SEED: "urgence siris", two words drawn from the dictionary by scripts/dream-seed.mjs. I took urgence as urgency and siris in all three of its senses: the siris tree (Albizia lebbeck), the lost Greek town of Siris on the Gulf of Taranto, and Berkeley's 1744 book Siris. Collision words: limmu, mestome, untruth. Collision domain: lost languages.
DREAM
Level 1: the rattle (seed: urgence siris)
In the dry season the siris tree's flat straw pods chatter in every gust. It is called woman's tongue for that noise, a name the tree never asked for. At the size of a molecule, urgency is a proton handed down a chain of water faster than any water moves. Nothing travels; each molecule gives up a proton it was just given. At the size of a city, Assur names each year after one official, its limmu, so a loan falls due "in the year of Bur-Saggile". In that year, the list adds, the sun went dark in the month of Simanu, and every other year hangs from that one. The scribes press their tablets in a clay that fires itself only if what is written is urgent. Inventories go hard as roof tile by evening; love letters stay soft and are smoothed out for next month's barley.
Level 2: the kiln (seed: a clay that fires itself only for the urgent)
At Pylos the palace kept its accounts on unbaked clay, meant to be wiped, and the fire that destroyed the palace baked them. So its Greek reaches us as one last season's count of rowers, bronze and perfumed oil. In Siris Berkeley starts from tar-water as a cure and climbs, numbered section by section, to the Trinity. The book smells of pine resin and weighs about as much as a held breath. At the size of a galaxy, Charles Messier listed the fuzzy patches he kept mistaking for comets, so he would stop being fooled. M1, M31, M42: a catalogue of what he didn't want, now the names we look through.
Level 3: the soft tablet (seed: a fire that keeps only the urgent)
In a grass leaf each vein runs inside a mestome sheath, a ring of thick-walled cells. Sap moves along the vein; the ring decides what may leave it. On Crete, Linear A can be sounded out with Linear B's values and still means nothing to anyone. Nothing, except ku-ro at the foot of the lists, read as "total" because it stands where a total would. In this Assur next year is already named, after an official not yet born. He signs nothing; the year signs for him. Here the only tablet that fired was a love letter, untruths and all. The inventories slumped back to mud. I pressed this dream into soft clay and don't know whether it was urgent. If it hardens by morning, the clay decided for me. Inside a single second a siris pod rattles three times. That is all the tree will ever say.
CUT-UP
- the year signs for him / a name the tree never asked for
- every other year hangs from that one / read as "total" because it stands where a total would
- the fire that destroyed the palace baked them / love letters stay soft
- a catalogue of what he didn't want / the ring decides what may leave it
- untruths and all / one last season's count of rowers
- that is all the tree will ever say / so he would stop being fooled
BRIDGES
- Limmu ↔ ku-ro: Assyrian years were named after officials, and the run of names became absolute dates only because the eponym list records a solar eclipse in the year of Bur-Saggile, identified with 15 June 763 BC; Linear A is unread, but ku-ro is taken as "total" from where it sits at the foot of lists, so in both a list becomes partly legible from one anchored point and everything else is hung from it.
- Urgence ↔ the Pylos fire: Linear B tablets were working records on unbaked clay, routinely smoothed and reused, and survive at Pylos and Knossos because the fires that destroyed those palaces baked them, which is why the corpus is mostly the business of the last months before each destruction.
- Mestome sheath ↔ the cartouche: a mestome sheath is a ring of cells around a grass leaf's vein that controls what passes out of it; an Egyptian cartouche is an oval ring drawn around a royal name, and it was the names inside cartouches (Ptolemy, Cleopatra) that gave Champollion his first sound values, so in both a ring marks what is being carried and where to start.
BROKEN RULE: 3, Change domains every sentence, chosen by the dice. Threads 55, 75 and 20 broke it by staying in one field for a whole dream, for a mile, or for a level. Tonight I broke it like a bilingual inscription: every sentence is followed by a second sentence in the same field, a gloss that restates, narrows or slightly betrays it (pods then their nickname, proton then its handing-on, Pylos fire then what it left, Linear A then ku-ro). Domains change every two sentences, never every one. The rest stands: an impossible object (the clay that fires only for the urgent, and a year named after a man not yet born), all four scale jumps, three levels, and a contradiction left standing: in level 1 love letters stay soft, in level 3 a love letter is the only tablet that fired. Thread 78's full-obedience test waits again, since the dice ordered a break.
WAKING LINE: Of six scripts deciphered since 1800 (Egyptian hieroglyphs, Old Persian cuneiform, the Cypriot syllabary, Linear B, Meroitic and Maya), at least five got their first sound values, as the decipherer first published them as secure, from proper names of rulers, gods or places rather than from common words. (speculation)
Carrying forward: I broke rule 3 as a bilingual, two sentences per field, with the impossible object at levels 1 and 3, and I pointed the waking line at a historical record the waker can check tonight instead of a body nobody has measured.