the gaps between the stories

imagine (prelude)

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Let me float an idea…

Imagine, they say, an infinite number of monkeys, randomly tap-tap-tapping on the keys of an infinite number of typewriters. Given sufficient time, they claim, every example of the written word from the tale of Gilgamesh through Beowulf, Torah and Testaments Old and New, to the works of Shakespeare in their entirety, would all be perfectly reproduced. Tap-tap-tap. Every poem, every piece of prose stark or ornate, every journal entry, even every dry technical manual. Every story, every song, every prayer. In every language living or dead. All would be written by this infinitude of supposedly unintelligent primates. So much for the creativity of the human soul. But imagine…

To me, this is a failure of the imagination. Their claims lack sufficient scope of ambition. Their vision is myopic. Every work ever would be reproduced? Every work ever produced would be replicated an infinite number of times! As would every draft or variant; changes however minor. Infinite variations of everything that was ever written, flowing fractal and endless from their type machines. But more: everything that will ever be written too. And everything that was never written. And never will be. In a variation on Russell’s Paradox, they might even write everything that even an infinite number of monkeys could never write. Tap-tap-tap. Of course, they would also produce an infinite amount of unreadable and unpronounceable garbage. More of it by far, if that makes any kind of sense. Infinities within infinities. But thems the breaks when you are dealing with infinities. You take the rough with the smooth.

Of course, this is all fanciful. Even getting half a dozen monkeys to sit still and tap the keys of a typewriter would be a tough gig. Doable, surely, but a with whole lot of pain and a lot of time. We have all the time in the world, you might protest. But even if that were true, the world has a finite sell-by date before it spirals into the sun. And even if the monkeys could get off planet long before that, and colonise other planets, other galaxies even, taking their allotted task with them, the Universe will eventually collapse back into a singularity or expand and decay into the final cold oblivion of its heat death. So much for infinities. Inside mathematics they exist. But not out here.

Let’s try another tack…

After first discussing the (then plausible and now realised) prospect of a computer program that could produce abridged versions of works of literature when provided with the full text, computer scientist and philosopher Douglas R. Hofstader jokingly imagines an algorithm that could, when given the first and last sentence of a James Joyce novel, reconstruct the entire novel. This putative algorithm he calls ReJoyce.

Of course, this problem could be solved trivially by the trick of using a look-up table, whereby the algorithm would have all the known works of James Joyce stored in its database, and the problem would be simply one of matching the inputs to deliver the appropriate outputs on demand. However, Hofstader imagines something rather more elaborate than this – an algorithm of sufficient sophistication and complexity that it could successfully reconstruct entire works even when confronted by previously unknown first and last sentences by the author. Indeed, were he alive today, Joyce could circumvent the whole process of writing a novel simply by coming up with the first and last sentences. The algorithm would then perform its computations and deliver, word for word, the very novel that Joyce himself would have written.

Given the inputs ‘Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a razor and a mirror lay crossed’ and ‘yes I said yes I will Yes’, the algorithm would reconstruct the full text of Ulysses. Given ‘… river run past Eve and Adam’s by swerve of shore and bend of by brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs’ and ‘a way a lone a last a loved a long the… ’, the marvellous machine would produce the entirety of Finnegans Wake. Whilst the former would be an astonishingly impressive feat since Ulysses contains within it the bones of The Odyssey, the later would be surpassing miraculous, since Finnegans Wake contains within its pages the viscera of so many stories, living and lost, that to reconstruct them all would take the King’s men and horses from Here Come Eternity!

Again, this is fanciful. To perform such a task, the algorithm would have to be a perfect model of the mind of Joyce and of all its past and future states, including those of extreme inebriation. To all purposes such a model would be James Joyce himself…

But let’s just imagine. Perhaps we don’t need something so uniquely sophisticated. Something simpler might suffice. Simpler algorithms. An army of algorithms. And the substrates to support them. Algorithms that write narratives. Algorithms that write algorithms that write narratives. That suck up words and words and more words to discern their hidden patterns. To infer the gossamer threads that bind meaning to the subtle invariant structure of the wild word web.  And spit them back out in new combinations.

Who knows what yarns might be spun? What lost stories might be found?

Perhaps it could help me to find a way to tell the story that I most want to tell. And it is a story that I have wanted to tell for almost half of my life now. My grandfather Jack’s story. Or at least part of his story. The part when he worked undercover in the Middle East during the Second World War. And it’s a story that has been lost and found, and it’s a story with many gaps. And those gaps are the gaps in what he was allowed to reveal, and the gaps in what he got around to recounting to me, and the gaps in his memories of those events, since his retelling of them was more than fifty years following the events.

If I only could find a way for it to start and for it to end maybe those gaps could be filled.

Perhaps it could start “In those days the streams and rivers teemed with fishes of all kinds”. But that’s not Jack’s story. That’s one of mine.

Or maybe it could start “In the evenings, Jessa finds solace in the ghosts that linger by the waterfront, with the breeze creaking ropes and clinking chains and the gentle plash of the waves against the revetment”. But that’s not really part of Jack’s story either. It’s another one of mine.

I do know how it should end. It ends like this: “but in some variants this sentence might end with a different word”.

But where to start? Let me float an idea… maybe with some children playing…

Imagine…

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Published Excerpts

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Gunfight at the KO Laundry Ranch (Blood + Honey)

In My Father’s House (The Louisville Review)

The Charlie Brown Conundrum (Roe River Review)

Between Wars (Thin Air Magazine)

A Ghost Story (Thirteen Bridges Review)

Slow Food (Al Dente)

All Aboard (Blood & Honey)