one, maybe two

i went down two rabbit holes today. the first was trying to identify these winter stems that i come across often, and who always catch my attention because of all that glorious texture. after several failed attempts, and a life-line call to a fellow local forager (who also failed), i finally found my answer–narrowleaf vervain. a common wildflower/weed of the central united states. whew. it shouldn’t be so hard to identify plants in their winter state. the second rabbit hole was much more abstruse. i am currently reading Jenny Odell’s new book Saving Time, Discovering Lief Beyond the Clock. last night while i sat by the fire reading, she made a brief mention of a french writer, Georges Perec, who coined the term infraordinary. She summarized his idea as such: “Media and the public perception of time, he wrote, focused on the extraordinary—things outside the ordinary, like cataclysmic events and upheavals. The infraordinary was, instead, that layer inside or just beneath the ordinary, and being able to see it involved the challenge of seeing through the habitual.” infraordinary! STILL is an exercise in seeing the infraordinary, i thought. common weeds, like vervain, aren’t even ordinary, they go so unnoticed that they become infraornindary. so this morning, i started googling “infraordinary” to see if it is a thing. it is. people know about the concept, but mostly in academia it seems, and maybe a few architects. and just out of curiosity, i went into OpenAI’s GPT-4 system to see if that could tell me anything more about infraordinary than i had learned doing my own research. whoa! was i blown away. freaked out, actually. i had an hour long, full on conversation, with GPT-4 about every aspect of infraordinary. it was like having lunch with someone who had done their dissertation on the concept. i learned which artists have applied the concept to their work, who the leading experts in the concept are today. we talked for an hour–me asking questions, and GPT-4 giving lucid, concise answers. that rabbit hole got a little too deep. i was so freaked out by how smart this system was, i had to go outside into the sunlight and shake it off.

p.s. i just spent 20minutes typing up my experience with GPT-4 today, and it just occurred to me…i could have asked GPT-4 to write the summary for me! 😳

narrow-leaf vervain in winter (verbena simplex)