Monte Carlo Poetry

MONTE CARLO POETRY

There are instances where I like to be fooled by randomness. My allergy to nonsense and verbiage dissipates when it comes to art and poetry. On the one hand, I try to define myself and behave officially as a no-nonsense hyperrealist ferreting out the role of chance; on the other, I have no qualms indulging in all manner of personal superstitions. Where do I draw the line? The answer is aesthetics. Some aesthetic forms appeal to something in our biology, whether or not they originate in random associations or plain hallucination. Something in our human genes is deeply moved by the fuzziness and ambiguity of language; then why fight it?

The poetry and language lover in me was initially depressed by the account of the “exquisite cadavers” poetic exercise, where interesting and poetic sentences are randomly constructed. By throwing enough words together, some unusual and magical-sounding metaphor is bound to emerge according to the laws of combinatorics. Yet one cannot deny that some of these poems are of ravishing beauty. Who cares about their origin if they manage to please our aesthetic senses?

The story of the “exquisite cadavers” is as follows. In the aftermath of the First World War, a collection of surrealist poets—which included André Breton, their pope, Paul Eluard, and others—got together in cafés and tried the following exercise (modern literary critics attribute the exercise to the depressed mood after the war and the need to escape reality). On a folded piece of paper, in turn, each one of them would write a predetermined part of a sentence, not knowing the others’ choice. The first would pick an adjective, the second a noun, the third a verb, the fourth an adjective, and the fifth a noun. The first publicized exercise of such random (and collective) arrangement produced the following poetic sentence:

The exquisite cadavers shall drink the new wine.

(Les cadavres exquis boiront le vin nouveau.)

Impressive? It sounds even more poetic in the native French. Quite impressive poetry has been produced in such a manner, sometimes with the aid of a computer. But poetry has never been truly taken seriously outside of the beauty of its associations, whether they have been produced by the random ranting of one or more disorganized brains, or the more elaborate constructions of one conscious creator.

Now, regardless of whether the poetry was obtained by a Monte Carlo engine or sung by a blind man in Asia Minor, language is potent in bringing pleasure and solace. Testing its intellectual validity by translating it into simple logical arguments would rob it of a varying degree of its potency, sometimes excessively; nothing can be more bland than translated poetry. A convincing argument of the role of language is the existence of surviving holy languages, uncorrupted by the no-nonsense tests of daily use. Semitic religions, that is Judaism, Islam, and original Christianity understood the point: Keep a language away from the rationalization of daily use and avoid the corruption of the vernacular. Four decades before this account was written, the Catholic church translated the services and liturgies from Latin to the local vernaculars; one may wonder if this caused a drop in religious beliefs. Suddenly religion subjected itself to being judged by intellectual and scientific, without the aesthetic, standards. The Greek Orthodox church made the lucky mistake, upon translating some of its prayers from Church Greek into the Semitic-based vernacular spoken by the Grecosyrians of the Antioch region (southern Turkey and northern Syria), of choosing classical Arabic, an entirely dead language. My folks are thus lucky to pray in a mixture of dead Koiné (Church Greek) and no less dead Koranic Arabic.

Why make room for this kind of randomness? Our human nature dictates a need for péché mignon. Even the economists, who usually find completely abstruse ways to escape reality, are starting to understand that what makes us tick is not necessarily the calculating accountant in us. We do not need to be rational and scientific when it comes to the details of our daily life—only in those that can harm us and threaten our survival. Modern life seems to invite us to do the exact opposite; become extremely realistic and intellectual when it comes to such matters as religion and personal behavior, yet as irrational as possible when it comes to matters ruled by randomness (say, portfolio or real estate investments). I have encountered colleagues, “rational,” no-nonsense people, who do not understand why I cherish the poetry of Baudelaire and Saint-John Perse or obscure (and often impenetrable) writers like Elias Canetti, J. L. Borges, or Walter Benjamin. Yet they get sucked into listening to the “analyses” of a television “guru,” or into buying the stock of a company they know absolutely nothing about, based on tips by neighbors who drive expensive cars. The Vienna Circle, in their dumping on Hegel-style verbiage-based philosophy, explained that, from a scientific standpoint, it was plain garbage, and, from an artistic point of view, it was inferior to music. I have to say that I find Baudelaire far more pleasant to frequent than CNN newscasters or listening to George Will.

There is a Yiddish saying: “If I am going to be forced to eat pork, it better be of the best kind.” If I am going to be fooled by randomness, it better be of the beautiful (and harmless) kind.