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 means “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 — not the ear on the side of the head, which takes only sound, but the mind’s ear, which hears 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 is not rejected in favor of a region, but is 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.” Felt questions 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 as 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, the medium in which mind and objects become mind-objects.
Burke’s terministic screen is a diagnosis of dirty air, where the same poison gets filtered in over and over, until the vague room is hardened. It could not be done with one party, or with five. Two is the number that hardens a room — a term, its negation, and nothing admitted between them. Both halves of America are so entrenched in saying their own buzzwords that they can’t breathe. Hence my urgency in what people think of as a “niche” project. And yes — I am installing a vocabulary term in an essay about what vocabulary terms make vanish; take this one as a screen with the door left open.
The politics of the USA plays out in so many ways, from AI-generated movies — endless content of the emotionless conveying emotion — that will not arrive in America until the message is under control, to the narrative of the middle east as our main source of energy. That narrative has outlived the fact: the United States has been a net petroleum exporter since 2020, and Canada alone supplies over sixty percent of its crude imports. In Thailand there are 10-15 different kinds of gas, and engines that take different ones. If that were allowed in the USA, instead of one or two kinds of gas, with a completely reduced set of choices about essentially the same kind of gas, our entire mythology about attacking Iran would change.
I feel a hurricane gathering, and in its eye is AI. I would rather it weren’t. But the eye is the one place with no weather in it — and no grief either. The calm we are all circling.
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 the two cases do not even enter by the same door. The song crosses at the sound base and arrives at the mind; the proof was never a sound at all.
And less crosses than they think. Wailing has a shape as well as a sound — the rise, the break, the repetition, the falling off — and we know it as grief without needing a word for it. The catalogue agrees more than I expected: speech itself is not filed at the sound base at all. Vocal intimation, the act of making language, is listed as subtle matter at the cognizable door. The sound base takes the sound and nothing else. But a shape takes more than one instant to be a shape, and the sound element is momentary. Nothing that needs two moments to exist can live there. The contour is already assembled on our side, at the mind-object door, which was never a room for language only. Language is its loudest tenant. The screen was installed in a room that had other occupants first.
The catalogue settles it, and settles it by parentage. Lamentation is “audible object born of perverted mind” — that is the entire definition. Not what it says. Not how it sounds. Where it came from. Grief does not enter the sound, but the sound comes from grief: cause without containment, and the catalogue offers no third term for it. The artifact I called mindless has a mind for a parent, which is not a contradiction but the architecture — associated with none, born of one. And the perversion gets its own gloss a few pages earlier: believing in a world of persons and things, mistaking terms and concepts for realities. Burke’s screen, sitting in the front matter of the Abhidhamma, twenty centuries early. So the wail is what Peirce would call an index — caused by the grief, joined to it through breath and throat and the loaded body, gravis. A machine makes the same shape with no such parentage: icon only, resemblance without cause. Which means that by the catalogue’s own arithmetic the machine’s sound is not lamentation. Not counterfeit — simply another item, an audible object born of no perversion at all. Nothing about the sound differs. The distinction the scorn is defending is real, it lives entirely in the birth, and the birth was never what crossed. My own first sentence gave that away: the artifact was always mindless, and resemblance was always all that arrived. My wife watches films now in which no one was ever sad, and the sadness arrives.
And now the mathematician can be answered. His proof was never a sound; it crossed no sound base at all. It was assembled where thinking meets its objects — the one door in the whole catalogue where the answers come only partially, the door where grief itself is filed. That is the door at which they have licensed the machine. Meanwhile they stand guard at the door of sound, which never held a feeling to protect and never held anything but matter. They are not defending the wrong room. They are defending the right room from the wrong door.
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 grief anyway. The feeling was only ever in the listeners and readers. 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.
. Traditionally 3 
, is enforced.