Grief is represented by mindless artifacts: writing, sound, whatever… and when another finds an artifact that is close to resembling his own grief… there is thought to be communication. Grief, (related to the Latin “gravis” which also mean “loaded, pregnant” ) is not characteristically human. Grief can also belong to ghosts and animals (at least, from a set-of-the-grieving point of view). The human realm is not grief but the wailing it produces. The human has developed the ear to a higher level, to hear grief, the way a dog smells every minute hint in the air, the human constructs lamentation as song, poem, with a mind to how it sounds to other minds.
This is why the art of teaching is elevated above other arts. It cultivates the capacity of the ear, and the mind’s ear. I suppose the line “one cannot be said to be like or unlike oneself” is a kind of resignation that communication is impossible.. even to oneself across the chasms of an instant. In the DhatuKatha, the 3rd book of the Abhidamma branch of the Tipitaka (the three baskets), one grief is not related to any other grief. An extreme divide and conquer, quietly added to a dry list of the associated, the dissociated and the associated and dissociated (not, as I self-importantly argued with the head monk of the Thai temple in Chicago, “associated or dissociated”)
And vagueness enters our wailing, as the physical medium that makes the wailing possible. interesting parallels are the post-modern contamination, in which contamination are not rejected in favor of a region, but instead caustic against the recognized boundaries. making contamination secondary to purity. Vagueness has none of these problems, and can be as simple as air: both with body and without, the most constant requirement of life, and what we must also constantly breathe out. The Dhatu Katha also has a softened boundary “partially associated” and “partially dissociated” but more: the book is exact about where it keeps its vagueness. Across all eighteen elements, “partially” occurs at a single address — the mind-object door, the base where thinking meets its objects. Everywhere else the catalogue is crisp; eye is eye, sound is sound. Only at the door of inquiry do the answers come in degrees. And one step deeper, at the feeling aggregate, the text marks questions that “cannot be answered” — not answered no, but unanswerable from that position. Crisp, partial, unanswerable: the gradient of a region, not the line of a boundary. The oldest catechism of precision maps what contamination cannot — vagueness not as a corrosion of boundaries but as a housed medium, one room in a crisp building. And the room and the open air are made of the same thing. I keep the confusion of vagueness with air on purpose. The physical air is beyond me, except as vagueness — the catalogue agrees: matter is associated with none, so my only relation to air is cognizing it, and cognition lives at the door where “partially” lives. Held apart, word and world need a customs house at the border, and nothing crosses whole. Confused — one medium, with body and without at once — a sound made with a mind to how it sounds to other minds is already moving through the stuff the world is made of, and magic stays possible: something inside changing the outside, directly, by air.
I feel a cyclone gathering, and in its eye is AI. Song made with AI is called cheating; a mathematician who uses AI to break a heavy problem is given credit — though the proof, like a Shakespearean tragedy, was supposed to be inevitable, given the conditions assumed. The scorn and the credit are the same desire: to be uniquely human, and to keep AI out of the uniqueness. But look where the border has been drawn. They have licensed the machine at the door of mind — the one door in the whole catalogue where the answers come only partially, the door where grief itself is filed — and barred it from the sound base, which was never minded at all. Lamentation is matter, associated with none. The wail was always mindless; the grief was always in the finders. They guard the empty room and stand the machine in the occupied one. Exactly backwards.
So what is the AI in the crossing? Not a rival wailer. It has no grief to load into the sound — and the sound never carried the grief anyway. My own first sentence named the artifact class mindless, and nothing that emits into that class can adulterate it. The feeling was only ever in the finders. The machine is air: the medium the wail crosses, the vagueness the mind breathes when it goes out to meet its objects — with body and without, beyond me except as vagueness, which is to say, open to magic. Words can still change something outside themselves, directly. What we have built is not a voice in the choir but more weather for the wail to cross. Human mathematics and poetry are the sounds of our grief. The air does not grieve. It carries.
. Traditionally 3 
, is enforced.