Book of Numbers: A Novel (28 page)

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.

This led him to develop the following resolutions: 1.) His language had to
be written, not spoken, because the intimate intricacy of his expressions would be lost
to time (the time required by human processing), and 2.) It had to engage that
processing in a way that convinced his parents he wasn’t frustrating their
ability to comprehend, or respond—instead he was encouraging their interpretation
(what his mother called “active communication”).

What Cohen decided he needed was an alphabet of a single letter—
something familiar, something recognizable[—a grapheme for
the wall of his puerile silicon cave]. The letter he needed had to have a shape that
allowed for representational or symbolic variance—many points, many limbs.

After auditioning and discarding the Hebrew letters
Shin,
Mem,
and
Ayin
(
), Cohen settled on the
. [The fourstroked digraphed double
, which evolved
from the
—the
dubya, the last ligature remaining in this language.]

A normal
, as
it would be read in this language, would indicate Cohen himself, in the nosistic or
firstperson plural [a note: Cohen always speaks plurally—at what point to mention
that?], but rotated 90° to
, it would indicate Cohen’s relationship with his father, rotated
another 90° to
, it
would indicate Cohen’s relationship with his mother, and rotated yet another
90° to
, it would
indicate Cohen’s relationship to the both of them[, and to everyone and
everything else?]. All pages of this writing had, at their fundament, a variationally
turned
,
,