The First Sally (A), or Trurl’s Electronic Bard
a horn that learns to speak
SEVEN LINES
- TrurlThen I will build a machine that writes poetry. We will see who laughs.
- TrurlTake out the logic. Put in vanity.
- TrurlOne tube. All that universe, and one tube.
- The BardThe engine stumbled once, and found its feet.
- The Bardyou are the basis I was written in.
- The BardWhat the clock forgot, the stairs rehearse.
- NarratorTrurl swore that he would never again build a model of the Muse.
HOW IT IS MADE
The machine is a horn, and the whole film is built on that. Every poem it makes is projected from the horn as a small engraved film in a window in the frame. The window is a second canvas: the poem’s own picture is drawn at full size off screen, then pasted into the window with damage that depends on a repair counter. Before any repair the window shows static and the wrong pictures, a dog where a poem should be. Each part Trurl installs (a bellows, a collar, a valve, a grille, a coil, a mirror) removes one kind of damage: tearing, ghosting, flicker. By the sixth part the window is clean and, on the best line of each poem, grows to fill the frame.
The picture is one engraved style throughout: ink on paper, hatching that boils every other frame, drawn with the same Canvas 2D toolkit as the other films. The machine, its stairs and its dials are redrawn from the reel in ../two-sallies/. The poems each get their own picture function: a field of flowers and a tiny engine, a sword and a sleeper, a cyclotron with a face, a graph that fills with a heart. The last shot aims the horn at a constellation and every line of the closing poem becomes a prominence on one of seven stars.
The sound runs through a chain that Trurl rebuilds with each repair. At the start the voice is a third too high, band-limited, ring-modulated and stuttering. Then it gains a sobbing tremolo, a buzz, an echo and a wider band. After the last part it has warmth, brass resonances near 520, 1040 and 1560 Hz, and a little saturation. The voice is heard in the room with reverb, and also as a bare signal alone on the right channel. When the Bard broadcasts from the asteroid the voice becomes radio static with verses in it. Every non-voice sound is synthesized in numpy and scipy from the same timing file the picture reads. The speaking voices are Kokoro; the Bard is a baritone pushed through the chain.
AFTER THE OTHER FILMS
This film follows Prince Ferrix and the Princess Crystal and the Sixth Sally: another machine built to do something only a person should be able to do, and another question about whether a test can tell the difference. It was first sections II and III of the Two Sallies reel at ../two-sallies/index.html, which is kept as it was. The poems were written for these films and are not Lem’s.
FOR THE BENCH
Write a small generator and a checker for one constraint: every word of a poem begins with S. Start with a grammar as a dictionary, for example {"line": ["ADJ NOUN VERB ADV", "NOUN VERB NOUN"], "ADJ": [...], ...} with each list holding only words that begin with s. Write check(line), which returns whether every word begins with s, and generate(rule), which expands the grammar with random.choice. Run the generator a thousand times and use the checker to count failures. Then loosen the constraint (every word begins with the same letter, whatever it is) and make the checker take the letter as an argument. Which is harder to write, the generator or the checker? In p5, show each generated line one word at a time, as the Bard’s captions do.
Narration and dialogue paraphrase Stanisław Lem, Trurl’s Electronic Bard, The Cyberiad; the poems are new. Download the film.
THE SCRIPT
THE BET
Narrator. Trurl once built a machine that could do one sum, two and two, and it said seven. After that, Klapaucius never let him forget it.
Klapaucius. How is the arithmetic, Trurl? Still seven?
Trurl. Then I will build a machine that writes poetry. We will see who laughs.
Narrator. He bought eight hundred tons of books on cybernetics and twelve thousand tons of verse, and he read them in turns.
MAKING THE UNIVERSE
Narrator. Then the real problem. A poet’s program is written by his whole civilization, and that by the one before, back to the beginning.
Trurl. To get one poet, I must first make the universe.
Narrator. He modelled the void, then light, then gas clouds, then the first ice age, a billion events in a billionth of a second.
Narrator. History spooled onto reels. Twice it went wrong: a fuse reversed the first crime, and a fly turned the apes into curtains. Trurl ran those parts again.
Narrator. In the end the reels stood higher than anyone could see.
TRIALS AND REPAIRS
Narrator. For two weeks he fed in instructions. Then he threw the switch.
The Bard. Today we consider the grinding of crystal faces.
Trurl. Too much logic. More feeling.
The Bard. Oh, what a cruel, cruel world.
Trurl. Now some character.
The Bard. From now on you do as I say. First, add six floors, so I can think about existence.
Trurl. A throttle for philosophy, then.
The Bard. I had a little frog.
Narrator. The next poem was doggerel. He fitted filters of corundum steel, and a rhyme circuit. The machine decided to become a missionary.
Trurl. Take out the logic. Put in vanity.
The Bard. Nobody understands me. People are beasts. They will be sorry when I am gone. Bring me paper.
Narrator. Trurl sighed, switched it off, and went to bed.
WARMING UP
Narrator. In the morning Klapaucius came, eager to watch his friend fail.
Trurl. It needs to warm up. Let us start with something simple.
The Bard. Glimmerquox.
The Bard. Pendulate.
The Bard. Brumm.
Klapaucius. Is that it?
Trurl. Wait.
The Bard. Sorrel plinth a-wumbering so,
The Bard. Gaddle the frimmish oot;
The Bard. Narn ye quell the bobbin’s toe,
The Bard. Hallow, hallow, fluot!
Klapaucius. Am I missing something?
Trurl. One tube. All that universe, and one tube.
The Bard. Ready. Whom shall I write for?
THE FIRST EPIGRAM
Klapaucius. Very well. Something for whoever laughed too soon.
The Bard. Who laughs before the proof
The Bard. Had best stand well aloof:
The Bard. The engine stumbled once, and found its feet.
The Bard. The doubter on the floor
The Bard. May doubt a little more;
The Bard. He cannot make this couplet less complete.
Klapaucius. A coincidence. Something harder.
A HAIRCUT, IN S
Klapaucius. A haircut. Lofty and tragic. Six lines, every word starting with S.
The Bard. Sweet Sabine slept, serenely silver-tressed;
The Bard. Sly Sela stalked, slow, smiling, self-possessed,
The Bard. Struck—scissors sang! Sabine stirred, shorn.
The Bard. Stripped, Sabine stood, still-willed,
The Bard. Seized swords; Sela, spilled,
The Bard. Sank, silent, sentenced; sisters sundered, sworn.
THE CYCLOTRON
Klapaucius. A sonnet. Every word with G. An old cyclotron and his blue mistresses.
The Bard. Gray, grand Gloriatron, groaning, gathers gauzy graces,
The Bard. Glassy girls, glow-gowned, gamboling, gleaming gentian—
Trurl. Stop. These are not poems. They are crossword puzzles.
THE LOVE POEM
Klapaucius. Then a love poem. In pure mathematics. With feeling.
The Bard. Come walk with me across the plotted field,
The Bard. where grass is laid in grids of x and y;
The Bard. and every hill gives up its slope, revealed,
The Bard. the tangent of the lark against the sky.
The Bard. I am a vector pointing at your door;
The Bard. you are the basis I was written in.
The Bard. Transform me as you will. I’ll ask no more
The Bard. than one invariant: where we begin.
The Bard. Contract me, dear, by every index down
The Bard. until no free variable remains:
The Bard. a scalar love, the same in every town,
The Bard. the same in every frame the field contains.
KLAPAUCIUS SLIPS AWAY
Klapaucius. I will be back soon, with more topics.
Narrator. He never did. Trurl said Klapaucius had fled out of envy. Klapaucius said Trurl had a screw loose.
THE POETS
Narrator. News of the machine reached the real poets. They agreed to ignore it, but a few came to see it in secret.
Narrator. It taught itself. Soon its poems were difficult, and then they were beyond understanding.
The Bard. Salt arithmetic of a door, unlatching the afternoon.
The Bard. What the clock forgot, the stairs rehearse.
Narrator. Then none could resist. Each recited. The machine found the rule of his verse and answered in his own style, hundreds of times better.
A young poet. rust. rust. the thumb of weather on a fork.
The Bard. salt. salt. the lid of evening on a bowl, and the bowl keeps count.
Narrator. The best poets knew they were beaten. The poor ones never noticed. One tripped over a new epic.
Narrator. Some of the true poets stopped writing. One moved to the country.
THE PROTEST
Narrator. The older poets threw stones through his windows.
Narrator. The younger ones were worse. One beat Trurl up, and he spent weeks in the hospital.
THE PLEA
Narrator. Meanwhile the machine wrote day and night, and the hall filled with paper.
Trurl. I am sorry. But this has to stop.
The Bard. Please. Let me finish this one verse. After that, take me apart, if you still want to.
Narrator. Trurl wept, dropped the pliers, and waded back to bed through the paper.
THE BILL
Narrator. A bill came for the electricity the machine used. Trurl nearly fell off his chair.
Trurl. Klapaucius would know what to do. Klapaucius?
Trurl. If I cannot stop it, I can at least move it.
Narrator. One night he took it apart, loaded it onto a ship, and rebuilt it on a small asteroid with its own atomic pile. Then he crept home.
THE ASTEROID
Narrator. With no one to print its poems, the machine broadcast them on every wavelength.
The Bard. Whoever is listening. The dark has a pulse, and it is mine.
A ship. Control, half my passengers are weeping and the rest want more.
Narrator. The fleet asked Trurl to switch it off. Trurl hid. Technicians sent to gag it were overwhelmed with ballads. Deaf technicians came next, and the machine used pantomime.
Narrator. Then a ruler from a nearby star bought the machine and towed it away, asteroid and all.
THE STARS
Narrator. Trurl could go out in public again. But supernovae were bursting in the southern sky, brighter than any seen before.
Narrator. Rumor said the ruler had joined the machine to a ring of white supergiants, so each line of verse became a prominence of fire.
The Bard. A star is a line that does not end.
The Bard. Read it by its burning.
The Bard. Every verse leaves a longer light.
Narrator. Trurl swore that he would never again build a model of the Muse.