Ada Limon, Dead Stars … a really lovely poem!

We’ve come this far, survived this much. What would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

October 07, 2022

Heather Cox Richardson, October 06, 2022

Trump’s continuing insistence that he won the 2020 election, and the Republican Party’s embrace of that lie despite the fact that Biden won by more than 7 million votes in the popular vote and by 306 to 232 in the Electoral College, says that they will never again consider the election of a Democrat legitimate.

“If you care about democracy and you care about the survival of our republic, then you need to understand—we all have to understand—that we cannot give people power who have told us that they will not honor elections,” Cheney said.

… the next two elections will be determinative about which way the country is going… democracy or authoritarianism… conservatives, don’t believe in democracy, haven’t believed in democracy for some time now… why?… because conservatism in this country is presently focused on the preservation of the power of the mostly white patriarchy and they can’t preserve their power if elections are free and fair… they are in desperate survival mode where any means justifies the end… thus, scandals like those of Herschel Walker, which would have taken down any politician just 10 years ago are no longer disqualifying… there is an absolute abasement in this desperation… the trouble is, it may prevail…

Want Lipstick That Actually Lasts? Rouge Dior Forever is the Answer

… i have a deep love of the feminine and what is more feminine than lipstick, or more important to lipstick than it be lasting?…

1. Who should use it? Anyone who wants intense, pigment-rich matte lipstick that actually stays where it’s supposed to – there are no smears, smudges or fading here

2. How long until I love it? Probably 16 hours after you first put it on, as one application promises to last that long
3. How planet-/people-friendly is it? As part of Dior Beauty’s Responsible Formulation Charter, the brand aims to source all ingredients in the most socially and environmentally responsible way possible
4. How do I use it? Make sure your lips are primed and moisturised with a good balm, then add a slick of Rouge Dior Forever and leave to dry for three minutes

Mushrooms: Cellist Zoe Keating Brings to Life Sylvia Plath’s Poem About the Tenacity of the Creative Spirit

They were the first to colonize the Earth. They will inherit it long after we are gone as a species. And when we go as individuals, it is they who return our borrowed stardust to the universe, feasting on our mortal flesh to turn it into oak and blackbird, grass and grasshopper. Fungi are the mightiest kingdom of life, and the least understood by our science, and the most everlasting. Without them, this planet would not be a world. Like everything vast and various, they shimmer with metaphors for life itself.

Viruses Are More Like Cone Snails Than Hijackers

… as i read this article, there is this growing sense of interconnectedness… that all things are connected to all other things and that the universe can only be understood as an incredibly wondrous tapestry of matter and energy and a byproduct, life… we can’t understand the parts without some comprehension of the whole… and we can never think that anything can be understood in isolation…

Viruses, like cone snails, evolve to be more like what sustains them. It is an uncomfortable form of relatedness, this predatory metabolic convergence, but it cannot be denied that it generates amazing patterns of likeness across biological kingdoms without everything having to be descended from the same line of direct genetic inheritance.

Even if something has evolved to get away from its mimic, it holds the imprint of that entity’s influence in its difference, like a shadow.

Immersing Yourself in the Works of Gustav Klimt #art #gustav-klimt #exhibitions

In the unlikely setting of the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank in Manhattan, seeping into the ceilings, floors, walls, and recesses of the hall, projections of Gustav Klimt’s paintings are now set on an hour-long loop. Built between 1909 and 1912, the bank’s interior retains many of its original decorative elements, which include elegant glass panels, patterned limestone carvings, and brass detailing. Contrary to what its facade seems to convey about what happens inside — mysterious and important affairs of the economy and the state — people inside are huddled and seated in clusters on the ground and on chairs in darkness, hushed and sedated by a carousing Johann Strauss waltz.

Wrightwood 659 Hosts Exhibitions on the “First Homosexuals” and Michiko Itatani

Roberto Montenegro, “Retrato de un anticuario o Retrato de Chucho Reyes y autorretrato” (detail) (1926), oil on canvas, 102.5 x 102.5 cm, Colección Pérez Simón, Mexico

The First Homosexuals: Global Depictions of a New Identity, 1869-1930 starts with the year 1869, when the word “homosexual” was first coined in Europe, inaugurating the idea of same-sex desire as the basis for a new identity category. More than 100 paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, and film clips from public and private collections around the world are on view, including works that have never before been allowed to travel outside their respective countries. This groundbreaking exhibition is the first multi-medium survey of early, determinedly queer art that explored what the “first homosexuals” understood themselves to be — and how the dominant culture, in turn, understood them. This is part one of a two-part exhibition (the second is planned for 2025 and will feature 250 masterworks) developed by a team of 23 international scholars led by distinguished art historian Jonathan D. Katz with associate curator Johnny Willis.

French author Annie Ernaux has won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature

Annie Ernaux is the author of some twenty works of fiction and memoir, winner of the Prix Renaudot for _A Man’s Place_, and of the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her body of work, and recently the winner of the International Strega Prize and the French-American Translation Prize and shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize for The Years.

Annie Ernaux on the “Infinite Lack” in Our Search for Love

Anyway, what does this sign really mean, the phone call from the Latin Quarter? That he’s thinking of me? But in what way? There’s nothing more impossible to imagine than the desire, the emotion, of the Other. And yet, only that is beautiful. All I dream of is this perfection, without yet being sure of attaining it—of being the “last woman,” the one who erases all the others, with her attentiveness, her skilled knowledge of his body: the “sublime affair.”

…232.2 lbs…

… the dogs get me up at 3:30 AM… wanted to stay in bed till 4 but… Fiona pacing the room… i think an animal was passing through our neighbor’s yard… the other day we saw a skunk family pass through… we seem to finally have secured the perimeter of our fence so Fiona isn’t getting out and animals aren’t getting in… except for squirrels…

… H has become determined to attract humming birds to the yard… we’ve had many sightings of them this year… we have flowers in the garden they are attracted to… she wants them to come to the feeders… so far, not much activity there… we have many feeders now… she is trying to find the perfect one… i hope they come to her feeders…

… we made pizza on the green egg last night… tending a fire more bearable than i would have thought in this heat… today and tomorrow are the peak of the heat wave… high 90’s… 100 predicted for tomorrow…

… a story in Hyperallergic about a mural in Queens defaced by Sony Spider Man additions and now restored…

… the mural, “Queens is the Future,” created by Eve Biddle and Joshua Frankel…

… an article about Abby Manzella, a micro fiction writer and host of Micro, a podcast… her 400 word piece, Lepidoptera, mentioned… a story about a little girl in the midst of a pandemic… she wakes up with butterfly wings one day… a paragraph about how she writes into her phone at night to get ideas off her mind… how this one emerged almost fully formed… i think, yes, i write into my phone… i have been trying to write more… this will be inspiration…

… this from Maria Popova in the Marginalian this morning…

By the time we can even begin answering for ourselves the question of whether or not is worth living, myriad things have been answered for us by the fundamental forces that have conspired into the confluence of chance that is our self. None of us choose the bodies or brains or neurochemistries we are born with, the time and place we are deposited into, the parents we are raised by, the culture we are cultured in. Any sense of choice we might have is already saturated with these chance inheritances and is therefore, as James Baldwin so astutely observed, part illusion and part vanity.¹

… the post is about Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem, To The Young Who Want To Die… wait another day… see what’s coming around the corner… wait another day…

… i, myself, have never been suicidal… depression is not frequent with me and never very deep… i once played with suicide, as a kid, in the basement of my parents home… i made a noose… attached it to the steel beam supporting the joists of the house and carefully lowered myself to feel the noose tighten around my neck… i had no intention of swinging from the beam… i only wanted to know what it felt like… when i think back on it, i think… what if i had slipped and hung myself… the world would have thought i was sad… there would have been no clue as to why… i would have seemed a generally happy boy… i don’t think my troubles with my father had started by then, beyond his being a strict disciplinarian… there is a short story in this… i should try to write it… something involving Schrodinger’s cat… am i alive or dead?…

… an article in Mother Jones about an article in Axios that H told me about yesterday… it’s about how the MAGA group plan to remake government when they get in office… fill it with cronies… and then leave the subsequent administration with the choice of doing their own cronies make over or returning to the bureaucratic state of olden times… i think, what makes them think there will be another administration if that plan is successfully carried out?… this would be the mostly white patriarchy taking over and never letting go… this would be the end of the multiarchy… oh god, why must we contend with this shit?… 45 must never be responsible for anything in government again…

… an article about Pelosi’s planned trip to Taiwan and China’s threat to retaliate “forcefully.”… there seem to be so many ways the world could go sideways right now…

… another review of Nope further reinforces that i want to see it… H feels the same way…

… Ukraine is winning… i read the article… i nod to its arguments… it lightens my mood a bit, but, i wonder, i still don’t see the end game where Putin retreats with tail between legs… another one that could easily go sideways…

… a Jonathan Blaustein review of the photobook Kyanite Miners… i don’t share his opinion of the book… it’s slick, corporate, meant to promote the mining company… it’s competent… i don’t think it is pushing any boundaries…

… Kitchen and Coffee… the handsome bleach blond dude barista… he is less personable than the women… i wonder how women customers respond to his handsomeness?… he reminds me of a young Paul Hollywood…

… as i walk down Main Street i am thinking about writing a short story about a boy toying with a noose… i am thinking that i will write multiple stories within a story, one where the boy toys with the noose, satisfies his curiosity and then takes the noose apart and goes on with his life… another in which he slips and accidentally hangs himself… others in which various plausible scenarios play out, including that he wishes to die, is not only playing with the idea of death… could be a very interesting story…

… i am liking my return to routine and structured workflow… for so many weeks things were moving all about… i was making pictures, writing, but not in the routine and rhythmic way i am now… i have started posting titled journal entries on a daily basis… each day i publish the previous day’s entry… they are Notes On Attention Paid… each day i am posting a selection of photographs taken that day… they are also Notes On Attention Paid… it’s that simple…

… on the way here, a bunch of male sexual performance enhancement packaging on the ground… i photograph all of them… one has the words “rock hard” on it… i don’t know, sounds painful to me… anyway, i am thinking today’s image post will include a number of them, may be only them…

The starting point of infinity is always at the center, where mind resides. Behind an image there’s an image. Nothingness is Being’s foundation, put on stage by poetry, which makes the erotic and the intellect meet. It’s not life, it’s alive.²

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In Nature, a Poet Finds a Visionary Language

You had me at Cody-Rose Clevidence… i mean… could there be a more alluring name for a poet?… one wonders if it is a name de plume, or a given name… if given, it would be like his parents fully expected him to be a poet…

And then there is the poetry itself…

all-the-way, magnificent

cluster-fuck, accident—

dodecahedron, demi-god

parallax, “kiss thy rod”

… i may have to buy his books…

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First few stanzas of a really good poem by H. R. Webster via Guernica…

The hottest summer on record I couldn’t open the windows.

A stranger had sent flowers to my house with a note that read say thank you.

I walked from my car to my door like a snake oxbows

across the sandy road from dune to dune. Balanced a colander

full of silver spoons, a saucer of cat’s eyes, a matchbook

spreading a mouse trap’s jaw, a potted conifer

I trimmed with scissors made for a doll on the sill

so I would wake if someone broke the feeble lock.

I’ve always been a deep sleeper, though. Roused for a fire drill, …

woman running along the trail–bright pink knit hat

how often have i sat by this stream?–water flowing by

birds rummaging through leaf litter–slim pickings

hearing horse hooves, i look up–a car leaving the gas station

**colored leaves flutter to the ground– distant jet plane sound

All ten episodes – and still i don’t know your name.

… a micro poem i wrote this morning as i was walking and thinking about Maid, the Netflix limited series… we watched the last episode last night…

… the female protagonist character, center of every episode… i couldn’t remember her name…

… hmmm…

Issa and the Meaning of Animals: A Buddhist Poet’s Perspective, David G. Lanoue

• _ The deeper truth of his not purely whimsical poem is that frogs, just as much as humans, are fully part of this universe and, in their way, might appreciate its wonders._¹
• … i read this and think… hmmm… making just a little too much of a claim to animal sentience… but then, but then… i wonder if animals, when their basic needs have been met, take moments just to enjoy the good feeling of having needs met coupled perhaps with an idyllic evening, or afternoon, or morning?… my immediate thought is that they have more to fear from their surroundings than i and most of the humans I know do… can they ever let their guard down?… can they ever experience a moment of vulnerability?, of bliss?… my dogs do, i am pretty sure… wrapped in the security of having their basic needs met and being with humans who love them dearly and protect them, they can afford to have their guards down and perhaps enjoy a pleasant moment in the cosmos…

Micro Poem

Apples on the ground– Isaac Newton’s time of year!

Issa and the Meaning of Animals: A buddhist Poet’s Perspective

• i read about butterflies as road trip companions…
• i learn about Arukigami, the God of Wandering… i learn that Arukigami entices people to leave their homes and walk about… sounds a little aboriginal to me…
• _ The haiku jokingly connects his and the cat’s restless journeys to a god’s influence, when in reality, as he and his readers must know, the force that compels a cat and a poet to wander is quite worldly: the cat seeks food or sex; the poet seeks inspiration for haiku—which, in turn, makes the attainment of food and sex (whether in marriage or in the brothels of which Issa sometimes writes) possible._¹
• i learn about winter seclusion, what Issa and poets before and after him did in the harsh winters… find a hut to hang out in and stay there until spring came around…
• i learn that fukubiki can be translated as “Lucky the Toad,” and that Lucky is a common stand in name for toad…
• _ People are genetically programmed to be repulsed by the smell of rotten food, to be excited by the smell of good food, and to be attracted to partners whose faces and bodies exhibit symmetry that indicates health and might therefore ensure the passing of one’s genes to the next generation. If our human sense of beauty evolved from such primal impulses, we might come to suspect that nourishing flowers excite and draw butterflies to them because, to butterflies, they are beautiful._²… i think the question and thought needs to be reversed, that humans need to first acknowledge that as conscious as they appear to themselves, they are largely driven by “animal instincts,” which are the same instincts all animals and even plants possess, so a concept of beauty is the world at large attracting the animal to something beneficial…

Issa and the Meaning of Animals: A Buddhist Poet’s Perspective, David G. Lanoue

… Chapter 2, Anthropomorphism or Realism?…

… the difference between Basho and Issa…

cawing in the tree

are you a widow, crow?

Milky Way above¹

… one of Basho’s most famous crow haikus:

on a bare branch

sits a crow…

autumn evening²

… in the first, poet and crow participate in the universe together and share existential possibilities and kinship… in the second, the poet channels his own loneliness and late stage of life through the crow… for Issa, animals are fellow travelers… for Basho, animals are symbolic of the human condition… of his condition…

… overall, this book has confirmed my sense that Issa is a “down to earth” poet… he keeps his poems grounded through anthropomorphism and a willingness to depict life in it’s every day sense…

… Issa observing the universal condition… every creature must “work” to survivie… food and shelter must be obtained and maintained… children must be conceived and fed and supported… life, for most creatures is work… we are blessed when we are one with the work that sustains our lives…

Basho and His Interpreters, Selected Hokku with Commentary, Makoto Ueda

… a book i ordered a couple of weeks ago… i have decided to set The Analysis of Matter aside given that i will be traveling and won’t be able to concentrate as effectively as i would otherwise… i will read this book instead as i think it will be more digestible in short spurts… also, the spiritual dimensions of haiku may be helpful at this moment…

… the haiku as a stand alone poetic form grew out of renga, a form of linked verse composed by a group of poets gathered… the guest of honor initiates the sequence and each poet takes a turn composing subsequent phrases in the sequence… renga have been known to get as long as ten thousand verses but more usually were one hundred or less…

… i find myself a bit tired for concentration even on haiku…

The Essential Haiku, End Notes

… today, the book is finished… the last notes discuss the origins of the haiku form and the difficulties of translating them… i am surprised that Robert Hass is not fluent in Japanese but rather, learned what he needed to learn to translate the poems, initially for his own pleasure/study, later for publication… he says he set himself the task of translating one haiku a day, which involved looking up the characters of both the Japanese and Chinese languages and deciphering what they meant or implied…

… at the very end, there is a list of elements of Haiku that make them difficult to render in English:

• syntax… The swiftness of the syntax is one of the fascinating things about these poems, and I don’t think itv can be rendered.¹
• Rhythm… exists in the structuring of the lines, where there are shifts and changes in direction, which have the effect of taking a 5-7-5 structure and rendering it as 5-4-3-5 or 5-3-4-5…
• Chinese Characters… Japanese is written in a combination of phonetic signs for individual syllable sounds and ideograms based on Chinese characters, or kanji²
• Pivot Words… words that suddenly change the meaning, or the expectation of meaning, of a sentence, as you read it, a kind of grammatical double exposure.³
• Seasonal Worlds… known as Kigo… as Mark Morris observes, “translation cannot convey the feeling of at-homeness, of being inserted in the cycle of a natural and ritual calendar that kigo communicate to the haikai reader.”⁴

… the earlier traditions of haikai and hokku, which birthed the haiku form, are compared to the call and response improvisation of jazz bands of the 1920’s…

The Essential Haiku, End Notes

… today starts the notes on Issa’s poems…

… in today’s notes, i learn that…

• the Buddhism Issa’s family practiced is that of the Jodo-shin-shu sect which has become Mahayanna Buddhism in present day Japan… it is the most important school of Buddhism in Japan and is considered mainline, middle class… it accounts for some aspects of Issa’s sensibilities…¹
• Robert Bly believes didactic intent is not in the realm of haiku, that is, haiku should not seek to teach… what then, should haiku do?… observe?… and really, if it observes well, doesn’t an astute student learn from it?… doesn’t it teach?… it feels like an odd and splitting hairs sort of distinction…
• scarecrows are an autumn kigo, which are words or phrases with seasonal reference, in haiku, a cultural code for the seasons… i found this extensive list of kigo in Wikipedia…
• The World of Dew is direct reference to Buddhist teaching about the ephemeral nature of things… in Mahayana formulation, it is this: All conditioned things are like a dream, a phantom, a drop of dew, a lightning flash. This is how to observe them.²
• that women turning into serpents figure in No and Kabuki plays…³

… i have finished the notes related to Issa and a section of Basho on how to make poems… it is interesting to me that Hass spends much more note space on Basho than either of the other two poets… because of the stature of his poetry?… or, are Buson and Issa generally a little more accessible to the western mind?…

The Essential Haiku, End Notes

… more notes on Buson…

… i learn that:

• the mountain cuckoo lives in deep forest, is often heard, seldom seen… the tradition is that nobody knows much about it, so secretive is it
• a deer crying three times = fall

… i am finished with the notes on Buson… next is Issa, then i move on to other reading material…

The Essential Haiku, End Notes

… i was telling my brother and sister yesterday that i have found reading this book of Haiku has had a daily centering effect on me… in light of all the family trauma and drama going on right now, this has been useful…

… more notes on the poems of Buson…

… i learn that in Buson’s time, there was an annual doll festival held in the spring… this poem talks about it…

the lights are going out

in the doll shops—

spring rain.

… i wonder about the translation not relying on cultural knowledge of doll festivals happening in the Spring in Buson’s time, and so reiterating that it is spring in the third line… i suppose it is so obscure that western audiences need the help?…

… Bats flitting here and there: Hass relates this poem to The Young Housewife, a poem by William Carlos Williams… i look up the poem, find it slightly confusing, but understand the connection… a poem of longing, less clearly so in the case of Buson…

… i learn about a particular willow tree that has long poetic tradition, visited and written about by Saigyo, Basho, Buson… i am reminded of the catalpa tree in the graveyard… from there, i remember a comment on my photos utility poles and wires at the last Salon, comparing them unfavorably to R. Crumb’s drawings of the same subject… i look them up and find this short video slide show set to the music of Joni Mitchel’s The Big Yellow Taxi… i respect the person who made the comment, but, i don’t think they were right…

… hmm… from the haiku of Buson to the drawings of R. Crumb and music of Joni Mitchel…

The Essential Haiku, End Notes

… i’ve moved on to the notes on Buson’s haiku…

… Buson seems a more down to earth poet as i have observed earlier…

… i learn that erotic themes are not generally pursued in traditional haiku, Basho certainly doesn’t… Buson, perhaps, indirectly…

… i learn that leeks are a winter vegetable… i am growing leeks in my planter tanks… i look up when to harvest them… soon…

The Essential Haiku, Notes

… continuing with my reading of the end notes of the book…

… i learn that the Japanese have a word, tani-watari, for the sound a Bush Warbler makes when flying from one valley to another…

… i learn about a book, The Karma of Words, written by William LeFleur, and order an inexpensive used copy… the subtitle is, Buddhism and the Literary Arts in Medieval Japan…

… this poem is discussed…

still alive

and frozen in one lump—

the sea slugs

… i am reminded that i received my copy of Rise Ye Sea Slugs!, by Robin D. Gill, which turned out to be nothing like what i thought it would be… i wish i could retrace my steps in purchasing the book because it’s a pretty humorous mistake and difference… what i thought i had purchased was a book that offered multiple translations of Japanese haiku, by well known poets, in an effort to get at the difficult to translate subtleties of the poems… what i received was a book of haiku, with large amounts of explanatory text of various kinds, solely on the subject of sea slugs!… oh my… i’ve read snippets and am intrigued… when i am done with TEH, i will start in on the sea slugs… the note that Haas provides on the above poem tells me that the sea slug is usually a humorous reference in Japanese poetry… indeed…

… i learn that Night Herons are associated with the uncanny by the Japanese…

… on the recommendation of Haas, i also purchase a previously owned copy of Basho and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary… i think i am officially diving down a rabbit hole, Japanese haiku… it’s an indirect way to get at Buddhism also… that i am finding it compelling at this moment likely has to do with my dad’s impending death… i have found it helpful…

The Essential Haiku

… still making my way through the notes, which are numerous and informative…

… a note about the Basho poem More than ever I want to see… what Basho wants to see is the face of a god that is so hideous he will only appear at night, at dawn… hmmm… how would one ever know if not Japanese?… or have some good notes to learn from…

… Spring going… a departure poem that opens up The Narrow Road to the North… it speaks of birds weeping and tears in the eyes of fish, which the note tells us is about his departure from friends to journey to the north… context is important…

… in another note i learn about the book Basho’s Ghost, by Sam Hamill… i look to see if it is available, only a collectible one, paperback, for $200… there are two others starting at $796… umm… i will have to see if the Public Library has it, hopefully under lock and key…

… i will stop today, with the note on A Wild Sea…

A wild sea—

and flowing out towards Sado Island,

the Milky Way.¹

… Robert Haas fears his translation doesn’t capture the grandeur of the poem commentators point to… he also tells me that at the time of Basho, the island was a penal colony where, according to Wikipedia, losers of political conflicts and dissidents were exiled… interestingly, i think one gets the grandeur of the wild sea and the Milky Way… the Island, it turns out, is fairly large, currently supporting a population of a little over 55,000, though in 1960, the population peaked at just over 113,000… the island has been inhabited for at least 10,000 years…

The Essential Haiku, Notes

… in the very first note i read this morning, an academic article is referenced, Basho—The Man and The Plant, by Donald H. Shively… i look up the article and it is only available through JSTOR, i look for it elsewhere but can’t find it any other way… at this point i discover that i can register for JSTOR and read up to 100 articles a month for free… um, i am not an academic, so the prospect that i might exceed the limit in any given month is unlikely… what a find!…

… and, on to the article, the plant is appreciated in China and, to a lesser extent, in Japan, as a symbol of ephemerality, as the leaves of the plant are easily damaged by the wind and the plant withers and dies in the winter in these places… Basho’s students took to calling him Master Banana Plant, because of the specimen he kept in his garden… Basho like this and adopted it as his poets name… a poem by Saigyo, one of Basho’s favorite poets, talks about the banana plant in this way:

When the wind blows

at random go

the banana leaves;

Since it is thus laid waste, is this a world

on which a human being either can rely?

… ephemerality of plan and human life… very buddhist…

Many of the traditions about the banana plant in Earlier Japanese literature are brought together in a Yokyoku of the fifteenth century entitled Basho. This No play is based on a theme suggested by the Lotus sutra, that even grasses and trees can be reincarnated as Buddhas.¹

… this idea immediately leads me to think about the concept of Panpsychism, which postulates consciousness as a fundamental quality of all matter…

… Basho apparently enjoyed the concept of non-functional beauty… that is, beautiful plants, things, that had no apparent use, which left them undisturbed by humans, and therefor, made them a reliable presence… one could ground themselves in and around non-functional beauty… i relate this to my reading on the Greek concept of techne yesterday…

_ Techne (Greek: τέχνη, tékhnē, ‘craft, art’; Ancient Greek: tékʰnɛː, Modern Greek: ˈtexni (About this soundlisten)) is a term in philosophy that refers to making or doing. As an activity, technē is concrete, variable, and context-dependent. The term resembles the concept of epistēmē in the implication of knowledge of principles, in that “both words are names for knowledge in the widest sense.” However, the two are distinct._²

… the importance of usefulness or functionality in Western culture which also appreciates the fruit of the banana plant rather than the ephemeral qualities of the plant itself, which has no “concrete” value other than to produce the useful fruit…

The world of robotics…

The world of robotics, is the world of robotics— and yet.

… this is a play on the Robert Haas translation of a famous Issa haiku…

The world of dew, is the world of dew— and yet, and yet.

… dew is symbolic of ephemerality and in this particular Issa poem is thought to be expressing grief over the death of his daughter…

… my “homage” picks up on the idea that things are what they are, neither good or evil in and of themselves… there is nothing inherently evil about robotics… it all hinges on the uses humans find for their creations and, on that score, the historic record is not good…