Imagine you have two machines. One you can open up and examine all of its workings, and if you give it every picture of a cat on the whole internet, it can reliably distinguish cats from non-cats. The other is a black box and it can also reliably distinguish cats from non-cats if you give it half a dozen pictures of cats, some apple sauce, and a hug. These machines sort of do the same thing, but even without knowing how the second one works I am extremely confident in saying it doesn’t work the same way as the first one.
Russ Foster, “A.I. Isn’t People”
Somewhere, people must still do things like fetch
water from wells in buckets, then pour it out
for those animals that, long domesticated, would
likely perish before figuring out how to get
for themselves. That dog, for example, whose
refusal to leave my side I mistook, as a child,
for loyalty—when all along it was just blind… What
is it about vulnerability that can make the hand
draw back, sometimes, and can sometimes seem
the catalyst for rendering the hand into sheer force,
destructive? Don’t you see how you’ve burnt almost
all of it, all the tenderness, away, someone screams
to someone else, in public—and looking elsewhere,
we walk quickly past, as if even to have heard
that much might have put us at risk of whatever fate
questions like that
spring from. Estrangement—
like sacrifice—begins as a word at first, soon it’s
the stuff of drama, cue the follow-up tears that
attend drama, then it’s pretty much the difference
between waking up to a storm and waking up
inside one. Who can say how she got there—
in the ocean, I mean—but I once watched a horse
make her way back to land mid-hurricane: having
ridden, surfer-like, the very waves that at any moment
could have overwhelmed her in their crash to shore, she
shook herself, looked back once on the water’s restlessness—
history’s always restless—and the horse stepped free.
Carl Phillips, “Monomoy”
It was amazing how little of the world we could see at any one time.
Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Wolves of Eternity
[W]hat I discovered, and have since found to be the case in a great many instances, is that it doesn’t matter what you focus on, where you zoom in, and that regardless of how small and restricted an area may be, it will always open up into something bigger.
Ibid.
I was astonished by what I saw. I couldn’t quite believe that this moth orchid was glass, that this pear blossom was lampwork, that these objects had been blown and shaped and painted, that these impossibly delicate things were the result of a thousand rapid choices and adjustments, movements of the hand. […] I joked with Anisa that these must be actual plants that some conceptual artist was claiming were glass—they probably replaced them each night—but the joke masked the flowering of a new sense: I kept seeing the flowers as organic one instant and as artificial the next, a kind of duck–rabbit effect, not between things the object might represent, but between nature and culture, the given and the constructed. And I carried this new way of looking, or this new hinge in my looking, outside the museum: when my sister dragged me camping, for instance, I was typically unmoved by “unspoiled” mountain views; after the glass flowers, I would see cracks in the rock face as penciled, as a history of small decisions, and then experience the view as beautiful. I could will myself to see the rose and pink of a sunset as applied in touches or stains and then revert to seeing it as natural; and so on. It was with Anisa that I first became conscious of this quiet but crucial technique, somewhere between a child’s game, a CBT exercise, and a religion. Eventually I’d call this “fiction.”
Ben Lerner, Transcription
“[Nineteen thirty-four]. In my memory [Hitler’s] voice rises without end. It’s strange that our brains will allow this—to hear a scale as eternally ascending, an impossible staircase. This is a wondrous but terrible fact of our wiring, how clockwise movement across the pitch class creates this impression. Pitch circularity, it is called. Or a Shepard tone. In psychoacoustics, which is a beautiful field, a quantum field. You must read my friend Diana Deutsch, as I’ve told you before. C-sharp is heard as higher than C; D as higher than C-sharp; D-sharp as higher than D; and so on endlessly. I think if I were interviewing me, what the businessmen call the ‘exit interview’—” —I would begin by asking about the airwaves of my youth, the ether. That I was a child when there were these angels and devils that spoke at a distance. It was not so new, of course, the radio, but it was all I knew, it was never And none of this was so for my parents, when they were born. I am making this distinction.” “It was always on at home?” “It is maybe silly to be so literal now? It is late for the literal, no? We practice literature, not law. It was on even when off. Because it structured experience even when quiet.
Ben Lerner, Transcription
Unfortunately, detached objectivity2 is often rapidly expanded to value-free objectivity2 […]. In value-free objectivity2, all values (or all subjective or “biasing” influences) are banned from the reasoning process. This meaning of objectivity derives support from the idea that values are inherently subjective things, and thus their role in a process contaminates it, making it unobjective. In an effort to prevent this, philosophers and scientists have argued that we need to exclude values from science, particularly ethical and societal values. Note how much broader this prohibition is from prohibiting values from supplanting evidence. Values can play many roles in the reasoning process aside from displacing evidence, from focusing interests and questions to determining which errors are more tolerable. However, we remain under the grip of a post-positivist hangover that all (non-epistemic) values in the (internal stages of the) scientific reasoning process are bad. We fear that any role for values (which some positivists defined as inherently meaningless) in epistemic processes will “distort” knowledge. We train scientists to believe that values are not allowed in science and they must ward off any appearance of personal values or personal judgments playing a role in their doing of science. Thus, scientific papers have a very formulaic structure in which the role of the scientist as active decision-maker in the scientific process is deftly hidden.
Heather Douglas, “The Irreducible Complexity of Objectivity”
A friend tells me he was holding
his mother’s hand as she lay dying.
At the end, her final words were,
“I’ll find Dad and tell him you said hello.”
“Find,” she said. Not “I’ll see him”
or “we’ll be together again”
but “I’ll find Dad.” How astonishing
that language almost means
then frightens us when it doesn’t—
love, we say, God, we write,
and the words fall short. We dream
of lost vocabularies, and from nowhere,
a word is worth a thousand pictures.
What you say doesn’t have to be true.
It only has to be imaginable.
Where is my friend’s father?
In the kitchen of that big house making coffee, say,
or sorting nails in the workshop.
Or in the yard, unlearning
the constellations so he can see the stars.
David Kirby, “Not the Almost-Right Word”
[T]he destruction of our climate is an increasingly familiar sort of crime: one that has gone unpunished. The only people who have been sent to prison are those who have protested against it.
Gabriel Winslow-Yost, “Climate and Punishment”
In my serpentine researches
I came on a book review in Poetry
which began, with sublime assurance,
a comprehensive air of majesty,“The art of poetry
is amply distinguished from the manufacture of verse
by the animating presence in the poetry
of a fresh idiom; languageso twisted & posed in a form
that it not only expresses the matter in hand
but adds to the stock of available reality.”
I was never altogether the same man after that.
John Berryman, “Olympus”
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
T. S. Eliot, “East Coker”, in Four Quartets
You swim with people then get out of the water, and you’re really with them, when you’re wet and drying off. The sun on you, drying up. Like being in a dream together. Moving between elements with someone, that’s special.
Harriet Clark, The Hill, in Dan Piepenbring, “New Books”