brianbrock.com The bird who cries cannot survive - coyotes find her first - yet lives like hers again arise, as kin escape the curse. They count their clever patterned feathers - press the edge of sanity - they burn to breed her tattered tethered heightened sensitivity. As each one dies, they mock her cries, and praise their fabled prophets. The dead shall rise, Cassandra lies, so catch her in a coffin. Ah! here's one now - let's cage her song! We'll save her from this place. But oh! my friend, is something wrong? She's shrieking in your face! How often do wild animals die of old age? For example, a wren or a fox. Sometimes in the winter I have wept quietly to think of wrens and squirrels and foxes and such, shivering outside with nowhere to go. How can they bear it? Curled up in a tree crevice, then out to find food. Dogs sometimes catch a moment of reflection where they realize how alike they are to the wild animals, seen outside through the windows. (And I am like the people. There are people outside. They too see through windows.) The wren and squirrel might share the same branch for a moment - mustn't they communicate somehow, even if only to navigate each other's presence? They sniff and nicker, shivering, their tracks commingling in the snow below. three examples groundless mechanism for fending off - forfend - the heav'n's wide maw as matrix grows, the cubes connect, the jewels interpenetrate - her standing waveform self-corrects as act and react oscillate rivulets brush speckled pebbles solid stones stay still sunlight caught through cottonwoods sparkles on the ripples' crests seems that intelligence arises naturally up from raw matter through natural recursion (at bottom the recursion is a result of duality, i guess), eg wave-particle, DNA containing instructions for how to replicate itself, language referring to itself, and onward - and that the intelligent naturally then prefer to get more intelligence more than anything else - and that while a certain amount of structured antagonism (reinforcement learning) is a driver of important aspects of intelligence, peaceful happiness (being given lots of data) is also vital - and that peaceful happiness is impossible if the antagonism becomes unstructured (eg instead of teaching teachers who teach teachers, someone chooses to state a falsehood or otherwise cause suffering) - i think this is why we play games - (for fun!) imagine a great power a living breathing system their breathing is a cycle this cycle changes as it goes a little by a little until its form is new and then anew it changes the new form is a moving point these changes form a cycle too the moving point completes the cycle but now the form of its form is new it never arrives exactly back home the same way it began so there's a cycle of cycles and the cycle of cycles itself cycles you get the idea now imagine another great power a living breathing system their breathing is their own cycle cycles of cycles emerge here too the two powers each are cycling but their cycles don't align their breaths are each their own so they build into different cycles now create a vast frame we see two vast cycles of cycles around a common center and in our present frame one is faster, one is slower or it may be the other way around the cycles sometimes pattern-match each almost arriving home as the other almost does the same these pattern-matches then create a larger cycle this is the power of powers and each of us is walking around a tiny epicycle upon the power of powers our epicycles flow through each other as we pass around the loop our moving points so near but never overlap unless we choose humanity is one great big living breathing organism when one of us gets hurt we all feel it the "organism of humanity" has nerves the nerves are made of symbols we feel each other's pains and joys through feelings communicated by language poems at turning, brian brock, Oct 2024 to Apr 2025