The Uncertain Sum of Definite Parts

[Image: “I dreamed about a human being,” by Fran Simó (original on Flickr; used under Creative Commons license. For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

The Life of a Day

Like people or dogs, each day is unique and has its own personality quirks which can easily be seen if you look closely. But there are so few days as compared to people, not to mention dogs, that it would be surprising if a day were not a hundred times more interesting than most people. But usually they just pass, mostly unnoticed, unless they are wildly nice, like autumn ones full of red maple trees and hazy sunlight, or if they are grimly awful ones in a winter blizzard that kills the lost traveler and bunches of cattle. For some reason we like to see days pass, even though most of us claim we don’t want to reach our last one for a long time. We examine each day before us with barely a glance and say, no, this isn’t one I’ve been looking for, and wait in a bored sort of way for the next, when, we are convinced, our lives will start for real. Meanwhile, this day is going by perfectly well-adjusted, as some days are, with the right amounts of sunlight and shade, and a light breeze scented with a perfume made from the mixture of fallen apples, corn stubble, dry oak leaves, and the faint odor of last night’s meandering skunk.

(Tom Hennen [source])

…and (italicized portion):

The brain’s dynamo runs millions of jobs, by mixing chemicals, oscillations, synchronized rhythms, and who knows what else. It is like looking at a mosaic or a pointillist painting in motion. Study the whole and the parts disappear; study the parts and the whole disappears. Maybe stronger brains will solve that problem in future days. I believe consciousness is brazenly physical, a raucous mirage the brain creates to help us survive. But I also sense the universe is magical, greater than the sum of its parts, which I don’t attribute to a governing god, but simply to the surprising, ecstatic, frightening everyday reality we all know. Ultimately, I find consciousness a fascinating predicament for matter to get into.

(Diane Ackerman [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Touch Gallery: Joan of Arc

The sculptures in this gallery have been
carefully treated with a protective wax
so that visitors may touch them.
—exhibitions, the art institute
of chicago

Stone soldier, it’s okay now.
I’ve removed my rings, my watch, my bracelets.

I’m allowed, brave girl,
to touch you here, where the mail covers your throat,
your full neck, down your shoulders
to here, where raised unlatchable buckles
mock-fasten your plated armor.

Nothing peels from you.

Your skin gleams like the silver earrings
you do not wear.

Above you, museum windows gleam October.
Above you, high gold leaves flinch in the garden,

but the flat immovable leaves entwined in your hair to crown you
go through what my fingers can’t.
I want you to have a mind I can turn in my hands.

You have a smooth and upturned chin,
cold cheeks, unbruisable eyes,
and hair as grooved as fig skin.

It’s October, but it’s not October
behind your ears, which don’t hint
of dark birds moving overhead,
or of the blush and canary leaves

emptying themselves
in slow spasms
into shallow hedgerows.

Still bride of your own armor,
bride of your own blind eyes,
this isn’t an appeal.

If I could I would let your hair down
and make your ears disappear.

Your head at my shoulder, my fingers on your lips—

as if the cool of your stone curls were the cool
of an evening—
as if you were about to eat salt from my hand.

Mary Szybist [source]

…and:

Falling Water
(excerpt)

Suppose we use a lifetime as a measure of the world
As it exists for one. Then half of mine has ended,
While the fragment which has recently come to be
Contains no vantage point from which to see it whole.
I think that people are the sum of their illusions,
That the cares that make them difficult to see
Are eased by distance, with their errors blending
In an intricate harmony, their truths abiding
In a subtle “spark” or psyche (each incomparable,
Yet each the same as all the others) and their
Disparate careers all joined together in a tangled
Moral vision whose intense, meandering design
Seems lightened by a pure simplicity of feeling,
As in grief, or in the pathos of a life
Cut off by loneliness, indifference or hate,
Because the most important thing is human happiness—
Not in the sense of private satisfactions, but of
Lives that realize themselves in ordinary terms
And with the quiet inconsistencies that make them real.
The whole transcends its tensions, like the intimate
Reflections on the day that came at evening, whose
Significance was usually overlooked, or misunderstood,
Because the facts were almost always unexceptional.

(John Koethe [source])

…and:

[Starliner] neighborhoods like SloGo, see, have something like real character. The wide corridors are flanked by raised walkways along the sides. These walkways are not carpeted, they don’t simulate hardwood or tile: to all appearances, and maybe in fact, they’re hewn or assembled from rock — irregular, cobbled surfaces — a tactile pleasure to walk on. Here in SloGo, they’ve even planted small trees every ten-fifteen meters. Their trunks poke up through the walkways, and their branches broaden and spread, intertwining, along the ceiling. You can walk for quite a few steps without encountering undappled direct lighting and casting sharp shadows. They’ve monkeyed somehow with the air here, too; it’s warm and damp, stirred by artificial breezes from time to time, and carries faint aromas of rain, of food being cooked, of human bodies in motion.

We’re hardly the only people walking around down here, either. If I wanted, and had time, I could lean up against one of these walls, in a shadowy niche, and pick up scraps of and entire conversations, rich in laughter and exotic accents: people angry and in love, busy and at leisure, geeks and out-of-lucks and swells, dormers and reboots all mingled together.

I love it.

Missy loves it, too, and she holds my arm and leans against me as we walk. [Our Pooch] Durwood wurfles overhead, apparently happy, sometimes dipping down to human eye level as though pointing things out, sometimes moving around in the leaves and branches up by the ceiling. We can already tell this won’t be our last visit to SloGo.

(JES)

_____________________

About the image: these 625 faces are but a small fraction of the millions analyzed by Fran Simó, using software which he developed. He says at his site:

How would a robot imagine a human face? “I dreamed about a human being” is like spying into a robot’s brain.

“I dreamed about a human being” is part of a project exploring the use of artificial intelligence as applied to photography by using online open source code and data. The project already has a database of 56 million images. We have freely accessible amazing tools and databases of gigantic images, but have not yet fully understood what we can do with them or what it means that they are there.

For more information, including a link to a fast frame-at-a-time video of over 2,500 of the project’s images, see this post.