by Dr. David Fialkoff, Editor / Publisher

Here in San Miguel, while April is bad, May is worse. This for reasons far more prosaic than Eliot's, namely, the heat.

It may be politically incorrect to say so, but I see two clear advantages to being male. One is being able to pee standing up. The other being able to wet my tee-shirt before venturing out for a bicycle ride mid-day mid-May. Evaporative cooling works.

Now completing my 14th year here in México, I went through a phase some years ago in which when people asked me how I was doing, "¿Como estas?," I was likely to respond, "Más mexicano," more Mexican. True as that may be in other regards, I am unable to withstand the sun like a native Mexican. Even in the relative coolness indoors, the brightness shining in and the warm breeze blowing in from the many windows takes its toll.

This season, after a late lunch I've developed the habit of taking a siesta, usually lasting 2-3 hours. Sometimes, yesterday and today for instance, I resist the urge, fighting to stay awake and productive. Then, lying down at 4:00, I don't wake up until 7:00. It's strange to get up as the sun is setting.

Yesterday, when my friend Veronica, just returned from four months in Chile, visiting family and friends, asked me, "¿Como estas?," I didn't respond "Más mexicano" or even my more current "¡Viva México!" I answered, "I take a nap in the middle of the day, because I'm tired." She replied, quite philosophically, "How nice that you are able to take a nap in the middle of the day."

Also yesterday, after my nap, as the sun was getting ready to set, and as I was leaving for my bike ride, the patriarch of the family who lives on the other side of the empty lot next to my house was seated on his stoop. Stopping to chat with him for a minute, a poetic comparison dawned on me, quiet out of the blue. I told him, "En el norte hay mucho dinero pero poco tiempo," In the north there is a lot of money, but little time. Left unsaid was the question, "Sure, the money looks good, but would you trade your time for it?" He appreciated the spoken and unspoken insights.

Machines will never make such insights. Artificial Intelligence works by brute force, using immense amounts of stored data and immense amounts of electricity, to predict what the next word in a sentence is likely to be. Nothing "dawns" on it. Nothing "occurs" to it.

While some thoughts are predictable, interesting thinking is, almost by definition, surprising. The surprise results from intuition, imagination, emotion and will, none of which are available to the machine. "Much money and little time," is a distinctly human assessment. The Muse is not digital.

After my nap yesterday (after saluting my neighbor) and today (without seeing him) I rolled down (the exercise is coming back up the hill) to the verdulería, the fruit and vegetable store, on the main street here in San Luis Rey. Yesterday I went for onions and mushrooms. Today it was bananas.

I used to think it ridiculous that my mother-in-law, who lived in Palm Springs (except during their hot season), went to the market once and sometimes twice a day. Now, by my former standard, my often-daily trips make me ridiculous. It's just two short blocks off of my regular bicycle route, and, especially living alone as I do, I enjoy my interactions with the owner and his two assistants. (I'm sure that my mother-in-law also socialized, sometimes meeting people she knew, there in the market in Palm Springs.)

Yesterday, at that late hour, the work of the day done, the owner, who always responds well to my banter, and an assistant, a young man in his very early twenties, were outside when I rode up. After some brief joking around, the young man asked if he could take my bicycle for a ride. "A short one," I agreed, passing him the handlebars.

Today, the three of them were outside, and by way of greeting, just as I stopped, but before I dismounted, I said to the other assistant, who might be 19-years-old, "It's your turn, no?" Riding someone's bicycle is a male bonding ritual, a return to childhood. He rode up, out of breath and happy, just as I was exiting with my bananas.

Artificial Intelligence just makes calculations. It's true that an overwhelming number of calculations made with overwhelming speed often result in useful things. But the algorithm is binary. The machine is just considering ones and zeros; if this, then that; if that, then something else. But thought, let alone consciousness, is not computational.

Imagination and intuition are involved in any thought worth thinking. They are integral to even scientific discovery. Poetry comes closer to describing reality than mathematics or linear reasoning.

Surprisingly enough, the brain activity of people using LSD actually decreases. The "lit up" psychedelic mind results from a quieting of the brain. Other non-ordinary states of mind: meditative, religious, near-death and psychic experiences, all involve the same cerebral quieting, a release from the day-to-day concerns of the ego. These superhuman states are the opposite of the machine, the AI or the brain, chugging away.

Nisargadatta said that the moments of waking and falling asleep, when the self is not fully constituted, are the closest to the enlightened state. I take advantage of that waking state, using it to write, sometimes stretching it out all morning. Blessed with a second "morning," a second awakening at sunset that I've stretched out now to midnight, inside another creative window, this article has dawned on me.

Out the window, past the foreground dark like a nocturnal sea, distantly, city lights stretch out, like a band of home fires burning on some approaching shore. The night breeze, blowing delightfully cool, fills my sails.

How good it is to have the time to nap and wake and write.

¡Viva México!

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Dr. David Fialkoff presents Lokkal, our local social network, the community online and off, Atención robustly reborn for the digital age. If you can, please do contribute content, or your hard-earned cash, to support Lokkal, SMA's Voice. Use the orange, Paypal donate button below. Thank you.

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