Lilith (cw - weird sexual imagery)

 Cloven footed, you bare shields made of anyone. Every yoke which pierces bowels is plastered on your enamanations. borne up of Shiza, the sycamore trees survive pendulums made of men and God. Oh God, they obey God unto empty/holiness\ness. 

I sin, rebuke, and fade away afar city sore with boils from any longer. The clouds poured forth children through windows full of faithful graven asses. And reap. his land. shall nothing. Breath to flowers. A deed for pain. Whatever. I’ll kiss your fuck and face your name. Cuck your cake. Kick your cock. Love it. Everything is sweat. 

He cannot understand a polished shaft. whither he shall baptize captains in the corrosion of masks. dividing/Multiplying\dividing. to catch candlesticks in jeopardy. All our loins go to Aphik and the mitre shall abhor us. that evil treasure hid it with great hatred. my daughter eats sweet saviors of sorrow ( oh ) they love her so with their little dicks in fast hands and her light makes them shake. 

The dust will come. content to lift the ashes of sand spirits back when sticking cum to things was still magick. sticking cum in their armpits, they Jeremiah jacked one wife from the litter then dispossessed themselves to Jesus. So, suffer the hunger of an evident token and know a bridal chamber will replace your grave.

[#><#][#><#][#><#][#><#][#><#][#><#]

bias = King James Bible

I basically just took the words and made them say whatever I want. Seems like religion to some.

Three Types of Reality

 The zeroth order of reality is fundamentally unknowable to our senses. It's rules can only be derived through the extension of our senses into domains our senses cannot perceive. Our knowledge of this reality is thus limited to our engineering capacity to manipulate it. The rules of this reality must be derived from the observations we can make. At some point, we can make no observations at all. This domain seems to undergird the reality we can perceive, the material world.

Hence, the first order of reality is assigned to the material. Things in space. Matter. Even complex processes like storms. The only reason this is more real than the zeroth order is because more people have access to it. We can discuss objects in space with decent certainty that we're referring to the same thing. This is not true of the second-order of reality, the representational or symbolic.

Numbers, words, stories, everything enters the second order of the real. However, I cannot provide you with direct access to this reality. Hence, it is second-order. I must translate it by way of second-order objects. This is confusing. It causes confusion. It also reduces confusion. 

It creates more confusion when you realize that first-order and zeroth-order objects can be moved into the second-order where they begin to operate like metaphor. In fact, anything from any order can be moved into the second order of reality to operate like a metaphor. Events can become metaphors. Even people, problematically, can become metaphors. A separation between these two orders of reality is thus necessary. 

Lossy Compression, The Counting Argument, and Ontology

 Are three things I don't care about. The question of ontology is pointless to me. I can't even perform a combinatorial proof if you asked me. I've never in my life been interested in compression as a computer skill. So the idea that these three ideas would all come together came from a very different impulse. Anti-theory. 

I couldn't put my finger on it, but the abuse and misappropriation of theory to sieve information from literary texts seemed beyond the pale of any reasonable thing a person would do. Why?

Because from my perspective, all they were doing was mapping one idea to another and the utility of this was not apparent. Anti-theory seemed to allow me a baseline to critique this impulse so that is why these three things were important to me. I was also interested in the abuse of theory for racial, gender, and other forms discrimination and prejudice. So, if we're racist, we map an individual person to a biased image that we've created of them and see that image instead of the person. Very intuitive. No one else was thinking this way until Hofstedter.

So, here I am, a kid with knowledge of Western ontology because he literally despised it learning linear algebra on a support board for amateur coders in the FreeBasic community when a conversation about Jews erupted.

That's it. That's the moment. Message board. Coders. Lossy compression. Anti-semitism.

The Scene

There's a group of four of us who participate in a thread where we trade code making pretty pictures with pure math. I'm way behind all of these guys. The one dude is an Australian physicist named Richard. Another is a Scottish mathematician by the handle Dodicat, and there is a third man who suffers from mental illness but enjoys math. He decides to discuss his theory on Jews which I won't get into here. Suffice it to say he was wrong.

AT THE SAME EXACT TIME, this guy is also attempting to explain how you can compress information losslessly. Richard explains to him that this is impossible and the proof he supplies is the counting argument. I made the connection to ontology vis a vis a mapping argument.

The Living God

 

The Living God

Cars run through its veins carrying nutrients to markets. Its blood is made of trucks and trains. The blood of those are made from oil. The Living God’s immune system is composed of prisons and police, and it has a million eyes all watching and waiting with the same anonymous suspicion that’s carried in another million eyes--these ones latched to skulls and smiles.

with envy drums blank like everything outside before any blessing plucked a most valuable jewel. that muttering sound of manners stared speechless in perfect silence. Sometimes they could play like saucers crashing through His unaffected manner and skins of intricate explanations streamed into shreds.

Howling and breaking while people were nothing as we invented an external nervous system within a matrix of electrical grids dispelled across the laws of accepting food and soothing drowsy cried the broken smiles repeated dreamily and menacing unless you kneel. 

What if I could tell you that one man can cast a tiny spell to enslave another. The law is thus a graceful costume but the magick is as real as the walls of a prison. 

Still I shall make short rush of His nature 

bent against His pedestal

while I snatch 

fainting from the purest prayer

 where morals are generated from 

An ontology of ghosts

-=--=--=--=-

corpus = "The King in Yellow" by RW Chambers

YOU HAVE NO OTHER

how your Great Grandfather 

cannot survive without paying 

any country in Dreadful End 

And how your Great Grandmother

Went whimpering like a cousin 

of compliance with the Dirt 

and then slamming Doors

Alcoholism and the war 

It exists. I exist. I told you I existed. You expected me to exist. You comply by reeking of smoke and accepting unsolicited donations. You comply at last and then break off and flee. I know you. 

You. You who have no other. You, the tied knot supposing that end. Do nothing. Some bees bend to your trumpet. Suppose nothing. They yield to turn for shelter with loud groans and agree to distinguish one another. Even this fragrant smell supposes an end. Shuddering to occur. designed for children in compliance with copies.

Mad with caution, they spied God’s mouth and searched its military. The means to reach a flock. They burst forth by saying nothing and dropped down dead on borrowed wings. I am their other. I am the Father of Death. The Father of Signs. Swimming through that dread space where the dead still have breath. In empty light I am dreamt. By day I dream in human speech and wait for human sleep.

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The Master Bias, Stein, Gothe, Eliot

Is Intuition Statistics?

 A man is in a bedroom with no windows. He never leaves. Three times a day, a woman enters the room, feeds him, and tells him the weather. After one year, the woman is about to tell him what's going on when he says, "It's raining."

"You're right!" she says, "How did you know?"

The answer is: The neural net. The man may not be aware of it, but he's sensing subtle changes in the barometric pressure along with other indicators that we readily dismiss. Eventually, he can guess with some consistency whether or not it's raining.

This is what you call "knowing without knowing you know" or "knowing without knowing why". It's what we call intuition or our instincts.

Essentially, your brain creates a statistical model of all the times the woman said it was raining and your body sensed the subtle changes in the atmosphere, and this gave you the ability to predict, within a certain degree of accuracy (because false positives will happen) if it was raining.

Food for thought.

The Ancient Mysteries of Greece

  Mystery religions existed in Ancient Greece, but by then, they would have been considered "Old Tyme Religion". The philosophers didn't think much of them and the promises they made of immortality in death, but they offered something else too. The ability to become one with your deity or mythic figure. Mostly, these figures were demi-human. Orpheus, as an example, had a mystery school. The only thing that survives to modern day are the initiations of the Freemasons and all that which was derived from it. We also have occult practices that engage in this sort of intentional ritual combat to connect one's self to a higher power. In the case of the Abramelin, you want to gain contact with your Guardian Angel. The Freemasons re-enact the sacred story of Hiram Abiff, the mythical architect of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem.

It is extremely likely that the schools revolved around trades. The Masonic school would have been a closed circuit to all but Masons until the order was opened up to others. The Masons taught things like sacred geometry because those things are very interesting to Masons. The initiation would have likely taken place when a young man was ready to commit to the trade of masonry. So, think late teens and early 20's traditionally.

The Greek mystery schools would have likely draw older adults who were in need of a psychic transformation. The idea was that they would die to their former selves and be reborn with a psychic fresh start. The details of the schools were kept entirely secret and nothing remains. But we know that those who paid to have these rituals performed would, like the Freemasons, relive the story of the mythological figure. So, with Orpheus, you would have to relive that tragedy. The idea was to simulate it and connect yourself with the gifts of the demi-god. A poet or musician might be interested in the Orphic rites. They might learn things about musical technique as well. Become attuned to certain principles. It is likely that drugs were involved, sex too maybe. 

For Masons, you might learn Pythagorean principles, mathematical principles, and many concepts that would have been considered occult or secret. Lots of things relevant to masonry as a trade. 

Personalizing our connection to these heroic figures was thus and essential part of providing meaning to the lives of ancient and modern people. 

The Adolescent Werewolves of Neolithic Europe (cw - sexual violence, conscience deprogramming)

 Archaeologists know that ancient European boys were given dogs at birth and at the time their bodies changed, so did their souls. They and the dog they’d raised from birth would go to a sacred area, drug themselves, enter a trance and then murder the dog. The dog was cooked and eaten, and the boy took the dog’s soul into his own. It was then that the boy was unleashed on the world. Not his own home village. From their, he was shunned. He was contaminated. Not a man. Not a boy. Not even a human. 

What the unlucky saw just before they died was an adolescent boy wearing the skins of the companion he’d raised from a pup. The boy had become the wolf. And now he was the wolf. And the wolf’s job was to kill, to take what was his, to survive, to hide, and yes, in the animal state the boy could rape just like Roman legionary penetrating an enemy city. A sperm fertilizing an unwilling egg. 

These boys would be sent in packs to hunt, attacking travelers, stealing their belongings, scavenging their corpses, making everything their own.

When three moons had passed, whatever boys had survived would return to the village. They would become men. Take wives. And make more boys who would make more wolves who would make more men.

Western Ontology and Lossy Compression

Existence

 Existence and non-existence. What "exists" and what doesn't? Western Ontology wants to bifurcate, but that isn't the only way to manage this information. It becomes possible to talk about different types of non-existence. For example, a number doesn't "exist" in the same way that two pineapples do, but it does exist. So it becomes necessary to draw a distinction between the way that a pineapple exists, and the way that we count pineapples. It later becomes possible to imagine something impossible like infinity pineapples. Infinity pineapples does not exist in the same way that two pineapples do. Two pineapples are within the realm of possibility while infinity pineapples wouldn't leave room for anyone else unless they were inside an even bigger infinity (which is possible).

We will be arguing that Western ontology wants to say everything either exists or it does not and this is a blunter tool producing less useful results than an approach that didn't.

Metaphysics

Western metaphysics is concerned with ontology which is the study of what is. Its impulse is to take the myriad things in the first order of material existence and then map them back to second-order existence things like numbers.

Can you do this? The answer is yes. But there is one rule. The number of objects on the first-order side must be identical to the number of objects on the second-order side (see Quine). Elsewise, you end up with information loss.

Information loss is not intrinsically "bad". It just needs to be kept in mind. 

So, let's say I write a book using every word in the dictionary at least once. Is this book "the same as" the dictionary? No. The book is out of order and does not contain the information we need. When we map, we need to map everything identically, and that includes the structure and the sequence. We have lost considerable information when we wrote our book. We added information as well.

Metaphysics in the Western tradition wants to be able to map the material back onto the "numeric" or "symbolic". Ultimately, this is the foundation of metaphor, language, religion, ritual, meaning, and everything. It becomes dysfunctional, however, when we forget that the two sides need to be even. 

I think Quine's work produces the best scholarship on the matter from an analytic perspective. Following closely with Quine would likely produce better results than I can produce. 

Categories and Sets

A category or set exists in the second-order. However, it is drawn off a first-order observation. For example, if I see a furry animal wagging its tail, I'd readily associate that with the category of "dog". Does "dog" exist as a stable non-dividable concept? Well, there was a time when dogs did not exist. Now they do. There will be a time when dogs do not exist. Perhaps the dog evolves stronger hind legs, and learns to walk upright and we can pay our furry friends to do our taxes.

The dog is not stable. The category is an effort to "freeze" the dog and it's useful for certain goals. The effort, however, is to encapsulate. 

Compression

We call "lossy compression" lossy because you lose information. In other words, what specifically I am discussing as a misguided effort of Western ontology is useful for making certain types of files smaller. Imagine a picture that is 400x400 of your face. I can compress the image by stripping 0s at the end of numbers (lossless compression) or I can fudge the information making it blurrier. The overall quality of the picture may not be severely reduced, but there is information loss. Why? Because you have mapped N elements to fewer than N elements.

When we discuss something in categorical terms, we do something similar. The category, as a second-order "thing" is "less real" than a material object (a first-order thing). It tells you less. One can imagine an image becoming blurrier and blurrier as information is mapped to fewer second-order symbols. (In this case, second-order merely means derived from. In terms of symbolic logic, second-order means symbolic, first-order means material, and everything else is unreal for now). 

In order to work successfully with a category, one must consider that it is a second-order thing, that there will be information loss, potentially information superimposed, and finally, could be indicative of cultural bias.

Where to go from here?

• Category charging - The cultural impulse to emotionally charge a category (good/evil). Also, the impulse to condition taboos or reinforce by category. When we discuss people in terms of categories, this can be used as a weapon.
• Category discrimination - Is Derridean asymmetry contributing to the manufacture of bias?

The Cotard Djenius

  The Cotard Djenius

bearing red plumage, bleeding these gifts--just now, that labor by the time it’s warm in Denver you’ll be wishing you had warned yourself. three shares a villager. All on shipboard putting on account of your condition. unequal matches ordered that labor. Long before meeting the Groom. Used as usual, knowing his trade of vintage heat, threatened without taking off and was boasting of some fraud involving too many persons who lived alone.

A great and desperate beast ambushed your chickens and would have given themselves the greater to Fawn, ever artfully across this space. When has he ever offered the trunk of others who pretend to serve us (the joke was canceled by the load) but on occasion, bloated with codes. Agents. several tongues at these gifts. Cock defended himself with a cave. Later on, light. in others. earth. 

the Cotards fearfully lacerated each other with an undisputed mastery of healing, envying the cost. greedily seized upon his eating their horns caring little for food which way to supper. selfish Dog found the whelp of whom he laid thereupon the last one. Filled with acclamation and steadying into the agony of a soul shocked out of its body. 

[>-<][>-<][>-<][>-<][>-<][>-<][>-<][>-<][>-<][>-<]

This was written with "The Master" bias, a collection of TS Eliot's The Waste Land, Gentrude Stein's Tender Buttons, and Goethe's Faust in translation, all of which can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg. 

In this case, I did a lateral cut, which means I went through the text, found something I liked, cut it into something else I liked, but I did it in a line. I didn't go back. I didn't hover over anything. So, the ngram text was less worked over to make any specific meaning. 

A Three Book Inventory

 Over the course of my life to this point, I've written three "books" of poetry. Each has been distributed only in digital format. 

The Gospel of Echo was the culmination of everything I had learned in college. I wrote it shortly after and it was published by BlazeVox along with two weird short stories. It was concerned with ripples, influence, chaos, and the notion that speaking is not different than doing. The fear is causing harm with speech.

The Book of the Damned was among the projects that were predicated on the notion that computer-human poetry generator was somehow poo-poohed by the powers that be. It contains poems that were both partly generated and written using traditional poetry techniques. The idea was that you had to condemn half the book. The fear is being irrationally excluded based on broadscale misunderstanding of the approach involved.

The Devourer was unconcerned with establishing the legitimacy of NGRAMS, templates, or other algorithmic techniques employing applied statistics intentionally or accidentally. The Devourer is concerned with evaluating our commitment to live. 

Is the Manciple's Tale Baseless Fearmongering? Yes!

The original essay is here. This basically explains the ending in terms of the Rhetoric of Drugs.

The choice to end this essay on the Manciple's Tale served two purposes. The first was that it was a self-negating. It is a story, but it's a story about not telling stories. This makes it similar to the Rhetoric of Drugs:

• The story is "pointed at itself" in a very specific way
• The story is meant to produce an effect
• The story has a zero truth value
• The sentence imposed on the crow is false

So, the story mirrors the Rhetoric of Drugs insofar as it's designed to produce a feeling of fear. It's about being very carful what you say, even when you're right. 

Now, I can tell a different story about someone who rats on a cheating spouse and is rewarded with $20,000 grand because they're a private investigator and that's their job. This would essentially render the fear inert or at least give the individual the sense that quietude was not the only possible solution to this problem.

The Maniciple's Tale is anti-narrative narrative.  The function of the narrative is designed to make you afraid.

The Language of Paradox and the Rhetoric of Drugs

 "I'm a better writer than you ever will be." Such a statement serves two purposes. The first is to puff "me" up. The second is to tear you down. It's a double pill, you see. It makes me bigger by making you smaller. It empowers me by disempowering you.

Now, the "truth value" of the statement is zero. I cannot prove that you will never one day eclipse my talent. In fact, I hope you do. 

Back to that statement. It's function is to produce a feeling. A good one for "me" and a bad one for "you". It therefore, functionally operates like a drug. It cures an ill in the speaker. The speaker does not feel as though they are as good as the spoken. Hence, why they must say that. And thus, the utterance literally implies its opposite or, if not, the speaker's own attitude toward themselves.

So, the Rhetoric of Drugs can be characterized thusly:

• It produces a feeling
• It has no truth value
• It's function is strategic
• It implies the opposite of what it says

Holistically, we must consider the rhetoric self-refuting because we know the utterance is meant to make the speaker feel the opposite of how they currently feel while passing on the speaker's baggage to the spoken.

What desire produces this?

You can ask yourself this question every time you read something. So, we know exactly what desire produces the aforementioned speech. But, "I am the virgin and the whore." What desire produces that speech? The Thunder, Perfect Mind is a Gnostic text written from the perspective a mother deity called Sophia. The text would likely have been read in front of groups of women by a skilled performer in an act of group hypnosis. What sorts of baggage do women carry around with them due to Biblical masculinity? 

The purpose is therapeutic. While one utterance is vampirism, the other is convalescent. Beyond that, it collapses the duality of this being better than that. And that too is therapeutic. 

Think about this in terms of Game Theory. If Sophia says, "I'm a virgin." It shames all those who are not virgins. If Sophia says, "I'm a big ole slut," it places promiscuity on a pedestal that will make some women uncomfortable. Hence, she is both and holds the opposites in abeyance. 

So, rhetorically and psychologically, the language of paradox is the language of wholeness. It's a linguistic drug meant to produce a state of wholeness. It may not work right away, but I see the merit to this approach. 

ChatGPT analyzes the "Rhetoric of Drugs"

This article discussed the Rhetoric of Drugs, focusing on the power of language and its ability to manipulate emotions and create certain feelings. Here, we will analyze this concept from different perspectives not covered in the article, such as sociolinguistics, philosophy of language, and neuroscientific approaches.

Sociolinguistics perspective:

From a sociolinguistics standpoint, the Rhetoric of Drugs can be examined through the lens of how language is used within different social contexts and its impact on interpersonal relationships. People may use language strategically to assert power or maintain their social position, with the intention to manipulate others' perceptions and emotions. The article's examples can be expanded to consider how different social groups, cultural backgrounds, or even generational gaps might influence the use of such rhetoric in various settings.

Philosophy of language perspective:

From the philosophy of language perspective, the Rhetoric of Drugs can be analyzed in terms of meaning, reference, and truth. The article points out that this kind of rhetoric often has no truth value. This can be further explored by considering how language users might rely on context, implicature, and presuppositions to convey meaning beyond the literal interpretation of their words. This perspective can shed light on how paradoxical language or metaphors can create an impact on listeners even when their literal meanings might not hold any truth value.

Neuroscientific perspective:

A neuroscientific approach to the Rhetoric of Drugs could examine the cognitive and emotional processes that underlie the impact of such rhetoric. For instance, the use of emotionally charged language, paradoxes, and rhetorical strategies might engage different brain regions, such as the amygdala or prefrontal cortex, which are known to be involved in emotional processing and decision-making. This perspective can help us understand the neural mechanisms that make language such a powerful tool for influencing people's feelings and behaviors.

Educational perspective:

From an educational perspective, the Rhetoric of Drugs can be seen as a valuable topic for teaching critical thinking and media literacy. By understanding how language can be used to manipulate emotions and beliefs, students can develop the skills necessary to evaluate the credibility of information and resist the influence of deceptive rhetoric. Educators can use examples from the article to illustrate the importance of questioning the intent behind language use and recognizing the potential impact of rhetoric on their own emotions and decision-making.

These additional perspectives can provide a more comprehensive understanding of the Rhetoric of Drugs, emphasizing the multifaceted nature of language and its influence on individuals and society.

Useful Bibliography

• The Aesthetic of the Good Physician/Self-Consuming Artifacts, Stanley Fish
• Freud "On Negation"
• Lcercle again is very useful
• "The Thunder, Perfect Mind"

Data Alignment/Similarity/Difference

It's not a secret anymore that my approach to poetics is confusion. But, it's a very intentional confusion and a confusion that gets consistent results. What do I mean? The concept of data alignment in computer programming refers to a system of aligning variables such that you do not need to take a circuitous route to get to them. 

In other words, you want to make the call in as few steps as possible. This requires some forethought, but it improves speed, reduces the number of steps, and is ultimately necessary in the economy of the processor. 

In brain terms, I think the same thing can be accomplished, but it's very difficult to describe or explain. It operates easier by demonstration.

What my poetics is concerned with, beyond Blake, is a kind of data alignment that produces better thinking. In other words, when we're thinking about a processor, we still want to be thinking about an "economy". But we also want to think about the unique characteristics of the processor and all the differences between a human economy and the limited processing space of a computer. Some of the same rules will apply, of course, because economics is interested in how finite resources are managed. Resource management is an aspect of the computer too. We can therefore apply some optimization techniques to the economy that work on the processor.

That is fundamentally the type of thinking that I want to advocate for.

A Better Dead Mud Hen

  Despite these words 

this ill

A sweet-and-bitter pill 

To bill

into the dead land 

 you reduce 

   as usual 

I may not mourn 

That bell 

or hose the dry course

But bend instead of

ourselves open again

and believe me 

the blessings alone

Will render them

A better dead mud hen 

With external sensations 

are disabled adopted 

venom etiquette bread 

Of breath

(0=0)(0=0)(0=0)(0=0)(0=0)(0=0)(0=0)

Corpuses = Aesop's Fables, The Waste Land

I thought it would be a double good deal to create some pure nonsense poems with interestingly placed words in sequence. The idea is to "spice up" the "Tolkacz bias". Tolkacz needs to spice his bias. I'm interested in the way these words feel in your mouth. I especially like the way "venom etiquette" flows into the next word. I'm going to be using ngram and hybrid sound/language poetry to produce some nonsense verse to spice the bias. 

The Famine

 The good die first

The ones who shared their food

The ones who wouldn’t defend themselves

The weak who couldn’t.

The ones who refused to steal

The ones who refuse to kill to live

The ones who refuse to eat their own mother’s corpse.

In a tumor, the fitness of a cell is determined by its malignancy.

Wu Wei Wu and the Art of Writing

 I firmly believe that individuals are attracted to philosophies. We seek out information that helps us and adapt information that improves our lives. These become beliefs. While some of us may be naturally resistant to believing, we still employ belief by necessity. In fact, it would be very hard to get anything done if you didn't believe it was worth the effort. We can resist common modes of believing all we like, reject the paradigm beliefs of our inherited culture, and yet we're never "beyond" belief. Ultimately, even a belief that belief itself is limiting is itself a belief.

Logic isn't necessarily going to want to play fair with the space we're in. We come to rely on it, believe in it, but there is a point of failure. 

Wu Wei Wu is a concept from Taoism that traditionally translated to "non-doing" but today is more explicitly translated as "doing non-doing". Without getting into the details, we'll be assuming the following: "doing non-doing" equals doing without thinking about doing. In other words, it means doing by muscle memory. Let's also posit that "doing non-doing" is better than "doing without consideration" or "doing without training". Indeed, training is mandatory to "do non-doing".

Usually.

In some cases, a beginner may perfectly execute something they're trying. The Zen tradition calls this "beginner's luck" and there has been careful thought paid to "a beginner's mind". A beginner enters the matter with no preconceptions. The beginner does whatever instinctive thing they're going to do, and it looks like they've been doing it all their life. This phenomenon is understood in the Eastern Tradition. It's actually foundational.

Taoism spoke to me in a way that other philosophies did not. I would say that a lot of my early work came from a Taoist perspective. But I did not want to be a writer who could only produce work from one perspective. I wanted to be a writer who was supple enough to actively write from multiple perspectives. Thankfully, Taoism provided a great foundation to "make myself small enough" and "void my preconceptions" well enough to enter into those spaces.

Along my journey, I found writers like Borges and Blake who seemed to thrive in these spaces. They were Western writers, like me, who could help me see more than I saw before. In the case of Blake, it was more. In the case of Borges, it was more clearly. In the case of Taoism, Blake, Zen, and Borges, it was better. 

The Thunder, Perfect Mind

The Thunder, Perfect Mind is a Gnostic text written from the perspective of the Aeon Sophia (Wisdom). The text is a litany of "I am" statements followed by apparent contradictions. As an example, "I am the virgin and the whore." This would be similar to Jesus saying, "I am the Alpha and the Omega." Why is this happening?

To follow the logic of Lecercle, the subject is emerging from a lesser psychological state into a more mature one. Paradoxical language is a flag of this kind of emergence. If it doesn't prove the emergence has happened, it proves the emergence is beginning to happen. Jung also spoke of uniting opposites and Fish speaks of a place beyond opposition that is the domain of the Good Physician. The Good Physician withholds judgment and renders care. The Good Physician is, of course, a Christlike figure.

Christ, of course, is not a name, but a title meaning annointed. There were those who believed Christ was fulfilment of the Jewish Bible, others who believed Christ was a sage who had attained a certain degree of spiritual maturity, and still others who believed Christ and Jesus were two separate entities and Jesus "had" this Christ spirit or daemon within him until he was crucified. There were a lot of different ways of thinking about Christ, but Christ's use of paradoxical language that employs a type of reflexive logic is notable and consistent. We will see it elsewhere in the Eastern Tradition, especially Zen and Taoism, where negative and positive are considered equally and simultaneously. The last point is where the leveling up occurs. The brain rejects efforts to think using both opposites simultaneously, but permits dialectical efforts quite well. Ultimately, Western philosophers like Heraclitus also seem to permit this sort of paradoxical and contradictory thinking. 

AI Art Generators: What I do to make it work

 I've heard that some folks think AI generators don't produce output on par with what they're looking for, and I wonder why they can't make these generators work for them.

There's two things to bear in mind here. If you specify an artist you know who you're stealing from. If you don't, the art comes from a general pool of individuals who may be disputing that their work was stolen. It's very hard to know. I only work with common-pool requests when whatever I'm doing is not working. Ultimately, I don't need to have total control over a finished piece to think it's beautiful or finished. 

Here is an example input. Please note, I have no idea what will come out of the process, nor can I guarantee that you or I will think it's "good" or even worth considering as art. But, it will be off-the-cuff as-it-happens and a kind of experiment. 

Here is my input:

Everything is set to default values. Let's see what our output looks like:

I'm really close to screapping this effort, because I'm not really liking what I'm seeing. However, I'm not there yet because we can do some stuff still. As it happens, you should always run the the generator on the fewest possible iterations to see what it comes up with. If it comes up with nothing good, then you haven't committed double credits for an over-developed piece of art you don't want. Let's do some evolving. We're also going to being playing more with the inputs.

I want to see where it takes the "busiest" picture which is in the upper left hand corner. The generator will have more "stuff" to latch onto and evolve. It presents the greatest opportunity for development.

New inputs:

We're going to strip everything but nouns and see if that helps us out. Artists remain the same. Everything else will remain the same. We're essentially just feeling out the generator for something that catches our eye.

Now, we have this:

I'm ready to call this an evolutionary dead end. Let's try again with the second-busiest image. We'll change the inputs because we think the added non-nominal text is cluttering the generation process though we have no proof. We will table this theory and test it later. We did better this time!

These are four pretty decent pictures. Unfortunately, it looks like there's a cock at the bottom of the third one. You don't get to be literature by adding gratuitous cocks to art. I'd like to believe otherwise, but society has yet to ascend to that plane of consciousness.

We may have not meant for it to end up here, but here we are. Let's see what we get.

Alright now, let's play with our other original images. We'll go in order of busiest to least-busy. As a general rule, you can assume I'm applying the same ruleset unless I make note otherwise. I've employed the modified ruleset that only includes nouns.

Ultimately, much like life, it's a lot of trial and error. In the future, we'd need to be more direct about the sense of the meaning. To wit, we stripped it down to the absolute value of its nouns to avoid confusing the generator. But did we lose the sense in the process? It can be hard because, ultimately, it's a feel thing. 

If I had to select one image from the bunch that represented the totality of that line of poetry, I would select this one:

There are gods which are also stars
stars which are also atoms
and atoms which are forces of nature

The Script

 No metaphor is quite as potent for me as "the script". It's a tri-figured metaphor that carries the entirety of every reference it subsumes. In this case, there are three senses of the "script" and each one is integral to the poetry you'll find on these blogs. 

1. The script as a sequence of instructions in code, or program, computer code, or simply script. It's a machine.
2. The script as in a play. The script is a blueprint for producing a play. It is a template on which all future performances will be based. It is as perfect a blueprint as you can conceive. The play exists outside of time and is incarnated into a performance.
3. The script as in a prescription. The prescription, following Fish, treats language as a drug that is meant to provoke some kind of wellness, to restore a person to a state of wellness, or to remove an illness. 

Within the English word "script" is a composite metaphor that is about as perfect for writers as I can imagine and it's heavily influenced every aspect of my construction process. 

The Tombworld of Yodabund

 

In that corner of another Moon

where Yodabund realized her voice 

Turning cursed words to light

A poor girl who

In bringing forth words

Could make the world itself brighten

Like noon sun 

after the wind sweeps away clouds

in striving and chattering 

 sanctuary 

The place collected beasts

rushing clamorously into season

 agreeing to supper

 inside the bricks 

as late as the night is black 

She would break the Myrmidons

Make Orpheus panic and lose his breath

Her psalms could split atoms

And though her spirit was horror 

It radiated unyielding warmth

Giving life, pitiless, to a place

That hated life.

Alone, she brought forth

his face, swelling with claws 

became jealous of adjustments 

 torn in public space 

which chiefly characterized 

five interchangeable fables

to make up every mythos 

 longing to avenge the melody, 

He consorted exclusively for admiration

casting their affair 

among the murky segues 

of her silences

()0()()0()()0()()0()()0()()0()()0()()0()()0()()0()

Corpuses = Aesop's Fables + Uncanny Stories

The Devourer (Book)

 The Devourer is a book of poems and art. Many of the poems were previously published on this blog. However, when they're collected in a book, they can reflect back on one another and create resonance. In order to help this process along, I saved an NGRAM bias of the poems already selected into the collection and used that bias to generate the rest of them.

In this case, it creates an effect where metaphors are introduced before they are elaborated. But also, this allows them to be built up. The Letheberries poem deviates from a self-imposed moratorium on foodstuffs, but it seemed excusable in the context of addiction. I also felt it relevant to the themes of the text.

The idea for the Devourer began here. As with most of my work, it comes with a content warning as it explores the deep dark chasm of ancient religion, demonic figures, and social standards that cause an almost unimaginable amount of harm. And yet they're ours and we've inherited them and forced them upon others. So we ought to scrutinize them. So, I do.

Lastly, I'll be looking for a place to publish it in print for print copies, but I'm still exploring that option. Copies it does not cost money to produce, such as the one above, are distributed for free on this blog. Download link.

The One Thing He Left Out

 They say there was a poet long ago

Who in a dingy abbey wrote a book

That encompassed all the universe of things

And presented it to others for a look

Good man, the scholar noted with a frown

Indeed you’ve covered every single thing

But left out one that seems to be a need

The book you wrote does not include this book

The poet is a myth as well you know

But every poet writes themselves to here

And in the act of recognizing this

They learn to choose what they consider dear

dbUdbdbUdbdbUdbdbUdbdbUdb

Inspired by La Luna by Jorge Luis Borges.

Any time

 Had you no notion

Resentment was minable?

Can you remember a better time?

Your eyes glass over and then you’re there

Comfortable, sunlight, worryless, arms

And then it’s gone. 

And now you want something back

Something that only exists in a feeling

A feeling you can summon at any time

An Object Among Eyes (poem)

In public spaces

There is no ‘I’

There is only ‘me’

And I know that anywhere

I can be seen

Watched by closed circuit eyes

Waiting for something to happen

Something to become news

And I remember, then

That I can become news

That I am a subject here

In the other sense

The sense of kings

Rightly, I am only an object

Among eyes

I become regular here

A fixture 

I blend in

I used to stand out

When I was younger

But now I settle 

into the stone buildings

And concrete 

Like a gray man 

On his way from a contract

And I remember the boy

Who fell for his own reflection

And I’m reminded of an orange troll

A yellow flower

And the gray man

One with the background

+---++---++---++---++---++---++---++---++---+

Sometimes, it's nice to generate a poem using nothing but your own brain. This poem is inspired by a description of the poet Stan Rice's style "paranoiac surreal". I can fully commit myself to developing a sense of the "paranoiac surreal" if I haven't incidentally done so already.