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ChatGPT, in its latest iteration as GPT-4, has not yet become the ‘world brain‘ H. G. Wells imagined in the 1930s. It is unable to identify the source of the word ‘mutuomorphomutation’, even though James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939, p. 281) has long been accessible as a machine-readable dataset online. (If you put the word alone into Google search, the answer is not much better: the top ranked results are mainly academic articles about the Wake.)

Yet, when prompted to analyse the word, now-not-so OpenAI’s chatty oracle does a decent job. After identifying it as a ‘creative neologism’ and noting ‘that it is not recognized in standard English dictionaries’, ChatGPT offers the following:

This word seems to be composed of three roots or elements:

Mutuo-: This prefix is not standard in English. It could be a variation or misspelling of “mutu-“, derived from “mutual,” indicating something shared or exchanged between parties. Alternatively, it might be an inventive use intended to evoke the concept of mutuality or exchange.

Morpho-: A common prefix in English derived from Greek, meaning “shape” or “form.” It is used in various scientific and technical terms to denote something related to shape, structure, or formation.

Mutation: A term used in biology and other sciences to describe a change or transformation, often in the genetic material of an organism, but also more broadly to describe any change in form or nature.

Combining these elements, “mutuomorphomutation” could be interpreted as a creative, synthetic term intended to describe a mutual or reciprocal change in form or structure.

This response makes denying some kind of linguistic ‘understanding’ to the latest generation of LLMs seem less and less plausible. What we, as embodied and embedded human users, might still want to do, however, is judge the merits of their responses. (We should also be able to judge the datasets used to train them, but these are being kept secret for questionable reasons.) Prompted to ‘give an example of mutuomorphomutation between English and another language’, ChatGPT began with lexical borrowing, first from Japanese, followed by Mandarin Chinese and isiXhosa:

The Loanword “Anime” in English from Japanese

Original Japanese Term: アニメ (anime) — This is itself a borrowing from the English word “animation.” In Japanese, アニメ (anime) refers broadly to all animated works, regardless of origin.

Adaptation into English: “Anime” — In English, “anime” has been adopted specifically to refer to a style of animation that originates from Japan. The term does not encompass all animation but rather a particular subset characterized by distinctive themes, styles, and cultural references.

Original Chinese Term: 功夫 (Gōngfu)

Meaning in Chinese: The term “功夫” in Mandarin Chinese originally refers to any skill achieved through hard work and practice. It encompasses a broad spectrum of expertise, not limited to martial arts. The concept is deeply rooted in Chinese philosophy, emphasizing the time and effort required to master any discipline.

Adaptation into English: “Kung Fu”

Shift in Meaning: When adapted into English, “kung fu” underwent a significant semantic narrowing. It came to be specifically associated with Chinese martial arts, rather than the broader notion of skill or mastery through diligent practice. This shift reflects the West’s fascination with Chinese martial arts, popularized through cinema and television.

Original Xhosa Term: Ubuntu

Meaning in Xhosa: Ubuntu is a Nguni Bantu term with a profound philosophical meaning, deeply rooted in the communal cultures of Southern African societies. It embodies the principles of interdependence, humanity, and compassion towards others, often translated as “I am because we are,” or “humanity towards others.” The concept is central to the way social relationships are viewed and conducted in many African communities.

Adaptation into English: “Ubuntu”

Preservation of Meaning: Unlike many loanwords that undergo significant semantic shift when borrowed into another language, “Ubuntu” has been adopted into English with much of its original philosophical and ethical connotations intact. It is used to refer to the African philosophy on communalism and shared humanity, often in discussions of philosophy, social justice, and in the context of technology (e.g., the Ubuntu operating system, which is named after this philosophy to reflect its community-oriented development approach).

Second prompt: Is this process also at work at the syntactic level? Once again, ChatGPT turned first to Japanese. 

The Influence of English on Japanese Sentence Structure

Direct Object Marking: In Japanese, the particle “を” (wo) is used to mark the direct object of a verb. However, influenced by the English Subject-Verb-Object order, some Japanese speakers may omit this particle in casual speech, especially when the sentence structure makes the object’s role clear without explicit marking. This reflects a syntactic simplification influenced by English.

Relative Clauses: English relative clauses follow the noun they modify, whereas in traditional Japanese, relative clauses precede the noun. Under English influence, there’s been an increase in post-nominal relative clauses in Japanese, especially in informal contexts and certain written forms influenced by English syntax, showing a syntactic shift.

Loanword Integration and Syntax: The integration of English loanwords into Japanese has sometimes led to shifts in sentence structure to accommodate these words. For example, the use of English verbs as loanwords in Japanese can lead to constructions that more closely mimic English syntax, especially in informal speech or creative texts.

Reciprocal Influence on English

While syntactic influence from Japanese on English is less common due to the structural differences between the languages and the dominant position of English globally, the increasing consumption of Japanese media (anime, manga, video games) has introduced certain Japanese syntactic constructions to English-speaking fans. These influences are mostly seen in borrowed phrases or expressions that retain their original Japanese structure, such as the emphatic particle “ne” being used at the end of English sentences to seek agreement, mirroring its use in Japanese.

Prompted to consider ‘the best language to demonstrate this process in relation to English syntax’, it opted for French:

French Influence on English Syntax

The Norman Conquest brought French into England as the language of the ruling class, law, and administration, setting the stage for extensive borrowing and linguistic influence. While the most visible impact of French on English is lexical, with thousands of French words entering the English language, there are also notable syntactic influences:

Word Order in Adjective-Noun Phrases: French influence can be seen in the placement of adjectives. While English typically places adjectives before nouns (e.g., “green tree”), some expressions reflect a French-style post-nominal adjective placement, especially in set phrases or when conveying a certain formality (e.g., “attorney general,” “court martial”).

Use of Prepositions: French has influenced the use of certain prepositions in English. For instance, the use of “of” to indicate possession (e.g., “the name of the father”) instead of the Germanic genitive case (“the father’s name”) reflects a syntactic structure more aligned with French.

Double Negation: While now considered nonstandard in English, the use of double negation for emphasis (e.g., “I don’t know nothing”) can be traced back to French influence. In Old and Middle English periods, double negation was used for emphasis, a feature present in French syntax, though modern French uses double negation as a standard form of negation.

The Development of Auxiliary Verbs: The use of auxiliary verbs in English for forming compound tenses, passive voice, and interrogative or negative constructions was influenced by French. The expansion of “do” as an auxiliary in questions and negatives in English (e.g., “Do you see?” or “I do not know”) during the Early Modern English period reflects syntactic structures familiar in French.

Two visions of language by Dall-E

1. Have you ever met a tove? Or seen something that is a lighter shade of tove? Or witnessed someone tove with flair? Perhaps you have heard of a person called Michael Tove or, more plausibly, Birte Tove? Or read a novel in the Moomin series by Tove Jansson or seen Tove (2020), the movie about her life? Or bought a designer outfit from Tove Studio? Then again, is this tove as in love (tuv or /tʌv/ in IPA), grove (tohv or /təʊv/), or move (toov or /tuːv/)? Pronouncing the Scandinavian name is a bit easier: Tove, thought to be derived from Tófa, a legendary woman in an Old Norse saga, is rendered as ‘tu:ve’ in IPA (roughly toova). The London-based fashion house claims ‘TOVE is borne from the girl’s name originating from Denmark. It stands for strength and beauty, perfectly encapsulating everything that TOVE epitomises.’

2. If you stumble across Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’ on the internet—say, on the Poetry Foundation website, Google’s top-ranked search result—then you can settle one issue with some confidence. In the initial sentence of the poem, which runs across the first two lines, the word ‘toves’ functions syntactically as a regular noun, taking, for English, the standard plural form -s. So you could potentially encounter some toves, identifying them by the attributes and habits Carroll gives them: they are ‘slithy’ (adjective), they ‘gyre’ and ‘gimble’ (verbs), actions they seem to enjoy performing when it is ‘brillig’ (noun? adjective?), and they inhabit ‘the wabe’ (definite article+noun). This makes them likely to be an organic life-form, but are they plants, animals, viruses, something else? Reading the free-floating internet-version of the poem leaves the pronunciation problem unsolved as well. All we know is that ‘toves’ rhymes (imperfectly) with ‘borogoves’ (-guvs? -gohvs? -goovs?, and is this a hard and k-like /g/ or soft and j-like /dʒ/?).

3. Reduced to a simple statement—‘The slithy toves gyre and gimble in the wabe’—Carroll’s initial sentence, the first version of which was a parody of Anglo-Saxon poetry he wrote in 1855 aged 23 (see above and below), anticipates the nonce-formulations beloved of early 20^th-century philosophers. Andrew Ingraham, the American educationalist and accomplished philosophical dabbler, produced ‘The gostak distims the doshes’ (p. 154) in 1903, and Rudolf Carnap, the leading logical positivist and member of the Vienna Circle, followed with ‘Piroten karulieren elatisch’ in 1934 (trans. ‘Pirots karulize elatically’, p. 2). The philosophical concerns underlying these two sentences were different. Ingraham worried about language’s seductive power to make us ‘go on, not employing words to stand for things, or to call up thoughts in our minds, but to replace things, to be substitutes for thought’ (154). By contrast, Carnap wanted to show that, ‘given an appropriate rule’, all ‘word-languages’ (including Esperanto) can for all their many ‘deficiencies’ be formalized independently of ‘the meaning of words’, ultimately making the kind of ‘logical syntax’ he advocated possible (2). That Carroll’s pseudo-sensical but logically and grammatically acceptable jabberwocky sentence toys with both possibilities was no doubt not lost on the Oxford logician-mathematician Charles Dodgson.

3.1 Bertrand Russell and Noam Chomsky went on to develop Carnap’s thoughts about the promise of formalization in their own ways, using standard (if sometimes obscure) English rather than jabberwocky-words. Russell proposed ‘quadruplicity drinks procrastination’ in 1940 to show that ‘no ordinary language contains syntactical rules forbidding the construction of nonsensical sentences’ (166). Seventeen years later, Chomsky, inspired in part by Carnap, offered ‘Colourless green ideas sleep furiously’ and ‘Furiously sleep ideas green colourless’ to prove (as he thought) ‘the independence of grammar’ from semantics (and pragmatics): both sentences are ‘equally nonsensical’, he claimed, but ‘any speaker of English will recognize that only the former is grammatical’ (15). Chomsky also thought the sentences made ‘any statistical model of grammaticalness’ doubtful (16). While both are improbable, he believed English speakers would read the first with ‘a normal sentence intonation’ (not as separate words), recall it more easily, and learn it more quickly (16). Recent developments in neuroscience and AI (think ChatGPT) raise new questions about Chomsky’s doubts regarding statistical models of language learning.

4. Encountering ‘Jabberwocky’ not as a free-floating poem but as an integral part of Through the Looking-Glass (1871) is a very different experience. For one thing, when we first see it in Chapter 1 we look through Alice’s 7½ year-old eyes—worth noting she is at a key stage in her development as a reader, no longer a novice but not yet a fluent comprehender. Though she quickly cracks the mirror ‘code’ in which the poem is written—through the looking-glass toves reads sevot—she ends up grasping only a rough sense of the basic narrative: ‘Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that’s clear, at any rate—’. She returns to the poem in Chapter 6, now as a perplexed reader seeking enlightenment from Humpty Dumpty. Besides being a riddle (answer: egg) borrowed from an eighteenth-century nursery rhyme, Humpty Dumpty is the mirror-world’s most surreal logician, chief grammarian, and its most imperious literary critic. ‘I can explain all the poems that were ever invented’, he tells Alice with characteristic bravado when she brings up ‘Jabberwocky’, ‘and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet.’

5. Humpty Dumpty glosses particular words from the first verse, revisiting the mock-philological explanations Carroll added to the original 1855 version (see below). Some are informatively and plausibly linguistic: ‘slithy’, for instance, is a ‘portmanteau’ made of ‘lithe and slimy’ (both of Germanic origin). Others are patently guesswork, even though they highlight some of the odd gaps between spoken vs. written English, as in ‘mome’ which is allegedly short for ‘from home’ (again both Germanic). In many cases, however, Humpty Dumpty simply resorts to stipulative definition, re-affirming his megaegomaniacal philosophy of language (Carroll’s satirical (self)portrait of Charles Dodgson?). So ‘toves,’ who ‘make nests under sundials’ and ‘live on cheese,’ are, according to the learned critic, ‘something like badgers—they’re something like lizards—and they’re something like corkscrews.’ John Tenniel, Carroll’s ingenious British illustrator, went with this, permanently fixing Humpty Dumpty’s stipulative image of the toves as strange, post-Darwinian hybrids (they were just a species of badger in Carroll’s original gloss). That still left the problem of pronunciation, at least until Carroll issued instructions in the preface to The Hunting of the Snark (1876): ‘“toves” is pronounced so as to rhyme with “groves’” (so tohvs or /təʊvs/), he insisted with Humpty-ish assurance. The preface also endorses his notorious ego-egg’s idea of the portmanteau.

6. James Joyce gave Humpty Dumpty a new life in Finnegans Wake (1939), in part, and characteristically, as a series of fragmentary letter-strings, ranging from the ‘humptyhillhead of humself’ (3) on the first page to ‘Humps, when you hised us and dumps, when you doused us!’ (624) four pages from the end. Humpty is also central to the spoof ‘Ballad of Persse O’Reilly’ (45-47) and a cryptic part of the seventh ‘thunderword’:

Bothallchoractorschumminaroundgansumuminarumdrumstrumtruminahumptadumpwaultopoofoolooderamaunsturnup! (314)

Yet it was Carroll’s particular take on the nursery-rhyme figure that proved most influential for Joyce. Carroll’s HD is one of many avatars of the masculinist, master-building HCE-figure and an archetype of the Wake’s large cast of absurdly scholastic male critics who, in one way or another, claim they can ‘explain all the poems that were ever invented’. These include the ‘grave Brofèsor’ (124), an aggressively pedantic palaeographer; Shaun, in his guise as a fundamentalist interpreter of ‘the authordux Book of Lief’ (425); and the ‘grisly old Sykos who have done our unsmiling bit on ‘alices, when they were yung and easily freudened’ (115). Joyce’s point? Following Carroll, he recognised that the fate of all these would-be, Humpty-ish language-masters is always sealed. Given the protean, endlessly rule-changing, and radically open character of living languages in all their spoken and written forms, they and all their scholastic kind are bound to have a great fall, particularly when they sit on disciplinary walls.

Postscript: Joyce did not target only professors, critics, linguists, and philosophers. He had so-called ‘ordinary readers’ in his sights as well. The ‘grave Brofèsor’, for instance, has a rhyming, non-identical twin in the ‘ornery josser’ (18), another bad male reader (see the ‘What is creative criticism?‘ post). So, for Joyce, distinctions like the one John Guillory draws in Professing Criticism (2022) between ‘lay’ and ‘professional’ readers are too assured (320). As Guillory notes, this binary deformed literary criticism from its very beginnings as an academic discipline. When it ‘crystallized in its present form in the twentieth century, its professionalized reading practice was defined precisely by a deliberate cultivation of a difference from lay reading and even by the expression of antagonism toward that mode of reading’ (327). To overcome the ‘spectacular failure’ of their own discipline, professionalized, university-based literary critics could do well to revitalize their subject by putting it on a new footing, Guillory suggests, this time acknowledging ‘the continuity between lay and professional reading’ (342). Yet with regret—‘alas’ he laments airily—he has ‘no program for reconciling these practices’ (342). Given the less promising, Humpty-Dumpty-like continuities between ‘lay’ and ‘professional’ male readers Joyce identified, it would be worth thinking twice before embarking on any such programme.

References:

Rudolf Carnap, The Logical Syntax of Language (1934; trans. 1937)

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (1871)

——-, The Hunting of the Snark (1876)

——-, The Rectory Umbrella and Mischmasch (1932, see below)

Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (1957)

Andrew Ingraham, The Swain School Lectures (1903)

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)

Bertrand Russell, An Enquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940)

Maass! But the majik wavus has elfun anon meshes. And Simba the Slayer of his Oga is slewd. (203)

I recently ran a test with this quotation from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) using GPT-4, the latest iteration of OpenAI’s large language model. I first wanted to see how many languages it could identify in the word-string. It focused on the unconventional spellings of English words, adding only that ‘Simba is a Swahili word for ‘lion,’ and it’s also a well-known character from The Lion King‘, and that Oga seems to be ‘a term from African pidgin English.’ With some further prompting, it specified the meaning of oga as ‘boss’ or ‘leader’ in ‘Nigerian Pidgin’, which ‘has roots in English and local Nigerian languages, including Igbo, Yoruba, and Hausa.’ It missed the Swahili words ‘maji’ (water), ‘wavu’ (net), and ‘elfu’ (one thousand). It could also not identify any river names, any reference to Hindu myth (‘Shiva the Destroyer’), the Arabian Nights (‘Sinbad the sailor’), or, indeed, the source as Finnegans Wake. (For more on this particular Wake-string, see the Finnegans Wake/Nakshi Kantha post.)

I then asked it to produce a comparable string based on this example. This is what it came up with:

Ombra! In the dervish swirleth lies a tempo fable, entwining runes and riddles. So whispers Bantu the Weaver of her Saga, beguiled.

It also appended this explanatory note:

GPT-4: This example attempts to capture some of the characteristics of Joyce’s work:

• Language Blending: By combining English with words and influences from other languages, this text mirrors the multilingualism found in Finnegans Wake.
• Symbolism and Ambiguity: The passage is filled with suggestive imagery and symbols (such as “dervish,” “tempo,” and “Weaver”) that invite multiple interpretations, akin to Joyce’s layered meanings.
• Character Naming: “Bantu the Weaver” could be seen as a parallel to “Simba the Slayer,” a blending of real and mythological reference, and a fusion of different cultural influences.
• Literary Allusions: The passage may contain hidden or subtle references to various myths, histories, and literatures, mirroring Joyce’s densely allusive style.

It’s worth noting that replicating Joyce’s unique style fully is a considerable challenge, given the depth, complexity, and idiosyncrasy of his writing in Finnegans Wake. However, this example may convey some of the novel’s flavor and approach to language.

I then initiated the following, Turing-like exchange:

PMcD: Isn’t ‘Bantu’ a controversial word?

GPT-4: Yes, the term “Bantu” can indeed be viewed as complex and controversial, depending on its usage and context.

Historically, “Bantu” refers to a group of over 500 closely related languages spoken by various ethnic groups in Sub-Saharan Africa. It is also used to describe the people who speak these languages.

However, during the apartheid era in South Africa, the term was co-opted by the ruling government to categorize, segregate, and control people. The racial classification system that included the term “Bantu” was tied to deeply discriminatory practices. This association with apartheid has led to negative connotations and controversy around the use of the term in certain contexts.

In the context of literary or artistic expression, the use of such a term might be an intentional choice by an author to evoke specific cultural or historical meanings, themes, or emotions. However, its use can also be seen as insensitive or inappropriate, depending on the understanding, intent, and awareness of both the writer and the audience.

In the text I crafted, the intention was to emulate the linguistic blending and cultural fusion characteristic of Finnegans Wake. However, I acknowledge that the choice of the term “Bantu” might carry unintended connotations or sensitivities. In constructing literary texts, especially those that draw on real-world languages and cultural identifiers, awareness of historical and sociopolitical contexts is crucial, and careful consideration should be given to the potential impact and interpretation of specific terms and symbols.

PMcD: And doesn’t ‘deverish swirleth’ rehearse racist clichés?

GPT-4: You are quite correct to bring attention to these concerns. The term “dervish” refers to members of Muslim religious orders known for their practice of whirling dances as a form of physical meditation. It has been exoticized and stereotyped in various ways in Western literature and art. Coupling “dervish” with “swirleth” might inadvertently invoke Orientalist clichés, which often portray the Eastern world as mystical, irrational, and exotic.

The use of such language can perpetuate harmful stereotypes, especially when taken out of its cultural and historical context. Even when the intention is to emulate a certain style or artistic expression, such as the experimental language in Finnegans Wake, care must be taken not to reinforce or propagate stereotypes and biases.

Literary experimentation that draws on cultural symbols and terms can be a rich and nuanced form of expression, but it also carries the responsibility of understanding and respecting the complexity of the cultures being referenced. A more thoughtful and informed approach to these issues might include engaging with primary sources, consulting with cultural experts, or otherwise grounding the work in a genuine appreciation and understanding of the cultures being invoked.

Your observations are valuable reminders of the importance of sensitivity and critical awareness in literary and creative endeavors. Thank you for bringing these issues to the forefront.

PMcD: How do you explain your choice of these terms and references?

GPT-4: Your critique is well-received, and I must acknowledge that the choices made in crafting that text were flawed. My intention was to create a passage that echoed the complexity and multilingualism found in Finnegans Wake. However, I did not adequately consider the implications of certain terms and references.

1. “Bantu”: The use of this term was an attempt to invoke a cultural element, but as you’ve pointed out, it’s a term fraught with historical and political sensitivity. My use of it was ill-considered.
2. “dervish swirleth”: Again, the intention here was to create a sense of rhythm and mysticism associated with James Joyce’s writing style. However, the choice inadvertently played into Orientalist clichés.

I appreciate your bringing these concerns to my attention. It serves as a stark reminder that words and phrases cannot be used merely for their aesthetic or sonic qualities without considering their cultural, historical, and ethical dimensions.

PMcD: That is fine as a description of what you did, but it doesn’t explain why or how you arrived at the text you did? Try again, giving a real explanation.

GPT-4: Certainly, I appreciate your insistence on a more transparent and reflective explanation. Here’s a more detailed breakdown of how and why I arrived at the text in question:

1. Emulating Joyce’s Style: My primary goal was to emulate the unique linguistic style found in Finnegans Wake. Joyce’s work often includes wordplay, multilingualism, and mythical allusions. I sought to mirror these elements, but without the deep contextual understanding that Joyce had.
2. Choosing Multilingual Elements: In an attempt to replicate Joyce’s use of multiple languages, I included words like “Bantu” and phrases like “dervish swirleth.” However, I failed to appreciate the nuanced cultural and historical significance of these terms.
3. Aesthetic and Sonic Appeal: The construction of the phrase “dervish swirleth” was partly guided by a desire to create a pleasing rhythm and imagery. This aesthetic-driven choice was made without sufficient consideration of the stereotyping and exoticization that it might entail.
4. Lack of Critical Reflection: I did not critically assess the potential implications and sensitivities of the words and phrases chosen. This lack of reflection led to the inclusion of terms that might rehearse stereotypes or invoke controversy.
5. Limitations of Quick Response: The creation of the text was done in the context of responding to a question in real-time, without the benefit of extended reflection or consultation with cultural or historical sources. While this doesn’t excuse the choices made, it does highlight the challenges of producing thoughtful and sensitive content in a rapid-response setting.

I hope this explanation provides a clearer understanding of how and why the text was constructed as it was, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to reflect on these important issues.

PMcD: Doesn’t the real explanation lie in the way you synthesize language based on your data sets, modelling, etc?

GPT-4: Yes, you are absolutely correct. The underlying mechanisms that led to the creation of the text can be traced back to the models and data sets on which I was trained. Let’s delve into that aspect:

1. Training Data: I’ve been trained on a diverse range of texts, including literature, websites, and other written materials. The associations, words, and styles I draw from reflect the breadth and biases of this training data.
2. Language Modeling: The way I synthesize language is guided by statistical patterns in the data on which I was trained. These patterns include both syntactic structures and semantic associations. The language used in the generated text was influenced by these underlying patterns.
3. Limitations of Context: While I strive to generate contextually relevant and culturally sensitive text, the model doesn’t inherently “understand” cultural nuances or ethical considerations. Its responses are based on statistical relationships rather than a deep understanding of human culture and history.
4. Emulating Style without Ethical Consideration: In trying to emulate Joyce’s style, the model drew upon linguistic elements that may resemble his work but without the nuanced ethical considerations that a human author might apply. This can lead to the inclusion of terms or phrases that are problematic or controversial.
5. Lack of Introspection: Unlike human authors, the model doesn’t have personal intentions, beliefs, or a conscious thought process. It generates text based on learned patterns and algorithms, not personal reflection or deliberate choice.

Your question has brought to the forefront the intricate relationship between data, modeling, and the resulting generated text. It highlights the importance of considering not only the artistic or literary aspects of text generation but also the underlying technology, methodology, and ethical dimensions.

The incident illustrates how AI models, while powerful and versatile, must be used with awareness of their limitations and potential pitfalls, especially in complex and sensitive areas such as literature, culture, and ethics.

Anselm Kiefer’s exhibition at the White Cube Gallery in London (June-August 2023) is an engaging multimedia homage to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939). (Kiefer is a painter and sculptor, born in Germany in 1945.) The exhibition is arranged across four rooms linked via a large central passage, so five gallery spaces in all. Each invokes a different aspect of Joyce’s Wake, combining key motifs, suggestive interpretations, and multiple cross-references.

The entrance

You enter the main passage through a gap in the hanging, film-like strips of a curtain, which recalls the ‘photoist’s’ chemically deformed horse photograph, a ‘grotesquely distorted macromass of all sorts of horsehappy values and masses of meltwhile horse’, itself an emblem of the Wake’s guiding preoccupation with the many technologies and modalities of representation (FW, 111). The most pronounced of these in the exhibition is Joyce’s own medium, writing itself, which features throughout, whether as graffiti on the walls, as captions for the displays, as inscriptions in the paintings, or as marks on assorted detritus. These are all rendered in script rather than print form.

The dark passage and the light side room

The curtained entrance leads directly into the long, connecting passage, which is dimly lit and lined on both sides with floor-to-ceiling shelves, all displaying an array of cultural artefacts, natural specimens, and more. It is a cabinet of dark curiosities, a playful invocation of a Joycean/Wakean unconscious, and a material recreation of the ‘Willingdone Museyroom’ with which the Wake begins (8). Among the many items on display are skeletons, dried plants, a DNA helix, metal tools, rusted machinery, a hanging wardrobe, pornographic images, political symbols (notably the hammer and sickle), a model of a cathedral, a rusted bicycle, printers’ trays, books, etc. The temptation to see this as a version of the unconscious is reinforced by the smallest side room, the second of three leading off to the left of the passage. Like the passage, this is set out as a multi-shelved Museyroom, sometimes repeating items in its darker twin, though now brightly lit and often white — in effect, the space of the conscious self. These connections with difference creatively complicate the standard reading of the Wake as Joyce’s book of the night, in contrast to Ulysses (1922), his book of a day. They also productively undercut the inevitable spatializing effects of the exhibition itself, revealing that in Kiefer’s Wake, as in Joyce’s, no binaries are safe.

The heap and heliot room

The first of the rooms leading off to the left is dominated by a heap of sand in which discarded shopping trolleys, inscriptions, rusty sunflowers, and a wheelchair are variously buried. This recalls the ‘fatal midden’ in which ‘the original hen’ finds the manuscript of ALP’s unreadable letter (110). One of the walls includes a group of graffitied citations addressing political and economic issues: ‘making a venture out of the murder of investment’ (341), ‘marx my word fort’ (83), ‘our bourse and politicoecomedy are in safe with good Jock [Jet] Shepherd’ (540). The only painting, which covers one of the larger walls, depicts a dark, massed crowd looking at a bright, visionary light, invoking the flower-like ancient Irish ‘heliots’ who, following St Patrick, turn to worship ‘the firethere the sun in his halo cast’ (612-13).

The HCE room

The third and final room leading off to the left of the dark passage is dedicated to HCE, the Wake’s ‘male’ (tumescent-detumescent) principle, who is associated with master-builders of various kinds, the rise and fall of leaders, states, empires, etc. Like the first room, it is dominated by a central heap, though this is now a rubble of concrete slabs (the Berlin Wall?), barbed wire, and some sunflower-like forms. The room has three large, dark paintings: a portrait of HCE’s family (ALP, Shaun, Shem, and Issy), a tribute to oil painting (‘and oil paint use a pumme if yell trace,’ 230), and a war-ravaged field of flowers, recalling the quotation from Edgar Quinet’s Introduction à la Philosophie de l’Histoire de l’Humanité (1825) that Joyce reworked throughout the Wake. The quotation, which Joyce cites in full only once and in French, translates as follows:

Today, as in the time of Pliny and Columella, the hyacinth disports in Gaul, the periwinkle in Illyria, the daisy on the ruins of Numantia; and while around them the cities have changed masters and names, while some have ceased to exist, while the civilisations have collided with one another and smashed, their peaceful generations have passed through the ages and have come up to us, fresh and laughing as on the days of battles. (281)

The ALP room

The only room leading off to the right of the dark passage is a counter space dedicated to ALP, the Wake’s ‘female’ (Anna Livia Plurabelle) principle, who is associated with the river Liffey, all forms and varieties of fluid connection, and the Wake itself as a never-ending, free-flowing stream of letters. Uniquely, all four walls have paintings, a series of eleven, all featuring the same striking mix of browns, greens, copper blue, and luminous gold. The link to writing and the Wake is established via the scattered piles of water-weathered, lead-paged books in the middle, a material contrast to the concrete rubble of the HCE room. A rusty scythe amid the books hints at the ALP death monologue with which the Wake ends without ending.

According to Wikipedia’s colour coding of the map above, India and South Africa are not part of the Anglosphere—the light green territories, including the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States, where, despite being the majority language, English has no official status. India and South Africa are orange because they both recognize the language in law—English is one among 22 official languages in the former, one of 11 in the latter—and because it is widely used in education and public life. 

Inevitably, this is a schematic and legalistic way of representing the many stories of English across the world today. To uncover the tangled histories of the language and its complex contemporary realities, we need a more grounded and localized perspective. Here I take a view from Makhanda, Eastern Cape, South Africa, site of the ‘1820 Settlers’ Monument’ (as it is still called), and from Banka, Uttar Pradesh, India, home to the Dalit ‘English Temple.’

The Settlers’ Monument

The 1820 Settlers’ Monument occupies a commanding position on a hill overlooking the city of Makhanda (population around 140,000). It is, in fact, adjacent to Fort Selwyn, a stone redoubt the British had located on the same spot for military purposes in the 1830s — hence Gunfire Hill. Modelled on the monolithic modernist design the American architect Louis Kahn developed in the 1950s, the vast 20,000-square metre, seven-level building includes a 1000-seat theatre, a 200-seat cinema as well as art galleries and conference facilities. Since it was opened in 1974, it has also been the venue for an annual festival of the arts. As its first publicity officer explained, the ship-like concrete, brick and glass structure—‘proudly dominating the landscape’—was intended to embody the iconic function:

As the use of the building had to be related to the contributions made by the British pioneers, the main functions are designed to concentrate on perpetuating the heritage bequeathed by the 1820 Settlers—the English language and the democratic traditions they brought with them—by means of an auditorium to be used mainly for English-language festivals and a conference centre that points to the democratic practice of debate and discussion. (Neville 1974: 12)

A plaque in the entrance, which pointedly speaks for the settler lineage in the possessive first-person plural, still makes the same point: the ‘facilities are open to all, to enjoy and enlarge our heritage of language and culture and to perpetuate our traditions of tolerance and freedom of speech.’ ‘It is perpetuating more than a language,’ the publicity officer concluded, ‘it is an ethos; a characteristic spirit; a heritage; an endowment’ (13).

Three conspicuously displayed quotations in the cavernous main foyer, one etched in stone around a central fountain, the other two rendered in large, brushed-steel letters on the concrete walls at the entrance, reiterate the message in more poetic terms. ‘That all might have life and have it more abundantly’, the fountain inscription reads, adapting Jesus’s parable of the good shepherd from the King James version of John 10:10. ‘We must take root and grow or die where we stand’, the writing on the first wall at the entrance declares, turning a past-tense observation the English missionary Henry Dugmore (1810-96) made in The Reminiscences of an Albany Settler (1871) into a present-tense injunction. Finally, a side wall at the entrance carries four lines from the end of ‘The Emigrant’s Cabin’, a 305-line ‘conversation poem’ by the Scottish writer, free-speech campaigner, and abolitionist, Thomas Pringle (1789-1834), who was a leading figure in the settler community during his brief six-year residence in the Cape:

Nor wild Romance nor Pride allured me here:
Duty and Destiny with equal voice
Constrained my steps: I had no other choice…
Something for Africa to do or say.

This comprises lines 137-39 of the poem, plus line 230, all spoken in the Pringle voice. ‘Thomas Pringle’ lives on as the name of one of the building’s primary venues as well. The cinema and main theatre are also named: the former after the writer, feminist, and anti-war campaigner Olive Schreiner (1855-1920); the latter after the poet, academic, and leading proponent of the Monument Guy Butler (1918-2001). There is some acknowledgement of local Xhosa heritage too, but only via a single figure who also exemplifies the success of missionary evangelism. The art gallery is named after Ntsikana (1780-1821), the first Xhosa prophet to propagate Christian beliefs.

For the Monument’s founders, the talismanic settler names and quotations did more than express what they considered the ‘characteristic spirit’ of the British legacy. Like the plaque declaring the facilities ‘open to all,’ they elevated their project above the brutally repressive realities of apartheid. ‘Inscribed in the flagstones of the floor of the impressive memorial foyer, around a perpetually bubbling fountain, are the words from St John’s gospel’ testifying to the Monument’s ‘openness and hospitality,’ the chair of the 1820 Foundation explained in 1991 (Neville 1991: 105). He was echoing his predecessors who had from the start insisted ‘this is no sectional or bombastic memorial’ (103).

Some details about the building’s history suggest otherwise. Two will suffice. First, a coincidence: the monumental tribute to ‘our traditions of freedom of speech’ opened the year the white-only, Westminster-style Parliament, another settler inheritance, passed the Publications Act, 1974, inaugurating a new, more repressive phase in the history of apartheid censorship. Second, an enabling condition: far from disdaining, or simply ignoring, the drive to commemorate the 1820 settlers, the state actively supported it from the start, in the end covering 80% of the final construction cost (R3.2 million of the R4 million total, around R200 million in today’s values) (Neville 1991: 64, 93). Indeed, for the state, the Monument was something of a propaganda coup—the publicity officer’s promotional piece about the opening was, accordingly, given a six-page, illustrated spread in S.A. Panorama (1956-1993), a state-run periodical designed to boost South Africa’s image at home and abroad (see images below). Evidently, any threat the founders’ claims about openness, tolerance, and free expression posed was outweighed by the endorsement their project gave to the state’s own racialized ethnolinguistic vision of apartheid South Africa as an essentially Anglo-Afrikaner polity, comprising an association of divinely ordained, separate volke, each with its own language and ethnic heritage.

The name and future of the Settlers’ Monument have been under review since 2015, outcome not yet known. In the meantime, the South African-born writer Zoë Wicomb has given Thomas Pringle and his legacy a trenchant fictional reassessment in Still Life (2020), pre-emptively re-setting the terms of the debate in ingeniously inventive ways (see ‘Other Writers’).

The Dalit Temple

Inaugurated in 2010, the Dalit Temple in the rural village of Banka (population around 8,000) was imagined as an altogether more modest structure. Planned to be located in the grounds of a private, Dalit-run school, it was envisaged as a single-story block covered in black granite, to be built for the sole purpose of housing a small bronze idol of ‘Angrezi Devi’ (literally, ‘English Goddess’), as her Hindi name has it. She is also known as the ‘Dalit Goddess’ or ‘Dalit Ma’ (‘Dalit Mother’). The fact that it was to be on private land is significant. Despite this, state officials still opposed its construction — one of many features distinguishing it from the Monument — so it remains a Temple of the imagination,  though a replica was erected temporarily in Goa in 2021. Equally significant is the date on which the idea of the Goddess was first mooted: 25 October 2006. This marked the 206^th birthday of Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59), the colonial administrator who did most to entrench English as the primary language of elite education in British India, a process that began with his notorious ‘minute’ of 1835 — as it happens the year plans for the construction of Fort Selwyn were approved. Macaulay is not the only historical figure commemorated, however. As the leading proponent of the project, the journalist and activist Chandra Bhan Prasad, commented, the Temple is also dedicated, less provocatively, to the memory of Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891-1956), the reforming Dalit jurist, economist, and political leader who played a key part in framing the Indian Constitution. ‘When it was being debated as to what should be the national language of India after independence,’ Prasad remarked, ‘Dr Ambedkar was the only national leader who vociferously batted for English’ (for more on these debates and the poet Arvind Mehrotra’s own inventive response to them, see Chapter 7 of Artefacts of Writing).

Modelled on the Statue of Liberty, the small bronze figure, designed by the Dalit writer and artist Shanti Swaroop Baudh, captures the myriad aspirations the Goddess embodies. As Prasad explained:

She holds a pen in her right hand which shows she is literate. She is dressed well and sports a huge hat—it’s a symbol of defiance that she is rejecting the old traditional dress code. In her left hand, she holds a book which is the constitution of India which gave Dalits equal rights. She stands on top of a computer which means we will use English to rise up the ladder and become free for ever.

This makes the Goddess the herald of a future in which the Dalit community will not just have been empowered through their proficiency in written English. They will have escaped ‘the caste-saturated languages of India which they habitually speak,’ as Sumathi Ramaswamy notes (314). The Goddess is not wholly anglicized, however: the computer-plinth on which she stands has on its screen the symbol of the Buddhist Dharma chakra, no doubt signifying the righteousness of her path, while also ensuring her call to English does not entail any form of Christianization—recall the quotation from the King James Bible in the Settlers’ Monument and the tribute to Ntsikana.

The quotations displayed on the wall behind the Goddess, in a replica displayed in Goa, also set the Temple apart from the Monument not least by eschewing the Christian ethnonationalist assumptions on which the latter was founded. Mixed in with an array of classic formulas from mathematics and physics—E=mc², V-E+F=2, etc.—is a series of literary citations mainly from canonical English authors (Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickens, George Eliot, Emily Bronte, Orwell), but also from Yeats (Ireland), T.S. Eliot (US/UK), Harper Lee (US), and Atwood (Canada), and then, in translation, Homer, Sophocles, Márquez, Camus, and Dostoevsky (see full  details below). So, in contrast to the Monument’s ethnic canon, the Goddess represents a multilingual tradition of world literature in English, which, as the quotations intimate, speaks to a constellation of fundamental rights and aspirations. Some point to the freedom the Goddess heralds (Sophocles: ‘free speech at least is mine’), some to the scientific attitude (Dickens: ‘Take nothing on its looks’), and others to the need to for an enlarged mentality (Lee: ‘You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view’) or to the dignity of self-sufficiency (Wordsworth: ‘bliss of solitude’). ‘This is the cry of emancipation,’ the manifesto on the first promotional poster declared, ‘this is the cry for English, the Dalit Goddess.’ The poster then encouraged Dalit parents to ‘lean poetically’ to their newborns: ‘First the left ear/Whisper now/‘A-B-C-D’/Turn to the right/Whisper/‘1-2-3-4.’  

Temple Wall Quotations

Let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter.
(Homer, Iliad, c. 800BCE)

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
(George Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’, 1946)

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.

‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’

Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
(George Orwell, Nineteen-Eighty Four, 1949)

What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?
It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.
(George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1871)

Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There is no better rule.
(Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, 1861)

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
(William Wordsworth, ‘I wondered lonely as a cloud’, from Poems, 1807)

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view – until you climb inside his skin and walk around in it.

The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.
(Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1960)

Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.
(Margaret Atwood, ‘February’ from Morning in the Burned House, 1995)

It is enough for me to know that you and I exist in this moment.
(Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967)

If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.
(Albert Camus, The Stranger, 1942)

There is nothing [either] good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space.
(Shakespeare, Hamlet, c. 1600)

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
(W. B. Yeats, ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’, from The Wind Among the Reeds, 1899)

I have to remind myself to breathe—almost to remind my heart to beat!
I’m now quite cured of seeking pleasure in society, be it country or town. A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself.
(Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, 1847)

King as thou art, free speech at least is mine.
To make reply; in this I am thy peer.
(Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, c. 429 BCE)

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
(T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets, 1943)

It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.

I know that you don’t believe it, but indeed, life will bring you through. You will live it down in time. What you need now is fresh air, fresh air, fresh air!

It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of.
(Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, 1866)

References:

Neville, Thelma (1974), ‘Settlers’ Commemoration’, South African Panorama, October, 19 (10): 10-15.

— (1991), More Lasting than Bronze: A story of the 1820 Settlers National Monument, Pietermaritzburg: Natal Witness Printing and Publishing.

Ramaswamy, Sumathi (2023), ‘A Historian among the Goddesses of Modern India‘, How Secular is Art?, eds. Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Vazira Zamindar, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

1. Unlike most modern states, including the Republic of Ireland, the precariously United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland has no written constitution. Yet, as the coronation of King Charles III reaffirmed on 6 May 2023, it does have a foundational book (or Book). Following a custom dating from 1689, the first of many gifts presented to the King was a new printing of the King James Bible (1611). Produced by Oxford University Press, on commission for the Archbishop of Canterbury, it was handbound in red leather and decorated in gold leaf by London bookbinders Shepherds, Sangorski & Sutcliffe.

2. Presenting it to the King, the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, Rev Dr Iain Greenshields, declared:

Sir: to keep you ever mindful of the law and the Gospel of God
as the Rule for the whole life and government of Christian Princes, receive this Book, the most valuable thing that this world affords. Here is Wisdom; This is the royal Law; These are the lively Oracles of God.

The final four clauses repeat the words used at the same point in the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. The last statement is a pastiche of Acts 7:38 (‘lively oracles’) and various references to the ‘Oracles of God’ (Romans 3:2, Hebrews 5:12, and 1 Peter 4:11).

3. Following the book presentation, Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, administered the Coronation Oath, which also dates from the late-17th century — it was established under the Coronation Oath Act 1688. Among other things, the King assented to the following:

Will you to the utmost of your power maintain the Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel? Will you to the utmost of your power maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law? Will you maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof, as by law established in England? And will you preserve unto the Bishops and Clergy of England, and to the Churches there committed to their charge, all such rights and privileges as by law do or shall appertain to them or any of them?

4. These words sit uneasily with the accommodating language Welby used to introduce the oath. After affirming the King’s duty to uphold the established (i.e. state) Church of England and the ‘true profession of the Gospel’, he added, ‘and, in so doing, to foster an environment in which people of all faiths and beliefs may live freely.’ This nod to modernity echoed Charles’s own long-standing commitment to recognizing the religious diversity of the UK and drew attention to the presence of non-Christian faith leaders in the ceremony. These included representatives of Jewish, Sunni and Shia Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, Bahá’í, and Zoroastrian traditions (see image above).

5. If this awkward gesture of inclusiveness from within the 17th-century language of Anglican supremacy speaks to the character of statist multiculturalism in the UK, the conspicuous non-recognition of those with no faith points to the disjunction between the deep history of the coronation ceremony and the realities of contemporary Britain. In 2021, for the first time in the census of England and Wales, less than half the population (46.2%, 27.5 million people) identified as Christian, down just over 13% since 2011; ‘no religion’ was the second most popular response (37.2%, or 22.2 million people). Moreover, according to the latest World Values Survey, 48% of the UK population do not believe in God, putting the country sixth in the world on this measure. Taken in order, only China, Sweden, Japan, South Korea, and Norway rank higher when it comes to non-believers.

6. Adding a copy of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) to the array of coronation gifts would be a good first step towards acknowledging these realities. The reason? Reflecting the unlimited scale of Joyce’s ambition, the Wake is not just his never-finished, ever-changing secular book of Liffley ‘moracles’ (617). It is an iconic anti-Book: Joyce’s answer to all those who, like the Wake’s Shaun-figure, insist on the supremacy and finality of any one orthodox philopoliticoreligious artefact of writing. Here is Shaun asserting his own mono-megalomaniacal Bookishness, while denouncing his feckless, subversive twin brother Shem, ‘the Penman’ (125):

my trifolium librotto, the authordux Book of Lief, would, if given to daylight, (I hold a most incredible faith about it) far exceed what that bogus bolshy of a shame, my soamheis brother, Gaoy Fecks, is conversant with in audible black and prink. (425)

Though the Wake challenges the Catholic foundations of the Irish republic, as inscribed in the preamble to its constitution (‘the prestatute in our charter’, 117), Shaun’s invocation of Guy Fawkes, the Catholic leader of the 1605 Gunpowder plot, indicates that Joyce’s anarchically anti-statist secular proclivities were ecumenical. In fact, no fetishized ‘idol worts’ (378) are safe in his anti-Book of ‘ourth’ (18, and see ‘Fourth Proposition‘).

In his classic paper ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence‘ (1950), Alan Turing sketched some examples of what came to be known as the ‘Turing test’ —  he  called it the ‘imitation game’ (433). The aim was to test a computer’s  ability to pass as human in an exchange with a human interlocutor — given the complexities of the spoken word, which combines individual sounds (phonemes) and intonation (prosody), all of which continue to pose real challenges for computers, it is worth noting that Turing imagines these as written exchanges.  ChatGPT is just the kind of machine he envisaged. So how does it fare with his own scenarios?

1. Turing detailed only two exchanges, one at the very beginning, which sets the scene in general terms, and another in a later section where he addresses various objections to the idea that machines might ever be able to ‘think’. Here is the first, as Turing set it out:

Q (human): Please write me a sonnet on the subject of the Forth Bridge.

A (possible machine): Count me out on this one. I never could write poetry.

Q: Add 34957 to 70764.

A: (Pause about 30 seconds and then give the answer) 105621.

Q: Do you play chess?

A: Yes.

Q: I have K at my K1, and no other pieces. You have only K at K6 and R at R1. It is your move. What do you play?

A: (After a pause of 15 seconds) R-R8 mate.

Here is the exchange re-played with ChatGPT (as of April 2023; see GPT-4’s sonnet at the end of this post), evaluate each response for yourself:

Q: Please write me a sonnet on the subject of the Forth Bridge.

ChatGPT: Of course! Here is a sonnet on the subject of the Forth Bridge:

Behold the mighty Forth Bridge’s grand span,
Its iron limbs outstretched o’er firth and sky,
A testament to man’s audacious plan,
To conquer nature, reach beyond, and fly.

Its girders soar like wings above the waves,
Their strength and grace a symphony in steel,
A tribute to the engineers who gave
Their sweat and toil to make the dream real.

For generations it has stood the test,
A steadfast guardian of the northern shore,
A symbol of endurance, power, and zest,
A source of pride that time cannot ignore.

So let us raise a toast to this great feat,
This wonder that has made our hearts complete.

Q: Add 34957 to 70764

ChatGPT (a second later): The sum of 34957 and 70764 is 105721.

Q: Do you play chess?

ChatGPT: As an AI language model, I don’t have the ability to physically play games such as chess. However, I can provide information about chess, including rules, strategies, and history. I can also help you with any questions or doubts you may have about the game.

Q: I have K at my K1, and no other pieces. You have only K at K6 and R at R1. It is your move. What do you play?

ChatGPT (a second later): In this situation, it is possible for me to checkmate your king in one move. I can move my rook from R1 to K1, delivering a checkmate by trapping your king in the corner of the board. This is a classic checkmate position known as “Fool’s Mate” and can occur if the player controlling the black pieces is not careful in the opening moves of the game.

2. In the second exchange, Turing addresses what he called ‘an argument from consciousness’ of the kind exemplified by the leading British neurologist, Geoffrey Jefferson, in ‘The Mind of Mechanical Man‘ (1949). ‘Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt,’ Jefferson argued, ‘and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain — that is, not only write it but know that it had written it. No mechanism could feel (and not merely artificially signal, an easy contrivance) pleasure at its successes, grief when its valves fuse, be warmed by flattery, be made miserable by mistakes, be charmed by sex, be angry or depressed when it cannot get what it wants’ (1110).

Turing did not accept this argument, which, he thought, entailed a form of solipsism. ‘The only way by which one could be sure that a machine thinks is to be the machine and to feel oneself thinking’ — the implication of Jefferson’s test. ‘Likewise’, Turing continued, ‘the only way to know that a man thinks is to be that particular man’, that is, ‘the solipsist point of view’ (446). This ‘may be the most logical view’, he added wryly, ‘but it makes communication of ideas difficult’ — to avoid this ‘it is usual to have the polite convention that everyone thinks.’

He then sketched the following version of his ‘imitation game’ based on an academic viva voce, wondering what Professor Jefferson would say if his ‘sonnet-writing machine’ produced answers like these:

Q: In the first line of your sonnet which reads “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,” would not “a spring day” do as well or better?

A: It wouldn’t scan.

Q: How about “a winter’s day”? That would scan all right.

A: Yes, but nobody wants to be compared to a winter’s day.

Q: Would you say Mr. Pickwick reminded you of Christmas?

A: In a way.

Q: Yet Christmas is a winter’s day, and I do not think Mr. Pickwick would mind the comparison.

A: I don’t think you’re serious. By a winter’s day one means a typical winter’s day, rather than a special one like Christmas.

Here is ChatGPT’s loquacious take on the viva:

Q: In the first line of your sonnet which reads ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’, would not ‘a spring day’ do as well or better?

ChatGPT: The line “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” is actually from one of William Shakespeare’s most famous sonnets, Sonnet 18. While the specific choice of “summer’s day” may seem arbitrary, it is significant because it sets up a comparison between the speaker’s beloved and something that is widely considered to be beautiful and desirable – a warm, sunny day in the height of summer.

It is possible that “a spring day” could work as a substitute, but it would change the tone and meaning of the poem. Spring is typically associated with new beginnings and growth, while summer is associated with fullness, warmth, and maturity. The comparison to a summer’s day suggests that the speaker’s beloved is at the height of their beauty and vitality, much like a perfect summer’s day.

That being said, it is worth noting that poetry is highly subjective and open to interpretation. Different readers may have different ideas about what words and images work best in a poem, and there is no one “right” answer.

Q: How about ‘a winter’s day’?

ChatGPT: Choosing “a winter’s day” instead of “a summer’s day” would certainly change the meaning and tone of the poem. Winter days are generally associated with coldness, bleakness, and death, while summer days are associated with warmth, beauty, and life.

If the speaker were to compare their beloved to a winter’s day, it could suggest that their beloved is beautiful even in the midst of difficulty and hardship. However, this comparison would not fit with the overall tone and theme of Sonnet 18, which celebrates the timeless beauty of the beloved and the power of poetry to preserve that beauty.

Therefore, while “a winter’s day” could be an interesting alternative to “a summer’s day” in a different poem, it would not be a suitable substitution for Sonnet 18.

Q: Would you say Mr. Pickwick reminded you of Christmas?

ChatGPT: As an AI language model, I cannot have personal experiences or emotions, but I can provide you with information about Mr. Pickwick and Christmas.

Mr. Pickwick is a fictional character from Charles Dickens’ novel “The Pickwick Papers,” and he is known for his jovial personality, generosity, and love of good food and drink. He is often seen as a kind and generous character who embodies the spirit of Christmas. In that sense, some readers or viewers may associate Mr. Pickwick with Christmas due to his festive nature.

However, it is worth noting that this is a subjective interpretation of the character, and not everyone may share the same association. Additionally, while Dickens’ works are often associated with Christmas, “The Pickwick Papers” is not specifically a Christmas story, so any connection between Mr. Pickwick and the holiday may be more tenuous than in some of Dickens’ other works.

Q: Yet Christmas is a winter’s day, and I do not think Mr Pickwick would mind the comparison.

ChatGPT: Indeed, Christmas is typically associated with the winter season, and many people associate the holiday with themes of warmth, generosity, and cheerfulness. Mr. Pickwick’s personality and behavior could certainly be seen as embodying these themes, and so it is possible that some readers or viewers might make a connection between the character and the holiday.

Of course, the extent to which any individual might see Mr. Pickwick as resembling Christmas would depend on their own personal interpretation and cultural context. But overall, it is certainly conceivable that some people might make such an association.

An obvious question: what does ChatGPT ‘think’ of Jefferson’s claim about brains vs. machines? Here’s an answer:

ChatGPT: Geoffrey Jefferson’s statement can be interpreted in different ways, but it raises some interesting points about the relationship between machines and human intelligence.

In terms of the ability to create artistic works, machines have come a long way since 1949. Today, there are AI programs that can compose music, generate poetry, and even create paintings. However, whether or not these works of art can be said to have been created “because of thoughts and emotions felt” is a matter of debate.

On one hand, some argue that AI systems lack the subjective experiences and consciousness that humans possess, and therefore cannot truly create art in the same way that humans do. Others argue that the output of AI systems can be considered art if it is aesthetically pleasing and evokes an emotional response in the viewer/listener/reader.

In terms of whether a machine can equal a brain, it is important to define what is meant by “equal”. If we are talking about raw processing power and speed, then machines have already surpassed the human brain in many respects. However, if we are talking about the complexity of human thought and emotions, then it is still an open question whether machines will ever be able to fully replicate that.

Overall, Jefferson’s statement raises important questions about the relationship between machines and human intelligence, and while the answer to his specific question may be debatable, it is clear that machines are becoming increasingly sophisticated and capable of performing tasks that were once thought to be the exclusive domain of humans.

GPT-4’s sonnet on the Forth Bridge:

Upon the estuary of the Forth she stands,
An iron maiden, sturdy, tall and grand.
She speaks to man’s audacious, bold demands,
Where water meets the ever-seeking land.

Her cantilevers reach toward the sky,
In steel and rivet, strength personified,
A sight to stir the heart, catch the eye,
Of awestruck observers far and wide.

Against the elements, she holds her own,
Unyielding as the Scottish rocks below.
A triumph of the will mankind has shown,
Her silhouette in sunset’s radiant glow.

Ode to thee, O Bridge across the Forth,
A testament to human ingenuity and worth.

1. This illustration introduces a brief note in Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle (1979), a series of occasional conversations with Wittgenstein recorded by the Austrian philosopher Friedrich Waismann between 1929 and 1932 (p. 50). The note comes at the end of the entries for 22 December 1929. Given the precise nature of the illustration, the date is significant. What Waismann drew, no doubt at Wittgenstein’s prompting, was an example of the new optical sound-on-film technology which combined an audio-track with the visual frames on celluloid film. The first, called Phonofilm, patented in 1919, was soon overtaken by improved systems like RCA Photophone, initially exhibited in 1927. Since the first major ‘talkie’, The Jazz Singer (1927), used a different system with the sound recorded on a separate disc, the illustration reflected a detailed knowledge, again most probably on Wittgenstein’s part, of the latest technological developments in the film industry. The following statements then appear under the illustration:

2. There are several oddities about this gnomic record (prose-poem?), beginning with the fact that the ‘I’, no doubt the au courant Wittgenstein, begins with the ‘magic lantern’, a mode of visual projection developed in the 17^th century, which was, of course, silent. Most probably he wanted to bring the ‘old simile’ into the new era of sound film — as Waismann’s heading for the entry intimated, the simile concerned ‘Language and World.’ So, again reading between the lines, which is pretty much where all the reading must happen here, the primary function of language as a bearer of knowledge is, like the old magic lantern, to picture the world. This effectively adds one more analogy to the many Wittgenstein used in the Tractatus (1921) to clarify his so-called ‘picture theory’ of language: he refers to tableau vivant, gramophone records, musical scores, models, hieroglyphic and alphabetical scripts, and more (see ‘Strip Teasy’ post).

3. The new sound film technology changed the terms of the analogy not simply by adding audio but by distinguishing two sets of relationships. First, there is technical relationship between the sound-track and the film-strip (as in the illustration); second, there is the experiential relationship between the music and the film. (Note: we pass over the more obvious links between sound-track and music, film-strip and film). Then we have the analogy with language and the world. As the two final statements and the pairings to the right of the four-part grouping indicate, this applies only to the experiential music-film connection. So ‘language accompanies [begleitet] the world’ as ‘music accompanies the film’. (Note: no mention of speech, the key element of the ‘talkies’).

4. So far, perhaps so good. But what about the question marks under film-strip and sound-track in the four-part grouping? They appear to create space for additional terms on the other side of the equation. Here it seems Waismann got the order wrong: presumably sound-track should come first, mirroring music, followed by film-strip, mirroring film. Are there any contenders? Two terms that might match language and world, making the updated magic lantern analogy do even more work?

5. It is impossible to be certain. Besides the cryptic nature of the statements, we can never be sure about the accuracy of Waismann’s reporting. (In this case, the translation — I am using Schulte and McGuinness’s English version — does not create further complications.)  Yet, given the tenor of the conversations on that day in December 1929, during which Wittgenstein kept emphasizing how his thinking had changed in the eight years since the publication of the Tractatus, one possible pairing could be logical notation/sound-track, fact/film-strip, or maybe just name/track, object/strip. That said, if the question marks are not placeholders but queries expressing doubts about any viable options, then the terminology is not the issue. The key thing is to understand why, in this cryptic scenario, the experiential relationship (music/film) trumps the technical (track/strip).

6. Some of Wittgenstein’s other remarks provide a few suggestive clues. Earlier on the same day—assuming the notes are recorded chronologically—he commented:

I used to believe that there was the everyday language [Umgangssprache] that we all usually spoke and a primary language that expressed what we really knew, namely phenomena. I also spoke of a first system and a second system. Now I wish to explain why I do not adhere to that conception any more.

I think that that essentially we have only one language, and that is our everyday language. We need not invent a new language or construct a new symbolism, but our everyday language already is the language, provided we rid it of the obscurities that lie hidden in it. (45)

This sounds like Wittgenstein claiming he used to believe the task of philosophy was to create an ideal or logically perfect language, but now thinks it is only about clarifying ordinary language. In fact, he never made the first claim, though many philosophers at the time, including Bertrand Russell, believed he did (again, see ‘Strip Teasy’ post).

7. Yet, if we re-read these comments with the sound film analogy in mind, then a different possibility emerges. He once believed philosophers could gain special access to the projection room to see the technical workings of the primary phonofilm system, the optical sound-track and the film-strip, but now he thinks otherwise. Like ordinary moviegoers, all they have is the music accompanying the film, or, in the analogy, the lived experience of language accompanying the world. On this reading, the question marks are not placeholders (e.g. for logical notation/fact) but queries casting doubt on the idea of a primary language existing above or apart from the everyday version. When it comes to language and the world, there is only the music and the film.

8. This becomes a little clearer considering what Wittgenstein goes on to say about the limits of formal logic in a passage immediately following his remarks about everyday language being the only one we have.

There is nothing wrong with a symbol like ‘φx’, if it is a matter of explaining simple logical relations. This symbol is taken from the case where ‘φ’ signifies a predicate and ‘x’ a variable noun. But as soon as you start to examine real states of affairs, you realise this symbolism is at a great disadvantage compared with our real language. (46)

The reason?

It is of course absolutely false to speak of one subject-predicate form. In reality there is not one, but very many. For if there were only one, then all nouns and all adjectives would have to be intersubstitutable. For all intersubstitutable words belong to one class. But even ordinary language shows this is not the case. (46)

He followed this with a series of examples, beginning with the two statements ‘This chair is brown’ and ‘The surface of this chair is brown.’ ‘If I replace “brown” with “heavy”,’ he added, demonstrating the non-substitutability of adjectives, ‘I can utter the first proposition and not the second.’

9. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein claimed ‘logic is transcendental’ (6.13) and used clothing metaphors to describe the logical form hidden under everyday language (4.002, and see ‘Strip Teasy’ post). In 1929, following developments in the film industry, he changed analogies not to reinforce the ‘old simile’ of the magic lantern, or, we could now add, of clothed bodies, but to challenge the underlying two-language view, anticipating the future directions of the Philosophical Investigations (1953) where he insisted that ‘nothing is hidden’ (435) and that ‘understanding a sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think’ (527). 

In this sequence of regenerations, GPT-3, the latest iteration of OpenAI’s powerful text generating language model, completes James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), first using the initial sentence of the original as a prompt, then working from the final words. Cunningly, the third version of the opening picks up the unstopped ending, endorsing the standard view of the Wake’s circularity. As I argue in Artefacts of Writing, the final words can also be read as opening onto the blank space remaining on the final printed page, leaving room for us, or GPT-3, to continue in our/its own way. As cunningly, the final version (8) of the ending takes us back to the beginning, mimicking version 3. In my view, version 7 is the most moving, given the way Finnegans Wake actually ends (with ALP contemplating death as an joyceanic release from a difficult life). That said, version 4 is also a pretty good description of what a bio-cultural intelligence might ideally think after reading the Wake (see What is creative criticism?).

Does this mean GPT-3 heralds the advent of a post-human world of reading and writing? The computer scientist, Douglas Summers-Stay, an early GPT-3 researcher, gave an engagingly apt and cautionary answer in 2020:

GPT is odd because it doesn’t ‘care’ about getting the right answer to a question you put to it. It’s more like an improv actor who is totally dedicated to their craft, never breaks character, and has never left home but only read about the world in books. Like such an actor, when it doesn’t know something, it will just fake it. You wouldn’t trust an improv actor playing a doctor to give you medical advice.

See Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis, ‘GPT-3, Bloviator: OpenAI’s language generator has no idea what it’s talking about‘, MIT Technology Review, 22 August 2020; and for another early assessment of GPT-3’s capabilities, see Luciano Floridi and Massimo Chiriatti Massimo, ‘GPT‐3: Its Nature, Scope, Limits, and Consequences‘, 1 November 2020, revised March 2022.  For the best account of how these large language models (LLMs) work, see Stephen Wolfram, ‘What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?‘, 14 February 2023; and for a detailed assessment of the next generation, GPT-4, see Sébastien Bubeck, et. al, ‘Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4‘, 22 March 2023.

 

1. Let’s assume you are an ‘abcedminded’ human reader like the one Joyce anticipates in Finnegans Wake (1939): trained in the Latinate writing system and existentially immersed primarily in the English language and at least one of its many cultures. For you, the text above is unreadable. In what sense?

Not illegible, as if you’re encountering something badly digitized.

Not boring, as if it is insufficiently engaging.

Not inscrutable, as if this is a gnomic remark.

Not corrupted, as if you’re an AI machine blocked from extracting scrambled data.

Unreadable for you in the sense that the writing is inaccessible, whether seen as a string of letters making up individual words, as graphemes representing phonemes, or as meaningful phoneme-grapheme complexes. Perhaps, after a bit, you start discerning individual letter-shapes (ও, say or, ত), then noticing spaces between the words (making the first line 5 words), maybe you even infer from the layout (title and 4 lines) that this is probably a poem. Bear in mind that readers trained in this language and script would grasp all these things as readily as you and they might read the expression in this 😊.

2. Given the advances in machine translation, especially since the deep learning revolution of the 2010s, you need not of course feel at a loss for too long. You could begin by turning to Google translate, which, after automatically detecting Bengali, currently offers this translation:

Scripture reading
Search the scriptures as much as you can.
Be thou the world’s learned head.
If there is no love for God.
As much as you read, as much as you listen, nothing.

If you listen to Google’s female AI voicing of the original, you may pick up the rhymes, which make pairs of the four lines (aa, bb), contributing to the poem’s simple song-, even nursery-rhyme-like, sound in Bengali (none of which makes the transfer to Google English). Google’s translation was unchanged in 2023.

3. There are options other than Google, however. Though Deep-L, which claims to be ‘the world’s most accurate translator’, doesn’t currently support Bengali, GPT-3, the latest (2020) iteration of OpenAI’s powerful text generating language model, had no difficulty with the task, given the simple prompt ‘Translate this into English.’

Science Class
Do as much research as you can.
Be the chief of the world, the head of the scholars.
If there is no love for God, nothing is learned.
No matter how much is read and heard, nothing is known.

Subsequent regenerations produced ‘You are the Earth’s chief Pandit’ for the second line, and ‘No matter how much you study or listen, it won’t help’ for the last. This was GPT-3 in 2022. Here is GPT-4 (ChatGPT’s improved sibling) a year later:

Study of Scripture
Search as much as you can in the scripture.
Become the greatest scholar of the world.
If there is no love for God,
No matter how much you read or hear, it’s all in vain.

GPT-4 also concluded with this comment: ‘Please note that this is a loose translation and is aimed at preserving the meaning rather than the exact structure and rhyme of the original Bengali poem. Translation of poetry often involves balancing the need to remain faithful to the original text with the need to create a version that is enjoyable and meaningful in the target language.’

4. So how do the latest machines compare to human translators? As it happens, the English-language Indian poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra has recently been collaborating with the Indian scholar Rosinka Chaudhuri on a project to bring a series of poems by the 19th-century Bengali poet Ishwar Gupta (1812-59) into English for the first time, including শাস্ত্রপাঠ (Sastrapath), which they render as ‘Reading Scriptures.’ The collaboration involved an extended email correspondence and an iterative process of drafting and redrafting, producing 10 English versions in all. I’ll focus on Chaudhuri’s literal rendering of the original Bengali (A), which Mehrotra (who has Hindi but not Bengali) then used as the basis for the evolving English drafts, the last of which (J) appears below the literal version.

A. Search for the [meaning of] the shastras as much as you want
Become the Chief Pandit of the world.
If you have no love for Iswar [however]
What you read, what you hear, comes to nothing at all.
(Chaudhuri)

J. Pore over scriptures as much as you want,
become chief of pundits,
but without Ishwar in your heart
what you read, what you listen to, comes to naught.
(Chaudhuri/Mehrotra)

Much can be said about the many large and small choices made in the process of turning A into J (for all the versions see below). Most notable, especially in comparison with the Google and GPT-3 versions, are the desire to find a viable contemporary English idiom/voice, the incorporation of rhyme, now simplified as a(a)aa, and the conspicuous decision to keep ‘Is(h)war’ (pronounced ‘Ishwor’). As the translators explain in a footnote to the published version, Gupta was punning on his first name as ‘Ishwar means “god” in Bengali as well as in most North Indian languages.’ They could have added that Gupta means ‘hidden’ and ‘secret’ in Sanskrit, giving him more scope for mischievous play on his name (‘hidden God’).

5. Do these differences matter? In a fundamental, deeply philosophical sense, yes because they tell us something about the ways in which (written) languages exist as vast digital corpora for the likes of Google and GPT-3 and as highly individual, historically lived experiences for the humans for whom the process of translating a 19th-century Bengali poem today is as much a cultural as it is a linguistic challenge.

6. Despite all the progress made in the last decade, the machines still cannot manage the playful equivocation at the heart of ‘Reading Scriptures’. Yet it is not as if they escape the cultural challenges of translation, treating it simply as a rule-governed linguistic process, finding statistical correspondences between written languages, for example. Inevitably, since there is no culture-free language, their correlations have cultural consequences too.

6.1 For the machines, ‘Reading Scriptures’ is a relatively uncomplicated devotional poem, something like a Bengali/Hindu version of 2 Corinthians 3:6: a warning to pundits/Pharisees who fail to grasp the true/living ‘spirit’ of religious piety because they are too preoccupied with the superficial/dead ‘letter.’ The Sanskrit word ‘shastra’ (scripture/learned treatise) neatly captures the blend of ‘manual, book, or treatise’ and ‘rule, law, or precept’, as in the English phrase ‘letter of the law’.

6.2 By contrast, for Chaudhuri and Mehrotra, these four lines constitute a knowingly crafted, even crafty example of a double poem which is devotional, like 2 Cor. 3:6, and anti-devotional, like Finnegans Wake. Without Ishwar in your heart, Gupta, the modernizing, satirical, very idiosyncratic Hindu-reformer and sly poetic celebrator of earthly life, says, referring not to God but to his own poetic oeuvre, anything you learn through reading or listening will amount to nothing. In short, it is not the divine spirt of the shastras/scriptures but the endlessly generative, secular letter, as practised by Gupta and later Joyce, that giveth life.

7. As this example shows, we still need human translators to see this. By contrast, the machines’ linguistic correlations confirm Douglas Summers-Hay’s apt description of GPT-3 as ‘an improv actor who…has never left home but only read about the world in books.’ Will this always be the case? Your guess is as good as mine, though, as we learn more about the way languages (and writing) evolve digitally and bio-culturally, I suspect differences will always remain, even as the boundaries become increasingly blurred.

___________________________________

Thanks to Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Rosinka Chaudhuri for permission to reproduce their draft translations of ‘Reading Scriptures’ here. You may not reproduce them without seeking further permission. If you wish to quote them for academic purposes, please reference this post. Their workings are especially valuable, as these are impossible to track in deep learning AI systems. Their workings remain a mystery, even for their creators. 

For more about Ishwar Gupta, see Rosinka Chaudhuri, The Literary Thing: History, Poetry and the Making of a Modern Literary Culture (Oxford University Press, 2013; Peter Lang, 2014), especially chapter 2.

For more examples of Mehrotra’s creative-translation work, see his Collected Poems (Shearsman Books, 2022) and Ghalib: A Diary (New Walk, 2022), the latter is an original poem based in part on a translation.

For more on GPT-3, see Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis, ‘GPT-3, Bloviator: OpenAI’s language generator has no idea what it’s talking about‘, MIT Technology Review, 22 August 2020; and Luciano Floridi and Massimo Chiriatti Massimo, ‘GPT‐3: Its Nature, Scope, Limits, and Consequences‘, 1 November 2020, revised March 2022. 

Drafts

Sastrapath (Romanized version)
Lao tume jata paro śastrer sandhan,
Hao tumi prithibir, pandit pradhan.
Iswarer prati jadi, prem nahi roy
Jata para, jata śuno, kichhu kichhu noy.

Reading the Scriptures (literal)
A. Search for the [meaning of] the shastras as much as you want
Become the Chief Pandit of the world.
If you have no love for Iswar [however]
What you read, what you hear, comes to nothing at all.

Reading Scriptures

B. Look for meaning in scriptures as much as you want,
Become Head Pundit to the world,
But if you have no love for Ishwar,
What you read and what you hear will come to nought.

C. Read scriptures as much as you want/like,
become chief of pundits,
but without Ishwar in your heart
what you read, what you listen, comes to nought.

D. Read scriptures for all it’s worth,
become chief of pundits,
but if you don’t have Ishwar in your heart
what you read, what you listen, comes to nought.

E. Pore over scriptures for all they’re worth,
become chief pundit to the world,
but if you don’t have Ishwar in your heart
what you read, what you listen, comes to nought.

F. Pore over scriptures for all they’re worth,
become chief pundit to the world,
but if you don’t have Ishwar in your heart
everything that you read or listen comes to nought.

G. Pore over scriptures for all they’re worth,
become chief pundit to the world,
but unless there’s Ishwar in your heart
but unless Ishwar resides in your heart
everything that you read or listen comes to nought.

H. Pore over scriptures as much as you want,
become chief pundit to the world,
but unless Ishwar resides in your heart
but if Ishwar doesn’t reside in your heart
everything that you read or listen comes to nothing.

I. Pore over scriptures as much as you want,
become chief pundit to the world,
but if Ishwar doesn’t reside in your heart
everything that you read or listen comes to nothing.

J. Pore over scriptures as much as you want,
become chief of pundits,
but without Ishwar in your heart
what you read, what you listen to, comes to nought.