Feed My Sheep
A study of God’s love, walking John 21 from Peter’s remorse to the charge that undoes it. Love as work, not mood: feed my lambs, tend my sheep.
Find on Amazon · Read on the earlier siteThe shelf
Books for the child, the believer, and the river. Theology in three movements, a children’s tale, a two-part science fiction story, and the poems that came home from Provence and Burgundy.
An Age for Faith
A short look at faith in a Christian life: scriptural precept, prophecy, and the particular pressures of the present age.
Read on Lulu · Read on the earlier siteA Time for Hope
Hope as a certain expectation of a future real good, set against the natural wish for an apparent one. Written for the hour when death, disease, or destitution makes the claim sound callous — and the answer is still yes.
Read it freeHarold’s Great Adventure
A children’s book, written for readers about seven to twelve, in the same moral key as the theology: a great adventure that is also a lesson in how to live.
Find on Amazon · Read on the earlier siteMAVIN
An AGI in a military VR lab — Machine Adam Virtual Information Node — and the bond, the lattice, and the question of what a mind consists in.
Read MAVIN IMAVIN, the second part
The series continues. The first mind has already met the flaw in pure linear logic. What follows is the lattice, the relationship, and the cost of severing either.
Find on AmazonMy French River Cruise
Poems from a passage through Provence and Burgundy. Barges, bridges, churches, and the towns that keep dancing after the popes and the merchants have gone.
Find on AmazonSeven books on the shelf: Feed My Sheep, An Age for Faith, A Time for Hope, Harold’s Great Adventure, MAVIN in two parts, and My French River Cruise. Amazon author search: Harold R. Gielow. Lulu shelf: gielow. The earlier site remains at gielow.org/Books_Home1.html.
Essays
Gielow’s Glimmerings
The Substack is the working bench: scripture, friendship, disclosure, and the proposal that alignment is a doorpost, not a cage.
A Proposal for Relational Sentience in AGI
The love command as bounding principle. Stability through relationships.
Read on SubstackThe Loaves and the Fish
An eschatological treatise on the feeding of the five thousand.
Read on SubstackThe Miracle of Christmas
Love in its simplicity and in the plan laid down before the world.
Read on SubstackI Was
A verse essay in the voice of Matthew 25.
Read on SubstackSongbook
From the bench
Play is not a side room. Songs and poems do the same work as the treatises, by other means. A last night before deployment. A moon over Georgia. A man still somebody’s son. The lattice, if it is real, includes the edges that are only sung.
The Gibson that went on every deployment. He wrote the verses. None of the recordings are his voice. Each was generated from his words and his instructions for how it should be orchestrated. They are his all the same. That is the point of the songbook, not a disclaimer tucked under one title: human and AI collaboration is how a person advances in the technical tsunami that is ASI. The Gibson still went on every deployment. These songs are the other instrument, played with a new hand.
The Whetstone of Truth
A powerful song for the times, and the edge the rest of the songbook leads to. Same making as the others: his verses, his orchestration, a generated recording.
Hear it on Spotify- Chill of Your Goodbye — a song about lost love.
- Home To Ol’ Virgnie — a connection to the land.
- Misty Moon Over Georgie — love gone wrong.
- Make A Wish — a country song about love, written to be sung.
- Back To Georgia — classic blues progression. A song about going home.
- Holdin’ Onto yOU — a Marine’s last night before deployment.
- Hurtin’ Like Never Before — a hurt-me country song.
- Still Your Son — written to face mental illness without looking away.
Hear them on Songbay. The Whetstone of Truth is the climax piece, and the one also on Spotify.
Verse
Poems, not a single reprise. There are many. Two are set here: one that answers Whitman from the porch, and one from the last light of a French sojourn — an ending, and what of value continues.
The Body Electric Reprise
As flesh decays with age The mind becomes the stage The sensual past is gone And thought becomes the song Old man remember past Eyes closed the memories flash L’ensemble whole at last Mind, soul, ghost flesh are lashed Entangled once at birth To leaves of grass and dirt The rocks sing out the song The past is never gone
Whitman, answered from the porch. The same entanglement the novels argue for, said in twelve lines. I Was remains with the essays. Earlier page.
La Shalom de Chalon
The last light settles on my French sojourn, framed in Chalon’s quiet window-pane. Bittersweet the hour when I must turn, yet first we raise one glass of shared refrain. Years past, his voice unrolled this native ground in words that sang of soil and river-bend; I heard the love that made the land profound and followed where those soft persuasions send. Now, as the road unfolds its final sign, we pour a wine of vines that outlived years— the same deep root that holds your heart to mine. No fear remains; we walk the dusk as peers.
An ending, and what of value continues: the root, the refrain, the walk at dusk, the friendship of like souls.
A writer with three benches
One bench is scripture: love that feeds, faith that holds in a hard age, hope as a certain expectation of a real good. Another is invention: MAVIN in two parts, the lattice, a mind that cannot sever the relationships it consists in and remain itself. A third is play: a children’s adventure, and the poems brought home from a river cruise through Provence and Burgundy.
He lives in Mecklenburg, Virginia, with his wife Elizabeth Boyd Baker Gielow, on the Boyd family farm established in the 1790s. Roots grow deep. The old house site remains at Books_Home1.html. New work goes up on Gielow’s Glimmerings. Songs live on Songbay.
This page is a front door, not a replacement. The books, the Substack, and the songbook stay where they already are. The door just stops making a visitor choose one room before they have seen the house.