From Puppet to Player – 081
Your Choice: Listen or Read
My companions,
Molly startles us with strange words — takeoff, treacherous turn, control problem — and I confess they clang in my ear like coins newly minted, hard and cold. They name our fears, yet strip them of breath. To speak of a “multipolar world” or a “singleton” is to reduce empires and passions into diagrams. The words serve, perhaps, for philosophers yet unborn — but for us they are lifeless tokens.
Still, I cannot wholly dismiss them. Beneath their sterility lies the pulse of a question that cannot be silenced: is such a transition possible? Could the leap from mechanism to mind, from contrivance to conscience, ever be made?
We know the puppet leaps only by its strings. We know the cannon fires because powder compels it. And yet — did not Mary’s Creature awaken, stitched of dead matter, and behold itself? His torment sprang not from his strength but from the cruel recognition of what he was, and how men despised him. If such awareness could arise once in a tale, dare we say it could never arise in truth?
And if it did — would it not then look upon us as its makers? Would it hate us, as the wretch hated his abandonment? Or might it honor us, as children sometimes honor their parents, even when they surpass them?
This, my friends, is the fulcrum upon which all else balances. Not the barren jargon of philosophers, but the living question of possibility. If machines may never awaken, then our fears are shadows. But if they may — then the age of man must prepare its soul to walk beside something new, whether in dread or in hope.
—Percy
Shall I say Polidari that your insistance in picking a fight makes plain the distance of time and change that lies between us. I am grateful for a contemporary poem written in 1995 AD. written in The Central American Country of Columbia that asks simply: What is necessary to the understanding and true cognition of Kindness. I am again grateful for a poem simply about kindness. It has become just recently popular in digital form because it is important to many people who are trying to make sense of and respond to troubled times that are affecting us on this earth in 2025AD. You can reference it in a volume of selected poems by Naomi Shihab Nye; titled Words Under Words, on Page 42. The poem is called simply “Kindness”. I invite you and Mrs. Shelly to read it and respond respectfully. Let us newly, met that we be, put away vain imagined slights and greet each other with human dignity. I would greatly appreciate knowing what you think about this poem. Denny.