One plus one equals elev.., p.2
One Plus One Equals Eleven, page 2
Garbage. Absolute garbage! Yet there was that curious familiarity, as if these odds and ends of nonsense were calling up some demon from amid spleen and pancreas. I wondered if poets all struggled with this feeling of incompletion, as if a jigsaw puzzle were almost finished, yet still missing the one or two key pieces that would make sense of the whole pattern.
I had heard of computerized music. Heard some too. Mostly it convinced me that neither I nor the computer had an ear for music. But how much more of this garbage was there buried in the computer’s entrails? Was the core just disgorging what some bored programmer had inadvertently fed into it, or was it synthesizing new forms, making it up as it went along?
PRINTOUT TOTAL POETIC CONTENT. As I finished typing this I realized the idiot machine might lock itself into perpetual motion, grinding out rhymeless, meterless verse forever unless I worked out a way to cancel that command. And meanwhile several tithe-paying worshipers were cut off from their godhead. Any minute now phones would start ringing. To hell with it. Nobody was feeding this stuff in from a time-sharing terminal. I switched them back in. At least that part of the computer was working right. The readout came alive again:
Elbert Hubbard talking
sense into villainous rulers. The Untied
simple dirty work ignoring our hopes as befitted the old to get themselves a war from which no one…
None of our concern.
Noble architect of the
possible into a cerebral…
After all, we had reason; a man
who killed, who pointed out that
neither persuasion nor
Henry Ford to end the—
Not quite; at least in…
We stood on Negro problems:
Example and inspiration.
After all, if…embroiled in,
wishing the accident when he
came to believe.
More convulsions on the Platte.
Pancho Villa neither drinks nor smokes!
There was an instant’s hesitation and I thought the spate of creativity was over, then it began again. I was reading:
Unanswerable this,
only half the women
drop fallopian lodgings.
So much moves, offspring
conceived benefit the
mindedly ferocious
out of the great
generation’s seeming.
Volunteer, round ovum.
Hang in there! Show
me a human; maybe you’ll get a
single right:
Be born.
The door opened and a pudgy young programmer I’d seen around the place before came in.
“Troubles?” he asked.
Wordlessly, I handed him the printouts. He glanced at the first one and muttered something scatologically unpoetic.
“You got any idea how they got in there?” I asked.
“Yeah. I wrote them. I thought I had it all erased though.”
I wondered what would happen next Friday when several thousand employees in various plants received bits of avant garde poetry in lieu of pay checks.
“Why?” I asked, mentally adding, how?
‘They won’t give me my doctorate without some remedial English.”
“You composed this drivel as a school assignment?”
“It’s not drivel in the first draft,” he explained, and produced some frayed and folded sheets from his pocket. The first one read:
One of the younger generation’s seemingly unanswerable ripostes to whatever happens to be bugging them at the moment is, “I didn’t volunteer to be born.” This, on plain biological grounds, would seem to be only half true. And that particular round would go to the women anyhow. So…possibly the ovum didn’t volunteer to drop loose from the ovary and begin its long dark fallopian passage. Once in the uterus, it seemed perfectly willing to accept whatever help in hanging onto lodgings that insisted on a once-a-month turnover of tenants. So much for ova. Now the sperm…How many flickering movies in poorly shaded biology classes must that sperm’s offspring be shown before they realize there’s no ‘after you, Alphonse’ between spermatozoa? Show me a human being conceived parthenogenetically and maybe you’ll get the benefit of the doubt but nobody descended of those singlemindedly ferocious tadpoles, each bent on freezing all others out of the great ovulation sweepstakes has any right ever to claim, “I didn’t volunteer to be born.”
There seemed to exist some linear relationship between this and the earlier garbage but I still couldn’t see how it happened until the pudgy young man produced a ruler and ripped the readout into three parallel strips. I wondered if Saul on the road to Damascus had felt the same blinding flash of illumination.
“Is that how all modern poets work?” I asked.
“Search me,” the programmer said. “I’m not a poet.”
“Well,” I grumbled, “You put it in there; I guess you know how to get it out again.”
“Right.” He nodded as I began changing out of my white coveralls again. Maybe I would have a weekend after all.
But flying back home I began juggling those odd, evocative poems around, fitting them back into their original homiletic framework. The idiot machine would never be a poet. I’d known that all along but, fitting the pieces together I found the broken edges were not exact. A word here, a phrase there…something had been done to smooth and improve the copy. Finally I faced the ultimate truth. The computer might not be smart enough to be a poet but it could do a fair job of editing.
* * * Text ends * * *
G. C. Edmondson, One Plus One Equals Eleven
