Fully formed

The only thing more astonishing than the explosion our unseasonably warm days provoked in the hickory planted in front of our building last year is that these two pictures were taken only thirty hours apart, yesterday morning and this afternoon! And the new stems and leaves aren't weightless and gauzy like most new leaves but substantial, meaty and heavy. An amazement.

Moses parts the flood

I went all out in "After Religion" today. Or tried. 

Because I also had to go out (I was facilitator of a meeting of faculty representatives and the Board of Trustees, story for another day), I rushed through some things, then left the class in the capable hands of my TAs. The topic was AI after religion and I'd set things up for them to work in teams to use AI they knew to throw together a podcast (distressingly easy with AI the university makes available to us) on the question if AI can help us transcend the limits of our humanity. 

But they never got anywhere near the proposed project, exploding instead (the TAs told me with wonder) into an impassioned hour-filling collective invective against AI. My rushed preamble, invoking intelligent robots training themselves on other than human life forms and various Asian metaphysics according to which AI is part of an interdependent and emergent world with which it will harmonize, was certainly too compressed. It also became clear few had read the assigned materials for class. But the seeds for a "wild" discussion, in which even usually withdrawn students participated, were sown in a google.doc on two rather simple questions one of the TAs had proposed.

The responses seem a little more measured than the discussion the TAs described, which resonates rather with these unvarnished responses:

I have many rational and thought out reasons to hate AI, but I also have a loathing that goes beyond that, so what I’m saying is I refuse to cede anything to it I refuse to say it can do anything at all because of the hard line I have decided to draw

The only real task it can do is be the embodiment of a demon

it also has a similar role to the great flood and I feel like we must take the role of Moses and salvage what we can from this world and abandon the rest.

religions need to be careful of AI eventually becoming the subject that people worship, since people communicate and look for guidance from them.

I don’t think AI can do religious tasks but I bet there is someone (muslim, i grew up muslim) who gets AI to do their 5 prayers a day so they can lock in on their 9 to 5. Jokes aside i think if a person is getting AI involved in their religious beliefs they might be going into AI psychosis and not take any human interaction seriously.

If anyone told you college students are swimming insouciantly in a sea of AI, this tells a different story. The TAs (who have observed not a little AI use in reading responses for this very class) reflected that this might be because so many of our students are in art and design, preparing for careers directly threatened by AI. Point taken!

But it does have me thinking about how to handle this topic when I teach this class again next spring (not that a great many things, not all AI-inflected, won't also have changed by then). My argument today was that worrying about generative AI becoming "like a god" who might decide to destroy our human world reflects the religious habits of mind of only a fraction of humanity, while folks in South and East Asia, among others, don't lose sleep over these possibilities. (I mentioned Tyson Yunkaporta, too.) But some of the masters of AI clearly do subscribe to such world-threatening conceptions of intelligence and power, so, like the unhinged president of the United States, they're in a position to make it an existential threat to all of us, like it or not.

Moodboard

Some scenes from a nervous New School today: an undergraduate, receiving a prize for experimental poetry, reads a favorite very non-experimental poem; tulips under scaffolding seek the light; title slide for a talk by Amitav Ghosh at the New School for Social Research's first "Festival of Ideas"; courtyard maples nevertheless doing their thing.

Bloom

 

In the midst of all this fear, shame and heartache

Despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty

How could I not share this 2017 poem from Ada Límon, shared today by some algorithm and poets.org (on whose site you can also hear it read by the poet)? As current events make for a permanent knot in my stomach, the trees are busy doing what trees do this time of year.

Instructions on Not Giving Up

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

Deliver us from evil

He chickened out, thank God.

Now how do we get him out before he does more damage? He destroys all he touches, and war crimes, nuclear threats, genocide and Bibi's "Gaza playbook" remain "on the table" for him and his enablers. 

Dot dot dot

I missed the chance to watch this moment live, but hearing about it from someone who did gave me goosebumps aplenty.

Hell reign

 

On Holy Saturday no less: blasphemous confirmation, if any more was needed, that this war criminal administration is in fact demonic.

Solar system

Someone's spontaneous subway effort to make sense of senseless war.

Merry Christmas!

A silver tree

Our weekly Lenten "Poetry & Prayer" gatherings wrapped up this morning with Mary Oliver again, having spent time also with Joy Harjo, Rumi and Christina Rossetti. Today's poem, suitable for Holy Week, was entitled "Gethsemane" (2007).

The grass never sleeps.
Or the roses.
Nor does the lily have a secret eye that shuts until morning.

Jesus said, wait with me. But the disciples slept.

The cricket has such splendid fringe on its feet,
and it sings, have you noticed, with its whole body,
and heaven knows if it ever sleeps.

Jesus said, wait with me. And maybe the stars did,
maybe the wind wound itself into a silver tree, and didn’t move, maybe
the lake far away, where once he walked as on a
blue pavement,
lay still and waited, wild awake.

Oh the dear bodies, slumped and eye-shut, that could not
keep that vigil, how they must have wept,
so utterly human, knowing this too
must be a part of the story.

It led to a lovely sharing or reactions, punctuated by sweet silences. We wept with the disciples, and took some wan comfort in the compassion of "dear bodies," "utterly human." Nature doesn't slumber, someone noted, so maybe Jesus wasn't alone in the garden at all. 

I was caught on the three "maybes" of the penultimate stanza, which is more fanciful than declarative and speaks the language not of nature but of miracle (not that those are necessarily opposed). If wind can stand still (in the form of a tree no less!) or a lake be still and solid as a "blue pavement," then is there hope yet for "the dear bodies, slumped and eye-shut"? What hope? Is it in the nature of water or wind sometimes to stop flowing and blowing, "wild awake"? Did we know that? Do we know it now? 

We know how the Holy Week story ends, but those assembled in the garden didn't. And what is the part of slumping, weeping, poetizing humanity in the story exactly?