Closed Surveillance Circuit

Research technology and its communication are usually forced into a mold to be considered rigorous. This results in a huge abyss between the language used in academic texts and the world it directs its efforts toward, which guides the hurricane of language through their vocal cords to try and give it a direction, a purpose, using words in a different way. Most of the time, the very subjects of research, turned into objects of study through a grammatical metamorphosis, are unable to access and understand the language that describes phenomena of which they are protagonists, and which could be important to them. I believe poetry can serve as a translator, using its tools to mediate between the cryptic language of academic writing and the rest of the world, building a bridge over the defiles of contrasting uses of language.  

«Circuito Cerrado de Vigilancia» (in English: «Closed Surveillance Circuit»), published by Cielo Santo in 2024, is my latest poetry book, which emerged from the difficulty of writing an essay about technology due to time constraints—on a 40 plus hour job, Monday to Saturday, who could rigorously write about technology? Who could write? I had notes on talks and articles written by Yuk Hui, Wendy Chun, Vilém Flusser, Jonathan Crary, Mark Hansen, Brian Massumi, Katherine N. Hayles, Ann Münster, Annet Dekker, and Remedios Zafra, among others. However, they were disconnected and insufficient, with the result that I could not plot a climbing route for others to find their way up these giants of thought—I did not even find it for myself. I had ideas to write about image theory in a world narrated through images that move at speed and sizes unthinkable for human beings—sometimes even turning themselves into text, while remaining images. I wanted to write about repetition, about the fiction in images and in the stories we currently tell ourselves, where we are always irresponsible toward the technological tools we design. Faced with the impossibility of remaining rigorous and linear, as an essay would have demanded of me (and even a novel), poetryoffered me fragmented precision to weave in and out of a project like this—in a life shattered by work. These poems, proof of my failure to write anessay, are nevertheless a triumph over an accelerated life that makes it very difficult to write at all. 

In the foreword to her book «Late in the Day: Poems, 2010–2014» (Oakland: PM Press, 2016), beautifully titled «Deep in Admiration» Ursula K. Le Guin writes: «Science describes accurately from outside; poetry describes accurately from inside. Science explicates; poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe. We need the languages of both science and poetry to save us from merely stockpiling endless ‹information› that fails to inform our ignorance or our irresponsibility.» I feel very close to Le Guin’s thought, given my approach writing these poems, which is no different from the one I would have adopted had I written an essay. I use language to collect and communicate ideas hidden in multiple books that people might not have access to read, like a parser of a body of code. Poetry acts here as a translator from one form of language to another, without simplifying argumentations—just arranging words differently. 

Moreover, poetry can claim the right to deal with objective data and do so with the meticulousness of a method. When we think of the work of Muriel Rukeyser, who uses poetry in «U.S. 1» (1938) to create a chronicle of the Hawk’s «Nest Tunnel»—a work that could serve as a legal document, as evidence to present to a jury of the irreversible damage to miners exposed to silica powder during the tunnel’s excavation. Or when we think of the work of Louise Glück, Agustín Fernández-Mallo, or Ursula K. Le Guin, who explored natural sciences and used poetry to try to tame the abstract—the poem becomes the record of an observational experiment of the world as matter. We also have the case of Walt Whitman’s poem «When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,» where he respectfully presents his doubts about the capacity of science to describe absolutely everything, even the gaps that cannot be grasped by human knowledge. In «The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral,» Diane Ackerman creates a treatise on astronomy, exploring the limits of science to describe everything, including the gaps that cannot be fully grasped. Poetry throws a curtain over the gaps in knowledge that cannot be further explored, or that could be further explored but remain incomprehensible to us. It is not opaque about the unknown but serves as a translucent lens that makes it more bearable. We see this approach in the work of Adrienne Rich and Louise Glück, who use the concrete modes of scientific expression to describe the body or the surrounding nature—a route that poet Rachel Carson takes in the opposite direction: based on her concrete knowledge as a marine biologist, she attempts to disentangle science through the potential of poetic language.  

In the same foreword to her book of poetry, Le Guin says about poetry that it is «the human language that can try to say what a tree or a rock or a river is, that is, to speak humanly for it, in both senses of the word ‹for.› A poem can do so by relating the quality of an individual human relationship to a thing—a rock or river or tree—or simply by describing the thing as truthfully as possible.» Poetry can become a method for the untamed: a site to negotiate with the uncertain. I regard poetry as a scientific description of a nonscientific event—precise words to capture something as fleeting as an animal that meanders through language and escapes any grammatical formulation.