by Joshua Cohen
Then it was fully night and the stars were in full relief and Joseph pointed out how they too had shapes like clouds, or were as shapeable as clouds. Joseph pointed out Ursas Minor and Major, the bears, and Orion, who could never lose or gain weight because his belt had only a limited number of notches, and the clawing crab, which he said had given its name to the disease he had, Cancer, because the marks it left on the body were like pincer pricks, and then he said, “And that’s the lobster thermidor, and that’s the shrimp scampi.”
He said, “They’re incredible, the constellations, how random they are, how arbitrary—the Chinese think Orion is actually a white cat playing with a purple bird, or else it’s really the Japanese who think that but about the Canis constellations, the dogs.”
Then, though Cohen was only dimly aware, his grandfather continued to invent them: “That constellation,” but Cohen wasn’t able to follow Joseph’s finger, “is the davening rabbi,” and Joseph waved his entire hand and pointed out, “the negligent mechanic—there, there, there, there,” and “the criminal nurse with the catheter needle—just here,” and “the east-west yarmulke, also called the angry beard,” and he encouraged Cohen to find his own and Cohen tried.
Joseph went on to mention Europe, which was “there, then,” and Cohen was aware that his grandfather was talking about a landmass now and not stars.
Joseph had never mentioned Europe before, but Abs had, a bit, and Sari, to be cryptic, would speak in its languages to her parents, “Ma and Pa Le Vay. Ilona and Imre, the elders I.”
“Think of our ancestors,” Joseph said. “They knew the very same stars. As old as water. Older maybe. Then again maybe not. Same stars.”
He said, “Pick one,” and Cohen, when faced with all those fantastical animals and archers, those electricians and plumbers, settled on the shiniest, and Joseph said, “Polaris, the North.”
“Common,” he said. “Never be ashamed of the common. The common is useful. Common understands.”
Joseph said that just as Cohen had a father, he, Joseph, had a father too, he still had one. “Other people are unlucky and have never had a father, but anyone who has ever had a father will have him forever.”
Joseph’s father had been named Yehoshuah, Joseph said, which was just Joshua in Hebrew, though his family had spoken Yiddish and called him Heschel, and his wife, Chava, called him Shy. In America he cut ice, this was before refrigerators, before freezers, he would have to wait for the freeze—“it froze more often back then, it froze more thick”—and then when the ice was sturdy enough he’d venture out onto it, the ice over the river, ice over the bay, and cut it out in blocks, cutting the ground out from under himself, like how the Israelite slaves built the pyramids.
[REPETITION: In Egypt, Joseph said, the Egypt of Europe, his father, Yehoshuah, had been a rabbi—in Bershad. Cohen asked what Bershad meant and his grandfather answered it meant Bershad. It was a city the size of a city block. All of it might fit inside Grand Central, or Port Authority. Yehoshuah didn’t have a congregation, but instead navigated the territory around Bershad delivering rulings on kashrut and fair labor practices, performing weddings and funerals. He’d be gone for days, even a week, at a time, like a traveling salesman, offering women brushes, combs, fertility incantations, fiduciary spells.]
“He had many brothers and sisters,” Joseph said. “In America, people don’t have that many brothers and sisters, even though they have the money to have them. I could never understand. My mother, and Evele, never could.”
Joseph told Cohen that Yehoshuah was the eldest of eight or nine children and Cohen asked how it was that his grandfather didn’t know whether the number was eight or nine and Joseph answered, “Old people have trouble remembering, young people have trouble knowing.”
Cohen was confused and Joseph said, “We left so young I barely knew how many hands I had, let alone how many fingers. Such a rush we didn’t count.”
But Yehoshuah knew the numbers, Joseph said, he was the type who always knew. “If you don’t keep the numbers in your head, they keep them for you on your forearm.”
Joseph said his parents, Yehoshuah and Chava, took him out of Bershad but left their family behind. “Uncles, aunts, brothers and sisters on both sides, cousins—the family was now what is called nuclear.”
[FUCKING REPETITITITIOUS.]
But it was difficult to stay in touch with the rest of the family, Joseph said, especially given all the turmoil. It wasn’t like he could just pick up a telephone, or send a telegram so easily. Rather he could, Joseph said, but it wasn’t like the family was always available to pick up the other end, or reply. The post was unreliable too, especially for packages. Instead, Joseph said, we could only think certain thoughts, and they could only think certain thoughts and, but this was important, “Each half of the family had to know that’s what the other half of the family was doing.” Joseph said, “At least, that’s how my father explained it.”
“He told me he’d picked his own star,” Joseph said, “like Polaris—lots of people pick Polaris, especially if they’re young, especially if they live in the north, in the cold. And he told me that if he was in the mood to communicate with his family he faced this star, not at a certain time or from a certain place, but whenever, wherever, and he talked to that star, or he didn’t even talk, he told me, he just poured himself into it, all his life and frustrations, all his feelings, his dreams, he just poured all of himself into that fire.
“Then he told me,” Joseph said, “that I could do the same thing, that I could just find a star, any star—I could find my own or I could use his star, because any star has the capacity of all of them—and I could invest this star with my emotions, I could make this star the outside pocket for everything inside me, and that the family still over in Europe would have their own stars and would do this same thing too, all of them, all of us, sending and receiving.”
[REMOVE FROM DIRECT QUOTATION]
Joseph told Cohen that these communications would become stored in these stars, turning them into mutual archives, common caches, omnipresent and yet evanescent. From which they could be accessed, not at a certain time or from a certain place—“people have to work, after all”—but at any time, and from any place, and ultimately not just by the relations and friends they were intended for but also by anyone sensitive enough to go seeking. Anything ever communicated to a star, Joseph told Cohen, could be accessed even after the death of its transmitter, and, unlike with the spinning satellites and their transmissions, could be accessed and even altered by the dead themselves, and then he mentioned Oma Eve and encouraged Cohen to speak with her in this way, freely, and then he mentioned himself and encouraged Cohen to speak with him in this way too, freely, once he himself passed, to that light on the other side of the darkness.
“Your father does this kind of thing now with machines, which I don’t have to understand. Because what they do isn’t new to me.”
But returning back to the bungalow, Cohen turned to his grandfather and asked about daylight, pointing out that this system worked only at night, or in darkness, and furthermore he’d studied at school how the sky was always changing around in circles and if in some seasons the stars decided upon were present, in other seasons they were absent, and so access was not as universal as his grandfather had said it was.
Joseph turned to Cohen and said, “Tell it to Polaris.”
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from the Palo Alto sessions: We went to Montessori, both D-Unit and M-Unit were active in the PTA. Basically we won everything at maths and sciences. But math really. Math was really our thing. Age eight was algebra, geometry. Age nine was trig and calc. M-Unit and D-Unit packed us brownbag lunches. Lots of veggies and fruits, pita crisps, bean dips, major beanloads. 1x/weekly an egg, 2x/weekly a yogurt, only if we insisted. Though there were vendingmachines at PARC and the Berkeley Linguistics Department and we would p/matronize them depending on whether D-Unit or M-Unit would pick us up from school. Basically just Fritos a
t Berkeley. But Twix and Mars bars at PARC. We did not consume them but bought them to sell to fellow students. Our best customers were Ricardo Boyer-Moore, now of Aquarius Initiatives, Bjorn Knuthmorrpratt, founder/CEO thebestof.us. A line taped to the carpet in the den marked how far we had to sit from the TV in order not to be irradiated. We were raised on a halfhour of TV per day we were allowed to choose ourselves though we had to justify our choices daily either in oral argument or writing [ANY OF THOSE WRITINGS STILL AROUND?]. The same policy obtained for the body, if we wanted to be exempt from the vegan dinner diet of our parents [THOSE WRITINGS?]. Rule #1 was do not waste water, only turn the faucet on to rinse, do not keep it on while teethbrushing or facewashing. Rule #2 was the same applied to energy, turn off the lights upon leaving a room, always keep the fridge and freezer doors shut, and memorize not just their insides but the insides of every room so as like to minimize ajarage and not waste electricity. M-Unit and D-Unit told us we could not have a pet until our 10th birthday when they brought home a lemming we named Chomsky. M-Unit lovehated Chomsky [EXPAND?]. But the lemming died and was replaced by a vole because it had an even shorter life expectancy and was largely monogamous, though we could only have one at a time, and the first we named Zuse [EXPAND?] but then it also died and was replaced by a second vole whose name we cannot recall and when that died too D-Unit brought home two computers. M-Unit chose the Tandy 2 so that left for us the IBM 5150. We also had an Alto in parts in the basement. Or we had so many parts of so many Altos D-Unit called the heap of them “Tenor and Bass.” FORTRAN, 1983. PASCAL, 1983. M-Unit was disappointed we were never too proficient at language-languages. Except. Give us a piece of paper, a writing thing.
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1984 was a dystopia. Life had become confusing, especially in the suburbs. There were simultaneously too many options, and too few. Everything was the same and different, at once. The supermarkets had every food and drink conceivable, but Cohen’s home had only certain foods and certain drinks, and his parents shopped at only specialty health stores. The candy Cohen was not permitted to consume came in more varieties than the fresh produce from his parents’ garden, but then the fresh produce had more vitamins than the candy did, which despite its branded array all contained the same ingredients, refined. To further confuse things, if the ingredients of an apple were just apple, it didn’t make any sense that his parents differentiated between organic and nonorganic varieties, or that apples were retailed with labels stuck on them alerting to pesticides and waxy preservatives. Water, the substance within, became particularly perplexing, because it came from the tap until it was delivered in jugs, which were initially plastic, then metal. Television and movies proved bewildering too, in that the same things didn’t just happen in different movies and shows but also in different episodes of the same shows, the same plots were always recycled, and during every commercial break the same sports drinks madness recurred. All the shows and movies began wildly enough—teenagers played with matches, snorted drugs, and appeared to enjoy doing both—but then they’d all end tamely, caged, contained in the frame, and even if the teens died tragically they’d return for a lesson, out of character and after the credits, telling their peers don’t pay attention to pressure, stay away from firearms, pederasts, drunk drivers, just say no, and notify an adult.
Sari wanted her son to attend private school, Abs wanted his son to attend public school. But not just that, Abs wanted his son to become a bar mitzvah, Sari wanted her son to avoid that[, calling the practice “a spiritual circumcision”][CAN’T RECALL: DID PRINCIPAL EVER HAVE AN INITIAL—PHYSICAL—CIRCUMCISION?]. Deliberations ensued. The costs were high, in drama and financials. Palo Alto High School[, staffed by PhD washouts from Berkeley,] would be forsaken for the coeducational, awardwinning [WHAT AWARDS?], $10K/year Harker School, whose infirmary was run by a Yale/Harvard MD DrPh, and whose track & field squad was coached by a medallist in the men’s 400m dash at the Munich Olympics. Which meant that instead of a weekend in middle June hosting the usual round of gaming—the forbidden Karate Champ, Kung-Fu Master, Montezuma’s Revenge, Drugwars, Dunjonquest, Wizardry, but also 1K Chess, and Tetris—it hosted instead the ungameable Sabbath.
The Torah, like a computer’s memory, is divided into compartments, parts, one to be read for each weekend of the year. Cohen read from the portion called Shelach Lecha, though he didn’t read from the scroll itself, but from a book. Rather, he didn’t read at all, but had memorized the verses phonetically from a cassette recording prepared by Lay Cantor Tawny Fienberg of Congregation Beyt Am. Though the Torah is divided into portions, one to be read for each weekend of the year, the divisions aren’t marked in the scroll itself, and neither do the verses feature any punctuation. It was the rabbis who compiled the Talmud who established, yet refused to physically separate, the sections, and so consubstantially commanded the reader, who reads aloud, with mentally tracking all classes and clivities of that separation, from section breaks and sentence breaks to, within the sentence, the pauses of phrases. The units the rabbis defined became referred to by their incipit, or opening clauses, and even today Cohen can remember the opening clause of his and chant it with the traditional cantillation: veyidaber adonay el Moshe leymor, shelach lecha anashim, veyaturu et eretz Canaan.
Cohen didn’t study for his admission exam to the Harker School[—on which he attained a score more perfect than anything achievable in Tetris—], but he couldn’t help but study for the bar mitzvah: Hebrew was the first subject that gave him trouble, and he could never decide whether it was that trouble or the language itself that fascinated[, and kept him from coding modifications to Tetris that allowed two elements to fall at once, that allowed two elements to fall at different speeds, that previewed the next two or more to fall and allowed the player to exchange them, and that expanded and contracted the playing surface both vertically and horizontally, and flipped it 360°, both by player whim and parametrically]. To be sure, Cohen wasn’t frustrated by the Hebrew language, but by its alphabet. Cohen never learned to read, speak, or write Hebrew fluently, and certainly never learned any grammar. His interest and experience were cut from semantic context, purely characterological. While bar mitzvah preparation required an emphasis on the letter as phoneme, to be reproduced orally, subsequent to that event the graphic or glyphic aspects prevailed, an approach that denied the letters their aggregation into syllables, the syllables into words, and favored instead their pictogrammatical or ideogrammatical identities, as if Hebrew were an Asian language in which each sign was a pantomime of arms and legs, ascenders and descenders, bars and stems and ties, in kabbalistic permutation. This pursuit of a symbolic or representative Hebrew was what inspired Cohen to develop his own written language, an unpronounceable language that would never be named, but that would serve as his sole mode of expression for an entire year after his bar mitzvah, until the summer of 1985.
[GET PRINCIPAL TO ELABORATE ON HIS MOTHER’S BOYCOTTING OF HIS BAR MITZVAH.]
[GET PRINCIPAL’S FATHER’S REACTION.]
Cohen’s initial impulse in creating his own language was to avoid what he considered the central paradox of all languages, both human and computational.
This paradox could be expressed in two ways:
1.) In human language an increase in the number of characters (or letters) means a decrease in the size of their utile aggregates (or words), until an alphabet gets so large that to be utile its letters must have their functions foreshortened, and returned to the primacies of the glyph, whose basic constituent is the stroke. English has an alphabet of 26 letters, and the average wordlength is an unwieldy 4.5 letters, while the Asian languages each have hundreds of characters that function as standalone pictograms (images of the things they mean), standalone ideograms (images of the ideas they mean), and thousands if not hundreds of thousands of pictoideo combinations and phonetically radicalized aggregates.
2.) In computer language the opposite of all this is true, in that a decrease in the number of characters
(the On or 1 and Off or 0 of binary code) means an increase in the size of their aggregates (strings or lines), so that though any given computer program must be made of millions or billions of positive integers separated by negativities in one unrearrangeable sequence, what is rendered is perfect, and perfectly understandable.
Human language sought precision, BUT became less widely translatable. Computer language found precision, AND became more widely translatable.
Cohen’s father’s coding meant nothing to Cohen’s mother, while his father couldn’t understand his mother’s specialist linguistic jargon—this resulted in “strife.” Things only got worse if they had to give directions, on masstransit, in Spanish.
Cohen was appalled by the fact that human processing unlike computer processing was not and would never be universally standardized. He resented that human languages could merely describe a program, they couldn’t execute one, and had to resort to metonymy, analogy, simile, metaphor.
Contraction from expansion, expansion from contraction: It was Cohen’s ultimate conclusion that human language had to be computerized—for each user individually. It occurred to him that his language’s proportionality should not be between the sum of its characters and the relative length/shortness of its aggregates, but rather between his parents’ interest in him and his own interest in privacy.