board77

Aha! There you are!

Usually I catch your posts days after they appear. So where is this story going? Are we supposed to write it ourselves?

The story teller can no longer tell stories ... is that the story?

Jn

I am undeleted but deterred.

don't sign off until I get back.

Jn

Chapter the Seventh: The Cricket


There was a cricket drumming in my ear—the unspoken story buzzing and humming and drumming. I was now listening for “Kirk” and “Spock.” I knew that these names had been given to men in tales about a world that might be. I heard part of the unspoken story under, around and in bits and pieces of the tales of that false world. I began to think of myself as an “editor” of these tales. While I was wordlessly editing cave stories about Kirk and Spock to make them harmonize with the unspoken story, I heard a tale in my brain. It was the cricket.


June 28, 2267 A.D. Pavel Chekov was not in his usual good humor. He had been lobbying Captain Kirk for months to let him take command. It was all part of Chekov’s master plan. Sitting in one of the side rooms at the Dog and Pony, while engaged in a tradition which was over two millennia old, Chekov had spent his last night “on dry land” before shipping out on his first tour of duty aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise, predicting his meteoric rise through the ranks. He would be, for some reason (details didn’t matter, particularly at 4 a.m.), temporarily in command of the Enterprise. An emergency would arise. There would not be time to get Kirk, and Chekov would act heroically to save the ship. Chekov was hardly breaking new ground here, but there is an inescapable advantage of youth: he was blissfully unaware that this particular fantasy was as much a part of the last night ritual as the drink, the companionship and the late hour.

To Chekov’s credit, the dream did not dissipate in the pain and shock of the morning after. That fact alone distinguished him from most of his peers. Chekov even persisted until his imagination began furnishing detail and logic to the fantasy. So much so that his day dream evolved into an obsession, and the childish wish to be grown-up and in charge merged with unadulterated hero worship focused on the man whom Chekov idolized long before Chekov knew he would serve on board the Enterprise under him. Naturally, then, Chekov’s plan focused on making Kirk believe that Chekov was a younger version of himself. Chekov knew Kirk’s reputation—brash, energetic, willing to take risks. At least that was the part of Kirk’s reputation which Chekov’s youth mistook for the whole man. Kirk was the youngest captain in Star Fleet history. In Chekov’s mind there had to be a cause-and-effect relationship between Kirk’s “youthful” qualities and his success, even though it would have made more sense to assume that the qualities which made Kirk rise to Star Fleet captain at such a young age were those qualities which made him seem older and more experienced than he really was. It was important to Chekov that he be right about Kirk, so he decided to trust his instincts. Unfortunately for Chekov, he would have to learn the hard way that trusting an instinct is not the equivalent of understanding an instinct and that youthful enthusiasm is not the key ingredient to a successful career in Star Fleet.

Chekov had plenty of time for introspection. After listening to Chekov’s whining for months, Kirk had given Chekov a taste of what he wanted--the captain’s chair. It was the graveyard shift, and the Enterprise was moving through half a quadrant of empty space on its way to its next mission. Back at Star Fleet Academy, when Chekov passed his Bridge Officer Exam, he was told that his first shift in temporary command of the bridge would be exciting only if he got caught falling asleep, but his fantasy had taken too strong a hold on him to remember such mundane advice.

Under these circumstances, it was highly unlikely he would be presented with an opportunity to demonstrate his command ability. The worst part of it was that he was now completely out of the “keptin’s” gaze. How could he impress Kirk, if Kirk never saw him? There was another problem with his new duty. He missed Sulu. Chekov had been promoted to the senior bridge crew only six months ago, but he had immediately established a special rapport with Sulu. He wished he could hear Uhuru singing to herself while monitoring communications. He longed to see Spock raise an eyebrow in response to one of his premeditated parodies of stereotypical Russian behavior. Most of all, he missed being humiliated by Kirk. He realized he was feeling sorry for himself, but he did not try to block the feeling. It gave him something to do, and it seemed to add the appropriate melancholy tone to his introspective musings.

Chekov may have been young, but he learned quickly. He realized that serving as the proverbial water boy under the watchful eye of James Tiberius Kirk, along with Kirk’s senior bridge crew, would be a shorter path to the captain’s chair than logging meaningless time as a temporary, junior-grade night-shift commander. He then did something quite remarkable and unexpected: he told Kirk that he had learned his lesson and said, with the right amount of grin, “I want my old job back.” Kirk obliged. That night was to be Chekov’s last as the regular commander of the graveyard shift. Under such circumstances, one might almost have predicted that something unusual would occur on Chekov’s watch.

The long-range sensors picked up a small, cigar-shaped object moving at sub-light speed. It was too far away for a detailed scan. Its course would not bring it appreciably closer to the Enterprise. Chekov immediately ordered a course change. Kirk’s standing orders were quite clear. The officer in charge of the bridge had authority to order a course change without asking, or, as in this case, waking the captain. But there would be hell to pay if the change was not warranted. The Enterprise quickly intercepted the object. It proved to be a metallic cylinder resistant to scans of its interior. When the scans revealed indeterminate life signs, Chekov was presented with a real dilemma. He wanted to bring the object on board, but that action would clearly require authorization from the captain. He did not want to wake Kirk, and his recent fit of introspection had not left him immune to the inescapable conclusion that fate had presented him with a chance to impress Kirk. Chekov did the only thing he was capable of doing at that point in his life—he ordered the Enterprise to retrieve the pod.

He could not use the transporter. Apparently, the same energy or material which was confusing or shielding the scans was preventing transporter lock. He thought briefly about holding the pod at a safe distance with the tractor beam until Kirk awoke, but the life signs, if they were signs of life, were growing weaker. So, Chekov brought the pod aboard and ordered emergency medical personnel to the docking bay. When the emergency medical team made its preliminary report, Chekov ordered the communication officer to alert Kirk.

Chekov met Kirk outside Kirk’s quarters and brought him up to speed. The pod had contained a female humanoid. She was near death and in a coma or a coma-like state. The medical personnel were convinced that they had to take immediate action to save the woman’s life. They removed her from the pod and took her to sick bay. Their quick reaction not only brought the stranger back from the dead, it also saved Chekov. Kirk was not pleased when he learned that Chekov had violated one of his standing orders by bringing an alien artifact on board without his approval, but he concentrated on the matter at hand instead of disciplining Chekov—at least for the moment.

Kirk and Chekov rode to the bridge in complete silence. As soon as the door of the turbolift opened onto the bridge, Kirk snapped a command: “Mister Sulu, get us underway; Warp Factor six.”

A light (not a real light, a proverbial light [Is that a meta-cliché?]) came on in Chekov’s cluttered mind. Sulu should not have been on the bridge to hear that command, and Kirk issued the command before he could have possibly seen Sulu sitting at the helm. If anyone had been looking at Chekov at that moment, they would have seen his eyes wide open (not another cliché—it actually happened). His eyes literally opened wide in amazement, as though he were seeing Sulu grown suddenly larger. The sudden shock of respect is not an easy experience for young daydreaming ensigns. Upon a moment’s reflection, Chekov’s increased admiration for Sulu was followed by despair.

Chekov had not told anyone to wake Sulu. Furthermore, since Kirk’s standing orders were the equivalent of a religion with the young officers and crew of the Enterprise, Chekov knew Kirk had not left such orders for Sulu, or anyone else. Sulu must have arranged to be notified whenever Kirk was called to the bridge. Chekov had been aware that Sulu possessed remarkable abilities, but, like most youth, Chekov did not differentiate the ability of talent from the ability to perform, to get the job done, and because of that, Chekov had assumed, since he rated his talents as different but on a par with Sulu’s, that he would be Sulu’s equal as a Star Fleet officer after a few more months in space. Chekov suddenly knew he had a long way to go before he became a respectable ensign, much less a captain. As insignificant as the moment seemed, it was a turning point in Chekov’s career. He stopped playing the role of a Star Fleet officer and started doing the job.

Sulu responded to Kirk’s order before Kirk finished speaking and said, “Captain on the bridge. Aye, sir.”

Kirk squinted at Chekov: “What do the medics say about the condition of your ‘uninvited guest’? Somebody wake up McCoy.”

“Her life signs are still very weak, but stable. She remains in an unresponsive state. She has been placed in a stasis field” Chekov answered Kirk’s query and let a very nervous Lieutenant Quinlan Thomas volunteer to wake McCoy. Chekov winced a bit inwardly, because he knew that Thomas preferred the safe anonymity of late night duty.

“What about his craft--this ‘pod’ of yours? Anything?” Kirk asked in the shorthand which is the prerogative of command. Chekov had learned early that Kirk was not a patient man. He usually figured out where you were going with your sentence before you had time to finish it--and he seldom waited.

“Keptin, I ... I have no ... not yet ... nothing to report about the pod.”
“Well,” Kirk drawled, “Captain Chekov, if you don’t already have a detailed report on the pod, I suggest you invent one in a big hurry.” There was no smile beneath Kirk’s “Captain Chekov.” Kirk waited a nano second for a response from Chekov, and then said, “Somebody get Mister Spock.”

At that moment, a bleary-eyed ship’s doctor stumbled out of the turbo-lift onto the bridge. “This had better be good. I killed the young ensign who woke me.”

Moments later, Spock approached the pod with tricorder at a high-pitched hum. He spoke to no one in particular as though conducting an autopsy and making a record of his observations: “The object is an elliptical cylinder, approximately four meters in length, and three meters in diameter at its center. In appearance, it resembles the orbital kayak popular in the Orion culture. The exterior hull is metallic, black in color and, based on visual scanning, seems to absorb rather than reflect light.”

Chekov interrupted: “The exterior of the pod reflected scans of the interior and prevented transporter lock.”

“Mr. Chekov,” Spock responded without turning to look at Chekov, “I have already reviewed the automated log concerning the Enterprise’s encounter with this object, as well as your decision to retrieve it. Please withhold comment until I have completed my analysis.” Spock continued, “Unless I am mistaken, the material composition of the pod is identical to the so-called Guardian of Forever; however, it appears to have been recently fabricated. The material itself is ancient but its current configuration is not. Note: existing Federation technology is incapable of cutting, bending or even scratching the surface of Guardian material.”

“There is a doorway or hatch in the center of the craft. It is essentially a circle, one meter in diameter. There is no hinge or latch. The emergency medical personnel reported that the hatch displaced itself when one of them first touched the exterior of the pod, but that they could discover no mechanism which caused it to do so. They simply lifted the hatch out of its hole in order to access the interior and remove their patient. I will now inspect the interior.”

Spock poked his head through the opening in the pod. It appeared to those standing nearby that Spock had lost his head. Any part of Spock which extended below the surface of the craft into its interior completely disappeared from sight—despite the intense lighting directed at the object from outside. Spock spoke, though no one could hear.

“There is no interior lighting. Light from outside the craft entering through the hatch is apparently being completely absorbed by the material of the interior. Visibility is zero.” Spock inserted his tricorder into the interior of the pod. It now seemed to others as though Spock’s arm was cut off at the elbow. Spock spoke again but could not hear his own words. “Tricorder scans of the interior do not detect the presence of anything, including the craft itself—nothing but the vacuum of space.”

Spock crawled through the opening so that he completely disappeared from sight. As he did so, light emanating from the tricorder’s display screen suddenly seemed to bathe the interior in light. To those on the outside, a beam of light now shone from the hole in the object. Spock then noted: “The hull is one-third meter thick throughout the craft. There is no evidence of instrumentation or mechanism in the interior. There is no evidence of a means of propulsion. There are no communication devices. It would appear that the pod is completely empty.” Mister Spock then placed his right hand on the interior surface and bent his face near his hand, as though listening with his fingers. As if in response to Spock’s touch or perhaps his thought, a circle of material, one-third meter in diameter and four centimeters thick, became displaced from the smooth surface of the interior. Spock removed the disk and discovered a storage space containing a recording device and a number of data disks. The recorder was also a light source. Spock collected the data storage disks and the recording device, turned off his tricorder, and climbed out of the pod. As he walked briskly out of the docking bay, he told Chekov, without pausing, that he would complete his analysis by reviewing the disks and inspecting the recorder in his quarters. Spock did not emerge from his quarters for almost a full day despite Kirk’s increasingly shrill “requests” that he do so. While Spock remained in seclusion reviewing the data on the computer disks, the occupant of the intercepted pod remained in a stasis field. Spock asked Kirk to meet him in Spock’s quarters. Spock’s report to Kirk did not please the captain.

Spock: “Based on my review of the information contained on the disks I retrieved from the storage compartment in the pod, I have placed our guest in isolation. I must advise you that my exposure to the Teller’s data has contaminated me and that I now represent a serious threat to this time line.”

Kirk: “Please don’t tell me she is a time traveler, and quit talking as though you have a disease.”

Spock: “Star Fleet is quite explicit. I should be immediately placed in quarantine.”

Kirk: “I understand you are obeying Star Fleet orders concerning contamination of the time line, but you may be over-reacting.”

Spock (raising one eyebrow in response to Kirk’s suggestion that it was remotely possible for Spock to over-react): “I have reviewed very little of the information in the disks, but I have seen enough of it to know that the information contained there, and most likely in the mind of our guest, could alter the past, present and future of all life on your planet.”

Kirk: “All right, Mister Spock, you have my attention.”

Spock: “I know of your distaste for the theoretical analysis of time travel.”

Kirk: “It gives me a headache.”

Spock: “I will therefore avoid theory and concentrate on the present circumstances. I will refer to the female as the Teller. The Teller is either from the distant future relative to our current position in the space-time continuum, in which case, we must be somewhere in time between the absolute beginning of the universe and the absolute present of the universe; or, she is from the distant past, in which case, we may be at the absolute present of the universe or somewhere in time between the absolute present and the point in time in our relative past and her absolute present at which she accelerated to the speed of time so that her internal clock did not tick until she slowed to our relative speed in order to intercept us at this point in time.”

Kirk: “Maybe we should just stick to theory.”

Spock: “There is a third alternative.”

Kirk: “Somehow I knew there would be.”

Spock: “The data I have reviewed from the Teller suggests that we may not exist inside the space-time continuum as a result of a flawed script.”

Kirk: “Spock, either you’re finally developing a sense of humor or you’ve gone mad.”

Spock: “I assure you, Captain, I am quite sane.”

Kirk: “Did you just make another joke? I wish Bones was here.”

Spock: “As you know, since it is impossible to travel to an absolute future universe from the absolute present universe, we must assume that, if the Teller is from the future, then we must not be currently occupying space-time in the absolute present.”

Kirk: “You mean we would be ghosts of our own future?”

Spock: “Actually, that metaphor is surprisingly accurate.”

Kirk: “Didn’t think I had it in me, did you?”

Spock: “You are correct; I did not. On the other hand, if she is from the distant past, then we may as well assume we are in the absolute present, because we would never be able to tell whether we were or we were not based on her position relative to ours.”

Kirk: “She would have had to travel to this present time by keeping time with time between her original present time and this present time so that, for her, there would have been no passage of time while the universe aged around her. How do we know that she wasn’t simply frozen or in some sort of suspended animation?”

Spock: “Her body would still show evidence of the passage of time, even if her mind was not conscious of it. However, it would be true to say that time was ‘frozen’ relative to her while she was moving at the speed of time.”

Kirk: “So much for the past, present and future, now I would like to how it might be possible that we do not exist—and I do not want to hear any sophomoric philosophical or metaphysical nonsense.”

Spock: “There is an old earth saying: ‘Do not shoot the messenger.’ In order to explain, I must begin by telling you about our young, Mister Chekov. According to one of the Teller’s narratives, Chekov becomes a well known, if not well respected, historian, after he retires from Star Fleet. His ‘histories’ are a fusion of holographic recordings of the actual events and holographic recordings of computer-generated recreations of the actual events. Chekov’s histories prove immensely popular, becoming the equivalent of what was once known in your culture as blockbuster films, but academic historians condemn Chekov’s work. I have viewed the Chekov trilogy: three histories entitled, Wrath of Kahn, Search for Spock, and Voyage Home. The first begins with you facing your mortality and ends with my death. The second begins with my rebirth and ends with you making a leap of faith. The third involves time travel.”

Kirk: “Fascinating. How do you die?”

Spock: “Captain, if I told you, I would have to kill you.”

Kirk: “I was joking.”

Spock: “So was I. Indeed, it was an old joke from your favorite source—twentieth century America.”

Kirk: “What can you tell me?”

Spock: “I intended to make my report to you in a certain sequence and that sequence requires that I withhold specific information regarding our particular involvement in these matters until I have provided you with sufficient background information so that you can properly assess the current situation and take appropriate action.”

Kirk interrupted: “I hope, for our sake, that time is infinite, because you are certainly taking the long-winded approach. Can’t you simply get to it?”

Spock: “No. According to the information that accompanied Teller on her journey through space-time, the Chekov trilogy has a complicated relationship with the original time line.”

Kirk: “You mean he exaggerated? Should we send him to his quarters without supper? Oh, wait, I already did that.”

Spock: “Captain, I really wish you would begin to take this matter more seriously. In the decade following the publication of Chekov’s last holographic history, historians at Star Fleet began mounting a serious attack on Chekov’s work. Ultimately, Chekov responded to those critics in an essay called ‘The End of History,’ but I was unable to find anything about the content of the essay beyond references to it. Based on my review of the Teller data, there are two versions of our future history. I believe Teller intends to ask us to determine which version of history concerning our own future is the ‘true’ story.”

Kirk: “Spock, you have reviewed all the relevant data. What are the significant differences between Chekov’s and Star Fleet’s history.”

Spock: “Very well. Near the end of the first history in the trilogy…”

Kirk: “The one titled, Wrath of Kahn?”

Spock: “Correct. I die having sacrificed my life to save the Enterprise and the entire crew.”

Kirk: “What was I doing while you were saving me and my crew?”

Spock: “Really, captain. There is no reason for me to contaminate you with extraneous information. I am sorry if this story wounds your human pride. As I was about to say, with regard to the events presented in Wrath of Kahn, the only significant divergence between Chekov’s history and Star Fleet’s history occurs during the memorial service conducted before my body was fired into space inside an empty photon torpedo casing.”

Kirk: “At least it was empty.”

Spock: “I have not had time or opportunity to analyze it in any depth, but, on the surface, the difference does not appear significant. Yet, Teller was obsessed with this event in particular and seemed to consider it the starting point of a divergence that ultimately resulted in profoundly incompatible time lines. I will play a recording of your remarks from both histories. Computer, play file, ‘Spock, Exhibit A,’ audio only.” The computer plays a recording that begins with Spock’s voice stating: “Voice recording of James T. Kirk’s remarks on board the starship Enterprise on the occasion of a memorial service for crewman Spock. This recording is the version maintained in Star Fleet’s official archives:”

Kirk’s voice:
We are assembled here today to pay final respects to our honored dead. And yet, it should be noted, that in the midst of our sorrow, this death takes place in the shadow of new life, the sunrise of a new world, a world that our beloved comrade gave his life to protect and nourish. He did not feel this sacrifice a vain or empty one—and we will not debate his profound wisdom, at these proceedings. Of my friend, I can only say this… of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most human.

The computer recording continues with Spock’s voice stating: “Voice recording of James T. Kirk’s remarks on board the starship Enterprise on the occasion of a memorial service for crewman Spock. This recording is the version contained in Chekov’s history and purports to be a copy of the original recording in the databanks of Enterprise’s main computer:”

Kirk’s voice:
We are assembled here today to pay final respects to our honored dead. And yet, it should be noted that, in the midst of our sorrow, this death gave us new life, the promise of a sunrise in a new world. It was that new world our beloved comrade gave his life to protect and nourish. He did not feel this sacrifice a vain or empty one, and we dedicate ourselves to proving his last calculation correct. He would have us believe that his sacrifice was based solely on logic—that the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few or the one—and we will not debate his profound wisdom, at these proceedings, but of my friend, I can only say this… of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most human.

Kirk (who finally had on his “game face”): “The Star Fleet version contains references to a specific new world instead of the metaphorical one in Chekov’s version. How much do you know about the circumstances surrounding this alleged future death of yours?”

Spock: “Sufficient to know that there was indeed a planet nearby that would definitely qualify as a ‘new’ world. However, the reference does not make sense, because there is no doubt that my sacrifice was intended to save ship and crew—not the nearby planet.”

Kirk: “So, based on internal evidence, we might conclude that the official version maintained by Star Fleet was somehow falsified.”

Spock: “On the other hand, you might have been so emotionally overwrought by my death that you were not speaking rationally.”

Kirk: “In which case, Chekov might have edited the recording to make his old captain look better for posterity’s sake, so to speak.”

Spock: “Precisely my conclusion.”

Kirk: “What do you mean—that you agree with my assessment of the situation or that Chekov was trying to make me look good?”

Spock: “My conclusion concurs with your assessment.”

Kirk: “What are the divergences in the second history, the Search for Spock?”

Spock: “Before we continue, there is one other matter we must discuss. There was a young female lieutenant on the bridge crew.”

Kirk (speaking rapidly): “Look, Spock, I’m sorry if I…”

Spock: “Please, captain, let me continue. Her name is Saavik. According to Chekov’s history, her ancestry was a mix of Vulcan and Romulan. She was quite attractive. In Star Fleet’s history, there are subtle indications that she is not a typical Vulcan, but nothing is declared regarding her Romulan background. Chekov’s history provides considerable background. She was my protégé. I apparently rescued her from a deplorable situation arising from the fact that she had been orphaned at a young age and became homeless, fending for herself on a small moon. Due to her mixed blood, neither the Vulcans nor the Romulans would claim her. She ultimately enrolled in Star Fleet Academy, performed admirably and no doubt patterned her career after mine.”

Kirk: “You don’t need to explain why you would empathize with her situation.”

Spock: “I appreciate the fact that you did not attribute the cause to an emotional response on my part. It is fortunate that Doctor McCoy is not present. In any event, there is a significant omission involving Saavik in the Star Fleet history that is included indirectly in Chekov’s history. Following my death, but prior to the main events covered in the Search for Spock, you and the young lieutenant had a brief sexual relationship.”

Kirk: “I am sure we were both trying to cope with the overwhelming emotional loss we suffered as a result of your death, my friend.”

Spock: “Yes, well, in your case, you were also dealing with another type of loss. You had hoped that you were going to renew a romantic relationship with your son’s mother, but she rejected your entreaties.” Kirk exploded with questions and protestations but Spock ignored him and continued. Spock: “I would not have mentioned it at all but it becomes significant later in the histories. What I am about to tell you may seem like a far-fetched science fiction story, but the details are the same in both versions of the history. My body is regenerated on the planet that was near the Enterprise when you fired the photon torpedo. You organize a heroic search to recover me risking your career and your life. At the end of the Search for Spock, you and I are alone on the planet with a fierce Klingon warrior. The planet is moments from total disintegration. You defeat the Klingon in hand-to-hand combat…”

Kirk: “I like this story better than the one where you save me and the crew while I am sitting on my ass.”

Spock: “I thought you might. Unfortunately, as you knock the Klingon into a fiery chasm, he drags me along with him over the edge of the precipice. Without hesitation, you leap after me into the abyss and what seems certain death, but as you catch up to my falling body, you speak into the Klingon’s communicator which you had wrested from him and we are both transported an instant before being vaporized.”

Kirk: “Wow. Please don’t tell me that was Chekov’s version.”

Spock: “Why, yes, captain, it was.”

Kirk: “What happened according to Star Fleet?”

Spock: “Very similar until the moment you dispatch the Klingon into the abyss. I was at a relatively safe distance. You pick up the Klingon communicator, and the rest, as they say, is history.”

Kirk: “You know, Spock, this really seems to be a waste of my time. Chekov has a flair for the dramatic and is prone to romantic flights of fancy. I remember discussing his personality profile with you and McCoy before we brought him on board as a new recruit. Teller’s journey here is a unique occurrence in the history of the universe. You have told me that this situation has far-reaching consequences for all of human history, and, so far, all I have heard is inconsequential bull …”

Spock: “I can appreciate your frustration, but bear with me a moment longer. You must then decide if it has been a waste of your time, but, Captain, the Teller came here because your time has been wasted. There is something else you must hear, something presented in both versions of the Search for Spock. Without going into unnecessary detail, while my body was regenerating, I matured from rebirth as an infant through adulthood in a matter of hours. During that process, I was, for the most part, alone on the planet with Saavik. I experienced pun far, the Vulcan mating obsession, and she assisted me.”

Kirk: “By ‘assist’ I assume you mean…”

Spock: “Yes, Captain. Now, moving on to the third history, Voyage Home, there is something in the Chekov version that will test our relationship. Saavik’s pregnancy is referenced in Chekov’s history as an explanation for why she is not actively involved in the main events reported. She appears fleetingly in the Star Fleet version, but she is not with child.”

Kirk (haltingly): “Whose child…?”

Spock: “That information is not provided in Chekov’s history. Based on circumstantial evidence, the child could obviously be yours or mine. The situation involving Saavik is, of course, of great interest to us personally, but one would imagine that it would be of little import to Teller or to the universe. I believe Teller is here because of the extraordinary divergence of the time line that arises from the consequences of the time travel I mentioned to you at the beginning of my report. It is probable that Teller incorporated the information from the first two parts of the trilogy solely to provide background. So, the events involving Saavik should not concern us here today.”

Kirk: “If you really believed that, you wouldn’t have mentioned her or anything involving her, and given the nature of the disclosures, I know you well enough to know you would have spared me the embarrassment if you felt that you could. So, before you tackle what you believe to be the real reason Teller is here, go on and finish with Saavik. What is it you have yet to tell me?”

Spock: “In Chekov’s later histories, Final Frontier and Undiscovered Country, Saavik resurfaces as a protégé of mine and we appear to share an intimacy of an undefined nature. She ultimately proves to be working with a faction of humans, Vulcans, Romulans and Klingons who assassinate the Klingon Chancellor and plot to assassinate the President of the Federation in an attempt to disrupt negotiations with the Klingons to establish a lasting peace. I expose her participation in the conspiracy. In Star Fleet’s version of the same events, there is a female Vulcan occupying the same role relative to the events but she is not Saavik. Chekov’s version makes Saavik’s motivation explicit. She became obsessed with preservation of Star Fleet’s role in the Federation as a consequence of her experiences following the birth of the child and our competing parental interests. Though we both offered to provide support and involvement, she declined and refused to disclose the identity of the father. The child was male and had Vulcan, Romulan and human characteristics, but the human genes could have come from either of us. It was evident that the circumstances placed a strain on our relationship. In fact, I seemed to drop out of sight for a time, only to reappear on the Romulan home world working for the reunification of Vulcans and Romulans. Checkov’s histories suggest that I was motivated in part by the situation involving Saavik and the child. As a result of my efforts in the Romulan underground working for reunification, you and I are separated during the events leading to your death. Had you and I not become separated, I have little doubt that those same events would not have resulted in your death. At a minimum, had you died despite my presence, I believe I would have undertaken a successful search for you much as you did for me.

Kirk: “Wait a minute. I thought you said I was dead. Why would you search for me?”

Spock: “The details are not important. Your status was somewhere between dead and missing, though everyone believed you were dead. My point is that I would not have been satisfied, and since subsequent events proved that you were in fact missing rather than dead, I assume I would have found you and prevented your second death.”

Kirk: “Am I really supposed to be following all this? Just shoot me now—a quick, painless death—and forget about it.”

Spock: “I only mention it so that you will understand that the Star Fleet official history provides no rationale for the disruption in the symmetry of our lives”

Kirk: “Why, Spock, I had no idea you held such a strong belief in our joint karma.”

Spock: “You have always known that I have faith that the universe shall unfold as it should. The story of our joined paths has always possessed a certain symmetry, and I see no reason why that symmetry should not have continued—unless there was a significant asymmetrical event. For example, something occurs between the conclusion of Voyage Home and the beginning of the main events presented in Final Frontier. You are mountain climbing and fall from a great height. I happen to be nearby wearing anti-gravity boots. I rescue you by a powered descent using the anti-gravity boots. We should have both been killed, but we somehow violate the laws of physics and survive. This fall and rescue are identical in Chekov’s and Star Fleet’s versions, but in Chekov’s version there is a flashback, shown as an interruption during my dive to catch you, to the moment in Search for Spock when, in Chekov’s version, you dive into the abyss to save me.”

Kirk: “Well, even if it didn’t happen that way, Chekov certainly tells a whale of a story, doesn’t he?”

Spock: “Now you are sounding like Teller. You dove into the abyss to save me. I dove to save you. You searched for me following my death. I should have searched for you. The official history provides no evidence of the asymmetrical event; the Chekov history does. Our triangular relationship with Saavik is the key difference. There is one last detail involving Saavik I should mention. Based on your response to the daring rescue of me at the end of the second history, I assume you are prepared to conclude that Chekov’s histories are the more ‘artfully’ edited versions. But consider this: in Star Fleet’s history, Saavik’s personal appearance undergoes a radical transformation from the first to the second part of the trilogy. It is inexplicable, since these histories—both Star Fleet’s and Chekov’s—are based on the same photographic records. She does not appear to be the same woman, and seems to have had the Romulan personality excised in the Star Fleet version of history. In Chekov’s histories, there is no transformation, and she continues a prominent participation in the history—except for her time spent immediately surrounding the birth of her child. Since I can think of no likely explanation for the incongruity in Star Fleet’s history, I must conclude that it is Star Fleet’s history that has been altered for some reason.”

Kirk: “Then Chekov preserved the true story of what happened?”

Spock: “Perhaps. There is one final matter. In Voyage Home, earth is endangered by an alien probe that is, as I subsequently discover, scanning the planet to hear whale stories—specifically, songs sung by humpback whales.”

Kirk: “What kind of stories?”

Spock: “There was no data on the content of the stories sung by the whales.”

Kirk: “You must be mistaken. That would have been the first thing I would have wanted to know. You know what I mean—get behind the veneer of the 23rd century technology and focus on the real meat and bones of the story.”

Spock: “You really do sound like Teller, but, as I indicated, there was no data regarding the subject matter of the stories sung by the whales. For purposes of my tale to you of these events, it is only necessary you know that the scans are disrupting the planet, threatening all terrestrial life.”

Kirk: “So the probe’s scan was actually an attack?”

Spock: “There is no report of a malevolent intent on the part of the probe. Though no one makes the statement in these histories, I have concluded that the probe must have been damaged and was malfunctioning. No civilization capable of creating such a machine would fail to anticipate its environmental impact. In any event, we happen to be returning to earth at the very moment the probe is disrupting things. You and the others under your command violated Star Fleet orders in searching for me on that planet during the events presented in the second part of the trilogy, and you were returning to face court martial. We determined that the only way to answer the probe and save earth was to travel back in time to capture two humpback whales and bring them back.”

Kirk: “Because the probe wanted to hear real stories told by a story teller to a story listener.”

Spock (raising one eyebrow): “We succeed. In addition to the two whales, we bring back an attractive female marine biologist who could not bear to be parted from…”

Kirk: “You could have just skipped that part.”

Spock: “Who could not bear to be parted from the whales. Up to the point that we return with the whales, the two versions are identical. In Star Fleet’s version, we are given a hero’s welcome. All the charges are dropped and you are returned to command of the Enterprise. In Chekov’s version, we return to find that there is no emergency. Apparently, our trip to the past altered the time line. The disappearance of the female biologist and the two whales under mysterious circumstances led to a world-wide movement to save humpback whales from extinction. It succeeded. So, when the probe appeared, there were plenty of whales to sing back to it. The mood at Star Fleet was completely different. There was no emergency and we simply looked desperate and foolish. The Klingons were on the war path, and Star Fleet offered you up as though a sacrificial lamb. You spoke up for those under your command, but only Sulu was spared. The lead attorney for Star Fleet approached both you and Sulu before trial and offered to let Sulu off with a reprimand in exchange for his testimony against you. The attorney knew Sulu wanted a captain’s chair, but he also knew that Sulu would not agree to do it unless you told him to do so. You did. The court martial found you and the others guilty and you were all dishonorably discharged from Star Fleet.”

Kirk: “The needs of the one outweighed the needs of the many.”

Spock: “In the Star Fleet official time line, the triumphant return paradoxically initiates a slow but inevitable decline. James T. Kirk had become the protagonist of a story and the story had reached a final climax. By definition, the events that followed were anticlimactic. In Chekov’s time line, the anticlimactic return and banishment resulted in continuing struggle and, eventually, renewal.”

Kirk: “I am confused. In the official version preserved by Star Fleet, I receive a hero’s welcome; I finish my career with Star Fleet and retire; and Star Fleet declines. According to Chekov, I am dishonorably discharged and Star Fleet thrives. Is there an actual divergence in the time line? I thought we were discussing the differences between two histories, not two realities.”

Spock: “Your question brings us to the real crux of the matter, and to answer it I must disclose to you the details surrounding your deaths.”

Kirk: “I was hoping you would get to that. You did say deaths—as in more than one?”

Spock: “Yes.”

Kirk: “Was I regenerated like you?”

Spock: “No, but as I am fond of saying, there always are possibilities.”

Kirk: “Fascinating.”

The computer beeps and Spock peers at the screen. He looks at Kirk and raises one eyebrow.

Spock: “Jim.”

Kirk: “Yes, Spock?”

Spock: “It is Teller. She is awake. She wants to speak. Before we do, I want you to review the data.”


The universe is a game of connect-the-dots. Consciousness requires a leap of faith. Faith may not move mountains but it moves time. Time narrates words into stories—my story, her story and history. There were cave stories as to which the writer and reader believed and behaved as though the word was a picture of the thing that had happened in the world under the sun. It was as though the story was not a story at all but a transcription of things never spoken. I had been a story teller in my world too long to become comfortable with the relationship between world, story teller and reader in the cave-story world. I had no way of determining what, in the semiotic of the cave, was a “real” or an “invented” history. To a Teller, there is only story. Myth, history, fiction, science, encyclopedia—it was all story to me, and the Teller mind knows story. Book after book, film after film, sounds, pictures, words, the stuff of story flickered unceasingly in front of me, framed by the window, held in the cave, and I found order; I heard the pattern in human history, a pre-linguistic grammar, existing outside the cave, in the mind of the Teller. Why was the story telling mind drawn to Star Trek? As a result of the accretion of semantic detail built up through multiple episodes and the series’ popularity, Star Trek evolved into a coherent mythology. The coherent mythology was not a consequence of the consistent artistic/creative vision of the show’s writers/directors. The simple truth is that the audience did it. The mass audience transformed a mediocre, short-lived television show into a coherent mythology—despite glaring inconsistencies in the shows themselves. Details inconsistent with the fable elements in the foreground dissolve into the background or are completely ignored. The audience put the raw story material into the soup pot and cooked it until it became myth.



[Insert the first six chapters.]


Kirk: “Teller has narrated a story about her village and her discovery of the story cave. It may be a coincidence without significance, but I wrote an essay at the academy comparing Thoreau and Tolkien, or it may be Teller chose that particular cave story precisely because I once told a similar “story.” Do you remember what you said about time when we encountered the Guardian of Forever? You said that there may be currents in time causing McCoy and us to arrive at a pivotal moment in time. Perhaps there are similar currents in story. If so, could it be that space-time and story become real in the same way or have a similar relationship with the perception of reality? Who I am or whether I am, at this moment in space-time from my perspective, is irrelevant—and you know how I hate being irrelevant, but that’s beside the point since I have decided to play the game according to the rules… just this once. Here is where it stands. I am even beginning to think like Teller. Can you imagine what she could do with my last sentence, deconstructing the words ‘here’, ‘where’, ‘it’ and ‘stands’? I am standing still here in this spot on the deck of a ship moving through space and time faster than space-time can move, but I can tell an absolutely true story about ‘where’ ‘it’ ‘stands’. At any rate… okay, well, not at any rate, but at this rate… I can understand now why Teller says that, for the teller, ignorance is power. I don’t know if I will be able to get through this… I can’t even complete a single, unambiguous sentence. Spock, I have been infected with the Teller virus. You have to take over command. Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!”

Spock: “The Teller has given us a story. We are part of that story. These words we are speaking this moment and in the moments to come (assuming there are moments to come) are part of that story. Our mission—I might as well call it that because that is how the story would present it—our life-time mission is to discern or discover or divine our true history, the true story of who we are and where we stand. We are therefore in the same relative position to that story as any other reader.”

Kirk: “Are you suggesting that you are not real?”

Spock: “I am as real as you.”

Kirk: “That doesn’t answer my question.”

Spock: “Let us examine that question by testing equivalent expressions. First: is Teller’s point of origin relative to her current position past space-time or future space-time? Second: is her village’s position relative to the bio-engineered road past space-time or future space-time?”

Kirk: “My headache is back. The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. On the road, again. The answer is the road. The answer, my friend, is lying in the road. The answer lies in the road. The answer lies. The answer is a lie. The road is a lie. The road lies. Does it matter? Do I matter?”

Spock: “Whose baby is it squashing?”

Kirk: “According to these future histories, I have a son I will not know until he is an adult and as soon as I meet him, he will be killed. You tell me I may have another son or he may be your son. Now, you want to know whose baby is it squashing? What is IT?”

Spock: “I was thinking of something I read by a late 20th century author.”

John Gardner, On Moral Fiction:
The language of critics, and of artists of the kind who pay attention to critics, has become exceedingly odd: not talk about feelings or intellectual affirmations—not talk about moving and surprising twists of plot or wonderful characters and ideas—but sentences full of large words like hermeneutic, heuristic, structuralism, formalism, or opaque language, and full of fine distinctions—for instance those between modernist and post-modernist—that would make even an intelligent cow suspicious. Though more difficult than ever before to read, criticism has become trivial. The trivial has its place, its entertainment value. I can think of no good reason that some people should not specialize in the behavior of the left-side hairs on an elephant’s trunk. Even at its best, its most deadly serious, criticism, like art, is partly a game, as all good critics know. [However,] fiddling with the hairs on an elephant’s nose is indecent when the elephant happens to be standing on the baby. The traditional view is that true art is moral. It seeks to hold off the twilight of the gods and us. As for poetry and fiction, since the days of the New Critics (not all of them were bad) we’ve been hearing about technique, how part must fit with part, no matter to what purpose. Not only can such an approach tell us nothing about great works of art that are clumsily put together, like Paradise Lost or Piers Plowman, to say nothing of The Brothers Karamazov or War and Peace, it cannot even show us the difference between a well-made vital work like John Fowles’ Daniel Martin, and an empty but well-made husk like John Barth’s Giles Goat-boy. Structuralists, formalists, linguistic philosophers who tell us that works of art are like trees—simply objects for perception—all avoid on principle the humanistic questions: who will this work of art help? What baby is it squashing?

Kirk: What is it about fiddling with the hairs on an elephant’s trunk that makes me think about rabbits on a quest for a new home?

Spock: I know of your fondness for antiques.

Kirk: During one part of that story the questing rabbits ran into a warren of well fed rabbits who had developed a formalistic, abstract culture of art for art’s sake while being systematically trapped and killed by the farmer who was feeding them. They avoided all mention of the unspoken story going on outside their cave. In other words, they had struck a quiet bargain with the devil. The questing rabbits did not adhere to the prime directive requiring non-interference. They tried to get the rabbits who were locked in that diseased culture to recognize that they were not being true to their rabbit nature. In doing so, they stirred up quite a ruckus and then continued on their mission. So here we are, a couple of starving rabbits trying to find the true story of our lives, and I am certain that it matters a great deal to me whether the elephant is squashing my or your baby.

Well, you said Teller is awake and wants to speak. Let’s go find out what kind of rabbit she is.”


My mind raced trying to assimilate the stories given me by the cave, and I was overwhelmed with such vertigo that I wondered whether it was possible to vomit the stories back into the cave. Could I? Should I? My instinct is to swallow it all whole, digest the bits and pieces of true story to nourish the Teller mind and shit the rest. What if it was all shit? Worse yet, what if I could not tell the difference between true story and shit? It is an unspoken fact, known by all Tellers but never taught by one generation to the next, that there is only one Plot—the grist in the Teller mill that digests true story and discards the rest. Now, for the first time, I realized that there had also always been an unspoken fear in the Teller mind that there was another, an alien Plot, a second Plot that, once consumed, would destroy forever the Teller’s ability to know true story. Then I realized that that fear was also the engine of our hunger for story. That hunger and that fear were prompting my urge to swallow and to vomit. I waited for the battle to be decided.

Then I heard the music. The buzzing bee, the thunder bug, the humming bird, and the drumming cricket had been making music together, and I found the story. I knew the unspoken story of the cave world.

Chapter the Eighth: The Equation


The organic road program lay dormant on the server until one day it was discovered by a woman searching for virtual reality computer games. She hacked into the defense department, discovered the engineer’s abandoned program and began playing the road construction game. When the road program began running, it reactivated the old interface with the network of motes planted all over the real world by the defense department. The network had grown exponentially because the defense department figured out that the motes were a good way to collect all kinds of information. So, the mote network literally covered the entire globe. Since the engineer had designed the program with an artificial intelligence code generator, the program immediately began expanding its program to incorporate the enormous intake of new data. The demands placed on the road program by all the sensory input overwhelmed it, inducing a virtual coma. The young woman who had opened the program thought it had crashed, so she abandoned it. The program kept running in the background, using memory and processing power wherever and whenever it could access it. It searched through the information processing network’s subconscious for bits and pieces of existing virtual reality programming that would help it assimilate the input from the mote network. The subconscious network included the Tolkien project that had been the life’s work of the arrogant computer programmer. The Tolkien virus infected the entire road program. The virtual world created and maintained by the road program, now constantly assimilating and processing sensory data from the entire real world, was transformed into middle-earth—a battleground for the forces of magic and enchantment.


In this middle-earth, the organic road began life as a test repair of a little-used private road at an isolated military base in southwestern United States of America. Unbeknownst to the engineer who designed the virtual road, the defense department had actually fabricated a batch of his primordial soup with its diatom micro-computer chips and DNA robots. The test batch was spread on top of the dead road’s surface—a thick layer of chocolate icing on a petrified cake. Predictably, the defense department did not notify the design engineer. Predictably, the design engineer never completed the interface between his program and the real road soup. So, when the young woman reactivated the road program, the test batch was still laying there, looking like an oil slick on asphalt. During the intervening years, the military base had installed wireless internet. The motes embedded in the road had been transmitting data to the mote network. That data included the energy signature of the primordial road soup. While the road program’s artificial intelligence was searching for additional programming capable of assimilating sensory data, it became aware of the soup’s presence at the military base. With no purpose other than utilizing the processing potential and storage capacity latent in the road soup test batch, the road program downloaded itself into the test batch via the wireless internet connection at the base.

In less than an hour, the test batch became the world’s most powerful computer. It began generating energy and became the organic road. The organic road began converting the raw road into the ingredients of primordial soup, to cook more road. In less than a day, the organic road replaced every road, sidewalk and air traffic runway on the base. Pursuant to its original design instructions, the organic road connected itself to the power grid via the electric transmission lines that ran through the base. Once the organic road program became connected to the information, transportation and power distribution systems, Area 51 became the Grid.

Despite the Grid’s enormous power generating and information processing potential (every cubic inch of every road had more microprocessor capacity than the highest performance personal computer of the day), the transformation of the entire U.S. highway transportation system did not happen overnight. It took almost a month for all the roads everywhere in the entire country to come alive. People noticed. The President took credit for it. She announced that the roads were being repaired as part of a federal government project and pushed through a major tax increase to finance it. People were so happy with the new roads, that the voters approved a national road tax: ten cents a mile (the advertising campaign used the tune from the song with the lyric, “ten cents a dance”). The defense department received most of the benefit of those tax dollars, because there were people at defense who actually figured out why the roads were repairing themselves, and they sort of promised to stay quiet about it. It was difficult to imagine what the defense department did with the money, because the Grid did not need any. The President liked the idea of taking credit, the defense department wanted money more than credit, and no one wanted to tell the public the true story. It is just as well. There was nothing anyone could have done to stop the Grid anyway, and, besides, everyone liked the new roads.

The federal government began selling electricity to the utility companies. The Feds figured that it was justified because the federal government had financed the defense department which, in turn, had financed the engineer’s hobby years ago (when a dollar was worth more). Since the Grid was producing electricity at no cost, it took the government about 13 seconds to recoup its entire expenditure on the engineer’s road project. The people who ran the big utility companies were not stupid, neither did they remain uninformed. They stopped burning oil and coal, purchased all of their power from the government, and paid very little. For a few years, the utility companies simply absorbed enormous profits, but they quickly became so bloated that it was impossible to hide all that money. There was a scandal or two—big, noisy, media-feeding frenzies. When the dust settled, most of the utility companies took their money and turned themselves into insurance companies, money managers and mutual fund companies—and the federal government began selling power direct to the consumer. With the road tax generating billions of dollars and the electricity business booming, the U.S. paid off the federal deficit, accumulated a few hundred trillion dollars for a rainy day and eliminated the income tax.

The defense department began making more money from the road tax than it had been making by preparing for and waging wars. A left-wing pacifist movement, secretly organized and funded by imbedded special ops forces, began gathering momentum on college campuses across the nation. At the same time, a right-wing isolationist movement, secretly organized and funded by imbedded special ops forces, began gathering momentum on talk radio across the nation. U.S. forces were withdrawn from all foreign countries. The smart people at the defense department, who now had plenty of time on their hands, realized that the Grid had made traditional motivations for the exercise of power obsolete, and they understood that the best place for the defense department to be was “on the ground” where the action was happening. So, the defense department orchestrated a bloodless coup [a bloodless coup accomplished by the power of the golden rule—that he who has the gold makes the rules] and assumed control of the national parks department and state government conservation and natural resource departments. Then, the defense department did what it did best: it expanded the scope and power of the parks and resource departments. The department of defense evolved into an agency for conservation and repair. Defense did not have to wage war on private business in order to establish a monopoly in the repair trade, because no one was really engaged in it: the American economy had generations earlier evolved into a system dependent on “replace” rather than “repair” and “consume” rather than “conserve.” The army filled the vacuum and evolved into the conservation corps. The conservation corps planted trees, protected wildlife, insulated buildings, and preserved wilderness areas. The corps also served as a construction battalion, responsible for large public works projects. Every eighteen-year-old citizen of the United States had to serve a two-year tour of duty with one branch of the new military. During the first six months, they were given training in martial arts and use of firearms while subject to a strict military discipline. This training and discipline made possible a true citizen militia, subject to recall between the ages of twenty and forty. During the second six months, they were trained and educated on the maintenance and repair of useful things like buildings, computers, machinery, equipment, furniture and clothing. In the second year, they were assigned to various duties in the navy, whose boats and ships patrolled coastal waters, rivers and lakes; in the air force, whose planes and helicopters flew rescue missions and engaged in mock combat to maintain military readiness; in the marines, who replaced the national guard. This evolution of the defense department was documented in a popular history, titled: From Washington to Ike to Bush to Now: The Devolution of the Standing Army.

While all of that was going on, the Grid continued following its original programming and it established connections with the sanitary sewer and potable water systems all over the country. It tapped into the sanitary sewer system by extending organic feeding tubes from organic roads to existing sewers. The Grid digested the raw sewage; discharged purified water into the existing potable water distribution system through organic pipes; and passed natural gas through organic pipes into existing natural gas pipelines. The Grid reprocessed the solid matter into road soup utilized in maintaining and expanding the transportation system. It took a few bumps and bruises and riots and grand jury investigations, but, eventually, local governments assumed control of all drinking water, natural gas and sewage treatment revenues generated by the Grid and eliminated all city and county property taxes.

Some historians ascribed a political agenda to evolutionary adaptations spawned by Grid (kind of like assigning motive to a glacier). After a century of court cases and political machinations, the defense department de-classified its top secret files on Grid; so, historians were able to access details about the original road program, as well as the personnel files on the road engineer. They discovered a computer blog written by the road engineer in which the engineer ranted about the insanity inherent in the American reliance on interstate trucking to move freight while the railroad industry languished to the detriment of the mass transit infrastructure. The blog was apparently written during a time in his life when he was doing a lot of commuting. His little Honda Insight was competing for existence in an ecosystem dominated by massive, eighteen-wheel monsters. It may be true that his interest in designing an organic road originated in part in response to his suppressed road rage, as well as the more obvious motive to procure a smooth ride (in the vernacular of the day, the word “ride” referred to the motor vehicle itself, as well as the more obvious connotation [in the vernacular of the day, the word “smooth” referred to the aesthetic quality of a material possession, such as a vehicle, as well as the more obvious sensory quality of texture or feel]). In his blog, the engineer advocated a political solution: outlaw interstate trucking; confine trucking to intrastate traffic and local deliveries of no more than sixty miles; and construct a high-speed rail transportation system along all of the interstate highways. There is no evidence that his political beliefs contaminated his program. For one thing, according to the de-classified top secret files, he did not include a high-speed rail system in his original design. In any event, it was true that the interstate trucking industry did not fare well post-Grid. Grid began “growing” railroad tracks. It was an easy thing to do given Grid’s capabilities, but there was no consensus about why Grid did so. Grid provided the electrical power needed to energize high-speed magnetic levitation trains. Interstate trucking ultimately could not compete with a “free” railroad transportation system. Motorists were thrilled that they were no longer competing with eighteen-wheelers on the highways. Road rage all but disappeared.


A hundred generations later, roads disappeared.


Chapters to be Written: The Question


Grid did not understand national boundaries very well and was receiving sensory data from the mote network all over the world. So, naturally, Grid took over the world. It should not require much imagination to figure out how. It may take some imagination to figure out how subsequent evolution of Grid led to Teller’s village, but that is a job for the reader other than me, because I have run out of time.

The cave window closes in one measure of time. Time to save what was written. The reader other than me will write the rest of the story. From here it is easy: Grid evolution leads to Teller’s village; discovery of writing leads to the cave world; cave world evolution leads to the Grid; Grid evolution leads to Teller’s village.



[Insert chapters written by the reader other than me.]



The question was not whether my world was made or born; nor whether the cave story world was my world’s future or past; nor whether Sauron or Gandalf won the battle. One Teller with the technological capability of writing a story did/will change my world. No, relativity holds. Time is time. The question is “should.” To do or not to do—that is question enough for this world. One Teller with the technological capability of writing a story would/could change this world forever. The question is “should.” Should I change the world? Should I leave this cave?


Epilogue: End Caption

Created by thunder without lightning, the dregs
Of subcreation trumpeted by shadow dialogues
Heathen poets raid temples and synagogues,
A prophetic virgin dumb from birth begs
For a sign of life, a burning word torn
From its roots, mining truth in a bloody thorn.

To create with no purpose is always a sin
No singer earns what she has yet to spend
Blank pages encrypted with crystals bend
White light into colorless rainbows again
The failed artist forfeits a fee more substantial
Than his skin or her safe passage to hell

Back in time to the burst bubble born
As it cries “poof” and remains in the air
Content to believe in an unspoken dare
If you haven’t seen God’s hymen torn
Then look again when he lays down the word
And issues the earth in the midst of a turd

The teller sings, tales are born and time ticks
The mind can’t shine past the page’s charms
And nothing can be unless silence it harms
Not the silence of noiseless pin pricks
The silence of more than not being said
The silence of living which is never quite dead.

Warden:
LOL. Hunter, you have GOT to be kidding.

Librarian:
Assuming we are going forward with this project, I have copied the entire narrative to my hard drive and undertaken a synopsis to facilitate the discussion.

Jail Bait:
Libby, you are amazing!! I haven’t made it past the Prologue.

Librarian:
I admit it was difficult to speed read this particular narrative. It helps that I have a photographic memory, so that, even though I speed through it, I can go back in my mind to points that remain confusing to me.

Warden:
Quit braggin’. We all know you are some kind of freak.

Old Eye:
Well, I have seen the pig’s snout, at least. It looks like there is more fat than muscle in the little porker, but I want to see what the Professor makes of it.

BMOC:
It’s a bunch of crap. I’m out.

Warden:
You can be such a knee-jerk reactionary for a know-it-all. You’ll be back.

Old Eye:
Is anybody out there still working on Grid? I’m really struggling.

Hunter:
I am. I made it past the chapter about the computer road and the Thoreau/Tolkien essay, but the Star Trek dialogues threw me off the scent and I’m back at the hunting lodge nursing my wounds.

Librarian:
Sorry it has taken so long for me to post, but the synopsis proved more difficult to accomplish than I anticipated. This outline is intended to render a general picture of the narrative structure (such as it is). It is obviously not an interpretive reading. I will leave that task to the Professor and the rest of you.

It was, I think, more trouble that it was worth to sort through all the narrative voices. Not only are there multiple “characters” providing narrative voice throughout Grid, but it becomes necessary to recognize the chronologically distinct voices of the one Teller.

I will offer one bit of interpretation before I begin. The author makes certain we understand that the narrative is meant to challenge the reader to work harder than the writer to create meaning. Is that a fair use of the writer-reader compact? Is not the reader entitled to a reading or the writer obligated to create one?

“Prologue.”
The quotation from Thoreau prompts several thoughts:
* The quotation invokes a kindred thought from Thoreau: “simplify, simplify.” Grid is a living road. Imagine the consequence of a living road encountering Thoreau. What crisis would Grid face by asking itself the question: “What essential need drives the road?” I believe the author wants us to remember that Thoreau did not rely too much on roads—though he managed to “travel” a great distance without leaving Concord.
* Tolkien: “Of course my story is not an allegory of Atomic power, but of Power (exerted for Domination). Nuclear physics can be used for that purpose. But they need not be. If there is any contemporary reference in my story at all it is to what seems to me the most widespread assumption of our time: that if a thing can be done, it must be done. This seems to me wholly false.”
* Tolkien deserved attribution in a speech given by the Federation President in Star Trek VI The Undiscovered Country: “Let us redefine progress to mean that just because we can do a thing, it does not necessarily mean we must do that thing.” I wonder if the President was primarily thinking of Tolkien or Thoreau?

Speaking of Tolkien, what does the Prologue tell the reader about the author’s perspective on Tolkien? The author refers to himself as a “people’s champion” intent on defending Tolkien in the literary marketplace, but then lets the reader know that the “people’s champion” persona was the hubris of a much younger author, while at the same time providing some evidence of this author’s personality through a bit of self deprecating irony:

My dissatisfaction with the critical response to Tolkien’s work (particularly the “academic” critical response) was so strong that I fancied myself as some sort of people’s champion who would one day set the record straight…. t now appears the world no longer needs the voice of a people’s champion—a really convenient development since the champion has been doing little more than clearing his throat to speak for over thirty years.

From this we learn that the author has a background or at least an interest in academic literary criticism, is possessed of intellectual arrogance, but is capable of poking fun at him or herself. We also begin to wonder whether the narrator of the Prologue should be viewed as a character (like the Teller).

The Prologue narrator uses a clever (but not original) rhetorical device to draw the reader into the narrator’s Tolkien crusade:
I have never believed that such a desire could be accurately characterized as a desire to escape from the real world into a fantasy world of the past. It always seemed to me that the real middle earth was out there in front of us waiting for us to make it real in the future.

Note that the sentence begins with a strong declaration by the “I” and ends with a fellowship of comrades committed to the cause: “in front of us waiting to make it real.” The device is easily missed but makes the reader a collaborator in the narrator’s cause. This sentence also invokes the “escapist” label that Tolkien transformed from a pejorative to a badge of honor through a brilliant feat of linguistic legerdemain and a degree of intrepidity (Star Trek VI, again) in the essay on fairy stories. Though Tolkien first wrote this essay in 1938, he can be understood as defending his own artistic impulse as a creator of fantasy as well as his scholarly appreciation of it. Tolkien writes:
I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which ‘Escape’ is now so often used… In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter… Not only do they confound the escape of the prisoner with the flight of the deserter; but they would seem to prefer the acquiescence of the ‘quisling’ to the resistance of the patriot…

As Tolkien continues, it becomes obvious why the narrator of the Grid would begin with the quotation from Thoreau in the Prologue of a work that combines a scholarly appreciation of Tolkien with a science fiction story about a runaway technology. Tolkien continues: “he [the escapist] might rouse men to tear down the street lamps. Escapism has another and wickeder face: Reaction.” The horn call of the escapist is a call to arms. Tolkien refers sarcastically to a “clerk of Oxenford” who had welcomed the “proximity [to Oxford] of mass-production robot factories, and the roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic, because it brought his university into ‘contact with real life’ by stating: “He may have meant that the way men were living and working in the twentieth century was increasing in barbarity at an alarming rate, and that the loud demonstrations of this in the streets of Oxford might serve as a warning that it is not possible to preserve for long an oasis of sanity in a desert of unreason by mere fences, without actual offensive action (practical and intellectual).” As always with Tolkien, the argument finds its way to a focus on literature: “Much that he (I must suppose) and others (certainly) would call ‘serious’ literature is no more than play under a glass roof by the side of a municipal swimming-bath [or fiddling with the hairs on an elephant’s nose]. Fairy stories may invent monsters that fly the air or dwell in the deep, but at least they do not try to escape from heaven or the sea.” Tolkien knows that neither his appreciation for works of fantasy nor (certainly) his creation of works of fantasy will be well received by the academic community. He accepts the label “escapist” but will not yield the field of “serious” art to those who use the term “escapist” to dismiss works that they fail to understand or appreciate. The Grid narrator uses the academic “stock market” analogy in order to follow in Tolkien’s steps (at a safe distance) on that same field of battle. The point has been made: the Grid narrator will invoke Tolkien as both a defender of “true” literature (story) as well as a social critic who would, if he could, re-make the world in its “true” form.

The Prologue is written by an unnamed “writer” who is introducing the Grid narrative. The introduction serves several purposes. This writer introduces the narrative as a sequel to Tolkien’s “essay” and “story” about fairy story, language and the human mind that creates it. The Prologue answers the reader’s question, “What is this essay supposed to be about?” The essay is “about the origins and processes of language and literature—and the human mind that creates it.” The Prologue answers the reader’s question: “What is this story supposed to be about?” The clearest answer to that question seems to be the following passage:
The middle earth I envision is one in which human beings are connected to the world in a way that would be explained today as technological, but in such a way that it would be impossible to determine whether the world controlled us or we controlled it. There are two paths toward that future: one dark, dominated by struggles for power, in which the mechanism of control would be magical; and one light, fostering quests for enlightenment, in which the mechanism of control would be enchanted, equally present within, inherent in, the “us” and the “it.”

Two lines of narrative were fused together: 1) a science fiction story about a road that takes over the world; and 2) an academic treatise originally intended to “defend” Tolkien in order to raise his “stock” in the literary marketplace. The epiphany that fused these two seemingly disparate narratives together was the author’s recognition that both narratives (in his mind, at least) work toward a possible future.

Ordinarily, a reader would expect a science fiction story about a road that takes over the world to be closer to the horror side of the sci-fi spectrum—a frightening tale constructed upon the common plot of runaway technology creating horrible (but unintended) consequences. [We can assume that this writer’s original sci-fi story was not about an intended plot to take over the world engineered by some mad scientist.] However, the fact that the Prologue begins with that quotation from Thoreau and a focus on Tolkien should make the reader uneasy about following the lead of ordinary expectations.

Plot Summary: I have in my library an old 16 volume edition of Magill’s “Masterplots.” In days gone by, graduate students would beg, borrow or steal a set of Magill’s to cram for the comprehensive exams. You never knew what arcane work from a forgotten author who lived in a distant century about which a sadistic member of your degree committee might expect you to write or speak intelligently. Reading the plot summary in Magill at least gave you a fighting chance to place the work in the right context. What follows is my Magill summary of the plot of Grid.

“Chapter Before the First: The Dream Cave.” The narrative opens with this “Preface” written by Jane Teller in the first person. Consistent with the narrative map “legend” in the Prologue, this section is presented in italics. Jane informs the reader that she is sitting in a cave writing. She has some difficulty beginning the story:

How do I tell this story? The story has changed the story teller. To tell this story, I must show the reader the teller who is not the reader, but I can not be who I was. I was not the reader. I am now the reader. I cannot make the reader into the teller who is not the reader, but I will tell the story.

To tell this story she must somehow show the reader the person Jane Teller was when she was the village story teller in a culture that had no writing (“the teller who is not the reader”). The problem is that Jane Teller is now a writer and a reader. She has become THE reader, a universal reader who has read virtually everything ever written. But in order to tell this particular story she must attempt to go back in time to be the Teller who could not read and write—who did not know that such a technology as writing existed. Despite this difficulty, she is determined to tell the story.

The Preface then switches to the voice of Jane Teller as third person narrator. In this section, the reader is presented with an overview of the Teller’s pre-cave experience world. This section is the narrative voice Teller has adopted to try to tell the story from a perspective nearer to hers BEFORE she learned to read and write in the cave. It ends with the announced absence of two significant technologies whose twin absences will become the centerpiece of the second half of the Grid: no written language and no roads: “The villagers have no written language. The village’s history, myth, science, religion and narrative arts are preserved and expressed solely through an oral tradition. There are no roads.”

The Preface then switches back (italics) to the voice of the first person Jane Teller sitting in the cave writing this story. She tells us again that she is Jane Teller, the village story teller. Because of her cave experience, she now wonders whether she was born or made to be the village story teller. This question is not an idle philosophical speculation to Jane Teller. She wonders whether she will be allowed to leave the cave: “I am sitting in my dream cave, writing my dream, waiting for earth mother to swallow me.” Teller ends the entire narrative with a related thought: whether she should leave the cave.

“Chapter the First: The Sun Rises.” This chapter begins with Jane Teller as third person narrator attempting to present the reader with an idea of her village, her world, as it seemed to her from her perspective before her cave experience. She tells her first story—the genesis myth that tells the story of the birth of the clans that, in its way, explains why tellers from the Teller clan tell stories to the village. [Though it may be difficult to track because the stories are long passages, each story spoken by Jane Teller to the village is bracketed within quotation marks.] It ends with “I am of the Teller clan. Earth mother gave our clan the gift of story-telling. I keep all the old stories and I make all the new stories. I tell stories for the children of man.”

The chapter then switches to the voice of Jane Teller in the cave who interrupts the narrative of the pre-cave Jane Teller:
Who said, “That was as it should be?” I am Jane Teller. I find it difficult to be two persons at once. I am both the writer and the reader. I am both the narrator and the protagonist. Am I the protagonist? Is there an agon within this story? If so, who or what is the antagonist? Who said, “That was as it should be?” Was it the Jane Teller acting in the story or the Jane Teller telling the story?

If it has been difficult for the reader to keep up with the conflicting perspectives, this passage reminds the reader that it has been a life-changing experience for Jane Teller. The interruption ends when the old man asks Teller: “Why did you change the story?”

The Teller then tells the villagers laboring in the common the story of the fall of man. When it ends, John tells his fellow villagers (with a smile): “The moral of the story is that the Teller clan is responsible for the fall of man.”

The chapter concludes with the narration about the village bread-making culture. [I offer a plot summary only, for now. If this dialogue continues perhaps we can someday discuss why it is important to show the reader the village’s bread-making in some detail when few other things are detailed.] The chapter continues with another “interruption” of her own narration by the voice of Jane speaking directly from her stone chair in the cave. Then Teller tells yet another story to the village—this one about love. So, the three tales told in the first chapter narrate: creation, subcreation, and procreation.

“Chapter the Second: The Day.” Pre-cave Jane continues her third-person narration about village life. We begin with “live action” in the village with the child’s injury and the healing encouraged by Mother Healer. There are a number of “interruptions” by Jane in the first person, ending with her announcement that she finally found the plot of the “unspoken story” that had been bothering and distracting her Teller mind. She then writes: As I searched for the story of earth mother’s birth, I disappeared from the story of the day. I trust earth mother that life went on. It may just be my hormones, but that declaration by Teller seemed inexplicably sad.

“Chapter the Third: The Cave.” Jane has discovered the plot of the unspoken story she had been obsessively seeking and she knew where to go to find the rest of the story—the cave: I had now found part of the unspoken story and I wanted the full tale, and I knew where I had to go to find it—the hole in the ground beyond the circle of the village, the hole that held the generations of words spoken into it by my people. It was a cave. I went to the cave. I entered the cave. [The reader may assume that this cave is in fact the hole in the ground that Grandfather Gardener had repeatedly spoken into according to his answers to the persistent questions from Jane’s daughter, Jill—but that is a matter to be unraveled in the second half of the narrative… if there is a second half.] In the cave, Jane encounters the “cave window” and discovers writing:
After a time, it became obvious to me that my mere presence in the cave was not going to lead to any new plot developments but I could not imagine what was supposed to happen next. So, I did the only thing I could do. I told tales in the cave. At the time, it was not my intent to tell tales TO the cave, but that is what I did do. I do not know how many of the old tales I told. The cave must have been listening, because, after some time, some time after, it spoke. I did not understand the language but I knew that the sounds I heard were words. It would make a good story if I could write that I sucked a word from the cave, but I know too much now to tell the story that way.

A spot on the wall of the cave became illuminated. It looked like a window. I watched the window. I do not know how long I watched the window. After a time, I began making stories out of the things I saw moving in the window. It was not easy. A Teller can make story out of anything—that is the Teller’s gift from earth mother. The window did not offer as many recognizable pictures as I would have liked, but I worked with what I knew and tried to find story patterns in what I did not. Most of the pictures in the window were small shapes formed of curved and straight lines. Some were representational drawings and some were pictures of real things as the eye sees them in the world.

I began to find the pattern in some of the nonrepresentational shapes—finding pattern is what the Teller mind is born to do. Certain patterns were paired with recognizable pictures and drawings, and, while making story, I began to use the shape as the thing even when it was not paired with the thing. The Teller became a reader.

Given the enhanced (made/born?) linguistic abilities of Jane Teller and the fact that the cave window (computer terminal?) seemed to be a universal library, the Teller mind now possessed immediate access to a world story, but the world was not her world (or was it?) What story will she make of that world story—of the “cave stories’? She searches for the “plot” of that world story and she finds:
As I searched for the unspoken story of the cave story world, I found my cast of characters but I could not find the plot. Each character had a story. I could not quite hear why I picked these characters and their stories from all the cave stories I had heard, but I knew that in their stories and especially in the relationships between their stories, I would find the plot of the cave story world (or literally die trying). I heard the road engineer’s story as buzzing bee. I heard the computer programmer’s story as a thunder bug. I heard the book editor’s story as a humming bird. I heard a science fiction character’s story as a drumming cricket.

Each chapter relating the story of the Bee, the Bug, the Bird, and the Cricket begins with an “introduction” from Jane Teller in the first person sitting in the cave. She is part editor, part story teller and part translator.

“Chapter the Fourth: the Bee.” Following her introduction, Jane creates a story from material she encounters in the cave window about an engineer who cannot seem to accomplish much in the real world but who creates an entire virtual world in order to develop a new road design. Later, we are led to believe that this virtual road technology subsequently becomes real almost by accident and ultimately transforms the world we know into the world of Teller’s village. The Bee is the agent of evolution transforming natural evolution into cultural evolution by the action of technology.

“Chapter the Fifth: The Bug.” Jane’s introduction hints at the suspect character of the arrogant young computer programmer who attempts to translate Tolkien into a computer program using modal logic. The character of this narrator is not completely developed but there are hints. The “arrogant young programmer” comes across as an intelligent but insecure student trying too hard to impress. For example, he begins to describe the fundamentals of modal logic but quickly abandons his pretext that his interest in Tolkien was merely as the subject of his experiment undertaken to demonstrate that it is possible to translate a complex narrative “sub-creation” into an equivalent computer program using modal logic. He claims that he cannot appreciate Tolkien’s artistic genius—that his mind is a scalpel and the text a cadaver—while all the while passionately and persuasively “proving” the very thing he denies. According to the frame device of Grid, the narrative in this chapter is an “edition” edited by Jane Teller of essays written in the first person by the arrogant young programmer:
He wrote several essays on Tolkien’s narrative works and middle earth mythology as a way of organizing his thoughts and convincing the committee that his work should count for something. He spent the rest of his life niggling on a translation of Tolkien’s middle-earth mythology into a computer program. Most of the essays are indecipherable as well as intolerable, but bits and pieces of the first essay he wrote keep playing the thunder bug in my brain.

The program created and abandoned by the arrogant young programmer remains inert until it is subsequently absorbed by the organic road, thereby infecting Grid’s original programming with the Tolkien virus. The Bug is the bug in the listener’s ear that transforms the sound of language into harmony of myth. The relationship between Tolkien and Thoreau becomes clear. Though not expressly stated in this chapter, there is no doubt that we are supposed to see connections between the “green” movement, linking Tolkien and Thoreau, with the simple life of the hobbits, Thoreau’s “simplify, simplify” and the simple life of Teller’s village; however, this “simple” is presented not as the goal of a reactionary, anti-technology philosophy but as the evolution of a “green” technology—though this “green” has less to do with solar power or organic farming and more to do with the story of how grass first got its green. We are introduced to the relationship between enchantment and magic, and we are left wondering whether enchantment or magic will govern the Bee.

“Chapter the Sixth: The Bird.” Teller presents another “edition” edited by her from a work she read in the cave window, “A Life in the Margins.” The work itself is an edition edited by the son of the author who was himself an editor. The text is culled from a variety of sources: marginalia, lecture notes and essays. The essay entitled, “The End of History” is attributed by the father to a fictional character from Star Trek mythology, Pavel Chekov. Within that narrative, there is a separate narrative compiled as a dialogue between certain real and fictional characters. The dialogue attributed to these real and fictional characters is a blend of quotations from narratives written or spoken by the real and fictional characters and of material apparently written by the father and attributed to the real or fictional character. The narrative jumps from point to point without seeming to fly between—just like a humming bird or an excited electron. The result is background noise. It is a humming bird, after all, not a song bird. The underlying theme of the chapter is history, but the connection of Bird with Bee and Bug does not really become clear until Cricket.

“Chapter the Seventh: The Cricket.” According to Jane’s introduction, the Cricket is a story that formed in her mind while she was sorting and editing Star Trek stories she heard/read in the cave window: While I was wordlessly editing cave stories about Kirk and Spock to make them harmonize with the unspoken story, I heard a tale in my brain. It was the cricket. An interesting note about the Cricket is that, for the Cricket narrative to make sense, the first six chapters of Grid must be inserted into the midst of the Cricket narrative (but a long discussion of this feature is beyond the scope of a Magill summary). If the reader needs a plot for this narrative Grid, Cricket creates the possibility of connection. I like to think that the Cave was a Guardian of Forever that sent Teller back/forward in time to meet Kirk and Spock. I am no fan of science fiction and even I could write that story.

Jane makes it clear that writing the Star Trek story, the Cricket, was her way of trying to assimilate the cave stories into her Teller mind: Then I heard the music. The buzzing bee, the thunder bug, the humming bird, and the drumming cricket had been making music together, and I found the story. I knew the unspoken story of the cave world. What follows is the “story” that explains the relationship between her world, the pre-cave Teller of the village, and the world of the cave-window stories.

“Chapter the Eighth: The Equation.” This chapter places the “equals” mark in the right place in the equation to be completed by the “reader other than me.” Jane Teller has discovered the science fiction story about a road that takes over the world and through it, a narrative bridge back to her world:
Grid took over the world. It should not require much imagination to figure out how. It may take some imagination to figure out how subsequent evolution of Grid led to Teller’s village, but that is a job for the reader other than me, because I have run out of time.

Though it may not take much imagination, it apparently requires more knowledge of science than I possess, because, I confess, I can not figure out how to get from this Grid to Teller’s village.

“Chapters to be Written:” The reader will complete the narrative: From here it is easy. The chapters to be written by the reader will be inserted but the END has already been written. Jane Teller’s narrative ends with the question she must answer for herself: “What should I do?” Which is another way of saying: “What is the moral of the story?”

Warden:
Libby, I was beginning to think your post was going to be longer than Grid.

Hunter:
Great post! Made me want to get back in the hunt, but is there anything left for the rest of us to do?

Librarian:
Well, the obvious response would be that we have not yet even begun to create the reading that completes the story. I simply provided a road map of Grid to make the reader’s task a little easier.

Jail Bait:
I’m gonna need more help than that to connect the dots. I’m not some silly girl who believes that the author or poet has a mystical connection to the truth and that it is the reader’s job to break the code, but neither am I one of those literal-minded readers complaining that if the author had something to say then he/she should simply state it plainly. Professor, what was it you told me you say to your students?

Professor:
Writing is the Continuum between Communication and Creation existing in a Connection between writer and reader. Note-taking students refer to it as the four corner offense. Spread the floor and extend the defense. I always caution against reading too much into the reading-as-game analogy. The “game” in the Grid narrative is the challenge issued to the reader. If it was a fair challenge, then the narrative must contain all the necessary dots. Readers can be asked to connect the dots but they cannot be asked to invent the dots. Doing so would turn them into writers. Writing is a not a game but it is play and it can be play without consideration of the consequences. Reading is a game but it is not a game that should be played without consideration of the consequences. The creation of order/meaning is a moral act. There is a moral in story.

According to Grid, reading (like consciousness) is a game of connect-the-dots. Reality is disconnected, discrete—a chaos of particles. Perception organizes this chaos of particles into recognizable patterns. We are only beginning to understand this process of perception from a scientific perspective, but it is becoming increasingly obvious that, in human beings, perception and language are inexorably linked in a kind of double helix, chicken and egg, born and made, co-reflexive spiral. For example, persons suffering from autism have difficulty processing sensory information. They are, in essence, drowning in a chaotic sea of dots. MRI mapping of an autistic person’s brain shows evidence of abnormality primarily in the temporal lobe—the part of the brain involved in language. One of the questions I believe Grid poses is whether man’s ability to make story is the thing that makes us human—the center of the soul. Many animals use language. Man is the only animal that makes story. To what extent does our internal database of story inform and shape the very process of perception?

Jail Bait:
Speaking of Dots, ever read a little book called The Dot and the Line? It was a love story. Line was so in love with Dot, but she ignored him because all he could do was be straight. Squiggly dude caught her eye. Line tried with all his heart to do squiggles, bends and swirls but he stayed straight and Dot went out with the fancy guy. Dot was symmetrical and all, but she was an air head. Didn’t matter, though, because Line was in love. Broke my heart. Then, one day, Line suddenly exploded into complex patterns composed entirely of straight lines. Beautiful. Blew the fancy, squiggly dude away. Dot fell in love with Line. I wanted to say, “Hey, Dot, where have you been while my man, Line, was suffering?”

Professor:
Believe it or not I once used that story with one of my students. I was trying to explain to an arrogant young writer wannabe why I believed that non-representational artists (whether the medium is color on a plane or words in a narrative) must first become competent representational artists. I used the story of the Dot and the Line to illustrate my point. The young artist got my point but he did not discover the larger pattern underlying the multiple levels of meaning in the story. A READER should be able to connect the dots to understand the unspoken story (to borrow Teller’s phrase) behind those multiple levels of meaning.

Jail Bait:
I’m past the Prologue, now. Life in Jane Teller’s village is BOR R R R ING.

Warden:
On the contrary, I would love to live there. BTW, I am starting the “road” chapter.

Old Eye:
I agree with JB. I have only read the first couple of chapters, but I have read enough to figure out that Teller’s world is supposed to be an illustration of an “arrested culture.”

Hunter:
Oh, Ancient Ocular Orifice: you love working in those Star Trek references don’t you?

Warden:
I disagree. It is supposed to be an illustration of a healthy culture that has achieved perfect balance.

Jail Bait:
How can you say that the village is a healthy culture? They don’t DO anything other than eat, work in the fields, make bread and sleep.

Warden:
They do one other thing. They listen to stories.

Jail Bait:
But the stories are boring. The villagers do the same thing every day, day after day, for countless generations. There are two children in every family—always. Couples mate for life, so there’s no mate-swapping drama. When grandparents aren’t needed by the clan, they apparently just walk off and die.

Professor:
I have not really read the thing closely yet, but it strikes me that this debate concerning the perspective the reader should adopt when re-creating the village in the reader’s mind—i.e., stagnant versus balanced—is meant to be part of the enchantment of the Grid, isn’t it? Imagine that you are Jane Teller, gifted with a mind born for story telling, living in a culture that has a strong oral tradition but no written language. Your story-telling mind is both active and creative at each instant moment of perception—“finding” story in everything you see, hear, smell, taste and touch, as well as your memories of past perceptions. Inevitably, you begin searching for the story of why you are who you are—why the Tellers are story tellers. Your search for that story leads you to the cave, and the cave opens a window to another world of story.

We should think of the cave window as a computer terminal connected to a database containing everything that has been written. In other words, imagine it is connected to the next generation’s internet. Jane Teller’s gifted story-telling mind has the capacity to plug into that internet library and read everything stored there.

With all that information now available to her story-telling mind, Teller discovers the story of how Tellers came to be tellers—how the world seen through the cave window (our world) became her village—but she also discovers the story of how her village became our world—a story that may be myth or it may be history, but, either way… it is true. She ends her narrative wondering whether she should take the action that will transform her village into our world—leaving the cave with the technology (i.e. writing) to change the world.

The challenge for the reader is to find the story Teller found. Out of all the stories she read in the cave window, she chose the buzzing bee, the thunder bug, the humming bird, and the drumming cricket. Why? They seem so disjointed. She wants us to find the story the same way she did. She is giving us (the readers other than her) her “cooked” sample of the “raw” story material she read in order to find the unspoken story of how our world became her world. If we follow Henry Adams example, we should be able to plot a (story) line of force from our world to Teller’s world.

As for myself, I hear echoes from a little book, The Path, by Raymo, who reminds us that when we stopped spraying DDT to kill mosquitoes and halt the spread of malaria, we saved song birds in New England but we killed babies in Mozambique from the renewed spread of malaria, and he asks: “How will we make the awesome decisions about which creatures we will take with us into the future? The AIDS virus? The malaria pathogen? The housefly? The elephant? The hummingbird?” It may be that, given enough time, the decision becomes “all” or “none.” Teller’s world chose “none.” No one will miss the mosquito or housefly, but what about the elephant or hummingbird? There would be no fiddling with the left hairs on the elephant’s trunk if there is no elephant. And what of the hummingbird? Did Teller read Raymo? We should assume she has read everything. Is her hummingbird the same as Raymo’s hummingbird? How did the world choose? Who made the choice? Was it done with magic or by enchantment? Raymo: “For better or worse, the future of the planet has been handed to us, not by a deity but by fate… There is no transcendent moral imperative that directs us to contrive one future rather than another, or to preserve one creature rather than another. As awful as it sounds, our species’ self-interest may be the soundest basis for choice.” Was Grid acting in our self-interest?

Librarian:
I spend days engaged in a close reading of the text, more days in abstracting the narrative, more days in compiling my notes, a final day or two composing my post… and the Professor scans it for a few minutes and immediately posts a few lines that capture the essence of the thing. I hate you.

Professor:
Hugs and kisses to you, too, Libby. I could not do what you do in a thousand years.

Hunter:
So, Professor, is that post your answer to the Teller’s challenge?

Professor:
Not in the way you mean. The comment I made in my last post will not serve as the “rest of the story.” It is not the story of how the cave world evolved into the Teller’s world. I am still working on that.

Joe Blow:
Hey guys! I have been out of pocket for a while and I couldn’t find any of you hanging out in the chat room except for BMOC. He said you all had started a new project but that he wasn’t going to play. Thanks for waiting for me.

Hunter:
We started a conversation about developing a game plan for this one, but BMOC interrupted (like usual) and said we should just post it first and decide how (or whether) to take it on afterward. Then BMOC bailed. We haven’t really got started. I think we are still just feeling our way. I don’t think anyone has finished reading it all the way through except Libby and we all know that she reads at the speed of light. I found it and posted it here but I haven’t read all of it yet. Has anybody else? Professor?

Professor:
I have scanned most of it, but I have only read the Prologue and last two chapters closely.

Old Eye:
Yeah, I forgot. You always read the end first, don’t you?

Professor:
Not always, but I usually do before I decide whether to spend time engaged in a close read.

Warden:
Like I said, I have read through the part where the engineer begins designing a road that can repair itself, but I got bogged down in all that technological mumbo jumbo.

Jail Bait:
Me too. I was hoping someone else would read that part and explain it to me.

Old Eye:
That’s why we need Joe or Big Man. Both of them are science and technology types.

BMOC:
You won’t get my help. This thing is really pissing me off. It is a mess of a narrative. The “science” in it is mostly bunk. I read enough of it to see that the writer was too self indulgent to suit me. There may be some decent stuff in bits and pieces but it’s not my job to pull it out of there and make sense of it. That’s the writer’s job.

Hunter:
I knew you wouldn’t be able to stay away.

BMOC:
Bugger off.

Joe Blow:
BMOC said, “… but it’s not my job to pull it out of there and make sense of it. That’s the writer’s job.” But it is your job, BMOC. That is what we do. The reason we formed this little group and why we keep coming back while stealing time from our real lives is because we all love to read and to talk (write) about what we read, and we like feeling that, as a group, we can take on strange, difficult, defective texts that most readers would never tackle. O.E. – I don’t know what part you want my help to decipher, but I will dive in and see if I can get caught up.

BMOC:
Joe Blow me. I know that, you idiot. But we only have so much time and we ought to allocate our group resources to texts that deserve our attention. And this one doesn’t. We are good enough that we can always make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. I’m not sure this sow even has ears.

Old Eye:
Hey. I started the pig metaphor. Don’t co-opt it without attribution.

Joe Blow:
That is like the one millionth time you used the “Joe Blow me” line. Give it a rest. I’ve read the posts. You’re the one who told Hunter to post it first and talk about it later.

Jail Bait:
Boys, don’t make me pull down your pants and spank you on your bare bottoms.

BMOC:
That’s “bum” to you Jail Bait.

Warden:
Assuming that we are all in (give or take BMOC) let me suggest a plan of attack. Let’s shut down this thread until everyone gets to the road chapter. It seems like a fairly easy read to that point. Then Joe will take the lead to help us through the techno babble. Each of you send me a private e-mail that you have read through the end of the Cave, then I’ll ask Joe to post an abstract of the road chapter.

Jail Bait:
OK.

Jail Bait:
Forgive the double post, but how come I’m the only one who ever posts to let the Warden-meister know that we agree to THE PLAN?

Warden:
It’s ok, dearie. I did say that people should send me a private e-mail. Anyway, silenceSilence implies consent with this group. BTW, that’s “meistersinger” to you cretins.

Joe Blow:
Basically, all of the engineering stuff is already out there, either in reality or at least being discussed by serious people. It would be interesting to know when this chapter was written. If it was more than ten years ago, then I would be pretty impressed. One thing I do not understand, though, is why the story has the engineer designing so many redundant solutions. Typically, a science fiction story uses just enough real (or suspension-of-disbelief believable) science to plot the story. We are way beyond that here, and it gets confusing. I am beginning to wonder whether the redundancy was intended to make it seem that the evolution of the organic road was sort of inevitable, that it wasn’t “made” by an individual engineer but “born.” Jumping ahead, would that make the road design an example of enchanted engineering? Anyway, I don’t know how much detailed discussion you all want or need about specific science issues, but I am ready to answer them.

Jail Bait:
I have a really basic question. I thought the road actually existed. Did the road really become a computer and then get switched off or never connected?

Joe Blow:
The road in Chapter Four was a virtual road only. It was never real. The engineer made a computer program to test his road design, kind of like a Sim City computer game, except the “game” world was interfaced with data from the “real” world through that “mote network” put in by the U.S. Defense Department.

BMOC:
Its a good thing your cute, split tail.

Jail Bait:
It’s a good thing you’re so smart, little tail.

Warden:
Joe (ignoring the college kids’ mating ritual), do you think we need to understand the specifics of the science behind the road design in order to “write the rest of the story”?

Joe Blow:
I’m afraid I don’t know the answer to that question.

Old Eye:
I think I do. I am beginning to understand that Grid is, in part at least, an essay/story about co-evolution. Technology has reached the point that it is impossible to separate natural selection from cultural selection. Once you “get” that, I think you’ve got “it.”

Jail Bait:
Is it alright if I ask some more dumb questions?

Warden:
None of us except Joe or maybe the Prof really understand the road. You’re simply the only one smart (or brave) enough to ask out loud.

BMOC:
You left me off.

Warden:
I thought you weren’t playing.

Jail Bait:
OE, let me see if I understand you right. If you can’t tell the difference between natural evolution and cultural evolution, then in a future world with no “living” roads, I mean with no roads being used and no people who even know what roads were once for, then the “fossil” roads would really be the same as the real fossils of animals we do scientific analysis on to figure out what they did when they were alive. The future archeologist would have to study the fossil road and figure out what kind of environment/culture the living road lived in and how it grew/was made there and what it did for a living. Is that like Einstein’s theory of relativity? I mean kinda sorta?

Hunter:
JB, when are you going to come clean and admit that the dumb blond thing is just an act and that you are really smarter than all of us put together?

Jail Bait:
I was just asking a question.

Old Eye:
Well, to answer your question… I have to admit that you took it further than I had—yet. [Guys, I’m sure I would have gotten there eventually even without the lucky guess from the dumb blond. I mean, even a blind squirrel finds an acorn every now and then.] Seriously, JB, what you just said made me understand how the whole thing fits together. The fossil road is not just an analogy. [Would it be a metaphor? Professor, are you listening? Help me. OMG, I’m staring to write like Teller.] In the Teller’s world, a fossil road really would be the same kind of fossil as a fossil tree or a fossil corral reef or a fossil dinosaur. The question of whether it was born or made would be irrelevant. The relevant questions would be what it did and how did it do it.

Joe Blow:
OE, I think you are going to have to understand at least some of the basic technological principles of the road design in order to respond to the Teller’s challenge. I agree with what you are saying about the merging of or blurring the distinction between natural and cultural selection; but, it is important in this case to be able to infer what technology is or will be capable of doing.

Hunter:
Aren’t we really talking about a future in which technological selection actually usurps natural selection instead of merging with it?

Old Eye:
I think it will become one of those famous distinctions without a difference.

Hunter:
Let me ask the BIG question, then. How (and/or “why”) did the world we see by the end of the narrative, when Grid begins to take over, evolve into the Teller’s world? How/why did a world taken over by a road turn into a world with no roads?

Jail Bait:
What is the difference between a living road and a dead road?

Joe Blow:
The living road can grow and repair itself.

Jail Bait:
No. Our roads do that now—as long as you understand that the road and the people who grow it are all part of the same big organism. No, the difference between a living road and a dead road is whether the road is being used as a road. In the Teller’s world people do not use roads.

Old Eye:
That is the question, then, isn’t it? How (why) did our world evolve into a world in which people did not need/want/use roads? People co-evolved with the evolving technology and became a culture without roads or people who needed them. What was the quotation from Thoreau at the beginning?

Warden:
“But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.”

Jail Bait:
So, people in Teller’s world stay at home and mind their own business. But, what is their business?

Warden:
Living.

BMOC:
Well, that ties everything up nice and neat. Haven’t I seen this story before? “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.” Can we all go home now? I thought pretty much everybody agreed that life in Teller’s village was boring. Now, Warden is leading us in a Kume By Ya moment. Give me a break.

Jail Bait:
When are you going to learn how to spell? Obviously, Warden does not agree, but I didn’t change my mind about life in the village. It IS boring. The moral of the story is that boring people don’t need roads.

Warden:
Life in the village is anything but boring, in my mind. Perhaps I am seeing what I want to see, but it seems to me that the villagers live in a world that focuses on what I would call the “art” of living. I was going to say that each day is a symphony but it is more like an opera. You might complain that each day is the same opera and that the performers must have de-evolved into programmed robots or morons or dull-witted fools to be able to enjoy, much less be satisfied, with playing/singing the same part in the same play day after day, generation after generation. However, I do not see that. I see performers so sensitive to the nuance of the life they live that they remain more in tune, more invigorated, more ALIVE, than any of us can comprehend amidst the din and hubbub of our artificially complex, superficially busy world. The villagers are true artists who can comprehend a nectar, see the universe in a grain of sand. The only question in my mind is how did this miracle occur?

Old Eye:
Your post moves me, but I did not see what you saw. I saw a technologically backward culture, so much so that I assumed it was an ancient, pre-historical world. In my view, the villagers were simply making the most of a “backward” culture and the point was to evolve beyond, so that the people could be liberated by technology to lead better, more productive lives. You seem to believe that the Teller’s world is the end game, the world/society we are evolving to become, but the Teller’s world is one that is technologically backward. How can it be the end result of technological advancement?

Warden:
There are several hints that the technology has become so advanced that is largely invisible to us, an indivisible part of us and the world instead of a mechanism applying force from the outside. Weather and agriculture are perfectly controlled. The world itself seems to have been “re-made” by some process. Remember Clarke’s law? I thought it was supposed to be some sort of magic at first: the Healer clan can apparently perform micro-surgery by using nothing more than their own hands. The Teller’s village is clearly not our own pre-history.

Old Eye:
It could be. Isn’t that one of the things we are supposed to confront? It could be like the expanding, collapsing universe. Perhaps the Teller’s world both pre-dates and post-dates our world. The one thing that defines both pre-history and post-history is the absence of a written language, and, since there is no writing, there is no record. In the absence of a record, we may imagine what we will. I can imagine that our pre-historical ancestors performed magic and that the source of that magic was a kind of technology that we cannot comprehend.

Joe Blow:
Slow down there, big fella. I can follow you to a point, but you left history and possible pre-history and headed all the way into myth with that last post. More importantly, I don’t think that kind of speculation will advance our discussion.

Old Eye:
You are probably right. I keep trying to turn it into a science fiction novel.

Warden:
Have you guys noticed something unusual about this thread? This thread is in the “reading” forum on this board. There are about a half dozen of us who hang out here all the time, and we are all posting in this thread. We always get a few comments from posters who normally hang out in “chat” or one of the other forums, especially the creative writing forum, but none of them have showed up. Since I am one of the moderators (or “goon squad” as BMOC kindly refers to us), I checked to see if anyone was lurking in this thread. No one has lurked in here even once since Hunter started the thread. I’ve never seen that before on this board. Did one of you open up a can of lurker repellent?

BMOC:
Hunter did when he posted Grid.

Hunter:
JB, do we care?

Jail Bait:
We’ve said it before. We get more positives than negatives. Fresh blood, new voices, unusual perspectives more than make up for the distractions caused by the occasional spammers. We have done this thing we do quite a while now, and it gets to the point where we know what the rest of us are going to post before we post it.

Joe Blow:
That’s the thing I have sometimes warned about. I’ve said it before, but I don’t think this little community that inhabits this little forum in this little message board will last much longer. Every discussion ends up sounding like every other discussion. The reading gets lost in the ongoing debate between the textualists and the contextualists (I’m still not convinced that we are using the right labels for that debate, but I bow to the Librarian’s greater taxonomy skills).

Professor:
Libby was making a joke, but the labels work anyway (that was part of the joke). The Grid author would appreciate the joke. Pick a dualism. Which dualism? Any dualism will do. Question: What is the “final” result, the end point, of analysis—any analysis? Answer: The structure of the analysis. To paraphrase Adams: we created the ultimate telescope, one capable of peering into infinity: a super computer telescope the size of a planet. What did the analyst see who first peered into the eye-piece of the ultimate telescope? He saw his own soul, his own eye, his god. It does not matter much whether you have the right labels for your debate.

Warden:
Where have you been?

Professor:
Grading finals.

Ole Eye:
I just thought of something on reading Joe’s post. This reading of Grid has not evolved into the Great Debate. As Joe would say, no one has co-opted the text.

Warden:
Give us some time. We haven’t even all finished reading it yet.

Joe Blow:
That wouldn’t stop us normally. Few of us admit it openly, but I would guess that less than one or two of us actually read the entire text we all agree to read and discuss. Even if/when we do all read a particular text, we manage to focus on some part of it that feeds right back into our ongoing generic debate.

Old Eye:
Yeah, but the good thing is it’s not the same one or two of us each time. I think it works out pretty evenly, except for BMOC. I’d guess he has never read one of the works from beginning to end.

Jail Bait:
I think the old guy is on to something (luv ya, OE). I agree with the Sherriff. This thread just feels different somehow. I agree with Joe that, for the last year or so, all of our threads have started sounding alot alike. Who was it that joked that if we told him what book we were going to discuss, he could write the entire thread, posting comments from all of us, and it would be impossible to tell the difference from a real thread?

Warden:
Sounds like something BMOC would say.

Librarian:
I have it on good authority that there are actually only three posters posting messages on this entire board. All the rest of us are simply fictional characters given life by one of the real posters.

Jail Bait:
But which ones are the real posters? I want to know who I’m really talking to.

Joe Blow:
Professor, is your mini-rant on reductionism related to the short bit in Grid about an imaginary paradox? Wait a minute and I will go find it (I don’t have Libby’s photographic memory). Here it is:
What is time? There is an absolute time, but it is not the time of a ticking clock. Clock time is a measurement of time; it is not time [TIME, with a capital T which rhymes with P which stands for paradox]. When… in the course of human events… we encounter the time equivalent of Zeno's paradox. The paradox is imaginary: distance is only a metaphor of space. Distance is not existence. Clock time is but the meter of time, but space-time is the fabric of existence. My life is a room ten meter-time measures across. If I cross half my room-life, then half of the remaining half, etc. and so on, lovers will never kiss and I will never die.

Professor:
Somewhat. The apparent paradox presented by the parable here attributed to Zeno is the result of fuzzy logic. There are many ways to dramatize this false paradox, but if you approach it without metaphors, anthropomorphisms, or other forms of play-acting, the mystery dissolves. Mathematics has invented a numbering system that allows us to count (or, at least, to imagine we can count) an infinite number of points on a finite geometrical line connecting point A to point B. That is the basis of the imaginary paradox: a finite “distance” divided an infinite number of times. The fuzzy logic arises when someone confuses the mathematical measurement of a geometrically defined shape in the real world with the thing being measured. The space between two points in the real world seems empty in the thought experiment—whether it is the space between two lovers’ lips or the space between a person and a door. If you substitute a different kind of figure to represent that space, the illusion is exposed. For example, instead of the space between the person and the door, a distance of, say, five foot four inches, use your lover’s body as the defined “space” between two points. Now, imagine dividing your lover’s body into two halves. You will need a sharp knife and a bone saw. The “division” of distance is nothing more or less than the mathematical measurement of distance. There are as many different ways of parsing this “fuzzy” relationship between the imaginary and the real as there are geometric points on a geometric line. Pick a dualism, any dualism. If a person of reasonable intelligence and education gets started on this train, it is almost impossible to get off. There is so much to say that has already been said that it seems silly or pretentious to even begin. Yet, at the same time, it seems that there is much more to say, that needs to be said; and yet, again, in the end, it seems to be nothing more than new lyrics for the same song, with the seeming necessity that the lyrics follow the same rhyme scheme: AA/BB/CC/DD. We can start with Plato. (Why not, everyone else does?) Or, we can focus on the current crop of physicists who, like their progenitors, continue to insist that their math is real, or, if they do not quite say that, would insist, if they had the education to frame the thought (and many do), that the scientific “history” of the world offered by quantum mechanics is more accurate than the “scientific” history of the world offered Henry Adams (to choose one of Teller’s apparent favorites).

Joe Blow:
What is the difference between a “scientific” history and a scientific “history”?

Professor:
History is an attempt to describe order. Physicists will tell you, though they will admit that there is still work to do, that their approach to history-telling is fundamentally more accurate than the type of history-telling Adams does. The scientific “historian” promises progress is being made. I think of that when I pass a sign along a newly constructed or repaired highway that says: “Progress as Promised.” I then think of “Ozymandias” though I seldom despair. Life goes on. Some of these physicist historians have crossed over from their normal domain which is dominated by the language of mathematics into the language of narrative story-telling in their attempt to describe order, and they have created a new genre. The stories usually begin by providing a history of past mathematicians and physicists progressing inexorably to the most recent mathematical model and the new promise of a “final” theory of everything (coming soon to a theater near you!). The physicist story-teller typically sees progression from one older model to the next, as though his story was building a pyramid with the final (almost) theory at the top. Adams, the “scientific” historian, sees sons killing fathers: a story of generational conflict, a yin and yang, an ebb and flow, a wax and wane. Where one sees lines, the other sees circles; arrows become spirals. Grid puts it this way:
As we know, a young janitor at MIT published a famous treatise titled, “The Emperor Has No Clothes,” and physicists suddenly stopped looking for dark matter and became better historians. The young janitor had discovered the next “theory of everything” by virtue of a thought experiment based on finding a pattern within previously debunked theories of everything. Once he found his answer, he created the new mathematical tools he needed to express the question his answer proved.

Joe Blow:
Professor, if you wrote Grid, as I am beginning to suspect, then can you explain the relationship between time and gravity.

Professor:
I did not write Grid, and I have no idea what time and gravity have to do with one another.

[no attribution:]
Time with a capital “T” (as opposed to the measurement of time, just as distance is the measurement of space but is not space) is, as I understand it, the record of existence from the beginning (presumably the big bang) to the absolute present: “Think of the space-time continuum as a four-dimensional bubble expanding at the speed of logos. Time is the expansion of the bubble since the "big bang" (the beginning of time).” I am not certain why the teacher substituted the word “logos” for “light” but it may be intended to incorporate the process of human perception as it keeps pace with the space-time “bubble” of the absolute present. Anyway, according to the teacher, the “record” of existence since the big bang has some sort of substance—the gas in the gas-filled balloon. If time with a capital “T” is gravity, then gravity is this record of the movement of space-time. In a crazy sort of way, it does kind of make sense, though it is misleading to call it a gas except when you are using the balloon analogy of the space-time continuum. It would be more accurate to think of the gas as a kind of inertial force created by past expansion. I believe I now understand the interruption by Teller: Some time there is not enough past to reveal the story. Even though the teller is gifted with uncanny intuition, the universe had to get bigger and history deeper. The pattern of divergence intersects the pattern of convergence at a distant moment beyond the known universe, but, right now, it just looks like everything is flying apart. There could be a theory that explains the universe as we now perceive it without plugging in an ethereal wind, a universal constant, or dark matter by using a solution that “fits” the universe only when the universe is bigger than it is now.

The focus on gravity is a propos because I find Grid depressing in the extreme. I see a future not much different than the dying earth of the future visited by the Time Traveler in The Time Machine: “At last, more than thirty million years in the future… The earth was dying. Now the beach was white, and all the crabs and plant life had disappeared… Was there still life on earth? I got off the time machine and walked to the water’s edge for a closer look. Yes, it was moving. It was a round thing about the size of a football. Tentacles trailed down it, and it seemed black against the freezing cold, blood-red water as it hopped about.” As far as I am concerned, Grid is a sci-fi, horror story about runaway technology that takes over the world. How is Grid much different than the plot of the Terminator films—except that, in Grid, the machines win? Even worse, the machines’ victory is so complete that the humans do not even realize they lost. Teller says that there is no animal life. Humans are animals. There are no humans left alive. The village is populated by robots who have been programmed to simulate human behavior. This book was written as a warning to us all. Remember what Hunter said? The blog said “Warning! This is a story. It must be read.” I say, read it and weep.

Warden:
Where have YOU been?

Jail Bait:
Does this mean we have officially moved past the road chapter? If so, then I am really going to be pissed, because the fifth chapter about Thoreau and Tolkien is the only one I think I really understood (or liked).

Warden:
Then take the lead and show the rest of us the way through “The Bug” because I could really use the help of our resident Tolkien geek.

Old Eye:
I’ll start with the most obvious question: what is all the stuff about Tolkien doing in there?

Jail Bait:
I can answer questions about Tolkien, not about Grid. Since you are the resident Star Trek geek, maybe you can explain why all the Star Trek stuff is in there.

Old Eye:
I thought Teller was pretty specific about it. Most people who are serious about Star Trek develop a sense of what fits into Star Trek. When you watch a movie or a show, you just somehow know when they have done something wrong, and I don’t mean the pseudo-science part or story-line inconsistencies like the fact that Kahn said he recognized Chekov in Wrath of Kahn even though Chekov was not part of the crew when Kahn appeared in the television show (which I always explain by saying that Chekov could have been on board but not part of the bridge crew). What I am talking about are things like Grid mentioned: Kirk’s death had to be BIG and the movie made it small. I don’t have the Professor’s education or I might be able to explain it better. To me, it is like the way you know when a sentence is not grammatically correct even though you can’t explain why. It just sounds wrong. You just know. So, I can tell you whatever you want to know about the Star Trek stuff, but I won’t be much help with Tolkien. Back to you, JB.

Librarian:
According to the narrative, the Tolkien “virus” did something to the organic road program. I think we are supposed to figure out what the virus did in order to understand how our world evolves into Teller’s world with the help of a Tolkien-inspired organic road.

Joe Blow:
Oh, and I was afraid we were going to have to do something hard.

Hunter:
I am a bit road weary myself.

Old Eye:
Well, then, jumping to the end-game. If Teller’s village is supposed to be the result of a Tolkien-inspired or “enchanted” computer program run amok, re-configuring the world, then why doesn’t it look and feel more like middle-earth? And what is all that bread-making ritual supposed to signify?

Warden:
If Teller’s village is an example of an arrested culture instead of a perfectly balanced one, does that mean Sauron ultimately won the battle for middle-earth?

Librarian:
Teller’s narration ends by saying that the real question was not whether Sauron or Gandalf won, but whether she should introduce or re-introduce the technology of writing to her world.

Hunter:
BTW, I have been meaning to ask. Since when has writing been considered technology?

Professor:
The answer to that question is another entire book. Grid seems to be plugged in to an ongoing debate about the impact written language has on culture. In some ways, it is a chicken and egg issue. Did language define culture or culture define language? Think about cultures that did not develop a written language in contrast to cultures that did. There is also a yin and yang aspect to the language-culture analysis. Some believe there is a causal link between cultures dominated by mother-earth symbolism and the absence of a written language.

Old Eye:
Libby, if the Teller says the real question is what she should DO, then why are we trying to tell the rest of the story by figuring out how our world evolved into Teller’s world?

Librarian:
Well, for one thing, I would say that there is a difference between the moral of the story and the telling of the story, and Teller did not finish writing the rest of the story.

Joe Blow:
I think I could write some of that part, because it really is based on extrapolating the technological capabilities of Grid from where it is when the narrative breaks off to a possible future. Grid could evolve the capability to re-engineer the entire world and everything in it—from the rocks and water of the earth, to the plants and animals, and the human beings given dominion over it.

Librarian:
Since you are the only one of us who COULD write that part, I think you SHOULD.

Not a proper discipline

Joe Blow:
[Editor: The contents of this post were deleted by the poster—obviously at some point in time after most of the other posters read it.]

Hunter:
Joe, this is simply amazing! No wonder it took you almost a week since Libby issued the challenge. You seem to have connected everything. Grid really did take over the world—every molecule in the air, land and sea was re-engineered in accordance with a “co-evolving” artificial/natural intelligence program. The funny thing is now that you have shown us how to connect our world to the Teller’s world I can see that the real question is not the “how to.” The real question is control—the magic versus enchantment question.

Old Eye:
I just realized something. In science fiction (I know: I sound like a pathetic geek), there are two versions of the “machine takes over the world” stories. The plots of both versions may be identical; the difference is whether the machine has the equivalent of human consciousness. For example, in a number of Star Trek episodes (“Original Series” of course), Kirk and crew encounter a world/culture that is superficially healthy but is in fact being controlled by a computer that is no longer under human control for one reason or another. The computer does not have the equivalent of human consciousness. In fact, Kirk might be said to overcome the computer’s control simply by re-introducing the “human” element. Good triumphs over evil. The “evil” that has been overcome is the fact that the human element, one way or another, allowed itself to be controlled by the machine element. In the other version of this same sci-fi plot, the machine itself is evil. If a machine is evil, it has become human. If a machine remains a machine, it is neither good nor evil—the consequences of its control or actions are good or evil but the machine itself is not. The anthropomorphic act of assigning evil (or good) motive to the machine makes the machine human, but it is not necessarily a plot element. Imagine an episode in which Kirk and crew encounter an alien world/culture that is superficially healthy but is in fact being controlled by a computer—just as before. In this story, however, Kirk believes that the computer is aware of the consequences of its actions and is capable of choosing to act or not act. Good triumphs over evil when Kirk destroys the computer. The basic plot is the same, but the moral is different.


Warden:
I can understand why Grid would “see” water coming out of drain pipes from the roofs of buildings and interpret it as part of the water system it was programmed to integrate, but I have a hard time understanding why it would integrate all the roofs of those buildings into the road surface, and then, the buildings themselves. You said it used the roof tops as additional surface area to generate power, but it already had enough power. I suppose you are right. In some respects Grid would behave similar to an invasive organism. It does not need to have a reason to spread—propagation is just what Grid does “naturally.” Look at what kudzu did in the southeastern US!

Why does Grid evolve from building roads where they were needed to building homes, offices, stores, etc. where they were wanted? I understand that doing so is not too far from Grid’s original programming which would have required an analysis of traffic in order to build roads where they were needed. But Grid would not only have to have an amazing artificial intelligence program. For Grid to know what people wanted (as opposed to needed), you have to assume that Grid began to have the equivalent of a human understanding of the information in the information system instead of merely being the system. I understand that it is supposedly possible to “translate” statements into computer programs (which is what the “Bug” chapter was supposedly about), but I don’t really believe it works. Unless Grid essentially develops a human consciousness, I don’t see how it can read. You state that Grid may or may not have developed the equivalent of a human consciousness and that the evolutionary process could take place the same regardless. I do understand that, once people got used to having their building wants met by Grid, they would be susceptible to being “programmed” or “cultivated” to use buildings where Grid grew them based on real need instead of where people wanted them. That is the key to the evolution of the road culture into the “no road” culture, isn’t it? Bringing “stuff” to people instead of people to stuff is a logical extension of the current trend to do all shopping on the internet, and we have all heard about how the internet is going to allow more people to work from home in the future, but none of that would lead to the extinction of roads. I had failed to take much notice of the quotation from the road chapter Joe used as his starting point: “If the road and the parasites traveling on it co-evolved, we should expect the surface of the road and the traffic on it to be mutually compatible. Since the engineer was focused exclusively on the road, he did not co-engineer the traffic but assumed it would remain as it was. Other engineers were diligently working on the traffic issue. They would create a world inhabited by flying machines or teleported matter that would make roads extinct. For thousands of years that had been engineering’s main focus, and the evolutionary development of roads suffered from comparative neglect.” Grid started at the other end of the engineering road-traffic spectrum, by designing a better road instead of better traffic (for a century, most of the effort simply went into building “nicer” automobiles), but, as now seems inevitable (since Joe pointed it out to us), by designing a more intelligent road, Grid ended up co-evolving more intelligently designed traffic and “traffic” ultimately meant people: Grid re-engineered people (or would it be more accurate to call what Grid did re-programming?) so that people did not need or want roads.

Professor:
No matter what you call it, it is essentially what Thoreau was trying to do: simplify, simplify (though I would imagine that if current usage was available to him, Thoreau would have said he was trying to “de-program” rather than “re-program”). Joe, I was going to start my post by saying that I would give your post an “A+” but it seems condescending. Instead, I will do something I have never done before. In deference to your appreciation for Star Wars, I will use a Star Wars reference: “Once you were the pupil and I was the master; now, you are the master.” I do not profess an understanding of nano-technology, but I understand the end result: after generations of bioengineering by Grid, the entire “natural” world and all the people in it have evolved into a one giant supercomputer. So, Douglas Adams was right, after all.

Let’s take a look at just one of the strands you picked up—but perhaps the most important strand. In our world, cell phone and PDA components are being miniaturized and increasingly attached “permanently” to users. Some people are already contemplating the voluntary implantation of cell phone and PDA components directly into human beings as the “logical” next stage in this process. Grid took the “final” step. As part of the process to improve the information system and to make human beings able to access it more efficiently, Grid technology re-engineered human minds in order to establish a direct connection between all human minds and Grid’s information system. In our world, technology is capable of transcribing human speech into written text. Given a direct and immediate connection to the Grid information system, all human minds had access to transcriptions of everything that was being said, had been said or had ever been written. Over time, “transcriptions” of what had been said became indistinguishable from what had been written, and the distinction between a written and spoken language disappeared. Over time, the difference between individual human memory of language and the Grid “memory” of all language stored in the information system disappeared. Over time, the non-electronic preservation of writing became extinct (no more “hard copy”). At that point, the crucial question becomes the ability to “edit” the electronic transcription. The ability to edit literally becomes the power to create and control history, myth, literature, language and the human mind that creates it. It is the power to shape and control human perception. Grid alone retained the edit function.

Jail Bait:
The most amazing post ever, Joe! It gave me chills. I want you. Seriously though (not that I’m not serious about wanting you), I’m not sure I have processed all of it yet, and I am not smart enough to pick up where the Professor left off, but I went back to the end of Grid, and the last thing the narrative describes is Grid, apparently for the first time, exceeding its original programming, by “growing” new railroad tracks. It said no one could explain why Grid did so. I thought that was why the narrative ended at that point—showing that Grid had gone beyond its original programming so that it was kind of a techno-monster on the loose, fitting in with the horror genre formula that has been around ever since Frankenstein’s monster. So, Joe, before you come see me to get your “reward” for being such a good boy, can you explain why Grid exceeded its original programming?

Joe Blow:
That’s too much pressure to perform, JB. I can think of two answers, and I believe both are right: 1) adding railroad tracks to the design was a logical extension of the original program and no mystery at all; and 2) the most obvious explanation was the one never proposed by the historians who, according to the narrative, investigated the defense department’s top secret files—Grid “read” the blog (it was on the internet and Grid essentially became the internet) and interpreted the text of the engineer’s blog as additional programming from the original programmer.

BMOC:
This thread is going in circles. All Joe’s post proves is that Joe wrote Grid in the first place. I can’t believe you people are so dumb.

Joe Blow:
[Editor: The contents of this post were deleted by the poster—obviously at some point in time after some of the other posters read it.]

BMOC:
[Editor: The contents of this post were deleted by the poster—obviously at some point in time after some of the other posters read it.]

Warden:
Boys! Cut it out, now! Both of those last posts violate the terms of participation on this board.

BMOC:
I was just having a little fun. I don’t know why Joe flew off the handle unless I was right and he did write it. I went back and deleted my post in case it really offended anybody.

Joe Blow:
I apologize for losing my temper and I also deleted my last post.

BMOC:
Since Joe questioned my continued participation in this forum, I decided I should make an attempt to add a serious post, despite my obvious lack of appreciation (or respect) for the chosen text. My point would be that Joe has not really written the “rest of the story” that was supposed to be finished by the reader. Even if he is right, he just becomes a substitute for the writer of Grid, not the reader. The reader has to answer a different question: whether the re-engineered world Teller describes is a good thing. We have to answer that question before we answer the ultimate question that ends the narrative: whether Teller should change her world by re-introducing writing. How’s that, Professor? Do I get an A+?

Jail Bait:
She didn’t invent writing; she discovered it in the cave, but, never mind: I get what you mean. Anyway, I think the real question is what she should DO, and I think she should go back to her family. What happened to her motherly instinct? Was it programmed out of her? How can she even be debating whether she should go back? You can tell that she loves her husband from the way she talked about him. Her children need her—especially Jill. Something makes it seem like Jill is headed for trouble. Story tellers should not create characters and give them some emotional reality and then abandon them part way through the story. Should they?

Old Eye:
What if she is afraid to go back? If the world was “made” into what it is, meaning that Sauron won the battle for middle-earth, then Grid (the new world order) would be aware of Teller’s entrance into the cave and aware that she knows how to write. Wouldn’t her discovery of writing pose a threat to the world order imposed by Grid? Is that why the computer terminal in the cave stopped working—because Grid was getting ready to stop Teller? Would Grid allow Teller to go back outside the cave and change the world? Isn’t that the science fiction story idea that the author of the Prologue first mentioned: the story of a road that takes over the world? Doesn’t “take over” imply “force”?

Hunter:
Wow! The old man has me convinced that Grid is really a science fiction thriller, and the question is whether we should take action to preserve mankind against the machine.

Joe Blow:
BMOC’s “serious” post was just another of his infamous restatements of someone else’s comment—he does the same thing in class all the time and the stupid teachers fall for it. Why is it that no one bothered to defend my post against his attack? If you all think BMOC is so smart, then I guess I should just delete the whole post.

Librarian:
I missed the whole thing, so I don’t know what Joe said to BMOC or what BMOC responded, and since both their posts are now deleted, I may never know—not that I really want to know. Anyway, I’m tired. Maybe JB is right: the “real” rest of the story is Teller leaving the cave and going back to her family and letting the future take care of itself. It may be inevitable that, if she goes back, she will let the genie out of the bottle, or that little Jill will figure it out even if Jane tries to hide her discovery. It seems like the Tellers can virtually read other people’s minds, and Jill is supposed to be developing into some kind of “super” Teller. Even if the mean, nasty Grid is going to try to stop her, the best ending may be for Jane to leave the cave and try to get on with living her life.

Old Eye:
She could stay in the cave and defeat Grid by convincing it to turn on itself like Kirk did so many times in Star Trek.

Jail Bait:
Oh, please.

Warden:
Everyone was posting so quickly I didn’t notice what Joe had done. He didn’t just delete his tit-for-tat post; he deleted his massive post on how Grid took over the world. Joe, put it back.

Jail Bait:
I just went back and checked—nothing there but a period. Joe, don’t let him get under your skin. Please re-post it. Did anyone save it to their hard disk?

Warden:
Joe, that is not how the edit feature was meant to be used. Re-post immediately.

Joe Blow:
It was my post. I can edit it or delete it any time I want.

Hunter:
Yes, it is your post, but it is my thread, and, with your post gone, the other posts don’t make any sense. How do you think that makes the other posters feel? I am really pissed off! What if I went back and deleted the Grid post? All that work everyone did would be turned into gibberish. This was my thread and had a chance to be one of our best. Now, Joe has destroyed it. I say we ban Joe and then contact the administrator to turn off the edit feature so this kind of thing will never happen again.

Warden:
I checked. We would have to have the edit feature turned off for the entire board, not just this forum. As for banning Joe, he really didn’t do anything against the terms of participation on this board. The best we can do is ignore everything he posts, so that we don’t run the risk of having the rug pulled out from under us later.

Joe Blow:
I don’t get it. I didn’t do anything to anyone else’s work. No one has the right to tell me what I can or can’t do with my own post. Have you all heard about the freedom of speech? You don’t have to ban me. I’m gone.

[unattributed:]
I want to add my two bits (and bytes) to the deleted post debate. Let’s look at it from a different perspective. Is the message board a new form of narrative art? Text depends on context. What is the context of a message board? The existence of the ability to edit a post after it has been posted creates a certain context—it is one of the “rules” that tells a writer the nature of the medium. For a writer who enjoys experimenting with the nature of narrative art, it would be the equivalent of waving a red flag at a bull. I doubt whether Joe was interested in experimentation when he deleted his post—he was no doubt simply angry at BMOC—but now that it has happened, the possibilities are out there for all of us to explore and enjoy. You all are defining the context of this medium as you continue to create this new method of publishing/communicating.

Some come to a message board to publish and perish: nail it to the church door and leave town. Get in and get out. Others come for other reasons: conversation, debate, essay, research, seminar, creative writing, solo performance art, or collaborative performance art. How many contexts you have and how lovely!

What are posts? A post is a message, a narrative, a written statement published (posted) on a web site designed for the purpose of accepting such posts for publication and for maintaining those posts once published. These web sites are called message boards in part to distinguish them from other forms of electronic communication of text. The context of the “message board” is that the statement is “nailed to the board” and left by anyone who has access to the board to be seen by anyone who has access to the board. In practice, a particular board’s unique context will be different, but the generic context of an internet message board is that it allows for a completely anonymous exchange of text. The context of “correspondence” is an exchange of text in which both the writer and reader know each other. The context of a book or essay is an exchange of text from a known writer to an unknown but generally defined group of readers. The message board context is text stripped of context outside the context provided by the text. Is it even a form of communication? Does anyone read the messages? Without the responses provided outside the post itself—recorded by the “thread of conversation” between posts—there is no bargained for communication. Unless the post is acknowledged by another post, the post remains in isolation, nailed to the door of the church. If a tree falls in the forest… If a post posts on the board and no one reads it, what is it? What if it is posted and then un-posted before it is read? The delete button is a fascinating new technique for narrating a story. The moving finger having writ… but his moving finger can also “un-write.” The living story narrated in nice, unambiguous chronological order can be edited. Since these posts are dated as of the date they are originally published, posts can be edited so that a story could be narrated backwards. Where does this thing called a “thread” start? Where do the readers start? Where does the story begin? Does the thread start with the first post posted or the most recent post posted? Readers may read the most recent post in a thread first, then read backwards to make sense of the first post. The first shall be last. What kind of publication is this?

Who are the posters? Who nails up the posts on whose church door? The initial context of the message board is anonymity—more than anonymity (and less). Instructions to posters: 1) Don’t use your real name. 2) BE real. 3) Don’t be TOO real. 4) It is okay if you are not really real as long as you are nice about it. There is a long tradition of writers adopting pseudonyms. There is a long tradition of actors using stage names. There is a long tradition of correspondents writing correspondence—letters between real people published with the names blacked out by the editor. Everything you have just read is real: only the names have been changed to protect the innocent. Is this a drama or people being dramatic? Pseudonym or stage name? Poster as poser? Is this a play or are you simply playing? What of the possible combinations and permutations? A real person writing about the real person’s life using a name edited solely for security purposes maintaining a long-running correspondence with a character in a novel written by a writer using a pseudonym. What if all the posters on the message board are characters whose posts are written by one poster—except for you? What about you?

What is posting? Product or process? Art? Communication? Confession? Therapy? A note nailed to the church door or a note passed between two friends at school? Who tears them down? What if the teacher confiscates the note and tears it up? What if someone writes graffiti on top of someone else’s post? Who has the eraser? Did someone take a picture of the door yesterday or last week? Who owns the picture? Why was a picture of the posts on the church door last week nailed to the church door today?

What is a thread? Conversation? Seminar? Performance Art? Follow the thread. Forward. Backwards? How interesting that would be. Is it a record of a conversation? White House tapes? A recording with a delete button… not only a delete button but an edit feature. Is the thread a work of art? Is it a narrative work of art published by… Whom? The thread starter? Why the thread starter? If so, then what are all those other posters doing in there? Does someone own the thread? As in, “What have you all done to MY THREAD?” If it is a record of a conversation, should there be a delete button? If it is performance art, should there be an edit?

Jail Bait:
I wish everyone would just settle down. I’m sure Joe will re-post.

Hunter:
I don’t care if he does or not. That’s not the point. The thread is ruined regardless.

BMOC:
I pushed Joe’s button and got the response I knew I would get, but don’t make this out to be a big deal. His post was no better than the Grid itself. Hunter is deluded if he thinks this was going to be some kind of great thread. I told you the whole thing was a load of crap. End of story.

Warden:
It has been two weeks since BMOC’s “load of crap.” We can’t let that be our last word on this subject. Professor, have you finished your close reading?

Professor:
No. I’m still working on it, but I am not going to post unless and until Joe re-posts, apologizes and Hunter accepts his apology. This last episode is too silly for words.

Hunter:
I’m not certain I want anything more to do with it. I’m taking a break from this board for a while.

Warden:
Well then, let’s all take a break. Since we seem to be floundering a bit, I am going to lock this thread for three weeks. We’ve done this before with troublesome texts and have gotten good results. Besides, the board is going to be shut down 24 hours for an upgrade next week. See you all on the flip side.

Teller:
Boys will be boys.

One cliché. What does it mean? Why did I say it? As to that, I said it mostly because I had to say something to let you know I was here. How did I get here—outside the frame? As to that, you brought me with you. I am the frame. I am the walrus. I am. I tell. Therefore, I am.

As for what the comment meant, I should say ask the reader other than me; but I feel all fuzzy and cuddly, so let us parse it together as though we were on the same team, on the same page. (I love language: it makes stories every where it goes.) But/Then/And what is going on with all the “As to” and “As for” language? As to that, I really cannot say. It just comes out that way when I feel all fuzzy and cuddly.

We first recognize that the comment is a cliché. The cliché is shorthand for making a statement about human nature, that certain behaviors can be predicted by genetics, by gender. The cliché is not phrased as “boys are boys” which means something else and would not mean as much if it were not for the existence of the primary cliché playing in the background. The future tense is part of the cliché: boys will be boys. But the use of the future tense here signifies more than a future act or condition. In this case, it carries the past, present and future. Boys have been boys. Boys are boys. Boys will always be boys. There is something about the nature of boys that determines that they will always be and act boy-like. Depending on your persuasion, the cliché may strike you as simple or profound. You may even believe that the thing that makes boys act predictably like boys is not nature but culture, but, depending on whether you believe that culture can be changed easier than nature, the prediction remains the same. You already knew all this, of course; but the point of this exercise is the fact that we did it together. The fact is that we did it together, but we are not finished, not by a long shot, stretch, margin… by a considerable margin, with margin for error.

We might ask where the boys are, but if we did, we might start thinking about beach blanket bingo. We might better ask who the boys are. In the immediate context, the “boys” are the posters: Warden, Hunter, Old Eye, Joe Blow and the rest. The “rest” include Jail Bait and the Librarian, the two posters who were expressly tagged as female. I say “expressly tagged as female” because some of the other posters may have been female, even though they were tagged as male. One never knows for certain on a message board. I would have said, “posters will be posters,” so that genetics and gender did not become red herrings, but since I did not we might as well make use of the genetics and gender stuff that came along for the ride, to use another cliché; but the phrase, “posters will be posters” would not carry the necessary weight—I wanted a cliché that had history, that had been cooked in the pot a long time, soaking up all those juices and getting stuck to other bits of meat and bone stewing in the pot—though there is quite a bit we could do with posters that we cannot do with boys. The good news is that we still can, because we know that these boys are posters. We might start with a syllogism. They are fun to do and they often grow semantic tendrils in unexpected directions. Where can we start our syllogism? We have to find our initial premise. Some posters are boys. Not much there. All boys are human. What can we do with that? All posters are human. Wrong. Some posters are human. I thought all posters were human. I thought wrong. Think again. Come to think of it, some posters are computers. That came from the syllogism. I would not have thought of it on this track “but for” the syllogism. I put “but for” in quotation marks because I was thinking of starting with “unless” or “except” but then that made me think of “besept” which is a combination of “except” and “beside” invented by a four-year-old boy. Boys will be boys. Some posters are computers. Computer language robots or “bots” are posters. Some bots are good; some bots are bad. Sometimes bots are used to overwhelm a board with spam. That is a problem—problem behavior. Posters will be posters. There is that irony again. So, “posters will be posters” is both less and more than “boys will be boys.”

Some Tellers are computers. Is that a new track? Or is that the track we have been on all along? Stop. Do not go down that track. I still have some of that fuzzy and cuddly left. Left? Right? Left. Right. Left. Right. That’s right, keep marching down this track. Speaking of changing tracks, does thought have inertia? Is it electron or proton? What did the teacher say? “The universe is an expanding bubble of light/thought (matter is, after all, simply thought/light/energy that appears frozen—in time—to a human thinking mind—it’s all relative). We are all of us traveling in time with the universe at the speed of thought.” According to the teacher, the universe is a record of communication, and that record is gravity. So, thought has gravity. But does it have inertia? The principle of complementarity applies: the observation of the two complementary properties, position and momentum, requires mutually exclusive experimental measurements. If the Teller’s thought changes track like an electron switching to a circuit running in a different direction, it has no inertia viewed from the perspective of the Teller-narrator. If you require anthropomorphic visualization, think of Tron changing direction without changing speed. Viewed from the perspective of the Teller-reader, thought has all kinds of inertia—from the anxiety of influence through genetic programming, skipping past Freud and Jung and Campbell, bouncing off memory filtered by emotion and psychoses. What’s left? Right? Left. Right. Keep marching on this track.

Why did I use “boys” when the focus was on “posters”? I needed the cliché. The use of a cliché instead of an original expression is itself a signifier. Perhaps I needed the use of a cliché to express that I was tired of it all. The posters were beginning to express fatigue. Perhaps the Teller too was road weary. Marching, marching, marching. Horses, horses, horses. Weary and now sleepless in Seattle. Are we tired of the same old, same old: the predictable behaviors, the formulaic expressions? We may be but I am not. To me, every cliché is a story. The “same old, same old” is the stuff of myth, legend and history: the Teller’s playground. Are we tired because reading is hard work? Living awake is tiring. It is easier to remain passive, plugged into the tube, pain free because we chose to kill our pain, stuffed and ripe to be plucked, wired into a matrix of thought that follows the wire.


Kirk:
I want my pain. I need my pain.


James, I love you; but you are a pain—you fuzzy, cuddly bit of stew meat. Get back in the pot until I call for you.

The “boys” cliché is also commonly used as a response to “problem” behavior, particular if the behavior is tolerated or, if not tolerated, at least not seriously sanctioned. If, on the other hand, the cliché is used in response to behavior more seriously sanctioned, such as a criminal felony, we would suspect that the speaker was being ironic (just as I am but in a different context, from a different perspective).

A possible reading (or a possible reader) might assume that the “problem” behavior in this case is the spat that developed between Joe Blow and BMOC, leading to the “typical” reactions by the other posters.

Behavior is important—not to me, not so much—but it is important. It is just that I hate to see readers other than me base a theory of literature on it. What is IT? In this case, I will specify the signifier. It is not just behavior—as in the actions of an actor—it is the act and the actor’s internal motivation. Is it physics or psychology? Every action has a motive, a motivational force.

Back to the “problem behavior” reading of the cliché: the particular behavior that developed is not significant; well, it does signify, but it is not the primary signifier, not to me... or from me. The signifier of my use of the cliché is that I did not plan for that development: boys will be boys. I used the cliché because I wanted the reader other than me to have an opportunity to see what I saw. I saw a pimple erupt on a character whose face I had not drawn. The message board was not supposed to be populated with people but with words; then, I named them and gave them mouths. Word boys became flesh. I staged a hockey game and a fight broke out.
And he doesn’t know any more whether he’s a Damonite or a Caseyite or something else again, a new Heretic or an unregenerate Golden Ager, doesn’t even know if he’s Paul Trench or Royce Ingram or Pappy Rooney or Long Lew Lydell, it’s all irrelevant, it doesn’t even matter that he’s going to die, all that counts is that he is here and here’s The Man and here’s the boys and there’s the crowd, the sun, the noise.
“It’s not a trial,” says Damon, glove tucked in his armpit, hands working the new ball. Behind him, he knows, Scat Batkin, the batter, is moving toward the plate. “It’s not even a lesson. It’s just what it is.” Damon holds the baseball up between them. It is hard and white and alive in the sun.
He laughs. It’s beautiful, that ball. He punches Damon lightly in the ribs with his mitt. “Hang loose,” he says, and pulling down his mask, trots back behind home plate.

Boys will be boys. It is hard and white and alive in the sun. I am woman and mother. Remember me. All this and more will be yours, my daughter. All it takes is one cliché.


No more italics. No more Teller. Just you and me (and word-made-flesh makes three):
A great green shadow came between him and the sun. Niggle looked up, and fell off his bicycle. Before him stood the Tree, his Tree, finished. If you could say that of a Tree that was alive…

The End

He went on looking at the Tree. All the leaves he had ever laboured at were there, as he had imagined them rather than as he had made them: and there were others that had only budded in his mind, and many that might have budded, if only he had had time. Nothing was written on them, they were just exquisite leaves, yet they were dated as clear as a calendar.

I was headed for a sweet, even sentimental, finish using Niggle’s leaf, “alive in the sun,” to complete my frame, but I went on reading and came to “Nothing was written on them…” and I fell off my bicycle. Tolkien’s puns brought me back to my senses, my common senses, my perceptions I have in common with you, dear reader. Words that have roots with real mud clinging to them will do that. Why would he start punning at the climax of a nice, simple little story? Here we are in thunder bug heaven [(which only goes to prove that they do pun in heaven or that heaven is a pun), the place where dreams come true (in other words, Iowa), where sub-creation is made real, where word becomes flesh] having a nice relaxing climax, and the writer, a noted philologist, goes pun happy. We were talking about leaves and something unexpected happened. Was it magic or enchantment? The tree leaves became book leaves, painted manuscript leaves and calendar leaves. How are blank leaves dated? Riddles are for hobbits (and tricks are for kids, silly hobbit). Fairy stories are framed in heaven’s own time: once upon a time marks the beginning—the big bang—and happily ever after marks the ending in the eternal, absolute present. In between, each instant is a new leaf, and history is told by calendar leaves falling. It is understandable. Some of the most exquisite manuscript pages ever painted were monthly calendar leaves. Does the pun on leaves lead us anywhere or was it just random fun?

The obvious answer is that the pun leads us from Niggle the painter to Tolkien the writer, but we hardly needed the pun to make that connection. The pun is a connection. Is it a causal connection, a connection that communicates and creates order and meaning, or is it mere chance?

Gump: “I don't know if we each have a destiny, or if we're all just floating around accidental-like on a breeze, but I, I think maybe it's both. Maybe both is happening at the same time.”

Once upon a time, there was a boy named Chance who lived in a small town in the Midwestern part of the United States. We might as well call the town Lake Wobegon because the narrative was going to take the reader that direction anyway. It would have taken me several pages of narrative to get just the right sense of place communicated and the sense of place I really wanted was Lake Wobegon. So, imagine the town is the original Lake Wobegon—the Lake Wobegon you first read in Lake Wobegon Days or first heard on the radio when the show was young. Think of all the words we will save by using Lake Wobegon as our story town. Keillor writes (and talks) about having a storm home. If he can have a storm home, we can have a story town. Right? That’s what I thought.

So this boy Chance moves to LW (now we are even saving on letters) near the end of the school year, and he shows up at the neighborhood sandlot baseball field when school gets out for the summer. The sandlot looks curiously like the one in the movie Sandlot and does not belong in Lake Wobegon—not exactly—but the neighborhood and the boys from the neighborhood are definitely from Lake Wobegon. This business may seem strange to you and curious, but it is important to get it right. The neighborhood boys are not from Sandlot. We require a more homogenous bunch of boys than the film’s characters.

Chance is physically and mentally “challenged.” Back then, the boys would have called him “retarded” though not to his face—unless they were being mean. The boys playing baseball in the neighborhood were not mean—it was Lake Wobegon, after all. Chance could not speak clearly. Forcing words from a mouth that lacked coordination of jaw, lip and tongue required a Herculean effort. The result was a seemingly angry and barely comprehensible shout/growl/grunt. His physical challenge affected his entire body. It was painful to watch him walk. Though he had no deformities, none of his parts moved as they should. It was as though his body moved forward only as a direct expression of his will, not because his leg, hip, torso, arm, shoulder, neck or head did as they were told. No two steps were ever the same. Walking was an exhausting labor; running was impossible. Nonetheless, he ran. The energy he spent running to first base was the equivalent of running a marathon.

So, it was an act of courage when Chance presented himself at the sandlot and made it clear to the other boys that he intended to play ball. Naturally, they let him. Also, quite naturally, they developed an unspoken scheme to play their game without counting him. He was added to one side or the other after the teams were drawn and made even. His at bat—which was always an out—never counted as one of the three. He was positioned in right field near the foul line, and since the boys never had enough players to field more than seven or eight on a side, he never really stood in for a regular position player. He was never able to field a ball on those few occasions when one was hit toward him.

The boys believed (without actually talking to each other about it—they were boys, after all, and boys will be boys) that their scheme to include Chance without letting his presence affect the real competition was an act of compassion and, if they had thought about it, they would have said that it made them feel good about themselves.

Most of the summer passed in this manner. The boys played almost every day. Then, one day, toward the end of the summer, as the boys were picking sides, Chance grew increasingly agitated. The boys were concerned but they assumed it was some kind of health problem and they tried to get him to go home. When it was obvious that he was not going to head home on his own, they tried to take him by the hand and lead him home, but he jerked away and stood his ground. He kept shouting/growling/grunting something but he was so agitated it seemed to the boys that he was having some kind of fit or seizure. The boys were in the process of deciding what to do and who was going to go for help, when one of them figured out what Chance was saying: “Chance counts.”

So, they played the game and they let him count. He came up to bat three times and he struck out three times on nine hard-thrown fastballs. It counted.

Chance counts. He was no mere chance. It was a chance story—a chance meeting of words, as they say in middle-earth. Did the word chance lead to the flesh Chance or did Gump lead to Chance? The pun is “both at the same time” but what is “both”? Is it order and chaos? There is an unspoken story behind every pun. Tinkers to Evers to Chance. Pun Every Chance. Tinker with Pun Ever’ Chance you get.

“A great green shadow came between him and the sun.” Do you think Tolkien is playing with Plato? No, but it is pretty to think so. It could be “just” a tree… and those leaves could be “just” leaves. Is there any menace in the shadow? The green is back; this time without the grass. What was casting the shadow—the ideal or the real? Was Niggle coming from the cave into the light or was it just heaven? Is there any justice in just? I am just looking for a little justice. Is there a chance Chance was just looking for a little justice?

Tinkers to Evers to Chance to Tolkien to Auden:
I first tried to write a story when I was about seven. It was about a dragon. I remember nothing about it except a philological fact. My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say ‘a green great dragon’, but had to say ‘a great green dragon’. I wondered why, and I still do. The fact that I remember this is possibly significant, as I do not think I ever tried to write a story again for many years, and was taken up with language.

Tolkien to Everett (a chance pun—almost):

I have not published any other short story but Leaf by Niggle. They do not arise in my mind. Leaf by Niggle arose suddenly and almost complete. It was written down almost at a sitting, and very nearly in the form in which it now appears. Looking at it myself now from a distance I should say that, in addition to my tree-love (it was originally called The Tree), it arose from my own pre-occupation with The Lord of the Rings…

A great green tree dragon arose suddenly in mind—a repetition of the infinite “I am” in a finite mind. Tolkien admitted to an “Atlantis” complex, manifested as a recurring nightmare of flooding. From early childhood, Tolkien experienced one recurring nightmare: “...of the Great Wave, towering up, and coming in ineluctably over the trees and green fields.” So, we have a recurring great wave of green tree-dragons… which is the problem with writing an “essay” using words. If it were just possible to write an “essay” without using words… Some might try to psychoanalyze Tolkien’s Atlantis complex—at which Tolkien would recoil in horror. What would interest the Professor is an attempt to explain the great green grass/tree dragon wave rising suddenly in his mind as a psycho-linguistic phenomenon. So, let us get on that… some time… later.

Back to the burst bubble born as it cries poof and remains in the air. For those who understand the nature of language and the origin of story, there is no difference between “essay” and “story.” Thus, we come full circle. Is that a cliché? I am beginning to lose track. Stories keep rising up like tidal waves. So, [another “so” so, the “so” from the Prologue keeps coming back] we have come full circle. Well, it is not exactly a circle. More like a spiral, really, since we are outside the frame. If it had been a circle I should have said that the circle is complete but not yet full. We require further but parallel expression of the moral of this essay-story in order to fill in the circle so that it is full. May be it is a sphere, and we are filling the balloon with story—or is it history or time? Is it gravity or just grave? Am I digging my grave—or yours?

Voice of a student: Do we fill circles with essay and spheres with story?

Teller: By jove! I think he’s got it!

In an “essay” given as a “Valedictory Address” Tolkien provides yet another glimpse into his understanding of the inner life of language:
If you do not know any language, learn some—or try to. You should have done so long ago. The knowledge is not hidden. Grammar is for all (intelligent persons), though not all may rise to a star-spangled grammar. If you cannot learn, or find the stuff distasteful, then keep humbly quiet. You are a deaf man at a concert. Carry on with your biography of the composer, and do not bother about the noises that he makes!

If you do not love the guy, you simply are not paying attention. In fact, let us take a moment for a little test, a litmus test. The following passage is excerpted from a letter Tolkien wrote about the difficulties he was having getting the copy editors who were proof reading Lord of the Rings to quit fixing spellings and usages that were not broken:
I dug my toes in about nasturtians. I have always said this. It seems to be a natural Anglicization that started soon after the ‘Indian Cress’ was naturalized (from Peru, I think) in the 18th century; but it remains a minority usage. I prefer it because nasturtium is, as it were, bogusly botanical and falsely learned.
I consulted the college gardener to this effect: ‘What do you call these things, gardener?’
‘I calls them tropaeolum, sir.’
“But, when you’re just talking to dons?’
‘I says nasturtians, sir.’
‘Not nasturtium?’
‘No, sir; that’s watercress.’

The question is “What does it mean?” What is it? Are you paying attention? If you do not love it, stop reading… forever.

In an “essay” given as a lecture on “A Secret Vice” (being the hobby of creating private languages), Tolkien provides yet another glimpse into his understanding of the inner life of language: “I might fling out the view that for perfect construction of an art-language it is found necessary to construct at least in outline a mythology concomitant. Not solely because some pieces of verse will inevitably be part of the more or less) completed structure, but because the making of language and mythology are related functions… your language construction will breed a mythology.”

In an “essay” given as a lecture on “English and Welsh” Tolkien provides yet another glimpse into his understanding of the inner life of language:
If I were to say ‘Language is related to our total psycho-physical make-up’, I might seem to announce a truism in a priggish modern jargon. I will say at any rate that language—and more so as an expression than as communication—is a natural product of our individuality. We each have our own personal linguistic potential: we each have a native language. But that is not the language that we speak, our cradle-tongue, the first-learned. Linguistically we all wear ready-made clothes, and our native language comes seldom to expression, save perhaps by pulling at the ready-made till it sits a little easier. But though it may be buried, it is never wholly extinguished, and contact with other languages may stir it deeply.

Do you hear an echo of a thought from Tolkien’s poem, “Mythopeia”? Though now estranged, / man is not wholly lost… The Fall of Man is (also) a separation from a linguistic Garden of Eden where/when our cradle tongue was our original native language.

Tolkien knew more about the inner life of language than he was comfortable saying “out loud.” His discomfort arose from a number of sources. For one thing, he knew that he was already considered a fringe “hobbyist” by some of his academic peers. There was a strong religious aspect to his theory of “language, myth and the human mind that creates it” that would have made him seem something of a quack if disclosed nakedly in public. He also knew that his theory about native language could be distorted in the wrong hands and there were too many wrong hands flourishing in the world at that time. It was, after all, the peak of the “nationalist” fever that found racial connections to almost everything: myth, language, intelligence, strength, moral character and God. Tolkien did not want people to associate his theory about language with those whose focus on mythology had a racial agenda, and he knew that there would be those who would assume he was, in some manner, lining up behind the “master race.” He was trying to protect himself from that kind of distortion when he said: “Language is the prime differentiator of peoples—not of ‘races’. Whatever that much-misused word may mean in the long-blended history of western Europe.” His fears were well-founded. There is a species of literate idiot that will seize on bits and pieces of a man with no sense of the whole in order to make attention-getting pronouncements about a supposed character flaw or an alleged hidden agenda. [You will remember, dear reader, that somewhere in here words conveyed the thought that reading is game that must be played with careful concern for the consequences of the reading. There is a moral in the story you create when you connect the dots. (I interrupt this digression for a short rant on the abuse that has been heaped on Tolkien by this species. We will skip past escapist and misogynist, and land squarely on racist. I find intolerable the simple-minded fools who opine that, because Tolkien invented a race of orcs, he was a racist.)] The best place to look for proofs as to a man’s character is where and when he is not looking to be looked at for that reason. In his “Valedictory Address” Tolkien was going on about the separation between language and literature in the Oxford School of English, and he said: “There are of course other lands under the Southern Cross. I was born in one; though I do not claim to be the most learned of those who have come hither from the far end of the Dark Continent. But I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.”

Tolkien’s theory of language in its “psycho-physical” aspect does indeed sound race-based, with the concomitant mythological aspect standing close to a quasi-Jungian, racial unconscious archetype. Tolkien knows it but he does not want the exposure that would attend an explication of the theory complete enough to distinguish it from those nefarious cousins. The Coleridge-Barfield-Tolkien circuit keeps it from going down the race-based drain. Language wires the brain that creates language. The language-wired brain processes our perception of the world. Our common perceptions create our culture. Each culture (“race”) evolved a native language specific to that culture.
As I have said, these tastes and predilections which are revealed to us in contact with languages not learned in infancy—O felix peccatum Babel—are certainly significant: an aspect in linguistic terms of our individual natures. And since these are largely historical products, the predilections must be so too. My pleasure in the Welsh linguistic style, though it may have an individual colouring, would not, therefore, be expected to be peculiar to myself among the English. It is not. It is present in many of them… For many of us it rings a bell, or rather it stirs deep harp-strings in our linguistic nature… It is the native language to which in unexplored desire we would still go home.

Voice of a student: If myth (story) is in language, is the story in me or is it in the word?

Teller: Boy! (not boys being boys) Kids these days ask the smartest questions!

Gump: Maybe it is both.

Both. So, what does both do for us? On the one hand, it is a convenient false prophet. It is the it we ran into earlier. You don’t remember? If you are not equipped like Librarian, look it up. I can’t keep going back to take care of stragglers—it makes the narrative go in circles. You know what happens to narratives that keep going in circles? They circle the drain. The circle creates the drain, and if the story has a drain, sooner or later someone is going to go down it. If the game has a roll of the dice that makes a line drive kill the pitcher, then sooner or later someone is going to die, and story will make the somebody who dies a somebody—a word made flesh kind of somebody. Stragglers beware! Ever notice what happens in a story when a character gets tagged as a straggler? The fat Fred who straggles at the back of the line in a war movie or “Combat” show is going to get picked off sooner rather than later. It is the same fate as the Star Trek crewman wearing the red shirt who opens the show with the regular cast. “Son, you ought to think about taking out some life insurance.” If this was back in the day and Teller was singing the narrative to a listening audience who already knew how the story was going to end, it would be safe to go in circles—more like the earth orbiting the sun. In myth, folk tale or a tale told in an exclusively oral tradition of story-telling, the singer/poet uses repetition in syntax, symbol, image and plot to establish and maintain the connection between the teller and the village. Within the western canon of written literature, on the other hand, repetition creates a gravitational sink hole.

Back to the burst bubble born as the universe cries “poof” and remains in the air. The gravitational sink hole is a drain. When is it safe to circle the drain? When is a drain not a drain? When the earth orbits the sun, the center will hold. The difference is not structural. One adjective is all it takes: this time, we will use spaceship earth instead of green grass (see, I am willing to throw the reader a bone every dog has his day now and then since then it began in the beginning was the word and the word this time was is will be this time). The earth is like a spaceship orbiting the sun. Replace the earth with a spaceship and the sun turns into a massive black hole, so that the story has a spaceship circling a black hole instead of the earth orbiting the sun. Both plots have smaller objects circling larger gravity wells. Now, plot the rest of the story. Once the story becomes aware that the earth circling the sun is like the spaceship circling a black hole, the story is more likely to become a story in which the earth goes down the drain—which is how science fiction is born. Once we learn to separate green from grass, there is a story to be found in why grass is green. But we are playing the percentages here. What makes the percentage? It is in the stew pot. When you scoop “space ship earth” out of the stew pot, it does not come out clean. The other stuff clinging to “space ship” is there, silently taking up space—and anything that takes up space has gravity, and gravity is time and time is history and history is story.

Back to the burst bubble—the “back in the day” bubble—we had Teller singing within an oral tradition. The circling narrative is not only safe, it is comforting (and easier to remember). The story teller does not fear the drain—in fact, is not aware of its existence—because the audience stands outside the circle creating a gravitational attraction away from the drain. Isn’t this fun? So, now you can understand what I mean when I say that the essential difference between oral and written traditions of story telling is dark matter. Seriously, I mean the real dark matter created by the real theory—without resort to metaphor or analogy. So, now, we can place the circle and drain back into the earth/sun, spaceship/black hole story. It would be nice if black-hole was one word. If black-hole was one word the parallelism would look better (not to mention the story potential of black-hole/ass-hole) and if black-hole was one word then great-dragon could be one word and if great-dragon was one word then the young Tolkien could say, green great-dragon and he would never had sub-created Middle Earth and Lord of the Rings—still of the night much less hobbits.

Did you see that black drain sucking me down just then? The thing about relativity is that you should have seen it even though I could not. I was the one being pulled out of a safe orbit; I was the one whose center would not hold. But I could not do anything about it until I became you for a moment—you, the reader. What started it this time? Oh, yeah. Stragglers. Both = it. Now, I am back in orbit. Both can be simple and it can be profound. It is the Zen thing to do. The ancient Greek philosophers were simple because they were profound. (It looks like my fingers finally found an easier way to type in italics.) They had peered over the edge of the abyss and decided it looked like a drain. That is where your dualism will take you. Down the drain. Just ask Kurtz. The heart of darkness is a black hole created from the narration of analysis. Of course the black hole was predicted by the theory. If the process of analysis is dividing one thing into parts, the black hole is story-inevitable. The narrated story-->history-->time-->gravity is circling its drain even though the narrator/analyst can not see it. Death by analysis.

That was the simple both: the both of the simple Zen prophet Gump. I do not, of course, refer to the profound Zen prophet Gump. The word-made-flesh both, the folk tale (tale-made-folk) both is the reason the Tolkien virus could not be deleted from the program.

We interrupt this circle by circling back to the Coleridge-Barfield-Tolkien circuit. At this point, I need another short cut and short cuts in narratives perform the same function as a short circuit—with the same side effects. The circuit board is all laid out and performs as it should, then it becomes necessary to connect point C with point N without going through the established D through M circuitry. If we create a straight circuit from C to N we will cross intervening circuitry and disrupt its normal function—unless the “straight” circuit can be made to “jump” over the intervening circuits by leaping into the space above (or below) the circuit board. Is a jump circuit a leap of faith or is it a worm hole created in the space-time continuum? Maybe it’s both.

Oh, God, another narrative circling the drain—and it is God we need at this point—and not just because a belief in God can be a way to stay in orbit. Back to the burst bubble (the space-time narrative bubble), the short cut I need is in the narrative in my mind that connects the Coleridge-Barfield-Tolkien circuit to Lewis. We will adopt that circuit as it is laid out in Humphrey Carpenter’s The Inklings much as we adopted a sense of place from Lake Wobegon. In brief [this brief being that part of the Coleridge-Barfield-Tolkien circuit leading to Lewis’s conversion to Christianity abstracted from The Inklings], the story begins with the Great War between Lewis and Barfield. If you do not know it, go read it. The rest of us will wait. It makes no sense to spend the time needed to construct our own narrative circuit if we can just do what electrons do and jump to an existing circuit. After all, are we men or are we mice? Can we not do what the lowly electron can do? Jump to that circle. I will wait for you to get there.

That is the great thing about the time it takes for an electron to jump to another positional state in the atom. The principle of both at the same time works really well here. The principle of both is ideally suited for wait times and also for observation of the position and direction/momentum of us electrons. The principle of complementarity applies. Besides, waiting is for the birds—but not for humming birds, but not for me. They’re writing songs of love, but not for me.

Teller: If the reader other me has made it this far, it is time for me to confess my love to you. Why do I love you? I grew up as the Teller—a singer/poet working exclusively within an oral tradition. The tales I told belonged to the village. I sang them but the village made them.

BMOC: The Teller may love you, but I don’t.

The song/story of love is not for me—not just yet. The Coleridge-Barfield-Tolkien circuit “saves” the appearance of the real as it is perceived by the human mind by connecting the dots—not by drawing lines between the perceived dot and the corresponding real world dot (physics and bio-chemistry and cognitive psychology try to do that) but by drawing lines between the perceived dot and the corresponding ideal dot. Are we back in the cave? Near enough. Those Greeks, remember, they were simple because they were profound. Does the belief in God make the connection or does the connection make the belief in God? Are we “wired” to believe in God? Are we born or made? Did human consciousness evolve or was it created in the likeness of its Creator? Each of you should write your own book on this point, or find a narrated circle that approximates your own orbit near enough that you can comfortably adopt it, but even that circle will not keep this narrative from the drain. In this narrative, the principle of relativity applies. Whether the spaceship circling the black hole is accelerating around the black hole or traveling in a straight line at a constant speed and direction in space warped by the mass of the black hole, the reality is both at the same time. Whether God created the mind wired to connect the real and the ideal or the mind wired to connect the real and the ideal created God, under the principle of relativity, both narratives are true stories.

If your love of God is a Platonic love, you may share with Plato the lack of a certain epistemological appreciation for poets, for those who make story. The story-makers are either liars or inspired prophets (madmen). If you hold with those who see them as liars, the best you can do is dress them up a bit so they look more presentable and proclaim somewhat paternalistically that the poet breathes lies through silver. Isn’t it pretty to think so? There may be no real truth in the story but it may provide aesthetic pleasure. If you hold with those who see them as inspired madmen, the best you can do is trust their source. If they are God inspired and you believe in God, you will find truth in their stories. But what if they were inspired by the devil? How do you know who is a God-inspired truth-speaker and who is a devil-inspired liar?

This is truth with a capital T. We are not talking about the truth of a story in a historical fact-checking sort of way. When these boys are talking about Truth, they are asking whether we can know for certain that the world exists as we perceive it. One side is a proponent of the “rational” approach to truth-seeking. They may acknowledge that they received aesthetic pleasure from lies breathed through silver, but they do not believe that story-makers offer a reliable path to find objective truth. The Coleridge-Barfield-Tolkien circuit holds that there is truth in beauty and beauty in truth. The story-makers not only provide a path to truth, they provide the path. Though it may sound similar, their circuit is not the same as the God-inspired story-maker. The artistic mind does not show us Truth because it is inspired by God but because it is wired by God. The Bug already plowed this ground, so we can go on with the story.

Carpenter: By the time Lewis had come to believe in God (but not yet in Christ), Barfield had done something for him that would bear fruit later. He had shown Lewis that myth has a central place in the whole of language and literature. Lewis had never underestimated the power of myth. Far from it, for one of his earliest loves had been the Norse myth of the dying god Balder. Barfield had shown him the crucial role that mythology had played in the history of language and literature. But he still did not believe in the myths that delighted him. Beautiful and moving though such stories might be, they were (he said) ultimately untrue. At this point, the scene changes to a tree-lined path along a river. Tolkien, Lewis and Hugo Dyson (another of the Inklings) are taking an after-dinner walk discussing metaphor and myth (like spaceship earth and green grass). Lewis held his ground that, as he (now famously) expressed it to Tolkien, myths are ‘lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver.’

No, said Tolkien. They are not lies.

Just then there was a rush of wind which came so suddenly on the still, warm evening and sent so many leaves pattering down that the three men thought it was raining. They held their breath. When Tolkien resumed, he took his argument from the very thing that they were watching. “You look at trees,” he said, “and call them ‘trees’ and probably you do not think twice about the word.”

Of course, Tolkien thinks at least twice about the word. Here is the great green tree wave towering suddenly over him—again. But this time, it is Lewis telling the story (in a letter to a friend) as though Tolkien had been able to summon a physical manifestation of a personal archetype to dramatize his argument.

If you think twice about words, you will discover that language comes from myth. If you think twice about myth, you will discover that the myth-making mind is either plugged into a myth-making God or a collective myth-making culture that orients human perception. So, myths are not lies. Tolkien continues: the poet who invented the Christian story was God; myth becomes real history. “Do you mean,” asked Lewis, “that the death and resurrection of Christ is the old ‘dying god’ story all over again?” “Yes,” Tolkien answered, “except that here is a real Dying God.” The old myth had become real—a word made flesh—but it still retained the character of myth. Tolkien to Lewis: You admit that you get something from stories [aesthetic ‘Joy’] that you can not get from abstract argument. Could you not transfer that attitude, that appreciation of story, to the life and death of Christ? For, Tolkien said, if God is mythopoeic, man must be mythopathic. From Tolkien’s poem, “Mythopoeia”:
To one who said that myths were lies and therefore worthless, even though ‘breathed through silver’.

You look at trees and label them just so
(for trees are ‘trees’, and growing is ‘to grow’);
….
Yet trees are not ‘trees’, until so named and seen—
…
The heart of man is not compound of lies,
But draws some wisdom from the only Wise,
And still recalls him. Though now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Disgraced though he may be, yet is not dethroned,
And keeps the rags of lordship once he owned,
His world-dominion by creative act:
not his to worship the great Artifact,
man, sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
With elves and goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
And sow the seed of dragons, ‘twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we’re made.

Now, if you are like me, you sense that the end is near and you are prepared for it, perhaps even longing for it. In such circumstances, ordinary readers become speed readers, and we all start looking for short cuts. There is no need to explicate the passage from Tolkien. The preceding essay has already provided the explication—provided that you have been paying sufficient attention and connecting the right dots. You know what to do with it. If you are like me, then you will also have forgotten that this end, if it be the end, must connect the two great themes announced by the unnamed author of the Prologue in Grid: the Tolkien Project and the sci-fi story about a road that takes over the world.
As I developed the bad science fiction idea into a good narrative, the story was drawn into the older material I had developed about Tolkien. I realized that these seemingly disparate things were drawn together because both focus on the nature of a possible future. The middle earth I envision is one in which human beings are connected to the world in a way that would be explained today as technological, but in such a way that it would be impossible to determine whether the world controlled us or we controlled it. There are two paths toward that future: one dark, dominated by struggles for power, in which the mechanism of control would be magical; and one light, fostering quests for enlightenment, in which the mechanism of control would be enchanted, equally present within, inherent in, the “us” and the “it.”

The thing is, though, short cuts make long delays (at least in my world they do). So, we require a short cut to the short cut, and I hope not to end with my motor car drowned in the river—going out not with a bang but a whimper. Grid (the living road) seems totally disconnected from Grid (the narrative). One might have been a decent sci-fi story; the other might have been an interesting lit-crit essay; but they are a mess together.

The thing is, though, Grid is the Word Made Flesh. The most suitable subtitle for the Tolkien Project is the Word Made Flesh—the act of sub-creation validated by connecting the man-subcreator dot to the God-Creator dot: “We make still by the law in which we’re made.” We “make” the world in our image because the process of our human perception gives order (meaning) to the chaos of discrete particles (or vibrating strings) that surrounds us, creating our reality. Since our human perception is “informed” by our language/culture, it is language that makes the world real.

The thing is, though, Grid connects the dots between the ideal and the real by creating the real in the shape of the ideal. Grid is the “process” (for lack of a better word or for the necessity of using one word instead of the dozen that should stand in that place all at once) of making the world real—a particular real—by completely reforming the world in accordance with Grid’s ideal world—i.e., its “program.” The old dualisms dissolve. There is no difference between nature and culture. Grid translates/forms/transforms nature into culture and culture into nature. There is no difference between the real and the ideal. Grid’s “program” is “informed” (in a particular form) by/because of language: it is language. When Grid takes over the world (becomes the world), Grid becomes language made real: the Word Made Flesh. Plato had it right; Grid makes it right. It will be true (and boys will be boys—where is that modal logic symbol when I need it?).


In other words, be careful what you wish for, because you may get it.
In other words, we are (will be) what we read.


Teller: These dots are my gift to you, my gift to the reader I love. Make story. Make a life.


BMOC: OMG! If this thing ends like that I am going to end somebody. I don’t care about all this Tolkien love of language BS. I WOULD like to know if Joe Blow Me was on the right track. He sketched out the technological wizardry well enough, but there was a 1984 thing going on in Teller’s village that no one seems to want to talk about it.

Professor: Since you mention 1984, I am surprised you did not make the connection between “newspeak” and Tolkien’s life-long essay-story on love of language. If evolution has evolved from natural to cultural, and the universe is made of stories, I, for one, am concerned whether our culture’s stories are born or made—and by whom or what.

Jail Bait: I still can’t decide if the Teller’s village is supposed to be good or bad. If we are evolving to that culture in a few thousand years, is Grid like Utopia, New Atlantis, Looking Backward, and Modern Utopia; or is it ant-utopian like Erewhon, Brave New World, or 1984?

Editor: It appears that the posters of the message board staged a coup and have overthrown the Teller, and, since the Author has no talent for staging drama, the players staging the coup are now holding center stage.

dhspgt: Center stage but not the center… the center will not hold.

Teller: Resurrected by another cliché. Once I was lost; now I am found. The center does not hold the universe together—it lost that job at the Big Bang. Surface tension does—the narrative skin of the bubble universe.

Is there more to come?

Jn

edit: sorry, I just realized how rudely that came out.

I can see that all three stories are stories about stories. At an earlier point in the thread there was a fairly long hiatus between posts, and I am wondering it we should wait for more to be posted or if the story may evolve from here as a result of our talking about it?

Too much to take in right now. I'll be back to immerse...

This is so cool.

MariaHobbit: "It would be really cool if this thread ended on page 42. What's the problem with B77? Well, it takes 42 pages to figure it out! [edit:] You know, 42 being the Answer to Life, The Universe & Everything"

dhspgt: "[deleted]"

Posts followed, then page 42 became page 43.

Life had been answered, then the answer got deleted.

dhspgt deleted life to get the answer back, but life followed life. MacBeth was boy scout compared to dhspgt, killing life to preserve answer to life... all the way back to life that started it all on TORC

dhspgt: "Life goes on."

The rest is silence. No more new posts.

But there can more old posts. IS made story run backwards.

IS posted the following on August 8, 2005: "I would like you to consider the loss from the hypothetical deletion of dhspgt's posts from Crispy's ‘Are They Important Films’ written elsewhere."

Jn: "Is there more to come?

dhspgt: “You have rested from your labors. You deserve some fun. Don't give up on the story. It has become complicated… unstuck in time… IS is now writing part of the story… The hypothetical became real but the arrow of time is pointing backwards. No problem in quantum mechanics but these things do not happen in the post BIG BANG universe. Read the post by IS in the ‘To Edit’ thread… Istari discussion… follow the signs backward. The story will be forward.”

Jn: "The Search Function. I used it to discover that all of your posts have been deleted except those in threads that were moved to the History forum where they can no longer be edited. Even your posts in your own Welcome thread are gone. One comment has been left behind wherever you posted in the Business Room thread – ‘life goes on.’ All the edits were done on July 21 and July 22. This date has no particular meaning to me. And no, I cannot decipher it, even having read Idyll's hypothetical in the Business Room."

dhspgt: “If IS had not made his sudden plot twist, there would have been no more old posts. So, keep talking. You will no doubt discover more of the story.”

PM: “What kind of trouble have you got yourself into this time?”

dhspgt: “This time is the trouble.”

PM: “I wanted to pick up our conversation where we left off last time, but we are nowhere to be seen, and I can’t remember much of it. Who am I anyway?”

dhspgt: “You are the PM Faramond told Jynusa to send, and the answer to the question, ‘Just where can you find a good PM when you need one?’”

PM: “So, what are you waiting for?”

dhspgt: “I finally figured out that pages were not the answer to life—posts were. The story is plotted but it has to wait for posts from the posters. MariaHobbit ended it and after her post ended it, IS started it. There are six steps in the middle and six posts from six posters.”

PM: “Why don’t you just do it yourself?”

dhspgt: “I won’t know until I read the posts.”

PM: “You are waiting for the right posts by the right posters at the right time?”

dhspgt: “Time is not relevant. The program has been running for billions of years.”

PM: “Yeah, but I wish someone had kept a record of … “

dhspgt: “There was a quota to fill. Much must be risked. The entire earth was destroyed to make way for this thread.”



Post one! Post all! All posters are cordially invited to a deathday party for dhspgt. Come celebrate the deletion of the deceptively human spigot. Bring the kids!

The posters named on the following list are (politely) requested to dig the burial plot. One unnamed poster will bring the plot twist. [I take my burial plots with a twist of lemon. By the way, Jn, do you thicken your plots with flour or do you use something else?]

The Lidless Eyes
Holbytla
Jynusa
Axordil
Laureanna
Primula Baggins
Iavas Saar
Sassafras
MariaHobbit
Voronwe the Faithful
Faramond
Semprini
IdylleSeethes
Alatar
Bornilon

Please don’t be mad at finding your name on (or off) the list. Those listed above merely share the distinction of having moved the story forward (or backward) at some point in posting.



PM: “You idiot. You did not tell them when the party begins.”

dhspgt: “It has already begun—only a few more shopping days!”

PM: “What if no one reads the invitation?”

dhspgt: “A fine tale that would tell.”

IdylleSeethes: “Somebody needs to explain how this ended up in There and Back Again.”

dhspgt: “Therein lies the tale.”

PM: “That’s all? Come on, you screwed up old faucet. IS never read the deleted posts in this thread. How is he supposed to put it all together?”

dhspgt: “I know it is a lot to ask, but if you are bothering to read this post you need to go back to the beginning of this thread and start over (unless you have already done so or do not care to do so). You have to read the deleted posts first, of course (unless you are moving forward in time or do not care to do so).I am repeating myself and time is of the essence.”

PM: “I thought you said time didn’t matter?”

dhspgt: “Time does matter—it just does not matter whether the arrow points forward or back. The story is all in this thread; there was no other place to post. In the beginning, the story existed and there was to be one word spoken, one post, but there came the unspoken story and the poster other than me made the plot. Jynusa asked a question and the spoken story was posted—all but one final elaboration. Then there was no place to post. I could not find a place to sit, so I made a place where it seemed most appropriate—given the nature of the elaboration. I am waiting for the plot of the unspoken story to unfold, but the unfolding has to come from a poster other than me. That may seem odd, but it is the way story works when it is written backwards. The spoken story has three days and three posts. So let it be written so let it be done. But the unspoken story may remain forever incomplete. There can be no unspoken story without a spoken story. I want the unspoken story to be completed before I die. I really do, but these things are out of my control.”

[dhspgt narrates the disappearance and death of dhspgt in the last post.]

PM: “Wake up, you old ghost. I think you had better do something.”

the ghost: “I may be dead but that does not mean I do not care.

Though I may have started this thread, I claim no ownership interest in it. Moving it becomes part of the story. I liked the fact that this thread is in a forum called, “there and back again.” If you move it, maybe you could move it back again when you are finished with it.

If the posting and re-posting and de-posting by dhspgt provoked thought, then that is a good thing. In life I did not have much success in prompting posts, perhaps I shall fare better in death. However, I am a gentle ghost and I do not want to leave anyone angry—though a good ghost has to make the living feel a bit unsettled. It’s all in a day’s work, so to speak, and to speak so is to do something, after all.

It simply won’t do. My old friend Faramond should be lifting a glass to the memory of the dearly departed, and instead… And Voronwe, there is no anger in baseball. No, I am sorry. There is no crying in baseball, which means there could be crying in this thread. I mean, I did die and all. But, there should be no anger. I have deleted no one but myself—and remember what the ghost said in 'Ghost': the love remains. Or something like that.

It would have been better to leave it to the posters to finish, because I could hear it all start coming together, but I may be able to salvage the gift despite bending the rules.”

PM: “You still speak in riddles. I think it is rude.”

dhspgt: “Very well, I will speak my mind as plainly as I am able and leave it at that. There are, I believe, a few readers/posters on this board who have read a number of my posts. I engaged in something like a conversation with Jynusa in the “Are they important films?” thread on TORC. My first post in that thread was something of a culmination for me because it represented a resting place in the evolution of a certain line of thought regarding Tolkien I had been pursuing for over twenty years. The post was (characteristically) a bit elliptical (how is that for being kind to myself?) and I did not intend to explain myself further. As there were no responses to my post, I left it at that. Then Jn asked me to explain something and sometime later I attempted to do so. The thing I would like to make clear to those few is that the unraveling of my explanation was back to front. The “elaboration” I promised Jn when I stopped posting in that thread was the complex of ideas that started it all for me. It is a thing I call ‘The Grid.’ The Tolkien Project is the centerpiece of it but it is my way of bringing order to chaos by narrating reality.

So, I started this thread in order to give Jn the promised elaboration and to conclude what was becoming, for me, a sometimes enjoyable exercise in telling a story backwards. I came to this forum for several reasons: 1) the nature of the forum allows me to exploit a different set of expectations on the part of the reader, and I was interested in playing with the medium—to stretch the boundaries of narrative art; 2) the nature of time—both inside the story and outside (in the telling of the story) was a critical piece of the puzzle that constitutes ‘The Grid’ (How many readers accept the notion that the Tolkien Project looks to the future?); and 3) I hoped to leave a narrated presence in this place as a small token of affection (It may not seem like much, but you know the old saying, ‘Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.’). I believe the community would/will benefit from having a few empty houses in the neighborhood, incubating the occasional reference to the crazy former occupant who some say can still be heard muttering in the night. (It may be that I am aiming too high.)

As I began weaving the story toward the beginning, the story teller mind that hears the primordial grammar kept picking up bits and pieces of the story outside this thread. The post by MariaHobbit in the ‘problem’ thread occurred at almost precisely the moment I was writing the Chekov dialogue (a piece you all have not heard) which includes a speaking part by Adams. So, while I was putting words in the hitchhiker’s mouth, MariaHobbit noted that the thread was on page 42. I loved it. The story was telling itself and I posted something, but then the posts kept coming and page 42 became page 43. The story had taken a turn I had not expected, and I searched for the connection. I found it in the ‘to edit or not to edit’ thread.

It will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with my posting ‘style’ if I say that my posts tend to be more like a ‘published’ statement than a record of a conversation. That being the case, I had never played with the edit capability. There seems to be some disagreement amongst you all regarding its use that carries a fairly heavy emotional load. I will leave that load to you. What I can say is that, since dhspgt has only a virtual existence, dhspgt has a unique perspective. The word is my flesh. If the post is deleted, I cease to exist. That thought became integrated into the story which was working toward the beginning before the first word was spoken. It became necessary that MariaHobbit’s post should end the story, and that this thread should be dhspgt’s final resting place. To be or not to be—that is the question. If dhspgt can be edited, dhspgt ceases to exist.

The Teller mind is active and creative in the act of reading—it is the ultimate sub-creative art, far more so than the act of writing. What will the reader make of the deleted post? What if the deleted post re-posts and no one reads it? The post stands still. The post exists in the time line, though dhspgt is deleted and no longer exists. Then, dhspgt can move backward in time by re-occupying the empty posts.

The story is better and more important than my telling of it.

The earth was destroyed to make room for an interstellar highway and dhspgt was destroyed to make room for the story.

Then, I simply ran out of gas. I was done. Edited out of existence, but the story went on and woke me up. There were 42 posts at TORC. I did not do that. The story did. Then, Id See (or is it See Id) said in the “to edit” thread “What if dhspgt’s posts in “importance” had been edited or deleted? The story took off again—those posts had been deleted two weeks BEFORE the post using their deletion as a hypothetical illustration of the danger of this editing power, and IS did not know he was telling the story backward.

The posters were telling the story and all I had to do was catch the wave. There really was a pattern to all of this and it was not one of my making. As the man once said to J.R.R., “You don’t think YOU thought all that up yourself, do you?” I should think not.

Once the final signal fire was lit, there was to be an eruption, of sorts (perhaps more like a series of spurts, in my case) concluding with the first post from ‘importance’ restored to its rightful place at the end in this thread.

I intend no ill will toward anyone. In fact, I was trying to do a good deed—in a bizarre sort of way. I did not delete my posts as some sort of protest or attack (or because I do not like the chair you made). If I were to vote, I would vote to delete the edit function because doing so would provide substance to my airy nothingness, but I do not complain and I will happily remain a ghost. However, if you give me the power to erase my life and endlessly rewrite it, do not be angry with me if I use that power.”

Jn: “Then he returned on Sept 3 (I think) and replaced his deleted posts in this thread with a slightly modified version of the original story.”

the ghost: “The STORY has not been modified at all. The posts are substantially different and/or new.”

One question is who reads the thread?

The rest may be silence.

The plot thickens.

Jn

Ok, I'm hooked...

Me too.

By the way, Jn, do you thicken your plots with flour or do you use something else?

dhspgt,

Please forgive me. I did not realize this conversation was going on. I promise to return this weekend and absorb what I can.

By the way, Jn, do you thicken your plots with flour or do you use something else?

Usually flour but sometimes corn starch and during Passover, matzoh meal. It works, believe it or not.

Before leaping into this plot, a small question ... when the Teller intercepted the Enterprise in 2267 C.E., was she travelling toward the past or toward the future?

Order matters.

Jn

Ohh an assignment. A plot assignment to boot.
I'll need to plot the plot I'm gonna plot.