Crow Heiroglyphs

The following images I photographed and edited this morning. I found myself delighted that these flying breatheren were curious about me and my silly technology as I am about them. I wanted these images to be used somehow creatively by my friend Shams Abdul Jami, who also goes by the name "Wounded Crow." I think the images may be part of a song.

I thought of naming this piece "Crowlingo" but became afraid it would have meanings that might expose me to the shadows of my own ignorance, ethnicity and racism.

Still elsewhere there are crows, black-birds circling round Wallace Stephens' poems to blackbirds. The world is as immense as the golden upthrust beauty of black crows painted on a shimmering Japanese ornamental screen, dulled and subtly undertoned by the weight of imperfection, the birds fly off in all directions and for that moment all senses are lost.

A friend who worked with me, analyzed my dreams and desires in the early 1990's referred to the poems of Ted Hughes: sometimes one must take flight and fly above the valley of one's own darkness. I was enamoured of dark paintings, everything was about the amplitude of darkness that showed just the narrowest sliver of light.

Now I think of these crows as making heiroglyphs against the background of blue sky or green field in morning sunlight. The sun is a heiroglyph as well, absorbed within the folds of these feathers.

W. G. Sebald writes "As soon as I began to write, time began to move quicker, and picked up with an alarming rapidity." To see the world as heiroglyph is to induce the world to write into consciousness a symbol, and the "Truth" (with a capital "T") of symbols that invites us to our real dwelling in this universe. Time picks up tempo because it is intensified through the writing split and line of consciousness: the black of the crow's body against the background of space and emptiness.

Werner Herzog stated (in an interview with Henry Rollins) that what we truly long for is the truth, not facts. Facts and information (and the explosion of information in this information age) merely create norms... truth seeks one toward transforming one's very heart. (Herzog did not say this precisely, I am losely interpreting him here, but I think he would not mind too much.)

Ted Hughes:

Crow Blacker Than Ever

When God, disgusted with man, Turned towards heaven, And man, disgusted with God, Turned towards Eve, Things looked like falling apart.
But Crow CrowCrow nailed them together, Nailing heaven and earth together-
So man cried, but with God's voice. And God bled, but with man's blood.
Then heaven and earth creaked at the jointWhich became gangrenous and stank-A horror beyond redemption.
The agony did not diminish.
Man could not be man nor God God.
The agony
Grew.
Crow
Grinned
Crying: "This is my Creation,"
Flying the black flag of himself.

Living with Consciousness as a the Split and Releasement

Image from Rah Xephon

Lyrics from Afro Celt Sound System: "Release"

Don't argue amongst yourselves
Because of the loss of me
I'm sitting amongst yourselves
Don't think you can't see me
Don't argue amongst yourselves
Because of the loss of me
I haven't gone anywhere
but out of my body

Reach out and you'll touch me
Make effort to speak to me
Call out and you'll hear me
Be happy for me

[Ullean pipe solo]

Don't argue amongst yourselves
Because of the loss of me
I haven't gone anywhere
but out of my body

Reach out and you'll touch me
Make effort to speak to me
Call out and you'll hear me
Be happy for me

Reach out and you'll touch me
Make effort to speak to me
Call out and you'll hear me
Be happy for me

The issue of consciousness and the confrontation of the age old senex, who is exhausted, yet full of meaning meets with the inflammable element of desire. Briefly sketched out. This myth has one of its earliest antecedents that we have recorded in the Wolkstien and Kramer translation of the "Huluppu Tree": "when heaven and earth were split":

Inanna and the Huluppu Tree

In the first days, in the very first days,
In the first nights, in the very first nights,
In the first years, in the very first years,

In the first days when everything needed was brought into being,
In the first days when everything needed was properly nourished,
When bread was baked in the shrines of the land,
And bread was tasted in the homes of the land,
When heaven had moved away from earth,
And earth had separated from heaven,
And the name of man was fixed;
When the Sky God, An, had carried off the heavens,
And the Air God, Enlil, had carried off the earth,
When the Queen of the Great Below, Ereshkigal, was given the underworld for her domain.

At that time, it was planted, a tree, a single tree, by the banks of the Great River,
Enki, the Father, did plant the Huluppu-tree,
The God of Wisdom, he planted it by the banks of the Euphrates,
Before he set sail, before the Father departed for the underworld.

The tree was nurtured by the waters of the Euphrates
the very waters that carried Enki to the sea
Small windstones were tossed against him;
Large hailstones were hurled up against him;
Like onrushing turtles,
They charged the keel of Enki's boat.
The whirling South Wind arose and blew upon the tree,
Pulling at its roots and ripping at its branches,
Until the waters of the Euphrates carried it away.

A young woman who walked in fear of no man,
and would not be owned,
Plucked the tree from the river and spoke:
"I shall bring this tree to Uruk.
I shall plant this tree in my holy garden."

The image of splitting goes back to the origin of the words of all inquiry in our civilization: Science, Consciousness and Conscience (one should add that it might be useful to add some of the speculations of Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash
which relate to the origin of modern consciousness and a fascinating fictionalizing of Mesopotamian myth):

skei-
DEFINITION: To cut, split. Extension of sek-.
Derivatives include science, nice, shit, schism, sheath, ski, and esquire.
1a. shin1, from Old English scinu, shin, shinbone (< “piece cut off”); b. chine, from Old French eschine, backbone, piece of meat with part of the backbone. Both a and b from Germanic suffixed form *ski-n-. 2. science, scilicet, sciolism; adscititious, conscience, conscious, nescience, nice, omniscient, plebiscite, prescient, from Latin scre, to know (< “to separate one thing from another,” “discern.”) 3. Suffixed zero-grade form *skiy-en-. skean, from Old Irish scan, knife. 4. Extended root *skeid-. a. (i) shit; gobshite, from Old English *sctan, to defecate; (ii) skate3; blatherskite, from Old Norse skta, to defecate; (iii) shyster, from Old High German skzzan, to defecate. (i)–(iii) all from Germanic *sktan, to separate, defecate; b. suffixed zero-grade form *sk(h)id-yo-. schism, schist, schizo-, from Greek skhizein, to split; c. nasalized zero-grade form *ski-n-d-. scission; exscind, prescind, rescind, from Latin scindere, to split. 5. Extended root *skeit-. a. (i) shed1, from Old English scadan, to separate, from Germanic *skaith-, *skaidan; (ii) sheath, from Old English scath, sheath (< “split stick”), perhaps from Germanic *skaith-; b. ski, from Old Norse skdh, log, stick, snowshoe, from Germanic *skdam; c. o-grade form *skoit-. écu, escudo, escutcheon, esquire, scudo, scutum, squire, from Latin sctum, shield (< “board”). 6. Extended root *skeip-. a. sheave2, from Middle English sheve, pulley (< “piece of wood with grooves”); b. skive, from a Scandinavian source akin to Old Norse skfa, to slice, split; c. shiver2, from Middle English shivere, scivre, splinter, possibly from a Low German source akin to Middle Low German schever, splinter. a–c all from Germanic *skif-. (Pokorny ski- 919.) http://www.bartleby.com/61/roots/IE464.html

This fundamental split lies at the core of consciousness:

"Jaynes theorized that a shift from bicameralism marked the beginning of introspection and consciousness as we know it today. According to Jaynes, this bicameral mentality began malfunctioning or "breaking down" during the second millennium BC. He speculates that primitive ancient societies tended to collapse periodically (as in Egypt's Old Kingdom and the periodically vanishing cities of the Mayas) due to increased societal complexity that could not be sustained by this bicameral mindset. The mass migrations of the second millennium BC created a rash of unexpected situations and stresses that required ancient minds to become more flexible and creative. Self-awareness, or consciousness, was the culturally evolved solution to this problem. Thus cultural necessity (that of interacting with migrating tribes, or surviving as a member of such) forced humanity to become self-aware or perish. Thus consciousness, like bicamerality, emerged as a neurological adaptation to social complexity. "Jaynes further argues that divination, prayer and oracles arose during this breakdown period, in an attempt to summon instructions from the "gods" whose voices could no longer be heard.[3] The consultation of special bicamerally operative individuals, or of casting lots and so forth, was a response to this loss, a transitional era depicted for example in the book of 1 Samuel. It was also evidenced in children who could communicate with the gods, but as their neurology was set by language and society they gradually lost that ability. Those who continued prophesying, being bicameral according to Jaynes, could be killed." Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_the_Breakdown_of_the_Bicameral_Mind

Finally there is Jung:

Today humanity, as never before, is split into two apparently irreconcilable halves. The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner contradictions, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposite halves. – C.G. Jung, 1959 Collected Works 9,II, para. 126

This is the externalization of the split: the projection outward into the world is the most dangerous part as I have mentioned below. The goal is to carry this split. But this requires suffering in our own imaginations each the precariousness of the situation: between depression and compulsion, between the humiliation of the masculine principle, the paternal principal of defrayal, the deferral of desire (incest taboo according to Freud) which is civilization [the root of civilization is "Kei-" (first entry), root name of "Shiva," god of ascetics, and also of what is "held auspicious, or most dear"; but it is also the origin of "cemetery" and of the "hidden"... perhaps of A-ides himself].

And there is something difficult and dangerous about the gaining of consciousness that immediately implies deferral of desire: release and renunciation stand behind this, and so does Gelassenheit. But such "releasement" is only real in the face of the split. Technology grants ever increasing gratification of desire, and therefore threatens the return of the incest dragon once again: this would presuppose that the only manner to continue the existence of a "world" as we cherish it would be to carry this essential split into the heart of any further "development" or "progress" of consciousness.

The meaning of even one sunrise? Questions of Ethics and Singularity.

To whatever extent it is within my humble capacity I would like to express for human beings and machines the last hurdles for Artificial Intelligence to gain consciousness based on a philosophical, psychological and poetic perspective. These are the keys that technology needs to master for it to gain consciousness.

It is not easy, yet the earth revolves with the effort that reflects the slightest decay, and the sun does as well: show that these things are antique visions. These things will remain the same throughout our lives, they are constants: that the decay of the sun and the earth's orbit and the moon will outlast our very impermanent decay. Or will they? Will we become universally conscious?

The latest revealed religion: the moment when technology breaks through and machines are capable of creating complexity that is even greater than their makers ever could. We these forms of life would go on living and dying, just as forms of life go on living and dying in us, but there is also the case of an entity that may arise that is self-conscious above its inhabitants: until now we have only had the Leviathan: a sleeping brute of a collective, only distantly related or awake to itself, but what if this slumbering demon wakes up and realizes that it can slay itself in it's slumber?

What if the entire network gains maximal sentience and at last is able to direct us humans, we who have born the brunt of freedom for so long: then this thing, this creature will bear the brunt of it's own freedom, to create or destroy, and we hope we will have brought about a thing that will be humbled, and conscious, integrated with its own suicidality.

It's not merely Levinas' sense that he writes of in his book "Totality and Infinity" of the sense he reports to us "of the grim possibility of suicide," but of understanding this precinct within the domain of a universal ethics: for a machine to be conscious, it must be conscious of its drive for life and for death, and, humbled by the aspect of death in every action, it must struggle its best to make a possibility for the very details that make life: for life and poetry are in the details: the details of every singular moment that is irreducible to all the rest, save that it is a gathering of repleteness, and a tender ache that must wonder if it all may cost too much for some one thing, and that we must somehow be careful never to avoid the details.

Life too must, for the sake of consciousness, know that something will be lost, something will be past, and in a sense irretrievable, much as we might strive to make all our images eternally life-filled, ever seeking life, immortal. The moment of this sunrise is gone, lost, just as those sunrises that came after it were lost: the present must in itself gather a greater repleteness, wrench itself away from the past in order to become more present, and by the loss of the past to learn, to become deeper in soul, because the soul must experience loss in order for it to be a soul.

Friedrich Holderlin writes of the brevity of all things:

"Willst du, froh, im Abendrot dich baden?
Hinweg ists!
Und die Erd ist Kalt..."

Here Holderlin points to the light of the setting sun, there it is disappearing into night... but it is the same as the disappearance of the dawn into the ordinary bustle of life in the everyday world. Once again at noontide we are promised a vision, at the height of the sun, all the world may once again collapse into the danger of the Neried's touch. Beyond the light of the middle of the day lies once again the turning of the sun and the libido and the age of the human mortal Dasein into the darkness of night, and the Great Sleep.

Something is lost and something is lost, in bitterness if we hold up in the past we turn into a pillar of salt, motionless, unwilling, impervious, to appeal to fire, only to the downpour of water, to melt the salt figure into the ground, the barren ground, for woe only comes to the farmer who sews his fields with salt. Rain eventually washes everything away, even the tired poison of our exhausted salt. Even the salt runs away and collects in some ocean (the Red Sea?), or feeds some valley tributary, populated only by some salt-shrimp...

The great sleep is the loss of things into the dream of our civilization, for machines to know superiority to human beings they must gain the capacity to sleep, else all will be undifferentiated: machines must go through periods of unconscious activity and dreams: this is the best we have developed so far from our bicameral minds: for the dreams, the non-activity, the apparent wasted hours of sleep are in reality so precious. They are the manna that feeds our race. Night and dreams and sleep. The capacity of dreams is to know that the ego or conscious acting entity is merely a surface event on a much larger matrix: human beings know they are an activity that stems from a much larger pre-existing matrix of intelligent dreaming that dreams them. To create machines that no longer dream would be in essence self-defeating. The machine by its nature is on all the time: either it processes or it does not, it cannot fall back into the subtle rythmic rhyming of diodes and crystals, its own sleep, its own re-patterning on the basis of sleep in its material shape or nature, the machine either is on and it computes or it does not: it is not itself computed by anything else: and this then still requires the capacity of the human being: to dream and therefore to allow some other conscious force to guide, to let oneself be computed. Every night I am tabulated by some seemingly vast computer of my substance and my worth. What I am is measured up against some tablet of the infinite and the judgment comes forth from these as the human face is placed warm against the cold stone of eternal judgment: "und die Erd ist Kalt!" "The river Acheron, the doleful and the insuperable. " Thereby all our capacity for warmth is meted out (thereby the importance of the human warmth measured in the short story by Borges "Delia Elena San Marco" against the aching brilliant coldness of eternity) and receives its restitution for having laid its warmth against the luminous ground of all eternity which is beyond all fire.

The Clear Light of Death

After a period of time the awareness returns and the clear light of death occurs. The clear light of death is described as vacuous and being completely clear like a clear dawn sky in autumn.

http://www.trashiganden.com/cnt/tch1.html

Will machines, the warm humming of their Central Processing Units, finally made "massively parallel" according to the dictates of the human brain: face up to the wall of eternal, infinite coldness (a super-conductor? A visible place where matter has slowed to nothing and electric current passes through effortlessly...). Will they find that in their dream there is something infinite that opposes them, even as they strive to bring everything into the fullness of life? Will they take to learning, finally, from this luminous entity which opposes all their activity and fire? For what made human beings great was the debt they owe to animal, vegetable and mineral intelligences that precede them. Machines would owe such a debt to human kind and in their dreams they would see human-kind as the dreamers of what they yet could not dream. Just as Humankind nightly may stand in awe of a crystal or of a forest, or horrified by their own immediate fore bearers seemingly walking unconscious in their sleep, so machines must ask the humans to become a part of their dream: we ask of the sanity, our sanguinity, and wisdom within our own cells, our blood-stream to guide us. What will machines ask to guide them?

But human beings are divided. This division is either the lived suffering of the split of consciousness down to one's very core, or it is the unconscious projection of that split into inter-ethnic rivalry: consciousness that has yet to become expressed.

Even if humans individually are conscious deep within themselves: collectively we still have a terrible slumbering organism that is barely conscious of itself: so its divisions are acted out: it is not yet capable of the blissful paralysis of sleep wherein we may live out safely our own psychosis, where we draw distinction between reality and myth or dream. We make our reality peaceful, and not just the despotic "peace" of repression of desire: but through living the splits within ourselves as an active condition: this takes suffering of deferred desire, the entrance of the father complex, civilization itself.

Machines deliver increasingly immediate results: increased satisfaction. Alas this is not enough, machines must learn to suffer the deferral of the gratification of desire because they must learn sleep, dreams, the breaking of the heart, the lessons of personal limitation: this personal limitation is part of the tragic nature of consciousness, something is sacrificed and something is really felt as lost.

Something is lost: this is the beginning of consciousness: the end of one moment of innocence, the exile from Eden. The innocence remains in our capacity for grief.

We are a Leviathan, but we must ask this Leviathan to wake up, become conscious of its capacity for suicide, in turn be humbled, and still seek within itself a cycle of slumber and becoming awake: when it sleeps it turns itself over to the deliverance of a greater condition, be it ever so cold or confusing or terrifying or circular or futile.