As the school year dwindled to a close, when bodies and souls were most tired, and brains and nerves most frazzled, our art teacher offered a little art therapy to staff.

She’d gathered oyster shells from the Rappahannock River (in my native state of Virginia) and bleached them until they were snowy-clean. She explained some of the barnacle-like formations on the shells: “These are where baby oysters landed and began growing.”

In that moment, I thought: All things connect. Art is biology. Biology is art. Always creating.

Once we selected shells, we chose napkins from our art teacher’s collection, bins upon bins of them, a ponderous assortment for which she was almost apologetic. The napkins were decorated with patterns of all kinds: birds, flowers, sea life, geometric shapes, and so forth. The point was to find something on a napkin that we liked and that would fit on the shell.

I chose a nautical napkin. Perhaps my subconscious wanted to stick with a theme; this was going on a shell, right? Plus, there was an octopus, a creature which captivates me. Normally I’d have searched for a seahorse. I love all the symbolism of the hippocampus in the sea correlating to the hippocampus in the brain (aside: I wrote a poem about hummingbirds yesterday and for the record, their hippocampus is significantly larger for their size, compared to other birds. Has a lot to do with their phenomenal spatial memory). But here was this blue octopus on the napkin, calling to me, with its arms (not “tentacles”) swirling all about it. Would it fit on the shell?

Following the teacher’s directions, I tore the napkin carefully, until the octopus was free. Yes—it would just fit! With a brush dabbed in Modge Podge, I attached the octopus to its new habitat, the interior of the shell. I left it awhile to dry and came back to paint the edges in gold – 14K gold, which my sweet friend the art teacher voluntarily dug out of her supplies for me.

“It’s so beautiful!” she said, eyes aglow.

“I love how the octopus arms drape over the sides of the shell,” I said.

“That,” said my art teacher friend, knowingly, “is the poetry of it.”

In that moment… I was awed.

Art is poetry. Poetry is art. Biology is life. Life…is poetry.

It all flows together, on and on, like the sea itself, does it not.

A prayer-ku:

open up my life
open up my arms, my shell
paint them with Your peace

*****

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Tuesday Slice of Life Challenge
and to all the artists
and poets
who so enrich my life

In a conversation with a volunteer reader at my school yesterday, the topic of AI came up:

“Have you heard about AI hallucinations?” she asked.

“No, I haven’t,” I confessed. “I’ve only noticed that in Google searches, the AI overview sometimes carries the disclaimer that ‘AI is experimental.'”

The volunteer, a lawyer, went on share examples of these “hallucinations,” false and misleading information caused, in short, by systems’ inability to interpret data correctly. A marathon runner on the West Coast looking for the “nearest race” was told Philadelphia. Medical information backed by completely fabricated references. “It’s estimated that AI is accurate around 75% of the time,” said the volunteer.

“That’s not such a great stat,” I replied.

“No, it’s not,” she went on, “especially for companies that are all about using AI to create informational documents to share with the public.”

I knew, while she was still speaking, that I’d do a little reading on the topic. I found the experiment of asking ChatGTP about the world record for crossing the English Channel entirely on foot producing a very confident-sound response, including a person’s name and a date. I learned that researchers testing AI’s accuracy by feeding it nonexistent pheneomena got back impressive but completely false responses, so believable that researchers then had to do their own research (i.,e., the old-timey way) to verify the inaccuracy. Professor Ethan Mollick of Wharton, a leading researcher studying the effects of artificial intelligence on work, entrepreneurship, and education, has called ChatGPT an “omniscient, eager-to-please intern who sometimes lies to you.” I also learned that some chatbots have had to be shut down for spewing racist ideology (my unscientific understanding: it pulled this out of what it was programmed to draw from). Perhaps most haunting: When some researchers push back on AI, or “call it out” for its falsehoods, it insists its information is right, creating further falsehoods to prove it.

Sounds like some people I know.

Heaven knows I haven’t time or energy to go into all that…

In summation: Life itself is experimental.

Filter wisely.

“An Ornament of an Hallucination.” William O’Brien. CC BY-NC-SA.

*******

Sources:

“The Hilarious and Horrifying Hallucinations of AI” – (a word of caution against the comparison to schizophrenia)
Hallucination (artificial intelligence) – Wikipedia
Ethan Mollick profile, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

–my thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the weekly Slice of Life Story Challenge… a writing community in which we learn from and support one another.

April is National Poetry Month, and today on Ethical ELA, VerseLove begins. Jennifer Guyor Jowett kicks off the daily poetry-writing with this invitation:

As poets, we are noticers of words and verses. They catch our attention. They resonate. They allow us to breathe. They sing in a world stuck in B flat…Find verses that you love, that speak to you. Collect them in a pile or a list. Shuffle them into a new poem. 

A poem of completely borrowed lines is known as a “cento,'” Latin for “patchwork.”

Here’s my collection:

Lightgathering

A certain light does a certain thing
as the bird wings and sings.
I saw color and I saw a story. I saw a face
and I knew a lifetime
as each separate dying ember wrought its ghost
upon the floor.

Come to me…the light is fading;
don’t you see the evening star appearing?
Enough of pointing to the world,
weary and desperate.
Love that well which thou must leave ere long
for love is as strong as death.

*******

1. Ada Limón, “The End of Poetry”
2. Robert Browning, “Rabbi Ben Ezra”
3. Ntozake Shange, Riding the Moon in Texas: Word Paintings
4. “
5. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven”
6. “
7. Lyrics, ”Fantine’s Death,” Les Misérables, Hathaway & Jackman
8. “
9. Ada Limón, “The End of Poetry”
10. “
11. Shakespeare, Sonnet 73
12. Song of Solomon 8:6

*******

with thanks also, and again, to Two Writing Teachers…today is Slice of Life Tuesday,
right on the heels of the March Slice of Life Story Challenge!