Unnoticed

Until now I have thought about Generative AI as a compendium of human knowledge, but I am coming to understand it more as the Cliff notes, a summarization and compression of time and meaning into the melody of life, recognizable and able to be embellished with harmonies, dissonance, coloratura, phrasing, and all the signatures with which our individuality and nuance impress upon history.

Our stories are the same stories, re-lived and revised, but nonetheless replayed with new music, new costumes, new sets and new theaters. They are heroes' journeys and comedies. They are romances and tragedies. They are the best and the worst of us intertwined in such a way as to be inseparably co-dependent and also mutually exclusive.

They make sense and no sense and as soon as they are sensible they are also nonsense. And as we dive into them and explore their depths, escape their clutches, surmount their obstacles we encounter other sense-makers. We run into them in opposition, we brush past them in pursuit, we find in them a part that’s recognizable and another that is more foreign than any alien, domestic or extra-terrestrial. And in such moments of encounter we choose not only whether to make them an enemy or friend, but also if we even see them or simply see through them as if they are ghosts whose shadows we walk through.

Perhaps to be one’s enemy is not the worst fate, for at least we are seen as something worth fighting. Even worse is to be deemed unworthy of a fight, to be simply a spectator of one’s own existence without being observed or even noticed. The cloak of invisibility may be a trick of magic. It may also be the curse of death.

Make me thine prey, for even in being eaten, you are forced to confront my flesh and its deliciousness as you wipe the blood from your chin and rub your full belly which I have so graciously filled and shall now proceed to irritate?with the reckless abandon of disease as you rot within and die of your own greed, full but unsatisfied by your conquest.

In so doing, I have given you the honor of being an enemy, even from within your bowels. Your innards in distress are me honoring your life, for if I simply passed through in nourishment and transformation, I would once again return to the ground which you tread unnoticed.

Which brings me back to this compendium of human knowledge or ergo its compression.? Where in this history are the unnoticed?? By nature, nowhere because once their stories are written, they are noticed, even if they have tried with all their might to be hidden from this cycle of good and evil, of night and day, of love and hate.? Once seen, they cannot be unseen, though their records may not actually reflect their presence as it appears to them, only to the observer.

And as we know by being observed they now behave like performers, cast in a role on a stage with an audience, spotlit like a main character or? in the shadows relegated to hoisting the riggs as the scenes change, thinking they are no longer in sight, but the effect of their actions or inactions apparent for all to see. ?

What if in seeing them. In telling their stories we have in fact stripped them of peace - the peace of being unobserved by none other than themselves? ?

What if we thought we were relieving them of the fate of death, when in fact they were at home with it?

What if in our process of knowing, of seeking further knowledge, of coming to understand meaning.? What if we are unraveling the very sweater that has been knit for us, whose threads have kept us warm in the cold, and whose holes have let us cool off in the heat. What if knowledge is both power and purgatory and we have now created a machine to perpetuate the inability to ever be unknown and unnoticed?

If we knew this to be the key that unlocks the door to better, would we stop looking and seeing? Would we stop loving and hurting? Would we stop revealing what’s hidden and allow it to remain dead to us? Or would we resign ourselves to this cyclical fate of the boulder? Up and down, up and down until all of existence becomes part of this cosmic tug of war.

Are we capable of resisting the urge to know and be known and to make known that which is noticed, to one another and to a god whose greatest power is remaining unknown, though certainly not unnoticed?

I cannot help but think that every step I take towards enlightenment is a step closer to stupidity. And to be imprisoned in a body whose entirety is designed to feel and see and touch and hear and smell, a body built to know.

And for this we should feel gratitude for at least we are known to the air we breathe which with each greedy breath has no choice to make us a friend, no capacity to irritate, no opportunity to be released untransformed, but simply passed through our elaborate tunnels leaving us only to feed the unknowing often unnoticed beings.

Oh trees, forgive me for seeing your leaves so crisply outlined in the sky, for visiting your forests that hugged me and made me feel small, for climbing you to get a better view of all I have made.

My only regret is having known your beauty. If only I had simply passed through your shadows.

I'm Lori Mazor. I teach AI with a Human Touch.? I'm reinventing how we educate, strategize, and build the future one article at a time. If you enjoy this newsletter,

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