Author Note: Marianne Apostolides

Marianne Apostolides recently published an excerpt from I Can’t Get You Out of My Mind: A Book of Lies, Sex, Love, and Artificial Intelligence in The Ex-Puritan Issue 43: Fall 2018. As part of our author notes series, she talks to us about the origins of the book.

The origin of this book is convoluted. It’s circuitous, serendipitous, born of frustration, fated. It’s bizarre. I can’t believe I’m writing this book at all. “I love you …” I got curious. What does that phrase truly mean? What am I trying to convey, to you, when I speak those words?I first noticed the phrase, as such, one evening in October seven years ago. A friend had called, which was rare in our friendship. Before I expressed my delighted surprise, he got right to the point: he’d had a seizure. It was a brain tumour. The surgery would be next week. At the end of the call, as we said goodbye, I told him I loved him. Never had I uttered those words with such ferocity, as if they could smash every barrier—death, distance—crack my sternum, communicate directly to his soul, saying how much I cared for him, how I wanted him to be safe. That was the inception of the question: What does it mean to say, “I love you”? I didn’t take up that question for five years (by which point, I’m happy to report, my friend was married, with twins, and a tiny scar on his scalp). But I took special interest in the phrase; I attuned to the words, as if they secretly belonged to me. “I’ll do something with you,” I thought. Then I did. Or I tried. For nine months, I wrote a book about the declaration of love. I read Derrida’s theory about the “performative speech act;” I discovered that Aphrodite says “I love you” only once—not to a god or a man, but to a woman, in a flare of rage. I paired my research with personal stories—intimacies from my life, with my kids and parents, my lovers and ex-husband. And it was shit. All of it. Days and weeks and months of writing, every morning: nothing. None of it was good. Okay, I mean: some of it was good. Sentences. Whole paragraphs, even? Some scenes were pretty, I guess, or insightful. But it had no purpose. There wasn’t an energy holding the writing; it was flesh without life—pinkly perfect muscle tissue, grown in a lab, lacking a body. I conceived of the body (the book) strangely. I was in Chicago, visiting family. My cousin-in-law was telling a story about his grandfather: a neo-Kantian German philosopher, highly regarded in Europe in the 1920s. Apparently, he was up for a big job at Freiburg; the other guy got it. The “other guy” was Heidegger. He, by contrast, was Jewish. He was sent to a camp—saved because a guard was a former student. Safe passage was obtained because another former student got him a job at a university in Scranton, Pennsylvania, despite the fact that he spoke no English. Such a fascinating story: enthralling in its sweep of history, its real-life drama. Awesome cocktail conversation, too. That’s as far as it went, I thought. But, when I got back to Toronto, I continued to write bad writing about “I love you.” Following blind impulse, I emailed my cousin-in-law: “What’s the name of your grandfather?” I asked. “Richard Hoenigswald,” he replied. Richard Hoenigswald is why I’m writing this book. I did a Google search on Hoenigswald. As it turns out, he wrote about language—specifically, the intersection of language with psychology and philosophy. I found three primary references: the first was an article he wrote about Hegel (beautiful, but impenetrable); the second, a book which utilizes his linguistic theory to elucidate “verb tense and aspect in Cairene Arabic." Wow. I don’t even know what that means. Then, however, I came across my Fate: the third reference was a declassified document from the US military. The memo discusses strategies for creating an “automated system” for retrieving information; the military was investigating how a search term (i.e., language) could be interpreted by a machine, such that it could find—from its ever-expanding archive of data—the most relevant information sought by the human. In other words, they were developing the internet. And Hoenigswald’s theories were being enlisted: his writing was helping them comprehend how acts of communication—in this case, communication between a human and a computer—functioned at the most abstract level. The next day, as I walked in High Park—having completed another pointless writing session—I had my epiphany. Whether I’m saying “I love you” or typing “Richard Hoenigswald” into Google, what I’m doing is communicating. I’m attempting to convey—to a person or machine—what I think and feel, such that “you” know what I mean to say, assuming I could possibly know my intention in the first place. By the end of my walk, my reams of amorphous writing had become an incipient thing. My protagonist would not be “I,” it would be Ariadne. She’s a 40-something single writer and mother who’s writing a book about what it means to say “I love you.” But because she’s struggling financially, she decides to join a study at the University of Toronto, in which she’s paid to interact with an AI device called Dirk. This structure lets me move between two modes of writing: first-person sections—intellectual and sensual—about the declaration of love (ostensibly excerpts from Ariadne’s manuscript); and third-person sections—lighter in tone, and more absurd—in which we follow Ariadne as she interacts with Dirk and the wider world. Suddenly, I could start to ask questions not only about the psyche—a book whose core is emotion, connection, “love” in its many guises and contortions—but also about Artificial Intelligence. I could tease out the implications of technology—explore its encroachment on the body and brain, ask how the “self” will shift in the coming decades as technology advances from speech-recognition to ingestibles, wearables, EEGs that “read” the images we form in our brains, haptics, androids, implants, “deep brain stimulation.” All of it was open for my writerly gaze. And Ariadne was still there, sitting at her desk each morning, writing about “I love you.” There it was …Nine months of composition, one random conversation, desperate curiosity, and the US military: I had my book. Now all I had to do was write it.