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“That mind artifact is mutable, thank the lord” — Clark Coolidge[1]

A few facts about crystals:

Once only mined (mind), most quartz crystal now is grown.

Quartz is the most common mineral on Earth.

Many crystals are piezoelectric: they emit a (thin) electric charge under pressure.

Crystals rotate the plane of polarized light.

Certain crystals are biogenic. Trilobites used calcite to form the lenses of their eyes.

Naturally formed by the combination of oxygen and silicon, quartz crystal has a habit of growing in the dark, its long prism always forming a perfect sixty-degree angle to the adjoining prisms. Calcite, on the other hand, occurs in limestone and other rocks that are formed biogenically, out of the fossilized shells of tiny dead sea creatures. In The Crystal Text, Clark Coolidge writes, “Transparency a matter of slowly mattering,”[2] torquing noun into verb and revealing in a flash both the semantic and scientific senses of ‘matter.’ The transparent matter of crystal accrues, slowly mattering itself into being. In the same way, the potential (however slight) for “transparency” in writing is “a matter of slowly mattering.” By turns transparent and opaque, The Crystal Text returns to the object of its contemplation — the crystal — and also to the grounds of its own composition. Matter amalgamates in gradual improvisation of poetic language and thinking, as Coolidge’s long poem accumulates its matter, layer by layer, letter by letter. It contains itself in much the same way a crystal does, and is a crystalline record of its growth.

In his study of jazz drumming and the work of Jack Kerouac, Now It’s Jazz, Coolidge writes, “I had thought the writer must first have it all in his head and only then put it into words, but no. I began to see how it was really excitingly done: You wrote from what you didn’t know toward whatever could be picked up in the act. Poetry starts here.”[3] Writing begins with accretion, accumulating bits both biogenic and inanimate, toward some structure as yet unknown. Coolidge, whose interests around poetry (he’s a jazz drummer, a caver, and a collector of fossils) so lucidly and plainly inform the poetry itself, mentions trilobites in several of his works.

After first reading The Crystal Text, in depth and amazement, I bought a piece of calcite crystal. It is clear, naturally formed in the shape of a rhombus, and it fits comfortably in the palm of my hand. (The Greeks felt a crystal “cooled” the hand when held. Pliny the Elder believed that quartz crystal was a permanently frozen form of water, and the word “crystal” comes from the Greek for “ice.”) There is a Moroccan trilobite on the desk next to the calcite. It is brown and spiny, like a chrysalis, and it’s about 250 million years old. It reminds me of the armored, anomalous horseshoe crabs that inhabited a beach in Delaware where I went every summer as a kid. Off past the beach houses with towels slung over porch railings and satellite dishes, the crabs crawled like dazed prehistoric visitors. I picked them up, walking with my father, and threw them back in the bay. Trilobites, which were killed off in the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, had compound eyes, with lenses like prisms that were made of calcite. These two remnants seem to have hurtled through space and time to land aligned on my desk: the raw, unpolished sandy rock fossil of an ancient marine animal and the clear, mysterious rhombus of calcite that composed the lenses of its eyes.

From ignorance toward (the impossibly small potential for) certainty, back out. At the outset of The Crystal Text, Coolidge writes, “Senseless this arrival at a subject for a start” (9). And later, “start / with something. Begin here” (67). The point is made, slowly and carefully, over the long series of poetic speculations, sprawling ruminations, and koans of which the text is composed:

One could divide it all up into
those who know how the work should be
and those who never know before the work.
But then those who did not know began to know
the materials, an intimate action
and can one go too far with material causes?
(will and would
     rather than
shall and should) (33)

To whatever extent the object is an object-lesson (here, as elsewhere, an emphatically silent one), the crystal provokes a strain of thinking (among a number of other lines of inquiry) about writing as improvisation. As doing to see where the doing will lead. A slow process which takes place in the dark, almost an improvisation resulting in rock —beautiful, transparent and cloudy — to be harvested from a cave or simply to be seen. Or as the gradual accumulation, as sediment, of millions of creatures’ eyes. Yet: “can one go too far with material causes?” The poet seems to defer an answer with the parenthetical aside. On closer inspection, however, Coolidge is making a statement about inevitability. The “intimate action” of engaging with material causes — word, stone — is exactly the responsibility the poet takes up in writing. There will (rather than “shall”) be a call and response, however quiet, maybe even nearly mute, between writing mind and the external world of objects the crystal inhabits. It sets itself forth in the action: starting to write, an impulse to music.

In Now It’s Jazz, but elsewhere also, Coolidge makes it clear how deeply his interest in music coincides with his writing. This influence permeates the poetry at every level, and the vocabulary of jazz can be usefully borrowed to think through Coolidge’s project in The Crystal Text. Syncopation, improvisation, the downbeat, the head or standard: all of these ideas are native to the generous and alien landscape of the poem.  Originally published by the Figures Press in 1986, The Crystal Text is a long (168-page) poem comprised of short bursts of lyric. It almost has the feel of a captain’s logbook, with daily entries detailing the crystal at the center of its attention. Like At Egypt, published two years later, it’s an epic lyric poem. Both are sustained meditations on a single subject; however, unlike At Egypt, The Crystal Text affords its subject more formal variation. Some of the poem’s sections are a single line; others run across several pages. Line lengths and sound patterns mutate, and there are fewer refrains.

If poems contemplating mute vessels (urns, jars) could be considered “standards” (in the sense of “All the Things You Are,” or “How High the Moon”), The Crystal Text returns to its head, or main theme, with a deliriously clear love of the form. Just as a crystal improvises its form (albeit — crucially — according to certain unseen constraints and systems), the poem stands as a record of its own improvised composition. Its form is a record of its relationship over time to the mute object of its inquiry, the crystal, in chunks of lived days, the sometimes clipped, sometimes sprawling sections of poetry which make up the long poem The Crystal Text. In Now It’s Jazz, Coolidge quotes Kerouac writing (in Visions of Cody) about jazz saxophonist Lee Konitz: “He can take care of himself even though he goofs and does April in Paris from inside out as if the tune was the room he lived in and was going out at midnight with his coat on.” Coolidge continues, “Yeah. That has the feeling of improvisation starting at a base and going out and you can get back if you want since you know where that is but you can also go anywhere and take whatever form in the going you want” (44). The tune, like the poem, records this form of departure from and return to theme. As obscure, dissociative lines snap in and out of focus, the crystal remains The Crystal Text’s base, a refrain strangely familiar in all its variations. The image of the clear piece of rock is suddenly and clearly summoned to the reader’s mind out of some piece of otherwise alien phrasing: as “Sky flake in a water pocket” (133), or “Stable portion, sense lesson, icicle twilight” (61), or “unlit candle” (114); as “a jet stripe of firm” (111), or “A scarf that is the weather’s edge / a rig of partial light” (83). These variations on the theme of the crystal are the matter of the poem; the poem’s transparency (or, turned to view from a different facet, its opacity) a matter of their mattering. As in good jazz, it’s all in the phrasing — fidelity to the theme and headlong, syncopated departure from it.

The beat is everywhere. Much of Coolidge’s poetic genius resides in his sense of stress, in his deliverance of language to its plain percussive value. At its most basic, syntactic level, the compression of Coolidge’s lyric exerts a sort of pressure of sound on sense. The words are struck, brushed, rolled, and dragged. Like Harry Partch, the iconoclastic twentieth-century American composer, Coolidge invents a field — a junkyard — of instruments, as well as a corresponding way to play them, in order to create the richly atonal, contorted rhythms of the poem. Through torque and compression of language toward pure sound, sense gets heightened and bent:

emitting his bulbs back behind the fog and fan factory
when evenings they laid out docked china and had
themselves a paid laugh. One knocked over the ocean
and sold his boat, walked away forever into the thicket
New England of brought ice turned into new green house.
Another plans wicked bop pranks in the L.A. smear (108)

That’s where poems (Coolidge’s, spectacularly) yield electrical charge, as do crystals when pressed. Their atoms (in quartz and calcite, for example) are so tightly and regularly formed that when pressure is exerted, the positive and negative charges of which they are constituted are momentarily divided. This momentary division produces a slight electric charge called piezoelectricity (from the Greek “piezo,” meaning to press). This is the principle behind a cigarette lighter on a car dashboard, or the push-start button on a propane barbeque grill. Crystal radios also operate on piezoelectricity. So too, if an electrical charge is applied to the crystal, it will bend. This strange and beautiful physical characteristic of the crystal seems apt to satisfy the lunging percussive urges of the poem. Every torque of syntax or stressed syllable, each hammered word, seems to emit a faint but distinctly glowing electrical charge amid the slow darknesses and changing lights of the poem. Here is Coolidge talking about the one-word poems of Aram Saroyan:

I had a reason for getting to the place where I started to write that kind of thing, which I was trying to explain in being influenced by Saroyan putting his one word. He put so much pressure on one word, is what it was. He insisted that that word was the poem. You could talk about art being insistent emphasis. The words really came to me very strongly, as strong things. And I began to think: but I want to put them together with that kind of intensity.[4]

That intensity, the charge of Coolidge’s percussive lines, generates flares of electricity through the long sequence of poems that constitute The Crystal Text, as it spans changing seasons and the poet’s own slow, assiduous concentration.

 “Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness!”[5] Keats addresses his famous object of poetic contemplation, an ancient vessel painted with an unchanging pastoral scene. The poet studies it closely, looking all around it, as though there might be something within or beyond its form that would come to illuminate its enigma. Immutable and transfixing, cold stone alive with imagery, silent vessel abruptly given voice, the urn’s narrative remains static, its outcome made unknowable by its own unchanging form. The poet of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” finds grim solace and unearthly beauty in the permanence of the urn’s imagery. Keats’s poem enacts the object’s painted, changeless activity, detailing the “flowery tale” of the (silent) “Sylvan historian” which is the urn. For Coolidge, the crystal occupies an even more radically ambiguous relation to time. Coolidge writes:

The crystal is always showing a world
that does not exist except in remission.
It does not contain but transposes. (37)

Throughout The Crystal Text, the inert, immutable object filters the changing light of day through the prism it is. As Keats, in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” narrates the flux the vessel points toward while always precluding, Coolidge watches hours, days, and seasons pass through the changeless facade of the crystal. Like the poem, it rotates these lights. The Crystal Text is strewn with cryptic glitches that point to the object’s temporal undecidability: it is “A scatter dance held rigid, knowledge is that?” (27) and “This place where morning is permanent” (34). Looking at it, Coolidge asks, “Why are there places where some thing is not happening?” (72). The crystal pends, it’s both in medias res and unfinishable: “During, see during, see the end of the line always receding” (46). It remains, like the urn, emphatically silent: “It does not say. It stay” (61). “Silence in the presence of the occulting lights” (104), writes Coolidge, baffled by the crystal’s strangely forceful reticence. It is almost as though the very silence of these objects — urn and crystal — were what both Keats and Coolidge find magnetic. In Keats, there is something to narrate: the urn is painted, and although the action depicted is endless and changeless, the poem’s attempt to speak for it constitutes the force and central dilemma of “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The crystal, however, offers less to narrate; its presence is even more radically ambiguous. The temptation somehow to “narrate” it persists, alongside the impossibility of doing so. “It’s taking my light? It’s taking my words” (137): of course, it is taking Coolidge’s words — and yet the crystal remains almost completely inscrutable as a cipher for the Text.

Senseless thing, crystal, say you of yourself?
And all the other things I would say of you. Unto you,
and for you. (95)

As Keats’s poem comes to speak for the painted urn, it paradoxically acknowledges that the object’s silence sets it always ahead of the poem itself: “heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter” (238). As the ode gains reflexive momentum, ecstatically listing the halted action of the imagery painted on the urn, it comes to speak for the silent urn, before running aground at the final, gnomic couplet:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. (240)

The urn’s silence becomes insurmountable here. The desperate, enticing equation for which the poem is known is just as much an admission of the futility of trying to find something beyond the object’s form as it is a mere affirmation of the significance of beauty. More than anything, it is an irreducibly powerful statement about the silence of the object. The urn may be looked at from all sides but keeps its silence and is set during. It can, for these reasons, disclose finally nothing but its form: its beauty is the truth it discloses, the only truth we need to know since it is the only truth knowable. The oldness of the object, its permanence and silence prompt questioning and preclude certainty:

He thought he knew that. He wondered
if the crystal would still be warming in the sun after
all the humans had died. He imagined it standing
on a sandy plain like a fire in the fire.
There seemed beauty in this but no knowledge. (The Crystal Text, 114)

In Hugh Kenner’s massive study of Ezra Pound, The Pound Era, he writes: “When Wyndham Lewis writes (Tarr, about 1914) that ‘the lines and masses of a statue are its soul’ (art has no inside, nothing you cannot see), he tells us that we may confront any art as we must confront that of the Upper Paleolithic.”[6] Coolidge, whose friendship with the painter Philip Guston was certainly mutually influential (both are sui generis masters), is certainly familiar with the merits, and maybe necessity, of confronting “any art as we must confront that of the Upper Paleolithic.” In “Arrangement,” a lecture on poetics and process given at Naropa, Coolidge writes, “one of the things Guston likes to talk about most is cave art: the first painters, who are incredible if you look at their work. I’m not sure that anyone is more sophisticated. The mark, the first mark. Of course Guston talks about it like Mallarmé’s statement, ‘being a civilized first man.’ In other words, you’re in the cave and you’ve got your stick, but you know all about art, you’ve been to the Louvre” (159). There is a necessity, when painting or writing an object, to see it as first man might have. This initial seeing — the condition of possibility for the “intimate action” of beginning “to know / the materials” — opens a space where poet and reader, painter and viewer, might see the object as abstract form.

In The Crystal Text crystal can then become “a lock of standages” (44) or “a glow zone” (14). Neil Young, frozen orange juice, Angel Hair magazine, and Dave Brubeck appear in the poem’s frequencies, among many others. But the abiding, initial amazement, a shock of wonder like that of first man at the stone’s oldness runs like a seam through the poem. The crystal’s ancientness, its existence a priori the poet and the modern world are knowledge underlying The Crystal Text:

Crystal not survivable, but will remain me.
It lives in the sun-tipped palace of my regard,
until. One could place no period after it. (89)

The magnetism of ancient things, their materiality in time — calcite, trilobite, the sounds of language — must be a primary obsession of the poet. This is the “will and would / rather than / shall and should,” the inevitability poems start with. The crystal’s persistence in form over time, a nearly musical persistence of quiet shape, is one of the poem’s underpinnings. Like the urn, which “When old age shall this generation waste / … shalt remain, in midst of other woe,” the permanence of the crystal urges the poem toward a recognition of the impossibility of its own completion. Stone, urn, and poem are what “one could place no period after.” For the crystal there is finally no finally.

All of which is crucial to an understanding of The Crystal Text. But also, critically: “art has no inside, nothing you cannot see.” This parenthetical of Kenner’s, an aside, has had a killer effect on me. I wrestle with it because it seems at times to run poisonously counter to the more hopeful uses of writing. There is something monstrous about that idea, but as The Crystal Text, like “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” points out, you point to an inside that is and isn’t there. Keats looks at the urn from every side, and when the silent object speaks, it can disclose nothing but its self, the beauty of its form.

The crystal sits on the poet’s desk. He observes it. It is both alive and inanimate, silent and yet awaiting response. Like Wallace Stevens’s jar, the crystal organizes reality (and thereby, obviously but crucially, the ensuing poem) around itself. Stevens: “It made the slovenly wilderness / surround that hill.”[7] The crystal, like the jar, becomes the poem’s inscrutable cipher, its placement the enactment of the poem’s own making. Coolidge writes, “The world is a baffle that shows through to / you, everywhere” (89). Stevens writes of the jar: “It took dominion everywhere” (76). Of the crystal everything in The Crystal Text comes to surround, Coolidge writes:

Now all I can see is you. Whatever you contain.
Whatever you do to time, not to mention
perform on space. (95)

However, like neither the jar nor the urn, the crystal both is and is not a vessel. “What am I looking at? Into what’s locked businesses?” (45). It contains itself, and is both open and closed, its contents visible to the naked eye.

In, within, withheld, appearance
owns a shifty lock? Back to the thought, the crystal
open while closed (27)

This sense of the crystal as a vessel of itself, which is both open and shut, is conjured throughout the poem. “The crystal holds light but it is not hollow” (151). It is a “box of instruments, padlocked” (36), “any space one can see / is enclosed” (14), and “our encased answer” (71). “Is there a half-broken-open rock?” (57), asks Coolidge. The crystal is “notionless of its fill” (111), “but / crystal itself does fill” (46). What can it mean to think the poem as a vessel both closed and open? To what degree is it “notionless of its fill”? The crystal isn’t, like Stevens’s jar, “of a port in air.” It carries itself, through time, in closed form. “Art has no inside, nothing you cannot see.” And yet the crystal does have a visible inside, through which light passes: integral, visible and invisible. Its contents both inaccessible, yet completely apparent. A closed thing whose visible contents rotate light? A static thing capable of generating electrical current when pressed? Is reading then a kind of pressure put on the poem? The poem, like the stone, is composed of materials that provoke this impossible line of questioning even as they render it moot. They provoke it, like the urn, out of the very beauty of their forms. And preclude it by disclosing themselves only as that: “aporian solid” (14). Like the urn, the poet studies the facets and sides of it, hefts it and stares; like Stevens’s jar, its centrality to the poem is pursuant to the way it “takes dominion everywhere.”

Open while closed. “Into what’s locked businesses?” The static businesses of a form which came into being through improvisation, marks on the wall of a cave: as a “finished,” “discrete,” or “singular” “thing,” the closed form of poem or crystal displays simply the processes by which it was formed. It resists reference to anything else: it pends as the forms of the process by which it was composed. In this way it’s precisely an arrangement, as are cave paintings in Lascaux or an Eric Dolphy solo.

In the midst of writing this short essay I watched The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a documentary by Werner Herzog about ancient cave art. Images of bison and horses seem to race across the walls of a cave our prehistoric ancestors once slept in, those early humans who felt the urge to record what they saw and to draw what they dreamt. In one scene, an experimental archaeologist wearing bearskin robes holds up a flute made of a vulture bone, and plays part of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” On this ancient, newfound instrument, the song is beautifully and weirdly unfixed from its familiar significance: it becomes just notes, forms of sound floating into space.

1. Clark Coolidge, “A Correspondence” with Paul Metcalf, Stations no. 5 (Winter 1978): A Symposium on Clark Coolidge, ed. Ron Silliman.

2. Coolidge, The Crystal Text (Los Angeles: The Sun and Moon Press, 1995), 74.

3. Coolidge, Now It’s Jazz (Albuquerque: Living Batch Press, 1999).

4. Coolidge, “Arrangement,” in Talking Poetics from Naropa Institute: Annals of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, vol. 1, ed. Anne Waldman and Marilyn Webb (Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 1978).

5. John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in Complete Poems and Selected Letters (New York: Modern Library, 2001).

6. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 30.

7. Wallace Stevens, “The Anecdote of the Jar,” in The Collected Poems (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 76.

Poetry generated from a source text has been around at least since 1920, when Tristan Tzara wrote his instructions for how to make a Dada poem. What follows is an argument for reading the procedures of such works as texts themselves, worthy of analysis. These procedures signify in ways that are as complex as the results they yield. In other words, just as language is circumscribed by its cultural use, so are these seemingly neutral processes.

NewsReader is an online “textual instrument” that was commissioned by the net art website turbulence in 2003. Created by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and a team of collaborators that included Brion Moss, David Durand, and Elaine Froehlich, Newsreader is software that lets the reader alter and reformulate news stories through a variety of cut and paste procedures. As the creators note, the main action of these instruments is “to perform William Burroughs’s injunction to ‘cut word lines’ — to break the chains of conceptual association that say this follows from that …” In doing so, the piece reveals much about our times, but not in the way one might initially expect.

As of January 2012, this piece was no longer “playable,”[1] so what follows is a session of “play” that occurred in 2007 when I presented this essay as a talk at the Modern Language Association’s annual convention.

When the Newsreader program is first opened up, a Yahoo! News headline feed from mainstream news sources appears. A click on any of the article summaries leads to the full-length article.

However, the full-length article includes a number of highlighted words and phrases. Although they may appear as such, these are not hypertext links that connect to some predetermined offshoot of text; instead, these are n-grams — words that commonly repeat in the English language in groups of two (digrams) and three (trigrams). A click on any of these groupings leads to another screen. In the example here, the digram “to build” was selected, which generated a screen with three paragraphs beginning with “to build.”

It took me a long time to figure out how this nonlinear text was put together, but I could tell that it was the result of some kind of cut-up process. After reading through the working documents of the piece, as well as contacting Wardrip-Fruin and plying him with questions, here’s what I understand to have happened. While I was reading my mainstream Yahoo news story, the program was busy downloading in the background all the top news stories from an alternative newspaper feed at the website Common Dreams.

When I clicked on the digram “to build,” the program searched the alternative news stories for matching digrams. When a match was found, new text (what I’ll call an “alteration text”) was generated according to the statistical n-gram model.

How this model works might best be understood as a procedure in league with the Oulipo’s N+7 or John Cage’s mesostics or Jackson Mac Low’s diastics. Imagine you’re reading the news at the Common Dreams site and you randomly pick the pair of words that make up this particular digram, “to build.” You then search for another occurrence of that digram on the site and when you find one you add the word that follows that next digram: “to build a.” So you now have three words — a trigram. The second and third words (“build a”) are then treated as a digram, and there’s a search for a recurrence of that pair. Then the word that follows that pair is added (“build a Humvee”), and so on until a chain is created. Thus, this paragraph is a cut-up generated by an algorithm. The n-gram screens contain further n-grams that you can keep on clicking to produce new screens.

N-gram chains can be followed indefinitely. Each time, the n-grams act as bridges between two separate textual bodies.

But generating nonlinear text strands are just part of the play here; there’s more that can be done.

If you click on a word that’s not highlighted or linked in the alteration text, the chain that extends from that word back to the digram beginning the chain/paragraph will be cut and pasted into the previous document at the point of the digram that led you to this alternative page in the first place. In this example, a click on the word “report” in the first line of the second alteration paragraph causes the phrase “to build a children’s well-being report” to be cut and pasted into the original news article.

The alteration text screen disappears when this is done, and the phrase “The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion project to build the world’s largest computer database of biometrics” becomes “The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion project to build a children’s well-being report.”

The screenshot above is the result of some extended play with the first paragraph of the article.

The main action of Newsreader seems to be to locate n-grams in a source text (a news feed) and then inject them back in so as to alter that source. But to what end? Could it be argued that this piece is an elaborate machine for creating something that earlier proceduralists like Tristan Tzara and William Burroughs, were able to accomplish with a simple pair of scissors? Or is this program modeling something that goes beyond the syntactic disruptions of an algorithmic cut-up? In order to articulate what’s at stake in a piece like this, I want to do a quick comparison with John Cage’s mesostics — specifically those created for his Norton lectures at Harvard in 1988.

Digitally reproduced by permission of the publisher from I-IV by John Cage, pp. 9, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1990 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.

This is the first mesostic strand in the first of the lectures.[2] Very briefly, mesostics are similar to acrostics, but with a center strand functioning as a kind of spine. The center strand is often a name or a group of words (in the excerpt above, it’s the word “method”), used to infiltrate or “read through” a much longer text or group of texts. The mesostic rule requires not repeating two adjacent center string letters which frame the wing words (between the “m” and the “e” in method, there is not a repetition of those letters).

Cage created this procedure so as to make unpredictable discoveries apart from authorial intention. Once the center strand was determined, Cage “hunted” for what the material was trying to say; he looked for the ideas that might become clearer by taking a few words or letters away from the wings. So the words to either side of the center are the result of his editorial choices. As Cage said during one of the question and answer sessions that followed each lecture, “this is a way of writing that comes from ideas but is not about them but somehow brings new ideas or other ideas into existence” (338).

The six Norton lectures are published as I–VI, but the sub- (or super-) title is above. Each word listed refers to an aspect of Cage’s work in music composition, and each word is used as a determining center strand (in the listed order) for sections of the mesostics that make up the lectures. The main reason I’ve chosen this particular procedural work for comparison with Newsreader has to do with Cage’s choice of source texts. Unlike other mesostic works that were generated from singular texts (Joyce’s Finnegans Wake or Thoreau’s journals being well-known examples), these lectures mix writings by a familiar set of Cagean influences (Wittgenstein, Thoreau, Emerson, McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller) with an array of newspaper sources (the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Christian Science Monitor). Such use of quotidian materials is rare for Cage. Below is a page where the news is visible, if not entirely readable:[3]

Digitally reproduced by permission of the publisher from I-IV by John Cage, pp. 14, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1990 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.

Due to the newspaper text, a number of questions were raised after the lectures about how Cage saw language and politics to be relating in his work. He answered:

I seem to be at a point where maybe many of us are where there’s a kind of separation between us and language and even things that are reported so that we don’t always respond — it’s almost as though we can’t … I’m in a situation of using words so to speak in a straitjacket but a straitjacket that includes the things from which we have so to speak numbed ourselves. I would like to know something more intelligent to say but I don’t know it. (115)

In a later question and answer session he noted, “Performance of a piece of music can be a metaphor of society … you can think of music as a representation of a society in which you would be willing to live” (177). A clue to how this might work is given in Cage’s introduction to I–VI: “there was a tendency on the part of the empty words, the particles, connectives like ‘and’ and ‘the’ and ‘a’ … to become important and to give us a kind of meaning that I’m not sure we fully understand” (5).

In this excerpt from I–IV, we can see and hear the particles:

Digitally reproduced by permission of the publisher from I-IV by John Cage, pp. 409, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1990 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.

AND IS with gets, is in AS TO …

In relation to this phenomenon, Cage states that “the words that we thought were so meaningful become almost meaningless …. Benefits can come from taking the lesser of two things and supporting it rather than the stronger one, as for instance noise as opposed to musical sound and in this case empty words as opposed to full words and in the case of our society the poor instead of the rich” (254).

Thus the mesostic provides a possible world model, a vision for how the status quo might be altered through a procedural and documentary poetics. Which brings me back to Newsreader. If Cage’s mesostic procedures are modeling a society in which we would be willing to live, what kind of connectivity between text, procedure, and world does Newsreader posit?

In my exchange with Noah Wardrip-Fruin, it was made clear that the n-gram model that runs Newsreader is used in a number of everyday circumstances, as computers try to recognize and work with the input we give them. For example, in voice recognition software, if a computer was trying to parse out whether a speaker said “banana” or “bandanna,” the trigram “ate the banana” is much more common than “ate the bandanna” and the computer can make its choice based on that knowledge.[4] But the n-gram model is also behind ideas such as “total information awareness” and other government-sponsored mass surveillance projects. These models are used to determine patterns of “normal” language behavior, so as to be able to locate when patterns are transgressed. They are used to locate syntactic combinations that statistically indicate suspicious or criminal behaviors. If you were following your non-linear aesthetic inclinations and found yourself producing digrams and trigrams with unfortunate associations over the Internet or over the phone, this could have consequences if you live in a society where your government decides to eavesdrop on its citizens. You might find yourself in a suspect data set, caught in the net of an early-warning system, marked by your avant-garde word chains. Although this might sound like some kind of Minority Report cyber conspiracy theory, the fact is that datamining for “pre-crime” has been (and no doubt still is) a subject of funded governmental research.[5]

Of course, the total information awareness model can’t actually function. It yields a lot of false negatives and false positives. You can really only get good results for matches on a very small scale — for example, if you’re dealing with textual units, you’ll be more successful trying to find matches for three words than for full sentences. But there are instances when such models do work in more common circumstances — for instance, when Amazon makes suggestions for books you might enjoy, or when a music or film site suggests things based on your past interests. The example that is perhaps most useful because of the potential for negative consequences is when credit card companies use the n-gram algorithm to identify fraud. Credit card companies have defined a profile of purchasing (purchases being the n-grams here) for each individual that can help indicate criminal activity on a card. You may have taken a trip abroad without informing your credit card company and then had the awkward experience, like I once did, of having your card denied at a restaurant. Basically, I was the victim of a false positive in the statistical model that the company used. The inconvenience was annoying, but a relatively small price to pay for the failure, and fairly easy to fix. But the cost for using these models for something like terrorist surveillance is much higher, in that everyone is monitored, everyone is treated as a suspect, and there are perhaps one billion false positives for every one terrorist communication actually intercepted.

According to Wardrip-Fruin, the people designing these surveillance systems know that the costs of massive information aggregation and analysis far outweigh the benefits. But they also know that the model is quite seductive, with its proposition that everything can be accessible and knowable via computer systems (the biometrics article in the Newsreader example above is another instance of that seductive quality). Such a promise is easy to sell to a government that continues to wage war on an abstraction like “terror.” The threat of a “false positive” was clearly not a concern when the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act was passed.

And that’s where Newsreader comes in. It’s a piece that calls attention to use patterns, but emphasizes the fallibility of any attempt to interpret them. It highlights and celebrates the fact that the matches it produces are false positives — they can’t lead to a place of narrative coherence, to a singular meaning. They have a different kind of story to tell, and they evoke meaning in a different kind of way. They defy the concept of normative language structures and predictable usage patterns. The reader must hunt for what these digrams have in common, what they might coincidentally suggest, in the way that Cage hunted through the debris of his procedures’ output for ideas. The action is not of solving a cryptogram, but of reveling in the multiplicitous actions of our words.

Both Newsreader and Cage’s mesostics make use of what we now easily recognize as forms of data mining. Both argue against habitual systems of knowing and experiencing the world, with the help of aleatory and anti-digestive fragmenting procedures. Both show readership (and authorship) to be performative: an act of sampling, transforming, altering, and physically handling text. But perhaps most importantly, both are functioning on metatextual or metaphorical levels, allegorizing our methods of attention, our methods of processing information, and the ways those forms of processing mirror the forms of life we actually live in and with.

As much as I want to make the case that these procedures are two parts of a continuing project, the differences between them keep me from bringing this piece to a tidy conclusion. These documentary procedures are responding to forms and structures that perform the contents of very different historical moments. Cage, in his decision to follow the path of nonintention, was resisting what he saw as the automatic privileging of romantic self-expression and intention. Newsreader, built with an architecture of information processing tools, resists the contemporary desire for everything to be knowable, searchable, and analyzable.

Similar to the Surveillance Camera Players performance group, Newsreader is co-opting a nefarious system and retooling it for creative play. Unlike Cage’s mesostics, which are wonderfully elegant in their precision and thus poised for instigating meditative discoveries through reading or listening, Newsreader’s outputs are deliberately clumsy. Readers are forced to prioritize the concept behind those outputs over the textual product. Readers are asked to see process as the content of the work.

John Cage is often quoted as saying that “the function of art is to imitate Nature in her manner of operation.”[6] Newsreader revises that dictum by declaring that the function of art is to imitate culture and its procedural operations, and that when those cultural operations become dangerously reductive, they must be altered.

1. When I attempted to access Newsreader in order to update my “play” with current news stories, I discovered that it was no longer functional. The creators say that an upgrade may be forthcoming; however, its current dysfunction points to the ephemerality of digital art that relies on an external data source. This piece is built on a certain kind of data collection (of news, in this case) in a particular format. But formats are always changing; perhaps digital works will one day be able to accommodate that constant change. Until then, they function (to use Wardrip’s term) as “impermanence agents.”

2. John Cage, I–VI (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), 9.

3. Ibid., 14.

4. Since presenting this talk in 2007, the concept of “n-grams” has moved perhaps more visibly into the mainstream with the introduction of Google’s Ngram viewer.

5. The Total Information Awareness program was created in 2003 as part of the Homeland Security Act. Although it was defunded by Congress in 2004, its work was renamed and absorbed by other intelligence agencies, such as the Disruptive Technology Office and the National Security Branch Analysis Center.

6. John Cage, A Year from Monday (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), 31.