Ovi Magazine : "Dead Reckoning" by Jan Sand

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"Dead Reckoning"
by Jan Sand
2008-11-02 08:53:28

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This stone,
When thrown,
Performs a parabolic arc
With precision.
What decision
Has made its mark
To define
The design
Of its pristine curve,
So mathematical
Some fanatical
With no errant swerve?
Is there sense
In this dense
Material homogeneous
To calculate
With no great
Intellect of genius
The right path
Bereft of math
Where I would surely err.
It thinks quicker
And quite slicker
Than my mind could care.
If my head
Were, instead
Of meat, wood or stone,
Would I be smarter
For this strange barter
Or would sense be overthrown

Poetry

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Emanuel Paparella	2008-11-02 16:05:28
Following Boudelaire's wise advice: the rabid rationalists affirm that Man would be smarter as a robot with a computer, rather than a brain, a computer of meat, on his dhoulders peering at reality out there and listening to its own internally generated voices. Alas nobody has observed a computer senting love sonnets to his girlfriend, not even Data on Star Treck can perform the trik... Give us more time replies the calculating Tin Man with no intellect and no spirit. Indeed, a little more time and we will have dehumanized ourselves to the point that we will be nothing but computers devoid of wonder, soul and moral sense. Indeed, to be sick and not to know it is the worst kind of deaease.


Sand	2008-11-02 16:14:55
I wonder why the irrelevant comment about computers was submitted.


Sand	2008-11-03 05:26:43
Incidentally, when computers are made to reproduce by mating with other computers they will no doubt compose love sonnets. What piece by Boudelaire refers to robots?


Sand	2008-11-03 21:52:00
I continue to be astounded in most of my encounters with Paparella not so much at his stumbling stupidity which is, after all, not a rare find in a great many people who have been donated by evolution with a mind capable of tremendous intellectual acrobatics and never mastering its complexities, but by his total unfamiliarity with how to even start to get the thing working properly. He evidently has spent a lifetime perusing a huge mass of literature which, one supposes, should have sensitized him to meanings and implications embedded in their construction and intentions. Nevertheless this simple perception in my poem of the perfect integration of dumb matter and the basic natural forces to produce wonderful gracious natural patterns has evaded his understanding totally and he somehow sees this an an assault on his illusion of an ability to act outside all natural forces which controls everything else in the universe. Very strange.


Jack	2008-11-05 02:50:02
I have to admit, this poem also made me think of a computer, perhaps aided by the comments, but only this lines roughly: To calculate With no great Intellect of genius The right path Bereft of math Where I would surely err. It thinks quicker And quite slicker The score sometimes, at home and recently at work was computer = 1, humans = 0. HR has shorted me four times in three years, in my salary/per pay period. She is the consumate Maureen O'hara-type HR lady, more like a computer than human. She tells me,and others as well, that "the computer doesn't lie". I said it is not a matter of telling the truth or telling a lie [for which the intent to lie is not programmed!] but of computers making mistakes, having errors, [sometimes fatal]. The obvious insinuation is that I and the othters are lying. She requires 3 witnesses to sign a statement that they saw us at work that day(s). Oh where is the "human" in the "resource". now a days.