Appendix B.
Ashima Slade And The Harbin-Y Lectures:Some Informal Remarks Toward The Modular Calculus, Part Two
A Critical Fiction for Carol Jacobs & Henry Sussman
Utopias afford consolation: although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold; they open up cities with vast avenues, superbly planted gardens, countries where life is easy, even though the road to them is chimerical. Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy ‘syntax” in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to “hold together.” This is why Utopias permit fables and discourse: they run with the very grain of language and are part of the fundamental fabula; heterotopias ... desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences.
[Concerning Ashima Slade and his Harbin-y Lecture Shadows, first published in Lux University’s philosophy journal Foundation, issue six and the double issue seven/eight.]
Just over a year ago, at Lux on Iapetus, five million people died. To single out one death among that five million as more tragic than another would be monumental presumption.
One of the many, many to die, when gravity and atmosphere shield were stripped away from the city by Earth Intelligence sabotage, was the philosopher and mathematician Ashima Slade.
Lux University, where Slade taught, was unaccountably spared by the Earth saboteurs. A keep and suburb to itself just to the south, with its own gravity controls and plasma shield, the University was able to seal itself off until help could arrive from the surrounding holds and ice-farms, and gravity and atmosphere could be restored once more to the city, which had, in minutes, become a charnelhouse and necropolis.
The University housed thirty-five thousand tutors and students. The war did not leave it undamaged. On the campus, a hundred and eighty-three died. Reports of what occurred there only pale beside the devastation of the city of which it was, officially, a part.
Ashima Slade did not live on campus but, rather, in a spare room at the back of a co-op run by the Sygn, a religious sect practicing silence and chastity, in Lux’s sprawling unlicensed sector. Not a sect member, Slade lived there as the Sygn’s guest. From time to time it was rumored Slade was a Sygn official, priest, or guru.
This is untrue. Various Sygn members had been Slade’s students, but Slade’s co-op residency was simple sectarian generosity toward an eccentric, solitary philosopher during the last dozen years of Slade’s (and the Sygn’s) life.
Once a month Slade visited the University to conduct his Philosophy of Mind seminar Once a week, from his room, he would hold, over a private channel, an hour session whose title was simply its university catalogue number: BPR-57-c. During these sessions, Slade would talk of his current work or, occasionally, do some of it aloud or on the blackboard he kept beside his desk. These sessions were observed in holographic simulation by some three hundred students living in the University or in the city, as well as special attendees registered in the University rotation program These sessions were difficult, tentative, and often—depending on the extent of one’s interest—tedious. There was no question or discussion period. All response was by mail and seldom acknowledged. Yet students claimed them, again and again, to be endlessly illuminating, if not to subject, than in method, if not to method, than in logical style.
The Harbin-Y Lectures were established forty years ago as an annual, honorary series “... to be given by a creative thinker in the conceptual arts or sciences who will present a view of her (or his) field.” Seven years ago, Slade was first invited to give that year’s Harbin-Y Lectures. He declined, saying (a bit overmodestly) that his view of his own field was far too idiosyncratic. Two years later, he was invited again. This time, tentatively, he accepted, on condition he could lecture from his room, by holographic simulation, rather as he conducted BPR-57-c.
Slade’s monthly seminar (which he held in person) had only six attendees. The traditional presentation procedure of the Harbin-Y Lectures is a personal delivery from the stage of the K-Harbin Auditorium to an invited audience of several thousand.
Twenty years ago, Slade had recorded a superb programmed course called The Elements of Reason: An Introduction to Metalogics which is still on store, unre-vised, in the Satellite General Information Computer Network (and is considered the best introduction to Slade’s own, early, ovular work, the two-volume Summa Metalogiae). At ease before any sort of recording or mechanical device, Slade still felt he would be uncomfortable before such a large, live audience.
The academic confusion over Slade’s not overly exceptional request escalated, however, out of all proportion. Slade was an eccentric figure in the University, whose personal rarity on campus had lead to some extraordinary (and extraordinarily idiotic) myths. Many of his colleagues were, frankly, afraid he would simply conduct a BPR-57-c session, completely inaccessible to his audience. No one was sure how to ascertain tactfully if he would discuss his work at the level they felt was called for by the occasion. How all this was finally resolved is not our concern here. But once more Slade did not deliver that year’s Harbin-Y Lectures.
Slade was not invited to give the next year’s lectures; it is said he expressed great relief about this to some of his colleagues with whom he was in correspondence, as well as to his seminar students. The reports, however, of Slade’s work in the Modular Calculus (growing out of his early work in metalogics) had percolated down from the devotees of BPR-57-c, making it inevitable that he be asked again; once more the invitation was extended. Slade consented. This time he discussed the outline of the three lectures he wished to present with the Harbin-Y trustees in a way that lead them to believe the talks would at least approach the comprehensible. A holographic simulation was arranged in the auditorium. The lecture titles were announced:
Some Informal Remarks Toward the Modular Calculus:
1) Shadows
2) Objectives
3) Illuminations
The three lectures were scheduled for the usual evening times. The usual invitations were sent. Thanks to five years confusion, there was a good deal more than the usual curiosity. Many people—far more than might be expected for such an abstruse affair—turned to Slade’s early work, the serious in preparation, the curious for hints of what was to come.
A perusal of any dozen pages from the Summa reveals Slade’s formal philosophical presentation falls into three, widely differing modes. There are the closely reasoned and crystallinely lucid arguments. There are the mathematical sections in which symbols predominate over words; and what words there are, are fairly restricted to: “... therefore we can see that ...”
“... we can take this to stand for ...”
“... from following these injunctions it is evident that ...” and the like. The third mode comprises those sections of richly condensed (if not inpenetrable) metaphor, in language more reminiscent of the religious mystic than the philosopher of logic. For even the informed student, it is debatable which of these last modes, mathematical or metaphorical, is the more daunting.
One of the precepts of Slade’s philosophy, for example, explicit in his early work and implicit in his later, is a belief in the absolute distinction between the expression of “process/relation/operation” on the one hand and the expression of “matter/material/substance” on the other for rational clarity, as established by the contemporary episteme; as well as a belief in their absolute and indeseverable interface, in the real Universe. About this, Slade has remarked: “... This interface will remain indeseverable as long as time is irreversible. Indeed, we can only model the elements on either side separably with those tools—memory, thought, language, art—by which we can also construct models of reversible time.”[3] As one of Slade’s commentators has remarked, in an issue of the Journal of Speculative Studies: “Put this way, it is either understood or it isn’t. Explication here is, really, beside the point.”
3
All quotes attributed to Slade are from the notes of Slade’s current and former students. Statements reported in indirect discourse are from personal reminiscences of both students and Slade’s fellow tutors and—in one instance—from notes on a comment the precise wording of which the writer did not feel she could vouch for, as the notes had been hastily jotted down seventeen years ago. To all who have helped in the preparation of this appendix, the editor extends her grateful thanks.