The Philosopher's Flight
Page 42
COUNTING
The sigil is counted in four, with two beats for the central line and then a sharp reverse, with one beat for overhead curve, and one to finish the spiral. Fitzenhalter, who himself could do no philosophy, rightly called the reverse “the toughest backhand in sigilry.”
DISSIPATE
EMPIRICAL PHILOSOPHERS HAVE KNOWN since the mid-eighteenth century that all forms of bronze interfere with sigils; drawing the dissipate sigil strengthens that native quality a thousandfold or more. There are currently thirty-eight distinctive forms of dissipate (each with dozens of subtypes), now all believed to be cross sections or “shadows” of a single, unified eight-dimensional figure. Numerous defensive strategies employing the interfaces between stacked dissipate glyphs were developed by the Radcliffe Working Group in the final months of the Great War, but outside of specialized military philosophy and theoretical research, the sigil is rarely used.
METHODS AND MATERIALS
Individual dissipate glyphs vary widely in shape, strength, and persistence. Ideal powder for each varies, but contemporary bronze, with 88 percent copper, 11 to 12 percent tin and trace amounts of zinc and antimony will produce consistent effects with all known glyphs.
COUNTING
For the Reverse Pearl Standard shown above, the glyph is drawn in four beats. The initial anticlockwise circle receives one beat, then one for the bridge and two for the inner square. Counting for the Philippine Figure 3 is idiosyncratic and beyond the scope of this introduction.
BONEKILL
SO MUCH MISINFORMATION SURROUNDS bonekilling that the authors decided an accurate description would do more good than harm. After all, if a philosopher is hellbent on murder and able to get close enough to draw a bonekill, there are numerous simpler methods for taking a life.
Bonekill came into use around 1895 and was employed by all sides during the guerilla actions in the Philippine-American War. While gruesome, it kills quickly and death is painless (so far as we can tell). Powder must be applied directly to the skin of the target; it cannot kill from a distance. A failed sigil does not cause brittle bone disease, as is popularly believed.
METHODS AND MATERIALS
Powder is a 7:1 mix of bone meal and elemental yellow sulfur. The bone meal should be ground from human bones—a femur if possible. The powder tends to stick and come out of the tube in a single clump; this is especially problematic in vials carried in a purse for years or worn in jewelry intended for self-defense. The central stem is drawn first, with the arced end-cap next, followed by the three barbs. Strokes should be fast, precise, and decisive.
COUNTING
Drawn on an open count, though each barb should receive equal time.
PROPHYLAXIS
ENTIRE BOOKS COULD BE written on what the prophylactic glyph does not do: it does not terminate pregnancies, rather it prevents them from occurring in the first place; it does not increase the incidence of ovarian or breast cancer; it does not cause pathological increase of the sex drive; it does not cause subsequent infertility.
Much of the challenge lies not in the glyph itself, which is relatively simple, but in not knowing immediately whether the sigil has taken and in the fact that it cannot be redrawn with hope of efficacy until at least twenty-eight days have passed. For that reason, even though prophylaxis is among the most widely practiced sigils in the world, many women prefer to visit a specialist or medical philosopher for one minute each month to have it drawn for them. A prophylaxis sigil should not be neglected until the heat of the moment, when inevitably a bottle of saline can’t be found or one’s hands are shaky.I
METHODS AND MATERIALS
Early practitioners believed that water from the Dead Sea was preferable for drawing glyphs, but it is far too salty, aside from being expensive to import. A simple 3 percent saline solution is preferred; this can easily be made by putting three grams of table salt in a graduated cylinder and adding water until one hundred milliliters of solution is reached. The old shortcut of half a teaspoon of salt in one-third cup of water will also work in a pinch.
The glyph is generally drawn one day following the end of menses and then each twenty-eight days thereafter. Specialists can make small adjustments to the glyph if it is being drawn at a different point in the menstrual cycle, as well as for age and number of previous pregnancies.
COUNTING
The glyph is drawn on the four-count, with two counts on the opening loop, one on the middle curve, and one on the final three-quarters loop, making it a classical accelerating glyph.
* * *
I. Failure rates of the prophylaxis sigil are often used as an example of independent probability in introductory theoretical empirical philosophy textbooks. To wit: the probability of at least one unintentional pregnancy over a lifetime is the probability of a successfully drawn glyph raised to the power of the number of months on which it is drawn (often estimated at 360 months, or thirty years). With a 99.5 percent success rate (one miss in two hundred—an enviable percentage), probability of at least one lifetime miss is 83.5 percent, which most women find unacceptably high. By contrast, a client of a specialist able to achieve 1 in 10,000 miss rate has a lifetime risk of unintentional pregnancy under 5 percent.
MANUAL REDUPLICATION
THE MERIWETHER LEWIS EXPEDITION famously lost its cartogramancer, William Clark, when he wandered away from the rest of his party only three miles outside St. Louis. Though his compatriots believed him dead, Clark nevertheless emerged in San Francisco ten years later, having made fabulously detailed maps of much of the American West. (His survey of the Yellowstone River Valley in Montana and Wyoming proved so accurate that it is still used as the basis for topographical maps of that region more than a century later.) Clark also devised a sigil and philosophical ink system by which he could make perfect copies of his maps.
Clark’s reduplication glyph was used without modification by nearly every clerk and bookkeeper the world over, until investigations by KF Unger in 1918 revealed it had many other useful properties, making it a cornerstone of the modular glyph movement. Temporary-permanent ink and a variety of related selective-binding emulsions have proven vital to fields of basic research ranging from cellular biology (where they are used to tag microscopic structures) to astronomy (for tinting telescope lenses so that stars are visible in daylight). However, none of these specialized versions has surpassed Clark’s original glyph for usefulness.
METHODS AND MATERIALS
Clark’s preferred ink, made from walnuts and naturally occurring magnetite, provides unparalleled image quality for copying maps and pictures. Most modern inks use iron filings instead, which have proven easier to work with, much less expensive, and perfectly adequate for duplicating documents.
For maximum fidelity, the glyph is drawn on the original sheet of blank paper by a fingertip dipped in ink and then on the sheet on which the copy is to be produced. The picture, map or document is drawn with the same ink on the first sheet; following this, a small amount of ink is spilled out onto the second page. The ink droplets will skitter across the page and into position before binding to the paper, making a perfect one-for-one copy. Copies can also be made of an existing printed or written page, though these duplicates are inevitably of poorer quality than the original. A tertiary copy (a copy of a copy of a copy) tends to be the last level at which handwriting is still legible.
COUNTING
Reduplication is among the simplest four-beat glyphs, with equal time given to the two curved strokes and two crossing lines. It makes for an ideal first sigil.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
WHERE POSSIBLE, I HAVE preserved the names and dates of historical events, including key moments in the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the Philippine-American War, and World War I. The most notable exceptions are the Battle of Petersburg (which was horrendous in other ways) and the Dardanelles Campaign, which I have prolonged by roughly one year.
Maxwell Gannet’s sermon is inspired by a 1978 speech by
radio personality Paul Harvey. Hovering Emergencies and Recovery is a nod to Judith Tintinalli’s Emergency Medicine, a book that changed the way I look at the world. Brock’s “malevolent presence” is an homage to Tom Wolfe’s demon that lives at Mach 1. Fox’s Prayer is an adaptation of the Astronaut’s Prayer, sometimes attributed to Alan Shepard. The song that Gertrude hums after Robert’s breakthrough is based on a paratrooper marching cadence. Northwest Aero’s advertisement is a parody of a Secret deodorant slogan. In his meditation on not being able to perform practical sigilry, Unger quotes Thomas Cranmer without attribution.
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