The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain

“It’s how we live—by collecting the castoff of the universe. We miners, we’re scavengers. Why not learn survival strategies from those who have survived?” Gil took a sip of wine. He said it was really great, really stimulating, what she was saying, they just had to word it right, to be careful how they expressed it, to emphasize the difference of t

the head of the Campus Committee for Unity and Multiplicity,

they stood entirely outside the dreadful intimacy that bound those in chains to those who wore the anklet, an intimacy of blood and resentment and fear of falling and tenderness and the strained, defiant determination to rise.

How long was the chain? He did not know, and the not-knowing was no longer a source of dread but of expansive comfort and strength.

Look, this is simple, okay? Certain things are always with us.” She counted on her fingers. “One: scarcity. Limited space and resources. Two: the need to maintain order, which, when things are scarce, is always under threat. Three: surplus. Too many people, not enough stuff: the result is extra people. What are you going to do with all these extra

She spoke of how the water caught the light, how people were drawn to its flash and froth, “a zone of freshness,” she said, “of play.”

Everything is good for them, the woman thought suddenly. The thought startled her. Its violence. Gil’s bracelet clicked against his keyboard. The woman remembered a line from the jaded elder’s draft of the project, now deleted: Can the University be a place of both training and transformation?

Bleak and dogged he made his way, always feeling that he was somehow walking sideways, or as if everything around him hung at an angle. The light upstairs was hot, immense, and ruthless. He noticed the pattern of his eyelashes. People asked him questions and took his photograph.

The problem was that in order to make her work legible to the personnel committee (legibility being an area where she must improve, she had been told), it was necessary to set up her argument with theories familiar to the discipline, to couch her work in terms her audience knew.