Milli mála - 01.01.2010, Side 203

sible configurations we must conclude that the total number of pos-
sible photographs my camera can take is a very, very large, but
quite coherent and solidly digital number. In other words, if we last
long enough, my camera will not be able to avoid repeating itself,
whatever I point it at. The digital universe is finite.
Language has been digital rather longer than photography –
since in fact the invention of the alphabet, which is a short and finite
list of ciphers. and so the same applies to these pages of a4 paper
on which I read my print-out of this essay: only a certain number of
characters can be displayed on each page, and each character can
only be one of the 30-odd letters of the alphabet, together with a
handful of ciphers such as spaces and punctuation marks. I could
program my computer to churn out random a4 pages until it was
forced to repeat itself. The number of pages is finite, and quite eas-
ily calculable. They would include, scattered ever so sparsely in
vast acres of gibberish, everything that has ever been written in
English, and a lot of other languages, and everything that will ever
be written, and everything that it is in any way possible to write on
single sheets of a4 paper, including all possible misprints; and it
would also incidentally, if we see this for a moment as a Cabalistic
formulation, include all the names of god, and perhaps little else.
Digital language, like the universe recorded by my camera, is finite.
But by now you should be protesting that no sentence ever
means the same thing twice, and that language keeps evolving. at
which point the positivist will start counting the number of neurons
in the human brain and calculating the number of all its possible
thoughts; but I shall not venture down that Mandelbrot road.4
Language is digital only in its statistics, and however ultimately
limited the printing presses of this world, and however flat the a4
page, its is a surface rather like the one mankind lives on: on to it
are projected great depths, and great heights, and they are all visi-
ble there on the surface. They lie there, as Charles Lock would say,
in the ink, and may be read there.5
Let us examine some of the sentences that surely appear on our
pieces of a4 paper, to illustrate what I mean.
PÉTur KnúTSSOn
203
4 The Mandelbrot set is described lucidly in The Emporer‘s New Mind, London: Oxford
university Press 1989, Vintage edition 1990, pp. 98–105.
5 For an exercise on determining the gravity of this statement, see Charles Lock, op.cit.
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