Coem (the attentive thing)

Here’s me trying to articulate, through protracted reflections and halting writings, some dreams about this poetic programming language of mine. I hope to make it a series.

There are things I’d like to say, but my pipes are thin and my hands itch for an instrument to hold.

I have charged myself with coaxing the heart of my computer out into the world. I’m learning the computer’s language and trying to carve out a way for both of us to carry meaning through this practice.

It’s not about creating a system big enough to fit all kinds of poems — just this one particular kind of poem. When I’m wrapped in the blankets of syntax and structure, the layers of encoding sound through the pipes like overtones. Here, I store my beloved in a variable and my loving in a function.

(Computer, I know you don’t understand, but computer, I’d like you to hold them for me anyway. It’s to keep them safe, to help me look at them. It’s because they feel so different when they’re not in my hands.)

To me, these tools are a way to examine my words, over and over until I hear each new way that they resonate. I write, on/to/with my computer, “let me be true”. It spells the letters back to me — “l-e-t-space-m-e-space-b-e-space-t-r-u-e” — the attentive thing. It finds the tokens — “let” is a familiar word in its dictionary, that quiet prayer, that open-chested word; “me” — an unfamiliar word that must be a variable, something to fill in and wash over with colour, but what with; there’s “be”, the word of assignment, so here it comes — and it’s “true”, a boolean, that constant that means yes, means whole, means go, means this is right.

(Computer, I realise, it might not really be about you. Computer, how your screen keeps so still, like a mirror.)

So I’ve given it a sentence, but in truth it’s a question, and as a response it fits the pieces together for me. Tells me there’s a variable, a reference to that thing called “me”, and we’re going to colour it with “true”, say that anywhere you put “me”, it will vibrate with intention, be infectious with yes-ness.

Me and my computer, we’re both one step closer to deciphering what I’m trying to say.

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