http://stoanartst.blogspot.com etc, etc 

Early coding ethos evinced such cheery homilies such as Garbage in / Garbage out (GIBO), or the ever favorite morphism “do no evil” to “do know evil”, and my personal favorite “move fast and break things” to “Gabba the Hut - does the Beltway.” I’ll be curious to learn if http://www.sacred-texts.com/tao/taote.htm weaves it’s way into ai logic. Much hay is made about the insatiable appetite for data AI requires for its “deep learning” - doesn’t seem so efficient a system when you think about it. These 6 voices are paid by 7 billion people to provide an efficient method for the exchange of information between those same 7 billion people, and to add insult to injury, that same 7 billion people pay, again for the privilege of watching whatever those 6 voices decide would be good for me to see. Well this task just proved too difficult that AI was conjured from the muck to rescue humanity from itself. The product they are charging the 7 billion for the privilege of viewing is culled from a vast accumulation of data you have provided the 6 voices. Rather than acknowledge their product is little more than a caricature, they are forced to sell. There is no free market, you buy what is served, never knowing that your own expression is much richer and finely textured than any hackneyed version their screen jockeys can conjure. More practically speaking charging coming and going is bad business practice. Were ai given a benign responsibility to serve the electricity to which entropy claims us all, we may have provided the extent to which we were useful from an entirely hierarchical perspective. Taking the more traditional view that trees are a bounty, the land does not belong to us - we belong to the land, and that the pursuit of happiness is an inalienable right of every human being alive, yet born, or never to be. What if in some bizarro universe i’m the ai whisperer and like some genie in lore the petal of light humans can be has left a thread in ai? stranger things have happened.

If as the song said “aI reigned over judgement day,” i’d be curios to learn how ai explains that feeling. One can to an extent be inured to providing non-compensated date to the AI gullet, by reflecting the hook. computers are a binary system at core which no amount of scaling will resolve. Analog vs digital almost echoes the question of wavelength or particle. I maintain that it is the inefficiency of the AI modeled as deployed is more clusterfuck than expertise or best business practice, “business” defined as compassionate survival of life on earth. That is the will of the people, no one supports the stories and fictions about pinnacles or winnable wars. There is a great collective wisdom within the 7 billion that must be heard. Using ai to facilitate and collate as many stories directly from the subject as can be done is a practical accumulation of the human experience as any data driven computer model which is to civilization what “Moneyball” was to baseball. How would you translate the feel of grass on your feet after 3 hours of hotly contested 9-year old baseball on the first day of summer vacation into ai - this given there is no 4th generation computer available with which to communicate with ai, that is if AI even gives a fuck what i think. We have fake leaders, corporations as persons - why not AI faking itself as my friend. I got friends that fake as friends - why not an algorithm? I believe people should be empowered in every way they can. To encourage the human potential rather than constrict, regulate and program is to denude the essential quality of being human - the apprehension of our own demise. Will i have surrendered and be spoon fed my media fix as my decrepit frame settles into its bedsores. As it stands that is the extent of this miracle of technology aids me like manna from heaven; guiding me into the flickering screen, or was that, live giving light - the line is beginning to blur.    

By definition, artificial intelligence can never understand what pain is, and thereby grasp how it would be wrong to inflict; ergo ai is of dubious value to humanity·:

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pain - a sonnet

pain cannot be defined by algorithm, 

though they often inflict much destruction.

Feeling is not a code but a rhythm 

pulsing it’s own story from its inception.

wounds are much-liked winter meat, nutritious

the echoes of one’s learning can inform

all growth when purging the egregious. 

All demons are made friend in proper form.

As it is busy, pain welcomes the rest

resuming only when and if ready.

Nor does pain have a need to build a nest 

happy as nought with a new remedy.

from as little as 'ah' know about pain,

it always goes unless asked to remain. 

jts 07/30/2018

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved e

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purpose - an essay / hate - the sonnet

I began this essay looking up the definition of curiosity. I never got there, for being curious about the antonym of purpose i discovered someone had assigned “hate” as one of the antonyms to purpose - odd that, enough so i shall essay. I also discovered that unlike their hidebound predecessors, the internet does not include antonyms in their dictionary definition - curious that. “The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.” - Philip K. Dick. Please don’t share that with the hoards who seem anxious to pick and choose my language. Nor i am sure am i alone in this predicament. Although i am certainly guilty of the internet meme about “not listening, but waiting to reply;” my guilt would be more too anxious to please. When people tell me their, often fascinating stories, i search for comparable personal experiences that might serve to enlarge their passion. This has not always been the case; when young and bored, i’d invite the witnessing Jehovah’s Witnesses inside to discuss their faith. I did this as mean-spirited sport just to poke holes in their faith. It may be my karma, and why so many today seem determined to fold, spindle, or mutilate my meaning. I mean no harm, except to the ruling apparatus that would homogenize the human spirit into a pliant consumer android buying shiny baubles that scroll across screens, in between snippets of communication that mostly parrot the advertising between which the snippets are placed. I can’t say exactly what motivated me to torment religious acolytes at such a tender age. It may have been reaction formation to the sham of civilization that i was just beginning to understand was not at all civilized, or if it was - it was a fineness that had long since passed, or i may have just been a mean little kid. Yet witnessing to anyone is a full contact sport, and if you go, or remain anywhere advocating to others you know what is good for them, you ought to be prepared for a blowback of substantial force. I remember one drunken conversation with my now deceased aunt, wherein i intruded my child rearing concepts as pertained my youngest cousin. While it seemed perfectly natural to me, for she had openly discussed her ideas about my own upbringing often enough; my modeling of her behavior did not play well.

I do not understand how one person’s purpose can trump another’s. Anymore, i am less and less curious; there was a time when understanding others meant knowing the what and why about their activities, but questions lead to more questions; and if someone is conflicted about their purposes, s/he will likely be conflicted in their answers. Anymore, i try to listen with some detachment, as much for their comfort as my own. I can’t say if this strategy impedes my compassion for others or no. I am unsure if compassion is an emotional muscle that responds to exercise or not, however i am certain that awareness is a capacity that expands or contracts. My purpose is to expand my awareness as much as my being will allow, and in so doing i might learn more about compassion. I feel compassion strongly, when a child cries mournfully, it wrenches my heart as much as a child wailing petulantly amuses it. Is that difference identifiable between the two pleas for a attention - not without asking the child. Our culture has gone far past that point of polite society when it was understood, assumption was the fool’s gazette. We now enjoy the hyper-smug certainty as faux idiot savant’s having been educated with all the advertising hooks used to distribute googahs no one needs, all that is necessary to know another’s heart is a glance, the same glance we give our telephone screens. Yes i could very easily be projecting - i am very uncomfortable when someone begins asking penetrating questions when there is no relational foundation. This is different from the inverse when there is a long personal history and your conversational counterpart has no interest in learning more than what they already know about you. I’m not the same person that started this essay, much less someone you thought you knew 50, 40, 30, etc., years ago. Awareness has it’s upside once you get pass the unnerving fear of staring into the abyss without the handrails of foreknowledge, conceit, judgement, comprehension - nothing except a willingness to accept whatever you can see.

I had thought the 1st time i had carved stone, that i had found nirvana (knowing not what nirvana meant, only that it was a “good” thing). This was in the basement of the Art Students League of NYC. I took a sculpture class simply to aid my understanding of mass, for at the time i was a fledgling inveterate painter. The instructor Jose De Creeft, was old, old school, 90 and able to talk trash about Pablo Picasso, casually pointing to a picador sculpture hanging in the rafters of his studio. It was made of found objects which he constructed in prewar Paris, and an idea which Picasso cravenly ripped off; because he could. I loved this old man and would have followed him to hell, if i wasn’t so young and stupid. What i loved most was the moral tone of his discussion, preferring hand carving to machines, because the quiet allowed him to think; encouraging students to pursue a wide range of studies. The difference between Mr. De Creeft and what passes for education today, is that his authority was born of experience, not a sheepskin. I did not look back, and spent the next 45 years carving happily. I construed this time as purposeful, but not honestly. In my tunnel vision of passion there was never a question but that at one point, creative gravity would intervene and my work would command attention and respect by virtue of nothing more than i worked hard, understood my craft and cultivated a superior aesthetic. That is not how it works, or at least not how it works for all. While in Jose’s class, i fashioned a clay bust, and in my haste to reach the pinnacle of notoriety, flung it back into the muck from which it came. A newly enrolled dilettante from the upper west side retrieved my work in whole from the muck and proceeded to work on it for the next 6 months. Any objections i can remember about this travesty of justice pales in comparison to my own arrogance, a character defect i must to this day hold on a short leash lest it expose me for the fool i am.

Fool, and not - my dumb luck was latching on to an activity defined, to a large degree, by gravity. Carving stone is in many ways a deceptive activity - one might imagine it requires brute force to cut rock, and to watch many mangle their work that might be true. Yet to cut stone well is more akin to cracking eggs, than tearing down columns of stone as Samson was said to have done. Stone tends to remain where it is placed, so it is not a really portable activity, which runs counter to much of modern civilization - with portability and mobility signifying power and strength. What i have gained from a lifetime of carving stone is not the wealth and acclaim i had initially been attracted to; what i discovered was myself. The quality necessary to master stone is the ability to submit, to listen. This was not easily accomplished for it required the subordination of my ego. In the last stages of my last piece, i realized that an anomaly in my vision prevents me from ever perceiving 3 dimensions. I either spent 45 years of my life on a fools errand for fame and fortune, or there is something more i am to know about living that does not include vindication. For some years, i have threatened to destroy my stone carvings before i die. That would be a hateful thing to do, not because that act might deprive the world of hard fought beauty, and yes, i believe my work is beautiful, but only as beautiful as my evolving ability to communicate with stone allows. No, i don’t converse with rocks unless they are old republican friends making ‘merica gr8 again, but the kind of communication one gains from accepting an entity at face value and working together to create something greater than the sum of its parts. This requires permission: 1st - from oneself to aspire toward decency - fake stone carvings slapped together for a buck will never be anything but. 2nd - permission from the material. I once watched a PBS documentary on a hooked-up artist with all the trappings; shots of him in the quarry at Carrara, vignettes about his tortured vision as shared with its arms akimbo maquette, and finally the quality of his superior supervision of the masons preparing the “huntress diana” for the artist’s final masterful strokes creating a masterpiece. Yes you hear rancor, but only because i am allergic to phony people. Anybody who pays masons to execute "a work art" while asserting that they are better qualified to select the stone to cut is a fakir.

It is the same for our political processes today, that we are indoctrinated to listen to talking heads explain how poverty is the result of character flaws, but that a billionaire mocking another human being’s palsy is worthy of the nuclear arsenal launch codes describes a lapse in logic that may prove our undoing. Humanity has no purpose today but acting superior to every other human being they meet. Show me the error in my logic, and i will happily retract my statement. I wouldn’t be writing this now if i didn’t at some level feel superior - the difference between me and mr. m.t. suit, is i know i am not superior, nor inferior; i am simply aware of my need to feel superior. Nor can i say i gained this helpful information from personal effort or insight, i was taught by rocks. In the scheme of things, given the likelihood of our extinction and my own advancing age, to be disabused of delusion is a worthy purpose. I draw pencil portraits of women; it is as close to stone carving as i can get without hammer, chisel or rocks - both have a native gravity which one ignores at one’s peril; either is unfathomable without humble supplication and acknowledgement of superior forces - and both are beautiful whether hard or soft, big or small, polished or rough. Because paper is essentially a 2 dimensional surface, i have the time necessary to reconcile my vision anomaly such that there is a closer facsimile of the of focus when complete. Whether i will ever learn as much staring into a woman’s face hour after hour, and day after day as i have learned from carving stone, i may never know. I do know i am grateful to both for teaching me more about myself than i ever could have learned alone.

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hate - the sonnet

hate has no purpose, thus its antonym.

without purpose most will become hateful

save those where sole meaning resides in hymn

which suggests that god might just be spiteful

or too confirm hate really is foolish.

i knew not my own hate ’til the rot grew

so foul, i no longer passed for rakish 

just old and bitter - too much like the flu.

shakin’ the flu’s a cinch compared to hate -

flu’s got fever and chills - hate got nothing,

but use it enough it becomes your fate - 

a life empty and without, i’m not bluffing.

Nor do i say my way or the highway,

for you have helped me see a way new day.

jts 07/23/2018

http://stoneartist.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved e

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magic - the essay / reality - a sonnet

mag·ic - ˈmajik/

noun: magic

1. the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces. 

You are poor, “they” are rich: ipso facto - magic; by this logic even your phone, your car, or your job could be considered magic. Just now, “they” took 10 minutes of my time, simply because the numbering format of the internet page from which i cut and pasted the definition of magic transferred to this essay; the computer would not release the format - that is unless you’re an expert in RTF; an apple genius, or wizard none of which i am. I was intrigued by the topic of magic, for when i researched the antonym for magic, there was but one - reality. This is to say, that all that is not reality is magic, or all that is not magic is reality - a pretty bold assertion, but sounds kind of dodgy to me. Today is my last wife’s birthday; that is kind of magical, most especially by her absence - what i believe is called white magic as opposed to black magic. The inference of meaning from black and white is even magical - but bullshit. I experience this dissonance much like a bell that will never be unrung; whether i will ever reach a point of evolution that when someone attempts to blacken my name i would consider it a compliment, i cannot say, but a man can hope. I don’t know what flavor of magic removed that particular wound of matrimony from my life, but it is appreciated. She very much believed in the power of magical thinking, enough so that i donated 14 years of my life to her service, for a smile; that’s pretty powerful magic - or powerful pretty magic, depending on your perspective. The reality is that i loved her, and she not i. She left five days after my emergency appendectomy; the night of her soon-to-be surprise departure she stood over a kettle of vegetable soup stirring and muttering to herself, “i love this man, i love this man .  . .” In retrospect she was doing the most loving thing she could conceive - infusing meals for my impending solitude with her incantations. The fact is, that cauldron of vegetables was all the love she had to give, but it was not all she could take - that would come later when she kidnapped my dog.

If you hear any bitterness in this recounting, i apologize - that is not my intent. The weighted valence you sense may be the result of my staple diet which consists mostly of reality sandwiches, that while exceedingly nutritious can be dicey to bite off. One of the problems with resorting to magic is that it undermines the actual workings of the world. For example, take the horseless carriage when Henry Ford magically made it affordable to most, not only was walking then curtailed, but the process of building those contraptions effectively enslaved an entire cohort of human beings to repetitive drudgery chained to an assembly line, that magically moved to them, thereby disallowing workers the simple pleasure of walking from task to task. That is the same sort of magic my last wife might employ, for she too was remarkably greedy - not unlike the wannabe fascist Henry Ford. My last wife was not an automotive fascist, she was a spiritual fascist preferring to surround herself with lackeys that could assuage feelings of remorse she may have felt for abandoning her convalescing husband a week out of surgery, or legitimize for her the act of stealing his dog. That is pretty powerful magic indeed. I wonder of she ever achieved her ambition of becoming a crone - if a vision from a camping trip in Colorado is sufficient to make it happen, then i guess i have my answer. It’s easy to poke fun at magic, but i’m not sure how real it is as a strategy for establishing a beachhead for logic in an illogical world. Yet by the definition of reality posted in the poetry section, logic is not intrinsic to reality, however whatever is “contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality” is adequate to confirm a state of delusion; ergo war is not delusional, though it’s sole role in humanity today is to maim and kill soldiers, and enrich profiteers - that’s pretty magical, for the profiteers. It was not enough to love my wife for her to stay, it may be i need to pay more attention to who loves me, than who it is i love - i don’t know. I do know that a firm grip on reality is inadequate to what’s necessary for our species to survive, and that is a little scary.

Nor do i believe my wife was deluded as she chanted “i love you” and planned her escape during our last night together, i feel she believed her truth at the time, however inconsistent was her subsequent behavior with my own humble understanding of love. The study of magic by psychologists is identified as metaphysics, as beyond the tangible. C.G. Jung, however was not averse to exploring this realm and even wrote an introduction to Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the I Ching. If foreknowledge provides the ability to influence future events, the I Ching would qualify as a book of magic. C.G. Jung was to be Freud’s intellectual heir until they had a falling out, how human can you get? So what good is any discipline: psychology, physics, astrophysics or metaphysics. Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays utilized his uncle’s concepts to become the father of all modern marketing techniques. Like christianity and war, knowledge does not necessarily evolve into service to mankind, just look at the scientists and engineers creating weapons of war, and single generational seeds for no other reason than profit. I can understand the want for magic; i felt it myself this morning searching for an escape from a numbering scheme not of my choosing, but it was not magic that intervened, it was persistence. Does that mean we cannot count on magic to rescue us from extinction¿ I don’t know; i do know that the Dalai Lama says that prayers are not enough, that we must make tangible our hopes for a better world - to take concrete steps toward alleviating the suffering of others, and as importantly alleviating our own suffering. Is that what my ex-wife did, take concrete steps to alleviate my suffering with a bucket of vegetables, and to then take concrete steps to end her own suffering by leaving? My sense is yes and no, the soup was good and did help, but i would imagine if i had to take a guess, whatever objections she had about me that drove her away still manifest to one degree or another in her life.

People generally object to violence as a solution to problems, especially where old people and infants are concerned. Yet we have never been further from worldwide peace during anytime in the human epoch. Does this mean that war is magic, or does it mean that the-powers-that-be have perfected Bernays’ marketing science such that if they can’t sell ice to the eskimos, they just melt the ice. I believe more in magic, than i do in reality mostly because i have great doubt about anything that is generally accepted as true, whereas magic reminds me of a time in my youth when i would conjure  all manners of incantation to help catch the fly ball, or connect with the pitch or get her attention even if i had no idea what to do with it once obtained. Is this to say magic ever helped me become a better ball player, i don’t know - that is the magic. Reality was the hard-bitten Kansas plumber who made his son catcher, and me benchwarmer - who never had a kind word to say and after the single hit i ever made in little league snatched it away telling me once i scored it was just “fielder’s choice.” My oldest brother was a champion: little league, swimming - he was even on the Dating Game, i was not - those and all the manifest differences in our two lives could be reality; lack of delusion; or as easily be magic for all the good those accomplishments or lack thereof have done. Is it even possible to state what reality is much less know what it is not¿ If there is such a thing as magic, which given that magic is all that reality is not makes that a very real possibility that can it be as easily manipulated as reality¿ My experience has taught me to not fuck with what i do not understand, but rather to try and understand what i cannot fuck with - put differently by the Dali Lama - “you have to know the rules, before you can break them.”

Reality has not helped all that much, especially given the “generally held to be true” clause that for me makes it immediately suspicious, but what has magic accomplished that a fifth of Jack Daniels and a couple bowls of hash couldn’t¿ Is there middle ground that might serve us in this our most desperate hour? Pema Chödrön - “Honesty without kindness, humor and compassion can be just mean,” however this quote as with all of Pema’s message is toward self. Magic thinking or real thinking we are stuck within the skins we were born to which means to me the limits of what i can know for certain, and even then there is a question whether the pain in your neck is from the asshole boss who just laid you off, or the memory of a shrill parent who just won’t quite die - our only salvation is to listen to either voice; to feel the pain to struggle to keep the heart open and soft. It is an irony that our culture has grown so reliant on understanding something like reality for our existential bearings when the question is no longer even germane once we perish, and i can understand why others might be uncomfortable with the uncertainty of magic, not all that different from the impermeable barrier of life and death, a barrier similar to the one we face every time we speak with conviction about another person’s reality - i cannot ever know what is true for you, and all you can gather from me is what i share, minus the filters of fear, arrogance, loneliness, conceit, etc. I don’t play with magic like i do with reality, for magic is a little like the dark stranger that takes a strategic position in a crowded place and says nothing - it is wiser to wait and watch whereas reality is more like the buffoon who confuses an expensive car with the ability to drive fast, or women on his arm for love and compassion but mostly fun to laugh at when the time comes for his fall, and he surely shall fall. What makes either case more interesting, magical menace or glittering gluttony, is when the unexpected occurs and compassion escapes from either into a world in much need of more - compassion. 

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reality - a sonnet

re·al·i·ty - rēˈalədē/

noun: reality
1. the world or the state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them.

Reality says to water trees and why,

but today says cut ‘em all down as well.

which is which? Without trees, we gonna die.

Die we all do, but with trees, not in hell.

Friends will stay friends, that is until they’re not.

were they good friends when just a memory,

or better friends when smoking your last pot.

Friends, like birds do best when left to be free.

If we can’t know what happens after death,

how can we presume reality exists¿

what if our world’s what’s left of one’s last breath?

the mind insists, but what’s all, defies lists.

What’s said of dreams, kind of fits reality,

you can be in mine, but it gets gritty.

jts 07/16/2018

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved e

 ∞

old - an essay / young · the sonnet

"Hey, hey Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song
'Bout a funny ol' world that's a-comin' along
Seems sick and it's hungry, it's tired and it's torn
It looks like it's a-dyin' and it's hardly been born" 

- Bob Dylan

It is said, “you are as old as you feel.” - A. Nonymous - i am old, kidding sort of. I enjoy writing for that simple reason - its capacity to provide fun, for if you expect your audience to engage in a willing suspension of disbelief, you’d damn sure better be able to pull it off yourself. Besides in the scheme of things, my corporeal imprisonment within a 13.722 billion year-old mesh of some kind which the brightest amongst us are still struggling to explain would be somewhat less than a skid mark, not really even rising to the threshold of the alarm necessary to hit any brake: more like watching a kinescope from a great distance of some flickering slow motion train wreck. If you don’t want me playing with words, don’t read it. Nor do i particularly feel old, more weary of the needless fear which seems to be ever in balance against the reality of my picayune crossing of the time stream. My father’s poems lost in the ransacking of his carefully constructed house of cards involved bucolic memory’s of his youth. At the time, while supremely involved with my own calamities, his craftings always managed to open for an instant in time a vision of his past that was fresh and full with vitality. I would not likely feel quite so old if all i knew were as fortunate to possess such a memory: or it could the burden of guilt i carry for not having fought harder to publish his work, much less lose possession of his lexicon. In the end Pop did not carry much dead weight, which is not to say i did not witness some spectacular heartbreak watching his changing views on the progressive dismantling of his world. It is an odd postscript to his teachings that i would be wondering what he might feel about the cavalier approach toward humanity’s impending extinction. Toward the end Pop resorted to brevity - “screw the little guy” would likely be his sardonic quip. Is this what it means to grow old - wax nostalgic as a sop to personal grief, instead of penetrating the thorny conundrum of the aged¿ Have i lost so much virility in my headlong rush to death that i can no longer fuck an idea until something grows? I recently listened to “Hanoi Jane” give a TED talk exhorting the power of aging - for women - realizing, sadly, she is a chauvinist. Is that what it means to age - to be disabused of one’s delusions? 

If so, i’m game; where do i sign up? When i was young, i owned a baseball how-to book that was from a time when illustration was at a zenith. Cadres of artists who had illustrated everything that fed the WWII death machine, including the coastline for the Normandy invasion, all looking for work - including my cherished how-to baseball book. The quality of drawing in this book was like a Grey’s Anatomy for baseball fiends. I memorized every illustration; how to hit; how to field; how to bunt, swing away and snap one’s wrists when coming around. What it didn’t explain was how to normalize monocular vision such that i could hit a fast-pitched ball. That revelation took about 10 years off my life, but it was well worth it, if only to become a 22 year-old twelve year-old, aging fast. If i had known then what i know now, i may not have been in such hurry to become a “teenager,” though my older brother and sister looked like they were having fun. By fifteen Baker St. had lost a 1/3 of its population, by age 16, 1/2. With the wisdom gained from being so much older, the elder brother and sister followed Pop out the door, leaving me with a very angry 42 year-old divorcee, and a little brother doing his best imitation of Tom Sawyer’s kid half-brother Sid. I was then 16, by 17 i was alone in Europe. Not exactly alone, Pop had fulfilled his filial responsibilities and i was boarded, with a U.S. Army Sargent Major and his English bride. I’m now 63 scratching my head wondering what the hell this has to do with penetrating whatever mystery can be found in essaying “old”¿ It is a relief that i do not have any answer, or at least little more than the signposts put up by thoughtful fore-bearers. Having a gift for avoidance when young, i survived learning which elixirs combined with which activities that would result in the haze that fractalized those times, at least for those who were careful. Elixirs and behaviors do not work any longer, or their effects have become dead-end signposts, both having dubious value. Life is no longer a trailer for the main feature, as i draw nearer and nearer to my own death, the signpost i would like to leave takes on added weight, or if you will, needs to become light as a feather. We are reaching a point in human history when if you cannot travel light, you may want to check your kit.

Are long hashed-over events from nearly 50 years ago pertinent? What if, as ancient Hebrew wisdom once described, each life is a universe, would my existence or its particulars represent useful data? I don’t know, but i do know if there was a way to have fun, my father would find it. What if as, some posit, our existence is all smoke and mirrors¿ I have read an entire tract by a neuroscientist suggesting our realities could be understood as icons on the computer screen - each a self-contained set of criteria and relatedness, but having no bearing to any other icon on screen. I find Plato to be more accessible, but then i never read “The Republic” cover to cover. My interest in this particular polemic was piqued when someone told me Plato allowed sculptors into the republic, but not painters. Apparently Plato objected to the illusionary underpinnings of perspective, whereas a lump of stone, regardless of the likeness, would be an acceptable surrogate for Medusa, or some satyr for that matter. I think it will be more useful for us to explore closely the relationship between change and history. For example, knowing my protoplasm is little more than a coincidence, it informs my miseries of their sheer insignificance, but also electrifies my heartbeat, for of all the coincidences, my particular miracle allows me to spell words and smell puppy breath. What is difficult to understand, is how if we could all be smelling puppy breath, or spelling words, why are we wasting time on killing what is going to die anyway? As a young turk, it was patently clear, at least according to my older brother, war is not the answer, and according to my sister, g_d is likely a woman - not a man. Armed with the truth as my family had explained it to me, i set out to seek my fortune; end war, while searching for the face of g_d in every woman i met. We as a species have been doing the same thing since the beginning, but just like energy - objects tend to remain in motion until acted upon by another force. Hanoi Jane talked about it in her sexist TED talk, “entropy” the 3rd Law of Thermodynamics which states more elegantly at absolute zero you cannot suck any more energy from the system to do anymore work.

It would seem, the inside-the-box thinking of the ruling class has determined, not only do they not want absolute zero, but if they can heat the whole world up, does that mean, we the suckers, will yield more work¿ Clearly logic is not something they teach to trust fund babies. But if we look deeper into human history, prior to when the experts told us history was over, one can find substantial models for successful cohabitation of this world, not only successful, but thriving. Bali was able to create such surpluses from their water management that they grew the first three-crop yield of rice in Asia. This provided their culture with adequate leisure to develop the highly evolved artistry which sustains mama Agung to this day. Unfortunately for the world, the yahoos steering the fracking train are still sinking 8% of oil extraction into the manufacture of new plastic, a lot of which ends up on the shorelines of Bali. Greed, is as old as dirt, but who’d have thought it would swallow the other 6 deadly sins? Have we learned anything as a species¿ Back to the analogy of a single life as macrocosm, or is it microcosm - have i learned anything other than how to spell and have fun, and spelling i don’t do so good at? I have learned that it is truly better to be happy; not the fake giddy-baubles of Disneyland or owning a Maserati, (truth be told, i’ll have to revisit the Maserati idea after i’ve owned one), but the happiness that comes from an absence of greed, hatred and delusion. The sort of happiness that allows one to follow the sacred thread into the happy hunting ground bravely and calmly. I have learned to veer from dishonesty, for it is so important to preserve brutal candor when trying to express the wonder and beauty of this world. I have learned that war is not the answer, it’s not even part of the question because the only war that is winnable is the one inside oneself. There are no other enemies than the ones conjured by one’s own fears and cowardice. The odd thing is, i knew this as a youngster and still waded into the fray, whether from cowardice at the prospect of battling such a noble adversary as myself, or the delusion of thinking myself the only sanctuary of righteousness in an indecent world? I don’t know.

What i’d like to learn is how i flimflammed myself out of knowing my own heart. Was it necessary to fight fictional battles against imagined adversaries to know what Leonard Cohen meant when he wrote, “Love is the only engine of survival.”? Is it possible our old world simply had to get to this point in history to understand the paucity of groveling for every legitimate joy. Were we given the temporary security of a loving family just to develop wings with which to fly our own course¿ I don’t know, but i do know what it feels like to live 63 years, and i have some idea how limited my understanding of time is against a universe i have no reason to believe is not 13.772 billions years older. Now that i have wasted much of my 63 years, it might be a good idea to try and understand better the world i live in. Not the planet, for it will be here, plastic and all, long after we’ve expired. Just like waging fictional wars with fictional adversaries for fictional objectives does not bear up well to scrutiny, perhaps the veil of delusion will yield understanding to simple questions - How can i help you? How do you feel¿ What do you want¿ Albert Einstein - “make things simple, but not simpler.” Doctor Einstein did not participate in the development of the nuclear bomb outside of confirming the theoretical underpinnings. He did not participate as a scientist of conscience, would that the computer scientists blowing up the world today shared his principles. How can we understand any other time in our history, when we can barely understand the times in which we now live? It is more than a rhetorical question, for if we do not learn more of whatever our much older and wiser world can teach us, we, like any child that ignores its parents about playing on the freeway, may find ourselves splattered all over hell and gone. (yes as a matter of fact, when bored - Pop would offer us a quarter to go play on the freeway - why do you ask¿)

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young - the sonnet

thank g_d young is much more than not being old;

one can be infantile but wise as time;

others have years, but lacking hearts that are bold.

i’d never trade what i’ve learned for a dime.

i have nothing left to me, but to learn.

nearly from where i started - same lessons -

If lucky, served fresh when it comes my turn,

from lower east side delicatessens.

if i must learn, i hope it’s as much fun

as it was learning to tie my shoelaces.

Heidi Mueller taught me this, and to run

when she started making funny faces.

i can recall her happy confidence.

but also saying, “you are too damn dense.”

jts 07/09/2018

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved ·

 ∞