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Monday, November 19, 2007
SCATTERED SHAVINGS
Drawing Voices
Drawing Voices
Hydrahead : 2007
[Buy It]
REVEALING THE COMMAS
Michael Harrison
Revelation
Cantaloupe : 2007
[Buy It]
MERGANSER (HOODED)
Feltbattery
It Had Wings
Migration Media : 2007
[Buy It]
Sometimes I like to get really high and try to read books. I say "try" because I'm seldom able to do so - more often, a sentence or two will comprise a feedback loop in my head, a current guided by the relentless, interior annularity of pot-thought that becomes rich with the mineral silt of whatever else happens to be rattling around in my mind. I don't get much reading done this way, but find the activity profoundly relaxing, and conducive to the formulation of new ideas. In this state, instead of passively absorbing a text, I'm actively engaging with it, mingling with it, which is a profoundly different experience than *reading* a book, one to be employed strategically.
Other times, I just wind up tripping out on the utter weirdness of language itself. A book or a magazine does strange things to my sense of conceptual space - they're compact objects that feel much larger as you approach them, their conceptual depth like a vertical column of light inscribed through them. You can feel yourself diffuse along this column as you read, and that sense of feeling larger than you are - that awareness of your essence being extended through someone else's thought - can be exhilirating. When I look at my car, its conceptual dimensions fit within its physical dimensions, but when I look at at a book (or an iPod, for that matter), I see a small physical object with a great glowing quantity of web-like data around it. The conceptual exceeds the physical.
Despite the ubiquity of language, when I really think about it, it never ceases to amaze me that it's possible to condense something as anarchic as thought into these orderly, compact symbols, which, on the receiving end, are reverted to thought, albeit thought inevitably transformed from its original dimensions by the shape of the medium. The process is very similar to sending someone a zip file over the Internet: content is compressed for transmission, then extracted. This is miraculous, and perilous, because our actual language still represents only a minute sliver of total language, which is why we're always fumbling over our words and having to explain ourselves. Total language is total knowledge. The minute sliver of language to which we've access is insufficient for expressing the total knowledge we have within us. What I can think is not the same as what I can say. When these two quantities align, the essence of humanity as we understand it will be irrevocably changed.
It's often been said that a million monkeys with a million typewriters would, given world enough and time, eventually produce Shakespeare. This chestnut is meant to illustrate something about probability, but its undermining of the assumptions we make about our relationship to language is more compelling. Since Shakespeare has already produced Shakespeare, I'm more interested in the texts these millions of monkeys would produce that *have yet to be written*. And why wouldn't they? Let's take "monkeys with typewriters" out of the equation, subbing in simply "computers." In my mere 28 years on Earth I have seen the rise of technologies that would have seemed unthinkable within my lifetime. Being generous and assuming I'll live for fifty more years, I place very few limits on the wonders that might emerge within my lifetime - at this point, nothing seems too far-out (this is why the best science fiction writers of the nineties and aughties have given up on the future to write about the present - flying bubble cars seem absolutely quaint compared to the Internet). Our technological reality already exceeds our imagination.
So let's imagine our modern monkeys with typewriters, an array of supercomputers, endlessly configuring and reconfiguring the whole of language available today into every possible combination. Let's imagine some software filters that disregard the pure gibberish while weeding out any randomly generated text that scans as remotely coherent in a syntactical sense. Let's imagine a team of humans who pore over these results, and what, with persistence, they would eventually discover: Shakespeare, perhaps, but also scientific breakthroughs, philosophical insights, great poems and novels, plans for weapons of incredible destruction or cures for currently incurable diseases, et cetera...
All of these secrets are locked within our language, if only we could find the key. Traditionally, human thought has been that key - the idea precedes the langauge. Ideation is fundamental to our self-image as humans, to our sense of personal agency. But in this new paradigm, the process would be inverted: language would precede thought. What would a Shakespeare text mean to us if it had been generated via computer algorithms, if ideation was a game not of intent but of chance? Is the beauty of Shakespeare's writing inherent in the symbolically condensed thought it contains, or in the fact that a human produced it? What if we truly learned to produce knowledge without thinking? We currently regard conceptual problems as tests of the human intellect, but in this new paradigm, their solution wouldn't be a matter of intellection, it would be a game with trillion-sided dice, a matter of combining words in the correct order, aided by tireless machines, using only the language that is already available to us. On the upside, we already have a cure for AIDS, we just haven't gotten the right words in the right order yet. On the downside, we already have a recipe for a bomb that could detonate the whole world, we just haven't gotten the right words in the right order yet. The secrets lie not in our minds, but in knocking down the walls in the labyrinth of our language.
I have read and loved many writers in my life, but there are a few I can isolate that changed my worldview forever. One of those is Jorge Luis Borges, who first put this idea of total language into my head. Borges intuited this linguistic supercomputer in stories like "The Library of Babel" and "The Book of Sand." In the former, he writes about a great library in which every possible permutation of extant language is rendered in its own tome; in the latter, he maps the same concept onto a single book, which you can never quite open to the first or last page, and never find the same page twice. He was circumscribing the infinite, which he embodied in language, where the infinite is partitioned off into discrete, digestible units. These are not fantasy stories - in the conceptual realm, the Library of Babel *exists* - we just haven't become able enough as librarians to catalog more than a fraction of its stacks. And in fact, it probably isn't within the realm of human pontential to be those librarians. But to build them is.
Once Borges taught me that total language embodied total knowledge, my conceptual filter was irrevocably changed. I had previously thought of my words as something I generated to contain my thought, but now I regard my words as little splinters plucked haphazardly off of the total mass of language, which create my thoughts. And once I perceived language as a total mass, it was impossible for me not to view art the same way: a mass of generative potential from which we steal little bits, mostly at random. I then understood myself, when I created something, as a conduit for a force that had nothing to do with me beyond being shaped, ever so minutely, by the contours of the vessel (i.e., little me.)
The randomness bothered me, and suddenly, process-based art was the only kind I was interested in creating (all the songs on today's post are in some way constained and guided by a process or technical imperative). I've since come to terms with that randomness. A common critique of poets, especially modern free-form minimalists, is that you can just put any combination of words on the page. This is true - any combination of words on a page will create a radically specific vector of thought, coherent or otherwise, and if this approach seems infertile, it's only because too many poets are using the same combinations of words in the same way. So that random element of accessing the great art mass can be fertile, if we're careful about choosing the words that call out to us and not the words that worked well for other poets. But it's still process-based art that has the greatest foothold in my imagination. (Not that process-based and intuitive art are mutually exclusive - most of my processes have aleatory agents and vast fields of unfettered play built into them. (Yeah, I know - we'll talk John Cage and Jackson Mac Low some other time.) And I still love to improvise in paint and music and words, although I tend to feed these extemporaneous acts of creativity into constrained processes after the intial fact.)
Think about it like this, as I did on a recent camping trip. Making art without a process is like sitting in the forest. You occupy a radically specific location and have a circumscribed panorama (this represents a portion of the art-mass, which is far too large to be viewed as a whole) in your field of vision. It's then up to you to choose which parts you want to write or draw or sing about, and in what order. Making art with a process in place is like doing the same thing from within your tent. You still occupy a radically specific location, and the same circumscribed panorama surrounds you. But you can only see a tiny portion of it, through a small window you've unzipped in the tent. This window represents your process, whatever concept or algorithm or intuition your project is operating under, which will desposit you at a radically specific point of entry in the art mass, perhaps allowing you to travel a continuous path toward the art-mass's interior, should you pursue the logic of your process far enough, instead of slicing random slivers from different points on its surface.
Paradoxically, by cutting yourself off from the hell of infinite options and focusing your creativity into a thin beam, you can attain greater artistic freedom, since your will, left to its own devices, will always be threatened by the pull of the market, vanity, insecurity. Enslaving yourself to a process makes that process into a shield, creating a protected field of play on which one can be free. And in making process-based art, I've been able to create texts that I've learned from, rather than texts that embody my meager learning. If I have to choose a master, I'll take a process of my own devising over the market any day.
Wow, was that discursive? I swear I'm not high.Labels: books, brian, language
posted by Brian
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