The Brain Is Deeper Than the Sea: Sea and Spar Between, Computational Stuplimity, and FragmentationNathanael MooreUniversity of Otagonatm42@gmail.com
Nathanael Moore is a graduate student in English at the University of Otago
Alliance of Digital Humanities OrganizationsAssociation for Computers and the Humanities000599016123 February 2022article
This is the source
DHQ classification scheme; full list available at http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/taxonomy.xmlKeywords supplied by author; no controlled vocabularyAdded abstract and teaser
The author demonstrates how we can use fragments of classical text as a heuristic to help us interpret a poem (Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland’s Sea and Spar Between) that is, on the face of it, quintessentially nonfragmentary because it contains over 225,000,000,000,000 stanzas.
Exploring fragments of classical text in computational poetry.
This article discusses
Sea and Spar Between, a long
computational poem by Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland (2010). The poem’s length
prevents human readers from reading it completely. I argue that although the poem’s
global inaccessibility raises complex interpretive problems, we can surmount them by
applying multiple interpretive modes to a single textual fragment, thereby meeting the
fragmentary text with a fragmented critical discourse; the idea being that a more
coherent theoretical apparatus would, in its latent totalizing impulse, be intrinsically
unsuited to a fragment’s incompleteness. I use this technique to read Sea and Spar Between through various lenses including, inter alia, cosine similarity, affect theory, and code. I conclude
with a website that reimagines the poem by populating its sea with language from the
critical literature on the poem. Like Sea and Spar Between,
this website cannot be circumnavigated by human readers and so enacts this
article’s solution to the problem of how to read computational poems that cannot be read
completely: to interrogate the assumptions that cause us to view unreadability as a
problem, and to embrace incompleteness as a source of critical insight.
Approaching a whole through a part of its parts
Against a light blue background — a visual metonym for the titular sea —
Sea and Spar Between consists of an immense lattice of stanzas that combine the distinguishing textual rhythms and rhetorical gestures of Melville and
Dickinson. The stanzas are comprised of a subset of the union of
the words in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Emily
Dickinson’s poetry. The words are combined and recombined by the poem’s code in a
manner that moves the language back and forth between the compressed
interiority of Dickinson’s poetry and the expansive intensity of Melville’s prose.
The poem’s words flicker and change as the reader’s mouse navigates the sea, like the
water disturbed by a prow moving through waves. At the bottom of the screen is a
search bar, where the reader can enter coordinates to move to a specific location in
the sea; each stanza in Sea and Spar Between has, and is
locatable by, two unique coordinates, which Montfort and Strickland conceptualize as
latitude and longitude. The set of latitude and longitude values both range from
0–14992382 inclusive, meaning that the total number of stanzas is 1499238222.The
poem can be viewed at: https://nickm.com/montfort_strickland/sea_and_spar_between/index.html.
To write that
Sea and Spar Betweenconsists of a stanza-lattice is slightly misleading. This is partly because
the word’s Latin root means to stand still or firm, yet
the critical literature on Sea and Spar Between
repeatedly emphasizes the poem’s instability.
Mainly, however, consists is misleading because the poem is impossible to read
completely and, by extension, the reader cannot definitively identify the poem’s
constituent parts. (By impossible to read completely I
mean impossible for a human to read completely; a
sufficiently advanced computer could parse the entire poem.) The poem is impossible
to read because of its scale. Montfort and Strickland write: Sea and Spar Between is a poetry generator which
defines a space of language populated by a number of stanzas comparable to the
number of fish in the sea, around 225 trillion. Its order of magnitude is therefore 1014, a length
that makes
Sea and Spar Between a nexus between one of
poetry’s oldest genres (epic) and one of its newest (computational poetry), though
here the nostos is incompletable and the hero, if there is
one, is anonymous. To use the Melvillean language that the poem invites, its length
transforms the reader into an Ahab surrogate, and the text into an analogue of the
white whale, though the pursuit of the latter by the former is indefinitely prolonged
because, as Stuart Moulthrop and Justin Schumaker write, a complete reading of the poem would take more than
200 million years. To appreciate the Sisyphean nature of
reading Sea and Spar Between more fully, observe that a
reader who has read 225 stanzas has only read 1e-10% of the poem. Given the
impossibility of completely reading Sea and Spar
Between, then, the question becomes whether it is possible (and if so, how)
to extrapolate an accurate sense of the poem’s architectonic whole from its
fragments. Although reconstructing the lost general from the extant particular is a
common task in disciplines such as archaeology, it is an alien task to the readers of
contemporary poetry, where the dominant genre, lyric, is characterized by structural
intelligibility (because lyric poems are conventionally brief). Moreover, as Joseph
Frank writes, modern poetry asks its readers to suspend the
process of individual reference temporarily until the entire pattern of internal
references can be apprehended as a unit. But in texts with largely unfathomable (because
unfathomably large) referential patterns, this process of referential suspension is
drastically extended, which effectively makes it impossible to a apprehend the entire pattern of internal references. In such cases, Stuart Moulthrop asks, how
do we choose configurations of output to serve as
representations of the work or objects of study?. One way of answering Moulthrop’s question is to look
to classical studies. Due to the fragmentary state of much of the Greco-Roman corpus,
classicists have also had to confront the question of how to interpret splinters of
output from inaccessible signifiers. Although the separation of classical textual
parts from their original wholes is due to the historical vicissitudes of textual
transmission, whereas the separation of Sea and Spar
Between’s parts from its whole is due to a contingent aesthetic decision
by its author-programmers, the consequences are identical: our tacit assumptions
about what it means for a text to be complete are foregrounded, and we are compelled
to explore new modes of interpretation and reading. Because fragmentation . . . hinders our understanding of . . . narrative structure,
particularly our ability to form any critical reading of it, these new modes must be open-ended. And, as Susan Stephens argues, because hypotheses about the relationship between a fragment and its whole are intrinsically non-falsifiable, critics are grant[ed] considerable latitude . . . for interpretation, which results
in an almost open-ended hermeneutic
environment. Editing fragments, she suggests, should
therefore be conducted along subjunctive lines as a negotiation,
an exploration of the possibilities rather than the transmission of dogma. Stephens’s emphasis on interpretive plurality
is representative of a theoretical shift in the criticism of classical fragments. The
standard scholarly practise, S. Rebecca Martin and
Stephanie Langin-Hooper write, was to understand them [i.e.,
fragments] as incomplete things, whose principal purpose was to serve as a
referent to a complete . . . whole. Increasingly, however, fragments are being
valued as texts and objects in their own right (ibid.),
rather than as the offcuts of an absent signifier, especially because fragments
implicitly eschew the totalizing impulse of conventional representational
modes such as naturalism, and thereby allow us to explore alternative modes that
embrace incompleteness (ibid., 10). Because fragments eschew totalities in favor of
the partial, the criticism of fragments can switch between multiple perspectives to
an extent that, in other critical contexts, could be condemned
as insufficiently rigorous. The benefit of thinking about Sea
and Spar Between through the lens of fragmentation, then, is that the
poem’s main theoretical challenge (how to choose configurations
of output to serve as representations of the work) dissolves because the work’s unreadability transforms
from an insoluble problem into an invitation to critical multiplicity.
I accept
this invitation by exploring
Sea and Spar Between
through several interpretive modes. I argue that because fragments encourage
us to move between different critical paradigms, we end up looking at them from
various perspectives; ironically, therefore, we can see the fragment more completely
than we could have had it been possible to view against the contextual backdrop of
its whole.
Seeking a microcosm in the waves of Sea and Spar Between
One possible response to
the overwhelming complexity of
Sea and Spar Between at
the macro-level is to focus on its more intelligible micro-levels. For example, we
could begin at an arbitrary stanza and interpret it in relation to its local context
to create a cluster of significance, treating the poem as a kind of jigsaw puzzle
with the conceptually inverted aim of disassembling the completed set into sub-sets
of related pieces.
Let us test this approach. Assume for the sake of argument
that the reader has pseudo-randomly entered the poem at the coordinates (22, 22): fix upon the bag-disk coursenailed to the sparfast-fisharrestless bank and rise
We can view (22, 22) through several different paradigms. For example, as a hub from
which spokes of stanzas radiate outwards, or as the temporary midpoint of a conveyor
belt of stanzas paratactically related to one another, or as a volta signalling a
pivot in thought or pitch that divides the stanzas of the upper half from those of
the lower, or as an element in an n-tuple. Of course, these examples do not exhaust
the possible perspectives we might adopt. As Barry Stroud writes, The only limitation on possible conceptual schemes is our limited
ingenuity in inventing them (1975, 92). But before selecting one of the
above paradigms to apply to (22, 22) and its local context, the limits of that
context have to be determined. How many of the stanzas in Figure 2 should we read?
(There are three obvious possibilities: first, every stanza depicted within
Figure 2, second, the row or column within which (22, 22) appears, third, (22, 22)
tout court.) For if we want to focus on
Sea and Spar Between’s textual micro-levels, then we must
decide how to partition the poem into micro-levels. And unless we choose to read each
stanza as if it were sui generis and therefore completely
unrelated to its neighbours, then our chosen micro-level must allow for the grouping
of interrelated stanzas and the mapping of relationships between stanza-groups. The
problem, in a nutshell, is that it is not immediately clear how to accomplish this.
These groups should be discrete insofar as the point of collapsing
Sea and Spar Between into micro-levels is to create a set of
sub-poems that are feasibly interpretable in isolation, as opposed to stanzas that
are interpretively dependent on their connections to stanzas around them, and the
stanzas situated concentrically beyond those stanzas, and so on for some indefinite
distance. So, the partitioning of stanzas will ideally be based on a system that we
can use to distinguish nonarbitrary points at which one set of related stanzas ends
and another begins. For example, we might group stanzas together based on
linguistic-thematic coherence. The difficulty with formulating a partitioning system
and applying it to Sea and Spar Between is that the
gradation of the poem’s language is exceptionally fine; textual elements from one
stanza bleed subtly into its neighbouring stanzas, whereupon they are minutely
calibrated before bleeding into a neighbouring stanza’s neighbouring stanza, and so
on. Variation occurs gradually and delicately, much like oceanographic variation
between different bodies of water, making it difficult to identify points at which to
nonarbitrarily separate groups of stanzas.
For example, consider Figure 3. It
depicts each stanza from Figure 2 as a circle or circular segment — with each
stanza’s constituent words extending outwards from, and placed at equidistant points
around, its respective circle’s circumference — scattered at random points upon a
rectangle. Note that each coordinate is represented as an integer: (24, 22), for
example, becomes 2422. The impression, bearing in mind that the placement of
the circles is random and therefore that imbrication does not imply relatedness, is
of a set of atomic stanzas. The most sensible textual micro-level against which to
align one’s reading of the stanzas depicted here, then, appears to be each stanza in
and of itself. It is difficult to see, judging from Figure 3 alone, how one might
nonarbitrarily connect, say, the stanzas at (24, 21) and (23, 20). But when this
process is repeated (see Figure 4), with the crucial adjustment of diagramming word
types, not word tokens, the set of
twenty stanzas is replaced by a set of three stanzas.I intend type and
token to be read in the philosophical sense whereby a type is a class,
and a token is an instance of that class. For example, the phrase hello world,
hello world has four tokens but only two types.In other words, once
the reader has read three of the twenty stanzas (i.e., 15% of the stanzas), they will
have read every word type that appears in the stanza-rectangle; the remaining 85% of
text consists solely of permutations of the tokens of those types. Figure 4 thus
illustrates that the stanzas within the rectangle are much more similar than Figure 3
suggests. The task of nonarbitrarily splitting the set of stanzas into subsets
therefore becomes more difficult because as similarity increases, so too does the
temptation to leave the entire set in situ as a textual
micro-level in and of itself. This point can also be illustrated mathematically, and
I want to do so to underscore the extraordinary extent to which
Sea and Spar Between is indivisible, before considering what interpretive
purchase this indivisibility affords us.
A mathematical illustration of Sea and Spar Between’s interconnectedness
Let us examine a rectangle, with vertices located at the coordinates (100, 109),
(104, 109), (104, 90), and (100, 90), that contains 100 stanzas. And let us place
those stanzas within a term vector model. Say we have a stanza S that is part of a
group of stanzas GS located in vector space VS. The number of dimensions in VS equals
the number of unique words (W) in GS. So, VS = {W1, W2, …, Wn}. And in VS, S = {wS1,
wS2, …, wSn}, where wSn represents the weight of Wn in S, where the weight is a
number that, in this case, is defined by how often Wn appears in S. For example, if
Ishmael were the 7th word in VS and occurred 5 times in S, then wS7 = 5. Repeating
this process for every stanza in GS for every word in VS would result in a sparse
matrix like the one depicted in Table 1.
1st word in VS2nd word in VS3rd word in VS4th word in VS5th word in VS6th word in VS7th word in VS8th word in VS…nth word in VS 1st stanza in GS0010010002nd stanza in GS3000001123rd stanza in GS100210000…nth stanza in GS 002001000
Each stanza can then be represented as a vector in n-dimensional space. For example, consider the following document-term matrix
where the rows represent two hypothetical texts that can only use two words
(dog and cat), and the columns represent the frequency of those
words:
Dog frequencyCat frequencyText one22Text two108
Document-term matrices can be represented in vector space by assigning each term a
separate axis, and by letting the frequency of each term equal the corresponding
coordinate value. For example, if we let the x-axis stand for cat and the
y-axis stand for dog in the below vector space, then text one will be located
at (2, 2) and text two will be located at (8, 10):
Once texts are represented in vector space, we can calculate their similarity.
Although the above vectors are relatively dissimilar in terms of Euclidean distance
(vector magnitude), the angle they form is acute and they are therefore similar in
terms of vector orientation (which is intuitive, insofar as both documents are
comprised of the same words and differ only with respect to the frequency of those
words). Vector orientation is the better measurement of document similarity in vector
space. For example, though one might assume that if term z appears more frequently in
document x than in document y by a factor of ten, then x is more concerned with z
than y, document x might simply be ten times larger than document y, in which case
both documents would be equally related (proportionally) to the topic denoted by term
z (assuming z is not polysemous). Vector orientation reflects this kind of
isomorphism better than vector magnitude. The cosine of the angle that two vectors
form is one way to measure text similarity. As the cosine of the angle between two
vectors approaches 1 (cos(θ) = 0°), the texts those vectors represent will
theoretically be more similar. As the cosine approaches 0 (cos(θ) = 90°) the texts
will theoretically be less similar. As the cosine approaches -1 (cos(θ) = 180°) the
texts will theoretically be more opposite. I took the 100 stanzas located within the above stanza-rectangle, computed each stanza’s cosine similarity to every other stanza, and exported the results to a spreadsheet, which can be viewed at https://github.com/moona740/Nat_Moore_MA_Thesis/blob/master/cosinebagofwords%20(1).xlsx. Note that the minimum cosine
similarity between two stanzas here is 0, not -1, because the algorithm I used is
based on term frequency (how often a word appears in a document, operating under the
assumption that if two texts share a roughly similar vocabulary, and the frequency
distribution of that vocabulary is also roughly similar, then they are roughly alike)
and a word cannot appear < 0 times in a text. The cells highlighted in red are
those that show a cosine similarity between 0.7 and 0.99 inclusive. There are 3046 cells in this range. But this figure does not tell us the
number of unique instances of cosine similarities between 0.7
and 0.99 because cosine similarity calculation is based on multiplication (the cosine
of two vectors is essentially their scalar product divided by their length product),
which is commutative. In other words, the spreadsheet (E) equals its own transpose (E
= ET); the value of the cell at row x and columny is identical to the cell at rowy and
columnx. So, to find the number of unique instances of cosine
values in the desired range, we need to divide 3046 in half, resulting in a quotient
of 1523. A rectangle with 100 stanzas has 10,000 ordered pairs of stanzas.100
ordered pairs from (1, 1), (1,2), …, (1, 100), another 100 ordered pairs from (2,
1), (2, 2), …, (2, 100), and so on until the 100th list of ordered pairs of (100,
1), (100, 2), … (100, 100), giving us 100 * 100 ordered pairs. This means
that 15.23% of the stanzas within the rectangle highly resemble (linguistically and
thematically), at least one other stanza also therein. What interpretive purchase
does this data give us? It reemphasizes that even relatively distant stanzas within
the poem’s stanza-lattice are similar. For example, the first stanza within the
rectangle has a cosine similarity of 0.8198 with the 99th stanza. The second stanza
has a cosine similarity of 0.8421 with the 94th stanza. The 76th stanza has a cosine
similarity of 0.9474 with the 35th stanza. These similarities complicate attempts to
sculpt the poem into discrete micro-levels because they show that there is a low
correlation between Euclidean distance and linguistic-thematic gradation. Reading the
stanza-rectangle is therefore complicated because it is less a stanza-rectangle than
a stanza-web, with a practically infinite number of interconnecting strands. For
example, if we took our previous stanza-web and stretched it from 100 stanzas to 1000
stanzas (an increase of 900%), the number of ordered pairs would increase from 10,000
to 1,000,000 (an increase of 9900%, which is an example of the curse of
dimensionality, i.e., the problems that occur when interpreting data in high
dimensional spaces). If roughly 15.23% of these ordered pairs were also significantly
like at least one other stanza in the same web, then we would be left with the
infeasibly large figure of 152,300 highly related stanza-pairs to read.
A possible objection considered and refuted through the relativity of scale
One might
make a reasonable objection here. Why is our inability to reduce the above stanza-web
to smaller micro-levels a problem? It is already a micro-level in and of itself (if
we ignore the 10,000 ordered pairs contained therein); 100 stanzas are not
unmanageably large. Why not simply analyze those 100 stanzas, instead of brooding
about how to make ever finer calibrations? After all, most literary scholarship on
long texts rest on generalizations, which themselves rest on mobilized inferences
from delimited, if carefully selected, parts.
The answer to this objection
returns us to the poem’s size and revolves around what J. H. Prynne terms the principle of scale and its working in
poetical composition, by which he means that very
small, local details can point to and complicate very large ideas or features of
argument. By extension, Prynne argues, we can use small
textual data as primary instruments to think with, to uncover
and investigate connections that can extend far beyond their immediate
occurrence. As a kind of proof of concept, Prynne proceeds
to use a single word (incense) as an interpretive key with which to unlock
Paradise Lost. There is nothing in Prynne’s analysis
to suggest that he believes the inferential movement from the small to the large is a
heuristic that should be limited to the analysis of Miltonic texts. It seems fair to
assume that Prynne subscribes to a literary version of quantum entanglement. Two quantum-entangled particles . . . can be arbitrarily separated
in space whilst remaining interdependent with respect to their measurable
properties, such that a change in one will invariably be accompanied by a change
in the other, writes William M. R. Simpson . If we replace particles with signifiers then we have a
gloss of Prynne’s vision of the poetic connection between the local and the global.
The problem for us is that Sea and Spar Between’s scale
puts even the local out of reach. One concordance of Paradise
Lost puts its total word count at 82, 860 (Matsuoka n.d.), and one
incense token therefore comprises 0.00120685493% of Milton’s epic.
Implicitly, Prynne believes that 0.001% of a text is an adequate tool to uncover and investigate connections that can extend far beyond their
immediate occurrence. Perhaps, then, we should content ourselves with
reading 0.00120685493% of
Sea and Spar Between and
dismiss our inability to read the entire poem. But recall that the algorithm
generates 1499238322 stanzas. 0.00120685493% of 1499238322 stanzas, rounded to the
nearest integer, is two billion, seven hundred twelve million, six hundred sixty-six
thousand, five hundred thirty-two stanzas. At my normal reading speed, I can read
about twelve stanzas of the poem in one minute. I would thus require roughly 43 years
to read 0.00120685493% of Sea and Spar Between. And even
if I did devote my life to this quixotic task, I could not take what I had read and
trace its . . . echoes and ambiguities of reference across
the entire poem, as Prynne does with the word incense, for the
simple reason that I would still have another 99.9987931451% of the poem to read
before I could do so. Readers of Sea and Spar Between
cannot use the small to illustrate or endorse the large,
as Prynne does with Paradise Lost. They are restricted
to using fragments to speculate about the poem’s largeness.
An alternative method to fulfil our obligation toward the
difficult whole.
In summary,
Sea and Spar
Between resists division into subsets because its interconnectedness makes
it difficult to identify exactly where to nonarbitrarily split its macro-level into
different micro-levels. Even if Sea and Spar Between did
explicitly encourage textual partitioning, subsequent partitions would have to be
exceptionally minute to be feasibly readable, and they would therefore have little
extrapolative value. Prynne’s principle of scale — that very
small, local details can point to and complicate very large ideas or features of
argument — is ultimately subordinate to the principle of meta-scale
because the micro-level of a very large macro-level makes a mockery of its prefix: 1%
of Sea and Spar Between, for example, is two trillion,
two-hundred fifty million stanzas. Consequently, to use the words of Aristotle,
as the eye cannot take it all in at once, the unity and sense
of the whole is lost for the spectator, and readers are therefore restricted to
conjecture, using whatever they can glean from the poem’s fragments, when questions
are raised about the poem as a totality. The poem’s readers, then, have little choice
but to resemble those critics who Brian McHale censures for staking their arguments
on apparently key pieces of text, which are subsequently treated as interpretive centres . . . around which to organize . . .
heterogenous material. Poems thus interpreted, McHale argues, are
reduced, in effect, to a skeletal structure of points that
yield most readily to a particular interpretive orientation. This strategy,
McHale writes, leads to the reduction of a poem to a collection
of decontextualized key quotes, and, as a result, the bulk of the poem goes uninterpreted — unread, to all intents and
purposes. The difference is that the bulk of Sea and Spar Between is not unread to
all intents and purposes, but literally unreadable; the reader’s reliance
on fragments of text is an imposed and unavoidable constraint, not a culpable failure
to meet what McHale calls the obligation toward the difficult
whole. I write imposed as a reminder that
Montfort and Strickland have deliberately thwarted the possibility of understanding
the poem’s whole by restricting readers to a virtually endless series of fragmentary
parts. We are thus forced to navigate the text in a manner reminiscent of the Pequod’s peripatetic voyage (our search for stable textual
meaning is therefore ambiguously conflated with Ahab’s dangerous and arguably
pointless obsession), and the conventional tools of close reading, as we have seen,
cannot help us upon this voyage.
However, denying critics the opportunity to
close read
Sea and Spar Between as a totality might
ultimately be an act of critical generosity if, as David Ciccoricco argues, the
trouble with second generation
digital-literary criticism . . . [is] the celebration of both the practice and the very possibility of close reading works [of] digital literature, while at the same time
failing to adequately articulate what close reading means, or must come to
mean, in digital environments. For by making it impossible to close read Sea and Spar Between, Montfort and Strickland not only make it
a fortiori impossible to celebrate the practise or
possibility of close reading Sea and Spar Between, but also
compel critics to articulate how close reading must evolve if it is to have any
relevant applications to overwhelmingly distant computational texts.
What we
need is a close reading of close reading. One place from which we might draw
inspiration for this task is the criticism of classical textual fragments. Here, I
argue, we can find a set of provisional, flexible principles that work with, rather
than against, the fragmentation of Sea and Spar Between.
According to the translator Diane Rayor, one such principle is the resolution to make
textual lacunae evoke connections, not absences, which thereby enables readers to bridge the gap between a fragment and its absent whole (quoted by Balmer [2013], 50). In the remaining sections
of this article, I attempt to invest the fragments of
Sea and
Spar Between with significance by meeting them with an equally fragmentary
array of alternatives to close reading (for example, the mode I turn to next
concentrates upon the reader’s affectual experience of the poem). In doing so, I
suggest that the best way to interpret a text that always already comes to us in
fragmented form is not only through using the fragment as an organizing
critical trope, but also through the mimetic making of new interpretive
fragments.
From the sublime to the stuplime
In The Brain — is wider than the Sky —, Emily Dickinson
writes: The Brain is deeper than the sea — For — hold them — Blue to Blue — The one the other will absorb — As sponges — Buckets — do —
Montfort and Strickland invert this relationship: the poem’s sea is deeper
than the reader’s brain, which cannot absorb the blue to which it is,
paradoxically, both parallel (grammatically) and incommensurate (spatially). We have
seen that conventional close reading is ill-suited to circumventing the challenges
that this inversion poses. I want now to examine a mode of reading that may be better
suited to the vastness of
Sea and Spar Between. It is
the mode that each of the poem’s authors recommend (for now, we will reserve
judgement as to whether this counts in the mode’s favour or against it), though their
recommendations differ on a subtle but profound point. We can therefore add Montfort
and Strickland to the list of oppositions (e.g., sea and spar, Melville and
Dickinson, longitude and latitude) that cumulatively entrench juxtaposition as one of
the poem’s central structural principles. First I want to address Montfort’s
recommendation: We do not consider that readers will often
seek out particularly apt stanzas and wish to return to them. While
returning to a favorite stanza is possible in our system, it may seem a curious
quest . . . . For some readers, the experience of Sea and
Spar Between will occur rather in the texture, operation, and journey
of reading the work as it presents itself, rather than in any particular
destination. Finding the free experience of reading to be better than the
saving of coordinates, they will soon be Done with the Compass – – / Done
with the Chart!
After conceptual poetry’s assault on the Coleridgean definition of poetry as the best
words in the best order, and on the high modernist values of originality and verbal
mastery, it is only somewhat of a surprise to read a poet predict that their readers
will prioritize texture over text. But it becomes more surprising when we recognize
that Montfort’s quote is from one of Dickinson’s most anthologized poems,
Wild Nights — Wild Nights! The decision to use an acclaimed
poem to buttress the thesis that Sea and Spar Between’s
stanzas are fungible is, at best, dissonant; quoting apt words to promote the
interpretive equivalent of drifting at sea is potentially self-defeating. For it
might make us ask why a text that is purportedly a homage to Dickinson’s poetry would
meet certain distinctive features of her oeuvre — originality, concision, and
concentration of meaning — antithetically with repetition, prolix, and dispersal of
meaning. But we should be cautious of this question because were we to truly ask it,
then we would move beyond the textual analysis of particularly apt stanzas to
the meta-textual analysis of texture, operation, and journey, which would
leave us uncritically obeying Montfort’s interpretive vision in a manner reminiscent
of some of the more obsequious crew members of the Pequod. Such obedience is already ubiquitous. The critical responses to
Sea and Spar Between (not excluding my own) are
marked on the one hand by little to no discussion about individual stanzas, and on
the other by prolonged discussion about the poem as a whole, or rather on the
impossibility of discussing the poem as a whole (see Moulthrop and Schumaker [2016]; Aquilina
[2017]; Le Cor [2018]; Moulthrop [2018]). But one person who does not
entirely agree with the paradigm of reading that Montfort advocates is the figure
from whom one would least expect divergence: his co-author. Strickland writes:
Narrative fails if you can’t know beginning or end,
even if you do know extent. But resonance does not . . . . In the 21st century
a single stanza from 225, or from 225 trillion, equally,
may resonate, even with meme-like force. And this impression will vary
depending on how you happen to, and/or choose to contextualize it within wider
swaths or waves of reading. There can be no anticipation of an outcome, only
registration of it.
Montfort’s assertion that we do not consider that readers will
often seek out particularly apt stanzas and wish to return to them
contradicts Strickland’s assertion that any one of the poem’s stanzas might resonate . . . with meme-like force, because readers of
poetry typically return to resonant stanzas. This contradiction is surprising because
Montfort’s we, unless it is royal, implies consensus. Further shattering the
illusion of consensus, Montfort’s emphasis on the singular (texture as opposed
to textures,mutatis mutandis for operation and journey)
implies that the poem is a vehicle for a single affect. Yet Strickland’s emphasis on
plurality (expressed in the language of the consumer warning: this impression will
vary) implies that the reader can autonomously dictate the text’s affectual
impact because they can choose to contextualize their impressions
within wider . . . waves of reading. The contradiction seems intractable.
On the one hand, how can a poem that is so formally and conceptually excessive play
host to only one affect? But on the other, how could a poem so overwhelmingly large
fail to overwhelm the reader, and how could this irresistible devastation of
attention not be the poem’s sole texture? The answer is that both are correct at
different points in time. Strickland is initially correct, and then, after an
indefinite period, the varying impressions that underlie her vision of the
registration of experience degenerate to a single texture: fatigue.
Strickland’s prediction that there can be no anticipation of an
outcome, only registration of it recalls Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s
small water-insect: Most of my readers will have
observed a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets . . . how the little
animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and
passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to
gather strength . . . . This is no unapt emblem of the mind’s self-experience
in the act of thinking.
What I have been calling Strickland’s prediction also functions as a
prescription, and what it prescribes is prioritizing the mind’s self-experience in
the act of reading over the act of reading. In
The Function of
Criticism at the Present Time, Matthew Arnold praises the self-scrutiny of
Edmund Burke (that return of Burke upon himself); Strickland similarly endorses the reader’s
return upon themselves as an object of critical reflection. In doing so, she reenacts
the so-called affective turn by turning to the reader’s affective experience as a
productive theoretical lens. (The affective turn names a growing fascination
with affect in the social sciences and humanities. It is difficult to be more precise
because affect theory is a notoriously diffuse area of
study, which lacks any generally agreed definition of
the central object. However, the key idea is that humans are imbued with subliminal affective intensities that . . . decisively
influence or condition our political and other beliefs. Affect theory is grounded in these affective intensities and their entanglement with discursive
forces.) Affect theory, at first glance, seems a promising way of overcoming the
poem’s expansion of scale by situating the effects of that expansion in an inversely
contracted locus: the reader’s body. Because, regardless of a text’s
inscrutability, readers can always scrutinize their own subjective feelings (granted
the Cartesian presumption that individuals have secure and privileged access to the
first-person phenomenal realm, which is open to debate: see Srinivasan [2015]). Even if a text is hostile to
intellectual assimilation, the reader’s conscious affective response to that
hostility is, ceteris paribus, still assimilable. So, although
Sea and Spar Between seems affectively recalcitrant
in its overall inscrutability, that blankness and closure invite an affective
response, and Strickland’s prediction hence begins to seem increasingly perceptive.
In a zone of partially unparseable poetic meanings, she denies that the reader’s
meaning-making capacity is consequently disabled. Instead, she predicts, the
impulses, attitudes, and emotions provoked by an unsynthesizable text will themselves
cohere into a meaningful gestalt. The poem’s effectively infinite scale is therefore
met, and neutralized, by the effectively infinite range of affects available to human
readers. According to the logic of Strickland’s prediction, the frustration of the
reader’s capacity to make meaningful claims about the textual whole stimulates
affective states; those states are meaningful; the reader’s meaning-making capacity
is therefore rehabilitated; experiential registration is therefore privileged over
experiential anticipation. Strickland’s impressionism is partially borne out by the
reader’s short-term experiential response to the poem. The only upper limit on the
quantity of these responses is the number of people who have read the poem because
each will have had a unique reading experience. But once the reader realizes that
they have no hope of circumnavigating the poem’s sea, the plurality of affectual
responses begins to converge to a deep and relentless boredom. For the longer one
reads, the less one is able to ignore the poem’s scale and its consequences,
including, most notably, fatigue. At this point, Montfort’s prediction comes into
effect: finding the free experience of reading to be better than
the saving of coordinates . . . [the reader] will soon be Done with the Compass
–– / Done with the Chart!.The phrase free experience imbues the reader’s
dismissal of compass and chart with a liberating sense of amor fati, which conjures images of the reader traversing the
poem’s sea with insouciant disregard for the impossibility of ever reaching shore.
But if we return to the poem from which Montfort extracts his concluding quotation
(Dickinson’s Wild Nights — Wild Nights!), we can see
that Dickinson’s speaker is only done with navigational instruments because
they are immobilized, which renders such instruments superfluous: Wild nights — Wild nights!Were I with thee Wild nights should beOur luxury!Futile — the winds — To a Heart in port — Done with the Compass — Done with the Chart!Rowing in Eden — Ah — the Sea!Might I but moor — tonight — In thee!
Dickinson’s speaker is port-bound, and it is this confinement that inverts
traditional symbols of movement (wind) and autonomous exploration (maps) to make them
represent, with an almost perverse irony, their respective antitheses. Montfort’s
prediction therefore resembles the sea in its concealment of its contents below a
surface. Even if the reader begins to operate
Sea and Spar
Between with a unique method, or with the aim of charting an
experimentally nonlinear journey, or by paying close self-referential attention to
their textural experience — thereby fulfilling Montfort’s ostensible prediction —
those operations, journeys, or textures will eventually contract into the texture of,
and journey through, imposed determinism: the brute reality of the poem’s scale. The
reader thus moves from the poem’s operator to that which is operated upon, which
places their interpretive autonomy in peril. What Montfort conceals below the surface
of his prediction is that each particular destination is
merely a way-stop on the journey to the poem’s final destination of stupefaction, a
terminus that is especially inescapable if one’s method of escape depends on texture, operation, and journey. Attempts to transcend the
poem’s size-imposed uninterpretability through tactical neglect of interpretation
will only manage to defer the problem of scale for an interval that is inversely
correlated to the duration of the reader’s reading session. Engaging with the poem’s
size is the sine qua non of prolonged engagement with the
poem.
Having sketched how Strickland’s prediction briefly reigns, before being
dethroned by Montfort’s, I want now to concretely demonstrate how this process
occurs. Suppose I am about to enter
Sea and Spar Between
and have decided to focus on how I read rather than what I read. I then observe that
although many critics have noted that each stanza has two coordinates (denoting
longitude and latitude), the possibilities that these coordinates open up have been
neglected (apart from the obvious utilitarian functionality: coordinates can be typed
into a search bar to move the reader to that location). But if we let each horizontal
and vertical coordinate stand for an x- and y-value, respectively, then we can map
every stanza of the poem on to a Cartesian plane. For example, here are the stanzas
(denoted by the green dots) from (0, 0) to (10, 10) plotted in Cartesian space:
Then we can take a function — an equation for which any x input will yield exactly
one y output, or y = f(x) — and plot that function on to the same Cartesian plane.
The sine function — y = sin(x) — is an obvious choice because its shape, bearing in mind the poem’s
location in a virtual sea, is fitting (even if it is plotted on a grid, whereas
navigating an actual sea requires adjustment for the earth’s ellipsoid shape):
Then we can read the poem geometrically by structuring our path through the text in
accordance with the wave-like shape of the sine function. We can follow the wave from
crest to trough and vice versa along the x-axis and note the points where the sine
wave and individual stanzas intersect (because the domain of the sine function is all
real numbers we could do this literally ad infinitum, so the
poem’s length, for once, poses no methodological problem). And then we could choose to
read only those stanzas that intersect the wave, such as the stanzas at (0, 0) and
(8, 1) in the above figure. Our journey through the text’s metaphorical sea would
thus be determined by the movement of a sinusoidal line receding and returning along
a metaphorical shore (i.e., the x-axis. Note that the x- and y-axes have now doubled
their representative function. The x-axis now represents both a stanza’s horizontal
coordinate and theta; the y-axis now represents a stanza’s vertical coordinate and
the sine of theta). The beginning of this journey is depicted Figure 8.
According to the sinusoidal method outlined above, we would read 16 of the first 101
stanzas of
Sea and Spar Between. These 16 stanzas are
located at the following coordinates: (0, 0), (8, 1), (14, 1), (22, 0), (33, 1), (36,
-1), (44, 0), (52, 1), (58, 1), (66, 0), (74, -1), (77, 1), (80, -1), (88, 0), (96,
1), and (99, -1). What
is the initial texture of the sinusoidal method? What journey does it initially take
us on? These are not rhetorical questions. I invite you to answer them for yourself
by following the instructions at: https://github.com/moona740/Nat_Moore_MA_Thesis/blob/master/Graph. But note
the exertion of initial. The sinusoidal pattern of reading could stimulate
hundreds of initial affectual experiences: curiosity,
displeasure, mesmerisation by the sine wave’s endless oscillation between its range
of [-1, 1] and so on. As Strickland correctly
predicts, the reader’s impression will vary. But only initially. If you have followed the above
instructions, then you will know that whatever affective response the poem first
provokes will, given enough time, eventually decay to a homogenous affectual
experience. The critical consensus is that this experience is one of sublimity. For
example, Aquilina writes that Sea and Spar
Between . . . is a poetic experience that provokes the
sublime, and Hayles claims that the poem’s effect is a kind of technological sublime. Moreover, the editors of the third volume of the
Electronic Literature Collection call Sea and Spar Between
an allegory of the relationship between readers and a
digital sublime. Montfort and Strickland demonstrate how the massive scales of
computer data far exceed human phenomenology. Finally, Moulthrop and Schumaker argue that Sea and Spar Between explores a
topological sublime — a level of possibility and complexity that overloads
traditional cognitive structures, noting also that the poem countersigns its topological excursion with reference to an older
register of the sublime, namely the sea, which functions as an image of natural immensity. But the sublime, with its Romantic
connotations of awe and astonishment, is an incongruous paradigm with which to read a
poem that ultimately induces overwhelming fatigue. A more appropriate aesthetic category
is Sianne Ngai’s stuplime (a portmanteau of stupefaction and
sublime), which she defines as the unusual synthesis
of excitations and fatigue stimulated by encounters
with vast but bounded artificial systems resulting in repetitive and often
mechanical acts of enumeration, permutation and combination. According to Immanuel Kant, sublimity is
experienced when an observer confronts an overwhelming whole that precipitates a
sense of cognitive and perceptual inadequacy . But
for Kant, Ngai writes, the threat that this confrontation poses to the self is
nullified when the imagination’s inability to comprehend the sublime forces the
observer to fall back upon ratiocination as a last-gasp defensive mode of
comprehension, whereupon reason is entrenched as a superior faculty — one capable of grasping the totality . .
. that the imagination could not in the form of a noumenal or supersensible idea,
and also of revealing the self’s final superiority to nature. The sublime’s initial majestic power, and the
analytical mind’s final victory over that majesty, makes it a poor theoretical
instrument with which to interpret a text that grinds its readers down by the mundane
accumulation of iterative poetic offcuts. Because, as Ngai writes, the initial experience of being aesthetically overwhelmed by
such texts is one not of terror or pain (eventually superseded
by tranquility), but something much closer to an ordinary
fatigue — and one that cannot be neutralized, like the sublime’s terror, by
a competing affect. Given that Sea and Spar
Between is one such fatigue-inducing text, its repeated theorization
through the lens of sublimity has given rise to a partially false impression of its
affective scope. The poem’s patient erosion of the reader’s attention span and
curiosity does not confirm the self’s sense of superiority over
the overwhelming or intimidating object, or cathartically dilute the terror instilled by
its own enormousness. Moreover, any astonishment it provokes is tempered by the
reader’s inability to read the poem in its entirety. Ngai writes that
fatigue-inducing texts demand new modes of thinking about what it means to be
incapacitated by aesthetic objects, on the assumption that radically different forms of cultural production call for equally radical
critical responses ; an assumption, incidentally,
that this article questions in its use of fragmentation to interpret Sea and Spar Between. Stuplimity is Ngai’s answer to
this call. The term names the affective interplay of fatigue (stupefaction) and awe
(sublimity) that promises, but perpetually falls just short of delivering, an
aesthetic denouement. We can see this stuplimic interplay in the language of Sea and Spar Between, where a mere 268 words combine to form
225 trillion stanzas; a contradictory mixture of linguistic poverty and wealth that
ultimately results, to borrow Ngai’s description of a prose-poem by Samuel
Beckett, in a language that is paradoxically both ascetic and
congested, thickening even as it progresses into a narrative of
not-progressing. The reader therefore succumbs to the fatigue
caused by the felt absence of propulsive linear narrative or hierarchical sequence,
which culminates, if that is the word, in an indeterminate
affective state that lacks the punctuating point of an individuated
emotion.
It seems, then, that the mode of reading
recommended by Montfort and Strickland is one that engineers an inescapable transfer
of stupor from text to reader. Yet by pointing to what obstructs
aesthetic or critical response, Ngai writes, the stuplime — much like the
fragment — prompt[s] us to look for new strategies of affective
engagement and to extend the circumstances under which engagement become
possible. The poem’s title hints at an alternative
strategy of affective engagement.
Sea and Spar Between
quietly advises the reader that when the poem entertains an apparent opposition, such
as sea/spar, the binary is less important than what lies between it. For example,
consider the Melville/Dickinson binary. I write above that the poem’s language moves
back and forth between the compressed interiority of
Dickinson’s poetry and the expansive intensity of Melville’s prose. But it
is equally plausible to claim that Melville’s prose is painfully cramped in places,
insofar as the Pequod is cramped (for example, the
blubber-room) and Ahab is constricted by, because in thrall to, an idée fixe. Similarly, one can adduce various lines of poetry to support the
argument that Dickinson’s poetry is centrifugal and expansive, despite or because of
her Amherst exile: The Brain — is wider than the Sky — For — put them side by side — The one the other will containWith ease — and you — beside —
We can therefore disturb the equilibrium of the Melville/Dickinson opposition with
surprising ease, which is evidence of the heed we should pay to the poem’s titular
emphasis on betweenness when making oppositional claims. One way of respecting the
title’s liminality is to examine what lies between the poem’s sea (the interface) and
its spar (the various fragmentary strategies of reading that permit the reader to
float upon the poem’s sea): its algorithm. Because we can read the algorithm in its
entirety, it offers us a secure basis on which to speculate about the poetry that it
generates. In the final section of this article, I ask whether reading the finite
code that generates an effectively infinite text allows us to imagine the poem’s
fragments as a cohesive whole. One might anticipate that at this point the article’s
emphasis on fragmentation will itself fragment, insofar as interpreting the poem’s
code involves understanding the system that structures its part/whole binary, which
is very different to working with nonalgorithmic classical text-fragments. However, I
show that fragmentation remains a useful heuristic not only because
Sea and Spar Between's code raises more questions than it
does answers (which ultimately leaves the text in an even more fragmented state), but
also because I use the poem’s code to double its fragments by making a duplicate
website, which exemplifies my argument that by bringing classical literary forms and
modern computation into dialogue, we can instigate a conversation that its greater
than the sum of its fragmentary parts.
Sea and Spar Between’s code: the questions hidden in its answers
Once we look at the poem’s code, which can be viewed at http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000149/resources/source/000149.html,
the 225 trillion stanzas simplify down to a small set of textons,I borrow this
term from Aarseth, who use textons to refer to strings
as they exist in the text and scriptons to refer to strings as they appear to readers. In a book such as
Raymond Quneau’s sonnet machine Cent mille milliards de
poèmes, Aarseth clarifies, there are
only 140 textons, but these combine into 100,000,000,000,000 possible
scriptons. which I reproduce below:
var shortPhrase = ['circle on', 'dash on', 'let them', 'listen now', 'loop on', 'oh time', 'plunge on', 'reel on', 'roll on', 'run on', 'spool on', 'steady', 'swerve me?', 'turn on', 'wheel on', 'whirl on', 'you — too — ', 'fast-fish', 'loose-fish'];
var dickinsonNoun = [
['air', 'art', 'care', 'door', 'dust', 'each', 'ear', 'earth', 'fair', 'faith', 'fear', 'friend', 'gold', 'grace', 'grass', 'grave', 'hand', 'hill', 'house', 'joy', 'keep', 'leg', 'might', 'mind', 'morn', 'name', 'need', 'noon', 'pain', 'place', 'play', 'rest', 'rose', 'show', 'sight', 'sky', 'snow', 'star', 'thought', 'tree', 'well', 'wind', 'world', 'year'],
['again', 'alone', 'better', 'beyond', 'delight', 'dying', 'easy', 'enough', 'ever', 'father', 'flower', 'further', 'himself', 'human', 'morning', 'myself', 'power', 'purple', 'single', 'spirit', 'today'],
['another', 'paradise'],
['eternity'],
['immortality']
];
var courseStart = ['fix upon the ', 'cut to fit the ', 'how to withstand the'];
var dickinsonSyllable = ['bard', 'bead', 'bee', 'bin', 'bliss', 'blot', 'blur', 'buzz', 'curl', 'dirt', 'disk', 'doll', 'drum', 'fern', 'film', 'folk', 'germ', 'hive', 'hood', 'husk', 'jay', 'pink', 'plot', 'spun', 'toll', 'web'];
var melvilleSyllable = ['ash', 'bag', 'buck', 'bull', 'bunk', 'cane', 'chap', 'chop', 'clam', 'cock', 'cone', 'dash', 'dock', 'edge', 'eel', 'fin', 'goat', 'hag', 'hawk', 'hook', 'hoop', 'horn', 'howl', 'iron', 'jack', 'jaw', 'kick', 'kin', 'lime', 'loon', 'lurk', 'milk', 'net', 'pike', 'rag', 'rail', 'ram', 'sack', 'salt', 'tool'];
var dickinsonLessLess = [
['art', 'base', 'blame', 'crumb', 'cure', 'date', 'death', 'drought', 'fail', 'flesh', 'floor', 'foot', 'frame', 'fruit', 'goal', 'grasp', 'guile', 'guilt', 'hue', 'key', 'league', 'list', 'need', 'note', 'pang', 'pause', 'phrase', 'pier', 'plash', 'price', 'shame', 'shape', 'sight', 'sound', 'star', 'stem', 'stint', 'stir', 'stop', 'swerve', 'tale', 'taste', 'thread', 'worth'],
['arrest', 'blanket', 'concern', 'costume', 'cypher', 'degree', 'desire', 'dower', 'efface', 'enchant', 'escape', 'fashion', 'flavor', 'honor', 'kinsman', 'marrow', 'perceive', 'perturb', 'plummet', 'postpone', 'recall', 'record', 'reduce', 'repeal', 'report', 'retrieve', 'tenant'],
['latitude', 'retriever']
];
var upVerb = ['bask', 'chime', 'dance', 'go', 'leave', 'move', 'rise', 'sing', 'speak', 'step', 'turn', 'walk'];
var butBeginning = ['but', 'for', 'then'];
var butEnding = ['earth', 'sea', 'sky', 'sun'];
var nailedEnding = ['coffin', 'deck', 'desk', 'groove', 'mast', 'spar', 'pole', 'plank', 'rail', 'room', 'sash'];
When the algorithm executes, it takes these textons and inserts them into predefined
line templates, such as the exclaimLine template:
function exclaimLine(n)
{
var a, b = n % twoSyllable.length;
n = Math.floor(n / twoSyllable.length);
a = n % threeToFiveSyllable.length;
return threeToFiveSyllable[a] + '! ' + twoSyllable[b] + '!';
}
The overwhelming complexity of
Sea and Spar Between’s
trillions of stanzas is thus generated with a very simple procedure: a small set of
textons are combined within the patterns defined by syntactic templates. In addition
to showing us the words that comprise the poem, and the structures that these words
must adhere to, the code also lets us see Montfort and Strickland’s explanations of
their rhetorical decisions. For example:
// The function nailedLine() produces a line beginning "nailed to the ..."
// In Moby-Dick, Ahab nails a doubloon to the mast, offering it as a reward
// to the one who sees the white whale first. This line template is meant to
// semantically mirror an extended attempt to find axial support, both by the
// reader of our poem and within Melville's novel, where being "at sea"
// involves trying to locate a moral compass, trying to track down a quarry,
// trying to control the crew through bribery, and using the mast itself as
// a pointer to the stars in 19th-century navigation.
Having moved from the poem, where the prospect of drowning in its textual
superabundance is an ever-present threat, to the poem’s code (which, at 930 lines, is
prima facie tractable), we might be tempted to assume that
we are in safer waters. But that would be a mistake. For example, Montfort and
Strickland write that:
// The array variable shortPhrase contains short phrases, almost all of
// which are taken from Melville's Moby-Dick:
var shortPhrase = ['circle on', 'dash on', 'let them', 'listen now', 'loop on', 'oh time', 'plunge on', 'reel on', 'roll on', 'run on', 'spool on', 'steady', 'swerve me?', 'turn on', 'wheel on', 'whirl
on', 'you — too — ', 'fast-fish', 'loose-fish'];
However, a concordance of Moby-Dick shows that the phrases
circle on,listen now,loop on,oh time,plunge on,reel on,spool on,turn on,wheel on, and whirl on do not appear in the novel. Despite being told
that almost all of the phrases in the shortPhrase[] array are
taken from Melville’s Moby-Dick, over half (10/19) do not appear there (see Irey [1982]). Similarly, we are told that:
// The array variable dickinsonNoun contains common nouns from Dickinson's
// poems. We judged these nouns as common using a frequency analysis of the
// words in the poems.
Yet the word leg, which is present in the dickinsonNoun[] array,
does not appear in Dickinson’s oeuvre (see Rosenbaum [1964], 432). Furthermore, we are told that the words in the
below array were commonly used by Dickinson (see line 232 of http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000149/resources/source/000149.html):
The words that I have bolded are hapax legomena; if a word is a hapax legomenon
in the context of an author’s oeuvre, then, by definition, it is not “commonly used”
by that author (see Rosenbaum [1964]). Once again,
Montfort and Strickland’s code directly contradicts their explicating comments. More
broadly, the use of non-Melvillean and non-Dickinsonian language complicates Montfort
and Strickland’s assertion that our poetry generator, Sea and Spar Between, was fashioned based on Emily
Dickinson’s poems and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. The disjunction between the authors’ self-professed
process and their actual process shows that although the poem’s code seems like a
ready-made solution to the many interpretive challenges that Sea
and Spar Between poses, it ultimately raises more questions than it
answers.
Conclusion
I have argued in this article that one way of responding to the computational
vastness of
Sea and Spar Between is through the lens of
a distinctly pre-computational literary category: the fragment. Because fragments are
cut off from their original context, they resist definitive critical judgements.
Although this resistance limits what we can and cannot say about Sea and Spar Between, it also lets us move from one provisional and
speculative critical perspective to another (we moved from close reading, to cosine
similarity, to affect theory, to the sinusoidal method, to the sublime, to the
stuplime, and finally, to the poem’s code), which results, paradoxically, in a more
complete understanding of the poem’s fragments.
I want to make one final point
about
Sea and Spar Between. Montfort and Strickland
write in the poem’s code that:
// If someone were to replace our words and phrases with new texts, a
// generator with a similar appearance and similar functioning, but with a
// new vocabulary, would be defined. That is, it is practically possible to
// create a new generator, a remix or appropriation of this one, by
// replacing only the data in this section. If this is done and the code
// is not otherwise modified, the system will assemble language in the same
// way, but it will work on different language.See lines 189–195 of http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000149/resources/source/000149.html
Moreover, they conclude:
// The most useful critique is a new
// constitution of elements. On one level, a reconfiguration of a source
// code file to add comments — by the original creator or by a critic —
// accomplishes this task. But in another, and likely more novel, way,
// computational poetics and the code developed out of its practice
// produce a widely distributed new constitution.See lines 925–930 of http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000149/resources/source/000149.html.
Montfort and Strickland are clearly inviting their readers to use
Sea and Spar Between as a computational poetic template, in
the same way that Taroko Gorge has been
persistently remixed in homage to, or as a reflexive interpretation of, Montfort’s
iterative poetics.
Figure 9 documents my acceptance of this invitation. I took the critical literature on
Sea and Spar Between (some 20,000 words) and collated it into a text document. Then I wrote a Python script that tallied the document’s most frequent words
(excluding stop words). I took the most frequent words and inserted them into the
various arrays within Sea and Spar Between’s source
code. I have hosted the resulting meta-critical fragments on a website that you can
view at www.natmoore.co.nz.
My
hypothesis is that somewhere within the new 225 trillion fragments of text is a line
that, due to a serendipitous combination of words and insights from the hivemind of
criticism that the poem has impelled, offers a novel idea that could lead the
theorization of
Sea and Spar Between in particular, and
combinatoric algorithmic poetry in general, in a pathbreaking direction. Of course,
the odds of someone ever finding this hypothetical fragment within a figurative ocean
of fragments is close to zero. But that is only fitting, given what this article has demonstrated: that a productive mode of interpreting Sea and Spar Between is firstly through the classical model of fragmentation, and secondly through the computational generation of new metacritical fragments. Because if we fragment a overwhelmingly large poem into a series of smaller reflexive pieces, then not only do we gain a broader, more nuanced critical perspective, but we also begin to mimetically enact the poem’s stuplimity in reverse because an expansive text and a contractive text are equally overwhelming once they expand or contract beyond the point of human comprehension. More broadly, the metacritical version of Sea and Spar Between signals the critical usefulness of replicating (as opposed to simply explicating) the source code of a computational poem; the text thereby transforms from an interpretive locus to a poetic template, and by studying the similarities and dissimilarities of the different poetic instances made by the template, we can come to a deeper understanding of the original text.
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