Something I'm writing:


Chimera

chimera - chimaera - a foolish, idle fancy.
[L. chimaera, <Gk. khimaira, she-goat, akin to Gk. kheimon, winter].

MONSTERS, in the language of mythology, were beings of unnatural proportions or parts, usually regarded with terror, as possessing immense strength and ferocity, which they employed for the injury and annoyance of men. Some of them were supposed to combine the members of different animals; such were the Sphinx and Chimaera and to these all the terrible qualities of wild beasts were attributed, together with human sagacity and faculties.

THE CHIMAERA was a fearful monster, breathing fire. The fore part of its body was a compound of the lion and the goat, and the hind part a dragon’s.

- Bulfinch's Mythology, Ch. XVI.


Translator's Note to the Terran Edition:

Not long ago a curious object was recovered from deep space. Its trajectory suggests that the object originated in the vicinity of a small star in the Sirius Supercluster. The star is middle-aged, and is graced with several planets.

The object weighs about 350 grams, and is composed primarily of cellulose. It is formed in a series of flexible rectangular sheets, 20x28x.01cm in size, folded in groups of six along half of their longest dimension, where they are bound together along the 20cm axis, producing a sort of many-leaved, rectangular fan.

Across the surfaces of these sheets of matted cellulose, at right angles to the axis along which they are bound, we find 43 regular rows of marks. The marks themselves are regular: 36 different marks occur in short strings, ranging from one to 28 marks in length, each string separated by a small gap.

As yet no theory of natural origin has survived serious scrutiny.

Fantastic as it might seem, the possibility that this object is the result of intelligent design cannot, therefore, be entirely discounted.

Object or artifact? While public opinion is predictably divided, debate rages among the experts.

This is an account of the author's attempt to find and describe any evidence of intelligent design to be found in the sequences of these marks.

I have transmitted this translation of my analysis for the edification of any, should such creatures actually exist, who might actually use these marks as a means of communication.

In the admittedly unlikely event that a copy of this translation should find its way into the hands of someone who can actually make some kind of sense out of it, the author wishes them well, and hopes to reward their attention with a deeper, broader, and more coherent understanding of what it is that we are actually doing when we use language.

The methods employed in this study may be fruitfully applied to the analysis of many languages, be they spoken, telepathed, or secreted, among the inhabited regions of the Orion Arm.


Dedication

For whom burns the midnight oil? For you, for one. For the author, it's like sluicing down Sliding Rock in springtime when the stream flashes down the chute in an icy sheet and you come hurtling over the ledge and sock wham into the ice-cold pool at the bottom, whoosh.
Sometimes, though, it's more like pulling teeth.

Unh.

And then there are those memorable moments when the limb breaks and you fall clean out of the tree.

Thud.

Gasps, bruises, and dental work have all been rendered under the constant supervision of the reader in the imagination of the author. Running the rapids down this mountainside of data to plunge into this book would have been inconceivable without your constant, if unwitting, participation.

And so it is with the utmost humility, delight, and candor, that the author offers this token of his gratitude for the reader's steadfast support.


Preface

To the cultivator of literary sensibilities, and to the investigator of linguistic intricacies, the author pleads guilt with premeditation for the crimes that he has committed to paper, in the words that are to follow. For what it's worth, he tried. The author has endeavored to contrive a single vehicle to bear a variety of readers to a diversity of destinations, and if the mainsail gets mangled in the tank treads, or if in high winds the pterodactylerons suspending the gondola yaw so precipitously athwart that the fruit bats can no longer navigate, send one bat back, and we'll dispatch a search and rescue team who'll talk you down to where you can resume tracking the bear, on foot.

Don't worry if none of this makes much sense right now. The vehicle is self propelled, and if from time to time it seems to wander off the track, strap yourself in, and trust the bats to find the way.

So let us pray, prostrate, and perambulate, as we prepare to peregrinate.

The author has shepherded this wild herd of words through a mighty wilderness of sin and pain, and prays they will bear the reader without mishap through canyon and crevasse . Still, even if their alphabetical meanderings are reflected in the Jeweled Net of Indra, hitched to a magic carpet and led down the Yellow Brick Road to the gates of the Emerald City by Pythagoras, Tinkerbell, and Yogi Berra, this monstrous throng that has kept half the county up into the wee hours through the frenzied corralling of, may ultimately fail to bear anyone, anywhere.

Avalokitesvara* hums, twinkling in her tiara, as the author opens the gate.

Neighbors dive for cover.

Some rare collections of words reveal the majesty of language in all her beauty, magnificence, and power.

This is not one of them.

The prospect of luring the reader away from other, more profound pursuits, like, say, Thucydides, has dissuaded the author from becoming one, until now.

Desperation and madness have driven him to this.

What this is, is a sort of linguistic fashion show, where we model a little of language's lingerie.

Flattening it out to the thickness of a sheet of paper does strange things to a language. Not to mention what it does to what we do with it, or what it does with us. Reducing the number of dimensions in the channel of communication generates certain paradoxes in the translation of the transmission.

Certain very useful paradoxes.

For this moment is, in fact, two. As these words appear in the author's mind, they also appear in yours. Right here, right now, the two of us meet in a strangely timeless place. It's an odd form of communion, arising out of our mutual willingness to engage each other in this way. As our fingers tap the keys, our fingers turn the pages. The keyboard is the rudder, the paper is the sail. We set out for lands yet undiscovered, across a sea of meaning, the Great Semantic Ocean. So lay in provisions, say goodbye to your loved ones, and let us

Cast Off

Pursuing our relationship this way, instead of face to face, live and in person, takes a special effort, and grants us special powers. Powers to consider, gossip, evaluate, speculate, and revise our interpretations and consequent responses, which amounts to inventing new ideas.

HOW DO YOU SPELL POWER?

WITH THE ALPHABET.

Think about it.

See what I mean?

Amazing.

Isn't it?

Why are we not shocked into silence by the audacity of the whole idea of using words, in the first place? How does it happen that we perform this miracle without even blinking, much less reveling in amazement at the feat?

WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?

Concentrating our attention on teasing meanings from these marks builds bridges that span the gaps that lie between us in space and time. Ironically, when we erase time and space, we also become more independent. More free. I write down whatever comes into my head, and you read whatever you want. I take a break to contemplate, you answer the door. And in a strange, timeless way that I don't pretend to understand, as I encounter these words for the first time, you do, too. This moment of discovery is one that we both share. You miss out on all the things that I experience along the way to encountering these words, like the wind blowing in the trees, and all the words that came and went before bearing these. I miss out on all the things that you've experienced along the way to meeting them, too. So in this sense, we're both in the same boat. For as long as we care to ship together.

What seems like temporal teleportation from our immediate perspective is actually only virtual temporal teleportation. It is achieved and maintained only within certain strict constraints. The circular paradoxes encountered in the event of actual time travel do not arise, since the reader can see, but cannot touch, while the author can touch, but cannot see.

Temporal teleportation by dimensional compression is achieved by precluding precognition in one direction, and by tying history's hands, in the other.

So we both give up something, in order to be here, together.

Seasoned explorers of these waters, 'distributional analysts', 'computational linguists', and 'corpus linguists', are wandering these seas without the wherewithall to navigate them. These intrepid linguistinauts do not suffer from any deficiency of subtlety or sophistication among the instruments that they devise, but they have yet to form a concept of the realm that enables them to find their way.

Every languageographic expedition that's returned so far has failed to find this ocean's limit. Some think it might be infinite. Others who set out to find one, have yet to find an edge.
No knotted line is long enough to span it. No mountain high enough to see across it.

Some think that even though it's limitless, it may not have an edge. If this world of ours is round, and if space itself is curved, then maybe the latitudes and longitudes of language bend around some as yet undiscovered dimensions, too.

The tack the author takes starts from a different understanding of where we stand in the universe from the one he absorbed as a child, and proceeds perpendicularly, from there. Are we sandwiched between heaven above and hell below, or are we pinned to the surface of a big wet rock, twirling as it spins around a nearby star?

Or are we somewhere else, entirely?

The author is searching for an answer. A means by which to navigate this Great Semantic Ocean.

Curiosity, as it turns out, proves to be a manifestation of the only truly irresistible force in the entire universe, the only force that in the end, is capable of moving even the most immovable object, which clearly, must be apathy.

Are these ideas that seem so clearly revolutionary to the author, to others, already anachronistic? Is he really, in his heart of hearts, just an unreconstructed structuralist?

Or just plain crazy?


Foreword

This is a preliminary investigation into the phenomenon of human language.

If the commonsensical ideas that we share about what it is that we are doing when we use language are correct, then those of us who are led to question these ideas, insofar as we actually discover the truth, will discover that the rest of us who already thought that we knew what we were doing when we use language, were right all along.

Sigh.

The author started losing his grip on common sense many lunacies ago.

It's hard to pinpoint just when he lost it, completely.

Actually it all started with Socrates. The authority that Socrates led the author to question, is the authority of his language, over his mind.

Whether these common sense ideas broke down because the author abused them, or because they never actually worked very well in the first place, is anything but academic, but impossible for him to determine without your help.

And so, out of the aboriginal collision of the author's immovably jaundiced view of his own intellectual powers, and the irresistible temptation to find out, once and for all, just where he went wrong, the words that are to come, follow.

These selfsame words that the author is at this very moment groping to arrange in the order that they were meant to be, these very words that the reader is somehow simultaneously, yet consequently, groping to find a reason for, drizzle, fall, and sometimes pour in cataracts across the page, and out of the inundation, ideas grow.

Might this particular concatenation constitute a kind of insertion mutation in our conceptual genome, a particular permutation that might promote the transformation of the metabolism of our thought-processes?

Whatever is about to happen, it would seem, is entirely up to us.

Is it possible for us to discover something new? Can two people who have never met, discover something, together?

If so, how? With words that we both already know?

How?

By arranging them in some special way?

How?

Does our desire to learn something new have anything to do with whether or not we actually do? How does it happen that we learn something new, when we're hoping to? What about when we're not expecting to? Do our hopes and fears, our expectations and predispositions, play some role in what we learn?

a.) If they play no part at all, then we have no worries. Life, sometimes, can be painful. Getting stubbed is just part of being a toe. Get used to it.

b.) If, perversely, hoping to discover something new actually eliminates any chance of actually doing so, then the only hope there is, is for those who don't have any. Our first mistake is trying to learn from our mistakes. We lose our balance when we look down, and we whack our throbbing toes, yet again.

c.) If, conversely, hoping to discover something can somehow engender its objective, how might those of us who hope to, do so?

As the author inundates, let the reader demystify.

I did not invent these words, nor did I contrive their arrangement. How these words wound up appearing here is a complete mystery to me. I decide to write, the words come out of nowhere. I learned to do this from other people, kind people, a whole forestful of people who have been caring for me and looking out for me, for my whole life.

This may go some way to explaining what drives these digits to such dervish frenzy. I want to thank you. I want to thank you, and these words wind up landing here.

But if gratitude is the thing that these digits are turning into characters, gratitude in no wise explains HOW these words decide to arrange themselves in the order that they do. Words come, I spell them. It's like collecting laundry in a windstorm, or catching fish in a whirlpool. All of these words are blowing and wriggling around, and I spin around in a lot of confusion, trying to catch them. Why these,words, in this order?

Why these words, and not others, in this order, and not another, and where they all come from, to begin with, and where they all go, afterwards, I have no idea. Maybe these words arise from the same nothingness into which they consequently vanish. Maybe it doesn't make any sense to think of these words as arising from anything at all, even nothingness, but are really just transient, illusory features of an ever-changing present as it inexplicably elides into something else.

All I know is, before these words appeared and eventually settled into the order that we now find them, others arose and vanished, many others, and a whole lot more others, never even occurred to me at all. Where did these words come from, in the first place? And of all of the words blowing around in this windstorm, swimming around in this whirlpool, why are these the ones that have wound up getting caught?

While I can't seem to come to grips with where they're all coming from, once they land here, it's another story. Now we've got something to work with. Now we've got some data to sink our analytical teeth into. Mysticism gives birth to logic.

If we really understood the results of whatever it is that tempts us to try using language in the first place, if we understood the things that we actually say, it might help us understand how we wind up saying them. Maybe we could reverse-engineer the process by analyzing its products.

An adequate description of the products of linguistic creativity might shed some light on the process that creates them. Maybe this is how we could define 'adequacy' in the first place. Before Copernicus, several dozen generations of good Christians imprinted their offspring with the belief that the sun went around the earth. Jesuit astronomers refined the geocentric cosmology of Ptolemy for hundreds of years to predict the motions of the planets through the heavens with ever greater accuracy. Was Ptolemy's ancient method of predicting planetary motions 'adequate'? A large body of evidence supported its predictions. But other evidence, that did not, seemed irrelevant at the time. So how do we select what evidence is relevant, and what evidence, is not? Do comets, and eclipses, count?

It depends on whether the evidence supports our theory, or not.

If, just for the sake of argument, we decide to question whether our understanding of what it is that we are doing when we use language is correct, then we might consider reevaluating our notions of adequacy. What evidence might a better theory more adequately describe? What aspects of language lie outside of our common sense ideas of adequacy that we use to circumscribe the aspects of language that we consider to be relevant to our understanding of it?

Grammatical comets? Semantic eclipses?

Some of the ideas that have been blowing through this salty brain tend to drift a bit from the course of common sense. If in fact the author's dinghy has truly lost its bearings, then the delusional state that buoys his boat is a truly wondrous, immeasurably immense, daedal chimera.

Something is extracting these words from this brain in this particular order.

Is it really magic, or just a clever trick?

-------------------

End of Foreword.

If anybody's interested, I'll post the first chapter next.