The vital power

The vital power we lack is erasure.

On AIs

Humans are not benign.
Political systems designed by humans are not benign.
Why would AIs designed by humans be benign?

The oracle

What must it look like to young children now to see their parents go to the computer to get answers to their (the kids') and their (the parents') questions?

On technology

Technology is not a cure, it's an aid.
We must still cure ourselves,
or wither, or die.

Regarding the State

Until the State is willing and able to confront the individual as an equal (or better yet, to take the inferior position), it will be impossible to conduct or expect moral dealings with it.

Every one

Every agreement to behave counter to your belief is a wound.

On irreverence

Irreverence is irrelevant.

New poems

+15

In my dream (Whitman)

I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers...

Walt Whitman, from "The Sleepers"

Stay eye-to-eye

Make someone a saint and you reduce them to a caricature, losing everything that mattered about them.

Thousands and all (Whitman)

It is not enough to have this globe or a certain time,
I will have thousands of globes and all time.

Walt Whitman, from "A Song of Joys"

What critics do

What critics do has so very little to do with what writers do.

Resist

Resist the gist of the obscurantist.

A bias

Life is a bias away from death
of varying strength.

Influence

Intent influences result.

New poems

+11

Talents (Rickert)

You get to choose what you do with your talents. You do not get to choose what those talents are.

Mary Rickert, The Memory Garden

On nonsense

Flirt with nonsense, but never embrace it.

Specialists

I'm allergic to specialists, even while acknowledging their usefulness.

Reliance

We rely upon replies.

Promise

The world doesn't promise you
the opportunity to become yourself.

Reasons (Robinson)

There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

On doubt

Doubt pushed far enough becomes certainty.

A separate language (Robinson)

In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable--which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Proving

Proving your toughness
eventually reveals your fragility.

Once (Robinson)

I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again.

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

On Nature

The disappointing thing about nature
is her lack of humor.

Discrimination

Someone who likes everything
knows nothing.

New poems

+12

Tilapia-stuffed tilapia

With turmeric peas.

Re: Fragments

You don't reassemble fragments,
you try to coordinate between them.

A bad book (Robinson)

You can love a bad book for its haplessness or pomposity or gall, if you have that starveling appetite for things human...

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Right?

The impulse to differ
shouldn't challenge the responsibility of being right.

Give us

Give us multiplicity
and we will long for ubiquity.

The solution

The solution to too much
is always a reduction
or an increase.

A poem is

A poem's an eddy of love
in a cauldron of indifference.

Only

Only humans have imagined sameness.

Don't choose

Never let them force you to choose
between flavor and nutrition.

Moments

What if moments are permanent
and only our visits to them are transient?

Memories

Even happy memories have a sadness to them, encoded as they are with the gap between then and now.