Stinctual Stirrings
Author: musickmorley0814
Crossword: It’s Perfectly Unambiguous
Nathaniel Sandalow-Ash is the co-founder of the defunct, New York Times crossword review blog “Saturdays Stump Us”. The puzzle below can be printed out from this webpage, or played interactively here. Answers are linked below the puzzle. Mouse is offering an $11.99 reward to whoever can solve this puzzle first.
Justice Under God Volume 2
Dedicated to the memory of Clancy Taylor, who wrote all the dick jokes in this issue.
Museum in the Basement of the Swimming Pool
Last summer, I spent three months working at a hotel, tucked away in a valley in Northwest Iceland. My father was born in Southern Iceland, and until then I had only known my connection to Iceland through a name, a passport, and a language.
On the drive to the valley with my aunt and grandmother I was told that the hotel had once been a boarding school. Upon my arrival, I found out that I would be one of the last people to work there; it was set to close for good at the end of August. So, the hotel that once was a boarding school, would soon be known as once having been a hotel. I tried not to think too much of its end during my beginning.
I worked at the front desk. I greeted families, solo travelers, couples who mostly spent their night at the hotel on their way North or further West. The valley had nothing spectacular about it, it was not a place to see waterfalls, glacier lagoons, or geysers. “Is there anything to do around here?” guests would sometimes ask me after their breakfast as they stared, confused by maps displayed on the desk separating us, expecting me to have all the answers. There was a small town 20 minutes south, and another 40 minutes north, and there is a natural hot spring a few meters away, I explained forgivingly. I was also often asked how high the mountains were, their names, and other questions I barely knew the answers to.
I started taking notes in a small notebook of visuals and people, to capture the fleeting days. I thought of myself as an archivist of Summer 2019 at Hótel Edda, Laugar í Sælingsdal. I kept in mind Sophie Calle, who began her artistic career photographing strangers’ belongings when she was working as a maid in a hotel in Venice.
I wrote down my daily tasks and observations as a list, imagining them as photographs:
-I pushed flies out of the window, folded napkins, served beers to 5 Americans
-The driver takes a smoke break, the sheep make a family
-Someone has their entire credit card memorized and she recites it to me
-The lingering smells of perfumes in rooms
After two weeks of working, I discovered a museum in the basement of the swimming pool across from the hotel. There were flyers in the lobby that I hadn’t paid attention to until I met Kendra. She was writing a book on Icelandic museums and had booked one night at the hotel as she traveled back to Reykjavik from the many museums she had researched, such as the Museum of Witchcraft and the Museum of Sea Monsters. I met Kendra and her friend for breakfast, and then we walked around the hotel. Beyond the entrance of the swimming pool and down the stairs we descended into the museum dedicated to the people of this valley.
In Iceland, local museums called Byggðasafn are time capsules of specific locations. Every town has histories and stories recorded and archived. In general, almost everything in Iceland is in a book and has a name: old ships, mountains, farms, houses. Too many to fit on every map. Too many to remember. Óteljandi is a word that signifies when there is too much of something, it translates to “uncountable.” I have heard the word used for scattered islands on the shore, but I imagine there are also hundreds of objects scattered around the museum, uncountable.
The museum we descended into was crowded but cozy. The woman who greeted us (the owner and collector of all these items) introduced herself. Valdís had long grey hair, which she pulled back into a braid. She wore a traditional lopapeysa (a wool sweater), which I can assume was knitted by herself or someone in her family. She later explained that she was the daughter of a sheep farmer, and so I imagined she maybe knew the sheep from which the wool came from, and even their names.
The museum opened in 1977 and existed before the hotel was a hotel, when it was still a boarding school. Valdís did not always own it, but she seems perfectly suited for being the story teller and speaker for these objects.
She shows us several objects, narrating the history of the ones she finds most exciting. She pulls up a stick and makes us guess its purpose. A thick branch that has been scraped of its trunk skin to reveal the light wood underneath. I notice that its texture is similar to sea glass, the way it’s been softened by water, and that’s when she reveals it was a stick used to stir laundry. She smiles as if savoring the secret knowledge of the stick’s utility. Clothes used to be cleaned in large buckets of boiling water and stirred with wooden sticks, long before washing machines. She thinks if an archaeologist were to find this, they might ignore it, not see its value.
The museum is separated into themes. The laundry stick sits surrounded by other wooden items from the 18th and 19th century. There are taxidermied birds scattered around the museum. A corner for technology, where I find a phonebook from the 1960s. Kitchen objects, sewing and traditional clothing, precious stones, and an entire corner of the museum is dedicated to the remains of a church. It is even set up to mimic entering a church; there is a bell hanging from the ceiling, there is an altar and bibles on chairs. There is even a giant cross, made from two large sticks and painted white. There is also a long turquoise church bench from the 13th century. According to Valdís, it was used not too long ago as a seat in a kitchen. She points to rust on one side, explaining that it was placed near a sink and the water created dents and rust. It had not yet been seen as belonging in a museum. One family had it in their home for decades before realizing its age, its value.
There was also a headstone used to commemorate a horse’s passing, a horse who had drowned in a pond during the winter of 1906. The farmer had placed an enormous rock on a hilltop to commemorate his beloved horse, but it eventually rolled down and cracked in half. Too heavy to be placed anywhere else, it sits on a table in the kitchen part of the museum, to the right of the entrance. I read the Icelandic, “Here lies a horse,” but I could only vaguely decipher the rest of the sentence carved into the stone, picking out the words “drowned” and the name Ólafur Pálmason, the farmer who owned the horse.
Valdís is a collector of the everyday, and her museum is a collection of the mundane, the used, the never polished or conserved or repainted to appear new. She is proud to share that every object has a small story attached to it, which other museum collectors might not be interested in. These objects are, to her, the most beautiful. There are marks and scratches that make them unlike any other. You can narrate something from them, and maybe explain and understand the past.
The hotel is a museum in its own way. The halls filled with class photographs, from the 1940s until the 90s. I enjoyed walking back and forth to examine the hairstyle trends. Beehives, curls, bobs, and mullets. I was confronted, one night, with the complaints of a guest who saw the hotel as “old fashioned and uninviting.” Other mornings, I was delighted to give keys to rooms for old women who whispered to me that they had gone to school here, pointing to their photos in the yearbooks, remembering the exact rooms that had once been their dorms.
One evening, as I was closing up the front desk, Valdís emerged from her basement museum and invited me on a “storytelling walk,” hosted by her and many other locals interested in the stories and histories of the valley. She drove me in her car, it was 50 minutes north, near the beginning of the Westfjords.
I use the word “story” loosely. The Icelandic saga, related to the English “say” and “saw” (as in “old saw,”) means both stories and histories, the real and the fictional, the factual and the mythical.
The winds were strong. I was shivering in my jean jacket. Valdís offered me my pick from the pile of knitted hats in the back of her car, spreading them out like a card dealer. They were all in the same shape, so it wasn’t much of a choice. We walked towards a church with matching knitted pom-pom hats. Mine grey, hers blue.
Inside the church, 39 of us listened to the storyteller of the afternoon. I could hear and feel the wooden structure creaking from the wind. The chandelier above us shivered. I was not fully listening to the story since my attention was turned towards the unstable structure of the church. I could slightly make sense of one story, a man who was hiking and stumbled upon a steep hill amid flat land named Tungustapi.When he climbed to the top, there stood a door he had not previously seen. He opened it onto a mysterious wedding, characteristic in Icelandic folklore of an encounter in the realm of elves.The hill was visible from my hotel room, and sometimes I was tempted to walk towards it in the hopes of an elf party.
After the elf story, we walked outside to the remains of a house. We saw stone outlines, recognizing where doors and walls once existed, as well as a bathtub. One woman knew the names of all flowers and plants. Everyone asked her for more while pointing to the various purples and the yellows sticking out of the archaeological remains.
All wind-swept and tired, we had coffee and cookies inside the church. I ask Valdís about what will happen once the hotel is sold. She’s optimistic about the future of her museum but we barely talk about it anymore. Her objects hold precious life and I am worried about their future.
I start thinking back to the museum in the basement, and what specifically defines a museum. Is it the stories that make the objects have value, or the objects themselves which create the museum? What are the limits of calling a room full of objects a museum or something else, such as these story walks? I start to see them as ephemeral museums themselves, fleeting and floating. Valdís never allowed me to record her speaking, but I accept what my memory holds and what it has lost.
The room I slept in for two months had once been occupied by various strangers going to school, from the 1940s until the 1990s. I, in turn, watched tourists come and go from July until August. I hope whoever owns the building next, the boarding-school-turned-hotel at Laugar í Sælingsdal, will remember its stories.
Attention, 1948, Gelatin Silver Print
I love this picture. I love the sense that this woman has stolen a moment for herself, carved it for herself out of the well-mapped and ill-considered humdrum routine with which the world compensates her effort and her presence. She has paused, shifted her focus, and made this instant irreversibly her own with the power of her attention.
This comforts me. It comforts me on her behalf and comforts me for myself. I am comforted to see that done, if that is what’s being done here, because it reminds me that I can do it myself—that one’s attention can reshape one’s relation to what’s there. It can change what one is connected to and how. That this can be up to her, up to me, up to anyone. There is a power there, and it’s a power I feel I’ve also invoked by looking with attention at a picture of someone looking with attention at a picture.
But this is not the only power one can find in this photo. By and large I find that readings of an image like this, of a working Black woman in the late 40’s “stealing” a glance at “high art,” take a more politicized, historical approach. This woman is a black service worker in 1948: her life is likely to have been one of daily injustice and banal dehumanization in which she might never see the inside of the MoMA or any other such institution if she wasn’t there, cleaning, after hours. It’s possible that Henle intended this image to highlight the disparities rampant in the situation it portrays, from the colonial artificiality of the figural relief on its blank wall to the stark contrast of idealized, headless nudes limning a breathing and looking woman.
I see these things, but I come away nonetheless with the conviction that I should see the person in the picture first as a person whose life may have been hard but who may have been able to see something beautiful in a way that no-one else did. I hope she looked forward to her job, just like I hope the people who clean the MoMA these days do.
But I’m often reluctant to offer up this kind of interpretation. When I have, I’ve found myself shot down as naively or even disingenuously refusing to see whatever’s on the table as an opportunity for systemic critique. What seems to me to be an intuitively respectful and empathetic appraisal is taken to be not merely useless but destructive, a distraction from the “real” significance of an image, event, or other object of interpretation. I understand the practical toothlessness of “hoping someone looks forward to their job.” But the more I talk with people who see a totalizing, systemic analysis as the only truth-bearing way to relate to the particulars of experience, especially our experiences of other people, the more I realize that such analysis not only rejects but erases personal, consciously limited (one might say “subjunctive”) understandings of the people involved.
Understandings like these are not a call to action. They are a call to ongoing attention. A call to attention that gives one a power over oneself and one’s relation to the world that this woman in the MoMA could very well be (and I hope was) employing in the very moment that picture was taken.
Simone Weil describes attention as a focused presence-with-something, devoid of preconditions, an emptying-out of the self (kenosis, really) to receive the other without presuming anything about the understanding I may receive of it, and in a manner that cannot act, because to act while accepting would be coercive. This is a sort of perfectly ‘unmixed’ attention—one that simply waits, however actively, upon revelation. It seems like the opposite of an attention that defines the particulars before it according to a canon of historical patterns. My visceral objection is to the latter, but am I not doing the same sort of thing by looking at this picture of a woman looking at a picture and hoping for her? If hope itself is not a conclusion, as I would argue, then what conclusions does it rely on?
My tentative answer is that in attending to this picture I have accepted—have concluded—that this is a picture of a person. In the same way that I can look at this photograph of her, she was also looking at a sculpture, a sort of picture, when this photograph was taken in 1948. In the same way that I can attend to something with enjoyment, she could. And I hope that she made, of that moment’s looking, something good for herself—that her attention was her own, her understanding her own, and her enjoyment her own. My regard for her can be subjunctive, both epistemically humble in a manner echoing Weil and confident in its hope that she enjoys attending to her world, because she is a being that can and should. Taking her to be this kind of being makes room in my understanding, not room in the total way Weil makes room, but room for something, room shaped a certain way because a person is involved, but which I cannot map or fill in on my own. In my understanding of the woman in the picture, I have to stop there, because she faces away from me and I do not know her, do not know the fullness she could bring to the room I have made in my attention for her. It hangs as hope. My hope for her is the result of attention that presumes exactly and only one thing: her humanity.
This kind of attention always invites fulfillment in further attention, further holding-open of space for its object to fulfill with the reality of itself. I would say this goes on forever, that we are always holding space in our understanding and that the things we attend to are always unfolding into that space. And a continual holding-open does not imply that nothing is formed there, only that understanding gained begets more room to be made, more hope that what will fill it is the best thing that could. Such attention can eventually inform a call to action, but not with the same immediacy as attention that reduces its object to a symbol in (and of) a system, evoking the mechanism of that system and how it can be manipulated.
In the months that followed George Floyd’s murder last summer, I remember noticing that no-one talked about the fact that he was a Christian. There are videos where he, himself, tells us what he thinks Black people in America need—Black men in particular. But what he thought and said about the very issues he became central to isn’t talked about. In the midst of the media storm about his death and its significance, I had to dig to find anything about him and his life that wasn’t already drastically reframed.
I’m not trying to bury the lede here: I’m saying that this conflict of attentions has been present for a long time and still is, maybe even moreso. Attention to a person as a symbol is a different kind of attention than the one I’ve advocated above: attention to them as a person that requires this deliberate making-room. I would say it’s a less complete, less honest type of attention, one that degrades its regard for its object but leads to a more actionable, constructive relation to that object precisely because it can be presumptive, can act at the same time as looking. But it is not making-room, it is making-fit. Can we value both kinds of attention? Shouldn’t we? Is attention that’s been streamlined, degraded by the necessities of history, valuable on its own terms or only towards some end? Is attention that actively attends and waits to be fulfilled always retrograde to actionable understanding? Do these questions solely frame an unfortunate tradeoff wherein the necessity justifies the degradation, or is there another way to see it? Am I wrong to want to preserve and laud attention for the sake of its object alone, especially when that object is another person? Am I wrong to look at this picture and, first and foremost, hope this woman looked forward to her job each night?
A Sereníssima República
First published in Papéis Avulsos (1882). Translated from the version in Obra Completa (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Aguilar, 1994, vol. 2) by Cecília Resende Santos.
The MOST Serene Republic
(A conference by the canon Vargas)
Gentlemen,
Before communicating to you a discovery, which I believe to be of some distinction to our country, let me express my gratitude for the readiness with which you have responded to my call. I know that a higher interest has brought you here, but I do not ignore either—and it would be ungrateful to ignore it—that a bit of personal sympathy is mixed with your legitimate scientific curiosity. I hope I can measure up to both.
My discovery is not recent; it is from the end of the year 1876. I did not make it public then—and, if it wasn’t for the Globe, interesting daily of this city, I still would not divulge it today—for a reason that your spirit will readily understand. This work I came to tell you about still lacks some last touches, verifications, and supplemental experiments. But the Globe broke the news that an English intellectual discovered the phonetic language of insects, and mentioned the study conducted with flies. I wrote to Europe right away and await an answer anxiously. If it is a fact, however, that a foreigner’s name is glorified for the feat of air travel, an invention of Father Bartolomeu, while our peer’s name is barely remembered by his fellow countrymen, I decided to avoid the fate of the notable Flyer and come to this tribune to announce loud and clear, in the face of the universe, that long before that sage, and outside the British islands, a humble naturalist made an identical discovery, and made of it something superior.
Gentlemen, I will astonish you, as I would have astonished Aristotle, if I had asked him: Do you believe it is possible to give spiders a social regime? Aristotle would have answered in the negative, along with all of you, because it is impossible to believe that we could ever succeed in socially organizing this skittish arthropod, solitary, inclined only to work, and hardly to love. Very well, this impossibility I have achieved myself.
I hear laughter, amidst whispers of curiosity. Gentlemen, you must overcome your prejudices. The spider seems inferior to you precisely because you don’t know it. You love the dog, you praise the cat and the chicken, and you don’t realize that the spider doesn’t jump or bark like a dog, it doesn’t meow like a cat, it doesn’t cackle like a hen, it doesn’t buzz or bite like a mosquito, nor does it steal our blood and our sleep like the flea. All these animals are the consummate model of idleness and parasitism. The same ant, so highly praised for certain good qualities, attacks our sugar and our farms, and builds up its property by stealing from others. The spider, gentlemen, does not afflict or defraud us; it catches flies, our enemies; it spins, weaves, works, and dies. Is there any better example of patience, of order, of predictability, of respect, and of humanity? With respect to its talents, there’s no two ways about it. From Pliny to Darwin, naturalists from across the world converge in admiration of this little critter, whose marvelous web your maid’s unconscious broom destroys in less than a minute. I would repeat again these propositions, if I had time; the matter, however, exceeds its due term, and I am obliged to abridge it. I have them here, not all, but almost; I have among them this excellent dissertation by Büchner, who so subtly studied the psychic life of animals. In citing Darwin and Büchner, I of course pay due respect to these two first-class intellectuals, without in any way absolving (and my tog announces it) the gratuitous and erroneous theories of materialism.
Yes, gentlemen, I have discovered a species of arachnid that possesses the faculty of speech; I have collected a few, and then several of these new arthropods, and I organized them socially. The first specimen of this wonderful spider appeared on December 15, 1876. It was so vast, so colorful, with a crimson back and diagonal blue stripes, so quick in its movements, and sometimes so joyful that it captivated my attention entirely. The next day, three more arrived, and the four of them took possession of a corner of my ranch. I studied them at length; I found them admirable. Nothing, however, compared to my bafflement upon discovering the arachnid tongue; a language, gentlemen, nothing less than a rich and varied language, with a syntactic structure, verbs, conjugations, declinations, Latin cases, and onomatopoeic forms, a language for which I am writing a grammar for the use of academia, as I have done summarily for my own use. And I have done so, it must be remarked, by surmounting the harshest difficulties with extraordinary patience. Twenty times I lost heart; but the love of science gave me strength to finish a job that, I can declare today, could not be done twice in a single man’s lifetime.
I will save for another opportunity the technical description of my arachnid, and the analysis of the language. The objective of this conference is, as I said, to safeguard the rights of Brazilian science, by means of a timely protestation; and, having done that, to tell you how I believe my work to be superior to the English intellectual’s. I must demonstrate it, and I call your attention to this point.
Within a month I had twenty spiders with me; the next month, fifty-five; in March 1877 I had four hundred and ninety. Two forces were particularly important in the enterprise of congregating them: the use of their language, as soon as I had a sufficient grasp of it, and the feeling of terror I infused in them. My stature, the garment reaching to the heels, the use of the same language, made them believe that I was the god of spiders, and since then they have adored me. And regard the benefit of this illusion. As I watched them with much attention and thoroughness, jotting down in a book my observations, they concluded that the book was a record of their sins, and became even stauncher in the exercise of virtue. The flute was also a great aid. As you know, or should know, they are crazy for music.
It wasn’t enough to associate them, however; it was necessary to give them a legitimate government. I hesitated in the choice; many of the current systems seemed good, some excellent, but all had against themselves the fact of existing. I will explain. An active form of government becomes exposed to comparisons that may diminish it. It was necessary to either find a new model, or restore an abandoned one. Naturally I adopted the second endeavor, and nothing seemed better to me than a republic, in the fashion of Venice, the same mold, even the same epithet. Obsolete, with no analogy, in its general shape, to any living government, it had the additional advantage of a complicated mechanism,– which would put to the test the political aptitudes of the new society.
Another reason determined my choice. Among the different electoral modes of ancient Venice, there was that of the bag and balls, the initiation of the sons of nobility to public service. They would place balls with the names of the candidates in a bag, and every year pull out a certain number, and from there on those elected would become fit for public careers. This system will make the doctors of suffrage laugh; but not me. It excludes the follies of passion, the maladroitness of ineptitude, the congress of corruption and greed. But this was not the only reason why I accepted this system; being this people so skilled in the spinning of its webs, the use of the electoral bag was of easy adoption, almost a native plant.
The proposition was accepted. The Most Serene Republic seemed to them a magnificent title; soaring, expansive, apt to ennoble the popular oeuvre.
I will not say, gentlemen, that this work has reached perfection, nor that it will reach it any time soon. My pupils are not Campanella’s Sun citizens or Morus’s Utopians; they form a recent people that cannot simply skip ahead to the pinnacle of secular nations. Nor is time a worker who would give to another his file or his pickaxe; he will do more and better than theories can do on paper, valid there and lacking in practice. What I can tell you is that, the uncertainties of the age notwithstanding, they march on, possessing a few virtues which I presume essential for the longevity of a State. One of them, as I said, is perseverance, a long patience of Penelope, as I am about to show you.
Effectively, as soon as they understood that the electoral act was the basis of public life, they made sure to exercise it with the greatest care. The fabrication of the bag was a national effort. It was a bag measuring five inches in length and three inches in width, woven with the finest threads; a thick and solid work. Ten principal dames were acclaimed to assemble it, and they received the title of mothers of the republic, in addition to other privileges and positions. It was a masterpiece, I can assure you. The electoral process is simple. The balls receive the names of candidates who demonstrate certain conditions, written by a public officer, denominated “of inscriptions”. On the day of the election, the balls are placed in the bag and taken out by the officer of extractions, until the number of electees is reached. This, which was simply an initiation process in ancient Venice, serves here to fulfill all positions.
Elections were first done very regularly; but, soon after, one of the legislators declared that the process had been tainted, for two balls with the same name had been introduced. The chamber verified the exactitude of the accusation, and declared that the bag, until then three inches wide, would be reduced to two; in limiting the capacity of the bag, the space for fraud would be restricted, as good as suppressing it. However, in the next election, a candidate was not entered in the election, we don’t know if due to oversight or intention of the public officer. The officer declared that he did not remember seeing the distinguished candidate, but added honorably that it was not impossible that he might have indeed given his name; in this case there was no exclusion, but distraction. The chamber, faced with an ineluctable psychological phenomenon such as distraction, could not punish the officer, but, concluding that the narrowness of the bag could give room for odious exclusions, revoked the previous law and restored the three inches.
Meanwhile, gentlemen, the first magistrate passed away, and three citizens came forward as candidates to the position, only two of them of importance. Hazeroth and Magog, the very presidents of the rectilinear and curvilinear parties. I must explain these denominations. As spiders are primarily geometers, geometry is what divides them in politics. Some understand that all spiders must make webs with straight threads; it is the rectilinear party. Others think, on the contrary, that webs must be worked with curved threads; it is the curvilinear party. There is yet a third party, mixed and central, with this postulate: webs must be made with straight and curved threads, it is the recti-curvilinear party; and finally, a fourth political division, the anti-recti-curvilinear party, that made tabula rasa of all litigation principles, and proposes the use of webs spun of air, a transparent and light work, in which there are no lines of any kind. As geometry could only divide them, without ever quite inspiring passion, they adopted a symbolic one. For some, a rectilinear line expresses good sentiments, justice, honesty, integrity, consistency, etc., while bad or inferior sentiments such as sycophancy, fraud, disloyalty, perfidy, are perfectly curved. Their opponents retort that no, the curved line is virtue and wisdom, because it is an expression of modesty and humility; in contrast, ignorance, pretentiousness, folly, boastfulness, are straight, sharply straight. The third party, less angular, less exclusivist, rejected the exaggerations from both sides, combined the contrasts, and proclaimed the simultaneity of lines as the exact copy of the physical and moral world. The fourth sticks to denying everything.
Neither Hazeroth nor Magog were elected. Their balls came out of the bag, it is true, but were deemed unusable, the first for lacking the first letter of the name and the second for lacking the last. The remaining and victorious name was that of an ambitious and moneyed man, an obscure politician, who quickly rose to the ducal seat, to the general astonishment of the republic. But the vanquished did not contently sleep over the laurels of the winner; they requested an inquiry. The investigation revealed that the officer of inscriptions intentionally corrupted the orthography of their names. The officer confessed the fault and the intention, but explained that they constituted a simple ellipsis; a purely literary offense, if one at all. As it was not possible to persecute someone for faults of orthography or figures of speech, it seemed right to revise the law. On this same day it was adjudged that the bag would be made of a mesh fabric, through which the balls could be read by the public and, ipso facto, by the candidates themselves, who would then have time to correct the inscriptions.
Unfortunately, gentlemen, eternal malice is the commentary of law. The same door opened to serve honesty served also the cunning of a certain Nabiga, who conspired with the officer of extractions to obtain a seat in the chamber. There was one seat and three candidates; the officer extracted the balls with eyes on his accomplice, who only stopped shaking his head negatively when his ball was grasped. That was all it took to condemn the mesh idea. The chamber, with exemplary patience, restored the thick fabric of the previous regime, but, to avoid other ellipses, determined the validity of the balls with incorrect inscriptions, if five people swore that the name written was the name of the candidate.
This new statute gave place to a new and unforeseen situation, as you will see. They set out to elect a collector of sportulas—an official responsible for charging public fees in the form of voluntary sportulas. Among others, a certain Caneca and a certain Nebraska were candidates. The ball extracted was Nebraska’s. It was incorrect, certainly, as the last letter was missing; but five witnesses swore in the terms of the law that the elected was the republic’s own and only Nebraska. The case seemed closed, when candidate Caneca requested to prove that the ball did not have Nebraska’s name, but his own. The justice of the peace granted the petition. Then came a great philologist, perhaps the first of the republic, also a good metaphysic, and not a bad mathematician, who proved the matter in the following terms: In the first place, he said, you must note that the absence of the last letter of the name Nebraska is not fortuitous. Why was it written incompletely? One could not say by fatigue or love of brevity, for only the last letter is missing, a simple a. Need of space? That neither; see: there is still space for two or three syllables. Therefore, the lack is intentional, and the intention cannot be other than to call attention to the letter k, the last one written, forsaken, unmarried, directionless. Well, for a mental effect, which no law has destroyed, the letter is rendered in the brain in two ways, the graphic form and the sonic form: k and ca. The defect, then, in the written name, drawing the eyes to the last letter, sets right away in the brain this first syllable: Ca. That said, the natural movement of the spirit is to read the entire same; returning to the beginning, to the initial ne, of the name Nebrask — Cane. All that remains is the middle syllable, bras, the reduction of which to this other syllable ca, the last in the name Caneca, is the most demonstrable thing in the world. And, yet, I will not demonstrate it, as you lack the necessary preparation to the understanding of the spiritual or philosophical significance of the syllable, its origins and effects, phases, modifications, and consequences — logical and syntactical, deductive or inductive, symbolical and others. But, assuming the demonstration, there is the proof, evident, clear, of my original affirmation by annexation of the syllable ca to the two Cane, resulting in the name Caneca.
The law was amended, gentlemen, abolishing the option of witness and interpretive proof of the texts, and introducing an innovation, the simultaneous cut of half an inch in length and half an inch in width of the bag. This amendment did not prevent a small abuse in the election of the alcaides, and the bag was restored to its original dimensions, now given, however, a triangular shape. You see, this shape had a consequence: many balls gathered at the bottom. Thus the change to the cylindrical shape; later yet it was given the form of an hourglass, which was found to have the same inconveniences as the triangle, and then the form of a crescent was adopted, etc. Many abuses, neglects and loopholes tend to disappear, and the rest will have the same fate, not entirely, of course, for perfection is not of this world, but according to the measures and terms of the counsel, one of the most circumspect citizens of my republic, Erasmus, whose last speech I regret not being able to share with you in full. Tasked with notifying the last legislative resolution to the ten dames charged with weaving the electoral bag, Erasmus told them the fable of Penelope, who wove and unwove the infamous web, as she awaited her spouse Ulysses.
You are the Penelopes of our Republic, he said as he finished; you have the same chastity, patience and talents. Remake the bag, my friends, remake the bag, until Ulysses, tired of running around, returns to take among us the place that is his. Ulysses is Wisdom.