When I Saw the Animal

by Cohen, Bernard;

  Fifty Responses to the Ravens Paradox*

  ‘I am a raven,’ said the white shoe.

  ‘I imagine you are,’ said someone at the end of the great extinction.

  ‘Is this one-legged bird a raven?’ asked the blind woman.

  ‘It tends to be,’ answered a man with a one-armed brother.

  ‘No, because I have painted it green or blue,’ said the artist.

  ‘Intrinsically,’ said the white shoe.

  ‘What’s that behind your back?’ Magellan asked you know who. ‘I have travelled the world and have seen every living raven but one, and I’m hoping to complete my survey.’

  ‘I’m also interested,’ said Elcano. ‘I believe I have seen every raven, and have looked everywhere except behind your back and behind her back, but I might have missed one or possibly two.’

  ‘Behind my back is a box which may or may not contain something black,’ said you know who.

  ‘We want to see it,’ chorused the travellers.

  ‘I also have a box,’ she (unidentified) said. ‘This box contains a red raven, but I’m not sure if it’s alive.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ said the white shoe.

  ‘If it’s red, it can’t be a raven,’ said a man of faith.

  ‘I am a raven,’ said a crow. ‘Pretty much a raven, anyway. Do you believe me?’

  ‘Yes. I’m very open-minded,’ said the white shoe, ‘in a particular fashion.’

  ‘I have to check your DNA,’ said the absolutist, whose name I’ve forgotten but whose type has stuck in my mind.

  ‘Well, I feel like I’m a raven,’ said the crow.

  ‘I’ll check your DNA,’ repeated the absolutist. ‘I’ll check it twice to make sure.’

  ‘What colour is my DNA?’ asked the crow, and took off, very fast.

  ‘A raven is flying towards me at close to the speed of light, as I fly towards it at close to the speed of light,’ remarked a photon.

  ‘I polished my feathers to make them more reflective,’ said the flying crow, breathlessly.

  ‘I see what you mean,’ said the (possibly) lateral tree in a forest.

  ‘Obviously I can’t see that,’ said the utterly static absolutist.

  ‘Cute, but small,’ commented someone. ‘In this infinite universe, there are bound to be uncountable planets occupied by ravens. Not all ravens can be observed.’

  ‘So we’re not just projecting ravens, we have to project planets?’ said no one.

  ‘There are languages which cannot conceive of ravens,’ said Artemis.

  ‘Then they are not languages,’ said Harry the hegemonist.

  ‘The darkness is coming,’ said a man at Speakers’ Corner, ‘rhetorically.’

  ‘I see all,’ said someone omniscient, ‘but I can only speak in analogies.’

  ‘Will you tell us at the end of time?’ beseeched many, many people.

  ‘You’re spinning me out,’ said someone really stoned at a music festival. ‘Ravens are like super smart, so they’d tell us straightaway if only we could learn to listen. I mean, have you seriously checked out a raven’s neural pathways?’

  ‘Formulate this, punk,’ said a multidisciplinary research team. ‘You’re the one who’s a mess.’

  ‘I’ve nearly found a recessive gene for colour,’ said the white shoe. ‘Do you believe me now?’

  ‘No,’ said a nihilist, ‘and you know why.’

  ‘I don’t think this is a story, but I like it,’ said Pola the real person.

  ‘If not a story, what is it?’ I (the real I) asked.

  ‘If I hold it behind my back, it could be a raven,’ said real Pola in the real world, but not really ‘said’ unless the category ‘said’ includes messages mediated through mobile telephony.

  ‘This qualification may also apply to “asked” and “observed”,’ noted an imaginary friend, who is maybe a raven.

  ‘I am not a raven,’ said the almost certainly black raven or black non-raven or non-black non-raven held out of sight behind someone’s fictional back. ‘I’ve been read my rights so you can use this statement as evidence in a court of law.’

  ‘That’s worthless information,’ said a judicial officer, ‘or infinitesimally useful, which in practical terms means the same thing.’

  ‘I’m practically a raven,’ said the crow.

  ‘Me too,’ said the white shoe, ‘and I have a character arc about identity.’

  ‘I am and I am not, plus I’m not practical at all,’ said a voice from inside a box.

  ‘I’m pretty sure the small details contribute,’ echoed Archimedes of Syracuse through history. ‘Also, in this story we follow the ravens from a relatively small and fully accountable population through to an incalculable number in an infinite and infinitely marvellous and enigmatic universe of corvid uniformity or diversity.’

  ‘Stop perorating,’ said a Pola (not the real one). ‘It’s not a story.’

  A raven appeared out of nowhere. No one could determine its hue.

  ‘I get the last word,’ said the white shoe.

  Everyone agreed.

  This is a story about inductive reasoning. Or a non-story (see inside). It’s about requirements for confirming or disconfirming the hypothesis ‘All ravens are black’.

  The New Class Is Troubling

  The curricular vector and the vector of learning are two skew lines through a non-ideal vacuum. This new class is troubling, worse than the previous one, and I wish I hadn’t asked to be moved. In retrospect, the haste with which my request was acceded to was regrettably portentous and I should have foreseen that no good would come of the change. The principal, Flederman, in agreeing to the shift, seemed overly pleased. He shook my hand, wished me luck for the only time.

  From that office, I made my way along the corridors to the most isolated end of the school, imagining – though surely this was impossible – that I continued to feel the press of Principal Flederman’s hand on mine. My new classroom was audible some tens of metres before it became visible. Its volume in no way diminished as I entered, nor did any student acknowledge by greeting or otherwise that I had entered. I headed towards the front. At first glance, the room seemed to contain chairs and tables in the correct allocation, but the spread of furniture did not intersect in any manner with clustered student orbits.

  ‘Ahem. Good morning,’ I said, writing my name up on the board. I repeated, somewhat louder, ‘Good morning! My name is Semmet. I’ll be your teacher from now. Please take your seats.’

  ‘Hello, Semmet,’ called out three or four of them.

  ‘We can’t sit down,’ said someone else. ‘We haven’t all had a turn yet.’

  It was not at all clear what their referent was.

  ‘You’ll have to do it later,’ I said.

  Someone laughed.

  ‘What’s funny?’ I asked, straining to avoid tonal sharpness.

  There may have been some further effort to suppress laughter, and the students began to shuffle towards desks. Instead of sitting though, they continued to move around, as if unsure of which desk belonged to whom. There seemed some kind of parcel they were passing this way and that, an Ella handing it off to a Marcus (this is not definitive as I didn’t yet know their names), the Marcus smuggling it into the hands of a Charlie and so forth. The uncertainty of their movements crystallised into a kind of choreography, all based upon passing the object and disguising it from me.

  ‘Right,’ I said, hanging on to my temper as best as I could. ‘Let’s see that.’

  The choreography led ten or twelve students towards the door, which opened and shut immediately. The students finally began sitting. I opened the door, peered around to the left and right, but saw nothing. I heard someone laugh behind me, but when I turned around, no one was laughing and no one was looking at me
.

  ‘Right,’ I said again. ‘The roll. Andrea?’

  No answer.

  ‘Andrea? Is she here?’

  ‘She’s called Ella now,’ said a voice.

  ‘Is that true?’

  ‘Yes,’ said several voices.

  ‘Okay then. Where is the Ella who used to be Andrea?’

  ‘Here, sir.’

  Someone snickered.

  ‘Anita.’

  ‘Here, sir,’ said the same girl.

  I looked at her as sternly as I could.

  ‘I’m on the list twice,’ she said. ‘It’s always been like that.’

  As it began, so it went on.

  And on.

  Portents of ill continued to manifest, or to metamorphose from portents into full-grown ill. Aspects of the new class were not as they should have been. There was, it seemed to me, a sense of unnaturalness in the room. The boy called Harry looked like he should be an Oliver. Equally, the Oliver was suggestive of a Harry. I tried to call them by their true names – and at times did so inadvertently – but both acted somehow offended and protested with much more vociferousness than a mere name-switch ought to have precipitated. Too much protest? I could not guess at what drove their fervour.

  The several girls called Ella formed a diagonal across the room, back left to front right, whether by chance or habit or intent. They had little in common. I was not yet sure which of them had been misnamed. Perhaps all? At the time I continued to call them each by the name Ella and extracted a low rate of response.

  There were three Marcuses. One was fourteen, one thirteen and the third claimed to be sixteen though was noted down as twelve. There may have been some sort of rule or prior arrangement which prevented all Marcuses from looking simultaneously in the same direction.

  Of the eleven Sams, Charlies and Georges, six were female, three male and two had left the gender box blank. In my previous class, no child left the gender box blank. No questions were raised. This was not a complaint, as one might say to Principal Flederman, who would in my experience misconstrue, but simply a recognition: classroom administration was from the old and classroom inhabitants were from the new. With regard to this grouping, the overarching complaint was and had been and is the same as for all their classmates: the pupils seemed not to recognise the structure within which they were placed. I pointed this out to them but they seemed not to hear. Complaint attracted the same degree of rectification from the entirety of the class as any of my criticisms of and advice to them: precisely none.

  Although my role in the new class was, I supposed, as it had been in my former class – to convey to these students information and techniques previously unknown to them and to revise those that they knew – there was almost no correspondence between role and actual function. For example, a large proportion of my function turned out to be identifying and confronting trouble. There was trouble in that room and my job was to face it.

  The children were not supposed to face trouble at all. They were supposed to face me. Not so many of them practised the facing. Instead, they configured themselves into five exclusive and exclusivist conclaves or enclaves. Occasionally a spokesperson for one of the enclaves or conclaves addressed me with demands or borderline threats, especially if I had attempted to draw attention to the trouble and/or the extent to which the children were facing it rather than me. For example, one of them might say, please would I moderate my tone, or perhaps stop speaking. The tone I was using might upset someone and that would be a pity. Also the words.

  I explained that my role was not to placate, mollify and assuage. The spokespeople were direct on this one: I was, they said, wrong. What about my feelings? I said. How about mollifying me? Subdued laughter.

  Unfortunately, I lacked reference points for almost all aspects of the non-curricular learning. This, also unfortunately, stemmed from a fortnight of enforced ostracism from my colleagues and supervisors due to what Principal Flederman perceived as my non-collegial tendencies.

  At that initial meeting in which Principal Flederman allocated the class to me, I had politely enquired as to whether this would be a permanent shift or whether there would be some form of trial period. Deputy Principal Glass had quipped that the only trial period was a trial-by-ordeal, whereupon Principal Flederman had laughed and counselled me not to worry. When I protested that this very admonition might induce the opposite in me, he laughed a second time and claimed that the children were really very good deep down.

  ‘That’s even worse,’ I said, though perhaps with a tinge of lightness in my tone.

  ‘Are you a complainer?’ Principal Flederman had said, demeanour switched in an instant. ‘I don’t like complainers. Had I known you were one, if you had responded truthfully to the question in the interview about complaining, you might not have been appointed. You’d best keep that in mind. Please come and speak to me in two weeks when the effects of your complaint have worn off.’

  ‘But,’ I said.

  The flat-smiling Deputy Glass guided me out the door and that was that.

  Consequently, given the seeming overthrow of the expected order, I had no local or contemporaneous framework for principles of classroom governance.

  Instead, I slowly accumulated questions and unexplained observations. I noted these down day by day, and read over them each afternoon in the quiet of the empty corridors after class ended. There were so many issues to discuss. Who would have thought the new class could provoke so much contemplation? When the trial fortnight finished, and I would be once more permitted to address Principal Flederman, I was hoping to have prioritised my questions, but these seemed not to bend to priorities, remaining somewhat scattered and hard to categorise.

  As mentioned there was the question of the Marcuses’ sightlines. Further, did the dry-skinned Ella who wished the windows opened take precedence over the Charlie with hayfever who wished the windows shut and the air conditioner running on maximum? If a chair broke, was there some order in which children should be deprived of seating, or was this at the teacher’s discretion? Regarding the children who were thus displaced, should addressing this lack fall to the classroom teacher, or was it more a question for administrators?

  On the subject of learning, should testing relate to that which had been covered (including extracurricular elements such as classroom architecture, choreography and rhetoric of complaint) or must only the documented curriculum be examined? If the latter, can hints be given (whether or not under the duress of isolation) or a secret pattern incorporated into the multiple choice sections such that further skills in guessing and intimation might also receive rewards?

  It occurred to me that the best solution for the gender box issue would be to remove it altogether. This might seem an overreaction given that there were only two non-indicators in the entire room, but I could think of no reason to continue to collect this data. The children themselves were completely indifferent to it, and became restive whenever I attempted to discuss it, whether or not the discussion was aimed at completing the classification of the remaining Sams, Charlies and Georges. If additional data were required, for example if our circumstance required that a set amount of data be retained, perhaps a box on preferred hours would have been more valuable, so as to identify the afternoon children who ought to be under less pressure in the mornings, and the morning children who were at their best first thing. Could I put forward this suggestion without raising further ire and risking Principal Flederman imposing a further period of verbal exile?

  I tried to discuss the competing demands with representatives from each of the conclaves or enclaves. I tried to convene meetings in which the contents of tests were communicated to the various groups. This was not successful. Instead, several of the groups refused to put forward representatives for this purpose, or stipulated that representatives would only be put forward for alternative agendas wherein any mention of tests or
testing was impermissible. When I nominated a representative for a non-compliant group, the representative either refused to come forward or was rejected by the group on their attempt to return bearing the information from our meeting. Three children were ostracised as a result, following which those three agreed to share a further table. At their new table, they continued to purport to represent their conclaves or enclaves but their rulings and suggestions were not listened to. Further, they bickered at volume about which of the three ought to represent the table at which they now sat.

  My own testing two weeks of isolation approached its end. I noted the eleven days passed, and three still to go, by means of an accumulation of exes on a calendar near my desk – although this record may not have been reliable as several additional marks had been appended by person or persons unknown. If I lasted this time out – no, I told myself, I would last these final days so as to put these many important questions to Principal Flederman.

  In the generic fantasy, after struggling for a few months, or maybe fourteen days, the teacher makes the kind of rousing speech in which he, she or I convince an apparent rabble, this apparent rabble, that each is an individual with the power to change her or his or their own lives. In return, they (all except one hold-out) transcend the institutional structures which, though supposedly set up to support struggling or recalcitrant students, in fact exclude them, and with their new clear vision (all except one hold-out) they understand their own and also my humanity.

  The subject matter in this mythic lesson should be a stand-in for the art form to hand, but in this imaginary case it is mathematics. How big would a tennis court on the moon have to be?

  It just so happens that my one hold-out loves tennis. Click. I open my eyes.

  Day Fourteen, Part I.