The Weaver Fish (12 page)

He picked up a pepper grinder, and handed it to Penelope Loom, on his left. ‘Pass this on to the person on your left, please.'

Penelope complied, and it continued around the table.

‘Now someone observing any one of you in isolation, keen to invoke causation, and cognizant that cause must precede effect, might conclude that receiving the pepper grinder from the right determines in some way that you dispatch it to the left.

‘Suppose now that he sees this same act by all five of you, still in isolation one from the other. If his ability to discern detail is limited, he may view it as repetitive behaviour executed five times by one undifferentiated individual, and propose an explanation accordingly. But if his inspection identifies that you are separate persons, he will theorize differently. Equally, if he can identify the object to be a peppermill, as distinct from, say, this figurine,' Tøssentern gestured toward it, ‘he is likely to attribute different meanings in the two cases. The problem arises if he were to observe me.' Tøssentern took the pepper grinder from PH-D on his right.

‘What he would see is that I gave it away on the left
before
I received it on the right. In my case, receiving it can hardly be in any way causal to dispatching it. If his inspection were further rescaled to include the connectivity of events, his explanation would again differ, and might account for the facts as we created them, though hardly our reason for doing so.

‘What we must conclude is that there is no observable totality of events, and therefore no completeness of inspection. This was Halfpenny's insight: that observations commonly labelled evidential are not, in this example, scale invariant. That single fact can invalidate apparently sound hypothesis testing.'

‘I'm not sure I follow.' Vissy had been virtually silent since the poetry discussion. Anna had a sense that he spoke for the others as well.

‘Let me give another example.' Tøssentern addressed Vissy. ‘Imagine you were not a classicist and opened a Latin dictionary, say, at the last page. You might conclude that all Latin words begin with z. Indeed, you would have no reason to suppose otherwise. But if you examine the fine structure of those z-words, the second, the third letters, and so on, you could conclude by an exhaustion argument that this could not be the case almost certainly, knowing the existence of more dictionary and the conventions of alphabetization.'

‘But he could just look at the rest of the dictionary, surely,' suggested PH-D.

‘Of course, if it is available to him. But that constitutes another inspection, in a scaling sense opposite to the fine structure inspection I've outlined. You see, it's perfectly possible that he can know there is more dictionary but cannot inspect it. For example, I might only provide him with a torn-out z-page. So,' continued Tøssentern, now looking at PH-D, ‘you have said that Simon Vestry has not been seen since the vicar's letter. But was he seen
before
the vicar's letter? Our inspection of events, in Halfpenny terms, needs rescaling at least to include that. Looking at the rest of the Latin dictionary, as it were. For all we know, his theatre reviews were submitted by email and his remuneration banked electronically. What evidence does that afford for a real Simon Vestry? And, if he is not real, in what sense can he be said to have disappeared?'

To his friends, this was classic Tøssentern, and the critique seemed compelling. The discussion briefly moved to the general problem of identifying causal pairings in a noisy sequence. This eventually devolved to a quiet exchange between Thwistle and PH-D on Markov chains, followed by what seemed to be a mild disagreement about commutative groups. A moment later, indistinctly, inexplicably, their subject had shifted to harmonic analysis of an ancient Tibetan singing bowl reputed to sound the Tristan chord.

Those two made a compatible pair, thought Anna. She looked at Edvard, sitting at the other end of the table in earnest conversation with Penelope Loom about the quality of software for Greek typography. Vicar and Vestry, it seemed, were become ephemera of departed conversation.

Beyond Edvard, she had a view of the garden, and in the distance could see the greenhouse lit up; evidently, Thornton was working late into the evening. Anna thought about him, about being Thornton. If he looked back through the garden, his would be a reciprocal view of the brightly lit conservatory, looking very much like a greenhouse for these exotic people around her.

Thornton. There was a resilient man, who seemed to have
recovered fully from that strange swint business by simply handing over his distress. That was the therapeutic transaction: she accepted his anxiety, and issued reassurance in exchange.

So now the anxiety was hers, and in consequence the greenhouse had changed in meaning. It always brought to mind her visit to Walter Reckles in New Mexico, that odd discomfort about the separation of realities by some improbably fine artifice. Here, it was glass, beguilingly transparent but no less deceiving. Even closer, even more beguiling, within this room, in her company, it was the human face, a veneer of openness that masked the silent from the speaking self.

What had Walter talked about? Eigenvalues in the complex plane determining stability of flight. Maybe eigenvalues on some abstract surface determined stability of everything—relationships, identity, sanity. (One could certainly argue that complexity of the mind, like that of number, had real and imaginary parts.) A psychiatric diagnosis, then, might be no more than a column of numbers.
I'm sorry, your child has an eigenvalue problem.
And where would Thornton be located? Surely he was stable. Or Barnabas Bending? Or these people, the two Penelopes, say? The difficulty was, in their silent selves, everyone could be insane.

Vissy had fallen quiet once more. Somehow, in speaking least, he remained the most eloquent. Anna glanced at him and thought about his word,
visitor.
She found herself drawn to its poetry, into its alienation, and powerless to resist as its contour of meaning expanded to enclose her, then Edvard, in their own place, the conservatory.

Thwistle and PH-D had returned to the z-page problem and the matter of self-similarity in alphabetical orderings when, quite abruptly, Thwistle turned to Tøssentern and repeated the words he had used on the telephone: ‘We should talk about Nicholas.'

Given the note of urgency, it seemed rather late in proceedings to raise the subject. Tøssentern, politely, interrupted to explain briefly to Vissy and the two Penelopes who Nicholas was.

Thwistle's news was that he had received a call from Nicholas's sister Millie (like Nicholas, a former student)
concerned that his normally reliable communication with the family had completely stopped. In fact, they were unable to contact him in any way. Some weeks previously, Thwistle had emailed two other acquaintances whom he knew to be in Perth suggesting that Nicholas might be in touch, but he had now learned that neither had met with him. One, who was called Worse, had asked for more information and promised to make whatever enquiries he could.

There it was, thought Anna. Another disappearance. Barnabas Bending, Simon Vestry, Nicholas and, before it all, Edvard. Again, she disconnected from the moment, imbuing events with an uncharacteristic superstition and Gothic exaggeration; here was the ghost of
Abel,
here was a curse of the weaver fish. Perhaps disappearance was to be the signature of a new order, where the normal cycles of going and returning break badly and promised certainties regress to the tracery of missing pieces. Fracture, confusion, loss: the imagery was depressing, and thrust her back to where she was, seated in the conservatory. Even there, for all she knew, the house behind her might have vanished, as from a conversation.

The others were canvassing possibilities. Anna thought about Nicholas; she knew he was clever and resourceful, and was confident that an innocent explanation would emerge. She shared this optimism. Tøssentern was also reassuring, asking for little detail except wanting to know more about Worse. The others, respectful of Thwistle's concern, were quiet or positive. By the end, Thwistle himself seemed happier, resolving only to maintain contact with Millie, and with Worse in Perth.

Daniel Halfpenny
was reportedly shot dead in an abortive Chicago jewellery heist before he had finalized his magnum opus
Probabilistic Reasoning.
The manuscript was completed and published with annotations and an introduction by Edvard Tøssentern (Lindenblüten, 2005). Every well-formed observation has an associated Halfpenny Set, being the set of all propositions refutable by the given observation. The set expands or contracts dynamically according as a fidelity function relating the observation to its object phenomenon. Fidelity takes account of empirical properties of the observation, such as resolution, scaling, boundedness, error and noise. It is increasingly the case that funding proposals in experimental research must define and argue the merits of a relevant Halfpenny Set, as competing applications can sometimes be decided on this measure alone. The interested reader is referred to Halfpenny's
A Fidelity Function
Approach to Sampling Theory,
and
Finite Halfpenny Sets
by T Thurdleigh. Less technical sources are
The Interpretation of Error
and
Partial Evidence,
op. cit. (It might be supposed that Tøssentern, in explaining to his audience the matter of evidential fallacy and observational scaling, would use as a prime example the Asiatic condor. However, of those present at the table, only Anna would be sufficiently informed to understand the allusion.)

[The following
Editor's Statement
is provided in the interests of transparency: After his death, it was revealed that Halfpenny led a second life in a totally different literature. Writing as
Timothy Bystander,
he was the author of the hugely influential
The Craven Soul,
and
Studies in Cowardice I: The Suicide Murderer,
as well as collections of poetry,
Moral Hazard,
and essays,
The Prophet of the One False God.
Moreover, based on concordance analysis, Bystander almost certainly authored
A B C Darian'
s
A Prayer Prepostery.
In turn, the admiring preface to that dark work, headed ‘Imitation Believers' and attributed to the defrocked Abbess
Magdalena Letterby,
has long been suspected to be Darian's own. These findings have raised the question of whether other (perhaps inflammatory) materials were composed under pseudonyms of even higher order, a possibility that is currently the subject of intensive research. Unfortunately, this endeavour is itself complicated by spurious contributions from persons of unproven identity (for example, Darian claims to be real, living in Perth, and the true author of
The Figment Tree,
a work never before connected to that name). There are respectable conspiracists who believe such a trail will, at its end, force the conclusion that Halfpenny's death was not truly accidental.
Alison Pilcrow,
UITA Press]

Vissy Mofo (Captain Hate)'
s latest release
Exegesis Christ
is available on the Acridaria label. Once asked how he acquired his name, the reply was: ‘On account of causin' vicissitude to moh foes.'

16

Dear Edvard and Anna

Thank you so much for inviting me to your home yesterday. You provided a wonderful meal and delightful company. I will remember forever the transcendent flavour of seki fruit.

I feel that I should apologize if I seemed impolitely quiet for some time. On occasions I am withdrawn into other worlds, and the residuum left at table is a very dull guest indeed. It was certainly not for lack of enjoyment or appreciation of the conversation. On the contrary, that conversation transported me happily into my retired
dictionarium,
from which I send you a question. It is long, in a tradition dating from the Syllabine Campaign, and yet to have music arranged. But I think we share an interest in
zothecula,
for which in modern times a conservatory serves well, and in notions of conflation, for which zothecula serves well.

Sincerely
Vissy

17

Cher Reverend Bending

I am most honoured to be made a corresponding member of the Postlepilty Symposium on the varied meanings and fascinations of your excellent word. I fear that our French philosophers are ageing and tired and quarrelsome, and much in need of the Anglican vigour that you bring to their depleted discourse. Only one, my fellow citizen of the Métro, M Henri Fumblément, is capable of extended wakefulness. You are surely familiar with his textual analysis of the lyrics of Vissy Mofo (Captain Hate), where it is argued that to every line can be appended your very same term (such is its versatility), all without compromise to the artist's meaning or inspired rhyming!

But first I disclose a technical plagiarism. I confess that I draw upon my recent Induction Lecture to the
Academie,
dedicated, as is customary, to the First Lady of France. By tradition, that most venerable person becomes the owner of its content, and all my thoughts and expositions on the subject now vest in her.

And I apologize the more for I speak with an accent of the shamed. I refer to what our liberated women call
la maladie sans serif,
the tribal ignorance of the average Frenchman, who is famously inattentive to the subtleties and fine graces of what we discuss. I ask only that you imagine fattened, Gauloise-stained
fingers, the smell of Citroën upholstery, and the breakdown lane of a national highway.

I confess also to some anxiety that you may view me more credentialled than I truly am. For we French share no ownership of your greatest ardour word, and despite a lifetime of earnest researches, my knowledge of Old Norse is limited. In this regard, I commend to you M Fumblément, a man of ravenous curiosity whose authority is, by reputation, Casanovan. (Whether he is practised in recognition, however, I cannot say.)

But some things I have learned. That here is a word infinite in form yet singular in virtue. That no other in man's lexicon is so repressed and more imagined. Its meaning, uniquely, is more displayed than conveyed. (Indeed, the common blush, becoming to the face, is sent from here.) Were English gendered, this would be feminine, and lightly scented. Its pronunciation is properly soft and slow and moistened on the tongue. It should never appear in a question, in the imperative, in the plural, or in the company of a moustache. It remains the foremost English cry of intimacy, of exploration and discovery, of invitation and acceptance; and it best belongs in a conversation for two.

A conversation for two that is forever experimental. A conversation between apprehension and desire, between suggestion and willingness, between consummation and a slow realization of the holy benediction in the word. That its meaning is a type of
kindness,
the embodiment and sublimation of
forgiving,
repeated and renewed with every utterance. (M Bending, as a priest, you will know this.)

Its finest expression is both music of the being and a symphony of the tongue;
largo
and
allegro, pianissimo
and
vibrato
—all composed in the moment, and conducted in the tempo of audience approval. Here is a performance where the lips are open but the voice is silent, or at least restrained, for the singing is the listener's and the aria is the word.

I assert that no other word in any other language contains such nuance and contradiction: of attraction and foreboding, transcendence and turmoil, promise and denial, paradise and enslavement. It is secretive, and clever in concealment; reserved, but expansive in good company; strong-willed, but open to
persuasion; tight-lipped, but loquacious in private. Flirtatious with strangers and often generous to the needy, it befriends most the selfless, and wholly welcomes only the loving.

And should some cataclysm extinguish all of language save this one sweet syllable, the conversation of the world would continue undiminished, the eloquence of poets would not be undone, and the natural commerce of men and women would be no less subtle.

Alas, in our bleak times there are too few euros for our schools of Applied Philology and for now, regrettably, these meagre observations exhaust my scholarship. It remains only for me to recognize the tireless contribution of my research assistant, Mlle Marguerite Sallumer, to these absorbing studies.

Finally, I propose that my good friend, M Simon Vestry, attend in person to deliver my paper. I hope this meets with your approval.

Cordialement à vous

Napoléon Lecémot
Professeur

Regarding the ‘cataclysm' assertion, Professor Lecémot seems unaware that such a circumstance has been tested historically. In
Cisalpinus
(circa 290 BC), there is described a race of
Syllabine Women
whose single utterance,
Can't,
served their every need in discourse. They were nonplussed into submission (and eventual annexation as the Roman province of Parsa) by tricky Latin speakers exploiting nothing more than two novel and devious linguistic constructions—the iterated negative and the very, very long question. Though not in themselves formally lethal, these were tactically upgradable, should hostilities require, to the dreaded
Z-Invectivus,
a barrage instrument of unsurpassed efficiency. Within a generation, the language of the Syllabines was lost, unrecognizable even to those who had been its native speakers. And with it perished that people's source repository of oral history, epic, poetry and drama. This is the earliest documented instance of language serving as a first-line weapon of imperialist conquest.

In the case of double, triple (and so on) negatives, the encounter also marks the invention of the modern parity check, foreshadowing the supremacy of number over word in the digital age. The Romans realized that there was no need to assimilate the cognitive reversal at each negation, but simply count their number. Lacking the binary vocabulary necessary to distinguish odd from even, it is unsurprising that the Syllabines succumbed to these aggressive confounding tactics. In our own times of inflationary coinage and the fatuous neologism, it is hard to conceive that for want of a word's invention an entire culture could disappear. (In turn, victorious Latin would similarly die of inertia, proving insufficiently profane to serve advancing civilization.
Its end was foretold by the Princess Periphereia (
Can't Can't
), known also as
Can't Can't Can't,
or the Prophetess of Parsa.)

Nevertheless, in the matter of parity, the Roman conquest was not without its difficulties. Division by II is not straightforward. (Who would suppose that X/II = V, or C/II = L, or MI/II = DS? Indeed, were it not for modern methods supervening, many a calculation begun in those times would still be unfinished. It is left as an exercise for the reader to evaluate S/II, and verify that II/S = II^II.) In the event, however, the Syllabines were vastly more confused than their invaders, and that is how conflict is decided. There does remain, it should be said, one consoling legacy for that defeated race: the Syllabine influence filtered through the entire Indo-European linguistic diaspora, and accounts for the silence content of conversations had in every descendent language. In consequence, we owe more to Parsan in our daily speech than we do to Latin. (See E Tøssentern,
Spoken Silence: Etymologies and Guide to Diction;
and N Misgivingston,
Stochastic Signatures of the Parsan Gap.
)

The expression ‘suffer in silence' has its origin in the Syllabine experience.

More generally, and more insidiously,
Milton Noyes
in
Latin Aleatorics: Translations with Commentary
points out that Roman numerals introduced inherent bias into games of chance, and almost certainly subverted Imperial history. For example, the numbered die, as cast before the Rubicon, was unbalanced, with only IV and VI having equal turning moment. Extraordinarily though, in this particular instance, the outcome may not have been corrupted by that fact. Noyes explains the relevant sample space (that is: to cross, and not to cross), and strongly affirms a remark of Martin Gales (made in a Lindenblüten lecture on gambler's ruin, in 1879, and scandalizing historians at the time) declaring it unthinkable that Caesar would not choose instead to toss a
denarius.
We now believe that he did, but reported the other as more literary. This appalling licence has left Noyes sceptical that the Rubicon was even crossed at all, arguing in any case that Caesar's military genius would compel the more strategic, more tactically surprising (but less eloquent) advance on Rome by anabasis into Parsa Syllabina, then striking quickly south. Rather sadly, Noyes' ambivalence about his own discoveries is evident in a footnote to that chapter, where he meditates on how these archetypal scenes, woven into our language and our art as metaphors of destiny and decidedness, are proving to be crassly falsified.

The reader should be made aware of this: In all of history, every setting out, and every tread and turn that follows, has probability underfoot. That said, only one other example from Noyes, a Biblical chance event, will be mentioned here—at Calvary, the soldiers' die, being evidently tetrahedral ({I, II, III, IV}), could not possibly have been fair. The Seamless Robe would have been more equitably quartered after all.

Further notes added in proof
It has been brought to the author's attention that the argument linking parity with the ‘want of a word's invention' warrants elaboration. We formalize matters as follows. Let
S(w, n)
be a sentence having word count
w
and containing
n
negations in series. Then
S
is affirmative (negative) according as
n
is congruent to 0 (1), modulo 2. Whilst it is not necessary to employ
n
distinct counting terms for this determination (because sequential negations can be assigned alternately to each of two registers signifying progressive
n
odd or even, disregarding cardinality of
n
), it is clear that a binary vocabulary (and,
a fortiori,
a monologic language) is not sufficient to define and justify the operation. Exactly what might be sufficient is still unknown, and is part of a more general unsolved
problem, the so-called Syllabine Task, which continues to torment modern symbolic language researchers.

The terminology introduced here provides for a technical specification of the aforementioned
Z-Invectivus.
For this we have (1)
S
is interrogative; (2) Excepting negation forms,
S
is composed of z-words exclusively; (3)
w
is free to increase without limit; (4)
n
is free to increase without limit; (5) Negations may be concatenated, as in
non non non...,
or
aaa
... in prefix, to any order; (6) Style variants are permitted. (One of these, the
Expectoratus,
can still be found in certain languages.) The power and tone and speed of abusive delivery from specially trained and fearsome centurions can only be imagined.

Finally, there have been numerous requests to expand on the life of the Prophetess. Despite the depredations of the Roman invaders, we can be grateful that among their number were historians and poets who rendered into Latin something of the Syllabine heritage, including many of the prophecies of Periphereia. These have in common a unique triadic structure that has often been compared with sonata form (it has also been suggested that they are syllogistic, but the case is considered weak; they certainly lack any Aristotelian formalism), and are thought likely to have had a musical cadence in the Syllabine that is not preserved in translation. They are also unusual in antiquity, being almost devoid of the oracular, instead having a disturbing profundity of insight into the human condition. Her most famous, and most enigmatic, pronouncement is incomplete, appearing to be missing its recapitulation. Normally, the latter would offer a degree of internal correlation, and its absence makes interpretation more problematic. It begins:

Almost all scholarly attention has focused on this line, and the catalogue of proposed meanings, including the night lunar transit and an oblique forward reference to Judas Iscariot, is too extensive to discuss. However, the ideas of Milton Noyes, who is the acclaimed modern authority on the writings of the Prophetess, should be recorded. Noyes is a probabilist by training and instinct, and is naturally drawn to the image of a tossed silver coin, perhaps catching the sunlight as it spins in the air. The inclusion of
half
is wholly corroborative, this being the defining probability in such a Bernoulli trial. Of course he is led, irresistibly, to a mention of Caesar's lie, but his programme is vastly more ambitious—nothing less than a grand exposition of a Syllabine preoccupation with balanced dichotomies, such as light and shadow, good and evil, free-will and fate. In a radical ‘re-reading' (‘reading' because its script has never been confidently decrypted) of an occult Parsan Greek text which includes an array of signifiers previously assumed to represent some important genealogy, Noyes believes he has uncovered a nascent Pascal's triangle. From that, in what must be acknowledged as a triumph of mathematical–historical synthetic research, he develops the coin toss theme into an all-pervading cultural philosophy founded on a sacred arithmetic of chance, specifically a rudimentary version of binomial statistics; for this, he summons extensive supporting evidence—most notably the characteristic quincunx design and a possible forked-path motif found on late Syllabine pottery.

(For all this manifest complexity and sophistication in Syllabine abstract thought, we are still left with the fact that, for want of explicit words to denote odd and even, their civilization perished. The lesson we must draw is that language
evolves not for civil communication, not for the expression of ideals, not even for its measured containment of silences, but for the rebuttal of insults. In this, of course, the Romans excelled, and still do.)