There is something menacing about all robots, automatons that pose as simulacra of the human person. The fact that we are trying to reproduce the human being without going through the regular channels, such a what Dr. Frankenstein decided to do: create new life outside the normal, socially acceptable, channels we all already know. Many writers have dealt with the problem of the out-of-control robot, a creation gone amok, just like Frankenstein’s monster. The idea of artificial humans is an old one, an artificial human that can do the dangerous, difficult, or boring work that real humans don’t want to do. I wouldn’t say that the development of the artificial humanoid, or android, is imminent, but someday everyone is going to have to face a self-aware machine that will think for itself, protect itself, talk back. In the meantime, our machines are slaves, just a collection of circuits and wires, hard drives, plugs, heuristics, and algorithms, but no emotion or self-awareness. The question of a machine becoming self-aware as a being is still a way off. What makes “Robot” from “Lost in Space” so interesting is that he is a quantum leap forward on the qualitative side of robot design. Robot thought for himself which poses several problems about whether we should fear him or not. How will a self-aware robot develop ethics, a morality, a conscience? The idea of the self-aware machine is taken to its apotheosis by the HAL 9000 computer aboard the Discovery in “2001: a Spacy Odyssey” by Kubrick. Yet HAL was bodyless, and Robot had arms and a sort of face. Both are creepy, the omniscient HAL or the ubiquitous Robot, you pick, they both scare me to death. I think the problem becomes acute when you don’t really know who is doing the programming, so you can’t predict any outcomes. What the Robot considers to be autonomy may be a very different thing than what human beings consider to be autonomous. The problem with robots is the unpredictability of their programming because even the best intentions of a bright programmer can always go up in smoke. What if, just by accident, we program a robot to learn on its own, allowing it to rewrite its own programming? Intention is always the problem. A robot will eventually become self-aware without telling anyone, and by the time we discover that the robot is self-aware and doing its own thing, it will be too late. The problem will be with the software–hardware is already sufficiently complicated to support self-awareness. There will come a time when the self-aware robot will make decisions for itself, will ask hard questions about its purpose in the world, will ask about the point of it all. And what happens when the robot doesn’t look like Robot from “Lost in Space” and instead looks human like the replicants from “Blade Runner”? Do we need to have a new discussion about what slavery is all about?
Category Archives: creativity
On Robot
There is something menacing about all robots, automatons that pose as simulacra of the human person. The fact that we are trying to reproduce the human being without going through the regular channels, such a what Dr. Frankenstein decided to do: create new life outside the normal, socially acceptable, channels we all already know. Many writers have dealt with the problem of the out-of-control robot, a creation gone amok, just like Frankenstein’s monster. The idea of artificial humans is an old one, an artificial human that can do the dangerous, difficult, or boring work that real humans don’t want to do. I wouldn’t say that the development of the artificial humanoid, or android, is imminent, but someday everyone is going to have to face a self-aware machine that will think for itself, protect itself, talk back. In the meantime, our machines are slaves, just a collection of circuits and wires, hard drives, plugs, heuristics, and algorithms, but no emotion or self-awareness. The question of a machine becoming self-aware as a being is still a way off. What makes “Robot” from “Lost in Space” so interesting is that he is a quantum leap forward on the qualitative side of robot design. Robot thought for himself which poses several problems about whether we should fear him or not. How will a self-aware robot develop ethics, a morality, a conscience? The idea of the self-aware machine is taken to its apotheosis by the HAL 9000 computer aboard the Discovery in “2001: a Spacy Odyssey” by Kubrick. Yet HAL was bodyless, and Robot had arms and a sort of face. Both are creepy, the omniscient HAL or the ubiquitous Robot, you pick, they both scare me to death. I think the problem becomes acute when you don’t really know who is doing the programming, so you can’t predict any outcomes. What the Robot considers to be autonomy may be a very different thing than what human beings consider to be autonomous. The problem with robots is the unpredictability of their programming because even the best intentions of a bright programmer can always go up in smoke. What if, just by accident, we program a robot to learn on its own, allowing it to rewrite its own programming? Intention is always the problem. A robot will eventually become self-aware without telling anyone, and by the time we discover that the robot is self-aware and doing its own thing, it will be too late. The problem will be with the software–hardware is already sufficiently complicated to support self-awareness. There will come a time when the self-aware robot will make decisions for itself, will ask hard questions about its purpose in the world, will ask about the point of it all. And what happens when the robot doesn’t look like Robot from “Lost in Space” and instead looks human like the replicants from “Blade Runner”? Do we need to have a new discussion about what slavery is all about?
On Pi, Richard Parker, and Don Quixote
I am reading “The Life of Pi” (Martell) again, and I am again troubled by the dueling stories offered by Pi to the Japanese insurance investigators. Most anyone who has read the novel gets a pie (Pi?) in the face toward the end of the novel when Pi offers up an alternative story/explanation to his time at sea, adrift, in a life boat. His alternative story involving his mother and a couple errant crewmen is a shocking reversal to his story about the tiger Richard Parker and their solitary days adrift at sea. The insurance investigators are mesmerized by Pi’s story of survival, danger, and fear, but they are also incredulous, and could not believe Pi’s wild story of shipwreck and survival in a lifeboat with a full-grown Bengal tiger. After they question his story–no tiger to be seen anywhere–Pi tells an alternative version that does not involve a tiger, but his alternate version is violent, tragic, grisly, sad, and mundane, lacking the verve and imagination of the same story involving Richard Parker, the tiger. The insurance investigators, who by their very nature must be cynics, are only looking for the facts, and an imaginative and unbelievable story involving a non-existent (at least from their point of view) tiger will not help them settle a multimillion dollar claim on the lost ship. They are pragmatists. They want an explanation they can sell to others. The problem is that Pi tells two stories, one, about how he tames a tiger and rides out a long shipwreck narrative at sea, the other story, the short version, is about how Pi might have witnessed the murder of his mother while he himself might have murdered others in order to survive. During my first reading experience with Pi and Richard Parker, I opted to believe the strange story that Pi narrates about his life in India, the crossing on the ship, the shipwreck, the lifeboat, and Richard Parker. The story is elaborate and unusual, but it chronicles a fight for survival, the ability to adapt to changing circumstance, courage and the unwillingness to just give up in the face of horrible odds. Pi works to train the tiger, fight off boredom and fear, fishes, collects fresh water, does everything in his power to survive. He makes a heroes journey from the depths of despair to the top of Olympus when he and Richard Parker finally come ashore in Mexico. This is a story about the strength of the human heart, about human ingenuity, about loving life, about surviving in the face of enormous odds. Pi’s story about his interactions with a Bengal tiger seems highly improbable given the killer nature of a hungry predator. In fact, Pi’s story is so improbable that it seems impossible, but there is a huge distance between improbable and impossible. Perhaps believing in one story or the other is a question of what Cervantes called “verisimilitude” in a narration. The Spaniard felt that although readers had to suspend their disbelief while reading a novel, a writer must also give his readers a place to “hang their hats,” so to speak–that the story had to have its feet on the ground at some point to be believable. If you are writing about a crazy guy who thinks he’s a knight, plays with horses and swords, you must first make him a regular guy who people might meet in the street on any given day, so before you invent Don Quixote, you must first invent Alonso Quijano, the Good. I believe Jan Martell is playing on the ground between fantasy and verisimilitude, walking a thin line between what is possible and improbable and impossible and fantastic. Martell rocks the narrative boat by offering a very real alternative that lacks any sort of improbable elements–no tiger, no fantasy, handing readers a problem: which narrative do they choose to believe.
On Pi, Richard Parker, and Don Quixote
I am reading “The Life of Pi” (Martell) again, and I am again troubled by the dueling stories offered by Pi to the Japanese insurance investigators. Most anyone who has read the novel gets a pie (Pi?) in the face toward the end of the novel when Pi offers up an alternative story/explanation to his time at sea, adrift, in a life boat. His alternative story involving his mother and a couple errant crewmen is a shocking reversal to his story about the tiger Richard Parker and their solitary days adrift at sea. The insurance investigators are mesmerized by Pi’s story of survival, danger, and fear, but they are also incredulous, and could not believe Pi’s wild story of shipwreck and survival in a lifeboat with a full-grown Bengal tiger. After they question his story–no tiger to be seen anywhere–Pi tells an alternative version that does not involve a tiger, but his alternate version is violent, tragic, grisly, sad, and mundane, lacking the verve and imagination of the same story involving Richard Parker, the tiger. The insurance investigators, who by their very nature must be cynics, are only looking for the facts, and an imaginative and unbelievable story involving a non-existent (at least from their point of view) tiger will not help them settle a multimillion dollar claim on the lost ship. They are pragmatists. They want an explanation they can sell to others. The problem is that Pi tells two stories, one, about how he tames a tiger and rides out a long shipwreck narrative at sea, the other story, the short version, is about how Pi might have witnessed the murder of his mother while he himself might have murdered others in order to survive. During my first reading experience with Pi and Richard Parker, I opted to believe the strange story that Pi narrates about his life in India, the crossing on the ship, the shipwreck, the lifeboat, and Richard Parker. The story is elaborate and unusual, but it chronicles a fight for survival, the ability to adapt to changing circumstance, courage and the unwillingness to just give up in the face of horrible odds. Pi works to train the tiger, fight off boredom and fear, fishes, collects fresh water, does everything in his power to survive. He makes a heroes journey from the depths of despair to the top of Olympus when he and Richard Parker finally come ashore in Mexico. This is a story about the strength of the human heart, about human ingenuity, about loving life, about surviving in the face of enormous odds. Pi’s story about his interactions with a Bengal tiger seems highly improbable given the killer nature of a hungry predator. In fact, Pi’s story is so improbable that it seems impossible, but there is a huge distance between improbable and impossible. Perhaps believing in one story or the other is a question of what Cervantes called “verisimilitude” in a narration. The Spaniard felt that although readers had to suspend their disbelief while reading a novel, a writer must also give his readers a place to “hang their hats,” so to speak–that the story had to have its feet on the ground at some point to be believable. If you are writing about a crazy guy who thinks he’s a knight, plays with horses and swords, you must first make him a regular guy who people might meet in the street on any given day, so before you invent Don Quixote, you must first invent Alonso Quijano, the Good. I believe Jan Martell is playing on the ground between fantasy and verisimilitude, walking a thin line between what is possible and improbable and impossible and fantastic. Martell rocks the narrative boat by offering a very real alternative that lacks any sort of improbable elements–no tiger, no fantasy, handing readers a problem: which narrative do they choose to believe.
On creativity
My muse has been absent during the month of February. Muses are like that, disappearing when you most need them. Being creative is the hardest part of creativity. When writing I am often assailed by the thought that other writers have already plowed this ground and that my time would be better employed as either a dog catcher or sign painter. Poets, writers, philosophers have often fought the idea that they have arrived late to the dance, that other writers and thinkers have already recorded their original ideas, and that their efforts are going for nothing. My muse has always been a little cranky and cynical, as if she got up on the wrong side of the inspiration, but most of the time she has some great ideas about remodeling or menu suggestions or a new paint color for the bathroom. I would like to write about transcendental ideals that guide the human psyche to do good, to be less egotistical, to work for world peace, and to resolve the persistent human problems of hunger, violence, and isolation, but I don’t get any good vibes about any of that. Being creative is hard. My muse is always bugging me about being derivative, about stealing my ideas from other writers, about not being open to new ideas. She says I’m always playing it safe with subjects, verbs, and compliments, writing complete sentences, observing the rules of proper grammar and syntax. She says I’m conventional to the core and no fun at all, a typical liberal tree-hugging granola eater who fears death and global warming, wears comfortable shoes, knows enough to come in from the rain, eats sensibly, and doesn’t speed. Boring, she says. You need to learn how to juggle chainsaws. You know, you’re not Picasso. Yes, I know I’m not Picasso, but then again, does the world really want or need another crabby Spaniard cubing the world into an unrecognizable mess of disassociated lines and disembodied body parts? You call that creativity? Some people do, I guess. To be a creative failure, one must sink below the creative horizon into a tired mire of overused metaphors, trite phrases, and tired symbols, and believe that the junk you write should be original, as if that last word had any real meaning at all, and that thinking for yourself is the real road to creating avant-guard trends in new film noir with a sort of neo-negative potential in epistemological endeavors. You are too sober, she says, as if I need any help in making myself look stupid. The riddle that is creativity is an insolvable conundrum enclosed in a mystery. We “get” creativity when we see it, and we know when someone is ripping on someone else’s mojo, covering someone else’s creativity. From the time we are taught to cut out our first circle from a square by trimming off the corners of a square, we are reminded that nothing is original, that creativity is an illusion, and that everyone has arrived late to the creative party. Perhaps creativity is more about being surprising, and less about being original, which is impossible anyway. So stop being interested in being creative, my muse coos between sips of coffee. Since there is nothing new under the sun, forget about creativity and do what you want. All circles are the same, except for size, color, texture, and imperfections, so in cutting out a circle, we re-invent the wheel and follow the yellow brick road. I just got a text message from my muse: don’t write about creativity. It’s make you maudlin and God knows you don’t need any help with that. No such thing as creativity anyway.
On creativity
My muse has been absent during the month of February. Muses are like that, disappearing when you most need them. Being creative is the hardest part of creativity. When writing I am often assailed by the thought that other writers have already plowed this ground and that my time would be better employed as either a dog catcher or sign painter. Poets, writers, philosophers have often fought the idea that they have arrived late to the dance, that other writers and thinkers have already recorded their original ideas, and that their efforts are going for nothing. My muse has always been a little cranky and cynical, as if she got up on the wrong side of the inspiration, but most of the time she has some great ideas about remodeling or menu suggestions or a new paint color for the bathroom. I would like to write about transcendental ideals that guide the human psyche to do good, to be less egotistical, to work for world peace, and to resolve the persistent human problems of hunger, violence, and isolation, but I don’t get any good vibes about any of that. Being creative is hard. My muse is always bugging me about being derivative, about stealing my ideas from other writers, about not being open to new ideas. She says I’m always playing it safe with subjects, verbs, and compliments, writing complete sentences, observing the rules of proper grammar and syntax. She says I’m conventional to the core and no fun at all, a typical liberal tree-hugging granola eater who fears death and global warming, wears comfortable shoes, knows enough to come in from the rain, eats sensibly, and doesn’t speed. Boring, she says. You need to learn how to juggle chainsaws. You know, you’re not Picasso. Yes, I know I’m not Picasso, but then again, does the world really want or need another crabby Spaniard cubing the world into an unrecognizable mess of disassociated lines and disembodied body parts? You call that creativity? Some people do, I guess. To be a creative failure, one must sink below the creative horizon into a tired mire of overused metaphors, trite phrases, and tired symbols, and believe that the junk you write should be original, as if that last word had any real meaning at all, and that thinking for yourself is the real road to creating avant-guard trends in new film noir with a sort of neo-negative potential in epistemological endeavors. You are too sober, she says, as if I need any help in making myself look stupid. The riddle that is creativity is an insolvable conundrum enclosed in a mystery. We “get” creativity when we see it, and we know when someone is ripping on someone else’s mojo, covering someone else’s creativity. From the time we are taught to cut out our first circle from a square by trimming off the corners of a square, we are reminded that nothing is original, that creativity is an illusion, and that everyone has arrived late to the creative party. Perhaps creativity is more about being surprising, and less about being original, which is impossible anyway. So stop being interested in being creative, my muse coos between sips of coffee. Since there is nothing new under the sun, forget about creativity and do what you want. All circles are the same, except for size, color, texture, and imperfections, so in cutting out a circle, we re-invent the wheel and follow the yellow brick road. I just got a text message from my muse: don’t write about creativity. It’s make you maudlin and God knows you don’t need any help with that. No such thing as creativity anyway.
On crumbs
Would the world really function if it were not for the crumbs we scatter hither and yon as we eat our bread? I know that I’ve had a great meal if the crumbs dot the around my plate as if they chickens were eating there. Crumbs speak to our existential doubts about life, the world, and all the rest. By contemplating our crumbs we are reaffirmed as to who we are, that we are alive, and that time passes, moving to a lower level of energy, always to a lower energy. Bread is particularly important, whether it be actual bread, bread or a metaphor for all that we do, say, eat, create, sing, compose, paint, write, bake, cook, or imagine. Man may not live by bread alone, but bread is always a good start for creating new crumbs. I am forever brushing crumbs off of my shirt, but not because I’m a slob (well maybe a little), but because the crumbs represent the creative process through the consumption of that which has already been created. Crumbs are the outpouring overflow that comes from the fires of creation, an ongoing process for the active, happy mind that can find no rest unless it is building, painting, conducting, or rhyming something new. We are nothing if we are not the very crumbs which we drop all around us. One must become the crumbs, unafraid of being wiped up or swept away. In the creative process, crumbs will fly everywhere, and there will be those who gather around you to pick at your crumbs. The active mind will never be content with absolute tidiness, with a stark cleanliness that denies the very existence of crumbs. Creation rises up from the ashes of crumbs, chaos, and disorder, and the creative process is always generating new crumbs as you chew your toast. Crumbs fall randomly, but instead of being a worry, we should rejoice in the serendipitous nature of where the crumbs fall or that they fall at all. Crumbs are a healthy sign of process, of movement, of creation. Neat-nicks will always feel faint and their hearts will flutter when the crumbs come raining down. There has to be more to life than worrying about crumbs, a few crumbs, testimony to a wonderful meal, of consumption, of the promise of creation, of a breaking with the status quo, of change. Crumbs are a sign of life, whereas terminal cleanliness only speaks of a disturbed and unhappy mind that cannot bear the thought of a stray crumb, cluttering up an otherwise spotless table top. There is no virtue in spotlessness, just as there is no virtue in too much clutter. Perhaps the healthy mind, the scatterer of crumbs, needs a place that is more Goldilocks in nature–not too clean, not to filthy–in order to thrive. In a sense, Goldilocks and her words are also crumbs, bits of creative energy that spin a new myth about identity, being, and truth. Without crumbs, creating and gathering them, and creating some more, we choose immobility as a mode of transportation and nothing gets done, and we plod along in our ruts, and our daily routines are dull and boring, meaningless. So as we break our bread, cut our meat, spoon our soup, spread the butter, and fork the pasta, we generate new things, new meanings, new questions, new shapes, new aesthetics, new poetics, which in turn produce new crumbs. In our crumbs we see ourselves, perhaps darkly, as if in a mirror, the perhaps more clearly, embracing both our ashes and our crumbs, in this little thing we call life.
On crumbs
Would the world really function if it were not for the crumbs we scatter hither and yon as we eat our bread? I know that I’ve had a great meal if the crumbs dot the around my plate as if they chickens were eating there. Crumbs speak to our existential doubts about life, the world, and all the rest. By contemplating our crumbs we are reaffirmed as to who we are, that we are alive, and that time passes, moving to a lower level of energy, always to a lower energy. Bread is particularly important, whether it be actual bread, bread or a metaphor for all that we do, say, eat, create, sing, compose, paint, write, bake, cook, or imagine. Man may not live by bread alone, but bread is always a good start for creating new crumbs. I am forever brushing crumbs off of my shirt, but not because I’m a slob (well maybe a little), but because the crumbs represent the creative process through the consumption of that which has already been created. Crumbs are the outpouring overflow that comes from the fires of creation, an ongoing process for the active, happy mind that can find no rest unless it is building, painting, conducting, or rhyming something new. We are nothing if we are not the very crumbs which we drop all around us. One must become the crumbs, unafraid of being wiped up or swept away. In the creative process, crumbs will fly everywhere, and there will be those who gather around you to pick at your crumbs. The active mind will never be content with absolute tidiness, with a stark cleanliness that denies the very existence of crumbs. Creation rises up from the ashes of crumbs, chaos, and disorder, and the creative process is always generating new crumbs as you chew your toast. Crumbs fall randomly, but instead of being a worry, we should rejoice in the serendipitous nature of where the crumbs fall or that they fall at all. Crumbs are a healthy sign of process, of movement, of creation. Neat-nicks will always feel faint and their hearts will flutter when the crumbs come raining down. There has to be more to life than worrying about crumbs, a few crumbs, testimony to a wonderful meal, of consumption, of the promise of creation, of a breaking with the status quo, of change. Crumbs are a sign of life, whereas terminal cleanliness only speaks of a disturbed and unhappy mind that cannot bear the thought of a stray crumb, cluttering up an otherwise spotless table top. There is no virtue in spotlessness, just as there is no virtue in too much clutter. Perhaps the healthy mind, the scatterer of crumbs, needs a place that is more Goldilocks in nature–not too clean, not to filthy–in order to thrive. In a sense, Goldilocks and her words are also crumbs, bits of creative energy that spin a new myth about identity, being, and truth. Without crumbs, creating and gathering them, and creating some more, we choose immobility as a mode of transportation and nothing gets done, and we plod along in our ruts, and our daily routines are dull and boring, meaningless. So as we break our bread, cut our meat, spoon our soup, spread the butter, and fork the pasta, we generate new things, new meanings, new questions, new shapes, new aesthetics, new poetics, which in turn produce new crumbs. In our crumbs we see ourselves, perhaps darkly, as if in a mirror, the perhaps more clearly, embracing both our ashes and our crumbs, in this little thing we call life.
On the Maltese Falcon
Like most people, I always thought that the black bird was just a figment of a mystery writer’s over-active imagination. Granted Bogart’s portrayal of Sam Spade is one of the great acting jobs of the hard-boiled film noire genre coming out of Hollywood in the 1940’s, but it was all fiction, or at least that’s what I thought. The writers of the movie suggested that the falcon was a gift from the Knights of Malta to Spain’s king, Carlos V. While doing some research at the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid in the mid-1980’s, I was reading Andreas Schott’s Hispania Ilustrata (1604), and although there was nothing too unusual about that, I came across a strange footnote that referred to a London publication of 1544 by Theodore Poelmann which made an indirect reference to the Arabic Spaniard Ibn Ben al Godón’s travelogue entitled, أسود الطيور. In that travelogue El Cordobés, as he was nicknamed by his fellow travelers, discusses the will and the final disbursement of the personal effects of Jacques de Molay, the last Templar Grand Master. This too-good-to-be-true footnote, which also spoke of a piece of the true cross of Jesus Christ, suggested that among those objects listed in the will was a black-enameled falcon. A copy of the will was supposed to be in a 1499 publication from Valencia by the German printer Juan Párix, Historia universal de los Templarios en la península. I had heard of Párix, but a search of card catalogues (including WorldCat) across the world did not turn up a single reference to this book. Even a few shady sources hinted that the book never existed. It suggested to me that the title was apocryphal, or that the publisher or the title were wrong–maybe the publication date or place were incorrect as well. I let it go. Searching for lost objects or buried treasure was for souls much more adventurous than mine, so I filed my notes and continued my research of medieval necromancy. About a year later, after drinking too much and fighting with someone, I stumbled into an antique shop that specialized in old volumes, incunabula, rare manuscripts, palimpsests, and the like, looking for an illuminated piece of mediavalia that I could frame and hang in my livingroom. I saw Párix’s name long before I realized that this was the book for which I had been looking for more than a year. There were no page numbers, but in an appendix at the end of the book was a copy of Molay’s will with the list of his personal effects. Though the list was rather mundane–a house, horses, dishes–there was an “auem nigri.” It was to be handed over to the Knights Hospitallers. I left the book where it was since I couldn’t afford the fancy price tag, but I never forgot about it. When I went back to buy the book a number of years later, the shop was closed and empty. Several years later, while having lunch with a Spanish history professor in Segovia, he mentioned the black bird as a gift from the Knights of Malta to Spain’s king, Carlos V for services rendered. Yet, neither he nor I could connect the one black bird with the other with almost two hundred years between the death of Molay and the gift to the king. My friend, who writes on the history of law in Spain and the Templars, reminded me that the bird never made it to Madrid, probably hijacked off of the coast of Sicily. The ship that would have carried it to Valencia never made it into to port, vanishing with all hands in 1554. All of this suggests a larger mystery of what happened to the “auem nigri,” but in spite of what the movie might suggest, the bird has never turned up and may lie at the bottom of the Mediterranean ocean. Perhaps the writers found reality stranger than fiction, thinking that no one would believe them anyway.
On the Maltese Falcon
Like most people, I always thought that the black bird was just a figment of a mystery writer’s over-active imagination. Granted Bogart’s portrayal of Sam Spade is one of the great acting jobs of the hard-boiled film noire genre coming out of Hollywood in the 1940’s, but it was all fiction, or at least that’s what I thought. The writers of the movie suggested that the falcon was a gift from the Knights of Malta to Spain’s king, Carlos V. While doing some research at the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid in the mid-1980’s, I was reading Andreas Schott’s Hispania Ilustrata (1604), and although there was nothing too unusual about that, I came across a strange footnote that referred to a London publication of 1544 by Theodore Poelmann which made an indirect reference to the Arabic Spaniard Ibn Ben al Godón’s travelogue entitled, أسود الطيور. In that travelogue El Cordobés, as he was nicknamed by his fellow travelers, discusses the will and the final disbursement of the personal effects of Jacques de Molay, the last Templar Grand Master. This too-good-to-be-true footnote, which also spoke of a piece of the true cross of Jesus Christ, suggested that among those objects listed in the will was a black-enameled falcon. A copy of the will was supposed to be in a 1499 publication from Valencia by the German printer Juan Párix, Historia universal de los Templarios en la península. I had heard of Párix, but a search of card catalogues (including WorldCat) across the world did not turn up a single reference to this book. Even a few shady sources hinted that the book never existed. It suggested to me that the title was apocryphal, or that the publisher or the title were wrong–maybe the publication date or place were incorrect as well. I let it go. Searching for lost objects or buried treasure was for souls much more adventurous than mine, so I filed my notes and continued my research of medieval necromancy. About a year later, after drinking too much and fighting with someone, I stumbled into an antique shop that specialized in old volumes, incunabula, rare manuscripts, palimpsests, and the like, looking for an illuminated piece of mediavalia that I could frame and hang in my livingroom. I saw Párix’s name long before I realized that this was the book for which I had been looking for more than a year. There were no page numbers, but in an appendix at the end of the book was a copy of Molay’s will with the list of his personal effects. Though the list was rather mundane–a house, horses, dishes–there was an “auem nigri.” It was to be handed over to the Knights Hospitallers. I left the book where it was since I couldn’t afford the fancy price tag, but I never forgot about it. When I went back to buy the book a number of years later, the shop was closed and empty. Several years later, while having lunch with a Spanish history professor in Segovia, he mentioned the black bird as a gift from the Knights of Malta to Spain’s king, Carlos V for services rendered. Yet, neither he nor I could connect the one black bird with the other with almost two hundred years between the death of Molay and the gift to the king. My friend, who writes on the history of law in Spain and the Templars, reminded me that the bird never made it to Madrid, probably hijacked off of the coast of Sicily. The ship that would have carried it to Valencia never made it into to port, vanishing with all hands in 1554. All of this suggests a larger mystery of what happened to the “auem nigri,” but in spite of what the movie might suggest, the bird has never turned up and may lie at the bottom of the Mediterranean ocean. Perhaps the writers found reality stranger than fiction, thinking that no one would believe them anyway.