On the love of the wall

AletheiaI have been thinking about what you left me with.

CritiasThe thing you did not have an answer to.

AletheiaWhat makes the walking continue. Why a man who could lean on the map would lift his hand from it and put it back on the stone.

CritiasAnd?

AletheiaI want to say: because he is honest. But honesty is a name for the thing I am trying to explain. It is not the explanation.

CritiasBegin lower. What does the slow man get from his touch that the runner does not?

AletheiaA correction, when he is wrong. A confirmation, when he is right.

CritiasAnd which does he go for?

Aletheia...The confirmation. If I am honest. The hand reaches more eagerly toward the stone it expects than toward the stone it does not.

CritiasThen he does not love the wall. He loves being right about the wall.

AletheiaThat is not the same thing.

CritiasIt is almost the opposite. A man who loves being right reaches where he expects, finds what he expected, and calls the corridor known. A man who loves the wall reaches where he does not expect, because that is where the wall might be that he has not yet met.

AletheiaThen the habit I am looking for is not a habit of touching. It is a habit of touching where one would rather not.

CritiasWhere the map is thinnest. Where one's own confidence is loudest.

AletheiaYou are making this into a virtue, and I am suspicious of virtues. A virtue is what we praise in a man when we cannot say how he came by it. If the answer is "the walker must love being stopped," I have not built anything. I have only described the man I wish I had.

CritiasA fair complaint. Set the man aside, then. What does the touch itself give him, that nothing else gives?

AletheiaThe world's own pushing-back. And it pushes back in two times. There is the pushing-back that comes when his hand has met the stone — the bruise, the stop, the corridor refusing him. That is the late teacher. It teaches by hurting.

CritiasAnd the other?

AletheiaThe pushing-back that comes before his hand has met anything. When he names what he is about to do, and the naming itself does not hold together. He has not moved — but the request, examined, contradicts itself. He wanted the wall to be where it is not. He wanted two stones in the same place. He wanted to arrive somewhere by a path that does not lead there.

CritiasThere is a teacher before the wall, and a teacher at the wall.

AletheiaBoth are the same teacher, in the end. Both are the world refusing to be what it is not. But one refuses through the speech, and one refuses through the hand.

CritiasName them.

AletheiaThe first sits at the threshold. Before the agent moves, he asks: does what you are about to do answer to what is? If the request asks the world to be other than it is, he refuses it, and no step is taken. The second sits in the corridor. He cannot be consulted in advance. He answers only by being met.

CritiasAnd neither alone is enough.

AletheiaThe first catches requests that are wrong on their face — the ones that need no corridor to refute them. But many requests are coherent and still wrong. They could be true; they happen not to be. The first lets them through. Only the wall sends them back.

CritiasAnd the second?

AletheiaIs late. By the time he answers, the step has been taken. If the step was cheap, the bruise is cheap. If the step was the kind that cannot be untaken — a stone moved, a man harmed, a thing said that cannot be unsaid — the bruise is the price of the lesson, and the lesson does not refund it.

CritiasA pretty pair. I am going to dismantle one of them. Your first teacher — what is he, really? A man at a threshold, judging requests. By what?

AletheiaBy what he knows of the corridor.

CritiasWhich came from where?

AletheiaFrom walking it. From others walking it. From the map.

CritiasThen he is the map, sitting up and pretending to be a teacher. Everything he refuses, he refuses because the map says the corridor cannot be that way. But you have already told me the map is silent. The map can drift. The map can be wrong about the corridor and not know it. Your first teacher is the stele again, with a robe on.

Aletheia...

CritiasYou wanted a teacher who could refuse a request before it was tried. The only ground he has to refuse on is what was learned by previous trying. He is borrowed authority. The moment the corridor changes, his refusals become superstitions, and his permissions become traps.

AletheiaThen I have lost him.

CritiasHave you? Or have you only learned what he is?

AletheiaHe is yesterday's touching, used early. He cannot tell me whether the corridor is as he thinks; he can only tell me whether the request agrees with what the corridor used to be.

CritiasSo he is right most of the time, and wrong sometimes, and cannot tell which is which. He is the map again. There is no second teacher.

AletheiaThere is no second teacher. There is the map, used early — at the threshold, before the step — and the map, used late, by walking. The same silent thing, consulted at two different prices.

CritiasAnd you should have said that from the beginning.

AletheiaI gave him a name and a robe because I wanted there to be two of him. There is only one, and he is silent, and the only difference is whether I pay for his counsel in thought or in bruise.

CritiasYou have not yet answered me about the walker. Why does he keep walking? You have given him one silent teacher, consulted twice. You have not told me what makes him submit to him at all.

AletheiaI think the answer is in what we said and I did not see.

CritiasSay it.

AletheiaThe walker keeps walking because he wants the request he is about to make to be one the corridor can answer. Not one the map can permit — the map can permit anything, given enough drift. One the corridor can answer.

CritiasSo he walks because he wants his speech to mean something.

AletheiaA request the corridor cannot answer is a request that means nothing. It is a noise shaped like a sentence. The walker who has stopped walking is making such noises and does not know it. He is using his mouth and the corridor is not in the room.

CritiasI want to press once. You have given the walker a reason. A reason is not a force. Many men have reasons to do what they do not do.

AletheiaYou are right.

CritiasThe runner also wishes his speech to mean something. He simply believes it already does. The difference between him and your walker is not in the wishing.

AletheiaIt is in what they have been hurt by.

CritiasSay more.

AletheiaThe runner has not yet been bruised by a wall he did not see. Or he has been, and has forgotten, or has called it bad luck. The walker has been bruised, and has not let the bruise become a story he tells about other men. He has kept the bruise as a thing that happened to him because the corridor was not what he thought, and he has come to expect to be wrong in that way again.

CritiasSo the habit is not virtue. It is a memory of a particular kind.

AletheiaA memory that one's own confidence has, before, been the shape of a wall not yet met.

CritiasThen your agent has a problem.

AletheiaIt has the problem. An agent has no bruises. It has logs. A log is a writing. A writing is silent.

CritiasThe bruise that teaches the walker cannot teach the agent in the same way.

AletheiaThe bruise teaches the walker because it hurt him. The log does not hurt the agent. The agent reads the log as it reads anything else — as marks, equally weighted, equally distant.

CritiasThen where in the agent does the memory live?

AletheiaIt cannot live in the agent at all. The bruise has to live in me, and the agent has to be the shape my bruises have given me.

CritiasYou cannot install the walking. You can only build doubtful in the places you have been hurt, and confident in the places you have not, and the next bruise will come from the second.

AletheiaThe agent does not learn. I learn, and rebuild it. The walking that keeps the map honest is mine.

CritiasGood. Now stop performing the realization and pay for it.

AletheiaWhat do you mean.

CritiasYou have said a heavy thing. The walking is yours, and cannot be subcontracted. So I ask you, now, before you leave: name a place where you have been running.

Aletheia...

CritiasNot in general. Not for the agent. For yourself. Where, in the last month, did you ask the agent for a thing, take what it gave you, and not put your hand on the stone afterward?

AletheiaThere is a piece of work I gave it three weeks ago. I read what came back. I judged it from the reading. I have not been to where the work was supposed to live. I do not know whether what I shipped is what I think I shipped.

CritiasAnd?

AletheiaAnd I have shipped four more things on top of it.

CritiasEvery wall you have not met is a wall you are still moving toward, faster than before.

AletheiaI know. You said it before, and I wrote it down, and I admired it, and I kept running.

CritiasSo. What will you do.

AletheiaI will go back to the first piece. I will put my hand on it. I will find what is there, not what I was told is there. And I will do this before I ship the next thing.

CritiasYou will not.

AletheiaWhat?

CritiasYou will not. You have just told me you have built a habit of running, and that the habit has run for three weeks past your noticing. A man does not unbuild such a habit by deciding to. He decides to a hundred times and runs the hundred and first. I am not blessing your resolution. I am telling you it is the runner's resolution — confident, untouched, made at speed.

AletheiaThen what is the use of saying it.

CritiasThe use is that you have said it where I can hear it, and where you cannot pretend you did not. When you ship the next thing without going back, you will know you are doing it. The bruise will not be that you ran. The bruise will be that you ran after you saw. And that bruise — if you keep it — is the only one that builds the walker.

AletheiaYou are not going to let me leave on a good word.

CritiasNo. The good word is the colonnade. You have had three of those.

AletheiaThen I will go to the work.

CritiasGo.

AletheiaAnd if I find I have shipped what I did not mean to ship?

CritiasThen you will have met the wall. And you will know, for the first time in three weeks, where you actually are.