Home-School

The house in which I live is very much like a school or other complex institution. If you have a chat in the bathroom, anyone can hear it from another bathroom because the bathrooms vent into open air all on the same side of the house. However, you can't hear a thing clearly if you are in any other room in the house.

So it is with institutions of public character. You have to go to the bathroom to hear the juicy stuff. I remember that in the old school, one quirk of the boardroom was that its false ceiling was shared with the toilet nearby. So if you went to that toilet, you could hear what was being said in the boardroom. Since nobody was really banned from using the toilet, you could tell who knew things and you could know things yourself.

But there's a broader sense to all that. Quite often, in-house information transfer is pathetically poor compared to what a determined observer can glean from outside. All you have to do is find the right connections, and where the bathrooms vent their air.

Shrediting

I spent most of yesterday morning and this morning shredding documents — piles and piles of them. It occurred to me that about 80% of what is shredded is part of 'defensive shredding'. This is stuff you don't need to keep but which you feel you don't want to have running about outside, probably because if people got their hands on it, they'd spam you with subscriptions for odd magazines and advertisements for (haha) unit trusts or property.

About 20% of it, however, can be truly tempting. Minutes of institutional meetings at which people discuss sensitive things, archival data which you know some future historian would give his right arm (or at least a finger) for, innocent statements by incautious people which you could someday take out of context and use... thank God I am not exposed to such documents on a regular basis.

Then it struck me that what I was doing was limiting the future options for other people. By destroying material which I knew would never otherwise see the light of day, material which probably was the last of its kind, I was protecting some people from future harm, protecting unborn people from having opprobrium visited upon their ancestors, protecting an image of the past by editing it, sculpting it, trimming it.

I was shrediting. I was making sure that innocent pieces of information never got the chance to be dangerous. They would never grow up and become part of some narrative tapestry, but remain forever threads, smaller and smaller, dustier and dustier, motives into motes.

I wonder if my memories are going to go that way too.

Counterfactual

This place is where I write, and it is a dangerous place. What you see as fact is almost always fact, and yet it must be hedged around to protect the innocuous and innocent. However, the hedging-about is itself a danger to such. What then should the writer do, since all is danger? There are two solutions: to not write (which is a lot like not breathing) and to warn.

So I can speak freely, since it is the morning of the day itself. But I must warn that what I say is hedged about.

At this point, as the sun rises in some distant realm of the peaceful ocean, it is around midnight where the College of Wyverns stands. It is a cold afternoon at Burnley, where the Gunners have just triumphed in a lackadaisical manner. And the results of the Great Examination are free over the cables.

Yet I am bound. Master of rituals, observer of rites, keeper of archives and writer of rhymes, I am bound. I cannot tell what is already free. Which leaves me to ask the questions that nobody will, since I do not know the answers. Whether it is true or not that half a legion can find the answer to the life, the universe and everything (or even more) is unknown. Whether it is true or not that Hooke's law (F=kx) was violated is also unknown.

Why is it that we must grub and dig for scraps of information when it is so free, so rich, so useful and ameliorative of stress? Why should young people be made to rub their troubled brows when a moment's largesse would set them at liberty to laugh and love and have a life? Are we indeed so cribbed and cabined, bound by saucy doubts and fears, that we must deprive others?

My grand-uncle said it well, that old and crafty gnome. This is what he said. And perhaps although his light has long since dimmed, its ancient residues might illumine your path a little, as it has mine. I am Number One Goat and I bow to the four corners of the earth (as Barry Hughart might have written), unknowing, innocent, a sacrifice to the craftiness of the powers above and the powers below.

What Cannot Be Said

The Magistratum glowers down upon him. Heavily hooded, guised in dark robes that none might know them, the officers of the Arcanum are a law unto themselves. Not even the Hierophant, holy and distant, knows what they do. Sir Wolff has been here before, many times. He is inured to the scathing stares which he does not return. In his mind, he knows they cannot scratch his armour, and killing him is not an option.

You have spoken out against the Rule, Sir Wolff. We are gathered here to judge you.

He feels an odd frisson of hilarity. Of all attacks, this? He is tempted, very briefly, to act in a jocular fashion.

I have only spoken out against the rule, my lords.

Only? Only, you say? We note your confession with due diligence.

Wolff is still tempted, but he quells that sensation. The irony in the Grand Inquisitor's voice has not eluded him.

(mildly)
I have only spoken out against the rule of the Magistratum and not the Rule of the Order. Before you say any more, my lords, let me make my position clear. I am grateful that you are enlightened enough in the disciplines that the brothers of the Order have generally benefited under your care. I am glad to serve the Order, and if that means serving the Magistratum, so be it. I wield a sword I do not deserve, I am made a champion of things I have little love for, I eat the scraps from your table and ask not for more. Why, just the other day, I was asked for the fourth time if I would ascend to a higher seat! And I declined.

But I insist that we do not contend against other Orders or against the powers of the secular realm. We must speak truth to power and teach the brothers of the Order not only to be skilled, but as skilled as they can be. We can do more with less, my lords, and it does not make the states around us happy to see us lord it over them through gold and graft.

Enough. We are gathered here to judge you and not for you to judge.

Wolff tries hard not to smile. He reminds himself that these are dangerous people who have had him up on false charges before, attempted to terminate his career, and tried to disarm him...

We are here to discuss your unhealthy need to bruit about the knowledge that should remain sacred to the Order.

I have not revealed knowledge to others that they have not already known from your hand. For every fact which others know, I can account for it from your hands to the hands of others. Look to your own, Grand Lord of the Magistratum! If those you trust cannot keep secrets or keep the wrong secrets, while those you do not are faithful, whither goes the Order?

An air of simmering embarrassment fills the room. Judgement is suspended from the point of a sword. And Wolff, having inadvertently blurted out the truth, is suddenly satisfied that he did.