Caminante No Hay Camino (Antonio Machado (1875- 1939)

 

It is Sunday, my personal time to wander without walking; to travel through lines others have thought about first.

Usually, Sundays are my time to read poetry. And as I was thinking about wandering and traveling, I revisited the lines by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado (1875- 1939) from his collection Proverbios y Cantares (Proverbs and Songs.)  The most remembered and celebrated lines from that collection are Machado’s dialogue with the reader about identity and destiny. It is a symbolic poem where the poet believes that we all make our paths by walking through life, hence that we have control of our choices. In a few short lines the poet makes the reader empowered and optimistic.

Here is the original poem in Spanish: 

“Caminante, son tus huellas
El camino y nada más;
Caminante, no hay camino,
Se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace el camino,
Y al volver la vista atrás
Se ve la senda que nunca
Se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino
Sino estelas en la mar.”

There are a number of translations I have read into English. Unfortunately the translators often are tempted to also “interpret” the original work’s intent. A representative of that temptation is a translation by Willis Barnstone in 2004, which incorporates a number of interpretations that would differ across and among readers of Merchado’s original choice of words, imagery and philosophy.

Here is the translation, which I do like, but I remain uncomfortable with a few words:

Walker, your footsteps
are the road, and nothing more.
Walker, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
Walking you make the road,
and turning to look behind
you see the path you never
again will step upon.
Walker, there is no road,
only foam trails on the sea.

 

Huellas directly translates into “Footprints” rather than “Footsteps.” And that is important because if indeed we make the road by walking, and if we are to able to look back and see the path we made, then we should have left signs of our passage. Or prints. Even if we will not take that path again.  

Interestingly, Machado’s last two lines leave us perplexed regarding our ability of looking back AND seeing that path. Because now he suggests that the road we created by walking is like a trail left by a boat on the sea which disappears with the waves.

It reads:

Caminante, no hay camino
sino estelas en la mar

A direct translation of “estelas” would be “trails” not “foam trails” as in the English translation. This is where the interpretation of the translator feels like interference.  Perhaps “wake trails” are a better interpretation of Merchado’s message regarding the vanishing of the past.

Finally, every time I have read this poem in Spanish, I got the sense that it is about a traveler rather than a walker, although Caminante translates as Walker. To me, it is more about our travel in life, through choices we make that define our identity.

.. In my walks, I might have made a road or two. And I have looked back, without regret yet sometimes with nostalgia. And when I sit in my rocking chair and try to understand, I still believe that ships do not lose their wake trails in the sea, because trails made by cutting waves find their way back to beaches they know, to the mossy rocks that await them.

Wake trails do not disappear.

 

April 14, 2024

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024

Cemetery Iris

 

 

A dream-weaver

Covered her shade

Where salt brush bloom

In the space

Of her passage

 

Shuffling through the sand

She reached the Ghaf tree

Where

She left last night's dream

Unfinished

  

In that dream she wove

The cadence of white camel herds

Like a Nabati poem

She had learned

Many rains ago

 

And now the day’s shade

Covered the dream-weaver’s hands

Holding on without regret

Letting go without a sound

The echo unspoken words

 

Bounce in the desert

 

April 5, 2024

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024

Nocturnal Flight

 

It was a quiet thought

Like the shadow August moons

Keep under the broken wing

Of lonesome fruit bats

 

It was a lost name

Left in secret meadows

That wore the scent August rain gives

To untaken paths

Of lonesome souls

 

It was a stone that rolled

Hoping for an unplanned ride

Through the ordinary

 

It was a quiet thought

 

March 30, 2024

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024

Human Consciousness in Understanding the Suprareality of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

 

Physics always attracted me - on this blog I have numerous essays about the intriguing parallels between quantum physics, the interactions at molecular level, to human behaviour with the world around us, or at the macro level.

Among these is our characteristic of having perceptions albeit not  always knowing how they translate to our understanding of our environment. More importantly, it is our “unknowing” how to translate these perceptions into evaluating our present and future behaviours.

In fact, this very topics has puzzled scientists for more than a century, especially when exploring the role of the brain vis à vis our perceptions in interpreting our sensory experiences. The scientific formulation of this inquiry was in the 19^th century by a German physician and physicist Hermann von Hemholtz. He proposed that while our brain interprets sensory signals/stimulations , many of us perceive and interpret that same signal in different ways. After all, visual arts, even written poetry send the same signal to everyone’s brain but we perceive what we experience differently, making art a platform where our individual past experiences  bypass the wiring circuits of our brain and transform the predictability of the  interpretation fluid, different and personal.

Present day scientific research has expanded Von Hemboltz’s framework of brain and perception to brain-mind perception. The intervening dimension in the new framework is that of consciousness when the mind translates what the brain analyses into perception. Thus, the brain records facets of an observation or experience, and the mind/consciousness interprets them within the parameters of perception that are influenced by the past experiences of the “brain owner.”  Such experiences range from feelings, passing through pragmatic decision making, to actions taken based on superstition. In this context, it has been proposed that the relationship between quantum physics, perception and effect on behaviour becomes more scientifically tenable.

Why?

In the observation of micro, molecular level interactions, quantum mechanics has demonstrated a fundamental effect of the observation on the behaviour of the observed. In the early 19^th century, the German physicist and Nobel Prize recipient Werner Heisenberg discovered that when atoms are observed, the very act of observing them affects their behaviour. It is called the “observer effect” and has influenced scientific research beyond physics, including psychology and medicine. And that is where the molecular world of quantum physics has guided our understanding of our own behaviour in, and interaction with the macro world.

How?

Any creature, including us humans, interacts with its “world” by interpreting the observed and reacting to it.  That reaction can be appreciation, rejection, fear, fight, flight as well new understanding leading to future reactions when similar observations are interpreted.  As such through the initial observation, the observed becomes real, and it shapes our own self. Further, through our actions post interpretation, we change the behaviour of that original observed which will now take a new “form” when encountered again. But through this new experience of observation and interpretation, we are also changed by understanding the process.

That is the essence of what is called “Quantum Leap” in psychology. Specifically that through the observer effect of daily life, we become multiple versions of our own selves – that we acquire different abilities to interact with our reality. And those multiple versions of us are like the particles observed in quantum physics – they will be affected and changed through observation. Thus the “Leap” we develop is like particles – going from version of ourselves to another, never at the same time, every time we are faced with a new interpretation of reality.

In a funny way, the quantum mechanics contribution to psychology, and the field of consciousness in the interpretation of reality, seems a mirror image of the observer effect – it is we who change when reality looks back at us!

… Today we face a new challenge – that of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Simply put, AI would act as a brain by processing all available “knowledge” about an observation of topic, and synthesizes a signal of that composite for us to run through our consciousness and perceptions. In traditional human terms, the composite signal the AI offers us is not reality as our brain is built to record, but a “Suprarealty” (my terminology)where “Supra” stands for “beyond and outside the limits”.  No doubt, this new reality is one that we have to learn to adopt, but with a caveat – our past experiences and knowledge will not be able to fully analyse that new reality through our present consciousness, hence perceive its meaning. We may not know wrong from right, real from fiction, and thus be unable to dissociate our known reality from the AI generated Suprareality.

The fundamental challenge may be because our reality and the Suprareality do and will coexist. Perhaps the human brain will evolve to accommodate such duality, but for now our old brains are not designed to guide our consciousness to evaluate the two realities in tandem.

As a simplistic experiment, I ran the photo at the top of this page through a rudimentary AI function on my phone. It is a photo I took in Mumbai during a passing summer rain.  The goal of my experiment was to see how that photo would be modified using the synthesis of drawing techniques and result in a product that would qualify as artistic. Here is the result:

 

As a street photographer, I aim at capturing reality as it happens. I do not alter what I observe, and my past 50 years of people photography have shaped my consciousness to predict the next behavior based on an initial one and get ready to take a photo when that predicted moment happens.

Looking at the “drawing” of my photo, I cannot hear the rain, the brouhaha of the busy street, and almost smell the humid air in Mumbai.

Maybe I will, one day, learn how to have those feelings when looking at a Suprareality photo. And that would not be a quantum leap, but rather a paradigm shift.

 

Sample from my previous posts about the role of physics beyond scientific research

1.    https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2013/11/paradox-and-uncertainty.html

2.    https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2015/06/yin-yang-and-st-augustine.html

3.    https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-oak-sleeps-in-acorn-james-allen.html

 

March 25, 2024

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024

Requiem to a Flame

 

There was a flame

At the end of a busy road

Stubborn and bright

Accepting to the wind

 

There was a melody

Simple and inviting 

At the middle of the road

Echoing on its own notes

 

And the road kept the flame

As long as the flame wanted to hear

The melody bounce on concrete and steel

On people's faces and on their steps

 

For the road kept them busy

Unaware of the flame and deaf

When a summer rain covered the flame

In melody, in caring lyrics, drop

By

Drop

 

March 23, 2024

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024

The Patience of a Cello

 

 

When that path

Finds your pace

On an

Ordinary

Day

 

When a smile

On that path

Becomes

A misty

Rhapsody

 

When you drink

From an empty

Cup

Laughter and

Silence

 

Your space is the await

For that dusty

Path

Which

Once

 

Found your pace

 

March 15, 2024

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024

An Old Man and the Desert

 

It was my birthday a few days ago. I do not celebrate birthdays anymore, even when others remind me of it.

There was a lot of snow on the ground that day. The desert is accepting when it gets covered. The heavy and wet snow bends the alderleaf mountain mahogany brush to the ground. To the sand. And the Crocodile Juniper trees lower their branches as if elderly folks secretly remembering.

And the horizon becomes flatter. And the desert becomes the horizon.

So I sat in my chair that has taken my body shape over the years. And sipped on luke-warm green tea and thought of things other than my birthday.

Then, searched through my favorite books on shelves that kept them together. Upright. Gibran, Voltaire, Tennyson, Balzac, Alexis Carrel. Then, I stopped and pulled Hemingway out of the file line. “Perfect” I thought “The Old Man and the Sea” is good to re-read today. Maybe I will discover a new line; or a new meaning to an old line.”

I went to Chapter Two. I felt like joining the old man going to sea after eighty four days without catching a fish.

I have read Hemingway’s works countless times, in three languages. While translations tell of the story and not the author’s genius, I enjoy discovering how that genius is pan-human, touching culture and spirituality through thoughts and images beyond the subtleties of the original language.

.. And I rode alongside the old man in his small skiff. There were other fishermen going to the sea before sunrise. I thought I saw the lanterns on each fisherman’s skiff quietly cutting the waves. I was quiet too so I would let the old man feel lucky on that day. I knew he had told Manolin that he felt lucky this morning.

And then, I heard a whisper in my ear. It was Hemingway. He said:

“There were other boats going out to sea and the old man heard the dip and push of their oars even though he could not see them.”

I put the book on my knees, took another sip of the now cold green tea, and thought about my birthday.

.. The old man heard the dip and push of their oars even though he could not see them. I realised that at that moment I was also hearing the oars of passage, their dips and push. I was on different continents, in cities I have never been to, and with people many I had not met. Yet, I knew they were there but could not see them.  I was with descendents of native Samoans in the north of Taiwan; found myself in the catacombs of Prague; and relived the last time I saw my parents in Paris.

And then, I felt a touch on my foot. It was my old dog who had put his large Akita paw on my right foot and was looking at me with his honey-brown eyes. He wanted to go outside and play in the snow.

So, wondered when I will read Hemingway again as I put “The Old Man and the Sea” back on the shelve.

And went out with my dog to play in the snow.

An old man, an old dog and the desert under snow.

 

February 21, 2024

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024