Ken has previously been published in Strange Horizons and Polyphony 4.
Ken wants you to know Platinum Blue is a real company about which you can learn more in this New Yorker article. Also, in his own words, “The description of the dilemma facing contemporary Chinese writers is inspired by the writings of Wang Xiaobo and his disciples. I wish them luck.”
Beneath the
Language
by Ken Liu
The
language beneath the language:
This is poetry.
Andrea Pacione
After two weeks
of last-minute cancellations and bad cell phone reception,
I finally caught up with Cal Solulu in Shanghai. Just under
six feet, Solulu was a barrel-chested man in his early
thirties, with short legs and long arms that gave him the
air of an orangutan.
He was speaking at a government-sponsored conference for
the China Writers Association. CWA, a curious organization
with no real Western equivalent, is best described as a
government ministry cum
writer’s guild
dedicated to the quixotic task of preserving
Marxism-Leninism orthodoxy while cultivating the freedom of
a new Chinese literary voice. It seemed a strange audience
for a man whose whole message was that ideology and
literary taste alike were mere illusions.
Solulu isn’t bothered by the irony of his presence at the
CWA.
“The young Chinese writers are more receptive to my message
than anybody else. They way they explain it to me, the
Chinese feel that they don’t have much of a native
contemporary culture to speak of. In the last hundred
years, they haven’t been able to come up with anything, a
picture, a movie, a musical movement, that isn’t derivative
of something the West -- or even worse for them, Japan --
invented. They are humiliated, but they are also less
invested in the idea of creativity than we are in the West.
This makes them more willing to listen to radical ideas.”
We were sitting in the lounge of the Manhattan Palace, one
of Shanghai’s newest and most expensive Chinese-owned and
operated hotels, an eighty-story concrete-and-glass tower
erected in only 181 days in the perpetual frenzy of
construction that defines modern Shanghai. As if
illustrating Solulu’s point, there was nothing original or
Chinese about the place: the muzak was a bad copy of jazz,
the color scheme a bad copy of the Shanghai JC Mandarin,
the furniture gaudy imitations of five-year old Japanese
designs, and the drinks menu full of translation errors.
The staff stood around aimlessly, green actors on a new set
with no script. The most coherently Chinese thing about the
place was that it felt like a copy of a copy of a copy.
But if Solulu is right, the Chinese don’t have to copy.
Creativity, according to Solulu, is an algorithm that can
be mastered and applied relentlessly, much like the way the
Chinese have already diligently mastered the art of cheap
and efficient manufacturing.
***
Solulu isn’t
ashamed to admit that he began as a failed poet. He’s not
ashamed because he thinks poets have no understanding of
what they are doing.
“Most successful poets are like idiot savants,” he said.
“They can no more explain how they write poetry than a fish
can explain how it swims. If they are successful, they
think they’re geniuses. If they are not, they think the
critics are philistines. They’re ignorant about the
mechanism of their art.”
As a boy, Solulu had poured his heart into “notebook after
notebook” of poetry. He wrote letters to Ashbery, Merwin,
and other names he found in the Poetry section of the local
bookstore, asking them to be his mentors. (Only Margaret
Atwood ever wrote back, though Solulu wouldn’t tell me what
she said, only that it was “what you’d expect from her
poems.”) He did all the “right” things: he read, he wrote,
he collected rejection slips. But he never got published
anywhere, not even in his college literary journal.
“It was embarrassing. It’s very difficult to maintain the
argument that you are simply not ‘understood’ when your
classmates are reading all the same books as you and share
all the same references as you and they still
don’t like your
poems. Very disheartening.”
Then, sometime in the summer of his Junior year, he had
what he called his “crisis moment.” He received his one
hundredth rejection slip.
“I showed the rejection slip to my girlfriend at the time.
To make me feel better, she said she’d read my submissions
and give me comments. But the next day I could tell, before
she even said a word, that she couldn’t even finish them.
It was devastating. I couldn’t bear to write another word
until I understood what it was that made good poetry good.”
***
I should stress
here that Solulu isn’t interested in the theoretical
debates that have raged among intellectuals from Plato’s
guests to today’s literary critics and academics over what
separates good poetry from bad, and how these judgments
could and should be made. To Solulu these debates are
nonsense. He knows what “good” poetry is -- it’s simply
what has proved popular over time -- or, as he puts it,
good poetry is poetry that “resonates with the greatest
number of souls over time.” The much more difficult and
interesting question for him is what
makes one poem
resonate more than another. He’s convinced that no one
really understands that secret, especially not the
successful poets.
“The things poets say about their craft
and
their process
have almost
nothing to do with what separates good poems from bad ones.
In fact, poets are like the money managers on Wall Street”
-- and here I saw flashes of Wallace Stevens’ most unpoetic
mien -- “who go around with their stock charts and their
P/E ratios, convinced that they know how to pick great
stocks. And year after year, the vast majority of them fall
short of the index, and neither the lucky ones who happen
to win that year nor the unlucky ones who lose all their
clients’ money understand what happened. But that doesn’t
prevent them from babbling to the financial reporters
that of
course it was because
it was the first Monday in March that the Dow moved up 20
points that morning. The successful poet and stock picker
alike are good at only one thing: manufacturing
ad
hoc justifications
for their good fortune.”
“That sounds a bit bitter, coming from a failed poet,” I
said.
“No, no, no,” he said, laughing but emphasizing each “no”
with two shakes of his head, that wild mane of unkempt
white hair flying about. “I was
bitter, but not
any more. Now I have the answer.”
***
Solulu found
his answer, as so many do in our age, in the heart of a
machine.
The machine in this case is a spaghetti mess of code (he’s
too embarrassed to show it to me) that Solulu wrote over
five years. When this program is fed the sound of a poem
written in modern English -- a limitation due to the corpus
used to train the program rather than an inherent feature
of the algorithm -- being read aloud, it will predict, with
much greater than 99% accuracy, whether the poem will be
sufficiently popular to be included in more than three
poetry anthologies today.
“So the first thing you have to do is to define the
problem: how will I objectively know when I’ve found a way
to tell the good poems apart from the bad poems? The only
legitimate measure is meme survival. In the short term
there may be all kinds of noise that cause a poem to be
popular: the author is a celebrity; the topic is
politically relevant; Venus and Mars are in opposition;
whatever. But in the long term, fads fade out, and only
good poems survive.”
Obsessed with the problem, he went to flea markets and yard
sales and bought up hundreds of poetry magazines published
in the last century. First, he read through them, trying to
see if he could predict which poems would survive thirty,
forty years down the road. Then he diligently applied
theories of aesthetics, from Aristotle to Addison, from
Dostoyevsky to Vendler. It was often a challenge just to
figure out what the critic even meant. In any event, these
theories turned out to be no better at predicting success
than random chance.
About four months into the project, Solulu hit a dead end.
“All these theories of poetics and aesthetics and the
history of criticism and ideas were swirling around in my
head, and I was trying out anything, everything, that could
help me figure out the pattern of which poems survived and
which ones didn’t. But one day I sat up, read a bunch of
poems, and realized I hated all of them -no, more like I
couldn’t tell whether I liked
any
of them. It was as if a musician suddenly woke up and
realized he was tone deaf, or if you woke up and realized
that you couldn’t tell the pretty girls apart from the
plain ones. I was beauty
blind.”
This beauty blindness lasted for several weeks, during
which time he seriously considered suicide.
He was finally saved by our least poetic modern medium,
television. He was at home, mindlessly letting the glow of
the tube wash over him. The program was a documentary on
the vanishing oral traditions of “some nomadic camel
herding people out there in Mongolia.”
“There was this scene, which lasted maybe five or six
minutes. It was just this old man reciting something. The
subtitles were in white text, and I couldn’t read it
against the white dunes on the bottom of the screen. I had
no idea what he was saying, but it was beautiful. I could
feel my heart beating in time with the rhythm of his
speech. I could hear the meter, the rhymes, the musicality
of the tones, even though I couldn’t understand what he was
saying. I was enraptured, transported,
in a way that I had never been before by poetry in English.
I literally could hear the blood rushing in my ears; I was
so excited. There it was, just like that, I could hear
beauty again.”
The experience gave Solulu a series of insights into the
problem. First, it had to be about beauty, not theory.
Second, language was a distraction. Finally, the “good poem
detector” had to be a machine.
***
“The core
problem is that we don’t trust first impressions.” He waved
his chopsticks in the air. “You see a painting, and you
know whether you like it or not within a tenth of a second.
But you don’t trust that feeling. You’ve been taught that
art must be ‘appreciated.’ You think you have to
understand
the
painting before you can really say if you like it. You
think you have to read that little pompous card written by
the museum curator, which gives you the painting’s title in
French and its English translation, a one-sentence
biography of the painter, and a few pieces of useless
trivia. And if you’ve been to a good college, well, then I
really pity you. Then you think you have to pay ten dollars
for the little electronic wand with the tinny speaker so
that you can punch in the number under each painting and
listen to the little speech from the curator about
why
the
painting was good. And at the end of it all, you think
you’ve learned something. You think you now know why you
should like the painting.
“But that’s just garbage. All of it. Nothing mattered after
that first tenth of a second. Everything afterwards was
just noise, epiphenomena, froth on the sea. But as a
society, we have beaten into ourselves the idea that the
noise and the epiphenomena are the real deal, that the
justification is more important than the snap judgment. We
know almost immediately if we prefer this painting to that
painting and if we like this poem better than that poem.
But we talk ourselves into a muddled confusion when we try
to explain that preference. The intellect gets in the way.”
That was insight number one. Step two?
“There’s this misunderstanding that because poetry is
composed with words, language and meaning and reasoning had
to be the most important part of the appeal of a poem. But
poetry is a lot more like music.”
Solulu got his inspiration from a company called Platinum
Blue, which was in the business of predicting which songs
by unknown artists would be hits. Their technology ignored
everything except the pure mathematical shape of the songs.
The idea struck a chord with Solulu.
“When I was listening to the old Mongolian herdsman I was
experiencing poetry in a raw form that we seldom do any
more. Mostly we read poetry silently, and we analyze poems
as patterns of words on a page. But the written language is
a distraction. Poetry is about the spoken word, and the
spoken word is just syllable and sound and fury. Listen to
this:
“Hige sceal
þe heardra, heorte þe cenre,
mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen
lytlað.
“Do you know it?”
I shook my head. It sounded German, or maybe Klingon.
“But I bet that you could hear that it was poetry. And I
bet you had an opinion of whether you liked it.”
He was right. I knew it was poetry. I could hear the hard
pounding beats, like sword against a shield. And I wanted
to hear more.
“That was from the Battle of
Maldon, in the
original Anglo-Saxon. It’s related to modern English, but I
don’t think you understood a word of it. You know nothing
of its imagery, metaphor, its history, its place in the
canon of English poetry, but you knew you liked it. In
fact, for most people who had to take Anglo-Saxon in
school, these two lines are probably the only ones they
will remember. The sound of good poetry is that powerful.
It’s like the chorus of a catchy song. It hooks you and
pulls you in, and you don’t care that the lyrics are
nonsense.
“I could try the same experiment with you with a popular
old poem in Chinese, in Japanese, in Arabic, and it would
be the same every time. If it’s read by someone with even
the smallest bit of musical talent, you’ll be able to tell
that it’s poetry, and you’ll be able to tell me whether you
like it or not, just like that.”
Solulu doesn’t mean that you don’t need to understand the
language to understand the poem. Of course you have to know
what the words mean to understand the story being told, the
sentiment being expressed, or the revolutionary message
that’s embedded. But he makes the radical claim that
understanding is, in fact, a distraction for determining
whether you like a poem. The sound of a poem is always
there, like the bass line of a song, even if you are just
reading the poem to yourself, silently. The musical shape
of a pop song determines our emotional response, even
though we may end up thinking that we like it because of
its clever lyrics. In the same way, the sound of a poem is
what really moves us, even if we think it’s about the
clever words.
***
At first
glance, Solulu’s program cannot be used, directly, to
generate a good poem. This is a consequence of the way the
program evolved as a neural network. Solulu refined it over
time by reading it poetry from various period publications.
Each poem’s mathematical signature was a bit of input. He
then found out which of those poems survived in multiple
modern anthologies used in undergraduate literature
classes, a reasonable proxy for success. These survivors
were then marked and fed to the program again, and the
program was asked to discover patterns in their signatures
that distinguished them from the poems that did not
survive. It did so simply by brute force trial and error
until it generated some complex mathematical function that
mapped all the inputs to the right outputs, but the
function is really a black box. You can ask it questions
and get back an answer, but even Solulu has no idea how it
really “works.”
To test the program, you simply feed it a new poem, and
check the program’s prediction against real life.
For Solulu’s theory to be of use, it’s okay for the program
to generate false positives (i.e., poems that the program
predicted would succeed but in fact did not), but it’s
imperative that it generate few, if any, false negatives
(i.e., poems that the program predicted would not succeed
but in fact did). This is because Solulu’s theory
presupposes that no inherently bad poem can ever succeed in
the long run, but it is possible for an inherently good
poem to never be given a fair chance to spread (think of
Emily Dickinson if she had simply locked all her poems
away).
A consequence of this asymmetry is that if you run it over
old poetry magazines you may well end up discovering
overlooked good poets. It’s not hard to imagine that
someone who’s very talented but also a bit of a recluse may
publish only a few times in an obscure journal and never
gain more than a few readers. If none of them happens to be
an important editor or prominent critic, the poet would end
up languishing in obscurity for eternity. Using his
program, Solulu has already managed to discover two poets
from the eighties who, he assures me, “are as good as
anything on Harvard syllabuses today.” (He’s currently
editing collections of their poems for Harvard University
Press.)
If you believe past performance is a good predictor of
future success, Solulu’s algorithm undeniably works. He has
run it on English poems as far back as the Renaissance, and
the false negative rate is lower than one hundredth of one
percent.
***
Solulu has
detractors.
I met with Len Keene, the Stuart B. Dunbar Professor of
English and American Language and Literature at Harvard
University, a few weeks after I came back from Shanghai.
“Cal was a student of mine,” Keene told me. “People find
that surprising. Maybe he’s proof that I’m a terrible
teacher.” He laughed.
Keene thinks Solulu is part of a general trend in today’s
academic world in which reductionism -- whether in the form
of E.O. Wilson’s sociobiology, Noam Chomsky’s universal
grammar, or Cal Solulu’s “good poetry detector” -- is
attacking the realm of culture, taste, society, the
traditional enclave of the messy humanities.
Keene can live with the first two steps in Solulu’s logic
(although he isn’t exactly happy with them). Of course,
under the logic of his first step, if good poetry is to be
evaluated by immediate impressions of beauty rather than
theories of worth, everyone is a suitable judge of
poetry except
the
academics. But Keene is used to this kind of anti-ivory
tower populism, and besides, the academy has proved itself
quite adaptable by inventing the field of cultural studies
to co-opt its critics. Under the logic of Solulu’s second
step, it is the sound of poetry, rather than its sense,
that determines the bulk of our impressions of beauty in a
poem before the “sense” and “meaning” come in to confuse
us. Keene finds these ideas more quaint than troubling,
since the analysis of poetry as
predominantly a
form of music hasn’t been taken seriously, by anyone, in a
long time.
It’s the third step in Solulu’s reasoning that really irks
Keene.
“Fundamentally, what we find beautiful must be explained at
the level of neurobiology,” Solulu wrote in a public,
online debate with Keene last June. “And I am convinced
that our individual neurobiology isn’t so different from
each other. We are all members of the same species, sharing
pretty much the same genes, and at a deep level, our brains
will likely react similarly to similar stimuli. If I find a
particular pattern of colors pleasing, it is because the
light from that pattern of colors causes my brain chemistry
to change in a certain way. But you, as a fellow member of
the human species, likely has a brain very similar to mine.
That same pattern of light is thus likely to cause similar
changes in your brain chemistry, and you are also likely to
find that pattern of colors pleasing.
“We do not need to understand exactly which patterns of
vowels and consonants will produce these pleasurable states
or how or why. It is enough that we will feel this way at a
level that is beneath and above thought.
“But thoughts inevitably come in, and our brain chemistry
is altered as we try to outdo each other in cleverness, in
coming up with reasons and explanations for that fleeting
first impression upon which so much depends. So much then
becomes muddled and confused. The epiphenomena froth over
and hide the deep currents and waves of real beauty.
“We need a way to access the non-linguistic, non-analytical
core of our common heritage as homo
sapiens, the human
animal, without all the noise and distractions. But it’s
too late to get back to that Zen-like state in ourselves.
The best we can hope for is to model that core of
ourselves, to recreate the beauty-detecting faculty in a
machine.”
When I asked Keene about these comments, he was silent for
a long time. He was one of these people who, instead of
filling silence with useless chatter, is comfortable with
it. Remaining in my chair across from his desk, I glanced
over the spines of the books in his office. A handsome copy
of the Douay-Rheims Bible sat on his shelf, dwarfing the
collection of C.S. Lewis paperbacks next to it. I looked at
Keene, pointed at the Bible, and raised my eyebrow. He
smiled and invited me to take a walk with him.
“I am not qualified to criticize Cal’s science, though I
think he is misusing science. My disagreement with him is
really one of philosophy. His arguments have an unhealthy
attraction for undergraduate students, the way all elegant,
beautiful, and astonishingly bad ideas do. The assault on
humanism from this relentless drive to reductionism has
been ongoing for more than two centuries, but there is
something particularly cold about Cal’s assault. He has
declared that we should turn over our aesthetic judgments
to a machine. He is arguing, in essence, that not only can
machines play chess better, they can also better judge what
is beautiful and worth reading. In making an argument that
is premised on reason he has discarded reason as an empty
shell. It is a meaningless conclusion, a view of the soul
as a void. And if I may misquote Charles Darwin: there
is no
grandeur in
this view of life. It is ugly, and I despise it.”
Over lunch Keene, who was Solulu’s academic advisor in
college, told me a story from Solulu’s time as a student.
Solulu had broken up with his girlfriend after she somehow
insulted him. That June, he ran against her for class
marshal, even though he had never before expressed any
interest in the position. He campaigned hard against her,
but lost in the end. And every year since then, he would
write a letter to the alumni magazine arguing that the
class marshal system was outdated and should be abolished.
I didn’t understand why he was telling me that story.
After lunch, as I carefully counted out my half of the
bill, Keene added, quietly but purposefully, “Cal holds
grudges. He can hold a grudge against something that he
loves. I don’t like to say this about him, because it
verges on an ad
hominem. But I think
if he can’t be the best at something, he has to show that
it isn’t worth doing.”
***
A few weeks
earlier in Shanghai, Solulu had been adamant that his
program was an affirmation of art. “If you look at what
this program is saying, it’s an incredible vote of
confidence in the value of art. The program tells you that
from the 1500s to now, despite all the revolutions, all the
social changes, all the ebb and flow of ideas and wealth
and class and race and colonialism et cetera et cetera,
aesthetic judgment is remarkably consistent. Despite all
our fears that ‘art’ is nothing more than the
representation of power and privilege in a particular
moment of time and a particular place, it turns out that
there really is something universal about it after all. A
poem that was pleasing to a sixteenth-century nobleman is
just as pleasing to a twentieth century middle-class co-ed
-- once we learn to keep all the intellectual masturbation
out of it. There’s something timeless and beautiful about
each of these poems that have survived: whether it’s ‘To
His Coy Mistress’ or ‘The Munich Mannequins.’ I don’t know
how you can see that as a bad thing.”
He has his fans. Efforts are underway by others to distill
a similar algorithm for paintings, novels, and other forms
of art. Others are less sanguine. A group of English
professors have tentatively reached out to their
engineering colleagues and asked for volunteers to show
that Solulu’s methods are flawed. So far there have been no
takers.
***
I had said
earlier that Solulu’s program can’t be used to generate
good poetry, but that isn’t quite right. A black box “good
poetry detector” can be used to generate good poems in a
process akin to natural selection. If you have a lot of
budding poets who are producing a lot of experimental work,
you can feed their productions through the detector and
continue to cultivate those that show promise. Let these
survivors produce more works and rinse and repeat until you
are down to just a few of the best poets, and now you have
a selection process immune from nepotism, discrimination,
privilege, and class -- a perfect way to develop truly
great art.
This is what made him so interesting to the CWA. Solulu’s
algorithm promised the hungry, proud young Chinese writers
a solution to their cultural deficit. If the machine could
be broadened beyond poetry, it would show the way to a
scientific method for the mass production of good,
successful popular culture. Because Solulu’s algorithm was
premised on universal and language-agnostic assumptions,
the Chinese could imagine that if the algorithm was fed
with Chinese works, the successes would have universal
appeal and while still being undeniably Chinese.
But the method of production for this hypothetical success
would not bear any resemblance to our understanding of
“creativity” and “art.” Writing poetry would be like
working in a factory. One can understand Keene’s rage,
which is really more like despair.
The prospect of a relentless army of Chinese artists
producing variations for his algorithm to sift through
until a national champion is produced seemed to me a
dystopia. Solulu does not see it that way. I am not sure
which of us is experiencing epiphenomena.
***
At the end of
my interview, I turned off the voice recorder and thanked
Solulu for his time. He was packing up his laptop and
preparing to go back to his hotel room for the night.
On a whim, I asked him if he was happy with his discovery.
He was quiet for a while, but he didn’t like the silence.
“I began this, you know, because I wanted to understand
what made good poetry good. I wanted to know the secret so
that I could write good poetry.” He would not make eye
contact with me.
“And now I do know what makes poetry good -- or at least my
program does. If I really wanted to, I could just feed
drafts of my poem to it, and see if each new draft gets
better or worse. Or I could just read it all my old
notebooks. There’s bound to be a good poem somewhere in
there.
“But I have no interest in doing any of that. I guess
there’s a part of me that feels that would be cheating. I
know it’s illogical, but that’s how I feel. To be honest, I
have no interest in reading poetry these days, and even
less in writing it. It’s not that I’m beauty blind again. I
can tell when a poem is good. But as soon as I get that
impression that it’s good, I think about the sounds, the
pattern underneath, the thing that pulled me in before I
was even aware of it, and then I feel that I’m being
manipulated, and I have to stop. I suppose it’s a bit like
how fashion photographers can’t stand to pick up
Vogue
because they
know what goes into the pictures. Or maybe it’s more like
loving magic tricks as a kid and then being shown how it’s
done. I don’t know. I can’t explain it really well.”
He continued to look away. He was fidgeting with his laptop
bag, opening it, closing it, opening it again. It reminded
me of a child who, peeking behind a curtain for his sitter
and finding no one there, incredulously peeks behind it
again and again, as though by sheer effort of will to
conjure her out of thin air.
Copyright 2007 by Ken Liu