The fourth quarter of 2023 was a very productive one.
- I have made some progress translating the fourth sermon into German, and hope to have it done by summer for my grandmother’s next birthday.
- With my father, I derived a new song from the fourth sermon much like Children of the Milky Way was derived from the first. We premiered it to some of our family yesterday. I’ll post that one next. It was written in English and German (so the German version of the song is a kind of preview of the translated sermon) near simultaneously…
- …much Iike The dockyard masters / Die Meister eines Docks.
These three are just neatly circumscribed side projects set apart from the huge construction zone of The Noticing Machine.
After finishing the sixth sermon, I managed to put in enough work towards this seventh to become almost certain this is going to be a particularly hard one to write. Hopefully not as hard as the fourth, but definitely harder than the fifth and sixth. Although only 25 finished sermons exist (after I already removed a couple) I know I’ll have more than enough content; the problem is the spinning it down into a single story thread. There are so many Big Ideas to be connected into a single narrative that will need to be entirely true, coherent, plausible, comprehensible and graceful, and fit into the highly constrained space of only 80 stanzas. Making it all rhyme, and making it work as a guided meditation, is comparatively easy because I have practice with that part.
Of the seven sermons, this one is easily the most ambitious, and it is also the culmination of 12 years (and counting) of heartfelt work. I think I have set myself a task that nobody in the world would be able to complete with a reasonable amount of effort. But I continue to believe that with an unreasonable amount, I might build enough on top of my existing knowledge base and skillset to become the one guy who can just barely pull it off. Or at least fail while daring greatly.
On the personal front, I continue to be very busy with the divorce and the parenting and my wonderful job, which is certainly becoming more exciting lately. But to help a huge media company transition into the new world of media production AIs remains a walk in the park compared to this.