I.

Desiring
#include <time.h>

Shall we go for a swim,

Descend to the depths,
And touch the sand
Where desire infinitely expands?

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include "eprintf.h"

As we fall through layers of water,

You’ll feel your skin touched
By libraries of laminaria digitata.
The seaweed can tickle out your soul’s inclusions.

#include <string.h>

I’ll look up you up in these libraries of kelp

In every page, in every hidden margin.
What water will quench this thirst
If anything down in this salty paradise
Will make it worse?

Desire it pulsates,
Like waves of information1,
Pressing on to me, making me
Press on.

1 add(): ////// // LA JALOUSIE

The deeper I read you in these realms,
The pressure becomes likely to overwhelm.

II. Understanding

As we swim down into the void

I quickly realize that
What was up is down
And down was up
And that golden rays arose
From the bottom of the ocean.

The Mariana Trench lent clarity.

Shall I cut to the main part of this love story?
To that epistemological break of jealousy?

III. Doubting

Desperately,
I grabbed your hand to swim into the light.
Aha! In this clarity,
I could finally see
What your face looked like.
You were not looking2 at me.

2 hash(): Any other by a rose’s name would smell as sweet? The woman sat by the sunlit
windowsill, unmoving in the stillness of the library. Her hair was just as he remembered,
red-brown like the kelp that strands itself on low tide sands in the morning, before the
tourists can drag themselves out of holiday beds. They had woken up to see the sunrise,
packed stale hotel coffee in thermoses, set out in their decaying hatchback into the
darkness when the summer air was still cold enough for fleece jackets. If the woman turned
her head just so, he was sure he would catch a glimpse of dark green eyes, their depths
shifting without logic or proof, unexplainable as all eyes are unexplainable, though you may
plumb their retinal depths with a slit lamp or slice open their corneas with a scalpel. The
only certainty was that the currents that pulled beneath their surfaces would soon wash
her away, drawn irrevocably into the ocean mists, into the uncertainties of time and space.
He called her name, and she turned. Her eyes were blue and clear. He didn’t care; she had
Soon I’d have to tell all of them,
All the eternal “me”s,
Each one a discrete entity,
That, in this descent, you had fallen in love.

You came to love the seaweed’s fingers,

On a moral eel you let your eyes linger.
You came to love a small seed
And what else could I do but continue to read3?

I’ve never had such gluttony to find and generate4,

A million theories of why these waters move
The way they do around you.

Each action I take, reduce and categorize.

turned.

3 addsuffix(): She had seen this look in his eyes before. She had caught flashes of it when
pretty waitresses came bearing trays of coffee, when he sat across from college girls on the
bus, when they went to the beach on sickly summer days, when he gawked at the
photographs on his phone of women he had once known and loved. It had always ended the
same way before. She waited to see if this would be different.

4 generate(): He saw each brick of the past, cemented in place by the crushing weight of
evidence, each moment in time, discrete and stateless: her glasses fogged in the chilly
morning, hair curled in the sea laden air, skin peeled from long afternoons, leaves and
branches crunched on an evening hike; she drove with the window down, rode in the
passenger seat with feet propped on the dashboard, danced wildly to thudding music; she
laughed, she cried, she bickered, she comforted; all her kindness, all her cruelties, small
and enormous, compressed into statistics. Had she the glance she cast at that man been
someone she knew? Were those alien hairs a cat’s or a man’s or a woman’s? Why did she
look so good on Wednesdays? In every detail, there was a world of meaning lurking behind.
Was it only a matter of uncovering what was there, or had he created these worlds in his
speculation?

And then he saw the future, each fragment of every possible eventuality of his universe laid
out in jagged detail. She would leave him, she was not, she would leave him, they would get
married and have two children, she would leave him, he would leave her, she would leave
him, they would marry then cheat then divorce, she would leave him for another…And then
the future was set; the terrible truth of probability moved as surely as the tides that pull oil
barges out to sea. The waves broke on rocks, unchanging and ceaseless. Too long?
Without confirmation,
I’ve created5 my own story of speculation
And most usually of damnation.

I’ve been possessed by this incomplete information.

Through a loop of indecisions and revisions,

My jealous watery eyes could choose to see
Entire worlds dancing in the current.
But in these states nothing ever returns.

I wake up floating at the surface,

In a desert of dead kelp withering in the corrosive sun.

5 build(): //////
Rationale:

For the final project, we’ve written a love poem in code and in natural
language. We chose poetry because it has a more similar style to code than
prose. The poem was written after the code, so the structure of the poem
follows the structure of the decompiled program. The footnotes make
reference both to the program’s functions that are called throughout the
main part of the program, as well as to the speaker’s memories that are also
called as we read through the poem. In both instances there is no need for a
chronological order since they can be called at any time. As like in poetry,
there are parts of the main program which are ‘abstracted’ in a certain way
meaning that the name of the function substitutes what the function does,
but you could back to where the function is constructed to see how its
operating. We’ve included footnotes in order to give a similar ‘explanation’
for certain parts of the poem, but it is likely that these footnotes can just
confuse more because they are equally as abstract. The compiling of the
code poem results in an actual program that operates to “want” something
beyond the poem.

The program is a markov chain model which can read a text and generate
another version of the text with the same pool of words. It does this by
describing a sequence of possible words in which the probability of each
word being set next depends on what happened previously. It has two steps
which occur simultaneously: it reads the text that is input scanning for
information, and from the information it reads it projects a prediction of a
possible new text. As inspired by the film Her, we wanted to further explore
the relationship between desire and machine learning, as well as what it
means to make our intimate actions and sensing knowledges technically
recognizable by algorithms. In this poem, we explore two specific concepts
and how they differ: desire and jealousy. The desire of another person
corresponds to the part of the program in which it runs in order to read the
information of a text. In this moment of desire, it is a desire to know and
learn from the other person as Samantha does in Her. Our choice in
wanting to represent the prediction part with jealousy is because extreme
jealousy, as is in Marcel Proust’s writings, often relates to the projection of
speculative worlds from incomplete information. The smallest of details can
gain an enormous significance when a person is possessed by jealousy in a
similar way as to how machine learning can produce worlds
incomprehensible to the human from partial information. They are both
speculative projections into the future through a scrutiny of what
information we may have. The reduction of a person’s actions to create a
specific story that confirms a jealous person’s beliefs is similar to the
creation of algorithmically recognizable actions. In this way, we found that it
is not only what algorithms want in desire, but that the imagery of jealousy
can help us understand the motion to exclude and include information on
what can be arbitrary observations.

We chose the imagery of the sea in order to give the poem an oneiric feel,
and to be able to play with transitions from obscurity to clarity. The
seaweed/kelp is a recurring image throughout, its life signifies information;
its scientific name is laminaria digitata: laminaria being a thin sheet, and
digitata is to press or to type. The last stanza motions towards the
impossibility to stay underwater, to be submerged in a pursuit for
knowledge too long, as indicates the dead kelp on the surface. Historically,
the dried kelp was used as an abortifacient and for mechanically induced
labour.