An hour and twenty minutes into Slade’s presentation, the first gravity cut hit Lux’s unlicensed sector. Two minutes after that, there was total gravity loss. The city was stripped of atmosphere. And (among five million others) Ashima Slade, still in holographic simulation on the K-Harbin Auditorium stage, was dead.
III
Ashima Slade was born in Mars’s Bellona in 2051. Little is known of his childhood; part was apparently passed in Phoenix Keep, a suburb just outside the city, and part in the notorious Goebels (which some have compared to the unlicensed sectors of the major satellite cities; the comparison must suffice for those who have never been to Bellona, but it has been argued elsewhere, lengthily, and on both sides). At seventeen Slade emigrated to the satellites, arriving, in a shipload of twenty-five hundred, at Callisto Port. Two months after his arrival, he became a woman, moved again to Lux and for six months worked in one of the city’s light-metal refineries: it was here she first met Blondel Audion, when the famous poet descended, among some dozen others, for a flyting, or ritual exchange of poetic insults, in the refinery cafeteria. At six months’ end
(four days after the flyting’s) Slade entered Lux University. Two and a half years later, she published the first volume of her Summa Metalogiae, which brought her, academically, both prestige and notoriety; and which led, over the next few years (when the second volume of the Summa appeared), to the development of metalogical program analysis, giving Slade a permanent, top-slot credit rating. Slade’s reaction to the commercial success of what had begun as purely abstract consideration was sometimes humorous and, sometimes, bitter. Undoubtedly this practical success prejudiced many of her colleagues in those early years—and in several directions. Some took it as a vindication of pure scholarship. Others took it as an unfortunate sullying of the same. Still others saw it as evidence that Slade’s own work was, at most, clever, rather than fundamentally profound. Slade herself once said (in a seminar, after a morning spent reviewing some of the commercial work done in metalogical analysis that had been sent her to review): “The saddest thing to me is that, though we are working under the same principles and parameters, I find what they are doing with them trivial, while they would find what I am doing with them incomprehensible, or meaningless if they could comprehend it.”
At about the time of the publication of the second volume of the Summa, Slade first became closely associated with the Circle (as it has come to be commonly known since the various studies in the first decade of this century), a collection of extremely talented artists and scientists, some of whom were also connected with the University, some of whom not, but all of whom lived and worked (sometimes together, sometimes in opposition) in Lux. Over twenty-odd years, it included George Otuola, whose twenty-nine-hour opera cycle Eridani is still, twelve years after its initial production, considered one of the greatest influences on contemporary art; it included the mathemeticians Lift Zolenus and Saleema Slade (no relation), the poets Ron Barbara, Corinda, Blondel Audion, and Foyedor Huang-Ding, as well as the venerable actress Alona Liang and her then-protege: Gene Trimbell, better known in the world of the theater today as the Spike, who at age twenty-two, directed that first, legendary production of Eridani.
Some commentators have expended great energy and ingenuity to show that all the work of these, and several other artists and (particularly) biologists, associated over the years with the Circle, revolved around the parameters of Slade’s philosophy—so that Slade might be considered the Circle’s center. If none has completely succeeded, one hindrance to their proof is the complexity of Slade’s work. Also, Slade’s thought for this time is only available through her students’ report. The only thing Slade herself published in these years was her translation, from the twentieth-century American “... into this Magyar-Cantonese dialect, with its foggy distinctions between the genitive and the associative, personally or politically enforced, which serves us for language in the Satellites, on Mars, as well as over eighty percent of Earth ...” (translator’s introduction) of Susanne K. Langer’s Mind. Her students through this period were allowed to make notes and were encouraged to “... construct alternate models from these ideas as widely deviant as possible.’* But her talks could not be recorded, as Slade considered her BPR-57-c sessions then “... merely sketches, full of inaccuracies ...” which makes assessment of her actual ideas rather difficult—until the corpus of notes, rescued from that small, back, basement room two weeks after the war, is made available.
Other commentators, less successfully, have tried to show that all the work of the principle Circle members, including Slade’s, hinges on the mystic precepts of the Sygn. As anyone knows who has read in the Circle’s history, that history is intimately connected with the Sygn’s: Barbara and Otuola were both members of the sect during their adolescence, only to break with it (in Barbara’s case peacefully, in Otuola’s rather violently) in their twenties. Barbara’s first book, Relearning the Language, deals fairly directly with his religious struggles during his speechless youth. And the Sect of Silent Singers, who figure so prominently in the action of EridanVs fifth, seventh, and seventeenth acts, is a fairly direct, if unflattering, portrayal. Slade’s final residence at the Sygn co-operative is only another example, among the myriads possible to cite. The difficulty of proof here, however, is the difficulty in learning more than superficial fragments of the Sygn dogma. Those who emerged from the sect, even those highly critical such as Otuola, were fairly respectful of its mysteries: the sect renounces speech, writing, all publicity, and sex. This makes ascertaining its fundamental tenets during these years only slightly more difficult than ascertaining the letter of Slade’s philosophy.
The most probable verdict is, probably, the most conservative: a great deal of personal, social, and spiritual interplay occurred between members of the Circle and members (and exmembers) of the Sygn. But it is what these men and women brought to it, rather than what they took from it, that ultimately makes the Circle the fascinating moment in the intellectual life of the Satellite Federation that it is.
Slade was fifty-four. Summa Metalogiae was two dozen years in the past. The triumphant opening of Eridard (which to many represents the peak of Circle creativity) was two years by. Only three months before, Corinda’s eighth collection of poems, Printed Circuits, had occasioned her receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature, making her not only the youngest person so awarded (she was then thirty-six), but also the first person born on a moon to be so honored by Earth’s Swedish Academy. (Many felt, with justification, that the award was really being given, in retrospect, for her magnificent Eridani libretto, written four years before. Even so, many took the award as a beacon whose light might hopefully banish some of the shadows which, day by day, were darkening relations between Earth and the Satellite Federation.) In the thirteenth paramonth of the second yearg, Ashima Slade, Gene Trimbell (then twenty-four), Ron Barbara (twenty-nine), with two men who had recently broken with the Sygn, Sven Holdanks (nineteen) and Pedar Haaviko (fifty-eight), decided to form a family commune. Otuola was, apparently, invited to join. For various reasons, however, she refused.
The commune lasted three months.
Exactly what happened during that time is not known and probably never will be—unless it is on record in some Government Information Retention Bank, available only to the participants. Its obviously painful character, however, is probably one reason biographies of all the survivors are not in General Information and are “withheld on request.” Because some of the members are still alive, speculation must be fairly circumspect.
At the end of the three months, at ten o’clock at night, the building near the center of the Lux u-1, housing the commune’s sixteen rooms, went up in flames, gutted by a furious chemical fire. Holdanks, the commune’s youngest member, had committed suicide the same afternoon in a music practice room on the University campus, hanging himself with piano wire. A day later, Ms Trimbell was admitted to a rest clinic for extreme distress (hallucinations, exhaust
ion, and hysteria) where she remained several months. Ron Barbara simply disappeared: his whereabouts only became known three years ago when, in quick succession, five slim volumes of poems {Syntax I, Syntax II, Rime, Themos, and Syntax III) appeared from a small, experimental publishing house in Bellona, where he has apparently been living for some while, having emigrated there after wandering for nearly a decade about the ice of four moons. The poems are abstruse, nearly incomprehensible, contain more mathematical symbols than words, and are in vast discord with his earlier, extremely lucid, direct and, essentially, verbal style that brought both popularity and critical approbation to such Barbara works as Katalysis and Ice/Flows. The new poems are the more frustrating because they contain (so people associated with the Circle have claimed) many references to the events of those three months. On the day of the commune’s breakup, Haaviko rejoined the Sygn and sank into its secret and silent rituals.
On the morning after the holocaust, Slade was found, unconscious, in an alley two units from the house, blinded, severely lacerated, and otherwise maimed—most of the injuries, apparently, self-inflicted. Sometime during the three-month interim, she had again become a man.
Slade was taken to a clinic, from which he emerged two months later, frail, blind, white-haired, prematurely aged, a round, two-inch silver photoplate set off-center above his scarred eye-sockets, which he now used to “see” with. (The photoplate was set off-center because Slade did not want to block his “third eye”, or pineal gland, an eccentricity easily complied with by the visual clinicians—another thing that has led some critics to suspect Slade’s connection with the Sygn to be greater than it was: the Sygn set heavy store by this traditional site of cosmic awareness. Slade himself, however, once said this decision was more in the nature of “Pascal’s wager,” which, on another occasion, when discussing Pascal [and not himself at all] he referred to as “... the archetype of moral irresponsibility to the self.” Whatever occurred in those three months, we can only assume that it shook Slade on every level a human being can be shaken. Slade left the clinic presumably cured, but many of his friends, who would occasionally meet him, walking barefoot, in his shabby, gray cloak, through the alleys of the Lux u-1, avoiding the main thoroughfares because they made him uncomfortable, felt he was not entirely responsible, especially during these first weeks.
Some of the younger members of the Sygn (Haaviko had been transferred to another city by the sect) invited Slade to live in the Sygn co-op, an invitation which he accepted, remaining, with their consent, however, apart from their rituals and practices.
Eventually Slade resumed teaching. He seldom left his room, except at night, or on his monthly visit to the University to hold his seminar.
The only people Slade really associated with now were a few of the other elderly eccentrics who gathered in the all-night cafeterias of Lux’s u-1, among whose crabbed and, more often than not, complaining conversations, he would, from time to time, enter a comment. Most of these men and women never knew he was, not a bottom, nonrefusable credit-slotter like themselves, but one of the most respected minds in the Solar System.
Most of them died not knowing—among the five million.
IV
In issues six and seven/eight of Foundation, we published the extant fragment of Shadows, the first of the three Harbin-Y Lectures Ashima Slade was to deliver on the modular calculus—and our subscription order, never particularly large, tripled. This popular (if a jump from five to fifteen thousand can be taken as an emblem of popularity) interest has prompted the commentary in the issue at hand.
A difficulty with Shadows, besides its incompleteness, is that Slade chose to present his ideas not as a continuous argument, but rather as a series of separate, numbered notes, each more or less a complete idea—the whole a galaxy of ideas that interrelate and interilluminate each other, not necessarily in linear form. Consider, however, these three statements from the last dozen notes Slade delivered:
42) There is no entrance to contemporary philosophical thought save at the twin gates of madness and obsession.
45) The problem of the modular calculus, again, is: How can one relational system model another? This breaks down into two questions: (One) What must pass from system-B to system-A for us (system-C) to be able to say that system-A now contains some model of system-B? (Two) Granted the proper passage, what must the internal structure of system-A be for us (or it) to say it contains any model of system-B?
49) There is no class, race, nationality, or sex that it does not help to be only half.
While none of these statements offers much difficulty in itself, it is still reasonable to ask what the three are domg in the same “galaxy.” A sympathetic critic might answer that together they suggest the range of Slade’s concerns. An unsympathetic one could hold that they only suggest; they certainly do not demonstrate; the fragmentary nature of the presentation precludes real profundity; to be significantly meaningful, the concerns should have been presented more deeply and with greater focus: At best, we have only a few, more or less interesting aphorisms. A third critic might simply dismiss many of the notes as examples of Slade’s notorious eccentricity and suggest we concern ourselves only with those notes, if any, that discuss the modular process head-on.
Our purpose in this article, however, is to explicate, not judge. And certainly the three threads from which the collection of remarks are braided, as these three notes suggest, are the psychological, the logical, and the political.
Slade took the title for his first lecture, Shadows, from a nonfiction piece written in the twentieth century by a writer of light, popular fictions; it employed the same galactic presentation and the term “modular calculus” appears (once) in it. There is little resemblance beyond that, however, and it would be a grave mistake to take this older piece as a model for Slade’s. Once Slade paraphrases it, in his note seventeen, “... I distrust separating facts too far from the landscape that produced them ...”; but for Slade the concept of landscape is far more political than it was for the author of the older work. Consider Slade’s thirty-first note: “Our society in the Satellites extends to its Earth and Mars emigrants, at the same time it extends instruction on how to conform, the materials with which to destroy themselves, both psychologically and physically—all under the same label: Freedom. To the extent they will not conform to our ways, there is a subtle swing: the materials of instruction are pulled further away and the materials of destruction are pushed correspondingly closer. Since the ways of instruction and the ways of destruction are not the same, but only subtly and secretly tied by language, we have simply, here, over-determined yet another way for the rest of us to remain oblivious to other peoples’ pain. In a net of tiny worlds like ours, that professes an ideal of the primacy of the subjective reality of all its citizens, this is an appalling political crime. And, in this appalling war, we may well be destroyed for it, if not by it.”
Though Slade’s major concern was logic, and his major contributions were made through the explorations of the micro-theater of single logical connections, Slade valued the role of Philosopher as Social Critic. How do the two concerns, politics and logic, fit together? Because the lecture is incomplete, we have no real way to know if Slade would have given us some statement on his concept of the relation between the two. Perhaps, however, his idea of the relation is suggested by the warning he gives in note nine of the lecture:
Suppose we have a mold that produces faulty bricks, and the flaw in single bricks can be modeled with the words tends to crumble on the left; if we then build a wall with these flawed bricks, that wall may or may not be flawed; also, the flaw may or may not be modelable with the words tends to crumble on the left; but even if it is, it is still not the same flaw as the flaw in any given brick; or the flaw in the mold. Keeping all these states clear and unentailed, despite the accidental redundancies of the language we can use to talk about them with, is the way out of most antinomies.
What Slade is suggesting, besides wh
at he has to say of antinomies, is that even if we have discovered the form of a micro-flaw common to every element of our thinking, to think we have necessarily discovered the form of a macro-flaw in our larger mental structures—say our politics—is simply to fall victim to a micro-flaw again. This is not to say that macro-flaws may not relate to the micro-flaws—they usually do—but it is a mistake to assume that relation is direct and necessarily subsumed by the same verbal model.
Slade, as we have said, is also concerned with psychology—specifically the psychology of the philosopher. How does he relate this to his logical explorations? There is little in the extant text of Shadows, beyond the rather flamboyant note forty-two already cited, to tell us—though I might refer the interested reader to Chapter VI, Section 2 of Volume One of Summa Metalogiae, where Slade discusses mistakes in reasoning, under which he includes many that “... another generation would have simply called insanity.”
Note twenty-two would seem to be the most accessible and detailed statement of Slade’s modular concerns:
What must pass from system-B to system-A for system-A to model system-B? Turn to animate organisms and the senses. First we have what we can call material models. With the senses of Smell, Taste, and Touch, actual material must pass from one system to the other, or at least come into direct physical interface with it, for system-A to begin to construct a model of the situation from which the material came. In the case of the first two, nerve clusters respond to the actual shape of molecules to distinguish information about them; in the last, variations of pressure generate the information into the nervous system as to whether a surface that we run our hand across is smooth or rough, hard or soft. Next we have what we can call reflected-wave models. Sight is the prime example: a comparatively chaotic and undifferentiated wave-front originates in some relational system-Z (say the filament of a light bulb when current passes through it, or the fissioning gases near the surface of the sun) and scoots through the universe until it hits and interacts with relational system-B (say a collection of molecules that make up a hammer, a nail) and is then sent out, by this interaction, in other directions. The nature of this interaction is such that the wavefront has not only had its direction changed—or rather been scattered in precise directions by the surface of the molecule collection—, many of the undifferentiated frequencies have been completely absorbed. Others have been shunted up or down. Other changes have occurred as well. The distortion of the newly directed wavefront is so great, in fact, we can just as easily call the distortion at this point organization. As an extremely narrow section of this distorted/organized wavefront passes through the cornea, iris, and lens of the eye—part of relational system-A—it is distorted even more. At the retina, it is stopped completely; but the pattern it has been distorted/organized into, on the retina, excites the rods and cones there to emit chemo-electric impulses that pass up the million-odd fibers of the optic nerve toward the brain. Now the pattern on the retina was not in the wavefront expanding through the air. It resulted from a fraction of a second of an arc of that front bent further in such a way that ninety-nine percent of it canceled itself out all together, in much the way troughs and peaks rippling over the surface of still water will, when they meet, cancel one another even as they pass through. But once inside the optic nerve, well before we get to the brain (the central organizer of relational system-A), we are not even dealing with the original wavefront anymore. New photons are involved. And the frequency of the impules in the optic nerve fibers is hugely below the frequency of the light that was our original front, however distorted; these new frequencies are not even related as simple multiples of the original frequencies. At this point, even before we reach the brain, we must ask ourselves again: What has actually passed from system-B to system-A? If we are honest, we must be prepared to answer, “Very little.” Indeed no thing has passed from B to A ... certainly not in the sense that things (Le., molecules) would have passed if system-A were smelling system-B rather than seeing it. The waves did not come from system-B, they simply bounced off it, transformed by the encounter. What we can say, with reflected-wave models, is that the original wavefront is at one order of randomness; the distortions system-B superimposes on that wavefront are at another order of randomness so much lower that when there is any change in that second order of randomness at all (say system-A and system-B should move in relation to one another; or they might both move in relation to the wave source) the panoramic change in the order of randomness can uniquely preserve the changes at the lower order through a series of simplifying operations that the eye and optic nerve (and eventually the brain) of system-A impose. In other words, visual order is a record of the changes in random order (as opposed to either the order or the randomness) of a series of wavefronts. Or, to become slightly metaphorical, all order is at least the fourth or fifth derivative of chaos. Now a third type of model can be called a generated-wave model. Sound is our primary example. Here we are also working with wavefronts, but these wavefronts have their origin within system-B, the system that system-A is attempting to model, and bear their distortion/organization with them from their inception. Notice: Once we pass the eardrum into the aural nerve, much less distortion occurs than, say, with light, once it has stimulated impulses in the optic nerve. The impulses in the aural nerve are pretty much the same frequency as the waves passing through the air. Still, it is the changes in the order that allow us to distinguish between, say, the three notes of a chord struck only for a second. In that second, what has been simplified into three singable pitches is in the realm of fifteen hunded bits of information. And it is the redundancy and the differences among those bits that give us, finally, a primary mental model (i.e., an experience) of, say, an A-minor triad. Even the single note A, sounded for a second, involves eight hundred and eighty changes of pressure on the eardrum. Two points should be made here: (One) When speaking of wavefront models, the only difference between distortion and organization—between noise and information—is the ability of the receiving system to interpret. In terms of clinical psychology, the answers to this first question of the modular calculus proliferate endlessly and become the psychology/physiology of perception. We can leave this question to the psychophysiologists with our next point: (Two) Within the human organism—indeed, within any animal nervous system—once the proper passage has occurred between system-B and system-A, be it material or waves (reflected or generated), and we are dealing with the information that has gotten through the surface of the system, so to speak (i.e., past the sense organs), and into the nervous system itself, all of it has been translated into the form of generated-wave models. In other words, sound is the modular form of all information within the nervous system itself, and that includes smell, taste, touch, and sight. The aesthetician Pater wrote: “All art aspires to the condition of music.” Yes, and so does everything else. But our answer to the first question of the modular calculus has altered the second question so that it begins to be quantifiable, or at least topological: What is the necessary structure of a series of generated wave models within system-A which will allow it to know/experience aspects of the system-B which first excited these waves, either by reflected waves, as generated waves, or with material?
Triton Page 38
