Some commentators have expended great energy and ingenuity to show that all the work of these, and several other artists and (particularly) biologists, associated over the years with the Circle, revolved around the parameters of Slade’s philosophy—so that Slade might be considered the Circle’s center. If none has completely succeeded, one hindrance to their proof is the complexity of Slade’s work. Also, Slade’s thought for this time is only available through her students’ report. The only thing Slade herself published in these years was her translation, from the twentieth-century American “... into this Magyar-Cantonese dialect, with its foggy distinctions between the genitive and the associative, personally or politically enforced, which serves us for language in the Satellites, on Mars, as well as over eighty percent of Earth ...” (translator’s introduction) of Susanne K. Langer’s Mind. Her students through this period were allowed to make notes and were encouraged to “... construct alternate models from these ideas as widely deviant as possible.’* But her talks could not be recorded, as Slade considered her BPR-57-c sessions then “... merely sketches, full of inaccuracies ...” which makes assessment of her actual ideas rather difficult—until the corpus of notes, rescued from that small, back, basement room two weeks after the war, is made available.
Other commentators, less successfully, have tried to show that all the work of the principle Circle members, including Slade’s, hinges on the mystic precepts of the Sygn. As anyone knows who has read in the Circle’s history, that history is intimately connected with the Sygn’s: Barbara and Otuola were both members of the sect during their adolescence, only to break with it (in Barbara’s case peacefully, in Otuola’s rather violently) in their twenties. Barbara’s first book, Relearning the Language, deals fairly directly with his religious struggles during his speechless youth. And the Sect of Silent Singers, who figure so prominently in the action of EridanVs fifth, seventh, and seventeenth acts, is a fairly direct, if unflattering, portrayal. Slade’s final residence at the Sygn co-operative is only another example, among the myriads possible to cite. The difficulty of proof here, however, is the difficulty in learning more than superficial fragments of the Sygn dogma. Those who emerged from the sect, even those highly critical such as Otuola, were fairly respectful of its mysteries: the sect renounces speech, writing, all publicity, and sex. This makes ascertaining its fundamental tenets during these years only slightly more difficult than ascertaining the letter of Slade’s philosophy.
The most probable verdict is, probably, the most conservative: a great deal of personal, social, and spiritual interplay occurred between members of the Circle and members (and exmembers) of the Sygn. But it is what these men and women brought to it, rather than what they took from it, that ultimately makes the Circle the fascinating moment in the intellectual life of the Satellite Federation that it is.
Slade was fifty-four. Summa Metalogiae was two dozen years in the past. The triumphant opening of Eridard (which to many represents the peak of Circle creativity) was two years by. Only three months before, Corinda’s eighth collection of poems, Printed Circuits, had occasioned her receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature, making her not only the youngest person so awarded (she was then thirty-six), but also the first person born on a moon to be so honored by Earth’s Swedish Academy. (Many felt, with justification, that the award was really being given, in retrospect, for her magnificent Eridani libretto, written four years before. Even so, many took the award as a beacon whose light might hopefully banish some of the shadows which, day by day, were darkening relations between Earth and the Satellite Federation.) In the thirteenth paramonth of the second yearg, Ashima Slade, Gene Trimbell (then twenty-four), Ron Barbara (twenty-nine), with two men who had recently broken with the Sygn, Sven Holdanks (nineteen) and Pedar Haaviko (fifty-eight), decided to form a family commune. Otuola was, apparently, invited to join. For various reasons, however, she refused.
The commune lasted three months.
Exactly what happened during that time is not known and probably never will be—unless it is on record in some Government Information Retention Bank, available only to the participants. Its obviously painful character, however, is probably one reason biographies of all the survivors are not in General Information and are “withheld on request.” Because some of the members are still alive, speculation must be fairly circumspect.
At the end of the three months, at ten o’clock at night, the building near the center of the Lux u-1, housing the commune’s sixteen rooms, went up in flames, gutted by a furious chemical fire. Holdanks, the commune’s youngest member, had committed suicide the same afternoon in a music practice room on the University campus, hanging himself with piano wire. A day later, Ms Trimbell was admitted to a rest clinic for extreme distress (hallucinations, exhaustion, and hysteria) where she remained several months. Ron Barbara simply disappeared: his whereabouts only became known three years ago when, in quick succession, five slim volumes of poems {Syntax I, Syntax II, Rime, Themos, and Syntax III) appeared from a small, experimental publishing house in Bellona, where he has apparently been living for some while, having emigrated there after wandering for nearly a decade about the ice of four moons. The poems are abstruse, nearly incomprehensible, contain more mathematical symbols than words, and are in vast discord with his earlier, extremely lucid, direct and, essentially, verbal style that brought both popularity and critical approbation to such Barbara works as Katalysis and Ice/Flows. The new poems are the more frustrating because they contain (so people associated with the Circle have claimed) many references to the events of those three months. On the day of the commune’s breakup, Haaviko rejoined the Sygn and sank into its secret and silent rituals.
On the morning after the holocaust, Slade was found, unconscious, in an alley two units from the house, blinded, severely lacerated, and otherwise maimed—most of the injuries, apparently, self-inflicted. Sometime during the three-month interim, she had again become a man.
Slade was taken to a clinic, from which he emerged two months later, frail, blind, white-haired, prematurely aged, a round, two-inch silver photoplate set off-center above his scarred eye-sockets, which he now used to “see” with. (The photoplate was set off-center because Slade did not want to block his “third eye”, or pineal gland, an eccentricity easily complied with by the visual clinicians—another thing that has led some critics to suspect Slade’s connection with the Sygn to be greater than it was: the Sygn set heavy store by this traditional site of cosmic awareness. Slade himself, however, once said this decision was more in the nature of “Pascal’s wager,” which, on another occasion, when discussing Pascal [and not himself at all] he referred to as “... the archetype of moral irresponsibility to the self.” Whatever occurred in those three months, we can only assume that it shook Slade on every level a human being can be shaken. Slade left the clinic presumably cured, but many of his friends, who would occasionally meet him, walking barefoot, in his shabby, gray cloak, through the alleys of the Lux u-1, avoiding the main thoroughfares because they made him uncomfortable, felt he was not entirely responsible, especially during these first weeks.