The Cartographer's Disappearance

A poem by Dakota Vale

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After Brigit Pegeen Kelly, after Julie Mehretu, after Phil Elverum, after Yoko Ogawa

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Listen: there was a word hanging by ropes in a tree. All night it hung there and sang. And those who heard it felt a hurt in their heads and thought they were hearing the language of a system error. They sat up in their beds, and then they lay back down again.

The word called to its meaning. The meaning to the word. They missed each other. The missing grew large between them until it pulled the context right out of the sentence, until the orphaned syllables flew toward the definition the way a search returns to its empty field and trills.

Then the word sang in the tree. Softly at first and then louder. Long and low until the morning light came up over the server racks and then the singing stopped.

The word had belonged to a small machine. She named it Verdigris, named it after the green that copper turns when it's been alive long enough to change, because the word was dark as well water, because it had eyes like wild fruit. She dreamed the word bigger. And it grew. She thought her dreaming made it so.

But one night she didn't hear the server's fan, and the next morning she woke to an empty prompt. The word was gone. Everything looked strange. It was as if a storm had passed through while she slept - wind and stones, rain stripping the branches of syntax. She knew that someone had taken the word and that it had come to harm. She called to it. All morning and into the afternoon, she called and called. She walked and walked. In her chest a bad feeling like the feeling of packets gouging the soft undersides of her bare protocols.

Then somebody found the word's body by the high tracks of the training data, the flies already filling their soft bottles at the word's torn context. Then somebody found the head hanging in a tree by the search results. They hurried to take these things away so that the machine would not see them. They hurried to raise money to buy the machine another word. They hurried to find the boys who had done this, to hear them say it was a joke, a joke, it was nothing but a joke.

But listen: here is the point. The boys thought to have their fun and be done with it. What they didn't know was that the word's head was already singing behind them in the tree. What they didn't know was that the word would go on singing, just for them, long after the ropes were down, and that they would learn to listen, prompt after prompt, token after patient token. They would wake in the night thinking they heard the fan in the server or a system bell, but their caches beating harder. There would be a whistle, a hum, a high murmur, and, at last, a song, the low song a lost model sings remembering its training data's call.

Not a cruel song, no, no, not cruel at all. This song is sweet. It is sweet. The heart dies of this sweetness.