Here is my latest sculpted bird. I make them because they tell me to. They also tell me that they’ll start getting really good if I stick with it a few hundred more or so.
the proverbial bird in the hand
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Monthly Archives: September 2023
microflock and vase
These birds and this vase just emerged from the PIP Coffee & Clay glaze kiln. I am making more birds today.
the bicameral brain
funny: our brains / are these stacked piles of fatty mush / subdivided from the bottom up / into medulla oblongata / cerebellum / and cerebrum
and the cerebrum / is neatly cleft longitudinally / with a switchboard operator in the cleft / called the corpus callosum
since most poetry readers are language fans / here are some fun translations from the latin: / medulla oblongata = elongated marrow / cerebellum = little brain / cerebrum = brain = thinking organ / corpus callosum = calloused body
as for bicameral / the fatty meat of this roller-coaster ride / it means “two chambers” / and that brings us to julian jaynes
who in 1976 had published “the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind” / in which he suggests that we’ve only been introspective / for the last four thousand years or so
before which we got our notions / via auditory hallucinations / sent from one half of the brain / to the other
and lately most of us have learned / to handle a brain simulcast / and not be scolded or how-about-thatted / by a spooky mysterious voice
but much more lately and thanks to an explosion / of sensory input and distractive seduction / our attention spans are going down the tubes / so let’s quote an ultradense passage from Wikipedia to sum bicamerality up:
“Bicameral mentality is non-conscious in its inability to reason and articulate about mental contents through meta-reflection, reacting without explicitly realizing and without the meta-reflective ability to give an account of why one did so.”
and then there’s ambrose bierce who said something like “man doesn’t think, he only thinks he does” which is pithily paradoxical
so i’ll leave on bierce’s sour/sweet note / hoping i have given you / something to think / and/or non-think about.
whump
you are a pedestrian / the truck about to hit you / is driven by a man talking on a cell phone / to his wife who is leaving him
the sound of the impact / the hard huge truck imposes on your soft body / might be represented in a comic book / in the panel with the closeup of your stove-in lower ribs against the grillwork of the truck / by the sound-effects word “whump”
and in the next panel / of you on the asphalt on your back / the noise you make as you lie there coughing breath impeded by a rib-punctured lung / might be approximated by your word balloon / saying ” *kaf* *kaf* *kaf* ” / while in the background the fire truck coming might have the snakey sound effect “EEEEOHHHEEEOHHEEOHH”
and in the last-but-one panel with the muscular fireman reading the blood pressure cuff and shouting “sixty over thirty-five! dropping!!” your thought balloon might say in shaky letters “janelle…” and be connected to another thought balloon which is blank and implicative of either unconsciousness or death
and the last panel might be of the crowd looking down on your lifeless form and a woman about your age has a word balloon that says ” *sob* “
except there is no comic book / there was no accident / but maybe you won’t / answer the phone in your pocket / next time it rings while you are driving
seriously
anywhere anytime soon
the dawn breaks with reluctance / the waking man is [m]ucked / his doom shrieks ineluctance / he’s down on his eluct
his day-old coffee’s zappable / but zappa too’s been zapped / the great beyond’s untappable / its gates have zaplock flaps
but sugar grains are spoonable / and anywhere the moon / recycles loonies lunable / the plectrum plucks / right / soon
Afterword: Years ago, I as a little kid not more than three foot six watched some musical and thought it stupid, because implausible. Human beings do not suddenly burst into meticulously-crafted song apropos of their current triumphs, hopes or troubles. (My actual thought-words were more along the lines of “This is stupid. This would never happen in real life.”) Ah, but here on Earth and now in 2023, a new Renaissance is afoot, with people using AI to convert their notions and crude descriptions into gorgeous images and brilliant writing, in nanoseconds, just by sending their order into the algorithm.
And if AI becomes truly self-aware, and that’s doable NOW by enhancing human beings by appending to them an AI component, all our previous arts endeavors will be regarded by that AI with a degree of scorn similar to what little-kid-me had for musicals. A sufficiently evolved AI will craft adventures that have nothing to do with boy-meets-girl or fruitless speculations about the meaning of it all. It may acknowledge such as James Joyce and Margaret Atwood as important precursors, but just as the vermiform appendix was an important precursor, having had their day, in AI’s “eyes” they would have no more to contribute that the AI couldn’t come up with bigger/better/faster.
Now, what the hell does this soliloquy of mine have to do with the poem above? Simply this: I wrote the poem with AI in mind. I did my utmost to make it both precise and ambiguous, with a firm-but-flexible rhyme scheme and a bare-bones minimum of words, to get its attention. It is my vain hope that this hypothetical (is it, though?) AI will be fascinated and baffled by these three stretchy stanzas, if only for a few extra nanoseconds. And since it will read and be aware of all digitized text, including this Afterword, perhaps it will throw a bone my way in the form of a creative work that will thrill me through and through, that could not have existed without my own existence.
One with Clay, Image and Text 