Identity — a demo song from Hallam London

Hallam London and I have been working on songs for his next album, working title: The Sheffield Album.


I'm excited to announce that he's now released one of these as a demo track!


This song is Identity.  It's about all the miscellaneous bits and bobs of different personalities that we carry around with us, and the problems we might have making our different selves get along with the other people in our lives.


Hallam currently has it on his front page, in the link above.  However he'll change that when even more exciting news comes along, so here is the SoundCloud page.

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Identity

She's taken my imaginary friend
and I'm upset I think I think.
Things get more complex, it's a trend
I hope that I can grasp before I sink.
He's left me for my spirit guide
I now doubt things I know I know
are real.  Keep calm.  I won't hide
my disappointment, everybody goes...

How can he leave

with the boy who isn't here?

How can he love the girl who can't exist

in this or any other world?

He's run off with two characters I wrote
short stories for so long so long
ago.  I think one left me notes
in margins but I may be wrong
and never worked them out anyway.
My other other self has gone
a partial person ought to stay
forever--so I thought, turns out I'm wrong...

How can she leave

with the boy who isn't here?

How can she love the girl who can't exist

in this or any other world?

Where have they done?  Where am I now?

There is so little of me left to show

and once I would have fought

but these days I am caught...

There are more people here than you and me,
though none agree what's real is real.
There should be someone I can be
to keep the gang together.  Seal
all the doors and count my shadows.
There's more and more of them abscond.
I need to be the one who's quite
certain where his fragments are tonight...

What have they done?  What can I do?

They think that I'm imaginary too

and once I would have argued

but recently I'm not so sure...

The need to know too much

Another oldie, this time from 2010.


This is an attempt to talk about raw experience at its most fundamental level.  How can I know that what I experience is the same as you, even if we have nominally been doing the same thing?  Is "red" the same for you as for me?  How about "blue"?  How about "blue" for music?


So if we extend that to experiences I haven't even had; especially if we mean experiences that a highly privileged Western, 21st Century inhabitant is very grateful not to have had...


This is a poem from 2010, and possibly today I might have written it more subtly.  On the other hand sometimes a sledgehammer works better than subtlety.

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The need to know too much


"There are some things we're
      just not meant to know..."

Aeschylus in overdrive, tragedies he wrote
and left them here to linger in the now. Was I wrong
to ask your story? You did not answer,
but held out the unsteady hypodermic.
I hear when you do not say: Friend,

you cannot read this in a self-help book,
or watch it with amusement
playing out in other lives.
You cannot trek for years to seek it


—and I do understand. There is nothing to discuss,
no elephant in this room for us to face.The only way to learn this
is by injection straight into my brain.

It is cold. I remain. Understanding nothing,
I resolve I will in future know one truth.

Sisyphus must still endure, but I was only told that.
I have stared, unmoving, at too many sunsets,
roses, match-books with the cover slightly torn...

Ready your needle.

Computable numbers

Alan Turing, regrettably far earlier than today

Alan Turing is one of my biggest fans, er..., that may have come out the wrong way around.


There are many accounts of his life and work, and in every one of them the genius clearly shines through.  It's not just that he worked brilliantly on things like computability and the development of the first electronic computers, but also that as early as the 1930's he was already starting to think in ways we're still developing today.


Then there is the (now) highly celebrated time at Bletchley Park during the war (although I feel it only fair to point out there there were many other brilliant and hard working people there as well...  there's a tendency to credit Turing with the whole circus.)


And then there is his tragic and wholly unnecessary death.  I don't usually rate government apologies issued decades after the event; I tend to shout "you weren't even born" at the radio...  however this one seems somehow appropriate.  The subsequent pardon is neither here nor there, obviously there was no crime to pardon, and the authorities of the day were obviously suffering a kind of mass delusion.  (Authorities do that a lot—the present day is no exception; please remember to hold them to account at every opportunity.)


Such is Turing's legacy that his name features in several bits of common computer science terminology still in common usage, and some of them come up in the poem below.  However the one that says the most doesn't feature.  This is is "Turing complete".  A Turing complete system can calculate anything which is calculable—given enough space and time.


2012 was officially "The Year of Alan Turing" but this poem dates from a couple of years before that.  I always felt I should do something to celebrate 2012 but in the event was far too busy working full time programming electronic computing apparatus.  So I guess I did celebrate, in my own way...

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Computable numbers



One 

Turing machine is how we remember
your name, a device which might—
given enough paper tape—
calculate anything,

except the mechanism cannot reach.
Not everything is computable, a point
you wanted made. Sometimes
there's no route from where you start
to the number you desire. 



Two 

Turing test is how we remember
your name, a sort of exam
where machines sit at consoles
and apply to join the human race.

Did you suspect you'd made a faith
when you invented this scrap
of applied philosophy? Some people need,
and passionately believe, that one day
the test will be passed.
They will look at a machine,
to see it looking back.

Did you imagine
your machines might be free—
as if paper tape could really be infinite—
and permit attachment
to whatever device
took their fancy:
dancing with lawnmowers by moonlight
or taking a chance
on an upright pillar-drill? 



Pi 

Code-breaker Turing is how we remember
you—genius applied to a problem
of ideology, ice-cold salt water, and steel.
How did it begin?

Maybe in a smoke-filled room,
a serious man with a pipe explained:
All we (puff) need
is a new branch of mathematics,
(puff) a new kind of engineering,
a love for doing crosswords in German,
and total (puff-puff) secrecy.

I like to think you hesitated
for only a second,
before rolling up your sleeves. 



Infinity 

Dear, dead Alan, if you had seen
all these future machines,
their imaginary rooms
where you can go to meet
even a pillar-drill. Perhaps
you could jot down suitable numbers.
Perhaps you wouldn't need
the apple.