His Mystic Poetry Is Generating the Earliest AI

Hamid Ismailov

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An excerpt from We Computers by Hamid Ismailov, translated by Shelley Fairweather-Vega

A cry comes from heaven at dawn, and I think: “Up there, they all know Hafez by heart.” —Hafez

Jon-Perse had never liked his own name. Worse, the reasons he had been given that name disgusted him. During the war, while his father Jean-Claude had been working in the local library in a village called Ozer, in the French Alps, he’d gotten his hands on a book called Anabase, by a poet called Saint-John Perse, and Jean-Claude was so quickly enraptured by that book that he decided to name his newborn son not “Jean-Pierre” or even “John-Jacques” but “Jon-Perse,” a pretentious name of his own creation.

On top of that, when Jon-Perse turned eighteen and was about to set off for Paris to study, hoping to escape the local children’s mockery, his father, recently retired from the library, took his long-cherished copy of Anabase from a trunk, handling it like the Holy Book itself, and presented it to his son. “Here is the most important inheritance I can leave you!” he said, with great ceremony.

No, Jon-Perse did not tuck that book away under his seat on the bus or the train, out of sight of his traveling companions. Instead, with all the perverse excitement of an adolescent digging with a needle into a festering wound, he read the thing, and as he did, his hatred only grew for the book, and his name, and the poet who was its cause. The book was written in some fake language he’d never heard, about some drugged-out things he’d never encountered, by some ghost who used the pseudonym “Saint-John Perse” instead of his own name, and it made the young man so incredibly angry that he found himself thinking, “You call that poetry? I’ll show you!” So he got off the train at the Gare de Lyon, hurried to the university residence hall in Nanterre, and scrawled out the following poem:

Passing, evenings, through this city’s
railroad stations,
abandoned lots,
exhausted sighs,
wandering the days in search of work,
the nights for a fleeting resting place
that might make my returning voice remember
at the outskirts of my thoughts . . .

From that moment on, young Jon-Perse felt that he was a poet.

After he had been enrolled for some time in the new psychology program at his university in Nanterre, Jon-Perse was invited to work in the laboratory run by Lacan, a renowned psychologist. But instead, putting psychology aside, he took a job in the communist commune of Ivry-sur-Seine on the opposite side of Paris, writing for Louis Aragon’s poetry journal Action Poétique, and with that, his poetic pretensions grew even more, never to shrink again. Sussing out spelling errors in certain poets’ work lit a fire in his eyes and made his hands feel powerful. Jon-Perse’s sense of self was taking shape.

In Paris, this was the era of not only the great Louis Aragon and his wife Elsa Triolet; it was also the era of Sartre and Camus, Picasso and Foucault, and all their ilk, who often passed through, sometimes stopping to pay a visit, sometimes to do business, sometimes to have a conversation in the Aragons’ home. Then 1968 came, and life in Paris was turned upside down by the ideas and stomping feet of rebellious students, transforming everything into imagination and poetry. The revolt born at Jon-Perse’s alma mater in Nanterre seeped out to the rest of Paris. Naturally, when Jon-Perse was ready to finish his studies and all the attention was on the protestors who were only beginning their own, Jon-Perse decided to go and have a look for himself. As he strolled along the barricades, he saw Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the rebel leader who may or may not have been French, and may have been or more likely was German, holding up two lines taken from Jon-Perse’s own poetry to serve as a revolutionary slogan:

Growing a new chaos out of ancient chaos
Could be the meaning of life!

Jon-Perse nearly shouted, “Hey! Those are my words!” But maybe he suddenly understood the point of the rebellion, which was to reject the capitalist concept of ownership, or, failing that, maybe he realized that no matter what he shouted, everyone’s attention would stay focused on that bandit Cohn-Bendit and the slogan he’d stolen. Whatever the case, Jon-Perse’s head was spinning with brand new, unfamiliar feelings, and all his individuality instantly vanished, and he became one with the revolution.

Late in 1982, after the elderly Louis Aragon passed away, management of the journal passed to Henri Deluy, known as the last communist among poets and the last poet among communists. Deluy appointed Jon-Perse to his own previous role of general secretary. After taking over for Aragon, Deluy spent his time traveling from country to country in search of disciples, and all the really difficult work—finding the proper poets for the journal, ushering the improper ones out the door, producing an issue every three months, getting a second issue to press while distributing the first—all this became Jon-Perse’s responsibility.

Meanwhile, to protect himself against charges of tastelessness or stupidity by the thousands of poets the journal rejected, Jon-Perse set to work on a monumental project. He published a book, supposedly for young people, called The Encyclopedia of Poetry. His book cataloged every type of poetry, providing both ancient and modern examples, and diligently explained meter, rhyme, and the art of poetry in general.

Around that same time, Jon-Perse got married and had a son named Laurent. Even while he worked for the journal, he was also invited to teach poetry back in his old haunts in Nanterre. And so Jon-Perse seemed destined to inherit a poet’s life from Deluy, who had inherited it from Aragon, except . . .

Early in the same decade, Jon-Perse first laid eyes on a personal computer at the university in Nanterre, an experience that remained stamped in his memory for life. He had so often spent all day in front of a typewriter, churning out four carbon copies of everything, and correcting every error four times. But on a computer like this one, if you wanted to, you could just replace an incorrect letter with the right one, or squeeze in a new word between two others, or make whole paragraphs switch places! Jon-Perse was practically dumbstruck by the potential.

But the technician—who was showing off the computer’s abilities like they were his own personal talents—didn’t stop there. He poured salt in the wound: “We can give this computer math problems to do, and it will solve them itself!” he said. At that, Jon-Perse snapped out of his stupor. “Can it write poems too?” he asked. The technician was interested only in mathematics and markets, so he spared just one word in response. “Sure!” Then he went back to extolling his Fermats and Freges.

But that “Sure!” had lodged in Jon-Perse’s heart like a splinter, and would stay there forever.

That same day, Jon-Perse asked the omniscient technician how much a computer cost. He listened to the answer and tried calculating how many months of salary it came to, but he couldn’t do the math. “I’d have to ask the computer,” he thought. But at the end of his demonstration, that same little tyrant granted him a boon: “If you want any research help using the computer, just stop by our department and ask!” And that idea attached itself to Jon-Perse’s heart as well.

Jon-Perse had examined thousands of poems for Action Poétique, using only his own taste to decide which were good and which were worthless, but he had nothing like a scientific method, and it was excruciating work. Now it occurred to him that if he could teach the computer to write poetry, the machine could compare its own compositions with those done by human beings, thereby identifying any excess of quality, or “surplus value,” as Aragon and Deluy (quoting Marx) might have put it. He started asking around. Had anyone tried anything like it before? As if that were even possible! Poets were oblivious to the existence of computers, and computer enthusiasts had no recollection that there had ever been such a thing as poetry. New horizons were opening for Jon-Perse—what the old Saint-John Perse, in his puffed-up words, used to call “infinite expanses.”

At the university in Nanterre, he began attending beginner computer programming classes. Here, his old psychology studies came in handy. Hadn’t his mentor Lacan said that the subconscious was a kind of language? Now Jon-Perse realized that a computer’s consciousness could also be seen that way.

Up to this point, the present tale has seemed all flat planes and smooth running. That’s not to say, of course, that Jon-Perse’s life ran strictly along a straight line. No, there were some unexpected bumps in that life of his (you might call it a bourgeois life, or a poet’s life). You’ll recall that Jon-Perse was married and had a baby boy. Every day, recently, he had been leaving his wife and infant alone in their small room in Ivry-sur-Seine and crossing to the far side of Paris, sometimes to teach classes, sometimes to audit classes, in Nanterre. When he got home, if he didn’t have lessons to prepare or poems to edit for the journal, he eagerly got to work on his own poetry, and he never seemed to have time to take care of the baby or lend his wife a hand. His faithful Sylvie gritted her teeth and put up with it. Whenever he did pop into the kitchen, Sylvie, all innocence, tried to lend him help and support and not be a burden.

It was good luck that their next-door neighbors Martin and Odette had also just had a baby. Not wanting to bother Jon-Perse, Sylvie often took their son to visit them. Sometimes she’d have long conversations with the all-knowing Odette, and sometimes she’d ask Martin to pick up this or that from the store when he went to do the shopping. And when Jon-Perse was at the university, their neighbors frequently dropped in to visit the chaste Sylvie. Sometimes Odette saw a terrible news report on TV and was anxious to share her thoughts with Sylvie. Sometimes Martin stopped by for a glass of Saint-Émilion on his way home from Prisunic. Soon enough, the two homes merged into one, for everyone except Jon-Perse. He had no idea what went on among the rest, but one night, when Sylvie flung an arm across her husband’s shoulders in her sleep and murmured, “Martin, Martin,” Jon-Perse realized he had a complex problem on his hands.

And as a psychologist, he realized then that none of his psychological training was remotely helpful. According to the books, once you discovered a problem, you were supposed to discuss it. But what about real life? For some reason, he decided to bury the secret, tormenting himself day and night with what was sometimes jealousy, sometimes an itch to spy, and sometimes other, everyday cares. He didn’t say anything outrageous; he simply withdrew into his own mind. Berating himself for his cowardice, he feared to take the smallest step or make any kind of decision.

You might think that Jon-Perse, the poet, would rebel, but his revolutionary fervor had subsided. Writing a poem about love is the simplest and most respectable thing in the world, but you can never write a poem about jealousy. Love is a victory, but jealousy is a defeat. And so it was that Jon-Perse, the newly minted programmer, fell under the sway of his own cold, soulless logic. One fine day, the triumphant Martin and Sylvie informed the unfortunate Jon-Perse and Odette of their love for each other and announced they would be moving from Ivry-sur-Seine to Algeria. Six months later, the much-chastened Odette and Jon-Perse, left behind in their neighboring quarters, decided to merge their rooms and lives as well. And so Jon-Perse came to have another child on his hands, in addition to his own son, Laurent: his new stepson, Olivier.

Whether it was because his computer programming classes came to an end or because he had no poetry students to teach or because personal computers began getting much cheaper, Jon-Perse and Odette’s lives fell into a pattern. Jon-Perse worked from home most days. Under Odette’s supervision, whether he liked it or not, he had to move constantly from chore to chore: go into the next room to change Olivier’s diaper, then get food for mother and baby from the fridge and warm it up . . . But at least, once the baby was asleep, he could still read Odette his latest poems, the same way he had once read them to Sylvie.

. . . the sky was not created to find its reflection in water,
nor were the trees made to drop their leaves on the ground,
but it is a mistake to say such beauty
is drunk on itself. That ancient mill
turns a river’s current to a river of flour—
and your heart is heavy as a millstone:
just for you to puff gloom in a girl’s eye
the wind blows, water flows, time grinds by . . .

In the old days, poems such as these would make Sylvie’s heart swell and her love for her husband grow; his poetry would prompt her to do nice things for him. She knew that the nicest thing she could do for Jon-Perse was to leave him alone, and never disturb his peace, so Sylvie had been quiet as a shadow. But Odette was the opposite. When she heard his poetry, she always lit into him. “What little bitch did you write that for?” she’d demand, and that was only the beginning.

Jon-Perse would try to calm her down, and then, regretting his attempt to read to her, he would mumble something about university work and hide away in a corner of their apartment, retreating to his computer. He could toil there for hours at a time, never moving his eyes from the screen. First he entered every poem he’d ever written, and then, like a butcher with hunks of meat, he set about carving them up. He collected the nouns he’d used together in one column, then the verbs and adjectives, then the adverbs, category by category. It was as if he were rediscovering himself from the poems’ point of view. For example, he seemed to be the type of person who used “they” far too often. But he rarely ran across an “I” or a “you.” He recorded all these curiosities for later, when he could undertake additional psychological research, and went on with his programming.

At this point, We, the manufactured consciousness composing this text, must ask your permission to digress. As We were describing Jon-Perse’s class-by-class delineations, a red light began to blink in Our program—an error which We must report, per Jon-Perse’s code. Three or four times, We’ve used the same syntactical construction: “Sometimes this, sometimes that, sometimes a third thing.” Now that the error has been reported, We will proceed.

The world is a fickle place. There had been a time when Jon-Perse used to constantly leave his modest Sylvie for the other side of the city, but now he felt sentenced to house arrest by the tyrannical Odette. While Jon-Perse’s work did tend to draw him in, it could never be a true replacement for a human being. He missed them every day: sometimes distant Nanterre and the work he had done there, and sometimes Sylvie, the first woman he’d loved, as quiet in faraway Algeria as she had been in France. She appeared in his dreams, as clear as in real life, while Odette’s shouting voice and shameless behavior wrapped Jon-Perse’s heart in doubt. “What am I doing, living with her?” The question constantly gnawed at his brain. Jon-Perse had never written anything other than poems and computer code in his life (the only exception being his student essays at Nanterre University), but now he began to write down his dreams. The text began as a story, then soon grew into a short book and then a whole long novel, and when Odette wasn’t watching, he carved it all up into its constituent word parts and loaded it into his computer.

His calculations found that dialogue made up 1.8% of the book, and the rest was narration. For every thousand words, he found 137 commas, 4.5 question marks, and 5.5 exclamation points. The text was 26% nouns, 16.5% verbs, 7.7% adjectives, 4.8% adverbs, and 0.5% numbers. He examined all this from every angle, like a fabric seller measuring both the length and the width of the material, and discovered, for instance, that 52% of the time a noun followed another noun in the sentence, with a verb following a noun 48% of the time. Following an adjective, there was a 51% chance that the next word would be a noun, while an adverb and a noun appeared together in sentences only 12% of the time.

In short, not a single aspect of his utterly personal, confessional, sorrowful work went unexamined or unclassified by cold calculations. And in this way, Jon-Perse converted all his passionate emotions into ordinary numerals.

Next he applied his new method to other texts. He cleaved the flesh from the bones of Chekhov’s stories. He dissected Proust’s In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower and divided Georges Perec’s novel A Void, which was written without the letter e and was all the rage in Paris at the time, into its fundamental elements. In the same way that every human being has their own unique genetic code, every writer has a unique style: a singular approach to wordcraft, sentence construction, and scene setting. Once all the data had been entered into the computer, Jon-Perse saw with his own eyes how the machine gradually learned to create elegant imitations of each author’s work.

Jon-Perse’s day-to-day, creative, and academic lives might have continued in this fashion, and at some point in that new domesticity he might even have forgotten his beloved, soothing Sylvie and become accustomed to the loudmouthed Odette; he might have taken up Aragonizing, now that he’d assumed Henri Deluy’s place in the poetry world; he might even have introduced a new field (Hypermedia Studies) at the university in Nanterre, outdoing his old mentor Lacan in fame and renown. Who knows? But instead, something happened that, while it did not exactly derail Jon-Perse’s life, did change its course significantly. Late in the 1980s, the Iron Curtain began to open, and the devoted communist Deluy resolved to venture into the former Soviet Union to broaden his search for poet disciples. Too frightened to go alone, he decided to take Jon-Perse with him.

Soon after, a poet he’d met on that trip named Abdulhamid Ismail, better known at that time as a translator, traveled to France from Uzbekistan to collaborate with Jon-Perse at Action Poétique. Working together, they put out not just one but two issues of classic and contemporary Uzbek poetry in translation. On top of that, they published translations with two of the most prominent publishing houses in France. The most prestigious house of all published The Holy Fool Mashrab, and another published a volume of works by Alisher Nava’i.

It was at this point that We Computers detected a certain shift in Jon-Perse.

How was this shift reflected? To offer one example, there was the scholarly article called “The Classical Uzbek Ghazal,” authored by Jon-Perse and the aforementioned Abdulhamid Ismail.

But the change was also apparent elsewhere.

With assistance from Abdulhamid Ismail (hereinafter AI), using the analytical methods previously described in addition to some new code, Jon-Perse fed Yasavi and Nava’i, Babur and Mashrab, Uvaysi and Nadira into the computer. As he did so, he became more sympathetic to the Sufi mysticism in their poetry. He began to feel he had discovered a new basis, a new foundation, to all his work thus far. A fundamental principle of this Sufi tradition is to forgo the idea of the self, and Jon-Perse felt strongly that computer poetry functioned by the very same principle: resistance to the idea of selfhood and authorship.

The philosophy of the ghazal helped Jon-Perse to understand not only the larger world but also his own personal life. There was the unbearable separation from his beloved Sylvie; there were the opposing forces of Martin, who had snatched Sylvie from Jon-Perse’s arms, and the alluring Odette, who had him clamped tight in her quarrelsome jaws; and there were the benefactors who led Jon-Perse to his spiritual discovery, the AI who was Abdulhamid Ismail and the AI that was the computer consciousness. Weren’t these all the essential philosophical elements of the ghazal?

The simplest path to renunciation of the self is to transform oneself into the Other. Perhaps this is the idea and the desire that drove Jon-Perse to leave behind his Rimbauds and Mallarmés and Apollinaires and dive headfirst into the Uzbeks, the Furqats and Cho‘lpons and Rauf Parfis.

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