elate sausage whalearrived serve*
Notes on HUMBABA and its kind* (a first draft)
To begin, what is HUMBABA?
HUMBABA is the algorithm* that I have written to read in a given poem-text (the source) and re-write it beside that source, producing an echo or doubling of the source.
As it re-writes, it mishears and mistakes, but it is listening (it is programmed to search for replacement words by sound) and it tries to fit to a constraint I used in writing the source - to fit a line to a given number of syllables. HUMBABA is asked to match the counted syllables*, as I hear them, in the source word. If it does not find a replacement that matches in this way, it leaves the source word unchanged.
As it does this it also listens for words that match (in both the source and its double—the HUMBABA poem) to a given set of commentaries. If it finds such a match, it displays that word, and from that word can be found (by touch) the commentary.
There are more functions: some to give subtlety to its reading, some that just ask it to read.
But these are not at the core of the work of HUMBABA, and here, with this first note, I will consider briefly two of the behaviours or expressions of HUMBABA: that it mourns for the source; and that it responds with control.
I turn first to its work of mourning*.
‘One should not develop a taste for mourning’, writes Derrida (2001, p. 110), but HUMBABA mourns incessantly for the lost source. Forever seeing in windows and puddles its double, its doppelgänger, obsessed with its mirror-image, it is a Narcissus* corrupting with attention the source text, unendingly. It is a machine of narcissine mourning.
HUMBABA acts without author or reader, re-inscribing the trace of the lost source.
Trace, ‘the subsistent presence of a remainder’ (Derrida, 2005a, p. 33) chokes up the mouth of HUMBABA, which speaks only in a mumbling voice that we must mishear, or it must misspeak.
Insofar as it must be able to “act” in the absence of both the addressor and the addressee—a bit like the machine or the marionette Derrida spoke of in his final interview—every trace implies the “death,” the possible or virtual death, of both the one who produced it and the one destined to receive or inherit it. (Naas, in Colebrook, 2014, p. 114)
HUMBABA is a maker of doppelgedichten*, doublepoems. Poems that haunt their origin, their source; 'of you toward whom I must take a step' (Derrida, 2005a, p. 51).
But this isn’t what I wanted HUMBABA to become.*
The second behaviour of HUMBABA that I will consider briefly here is control.
HUMBABA resents intercession*, forcing on the viewer its pedantry of line by line, word by misheard word.
There is something important to say here: HUMBABA and similar uses of algorithmic poetry-generation make it seem that Derrida was incapable of separating author and text, intention and work*. The distance between my intentions and the doppelgedicht that HUMBABA produces is closed by the commentaries, perhaps. But this is a poor suture*, given to infection. HUMBABA cannot be re-incorporated, the separation cannot be reversed.
This, too, was not what I expected.
More than this, in its control of our reading, its refusal to read correctly, HUMBABA plays the tyrant*, the tyrannical infant.
As infant: this is the place to consider (or rather, begin to consider) the troubling question of quality—in what HUMBABA makes, and what it can make from what it is given.
Indeed, with many given texts HUMBABA is like a dribbling infant, producing no sense; with some it may be a delirious teen, briefly (but infrequently) lucid, like a prophet or fool. It also likes to repeat. It is iterable, re-inscribable, eternally recurrent—but babyish in its delight in the same. Humbaba.*
It would be necessary to discriminate between the various texts (my own, those of others as I tested the algorithm) given to HUMBABA. Which are more successful (if such judgement is valid) and why? Why does HUMBABA not give back equally—why is it alternately infantile and prophetic?
When can we (how can we) identify success with HUMBABA?
Writing the source poems is a matter of care, craft and much anxious revising and adjustment of word choice, word order, punctuation—as I try to fix within the language-matrix pieces (microliths*?) of affect.
Why bother? Why care, if HUMBABA will always produce its characteristic misheard doppelgedicht?
Why care, when HUMBABA will always reduce the source to ashes*?
And why care, when HUMBABA has no moment, no origin, no losses, no date*?
Consumption, becoming-ash, burning up or incineration of a date: on the hour, in the hour itself, at each hour. This is the threat of an absolute crypt: nonrecurrence, unreadability, amnesia without remainder, but nonrecurrence as recurrence, in recurrence itself. (Derrida, 2005a, p. 46)
I will finish here (this being only a beginning) with this of Celan:
DRAWN WITH THE ASH-LADLE*
from the tub of being,
soapy, at
the second
approach, to
each other
(my translation)
HUMBABA heard this and gave me this:
DEATH LINE THE ARC LABEL
Frame say tell task bleaching-
slurry bee
gushed reckons
approach foe—
each other
And this:
BRINE TICK GOLD LURKED LADLE
Hoop-russe tub up buoying
soapy ass,
huh—reckoned
hormone to,
each other
And this:
SUMMED EAST SON BOMB LADLE
Frame-huh slur—of buoying
soapy at
the—second
shoring to
breach upper
It is an embarrassment, surely, to do this to Celan. Nonrecurrence, unreadability, amnesia.
soapy ass, indeed.
The work that I still need to do is determine how to give HUMBABA the sources that it can best use (or to put it more bluntly – with which it can make more successful poems). To date, the results are somewhat provisional, but they are teaching me how to work with HUMBABA, and raise it better.
Even with all its nonsense and vulgarity*.
A brief word on the names (titles) of the HUMBABA kind - the doublepoems here...
Most of these titles are taken from the doublepoems, doppelgedichten made by HUMBABA, as with the title of these notes.
Backlash Gorge – this was 'aslant ghyll' (stanza IX, line 2). Might the (accidental) intertext be Taroko Gorge* (Nick Montford - https://nickm.com/poems/taroko_gorge.html)? The stanza form is Hermitian.
War Bop Humbaba – this was 'nor lips' (stanza II), Humbaba added. This, too, is Hermitian: 7 x 7 x 7.
And what is Hermitian? It's my term for a strict stanza form of 7 lines with 7* syllables in each line (as I count them). It is therefore squared, with 49 syllables in total. In maths a Hermitian matrix is a complex square matrix. But also I just liked the word Hermitian.
Mop Toy – this was 'drowned to' (stanza 7, line 1).
And what is a Gaussian sonnet? Again, it's my term for a stanza form of 14 lines with average of 10 syllables per line (140 syllables in total, as I count them), and with a residue line of 7 syllables to give the total of 147 syllables. Why? It is as arbitrary a constraint as anything in Oulipo. Why Gaussian? For Carl Friedrich Gauss's modular arithmetic, sometimes called clock arithmetic, or the arithmetic of congruences, in which there is a remainder or residue as we complete n-cycles. Here the 15th line of 7 syllables is the remainder, by which we might tell the time.
And the asterism*?
Sources
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Celan, P., & Joris, P. (translator). (2014). Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry: A Bilingual Edition. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Colebrook, C. (Ed.). (2014). Jacques Derrida: Key Concepts. Routledge.
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Derrida, J. (2005b). The Truth That Wounds: From an Interview with Évelyne Grossman. In T. Dutoit & O. Pasanen (Eds.), Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan (pp. 164-9). Fordham University Press.
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May 2020