6 minute read assuming 200 WPM
As a software engineer, I’ve gotten used to describing things precisely. Specifically, programming involves describing a process so meticulously that even a computer can understand it. I’m given some behavior that I need to tell the computer to do, and I write a step by step sequence of instructions that the computer is able to execute.
If that sounds dry, it’s because it is. And yet, I do it for a living, and I enjoy it thoroughly. What gives?
Natural language (what I’m writing in now) is an extremely useful tool for the conveyance of information and the explanation and exploration of ideas. Through language, we are able to speak with one another and come to an agreement about a legal contract, whose turn it is to do the laundry, or whether or not God exists. We can fight in twitter wars, or call our neighbors something so foul that their blood turns cold. Language can create, and language can destroy.
But predominantly, in day to day life, we think of language as a way to communicate information.
I write this essay. You read this essay. Your brain processes the information on the page and forms an opinion based on the content of the essay. I have written a program, dry, but with so many words, for your brain to interpret, execute, and respond.
If that sounds dry, it’s because it is.
I would like you to perform an exercise. Look at whatever it is you’re sitting or standing on, and describe it.
Done? Good. Consider whether you could describe it well enough that someone on the other end of the phone would be able to have a reasonable idea of what that thing looked and felt like. Chances are, you could.
But now I want you to imagine something else. Imagine you’re tasting your favorite food.
Now, try to describe that feeling.
If you’re anything like me, you can’t. And yet, this sensation is one of the most common, pleasurable, and fulfilling feelings there is. How can this be?
And even if I could describe it – “warm, cozy, home” – would you feel that feeling? Would you know what it is for me to truly taste my favorite meal?
Poetry is the taste of language, and it’s meant to be that way. As soon as you see the structure of a poem, lines spaced unevenly, a Jenga tower of words on the page, you know that what you are about to read is not a sequence of instructions. What you are about to read is a journey, designed to take you from Point A to Point B, where Point B is uncharted territory, off the Feelings Grid of labels and “hungry” and “sad” and “sorry”, but instead on an island, where you find yourself without having ever taken a single step. And on the first attempt to describe the island, it will vanish. Others can only find it by following their own journey through the words, and they cannot know where those words will take them until the path has been made their own.
A quick google search tells me that “sublime” is thought to come from the Latin “limen” meaning threshold. Poetry can take you across the threshold – but in order to explain what’s beyond it, you have to cross back.
And yet, it seems unlikely to me that if so few words can take you to a place beyond the threshold, that there’s not something more than ordinary communication of information happening when we talk to one another. As keen as we are to consider ourselves master manipulators of concepts and symbols, high minded and full of reason, able to burn anyone on Facebook by pointing out their logical fallacy when talking about Trump or the liberal media, I think it’s likely that what’s really happening when your face turns purple reading your cousin’s latest tweet is more akin to poetry than it is to programming. And yet we continue to swat each other around with words, knocking them back and forth like a puck on an air hockey table, with the puck always floating just above the surface. It never quite touches the table.
Similar to poetry, when an advertisement comes onto the screen or is pasted onto a billboard, we are quick to dismiss our worship of the primacy of words and symbols and reason. We’re taught that when looking at an advertisement, there is more going on beneath the words, and we must look past them and their literal meaning, onto what they are telling us – the subliminal messaging. It is no coincidence that subliminal and sublime have the same root.
For most of my life I’ve considered myself a scientifically-minded person, and I would still say that that is true today. Sure, I’ve written poems and music, but I have always idealized logic as king. And it is true that logic provides an excellent framework for the development and criticism of ideas. But in a way, logic and science can form a trap that’s very hard to extract yourself from.
The trap that science and logic can form is the trap of thinking that you understand something fully.
It’s the trap of thinking that you can use them to explain everything.
It’s the trap of thinking that logic is really the way that humans make decisions. If you’ve ever written up a list of pros and cons for an important decision you’ve had to make, trying desperately to force the decision into some formula, you know that this isn’t the case. A right decision isn’t a program you write. It’s poetry that you read.
I described the consumption of poetry as a journey, but said nothing of its production. The job of the poet is to dive beneath the threshold, feel out the twists and turns of the eddies in their bodies, flesh out the flowing currents as words, and produce on the page some small sequence of characters in the hope that the form they’ve created could reproduce the swirling depths in which they once swam. In a sense, a poem is not written – it is read.
It just doesn’t start out as words.
It’s true that a program is a sequence of steps that the computer can consume and execute. But a given program is only one of many that would accomplish the same task. As a programmer, my job is not the dry one of typing out a mechanical set of instructions, but rather one of searching the space of all possible programs to find the one whose structure fits the most elegant form. It’s a process of sifting through this and that structure until I find the one that feels right all the way down to my bones. And hopefully, if I listen well enough, others turn out to feel this way too.
But inevitably, and probably frequently, I will miss the mark, and others will read the code I write and curse it and send messages to their coworkers about how awful it is, and why didn’t I just do this, or that?
And inevitably, I will argue with someone with differing political views, and I will hear the words they are saying and I will swat at them with my own words and I will only serve to increase the division between us.
But perhaps, sometimes, I will be able to listen with open ears, looking below the threshold, and instead of attacking their information, I will listen to their poetry. And if I can listen to theirs carefully enough, perhaps I will be able to hear my own poetry, too.
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