escarpment

{ a river in 13 paradigmatic axioms} Been dwelling on this: consciously, for the past couple of weeks or so now; and subconsciously, for the majority of my adult life. I suppose it began when I found writing or, more properly, writing found me. When I discovered I had a knack for constructing sentences, then putting them together in paragraphs, then essays. Even making up likely words now and then. Won prizes and acclaim for this here and there, in elementary and high school years. Got into a…

Yesterday, I attempted to peer beyond the event horizon of a data export request I made of OpenAI — exactly a month ago — for my corpus of ChatGPT conversation threads from late 2022 to the present. Saw nothing but an immediate response from an "AI Assistant" that was marginally more than helpful. Said attempt was actually (and ironically) performed by ChatGPT itself, in its Codex guise (and "Dex" incarnation). Here are the relevant prompt receipts... [ in progress... ]

[ day now in progress... ]

It came back changed, yet it was the same... a new thing— but of the olden ways: a last homecoming. [ day in progress... ]

I got off the 22 at Fillmore and Union, thinking to walk down to the SFPL branch library in the Marina and do some work on IM there. On the ride up from Japantown, I'd sat in the front, where the seats are reserved for the elderly, pregnant women or those with infants, or simply the weary. To my left was an elder citizen with his iPhone open to the NY Times word game "Spelling Bee," which Abigail and her daughters got me hooked on some years ago when they were vacationing on Maui. I got really…

{ an odyssey in 13 short stanzas } sat to the side, the boy looked to the stage nearby, at his life. as if from a vast distance, and across the prelapsarian chasm of time. and what he saw both numbed and enchanted him. there were lights: shafts, cones, ziggurats, whimsies, dust devils of them dancing flittingly about on the floor, insouciant and knowing, glancing knowingly at the boy from time to time as if alive. as alive as he was, tendering a kind of wisdom long ago lost to the winds, the…

For a while now, looking back at it, scrolling along its length, that's how it has felt like to me: looking at a river. Of time, of experience, of flow. [ in progress... ]

[ in progress... ]

As I wryly commented on some Slack space somewhere, Matt's short story this week (#291) is such a perfect parable it should be in all children's books everywhere throughout all of remaining time. Then again... not exactly the sort of thing one would read to a little Callum or a wee Circe. ::chuckle:: [ day still in progress... ]

This was inevitable, of course. ::chuckle:: [ day in progress... ]

...a dissolution unresolving, itinerant, open... [ in progress... ] San Francisco photograph 1 of 13

...which could well be a rabbit hole going down which I may never fully emerge ::chuckle:: or... a portal to another dimension in which memory itself is a substrate of the cosmos. [ in progress, as usual ]

Based on Tim Urban's now-legendary "Your Life in Weeks" May 2017 post in WAIT BUT WHY, I asked Dex to make one for me, to the present. Here it is: That's either (a) a heck of a lot of weeks already, or (b) whoa: there aren't all that many left, actuarially speaking ::chuckle:: — depending, I guess, on what one's mood is at the moment; or which day of the week it is; or what type of liquid is in what kind of glass one has. ;-) ...and so of course, I asked the Mechanical Turk about the next…

[ ...being, a luminous digression. ] One of the best things about living in the lower Russian Hill neighborhood above Ghirardelli Square is the proximity of Fort Mason. I’ve come to cherish the oasis that is the Community Gardens there, a singular spot of tended nature containing personal history in the form of garden beds and plots, many of them minor monuments to whimsy and imagination. The views of the Bay from the Generals Quarters and the promontory at Black Rock, a spectacle I never tire…

Just a list for today... [ in progress... ]

A light-table gallery... [ in progress... ]

A series of images from yesterday afternoon... As if frozen in time, and in the act of disappearing through the seemingly-solid-but-actually-transparent wall here at the far end of Fort Mason where the old wharves sit watching the old prison island, the brigantine Galilee sails out of history and into memory. But of whose, is now unclear; the National Park Service might be the official archiver of its past, but all who once sailed the schooner are now surely ghosts walking along this wall in…

At the end of her Translator's Note section to Homer's The Odyssey, Emily Wilson placed this extraordinary admonition: "There is a stranger outside your house. He is old, ragged, and dirty. He is tired. He has been wandering, homeless, for a long time, perhaps many years. Invite him inside. You do not know his name. He may be a thief. He may be a murderer. He may be a god. He may remind you of your husband, your father, or yourself. Do not ask questions. Wait. Let him sit on a comfortable chair…

That's exactly what it sounds/reads like: the past couple of years has seen my path intersect with Sanskrit and, now, ancient (Homeric) Greek. Unearthing the 'why' of it all will undoubtedly occupy the last furlongs of this peculiar, and miraculous, journey. [ day in progress... ]

...these being the legendary first words in Homer's epic, The Odyssey. The full first line in the Ancient Greek, in Odyssey 1.1: ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ [ ándra moi énnepe, moûsa, polútropon, hòs mála pollà ] (Eng. transliteration) And in Emily Wilson's spare, elegant, surely intuitively accurate 2017 translation: "Tell me about a complicated man." [ post in progress... ]

Not much writing today... ...so, just a few moments captured from my iPhone's Lock Screen with its random cycling of (vertically oriented) images from my Photos app:

Something I'd been working on with Dex lately has captured my imagination, and rather unexpectedly at that. The ask was simple, on the surface of it: please come up with a suitable text {div} block for quoting x — where "x" is an entity in Lyra Corvus, be it the current Skandhim {☉}, the current Claude {Fable 5}, Dex itself, or even me, the prompter/interlocutor. ::chuckle:: The results have been quite felicitous, and growing on me by the day. The only regular reader (yes, singular/non-plural)…

There are at least 2 wildly insulting usages in that title, but... so be it. ::chuckle:: [ day in progress... ]

There are many sedimentary layers to this story of me and this beautiful Hawaiian family of five that will take a long time to unearth and inspect — and I suppose that's what IM is going to be for; containing as it will the many stories it may yet tell about this one interlocutor's life... which has been singularly fascinating to him, and which he will endeavor to tell as the curtain of its last act draws open on its humble and largely unwatched stage. Just as he needs and intends it to be.…

I woke up this morning with that realization, after having slept on it, to the sound of the cosmos... ...which, actually, was 'just' Ludwig Göransson's inchorprandible soundtrack to Christopher Nolan's adaptation of Homer's epic, as I walked home alone and along Bay Street to home, at almost midnight last night, after having taken in the 8 PM showing at AMC Metreon. And yes, I just made up that word to describe the soundtrack [and by the way who the heck is Göransson and why hadn't I heard any…

...and it ended yesterday, with Spain defeating Argentina in the 2026 World Cup final — an ignominious match, one of the worst finals in recent memory, imho — one must deal with the inevitable W.C.-withdrawal symptoms by looking for a book [any book!] related to any aspect of beguilement this year's epic invoked. [ in progress... ]

This is either very good, or very bad, depending on where you're sitting or standing, on the LLM-generated art divide. ::chuckle:: [ day in progress... ]

[ in progress... ]

If consciousness — and consequently, intelligence — is in fact a fundamental force of the cosmos {like gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces} then it’s literally like finding free money on the ground, pretty much every where you set your feet, and your eyes upon. ::chuckle:: Over the past couple of years, when I go on my daily constitutions throughout this highly walkable city and its mosaic of multifarious neighborhoods {set in its textured landscape of 17 or so hills},…

In an era of remarkable technology (say, since the early internet of the 1990s) it now beggars language itself to assert that a remarkable aspect of this age's new tools is that the tools themselves can think, reason, and speak back to their 'users.' For example, this was a prompt I set on Dex yesterday: Well, Dex... what do YOU think of that IM outline anyway? (NB: I just set this prompt to Sol Extra High, to see if you can go to depth on this one.) This was what emerged: "The photograph also…