Ha! What Means This Sudden Thrill.....

Extract from The Hasheesh Eater (1857) by the US novelist and journalist Fitz Hugh Ludlow, born on this day in 1836. Cult figure Terence McKenna would describe Ludlow as beginning “a tradition of pharmo-picaresque literature that would find later practitioners in William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson.… Part genius, part madman, Ludlow lies halfway between Captain Ahab and P.T. Barnum, a kind of Mark Twain on hashish. There is a wonderful charm to his free-spirited, pseudoscientific openness as he makes his way into the shifting dunescapes of the world of hashish.” Read the whole book here: https://buff.ly/3glDC33

 

When The Left Overs Are Better Than The Main Course

Are you an Opsimath?
A person who is learning late in life,
for whom the retired life feels like
they are learning for the first time?

I see myself as in that class,
and enjoy the choices open to me:
the people to say 'I know what your life
should be better than you know how to. 
I will live it for you, and leave you
alone to pick over the leftovers...   '
are now long gone, distant relatives.

With patience I wait for others to ask,
before seeking to say to others how to live.
That way, I imagine they will listen.
  

When Painters Piant

For the pleasure in painting
their home becomes their art gallery,
storage space, workshop, and more besides.
They don't watch television - they find it to be 
'visual pollution' because of the careless speed
with which it generates more images that can be processed
where the images are have less aesthetic than expected.
Radio and music do images better, and allow life
to change in it's own time, Painters live like well kepts housee plants
 - aware of the world but most settled in their own envoronment.

Where Are The Scientists?

The 10 % chance of AI exceeding its boundaries
and destroying it's creators sounds fine to me,
My attatchment to my own life is not that strong,
though I can see how annihilation might concern many.

My only worry is all the wildlife that populate the earth
that might also die, which I feel the naturalists and scientists
should be pointing out in the news media, a lot more than they are. 

How Rich Is Your Imagination?

With the new Artificial Intelligence
the 99% can't tell where it is going
beyond that it is driven by P.R.
and the new money owned by the 1%
of the wealthiest earners, in 'the free world' 
 - that conentration alone should be cause
enough for the 99% to be concerned.

Against that is the old human AI - Authenticity
to Integrity where both will change in the everyday
according to the bes of the beliefs, words, and actions, 
which summarise the life in our days as we live them,
even when some integrity is nearer a hypocrisy
that we can only recognise with hindsight. 

The strength of the old AI is that tomorrow
we will be different, and with some humility
we may appreciate the losses as improvement.

More consistent with this old AI
is how immune it is to the extremes of material wealth,
where aspiring to be a money based life form
is aspiring to be measured by the poverty of your imagination. 

Creatively Unwaged (3)

As AI advances on human capabilites
and humans cede control to technology
that collectively it cannot comprehend,
as people will do anything to cheapen
other peoples lives, not comprehending
that their projections might diminish them.
the arts are going to be one of several areas
for rationalisation via costing less, the artists
who really want to create will continue to do so
but for less reward, to the level where their creatively
may still flourish in abundace, but will be unwaged.

Untamed Magnificence - Herstory Indeed

Bessie Smith phographed in 1936  by writer Carl Van Vechen

 'But the stories of her portentious rages, tempestuous love afairs, wind bouts of generosity, epic binges, and not infrequent recourse to devastating fisticuffs - all of which stretch as far back as her public career itself  - leave us with the impression of a totally untamed creature who remained to the end of her days, immune from the restraints of manners or convention.'. - Humphrey Lyttleton on Bessie Smith