Sketch

The ability to play the eternal victim, to say 'now look what you made me do" to the horrors of history.

I carried a tiny Shambhala edition in my backpack for years.

That is at variance with the version of chatgpt I've used, which is only trained on information from the internet a couple of years ago, and has no access to current information.

Chi non fa, non falla

Constructively, it would read better with some attention to line breaks.

Every translation is the most in depth one yet. "Traduttore, traditore”. This one seems a bit flat...but then, it's not in my own "pet vocabulary ". Engaging with the language of the Dao De Jing is an extremely worthwhile effort, and I'm enjoying this take on Lao Tzu.

I spent a lot of time on the AT in Pennsylvania and NJ over the years before hiking from Georgia to Massachusetts (with a new bride) back in '95.

From my own commentary on the first part of the Dao De Jing; All of this makes me picture a well-worn, maintained footpath That was once a deer trail which follows the contours of the land in such a way As to follow the watershed. This is simply the natural way For all kinds of living creatures to go, even without the obvious path, or markers of any kind. A peaceful woodland trail Created by all the varieties of movement along its length. Dust motes in a sunbeam Harmonize light filtered through trees It very emphatically seems to exist! It was all there Before there were any blazes marking it. I saw this while hiking along the Appalachian Trail.

A difficult look to pull off. Adopting titles and the responsibilities that accompany them is exactly the opposite direction to the path I've been following over the years.

Lao Tzu never told me what to do...but Involvement with Dao De Jing (and other early Daoist texts ) helped me develop my perspective, and has influenced my decisions and my approach to life over the years. I wouldn't call myself a Daoist though; I don't look good in the hat.

We're certainly likely to find things purporting to be inspired spiritual writings with largely machine generated text at some point. Novels and books of poems too, I wouldn't doubt. Bad catalog copy is bound to get a new look, too.

Well, it can't really think, and has no insight or any sense at all. Much like a million monkeys at a million typewriters, eventually something that seems clever is bound to pop out, but who wants to edit all that? It's hard enough to make sense of human writers trying to make sense. It doesn't give a useful I ching interpretation, and it chose "lorum ipsum" as a starting text for a demonstration of the Burroughs-Gysin cut up method. There's no ghost in the machine.

Putting things in iambic pentameter and choosing rhymes is also a technical problem. It's a neat tool.

It's like playing with a thesaurus or a rhyming dictionary for the first time. The potential for generating vast tracts of meaningless spam is obvious.

I like the gunshot in a vacuum bit. It's got the beat and the modernist word choices, but misses meaning by a mile.