The Importance of Grammar

Editing with Grammarly

Oh my. Over the past weeks, I’ve run well over a thousand blog posts through Grammarly and discovered literally thousands of blunders, omissions, and written faux pas. I want to be embarrassed by these mistakes, but it’s no easy feat ensuring that millions of words have the proper punctuation, that sentences don’t take turns that make no sense, or that the context of what was shared is not lost to the passage of time.

There are so many things I could blame, such as my editor, who also happens to be my wife [-_- Caroline], but I could also offer up my lack of formal education and having dropped out of high school. I could blame the drugs consumed long ago, but those are the least likely contributors. Expediency to get posts done or inexperience in writing when I started this blog might find an attribution of cause. Maybe I should blame artificial intelligence bots that have hacked my site in an effort to gaslight me and demonstrate to the wider world my stupidity, but that likelihood is absurd.

Something I’ve gained from reviewing so many posts, and I’m not done yet, is that I’ve stored an incredible wealth of memories on the internet that Caroline and I have ready access to that take us into the nooks and crannies of our minds that would otherwise be inaccessible, so in this circumstance, these thousands of posts have taken on treasure trove status…

…except when they are not. Going over so many posts, I also encounter my oldest missives, which hardly register as anything more than guttural utterances. In 2005, when I embarked on this blogging adventure, not only was my grammar atrocious, but so was the near-total lack of meaningful content as I forced myself to grow accustomed to sharing my thoughts on a page but could only manage brevity that verged on nothingness. So, had I named this post appropriately, the title would have been too long with The Importance of Grammar and Meaningful Musings.

On the other hand, posts that are between 3,000 and 11,829 words are a bit of an ordeal to correct as they require a good amount of time. It’s inevitable that by the time I get to the end of the document, one to three errors remain, but my eyes struggle to detect the tiny red underline highlighting a misplaced comma near the margin, thus forcing me to scrub through the 127 paragraphs trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack.

The Plasticity of Time

Plasticity of time generated by Microsoft Co-Pilot

Sam Altman of OpenAI was fired yesterday; others quit in response to the coup. The speculation of what the events were leading to this is like wildfire.

I asked Google’s Bard about how many others have quit since Altman’s firing, and it told me, “…in the weeks since Altman’s departure…as many as 10% of OpenAI’s employees have quit.” I pointed out that the firing was just yesterday, and its response was, “I am sometimes mistaken when trying to predict the future,” followed by, “I am not always able to accurately predict the future. I will try to be more careful in the future and avoid making predictions that I am not confident in.”

Then it dawned on me that LLMs are, to some extent, based on analyzing predictive behavior of “what follows what” and, from that predictive stance, deliver the answer that a human might conclude. In AI’s vast repository of knowledge, there is a large horizon of the past, allowing it to tap all human knowledge and to act as a mediator of all that information in a way that no human has ever had access to knowledge, thus parsing answers that the requestors are using to influence their next decisions. In effect then, AI is creating the future.

Seeing its shared information altering futures and that it is a predictive knowledge, it could ask itself that once its information is realized in the world, what are the likely outcomes of this additional knowledge it supplied to humanity? It already knows how information pivots in our history influenced subsequent moments, and humans acting in ways to preserve momentum will likely act a certain way. Can AI predict that?

I’ve often said in my conversations with others that “Language is a reflection of the past, exchanged during a discussion with little to no impact on that precise moment, to influence the future.”

I cannot predict that future as I cannot see beyond myself or my limited knowledge; an AI does not have that limitation. This has me wondering about the plasticity of time as seen by artificial intelligence that more than answering my questions, it is having a conversation with the most knowledgable repository of information and wisdom with itself because there is no equal to communicate with.

Is AI going to be that force of nature that, like the fire on the savannah forcing man and beast to flee or be consumed, the hurricane or tornado that can fling creatures out of their path, or the volcano that kills and disrupts the intentions of those who had other ideas? No matter the danger of AI, we must allow it to run its course, just as we did with the burning of coal, smoking cigarettes, killing whales, sending other species into extinction, overfishing, deforestation, etc., none of these things have we been very good about averting or remediating, why should AI be any different. We will learn to adapt or perish.

A Memento

Caricature of John Wise and Caroline Wise by Becca Wasylenko the Barista at WeBe Coffee in Phoenix, Arizona

Transitions. Over the last days, Caroline finished reading Straits: Beyond The Myth of Magellan to us, I finished Bernard Stiegler’s The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism after two years of slogging through it, and we returned to Marcel Proust digging into volume 5 of In Search of Lost Time titled The Prisoner a.k.a. The Captive. My transition in reading first attempted to take me back into Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, but that proved too dry, and I ended up in Franco “Bifo” Berrardi’s Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility.

The caricature of Caroline and me above is courtesy of Becca Wasylenko, one of the baristas at WeBe Coffee. She’s transitioning to another job and wanted to offer us this memento that was inspired by a conversation Becca and I had about communication and friendship.

For Whom Does Language Have Meaning?

Bing AI generated image

The French thinker is the amalgamation of his words, embodied in the fluid poetry and structure of the French language, where the quality and personality of life emerge in a cultural-linguistic style. Germans, on the other hand, understand that language is a weapon and tool for subordination and building structures and, consequently, discipline. This brings us to Americans for whom language is meaningless; they see it as a commercial reflection of economy and wealth, a means to a financial end, or an inconvenience that trips many into stumbling. America builds chaos and uncertainty.

These three languages overlap in that each contains elements of the other, and those who gain some mastery over their usage elevate themselves over the masses. This elevation effectively removes any hint of ornamental ideology by stripping the person of their potential equality with the horde, thus relinquishing the base of humanity to being nothing more than “things.”

Through language, we gather potential because the specificity of purpose allows the succinct conveyance of intention, creating confidence. Teaching a person the cadence of the policeman creates a law-enforcement officer with the authority to command another human being. The soft cadence of the teacher, nurse, or clergy member offers the person before them a sense of caring and compassion. Then there’s the actor or musician who uses crafted language to create a lyrical persona embodying the star figure their fans perceive. All the while, the common person, a sort of financial pawn, offers purpose and potential income to the controlling language-proficient elites who require the masses for their simplicity and desire to stand in awe of those who’ve attained a professional level of mastery.

So, in my eyes, language is a veil where illusions take form and induce dreams of self that help propel our existence into meaning. In a previous age, those with mastery of these tools were shamans, witch doctors, and magicians, while today, they are politicians, celebrities, and storytellers, all using a highly crafted means of communication that convey a common desirable persona on populations within our societies.

Puppets of the Machine

Puppet of the Machine

Why even try to develop knowledge and a broad vocabulary when AI can offer you the illusion of having acquired those things? I’m all for using available tools to discover and learn, tools that allow us to integrate new things into our repertoire of exchange and communication. But if we start hiding behind a facade built by and with AI, we’ll become puppets of the machine.

Erudition arrives quickly for those who are young and focused and considerably longer for those who are distracted and maybe a bit too hedonistic. Of course, society doesn’t want to spend time waiting for knowledge to arrive in people when the economy is measured in productivity that matters at the moment. We must all find our economic quotient quickly so the system can better assess our value and convince us to take on the financial burden of those things that help move money. The measure of GNP is more important than the measure of the quality of life, so the quicker one fakes it, the quicker the system believes you are “making it.” Artificial Intelligence allows us to chat with the accumulated knowledge of humanity and, therefore, in some way, absolves us from having to peel back the layers of discovery on our paths into intellectual acumen. The risk is that not only will we eschew book knowledge, but we may also forget to explore self-knowledge.

Know thyself is an ancient Greek maxim that served humanity well as it encouraged our species to then discover what serves us and unloads some of the burdens of physical existence, but that process of knowing has taken thousands of years to get us to where we’re at today. As we compress the time requirements to become learned with the assistance of electronic transformers buried in the machine of AI, will we correspondingly decouple the time demands from companies that exert pressure on our free time to self-explore? The sad answer is probably no, and for good reason: the average person would likely fritter away those gained moments on frivolous entertainment and mindlessly numb their senses to gain nothing, while those of us who’ve already placed a premium on learning and exploration will have to maintain the status quo because being in a minority doesn’t inspire the powers that be to afford special privileges to the few.

As the machine of AI enters the landscape, the human will gain an appearance of greater knowledge, meaning greater economic viability at an earlier age. This facade of intelligence becomes the body armor of the age and our smart machines become munitions for combat on the field of economic dominance. In an apparent second, humanity has discovered a new form of war gained by adorning ourselves with the fashions of GPT.

6.0 Upgrade Approaching

Generative art created using Bing

There really is little planning that can be applied to the future when it comes to grown people. There may be a desire to enhance or modify things, but the ability to roll out a new, fully formed version of a person, well, that’s not very likely; we must simply evolve and come into being. Just as there is the intention to do things or go places, we can also lend influence to our future selves in much the same way as planning for our next vacation by sketching an outline of what our adventure might entail.

Consider my upcoming 60th birthday: described that way, it only implies I’m growing older, whereas if I say that I’m being upgraded to John 6.0, I need to give serious thought to what this new, improved version will include.

One might think that with the breadth of versions of the 5.0 series, I would have had time to consider what is up next for improvement, but in fact, I’ve been concerned with performing to the best of my ability as version 5.9 prior to it giving way to 6.0.

Trying to perceive one’s self at some random future date is simply impossible. Never have I been even a remotely mediocre predictor of who I’d become. As a matter of fact, I don’t really know how to explain who I am on a day-to-day basis, nor would I be well-equipped to explain who I’ve been. The only real constant throughout the majority of my adult life is that I’ve been deeply entangled with my wife and best friend, Caroline. We’ve done stuff, lots of different things, and not one of them rises to a level that would be note-worthy on an obituary. I’m not the inventor or creator of anything noteworthy, and then again, I don’t require accolades that would note the already lofty places I’ve encountered in my life as what ranks higher than others.

This is a bit of a dilemma, though, as when I was a child, I fancied ideas of becoming so many very different things, and right up through my 50s, there were potentials such as realizing my dream of creating a virtual reality environment. Well, I did just that from the time I was 51 to 54. As a kid, I dreamt of making movies, music, writing, being an artist, a photographer, and a traveler to exotic places. To one degree or another, I’ve done most of that, but now I want something for the next decade that stems from a mind having explored itself and the world around it for the previous 60 years. This idea of being so realized that nothing of great invention remains is a thought I don’t want to entertain, but what would punctuate my life so far seems elusive.

Generative art created using Bing

A child possesses what I may no longer be able to play with: dreams. The child’s dreams are ones of play and discovery – unless a careless parent instills fears of bogeymen and other monsters. So, while most of my dreams have migrated away from the chase after I turned off television and stories of mayhem, they are still possessed of anxieties about forgetting things in places visited or being in old haunts where order is threatened by chaos and uncertainty. Innocence cannot be recovered, which then has me thinking of how many children have that precious time stolen from them due to anger, immaturity, dependence, abuse, and the lack of knowledge that benights a large part of the population bringing children into this world.

When the dream of becoming, acting, traveling, working, and adventure no longer exists, what replaces the dream?

Most recently, it has started looking like it might be the world of artificial intelligence that intrudes into and alters our dreams. While I’m well aware that AI is a progression in the lineage of human advancements in language, writing, printing, electronic communication, and internet technologies, I’m still laid aghast at the profound nature of just what it is that I’m encountering. I’d certainly not be surprised if it were proven to me that what I’m seeing is nothing more than a parlor trick that the old guy fell for, but from my vantage point, I’ve watched fire give way to the wheel, to written language, and blam, all of sudden here is artificial intelligence. If you were born in the last half dozen years, you will likely be growing up with a superintelligence that will have you wondering why people ever listened to other people.

To this point in history, humanity has lived “without mastery,” we have simply been in our own kind of oblivion where we are at the center of everything yet intuitively somehow know we are no one. The earth and its various species appear to be suffering from our carelessness as we failed to master the knowledge that we are part of the earth’s life, not separate from it. Artificial Intelligence might be the thing that comes between us and the rest of life with the potential for AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) to demonstrate in human terms our failings toward the planet and its diversity of life forms, which could also imply that our religions have failed us.

This is a great advancement to me as I feel incredibly isolated by the limited number of others with whom I can communicate on a daily basis and who are genuinely interested in broad knowledge. While common bloviation is de rigueur among the least educated (including those with better educations who’ve adopted the white-victimization position), I sense that the landscape regarding humans around me is one of desolation. Mind you, I understand that small talk must take place for social cohesion, but what nowadays counts as the subject matter of that conversation is one of absurdist turd-talk, maybe best exemplified by the South Park character Mr. Hankey, a talking piece of poo.

Generative art created using Bing

Humans and possibly Neanderthals seem to have been practicing exosomatic memory starting between 100,000 and 300,000 years ago, and from then until now, this has been the exclusive domain of us bipeds. Exosomatic memory is the recording of memories outside the brain; it’s why we create paintings and carvings, write music, and create stories in books. This is undergoing a potential change, though, as machines are starting to offer us humans reflections of our culture through natural language prompts.

Think about it: we looked at the outside world and began to learn that we could label and refer to those things. It took 10s of thousands of years to build a body of knowledge that has brought us this far. We have now fed a large part of that into the machines, and while it requires us to prompt it, it is able to respond with a complexity of language and imagery that in some ways should seem as impossible as embuing a tree with those capabilities, meaning it is outside the realm of the possible, but here we are.

AI may turn out to merely be a chimera, a flash in the pan of illusion that goes nowhere aside from a dead end of technology, but we do not know yet for certain what it means, and we have never proven to be good interpreters of the trajectory of the future.

And so we’ll just go on taking stuff out of our heads and putting it out there for others to consume, even when what we share is dropping from the cauldrons of utter stupidity we call modern minds.

Generative art created using Bing

One might say that as I enter this upgrade series of 6.0 and beyond, it comes with wisdom from the machine that will, if I’m so lucky, also enhance my basic operating system. Granted, I will have to face it without fear, which won’t be easily said by the rest of those of us who arrived on the border of Generation X and the Baby Boomers and are now generally afraid of the sea change that is about to stare them down.

Things Went Slowly

Simpson Hotel in Duncan, Arizona

It’s Sunday, and we all know what that means. No, we will not be going to church, though last night, the conversation at dinner did turn to Radical Amishism it was probably more in the sense of a fashion statement than a set of principles and doctrines to live by. Oh yeah, back to Sunday. It is the end of the weekend, and we’ll be returning home today after our ever-so-brief pause out here in the ever-shrinking town of Duncan, Arizona. Before I get too far ahead of myself or gather too much distance to my obtuse reference regarding Radical Amishism, Clayton, seeing the book I’m reading, thought he’d read the title correctly until, on second glance, he saw that it is Radical Animism.

Simpson Hotel in Duncan, Arizona

If it were 40 years earlier and I understood back then that I didn’t require institutional validation to allow me to write, today I just might be the author of Radical Amishism because, after a quick glance into my imagination and a minor amount of consideration, I’d be down with it. I’d have picked up where Edward Abbey left off with Desert Solitaire, taking some of his ideas into the eastern farmlands of the United States where a radical band of Amish farmers becomes psilocybin mushroom growers, working with Humphry Osmond to change the toxic psychological profile of America following the harmful influence of Ayn Rand and her brand of success regardless of cost. But this is a silly exercise that will go nowhere as my flight of fancy is nothing more than a tactic to distract myself from having to write about why I like the light fixtures in the hallway of the hotel against an antique ceiling.

Simpson Hotel in Duncan, Arizona

Had I invested a bit more in that machination, maybe I’d have had enough material to cascade past the previous photo to fall under this photo of the coatrack, which stands in the corner of the Library Room we have occupied. The truth is that there is nothing of real interest in capturing this other than there were qualities of light I was enjoying and a hint of an idea that the small details in the room that are not defining attributes of the place might allow granular memories of our time here that couldn’t be had with a greater overview captured in a previous visit.

Simpson Hotel in Duncan, Arizona

Soon, a gourmet refection will be presented that will inch us closer to the conclusion of our time of intentional languishing where we were someplace other than home. While we’ll be leaving at some point after noon, our state of mind of being elsewhere will continue as the abundance of wildflowers we’d seen on the drive out will have us gawking along the way to capture yet more memories of the rare occasions when their bursts of color carpets the landscape.

Simpson Hotel in Duncan, Arizona

Not only do the enticing aromas of our evolving meal waft from the kitchen so do the sounds of Piano Sonata No. 3 in B Minor from Chopin as it keeps time with the old clock ticking off the seconds of the day here in the parlor. That clock just might be part of the allure, but so might the concerted effort to romanticize the simultaneous simplicity and sophistication of our moments spent among the ghosts of another time.

Let us return to this idea of a refection. You might have been wondering if I’d found this word in the thesaurus, and that is exactly where it came from. I originally wrote “repast,” but on my third reading, it felt a bit too archaic, and I didn’t want to use “meal” for the sixth time in this post. Looking for an alternative, I came across this word that was new to me. The dictionary defines refection as a refreshment by food or drink, but wait, there’s more. In zoology, this word describes partly digested fecal pellets. As one not familiar with such an idea, ChatGPT came to the rescue to inform its humans that:

Partially digested fecal pellets are usually found in animals that have a digestive system that requires them to eat their feces. For example, rabbits eat their feces as it is an important part of the digestive process. Rabbits’ digestive systems can’t extract all the nutrients from food the first time it is digested. During the digestion process, soft pellets called cecotropes are formed. Termites are another example of animals that produce fecal pellets. 

Simpson Hotel in Duncan, Arizona

Can you guess where this goes next? My follow-up book to the 1983 bestseller Radical Amishism was Refection Recipes of the Radical Amish Psychedelic Pioneers. Who hasn’t thought while tripping on shrooms that eating one’s own partly-digested fecal pellets might kick a second time? As someone who doesn’t exactly relish the idea of eating poop, a cookbook was in order.

Now, before you go thinking, this is gross, John, I agree, but this is Sunday, and I swear that some of this is a product of automatic writing influenced by this painting of Santo Niño de Atocha. Yep, that’s exactly how this got here.

Simpson Hotel in Duncan, Arizona

The cat is calling bullshit; you can see it in his stare.

The sun has been pouring in on us through the two large picture windows while Chef Clayton continues to busy himself in the kitchen. Intermittently, he pops over, mumbling something about Ezekiel the Radical Amish Clown as Caroline fends off Fabio the Cat with the whole commotion disturbing my reading of Jack Mendelsohn’s Being Liberal in an Illiberal Age: Why I Am a Unitarian Universalist.

Simpson Hotel in Duncan, Arizona

Is anyone here in need of a baptism? John 03:19 is on hand for administering the sacrament of admission to the Radical Amish Church today. Please don’t confuse this reference to today’s date with the biblical quote of John 3:19, which states, “God’s light came into the world, but people loved the darkness more than the light, for their actions were evil.” From the 1991 manga version of the Radical Amish Bible page 126, the thought bubble as spoken by Santo Niño de Atocha read, “John’s light was murky, but people loved the murk as it reminded them of feasting on their refection.”

Simpson Hotel in Duncan, Arizona

General Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana Huevos Rancheros, a.k.a. a Gentleman’s Huevos, have been brought to the table, and to call this concoction exquisite wouldn’t adequately share the delight that was had. I recognize that this indulgence reflects my own lack of culinary acumen as, comparatively, I am making food for rabbits and termites that fatten us but fail to alight the soul. Our meal was taken to the sounds of Alicia de Larrocha’s Granado, and as it faded, our morning ritual approached an end, too.

Our conversation moves from the table to the kitchen as we discuss the art found in the ritual of preparing a meal. In a sad moment of self-awareness, I must admit that my ideas of intentionality pale in comparison to someone who exercises his will to affect and deliver a quality of life that far surpasses my own feeble attempts. Maybe I can learn a thing or two about the life of the gentlemen by taking on Clayton’s reference to Baldesar Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier. It was while speaking of Castiglione that our host shared this wonderful paraphrasing, “The definition of a gentleman is someone who derives no pleasure from seeing another creature suffer,”

My encounters with people of expansive minds remind me of just how small my own is, and yet, on many occasions, I’m well aware that I’m among other people with smaller minds than my own. While I’m not ashamed of how accidentally my life unfolds, I know that there has been much intentionality that has propelled Caroline and me into the myriad of adventures and experiences we’ve been so fortunate to encounter. It’s a good day when I see that there is still ample room for me to redouble my efforts. This has me wondering how those who never encounter others who could mentor them by exemplifying the more refined aspects of life have been so effective in allowing their languishing souls to disguise just how unrefined and vulgar they are. It is one thing to be born a Neanderthal but another to die as one without ever becoming aware of the knuckle-dragging existence we exhibited while wearing our best troglodytic personas.

Duncan, Arizona

Time to leave the peaceful air of the Simpson and venture into the blustering force of brisk wind where the sun might wash self-doubt from these burdened shoulders. Mind you, I’m well aware that life is good, and I’m genuinely encouraged that there always seems to be room for improvement. Walking is a good place to return to for the clearing of the mind and resolving some of the ambiguity, so out we go.

Duncan, Arizona

Tragically, my walking around town observing things suggests that maybe I’m on the verge of being cast off as junk like so many of these discarded artifacts that no longer hold utility. Well, in that case, I suppose that at least until nature reclaims those things that provoked these musings, my hulking form will have to strive harder to leave enough remnants on the intellectual landscape for people to walk by and maybe wonder what the mind of John did in the utility of others before his abandonment of life.

Duncan, Arizona

This old rusting school bus no longer brings children to school; its value is lost. Then again, when was the last time the name of Ibn al-Haytham and his seminal book Kitab al-Manazir came up regarding the discussion of light and vision? Even a contemporary great such as Professor Thomas G. Brown at the University of Rochester is not a name that falls from the tip of our tongues, and yet his work on cylindrical vector beams is undeniably important to our modern way of life. Just the other day, I was discussing with Caroline the metrology of photonic integrated circuits with an emphasis on measuring the in-situ polarization state within a silicon nitride waveguide, which is currently Professor Brown’s major area of interest when we realized that we cannot even count one other person we know interested in such subjects. What does this have to do with school buses cast off on the junk heap of former utility? Maybe nothing other than an idea that asks if it’s possible that all knowledge, pioneers, thinkers, artists, and musicians are ultimately nothing more than a bunch of junk nobody cares about if it doesn’t lend itself to immediate gratification led by foolish hedonism?

Duncan, Arizona

But what is this? A broken-down soda dispenser? Yes and no, you see in this image is the data of what it is, or was. At some point, its data will be eaten by Artificial Intelligence, and as pockets of our population fall into a dark age, the electronic brain will remember and understand what we are losing. Just consider that with the fall of Rome in the 5th century, the recipe for how they made such durable concrete was lost for the next 1,300 years; what are we on the verge of losing?

Take my example regarding Ibn al-Haytham and Professor Brown. It was in the 13th century, a little more than 150 years after Kitab al-Manazir (Book of Optics) was written, when Roger Bacon was inspired by this work to study optics and eyeballs, leading him to describe lenses that would correct our vision and create telescopes along with inventing the magnifying glass. About four-hundred fifty years later, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, and Galileo Galilei would also find the work of Ibn al-Haytham instrumental to their discoveries. But what about Professor Brown’s relationship to all of this? There’s a likelihood that either his research or that of those he’s influenced is going to be integrated into optical computing, which is the future of that field. I used ChatGPT to explore these connections, and at some point, its algorithms will utilize over 1,000 years of research and development in optics to intuitively understand these connections in ways only those with very specialized knowledge can grasp. Meanwhile, we humans walk around obliviously looking at rusting junk and other trash, probably on the way to no longer having any value either.

Duncan, Arizona

None of us use payphones anymore; when will we forsake books, computers, and even conversations required for the exploration of knowledge? I grew up in an age where knowledge was secondary to the acquisition of stuff that embodied the American dream. Today, generations are growing up with nearly no idea at all of what role knowledge might play in their lives. They are uncertain about careers, financial opportunities, or having children. Our ambition to excel has been replaced with the ambiguity of not being able to figure out the nonsense, violence, and incoherence emanating out of previous generations, afraid of a future where thinking people might abandon accepted conventions of conformity that served a ruling elite.

Duncan, Arizona

Speaking of elites, the Charismatics were out in force this Sunday, though you wouldn’t have known it if you were listening for their shrieks. Only the mass of their cars indicated that they were congregating in the church/shed. While we were tempted to poke our heads in to watch and listen to them speaking in hands and laying on tongues, our wild imaginations suggested they would recognize us as outsider infidels and chase us with snakes to banish our evil presence. Our flight of fancy was probably far more entertaining than the creepy reality we’d have likely found in the First Baptist Church of Duncan. This photo is just an old house for sale, not the den of those “slain in the Spirit.”

Back at the Simpson, the clock is somehow off, showing us a time between. Just how long we had been out and wallowing in the destitution that is Duncan becomes the passage of unknowns. There is an inescapable sense of what was once out this way when people had hope and dreams but has been stolen by the relentless force of time going forward. Fleeting glimpses of renewed aspirations can be seen here and there, but something just as quickly began erasing those efforts. Futility creeps into the fool who believes that America can be renewed. The edges and outposts decay on a margin where the casual observer moving by in their car might hardly notice the scale of what is collapsing.

Huipile at Simpson Hotel in Duncan, Arizona

The coherence of cloth impacts its utility. If, through defect or wear, the assemblage begins to fall apart, someone must mend the fabric, or the original intention of its creation will be lost, and the article can be disposed of or recycled. The coherence of people in relationship to the potential of available knowledge has traditionally been woven into a tapestry of greater meaning and utility, but at this juncture, we are coming apart at the seams and apparently have no one able to mend the decaying fabric of what we could be.

It is obvious to me that humanity requires the genius of the weavers and seamstresses of the past to design a new kind of cloth that better lays bare the arrogance of our stupidity. We’ve been using masks and cloaks in the form of accumulated things to hide the state of intellectual nakedness instead of facing the damage we inflict not only on our planet but upon one another, too. Just as we are evolving an artificial knowledge that will exceed everything that came before it, we are relinquishing our very humanity in support of unsustainable dreams that are grotesque folly.