Jack July, Christian Bök, & Poetry in Bacteria
Jack July is Will’s brother. Those who know Will are discomfited by his perfection and the modest ease with which he inhabits it, and his brother is more or less the same (but angrier!): a genetically-faultless, brilliant, and thoughtful human being who makes me want to open my wrists and pour my inferior life out all over the concrete before any girls come by and see how much shorter I am than they are.
That is how I’m going to introduce Jack July, who showed us around Oregon and now has a tumblelog. I am also reblogging his incredible note about Christian Bök.
I have written about Bök before; he wrote one of the most amazing things I’ve ever read: Eunoia. Working within ludicrous enabling limits beyond the overall restriction, Bök completed a book in which each chapter can use words with only one vowel: A, E, I, O, and U. The other requirements are as amazing.
Jack July alerts us that Bök is “striving to engineer a life form that becomes a durable archive for storing a poem, and a machine for writing a poem — a poem that can survive forever.”
[Bök] was inspired by a researcher at the PNWNR Lab in WA who recently enciphered the Disney classic It’s a Small World (After All) into bacteria, allowed them several rounds of division, and then retrieved a regrettably no-less putrescent copy of the song…
Anyway, this poet, who has enlisted the help of a no-doubt Rush-loving libertarian Canadian scientist from Calgary, thinks that perhaps an efficient means of first contact (in case the Vulcans can’t detect our warp trail) is the colonization of other planets with bacteria that encode campy publicity stunts. In his interview with Nature, he says, “…My project is analogous to building a pyramid and then leaving undecipherable hieroglyphs all over it: later civilizations may not understand the language, but its presence will testify to the enduring legacy of our own civilization.” Thanks for the explanation.
Bök’s desire to encode poetry into life is itself poetic, but beyond its lyrical or symbolic appeal it reminds me of the suggestion made by David Deutsch from the work of Richard Dawkins and Karl Popper that life is best thought of us encoded knowledge: processual knowledge, adaptive knowledge, even a sort of experiential knowledge (non-individual, of course). This is how the universe expresses knowledge: in life, which responds to and reflects the laws of time and space and matter and energy.
That poetry is the knowledge chosen here is all that’s odd; otherwise we might remark that Bök’s idea is already manifest: every organism is a code of abstracted knowledge, its DNA a high language directing low functions. Life seems to be the best and most durable way we have of coding, demonstrating, preserving, and developing knowledge, which in any event is so synonymous with life that neither exists apart from the other.
In other words: life is self-animating, self-propagating, self-extending knowledge. If anything, Bök’s plan is at most a variation on what already is.
