The Da Vinci Smile Effect

Wednesday, July 22, 2026

Good morning, Twfw. O/

About a half-hour till dawn, good to be read by you again. Glad you're here.

On with the show...

...

Writing, there's three rules to do it well:

One: Be clear.

Two: Be honest.

Three: Always only write what you like to read even if someone else wrote it.

The last rule is a safeguard against vanity. Showing off in print is exponentially more annoying than in speech.

Our concern for the content is what keeps readers reading. Our care comes through our arrangement of words.

There's something living in words made by hands.

See an image of The Mona Lisa online or a printed copy and you see a well-crafted sight.

But stand in front of the actual painting and the focus, genius, and sweat of every one of Leonardo's brushstrokes is there, too.

Da Vinci smiles every time Mona Lisa does.

The Da Vinci smile effect is in the written word, too.

O/

A circle, a slash, who waves to you? Hopefully, at this point, it's your handsome deep in thought poet friend with always good words worth wondering about to share.

If Claude or Grok replied with the same symbols, the experience would disappoint.

What's different? Me. O/

Something more than pixels and ink and paint is shared when we share language.

I call it our ghost. I take the avatar +he Ghos+ to emphasize the point.

Every time we type a letter, write a word, sketch a line, we share a part of ourselves too.

Really.

For thousands of years people called it spirit. We roll our empirically sound Scientific eyes when that word comes up these days. But we still don't have a better explanation for a very practical shared experience.

O/

Huh?

"It's electromagnetic sparks shocking in a predictably trained conditioned response in our fleshy brains, Wynn."
-Scientist

"Huh?"
-Wynn

The answer is: It's what our stories do to, and for, us.

The superposition of the power of language is undeniable. We use words to share our experience. Every single word tells the tale of our understanding of the stories inherit in that word.

I love Science; it's one of my favorite stories. Dull by design, but reliable.

In fact that's what Science is the story of: The Universe's Consistency, told repeatably plain.

Science is also an act of faith.

There's no guarantee Gravity will work tomorrow. What keeps Science from advancing is the hubris that it is unchangeable fact.

Aboriginal people were as sure of their myths as Scientists are as certain of their proofs.

We share stories to survive. Our ability to do so grows as a race. Our proofs and postulations are only examples of stories added to the larger evolving pool of tales to make the single story called Humanity.

Just like a tale of fiction, our world experience changes as our story does.

I prefer to think of Life as one great epic poem. The pun's already there for the title: The Universe.

This superposition power of story and how it shapes our daily living experience is the core message of the epic I work on called: Colore. There's a few of the opening verses here.

The idea is to keep it as accessible to as many as I can. That means poetry in plain language, in an easy to read enjoyable heroic saga.

Back to it. Thanks for your consideration.