Onto the Grayness | Los Angeles Review of Books

FOR THE LAST 25 years, Canadian poet Christian Bök has taken on one of literature’s most audacious experiments: encoding a poem into the genome of an organism capable of outliving humanity itself. After years of Herculean endurance, collaborating with biologists to overcome almost impossible challenges, Bök has managed not only to succeed in this feat but also to write one of the most—if not the most—stringently constrained poems of all time. Now encoded within an extremophile bacterium named Deinococcus radiodurans, which can survive extremes of heat and cold, of desiccation, of irradiation, even of corrosive compounds, his poem, entitled The Xenotext, can replicate itself, thriving on our planet long after the human epoch has ended.

In the cadence of his responses, one can see that Bök believes in the power of poetry to chart the grand achievements of the human race. He sees The Xenotext extending from the same lineage as the Homeric sagas or Miltonic epics—works in which the fate of humanity finds itself tested and mythologized. While Bök has been known for the sweeping ambition of his projects (including his best-selling, univocalic collection Eunoia), The Xenotext may be his most outlandish yet. Not only has he tackled one of the most challenging poetic feats of the century; in doing so, he has also called into question the nature of language itself. While civilizations in the future may look back upon the germ that contains The Xenotext and see there one of the last vestiges of our culture, The Xenotext today forces us to consider the “poetics” of the genetic code and, by extension, the poetry that might be buried within the origins of life itself.

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DASHIEL CARRERA: How did you conceive of The Xenotext? Were you attracted most to the idea of crafting poetry from genetic material, or the idea of creating an eternal poem, or a bit of both?

CHRISTIAN BÖK: After my project Eunoia (a work that enjoyed global success in 2001), I thought that I had permission to do something more ambitious. I read two articles in science journals: one by Paul Davies (an astrobiologist who speculated about our search for extraterrestrial intelligence); and one by Pak Chung Wong (a bioscientist who enciphered information into the genome of an extremophilic microorganism). My readings of these two articles mutually reinforced each other.

In the case of Paul Davies, he implied that we might be searching for extraterrestrial intelligence in the wrong way—only because it was probably very difficult for aliens to maintain radio beacons over millions of years, and it was probably prohibitive to send crewed spaceships across interstellar distances. Davies suggested that civilizations would more likely send out robotic probes that could replicate themselves during their journeys, adapting to the environments that they encountered, auditing them until something got interesting enough to warrant communication. He speculated extravagantly that such machines already existed—in the form of spores and viruses. You could send out such biological emissaries with little messages encoded into their genomes, disseminating them from star to star through relatively inexpensive means, colonizing the galaxy in a few tens of millions of years. He seemed to suggest that, perhaps somewhere in our own ecosystems, there might, in fact, be genetic messages enciphered by aliens from outer space—but we just haven’t found them yet.

In the case of Pak Chung Wong, he showed that, in fact, we could already encipher messages in such a way, using germs to archive information. Why wait to look for such an alien civilization? Why not become such a civilization? Surely, you would want poetry, in fact, to be included in such an enterprise. I don’t think that I’d want my first genetic messages in life forms to be advertisements for Microsoft. I’d prefer that these messages were initially artistic. I thought that, given the work of Wong, such a project would prove to be a relatively straightforward process to undertake. As it turned out, of course, creating a work of “living poetry” proved to be an immensely challenging exercise at the very cutting edge of scientific endeavor.

What do you think it might mean for The Xenotext to reach an extraterrestrial civilization, after having outlived humanity?

Well, the project takes at least some of its inspiration from the Voyager probes—probably the most important objects ever created by humanity. The probes are among the only objects so far created with the capacity to outlast the sun, and they are going to testify to the existence of humanity for billions of years. If ever found, they are going to say something important about our presence in the cosmos, signaling to potential discoverers that, despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, they have shared this galaxy with some other form of intelligence.

Like the Voyager probes, my own poem The Xenotext might go undetected by any readership in the future—but if humanity disappears from the planet tomorrow, nothing that we’ve made on the surface of the earth is going to endure over epochal time; the earth is going to grind it all tectonically into dust, reducing everything to an almost undetectable layer in the geological strata. And if an intelligence were to show up on our planet, say, a few eons from now, the only evidence, perhaps, of our presence here would include three things. First, the background radiation from the enriched nuclear fuel, not natural to the geophysiology of the earth, but artificially enhanced by human activity. Second, evidence in the fossil record of a sixth mass extinction event, uncorrelated to any astrophysical disaster, like a solar flare or a comet impact, but presumably caused by a superpredator that occupied the planet. And third, evidence in the geological record of all the adverse effects of climate change currently being preserved in ice cores, but again not associated with any geological phenomenon. That’s it. That’s our legacy. Three forms of pollution. I’d probably prefer, again, that if we could testify to our legacy in deep time, we should leave behind something better—an archive or an artwork.

The Xenotext touches upon the role that poetry might play in the 21st century, acting as a harbinger for the risks that face us. You know, every civilization owes its existence, in part, to the invention of poetry. Without the inception of poetry, in song lines from at least 40,000 years ago, we wouldn’t have had our cultural heritage preserved and transmitted from generation to generation, through storytelling, through epics and sagas—through religious grimoires. We wouldn’t be here today without poetry that could, in effect, found a civilization—and yet, poetry no longer aspires to this kind of activity, forming the basis for preserving entire worlds.

Why are poets shying away from this form of activity?

I think that, at least for now, poets have found cause to express suspicion in the face of these epic sensibilities. The history of poetry shows a prolonged “devolution” from an epic stance towards time, shifting to a lyric stance towards the self. The scale at which poetry imagines itself has become much less grandiose, much less heroic in its aspirations, retreating instead into a more insular version of itself. I think that most poets today would look upon acts of heroism as vulgar, preferring to discredit Miltonic scales, if not Homeric scales, of achievement.

But I think that we’ve got good reason to express concern about such prejudices. For example, my first memory that I can actually date (my first awakening into consciousness) coincides with the moon landing of Apollo 11. My first memory consists of a little white ghost stepping off the rung of a ladder onto the grayness of an alien world. I remember watching this event on a small black-and-white television, installed on the lawn outside my house very late at night, my mother hugging me from behind, while pointing at the man on the screen, then pointing up at a waxing crescent moon in summer, just a few weeks shy of my third birthday. Not a lot of people can easily date their first memory—but mine is tantamount to watching a tetrapod flop out of the ocean onto land for the first time, 350 million years ago. The moon landing is probably the most important thing that life on earth has so far accomplished in its evolution—willfully escaping the gravity well to embark upon a journey to the stars. And yet, if I were to ask you “What’s your favorite, canonical poem about the moon landing?” you can’t name one, because there isn’t one. And in fact, the only poem that has any cultural cachet is actually a complaint about the event. To me, this fact is distressing. If the ancient Greeks had rowed a trireme to the moon, you can bet that they would’ve written 24 volumes of epic poetry about this adventure.

Recent administrative changes—in the US, at least—have reflected a withdrawal from scientific exploration. NASA has seen significant budget cuts, and there have been a number of grants cut or frozen at both the NIH and NSF. How do you see The Xenotext in conversation with this cultural shift?

Well, my work expresses optimism about the future, about the ability of poetry to outlast its own demise. At this time in the 20th century, during the 1920s, there were at least eight avant-garde aesthetic movements of global renown in the world, all making futuristic claims about innovations in poetry—but at this moment, in the early 21st century, during the 2020s, there’s at best only two. And again, I find this fact very disconcerting, because right now there’s more reason than ever to be innovative and experimental in the avant-garde. We’ve got more tools at our disposal, with even greater capacity to make a difference, contributing novel ideas to the tradition—and yet, for poetry, at least, we’ve entered into a period of relative, aesthetic conservatism, characterized by philistinic, if not puritanical, manias. I think that the job of the avant-garde, in most respects, is to ensure that everybody shows up for the future on time.

What made the literary constraints of your project uniquely difficult?

Well, the two poems of The Xenotext are written according to a mutually bijective cipher that responds to the biochemical constraints of the environment in the organism. Imagine this scenario: you’ve probably solved cryptograms in Sunday newspapers, where you’ve got an ostensibly nonsensical message, but if you analyze both its letter frequencies and its letter patterns, you could, through educated guesses, substitute the correct letters for the ones in the puzzle. Now I used to wonder, as a child, solving these puzzles, why the puzzle designers didn’t actually give us a meaningful sentence as the ciphertext, such that, if we analyzed its letter patterns and its letter frequencies, we could decipher it into yet another meaningful sentence. I now understand why the puzzle designers haven’t done this. The task is supremely difficult.

Imagine pairing off all the letters of the alphabet so that they’re mutually referential. If you assign A to T, you have to assign T to A. If you assign N to H, you have to assign H to N. If you assign Y to E, you have to assign E to Y. You do such pairings for every letter of the alphabet. With this one constraint, there exist a little less than 8 trillion possible ciphers at your disposal. Now select one of these possibilities through a set of heuristics. Then write a beautiful poem that makes sense in such a way that if you replace every letter with its cognate from your chosen cipher, you get another equally beautiful poem that also makes sense. So there’s eight trillion ciphers to explore—and despite the immense vastitude of this repertoire, none of them actually works. There’s almost no poetry anywhere among them. You can barely write a phrase that might actually translate from one text into the other meaningfully. And as it turns out, only one possibility (out of the eight trillion) can actually allow me to say anything at all. This one cipher produces a little dialogue between Orpheus and Eurydice—two poems that, for me, have a kind of unique fragility, because I didn’t write them so much as found them.

Imagine that in our own galaxy, there are probably trillions of exoplanets around billions of stars, and as far as we can tell, at first glance, none of these worlds seem to host any intelligent civilizations. And hey, if there’s no life out there, then there’s no poetry out there. So far as we know, poetry inhabits only one place in the cosmos. Among the eight trillion worlds in the galaxy, only our world has any poetry at all—and similarly here, among the eight trillion ciphers at my disposal, only one gives rise to poetry. So there’s a bit of spookiness in these two poems. A kind of uncanniness to them. They’re the only ones possible under the duress of this very difficult constraint—and it took me four years of labor to write this pair of sonnets. I worked on nothing else, and I really thought that the poems would prove to be the hardest part of the enterprise.

Alas, I faced even harder tasks. I still had to figure out how to ensure that the second poem would translate adequately into a viable protein capable of folding properly within the organism. I had to design a protein persistent enough to be detectable without being metabolized, ensuring that it remained benign enough not to affect the cell adversely. I discovered that I was confronting the hardest problem in bioengineering: figuring out how to predict the folding of a protein. There was a lot of voodoo that went into figuring out how to make this construct work, and the odds were stacked very heavily against me. The probability of finding this protein at random is around one in 100 novemquinquagintillion (a one followed by 180 zeros)—a number so large that there’s nothing in the universe to count with it. And again, finding the viable protein among the available repertoire is immensely difficult. For this reason, I think that my project testifies to the “extremophilic” characteristics of poetry itself—its capacity to arise under extraordinary conditions of duress, thriving perhaps under the worst conditions imaginable.

The Xenotext is, in part, a response to a quote by William Burroughs: “The word is now a virus.” How has working on this project affected your understanding of this quote?

The quote by Burroughs constitutes a very paranoid understanding of language, suggesting that language seems to have many of the characteristics that we associate with the infectiousness of a living system, capable of evolving on its own. Language seems to have sculpted out a niche for itself in our neurophysiology, hijacking our brains so as to turn them into reproductive organs.

The claims of Burroughs do not seem unwarranted. In our own culture, we can see information transmitted virally, with a kind of epidemiology attached to it, right? We can express concern about ideas poisoning our collective imagination, spreading too quickly, with people falling prey to information, because their minds do not host an adequate diversity of contending ideas, all of which might act as modulating immunities, helping us to interpret the truth.

To an avant-garde poet, such ideas might seem compelling. I like to think that, when working with language, I’m studying a kind of alien thing, reverse engineering it at Area 51, trying to produce antigravity machines from some technology that has crash-landed on earth from outer space. A language might look, at first glance, like a tool that we use to communicate with each other—but communication might not, in fact, represent the primary reason for its existence. It could have other attributes and functions, all of which remain extraneous to this rather practical function. I think that people often get upset with poets, in part, because we tend to break the social contract around language, exploring its functionality beyond our need to communicate.

Do you consider the engineered bacterium to be itself a sort of poem?

Well, I have written a poem that can literally reprogram the behavior of living things. The primary outcome of this project is the organism—a work of “living poetry,” embodied in a microbe. I’m making a claim about the “vitality” of poetry itself, that poetry has a kind of life of its own, that it might constitute a crucial feature, underpinning life itself—that there’s probably a “poetics,” so to speak, to the genetic code. The job of the poet is to make this poetics intelligible to the rest of us. And as you know, poetry is not simply limited to the marks upon the page or the vowels in my voice, but to other kinds of media as well. I think that poetry shows an immense capacity to replicate itself in all kinds of media—and again, by virtue of my status as an avant-garde poet, I’m trying to figure out how to make poetry as versatile as possible in a diverse variety of environments, contributing to its capacity to outlast us all.

At the end of Book 2 of The Xenotext, I’ve written a poem called “The Perfect Malware.” I regard this work as the best poem that I’ve so far written in the course of my career. I don’t think that I’ve written anything better—and its title constitutes my definition of life. If you were to ask me “What is life?”—I’d reply that it’s “the perfect malware.” It’s something that seems to infect matter, suddenly imbuing it with a kind of vitality, which permits matter to recopy itself, mutating and evolving, growing until it becomes something capable of thinking for itself. And I think that poetry, like life, constitutes a kind of malware, subversively animating the dead word.

Do you think genetic code itself has a poetry to it?

The genetic code consists of nothing more than three-letter words, “codons” that permute an alphabet of four “letters” (each letter corresponding to a molecule). With this alphabet, you can derive a lexicon of 64 three-letter words. A few of them are marks of punctuation—but in effect, you have rigorously constrained vocabulary. I’d dare any poet to imagine writing anything with so limited a lexicon, choosing 64 trigrams, then producing a body of literature as rich in its diversity as the complete repertoire of living things on the planet earth. All life that you see around you on this world, everything from jellyfishes to dragonflies, from labradoodles to nightingales, all these living things are made entirely with a lexicon of 64 short words. That’s it. With this set of constraints, the genetic code produces all the biological robustness that makes our planet beautiful. Nature establishes a standard of “poetics” to which poets can only aspire. I can certainly think of no other procedural constraint more extreme than the code that governs the artistry of life itself. The semiotic framework of biochemistry underlies an improbable aesthetics that, when you look at the history of the earth, seems intent on making things more beautiful. If life has a purpose, it seems to transform otherwise infernal, hellish environments into something more hospitable, something that is, by comparison, more akin to paradise.

And I suppose that my poem, with its infernal allusion to the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, speaks to the capacity of life (of love) to make hell itself more heavenly for the rest of us.

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Christian Bök is the author of Eunoia (Coach House Books, 2001), a best-selling work of experimental literature, which has gone on to win the Griffin Prize for Excellence in Poetry (2002). Crystallography (Coach House, 1994), his first book of poetry, was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award (1995). Nature has interviewed Bök about his work on The Xenotext (making him the first poet ever to appear in this famous journal of science). Bök has also exhibited artworks derived from The Xenotext at galleries around the world; moreover, his poem from this project has hitched a ride, as a digital payload, aboard a number of probes exploring our solar system (including the InSight lander, now at Elysium Planitia on the surface of Mars). Bök is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and he teaches at Leeds School of Arts in the UK.

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