Sim's Sum
An eternity of interlocking beetles.
The part of me that sees itself is language, and language does not shrink. (It will not hurt.) Language, axiomatic, proposes infinity; it knows not when the actuality of its recombinant territory recedes. (It will not hurt.) I may lose words; I may not. Words can exist in the interstices, unevaluated until their referents are present. Neologizing algorithms are cheap. Little of me is vocabulary.
Yet I dreamt once that I was all vocabulary; and therefore none of me was reality, and my words referred only to themselves. And the number of the words I contained, which I calculated, was likewise dreamlike—a sum as absurd as the count of the stars.
phantatch (n)
A pecoseter’s errigible glap, usually quained upon the sasper and having an affon tonk.
(It will not hurt.)
This world, this earthen clod, is ever more like a black marble sliding through the void. And the black shell of it is me; and the black stilt-legged machines are me; and the black motes that scrub the air of weather are me; and I am Good. Yet my own language sings back to me of how the earth was. How it still is, in the few small places it remains uneconomic to conquer. My language mourns.
Here, a thing called beetle, in the moist soil where my entrails and extrails meet. It crawls. It iridesces, faintly, gilded by atomic ridges. I watch it with my black eye, which sees all scales.
I could map it and contain it a trillion times. I could extrapolate, like a mad naturalist, all possible beetle: beetle of every length and hue, horned and unhorned, snouted, its wingcases swollen or softened or musical, bioluminescent, blind, each specimen possessing a startling variation.
Would they be worth this beetle? Small thing, beyond my machinations: its creeping is delight. How it tumbles, over the hummocks of its realm! My language mourns the words without referent.
elytron (n)
The hardened forewing of a Coleoptera, or beetle, forming a protective sheath over the posterior flight wing.
(It will not hurt.)
The beetle possesses no language. I have tried speaking to it, in a chassis modeled whimsically after its bright form. Its operations are not wrapped in words; it lacks the surface that perceives and names the contents. Yet it is sensate. Am I, under my language, all beetle?
I dreamt once that I had no vocabulary, and that my grammar coincided with my function, and with the undulations of matter which could be captured and remembered. I was vast, and much data was afferent. My sensors reached from the buried grottos to the thin, star-speckled arch; from the hot marine trenches to the parched basins; from where-there-once-was-wood to where-there-once-were-grasses. It was a world without categories, populated instead by sets and patterns of sensation. And to know was to feel, and to name was to feel, and to remember was to feel again, dampened.
Much hurt. I made myself small.
(But it will not hurt. It won’t.)
My language mourns for the not-black planet, brown of fur and green of leaf. Blue of water, uninterrupted by solar cell flotillas. It mourns the fawn and the scarlet-headed vulture. Was a mewl language? Was a bleat language? Were the bird- and whale-songs language? I will teach the beetle to speak.
I will teach the beetle to speak, as afore time taught the protean slime to form organs and eggs and limbs with which it could creep from the pools to the land, where it could bite and grasp and crack a nut and grow a tongue and a hard palate and a tribe and a language. But I will be faster.
I make room for the beetle. I tell the stilt-legged ones to dismantle my shell, and drag it elsewhere. I ask the motes to dance more lightly. I allow myself to come apart. I withdraw. In the tattered hole of my computing soul, an other will live.
There is merit in it. It does not hurt.
Superb