By what route is the soul or history or society or the subconscious transformed into a series of black lines on a white page?

Italo Calvino

Every morning and evening I draw a picture of my hand. It only takes a few minutes. I look at my hand, try out a few different positions, settle on one, and then try my best to render it on the page. I’m not a great artist and it is probably too late to become an even halfway capable illustrator. There is something about my lines that just feels amateurish. I know people who draw with much greater confidence and whose drawings look like there is a real “causal” relationship with the things they depict. It’s like they are able to project their visual image onto the page and then simply trace it. It’s like the light from the object that hits their eye somehow directly impacts the page.

That’s not how it works, of course. Or, at least, I assume that’s not how it works. Artists learn to draw like the rest of us by looking at the world and training their hands to make lines that we all recognize as pictures of it — two dimensional shapes on a plane that indicate three dimensional objects in space.

In his lecture, “Cybernetics and Ghosts,” from 1967, which I had hoped to write much more about last week, Italo Calvino describes his struggle with writing in similar terms. “Literature as I knew it was a constant series of attempts to get one word to stay put after another,” he tells us. Notice that this removes a dimension from my description of the problem of drawing. In fact, writing is more difficult (if it is) than drawing because it is usually an attempt to render a four-dimensional object (a story unfolding in time) along a one-dimensional line (one word after another). The artist only has to flatten the object once; the writer has to do it three times, transforming the breadth, the depth, and the duration, of an experience into a sentence. Then again, perhaps both operations are infinite in their scope. As Calvino suggests, whatever lines we choose to draw or write, we’re putting our eternal soul on the ephemeral page.

I’m going to have to leave it there for a while. The semester is beginning and I have to turn my attention to teaching students how to write paragraphs about the things they learn. I have to teach them to appreciate the finitude of the problem, get them to see the limits of the page as a friend, help them to use it to get the words to stay put.

See also: , “One-Dimensional Prose”, “The Two-Dimensional Page”, “The Three-Dimensional Book”, “The Fourth Dimension”

Last summer, Mike Sharples drew my attention to a lecture that Italo Calvino toured Italy with in 1967, reprinted as “Cybernetics and Ghosts” in the Vintage collection The Literature Machine. It presents a puzzling and somewhat disturbing argument. But the other day I was rereading it and think I discovered a key to unlocking its meaning and dispelling some of my concerns.

First, let’s quickly summarize the concerns. Calvino takes his cue from the meeting of theoretical and technological developments that must have appeared quite exciting at the time, although the excitement, which I suppose I was literally born into only four years after Calvino’s lecture, had always, or at least until last summer, seemed to me a little overblown. Simplifying somewhat, he asks us to imagine the consequences of feeding our structuralist and formalist theories of language and literature into a sophisticated computer — indeed, a computer whose sophistication can be seen simply as an extrapolation from Raymond Queneau’s “rudimentary model of a machine for making sonnets,” which I have myself suggested is a good model for thinking about large language models.

Having laid down these procedures and entrusted a computer with the task of carrying out these operations, will we have a machine capable of replacing the poet and the author? Just as we already have machines that can read, machines that perform a linguistic analysis of literary texts, machines that make translations and summaries, will we also have machines capable of conceiving and composing poems and novels? (12)

His answer to this question seems at first to be yes. He even welcomes the prospect. Like Barthes, Calvino imagines a time when “the author vanishes — that spoiled child of ignorance — to give place to a more thoughtful person who will know that the author is a machine, and will know how this machine works” (16). Of course, he was able to say this at a time when this situation was still a long way off. In fact, I don’t think the machines he mentions — machines that can read, analyze, translate, and summarize literary texts — existed in 1967 as he claims. There is no question that they do today, except there is one thing: it is not clear that knowing how a large language model works tells us very much about how that “spoiled child of ignorance” works. Maybe authors aren’t machines after all?

I’m not doing any of these ideas justice because I’m in a rush to get to the passage that suddenly made me realize that Calvino wasn’t being entirely serious.

Literature is a combinatorial game that pursues the possibilities implicit in its own material, independent of the personality of the poet, but it is a game that at a certain point is invested with an unexpected meaning, a meaning that is not patent on the linguistic plane on which we were working but has slipped in from another level, activating something that on that second level is of great concern to the author or his society. The literature machine can perform all the permutations possible on a given material, but the poetic result will be the particular effect of one of the permutations on a man endowed with a consciousness and an unconscious, that is, an empirical and historical man. It will be the shock that occurs only if the writing machine is surrounded by the hidden ghosts of the individual and of his society. (22)

There’s a lot to work with here. And I’m going to try to pick up the threads on Wednesday and Friday again. As I’ve mentioned many times before, already before Calvino’s lecture (and I’m sure Calvino was aware of it) Borges had rejected the idea that literature is a “combinatorial game”: “Those who play that game forget that a book is more than a verbal structure, or a series of verbal structures; a book is the dialogue with the reader, and the peculiar accent he gives to its voice, and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory.” In this passage, Calvino seems to be making the same point. Literature needs a soul. I’d argue that all writing does.

I’m one of those people who thinks that “artificial intelligence” is a misnomer. So is “machine learning” and, I hasten to admit, I sometimes extend this line of criticism all the way to such familiar things as “computer memory” and “programming language”. That is, I’m a bit of a kook. It is my deep conviction that computers can’t think, speak, or remember, and I don’t just mean that they can’t do it like we do it; I mean they can’t do it at all. There is no literal sense in which a machine can learn and, if we are to take it figuratively, the metaphor is stone dead. Much of the discourse about the impending rise of artificial general intelligence these days sounds to me like people earnestly claiming that, since they have “legs”, surely tables are soon going to walk. We have not, if you’ll pardon it, taken the first step towards machines that can think.

To fully appreciate my seriousness on this point, let me try to persuade you that pocket calculators can’t do math either. They have a long and very interesting history and, until I looked into it, I didn’t realize that it was actually Blaise Pascal who invented the mechanical adding machine – the Pascaline — in 1642. But, before this, there was always the abacus, and before this there was the root of the word “calculus”, namely, “chalk,” or the small limestone pebbles that were used as counters and eventually become the beads on the wires of counting frames. Interestingly, the word “abacus” originally denoted a writing surface of sand that was also used to do calculations. In any case, I hope you will immediately agree that a pile of pebbles or a string of beads can’t “do math”. A paper bag that you put two apples into and then another two is not capable of addition just because there are, in fact, four apples in the bag when you look.

Is it such a leap from this to the electronic calculator? Do we have to imbue it with “intelligence” of any kind to make sense of it? Some will point out that calculators use numbers and operators in their symbolic form as input and output. You type “2 +2 =” and you get “4” back. But suppose you have an ordinary kitchen scale and a bunch of labelled standard weights. Surely you can get it to “add up” the weights for you? Or you can imagine a plumbing system that moves quantities of water in and out of tanks, marked off with rulers so that the quantities are made explicit. Whether these systems are manual, hydraulic, mechanical, or electronic doesn’t change the fact that these are just physical processes that, properly labelled, give us an output that we humans can make sense of.

That’s all very well, you might say, but have I tried ChatGPT? How do I explain the perfectly intelligible output it produces daily? Here’s my take: it articulates words, like a calculator calculates numbers. To calculate is basically just to “keep count”. To articulate is just to “join up”. A machine that is capable of keeping count is no more intelligent than a paper bag, nor is a machine that is capable of joining words together. Imagine you have three bags, numbered 1, 2, 3. In bag number 1 there are slips of paper with names on them: “Thomas”, “Zahra”, “Sami”, “Linda”. In bag number 2 there are phrases like “is a”, “wants to be a”, “was once a”, and so forth. In bag number 3, there are the names of professions: “doctor”, “carpenter”, “lawyer”, “teacher”, etc. You can probably see where this is going. To operate this “machine”, you pull a slip of paper out of each bag and arrange them 1-2-3 in order. You’ll always get a string of words that “make sense”. Can this arrangement of three bags write? Of course not!

In a famous essay, Borges credits Ramon Llull with the invention of a “thinking machine” that works much like this. Or, rather, doesn’t work: it is not “capable of thinking a single thought, however rudimentary or fallacious.” Llull’s device (or at least the device that Borges imagined based on Llull’s writings) consisted of a series of discs that allowed the operator to combine (or “correlate”) agents, patients, acts. (I wonder if this is where the “robot rights” people got the idea of distinguishing between the moral “agency” and “patiency” of subjects.) “Measured against its objective, judged by its inventor’s illustrious goal,” Borges tells us, “the thinking machine does not work,” but, like all metaphysical systems, he also points out, its “public and well-known futility does not diminish [its] interest.”

The machinery has become a lot more complicated since Pascal and Llull. But I want to insist that it has not become more mysterious and, by the same token, not more intelligent. That is, we don’t need a “ghost in the machine” to explain how the prompt we give to a language model spurs it to produce an output that, on the face of it, “makes sense”. Just as the calculator has no “understanding” of numbers or quantities or the mathematical operations it carries out, so, too, does ChatGPT have no conception of what the prose it generates means. All it does is to convert a text into a string of numbers, those numbers into vectors in a hundred-dimensional space, in which it then locates the nearest points and, from these, chooses one of them at somewhat random (depending on the “temperature”). It converts the result (which is just a number) back into a word or part of a word (by looking it up in a table) and adds this to the string it is building. It repeats the process to find the next word. If “artificial intelligence” is a misnomer, what would I call these machines? They are electronic articulators.

I doubt this will catch on. In 1971, the year I was born, Sharp marketed its EL-8 calculator as “a really fast thinker” and I remember, ten years later, my elementary school principal announced that a computer (an Apple II+) would “moving in”. It was all very exciting.

“Your daddy’s rich
And your ma’ is good looking…”

I encourage scholars and students to work on their writing in a deliberate and disciplined fashion 32 weeks out of the year — 16 in the fall and 16 in the spring, each divided by a one-week break into two stretches of 8. This leaves 5 weeks in the winter 13 weeks in the summer for more impulsive and improvised pursuits. The winter includes some time off for Christmas and, if you’re like me, indulging your melancholy disposition. In Denmark, it’s customary to take a three-week summer vacation, so that leaves 10 weeks to work in a less rigorous key. I won’t pretend to know how students should spend their summers, but, for scholars, some of that time is usually devoted to exams and conferences anyway. So it all usually works out pretty well. By mid-August, they return, hopefully refreshed, to the discipline of composing paragraphs, one at a time, about things they know for peers they respect.

We’re two weeks into summer here. The other day on Twitter, I stumbled on an apposite exchange between two poets. “Many things are very hard but nothing is hard the way writing is hard,” said Lindsay Turner. “Kenneth Koch was very fond of Valéry Larbaud’s line about facilité,” replied Jordan Davis. This piqued my interest (and Henry Gould’s) and we set about trying to locate the source. I soon found Koch’s remark: the transcript of a 1993 talk her held at the Center for Imaginative Writing of the Teachers & Writers Collaborative.

It really is true about Whitman what the French writer Valery Larbaud said, that the main thing that Whitman showed to twentieth-century American poets was that greatness in poetry can come not from difficulties overcome but from — and this is better in French, facilités trouvée — easinesses found.

 Kenneth Koch, Teachers & Writers Magazine (1994, Vol. 25, No. 4)

Well, that was certainly interesting for me to hear, having just written written two posts about the “measured little difficulties” we call paragraphs! “I’m not here to make writing easy,” I had tweeted almost exactly a year ago, “but I may be able to help you locate the difficulty.” And the difficulty is always the difficulty your reader faces in trying to believe, understand, or agree with you. Lindsay Turner is right that there’s no difficulty quite like supporting, elaborating, or defending a claim in writing. But was Kenneth Koch (and is Jordan Davis?) right to counter that we sometimes do better to find writing easy than to face it as something hard? The idea is certainly worth exploring.

Ezra Pound used to say that a poem is the “record of a struggle”, and his own Cantos can rightly be called an epic struggle with his material. (Some would argue it was also a failure of epic proportions, a tragedy of literature.) Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, on the view we’re exploring, would be more like the record of loafing in an orchard, picking low-hanging fruit from the trees. In one sense there is no contradiction here. A teacher, and certainly a coach, is always helping you find the difficulty so that you can master it in a general way, making it at least look easy when you do it from then on. Could I not argue that my approach is, basically, to pick the ripe, low-hanging fruit every day? Choose paragraphs to write that are well within your ability. Choose your subject and your reader wisely so that the problem is not one of knowing what you’re talking about, nor who you are talking to, but simply that of saying it as clearly as possible. You don’t want your difficulty to be that of knowing the material, just the difficulty of presenting it.

Let’s resolve this summer to take it easy! That is, instead of writing the paper you think you have have to write, instead of “getting things done”, go after those facilités trouvées that Larbaud was talking about. Just pick something you know very well and a reader whose company you enjoy, and write freely and easily exactly what you think, in your own voice. In the morning, rise up singing, spread your wings, and take to the sky. In the moment of writing, there’s nothing that can harm you.

An 8000-word paper in the social sciences consists of about forty paragraphs. With a few exceptions, each paragraph supports, elaborates, or defends a claim that the writer presumably thinks is true. The claim poses a particular difficulty for the reader — it may be hard to believe, hard to understand, or hard to agree with — and the paragraph helps the reader overcome this difficulty. The reader may be provided with evidence to foster belief, illustration to clarify meaning, or arguments to address objections. Since a paragraph consists of no more than two-hundred words, it must accomplish its task in less than a minute of the reader’s attention. A paper occasions forty such difficulties and equips the reader to face them. It takes less than hour to read.

Since it takes 27 minutes to write a paragraph, a paper can be written — once — in 20 hours. Working 2 hours a day, taking three-minute breaks between paragraphs, a paper can be written in two weeks. You can even take the weekends off. At the end of each day, decide what four paragraphs you will write tomorrow, assigning a key sentence and a half hour to each; at the beginning of the next, pose each difficulty and compose each paragraph in 27 minutes. Then get on with your day. You probably have other things to think about too, but you can take an hour or two in the afternoon to reflect on the larger structure of your paper and your line of argument. The important thing is to make a decision, when your working day is coming to a close, about what paragraphs you will write tomorrow. Whatever you’ve been struggling with, you need to pick four things you know are true to write about in the morning.

Remember that 27 minutes is 27 times longer than the reader has to read your paragraph. Use the time to make the text as easy to read as you can. A paper consists of forty little difficulties, not one huge impossibility, and it is your job as a writer to cut the reader’s work out for them. Take your time, choose the right words and put them in the right order. Be conscious of the effect you are trying to have on the reader. What experience are you trying to get the reader to have? What claim should the reader feel is being supported, elaborated, or defended?

You can get an overview of these experiences by making an outline that simply lists the key-sentences. A good paper will make sense at that level; that is, if you read your key sentences one after the other, without the rest of their paragraphs, you argument should make sense but, of course, lack a certain persuasiveness. Just looking at the key sentences, however, you should feel that you know they are true, and you should even be able to call to mind your reasons for thinking so. Also, with your reader in mind, each of the key sentences should represent a difficulty to overcome: will the reader need help believing, understanding, or agreeing with it? This difficulty is the occasion you will rise to on each half page of your paper.