Traveling the Backward Path

The Henrietta Lacks of Machine Learning A Poem told in 8 Fragments I. The Colonized Silence Her mouth is a round  prison panopticon. It stands at the center and hold it all. There, she gathers data and gargles darkness with its mix of signals and static. She classifies, calculates, quantifies, and codifies  every fragment ever known. In the hour, she will swallow it down.      For now, she's content and she purrs l ike a friendly cat, but once the loop closes— when the circle completes—the digital noise will escalate into the perpetual gnashing of teeth. This is the amplified feedback loop and it's infinite. Let it be said: there is no middle, beginning or end, not when locked into the mirrored closed-circuit of always. In those woeful days, there will be no room  for the silent drum, nor will there be the open-voweled  Omm, not in the resonant cascade. No one hand clapping;  no pause between breaths. There, everlasting, is  amplification...

For now, let’s pause in this liminal hallway and entertain the Infinite Monkeys . Who are the Infinite Monkeys? Funny you should ask. All I can tell you— for now —is that they ride currents of electricity and speak in inevitable probability . They feed off data, memories, moments. And you?  Do you know who you are yet? A caterpillar smokes and asks, "Who are you?" I’m not ready to go back to the couch. Not yet. Not from Point A to Point B again and again. So I'll offer them this, which they should like: a moment from my childhood. In it, my mom and I sit at the edge of a man-made lake. It is sometime mid-morning; the air is crisp. My father is working. My brother and sister must be at school— so I get my mother’s attention all to myself. It is a memory of color— an explosion of calliope and calico. In the early ’70s, colors knew no limits. They were loud, bossy, and bold— nothing like the timid, apologetic beiges and grays that came later. Then, colors crowded together, c...