The previous one and its mutation in the Mutations poetry series:

4      Innate savants’ great valley

The calm smile of an umbrella stand is transient

and elephants returning home to dark energy

bury their words in a rich port of failure

Scent discovered effortlessly disappears quickly

ignored at first this content reduces concern

for capital delays in hard pronunciation

Apprentice beetles bowing to want dive into

the prison master’s sick pink features and

as a group rub their free hands in oil

Death has become unclear in limited speculations

all fixed by several old torture treatments that

freeze crematorium victims’ ashes forever

(Geoffrey Mark Matthews 16 April 2022)

5      Taunt

There are miles of serene rotating shadows,

with crumbling mansions for beleaguered lords,

whose mausoleums house dry sprites of bone

When once I sought these receding dwellings,

setting aside the voices of others who warned:

‘Perils beset whomsoever attempts these withered lithic lands’

The servants of their carapaced masters issued forth

Splitting light into a myriad rays,

That swarmed as vile rubies against my approach,

Regret is a bitter pill of long-.

lost ways

A fixated end, slow and methodical was mine,

The breeze blew and I wept for a stony age.

A series of poems, each one a mutation (by any means) on the previous one.

A cobbler who made shoes for ants,

Wept at the enormity of his task,

And drained away in pale exhaustion,

Yet rose again in fluid form,

A resurrected cordwainer,

Thought fit for arthropic labour,

Long he hung on their sounds,

Gave heed to their chaotic babblings

And tried in vain to craft

Brogues fit for that endless marching,

Of sufficient wear and pluck,

And for some styles gavelled cleats,

Yet this now protean formed bootmaker,

Who once deemed his aqueous morphism,

A gift of salvation,

Came to reckon his new un-boundaried life,

As curse and not blessing, saying thus:

“Neither life nor liquid can shoe so many feet”

(Graham Freestone 13 April 2022)

4      Innate savants’ great valley

The calm smile of an umbrella stand is transient

and elephants returning home to dark energy

bury their words in a rich port of failure

Scent discovered effortlessly disappears quickly

ignored at first this content reduces concern

for capital delays in hard pronunciation

Apprentice beetles bowing to want dive into

the prison master’s sick pink features and

as a group rub their free hands in oil

Death has become unclear in limited speculations

all fixed by several old torture treatments that

freeze crematorium victims’ ashes forever

(Geoffrey Mark Matthews 16 April 2022)

The previous (first actual) mutation is included here accompanied by the second.

Harvest

The brittle straw man sat bewildered,

          by the cream that dripped,

          as he looked wistfully on,

and in the elevator,

          that hoary contraption of descent,

          which floated sonorously down,

a toad’s call echoes from the pool below,

          as the fake antagonist hungered still,

          dreaming of bees,

all this I heard without once moving,

          keeping my eye firmly,

          on the receding highway,

(a hare moves at speed,

          an alacrity of asphalt,

          suitable only for evasive swerves).

(Graham  5 April 2022)

2  Arm wrestling

a cephalopod can dance

          burning bright on coral sands

          and turning white to die

a newly tattooed limb facing the

          written blast of sacrifice

          relaxes into resignation again

and the switching gear trips

          in the coolest convoluted

          lizard part of the brain

marching to a different conviction

          banner furled and leaking guilty

          memories of whipping sheets

into the deafening foam

          every frequency registers

          the presence of other minds

From the perspective of pneuminous accretive theory, the issue of AI created art/writing has a particular distinction from that created by humans. The differentiation turns precisely on the pneuminous realm. Let us remind ourselves that in this model, the human-body-vector is inhabited by the self accretion of particular name. This self-accretion is controlled by competing accretive forces that pass through it on different planes: now it is interested in this, now it is interested in that, now it believes this, now it believes that. It is only quasi discrete insofar as it plugs directly into the vast sea of other accretions of pneuma, extending in all directions of semantic connection.

Every communication, every thought, taps into the pneuma constantly, and writing and art is of course no different in this respect. Weaving words together to forge a poem, a narrative, and essay even, involves a sewing together of pneuminous structures in a particular configuration. To try to be as unambiguous as possible, this is literally metaphysical play/craft with the pure stuff of conceptuality (pneuma). The action of successful weaving together with the force of deep intent creates connections between that particular self-accretion-body and the work. The two things are tied together literally. The work is formed of accretions which have an externally existing aspect independent of any particular self-accretion-body (SAB) (or NARP as it has sometimes been referred to as), that in this case are woven together by the SAB to form the new work. The pneuminous accretions of ‘a work of art’ or ‘a poem’ etc itself exist, which structure the ability to see it as such. Thus if we could see it through pneuminous glasses, the work and the creator would appear tied together through pneuminous fibres.

This sounds like metaphysics that settle the ‘real meanng of the work’ type question in favour of the author, and one interpretation of it could indeed yield this conclusion. It would be important to remember however, even acceptance of this theory gives no access to the meaning of the author. If one developed some kind of sorcery level awareness then maybe it would be possible to see the meaning, but even if possible this is generally not the case. Hence, the many interpretations of the work themselves accrete to the work vector, adding to the general accretion. The temporality of the phenomenon exists also pneuminously and hence there is a sense of precedence of the intended meaning, however once again, there is always the possibility that the work is designed deliberately in ambiguity or even that the competing aspects of the artist themself could not agree on the meaning.

Whether though, the work is designed ambiguously or not, the work still emits from the kind of being we are. These beings have meaning relations to the world of infinite complexity, cultural and historical for each individual. On the pneuminous plane they are visualisable as connecting fibres of a particular structure with each fibre coloured by others in emotive hue of joy, trauma, humour, horror sadness etc. This is the being we are, hence when the artist produces, they produce with this material. These affects of pneuma are not metaphorically, or epiphenomenally attached to the the work, they are literally so, whether perceivable or not.

Hence it is with the notion of the imagined existence of the pneuminous realm (argued for variously on this site (though the acceptance of only its transcendental appearance is accepted —see agnostic disjunction), that enables a clear perception of the difference between AI produced work and human. The AI work, whilst still existing pneuminously, indeed is a bizarre looking binding of endless single fibres, reconfigured to order. Work can be produced that can in fact trigger affective and appreciative responses from the human/SAB, yet even a glance at the pneuminous structure reveals a massive difference from the human creation.

Even a casually created piece of art by a human has some affective colouration to it, whereas the AI work only has the dimmest glow of this that emanates from original work that it draws from in the data set; by itself it cannot colour it at all. As stated the work can accrete from one end i.e. the perceiving humans can accrete meaning to it, but underneath it looks much hollower, lacking an entire dimension that is present in human art. Metaphysically it cannot be plumbed in the way human art/writing; literally its ontological structure is different.

Agnostic disjunction means the speculative nature of this work is always admitted, however, this picture is nor really so bizarre, it entails only a notion of conceptual substance beyond a Shannon like information (one that is ontologically effective and contains meaning in the broadest sense). If anything like it obtains, then vast consumption of AI as art/writing could have a profound effect upon what we are. This is not even to say, ‘we shouldn’t’, it is only to point out, the metaphysical thing (art/writing) in both cases is, (to reiterate) essentially two different structures.

Laszlo Aranyi (Frater Azmon)

Twilight of the Gods

Light sleepers without bodies; homunculus germs in sticky,
curd-like drivel
on a cutthroat flypaper.

The unity of male and female,
the degenerated, fading, distant, magical obsessions
of the primordial, blameless root cause become perceptible
The rebel leader writhes in chains.

Call to your ancestors, the flooded river answers,
your double that moved to your house,
is the lynx.

Meanwhile, a double-edged, demon-slaying sword inflicts
a wound upon you,
your self-reanimated shadow draws you deeper.
The dreadful North’s sending a dire army; it crushes
the masked, sleepless foe. Before he murders you though
he waits insidiously for you to kill him.