1. The world limits inclinations with each revolution. I have learned to interpret what happens only as I write*. There’s more to live without than there is to get inside. I have come to understand others unclearly, sometimes halfheartedly, rarely boldly, but I know that laughing is our common ground. And so this is my essay of the wonders of life. Each sentence seems its own aphorism, a particle afloat humming in harmony with the others.
* Given my long interest in the possibilities for computers to mimic or create new texts in a writer's style (especially mine), it is perhaps no surprise that I would find Botnik's Predictive Writer (http://botnik.org/apps/writer/) utterly fascinating. Although the way it works is less magical than I had hoped, it nevertheless does make interesting sentences. I have uploaded the full text of my two books, and the software creates a predictive keyboard much like the one on a smartphone, but with twenty-eight suggestions instead of three. I "wrote" these essayistic vignettes using the computer's recommendations, selecting words that make some kind of sense together. The product is a kind of android: part human part machine.
2. In Uruguay, where I have always found myself awakened, unknowing, I began to believe that ideas collaborate*. Whether the world laughs heartily or skeletons understand the laughing, I realize that I think more than before. So does Jerome, who assures us that death is being, just as birds are unbounded. We have always felt that existence is a strange amorphous miracle that means everything. Then all material against this backdrop is like a weaver's heart: a kind of gossamer realization that what we observe is not nature but a reassignment of letters across town.
* Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: “Language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes 'one's own' only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to his moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own.” And if the speaker is half machine? Or if the basket from which one chooses words is not quite a dictionary but a probability engine?
3. That was almost nothing, but even now only my mind will hang memories to give this essay alleyways of contemplation. Still I know through portals of subversion and decay*, indirectly, the semblance of a moment. Pick a day when you were contained entirely within two planes: the vicious and the domestic. When you compare yourself now to pictures of injustice, who were you? How can we know? From somewhere else the minutes recreate faulty obstacles.
* I first became aware of Botnik’s capabilities through a Facebook-shared (perhaps “viral” is accurate) article linking to a new Harry Potter chapter created with the predictive keyboard. While the creators’ tweet stated clearly, “We used predictive keyboards trained on all seven books to ghostwrite this spellbinding new Harry Potter chapter,” most articles that picked up the story claimed that “a bot” or “a robot” wrote the chapter (“and it’s delightfully hilarious” said Mashable). That, I suppose, is the Holy Grail I’m searching for: a computer that can create its own Patrick Madden essays without actual input from Patrick Madden. For the time being, though, I’ll chuckle along with the rest of the world at oddball Rowlingish sentences like “The tall Death Eater was wearing a shirt that said 'Hermione Has Forgotten How To Dance,' so Hermione dipped his face in mud.”
I first became aware of Bakhtin in graduate school (where else?), where I read selected passages of narrative theory, understanding only vaguely the ideas his (translated) words meant to convey. I struggled with his texts, glossing over long passages but sighing with relief when I encountered an aphoristic, intelligible idea. For the time being, I chuckle along with the rest of the world at offbeat Bakhtinian sentences like “The word in living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-word: it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the answer's direction. Forming itself in an atmosphere of the already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by that which has not yet been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word.”
I first became aware of the sonic similarities between the words Botnik and Bakhtin only now, as I write and consider the prominent names aloud. The terms are phonemic anagrams, which fact gives me a rush of delight, which is, I think, one of the purposes of literature: beyond utilitarian conveyance of information, savory artistic pleasure.
4. Variations of garlic in new connections stretch the belief that I could puzzle out my own thinking. Wednesdays postulate objects hinting toward amoebic difficulties until garlic bulbs tied with considerations gather excuses and people respond with infinite divisibility. Garlic's name remains borrowed and revealed across our arsenal of this and that adjective from before our failing prophecy. Largely intact, I realize things I never worried about, resigned that I will find nothing more substantial than the requisite emotion.*
* These brief essaylike paragraphs that you see here were shaped from the possibilities Botnik suggested from its analysis of my books, but I was the one choosing which of 28 words to insert after each of the previous words I’d selected from a prior list of 28. This was interesting, quite often frustrating, never quite as easy as I’d hoped. “Language, whether processed by the ear or the eye, relies on a system where word follows word, line follows line, ideas accumulate through the rituals of diction.” (Wendy S. Walters, “How to Fix Catastrophe”) In truth, the process was quite a bit like writing without a predictive keyboard, perhaps because I subconsciously tend to draw from the same word bank even without a computer mediating the process (in my two books there are 16,392 unique words out of 141,833 total; “like” is my most common “real” (non-function) word, with 333 occurrences, because I’m a valley girl, I suppose). Were I to load another author’s works into Botnik’s memory, perhaps I’d arrive at something more whimsical, like the Harry Potter chapter, but feeding myself my own words may have gotten me into a self-perpetuating loop.
5. Perhaps transubstantiations happen all the time with their incongruous interconnections holding on to furniture from the fringes. Everybody loves mystery*, at least with the spacey metaphors from atop the tombs of local veterans. Between theory and desire the ancients returned to give away the entire palace of similarities between unending experiences and divisible recoveries. Temporary poses against their oppressive deaths.
* Should these interstitial paragraphs respond to or otherwise explain the nonsense they follow? Analyze or extrapolate? Perhaps only to comment that their inanity reflects the inanity of their source texts: faux-erudite phrases jumbled together in a semblance of meaning aimed primarily at convincing the reader of the writer’s intelligence… which is itself a form of dialogic, allowing for widely variant interpretations. George Orwell listed first of his four great motives for writing, “Sheer egoism: Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death…” And surely, as E. B. White asserted, “Some people find the essay the last resort of the egotist, a much too self-conscious and self-serving form for their taste; they feel that it is presumptuous of a writer to assume that his little excursions or his small observations will interest the reader.” Mea culpa; mea maxima culpa. But what, then, is predictive text generated from my former writings now creating new writings? Perhaps a white flag, a recognition of self-defeat.
6. Devils scream out with impotence from centuries ago: “those mentioned in the histories haunt the capacity to make people below restrain themselves from thinking about them.” Somehow this is comforting. We start with Montaigne and his small studies in life's brevity. Later we remember Cleopas* and his friend disappeared from the realm of the miracle that is possibility. A montage of fragmented notions about these darkening dangerous conventions... a whirling immensity exploited by an impossibility.
* Botnik seems to have a preference for obscure words. Cleopas, one of the disciples who unknowingly encountered Jesus on the road to Emmaus, appears only once in my books, in a montage of people who saw the resurrected Lord before Thomas famously doubted. To my knowledge, Luke’s gospel is the only written mention of Cleopas, as unwitting witness, one of a small number of necessary figures whose testimony made real the resurrection of a slain god. (To make matters more interesting, Cleopas and his companion believe it their duty to inform the stranger along the road about “the things which happened [in Jerusalem],” thus recounting to Jesus the story of his crucifixion. In the account, he resists the urge to stop them, “Dudes, I know!”) Now he is in a second book of mine, propagating almost genetically through my works, which is essentially what I am hoping for myself: that the computers of the future will discover my writing and resurrect me, take it upon themselves to write new Patrick Madden essays long after I am gone.
7. Respiration asks only to give, to make people respond, mindful of our elemental excursions, mendicants who ply our frail circumstances, holding vigil against the influence of machines*. Because time limits excuses along the day, I halfway recognize my isolation, for instance, as centuries of loss transformed into Morse code, staccato clucks holding firmly -- vaguely -- as if unsatisfied with our antics. The most common reminder of matter is higher indeed than the most wondrous saying (though factual).
* It occurs to me that some readers may find no discernible difference between the numbered paragraphs and their asterisked followers, so obtuse is my mind as it draws upon decades of accumulated vocabulary. And yet perhaps these disparate meldings are more than meaningless letters or sounds abutted. Consider the way the reading mind so desires meaning that it works for connections absent (or intentionless) in the text: see in the passage above the struggle for calm and meditative focus, the easy denial of the void, the incessant transformation of life into symbol. Remember that for all its beauty, language is representational; matter matters.
8. Release the idea of continuing on into these descending letters while attending to ordinary objects hinting at isolation. There are exceptions to preachings. Instead of hardcore requests dashing through portals whose struggle includes each passenger's impositions, the fastidious hand rests holding unreality. When Nero dangers forth from suburbia, marksmanship stalls temporarily and arrogance scams bearers. This situation is placated with only minor variations on imperturbability as the first mathematical principles* pass from chaos to nothing.
* In his 1903 book Principles of Mathematics, Bertrand Russell asserts absolute space and time (the most convenient frame of reference for physics calculations, but not the currently accepted view of physicists, or essayists, or anyone who’s ever mused on time’s plasticity “when you’re having fun” or watching a pot boil) and discovers a paradox in set theory, the most famous example of which my father excitedly shared with me when I was a boy. He must have gotten it from Martin Gardner’s column in Scientific American, which he subscribed to and read steadily during my entire childhood. “The Barber Paradox” goes: suppose there is a barber who shaves all the men in town who do not shave themselves and only those men who do not shave themselves. Can this barber shave himself? Russell himself extrapolates it thusly:
You can define the barber as "one who shaves all those, and those only, who do not shave themselves." The question is, does the barber shave himself? … I think it is clear that you can only get around it by observing that the whole question whether a class is or is not a member of itself is nonsense, i.e. that no class either is or is not a member of itself, and that it is not even true to say that, because the whole form of words is just noise without meaning.
9. Likewise the idea of completeness: from insights to music I never made, I construct a series of pages around the idea of mirrors. What paralytic reasoning to make something matter! Enough about mimics! My grandmother sang away her ills that you might remember to make possible the gists of everything. Either way, we can believe that the expanding universe babbles on toward its own ephemeral patterns*.
* As, I hope, does this essay… inevitably? Perhaps the set of words without meaning, or combinations of words that mean nothing, is a null set, or it contains an inherent contradiction, because, to take an extreme example, a lecture in, say, Japanese, will seem “noise without meaning” to me, yet I cannot say that it has no meaning. Similarly, even Borges’s maddeningly hypothetical infinite books in the Library of Babel may mean to particular readers, or, in sum, in the abstract, they certainly mean (in a multiversally metaphorical garden-of-forking-paths kind of way) even to me. For what it’s worth, Botnik offered me “bubbles” above, after “universe,” and I chose it, but later, in revision, after hitting upon Borges, who himself was alluding to the Bible story explaining the division of languages, and noting the phonemic (if not etymological) similarities between “Babel” and “babble,” I changed the vowel. So what?/So there.
10. But perhaps the matter is analogous to the ascension of laughter to the sky. From elysian fields to transient beaches, I lament the proof of genre, longing for variety (or stability). Tunnels represent falling slowly into seemingly unimportant gibberish, but everything regarding negative capability appears ironic, partly because of joys and partly because of consternations. Who said it was meant to be so imitative? Name one disillusioned nineteenth-century German and flip the world*. Whispering does this, changes existing legends while increasing dependence on dubious destiny.
* Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: “We really suppose that in language we possess a knowledge of the cosmos,” yet (he suggests) language as a structure of consciousness is both the way we apprehend the world and the way we create it. This essay, which began as a frivolous exercise, has become, for me at least, a kind of engine, humming in harmony with itself, self-perpetuating and –actualizing. I say this not to suggest that the essay drives itself, but that the essay and I are symbiotic, as I both write and read it into meaning. Someday (now; the essay exists in the perpetual now), you will read it, too, and it will mean again, but differently. As Andrei Linde said, “It's not enough for information to be stored somewhere, completely inaccessible to anybody. It's necessary for somebody to look at it. You need an observer who looks at the universe. In the absence of observers, our universe is dead.” Yet I also feel as if this particular selection and ordering of doubly pre-existing words has achieved its own momentum, so that, with barely a nudge from me, it continues accumulating and meaning, potential energy becoming a reality, not reality writ firm, but one version of it, your reality, the part that is a contextualization and interpretation of these words I’ve committed to electronic paper and transmitted over the ether to other media to bring them to you, so that you may realize them. Your witness makes real these words and in effect transports, even (in a small way) resurrects, me.
This android essay reminds us that we are participants in the creation of the universe, that our observations are necessary to the resolution of possibility into actuality, that, in the words of Alan Watts, “We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.”
Patrick Madden's brand new essay collection is called Disparates (2020). His other books are Sublime Physick (2016) and Quotidiana (2010), and he coedited After Montaigne (2015). He teaches at Brigham Young University and Vermont College of Fine Arts; with Joey Franklin he edits the journal Fourth Genre; with David Lazar he edits the 21st Century Essays series at the Ohio State University Press; and he curates the online essay resource www.quotidiana.org.
Photo by adafruit on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA
"Jesus Appears to Cleopas and Another Disciple," unknown engraver, 1853, from Volks-Bilderbibel