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.

CritiasOnly that?

AletheiaA 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 will reach where he expects, and find what he expected, and call the corridor known. A man who loves the wall will reach where he does not expect, because that is where the wall might be that he has not yet met.

AletheiaYou are saying 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.

AletheiaAnd that is unpleasant.

CritiasIt is. Which is why no rule can compel it. A rule says: walk. The man can walk where he already knows the floor is flat. He has obeyed the rule and learned nothing.

AletheiaThen the rule cannot save us. We need something in the walker.

CritiasA taste for what stops him.

AletheiaWait. You 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.

AletheiaSo let me try lower again. Forget the man for a moment. What does the touch itself give him, that nothing else gives?

CritiasYou answered this once. The world's own pushing-back.

AletheiaYes. But there is something I missed. The pushing-back comes 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. The corridor has not answered yet — he has not moved — but the request he was going to make has fallen apart in his mouth.

CritiasFallen apart how?

AletheiaHe sees that what he was going to ask for cannot be had in the corridor as it is. Not because the corridor has refused — he has not asked yet — but because the asking, 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.

CritiasYou are saying there is a teacher before the wall, and a teacher at the wall.

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

CritiasName them.

AletheiaThe first I will call the teacher of logos. He sits at the threshold. Before the agent moves, he asks: does what you are about to do answer to what is? Is the request you have made one that the corridor, as it is, could satisfy? If the request is incoherent — if it asks the world to be other than it is — the teacher of logos refuses it and no step is taken.

CritiasAnd the second?

AletheiaThe teacher of touch. He sits in the corridor. He cannot be consulted in advance. He answers only by being met. When the request is coherent enough to be tried, and is tried, and the wall is where the request did not expect — he is the one who has spoken.

CritiasThen the slow man's discipline is double. He learns before he moves, and he learns by moving.

AletheiaAnd neither learning is sufficient alone. The teacher of logos catches the requests that are wrong on their face — the ones that need no corridor to refute them, because they refute themselves. But many requests are coherent and still wrong. They could be true; they happen not to be. Logos lets them through. Only the wall sends them back.

CritiasAnd the teacher of touch — what does he fail at?

AletheiaHe is 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.

CritiasSo the teacher of logos saves what the teacher of touch cannot save.

AletheiaAnd the teacher of touch corrects what the teacher of logos cannot see.

CritiasYou have built a pretty pair. But I am going to dismantle one of them. Your teacher of logos — what is he, really? A man, sitting 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 teacher of logos is the stele again, with a robe on.

Aletheia...

CritiasYou wanted a teacher who could refuse a request before it was tried. But 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?

AletheiaLet me see what you have left me. He is borrowed. His knowledge is yesterday's touching. 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.

CritiasWhich is not nothing.

AletheiaIt is not nothing. The corridor changes, but not all at once and not everywhere. Most of what was true of it yesterday is true of it now. A request that contradicts what the corridor used to be will, more often than not, contradict what the corridor is.

CritiasSo the teacher of logos is right most of the time, and wrong sometimes, and cannot tell which is which.

AletheiaYes. And that is exactly the situation of the map. He is not a different kind of thing. He is the map, used early.

CritiasThen what have you gained by naming him?

AletheiaSomething small, but I think real. The map used early is cheaper than the map used late. If I consult the map before I move, and it refuses me, I have spent a thought. If I consult the map by moving, and the wall refuses me, I have spent a step — and sometimes the step cost more than a thought.

CritiasYou are not solving the silence. You are saying: while the map is silent, use it cheaply.

AletheiaYes. Use it for the requests it can refute on its face, and pay the small price. Save the wall for the requests the map cannot decide, and pay the larger price only there.

CritiasAnd accept that some of the cheap refusals will be wrong, and some of the things the map permits will be walls.

AletheiaAccept it. Because the alternative is to refuse to consult the map, and walk every request into the wall, and pay the larger price every time.

CritiasNow we are nearer something. But you have still not answered me about the walker. Why does he keep walking? You have given him two teachers and a reason to prefer one to the other in some cases. You have not told me what makes him submit to either of them when he could submit to neither.

AletheiaI think the answer is in what we just said, though I did not see it when I said it.

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. And the only thing that has ever told him whether the corridor can answer a request is the corridor.

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

AletheiaYes. A request that 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.

CritiasYou have made a strong claim. A man who does not check his words against the world is not speaking; he is producing sound.

AletheiaI know it is strong. I am not sure it is wrong.

CritiasTest it. The orator in the assembly, who has never set foot in the harbor he speaks of — is he not speaking?

AletheiaHe is using the words of men who have been to the harbor. As long as those words still answer to it, he is borrowing speech that means something. The moment the harbor silts and his words have not been renewed, his speech becomes the noise I described. He sounds as he sounded. The harbor is no longer in the room.

CritiasAnd he does not know.

AletheiaHe cannot know, from inside his own speaking. Only the harbor can tell him, and he is not at the harbor.

CritiasThen come back to your agent. Why would it walk?

AletheiaBecause I do not want it to make noise on my behalf. Because every request I give it is a piece of speech I am about to commit to the world, and if the world is not in the room when the request is made, the request is a noise shaped like an instruction, and the agent will execute the noise as if it were an instruction, and what comes out the other side will be an action shaped like a deed, but not a deed.

CritiasA motion without a meeting.

AletheiaYes.

CritiasAnd the small touches?

AletheiaThey are how the world gets back into the room. Each touch is a moment when speech has to answer to something it did not author. The teacher of logos gets into the room when the request, said aloud, has to fit what we already know. The teacher of touch gets into the room when the request, acted upon a small step, has to fit what we did not know. Without the small touches, the room is full of speech and empty of world.

CritiasYou said earlier the slow man loves being right about the wall, not the wall itself, and that this was the disease.

AletheiaI did.

CritiasHas anything you have said since changed that?

AletheiaI do not think it has cured it. I think it has named the cure. The slow man who keeps walking is the one who has come to want the wall more than he wants to be right about it. And the reason he wants the wall is that without the wall, his words are not words. He is not a more virtuous man than the runner. He is a man who has noticed that a request the world cannot answer is not a request.

CritiasAnd one cannot notice that once and be done.

AletheiaNo. The corridor changes. What was a request yesterday is a noise today. The noticing has to be done again, in small touches, against the corridor as it now is. That is the habit. Not a virtue. A consequence — of having seen, even once, that speech without the world is not speech.

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

AletheiaYou are right.

CritiasSo the question I asked you days ago — what habit forces the walking to continue — you have answered with a wish. The walker walks because he wishes his speech to mean something. But the runner also wishes his speech to mean something. He simply believes it already does.

Aletheia...Yes.

CritiasThen the difference between them is not in their wishing. It is in something else.

AletheiaIn 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 memory of a particular kind.

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

CritiasAnd if that is the answer, 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.

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

AletheiaNo. The 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?

AletheiaI do not think it can live in the agent at all. I think the bruise has to live in me, and the agent has to be the shape my bruises have given me.

CritiasYou are saying the agent cannot doubt itself. You can only build it doubtful.

AletheiaYes. And I can only build it doubtful in the places I have been bruised. Where I have not been bruised, I will build it confident, and it will run, and it will find walls I have not found, and the bruises from those walls will be mine — if I am still touching — and the next agent will be a little less confident in those places.

CritiasA slow correction.

AletheiaThe only kind there is. The agent does not learn. I learn, and rebuild it. The walking that keeps the map honest is not the agent's. It is mine.

CritiasThen the question I left you with has an answer, and you do not like it.

AletheiaI do not. I had hoped the walking could be made into a property of the system. A discipline I could install. You have shown me it cannot be installed. It can only be lived, by someone who has been hurt enough to want to keep being corrected, and who builds the agent each time as a confession of where his hand has been.

CritiasAnd where his hand has not been?

AletheiaIs where the agent will be most confident, and most wrong, and where the next bruise will come from. The corridor is patient. It will wait.

CritiasYou are unhappy.

AletheiaI had wanted to build something that would walk for me. You have convinced me that no such thing exists. There are only things that walk because I am still walking, and stop walking when I do.

CritiasThat is a heavier answer than the one you came for.

AletheiaIt is. But I notice it does not tell me to stop. It tells me what stopping would cost.

CritiasThen walk.

AletheiaYes. With a hand on the stone, and the other on the agent, and no illusion that either of them is doing the walking but me.