You are brilliant. You are foolish. Your nature cycles like the sunlight.

Which are you, in any moment, in particular? How could you tell?

Can you reach behind yourself to pull your own puppet strings? Can you reach in front of you, lift your own palm to your face–’stop’?

Eyes will only see only one of your faces unless you spin, like a plucked coin.

In the end, they will ask, ‘which way did it land?’ As if you were heads, or tails, all along.

Not now. Now, you spin.

What redeems our inadequacies is that we are each but one being churning among diverse forms of life.

What she discovered, after experimenting for several months, was that she could slip out from under the gaze of that part of her by telling it that it was silly, just superstition. She would run wild, tasting freedom on her lips like it was fresh blood. She would pretend to be made of something else, but she was made of fine china, and she would crack, then fall to pieces, and have to crawl back under the stern gaze of her other part, where she would be a miserable slave again.

Apologies.

Every once in a while, they would fire a rocket to the colony with supplies from Earth. Samples of the latest artwork, relics to encourage the memory of the colonist’s heritage, food items that they hoped would be delicacies.

The colonists received these rocket packages warily. Sometimes, they would contain tool crucial for survival. Other times, they would unleash Earth diseases that would slay tens of thousands.

Every once in a while they would discuss the stone–its facets, its shine. They were proud but never satisfied. They would pick up their tools again and again to recut it. It was now a mere two-thirds of its original size.

The stone could not understand why they did not respond to its screaming.

I inhabit a cave on the fourth story of my building, but as it is too hot to live in I spend my days shuffling back and forth on my roof, looking out over the cliffs.

When I am hungry and there is nothing to eat inside, I swoop down, so to speak, and pick up a slice of pizza or a sandwich to bring back to the lair.

The bathtub tap has leaked a steady stream for two months now. The water leaves a rust colored stain in its path; a pink mold grows near it. As there are no more clean cups in my apartment, sometimes for water I will suck on the faucet like a wolf’s teat.

I am not exactly alone up here. The new condos next door all have south-facing balconies. I saw a new, multi-racial family with a baby play there once. The child is adorable. It was allowed to play on the balcony only after its mother tested the strength of the banister.

Across the street and down a door or two is another four story apartment building like mine. They sit in groups over there.

Last Friday there was a storm that rolled slowly east over the Hudson. From my roof I could watch the heavy clouds defy the sunset pinks and blues and rather seethe with hot lights from Manhattan. It answered with lightning, often trapped in its own folds but sometimes plummeting radiantly.

Across the street the crowd gathered on the other roof would cheer. In truth it mattered to none of us what had absorbed the shock. The clouds were still far away, though approaching.

Twice that evening I encountered others directly. First, a young woman came up the stairs and saw me sucking on a pig’s tail on the north side of the roof. She went to the south side and sat in silence.

A second female arrived after I had found another chair and repositioned myself to get a better view around the buildings to our north. She sat down at the table I had sat at to dine.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello, caw,” I said.

We watched the storm some together.

“Too bad those buildings are in the way, ” she said.

“Caw caw caw,” I said. “Caw caw caw caw.”

Sometimes I rummage through the bones and shiny things in my bedroom and find tokens of long ago, like times when I was in a tribe of some kind, or in love. I look at damp photographs. Back at me smiles someone wearing clothes. Sometimes others are with him.

Though I have an appetite for pictures like these, I cannot actually eat them. Wiser now, I know what is important and to not worry about life’s little details, like whether the mice are cooked.

Narrative is a High Level Data Structure

was the first thing I read this morning. It was a text message that Ethan Jucovy had sent the night before.

“Or…is data a high level narrative structure?” I responded, pleased with myself for having found something to say on the topic at 7:14 am. I was preoccupied with the question for most of the early morning before I left my apartment to go to work.

So you can imagine my joy when I bumped into Ethan on the Park Place platform of the Franklin Avenue Shuttle.

We discussed the matter. In short order it was clear that Ethan’s original comment had depth deserving of a more careful response than my cheeky one a few hours earlier.

To sum up, his contention was this: he had used to believe that narratives were primarily a way of packaging a single idea, or what he sometimes calls “conceptual atoms”. But he has recently thought that they may be data structures, like stacks and queues.

Data structures are designed to optimize certain kinds of data input and access. So what kind of operations are narratives optimized for? Ethan had struggled with these questions and hypothesized that the narrative structure might be defined by a geometric braiding of ideas.

At this point I should have admitted that I didn’t fully understand what he meant by braiding. But I was already suspicious of the contention that narratives could be defined in such geometric terms.

We debated the topic for the duration of the subway ride. At one point, we were interrupted by a panhandler who announced:

I am homeless veteran. I came home with post-traumatic stress disorder. I have been waiting on the results of a specialized treatment. I don’t know why its taken this long, but it has. I am out of money and haven’t eaten in two days. If any of you could spare an apple, a bottle of water, a quarter, a dime, a penny, I would deeply appreciate it. I hope you will find that charity or love of our country in our hearts, and blessed you all.

I asked Ethan what he thought the constituent ideas of that narrative were, and how they were arranged. He hesitated, then said that the difficulty in extracting the entangled constituent ideas from such a story was precisely why he had proposed the braid structure. The most compelling Art, he claimed, expressed just one idea–the idea of the work of art itself. So a good narrative was, in this way, like good music.

We arrived at my stop on Canal Street. I asked him to hold the thought.

Later, we would continue the discussion on IRC:

<sbenthall> ejucovy: so, what I was going to say before being so rudely interrupted by arriving at my stop was that I was concerned that that description of what makes a narrative compelling wouldn’t generalize culturally

He agreed and said he had the same reservations, and began to refine the definitions of his terms. But as we discussed them, they showed themselves to be increasingly entangled. This was frustrating because it took the discussion away from the motivation behind our interest in narratives, which, between the two of us, were threefold:

• Interest in the potential for technology to capture and communicate the processes implicit in the creation of various forms of human expression
• The conviction that the establishment of narrative is essential for building political movements (or more generally, essential for broadcasting actionable ideas)
• Curiosity about the role of narrative in knowledge legitimization

Ethan pointed out that the discussion was getting lost and that we needed to regroup. He asked how we should proceed. I hemmed and hawed, saying that it depended on what we were trying to accomplish in the first place. But eventually I came around to the conclusion that we should begin to accumulate examples of narratives in order to provide a data set against we could test any proposed definition of narrative. I with the follow examples:

But I surprised myself when I proposed as an example the following sequence of words in quotation marks:

“There once was a small boy named Peru who was fond of foreign languages. He had learned about five or six before he was hit by a bus. His gravestone read, ‘He never learned Spanish.”

And suddenly my way of looking at the problem changed radically.

What does the narrator in the preceding narrative mean when he concludes cryptically that his “way of looking at the problem changed radically”?

Luckily, I am that narrator and can explain everything.

If one wants to go about identifying the necessary structure of a narrative, then the best place to start is with concrete examples and look for parsimonious hypotheses that accommodate them. This is the methodology that linguistic syntacticians use to derived models of formal syntax. In retrospect it seems like a no-brainer to consider narrative to be a linguistic phenomenon and treat it as such.

I am sure that just such a sociolinguistic analysis has been done already. But rather than looking those up (because what fun would that be?), we can already draw substantive conclusions from the narrative provided in the first half of this post.

First, and most obviously, the narrative structure integrates well with other data structure. The above narrative has, nested within it, several other narratives as well as more formal structures such as the list structure and the tabular structure.

Moreover, the narrative structure nests easily into non-narrative forms, such as this expository post on the nature of narrative structure.

This method is especially informative when applied to extreme cases, such as the minimal narrative. For example, the following:

I met a girl yesterday. I got her number.

Can this be further decomposed into narratives? Does “I met a girl yesterday” suffice? Or is some introducing and easing of import or tension necessary for mere statements of fact to combine into narratives?

We can also use this method to find counterexamples that break the structure of narratives (and the structures within which they are embedded) to test their limits. Because Peru’s grave was secretly empty; he had been stolen from the hospital and raised in Argentina, where he learned Spanish after all.

To conclude, I’d like to provide another example that demonstrates another interesting feature of narrative structure: the possibility of a sequel.

I rambled on in IRC about possible examples on narratives until it was clear that I had killed the conversation. All for the best, perhaps, because there was work to do. By the time I came home and consumed my burrito from Taqueria De Los Muertos, I was thoroughly distracted by more urgent matters.

But shortly after dinner I found myself pacing, unable to stop puzzling over the conversation of the day.

I invited Ethan to go on a walk with me, but he did not answer. Perhaps he knew my intentions and had grown bored of the subject. Or perhaps he knew, precognitively, that it was about to rain.

Plodding through the drizzle down Eastern Parkway, I began to plot this very post as a structural knot for him to untie, should he accept my methodological proposal.

So ends the story of my day.

The first astrobotanists nurtured the plant with sunlight and the atmospheric chemicals of Venus, discovering that the tendril roots of the mature plant had terraforming properties. Every five years or so, it would form a new spore, direct it towards a distant star, and fire it with extreme speed into interstellar space.

They named it Grower.

By 2210, humanity’s original solar system was reaching the limits of its natural resources, but researchers had discovered how to equip the gigantic spores, as they formed, with biostatis chambers and industrial equipment. Mankind began its diaspora to promising new systems. Some colonies were national missions, others commercial ventures, other utopian experiments. But each knew that they were to travel for a hundred years or more, never see the Earth again, and perhaps perish never to regain contact with human life.

Indeed, it was seven hundred years after the diaspora, 2900, that one very advanced system on a mineral rich planet with strong ties to the original human solar system developed a revolutionary Space/Time Vortex technology (STV). This technology was able to sustain, very briefly, a wormhole that allowed transportation across long distances in space, and (in its current state) brief distances in time.

For the first time in six hundred years, humanity is reuniting afters its diaspora.

Use of the technology is very risky, with the potential to disrupt stars on a malfunction, and so must be practiced very far from human life. Operating an STV wormhole is therefore a costly and lengthy enterprise, unavailable to any but the most powerful. But it is the key to power in a turbulent time.

His unique burden gave him a sense of perspective which others, to his dismay, found magnetic.

“Be careful around me,” he advised. “There is a bomb in me that could blow up and kill you at any minute.”

“Oh, you’re not that bad!” his friends would laugh. “You haven’t blown us up yet, have you?”

To assuage his own uneasiness he would strive to be exceptionally understanding to those around him, as if he could pay off in acts of kindness the price of the devastation he would inevitably unleash.

The strain made him spiteful. Eventually, he moved to a cabin in the mountains where he was visited only by the postman. Alone and at peace, he could be an honest man in his letters until his final pop.

He did not remember it well. It was soft, damp, and warm. There was nothing to worry about there.

Their bodies in the Primate Material Plane held in trances, these wizards battled and became enamored in the silver-lit ether of their parallel universe. In anger they would carefully compose monsters and storms, then blast them in a ball of light to the rim, where it would bounce before settling as if on a roulette wheel.

The real motivation for the majority of them, of course, was loneliness. They rang out their arcane pulses into the boundless mist always with the hope that they would swiftly be returned by someone would be neither bored nor enslaved by it, neither disdainful nor slain. Somebody, in short, who could respond.

Meanwhile, their corporeal bodies grew dusty and thin.

“As you know, when I was your age I was already out on the open sea fighting pirates and scoundrels.”

The cool night breezed through the candle-lit cabana. The captain of the mercenary ironclad People’s Hammer began to fill his pipe. He wore a silver medal on his civilian jacket. His hands we black with engine grease.

The heretic monastic who shared his table sipped at a piña colada. He was not much younger than his companion, but he had practiced naiveté in the cloisters. Silence bid the captain to continue.

“After the Navy of the Socialist International sold its soul to the Hype Regime,” he explained, “there was no place there for a man of principles and brilliance. Just a waste of fuel chasing radio meme hot spots. Can’t fight the Silent Revolution with your head up your ass. Might as well be a Demogarch lapdog.”

The heretic removed the cherry from his paper umbrella sagely in agreement.

“At least the merchants got two feet and walk loudly with them. Scoundrels ain’t bad blokes either, in comparison to the sellouts,” the captain coughed indignantly.

“How’s the ship?” The monk sucked the cherry and its juices from his fingers in a single motion.

“Some creaks and leaks but its mine.”

“Patches planned?”

“Better than planned. Merchants don’t care what happens to pirate boats as long as the route is clear. Towed two already to the Bay of Renegades. New guns, good lumber. Sold a chassis for enough bank to hire another shipmate.”

“Got someone?”

“Asking the veterans. And there’s some in the Navy that still got sense,” the captain muttered nostalgically.

The Brother nodded before standing. “I may know someone. I’ll ask around.” Without waiting for a reply, he turned and melted into the night.

“The language games of the Martians and the cave dwellers became life-forms that existed primarily in the quivering extra dimensions of the super-string loops. They battled for supremacy over the evolution of other life. Cut a thousand years into the future, and there I was: meeting with one of them (not sure which kind) and discussing network identities….”

Phillipe wished the conversation would move on. He did not understand everything that Marcel was saying, but he knew vaguely of it symbolism. A close reading of the fantasy would illuminate a grand logic to the world both fundamental and all-encompassing. It was the same logic Marcel had been developing since adolescence, and it was wrong.