Crooked Cucumber

I've switching between two texts for the past few weeks. One, of which the title is the title of this post, is a biography of Shunryu Suzuki, a great Zen Master. The other is 'Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness', Suzuki's commentary on the Sandokai, an ancient poem by Sekito Kisen. Suzuki gave the talks shortly before he died, something Zen Masters are known to do.  I don't know why, but I'm trying to find out.

At 66, I don't think my chances are very great at becoming a teacher of Zen, so I hope my actions in the last section of a life that has swung from being a promising poet to wearing a coat and tie and creating wealth for the captains of industry to be an unofficial zen monk who sits and carves and walks and sees will be enough to lighten my load in the next round. If I've learned anything form zen practice, it is that all creatures deserve compassion and that all creatures are capable of giving it.  If I can be a positive infuence on one other creature, it will be a start.  I'll be putting more thought into this blog, become everthing happens on Stone Street.

Poland: the Motherland Discovered

This is going to be a long one.  My first trip to Poland was an adventure for me, a great adventure, and the impressions I've made are (unashamedly) poetic.

My good friend Maciej Janowski, with whom I worked for a few years here in Herford, invited me to visit him in Poznan.  He was coming to Herford and we could drive there together.  I accepted, and we went.

Note from my journal:
Tomorrow - Poland

I've been close for years. A six hour drive. By American standards, a day trip. Something always held me back. Books and websites gave a good enough picture. It's a hundred years later (fifty since the last letter). Germany's the same thing. My Polish is pathetic.

It is the Summer of 2012. My 66th birthday is next week. I won't live forever and Maciej's in Herford extending an offer. Poznan, Warsaw, Lipno-the  Americans are coming. At least this one is.



Welcome to Poland
Just after crossing the border into Poland and about 50 kilometers from Poznan on the recently completely A2 (E30) autobahn, everything stopped.  We were in a line of traffic two lanes wide, 2 kilometers in front of us, and before we started moving again, at least another 2 behind.

A2 Traffic Jam

It cleared after an hour or so and on we went.  We dropped our things at Maciej's apartment and went to town.  

Poznan

Poznan has a good system of buses and streetcars and we took advantage of it, even though it's easy enough to drive and park.  It's only a few minutes from Maciej's apartment  near the  the center of the city by tram, and so we go.  Poznan's Old Town is a beautiful one.  The very large market square is dominated by the whimsical city hall with it's head-butting goat clock.  It is surrounded by restaurants and cafes where one can sit under the umbrella and sample pierogi of every sort, bigos, kielbasa, pork, beef, beets, all within an atmosphere of cabbage and mushrooms.  I was at home, in heaven, in short, I ate......

Over the next few days we walked and we walked, through the city's churches, cathedrals, monasteries, and museums.  We sampled at least half of the restaurants and meandered in out and of shops.  

Note from my journal:

Poznan is a sprawling city. Remnants of the Communist years are scattered across the cityscape like randomly generated anomalies in an otherwise pleasant dream. At the center of it all, some of the richest church art and architecture in central Europe, the whimsical representation of the Prussian era, the beginning of Polish monarchy, and the humor, and the pride of the new Poland.

Background

Bamberka

Poznan is called Posen in Germany.  It was a part of the German territory of East Prussia until the end of the Second World War when it was receded to Poland.  It has always been a crossroads of Germanic and Slavic culture.  The Bambrzy or Bambergs are a prime example of the constant flux in the constitution of the folk of Poznan.  


Polish, Prussian, Soviet, the people are the people and Poznan survives and flourishes.  If you speak German or English, you can get around in the city with little trouble.  Of course, it helps if you speak a little Polish.

Poznan was the last stronghold of German resistance against the oncoming Soviet Army at the end of WWII and the story is told at the Cytadela, a beautiful park and museum of Polish Military History as well as a cemetery where, along with Polish heroes, the graves of Russian soldiers of WWII and British soldiers from WWI can be found.

There's a lot more to tell about Poznan, and Warszawa is another story, but for now, it's Sunday, I need to take a walk.....(to be continued)

Poznan Continued
There is not only a sense of history in the city, but a sense or irony and humor.  One evening, Maciej and I met a colleague of his in the city and in our touring they took me to a cafe that was done up in the finest of Communist Time decor: white walls and black and white photos of butcher shops and grocery stores with bare shelves, newspaper articles about Stalin and company, bright light, and, or course, lots of vodka.

For Sunday lunch, Maciej took me to a restaurant of the same genre, where the food came to the table on a well-worn wooden cart.  Despite the austere appearance, it was delicious (not to mention, ample)!! I don't photograph inside of cafes or restaurants, but I did get this example of the wistful humor with which the city remembers the Communist Time:

Comrade Lenin's New Tie

Poznan's churches are a treasure trove of art and architectural delights with open catacombs for the historian, with the different styles of stone work dating the stages of construction and/or destruction. The devotion of the Polish Catholic Church to Mary the Mother of God is everywhere visible with reproductions of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa abundant in both fine and folk art. The first documented ruler of Poland, Mieszko I and his son Boleslaw the Brave (the first crowned king) are believed to be buried in the Poznan Cathedral.

Warszawa

Warszawa is a large city with over 2 million inhabitants.  It is the capital of Poland and a center of art and culture.  I won't try to give any history lessons.  You should know enough about Chopin, Copernicus and Marie Curie to know that a lot of good stuff happened and is still happening in this city.  You should also know about the Warsaw Uprising during the Second World War and the involvement of John Paul II in the solidarity movement which eventually forced an end to communist rule.  Even if you don't know these things, you would do yourself a favor by learning them.  Again, this isn't a history lesson, it's an essay about my summer vacation, so I'll get off the soap box and onto the streets.

One of the most impressive sites is the Palace of Culture.

Day and Night Views

The story goes like this:  in the 1950s, the Soviets wanted to give a gift to Poland.  They offered a subway system or this building.  The Poles chose the subway system. Because of the sandy soil, construction did not go well, frustrating our Communist friends to the point where they gave up and built the Palace. At any rate, it's an impressive edifice.

When I've got the photos all sorted out, you'll be able to see more of the city, the Presidential Palace, the beautiful old town, parks, art, and more.  There are a lot of photos, some of which need to be discarded.  Warsaw is VERY big, with over 2 million people in it and two four hour shifts of photo wandering force some hasty shots!!  

I talked to a few artists in the old town, painters, wood carvers, and a maker of little angels and really enjoyed myself being able to pronounce almost one hundred words with only a slight Russian accent.....

On Monday morning, Maciej had some business to attend to, so I roamed to old town through a park where I lingered under the trees for almost half and hour listening to a student in one of the buildings on the edge of the park playing Chopin.  It was magic for me, Poland, Summer, and Chopin!

I met Maciej back at the Palace of Culture, waiting on a bench and watching people while I waited, there were old folks, children, an angry sounding Russian folk guitarist, and the cool breeze blowing off of the fountain.

The Fountain

We drove back towards Poznan to pick up Kasa and the boys and visit a bit with Kasa's family.  The hospitality was wonderful and we ate kotelety and grzybki and ogorki and it was delicious!  We went from the apartment to their garden and I was a kid again in Babchi's garden-grape arbor, fruit trees, flowers and a whole family of people talking and examining the plants!  Unfortunately, my camera was in my backpack in Maciej's car and I was so completely engrossed with these lovely people that I forgot all about it!!

We drove back to Poznan in the dark, with a hellacious thunderstorm in front of us.  There was a lot of enormous lightning striking in the distance, but always ahead of us.  When we got to Poznan, it was gone, but the next day, it was obvious that it had been there.  Workers were sawing through branches and cleaning up the debris all over the place!  

Maciej drove me to town and spent the afternoon with his family while I visited the Musical Instrument Museum, some more churches, and made more photos.  Late afternoon, Maciej, Kasa, Julian, and Marcel came to town.  I met them another fountain (landmark navigation, I love it) and we strolled around the Old Town, ate, and spent the evening at their beautiful apartment.  The next morning, the whole family drove me to the train stations and by five in the afternoon, I was back in Herford with enough material for a few good short stories!

Tomorrow, I'll complete the web albums and insert the links at the top of this page.

Thank you for your patience....

Maybe I Should Have Said Nice

You're not just what you eat. If I were, I'd be a fish swimming in a sea of rice and vegetables. If you've got a Higgs boson handy, you can throw it my way and see for yourself. Having a boson of any sort around takes a lot of work, so I'll assume you don't, and save you time by admitting it: I am not a fish.

I am however disturbed by concepts of good and evil, god and satan, Illuminati, the zeitgeist of the new millennium  politics, religion, and economics. Let me talk for awhile before you hit the back button. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, fundamentalist preacher, new age prophet, or guru of any flavor.
The question of context keeps coming up. And the context is often dreams.

Dreaming of bridges and tunnels and lights and shadows is vague.  Amorphous ideas resound in dreams, at least in mine.  They are always things becoming.  The big ones are most difficult to retrieve.  Some small detail which might give me a clue as to why I think the way I think, the things I think, is always missing.  No small matter.  Although matter, without energy, is nothing to think about.  It's the energy that keeps it all in motion.  So I eat the fish, the rice, the vegetables in order to stay in motion.  Since matter without energy.....

Happy Birthday Sprot!

Today is the 25th anniversary of the birth of my daughter, Abigail Flora. A quarter of a century. Twenty-five years. We've had a lot of good times together, a few not so good, but none of them bad enough to break the bond or push us apart. We share a lot of personality traits and a lot of interests and we learn from each other. Even our mistakes can become part of our collective myth, like the title of this post. I use to call her Sport until I made a typo and she liked it, so Happy Birthday, Sprot. Giovanni says so too 'alles gute zum Geburstag!!'

The Return of the Polak

Although I've been back in Europe for almost a week (actually, it's getting close to three weeks, I've been hibernating) and  I've not written a word, and until last evening, close to a thousand photos were sitting lifelessly in the storage card in my trusty old Nikon.  Today, SATORI, or something like it, at least you might say I am awake, with a little activity on the right side of my limited capacity thinking machine......

I was in the United States for three and a half weeks.  I started out in New York, moved over to NE Pennsylvania, and closed the chapter with more New York.  It was a lot of living outside of the Stone Street Monastery.  It was a lot of human contact.  It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of experience.

You'd think a 65 year old would just say something like 'it was nice' and get on with his preparations for death, but you'd be wrong.  The reason for this is linked very subtly to the Android operating system.  I don't mean the one by Google, I mean the one envisioned by guys like Alan Turing, Norbert Wiener, and, more recently, Ray Kurzweil.  On top of the science, we have guys like Charlie Stross and Verner Venge giving us the futurist view of 'post-singularity' society.

What's this got to do with my summer vacation?
An observation.
An experiment.

AI (artificial intelligence) is all about behavior.  Intelligence is the the way a brain responds to decision making and problem solving (a multi-branching decision tree).  Decision making is contextual.  Dickson and New York cities are contexts.  Your living room is a context.  If you understand the concept of original mind, you understand the problem of artificial intelligence.  If you understand the concept of context sensitivity in language, you understand the problem of human behavior.  If you understand the problem of human behavior, you understand the problem of artificial intelligence. The problem with artificial intelligence is this:

we don't fully understand

any of the 

above

We all start out with the same bits and pieces, arranged a little differently because of historical context.  Some develop into mystics, some into murderers, and the rest lie somewhere in between.  The way we see them is the way we have been taught to see them, and for many of us, that doesn't work anymore, so we are conflicted about it.  We don't want to be afraid of people because of their skin color or the density of their tattoos and piercings, the language that they speak, or any other marker that tells us they are from another context, but we are.  Fear, anger, hatred is the primordial progression of emotional response to out of context markers. It results from our training in dualism.  

I:Not I. 

Good:Evil

God:Man

Escaping this eternal looping of our psychological defenses is the goal of artificial intelligence proponents of the singularity, the technological singularity, the point at which we reach an event horizon where we can no longer understand or predict the behavior of our creations. The basic premise is this: algorithms will become self-teaching, transcending human intelligence, becoming super intelligent, and will travel beyond the reach of human comprehension. 

Some suggested solutions to the problem entail implants: augmented perception, learning, behavior, through the implantation or wearing of devices with direct feedback and feed-forward access to the brain.  Secondary benefits to such technology include increased longevity, and even immortality.  When your augmentation senses something going awry in your shell, it adjusts it back to acceptable levels.  Potential health and behavior problems can be detected, regulated, and maintained. We are the Borg.....

On on hand, heaven on earth, on the other.....

Heaven:Hell

Man:Not Man

One way of seeing augmented Man is through the lens of Trans-humanism, the human transcended by augmentation, a kind of techno-mysticism. You first need to program morals and values into the intelligence by incorporating a fail-safe set of algorithms corresponding to the belief that man is the reason for being of the universe and therefore should be protected from harm at all costs.  This way, rogue machines, regardless of their transcendent state, will be prevented from doing anything men would think irrational or immoral.  One problem with that is the human-centric notion of free-will.  If the algorithms are to be human-like, they're supposed to have it, which means that they are allowed to harm humans as well as other machines.  The whole thing is a double-bind: damned if you do, and damned if you don't.  The double bind is a well documented trigger for schizophrenia.  Draw your own conclusions.....

There is another way to getting to this state.  You can come to Steinstrasse and meditate.  Just follow your breath and realize that heaven and hell, god and man, good and evil, pretzels and ice cream are all loved, feared, enjoyed, avoided based on psychological reality (a sort of magical state in which you create your own heaven or hell, otherwise known as daily life).  The key is finding your Steinstrasse, your psychological reality, the universe which makes you happy and doesn't harm any other sentient being because of its existence.  Once you've created yourself, you've only got to avoid extinction. Context is what you allow it to be and what we allow, we teach, so teach the world that one human sitting quietly is trans-human and proto-human and superhuman.  When we finally realize that the reality of the singularity is an internal event horizon, a quiet walk across the borders of perception and conventional learning into a world that is free from suffering it's okay if the machines and rocks and pretzels think for themselves.  It's the nature of nature.

Which brings me back to New York and Dickson City, my daughter and my son, and Gideon the Great, Grandson of he who sits on Steinstrasse.  New York, Dickson, and Herford are studies in contrast.  Size, architecture, demographics, infrastructure, even the birds change the context, and yet, if you look at it in the right way, they're all the same thing, which brings us back to nature, which is (if you think about it in the right way) everything.  I think it's time for a nap.

Guten Rutsch!!

Spent a few hours with some friends at Giovanni's 'Mona Lisa' last night.  The New Year was ushered in with a great fireworks display as well as the traditional Berliner (that's a jelly doughnut, to those of you who can't remember John F, Kennedy.)

The place was full, with a lot of dancing and camera flashing, lively conversation, and camaraderie.  Simple, elegant way to say Happy New Year.

I am not, as anyone who knows me, a wildly enthusiastic marker of anniversaries.  For me, every time I open my eyes after sleep, it's the start of something new, which makes everyday an anniversary, and for celebrations on such a grand scale, it wouldn't leave time to live a quiet life. If you believe that time is linear, that is, but that's a topic for the next entry.

Advent in the Old New World

The Weihnachtsmarkt is in full swing, the neighbors are in good spirits, the weather is extraordinarily unlike any December I've experienced (except for a few I prefer to forget) and I'm enjoying it all.  The seasonal depression of years gone by has been defeated (momentarily, I cannot predict the future) and the alcoholic haze that was my home-grown remedy is unnecessary.  When I remember the 'Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up To Me' days, months, years, I can smile at them at say they were, and I wish that they hadn't been, but there's no denying history until I learn how to use wormholes.....