The real AI…
That was, originally, going to be the name of this project—"The real AI"—but I decided against it because, ultimately, I don't want to come across as contentious.
“Ki to the City” more accurately indicates my mission. I really just want to bring more ki to the city, promote my dojo, promote Aikido… And, anyway, I can’t claim to profess to know what’s “real” or what isn’t.
I also don't want to insult people who are strong proponents of what they call artificial intelligence. Well, sometimes I do want to insult people who are strong proponents of what they call artificial intelligence, I just don't want to necessarily do it in such a semi-permanent way as this virtual ink stain here on this screen page.
But yeah, the real Ai is love—the real Ai is harmony—this other AI… all it would take is a strong solar flare or some other catastrophic meteorological event to just come knock out all the power grids and it's gone—it's finger snapped out of existence.
I'm not saying I don't use what they call Artificial Intelligence. I find it pretty useful for correcting my punctuation. As you can see, I get annoyed with commas and semicolons and end up over-using dashes. I’m not ever gonna send my writing to a proofreader—I use AI for that—so I guess I’m a bit hypocritical.
I'm also susceptible to trying to come up with catchy titles. “The Real AI” was a song I wrote during a fictional fugue state last year. In songs you can get away with making declarative statements without having to back them up with “arguments.”
Speaking of arguments, earlier today I was pondering over whether to write a prose poem called “O Sensei as shaman” or one called “Arguing about Aikido on social media.” But I decided I couldn’t commit to writing either.
I didn’t write “O Sensei as shaman” because it would’ve required too many footnotes for this funk I’m in—and I don't feel like I'm in a position to qualify anyone else as a shaman or not. It sounds cool and I think it’s true—but how many people would really be interested in that besides me, anyway? Raise your hand…
And the second one, “Arguing about Aikido on social media”—well, that's just kind of like some low-hanging fruit. It would be easy to write about quite vividly because it's a phenomenon that’s been impressed upon me viscerally in the immediate vicinity of my own sensory experience. I mean, I didn't argue online about Aikido today, but I almost did—and have before.
Since I've been working on this project in earnest, I've been way more active on social media than I’ve ever really wanted to be in my life—and I've gotten sucked into myriad mucky trifling vortices of “debate” regarding Aikido.
I can’t always resist...
The real Ai is love—the real Ai is harmony! I should just focus on that. Why can't I just ignore the gatekeepers and extol the praises, pen the exhortations, cerebrally celebrate, rhetorically embellish, define a new generation…
Incidentally, O Sensei was a shaman because he conversed with the ethereal realm and brought back a technology that could soothe us spiritually against the onslaught of industrial mechanization. (See how I shoe-horned that in?)
Training’s been difficult lately because the attendance has been pretty low. When only a few people show up to class, I feel like it's just so much more intense, both physically and psychologically.
It's also a little weird because some people at my dojo are subscribed to this Substack, and I feel like when I write now—I'm thinking too much about what they will think about it—and it kind of reminds me of when I first started going to open mics after my mother died. Sometimes my friends from highschool, or, once in a while, my grandmother would come along, and afterwards they’d ask me what my poetry meant. And I had to admit that I didn't really always know myself—it was all pretty much just anecdotal psychography.
Share this post