Aporia

Jack July is Will’s brother. Those who know Will are discomfited by his perfection and the modest ease with which he inhabits it, and his brother is more or less the same (but angrier!): a genetically-faultless, brilliant, and thoughtful human being who makes me want to open my wrists and pour my inferior life out all over the concrete before any girls come by and see how much shorter I am than they are.

That is how I’m going to introduce Jack July, who showed us around Oregon and now has a tumblelog. I am also reblogging his incredible note about Christian Bök.

I have written about Bök before; he wrote one of the most amazing things I’ve ever read: Eunoia. Working within ludicrous enabling limits beyond the overall restriction, Bök completed a book in which each chapter can use words with only one vowel: A, E, I, O, and U. The other requirements are as amazing.

Jack July alerts us that Bök is “striving to engineer a life form that becomes a durable archive for storing a poem, and a machine for writing a poem — a poem that can survive forever.”

[Bök] was inspired by a researcher at the PNWNR Lab in WA who recently enciphered the Disney classic It’s a Small World (After All) into bacteria, allowed them several rounds of division, and then retrieved a regrettably no-less putrescent copy of the song…

Anyway, this poet, who has enlisted the help of a no-doubt Rush-loving libertarian Canadian scientist from Calgary, thinks that perhaps an efficient means of first contact (in case the Vulcans can’t detect our warp trail) is the colonization of other planets with bacteria that encode campy publicity stunts.  In his interview with Nature, he says, “…My project is analogous to building a pyramid and then leaving undecipherable hieroglyphs all over it: later civilizations may not understand the language, but its presence will testify to the enduring legacy of our own civilization.”  Thanks for the explanation.

Bök’s desire to encode poetry into life is itself poetic, but beyond its lyrical or symbolic appeal it reminds me of the suggestion made by David Deutsch from the work of Richard Dawkins and Karl Popper that life is best thought of us encoded knowledge: processual knowledge, adaptive knowledge, even a sort of experiential knowledge (non-individual, of course). This is how the universe expresses knowledge: in life, which responds to and reflects the laws of time and space and matter and energy.

That poetry is the knowledge chosen here is all that’s odd; otherwise we might remark that Bök’s idea is already manifest: every organism is a code of abstracted knowledge, its DNA a high language directing low functions. Life seems to be the best and most durable way we have of coding, demonstrating, preserving, and developing knowledge, which in any event is so synonymous with life that neither exists apart from the other.

In other words: life is self-animating, self-propagating, self-extending knowledge. If anything, Bök’s plan is at most a variation on what already is.

If contemporary life, in whatever economy and whatever nation, seems strangely groundless, superficial, or empty to you, the following quote might resonate:

“…the absolute triumph of the will turns out to be a ghastly and unstable concept, antithetical to the very happiness it so ardently seeks. An individualism that gets precisely what it wants soon loses its savor, and even its reason for being. Deprived of the hardness and intractability of the very nature it struggles against, deprived of a world whose form and pressure it needs in order to thrive, the will dies of enervation…or it seeks solace, as so many romantics did, in fantasies of self-annihilation, or of immersion in that “oceanic” feeling in which the problem of individuation itself is absorbed and thereby disposed of.”

So writes Wilfred McClay in his prefatory remarks to an essay in Figures in the Carpet. I’ve written about this remarkable collection of essays from my friend WTM three times before, but this quote reminded me of the concept of enabling limits.

Enabling limits are those boundaries of medium, time, ability, or resources that, while seeming to limit artistic freedom actually prompt artists to be more creative, more dynamic. I’ve mentioned the highly formalistic novel Eunoia, by Christian Bök, in which all chapters are written with only a single vowel (among various other rules).

Self-imposed enabling limits replace limits once imposed by resource scarcity, demographic dynamics, and other boundaries now conquered by technology and economic expansion. Artists must self-limit, or drown in a deluge of possibilities. How often does one see a promising young filmmaker, for example, slowly unravel as success allows him to chase every possibility and entertain every self-referential notion?

As it goes with the artist, so it goes with the self: the asceticism of the monk or the training regimen of the obsessive runner are means for overcoming the problem of the enervated will McClay mentions. In a society of plenty, it grows difficult to define ourselves except in adherence to fads and movements (whether shallow or profound) as part of the oceanic immersion he notes or in acts of hostility and self-annihilation.

McClay adds this:

“What forms the soul and makes it interesting, and capable of work and love and responsibility and happiness, is not the triumph of the will, but the triumph over self-absorption and narcissism- a triumph that always entails the defeat of the will…”

What we value as a society is the maximum extension of the will, maximum willfulness, maximum freedom to do what we want, when we want, how we want. One wonders, however, if the freedom to enact one’s will yields any meaningful happiness, or if we aren’t rather like children who wish to eat candy until we feel sick, stay up until we’re cranky, and avoid every lesson reality is kind enough to offer.

Enabling limits are boundaries on what we can create or achieve that have a perversely liberating quality on our range of action. For example: painting traditionally has a limited capability for showing motion, as once fixed on a gallery wall a painting is fairly static; this limit required artists to craft techniques for showing movement that occasionally exceed actual movement in their beauty and resonance.

Another art example: since paintings don’t actually emit light, to capture light requires the use of inventive techniques like those that make Van Gogh so striking. That enabling limit, then, forced human creativity to proceed in a specific direction, solve a fundamental problem with the medium, and in doing so develop something beautiful. There are countless examples in design, music, film (think how much more effective most movies are when they don’t directly show or tell something, often for lack of budget or technological capability), and so on.

Often, people fight against enabling limits to their own detriment, in art and in design (particularly user interface and web design) but also in life. I sometimes think that a chief problem for modern Americans is that we are overwhelmed by choice, saturated with functional freedoms that inhibit decisions and devalue the liberties we savor. This freedom from all traditions and bonds of cultural inheritance was our goal in youth, but many of us look with envy on the lives of others around the world who seem more grounded in their particular social group.

Some people artificially reintroduce enabling limits into their lives: they build small patterns of behavior from which they won’t deviate as a means of asserting control over the empty stretches of purely free time many of us have. Some artists do the same.

Christian Bök, a Canadian poet, wrote one of the only formalist books I’ve ever loved, called Eunoia. It’s all online for free viewing; just click on each paragraph to go to the next. Divided into chapters which must use only one vowel (and whose words must all have that vowel), it obeys several other requirements: each chapter must describe a feast, a sea-going excursion, an erotic act, and must discuss the art of writing.

I thought the “I” chapter was pretty extraordinary. Through this limit, Bok achieves some striking phraseology and genuinely fascinating prose, not as a novelty but as the result of highly directed creativity.