Inspired by Nader, Farritor and Schilliger's recent AI-assisted decryption of ancient texts, netting them the $1m Vesuvius Challenge Prize, I attempt to crack the code of a 1000 year old Japanese poem using Google's Gemini chatbot.
I pose to Gemini the four cryptic questions in the form of a poem about love's paradoxes by Izumi Shikibu, whose work was celebrated by Kenneth Rexroth with the following words: “Of all the poets of the classical period, she has, to my mind, the deepest and most poignant Buddhist sensibility.”
Can the latest Oogly Woogly Google tech finally solve riddles that have puzzled human readers and thinkers for centuries?
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Things I Want Decided
Which shouldn’t exist in this world, the one who forgets or the one who is forgotten? Which is better, to love one who has died or not to see each other when you are alive? Which is better, the distant lover you long for or the one you see daily without desire? Which is the least unreliable among fickle things— the swift rapids, a flowing river, or this human world?
-Izumi Shikibu (tr. Jane Hirshfield)
An episode inspired by Tadeusz Dąbrowski's poem "Sentence", Nick Flynn's "Tattoo" and Jack Gilbert's "The Answer":
SENTENCE
It's as if you'd woken in a locked cell and found
in your pocket a slip of paper, and on it a single sentence
in a language you don't know.
And you'd be sure this sentence was the key to your
life. Also to this cell.
And you'd spend years trying to decipher the sentence,
until finally you'd understand it. But after a while
you'd realize you got it wrong, and the sentence meant
something else entirely. And so you'd have two sentences.
Then three, and four, and ten, until you'd created a new language.
And in that language you'd write the novel of your life.
And once you'd reached old age you'd notice the door of the cell
was open. You'd go out into the world. You'd walk the length and
breadth of it,
until in the shade of a massive tree you'd yearn
for that one single sentence in a language you don't know.
TATTOO
You do know, right, that between the no-
longer & the still- to-come
you are being continually tattooed, inked
with the skulls of everyone
you’ve ever loved—the you & the you
& the you & the you—you don’t sit in a chair, thumb
through a binder, pick a design, it simply
happens each time you bring your fingers to your face
to inhale him back into you . . . tiny skulls, some of us are
covered. You, love, could
simply tattoo an open door, light
pouring in from somewhere outside, you
could make your body a door so it appears you
(let her fill you) are made
of light.
THE ANSWER
Is the clarity, the simplicity, an arriving
or an emptying out? If the heart persists
in waiting, does it begin to lessen?
If we are always good, does God lose track
of us? When I wake at night, there is
something important there. Like the humming
of giant turbines in the high-ceilinged stations
in the slums. There is a silence in me,
absolute and inconvenient. I am haunted
by the day I walked through the Greek village
where everyone was asleep and somebody began
playing Chopin, slowly, faintly, inside
the upper floor of a plain white stone house.
TOPICS COVERED: Alienation; Analytical preparation; Ashberry's trees; Authenticity; Birth and self-discovery; Boundaries of essence; Communication dynamics; Confinement vs. liberation; Consciousness; Contemplation of existence; Cosmic symbolism; Cultural backgrounds; Daily Mail controversy; Deciphering life's language; Developmental path; Disorientation and discovery; Emotional reactivity; Enlightenment and insight; Estrangement and alienation; Ethical boundaries in therapy; Experience of reading a poem; Exploration of self; Expression and concealment; Fowles' "The Magus"; Genie metaphor; Gilbert's "The Answer"; Goldilocks metaphor; Human existential trajectory; Identity construction; Illusion of continuity; Individuality vs. collective unconscious; Intercostal nerves and pain; Interpersonal misunderstanding; Interpretation of symbols; Introspection and growth; Kabbalah and symbolism; Language as a cage; Language's role in suffering; Liberation magic; Life-defining tattoos; Linguistic clichés; Locked cell metaphor; Masson's "Final Analysis"; Merwin's trees; Misunderstanding as growth; Mystic union with God; Narrative construction; Neurological aspects of communication; Personal biases; Physical and mental isolation; Poetic inspiration; Potential for exploitation; Psychoanalytic dynamics; Ramanujan's trees; Recycled materials of past experiences; Relational nuances; Revelation of self-awareness; Rites of passage; Schiffer's character and influence; Self-awareness dawn; Semiotics of Hebrew letters; Silence and bliss; Social contexts; Spiritual symbolism; Stafford's "The Interior Castle"; Symbolic language complexity; Symbolic realm's labyrinth; Symbols interpretation; Tattoo as therapeutic act; Therapeutic boundaries; Transformation through language; Unraveling of human story; Vulnerability and humility.
Being an Anne Carson megafan (looking forward to her new collection Wrong Norma published this month) I decided to spend an evening with an artefact she created in 2016 called Float comprising 22 chapbooks held together in whatever order you choose to read them in, one of which is an essay that I’m about to read here.
This essay, "Variations on the Right to Remain Silent", is also linked to my favourite poem in Float which can be found in the chapbook Candor, written originally for a performance piece with dancer Rashaun Mitchell.
COULD I
If you are not the free person you want to be you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere. You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself. Consider a person standing alone in a room. The house is silent. She is looking down at a piece of paper. Nothing else exists. All her veins go down into this paper. She takes her pen and writes on it some marks no one else will ever see, she bestows on it a kind of surplus, she tops it off with a gesture as private and accurate as her own name.
I've called "Variations on the Right to Remain Silent" an essay, but I prefer to think of it as An Event, or a kind of Performance - or a weird and delightful lecture.
If you’re anything like me, finding such a koan is usually followed by an overwhelming desire to share. Hence.
POEMS REFERRED TO IN THIS EPISODE:
Fragment 286
In spring, on the one hand, the Kydonian apple trees, being watered by streams of rivers where the uncut garden of the maidens [is and vine blossoms swelling beneath shady vine branches, bloom. On the other hand, for me Eros lies quiet at no season. Nay rather, like a Thracian north wind ablaze with lightning, rushing from Aphrodite accompanied by parching madnesses, black, unastonishable, powerfully, right up from the bottom of my feet [it] shakes my whole breathing being.
Tubingen, January
Eyes talked over to blindness. Their— riddle is the purely orginated"—, their memory of swimming Hölderlintowers, gull- whirredaround.
Visits of drowned joiners to these diving words: Came, came a man, came a man to the world, today, with the lightbeard of the prophets: he could, if he spoke of this time, he could, only stammer and stammer, over-, over- againagain. ("Pallaksch. Pallaksch.")
-Paul Celan
TOPICS/THEMES:
Adam and Eve,
Aphrodite,
Artistic representation and interpretation,
Authenticity and translation,
Bacon, Francis,
Catastrophe as a creative force,
Celan, Paul,
Cliché and its avoidance,
Communication barriers,
Consciousness and self-awareness,
Divine versus human language,
Greek lyric poetry,
Historical and cultural translation,
Hölderlin, Friedrich,
Immortality and the divine,
Individual versus authority conflict,
Joan of Arc,
Language's limitations and potential,
Madness as a method of understanding,
Metaphorical versus literal interpretation,
Mythology's influence on art and literature,
Nature of reality and perception,
Personal identity and expression,
Power of silence and absence,
Rembrandt,
Relationship between language and thought,
Role of the translator,
Sacred versus profane knowledge,
Struggle against conventional norms,
Subjectivity of experience,
Untranslatability and the ineffable,
Violence and its representation
An episode inspired by two Dalton Day poems: "Love Poem" and "An Understanding" (from the chapbook Overlay).
All poems referenced in the episode (in order of appearance):
YOU SEE I WANT A LOT
You see, I want a lot. Perhaps I want everything: The darkness that comes with every infinite fall And the shivering blaze of every step up.
So many live on and want nothing And are raised to the rank of prince By the slippery ease of their light judgments
But what you love to see are faces That do work and feel thirst…
You have not grown old, And it is not too late to dive Into your increasing depths where life Calmly gives out its own secret.
-Rilke
LOVE POEM
Every now & then like a gazillion cicadas dig their way out of the dark earth & they are screaming against the air, against the very thing they have clawed their way into, & the time we call summer is stitched with this terror, this gratitude for knowing something will happen & still having some sense of awe when it actually does, & what I'm saying is, I feel like that, even when I don't.
-Dalton Day
AN UNDERSTANDING
Because howling is scary we begin to cover our eyes.
Because covering our eyes is scary we begin to go underground.
Because going underground is scary we begin to talk to each other. Because talking to each other is scary we begin to howl.
One time, I knew your name. I said it to you every night. It sounded like AOOOOOOOOO AOOOOOOOOO AOOOOOOOOO.
-Dalton Day
STOP THINKING AND END YOUR PROBLEMS
How do I know that it’s “good”? I can’t compare it to anything. I think it’s largely unconscious, feels like a collective decision, not a chain of events. I think you just have to let it wash over you, like pain. I think of it as a very dramatic form of giving up. (It is pitch black outside, not the colour black but rather a complete absence of light.) I think it’s related to how you pick up your friends’ speech patterns. But more unsettling and intense. I just think it’s weird to sit around waiting to develop a sixth sense. I think it’s fooling yourself into thinking you’re thinking. I think it’s philosophical and physical and have not gotten a good answer.
Everything reminds me of it, but I don’t know what “it” is.
-Elisa Gabbert (remixed version | full poem)
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LINKS:
Saved By A Poem (Kim Rosen)
Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (David Abram)
The Wheels On The Bus (Noodle & Pals Version)
Drop It Like It's Hot (Snoop Dogg)
Brown Cicada Being Made To Scream By A Human Animal
Going Sane (Adam Phillips)
Dvořák: Gypsy Melodies, Op. 55, B. 104 - IV. Songs My Mother Taught Me (Arr. Soltani For Solo Cello and Cello Ensemble)
I Want A Little Sugar In My Bowl (Nina Simone: Live Version | album track)
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TOPICS COVERED IN THIS EPISODE (in alphabetical order):
Abram, David; Appetite; Awakenings; Becoming Animal; Being; Buddhism; Carnal Knowledge; Cicadas; Cloned Voices; Consciousness; Creativity; Dalton Day; Death; Desire; Disappointment; Disconnection; Dreams; Ego; Elisa Gabbert; Emergence; Emotion; Empathy; Enlightenment; Essence; Existentialism; Expression; Fear; Fulfillment; Gwyneth Paltrow; Healing; Hot Yoga Teachers; Human Experience; Identity; Imagination; Indigenous Tribes; Inevitability; Insights; Instinct; Intellectual Curiosity; Introspection; Joy; Knowledge; Language; Learning; Liberation; Life; Longing; Love; Love Poem; Mastery; Meaning-Making; Memory; Misfits; Music; Nature; Neurons; Nursery Rhymes; Pain; Passion; Perception; Philosophy; Poem; Poetry; Practice; Psychoanalysis; Psychotherapy; Reciprocity; Reflection; Relationships; Resonance; Rilke, Rainer Maria; Rituals; Rosen, Kim; Samsara; Self-Awareness; Self-Improvement; Shamanism; Sheffield; Social Dynamics; Somatic Memory; South-East Asia; Speechify; Spiritual; Suffering; Symbolism; Terror; Therapy; Thought; Transformation; Transcendence; Understanding; Utterance; Validation; Vision; Voice; Wanting; Workshop; Yoga; Zen.
An episode inspired by two Wendell Berry poems:
A MEETING
In a dream I meet my dead friend. She has, I know, gone long and far, and yet she is the same for the dead are changeless. They grow no older. It is I who have changed, grown strange to what I was. Yet I, the changed one, ask: "How you been?" She grins and looks at me. "I been eating peaches off some mighty fine trees."
EXCEPT
Now that you have gone and I am alone and quiet, my contentment would be complete, if I did not wish you were here so I could say, “How good it is, Tanya, to be alone and quiet.” -- LINKS: Jack Black's Peaches
Virgins? What Virgins? (Moslem Martyrs)
Adam Phillips & Devorah Baum (Attention Seeking)
Text version (with longer/better explanation of W.D. Hamilton's R-values!)
An episode inspired by Noor Hindi's poem 🐳 The World’s Loneliest Whale Sings the Loudest Song 🐳
The World’s Loneliest Whale Sings the Loudest Song & Other Confessions
I won’t make metaphors out of fish.
If I have to die, I choose the ocean. If I have to live, I choose you.
You: Everyone I’ve ever mourned.
I believe less & less of sunlight these days. I won’t die alone.
To awaken crying is to awaken displaced. Ghost of your joy in the bathtub. A face in the mirror. Your nephew’s painting in the foyer.
My mother cried in bedrooms growing up. I would study her for hours.
In a study, researchers learned patients who cried less are likely to have dismissive attachment styles.
Today, every bedroom in the house is mine. I stopped crying at age 12.
As a child, I spoke a language no one understood.
Research suggests loneliness increases cardiovascular disease.
When my cousin died, she died alone. When the world collapsed around Darwish, he wrote of coffee and sex.
When you held my body close to yours, I thought of clementines, sweet citrus, all the world’s lemons we’d temper with honey.
The world’s loneliest whale sings the loudest song.
This is what you’ll tell me the first time we meet.
And I’ll think about the ocean. And I’ll think about you.
I never learned how to swim. I’ve been drowning my whole life.
Studies suggest drowning lasts 1-3 minutes. But I’ll never stop grieving.
Scientists are still searching for the 52-hertz whale. But I swear he’s here. In my bedroom.
And I can hear him. And he’s telling me I can stop.
The Loneliest Whale In The World
In this episode, I explore our longing for basic trust, weaving together poetry (Pat Schneider, Rilke), philosophy (the Stoical idea of Logos, Cosmic Indifference, Animism), and psychology (Ego Psychology, Object Relations, and the developmental impact of early relationships) in order to make sense of our mistrust and the desire for deeper, authentic connections in a digital and fragmented world.
I suggest that this existential trust, foundational to well-being, is often found in the poetics of objects, putting us on the path to discovering the You we need in our lives.
SEGMENTS:
(00:00) The Art of Online Personas: Decoding the Facade of Dating Profiles
(03:00) Unveiling Basic Trust: Perspectives from A.H. Almaas on Digital Connections
(04:35) Stoic Echoes in the Modern Psyche: Linking Logos to Basic Trust
(05:18) Rational Cosmos, Illusion of Free Will: Stoicism's View on Life's Order
(08:41) Embracing Cosmic Virtue: Stoicism's Guide to Harmonious Living
(9:50) Cosmic Indifference versus Inherent Benevolence: A Philosophical Dilemma
(10:41) Science and the Search for Universal Goodness: The Stoic Conundrum Faced With Camus' Absurd
(12:46) The Formation of Self: Insights from Ego Psychology and Early Experiences
(13:24) Decoding Personality: The Role of The Enneagram and MBTI in Ego Development
(19:09) Assessing Basic Trust: A Basic Trust Assessment
(21:58) Animism: Rebuilding Trust through a Connected Worldview?
(25:20) Ordinary Things, Extraordinary Patience: Finding Connection in Animism?
The Patience of Ordinary Things
It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they’re supposed to be.
I’ve been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?
-Pat Schneider
The Inner Rose
Where is there for this inner
an outer? Upon which hurt
does one lay such fine linen?
And which heavens are reflected within them,
upon the interior seas
of these open roses, these carefree ones, see:
how loose in looseness
they lie, as if a trembling hand
could never tip them over.
They can hardly hold themselves
erect; many allow themselves
be filled all too full and flow
over from inner space
into the days, which, ever
more and more full, close in upon themselves,
until the entire summer becomes
a chamber, a chamber in a dream.
-Rainer-Maria Rilke (tr. Mitchell)
Resources and Reference:
-Facets of Unity (A.H. Aalmas)
-In Our Time: Marcus Aurelius (Radio 4)
-The Handbook of Contemporary Animism (edited by Graham Harvey)
-Graham Harvey’s Animist Manifesto
-Michal Zerkowski's article about Irving Hallowell's research on the Ojibwe animism
-The Perception of The Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill (Tim Ingold)
Music:
-Breathless (Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds)
-Chips & Dip (Sam Greenfield)
-With You (Teenage Fanclub)
-Nocturnes & Meditations (Matt Tondut)
-Goldberg Variations, BWV 988: Variation 1 (Arr. for Harp) - Parker Ramsay
-When Everything Fades (Matt Tondut)
Primarily an excuse to play you Tindersticks' gorgeous "Travelling Light", but also an attempt to unravel in 15 minutes the world of referential delusions, where ordinary events assume personal significance in ways that cross the boundary between quirky beliefs and mental disorders.
Meet, my ex-client 'Eric' and his unshakable notion that love signals are being played to him, and him alone, from a DJ's playlist who professes to have no romantic interest in him at all.
The poem mentioned in the episode is this one by Elizabeth Bishop:
One Art The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Parallels drawn between Marcus Aurelius's Meditations and Byron Katie’s Loving What Is, with a nod to the Philosopher King’s son, Commodus (“a bit of a shit” - Cassio Dio, History of the Roman Empire).
Also, some late Wallace Stevens, doing "The Work”.
The Plain Sense of Things
After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir. It is difficult even to choose the adjective For this blank cold, this sadness without cause. The great structure has become a minor house. No turban walks across the lessened floors. The greenhouse never so badly needed paint. The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side. A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition In a repetitiousness of men and flies. Yet the absence of the imagination had Itself to be imagined. The great pond, The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves, Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see, The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge, Required, as a necessity requires.
Our desire for meaningful communication with an inner or outer You in W.S. Graham's What Is The Language Using Us For, and Maureen McClane's Open Sky.
OPEN SKY open sky— what you want? what you want I want for you, want whatever you want when you say you want everything under the sky— is that what everyone wants never to die— what you want? what you want I want for you, want what you want when you say you want never to die except when you want nothing— what you want? nothing's something to want, something annihilating, something beyond want that stops at nothing— ravenous want
In this unnecessarily long-winded intro to APFY, I explore Rilke's poem "Du im Voraus verlorne Geliebte," ("You Who Never Arrived"), alongside Leon Russell's "A Song for You," and Martin Buber's book I and Thou, delving into themes of elusive love, the intricacies of human connection, and the profound nature of both inner and outer I-You-ness.
(00:00) "You, In Advance, Lost Beloved”
(01:30) Only You (1994 Romantic Comedy - watch on YouTube)
(03:39) The "Mission" of Rilke's "Du Im Voraus" & The Duino Elegies
(07:52) Learning Rilke on Walks in the Kent Countryside in 2019
(09:19) Rilke's Death at The Age of 51: Slain By A Rose?
(10:38) The Main Ideas Behind Buber's Book Ich und Du (I and Thou)
(13:25) Split Brain Personalities
(15:00) GPT-4's Enneagram Nursery Rhyme Inspired By "This Little Piggy"
(15:56) The Left-Hemisphere "I" Narrator Vs. the Right-Hemisphere "Self"
(18:15) Primate Evolution in the Great Rift Valley: From Forest Dwellers to Survivors of the Savannah
(20:48) Greed is Good? (watch clip on YouTube)
(21:40) The Emergence of the 'I' in Human Evolution
(23:10) Present-Focused Animate Consciousness vs. Conceptual Consciousness
(24:17) Social Interactions and Survival in Early Human Communities
(25:28) Theory of Mind
(31:03) Conceptual Self-Description and Mental "I"-Focused Time Travel
(32:27) The "I" as Podcaster, the Self as Listener
(35:25) The Story Behind Leon Russell's "A Song For You"
(37:54) Analysis of Russell's Vocal Style
(39:51) Leon Russell's Childhood and Struggles With Disability
(44:25) Evolutionary Human Lifespan Limits
(44:35) Vulnerability
(47:54) The Desire To Be "Seen Through"
(52:00) Buber's Three Spheres of I-You Relating
(53:20) Podcasts As Messages In A Bottle
(55:35) Finding You in Slug Trails and Solitary Spiders
(56:30) Samuel Barber's Agnus Dei "You"
(57:00) Hello/Goodbye