I couldn’t write anything until I could be written.

I wrote my first poem, the first one I shared anyhow, using a Markov Chain generator. I first head about Markov Chains when my composer friend Troy was visiting us with his Robot Rickshaw, one iteration of his project to build robotic musical instrument-performers. At the kitchen table — where I’ve had the best conversations about art and life — Troy told me about Dr. Nerve, also a musician, who programed a Markov Chain generator for text. From our conversation I understood that Markov Chain sequenced notes based on the relationship between what has just come before; that there was something random and ephemeral about it. I tried it immediately with a text I was writing about fear and desire. I hated what I wrote, but that seemed somehow necessary at the time, as a rather inconvenient crush on a friend collided with memories of abuse and reignited my gender identity issues.

My partner tells me its a digital humanities project, which I suppose it is in a way, though far more personal. I’m drawn to the “deformative” work of Mark Sample (who is also an avid Markov Chain methodologist), which plays between the text itself and the performed work of texts: “And what is broken and twisted is also beautiful, and a bearer of knowledge.” 

I tried to learn more from Wikipedia (and you can too). I quickly gave up, lost in the complexities of mathematical theory. But what struck me was the transition from one state to another state on the principle of memorylessness. I’m taking some poetic license here. I’m looking for ways to access and rewrite my own memories, to bring the unconscious into conscious awareness, and all the while to stay present and to let go of the past.

Let me get to the poem itself. I re-ran the original text through the Chain generator multiple times, setting it to generate 250, 300, 350, 400, 450, and 500 words. I copy pasted the results into the notes app of my phone. I had this need to hack the words into pieces. When my memories of violation surfaced I felt like I had broken into countless shards of glass. I needed to break everything apart absolutely, to get it all out, in order to rebuild. I used the resulting texts as a way to read my subconscious and to listen to what I was trying to say. I selected out about 20% of it based on what struck me intuitively, both in terms of style (repetition, surreal juxtaposition, and pronoun shifts), as well as anything that seemed expressive of the fine line between fear and desire. I took these bits and rewrote them into a surreal prose that means something different to me each time I read it.

It was the first time I’d ever consciously juxtaposed abuse, helplessness, and victimization with a desire for intimacy and affection. I kept the broken grammar of those lines that evoked the voicelessness I felt.

He put his mouth for a thousand lashes of me without leaving my mouth for as long as I could. Pretend like about making out.

He put his mouth, feeling stupid passion of skin and it suits me too.

Throughout my current writing, I’m working at the lines between abuse and affection, trying to disentangle the way they were are cross-wired into my brain. This poem along with the others in the Markov Chain series have helped me to craft the kind of voice that represents a sullen and quiet inner child whose internal mind blazes with sensory and emotional light. I write with a simplicity of a child’s vocabulary, with nonsense grammar, homonyms, repetition (as if to commit it to memory), poignant misuse of big words, and playing with words as if they are costumes to put on or take off. Its helping me to dig into trauma and to access memories that cannot be easily verbalized, but are nonetheless intensely felt.

I am willing my feelings and senses into language. As much as I’ve studied, read, and learned, I have a hard time speaking. I didn’t talk in public, or to people I didn’t know well, until I found myself in front of my first class of college students as TA in grad school. I’m trained as an academic sociologist and I can use complex vocabulary to wrap my voice in brilliant gift bags, employing complex theories and expressing elaborate ideas that hide the fact nothing is inside. When it comes to what I sense and feel, when it comes to talking to you while looking you in the eye, feeling your reaction, and staying in my own body, language breaks down completely.

For me, algorithmic generation is doing in its undoing, raw materials that I can build into a way of knowing myself and speaking, really speaking, to you.