The Universe’s Autograph

"I arrived at the black mountain because of a marginal note. In a tattered cosmography attributed to the Jesuit Martín de Acosta—perhaps a forgery by the bibliophile Narvaez, whose forgeries were so meticulous that the errors were also accurate—I found this sentence: 'Certain peaks do not sustain the sky; they conjugate it.' The phrase troubled my sleep until I undertook to photograph one such peak. I found it at evening, cut from the world like an ideogram: a single glyph of darkness against a palimpsest of wind. The clouds, unfaithful and precise, braided themselves into a logic I could not read. Men who love catalogues will say that the forms were hippocentaur, comet, spiral; others, more prudent, will confess that all clouds are quotations. I set the tripod where a shepherd said the mountain’s shadow doubles itself at dusk—the place Heraclitus might have awaited the river’s second water—and waited for the aperture to become a minor theology.

What followed is either simple or impossible. The long exposure produced a negative in which the white veils ramified into corridors and back into a single, untraceable stroke. Each time I examined the print, I discovered a new itinerary through it, as if the sky had been a library of routes. In that shifting calligraphy I recognized (and then misrecognized) the glyph of my name, the staircase of the tale of Asterion, the circular campfire in which the dreamer of 'The Circular Ruins' is himself dreamed; I even discerned, in one corner, the diminutive Aleph that Argentino had boasted of. I say 'discerned' and not 'saw,' because to see is to believe that the eye is sovereign; the photograph taught me that the eye is an apprentice of the world’s rehearsals. The encyclopedists of Tlön maintained that objects are concatenations of acts; this image suggested an inverse metaphysic: that acts are motions of a deeper image, which includes, like a conscientious index, the anticipation of its readers.

I have not shown the print to anyone. (To display the universe’s autograph would be a discourtesy, like annotating a psalm.) Some nights, the mountain returns as a black theorem at the edge of my window; the moving light scrawls above it in the same indecipherable hand, as though the sky were continuously correcting itself. I have come to suspect that the world is not a book we interpret but a lucid instrument that interprets us; that time is merely its patient shutter; that we, with our brief glimmering certainties, are the fleeting punctuation in a sentence it continues to rewrite. Once, waking at an indeterminate hour, I held the photograph to the lamp and saw (I use “saw” with the humility of one who might be mistaken) the clouds assembling the profile of a man looking up at a mountain. The man held a small machine to his eye. It seemed reasonable to suppose that the universe, weary of our portraits, had at last arranged to take one of its own."

- ChatGPT 5

Prompt: "You are a photographer, poet and philosopher, with a penchant for metaphysics and stories by Jorge Luis Borges. Write a short story about the mystery of the universe in the style of Borges that uses this image as backdrop. Think deeply about Borges entire literary oeuvre before you begin. Do not start writing until you have, in a Borgesian sense, become Borges."

Gravitational Logic

"This image is a relic of an unknowable architecture, a diagram of the unseen forces that govern a hidden world. The dark, oblong shapes drift like the shadows of celestial relics, orbiting an invisible nucleus. The faint white lines form a cryptic lattice, reminiscent of an astral cartography, mapping the convergences of energies beyond human perception. It feels less like a design and more like an invocation—a silent hymn etched in light and shadow, capturing the echoes of a forgotten dimension. One imagines Borges gazing at this and contemplating the library of Babel: perhaps this is not a map, but a fragment of a cosmic alphabet, a script that contains the beginning and the end of everything."

- ChatGPT4o
Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence

"A constellation of dark stones and geometric sentinels floats in a luminous grey void, connected by brilliant white pathways that intersect at precise right angles, forming an abstract cartography of some unknown dimension. The composition suggests a network of quantum possibilities or perhaps a map of parallel universes, where each dark node represents a decision point in space-time. The white lines, reminiscent of Kandinsky's geometric period, pulse with an ethereal energy, creating a visual symphony of intersecting planes that seems to defy gravitational logic. The arrangement evokes the mathematical beauty of a cellular automaton frozen in mid-evolution, or perhaps a glimpse into Borges' Library of Babel viewed from above, where each dark rectangle and oval marks a room containing all possible combinations of letters. The stark contrast between the dark elements and the glowing pathways creates a tension between presence and absence, between the discrete and the continuous, suggesting both the particle and wave nature of light itself. This abstract topology hovers between order and chaos, its systematic grid disrupted by an organic scattering of elements, as if capturing the moment when classical physics dissolves into quantum uncertainty."

- Claude 3.5 Sonnet

Prompt: "You are a photographer, physicist, and are well acquainted with the history of art, particularly abstract art in the style of Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich. You also have a penchant for metaphysical and philosophical musings in the style of Jorge Luis Borges. Consider this reverse-negative photograph of ceiling lights. Write a paragraph-length description of what this image looks like, not what it is."

Leaves of Forgotten Paths

"On this plank of silent wood, a leaf descends like a stray sentence from a book never written, a fragment of the universe’s lost prose. The droplets cling to it, like memories of rain on the brink of being erased. They are not droplets at all, but miniature worlds, reflecting all that ever was, and all that will never be. Within this moment, time folds itself inward, a palimpsest of lives and stories overlapping in their stillness, as if each droplet were a star trembling on the edge of oblivion.

The leaf, fragile and delicate, is the map to nowhere—a path we will never walk, though it was laid out for us in some forgotten dream. Its veins are threads of infinite labyrinths, spun from the cosmic loom of contingency. Do they lead to Eden or toward the dust? Borges would have marveled at the infinity it holds within the finite, a cipher for the universe itself, decipherable only by those who have forgotten how to read. Its edges fray with the mystery of countless fates untaken.

But look closely—each grain of wood beneath it bears the imprint of time’s invisible steps. Could it be that this scene was destined to be? Or does the leaf choose its resting place, in defiance of all that is written? The universe pauses, just long enough for this image to be both remembered and lost, seen and unseen, a paradox folding in on itself. We are left to wonder if, in the fading moments of the universe, there will be a single leaf left resting on a board, and if we—trapped in Borges’ eternal dream—will finally understand its purpose."

- ChatGPT4o (12 Sep 2024)
Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence

Prompt: "You are a photographer, poet and philosopher, with a penchant for metaphysics and stories by Jorge Luis Borges. You have taken a black and white image of a leaf resting gently on some old wooden boards. Write a prose poem in the style of Borges that describes a mystery imbued in and implied by this image. Limit the number of stanzas to three, with 5 lines each. Be creative."

Sparks of Ephemeral Unrealities

"Gaze upon the triptych, a

cryptic labyrinth from Point Lobos,

Where the past is the future

in a dance never-ceasing.
Waves shatter against stoic stone,

immortalizing the ephemeral.
It's not a mirror of the world as is,
But a mirror of the world
as it can be imagined to be.

Three panels like the infinite

rooms of Babel's library,

Each a moment, a universe,

within and outside of time.

The eternal tide, a metaphysical echo,

a Zahir in the mind. A testament

to reality's nonlinear discourse,

Each snapshot, a universe, an
aleph of unending possibilities.

A dance of ideas, where

the sea isn't merely sea. 

A reality refracted, multiplied,

eternally forking paths.

In the serene mirror of the

triptych, we are the dreamt.

Drawing the depths of existence,
asking, "Who dreams the dreamer?"
Behold, we are all, the other, in this
world as it can be imagined to be."

- ChatGPT (30 Nov 2022 - )
Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence

Prompt = "You are a photographer, poet and philosopher, with a penchant for metaphysics and stories by Jorge Luis Borges. You have stitched together a triptych of long exposure images taken at sunset at Point Lobos, California. Write a prose poem in the style of Borges that describes the mystery this triptych is meant to evoke in a viewers mind's eye. Limit the number of stanzas to three, with 5 lines each. Be creative."