'Rien n'est plus
fecond, tous les mathematiciens le savent...'
'English!'
'Yaah!
No more of your endless bloody Racine!'
'That’s
not Racine’ Obi intervened, ‘still, the boys are right. So, I’m sorry
Celeste, as Chair, I'm obliged to ask-
could we please have that in English? '
'Ra
Ra Rasputin,' David chanted drunkenly, 'Lover of the Russian Queen, C'mon baby
do your thaaang.'
Celeste
fumed and muttered but surrendered her paper to the hieromonk with surprising
good grace. Indeed, she was being uncharacteristically well behaved. No doubt,
she thought her paper would blow everybody else's out of the water.
'Let me see. Yes. The quotation is from Andre
Weil. He writes- 'Nothing is more fecund, as all mathematicians know, than
these obscure analogies, these troublous reflections of two theories in each
other, this reciprocal blurriness which is inexplicable save as the smudge
marks left by furtive kisses, fugitive caresses, detecting which the Researcher
will taste no higher pleasure because- when daylight dawns & the phantoms
of his obsession dissolve, when
Conjecture incarnates as Certitude- then, at that very same moment, those twin theories, revealing their common
source- desert him by vanishing together.
‘As is taught by the Bhagvad Gita, we reach
Knowledge and Indifference at the very same time. Metaphysics has turned into
mathematics, making itself the marble of a sculpted treatise whose cold beauty
can no longer move us.'
'Okay,' said Richard, 'I get it. What Celeste
is saying is that Descartes only introduced Geometry to Algebra so as to get up
a three-way for fruity, future, French Mathematicians, but then- and this is
what Andre Weil finds out- if Froggy will a wooing go, it turns out all Love
but is Lust for a pair of for long sundered, latently Sapphic, twins who, so
piquantly discovered to each other, promptly run off together to pleasure only
themselves in perpetuity- which, truth
be told, is a picture actually kind of yucky- so, all we are left with is this
sepulchral pornography which is utterly Ancient Greek in that it turns out the
pin-up you've been beating your meat to is actually a bikini shot of your own
...'
'Not Algebra,' Babu said, 'Arithmetic. What the Weil conjecture is about is far more
mind-blowing. He's saying ordinary Arithmetic-nothing more complicated than
fractions- inputs into Diophantine equations you don't need High School Maths
to understand- yet is deeply connected to algebraic topology.
‘But, to generalize from Weil is to miss the
really prodigal aspect of Diophantus's genius- his rigorous eschewal of general
methods- each one of his equations requires the use of a special techniques
that won’t work for even its most closely related problem- which is perhaps
what Celeste is getting at when she equates, his pupil, Hypatia's defence of
her virginity- by the display of her menstrual rags- with 'the Paraclete's
monstrance & Plato's remonstrance'.
‘I
don’t dispute the importance of Weil’s conjecture- but its modish or seductive
glamour for intellectuals, its impact on Structuralist Anthropology &
Semiotics and so on, seems utterly
mischievous- after all, if Celeste is right, Hypatia, was killed by the
Alexandrian mob, not because she was a Platonist- Neo-Platonism had already
been assimilated to Judaeo-Christianity- but because she lectured on Diophantus
and demonstrated a range of different heuristic devices, astrolables and
orreries and other such apparently magical objects, each of which was highly
efficacious in a highly specific context but useless in every other. Thus,
Diophantus should be taken as showing how much can be achieved without the zero, the negative, the
irrational, the imaginary, and this- by itself- delivers a salutary rebuke to the System builders, the
Generalizers, the totalizing Theorists-
who had actually invented those concepts in the first place- but, for that very
reason, jealously prevented their being used in any useful way.
‘But, if I accept this part of Celeste's
argument, regarding Hypatia, then I am obliged to take issue with the use
Celeste is making of Weil’s Gita and Grothendieck’s Yoga. Indeed, even according to the Brahmins' own
hermeneutics, in so far as the Gita, or the Yoga Sutras, or anything else,
confirms things already believed or known, that meaning does not exist in them.
The confirmation is actually a de-confirmation. Hermeneutics has a heuristic
which says, if we already know the meaning then that isn't the meaning. No apoorvata obtains- nothing novel is
here- the chain of causation has not been affected- the action of reading could
have been omitted for all the good it did.’
‘Now, clearly, Weil's conjecture does have 'apoorvata' with respect to the
Diophantine equations, clearly it does
open up new vistas for his own subject. But only because of the very domain specific way in which it
is framed. Yet, Structuralism ignores this domain specificity and claims Weil's
Bourbaki as legitimating its model. I
say this not as an expert on Structuralism, but because that is what I read on
the very first page of Jean Piaget's
slim little volume on the subject. But, and this is the crux of my
objection, Weil's conjecture has no apoorvata
outside a highly specific Research
Program confined to Mathematics alone. Thus it can't have the meaning that
Celeste is claiming for it. Why? How so? The fact is, Godel had already
shown that each higher level axiom in Set Theory entails the solution
of certain Diophantine problems which had been undecidable from the previous
axiom set. Godel, via Tarski, is the
landmark figure for us who are outside Maths or on its fringes. What is the
corollary?
'Think of axioms as being rules- indefeasible
rules like moral absolutes, deontic absolutes, rules about your duty- things
like 'Thou shall not kill' and so on- then, what happens is that, the attempt
to unify domain specific theories on the basis of greater and greater
generality yields something which is the opposite of useful, the opposite of a
utility belt of heuristic tools- what we get is an infinite rule set, an
infinite deontics, a cancerous meta-metaphoricity.
'That’s the danger with having rules in the
first place. They are supposed to make things simpler because they are few and
facts are many. But, what happens when you propose a rule?- even something as
obvious as 'don't play with your own faeces'- the bad news is you are already
on a slippery slope to- 'don't touch the person who carries away your faeces'-
then- 'consider as Untouchable all people even vaguely related, or who perform
a function vaguely similar, to guys who carry away shit'- till finally you end
up with patently absurd stuff like 'Your mother becomes Untouchable to you
during the hour when Saturn is in your paternal ancestor's Lunar House but
ceases to be so if the wind is blowing from the west and the Stock Market is
down.
'Ultimately, the High Caste man hurriedly
bolts down his flavourless food alone and naked- like a furtive animal.
Everybody and everything, including his own clothes, have become untouchable
and inauspicious to him by the metastasis of meta-metaphoricity. '
'But, Babu,' Obi warned, 'That is precisely
the point Celeste made when she invoked, the scholar vagabond, Solomon Maimon,
as opposed to Moses Mendelsohn, as the true tutelary spirit of what she calls '
the lumpen Ashkenazi Aufklarung which
equated the Talmudic delight in the creation of more and more rules, its
thymotic meta-metaphoricity, with the unbridled 'Golden Liberties' of the
Polish aristocracy, so ruinous to their country, yet which, much more than
Marx, granted a relative freedom from both heteronomy and humanism to what
would become Europe's new revolutionary class par excellence.'
'Really? Was that what she was doing? Well,
forgive me if I want to spare my people the holocaust visited upon the lumpen Polish Jew- revolutionary or
otherwise. Celeste's Maimon is a Mathematical Spinoza, au fond. But, that unlucky conjunction is itself a Shoah. Why? You
are tacking metaphysical univocity to a skeptical critique of dualism- whether
dialethic, like that of Maimonides, or cognitive, like that of Kant. What's the
upshot? Reason can still release from bondage- but only under the seal of
vagabondage- the malamati dervish,
the kapalika yogi and now the drug
addled hippie pimping his College educated girlfriend in the name of Universal
Love.
'And this is the new Indology, the new
Orientalism. Sex, drugs & rock & roll- as if that last, the
confiscatory orchestration of the clinking of the fetters of the oppressed,
wasn't already that undying Diophantine Dionysios which renders a class
proletarian- child bearing- serving the community only by, even breadlessly,
breeding and unpermitted the possibility of becoming, by the Logos or Love's
leaven, either Eucharist or better bred.
'This is the other side of the Structuralist
turn in Antropology. When Dr. Ambedkar- the Liberator of us Untouchables-
studied Anthropology at Columbia, it was still possible for that ad hoc or
incipient Science or Monadology to serve a useful purpose. It provided the
right stepping stone to things like Constitutional Law and Monetary Economics,
which our Boddhisattva Ambdekar proceeded to master, but master only for our
benefit. These are the practical tools by which millennia of oppression can be
shattered. Anthropology, from being the servant of the Colonizer, the
Imperialist, could have gone on to become the liberator of the slave class, the
mender of broken men. Instead, what
happened? You have Levi Strauss- the notion that there is some sort of
Universal Mind which structures all things outside Time. The appeal of
Structuralism, for Anthropology, is that it unites, on the basis of greater
generality, ad hoc theories based on observations of particular places at
specific times. But, the effect has been the opposite of Liberative, at least
in India.
Sanskrit has a special place- a safe place,
thanks to Nietzche's praise of the pitiless persecution of the Chandala- for
Saussure and Structuralism but only because it is so patently synthetic,
atemporal, and artificial. Thus, though
this same 'Sanskritization' equates the organic and the natural with dirt,
death and pollution- it has been willy nilly valorized as the 'natural' or
'canonical' method for our people, the people it stigmatizes as Untouchable, to
advance forward.
'We must give up eating meat, drinking wine,
worshipping God under vernacular, as opposed to Syndicate Hinduism's
Sankritized, names and...and what? Will we be any better off? No. We will still
have to carry night soil on our heads, except not just night soil, now we have
to carry all that fucking Sankritized shit as well!'
'Andre Weil, like his sister Simone, learned
Sanskrit as a kid. He read the Bhagvad Gita in the original. That's why he came
to India. But, in India, seeing the reality of Untouchability- worse even than
the treatment meted out to the ghetto Jews- what did Weil do? He aligned with
Gandhi, the last of the 'Mahatmas' to champion the Caste system.
'Not that Gandhi was particularly Casteist
himself. It was just that he was part of the nativist, lawyerly, reaction to
the advent of impersonal British Law. Thus, there was a Temple road in Kerala which
anybody could use because it was a public highway. Some High Caste lawyers go
to Court and, simply to advertise their cleverness, have it declared a private
road. Untouchables- but only Hindu Untouchables, not Muslims or Christian
Untouchables- were now forbidden to use it. Gandhi goes to Kerala and holds a
debate with the priests. He is defeated. They prove that they are only doing
their duty- as is prescribed in some ancient text- they have no personal animus
against Untouchables, nor do they deny the Spiritual greatness of the Saints
from that Community. Indeed, they point out, since the Untouchable can continue
to use the road simply by changing his Religion, there is no element of
coercion. The whole thing is merely a voluntary observance of a ritual, and
therefore a meaningless, hoary old
practice. Now the priests were not
saying that they were obliged to uphold Untouchability under all circumstances.
They were only saying they did so because no inducement or sanction obtained for them to do otherwise.
If the Law was changed declaring the road, or the Temple itself, a public
space, then they would not stick their necks out to fight it. But, Gandhi did not believe in Laws and
Courts- precisely because of their eschewal of meta-metaphoricity, their
commitment to positivism- so he could not take the path that was being offered
to him. Nor could he endorse Untouchables converting to Christianity or Islam-
Untouchables, for him, had less sense than cows. Instead, this cancerous,
seemingly voluntarist, type of Casteism becomes attractive to him. He affects
his final apotheosis- making himself the ultimate object of Gabriel Tarde's law
of imitation- by calling himself an Untouchable 'Bhangi' and therefore univocal
with the Supreme Deity of the Brahmins- Lord Siva who laves the soul's
impurities at the Creation ground.
'Fine, you may say, if he had stopped it
there. He didn't. In 1932, the second year of Weil's stay in India, Gandhi
blackmails Ambedkar, by going on a fast. Why? The British- who had given
Universal suffrage and Representative Government to Ceylon the previous year-
they could do so because Ceylon's native elites were still loyal enough to
accept the British provision of highly effective protection for minorities
across the board- the British were seeking to move thing forward in the same
way in India, though Universal Suffrage remained a far off dream, and part of
their project meant protecting the Untouchable minority by granting them
separate electorates. Gandhi- who had at first cooperated with Ambedkar,
believing him to be a Brahmin- now used his 'non-violent' weapon of the
fast-to-death against him. Ambedkar had to yield. His people would have been
massacred in every village in India if Gandhi's health suffered during his
hunger-strike. Ultimately, with mixed electorates, but reserved seats, only
Uncle Toms would be elected- until, that is, the Untouchables evolved a
gangster class that might pose a sufficiently compelling countervailing threat.
'Weil was in India while all this was
happening. Yet, he chose to accept Gandhi's interpretation of the Gita, even
though he had just seen it used to perpetuate caste hierarchy in the name of
non-violence. Why? Well, I suppose, because Gandhi's approach appeared to unite
disparate theories, the prescriptions of different religions, on the basis of
greater generality. But, according to
this more general theory, what does the Gita say? It says- do your duty- follow
the profession of your caste-but do so without relish or hope of reward. Don't
do another's duty even if you are better at it or will relish it more because
that would be a sort of Violence- and Violence is always wrong.
'Weil
took this lesson to heart. He was a mathematician not a soldier so he felt no
obligation to hurry back to France and enlist once War was declared. But, this
just put his own life in more immediate danger. Ultimately, he was incarcerated
as a deserter. Yet, the truth is, for Mathematics to survive, for Weil's
conjecture to have yielded fruit, Hitler had to be defeated. In fact,
Mathematics played a big role in the defeat of Hitler. Turing with his Enigma
machine, Von Neumann on the mathematics
of shaped charges at Los Alamos- indeed, when Oppenheimer quotes the Gita- 'I have
become Death, the devourer of Worlds'- it is noteworthy to recall that, in the
Mahabharata, the Just King has to learn Probability theory and a sort of
autistic savant, Diophantine or discrete, maths before gaining the necessary
auctoritas to press the button
triggering the Kurukshetra holocaust.
'Interestingly, the other lesson Yuddishtra,
the incarnation of Justice, has to learn- this happens just before his
instruction in Game Theory- is that the so-called Sages and Anchorites are
actually spiritually lower, not higher, than the low caste 'Vyadha'- the
butcher or meat vendor- who worships his own parents as his Gods and lives
extremely well without giving a thought to the strictures of Kings and priests.
'But
Weil wasn't interested in the egalitarian Gita of the enlightened butcher. He
preferred instead the slavish doctrine of the Bhagvad Gita- which makes the
dispassionate Butchery of men a moral absolute and which seeks to unite all the
different ontological and epistemological and soteriological traditions of
India into one seamless Casteist strait-jacket. A joyless strait-jacket- as
Weil points out. Why bother reaching for Knowledge if you reach Indifference at
the same time? Weil's erotic subtext gives the game away. Essentially, the
project is either masturbatory or meretricious. To climax, in this context, is
to feel indifference, if not disgust, for the object that excited your lust.
The reverse is the case with ordinary sexual intercourse, based on mutuality
and reciprocity, because it intensifies
pair bonding, diffuses an exponential tenderness, and widens the circle of
affection and responsibility, familial, social and oecumenic.
'In
contrast, to assimilate sex to masturbation is, I suppose, to have united two
projects on the basis of greater generality. But, it is also to disable Love as
something that might shape Evolution, bring about Change, and thus abide with
us for aye as a source-spring of Joy, of Hope, of Liberation.'
'Babu, I
appreciate what you're saying,' Obi said, 'more especially as it arises out of
the terrible suffering of your people, but, as an Anthropologist myself, I am
obliged to observe that you are completely misunderstanding not just Celeste's
paper but also Levi Strauss's Structuralism.
He is certainly not legitimating your Indian caste system by asserting
its correspondence to some deep Structure embedded in a Platonic 'Universal
Mind'- indeed, just as he rejected a unification of Totemism with his theory of
bride exchange precisely because women really do have babies while men don't
actually produce more totemic animals for the hunt by their couvade- that is false pregnancy- rituals, so too would he utterly reject
Untouchability as abjectly delusional and working only by a purely verbal, metonymic or meta-metaphoric, illocutionary
force. '
'Non,'
said Celeste, ' ma chère Obi, you are unjust. Babu has understood. You have
not. It is, the Criminologist, Gabriel Tarde's monadology, not the Mandarin, Durkheim's, functionalism, which is
important for understanding Zadig. Tarde believed Cartesian dualism- the hiatus
between matter and mind-was resolvable in a gregarious Monadology, escaping the
prison, the frustrated geometry, the concurrency deadlock, of an intractable
and Bourgeois relationism, by a vulgar joy at mimicking the substantivism of
Newton's hooligan God. These words- Structuralism, Functionalism,
Structural-Functionalism- these are totems, nothing more. And Academic
Anthropology, publishing its papers, is the
couvade ritual which brings to birth more and more totemic animals for
other clans to hunt.'
'You're
saying...'
'NO!
I am NOT saying. This is not my paper. That is why I am giving it.'
'Good
to know', said Richard,' If it isn't yours, it might mean something. Read on
McDuff!'
'Yeah,'
said David, 'but just the sexy bits.'
'David!'
Obi frowned.
'No,
is okay,' said Celeste, 'Give me the paper. Here- this is for you- if you
didn't like the bit about the virgin Hypatia then perhaps you'll like this-
'A young
Egyptian, having become hopelessly infatuated with the courtesan, Thonis, made
a contract for her services for an extortionate sum of money. That very
night, however, she appeared so vividly to him, in a dream, that his lust for
her was utterly sated.
'When he failed to keep their
tryst, Thonis took him to court demanding the cash due her under their
contract. The judge, Bocchoris, ordered the Egyptian to bring in the
money, and to hold it aside while Thonis was allowed only to grasp at its
shadow -- the thing imagined being a shadow of the reality.'
'Lamia, the flute player, the
greatest hetaira of her day, protested this injustice to a colleague. Though
the dream-Thonis had indeed sated the young Egyptian passion for her, the
shadow of his silver had rather kindled than set free the courtesan from her
desire for commerce with it.'
Consider this as a metaphor for Zadig's
mimetic monadology. Behind the hiatus between the real and the rational
numbers- between what is and what Minds conceive- there is this eager grasping
after shadows upon which Mathematics, like Judge Bocchoris, must pronounce
Judgment, but pronounce Judgment only so Justice becomes the shadow for all
whoring to pursue.
Aliki has described Zadig's 'tâtonner of the axioms' as being like a set of cannibal
mountaineers, consuming those of their
comrades who are a drag in the task at hand, and climbing the cliff faces of
the different Diophantine escarpments, only to piously commemorate those they
had ingested by being randomly possessed by their angry shades.
Aliki's metaphor captures a lot
about how Zadig's goal is to be achieved. I want to think about what it means
for it to exist at all. Let me read on
'Suppose contracts for sexual services are legal and
conscionable so Thonis can sue for damages. Surely the court has to grant
substitute specific performance- i.e. the payment of the agreed on sum,
less, perhaps, Thonis's 'transfer earnings'- i.e. her regular tariff for
walk-in trade- so as to make both parties as well off as if the contract went
ahead?
Is there a counter-argument? What if the
defendant's lawyer maintains that Thonis performed some action such that her
phantom appeared to his client and satisfied his desire so that she herself was
not put to trouble? In that case, it is the phantom who should be rewarded and,
it may be, the shadow of the silver suffices to do so. This argument holds
because Thonis has 'unclean hands'. She has done something in bad faith so as
to make the contract unequal in that the other party would no longer have a
desire for specific performance on her part, should she have decided to renege.
Thonis, of course, would maintain that she has no
control over to whom or to what purpose she appears in dreams. She has not
studied dream magic- quod nescis quo modo fiat, non facis- she didn't know how the thing could be
done so she did not do it. Her hands are clean, she acted in good faith.
Judge Bocchoris has rewarded her shadow with shadow wealth- and perhaps this is
shadow Justice- but what of her own claim?
The defendant's lawyer might argue that his client
had not in fact entered a contract, but, being indifferent as between the
phantasm of Thonis, and the actual Thonis, merely advertised the offer of an
unilateral contract to both while stipulating what consideration would pass to
the latter if she was the first to slake his lust. Thus, the
courtesan should be disallowed substitute specific performance- which is
damages- because otherwise something which is not, in essence, a bilateral
contract is treated as being so.
Thonis has a counter-argument in that, even if the
contract is not a contract, nevertheless, by participating in it she performed
a service in return for a promise of payment and thus has an action in Assumpsit or under an implied contract. What
is the price of the service? Clearly, it is the price stipulated in the
contract, even if that contract isn't a contract simply because the defendant
did not stipulate for any other sum as consideration for Thonis's entering into
this contract-that-is-not-a-contract.
Judge Bocchoris, now, has a chance to put forward an
argument touching upon the nature of Justice. He can say that the moment
Thonis brought a suit for damages under a implicit contract for a service- viz.
the service of entering into a contract-that-is-not-a contract- her failure to
specify that this was the case meant that he, himself, as Judge, was released
from the duty of judging of that issue and only had a duty to provide a show of
enforcing Justice with respect to a mere show or appearance of a contract. But,
since no contract becomes Justiciable, being of itself permanently either
unripe or moot (i.e. no party suffers injury save by some supervenient,
multiply realizable, mental act of their own), it therefore follows that such
Justice as is invoked by any Contractarian theory is but a meretricious phantom
or wet-dream.'
'I actually quite like
that!' said David suddenly sober, 'Your Judge Bocchoris was a Straussian! Did
you really write that? I mean that's Hilary Putnam's supervenience and multiple
realizability and then the substitute specific performance thing and so on-
it's Anglo-American is what it is- so you're telling the truth this isn't your
paper.. so... what are you saying... you are Thonis, the courtesan or ...Jeez,
I'm drunk again.'
'I did write it. I wrote
it just for you. There's something in my paper for each one of you. That's why
it's not my paper. I'm not speaking.
Don't you get it? This is Zadig's Seminar. His Silence is only meaningful while
we speak. We have to become silent to let him
speak us.'
'So if we say nothing, he will speak?'
'No. His silence will speak ours.'
'Okay,
now I'm definitely drunk again' said David.
'Wharrabou' me, Pet?' said Barney- who'd given up on
being a bisexual, David Bowie, Space Pirate in favour of a lugubrious, shoulder
padded, Roxy Music, New Romantic, persona- 'got any Smarties left over for yer
lover-boy me ole china plate?'
------------------x------------------
'Barney was a
spy! Typical American perfidy!'
'It's your own fault ' David said, 'it was
your paper planted the idea in his head. Byzantine General's & Theodora's
orifices! Way to go, Celeste! '
'But, I told you- it was not my paper, I was
not speaking!'
'Yes, that's why he listened.' Richard said,
'Though, for the life of me, I can't figure what it was about the Byzantine
Generals theorem which gave him the billion dollar idea he mentions in his
note. Frankly, if I could see any way to make money off it, I'd have left too.
As it is, I have to stick with this bloody Seminar or give back my grant to the
British Academy. Fucking Barney! Really, really, selfish of him to slope off to
make money for himself. I mean, whatever this great idea is- it emerged out of
our discussions- I mean, we should have a share in it. We really ought to sue
that twat. I've an Uncle who is a barrister in Swansea. Maybe, we should give
him a call.'
'Wouldn't do much good.' David said. 'His Dad
is a top patent attorney. Which actually isn't saying much because the Ninth
Circuit, which covers California, isn't patent friendly- at least when it comes
to algorithms or Software though that might be a different story if this mooted
CAFC gets off the ground. Still, for the nonce, the fact that his Dad's surname
is Needledick- Bastard means that he
gets a lot of co-licensing work. The nerds in Silicon valley recognize that
they need a Bastard for a lawyer but are more comfortable with a Needledick-Bastard
for when the time comes for them to be shafted themselves.'
'That's his actual name?'
'No,
it was done by deed poll as a condition of his divorce from Barney's Mum- she's
the second best divorce lawyer in Southern California.'
'The second best Divorce lawyer, you say? I
suppose that explains her surname-
Slacktwatted-Whore.'
'No.
Why do you ask? She simply reverted to her maiden name- a fine Old
Money, New Mexican one at that- but did lose custody of Barney and had to pay
alimony on a scale which let her husband take his practice global. The truth
is, Barney has had a pretty rotten time because of the divorce. I guess that's
why he wanted to turn into a Rock Star so badly. Actually, Richard, if only
you'd got him that role in the rock-opera you had Babu work on- what was it,
Oscar Wilde and Lily Langtry?- he'd still be here. And we need him. I've been
reading the fine print on my offer from the Corven Institute. There is a rule
that this Seminar terminates if less than ten people attend two consecutive
sessions. What that means is, I risk getting no academic credit for this through
no fault of my own.'
'Shit! In that case, me and Moyra might have
to return our Grant money to the British Academy!'
'Yeah. Look, we're all totally screwed unless we
make some systematic arrangement to rope in alternative delegates to keep up the
quorum. As far as I can make out, the only condition is that they have to be
less than 21 years of age. There doesn't seem to be much of a lower limit.
That's why, when Obi brought along her twins, Zadig let the Session go ahead.
But now they have had to go into hiding, we're really up against it. I mean the
fact that Zadig still isn't saying anything means that a lot of us just aren't that motivated to
show up. Not that I blame Li Xi- her Embassy work takes priority-and obviously,
we've got to respect the fact that Shahrukh is on a roll at the Chess Olympiad
up at Oxford. Still, it's a bit of bad
luck that Mohammed is stuck down at Ascot seeing about his Uncle's Derby
winner. What I don't get is why Moyra had to rush down there to make sure the
horse is getting organic oats and not chowing down on Fried Chicken or
something equally unvegan. But it isn't
just Moyra, now there's the problem with Aliki- her love life is out of
control- we can't depend on her... Honestly, this whole thing is turning into a
farce. Say what you like, at least Barney was a regular.'
'There
might be a way round this.' Rasputin spoke up.
'How?'.
'Well,
I think this Seminar is set up like a Minyan- the Jewish congregation. Wherever
ten are gathered then an extra two- the Shekinah, the Divine Presence, and the
Torah, the Law- also appear so that the number is 12 for the 12 tribes of
Israel. The Rabbis establish that ten is sufficient for the quorum because the
ten spies- who give discouraging reports
about the Land of Canaan thus incurring the wrath of the Lord- are
described as a Minyan. Now, clearly, we here don't make up a Minyan. Only David
is fully Jewish and, in any case, women, normally, wouldn't count. Furthermore,
where is the Torah? And if there is no Torah, why should the Shekinah descend
upon us? It may be, if Celeste is right, that there is an apophatic Torah in
Zadig's Silence and that attracts the Shekinah. But, this permits an additional
possibility. You see, according to the Kabbalah, after puberty a second, higher,
type of soul is infused and there is a possibility of a third soul being added
as one approaches the age of 21. The soul of a male zadik, a Jewish Sage, can
enter a woman's body. In fact a female zadik could also do this if a woman has
the nefesh, the soul, of a homosexual
man and this needs to be cancelled. So
long as the ibbur is of male Jewish Sages, or for the purpose of cancelling
homosexual nefesh in a woman, the
defect of a person being female or non Jewish is remedied. In that sense this
Seminar could indeed be a Minyan. But,
bear in mind, this is Zadig's Minyan. If Aliki is right, his mimetic monadology
works backwards from the optimal outcome in a manner that crams competing
ditopologies into Concurrency dynamics.
'What all this boils down to is that five people under the age of 21 can, if ibbur is ongoing, count as ten souls. In fact, even two people under twenty one,
along with two children under puberty, could exceed the quorum because the
children have two empty slots- one for the ruah and one for the higher type of
soul known as neshama.
'I think that's what happened when Obi
brought the twins- -being under the age of puberty, they had only the nafesh, the basic soul, but not the
higher type of soul called ruah or
spirit. You see, I've been keeping track of our numbers and carefully observing
Zadig to test my theory. I think he halts a session when he thinks the quorum
is broken. But, it isn't just a matter of 'bums on seats' to employ Richard's phrase- it's something spiritual. If a third
soul is descending on us- if the talk takes a spiritual turn- the number goes
up. But, when a profane turn is taken- the number can go below the Minyan and
so he gets to his feet and dismisses the Session. What I'm trying to say is
that we have to do two things- get in surrogates to make up the physical Minyan
but also pay attention to the spiritual side of things, the serious side of
things. We must permit this ibbur-
this entry of a third soul, the soul of a sage- into ourselves. We must be
hospitable to the Shekinah and seek to respond to the Wordless Torah.'
'That may be,' Obi said, 'But, if we
ourselves are to benefit from this Seminar- I don't mean benefit in any purely
personal or selfish way- then our own interaction is important. As Celeste has
shown, Zadig knew Gabriel Tarde's inter-personal Monadology. Recall the
Byzantine Generals theorem. So long as the number of spies is less than one
third of the whole, we have fault tolerance. This means there must be at least
three of us, plus one innocent, involved in any productive deliberation of our
own because the truth is none of us came
here with unmixed motives, none of us have clean hands, so none of us knows
whether, in this context, we are spies or not.'
'One more thing,' Rasputin said, 'The ten
spies formed a Minyan because they hadn't acted in concert. If even two of us
act in concert, the Shekinah withdraws. The result could be disastrous.'
