Aya writes: “it has been a long while since i was so devasted upon finishing a book.” I feel this too. For me the book is a love story. A classic love story where there is no actual consumation of love only longing….

Aya also writes: “i’m curious about the purpose of the place-inside-the-blizzard, that weird gray space that came upon the two doomed travelers as they crossed the ice field” The light and darkness is not balanced by gray but erased … there is no escaping polarity…

I have difficulty telling my left from my right. Handedness is called chirality and the universe is slightly left handed, that means there is a left handed directionality to the universe. In four dimensions there is no chirality – left handed and right handed only exists in three dimensions.

The light the dark the male the female the yin the yang … these are all polarities. Polarities are reflections of one another. In the book it says something like light is the left hand of darkness. Negation connects polarities. Male is not female. What about the third way or the multiplicity…

What is the gender of Genly to the gender of those on Winter? Winter is one of four seasons.

Numbers on winter have a meaning… Perhaps polarity makes us quantitative instead of qualitative.

Transcreation –

What is translation

a) We upload an image

b) There is a classification ml engine that looks at the image and gives it a list of labels and weights

The is the first translation – as Aya says it is Aristotelian – how do we translate an image into language, well with machine learning we create labels with numerical weights that represent probability and or image percentage (like 20% is a dog)

For version 1 – we are just taking the highest ranking label and we are using it to generate 6 images, because it is easier at the moment. We are translating the python scripts into javascript so we can run it on the browser and it will be faster.

d) The project itself s a process of translation from the BigGAN white paper into mathematics linear algebra into python code and then we are translating that into javascript to use on the web.

Another version that involves more javascript ‘translation’ could use more labels and use these labels to generate a mix of images or combined images.

e) What is a GAN – a gan is a machine learning algorithm that trains a model based on a particular set of input data and then generates output data. BIGGan is faster and can manage larger datasets for example.

f) We are taking the label that we found from the image and using that to create 6 result images from the GAN. We are apply a noise function that makes each image that we generate slightly different.

We are doing a seed word from a seed image. (this is Aya now channeling) That in originally we have image based culture and then we have written culture – From images we get words – where do words come from.

Also in Yoga – there is this notion seed mantra – an example of the seed mantra is the Adi Mantra – and within that seed is all the teachings of yoga or everything unfolds from that seed.

Poetry with images

Aya and I are using GANs in an alternative way. It is like the shift from perspective or representation to abstraction. We are using lines but in a different way, not to represent the way something looks but we are using them as a line. Here we are using the machine learning engine not to generate an image of the way the world is but to generate an impression of what words and images together feel like.

Aya and I are going to post this last chapter 10 post and then blog about the rest of the book in one post – I think that is half the book.

Anyway chapter 10. I read it two weeks ago and did not blog. I blame eclipse season.

The chapter is called conversations in Mishnory and that is what it was… it was hearing the way people spoke the language: “foilskin-wrapped packet of money’, ‘Ten are more trust worthy than one’, ‘Sarf.’

There is rumor. A friend of mine said last week that she read that the way to socialize talking again after COVID is to gossip. This chapter is sort of like gossip. It is not the free flow of conversation but the feeling out of conversation, conversation as a dangeous journey and what is the destination? Trust? Safety?

At the end of the Chapter Mr Ai our protagonist is still not sure … he has not ventured to the promised land of conversation’s end.

Mr. Ai says the people he met lacked some quality or dimension of being solid. They did not cast shadows. There is the connection of this with understanding someone’s moral core. Morality always has a shadow. There is no ethic of only always right action – there is only ethic of the balance / the edge of the shadow.

I have been binge reading Gertrude Stein and Gertrude Stein bios (and some Alice B. Toklas).

How do we break out of our dogmatic slumber? This was the question Socrates asked.

For Gertrude Stein language slumbered. She was awakening language from its dogmatic slumber.

“A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”

Perhaps when we speak when we let language sleep, we forget that language engages all the senses, not just our interpretive faculty.

This is the pendulum swinging from language as disenchanted and only symbolic or indexical, to language (also disenchanted) but as sounds and rhythms. There are things in this life that have no meaning beyond their use – money for example.

Language is not just an empty symbol it is just just sensation it is also a cluster of meanings that themselves evoke sensations. Language is an affect machine. Music is an affect machine. Painting is an affect machine. I listen to a Bach Cello Suite, I stand in the sistine chapel, I listen to four quartets and I feel something. Do we both feel the same thing? Not necessarily. That is what it means to have different taste.

What is feeling anyway? If I say that a piece of music makes me feel a certain way, I am overlaying an interpretation on my emotional state (my feeling). The feeling is just an energetic state. Emotion is just energy. There is no causal relationship between a piece of music and my emotions.

But there is an atmosphere. I imagine myself as an electron cloud walking through the world and coming into contact with electron clouds of people and art and machines and animals and plants and the air and the sunlight. When I experience a work of art it affects my atmosphere.

Our electron clouds interact with art, poetry, music, Gertrude Stein in different ways in part because our personal electron clouds are different. They are different because we have different bodies and different histories. My experiences of roses are different than yours. So a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.- but it is a also a rose and it is different from your rose. And if I create a string of words rich with meaning then they will create a different electron cloud in you and me that interacts with your history.

I think of the poetry that I write and I consider it splenic. In is splenic in that it contains the history of human evolution of human preservation. My immediate present – experienced in all its sensorial wonder – is a product of my history. So maybe a rose is scarlet a rose smells of geraniol my rose goes down easy with brie it is natural with some funk. How does its sediment land on your mountain of meaning? What is your archaeology?

Words are machines. Gertrude Stein takes the batteries out of words. She breaks the hammer and reveals its tool-being.