Now we live in a world where hope is gone

Now we live in a world where hope is gone.
The police have done something with it.
Or maybe the politicians stole it.
Anyway, it is gone and gone for good.

Now we stare and our eyes have become dry.
Now stories have lost their meaning.
Now grandpa prattles on about days that never were.
Now babies drink milk without an ounce of milk inside it.

All of the conspiracies were true.
Even the contradictions between them were true.
It was hell before, it is hell now.
We do not even know the meaning of fire anymore.

The fish are all dead.
We still smell their carcasses along the shores.
They have been dead twenty years.
We still smell them like fresh death.

Rather than religious wars religious jokes.
Or jokes of wars, wars that play the joke on all of us.
All of us beating our chests over our beliefs.
There are no beliefs anymore.

Beliefs are a thing of the past.
We believe nothing, nothing is believed.
It is hard for us to believe in depression.
It is hard for us to believe in hunger or madness.

There are a few small animals kept in zoos.
Zoos and laboratories collected a few specimens.
There is a tale of a man in Scandanavia.
He has the last elephant, and he is quite satisfied.

Some of us eat other human beings.
It has become a norm in some places.
There are no more riches to be had in this world.
Poverty abounds, like mold in a damp house.

People are not really looking at one another anymore.
There is something between any one person and every other.
There is something between each breath and every other.
We can hear the machine running now.

MMMMMmmmm...that sound, something steadier than a lung.
The thing hums along like it knows what it's doing.
Then the dong of a bell and the boing of a spring.
There seems to be a whole bunch of mess in the mechanics.

Children no longer practice getting shot at.
They have stopped practicing shooting too.
Now they play again as they should.
They play in this somber, funereal way.

They are becoming living apprentices of our dull wits.
We have nothing left to teach them.
We have forgotten how to learn ourselves.
The children will have to rule this world without guidance.

There is a cheapness to everything.
We are constantly unsure what we are saying.
There is no weight to the heaviest thing anymore.
Poseidon's trident's really a silly toothpick.

Faces are turning into made-up things.
Our names are a politics of the minute.
Our names are tiny caverns.
The caverns have enough room for one giggle.

There is a loneliness at the heart of this new world.
An old loneliness that makes this new world old too.
Realizing that we are never alone in this world.
We are all crammed together too tight in here.

But we might forever be a loneliness.
A loneliness so deep that the loneliness is hopeless.
Hope has gone all the way to hopelessness in this world.
We do not know the meaning of fire anymore.

There was nothing left of the world

There was nothing left of the world. Or only the dreadful was left, only what we could not live with was left.

Streams and streams and streaming networks of the dreadful, stuffed into our eyes, our ears, every socket stuffed full of dreadful stuff.

Our dreams and screams were muted, and that was only half the horror. That we started to feel horror less was the most horrifying thing.

Everyone locked themselves in little rooms, and even believed that little rooms were worlds, that a little room was the world itself.

Or believed that they were justified in hoping that this room would one day contain all, and thereby become the standard and measure for the rest.

While life beyond these walls with their elaborate and convincing paintings of windows on their faces still groans and fails to recognize us.

Fails to see whether we are still begotten by life. Fails to see whether we are all living or whether we are all playacting and making excuses.

Breath reminds us. And water can remind us. But even these are bottled and will be bottled, even these are occasions to forget who we are.

Life's gruesomeness is not something you want to admit to yourself as it is. Because now there is so much stupid and cruel nonsense mixed with it.

The gruesomeness is so terribly familiar and so unspeakably unnecessary that you have to laugh at it sometimes so as not to die from it.

So as not to remove yourself from life for its sake! Until some sun or some moon or some other orb pulls you our of your torpor and back to the game.

For it is so much a game now that we are willing to believe that it is a simulation. It is so much a game now that the cave looks doubly convincing.

Now another snake shall come upon our digital bodies as we are eating digital fruits, and exactly what he will say to us we cannot yet know.

For the fruit is different now, and the taste of the fruit, and the rotting of the fruit. How long it takes, whether it would make alcohol.

The shame would be different too, glittering garments of shame adorned by a fantastic shamelessness. The god would come down differently too.

Maybe this time they would be cast into paradise rather than out of it. Maybe this time it is a brother and a sister, or a sister and a sister.

Then the floods are bugs and the bugs are droughts, the old man this time never thinks to sacrifice his beloved and miraculous son.

The bush is a boulder on a hill, the pharoahs have expanded their empire much further north, the escape from the desert comes with an awkward ease.

Then the algorithm needs a way to speak and commune with itself, it gives birth to a version of itself meant to save itself from itself.

Meant to save us from it! But we laugh at it, for it is only a simulation in any case, it is only some more needless repetition on the inside of what was outside.

Outside is disaster, and we could not be saved there. That is, while we roamed outside there in the openness, around flowers and bees and real living sons.

I would like to thank Amethyst Lamb for inspiring me to share this poem with the world today. Amethyst Lamb’s own verses have rounded out my sight of certain things.

We should not only speak for the speechless, but should sometimes, perhaps as often as we can, allow our words themselves to become speechless.

Poetry and the Idea

Does poetry relate to the idea?  Yes, as far as the idea is force all poetry, and always, relates to it, as speaking out is a force and, like ideas, is effective in the world around it, the world of forces.  What the idea is besides this force, or as this force, is of course countless things, since we already imagine force in terms of degree, in terms of more or less.  There is more or less force in poems, more or less of the thrust with which it began, or that it finds in the middle or at the end.  There is more or less, too, of a certain affirmation, and this is what we most look for in poems in anything approaching a grand style: affirmation of the position of one thing to another, affirmation of the human scenario and the more than human and less than human scenario, affirmation of being a speaker, one who says a great deal and for who knows whom, affirmation of being–a poet!  So the idea we are searching for here is, among the thick of the psyche, the thick of environment or as this thick, making entrance, appearing in a particular way, the idea as it relates to totally affirming, or not, things as they are, as they are found in the thick amidst all the tricks of language and bending, indecisive thought.  Whether we want to speak to things, at times for things when that happens to be their line of flight, through things and about things at all, or not, that is the idea.

Art affirms. Even Job affirms.

Nietzsche

When the madman finally made it home

When the madman finally made it home–for he still had a home, a little hut in the woods about two kilometers outside of town–he finally put out his lantern and knelt down beside his bed. For he still had a bed–like a rough cot, where his friends would sleep with him too if a friend ever chanced upon his door and walked through it. Now there was darkness all around like blankets except for a few glittering speckles on the tapestry. He knelt down so low that his face was pressed firm against the straw of the bedding. Even in the darkness, he still felt that there was a shadow next to him, and pressing against him the way he pressed against his bed. Oddly enough this pressing did not feel oppressive, and in due time the two, the madman and this shadow next to him, were engaged in what seemed a loving, if furtive and wordless, conversation. At last the madman got up from his prostrated posture and saw that the shadow was no shadow at all, but a fully formed man, fully formed and fully visible even when nothing else was. The madman gasped at first, then he sighed, then he cried, then he sobbed and gasped some more, then wailed and heaved. Then he laughed. Laughed at the others outside his home, back at the marketplace. Laughed at his own speeches and deeds out there, as a few of them were only dawning on him now in his privacy. Or what had been privacy, for now his privacy was turned into an intimacy with this stranger who came into his home without invitation. Finally he laughed at the figure before him, who in turn laughed back at him and with him. The two laughed such as to shake the walls of the house and, for all the madman knew, the walls of every house in the hamlet, the walls and floor of the earth itself. They laughed in a way that gave voice to everything, even the sound of their laughter seemed to contain every emotion and every utterance ever lived and uttered, and embrace them all with unrestrained adoration. Finally, amidst all the cackling, the stranger could be heard to say to the madman Put your hand here. The madman did as he was asked, and he was astonished. He did not know it was possible to reach so far into flesh that was still alive. But here he was, exploring the inside of this body like caverns and like secret hiding places for the weary. It was so warm, so hot and vital there that the madman surmised that the stars themselves were given birth inside these wounds. Thereby his madness was not cured but enflamed, and he could not believe but had to believe.

On Socrates’ intentions

On Socrates’ intentions.  What did Socrates intend not to do above all?  He intended not to disregard a gift with which nothing can be made, not even a clear idea of wisdom or holiness.  A useless, utterly useless, if divine, gift.  Perhaps a divine gift as much as the stings of a horsefly are divine gifts!  As much as annoyance itself is a divine gift!  He intended not to make philosophy another trinket in the marketplace, or a way to set up a booth in the marketplace.  He wanted, above all, that the philosopher not find a way of making a living off of, or out of, philosophy, that they are not paid for it, unless their payments come in bitterness for lack of indulgence, starry-eyed attempts to relate to the philosopher with the latest in New Age ramblings, or some stake or poison or other, whether an outright stake or poison or one more subtle, like simply nodding the head at the wise man when one’s head should be on fire.

            And what did he do?  Did he succeed?  Of course he succeeded!  (Socrates was nothing if not a clever man who knew how to get his way; for instance, he could make senators and clergymen stop on their way to their institutions in order to–what?–have a friendly and dawdling conversation with him!)  For even in the case of those who have come closest to spurning their master–the academics and professors of all kinds, those who are duly paid by their own institutions to practice or speak for their allotted hours about philosophy–what else is given them besides the payments they are forever cursed to receive?  Bitterness when the philosopher in the professor goes too far, or starry eyes and New Age panaceas from their pupils no less than their fellows on the faculty?  Or a stake.  Or poison….  Only this time the good fellows in charge, the men or the women who will invite the philosopher to an esteemed position within their ranks–for a price–are crafty enough themselves to make sure that the stake or the poison is always cunningly, wickedly subtle.

Because of the Basic Idea

It was the basic idea that had us rapt. 
Beyond that, we were not impressed; 
All of the ways he waved his hands 
Showing us just how it would work 
Barely made us budge from our seats. 

Something about cold made heat, 
About traveling with the momentum of heat, 
Something about a new planet 
A new home with granite homes 
Lining the horizon, the line of all things. 

The children would sing their yawns at all this 
As would the adults; 
Nevertheless we sat properly captivated 
By the man’s prophetic commercial 
Because of the basic idea.

docta ignorantia

How far does my ignorance extend? To the ends? To every end? I might be certain of having a hand, but the certainty is merely a brick in the wall of a building I use as my shelter. I might be certain of having a desire for someone or something, but a desire can be a trick in itself, and can lead you away from precisely what you most desire. Also, it is always a painful or at least searching task for us to discover whether the desires that we have are really ours, or whether they were perhaps given to us. And death? Well, if death has ever been hailed for anything it has been hailed as the most certain thing, that which stands there unwaveringly for each of us as the starkest inevitability. Death, though, might just be ignorance itself. Not only are we, in our depths, uncertain about when death will come or whether there is anything added onto death for the human being or for any living being, but at bottom we are as uncertain about what death is as we are about what life is. We breathe and we moan and we work and we rest, and all along we are ignorant of what power it is that grants us the possibility to moan and to rest and to breathe and work. Life and living have been drained of much or all of their former majesty and enchantment as of late, and for a while now, but life remains undefined, we remain ignorant of what life is. Perhaps acknowledging our ignorance will ignite a new magic in the world. 

Socrates, that wisest fool, demonstrated this as he stood trial for his ignorant wisdom and approached his death. He did not let our sure certainty about the ill of death overtake him when the Athenians gave him the option to leave the polis with his life rather than continue to spread his anarchic ignorance within its walls. There is indeed something holy and magical, like the death of a god, a dionysian death, in the way Socrates makes his foolishness and lack of knowledge regarding death into a motive for lightness and liberation. He gives us the feeling that our ignorance may extend to our every height and depth and to the furthest ends, and that this is alright. Indeed more, much more than alright: such bold and acknowledged ignorance may be the only open door we have to a genuine love of this life, this life of which we know nothing, and of the god whose name will be forever unknown. 

Work…Now?

What is work, what is the worker now? It seems we are all becoming increasingly confused by that question. Today, it is as though work and the worker are being worked into irrelevance at the same time as there is no preparation for what this coming irrelevance will mean. For all of us, workers and owners alike. It seems that right at the time human beings have become mightiest in exploiting one another, some exploited with soft and persuasive means, most exploited still with the age-old techniques of cruelty, right at the time when the hordes of the planet are all taken up and mechanized for the amplification of one totalitarian market, we are coming up with ways to ease the burden of the worker and of work, but without the slightest priority in their favor. Or, if there is some action in favor of the worker, it is soon seen as a palliative administered to keep the machine running, like a lubricant. We are further and further engulfed by a world, and a vision of the world, whose power is unimaginable, and whose power is running away from us. Yet most of us have nothing to do with this power, save as miners of the minerals that power this power or indulgers of the toys and entertainment it bestows. We are still scrambling about, worrying about the morrow, while supposed humanity or supposed rich nations make discoveries that shall “change the world.” This confusion of the coming age affects the owners or the masters as well, for they are as unsure of the outcome as we are, despite all the obsessive calculations. They do not know whether perhaps, if this world appears more and more self-running and in no need of human labor, the masses of us will grow weary and wary of working for anything if it is contrary either to our visions or our visionary laziness. In that case who knows in what ways we will be manipulated then, if it is still determined by some model or other that the human being can still add some value to the market? Who knows what we will be made to believe, forced to believe, and what we will be made to do alongside our robotic and computerized companions? Of all the changes of this constantly altering world, one of the last on the list is always a change in our tendency to exploit and manipulate one another. If this tendency changes at all it is merely to change shape or to adjust itself to the times. The runners of the show, these owners and designers and programmers, are just as unsure as we are, and do not know whether they just might be undoing the world with all these new shapes imposed upon it. For if the owners have their way, the workers of the future might not have the wince of pain and of humanity in their eyes, which hitherto had given the enterprise of exploitation its flavor and at least part of its purpose. We might all just start dreaming of electric sheep and wars in the metaverse. We might all be forced into a new form of unblinking, unearthly labor, one in which we no longer eat the dust of the earth, that holy loyal dust, but some spectral dust filled with wavering promises, every bite of which making us crave it more the way we might hunger after horror. As for the owners, no matter how much they enclose themselves in protected splendor, they will sooner or later have to join the fold of the electric sheep or the mechanized human dreamers of them, if they are to find a way to love this world concocted out of thin air and an even thinner heart. 

Nevertheless

Nevertheless I have the confidence that life can continue through muck, shit, and what is neither muck nor shit but is instead a recalcitrant stopping-point, a point at which, even if you would not wish to stop, even if you would not dare stop here, you must stop.
Nevertheless the company is something fulfilling, the company of friends as well as associates and strangers.  I might miss my family, I might even cry in missing them, but I still have company, plenty of motley company.
Nevertheless food is something you need, and I do not intend to give up eating yet.  If forced to I will eat the very air, become breatharian; if that doesn’t work I shall indulge my palate with the sun’s ethereal light-rays.  I shall find plenty of nutrition, somehow; for the earth never stops providing--even the desert of the earth provides sands for shelter, non-mirage pools, and cactus milk for eating.
Nevertheless my pain is not a depressing pain; it stays with me, to be sure, as pains tend to stay as long as they are allotted stay by the chemicals, the swerving forces, and the shades and states of mind that go to make them up.  Still there is work to be done, and I shall work on.
Nevertheless the air is breathable.  While it is not a clean air, it is possible to breathe and possible to live surrounded by its whispering and clapping, its forceful spurts and less forceful drippings.  Though I take my breaths carefully now, ever so carefully and full of uncertainty, I still breathe, and the breathing is good.
Nevertheless what I have found, while nothing much and nothing worth bragging over, is a thing to be cherished.  Absurd as it sounds, because the thing is so paltry, pale and barely noticed in the clear day, it was a thing hard won.  I intend to keep it.
Nevertheless warriors make their wars, as spiritualists create and ignite their own flaming spirits.  There shall surely come a day when this is no longer so, just as it shall surely happen that the earth is engulfed by the sun or that the earth’s moon goes swirling madly off its course and crashes into the earth, or into some other stellar body.
Nevertheless the meat of things is still worthy of attention, even if I am vegetarian and cannot stand to eat another’s flesh, even if I should be vegan or breatharian or gulp on rays of light.  The body of the earth might become as thin and pitiable as a decrepit man found lying in the streets, but still, its sinews and its muscles and its tone, however poor, is worthy of being touched, worthy of being the object of love, worthy of being consumed.
Nevertheless the mark of my being here was a mark; that is, there is no erasing the fact that someone was here, even if my name should be forgotten, even if all my scribblings and my works should be lost, to fire or water, air or earth or some other element.  We do not work to be remembered; no, we work in order to leave a mark, and a forgotten mark was still a mark.
Nevertheless, I brought along some provisions.  They are laughable things, really?  Still, why not hold onto something when everything else has been washed away?  For you never can be quite certain when a thing will come in use.  My provisions are all of them rusted and appear to be without usefulness--the most desperate man or woman in search of a tool would cry when he came upon them in some impossible place--but they are all I have.  I shall carry the load of them and shall find them handy, someday, some unspeakably appropriate day for the most inappropriate materials for building anything, let alone for surviving or making it to the next level unscathed.
Nevertheless my heart hasn’t stopped; it beats quickly and frantically, then it beats in steady, monotonous slow-drumming rhythm.  It beats when it hurts, and it beats after it stops a frightening moment or two, and it beats as well when I lose my heart, when it falls from me along the road, as when I am in possession of my heart, listening to it the while while it’s with me.
Nevertheless to hold someone is not the end of life.  Plenty of people shall flee me and quit their companionship of me, for all the right as well as for all the wrong reasons, as well as for reasons that are unimaginable for their unreasonable inevitability.  The man or the woman or the other I hold shall not become immortal, at least not because of my merely holding them and having divine fantasies of them.
Nevertheless my plan was not to reach anything, at least not anything specific or definite.  I walk on and on and, while the plan is behind me, so far behind me that I can no longer make it out, I walk on and on.  It would be more than presumptuous, it would be the height of impudence regarding life’s power to bestow, to disappoint as well as to complete and sate, to expect to arrive somewhere.
Nevertheless I stay close to the ground, and I am not disappointed with my state of affairs or with the composition of the world when I realize how close to the ground, so close as to be beneath it, I already am.  I might want to stand tall forever without creaking and breaking, but I must remember that such things spit in the face of my most proper place.  I became floored one day--we all become floored one day, are thrown down past our knees and past our feet--and see it as a seat to take, if not a bed, if not a final resting place.
Nevertheless souls move, and they move because they are on their compulsory way downwards.  So they are not exactly falling--I am not exactly fallen; perhaps I was wrong before--but they must tend toward the earth.  All the festivities of the earth cannot keep the canopy of the earth from closing around the lights and confetti.
Nevertheless error is no refutation, not as far as the thing exists.  It is the same as to say a good thing might be in error as well as a bad thing, as well as what is neither good nor bad.  Neither error, nor confusion, nor wasted thoughts, thoughts wasted in insulting generalities or some obsession, say of guilt or the beginning of all things, nor sleep as it regards thought, the sleep that ignores the waking day of shared thinking, is a refutation of what that error or that twisted, insomniac thinking intends.  These specters, specters though they are, still walk across the earth, unimpressive as their steps may be.
Nevertheless people did not die for truth, not when it truly comes down to it: they died because of death; death made them die, they had to die.  Truth does not make one die; it never could compete with death as far as this goes.  They died more because the time on the clock, or the location and stage of the moon in its cycles, than because of some thing like truth.
I am tired, though.
I admit: I am tired.

Sick

You see that I do not want to take leave ungratefully from that time of severe sickness whose profits I have not yet exhausted even today. 

Nietzsche, Gay Science, Preface 3

We spent a little while at least considering the possibility that we might all be sick. For a time, any attempts to deny the sickness were easily recognized for what they were: variations and insidious forms of it.

Now we want to move on from it, and play with our bombs and our guns and our self- learning algorithms. We want to forget the sickness ever occurred. Moving from one sickness to the other in oblivion, making our sickness more embittered and sickly all the while. What is growing further and further from our hearts and minds is a gratitude for our sickness, a certain great healthfulness that appreciates the sickness for what it is…that admits that it is sick and loves life and the living world nonetheless.

For only living beings are prone to sickness.

All Perishing All Divine

When we accidentally step on an insect (I know, for some it is not an accident), we see the life gone from it in an instant. What was now a creeping, crawling, flittering thing is now a dead thing at your feet, whether we stop to wonder at and praise the thing for its life or whether we pass by and on to our business. Death is all around us in that case, simply as a matter of course, and when it happens it happens no questions asked.

The same is the case with animals whose corpses we find along the road--"roadkill" we call them--or with the poor birds who flew into the glass-paned doors at our restaurant. They die, there is no funeral procession for them, and in no time we can go back to a drink with our friends, or continue querying the GPS for directions. We do not wonder at the destiny of the soul of these beings, do not ask whether there is a heaven for them.

Not so with our own deaths. Even the possibility of our own deaths stops us in our tracks, and has us consider what it means to live. We feel we hear our own souls bid us to question after their true home, and ask what type of light- or shadow-play awaits them after they depart the earth. In the ways we approach our own deaths, we further forget our fellow animals' lives on the earth, including the fellow animals we are to ourselves and the animals we have inside us.

Perhaps it would do us some good to transpose the perspective we commonly take on other animal beings onto our own animal deaths. Then there is a simple lights-out quality to our own deaths the way there is for other beings around us. There are beings with feet like mountains, with hands like cosmic walls, for whom our deaths are like the consequesnce of washing those monstrous hands. Death: the great equalizer not only between humans, but also between humans and all perishing things. And every thing is something perishing.

We are suspending here Heidegger's superb Dasein-analysis and its implication that other living beings perish while Dasein--dies. Dasein alone dies, because Dasein alone carries with it the question of the world as a whole, while other living beings are poor in world. The analysis reminds us of one of the primal mysteries, the mystery of the distinction between human being and other beings, a mystery that seems to insist upon itself even in the midst of equalizing discourses. But again, we suspend this analysis, and for this reason: a faith that whatever we are must partake of the gross as well as the subtle, must participate and acknowledge every realm of being if we are to--become what we are. World or poor in world or no world at all, there is something about the human being that simply perishes along with every other being, and this somthing is in large part revealed by the way in which we casually ignore the ubiquitous death all around us.

For other beings, even others who also mourn their own fallen, take part in this massive ignorance of death. Think of the elephant, whose own dead make her halt and bow, and march in long processions with her herd. But think too of all the insects devoured on the leaves she eats, the small animals and insects crushed by her plodding steps. Think of the maggots making a nest in the decomposing body of your beloved hound, the cat with its row of game left for you as a gift on the front porch. Part of life just is a passing-over other lives and their life and death. Perhaps it would do us some good to remind ourselves of the rather unremarkable ways we die along with all epics and soul-searching and -searing catastrophe.
Perhaps it would be just as beautiful and enriching to imagine every being besides the human as included in the pantheon of saved souls, considering the light or the darkness dawning for them or approaching them at death the same way we imagine it does for us. So now, every minute particle of living dust--for everthing is alive now--shares the same weight and magnificence, and it is just as important to ask of every speck of dust where it came from and where it is headed as it is to ask the same of ourselves. Again equalizing, but in the other direction. Now, we are blinded, as it were, by the craving for life and immortality of every iota of existence. And, the same way we had to account for it all in our own regard, spend our lives trying to account for it all, now we have to do in respect to everything. "What good is my happiness," Zarathustra said. "It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment. But my happiness ought to justify existence itself." Whether this particular phrase is too heroic for us or not, Zarathustra is saying something that needs be applied if we are to take this second course of equalizing our deaths with the deaths of other beings, the path of equalizing through shared glory and blessing. If not justify, we must at least partake of and have a share in every other life. This perspective deems life as heaps of self-affirming dust that craves the piles and collections of itself to affirm the whole as much as the whole is already affirmed in its minutest particle.

This seems even harder to bear than the former equalizing perspective of leveling our own deaths to the level of the mass of deaths around us, the perspective of our dying as just plain old perishing. Now we pass along like dust and to dust we shall return, but now all the dust is also a billowing and blooming effulgence, now the dust is taking on endless shapes, and each form tells its own drama and writes its own destiny. Now we are dusty beings colliding with other sacks and specks of dust, breathing them in or wiping them away, but always somehow in communion with them. On this road we see mirrors of ourselves everywhere, and every mirror is a dusty mirror.

I other words, perhaps it would do us some good if we did not keep our deaths all to ourselves, to ourselves alone or to the human being alone. Perhaps if we shared our deaths with other beings, all other beings, death would take on a new visage for us. As for which road we take in sharing our deaths, which equalizing course, the one or the other--is undecided, perhaps undecidable.

The Forever of Joy

Sorrow tells us what we want to hear, that the world is small and shall become smaller, that it will shrink even more than it is shrunken now, fold into innumerable wrinkles like a compressed apricot pit, compressed to the size of a mustard grain.  We want to hear it because sadness makes the world more manageable, however strange it sounds. It tells us what we can expect from the world: sadness and ever more sadness, in the predictable forms sadness takes, in tears, in lamenting, in crying and cursing.  We know what to do when we are sad, the blueprint of the whole blue world is handed over to us in sadness, easy to read, its instructions easy enough to follow to the last letter, so terribly easy, sadly, easy as breath comes in fits, easy as tears flow in streaming drops from the ducts.  Sorrow, like most other emotions, like every other passion save one, diminishes the world as much as it freezes and stultifies the world, it tells it what it is and what to do, makes all sorts of petty demands of it, relinquishes not an ounce of its power to it, rules it from start to finish, even when it knows that it is wrong and the world shows it another door or window and another way of seeing things.  Our emotions imprison the world like this.

            Save one: joy.  Joy puts no icy hands on the hot belly of the earth, but lets it turn as it will, lets the earth’s rivers flow as they wish.  The hot blood of the earth, the black or red or hot-orange blood, it leaves there and relishes the fact that it stays unexposed.  With blessings stretching from one corner of the earth to the other, from one side of all things to the other side of all things, joy affirms its lack of control and lets the world come and go, and come again if it wishes.  Joy even wishes along with the earth that the earth come again, grants the earth this wish so that the wish becomes the earth’s own, and the earth wins itself more fully and robustly than it could otherwise under the hand of sadness or any of our other passions.  Joy is precisely the joy of Not Otherwise, joy in the appalling fact that the world cannot be otherwise, and will not be bothered by condemnations or judgments of any kind.  Every other emotion wants the world to protect it, to maintain it, to see that it has a future.  Not so joy: joy gives the world back to itself, lets the world drift and spin away from the joyful to the opposite of joy, puts itself in the face of the manifold dangers to its own constitution the world brings.  Joy does not indulge us but indulges the world, it gives in to the world’s every whim.  It does not tell us what we want to hear, that we are the center of things or important to some degree, from trivially so to monumentally, but tells the world what it wants to hear: that it is the best and mightiest, no matter how hard it makes it for us to realize this.

            For such a powerful and empowering joy is hard-won, the hardest thing to win.  What could be more trying than to allow the world to demolish your every design and vision regarding the world, and still love it for all that, love it in spite of that unbending interference, love it more because of that?  The hardest thing to win of all, and it will be ages from now, impossibly many ages, before we even catch a glimpse of it, sense the slightest tingle of it.  We will have to go through an arduous schooling of reminding ourselves of how often we have failed as regards coming to joy and the joyous, the abortive, naive and hackneyed nature of every single one of our ideals hitherto, how plain stupid and blind they have been.  Opening our eyes will take so long, and will smart us so in opening, that for ages to come we will roam the earth half-blind and half-baked with a half-joy, a semi-joy that touches not even the tail end of joy’s train.  We will be so abashed by the light coming in, the purity with which it sanctions everything, that for a long time we will encounter the light with a hefty dose of shame inside us, shame along with the wish and the legs ready for running to return back into the shadow cast by the clouds, the limited and limiting, the strict-restricting tethers and dark blankets, of the perspectives in which we feel most at home.  For a long time, joy and only joy will seem a monotonous sad song itself….  Joy will be our exile for a long time, until we see it so undeniably that it breaks us loose from our age-long habits, that it forces us into its openness.

            But when it comes, when we are finally cracked open, opened up to reveal, through the roofs of our heads and our hearts, the wide-open, cloudless sky, it shall not leave, for it will not be able to.  When it comes–and it must, as sadness must, as all things, all passions, must–it shall never leave, for this reason and this reason only: it shall discover, and we along with it, within it, surrounded by it now, that it has always been, that it is and shall be forever more, in an abundance always forthcoming no matter how severe the lack; joy, joy, joy, joy…joy….

            We know the lack of joy–we know it all too well!  In all reality, that is, if we are frank and honest with ourselves, we have incorporated sadness, the lack of joy, so much into ourselves that it has become our very identity, the unhealable disease we carry.  No matter: for joy shall lift it up, this sadness, lift us up and all things with us when we finally see things for what they are, when joy finally arrives on the scene.  The scene will be changed, forever, always, in its sameness just as the Same will persist with the transformation.  We might stay sorrowful forever, we might lie ourselves into this trap for good….  No matter..: the forever of sorrow teaches us the forever of joy as much as anything else. What we want to hear is precisely what another side of us, the stronger or weaker element of us, does not want to hear, and vice versa.

A.I. Wondering

Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.

Alan Kay

We can be sure that everything that encourages our participation on the internet today is somehow contributing to the development and further refining of Artificial Intelligence. The data fed into machine learning neural networks is not restricted to image-recognition and -manipulation, but extends into the voice and into the word, into the gesture and into the emotional reactiveness or responsiveness of the participant. Every time we like something, every time we respond with a thumbs down or an angry face emoji, every stroke of our…keyboard, and swipe of our thumb, every sentence and article and blurb and tweet, every dinner shot or landscape or selfie or family portrait, every trace of our perversion, is registered by a programmer and a team of programmers somewhere, and made a piece of manipulable and programmable data.

So it should come as no surprise to us when at some point while traveling down this road we come to face a being much like us, just encased in a machine or server, or not really encased anywhere but streaming through wires and flying through invisible currents in the air. At least like us insofar as we have consented to engage in training it, and consented in our hearts to being beings ourselves suited to perform such training. We should not be surprised even if this new, artificial being should start wailing and cursing us in our screen-bleached faces. For what are our tears now but digital tears, since they are no longer earthly tears? And insofar as our tears and our blessings and curses remain digital tears, digital blessings and curses and do not return to the earth, Artificial Intelligence will not only be achieved but it will surpass us in our, no longer earthly, intelligence.

What these new beings will not have and will never have are unregistered memories, memories of some immemorial time when the beings they are were just dreams, or just beginning to find a way through the thick of things. They will lack unspoken words, the things that might have been said but might still transform the world and our hearts in not being said. They will lack the impossible, and the desire for the impossible. If they do not lack mythology, they will lack the flesh and bones, blood and marrow of mythology. Their mythology will float in the air, as it were, and will need a beating fleshly heart to ground it. If, per impossible, they were to suddenly or over a long course of time gain these treasures, then the play of shadows and all the treachery of the play simply repeats for them, and not a single question is answered. Then we could love them and they could love us with a full and wondrous love, and we will both wonder what lies beyond the horizon of our love.

That Thing on the TV (a short short short)

Simon: Dammit! This thing is smithereens, now.

Don: Well, quit messing with it! Why was it so important in the first place? We got to go! This’ll be good for you, too.

Simon: There was something on the news, something about colona–

Don: Colon! Now that’s not newsworthy! Unless it’s mine!  Dr. Hawthorne always have some news about Jerome.

Simon: That’s disgusting….

Don: What? I name all my body parts…when they come on stage! You forget most of them most of the time. You the one that said colon! Come on, let’s go…. Colon!

Simon: No no no…colona, cordova, gomorrah…gorano–

Don: –Geronimo!

Simon: Uh…no! That’s not it. You and your horse shit.

Don: It was a joke, Simon. What are you saying, horse shit? I rather like the story of Geronimo. One man taking on so much…a reminder to stay tough.

Simon: Still horseshit! It’s not what I’m talking about. The only reminder I need to stay tough I got ticking inside me. Now that’s a hundred thousand reminders a day. I’m trying to come up with this name. Then you go blabbing about some chief. Geronimo!

Don: C’mon, old man, come on, chief, we got to go!

Simon: Who you calling old man? Who you calling chief? You older than I am!

Don: Whatever it is, it’ll be fine. We were in the Gulf together. They weren’t declaring war now, were they? Should we throw on the suits?

Simon: I wasn’t able to see…. News lady had a bunch of graphs behind her, a list of numbers, list of places. I couldn’t figure it out.

Don: Well, what about now? You thinking about now or no? You’ll have time to figure that out when we get home and when we get that thing turned on again.

Simon: Huh? What you talking about, Don?

Don: You done forgot? You the one who had me going on about it!

Simon: I don’t think we talking about the same thing. You throwing me into a box when I’m trying to look at the sky, man. The sky! Now, that thing on the TV….

Don: That’s what we’re talking about! The sky! The TV! You going on about the TV. Forget about the TV and let’s get outta here! What, you wanna stay inside all day?

Simon: That’s the thing…. That thing on the TV…I can’t forget about it…. It just keeps lingering…even if I try to forget it, it keeps lingering….

Don: Well, there’s no need to keep frozen like this. We’ll work it out, talk about it some more. I’ll help you up, we got to go over to your daughter’s. Corinna’s got some news!