—————–
“Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly?
Now is the time that face should form another;
Nature’s bequest gives nothing but doth lend,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
For where is she so fair whose unear’d womb
By unions married, do offend thine ear,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
And threescore year would make the world away.
Look, what an unthrift in the world doth spend
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Be, as thy presence is, gracious and kind,
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
This were to be new made when thou art old,
Die single, and thine image dies with thee.”
from 11,112,006,825,558,016 Sonnets
by William Gillespie
Spineless Books, 1999
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Baudrillard remarks that, while quantum physics has corrected an implicit error within deterministic causality, substituting alea for fata, such a science has nevertheless disclosed an even more implicit order behind indeterminate causality—a synchronistic order that is itself coincidental and conspiratory: “chance…correspond[s] not to a temporary incapacity of science to explain everything…but to the passing from a state of causal determination to another order, radically different, also of non-chance.” Baudrillard formulates two hypotheses about randomness: the first, metaphysical (all things, when disjoined, disperse and only by chance do they meet each other); the second, pataphysical (all things, when conjoined, converge and only by chance do they miss each other). Chance fulfills two contradictory duties, since it scatters connected things even as it clusters unrelated things. Where the world disjoins events in order to keep them quarantined from each other, chance serves to force events into a state of mutual collusion, but where the world conjoins events in order to keep them adulterated with each other, chance serves to force events into a state of mutual dispersal. Is chance preserving its power to be intractable by doing both things at once? Is it not fair to say that, wherever a norm prevails, chance seems to intervene on behalf of an anomalous behaviour?
Aleatory writing almost evokes the mystique of an oracular ceremony—but one in which the curious diviner cannot pose any queries, except perhaps for the kind imagined by Raymond Roussel in Locus Solus, where he describes a fortuneteller, who spins a die inscribed with three phrases: l’ai-je eu? (did I have it?); l’ai-je? (do I have it?); and l’aurai-je? (will I have it?). Roussel derives this prophetic die from the word déluge, which he fragments into dé (meaning “die”) and l’eus-je? (meaning “did I have it?”). Roussel thereby deduces an uncanny coincidence in language between the rising flood and the gaming table, both of which are governed by the principles of randomness. When we write, using an aleatory protocol—do we not probe the status of our talent, asking the dice whether or not we still “have it,” the genius to push our luck, in order to produce a major effect from a minor cause? Do we not exaggerate our insignificance as poets so that, despite our own innocuousness, our sneezes might yet set in motion a series of events, resulting in a cyclone. If my thoughts meander, jumping, as if at random, from topic to topic, I have perhaps let them do so in order to follow the clinamen of a peripatetic speculation, taking a chance, putting thought itself at risk in the hope that, like Cage, I might use “anarchy…to explore a way of writing which, though coming from ideas, is not about them, or is not about ideas, but produces them.”

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