Immanence and the Library of Babel

I have not read Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Library of Babel”. I am a very slow reader. I only read with a purpose. It is sufficient to know from Derek Beaulieu (and everyone else who has read it) that “The Library of Babel” posits a universe embodied in a single interminable, honeycomb-like, library. Borges’ literary repository holds every potential combination of letters arranged without a card catalogue, dooming the denizens of this collection to wander the stacks searching for meaning. “For writers, Borges has issued both a condemnation and a challenge. By proposing an effectively infinite library … Borges lays claim to every book within the library’s holdings: there are no books that an author could propose which Borges’ library does not already contain. When faced with the ontological nightmare of the Borgesian library, a writer has two choices. They can either shrink from their task, believing that there are no remaining original ideas that Borges has not already placed within his collection, or they can see Borges’ library as freeing them from the onerous weight of originality. Within this tact, the author must assert the poetics of choice—writing for them has become not a matter of creating art but selecting art. To be a writer is to artistically select a single volume from Borges’ shelves and assert that volume as particularly worth examination and consideration.”

Hmm, to be a writer is to select a single volume from Borges’ shelves and assert that volume as particularly worth examination and consideration. Is though? The rules say we only have two choices, apparently.

I’ll see your Borges’ library and raise you Hilbert’s Hotel. David Hilbert’s hotel has an infinite number of rooms and is full of an infinite number of guests. What do you do if more guests arrive? Ask everyone to move up one. Or as I have frequently opined in my working life – The solution to a problem is always bigger than the problem itself. That is why, by the way, the Text Festival was not a poetry festival.

'Canon' - Text Festival 

Anyway, returning to the Library, assuming its possible 10^1,834,013 Universes, even if there is one in which I have read Borges’s Library of Babel, there is still a problem. The number of books in the library is irrelevant; the number of rooms is irrelevant. Perhaps the most mundane proof of the fallacy is that all the books have already been written and this is an ‘ontological nightmare’: The concept of that constriction is based on a misunderstanding of Possible Worlds theory. As philosopher David Lewis posited - every world is spatiotemporally and causally isolated from every other world. So the ontological problem, if it is one, only applies to an existentially impossible writer who exists across universes.

In the Universe where Duchamp and Beckett are available to testify, I call them as my expert witnesses and turn to the Shannon number. Mathematician Claude Shannon in calculating the complexity of chess, found that 10¹²⁰ games were possible. He was trying to demonstrate the impracticality of solving chess with the brute force of computer power. This did not stop programmers from seeing Chess as the ideal analogue for computer ‘intelligence’; ultimately leading to the then World Chess Champion Gary Kasparov losing to Deep Blue in 1996-7. Claims were of course made that the match presaged the symbolic end of human intellectual dominance, and, less important to some, the end of Chess. Now? Who cares? The current question in chess is whether Grandmaster Magnus Carlsen is so good that he has ‘broken’ chess.

More specifically the idea that meaning has to be found within an infinite, modular (but closed) library is fallacious. Alain Badiou observes in The Immanence of Truths “[There are] four different types of infinities based on special properties: operative transcendence (inaccessibility), resistance to division (compactness), the existence of a very large ultrafilter (completeness), and the existence and property of an elementary embedding (the degree of proximity to the absolute of one of its attributes).” Not having read the short story locates me (and you) in a universe where there is an outside to the library. Lawrence Weiner observed “anything that exists has a certain space around it; even an idea exists within a certain space” and from that vantage point, the infinity which the library exemplifies, rests with its shaky claim to completeness. I/you are not constrained by it because we can view it from the outside. Further, as Badiou also notes, “A set will therefore be said to be finite if all its elements are definable, which means that they are inscribed in the dominant language in the form of well-identified properties, known to everyone.” Libraries and books are known to everyone. Library of Babel turns out to be a trap for the unwary – let’s face it, it’s a pretty shit library if it hasn’t got catalogue, it’s not a library – it’s a shambolic warehouse. And frankly there aren’t actually that many books I can be bothered to pull down from the shelf, as I wander, “every infinity requires wandering” (Badiou), even if we imagine that we are within this constricting self-important pile of books, there remains the space between the aisles, it is the same space in which Camus imagines Sisyphus happy, the infrathin space within a space of Duchamp’s ‘Opposition and Sister Squares are reconciled’, in its restless mobility the agency of writer takes a rather jaunty precedence over the passivity of the idle reader or the bespectacled librarian cliché.

 

Hymn

Earlier in the year I was invited to participate in an intervention art trail at the William Cowper Museum curated by Wayne Warren.(picture above) Barney had just died and recognising Cowper's love of his pet ducks, I wrote: 

Hymn

Iff one word is enough for a fatal dream,

The jaws of a dying boy have a slow hinge of tears                   like loss

Pressing air from those lungs   auxetic pain

perpendicular to the force applied,

More words offer                    astheny

Extreme separation without end its inverse

                                                            ratio of not at this address

                        For the dialogue of men fades to

Irrelevant by name                  forgotten                      but for name

I know the name but don’t know the work

Unlike song                 its shiny hopeful eyes implying needs

And small creature openings.

It was initially displayed in a display case with a Cowper poem and later moved to be displayed on a typewriter. Also included in the show Jayne Dyer and Jonathan Wright . 

AI – Against Interpretation

“It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery.” George Orwell 

AI Prompt: write a pop song using Schönberg’s 12-note scale celebrating a time-traveler's deletion of that bastard Brahms from this timeline:

The question of what art is: Joseph Beuys: “The thing that was missing was that all these fundamental questions, that is, the fundamental research into art and its function, could not be answered at the Academy,” or by Artificial Intelligence.

AI language games directed towards/focused on answering inane questions, not fundamental questions; its baby-paws grasp after graffiti equivalence, DPRK candy realism, the desperate urge to it-looks-like representation – count each hair on that cat - O and/or plastic abstract neatness. New car shiny. As with every new technology from oil paint to Augmented Reality, the Paradigm: artists and pornographers take up the challenge to push it beyond its material limits to explore or predicted for the technology ('tis a consummation devoutly to be wished by Capital juggling “a world defined by new and complex regimes of differentiation and homogenization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization” – Negri+Hardt). AI’s Eternal September to ‘create’ is ‘exponential’, they say, the adjective triggers fear in some/fearsome – FEAR a system requirement – fictively we anticipate Cyberdyne Technologies, Elysium, or Brain Salad Surgery “I’m perfect. Are you?”: all AI literature descends to an end-digit, redundancy, extinction.

AI Prompt: Reimagine Duchamp’s ‘Opposition and Sister Squares are Reconciled’ as if Duchamp had been Mikhail Tal in his 1959 match against Dieter Keller

True or manufactured, manufactured or true, the media reports two responses from the ‘cultural’ sector: the early adopters embrace it, and the luddites design ‘Human Artistry’ campaign kitemarks. This is no more than a repetition, repetition, an evolutionary categorisation of late capitalism, consumption, surplus value increased with the artificial means of production in the hands of the few, ‘all-human’ production having as much relevance to this model as Sunday painters have to the Venice Biennale. 

AI Prompt: Create a concrete porn-poem featuring a Monkey Christ and two cats

As with every new artistic tool, the quality of work produced has a direct relationship to the talent or vision of the human experimenting with it. There’s always a Leonardo who paints the Last Supper in oil on plaster, so it takes centuries of restorers to stop it flaking off the wall. We sit in that refectory as intended.

AI Prompt: Create a 1980’s playlist for DJ Dostoevsky

Ironically the Leonardo’s are the most dangerous to the capitalist paradigm. Bertran de Born and the pop song writers who whinge about how ‘terrifying’ it is that pop could be completely appropriated by AI need to listen to themselves, that boat sailed some time ago. I am reminded of an interview I heard on Radio 1 in the 1980’s with Martyn Ware, lead singer of the band ABC, in which he opined that if Dostoevsky was alive in the 80’s he would be DJing in Covent Garden. I remember laughing out loud and like to think that I spat out my coffee. (I wonder whether anyone else remembers that statement? Roy Batty: ‘I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion... I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain… at the end of that tea ceremony in Taipei).

AI Prompt: Design a sampler font which represents Saul Bellow’s description of seeing Trotsky’s corpse in the Mexican hospital in 1940.

Dostoyevsky: “I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me.” Bellow: “If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog” –      "the periphery still reproduces itself as the periphery.” This was my mistake. I tried to make the peripheral central: it was contraindicated all along.

Ai is the revenge of a kindergarten intellect upon art… violate art - based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content. “It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories,” observes Susan Sontag. The Handbook of Inaesthetics notes “[a work of art] sets itself up as an inquiry into the question of its own finality. It is the persuasive procedure of its own finitude. This is, after all, why the artwork is irreplaceable in all of its points (another trait that distinguishes it from the generic infinite of the true): Once ‘left’ to its own immanent ends, it is as it will forever be.” Sylvain Lazarus asks whether there may “exist a regime of the thinkable that is inaccessible to this total jurisdiction of language.” The answer is obviously YES. I count five just in this post.

A truth is something we make. It is declared, composed, and upheld by the subjects it convokes and sustains. “Our world is full of copiers and repeaters, ... It is better to interpret than to compose; it is better to have an opinion on a decision that has already been made than to make one’s own. The modern illness is the engulfing of the new in the duplicata, the engulfing of intelligence in the pleasure of the homogeneous” (Michel Serres) but it’s hard. “No bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of questions,” says René Char. 

AI Prompt: Choreograph a pustulant pavane for James Daly MP in the style of Charlemagne Palestine’s Schlongo!! 

To show willin’: I gave AI a couple of chances while writing this: its DJ Dostoevsky generated nothing more than a 80s playlist and its Pavane was literally a description of dancers imitating spots bursting which scraped to the technical level infant school play. AI embarrassed itself. To anyone saying 'ah, but maybe AI is still at the level of a child.' I say child art is of no interest except to its parents.

AI Prompt: what would it mean if  

Christian Bök has claimed poetry in the future will be written by machines for other machines to read – and like humans, the poetry machines won’t be paid for their works and the poetry reading machines will be a tiny group that turn up to performances on a wet Tuesday night in a room over a pub. In the words of the Irish gangster – “who fucking cares?”

Or as Tom Raworth wrote:  

Lion Lion

the happy hunters are coming back

eager to be captured, to have someone unravel the knot

but nobody can understand the writing

in the book they found in the lion’s lair.

In Search of Method

We will call first thinking

the ‘thought-there’

Sylvain Lazarus.

The value of a thought is measured by its distance from the continuity of the familiar.

Adorno

whereas now prey is scarce –

Lévy

Flight

still applies

 Back in 2020 I wrote about the challenge we faced in Poetry as Thoughtcrime, to summarize:

I was wrong. I didn’t see far enough into the darkness.

 I thought “The final systemic replacement of humanity will be the AI breakthrough into creativity. When machine intelligence conquers this uniquely human realm, the march to monetarise your consciousness is complete. Companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook aim to automate creation and reception. The hegemonic colonisation of consciousness manipulates the authentic reader to irrelevance and makes the writer redundant; what space is left? How will resistance be possible? Only the declaration of poetry as thoughtcrime offers a resistant literary space. We are we to create a praxis that can only be tamped down after its facticity has manifest a change of moment unpredictable to digital simulation. The poem has to become uniquely outside the poet’s own data set, the poem becomes the thoughtcrime. Art has always laid claim to a capacity to change perception, but now rather than Poetry ‘making it new’, the imperative is to first make the writer new.”

Though I said my theoretical solution would soon follow, I realised that that was me still thinking like a curator, facilitating/appropriating other creativities, and so my answer was held back to allow time and space for me to apply it to my own practice. So now, I find myself at the explanation of the Search for Method phase of thought:

In Search of Method is a lie.

In Search of Method is the conceit of sequential philosophers. Jean-Paul Sartre called his 1957 precursor to the ‘Critique of Dialectical Reason’: ‘Search for a Method’. The Rules of Rene Descartes’ ‘Discourse on Method’ contain the most detailed description of his method but, magically for the Search for Method, he never completed it, and never refers to it in his subsequent published writings or correspondence. Alain Badiou’s ‘Logics of Worlds’ similarly pauses before the launch, with the first step - “Once we are in possession of a Greater Logic, of a completed theory of worlds and objects, it is possible to examine on its own terms the question of change, especially the question of radical change, or of the event”.

This then that. The working out.

But they already knowing where it will end: “we will adopt a method of maximal interiority to show from the outset that which is only fully intelligible at the end” 

– they/we are writing backwards:

Peripheral like a traditional refugee,

Contrary to Lettre à un otage - the catalyst is here not there.

In the original Base people came, ate and went.

Some left Four Temperaments but not Balanchine’s winter coat, So here:

“in geosocial space that may assume many forms,”

The problem is clearly stated and urgente:

You:             the sum of all your vinculum data.

 “The issue – the construction of something unconstructible – arises as much for a Leninist revolutionary party as for an early Cubist painting, Schoenberg’s first twelve-tone works, Galois’ theory, or Aeschylus’ invention of tragedy. In all of these examples – actually, in every creation of a new truth – something is produced that, precisely from the point of view of the established order, is not constructible.”

Alain Badiou – The Immanence of Truths

(more of which later)

 

'peut-etre le Messie' by Marton Koppany

 

Gaza, Take This Cup from Me

a Compendious Book on Guernica reruns in a place

Urim and Thummim chose to transform every figure

A cheap breastplate as random as desultory tribes

Equates to autoimmune disorder: acts sensitive to assumption

Reports, exogenous acts of God – by incidence and effects

Enshrine pernicious anaemia around anthropic argument

– imposing on you the easiness of death,

Defeat won’t matter, in every scenario they lose

stones placed for some day in the future, ordinance won’t matter,

in every scenario they lose, operations run their inquisition,

the vanquished of today

Masjids call

Flowers braver than us.

 

Identity and Genius (Writing 2023)

Is 2023 a year in some form of demonic possession? It’s been pretty dark for us so far but strangely one of my most productive writing periods for years. The metaphor of the band continuing to play as the Titanic sank comes to mind, but more positively maybe the writing was a way of getting through.

Identity Theft Poems

One of the major horrors has been a sophisticated Identity Theft fraud - malevolent actions full of unpleasantness and threatening developments every day for literally weeks. In poetic terms it raised all sorts of issues about identity and the experience of identification of self, generating material questions about the nature identity itself, material turned into poems. I wouldn’t recommend fraud as a way of kickstarting a project, and it didn’t exist in my work plans in June but now I have more than half a book’s worth of intense poems with more in urgent draft.

One of the poems ‘Hymn’ is a eulogy for the loss of Barney and will form part of a forthcoming exhibition by Wayne Warren at the Cowper Newton Museum (by evil coincidence, the Fraud attack began the day we brought Barney home from hospital to die.) 

In similar vein, though not part of Identity Theft, I've been invited to write a 'Psalm' to form part of a sound installation by the John Cage of our Time, Helmut Lemke, at The Byre, @ Corriedoo Forest, addressing the hewing negation of Scottish Forestry Strategy. 

Novels

Working on the novels has been harder, due to impossibility of creating the time and mental space needed while shit things happened. It’s mostly been research and mapping out stuff. Though again something unexpected occurred. The logic of the Urim novel required that I rewrite the Christian Gospels, which I started with no great enthusiasm, it being just world-building background, the text of which will not be an undue presence in the final novel. However, in the other novel that I am fired up about, ‘Singing Voices’, I needed a character to be eavesdropping on Ezra Pound sitting in his cage writing the Pisan Cantos. As I needed to use a fair chunk of Canto LXXIV-LXXXIV, it occurred to me that I could face copyright issues; having already committed to rewriting the Gospels in the other novel, rewriting the Cantos was the obvious solution.

Genius

BUT Bob Perelman observed in The Trouble with Genius  “No one but Pound could write The Cantos”. As I reread them for “Singing Voices”, I was struck by how many points of Pound’s reference coincide with my experience. My answer to Perelman’s observation increasingly turned into a skeptical question “Is he though?” Putting aside some affected OULIPO reinterpretation or meta-rewriting from the Conceptual Poetry School, (see Derek Beaulieu’s impressive ‘Flatland’  or Simon Morris’s ‘Re-Writing Freud’ etc, etc.) I needed my Cantos to dovetail with the requirements of the novel, so it had to be written in Poundian terms.

Like Pound, I have spent a lot of time writing in Venice (and married Sue there). When writing the Venice section of 50 Heads, though I didn’t realise immediately, I often sat on the bench which Pound had sat on when he considered throwing his first book into the Grand Canal rather than sending it to be published. In Cantos LXXVI, he records the moment, and, as if planting a seed for myself, 4 years later when in Florence I wrote ‘Benches’ (sitting on a different bench beside the Arno) which was published in Space: the Soldier Who Died For Perspective in 2009. The first stanza is quotation of Pisan Canto and the second is my response.

Benches

shd/I chuck the lot into the tide-water?

                        le bozze ‘A Lume Spento’/

                                    And by the column of Todero

shd/I shift to the other side

                                    or wait 24 hours

 

shared benches, A Lassitude Seed

anticipate other my Arno

outside/Armani Time

can’t/I face

the moment of nowhere in particular

only be sobbd/

quietly

 

My last book, The End of Poetry had the subtitle ‘Other possible Trehys with Leibniz’ referencing of course other worlds, so this would appear to be the world in which I rewrite the Pisan Cantos. The things that are supposed to make the Cantos difficult such as the interweaving of histories & mythology, the culture of China, the renaissance, multiple languages, turn out to directly paralleled in my own lifetime research trajectory: in my teens I was obsessed with China, and had studied multiple translations of Confucius Analects, Menius, the Buddhist Scriptures, Tao Te Ching, Chuang Tzu, and many Chinese poets; for many years, I was never without the Wilhem translation of the I Ching – all the sources Pound used. 

“Bartok’s Fifth Quartet … is the record of a personal struggle, possible only to a man born in the 1880s. It has the defects or disadvantages of my Cantos” - Ezra Pound.

In one respect in relation to Pound’s Chinese, I have the advantage of having visited and worked in China on many occasions. He frequently name drops restaurants he ate at around the world and artists he hung out with in London, Paris etc. I can go some better, name dropping say the best Italian restaurant in Shanghai or the great French food in Taipei and my years of curating international contemporary art, sound art, Text, dance, etc, mean I can anecdotalise and appropriate stride for stride with Pound. He wrote once: “blessed are they who choose the right artists and makers” – which I used to use as my joke defence when taking curatorial risks. Similarly, when I was doing my art education the Renaissance was the key period of study – it’s probably not nowadays. My first ever published poem (in Chain) was ‘de re aedificatoria,’ which uses Leon Battista Alberti’s Renaissance treatise (in Latin) on Architecture published in 1452. And of course, my title ‘Space: the Soldier Who Died for Perspective’ is the art historical epithet for the dead soldier at the foot of Paolo Uccello’s 1438 painting ‘The Rout of San Romano’. My favourite biography in Vasari’s ‘Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors & Architects’ (1568) has always been Uccello’s and the opening of this was the postscript in ‘…the Soldier Who Died for Perspective’:

“Paolo Uccello would have been the most gracious and fanciful genius that was ever devoted to the art of painting from Giotto’s day to our own, if he had laboured as much at figures and animals as he laboured and lost time over the details of perspective.” 

I’ve always had a ‘gracious and fanciful’ fascination with the idea of the failing genius. After modernism, genius is a problematic idea, only useable without irony to describe sportspeople. However, as Perelman writes “Genius is not simply a critical demerit to be applied whenever a writer oversteps generic and aesthetic boundaries.” What does it mean if a ‘genius’ could overstep and doesn’t? To paraphrase Alain Badiou in ‘The Ethics of Evil’, to fail to live up to a creative fidelity is Evil in the sense of betrayal. So my ‘Cantos’ is called ‘Genius’.

 The Pisan Cantos opens:

 The enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasant’s bent

            shoulders.

 Genius opens:

If Mycerinus and his wife is no longer categorically possible,

            revetment

 

Don’t get me wrong, Pound is not a hero of mine. Another reason for taking on the Cantos is to confront his fascism with my militant communism. Politically, I would have supported his execution in 1945.

The character in ‘Singing Voices’ novel will hear Poundian writing of this contra-Cantos, the poem will be ‘Genius’ and that as a stand-alone work will be a poem including history.

The Last International Poetry Dog Day

This would have been the 15th birthday of Barney, the famous Poetry Dog - he missed it by one month. We have been touched by the outpouring of condolence for him. So I thought a last acknowledgement of his status in the Poetry World was a suitable memorial. 

Ron Silliman, Tony Lopez, Tony Trehy, Christian Bök (Text Festival)