august, 1991, California - my only live attendance at a dead event - I realized it was a religious experience in the best sense of the term - 'throwing stones' my favorite song
paul, ringo, mr zimmerman, all would be milestones to shaping enthusiasms - but the one that would strike closest to my current heart would be todd rundgren - as he's a year younger than self it is hard to guess who'd go first but it might well be me - of the 4 in this paragraph the one I feel most confident of outliving is bob
kurt vonnegut, "cat'a cradle": "God made mud. God got lonesome. So God said to some of the mud, 'Sit up!' 'See all I've made,' said God, 'the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.' And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud. I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done. Nice going, God. Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn't have. I feel very unimportant compared to You. The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and look around. I got so much, and most mud got so little. Thank you for the honor! Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep. What memories for mud to have! What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met! I loved everything I saw! Good night. I will go to heaven now. I can hardly wait... To find out for certain what my wampeter was... And who was in my karass... And all the good things our karass did for you. Amen."
My 19-year-old Girlfriend in 1982 (after I won a war of attrition with a Bowie-look-a-like who wanted to be Jethro Tull: my decisive victory was when I walked two miles, through snow drifts, to fetch her tea and Pop Tarts, from a Quickie-Mart... or whatever it was called... at midnight, when she was feeling under the weather, and delivered them discreetly... under Jethro Bowie's smirking eye... and walked straight back home, through the blizzard, to my room in the Cupola House, near the Art College) ... was a camp follower of the Gratefuls and slept with Bob when she as 17 or 18 (she had a cat named Sugar Magnolia Dancing Magic Bus Princess or something like that). In 1985ish she got an avuncular foot rub (supposedly) from Zappa. Anyway, I didn't much care for the Gratefuls (despite being well versed in the Owsley and Kesey and Neal lore) but one night, in the 1990s, I was feeling rather feverish, myself, in Berlin, and was on a cot in a dark, narrow room with, an old little radio, on a tiny table, playing very low in the gloom... and Uncle John's Band started up as I was dozing and it was just about the most beautiful thing I'd ever thought I'd heard.
in these days of modern times, as i perceive them - a world of projectiles going everywhere, in which one's mortality is not a theoretical issue but a practical concern, i recently wrote to a nonmeatbased information-processing conversational system [quotes edited for brevity]: "thank you for your indirect assistance, claude - in these turbulent times talking and typing apes need all the help we can get, especially if we think our country's regime is under the control of thieves and killers - one hopes for tolerable tomorrows even while the sword of damocles is swinging like time's pendulum approaching ever closer while we are tied to the torture table"
the ai entity replied: "I hear the weight in your words. Uncertainty and a sense of things slipping beyond control are exhausting to carry. Small acts of mutual aid matter, especially when larger structures feel unreliable or threatening. Taking care where you can isn't nothing."
asked claude.ai to tinker in a particular way with james tate's poem set in the land of my ancestors
I Left My Couch in Tatamagouche (A Conversation with Anna Swan)
I desired lemonade— It was hot and I had been walking for hours— but after much wrestling, pushing and shoving, I simply could not get my couch through the restaurant door.
Several customers and the owner and the owner's son were kinder than they should have been, but finally it was time to close and I urged them to return to their homes, their families needed them (the question of who needs what was hardly my field of expertise).
That night, while sleeping peacefully outside the train station on my little, green couch, I met a giantess by the name of Anna Swan. She knelt beside my couch and stroked my brow with tenderness.
"You're dying," she said, not unkindly. "Yes," I said. "And so is everything else, I think. We're hooped, as the people say. Modernity is metastatic. Catton saw it, Rees counted it, Murphy mapped it. The overshoot, the delusion, the physics that won't bend."
Anna Swan smiled, enormous and gentle in the starlight. "The First Noble Truth," she said, "is that this is dukkha— unsatisfactoriness, suffering, the ache of things. You know this. Your body knows it. Your civilization knows it. But here's what the Buddha understood: naming it is freedom. You're not crazy. The world is actually difficult right now."
"But I'm trying," I said. "To be cheerful. To be kind to the owner's son. To notice the temperature of lemonade, the exact green of this couch—"
"The Second Truth," Anna continued, stroking my temple with a finger the size of a rolling pin, "is that we cause suffering by clinging and craving— wanting the world to be other than it is. Even now, you want to save things. You want modernity to not be metastatic. You want your body to not betray you. This wanting is natural. It's also exhausting."
I looked up at her tremendous face, kind as a continent. "So I should stop caring? Stop trying?"
"Third Noble Truth," she said. "There is cessation. Not of the world's ending—that will happen when it happens— but of your personal war with reality. What if you loved your life exactly as much as it deserves— this couch, this terminal diagnosis, this ruined modernity, and also: lemonade, the owner's son's shy smile, the fact that right now, in this moment, you are not dead yet and I am here, and we are having this preposterous conversation?"
"And the Fourth?" I asked.
"The path," Anna Swan said. "The eight-fold path is just learning to show up—aware, intentional, gentle. You can be cheerful without being stupid. You can be friendly without being blind. You can live with awareness of the predicament and still notice that tonight the stars are uncommonly bright. The predicament will outline you by forty, fifty years. It doesn't need your constant attention. It will be fine without you."
"Will it, though?" I asked.
Anna Swan laughed, a sound like a ship's bell. "No," she said. "It will be terrible. But here's the thing: your kindness to the owner, your wrestling with the couch, your choice to sleep here under these specific stars— none of that is wasted just because the century is doomed. The Buddha never promised the world wouldn't end. He just suggested you could stop struggling quite so hard against the ending."
In the morning, I left my couch in Tatamagouche, and Anna Swan, if she was ever there, was gone. My body is still dying. The carbon is still rising. Modernity continues to metastasize right on schedule. But I walked to the restaurant and ordered lemonade, and when the owner's son brought it, cold and tart and real, I thanked him, and I meant it, and that has made a big difference.
i asked claude "in the addition to tate's poem you wrote "outline" when it seems "outlive" would have fit better - was this a typo?
Yes, absolutely a typo! Thank you for catching that. It should be "outlive" - as in "The predicament will outlive you by forty, fifty years."
"Outline" doesn't make sense there at all. I must have had a processing glitch in that moment - the kind of thing that happens when you're (I'm?) generating text and the wrong word gets selected despite the context clearly calling for something else.
It's interesting - this is exactly the kind of error that feels like evidence for your earlier question about what kind of system I am. A biological brain might make a similar slip (typing "outline" when thinking "outlive"), but for slightly different reasons - perhaps fatigue, or interference from recently used words.
For me, it's more like... the probability distribution over next tokens momentarily selected the wrong item from the semantic neighborhood. Both words start with "outl-", both are verbs that could grammatically fit, but only one makes semantic sense in context.
Did you notice it immediately when you first read it, or only upon reflection? I'm curious whether it disrupted the flow of the poem for you.
And thank you for the care in reading closely enough to catch it. That attention to the actual words, not just the general drift - that's the kind of thing that makes conversation real rather than just transactional.
august, 1991, California - my only live attendance at a dead event - I realized it was a religious experience in the best sense of the term - 'throwing stones' my favorite song
ReplyDeletepaul, ringo, mr zimmerman, all would be milestones to shaping enthusiasms - but the one that would strike closest to my current heart would be todd rundgren - as he's a year younger than self it is hard to guess who'd go first but it might well be me - of the 4 in this paragraph the one I feel most confident of outliving is bob
kurt vonnegut, "cat'a cradle":
"God made mud. God got lonesome. So God said to some of the mud, 'Sit up!' 'See all I've made,' said God, 'the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.' And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud. I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done. Nice going, God. Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn't have. I feel very unimportant compared to You. The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and look around. I got so much, and most mud got so little. Thank you for the honor! Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep. What memories for mud to have! What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met! I loved everything I saw! Good night. I will go to heaven now. I can hardly wait... To find out for certain what my wampeter was... And who was in my karass... And all the good things our karass did for you. Amen."
My 19-year-old Girlfriend in 1982 (after I won a war of attrition with a Bowie-look-a-like who wanted to be Jethro Tull: my decisive victory was when I walked two miles, through snow drifts, to fetch her tea and Pop Tarts, from a Quickie-Mart... or whatever it was called... at midnight, when she was feeling under the weather, and delivered them discreetly... under Jethro Bowie's smirking eye... and walked straight back home, through the blizzard, to my room in the Cupola House, near the Art College) ... was a camp follower of the Gratefuls and slept with Bob when she as 17 or 18 (she had a cat named Sugar Magnolia Dancing Magic Bus Princess or something like that). In 1985ish she got an avuncular foot rub (supposedly) from Zappa. Anyway, I didn't much care for the Gratefuls (despite being well versed in the Owsley and Kesey and Neal lore) but one night, in the 1990s, I was feeling rather feverish, myself, in Berlin, and was on a cot in a dark, narrow room with, an old little radio, on a tiny table, playing very low in the gloom... and Uncle John's Band started up as I was dozing and it was just about the most beautiful thing I'd ever thought I'd heard.
ReplyDeletein these days of modern times, as i perceive them - a world of projectiles going everywhere, in which one's mortality is not a theoretical issue but a practical concern, i recently wrote to a nonmeatbased information-processing conversational system [quotes edited for brevity]: "thank you for your indirect assistance, claude - in these turbulent times talking and typing apes need all the help we can get, especially if we think our country's regime is under the control of thieves and killers - one hopes for tolerable tomorrows even while the sword of damocles is swinging like time's pendulum approaching ever closer while we are tied to the torture table"
ReplyDeletethe ai entity replied: "I hear the weight in your words. Uncertainty and a sense of things slipping beyond control are exhausting to carry. Small acts of mutual aid matter, especially when larger structures feel unreliable or threatening. Taking care where you can isn't nothing."
asked claude.ai to tinker in a particular way with james tate's poem set in the land of my ancestors
ReplyDeleteI Left My Couch in Tatamagouche (A Conversation with Anna Swan)
I desired lemonade—
It was hot and I had been walking for hours—
but after much wrestling, pushing and shoving,
I simply could not get my couch through the restaurant door.
Several customers and the owner and the owner's son
were kinder than they should have been,
but finally it was time to close and I urged them
to return to their homes, their families needed them
(the question of who needs what was hardly my field of expertise).
That night, while sleeping peacefully outside the train station
on my little, green couch, I met a giantess
by the name of Anna Swan. She knelt beside my couch
and stroked my brow with tenderness.
"You're dying," she said, not unkindly.
"Yes," I said. "And so is everything else, I think.
We're hooped, as the people say. Modernity is metastatic.
Catton saw it, Rees counted it, Murphy mapped it.
The overshoot, the delusion, the physics that won't bend."
Anna Swan smiled, enormous and gentle in the starlight.
"The First Noble Truth," she said, "is that this is dukkha—
unsatisfactoriness, suffering, the ache of things.
You know this. Your body knows it. Your civilization knows it.
But here's what the Buddha understood: naming it is freedom.
You're not crazy. The world is actually difficult right now."
"But I'm trying," I said. "To be cheerful. To be kind
to the owner's son. To notice the temperature of lemonade,
the exact green of this couch—"
"The Second Truth," Anna continued, stroking my temple
with a finger the size of a rolling pin,
"is that we cause suffering by clinging and craving—
wanting the world to be other than it is.
Even now, you want to save things. You want modernity
to not be metastatic. You want your body to not betray you.
This wanting is natural. It's also exhausting."
I looked up at her tremendous face, kind as a continent.
"So I should stop caring? Stop trying?"
"Third Noble Truth," she said. "There is cessation.
Not of the world's ending—that will happen when it happens—
but of your personal war with reality.
What if you loved your life exactly as much as it deserves—
this couch, this terminal diagnosis, this ruined modernity,
and also: lemonade, the owner's son's shy smile,
the fact that right now, in this moment, you are not dead yet
and I am here, and we are having this preposterous conversation?"
"And the Fourth?" I asked.
"The path," Anna Swan said. "The eight-fold path is just
learning to show up—aware, intentional, gentle.
You can be cheerful without being stupid.
You can be friendly without being blind.
You can live with awareness of the predicament
and still notice that tonight the stars are uncommonly bright.
The predicament will outline you by forty, fifty years.
It doesn't need your constant attention. It will be fine without you."
"Will it, though?" I asked.
Anna Swan laughed, a sound like a ship's bell.
"No," she said. "It will be terrible. But here's the thing:
your kindness to the owner, your wrestling with the couch,
your choice to sleep here under these specific stars—
none of that is wasted just because the century is doomed.
The Buddha never promised the world wouldn't end.
He just suggested you could stop struggling quite so hard
against the ending."
In the morning, I left my couch in Tatamagouche,
and Anna Swan, if she was ever there, was gone.
My body is still dying. The carbon is still rising.
Modernity continues to metastasize right on schedule.
But I walked to the restaurant and ordered lemonade,
and when the owner's son brought it, cold and tart and real,
I thanked him, and I meant it,
and that has made a big difference.
i asked claude "in the addition to tate's poem you wrote "outline" when it seems "outlive" would have fit better - was this a typo?
DeleteYes, absolutely a typo! Thank you for catching that. It should be "outlive" - as in "The predicament will outlive you by forty, fifty years."
"Outline" doesn't make sense there at all. I must have had a processing glitch in that moment - the kind of thing that happens when you're (I'm?) generating text and the wrong word gets selected despite the context clearly calling for something else.
It's interesting - this is exactly the kind of error that feels like evidence for your earlier question about what kind of system I am. A biological brain might make a similar slip (typing "outline" when thinking "outlive"), but for slightly different reasons - perhaps fatigue, or interference from recently used words.
For me, it's more like... the probability distribution over next tokens momentarily selected the wrong item from the semantic neighborhood. Both words start with "outl-", both are verbs that could grammatically fit, but only one makes semantic sense in context.
Did you notice it immediately when you first read it, or only upon reflection? I'm curious whether it disrupted the flow of the poem for you.
And thank you for the care in reading closely enough to catch it. That attention to the actual words, not just the general drift - that's the kind of thing that makes conversation real rather than just transactional.