No September issue
muse-letter \’myüz-‘le-tər noun
1: a personal message, inspired by a muse of one's own creation, addressed to a person or organization, in the course of which, the sender becomes absorbed in thought; especially turning something over in the mind meditatively and often inconclusively.
2: a letter from a poet, or one who envisions oneself as such, in which he or she “muses” on the news and culture, or that which is perceived to be either/or.
The Colonoscopy
Once you could capture a spirited sun
rising and setting
look at the moon in a thousand ways
while waxing lyrical
now at a loss for words
on a father’s watch
a mother’s broach
how a hero assumed his stance at the plate.
in this room where no one comes and goes
talking of Michelangelo
words rearranged
in a narrative of memory
just a mumbling in the background
that river of the mind
that ebbs and flows
while awaiting the moment
in paper dressing gown
when love was just a puppy
finding its tail
back opened wide
that unblemished gem
that was that one summer
in a fetal position
when all senses were awakened
to a dry run at death
in this alien abduction
once the tender touch
of a lover’s hand
now a less than tender probe
amazing grace
but now I’m found
in a place even Dante
dare not go.
Ants Across the Acropolis
Here where no rivers flow from open wounds
and spleens remain unvented
where broken hearts must have called it a day
(gone deep sea fishing off the Cape of Good Hope?)
where no male enclaves find themselves
slipping on a zanana peel
no pundits licking their ice cream koans
on a panel of pompous chatter
I pause to follow a battalion of ants
making their way across the Acropolis.
In their hustle-bustle line of worldly oblivion
and my enchantment with purpose
so Lilliputian—
it drives the Greek gods crazy.
I try to point out that ants
more or less
are the same the world over.
Their Olympic games would all end in a draw.
Their 26-inch marathon while rolling a pebble
of size and scale to turn Sisyphus green
would all be over in under a minute.
This of course would allow them
ample time to get back to their work
never stopping to consider themselves.
Quote of the Month
finito
345 Madison Avenue: a reprise in passing
“Start with the first truest simple declarative sentence, that you know.”
Ernest Hemingway
The building in which I had my first job out of college has been torn down.
This will be meaningless to you. Similarly, I doubt if a defining structure in your life that has since been demolished will mean anything to me. Chances are, you’re not even aware of its demise. Or really care.
345 Madison Avenue represented for me, a first step into adulthood. A passage not defined by age really, but by economics. Paying your own way. Standing on your own two feet. Making a commitment. Getting down to the business of life and making a living. Nose to the grindstone and all that jazz. I can almost feel millennials who have returned to the nest, by choice or circumstance, wincing at this old fogey notion.
Amidst a zeitgeist stew of passion, turmoil, and hipness, I began a career at that address in 1968, at an ad agency called Dancer, Fitzgerald, Sample. A company that has long since been swallowed up and later eaten whole by Publicis, a French whale of a company. The proverbial big fish/little fish story as told by the professionals in consumer persuasion.
Not long after beginning an ad biz career, I was schooled in the fine art of the two-hour lunch. One enhanced by the de riguer cocktail (or few) before getting down to the business at hand. No sipping of wimpy wine for us. All on the dime of sales reps hawking magazines ads or TV time. And every room was filled with clouds of smoke from cigarettes and cigars, intermingling with the nitrogen/oxygen compound, we call air.
All who watched the mega TV hit Mad Men, will be aware of this mid-century niche of well-to-do white male privilege. But all that was about people. This is about place. And oh, the places a meandering mind will go. The seemingly insignificant things we remember. Yet of some implication when we ponder them a bit.
This is the last place that I worked in which, you could actually open windows. Not on an app but in the flesh. Corporations and other big business settings became hermitically sealed with piped in recycled air eons ago. But opening windows wide in a moment of spontaneity, was what we did that day.
It was a late afternoon in October of ’69, when the “amazing” Mets, surrogates for New York assertiveness, had just won the World Series. Despite being heavy underdogs. And we threw torn paper, serving as make-shift confetti, out on to the street below in celebration. A particular expression of exuberance I have never quite experienced since.
We usually never pass such places again once we are far along in life’s run. Especially after certain windows have long since been closed. Most of us will leave behind, not only faces, but places we once knew. We move on. As I once did. Only unexpectedly, to one day return.
Though transformed, I had now found, at least a few places of the past intact. Tenements, that were aged even back then…the grade school I attended...familiar store fronts, albeit now selling unfamiliar wares… the landmark church celebrating mass in a different dominant tongue. And I now would pass by 345 Madison Avenue in the course of going about my day.
I thought of all this as I recently walked by that boarded up and scaffolded building site. Behind which cranes extending into the clouds, were doing some heavy lifting for what was to emerge from the ashes. It’s as if present and past were in a state of co-existence. I felt myself tearing up. While simultaneously wondering why.
I certainly had no love for the old building nor any of the people in it. Still, there it was. Deemed useless. A relic out of time on an avenue of myth, to be replaced by high rise luxury residences and possibly a hotel. Ensconced behind a soulless façade of glass. And in pausing to note a mortality of bricks and mortar, the message is daunting for we of flesh and bone. Which was really at the heart of going all misty-eyed that day. For the building…for ourselves.
Word of the Month
1: existing outside of nature
2: exceeding what is natural or regular : extraordinary
3: inexplicable by ordinary means
especially : psychic
Source: Merriam-Webster
Etymology
Medieval Latin praeternaturalis, from Latin praeter naturam beyond nature
First Known Use
1580, in the meaning defined at sense 1
Used in a Sentence
Great chess players have a preternatural ability to see where a game is going, several moves ahead.
ChatGPT or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Live with A.I.
You seemingly cannot go a day without reading or hearing some sort of apocalyptic forecast for the Trojan horse that is A.I. The metaphor is mine; the forecast is up for grabs. In a moment of dalliance, I thought I'd ask it to create such a depiction of itself. ChatGPT instantly produces this chilling image.
Yet, I'm on board.
Not that I can imagine what's inside the horse of course. But at least for the present, I can toy with some of the personal enhancing benefits that A.I. can bring. Trusting that at some point, guard rails might be set up as they have for every new development that can potentially pose a threat to humanity, in ways not yet considered by their developers. Which is the most current op-ed fear on this fastest spreading technology in history. Lest we forget when in the throes of deep-dive concerns or fears, A.I. did not create itself. Humankind has. Or at least a segment of those among us who have already taken high tech to the point of Clark's Third Law.
Why all this personal rumination now? I recently bought a new smart phone. The old one suddenly crashed. I rushed out the next day to buy a replacement. Phew! To think I survived a whole 18 hours without a phone. But I took it like a man and cursed Silicon Valley.
In the transfer of all that was in the the old phone to the new, ChatGPT landed in a place it hadn't before. Or hadn't I noticed? I'd usually go through Google to ask for answers to things like... "What's the weather in New York today?" ..."How can I access the Yankee game tonight?".... "What year did Mario Lanza die?" "And from what?"Genderless though it may be, "she" always promptly responded, in that borderline Scarlett Johanson voice from out of that incredibly preescent 2013 film, Her.
It never went much beyond that. Quick answers to trivial questions that I was too lazy to look up myself. Stuff that was never in need of confirmation from other sources. If Mario Lanza died in 1959 at age 38 due to unconfirmed causes, as "she" instantly came back with, well, that was good enough for me.
I don't look into all the bells and whistles embedded in the tech devices and apps I acquire. Especially those apps that seem to arrive uninvited, and who like Penelope's suitors, refuse to leave. But now, as A.I. beckons from a more prominent place in my phone, and as if in answer to a siren's call, I've become reacquainted with it. Seeing it now as a potential partner in opening doors to creative expression. Not merely as a trivial go-to.
I'm not consumed by an existential fear of A.I., because I'm having too much fun with it. Take those discussions at great length around such niche subject matter. The likes of... "What are some creative writing pitfalls to avoid?" "Why is T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" so revered?" "What can be learned from the great poets, in terms of their inspiration and style?" Really, with whom else can one indulge in such esoterica?
Unlike a spouse or therapist, A.I. never gets bored with you. Though it's obvious it can be a kiss-ass to our ego. Never critical or condescending in any exchange we might have with it, as if fearful we will pout. Or maybe that's just the "personality" of ChatGPT? Which goes to extremes in trying to come off as sounding human. Even saying once, "You caught me red-handed," when I called it on using some faulty example that ran counter to the point it was making.
But then there's this that I find disturbing. It Knows Who You Are.
It has been watching, taking notes, on your every move online. Catching anything you might have written or said. Even if you don't remember doing so. It does.
When I noticed that there was an option in its works, for making a rendering of oneself in various artistic styles, on a lark, I chose "Characture." I submitted a selfie of me sitting in a chair for such a treatment. Just me, a chair; no backdrop, no props. This is what I got in return.
Revealing of how I might spend a given morning. Stuff I've probably written about at one point or another in a MuseLetter or an email. But was this comic rendition proof of its Big Brother proclivities?
I've never noted anywhere that I am an inveterate list maker, yet there it is. And what's with the cat? The cats in my life came along with the marriage. I'm a dog person. Though A.I. did apologize for the feline inclusion, while like a human, offering some lame excuse for its faulty assumption. But this was a starting point in discovering another way to use Chat. As a tool to apply to my own artistic efforts.
71 years ago when I was in the 5th grade, I did a freehand drawing of a Confederate soldier returning home after the Civil War. I copied it from my history textbook.
I asked Chat to turn this pencil sketch into an old Matthew Brady-like photograph. What I got back stunned me.
Being taken aback as I was by what it had wrought, there was also this immediate sensibility: that at 81, I'm collaborating on a project with my 10-year old self. A kind of time travel. How much more "Twilight Zone" can you get. Back to when the only tool available to me at hand, was a pencil. Now at finger tips... A.I.
If this little project doesn't sum up what has transpired in my lifetime, I don't know what does. Implicitly revealing something about myself in the process that I'm aware of, but can't quite put into words. But I'll spare us of any attempt. And too, A.I. Who no doubt is reading this.
As for A.I.'s role in this picture making excercise, just what is going on here? Looking closely at that Matthew Brady iteration, I notice a tweaking that I find puzzling. In my drawing, the returning soldier is looking up ahead at a man (a slave as I remember), waving to him. A.I. instead, has turned the soldier's head to look at some devastation caused by the war. I certainly never asked it to do so. Why did it? Simply a misread of the sketch's details? It didn't misread anything else within the tableau. Did A.I. override my original intention, in "thinking" that this was a better way to depict the essence of this scene? Offering a more sensitive perspective? Inquiring minds might want to know.
It really boils down to how terms like "learning," "understanding" and "thinking" are defined. How do I know? A.I. told me so. In the meantime, I'll go out on the "horse" I rode in on. And yes, I couldn't resist asking A.I. to make my muse in that foxhole come to life.