Listen

by Yoni Gelernter

“…according to one hypothesis, you shouldn’t need to glimpse more than an independent clause: even if some engineers say one little word is enough, provided it’s the right word, though you can’t know you’ve found the right word without, first, finding lots of wrong words: but, according to one hypothesis, you shouldn’t need to glimpse more than a single independent clause, because, given the in-principle infinitely recursive character of language, a sentence that contains and says all known true things and, in saying all known true things within the bounds of a single sentence, remakes the shuffled archive of all knowledge as a single, sensical comment in which all relations between objects can be understood in terms of the immutable natural laws of grammar, in order to be a true sentence (even if only for you), would have to contain itself in miniature, and so on and so on; it follows that any description of the sentence embedded within the sentence, to be a complete and true description, will have to contain itself in successively more microscopic self-descriptions until finally it reaches the atomic level of written language, which some engineers say is the clause and some the word and some the letter and some not even the letter, even punctuation, and some even say: the spaces between the words, or: the spaces between the letters, that these are atomic, as without these spaces there could be no writing; it was long thought impossible that a single sentence could be written which, making use of the in-principle infinitely recursive character of language, expressed legibly, clearly, and totally all knowledge and thought up to the moment of its composition, thus setting all known things into syntactical relations with all other known things, but this was before recent advances which made it possible to write a program which would then write such a sentence, even if no one could ever read the sentence, which, if it ever were to be read, would have to be read by another machine, which in turn could then find, maybe, means inconceivable to man of summarizing the sentence, in effect providing humankind for the first time with an eternally satisfying distillate of its own wisdom, in which all things were related to all other things by the unchangeable and eternal rules of grammar; but even a summary of a sentence many orders of magnitude longer than any sentence readable or writable in a human life would, if it weren’t to lose much of its meaning, still be much too long for anyone to read before the time came for Death; here you should remember again that, according to some engineers, for the sentence to exist at all would require it to contain nesting self-descriptions down to the most particulate imaginable scale, and, if those engineers are right, a reading-machine programmed to write the shortest possible description of the sentence could operate simply by finding this description pre-embedded in the sentence itself, consisting maybe even in the spaces between two letters, or the space required for a single letter; but such descriptions, being so rich in data even if only for you, would in another way still be basically unreadable for human beings who are used to living in, let’s say, a universe of physical language, where language has taken on the property of seeming to be continuous, though in a certain sense also discrete because of the artificial divisions that exist between this word and the next or this sentence and the next, people have no more natural intuition about the behavior of linguistic atoms than they do the behavior of sub-atomic particles, and consequently, the only way to find the meaning of the sentence is to read the sentence, but nobody can hope to read the sentence in a lifetime; in much the same way that once people built simple shacks and huts and later learned technological methods for extending their imaginative powers, enabling them to construct Hoover Dams and skyscrapers, it eventually became possible to build things in language that would have been not only impossible but unimaginable at an earlier stage in the development of civilization; though the sentence is, like a skyscraper, gargantuan, so that people can only venture into it by means of linguistic formulae and coordinates, examining fragments, excerpts, and quotations, the sentence itself isn’t infinite, even if the idea of infinity was needed in order to make it possible: no infinite sentence can exist in a universe with our physical laws: it’s exactly because the sentence isn’t infinite that there are people who, like spelunkers or environmental scientists mining ice cores from the great sheets in Greenland, can discover new secrets by examining the sentence in samples extracted from its long middle; still, the small number of engineers who understand something about the structure of the sentence and about the processes necessary to construct it warn that no one should pretend to find too much knowledge or insight in anything it says, in principle one can deduce the structure of the whole from the structure of the most insignificant part, but in practice this would take more time than anyone has been given to live because, no matter how large the section of the sentence under examination, there is still the possibility that it is, at some higher level of the structure, embedded in a clause or sub-clause that negates it, so that one could read in the sentence that penguins lay eggs but even that would remain uncertain, because the statement penguins lay eggs could appear in a portion of the sentence that, as indicated either at an earlier or a later point, exists only to illustrate the concept of mistaken assumptions, and in fact because, as a consequence of empiricism, there are more things that are known to be false than there are things that are known to be true, it is arguably: most engineers make this argument: more likely that something read in the sentence is false than that it is true, and that it belongs to a list of things known to be false, any number of things can explain the appearance of false information in the sentence, a fact that, if generally appreciated, could save lots of marriages and prevent lots of wars, but it isn’t properly understood, and even when it is the understanding is misapplied, so that a principle that could save lots of marriages and prevent lots of wars instead destroys lots of marriages and begins lots of wars; people read things that are obviously true, that are true by the evidence of their eyes, and nevertheless conclude that they must be false, for the simple reason that the number of statements known to be false is massively larger than the number of statements known to be true, so that the sentence provides them with information they know to be accurate—penguins lay eggs, my wife is faithful—which, because it appears in the sentence which synthesizes all known truths into a megastructure more outstanding and in its way more enormous than anything previously built by man, they instantly assume to be false; but the process of mapping the sentence continues, everyone knows that there’s nothing more important than understanding the structure of the sentence and what the sentence says, the sentence is even being translated into various languages though contextual problems emerge again there, and besides translation is pointless, because the purpose of the sentence has always been to address someone in particular and, to be clear, you are this person, you yourself are the destination towards which the sentence is extended; most engineers don’t understand that only a destination can give a sentence forward movement, and they still think the sentence can be explored through an impersonal process in the same way that earlier generations of scientists explored the layers of the earth’s crust for evidence of earlier generations of life, these people don’t understand that, far from a crystalline structure in language of previously unfathomable perfection, what their theories produced is an imperative, an instruction, an order, that this order is meant for someone in particular, that the person for whom it is meant can be found, that the person for whom it is meant has been found; that, thanks to a previously unconceived principle of language, any statement, read with the appropriate form and degree of irony, can be read with a meaning equivalent to any other statement, and therefore statements weren’t selected by the program or theory which actually constructed the sentence to be its primary tissue, imperatives were, which, unlike statements, have actual verifiable content, can be fulfilled—either the President is or is not shot as his car passes the Texas Book Depository; although it’s worth noting that once again this grand imperative, vast and unreadable by any single person in a single lifetime, because it contains a very high but finite number of imperatives, and because, in some instances, those imperatives are themselves no doubt contained in clauses which negate their content, for the students of the sentence, though a commandment is surely being given, it isn’t clear who should be killed and who should be saved, who is high and who is low, even who is addressed by the sentence and who isn’t addressed by the sentence—you are addressed by it—in fact, only one thing, the engineers say, can effectively be concluded about the nature of the imperative the sentence surely is, whatever it should turn out to be, because, while even ascertaining the full length of the sentence is a more complicated procedure than you might think, it’s easy to navigate to the very beginning of the sentence or the very end, this is pretty trivial to do with existing technology, and what is known about the imperative which constitutes the sentence is simply that it is very urgent, because the last word in the sentence is now and it is followed not by a period, but instead by an exclamation point, and not only one exclamation point, but an exclamation point alternated with a question mark in the apocryphal formation known as interrobang, and furthermore, that this interrobang occurs not only once, at the end of the sentence, but many times, in fact so many that it has been calculated that, should each interrobang be given the mass and size of a sub-atomic particle, these particles would be enough to fill all the grain silos in Iowa to the very top—to the tip-top—with no space left over…”

______

Yoni Gelernter's writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Drift, The Baffler, Santa Monica Review, and other publications. He lives in Brooklyn.

[GO HOME.]