SplendorQuest.com

This is from my book The Unfallen. In essence, it is the countermelody to Loving Cathleen, below. I really like these two people, and I really like to let them talk. This is the furthest remove from high-action genre fiction, but this is everything that I think is important in art, real relevance to real life.

They walked up Boylston Street to Tremont, then up Tremont toward the center of the city. He stopped in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral, right at the top of the Commons. He said, “I was married there. It seems like such a long time ago…”

“A very Catholic wedding, I imagine.”

He smiled. “Very Catholic. It didn’t matter to me and it did to her, so that’s where we were married.” They had turned into Downtown Crossing, heading down the cobbled mall to Washington Street. “You should ask me about my marriage.”

“Should I?”

“I think you should. I’m a demonstrated loser at romance, after all. I should think that would be grounds for concern.”

“I’m in no position to throw stones, I think. But suppose I were to ask you. Wouldn’t you simply tell me it was all her fault?”

“That’s the point. It wasn’t. When two cars crash, maybe it’s (more…)

It’s late and the kids are in bed — do make sure the kids are in bed — and I feel like digging a little deeper into the idea of writing. This is a love poem I wrote ten years ago:

let’s make love like velcro baby
it’s the best thing we can do
you stick to me like strapping tape
i’ll stick to you like glue

i’ll cast my anchor in your harbor baby
thrust my shovel in your earth
cling by claws to your cavern walls
take me test my worth

        love’s just a hint baby
        love’s just a scent
        just a sniggling squiggling clue
        could it be me
        could it be me baby
        could you be in there too

let’s make love like velcro baby
let’s do it ’til we die
grab me grasp me clutch me clasp me
hook me with your eyes

This is fun, first, simply because it’s such a goofy idea. The word play itself is fun, but, even before that, it’s fun because it’s such a clumsy, clinical premise for a love poem, the polar opposite of the sunsets and silences and solitudes of the sonnets: Let’s make love like velcro, baby.

The poem is built from very simple stuff. English words, not stuffy Latinate polysyllables. Active verbs, along with nouns and adjectives (more…)

i took myself to the vet at the zoo
to measure my animal heat for you
he sounded my skull with a rap on my head
and said I might need psychiatry instead
the shrink had no patience for gross physiology
the shrink had no practical use for ontology
he said ‘i ponder imponderables both little and small
i measure immeasurables that aren’t there at all
if it’s fever or burning or a chilling condition
get out of my office go see a physician!’
the doctor was kind for a man in a hurry
i told him about you but he said ‘not to worry!
you think you’re the first guy with this problem i bet
take this prescription you coulda got from the vet’
i said ‘doc forgive me the thing is i’m not ill
it’s my thoughts it’s my passions my pastimes my will
that woman possesses me with love soft and sweet
from the ends of my hairs to the soles of my feet
i sleep her i dream her i wake her and then
she captures my soul for the whole day again
i seek no escape no! i am her belonging
i just want to know is this love or mere longing?’
he started to speak then he paused then reflected
he said ‘on its face this is oddly (more…)

You come to me by twilight
In a gown of gauzy white
Your sacraments revealed concealed
High priestess of the night

You whisper vespers whisper prayers
Whisper vows of faith and fear
In still and silent grace you stand
As I in trembling awe draw near

I kneel in worship grasp your hand
Press it to my searing lips
Pray god to know the endless peace
Flowing from your fingertips

You come to me in night divine
Your glory lit by crowning gold
You consecrate by hungry glance
Devotion’s heat in evening’s cold

You come to me I kneel I stand
You lay me on the dewy ground
You guide my worship guide my hands
Lead my heart your heart to sound

You speak to me with loving grace
You catechize in passion’s glow
You reach you teach you seethe and burn
And I am blessed by truth to know

You come to me in gauzy gown
High priestess of the night
I lay in awe in faith in fear
Lifted to your heaven’s light

kiss me your glory i kiss you my joy
kiss me your giggling girlishness
     i kiss you my mannish boy

kiss me your tickling i kiss you my laughter
kiss me your before your before your before
     i kiss you my ever after

kiss me your promise i kiss you my prayer
kiss me your fire i kiss you my air
kiss me your hunger i kiss you my need
kiss me your giving i kiss you my greed
kiss me your worship i kiss you my vow
kiss me your present your presence your presents
     i kiss you my endless now

kiss me your seeking i kiss you my knowing
kiss me your staying your staying your staying
     i kiss you my never going

kiss me your wisdom i kiss you my clever
kiss me your always your always your always
     i kiss you my always forever

My wife Cathleen and I have been on a love jag over the past few years, and I cannot begin to tell you how beneficial it’s been. A very simple idea: We added spending time alone together every day as a part of our goal-getting regimen. This turns out to have been an inspired idea, although I did not foresee that going in.

When you were young and you scowled or grimaced, your mother would say, “Be careful. Your face is going to freeze like that.”

You thought she was making it up.

The life you live — largely introspectively — writes its history on your face. If you don’t want to look like this, don’t be like this.

Everything you’ve been taught about Artificial Intelligence for your whole life is false. AI researchers are not frauds, I don’t think, but they’re exuberant when they talk to reporters, and the reporters are ignorant, thoughtless and brash. In real life, AI is Siri, which can reliably lead you to the nearest closed-down super-market. In your imagination, AI is C-3PO, who can lecture you on Chinese lithography while clobbering you at backgammon.

This is the truth — and telling the truth about AI is as rash as telling the truth about Anthropogenic Global Warming or abortion, an incitation to a frothy wrath: There is no Artificial Intelligence anywhere — nor will there be any time soon, if ever. This is a case where new theory really is required. The theories currently being deployed in AI research will produce ever-more-competent Siris — which achievements will be hailed as “proof” of Artificial Intelligence — but they will never produce any actual intelligence.

Why? Ontology and teleology, of course.

AI fails because it is not actually attempting to model intelligence but simply to mimic the effects of intelligence. In this respect, AI is a cargo cult, and its argument of “proof” is the same as that of any (more…)

Caveat lector! The words you are about to read are unvetted, unhomogenized and unlicensed. One of my longer-term projects is to write essays on reasons why you should dismiss the things I have to say. I’ve only done two so far: You should dismiss me because I don’t care if you do and because I can see right through you. There are zillions more reasons, whether I get to them or not, but the one that matters most, in this context, is this one:

I am completely without credentials.

That’s a statement I could quibble with, but I don’t want to. There is no limit to the caviling to be found on that road, and I don’t care, anyway. I am writing about tools that could and should exist, and if you want to dismiss what I have to say because I don’t fit your profile of a nerd — so much the worse for you. The world is awash in a billion blends of stupid, and credentialism is hardly the worst of the bunch. Looking outside yourself for your intellectual self-defense is the parent of that error, though, and that one is deadly.

Whatever. I think these ideas are fun. I’m looking at (more…)

Somehow.

The only motivation of purposive human behavior is free will. If you fail to understand this, even in the face of obvious evidence, you just might be an academic.

Meanwhile, never doubt it: Making absurd, hysterical claims about human motivation is as addictive as smoking crack cocaine — but it pays better.