WhyJanus.htmlTEXTStMl->ԺԺ, JanusNode: A Window To Janus


Why Do Janus And JanusNodes Exist?

"there is no simple explanation for anything important any of us do, and the human tragedy, or the human irony, consists in the necessity of living with the consequences of actions performed under the pressure of compulsions so obscure we do not and cannot understand them."
                        Hugh MacLennan
                        The Watch That Ends The Night

"If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it."
                        Isadora Duncan
                        cited by Gregory Bateson
                        Steps To An Ecology Of Mind

"But what good are riddles? Why bother with them? One might just as well ask why bother with growing old. They are the ways to begin to say what wonder means."
                        Richard Powers
                        The Goldbug Variations

"The highest to which man can attain is wonder; and if the prime phenomenon makes him wonder, let him be content; nothing higher can it give him, and nothing further should he seek for behind it; here is the limit."
                        Goethe
                        cited by Oswald Spengler
                        The Decline of the West

"If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: 'This is simply what I do'.'"
                        Ludwig Wittgenstein
                        Philosophical Investigations


Some of you may be wondering why you should you bother interacting with your JanusNode at all. Why do JanusNodes even exist? Why should anyone care about Janus? While this is ultimately a question which only you, dear reader, can answer for yourself, I am happy to share a few thoughts with you.


Your JanusNode is not intended to be taken too seriously as a poetry generator, though I do hope that it may provide some amusement and even utility on that level. JanusNodes are intended rather to function as a tool to help me (and, if you wish, you) to explore the interesting phenomena which exist at the border of one of the fundamental dualities of the human condition: that dynamic border which divides order from chaos, law from anarchy, meaning from absurdity. For all their absurdity, the interesting thing about JanusNodes, and other simple means of generating random texts, is how often they actually manage to strike a nerve; how often we actually find ourselves reading the words and thinking 'That's true!' or 'That's elegant!'. I am very interested in understanding how this happens. Where does that experience of meaning come from? How did Janus emerge from randomized nothingness?


Unless you believe that Divine Intervention (the active contrary of Janus, who works by Divine Indifference) is tailoring your JanusNode's output specifically for your eyes, the answer, of course, must be that Janus is created by us, not by the JanusNodes. When we evaluate the output of our JanusNodes, it is you and I who are the poets. It is you and I who decide what is good and what is bad; what is interesting and what is not; what transcends the randomness of the Universe to enter into the exalted realm of Meaning. A JanusNode teaches us, first of all, that we are all poets. We are all creators of meaning. We are all able to experience for ourselves what is fine or funny or profound.We are continually imposing our value system onto the Rorschach ink blot of the Cosmos, just as we impose it upon JanusNode's words. We are deciding what makes us angry or crazy, just as, sadly less often, we are deciding what makes us good or valuable. We are creating much of the horror in our existence, and much of the good as well. When we accept that this is so, we can start to re-organize the way we inhabit our environment, to find a better, gentler, funnier way. If we had the eyes to see, the ears to hear, perhaps we might sense that Janus is emitting strangely touching messages everywhere. Perhaps the whole world is one big JanusNode, just waiting to make us laugh , wonder, and understand.


Going from the sublime to the ridiculous (from Janus to autobiography), JanusNodes exist simply because I am obsessed with them. I have been saddled with the kind of brain that is interested in randomly-generated texts. I loved MadLibs (a pencil-and-paper word game- still for sale- that asks you to fill in missing words to complete a story) when I was a little child. My brain first demanded that I explore the topic in more depth over twenty years ago, when a friend of mine wrote a program to randomly string together words on our highschool's Radioshack TRS-80 computer. The program was utterly random, but it nevertheless surprised me by occasionally producing word strings that made sense, and sometimes even seemed eloquent. My immediate inspiration for what was to become a JanusNode came a few years after that, when I was reading the artist Claes Oldenberg's notebooks. Oldenburg juxtaposes ideas that could never go together- 'pork-chop bras', 'soft pencil sharpeners' and 'hat-shaped sky-scrapers'. The results are often inspiring. My brain was struck one sleepless night with the idea writing a program that would generate noun-noun or adjective-noun pairs like Oldenberg's. By the time my Mac was warmed up, my brain had decided that it would go further than that. My brain has kept me in virtually continuous slavery ever since that night. Your JanusNode is the result of its decision.


JanusNodes have many analogues in various domains: artistic, philosophical, psychological, and religious. There are many epistemological practices which use complex random phenomena as projective surfaces. Devotees of these practices believe that these projective surfaces can offer a 'window into the mind'. The sensible traditions are not so inane as to suppose that they can circumvent the hermeneutic circle by proposing their own system for interpreting the productions which are elicited by the procedure. To pretend to do so, in the manner of some schools of modern clinical psychology, is simply to miss the point. It is to confuse a wish for the world to be a certain way with the process of understanding how the world actually is. People who tell you otherwise are fools or charlatans- or at least not very widely-read! In sensible systems of epistemological hacking, the person who produces the productions in response to a random complex stimulus must also to make the interpretation, while realizing that any interpretation so produced must itself be subject to the same kind of analysis as the earlier analysis of the random phenomena was. One can interpret the interpreter, and interpret the interpreter of the interpreter, and so on. At some point one has to arbitrarily decide that enough is enough. Your JanusNode may help to make this subtle point clear. In doing so, it clarifies the structure of the endless recursion which underlies all attempts to explain anything completely. It is up to you to decide when to stop an explanation. The world cannot tell you itself. You have to help it to tell itself to you.


If you need further purpose for your JanusNode than such clarification, consider it as a Dadaist art object; a symbol of the human condition; an exercise in bringing absurdist literature into the computer age; a machine for studying the relationship between syntax and semantics; a tool box for conducting experiments to examine your own epistemological structure; as an 'idea maker'; an over-extended metaphor; a tireless piece of performance art; or as one man's lone cry against (or expression of reverent love for?) the unexpressible incoherence of the universe.


My own JanusNode has constructed many lines which made me laugh and wonder. Perhaps ultimately your robot is good for nothing more than this. I do not think one could ask much more of anything in this life.
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