Here's some DALL-E-2 art created from the first stanza of a poem that I'm definitely not recalling correctly:
A clock box is like a sandbox that works like a database.
Your body is a clock box and so is your mind.
The sand in the sandbox is your contribution.
It looks like a rainbow and there's only so much.
A few years ago, maybe in the fall of 2018, I went to a small rainbow gathering in northern Minnesota. At this gathering, I heard a poem that many rainbows had apparently contributed to, whether by writing their own verses or by simply doing their own versions of it. Although I wrote the first part of this poem down, I misplaced the piece of paper at some point, leaving me with only a vague memory of its contents.
The rainbow family is an informal group of camping enthusiasts who assert their constitutionally-protected rights to freely express themselves and assemble by gathering on public lands without permits. The total number of rainbows is likely under 100k, and all governance takes place by consensus, achieved by ad hoc councils.
The rainbow family's fifty year history has given rise to all sorts of mythologies. Some, like a fake Hopi prophesy painting rainbows as saviors of humanity, are little more than New Age religion masquerading as cultural appropriation. Other rainbow mythologies and traditions are less offensive and somewhat more interesting. This is where the clock box poem fits in.
The poem is an awesome example of poetry as a dynamic, living thing. It had an original author, but also many contributors, with each added verse exploring some new facet of life or consciousness. The woman who presented the poem to me did so with mischievous reverence, producing the work in a handwritten tome. A few people took turns reading this aloud.
I wanted to copy the poem down but was distracted. I'd roasted five pounds of coffee beans and was overseeing the process of having the roasted beans ground. This involved two hand crank grinders and a dozen rainbows, each willing to turn a crank for a minute so we all could all have coffee. At some point, I lost track of the woman with the tome, and failed to write the poem down until much later.
My memory of the clock box poem is imperfect. It may even be fundamentally mistaken. The words sandbox and database are my own embellishments. With every retelling, this poetry grows and changes. Was that the intent of the poem's original author?
It may have been. The author was apparently a level ten rainbow and the poem arose from some kind of rainbow awakening. One or more copies were circulated at gatherings and selectively added to by a variety of other people. In a sense, the poem became a shared story, passed from one person to the next, enriching the social ecology of gatherings.
Someday I may track down the original poem and see what it actually says. It would be fun to plug the entire thing into an AI engine. I feel like the whole concept of a clock box has great visual potential.
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