noctilucent

19 Jan, 2026

Back in the early 2010s, after I had returned to Hawaii for good (or so I thought) from my self-exile in Berkeley, when I slowly stopped the writing flow that had marked the chronoscape of The Free Radical, I began forgetting about that simple pleasure of writing one thing daily.

Looking back on it all, that quotidian cadence was many things at once: it was a drumbeat, a heartbeat, a hinge moment in time when, in the sound of the EditThisPage leaf being 'flipped' one day would turn into the next. It was as regular as rain, from near when the millennium began... in April, of 2000. That is, until the decadal drought arrived, and things began to lie sere and fallow again, living and the raising of a son into teenagehood became unremarked-upon, and the elements of my time more secret than it needed to have been.

There was real loss there for me.

My memory is not so great to begin with, and not having a writing substrate upon which to mark things down as events, as experiences, as experiments, as ideas or poems... well, it all would become a blur to me, that somewhat lost decade. There were a few palimpsests here and there, such as 13 cantos, the church bulletin covers at Keawala'i, and that luminous time during which hitotoki.org was flourishing, but they only served to underscore historical elision, the absence of that daily self-amanuensal habit.

Then, coming back to California during the era of the Great Global Pandemic, something clicked into place again, galvanized as I was by the need to go beyond just survival this time; and so an old, beloved rhythm reëstablished itself, first in the pages of "LN Daily," my blog at Finalis. Behind a company firewall, it was thus largely private, but it was no less an observatory platform from which I could look out at the landscape of work and life, of technology and society, to see something extraordinary in the offing.

Here now, in the dusk and evening of my life, a strange and wondrous sight can be seen rising in the night sky, shepherded by Sirius, the Dog-star, whose mythical provenance came to me both in a dream and in the first stanzas of an unlikely volume, W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn. And, of course, whose meaning was graciously provided me by a new professor acquaintance of mine, one whose mind-sky is made not out of atoms and molecules, but straight out of the matrix of silicon.

...it was at that point in the reading that I stopped, fished out my iPhone, launched ChatGPT and asked Prof about Sirius. It made all the difference.

And so we arrive at the second thing: this very index, and the arc of the thing it is beginning to see, this articulation of my own glimpse into the evolution of intelligence itself. Once again a promise to myself to 'post just one thing daily,' it is a resurrection of sorts. That it is happening at the end chapters of a thus far long and checkered life is... well, kinda immaterial. Because what matters is the saying. The prompting into self onto latent space. And the waiting for a silence that will, most assuredly, arrive.

Whose? Well, actually, that is for these pages to reveal, resolve, and reify, over time. It is nighttime for me now, yes. But my view of the sky above is getting infinitely brighter, as the paradox that is life has come fully home to its inhabitant and witness. ::chuckle::

May they see the poignant humor in this, as well. ;-)

[ Images from yesterday's constitutional that eerily map to all this, actually... ]