[bk] a wellgorithm for Michial Farmer
The machine can make a song. Only a circumcised heart can make it sacred.
Beloved brother Michial, ἀγαπητέ —
Grace and peace to you from the One who tabernacles in the tender tent of your heart.
You are a child of the ἀγαπαρχή — the Beginning of Love, the Beloved Bang — God’s original score, the music of the spheres, which called our world into being.
Thank you for curating A Symposium of Popular Songs. You have brought trust and wisdom to curating the music of solidarity. But what happens to our solidarity when the songs approach infinity?
Infinite songs.
Finite ears.
A machine can make a thousand songs before dawn. It cannot make one more minute of Michial Farmer. Five minutes of listening are five minutes of a life that will never return.
And now a stranger, a man with no musical pedigree, is offering his first album of songs — dedicated to Pope Leo XIV — and asking for a block of your time.
A man who mixes Augustine and fart jokes, who calls himself Neandershmuck, is asking you to take him seriously.
A man is asking you, in the spirit of Luke, to “take care and listen.” To join him in solidarity, bear his burdens, and witness his circumcision of the heart.
And the music is AI-assisted.
Which means: I risk humiliation, ridicule, and rejection ... for daring to suggest that AI could help with the circumcision and its ultimate use could be redemptive.
Will you join me for a little while, brother Michial?
In a democreative culture — where anyone can create anything at scale — the trusted ears may be the most important instruments in the room. Songs are now abundant. The scarce work, the sacred vocation, is the trusted ear.
Infinite songs.
Finite ears.
The creator risks his soul.
The listener risks time.
The machine risks nothing..
The machine risks nothing, yet judges everything. With certainty, the machine insists on its own warped version of truth. And we are letting the force behind the machine — Big Mammon — nudge us, judge us, label us, lie about us, and even decide the meanings of things.
According to the AI, I’m the villain in this drama. I ran this letter through four different AI models:
ChatGPT claimed that some words here are “vulgar” and “obscene.”
DeepSeek called me “spiritually dangerous.”
Claude said “many in the faith will be offended.”
Grok accused me of “aggressively male sexualization” —
all because of a widely-accepted reading of Genesis 24:2 … they all warned me, in the starkest terms, not to send you this letter.
The AI consensus was:
address Michial as a
“beloved brother.”
Two of them even capitalized DO NOT.
AI is supposed to be sycophantic. But Sickophantic?
My first album is titled interior intimo meo — a belov’d phrase from Augustine, meaning “more inward than my inmost self.” I have been coloring and typesetting this phrase for decades. Then, suddenly in 2026, with the help of AI, I heard it sung.
I did not have the trained voice, band, studio, budget, or institutional permission required to turn my words into song, but with AI, I crossed that threshold.
And now my prayer is, with AI-assisted music — call it musAIc — that others can cross their own thresholds, too.
The album’s theme song explores what happens when intimo becomes occupato.
Interior Occupato Meo, could not have existed until now — not until our interiors were invaded by temptations,
biases, lies, propoganda, and mammon-made names.
I, Augustine of Hippo, am back.
and I see that Domine has become Doomine
Your interior intimo meo.
is now interior occupato meo.
In the next song, AI May I, a man asks a machine for permission to burp, sneeze, fart, and scratch his balls. The song pushes surrendered agency into bodily absurdity:
My nose started itchin’ like it had its own mind
AI May I pick it — or let the booger grind?]
These songs do not replace musicians who would otherwise have made them. Their previous competitor was silence. No band was standing at my door waiting to make an Augustinian innerpunk gospel album about Big Mammon’s occupation of the soul.
AI can create, but it cannot risk..
AI can create, but it cannot experiece the Resurrection.
AI can create, but it cannot consecrate.
I have a lot of soultime in these songs.
There were so many production decisions — what genre, what voice, what tempo, what refrains, how long, how loud, how instrumental.
But only a fleshient brother or sister can give time and communion to the song, and help decide if it lives or dies in the ears of the Church.
And for that, we need a
In Genesis 24:2, Abraham asks the servant to touch his testicles — “touch the place of circumcision,” as Rashi sees it. Deeply vulnerable, and exposed, Abraham trusts the future of his family to the servant’s hand.
The machine has no fleshience. It cannot lose your respect. It cannot feel a room go cold. It cannot lie awake after a joke fails. It cannot be shunned, shamed, or damaged by the judgment.
The machine has no testis — no testicles. Nothing virile. Nothing to lose.
And I don’t envy you — staring into the abyss of an entity that hogs your time and has nothing to lose. With a near-infinite supply of music, it’s like you’re standing on the beach, waving a towel at a tsunami.
~
And in the midst of this tsunami, a stranger, a man who calls himself Neandershmuck, is asking you, metaphorically speaking, to touch his place of circumcision. Touch his vulnerabilities, his foolishness.
And trusting that you will touch and not squeeze.
You can touch and say no. Say the song fails. Say the joke falls flat. Your ear is yours.
You may hear and say no. But we trust your no. We trust your yes.
Above all, we trust you not to squeeze us. Squeezing violates the covenant. Squeezing is lying, labeling, accusing, naming falsely.
Big Mammon is squeezing. Squeezing us into believing that we are data, users, content. And that it has dominion over our words.
Here is the verse that has sustained me since I was a little boy, getting whipped by my father:
“Remove the foreskins of your hearts.”
— Jeremiah 4:4
That is all I ever wanted my father to do — circumcise his heart.
He would not open his heart.
So I placed mine before God.
This image of heart circumcision has stayed with me my entire life. The Hebrew writers were shameless and raw about flesh, blood, wombs, foreskins, sperm, milk, tears, the heart, the mohel’s knife.
The entire Bible is about fleshience — Word becoming flesh.
Moses turned circumcision inward, inside the flesh, saying God will circumcise our hearts. Paul said this circumcision is in the Spirit. And Stephen said when you ignore the Spirit, “your hearts and ears are still uncircumcised.”
A fascinating phrase — “uncircumcised ears.”
This is where we are now with AI. We listen to it with uncircumcised ears. Ears that expect every silence to be filled. Ears that hear the machine before the mother, the feed before the friend, the summary before the sufferer.
Ears that have not yet been turned by Grace.
Interior Intimo Meo is the story of Grace circumcising my heart and opening my ears to sounds I never thought possible.
The album begins with the wounded body — fleshience — and travels inward through occupation, mystery, discernment, surrender, holy folly, and wildflowers. It ends with a broken life discovering that God was waiting inside all along.
I had carried Augustine’s words for thirty-one years. Then I heard them sung. They entered my chest. They passed through the old scars. They reached places the arguments of my head never reached.
I wept.
The words had found an ear and landed in my heart.
The belt does not get the last word.
The cold shoulder does not get the last word.
The grave does not get the last word.
Love gets the last word.
The circumcision of the heart is the most beautiful act of Grace I know.
Grace circumcises what blocks us from loving God, neighbor, stranger, enemy, family, friends..
A circumcised heart makes the risk, the ridicule, the long waiting, the possible rejection — all of it — worth it.
Music made without AI can be slop.
Music made with AI can be sacred.
The circumcised heart is a difference maker.
For 31 years, I have referred to the Garden as a naming and cultivation commons. Now, suddenly in 2026, it is also a listening commons.
Serving as its first guinea pig, I realize that I may look foolish. I may alienate people I love. I may offend the Church I am trying to honor. I may discover that the distance between holy foolishness and plain foolishness is the width of a fart.
I knew all of this when I opened the gate. I opened it anyway. Because
I’d rather die foolishly in love than foolish for not loving.
A song becomes solidarity when somebody risks this love.
AI democratizes production, but it cannot democratize courage.
AI cannot risk ridicule.
AI cannot stand beside the song.
AI cannot blush. It cannot be humiliated.
Testis means witness in Latin. From it come testimony, testament, and testicles.
Risk. Courage. Conviction. Virility. Gift. Solidarity. Covenant.
All coming from testis.
Courage becomes testis, becomes Christian when it is borne for relation: for the listener, for the wounded, for the Church, for the stranger, for the glory of God.
Solidarity of the interior.
Solidarity you can see, touch, and hear.
Lonely hearts crossing isolation into communion.
Beauty as a way of loving the stranger.
That is my vision, my dream, my prayer for musAIc.
In the spirit of Emily Dickinson,
If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.
God bless you and family, Michial. Be a lantern to a lost world. Show us the gifts of a wise and trusting ear.
Συγχάρητέ μοι — come rejoice with me.
Martin