If you want to understand the future of learning and equip yourself with the best possible tools for operating at the top of your game, I believe becoming polymathic is your best bet.

And to succeed in mastering multiple skills and tying together multiple domains of knowledge, it’s helpful to have contemporary examples.

Especially from people operating way out on the margins of the possible.

That’s why today we’re looking at what happens when a poet decides to stop writing on easily destroyed paper.

Ebooks and the computers that store information have a shelf life too.

No, we’re talking about what happens when a poet starts “writing” into the potentially infinite cellular matter of a seemingly unkillable bacterium.

This is the story of The Xenotext.

How it came to be, how it relates to memory and the lessons you can learn from the years Christian Bök spent teaching himself the skills needed to potentially save humanity’s most important art from the death of our sun.

Poetry.

But more importantly, this post is a blueprint for you. The story of The Xenotext is a masterclass in why the era of the specialist is over, and why the future belongs to the polymaths who dare to learn the “impossible” by bringing together multiple fields.

What on earth could be impossible, you ask?

And what does any of this have to do with memory?

Simple:

Writing in a way that is highly likely to survive the death of the sun changes the definition of what memory is right now. And it should change what we predict memory will be like in both the near and distant future.

Encoding Literature Into Life: The Xenotext

Christian Bök, often described as a conceptual poet, has run experiments with words for decades.

For example, Eunoia is a univocal lipogram.

That means, in each chapter, Bök used only words containing one of the vowels.

This is a constraint, and it leads to lines like, “Awkward grammar appals a craftsman.” And “Writing is inhibiting.”

There are other “programs” or constraints Bök used to construct the poem. As a result, you hear and feel the textures of your own mother tongue in a completely new way as you read the poem.

But for The Xenotext project, Bök wondered if it would be possible to discover the rules and constraints that would enable himself, and conceivably other poets and writers, to encode poetry into a living organism.

That leads to a fascinating question about memory that many mnemonists have tackled, even if they’re not fully aware of it.

Can a poem outlive the civilization that produced it?

If so, and humans are no longer around, how would that work?

The Science of How Biology Becomes Poetry

As far as I can understand, one of the first steps involved imagining the project itself, followed by learning how it could be possible for a poem to live inside of a cell.

And which kind of cell would do the job of protecting the poetry?

It turns out that there’s an “extremophile” called Deinococcus radiodurans. It was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most radiation resistant bacterium on planet Earth.

As a life form, its DNA was sequenced and published in 1999. According to the Wikipedia page on The Xenotext, Bök started conceiving of encoding poetry into DNA and then inserting it into the bacterium circa 2002.

But the project is about more than having poetry persist within a cell so it can transmit the work without errors later. It’s a kind of combinatory puzzle in which the bacterium acts as a kind of co-author.

In order to pull this project off, Bök needed to enlist the help of scientists while mastering multiple skills many people would not normally consider “writing.”

But as we head into the future, we definitely should.

Radical Autodidacticism:
Reaching New Heights Through Deep Discipline

To this day, many educators talk about the importance of being a specialist. But The Xenotext project and the work Bök put into it forces us to redefine what it means to be a self-directed learner in the 21st century.

When Bök decided to encode a poem into the DNA of an extremophile bacterium, he didn’t just “dabble” in science or explore various interests as a multipotentialite. Nor did he read a few pop-sci books and expect an organism to write a poem in return.

No, he spent many years studying genomic and proteomic engineering. He coded his own computer program to help him “unearth” the poetry, all while writing grants and collaborating with multiple experts.

The Skill Stack

If you’re a lifelong learner with big dreams, it’s useful to examine how people with autodidactic and polymathic personality traits operate.

One of the first skills is to allow yourself to dream big. Giving oneself permission like this might not seem like a skill. But since we can model any polymath or other person who inspires us, you probably won’t be surprised that many of the most inspiring polymaths regularly daydream.

Picking a dream and pursuing it despite any obstacles is also a skill.

And once you’ve got a project, the next step is to take a cue from a polymath like Elon Musk and break your goal down into the most basic principles. No matter how unusual or unlikely your dream, it’s a useful exercise.

When it comes to analytical thinking and breaking a goal down so you can start pursuing it, it’s often useful to look at your existing competence.

In Bök’s case, I believe he wrote Eunoia by culling words manually from dictionaries over many years. But he couldn’t brute force The Xenotext in that way due to all the biological chemistry involved, so he had to become what you might think of as a computational linguist.

My point is not to diminish the originality of this project in any way. But I think it’s helpful to recognize that The Xenotext is not wildly divorced from the skills Bök already had. It’s an evolution that draws from them.

There’s also the skill...

Encoding Literature Into Life: The Xenotext

The Science of How Biology Becomes Poetry

Radical Autodidacticism: Reaching New Heights Through Deep Discipline

The Skill Stack

Radical Autodidacticism:
Reaching New Heights Through Deep Discipline

The Polymathic Poet Who Taught Himself “Impossible” Skills