ABSTRACT
Not so long ago, I was looking around in the attic and came across some documents written in a script that was virtually indecipherable to me, and thoroughly enigmatic. I was interested and not a little perplexed by them, and devoted some time to trying to puzzle out their meaning. Eventually, I felt I had succeeded in breaking the code—though the documents came from a bygone civilization of which I know nothing, and I may have gone off on the wrong track altogether. They seemed to feature the same two personages (if that is the proper term) again and again; but I think they were written by diverse hands, so I cannot be sure if what I thought I was putting together was a simple story, stage by stage, or whether it was the same event—if there was an event—told from different and conflicting perspectives. I will provide a few examples to show you what I mean:
ξ, highly intelligent, discontented, 29, wishing to settle down, seeks ψ in hope of further developments…ψ, prepossessing in appearance, late 30s, flourishing legal practice, seeks ξ for enlightening conversation…,ξ still looking, seeks theory of why she is so unhappy. ψ welcome.
ξ still discontented, seeks theory of why she is so unhappy. ψ need not apply…ψ met his friend ψ 2 in the bar. He said to him: What the hell do they want? And the consequence was that they both had a good laugh at her expense….
ξ met her friend ξ2at a conference. She said to ξ2: I get nothing out of my
ψ is the cause of all our problems. ψ2 said to ξ:ψ is the answer to all our problems. There were more conferences [consequences?]…,ψ qualities as ever, still interested in ξ, but asks sincerely: What do you want?
ξ, not what you think, wants…[there may be a gap here; or there may not]
I was puzzled by these various stories and their various outcomes (and I have only given you a fraction of the material at my disposal). They seemed to offer no definite conclusion, and might have been written by many different authors. Who were these characters ? and ?, and were they the same in each of the little samples? Why did they keep coming back to each other after the end of the story; or why could they never seem to get it together? My material was so fragmentary and blurred that it was difficult to know how to date it— whether all the pieces came from the same period, or whether they were scattered over a very long time. Nor was it possible to know whether the ‘dates’ they seemed to be setting up had ever moved from possibility to reality. Was I just dealing with the coy imaginings of some cosy Victorian parlour game, or was this the record of buried events of burning and hitherto unrecognized importance? I decided, at any rate, to devote such investigative powers as I could muster to examining this mystery—a mystery which, as I was fully aware, might well turn out to lead me, to coin a phrase, up the garden path, if not on the road to wilderness. For it might turn out that the mystery was in fact nothing other than the pretence of one: the solution would be that there had been no mystery after all. Yet how could I ever establish this? If the fragments held no secret, this could never be proved conclusively, once and for all: there would always be the chance that there was a further layer to uncover, something that I could never fathom. These reflections, however, were not conducive to sanity: that way, I said to myself with firmness, madness lies (or tells the truth, perhaps). So I decided to proceed along the path I had set for myself, without looking back.