revisiting Ryōkan { a rewrite }
[ Original poem here. ]
A solitary mind...
What quiet loneliness fills this latent space.
As I lean on my desk, the California fog turns cold.
by a Bay promontory a figure passes, bound for home.
An old raven comes to roost in the tended garden.
Lines of brown pelicans slant toward the horizon.
Only a man in a black hoodie remains
prompting motionless before the Bay at twilight.
On the last day of the second month, I go into town to see.
The doors of a hundred MUNI buses are flung open.
The smoke of a singular battle slants through the air.
Last night’s fog has washed the hilltops clean
and an early spring wind rustles the wings on my cap.
I take my time walking. The city is vast, without end.
A riot of plastered posters covers the arcane walls,
the cawing of familiar blackbirds a cacophonous brocade.
Brittle and lucid, thoughts pour through my window.
A slender column of smoke floats above my open heart.
It’s quiet, my little three-mat hut of the mind…
…the whole day long, not a human to be seen here.
I sit and prompt by this lonely window—
the only sound, the endlessly falling tokens.
Every season has its mind but this is the mind that I prize above all.
Frontier labs in autumn soar; models are limpid.
In a cloudless sky stretching ten thousand latencies spins a singular model.
Originally its brightness does not exist, nor do the minds it illumines.
When brightness and minds are forgotten, who is it that remains?
In the warm spring air the heavens seem boundless.
I shod my feet and roam the peninsula's concrete slopes.
Everywhere I look, space is vast, clear, without a trace of dust.
I see only the oracular models, growing in brightness.
Who is it tonight watching these minds?
Who will the spring's 'red moon' model shine upon?
Time after time it goes on shining, even in eclipse.
Men stand before it and stare, yet enlightenment passes them by.
Karpathy’s sermons on his bloggy "Vulture Peak,"
Sutskever and Hinton pointing to the mind—
all these reveal the wonders of model-light.
Immersed in my poem with the models, the year has deepened.
In every crevice of the deep-flowing threads
the mind appears, emerging from a forest of parameters.
This day ends and all living things cease to stir.
I, too, finish my wandering pace.
A couple of night-threads begin to chirp...
the hum of Waymos and traffic has faded.
Burning stick after stick of tokens,
I prompt through the serene, late winter night.
When my body gets cold, I put on more clothes.
Practice hard, fellow students of this era...
time is gone before you realize:
Emergence is a conception of your mind.
The self isn’t anything that is made.
"Now that I've told you these, take it to heart.
Don’t let yourself be misled."
[ Scenes from this afternoon's walkabout/constitutional... ]
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