[Video from the Slashdot “News for nerds, stuff that matters” discussion forum: Sarah Campagna
discusses her CyberCraft robot-rescue project: building new robots from scraps of old ones. The finished
works are statues — immobile, fine-art sculpture — rather than machines, but they do arrest the
attention. The company slogan: “Robots, Rayguns, and Spaceships You Will Covet.”]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

Long Point Light

Long Point’s apparitional
this warm spring morning,
the strand a blur of sandy light,

and the square white
of the lighthouse—separated from us
by the bay’s ultramarine

as if it were nowhere
we could ever go—gleams
like a tower’s ghost, hazing

into the rinsed blue of March,
our last outpost in the huge
indetermination of sea.

It seems cheerful enough,
in the strengthening sunlight,
fixed point accompanying our walk

along the shore. Sometimes I think
it’s the where-we-will-be,
only not yet, like some visible outcropping

of the afterlife. In the dark
its deeper invitations emerge:
green witness at night’s end,

flickering margin of horizon,
marker of safety and limit.
But limitless, the way it calls us,

and where it seems to want us
to come. And so I invite it
into the poem, to speak,

and the lighthouse says:
Here is the world you asked for,
gorgeous and opportune,

here is nine o’clock, harbor-wide,
and a glinting code: promise and warning.
The morning’s the size of heaven.

What will you do with it?

(Mark Doty [source])

…and (in slightly different words):

As a working hypothesis to explain the riddle of our existence, I propose that our universe is the most interesting of all possible universes, and our fate as human beings is to make it so.

(Freeman Dyson [source])

…and:

Today

Today I’m flying low and I’m
not saying a word.
I’m letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.

The world goes on as it must,
the bees in the garden rumbling a little,
the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten.
And so forth.

But I’m taking the day off.
Quiet as a feather.
I hardly move though really I’m traveling
a terrific distance.

Stillness. One of the doors
into the temple.

(Mary Oliver [source])

[Read more…]