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“I have seen old men who, for long periods of time, would hide in the latrines with some metal disks in a forbidden dice cup and feebly mimic the divine disorder.”
[A sentence quoted from an English version of "The Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges.]
“T TTTT HTTH TTT THH TTH HTH HHHT TTHHTTT TH HHTH TTHTH THHT HT THT THHTHTHT HTHT HTTH HHHHH HHHTH HT T THHTHTTHT THTH HTT TTH HHHTHT HTHHT TTH HTHHHH HHTTHHHT”
[A series of heads (H) and tails (T), showing a coin-toss for each letter in the above quote.]
“• •••• -••- ••• •– ••- -•- —• ••–••• •- –•- ••-•- •–• -• •-• •–•-•-• -•-• -••- —– —•- -• • •–•-••-• •-•- -•• ••- —•-• -•–• ••- -•—- –••—•”
[A conversion of the random series, above, into a sequence of dits (T = •) and dahs (H = -).]
“E H X S W U K Ö ?E A Q UA P N R &N C X 0 ÖT N E &R Ä D U ÖN Ĥ U YM ,N”
[A translation of the dits and dahs, above, from Morse Code into a series of English symbols.]
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Baudrillard has remarked that, when we gamble, “[c]hance is never neutral, the game transforms it into […an] agonistic figure.” When we throw the dice, we throw down a gauntlet in the face of chance, doing so in order to defy the transcendence of any random series, thereby forcing chance itself to choose sides, either pro or con, with respect to our fortune. Does such a challenge occur when a poet decides to write according to an aleatory protocol? Does the poet wager that, despite the improbable odds, a randomly composed poem is nevertheless going to be more expressive and more suggestive than any poem composed by wilful intent? Is meaning the stake wagered in this game? If the resultant poem is meaningful, has chance proven itself amiable to the desires of the poet? Or does the poet write with a throw of the dice in order to escape the tyranny of meaning? Is the poet challenging chance to a duel: “I dare you to write this meaningful sentence; I dare you to write some marvellous nonsense—I dare you to write a poem better than I can.” I suspect that, like the gambler, we fully expect to lose such a wager, but nevertheless we hope that events might conspire to surprise us. I suspect that we gamble with meaning in order to seduce the world of signs, currying their favour in the hope that these signs might indemnify our poetic genius by demonstrating that chance itself has already ordained it….
A throw of the dice can never abolish [warning: PDF] chance.
As ever, Christian, I find your remarks much more illuminating and thought-provoking than the (in my view) reductive code games that spark them…
Christian,
I, too, was struck by your remarks, they’re lucid in ways that approach–eee gads!–lyric poetry, or perhaps philosophical prose poetry, whereas the “poems” you cite interest me because they approach visual art, as your sound poetry approaches music.
I stumbled on this short poem by Kay Ryan in her first book Strangely Marked Metal. It almost seems a lyric explication of your post:
GAMBLER
He’s seen all he can of moon,
the white which names black:
he’s had enought of that.
There is no randomness behind
the card’s face; the night
waits to erase change, each trace.
Emily