Adam Cornford

COSMOLOGY: INTELLIGENCE AND INFINITY IN LANGUAGE

      "Scrape the surface of language, and you will behold
       interstellar space and the skin that encloses it."
       - Velimir Khlebnikov, Zangezi, trans. Paul Schmidt

During a recent conversation with the English experimental poet Tom Raworth, 
my colleague Lyn Hejinian said, as close as I can remember: "Language is much 
bigger and smarter than we are. We should let it speak...The possibilities are 
infinite." This is a very seductive and exhilarating assertion, and in a certain 
sense true. It is a singularly concise and elegant statement, too, of a view 
widely held among contemporary poets. But I want to contest it nonetheless, 
because I think it has an important contrary or counter-truth.

First, it's certainly a useful metaphor to say that language is "bigger" than 
any one of us. The grapholect (i.e., the unabridged dictionary of all 
dictionaries of a language) is immense - and the grapholect of English is the 
most immense in human history. Even the vocabulary we actually know, in the best 
of cases a small fraction of what the grapholect has to offer, is capable of 
vastly more permutations than we can consciously conceive.

Second, is language "smarter" than we are? Well again, perhaps in a useful 
metaphorical sense: that is, each of those words and phrases that we have in our 
heads is linked to an impossibly dense wealth, of connotation via both 
metaphorical (similarity) and metonymic (contiguity) links. So each of these 
words or phrases can be said to "know" a great deal; and when we put them 
together, they multiply their "knowledge" - they "think" in ways we can't 
predict beforehand, because the associative or connotative processes become 
increasingly nonlinear.

But, even so, are the possibilities of language "infinite"? Again, yes, or 
almost - in a sense. As Noam Chomsky points out, a given grammar is capable, 
given even an average adult vocabulary, of generating a near-infinite number of 
sentences, more than there are stars in all the galaxies.

This cosmic analogy, though, brings me to another one. A conundrum in 
contemporary cosmology is the fact that the universe we inhabit actually 
supports the organization of matter/energy into atoms, molecules, stars, 
planets, and finally, life - even intelligent, language-using life. Our universe 
supports this organization by virtue of quite specific and delicate balances of 
fundamental physical forces. The odds against winding up with such a universe 
following the Big Bang are very considerable. Far more likely, if the constants 
of the nuclear forces had emerged in only slightly different relation to one 
another in those first few hot fractions of a nanosecond, there would have been 
no universe - a collapse back into a spaceless, timeless, pinpoint of potential
 - or a completely entropic universe of dispersed subatomic particles spreading 
away from each other for ever. Or there might have been a universe whose highest 
level of organization was huge thin veils of dust and gas, or a great burst of 
black holes of various sizes cannoning out across expanding nothingness. In none 
of these universes would there be planets, especially not blue-green ones 
hosting viruses, plankton, palm trees, lightning bugs, larks, and philosophers.

Modern cosmology looks to quantum mechanics in attempting to resolve this 
conundrum. Specifically, explanations for the existence of an improbable, 
intelligence-generating universe center on interpretations of a core issue in 
quantum physics, the "quantum wave function." The wave function describes the 
probabilities that a given subatomic particle (quantum), whose origin is known, 
will behave in one way or another when observed at a later point in time and 
space. Once the observation takes place the wave function is said to "collapse," 
because out of all the probabilities, only one is "real" in the sense that it 
has been observed. The standard (Copenhagen) interpretation of the quantum wave 
function is that the particle's "actual" behavior does not become real until it 
is observed and the wave function collapses; until that instant, all that is 
"real" is the wave function, the mathematical set of probabilities. The observer 
makes the specific quantum event real by observing it.

In keeping with this notorious but widely accepted bit of weirdness, one school 
of thought attempts to resolve the improbable-universe conundrum by proposing 
that the improbable universe we inhabit exists precisely because we are here to 
observe it. This a version of what is called the Anthropic (human-centered) 
Principle. Another, somewhat less popular view, the "many worlds" or Everett 
interpretation of the quantum wave function, says that all the universes 
possible at any given moment actually exist, some parallel to one another, 
others branching in and out of each other as quantum events occur - as wave 
functions collapse one way in one universe and another in another. Many of these 
universes, of course, have only infinitesimally brief existences, since they 
differ from their nearest "sister" universe only by one quantum's-worth, and may 
simply become identical with this sister again in the next instant. But other 
"sisters" branch away, becoming more and more different from the "mother"; and 
still others branch away from these in turn. By this interpretation the 
continuity of "our" universe is no more real than that of a film, in which 
apparent continuous movement is produced by the rapid succession of individual 
still images, each differing only slightly from the ones preceding and following 
it. Just so, we "surf" the continual appearance, divergence, and disappearance 
of timelines, in others of which different events happened than the ones we 
remember, and in still others of which we (or our parents, or our culture, or 
life on earth) died in the next moment or never existed at all. We are, 
according to this theory, surrounded by an infinity of universes, all 
originating in the Big Bang - and in most of which, according to the laws of 
probability, nothing of any great coherence or interest exists.

I suspect that the same is true of the infinity of language. The possibilities 
are, in a mathematical sense, limitless; but most of them are pretty dead. It's 
quite easy to write a software program to compose sentences, building from a 
dictionary and sets of grammatical rules. But even if the dictionary has 
attractive and resonant words in it, even if one programs in a few tropes - 
simile, alliteration, anaphora, assonance and rhyme - the result gets quite 
monotonous after a while. Occasional lines gleam with vivid meaning or 
mysterious beauty like fool's gold in a stream, but they become genuinely 
meaningful or beautiful only when lifted out of the flow of routine-generated 
sentences and linked to some human context - when "observed." We don't need the 
chimps with typewriters now - computers can do the random "typing" a lot faster
 - but it would still take an awful lot of very powerful processors a very long 
time, using the most scholarly programming based on Shakespeare's stylistic and 
narrative repertoire, to compose anything even remotely as good as the most 
mediocre Jacobean play. And randomly, it would still take forever.

The astute reader will object at this point that the analogy breaks down because 
language is a human artifact. That is, unlike the potential range of relations 
of physical constants in possible (or parallel) universes, all the elements of 
language are parts of a semiotic system and always have some meaning in relation 
to one another, even if only in the faintest connotative way. When Chomsky, 
famously, proposed the sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" as an 
example of the way grammatical rules can generate "meaningless" sentences, poets 
took this as a challenge and based poems on it. (Arguably, it was the very 
strenuousness of Chomsky's evident effort to be meaningless that made the 
sentence interesting, because he gave it at least two oxymorons - "colorless 
green" and "sleep furiously" - that are suggestive to the poetic mind. As a 
theoretical grammarian, Chomsky lacks a good grasp of connotative processes, 
which are not grammatical. For really low levels of meaning, try mid-level 
butt-covering bureaucratese or sub-Lacanian academic theory-babble.) There's 
still a problem, though. This is like saying that language can generate an 
infinity of universes with, say, stars in them. However, only a minority of 
these stars will acquire planets; and only a minority of these planets will 
engender living ecosystems; and only a minority of these ecosystems will produce 
self-aware intelligence. Combinations of words appear to give off a sparkle of 
"meaning," no matter how vague or tantalizing, because our brains have evolved 
in tandem with language. The semiotic impulse hardwired into the human neocortex 
and triggered by early language experience perpetually strives to assign meaning 
to any potential sign-system. But where the average density of meaning is thin, 
the mind tires after a while of seeking it (and, arguably, creating it), and 
turns to richer, more organized zones of signification - ones where the rifts, 
as Keats put it, are "loaded with ore."

To shift analogical ground: the language, with its dense web of connotative 
links, is itself like a vast virtual brain, to a version of which each of us has 
access. In this virtual brain, connotation forms the "axons" and "dendrites," 
the connective fibers, of word-neurons, while syntax makes up the coherent paths 
burned along these connections. Within patterns of connection in the language- 
brain, as in the biological brain, memories are stored. Since this virtual brain 
is very largely a copy or clone of the same one used by all other speaker- 
writers, the vast bulk of the memories held in the language-brain are not our 
own, but are the shared experience of countless people through generations, 
growing less specific and less consciously available the further back in time 
one reaches toward etymonic roots and grammatical origins. What's more, all 
these personal copies of the language-brain are in continual communication with 
many other current copies through daily social interaction as well as via the 
mass media - and in communication with earlier "editions" via reading, viewing 
old films, listening to old recordings, and so forth. Yet crucially shaping the 
personalization of each copy of the language-brain is its possessor's actual 
material and emotional life. This life, no matter how much it is shaped, like 
the language, by historical and social forces, is also unique and, however 
infinitesimally, is itself part of these forces and shapes the social and 
physical as well as the linguistic world. To paraphrase Marx: "People make their 
own meanings, but not with a language of their own choosing, rather, with a 
language given and transmitted from the past." Finally, it is the experiencing 
biological brain, the living body in the social timescape, that brings this 
virtual brain to life, maintains it moment to moment, thinks it and thinks with 
it.

In this thinking, when we write poetry, there is a necessary suspension, a 
"float," whereby we make space for the new and appropriate word or phrase to 
appear. This suspension is analogous, in my quantum-cosmological model, to the 
moment before the collapse of the wave function, when the photon goes one way or 
another as I observe it doing so. For purposes of the analogy, it doesn't matter 
whether I somehow unconsciously "choose" for the photon to go one way rather 
than another - or whether one "I" chooses to inhabit the universe in which the 
photon goes that way, while another "I," brought into being that moment, 
"chooses" the universe in which it goes the other way. Or - if we are loyal 
followers of Einstein, who hated to think that God plays dice - we could say 
that the universe chooses for me which way the photon will go. And it is a 
truism that in writing well, we often have the sensation of receiving words from 
a mysteriously familiar "elsewhere." This source may also feel like an 
"elsewhom," a power beyond our conscious control, but one with which we have 
entered, momentarily, into a covenant like the ones the Greeks often made 
between themselves and the gods. The basis of this covenant was the similarity 
between humans and gods, their common ancestry as children of Earth and Sky, 
Time and Space.

What, then, is the "universe," the bigger, smarter source that chooses the words 
for us? I would argue that it is a state of the language-brain conditioned by my 
consciousness, existing only in interaction with it. This is the covenant. So 
that what writes is neither "I," nor "language," but I-in-language, the self- 
process of experience and desire mapped onto the language-web, physical brain 
and virtual brain acting together. In this moment, biology fuses with society, 
history with Now, the many with the one. Because this is so, the writing has 
meaning. And the more closely my experiences and desires, perhaps unrecognized 
until this instant, are mapped by my attention onto the language-web, the more 
sharply my imagination reveals huge patterns of protosyntactic paths in that web 
lit up by those experiences and desires. The synapses, the spark-gaps, in these 
paths are the differences between my unique experiences and desires and the 
similar yet different experiences and desires, conditioned by the same large 
historical and biological forces but varying by circumstance, of many others. 
(Pierre Reverdy, famously quoted in the first Manifesto of Surrealism, says it 
this way: "The image . . . cannot be born from a comparison but from the 
juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more the relationship 
between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image 
will be - the greater its emotional power and poetic reality . . ." [my 
emphasis].) The more of these synapse-firings I perceive, the more meaning I-in- 
language make, reaching asymptotically toward infinite density. Connotative 
links at this point are not merely nonlinear; they achieve a complexity and 
infoldedness like that of the seven-dimensional space around the nucleus of an 
atom. If I have trained myself well, so that I can maintain that suspended, 
neutral, yet passionate focus, I can release at least some of those path- 
patterns via the nerves of my arm and hand onto the paper. "The clock ticks, the 
page is printed."

Attention is the key to this process, but imagination is the door. Seventy-some 
years ago, the psychologist Wolfgang Köhler showed in a famous series of 
experiments with chimpanzees that perception in large-brained animals does not 
proceed by linear accumulation of details and their logical linking, but by a 
nonlinear series of pattern-recognitions, within which details are configured 
into a meaningful whole. A chimp, for instance, confronted with a banana 
suspended about eight feet off the ground, a stool, and a stick, would not first 
try to grab the banana by himself. Instead, he would survey the situation, then 
move the stool directly beneath the banana, grab the stick, climb onto the 
stool, and use the stick to knock the banana down. Similarly, Jacques Cousteau 
showed how an octopus confronted with a stoppered clear glass jar containing a 
live lobster will first try once or twice to reach the lobster through the jar 
and probe the stopper with her tentacles; finding this ineffective, she will 
swim round and round the jar for some minutes, and then abruptly brace herself 
with some of her tentacles around the jar while she pulls off the stopper with 
the others. Rather than trying every possible action or combination of actions 
at random, both chimp and octopus, after an initial experiment or two, shape the 
"whole picture" in their minds and act on that. Köhler called these meaningful 
whole-pictures or perceptual configurations, gestalts, meaning forms or shapes. 
(The verb gestalten means to mold or give form to, thus making it a very close 
cognate of the Greek poiein, to make or shape - the etymon of "poetry.") If the 
somewhat overworked word "imagination" means anything, it means the power to 
perceive (create) these gestalts, in language as in our physical sensations, our 
emotions, our memories, our relationships with others. As Shelley says in A 
Defense of Poetry, imagination is "to poiein, the principle of synthesis."

A few years before Shelley wrote this, Coleridge in Biographia Literaria drew 
a distinction between imagination in this sense - "the modifying power in the 
highest sense of the word" - and what he called fancy. The eighteenth century 
had used the two terms synonymously, but Coleridge argued that fancy was a 
different faculty altogether. While Coleridge does not fill out what he means by 
fancy, he likens it to "delirium," by which was then meant a fevered state in 
which one makes verbal or pictorial associations that are purely personal or 
altogether random; whereas he likens imagination to "mania," which in his day 
was the term for paranoia, the construction of a parallel meaning-universe 
around one's own subjective experience. I want to suggest that fancy is the 
recognition of that tantalizing sparkle of near-meaning given off by unfamiliar, 
but still mostly one-dimensional, connotative links. I might call it the 
peripheral vision of the semiotic impulse, whereby suggestive shapes - sometimes 
real, sometimes illusive - are glimpsed. As such, it is one of the faculties 
whose functioning is necessarily synthesized, in the poetic moment, by 
imagination as Shelley and Coleridge mean the word. Writing dominated by fancy, 
however - by connotative chains which may or may not have much of an "objective 
correlative" in the mind of the reader - is like those universes where many 
stars glitter intriguingly, but where no planets have coalesced around them. 
Here no mind has evolved to link the stars in image and story or to analyze 
their spectra and chart their fiery anatomy as part of a cosmology, a mapping of
logos onto kosmos.

Fancy, roaming through the gigantic brain of language, can let the rules of 
syntax (and even prosody) play with the possibilities of connotation to make 
endless "interesting" texts or verses, as in the minor Metaphysicals that 
Coleridge uses as his exemplars, or as in minor surrealist or minor post- 
modernist writing. And at least these fanciful texts and verses are more amusing 
than the banal exercises in received emotion and received form produced by what 
Blake called "the Daughters of Memory," the muses of the generic workshop. But 
it is only when fancy is fused with deep experience by the simultaneous synaptic 
arc-flashes of similarity-difference, only when the pattern of these flashes is 
grasped by imagination, that poetry appears. Poiesis, in the deepest sense, is 
cosmology. Moment to moment, we imagine our way across the branching and joining 
of universes, telling the story of ourselves in the Language behind languages 
that Heidegger says is the same as Being. Poetry enacts that forest of journeys 
in the words we have. It is this poetic process, not raw combinative potential 
alone, that gives language its savor of the infinite, as it is we, living and 
finite in space and time, who animate its immensity into intelligence.