You say there’s no such thing as randomness, yet the stairs that curve between an event and its flowering cannot be traversed by a mind or machine. Probability assembles its empire from drunken coincidences of the material, metaphorical fossils, historical rainfall, and a familiar-looking archway to make us believe in something other than the senses. A foundation that fits betwixt eyelids and under the skin. An incarnation of truth that rides a pale horse.
2
Burke never imagined spreadsheets in the night, scrolling as if for centuries with columns of specificity beyond novels and poems. There is a figure of entropy in the astrology of a grid, its conservation of the tide of human repetition. The blood of the model hums in its orbit. There is a silver school in history where cosmology has been automated inside a mechanical pocket watch. Matter dwells under the concavity of numbers and extension. Cupid’s archery and atoms as seeds of motion, Like dreaming an ocean of slowness, the love of a satellite builds the heartbeat of a wave, one droplet at a time. Curving tributary of conditions, reflecting itself on the convex surface of an animal’s retina, drowned in the ochre fabric of subjectivity, rendering the fats of the multitude. Do ruins of time know if this is language or not? Can they recognize your face?
3
Sometimes you jump into my eye Not for singularity or winter’s green. Sometimes you need to copy something if not faster, with a broken theory to watch for its association, those factors looking after conditions, and gathered by frost Each echo has its dawn to continue, its plain reference. I don’t think pleasure teaches much, maybe because we’re not ready for it. All to scramble facts, reserving the nectar. As if private sometimes a river scraped by mindlessness, gaining fineness from the lack of intention. Sometimes you need to be a tear of ice Unsure, if to melt or freeze would complete the world’s puzzle.
4
We try to stop it with a kiss but the tide was too heavy with precious metals. Spectrum of codes, kinetics of something washing a transparent mirror with something. Magnitude of a basilica, reduced to a binary. Near infinity is just another god to misuse. I cannot connect millions or billions of frames; I fall for something vivid and specific, while the machine generates a black and white creature film, expression drained of its input. We fear the monster we cannot see, not the monstrosity in plain sight. Something at the margin erodes distinction by constantly throwing up exceptions. This intensity of dream notebooks that wastes its breath on explanation. But some lurking variable always confounds us. A residual coefficient of philosophy. Distribution, continuity, inference.
5
Dendrites and unicorns drink from the source, drawing elemental designs in the network. To pluck significance from the symbol tree is to blend one’s beliefs with blood and honey. If Plato had computed a linear regression on the relationship between the forms, we would have remembered it by now in this air-conditioned server farm. Our mistake was to love knowledge. Can we overcome it with quiescence? No, luddite, I fear not. The momentum of waves and keystrokes holds us in tow. There must be some ongoing music to intersubjectivity, but which form of transcription is not pernicious? I hesitate to mention the so-called music of the spheres but the clouds make noise as they stitch us together, a soft, shady city where we might build something on a foundation other than information.