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.
Some of the younger members of the Sygn (Haaviko had been transferred to another city by the sect) invited Slade to live in the Sygn co-op, an invitation which he accepted, remaining, with their consent, however, apart from their rituals and practices.
Eventually Slade resumed teaching. He seldom left his room, except at night, or on his monthly visit to the University to hold his seminar.
The only people Slade really associated with now were a few of the other elderly eccentrics who gathered in the all-night cafeterias of Lux’s u-1, among whose crabbed and, more often than not, complaining conversations, he would, from time to time, enter a comment. Most of these men and women never knew he was, not a bottom, nonrefusable credit-slotter like themselves, but one of the most respected minds in the Solar System.
Most of them died not knowing—among the five million.
In issues six and seven/eight of Foundation, we published the extant fragment of Shadows, the first of the three Harbin-Y Lectures Ashima Slade was to deliver on the modular calculus—and our subscription order, never particularly large, tripled. This popular (if a jump from five to fifteen thousand can be taken as an emblem of popularity) interest has prompted the commentary in the issue at hand.
A difficulty with Shadows, besides its incompleteness, is that Slade chose to present his ideas not as a continuous argument, but rather as a series of separate, numbered notes, each more or less a complete idea—the whole a galaxy of ideas that interrelate and interilluminate each other, not necessarily in linear form. Consider, however, these three statements from the last dozen notes Slade delivered:
42) There is no entrance to contemporary philosophical thought save at the twin gates of madness and obsession.
45) The problem of the modular calculus, again, is: How can one relational system model another? This breaks down into two questions: (One) What must pass from system-B to system-A for us (system-C) to be able to say that system-A now contains some model of system-B? (Two) Granted the proper passage, what must the internal structure of system-A be for us (or it) to say it contains any model of system-B?
49) There is no class, race, nationality, or sex that it does not help to be only half.
While none of these statements offers much difficulty in itself, it is still reasonable to ask what the three are domg in the same “galaxy.” A sympathetic critic might answer that together they suggest the range of Slade’s concerns. An unsympathetic one could hold that they only suggest; they certainly do not demonstrate; the fragmentary nature of the presentation precludes real profundity; to be significantly meaningful, the concerns should have been presented more deeply and with greater focus: At best, we have only a few, more or less interesting aphorisms. A third critic might simply dismiss many of the notes as examples of Slade’s notorious eccentricity and suggest we concern ourselves only with those notes, if any, that discuss the modular process head-on.
Our purpose in this article, however, is to explicate, not judge. And certainly the three threads from which the collection of remarks are braided, as these three notes suggest, are the psychological, the logical, and the political.
Slade took the title for his first lecture, Shadows, from a nonfiction piece written in the twentieth century by a writer of light, popular fictions; it employed the same galactic presentation and the term “modular calculus” appears (once) in it. There is little resemblance beyond that, however, and it would be a grave mistake to take this older piece as a model for Slade’s. Once Slade paraphrases it, in his note seventeen, “... I distrust separating facts too far from the landscape that produced them ...”; but for Slade the concept of landscape is far more political than it was for the author of the older work. Consider Slade’s thirty-first note: “Our society in the Satellites extends to its Earth and Mars emigrants, at the same time it extends instruction on how to conform, the materials with which to destroy themselves, both psychologically and physically—all under the same labeclass="underline" Freedom. To the extent they will not conform to our ways, there is a subtle swing: the materials of instruction are pulled further away and the materials of destruction are pushed correspondingly closer. Since the ways of instruction and the ways of destruction are not the same, but only subtly and secretly tied by language, we have simply, here, over-determined yet another way for the rest of us to remain oblivious to other peoples’ pain. In a net of tiny worlds like ours, that professes an ideal of the primacy of the subjective reality of all its citizens, this is an appalling political crime. And, in this appalling war, we may well be destroyed for it, if not by it.”