AT THE STOA

To be able to perform magic trickery very well, you have to master the force, misdirection, cunning wordcraftery, and sleights. It is in these four essential principles that magic is most diametrically opposite to love, if we understand and reduce love to terms of the question, reassurance, honesty, and transparency - for, as one definition goes, magic is the art of deception, implying a cleaving from the other; and love is the closest we get to being one with an other. First binary: Force and question The force in magic is already a predetermined "choice" the magician presents, along with others, to his audience. Without going into mentalism and the magician's choice, the force is the principle of rigged order in what appears to be chaotically random concatenations of things or options. It is in this forced/rigged action of the magician forcing your hand, unbeknownst to to you, that the trick comes to fruition. When asking a question of a lover, you do not ask merely to ...

"There is only one evil: disunity." - Pierre Tielhard de Chardin  In Gaiman's Endless, there was once a nightmare that escaped in Dream's absence that wreaked havoc in the dream world. It is one form of metaphysical monism that assimilated everything organic unto itself, and Cain had let it out into the kingdom. The story revolves around how Dream, having just gotten back from being wrongfully summoned, controlled it again, not without considerable damage to everything he has. I have no object permance or ontological security, up until now. I didn't get to develop it when I was supposed to, and it resolved into separation anxiety when I was older. I remember I would cry my 2nd-grader eyes out when my mother would leave me in school for the day. This persisted until 4th grade. That is why when I read that Gaiman story, it spoke volumes to me - dare I say it - in feeling, in primordial fear, and not in words. "This is what God must feel like," I remember t...

I have been trying my hand at generative AI art for a couple of months. Some thoughts: Art is from the word 'ars,' meaning 'skill,' or 'craft.' Applied to what I do, which is generate images using AI algorithms (by putting descriptive prompts), this definition makes me immediately hit a roadblock, especially since "generative art" is actually a phrase in the Internet. What is the art, or skill, in what I do? I am not skilled the way a sculptor is skilled: a sculptor   makes  sculpture. It is not in this sense that I   make  an image from the algorithm. There are two senses to the word "creation" or "artist" involved in the case of an AI-generative artist and a sculptor. Which led me to consider that "make" isn't the right word for what I do - it's more like "curate." The images are there, after all, and the images are the bases from which the AI generates further images from which I then choose.  Or anoth...