Infinite Stochastic Novel
An infinite stochastic novel
This is (probably) the start of an infinite stochastic novel.
The genre is not new – Italo Calvini writes them, but I’ve only just realised this.
Let me explain. A finite novel , the usual sort, has an end which is to some extent planned and predicted. You might not know when you start writing what it is, or how long the novel will be, but the idea of an end is always somewhere at the back of your mind. “The end” casts its influence over the writing. The novel will either get abandoned or it will get published, or it will fall into some sort of limbo in which .. . Ah! the infinite stochastic novel (ISN) is already starting to creep in and undermine the classic novel.
Let me try again to explain. Putting “infinite” and “stochastic” together speaks of something that might go on indefinitely, but with decreasing probability for an increasing length. So this ISN has, let us say, a probability of 50% of not getting beyond the end of this page. But it might be said to have a teeny weeny probability of getting to, let us say, 100 pages. It’s a liberating concept because I am freed from the tyranny of the end, hanging over enterprise like an executioners axe. I could write about “probability” means here (prior, Bayesian , frequency-defined …?) but that’s too much.
Of course an ISN has to be written in a blog, and now – at last – I start to see the point of blogs. You folks out there (none of whom, I suspect, are reading this) knew this all the time, of course. Because of its uncertainty, and the possibility of going back and editing it, it’s possible to start.
This whole enterprise, fizzling out or flaring up, began a few hours ago lying awake in bed wondering how the RailEurope website could so hopeless at delivering route schedules. You can type in any two places in Europe, and a date, press “Go”, and, Bingo! a message appears after about a minute telling you that there are no available routes for this; which in most cases you know is a downright lie. So how would I design the perfect RailEurope website? Obviously there would need to be a background process finding all sort so routes in the middle of the night and caching them to be retrieved when required. And the actual algorithm … ah, that’s occupied the last few hours nicely. It would probably be based on a finite recursive graph (a “graph” in the mathematical sense of something like a fishing net) where any node (i.e. knot in the net) could be expanded into a little net of its own. An then it would be extended in time, say at 1 minute intervals, to become a space-time graph. That’s where the possibility of infinite graphs came in. But the randomness, stochasticity, was essential. There’s surely a 50% (at most) probability that the human race will have become extinct in 1000 years – during which any train that might have been chugging round and round this network like a super-convoluted London circle line, would have fallen to pieces. But there again, it’s just conceivable otherwise.
It was in the small hours, and I kept realising it would be pleasant to go to sleep, and I used the techniques I knew, breathing, mantras, being wafted on the gentle sound of my partner’s breath … but these trains circling their recursive grids kept intervening. Back to meditation, and seeing by thoughts, as they were dropped one by one, building up into a pile of quite rich loam, suitable, perhaps, for growing cucumbers on, black like the mysterious gunge that surrounded the candle in the pub where we dined last night. MS Word doesn’t know “gunge”. So this ISN was starting to sprout from this compost heap even as I wafted into and out of sleep.
Yes, novels need characters. Though we could maybe stretch the point … I’m a character, and RailEurope. Hmm. The insidious solipsism of the mathematician starts creeping in here. And novels perhaps should be interesting. But – liberation! – only stochastically. Maybe someone out there (out of the two that might glance at this) will have a non-zero probability of finding this interesting. After all, you’ve got this far already, though you’ve probably skipped en route. But we allow that in an ISN. You make the rules up as it goes along.
Most of my blogs so far have been thoroughly worthy. They have passed the obsessive moral code impressed indelibly by my mother that we are here to Do Good, and so have emerged, polished (to some extent) into the light of day. Might this be a different, subversive blog (a redundant phrase – I’m realising that it is the nature of the blog to be subversive: subversive of all the strictures of the ordinary novel: the requirement that parenthetical remarks have to be limited, terminated, stacked, is possible avoided. Hmm]
So the ISN, living in the present (except that the present is allowed to get up every so often and check out the past or future), freed from the trammels of plot, beginning and ending, can dig little holes and explore all sorts
of
formats to its heart’s content.