A Prayer For My Daughter: Dead Beat Kow-Tows to Eavan Boland

Eavan has been back onto Dead Beat.

"Not many daughters in poetry, you know."

"Hadn't thought about it before," I tell her.

"Of course you haven't, you're a man. Took Yeats until he was in his sixties. So print it."

"Yes Ma'am," Dead Beat kow-tows.

A Prayer For My Daughter
by W.B. Yeats

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle
But Gregory's wood and one bare hill
Whereby the haystack- and roof-levelling wind,
Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.

I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
And under the arches of the bridge, and scream
In the elms above the flooded stream;
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.

Helen being chosen found life flat and dull
And later had much trouble from a fool,
While that great Queen, that rose out of the spray,
Being fatherless could have her way
Yet chose a bandy-leggèd smith for man.
It's certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.

In courtesy I'd have her chiefly learned;
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those that are not entirely beautiful;
Yet many, that have played the fool
For beauty's very self, has charm made wise,
And many a poor man that has roved,
Loved and thought himself beloved,
From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.

May she become a flourishing hidden tree
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing round
Their magnanimities of sound,
Nor but in merriment begin a chase,
Nor but in merriment a quarrel.
O may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

My mind, because the minds that I have loved,
The sort of beauty that I have approved,
Prosper but little, has dried up of late,
Yet knows that to be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief.
If there's no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of Plenty's horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?

Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will;
She can, though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all's accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony's a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

The Isomorphic Writer and The French Lieutenant's Woman

"Analogy-hungry perceiving machine?"

"That I am." Hofs and his incessant smile.

"You like your job, don't you, Hofs?"

"Don't you like yours?"

"Writers are funny that way."

"Anyway, Dead Beat, the point is that "conscious being" need not be human or even organic. Actually I would carry the abstraction of the term "reference" even further, as follows. The mapping of systems and roles that establishes reference need not actually be perceived by any such being: it suffices that the mapping exist and simply be perceptible to such a being were it to chance by."

"I chanced by Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern in my local library."

"I am glad you did, Dead Beat."

"So am I."

"The French Lieutenant's Woman."

"Say what, Hofs?"

"The French Lieutenant's Woman."

"John Fowles."

"The very same. Let's consider the film version, however: It consists of interlaced vignettes from two concurrently developing stories both of which involve complex romances: one in the past, one in the present. The fact that there are two romances already suggests that a mapping is called for. But much more is suggested than that. There are structural similarities between the two romances: each of them has triangular qualities, and in both stories only one leg of the triangle is focused upon. Moreover, the same two actors play the same two lovers in both romances, so that you see them in alternating contexts and with alternating personality traits. The reason for this "coincidence" is that the contemporary story concerns the making of a film of the past story.

As the two stories unfold in parallel, a number of coincidences arise that suggest even more strongly that a mapping should be made. But it is left to the viewer to carry this mapping out; it is never called for explicitly. What is pleasant in this game is the fluidity left to the viewer: there is much room for artistic licence in seeing connections, or suspecting or even inventing them.

Indirect reference of the artistic type is much less precise than indirect reference of the formal type. The latter arises when two formal structures are isomorphic - that is, they have strictly analogous internal structures, so that there is a rigorous one-to-one mapping between the roles in the one and the roles in the other. In such a case3 the existence of genuine reference becomes as clear to us as the case of someone talking about their mirror image; we take it as immediate, pure self-reference, without even noticing the indirectness, the translational steps mediated by the isomorphism."

"I am writing a novel set in the past and present."

"I know you are Dead Beat."

"Each consists of a triangular romance."

"Of course it does."

"The same main character, but two different characters in the other parts of the triangle."

"Tell me something I don't know."

"Are you giving me advice here Hof?"

"Would you tell me how to do my job?"

"I guess not."

Hof shrugs.

"It's just that it sounds like you know more about the form of writing than I do. Even after all these years."

"Mapping, analogy."

"We're in the same business."

"I guess we are."

"It's fun isn't it?"

"Isn't this where we came in, Dead Beat?"

"Isomorphism."

"You're learning my boy. We'll make a writer of you yet!"

The Writer as an Analogy-Hungry Perceiving Machine

What with Baudrillard ceasing to exist and all, you thought I had forgotten about old Hofs, didn't you. Well no. Hofs exists even if he has to tell us himself in a self-referential way.

Anyway he looks up from his desk in Indiana and sees me sitting there.

"It is I," I say.

"I say it is," he replies smiling broadly.

"Directly or indirectly?"

Broader smile. "I would say they are just distant points on a continuum. The question is one of reference in general. The essence is simply that one thing refers to another whenever, to a conscious being, there is sufficiently compelling mapping between the roles the two things are perceived to play in some larger structures or systems. Caution is needed here, Dead Beat. By "conscious being" I mean an analogy-hungry perceiving machine that gets along in the world thanks to its perceptions."

"I?"

"Continuously."

"I am a writer."

"That, my dear conscious being is precisely why I am telling you these things."

That The Science of Cartography Is Limited - Eavan Boland

That the Science of Cartography Is Limited

—and not simply by the fact that this shading of
forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,
the gloom of cypresses,
is what I wish to prove.

When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.

Look down you said: this was once a famine road.

I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in

1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads to build.

Where they died, there the road ended

and ends still and when I take down
the map of this island, it is never so
I can say here is
the masterful, the apt rendering of
the spherical as flat, nor
an ingenious design which persuades a curve
into a plane,
but to tell myself again that

the line which says woodland and cries hunger
and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
and finds no horizon

will not be there.

Eavan Boland

What A Poet Is - Eavan Boland

In case you ever wondered what a poet is... and in case you didn't, you should have...especially if you write poetry...and if you don't, shame on you...how do you expect to become a better fiction writer anyway?

So Eavan is giving me a hard stare and kindly refuses my offer of a G&T.

"What we find in a poet," she says, "is always a volatile mixture of knowledge and self-knowledge. The best poems are anti-historic: they survive change. History fixes an experience in the moment. The good poem does the opposite. It takes an experience and builds a shelter for it in language and craft which protects it forever from the erosions of time and space."

Jean Baudrillard 1929-2007

So Jean Baudrillard no longer exists.

Remember: There are three orders of simulacra:
(1) natural, naturalistic simulacra: based on image, imitation, and counterfeiting. They are harmonious, optimistic, and aim at the reconstitution, or the ideal institution, of a nature in God's image.
(2) productive, productionist simulacra: based on energy and force, materialized by the machine and the entire system of production. Their aim is Promethean: world-wide application, continuous expansion, liberation of indeterminate energy (desire is part of the utopias belonging to this order of simulacra).
(3) simulation simulacra: based on information, the model, cybernetic play. Their aim is maximum operationality, hyperreality, total control.

Thoughts do not die.

We will think more on this.

The Cybernetic Poet

Okay, Ray Kurtzweil, one of the great innovaters of Artificial Intelligence, gets on the phone.

"Is that you, Dead Beat?"
"Who you?"
"Kurtzweil."
"Sorry Kurt before you ask, no I don't have any intelligence to give away, artificial or otherwise."
"We all know that, D.B. It's not that I'm calling about. It's your last post on Creative Computing."

"Yeah, I like that one."

"Just to let you know I already did it."

"Did what?"

"Write a program for computers to write poetry."

"You kidding me?"

"No. The computer reads a selection of poetry and then creates a 'language model' and writes original poems from that model. So far it writes stanzas of poetry. A more difficult problem than writing stanzas of poetry is writing complete poems that make thematic, syntactic, and poetic sense across multiple stanzas, but that's on the way. Computer generated music and art is already well progressed. Oh yeah, Hofs knows what he is talking about. Don't you forget it."

"I don't intend to."

"By the way Dead Beat, you might want to download a free copy. In fact I read your poems...you need to download a free copy."

The Cybernetic Poet

Creative Computing

So, Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter. Computers. Babbage.

That's where we were. Hofstadter of course looking over our shoulder.

Well there is an old argument concerning Artificial Intelligence and whether computers can ever capture the essence of the mind.

Not so, Ada says, because a computer can never, in and of itself, be creative.

Not so! Old Hofs insists. He claims that the essence of creativity is pursuing a theme through all its possible outcomes and being clever enough to recognize a bright new possibility with the combinations that emerge. Others have similarly argued that creativity can be explained as a process combining exploration and recognition.

Margaret Boden, Cognitive Scientist with all the hoop-la distinguishes three degrees of creativity: 1) The simplest type of creativity occurs when one explores permutations and combinations exhaustively, hoping for an inspired change; 2) The next degree of creativity involves exploring an unknown space, that is, a dimension or variable that has not been used before; 3) The third and highest degree of creativity is again when one explores a space but this is a space that has been transformed in a way that others have not considered.

Can a computer be programmed to pursue these three stages? Why ever not?

And what about us, this vast pool of shoddy writers that we are? Can we pursue these stages more effectively? Or are we going to let our computers write better novels and poems than we do?

Yeah, you're right, most probably.

Byron's Daughter and Other Dangerous Poetic Tendencies

Dead Beat, that old Merry Prankster is leading you somewhere. Don't be afraid to follow along. You will be the better for it. Your writing will be the better for it. Remember he is peppering the space with dots.

So Byron? Yeah, I know you guys know everything about him, you're writers after all. He was a Lord right? Lived 1788-1824. Born with a club foot. Inherited the title and estates of his great-uncle, the "wicked" Lord Byron, at age 10. Harrow. Cambridge. Friendships with young boys....

"Dead Beat! Dead Beat! (Horace running out of the tool shed) The gossip is mine. Shake yourself to see whether nature planted your vices in you or, perhaps, your own bad habits did, for it's certain that in neglected fields grow weeds that must be burned...."

.... okay, okay! I'll stick to the details....

"Get to the poems, Dad (Hudson ). You did know he was a poet?"

Alright, The Bride of Abydos, The Siege of Corinth, The Prophecy of Dante and all those other puppies. Thing is, it's not so much Georgie Porgy I am interested in as his daughter, Ada. Lady Byron left with her a year after her birth and never did return.

"A bit like Jim Morrison and Paris."

"No Hudson, nothing like Jim Morrision and Paris....

Anyway all you so called Byron groupies out there, what can you tell me about her, Ada Lovelace? Humh?

"Did you say Linda Lovelace?"

"Hudson, leave it out...

Let Dead Beat tell you all about it, how Lady Byron wished her daughter to be unlike her poetical father, and she saw to it that Ada received tutoring in mathematics and music, disciplines which would counter her dangerous poetic tendencies.

In 1828 she produced the design for a flying machine. When she was just 17 she met Charles Babbage, Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge, and became a lifelong friend..."

"Whoh Dad!"

"Y-e-s, H-u-d-s-o-n!"

"Is that the same Cabbage considered to have invented the first computer?"

"Babbage, Hudson, Babbage. But yes you're right. He was known as the inventor of the Difference Engine, an elaborate calculating machine that operated by the method of finite differences. He then made plans in 1834 for a new kind of calculating machine (although the Difference Engine was not finished), an Analytical Engine. In 1842, an Italian mathematician, Louis Menebrea, published a memoir in French on the subject of the Analytical Engine. Babbage enlisted Ada as translator for the memoir, and during a nine-month period in 1842-43, she worked feverishly on the article and a set of Notes she appended to it.

Ada called herself "an Analyst (& Metaphysician)," and the combination was put to use in the Notes. She understood the plans for the device as well as Babbage but was better at articulating its promise. She rightly saw it as what we would call a general-purpose computer. It was suited for "developing and tabulating any function whatever. . . the engine [is] the material expression of any indefinite function of any degree of generality and complexity."

Her Notes, by the way, anticipate future developments, including computer-generated music.

"Good story, Dad."

"Thank you Hudson."

"And it's point?"

"It's point, Hudson! It doesn't have to have a point, does it? It's a dot. A Hofstadter dot."

"Poetry and math. That's what you're about Dad, don't think I don't know."

"So why ask, hot shot? Go eat your kibble."

Self-Referential Sentences - Dead Beat Lays Down A Challenge

So Dead Beat as you know has been chewing the fat with Douglas R. Hofstadter on Self-Referential Sentences - sentences which refer to themselves.

Here are a few D.B. enjoys:

- I have heard this sentence is a rumour.

- You have just started to read the sentence you have just finished reading.

- The only point of this sentence is to make clear what is the point of this sentence.

A variant of this: This sentence contains exactly threee errors.

Some of the sentences depend on the difference between use and mention - the use-mention distinction.

When a word is used to refer to something, it is said to be used. When a word is quoted (to be examined for its surface aspects - typographical, phonetic etc) it is said to be mentioned.

You can't have "your cake" and spell it "too".

Another possibility is the ambiguous nature of the first-person pronoun "I". does "I" refer to the speaker or to the sentence?

I am not the subject of this sentence.

I am simultaneously writing and being written.

Expanding on this ambiguity: As long as you are not reading me, the fourth word of this sentence has no referent.

Hey out there - is that you reading me, or is it someone else?

What about sentences with ambiguous referents?

Thit sentence is not self-referential because "thit" is not a word.

Then there are counterfactual conditionals - sentences which postulate in their first clause (the antecedent) some contrary to fact situation and extrapolates in its second clause (the consequent) some consequence of it (phew! - are you glad to get to the end of this sentence?)

If wishes were horses, the antecedent of this conditional would be true.

This sentence would be seven words long if it were six words shorter.

So Dead Beat thanks The Hofmaster and lays down a challenge for all you would be writers out there.

Am I the best sentence there is?

Please send your samples along.