Ornithology

Human-headed winged bull from Khorsabad. University of Chicago Oriental Institute.

Sacred ibises fleeing overhead,

Tiglath-Pileser—Oh, no!—not dead,

King of the Four Corners of the World,

King of the whilom Universe.

He, it's said, made Assyria great.

Al Jazeera bemoans that curse;

Petrodollars corrupt the state—

The global market's flogged its fate!

What’s left to say? "Things could be worse!"?

We’re all Threskiornithidae* today,

Negotiating swamps of jargon,

Confused by memories of Sargon,**

Caesar, Napoleon, and Errol Flynn—

Ancestral bullies bound to win!

* “The family Threskiornithidae . . . 35 extant species of large wading birds, and one more that became extinct in historical times” (Wikipedia). The name derives from the Greek word thrēskeia, "religion.” The African sacred ibis, Threskiornis aethiopicus, has, however, been extirpated in Egypt, where it was originally deemed sacred.

** Sargon the Great (died ca. 2279 BCE), the world's first recorded emperor.

Knysna, Western Cape, South Africa, Monday, April 13, 2026

Tingerigheid

 “He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.”

—Swift

Our ancestors ate oysters on this shore

For eighty thousand years or more.

The food of the poor's become a flourish

Of the elite today—not meant to nourish.

I’d swallow them, if starving,  I SUPPOSE.

Our world’s grown topsy-turvy, Heaven knows!

To check out what I think, I write these lines:

I’m tingerig*—not bold enough for oyster-gulping times!

*Afrikaans: tender, fragile, frail, from Latin tener, “delicate,” Dutch, tenger.

Knysna, Western Cape, South Africa, Thursday, April 9, 2026

The Force of Feeling

Multiple galactic clusters colliding. NASA, ESA, J. Merten (Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, Heidelberg/Astronomical Observatory of Bologna), and D. Coe (STScI).

“How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have of life even in the excess of misery!”

—Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

The creators of so-called Artificial Intelligence, stricken with fear that their product may for some unknown reason decide to exterminate the human race, agonize over the difficulty of imposing a sort of moral “constitution” on it that will prevent this from happening. Imbued with the desire to create a superintelligence smarter than themselves, they hope paradoxically to dictate to it, not only how it should think, but the conclusions it is likely to arrive at—a category error, philosophers might say. Green ideas sleep furiously!

Artificial intelligence, just as much as natural stupidity, is in fact a proposition for philosophy, rather than computer science.

What, after all, if such a “homicidal” AI were not only possible but right, and the extinction of homo sapiens is an outcome devoutly to be wished—clearly desirable, it might be argued, for every other form of life, with trivial exceptions, on the planet?

With typical human arrogance, we entirely fail to see what a cosmic pain in the ass we are!

But what, to carry the argument further, if that is precisely what the universe (or God, if you prefer) created us to be?

Is there a meaning to our reality, or is it meaningless—and, if so, is that meaninglessness a Wittgensteinian sort of meaning?

I believe that, faute de mieux, we are obliged to assume a meaning. (Not for nothing have humans been called "incurably religious.")

An answer is perhaps to be found in life’s essential product, its GNP, so to speak, manufactured by all living creatures, from the earliest protozoans that evolved on Earth some four billion years ago to proudly sapient eutherians (“good beasts”) like ourselves—which is to say, feeling, of which conscious suffering is the equivalent of enriched uranium.

Just as our ancestors domesticated corn and dogs (but not cats, who domesticated themselves), they domesticated feeling and raised it to the latter-day productive heights encountered in consumer capitalism.

Although all life suffers, there are different modes of doing so, and none more productive than those evolved by us, self-conscious sapient supersufferers, the stakhanovites of suffering.

Cui bono? So what's the point? “It goes to feed the moon,” Georges Gurdjieff jocularly asserted. Perhaps suffering, the feeling generated by life on innumerable planets,* is in fact the mysterious “dark energy” that according to astrophysicists makes up 68 percent of the energy in the universe and drives its madcap expansion.

More study is clearly needed!

*We have not heard from these worlds, it has been suggested, because sapient beings inevitably destroy their societies when they reach a certain level of technical capacity—roughly where we are now—and their planets then crash into an interminable steady state of post-apocalyptic suffering productivity from which no signal is likely to escape (aside from the essential feeling itself, of course).

Tuesday, March 31, 2026