Tears in Rain...

Ghosts in the Machines...

...Will AI ever learn to love and thereby acquire "sentience"?

...or will humanity lose its' capacity to love and descend into the realms of Automata?

Silence and I

Henry Kendall, "Ogyges"

Stand out swift-footed leaders of the horns 

And draw strong breath, and fill the hollowy cliff

With shocks of clamour, — let the chasm take

The noise of many trumpets, lest the hunt

Should die across the dim Aonian hills,

Nor break through thunder and the surf-white cave

That hems about the old-eyed Ogyges

And bars the sea-wind, rain-wind, and the sea!

Much fierce delight hath old-eyed Ogyges

(A hairless shadow in a lion’s skin)

In tumult, and the gleam of flying spears,

And wild beasts vexed to death; “for,” sayeth he,

“Here lying broken, do I count the days

For every trouble; being like the tree —

The many-wintered father of the trunks

On yonder ridges: wherefore it is well

To feel the dead blood kindling in my veins

At sound of boar or battle; yea to find

A sudden stir, like life, about my feet,

And tingling pulses through this frame of mine

What time the cold clear dayspring, like a bird

Afar off, settles on the frost-bound peaks,

And all the deep blue gorges, darkening down,

Are filled with men and dogs and furious dust!”

So in the time whereof thou weetest well —

The melancholy morning of the World —

He mopes or mumbles, sleeps or shouts for glee,

And shakes his sides — a cavern-hutted King!

But when the ouzel in the gaps at eve

Doth pipe her dreary ditty to the surge

All tumbling in the soft green level light,

He sits as quiet as a thick-mossed rock,

And dreameth in his cold old savage way

Of gliding barges on the wine-dark waves,

And glowing shapes, and sweeter things than sleep,

But chiefly, while the restless twofold bat

Goes flapping round the rainy eaves above,

Where one broad opening letteth in the moon,

He starteth, thinking of that grey-haired man,

His sire: then oftentimes the white-armed child

Of thunder-bearing Jove, young Thebe, comes

And droops above him with her short sweet sighs

For Love distraught — for dear Love’s faded sake

That weeps and sings and weeps itself to death

Because of casual eyes, and lips of frost,

And careless mutterings, and most weary years.

Bethink you, doth the wan Egyptian count

This passion, wasting like an unfed flame,

Of any worth now; seeing that his thighs

Are shrunken to a span and that the blood,

Which used to spin tumultuous down his sides

Of life in leaping moments of desire,

Is drying like a thin and sluggish stream

In withered channels — think you, doth he pause

For golden Thebe and her red young mouth?

Ah, golden Thebe — Thebe, weeping there,

Like some sweet wood-nymph wailing for a rock,

If Octis with the Apollonian face —

That fair-haired prophet of the sun and stars —

Could take a mist and dip it in the West

To clothe thy limbs of shine about with shine

And all the wonder of the amethyst,

He’d do it — kneeling like a slave for thee!

If he could find a dream to comfort thee,

He’d bring it: thinking little of his lore,

But marvelling greatly at those eyes of thine.

Yea, if the Shepherd waiting for thy steps,

Pent down amongst the dank black-weeded rims,

Could shed his life like rain about thy feet,

He’d count it sweetness past all sweets of love

To die by thee — his life’s end in thy sight.

Oh, but he loves the hunt, doth Ogyges!

And therefore should we blow the horn for him:

He, sitting mumbling in his surf-white cave

With helpless feet and alienated eyes,

Should hear the noises nathless dawn by dawn

Which send him wandering swiftly through the days

When like a springing cataract he leapt

From crag to crag, the strongest in the chase

To spear the lion, leopard, or the boar!

Oh, but he loves the hunt; and, while the shouts

Of mighty winds are in this mountained World,

Behold the white bleak woodman, Winter, halts

And bends to him across a beard of snow

For wonder; seeing Summer in his looks

Because of dogs and calls from throats of hair

All in the savage hills of Hyria!

And, through the yellow evenings of the year,

What time September shows her mooned front

And poppies burnt to blackness droop for drouth,

The dear Demeter, splashed from heel to thigh

With spinning vine-blood, often stoops to him

To crush the grape against his wrinkled lips

Which sets him dreaming of the thickening wolves

In darkness, and the sound of moaning seas.

So with the blustering tempest doth he find

A stormy fellowship: for when the North

Comes reeling downwards with a breath like spears,

Where Dryope the lonely sits all night

And holds her sorrow crushed betwixt her palms,

He thinketh mostly of that time of times

When Zeus the Thunderer — broadly-blazing King —

Like some wild comet beautiful but fierce,

Leapt out of cloud and fire and smote the tops

Of black Ogygia with his red right hand,

At which great fragments tumbled to the Deeps —

The mighty fragments of a mountain-land —

And all the World became an awful Sea!

But, being tired, the hairless Ogyges

Best loveth night and dim forgetfulness!

“For,” sayeth he, “to look for sleep is good

When every sleep is as a sleep of death

To men who live, yet know not why they live,

Nor how they live! I have no thought to tell

The people when this time of mine began;

But forest after forest grows and falls,

And rock by rock is wasted with the rime,

While I sit on and wait the end of all;

Here taking every footstep for a sign;

An ancient shadow whiter than the foam!”

 Jan Brueghel the Elder, "Odysseus and Calypso in the caves of Ogygia" (1568–1625)

 

Cease, now cease 

Oh, how for ever unhappy
Ungrateful Dorilla wishes me
Oh, ever more merciless
She brings me to tears
Merciless, she brings me to tears

For me, there is no relief
For me, there is no hope
And the cruel torment and my sorrow
Only death can console

Gradiva Studies...

 

                        Salvador Dali, "Remorse, or Sphinx Embedded in Sand" (1931)

Salvador Dali,  "Scatalogical Object Functioning Symbolically. The Surrealist Shoe" (1931)

Rainer Maria Rilke, "Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes" (1922)

This was the eerie mine of souls.

Like silent silver-ore

they veined its darkness. Between roots

the blood that flows off into humans welled up,

looking dense as porphyry in the dark.

Otherwise, there was no red.

There were cliffs

and unreal forests. Bridges spanning emptiness

and that huge gray blind pool

hanging above its distant floor

like a stormy sky over a landscape.

And between still gentle fields

a pale strip of road unwound.

They came along this road.

In front the slender man in the blue cloak,

mute, impatient, looking straight ahead.

Without chewing, his footsteps ate the road

in big bites; and both his hands hung

heavy and clenched by the pour of his garment

and forgot all about the light lyre,

become like a part of his left hand,

rose tendrils strung in the limbs of an olive.

His mind like two minds.

While his gaze ran ahead, like a dog,

turned, and always came back from the distance

to wait at the next bend–

his hearing stayed close, like a scent.

At times it seemed to reach all the way back

to the movements of the two others

who ought to be following the whole way up.

And sometimes it seemed there was nothing behind him

but the echo of his own steps, the small wind

made by his cloak. And yet

he told himself: they were coming, once;

said it out loud, heard it die away . . .

They were coming. Only they were two

who moved with terrible stillness. Had he been allowed

to turn around just once (wouldn't that look back

mean the disintegration of this whole work,

still to be accomplished) of course he would have seen them,

two dim figures walking silently behind:

the god of journeys and secret tidings,

shining eyes inside the traveler's hood,

the slender wand held out in front of him,

and wings beating in his ankles;

and his left hand held out to: her.

This woman who was loved so much, that from one lyre

more mourning came than from women in mourning;

that a whole world was made from mourning, where

everything was present once again: forest and valley

and road and village, field, river and animal;

and that around this mourning-world, just as

around the other earth, a sun

and a silent star-filled sky wheeled,

a mourning-sky with displaced constellations–:

this woman who was loved so much . . .

But she walked alone, holding the god's hand,

her footsteps hindered by her long graveclothes,

faltering, gentle, and without impatience.

She was inside herself, like a great hope,

and never thought of the man who walked ahead

or the road that climbed back toward life.

She was inside herself. And her being dead

filled her like tremendous depth.

As a fruit is filled with its sweetness and darkness

she was filled with her big death, still so new

that it hadn't been fathomed.

She found herself in a resurrected

virginity; her sex closed

like a young flower at nightfall.

And her hands were so weaned from marriage

that she suffered from the light

god's endlessly still guiding touch

as from too great an intimacy.

She was no longer the blond woman

who sometimes echoed in the poet's songs,

no longer the fragrance, the island of their wide bed,

and no longer the man's to possess.

She was already loosened like long hair

and surrendered like the rain

and issued like massive provisions.

She was already root.

And when all at once the god stopped

her, and with pain in his voice

spoke the words: he has turned around–,

she couldn't grasp this and quietly said: who?

But far off, in front of the bright door

stood someone whose face

had grown unrecognizable. He just stood and watched,

how on this strip of road through the field

the god of secret tidings, with a heartbroken expression,

silently turned to follow the form

already starting back along the same road,

footsteps hindered by long graveclothes,

faltering, gentle, and without impatience.

Margaret Atwood, "Orpheus 1" (1976-1986)

You walked in front of me,

pulling me back out

to the green light that had once

grown fangs and killed me.

I was obedient, but

numb, like an arm

gone to sleep; the return

to time was not my choice.

By then I was used to silence.

Though something stretched between us

like a whisper, like a rope:

my former name,

drawn tight.

You had your old leash

with you, love you might call it,

and your flesh voice.

Before your eyes you held steady

the image of what you wanted

me to become: living again.

It was this hope of yours that kept me following.

I was your hallucination, listening

and floral, and you were singing me:

already new skin was forming on me

within the luminous misty shroud

of my other body; already

there was dirt on my hands and I was thirsty.

I could see only the outline

of your head and shoulders,

black against the cave mouth,

and so could not see your face

at all, when you turned

and called to me because you had

already lost me. The last

I saw of you was a dark oval.

Though I knew how this failure

would hurt you, I had to

fold like a gray moth and let go.

You could not believe I was more than your echo.

Margaret Atwood, "Orpheus 2"

 Orpheus (2)

Whether he will go on singing

or not, knowing what he knows

of the horror of this world:

He was not wandering among meadows

all this time. He was down there

among the mouthless ones, among

those with no fingers, those

whose names are forbidden,

those washed up eaten into

among the gray stones

of the shore where nobody goes

through fear. Those with silence.

He has been trying to sing

love into existence again

and he has failed.

Yet he will continue

to sing, in the stadium

crowded with the already dead

who raise their eyeless faces

to listen to him; while the red flowers

grow up and splatter open

against the walls.

They have cut off both his hands

and soon they will tear

his head from his body in one burst

of furious refusal.

He foresees this. Yet he will go on

singing, and in praise.

To sing is either praise

or defiance. Praise is defiance.

Eurydice Looks Back...

Margaret Atwood,"Eurydice"

He is here, come down to look for you.

It is the song that calls you back,

a song of joy and suffering

equally: a promise:

that things will be different up there

than they were last time.

You would rather have gone on feeling nothing,

emptiness and silence; the stagnant peace

of the deepest sea, which is easier

than the noise and flesh of the surface.

You are used to these blanched dim corridors,

you are used to the king

who passes you without speaking.

The other one is different

and you almost remember him.

He says he is singing to you

because he loves you,

not as you are now,

so chilled and minimal: moving and still

both, like a white curtain blowing

in the draft from a half-opened window

beside a chair on which nobody sits.

He wants you to be what he calls real.

He wants you to stop light.

He wants to feel himself thickening

like a treetrunk or a haunch

and see blood on his eyelids

when he closes them, and the sun beating.

This love of his is not something

he can do if you aren’t there,

but what you knew suddenly as you left your body

cooling and whitening on the lawn

was that you love him anywhere,

even in this land of no memory,

even in this domain of hunger.

You hold love in your hand, a red seed

you had forgotten you were holding.

He has come almost too far.

He cannot believe without seeing,

and it’s dark here.

Go back, you whisper,

but he wants to be fed again

by you. O handful of gauze, little

bandage, handful of cold

air, it is not through him

you will get your freedom.