A True Experiment

Well, I stepped out on a limb today. Sometimes, you have to try something new. A long time ago, I started collecting old dictionaries, quantum physics books, and computer code books to use as material in my physical art. I will use a page of equations or data function tree from computers as the focal point for a canvas, drawing a portrait over the text/numbers and painting it or filling it in so that only fragments of the original is there. I am a total English major, so when I open a computer book filled with programing language- it is unintelligible to me. However, the terminology is fascinating in a sort of verbal brownian motion- there is a beauty akin to Dylan Thomas' more obtuse verse. Besides... after recently watching the documentary about the artist Basquiat, how he would have music playing in the background, the television going, the radio blaring so that he was constantly incorporating incongruities, weaving a quanta of disparate elements into a balanced final product. I listened to Philip Glass's symphonic music to relax my conscious mind, then opened Data Structures to Computer Applications to Non-Linear Data Structures and just started grabbing random phrases and words. Soon, I was able to fit them together like puzzle pieces, although several times I had to turn the whole thing upside down several times. When stumped several times, I incorporated several random words from Twentieth Century Small Fire-Arms encyclopedia, The History of Tree-Bark, Computer Reversion, and from earlier today, the title of a SyFy episode, Caprica (Apotheosis- I did not know the meaning of the word, but it stuck in my brain, and at the appropriate moment, I inserted it, and then looked it up to verify- I was ecstatic that it was right on target). So, here is the poem:

 Figure 5-1.9 
or
(men as trees walking)

An arbitrary footstep

The careless hand

A casual seed hastened by gravity.

There was a rebellion in the soil

A force-age of celluar stuff

Powered by water

Pushed by a chaos of roots

Mucilage aggression

Terminal advance of lignin and cellouse through loam.

The representation of a tree is not an actual tree.

There are glossaries for representations

But then-

We make glossaries from trees

Bind fibers with mucilage.

This is an ordered forest of binary trees

The represented and the actual

Intrinsic to but one family

Sparse matrices with terminal nodes.

Their every leaf designed

Fragile mazes inscribed  

Facilitation of chemical seraphim.

So listen:

Here we shall describe trees

The manipulation of trees

Nodes between branches

And the sap that flows

In non-linear ways

By a variation of notes

Ordered cues for a biological routine

The linked allocation in an mutually supportive scheme.

Lo the linear engine with traversing gears

Branch and sub-branch

Twigs that bend

Roots in profusion

All this correspondence

Threaded through with sequential cells

Empowered by rare fire atomic hued

Angels who whisper molecular chords:

Grow! Grow!

The cycle endures through repetition.

We borrowed terminology,

This bird sings a song of fluted chrome

There is no silence amid ambient action

Otherwise notes would blend to monotone.

The data structure of lignified matter

Pushed by life

Defies the force of density

Progresses geometrically

Initiates an indefinite recursive procedure.

The infinite triumph through finite components,

Apotheosis.

Trees have a valid logic.

The forest is global.

Here is the algorithm:

To die is human,

To live-

Divine.

So human being: Dying, live!