Collocations

Link to article: Collocations.

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[[include component:preview
text=A Public Domain Con 2025 entry that leads you to an overwhelming question...
Oh, do not ask, 'what is it?'
Let us go and make our visit.
]]
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The awkward thing is that Collocations the original version had extensive material in its page source, and the accessible version doesn't. If you're here looking for the extra stuff, you instead should visit
https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/fragment:collocations-1
which has what you want. Sorry about any confusion.
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To view the accessibility-friendly undecorated version, please [[[/collocations/offset/2 |click here]]].

To view the original version, please [[[/collocations/offset/1 |click here]]]. Its coding is accessible [[[/fragment:collocations-1| here]]] (view page source).

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[[# Title]]

+ Collocations

[[# TableOfContents]]

[[toc]]

+ Comments in Advance

[[div role="contentinfo"]]

++ Content Notice

This article contains mild non-explicit consensual intimate/sexual content, mostly innuendo.

In keeping with accessibility guidelines, all coloration of text has been removed from this document. Unfortunately, one section of this article in particular very deliberately and specifically explores the potential for parallel communication using color in text.

The original version of this document also notes this article contains Modernist pastiche slice-of-life content, as well as puzzle-related content (in hindsight, mystery-related content would have been a better description).

++ Comments on the Accessibility Revisions

As regards punctuation, please ensure that your device can properly identify and render parenthetical statements (like this), as well as the em dashes used herein — like this — to break text, as well as the ellipses used herein to indicate trailing off... like this... Each instance of "like this" in the previous sentence should have been rendered differently.

The notation [data missing] is an indicator; in the original document, em dashes were used to indicate this in a manner that deliberately obfuscated the absence as possible punctuation. Because there is no way to make the punctuation apparent to screen readers, I have opted to make the absences more explicit.

The original document was structured in a two-dimensional fashion, using footnotes, colored text, and comments in the page source to simultaneously advance a parallel narrative. To ensure accessibility, this has been "flattened" into a linear narrative, prioritizing accessibility over structural convenience. The page-source material has been omitted, regrettably.

The title, Collocations, is intended to be decorated with animation that rotates the first L to make a dash, creating the word co-locations. The title was additionally decorated with an animation intended to be suggestive of scientific attempts to iteratively estimate its characteristics. The final result of this animation is very close to, but not exactly, the original title. The title was additionally stylized as an HTML element, with the initial instance of the title appearing as a start tag with angle brackets, and the final instance of the title appearing as an end tag.

[[/div]] [!-- contentinfo --]

[[# I]]

+ Chapter One

++ Setting Notes

The setting for Chapter One is a laboratory, room R.A. 302 the H Wing of Site 55 (formerly Laboratory room H.C. 328, repurposed for the Recalcitrant Anomalies department). The date is September 23, 2011. The time is Friday afternoon.

++ A Recalcitrant Volcano

Before the smoke can clear, before the gong can fade to silence, a fox-fur-gloved hand reaches forward, firmly grasps the leftmost of the wardrobe's twin doors, and tugs — twice — to no avail.

"Mm. Well," says Andrews, marking on a clipboard, "It was worth a try."

There was a time when Cecilia would have nodded in agreement. There was a time when she would have at least put on a thin and tolerant smile. There was a time, even, when she would have offered Andrews an annoyed sideways glare, followed by a sigh tacitly acknowledging that her frustration was not with him. But those times have all come and gone: this latest failure was the seventy-fourth experiment they've run on SCP-9291-A this week, at least the two hundredth this month, and roughly the thousandth buoyant "it was worth a try" that Cecilia has had to endure on this assignment; the finer points of her personality have been ground coarse and then smooth, eroded by relentless tedium; her face does nothing, her grip loosens, her arm falls back, her eyes track her arm as it falls back … hmm … not lifelessly, per se, but not with natural ease … more of a hydraulics-tempered motion … robotically, she decides, without much satisfaction. How did people describe robotic behavior back before robots were a thing? Mechanically, maybe? Nah, still too neoteric, too narrowly technical. She could always check with Oscar...

Hardly relevant, in any case, to this godforsaken impenetrable edifice of stately antique furniture, steadfastly refusing to manifest its anomalous properties, like a grinning older brother withholding his latest yo-yo trick because he's enjoying the poke-and-prod attention from those who actually want to see it, once, before they go back to being adults ignoring you. Of course, that's generally how researching these "recalcitrant" anomalous objects goes: nearly ninety-nine percent of the time spent standing idle while wishing that something, anything, would happen, followed by one percent spent diving for cover while wishing it hadn't. The most apt kids' game analogy is probably Red Light, Green Light (led by a Red Light enthusiast), but what comes to mind for Cecilia is a variant of Duck, Duck, Goose. In any case, maybe, between this dull ninety-nine percent and that sharp one percent, Cecilia hopes for that tantalizing slimmest rounding-error of probability, triumph without tragedy.

— Suddenly acutely and paralytically aware that time has been passing in what people less prone to wandering thoughts tend to call "uncomfortable silence" — with only the hiss of the outgassing fog machine for comfort — and that's not much comfort — Cecilia begins to hum a soft monotone to herself, a habit she has tried diligently to avoid indulging while at work — 

Andrews, either a born natural at consummate professionalism or still young enough to have the energy to feign it, is exactly as oblivious to her unresponsiveness as polite decency requires. He checks his wristwatch, a treasure he recently inherited, currently worn on the distal side and lacquered on the back with acrylic nail polish, because it was giving him a rash. The nail polish was Cecilia's idea; Andrews had tried covering it in contact paper.

He says, "It's quarter to. We might have time for one more reset if we use the same fogger base?"

By the time he finishes asking the question, Cecilia has lifted the mask off her head and started to peel off one of the gloves, sticky with perspiration. She says, "Eh, let's not. Stopping now gives us time to clean up and file for the week and cruise out of here right at five."

Andrews replies, "Look at you, boss lady, aiming for a timely clock-ouout." The last word is a muffed, distended mess, interrupted by the pops of Andrews's back cracking as he shelves the clipboard, folders the checklist, kills the Bunsen burner (which really should have been done before the test), pulls the fuel tubing, and leans on the peninsula, wincing for a little longer than ordinary fatigue would explain away. Cecilia feels her brows furrow. He's too young for degenerative lumbar problems, isn't he? Twenties, thirties? Hmm … he's been Foundation eight years, has a pre-med bachelor's, a likely fiver, nobody gets out in four anymore, plus his younger self was probably a backpacking gap-year kind of guy, so … 18+6+8, thirty-two? Give or take. She could double-check his doss on SCiPNet, but jeez. When did she lose the ability to discern someone's age? Do they all just look like kids now? Oh god, they do, don't they. Like kids. Like someone else's kids.

Andrews rallies impressively, exhales with a forced smile, and says, "I mean hey, that works for me, Mom's flying in for the wake and I could use more time to tidy up and maybe see to fixing the strut on the trundle." As Cecilia makes a mental note to look up what a trundle is and whether it's something specific to Scottish-American funeral practices (and also: are there Scottish-American funeral practices?), Andrews waggles his eyebrows, and asks, "How 'bout you, boss? Big weekend plans?"

Cecilia could suppress the wild goofy can't-keep-a-secret grin that springs to her face, but chooses not to — she almost, almost, she almost replies "probably diving down a Wikipedia rabbit hole about trundles;" it's achingly tempting; but she thinks better of it — she replies, "Oh, you know me. Always."

He doesn't actually know her that well, of course — she's not much of a "chat about life outside work during work" person — but hey, let the man wonder. Surely it can't hurt to spark a little mystery now and then.

[[# II]]

+ Chapter Two

++ Setting Notes

The setting for Chapter Two is Headquarters House, 55 Beacon Street, Boston, Massachusetts (famous for being the former residence of W.H. Prescott). The date is September 22, 1911, a Friday, 100 years before Chapter One. The residence is currently owned and occupied by Augusta Peabody and her as-yet-unidentified guest.

++ The Litter You Have Left

The man, standing scrunched up and coiled over the drink he's been nursing and the flame that illuminates this little corner of the study, suppresses another sneeze. The crisp rectangle he holds addresses its intended recipient by the initials J.A.R. It is no Post Card, no chic trend for requesting one's presence at a supper over an artificial-silk tablecloth, but rather a sealed letter of conventional proportions and genteel purport; it bears a mark in one corner, not a post-mark Washington in his reds or greens, but a dutifully traced Symbol of the Minor Arcana:

[[image https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/local--files/collocations/ace-of-wands.png height="200px" alt="image is a drawn approximation of a Tarot card, the Ace of Wands" text="Ace of Wands" link="ace-of-wands.png"]]

The envelope is exquisitely discreet, exquisitely cryptic.

However palpable the sense of intended mystery may be, the man has no doubts regarding the provenance of the invitation, and is cognizant of the likely urgency of a timely reply. Nevertheless, he merely holds and gazes at the envelope, turning it ever-so-slowly, in a manner that might seem reverent if he looked even a little less unhappy.

The desk is as barren as the room is sparsely furnished — some papers, a screw-cap pen, the candle-holder and the glass (and a bottle of [data missing] that would normally be tucked away). There is no letter-opener at the ready, or even in the desk-drawers; this is no accident; they are much too messy, either sharp enough to draw beads of blood or, more commonly, dull enough to merely tear; one might as well be brandishing a crustacean claw. No, the attentive and respectful way to open an envelope of this import is by the warmth of a candle, by warmth and patience. Such a method, when reversible, could be used for nefarious meddling or covert espionage; accordingly, an attentive sender of sensitive materials would have introduced confounding factors, perhaps by impressing the wax with a unique and delicate embossment, or by lacing ribbon underneath the seal, or even by use of highly textured envelope-paper. It is reasonable to conclude that the originator of this particular communication is not well-versed in long-established methods of containing, securing, and protecting information, and the sealed structure of the package is merely an amateur's affectation. … Coax the wax into its primordial state, until paper parts from paper … Like — so — 

With a nearly-inaudible pop, the contents are his to retrieve and unfold; he stretches, sits, settles in, and proceeds:

[The letter begins as follows.]

Our dear Brother awaiting Dawn,

It is with all available pleasure that I announce to you the Preliminary Finding of this Lodge. Your Ingenium is in consonance with the Great Work of our Society. Its Perturbation is luminous in its current and patent meaning, and so a worthy offering to the Divine Light of Kaether. We find your Art, in short, Considerable.

[Here the letter-reader pauses. Note that most of the nouns throughout this letter are capitalized, which is emphatically archaic. The name Kaether is a portmanteau of Keter and ether.]

Purple prose and extravagant text decoration aside, this is, undoubtedly, the best news this sort of missive could possibly bear, but no joy finds the man's face, and no excitement quickens his heart. He merely reads on, with attenuated glumness perhaps better suited to news of some tragedy overseas, or the death of a distant relative, or a dinner-roll dropped buttered-side-down onto a rug.

[The letter continues as follows.]

The consideration we extend to you is Induction by initiatory Ritual of the Transfiguration Grade Zero Equals Zero; the first Purification, that your form and vibration may become unutterably splendid to Kaether; that your Art and Essence may be put before Kaether and beheld by us all, and thereby dissolved to Coincide; that you may be opened up to your fullest luminous Presence before what can only be described as a crowning achievement of the highest Age.

[The letter-reader pauses again.]

The greater portion of this passage merely conforms to the eclectic flourishes customary to Hermetic Orders, or Societies, or whatever faddish appellation the socialites and public intellectuals are bestowing upon themselves and their closest associates at the moment, but the last line hoists the man's attention from its stupor (and he stands as he reads it) — why, wasn't the Daily Evening Traveller newspaper just blaring about some stolen priceless sculpture, said to be a never-previously-exhibited work of Michelangelo himself, copped en route to its exhibition? — and the would-be exhibitor himself (here the man retrieves a newspaper, consults it) was quoted proclaiming the work to be —

[The man begins to read from the newspaper he retrieved.] "a crowning achievement of the Renaissance giant."

— Astonishing! The man muses: (Maybe just … Or could they truly have … And why else would … Then perhaps … did they?)

And after all, the man considers, is Charles's culpability, perhaps only as accessory after the fact, truly inconceivable? He has been reacquainting himself with the enterprises of some old prisoner-of-war comates, potential "business acquaintances" … men of ambitious and irregular character…

Hm.

[The man resumes reading the letter.]

There will be a Lodge-hall ceremony thereafter to welcome all our new Brothers and honor the Equinox, and also a supper. Please find enclosed Instructions with regard to time and place and Necessity, with a combination of Numbers to be kept on your person and in strictest confidence, for to pass the Lodge gate, they must be indicated in the enumerated order exactly.

Join our tapers in the Darkness, come and see what appears from Within.

Yours in Light and its Shadow,

Signed, Charles Follen Adams.

[This ends the letter.]

Hmph... Appalling, truthfully, that men of the caliber of Yeats and his theater-friends find these eccentricities so appealing. The sooner that everyone tires of and abandons all this occultist affectation, the better. But one does what one must with the circumstances as they are…

With reinstituted glumness, the man moves automatically, instinctively, to crumple the whole thing up and be done with it, to roll their world into a ball and feel it become rubbish — he almost, almost, almost indulges the urge, but stops himself — glances over the second paragraph again, lingering… and, at last, makes a grave Decision.

With renewed vitality, he unscrews the pen-cap, scrabbles for a clean sheet of note-paper, and sets to briskly copying down Instructions with regard to time and place and Necessity; then, after a precise refolding and replacement, and while straining to peer out the window to gauge how much time is left in the day, he begins to warm the wax again.

+ Chapter Three

++ Setting Notes

The setting for Chapter Three is the residence of Oscar Dominguez and Cecilia Hartford, located in Andover, Massachusetts. The date is September 24, 2011, one day after Chapter One, Saturday.

++  Involuntary Resemblances

[A note. This chapter contains diary entries and audio logs, which the navigation identifies as "files." For navigational accessibility, the narration in between has been split into "passages."]

+++ Passage 1

It surprises no one that Cecilia keeps a paper diary that, purportedly, no one gets to see. That rule is more honored in the breach than in the observance, such as whenever colleagues peek over her shoulder in the Site cafeteria, conspicuously inconspicuous, reading or pretending to read while waiting for her to notice and shoo them away.

Regardless of its apparent purpose, the diary itself has many roles, at least one of which is phatic, which requires that it be seen. The idea to use "Stardate" was inspired by the same colleague who for unfathomable reasons developed the habit of calling her Captain, whom she aggravates in turn with "May a Force be with you" salutations. Mutual annoyance is the better part of workplace camaraderie. That colleague, Tom, practically howled in triumph when he espied the Stardate label: "A-ha! I knew you were a nerd!" At that she smiled sweetly, with mission accomplished, and raised a shushing finger to her lips. Then winked. Camaraderie is the better part of workplace morale.

It might surprise some that lately the diary is practically a dictionary, almost superseding its (generally much more entertaining) role as a repository of quips and banter. The reason for this shift is principally technological: Cecilia discovered that she has access to the transcripts her cellphone's autorecord "feature" generates, and can export clips, even; no more struggling to remember just how someone phrased something.

Her handwriting can be a little inscrutable, but Cecilia (generally) doesn't care if her spying colleagues learn her word of the day. For those times when she does care about successful over-the-shoulder communication, everything is painstakingly legible.

+++ File 1: Diary, Friday

[This is a digitization of Cecilia's diary entry for Stardate 2011-09-23. It reads as follows.]

Word of the Day is "collocation." Noun. Webster's definition is pretty funny considering how we use it — it's a natural-sounding word pair, not idiomatic, but swapping out either word for a synonym would make it sound unnatural. With natural and unnatural defined by like, vibes shared broadly by native speakers. Take part, intended purpose, bear witness, fighting chance, quick nap, fast car (as opposed to fast nap and quick car, which sound a little weird). I guess "person mulch" and "swordfish lime" would be counterexamples. Not sure about word-pairs like "ant problem" or jargon like "anomalous effect" or "anomalous influence"; jargon might fall under idioms? The word dates to 1600 A.D. roughly. I am IN LOVE with this word. Can't unsee how many of these bad boys exist!

"Trundle" was less interesting; it refers to a trundle bed, one of those roll-out things people keep on hand for company. Probably not called a "pull-out" because that means something else now. Webster's dictionary also says some miscellaneous stuff about lanterns and wheel spokes, which might create opportunities for obscure punning. More importantly, by utter chance, I found:

"Magic Lantern", a noun mentioned in Webster's under "trundle" definition 5 related phrases: "An optical instrument consisting of a case enclosing a light, and having suitable lenses in a lateral tube, for throwing upon a screen, in a darkened room or the like, greatly magnified pictures from slides placed in the focus of the outer lens." Note to self, let Julia know that's what it would've been called by contemporaries (and maybe tease her with confirmation that they did call the projection surface a "screen" even back then), review docs for references to "magic" that might be non-anomalous. See if referred to as such in records.

E.T.B.E.T.R.

[This ends the diary entry.]

+++ Passage 2

Brushing teeth, bleary-eyed, and busy contemplating collocations, Cecilia is ambushed by her husband, who cries out, "Hey look! It's Query!"

The old man jazz-hands-jazzes this announcement, like always, and it's genuine; he really is just as excited to see her as he was the day they met for real. What a dork. She grins, gags a little, spits toothpaste-foam that nearly misses the basin, re-grins … and with a single smooth and gentle motion, maintaining eye contact, she shuts the bathroom door right in his stupid smiling face.

Five or six seconds later, having not moved, he finally responds, "Mmm. I'd better make coffee." It has the air of diagnosis, or maybe prognostication, as if to say: "ahh, it's going to be one of those days, isn't it." (It is.)

+++ File 2: Diary, Saturday

[As Oscar makes breakfast, Cecilia begins today's diary entry, Stardate 2011-09-24. The digitization reads as follows.]

Today's word of the day is "inimical." Yikes, almost as pretentious as "neoteric" from Tuesday, and harder to pronounce. It means unfavorable or hostile, but more like inherently or environmentally than like cold-bloodedly or calculatedly.

[The diary entry ends here, for now, as Oscar brings breakfast to the nook table.]

+++ File 3: Audio Log Saturday Breakfast

[This audio log of Oscar and Cecilia's breakfast conversation was automatically recorded by her Foundation-issued cellphone. It was transcribed, on the same day it was recorded, by the artificial intelligence construct named phonmon A.I.C.; phonmon is short for "phone monitor". Supplementary notes indicate breakfast consisted of granola, extra raisins, and lactose-free added-calcium 2% milk. The log begins now.]

Cecilia asks, "Since when are we doping milk with extra calcium? Is lactase inimical to calcium?"

Oscar says, "I don't think the word for that is doping, Query. It's not the Tour de [data missing]."

Cecilia says, "Well I'm not going to call it fortifying, that reeks of advertiser lingo."

Oscar says, "Calcium-enriched is what they put on the carton. Not sure if that's any better, if you're trying to avoid advertiser lingo, but good luck with that, ad people will probably co-opt every health initiative eventually. Fortification does sound like the type of idea the ad man Kellogg would have pinched from the nutritionist man Kellogg."

Cecilia asks, "Were there many of those? Besides cereal?"

Oscar says, "I assume so. I don't know actually. There was a [data missing] documentary in my relax queue last night, preview looked good but guess I fell asleep before it played. I woke up to find my tablet buzzing on the floor again, nearly out of battery."

Cecilia says, "Oh, so that's what that racket was. Thump thump thump thump. It woke me up. I figured that sound meant you were watching something else."

Oscar, with stately indignity, says "Absolutely not. I would never do any such thing, without you."

Cecilia asks, "Wait, why not?"

Oscar says, "Because you've spoiled me, love. That kind of thing is much more fun as one of your couples' enrichment activities."

Cecilia exclaims, "Oh my god, we should call them fortification activities!"

[There is a moment of audio interference, which the transcriber represents with question marks.]

Cecilia says, "Okay. Objection noted. I guess that implies the phrase enrichment activity is a collocation. In more ways than one!"

Oscar says, "Heh." You want a collocation enrichment activity, at [data expunged] I used to explain the concept of collocation by comparing the meanings of "bad boy" and "naughty boy." I got some giggles out of that, even from a couple of the surly dozers. Sometimes I actually miss teaching high school."

Cecilia asks, "Which one of those was the collocation?"

Oscar says, "At one time, both. They weren't interchangeable, despite consisting of synonyms. Nowadays I'm not all that sure "naughty boy" would have enough salience with the kids to qualify."

Cecilia says, "Honestly, I'm surprised "bad boy" still resonated."

Oscar says, "Honestly, it kind of didn't." He sighs. "There are times when I really don't miss teaching high school."

[This ends the audio log.]

As OED loads the dishwasher, Cecilia flicks a phone browser open, tapping her pen rhythmically on her forehead. This is a replacement habit she has developed, or really, is resolutely attempting to develop, in order to keep herself from gnawing all her Bics to bits.

+++ File 4: Diary, Saturday Continued

[Cecilia adds the following to her diary entry for the day.]

Enrich. Transitive verb. To reintroduce essential nutrition removed from the food by the industrial so-called "refinement" process. It'd be fun to have aliens show up to inquire what we do to "refine and enrich" our foods, only to find out the results we get are crap.

Fortify. Transitive verb. To add essential nutrient content to a substance from which it does not originate. So putting lemon in my water is technically fortifying it.

Webster's states the earliest example of fortifying, iodine in salt, did not occur until the nineteen twenties. I need to verify the salt we use is uniodized. Imagine something that dumb making the difference. But it's always something dumb that makes the difference, isn't it?

[This ends the diary entry.]

+++ File 5: Audio Log, Saturday Errands

[This audio log of Oscar and Cecilia's mid-morning conversation was automatically recorded by her phone. It was transcribed, on the same day it was recorded, by the artificial intelligence construct named phonmon A.I.C. The log begins now.]

Cecilia asks, "So what was it you were so busy with yesterday, if not naughtiness?"

Oscar says, "Oh, I was paper-shuffling. Our favorite two-bit troglodyte Senator Cecil Teubit is on his ban rampage bullshit again, this time Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass' and Shaw's [data missing] made his list. It'll go nowhere like always, but the last thing I wanna do is get wet making waves this year, so I figure it's better to sub them out before someone shows him how to [data missing] course reading lists and he pegs me for the next "Taxpayer-Dollar-Funded Professor of Dangerous Influence."

Cecilia asks, "The course syllabus doesn't lock you in?"

Oscar says, "It's for [course name expunged], the graduate student seminar, nobody's gonna care, the other guy had them reading Stoppard. But I'll run it all by [name expunged] just in case."

[There is a moment of audio interference, transcribed as question marks.]

Oscar says, "Nothing too out there, I'm thinking Prufrock for the chapbook and Constance for the play."

[There is another moment of audio interference, transcribed as question marks.]

Oscar says, "Oh, you'd love him. He's a Modernist poet and weirdo, you should give his Love Songs a read, playful and melancholy and with a cadence that will bounce around in your head for days. Gutenberg should have the whole thing, or I have a couple different dead tree sources you can borrow."

[This ends the audio log.]

+++ File 6: Audio Log, September Lunch

[This audio log of Oscar and Cecilia's midday conversation was automatically recorded by her phone. It was transcribed, on the same day it was recorded, by the artificial intelligence construct named phonmon A.I.C. The log begins now.]

Cecilia asks, "Who decided that everyone's tuna fish should taste so much like pickles? Even the pickle didn't taste this much like pickles."

Oscar asks, "Is that a complaint? And here I thought you liked pickles, the way you're always taking mine."

[There is a moment of indiscernible audio, represented with question marks.]

Oscar says, "Case in point."

Cecilia says, "I like pickles that taste like pickles, and fish that tastes like fish."

[This ends the audio log. In the "Remarks" field underneath the log, the transcriber left a note, which reads, "phonmon doesn't taste like a name."]

+++ File 7: Audio Log, Saturday Dinner

[This audio log of Oscar and Cecilia's dinnertime conversation was automatically recorded by her phone. It was transcribed on the same day it was recorded. The name of the transcriber was not specified in file metadata. The log begins now.]

Oscar asks, "I thought you liked your fish flavored like fish?"

Cecilia says, "This isn't pesto flavored, dear, it's pesto fortified."

Oscar says, "Good to know I won't have to worry about pesto deficiency for a while."

Cecilia says, "You still might. I plan to steal your leftovers later."

Oscar says, "You wouldn't dare."

[From here on, the audio itself is indiscernible. It may have been corrupted after transcription somehow, as otherwise it is unclear how the transcriber managed to hear any additional dialogue.]

Oscar starts laughing, and says, "Okay, okay, point conceded, point conceded! You would dare. I'm not sure why I even said that. Sheesh."

[There is a moment of indiscernible audio, represented by question marks.]

Oscar, still laughing, says "No more than usual. It's certainly not worse."

[This ends the transcript.]

+++ Passage 3

Cecilia's midnight snack, which she calls her midnight sneak, consists of pickles straight from the jar, one-handed, because the other is busy holding open the slim paperback "Robinson, Prufrock, Adams: Modernism's Lost Pilgrims" and page-turning with practiced dexterity. Cecilia taught herself this trick, which is to place the middle finger on the spine for leverage, put the index finger in the crease between pages to hold the book open, and turn the page by feathering it apart from the rest with the thumb and then maneuvering the index finger clockwise or counterclockwise as necessary to finish the transition and secure the new crease.

Having gotten about a quarter into this book (with plenty of jumping around), Cecilia has settled on some preliminary verdicts.

One, Robinson seems like kind of a hack, the type who nowadays would have excessively strong opinions about feminists and regional microbreweries. This one is neither a preliminary verdict nor a new opinion, as she was already quite familiar with him from SCP-9291-A-related research into his Hermetic Order of choice. Two, Prufrock's early stuff comes across as a vivid surrealist type with an intensely melancholy whiskey-breathed maturity, but oh my god is he ever a guy's guy. Three, Adams is humorous and pleasantly conventional, but tying him in with the others as a "Lost Pilgrim" feels like a tendentious stretch only attempted because everything's gotta be grouped in threes. Heaven forbid someone deign to write about just two people.

Cecilia figures maybe just one or two more pages (what she means is: one or two more pickle slices) and it'll be time to turn in for the night for real this time; the next poem is Prufrock's first "Love Song."

Looks like it has lots of short lines, surely it'll be a quick read.

+++ File 8: Opening Stanza, Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question...
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.

+++ Passage 4

Cecilia is utterly dazzled by this poem.

Just a few lines into the first stanza, already oblivious to mere mortal matters of time and space and necessity, she puts the pickle-jar back without looking at it, unaware that it's missing its lid; in fact, her eyes don't leave the book-pages until she's sprawled on the landing and oh! — ouch! — indeed, here she is at the top of the stairs and sprawled on the landing, clenching her jaw and squeezing her eyes shut, processing, processing. Ouch. There is a fifteen-second wordless pandemonium of undifferentiated pain-impulses; eventually, her left foot helpfully reports in that she has stubbed her toe and please let's not be doing that; a while later, as her forearms throb to the tempo of her heartbeat, her left wrist begins to have big opinions, broadly consonant with those of her big toe. By this time she is back to thinking thoughts: "Well, that will bruise," and, "Now I really do need to think of something exciting to pretend to have done this weekend," and, "You're too old to be going up the stairs inattentively. Be better."

Sitting on the top step, she eyes the book (which skidded down the hall and sits splayed chaotically, lit by the hallway night-light and casting grandiose shadows) with a grim, categorically unjustified suspicion. "Oh, I see, Mr. Love Poems," she says, "you think you're dangerous."

The book does not reply.

Joint-stiff and a little embarrassed, Cecilia fetches an ice pack, evaluates, decides she's a little too heavy-headed to try the stairs again, and ultimately collapses into her armchair, wondering what sort of creature would eat at a sawdust restaurant, and what they would order. (Sawdust, probably.) She wakes up an hour past daybreak, having dreamed of running through half-deserted streets as they eroded her skin into the wind, an endless dust making burrs of the air, grinding her coarse and then smooth and then smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and — and all the way through, that feeling of someone unwelcome beside her, matching her stride for stride, breathing words into her ear to the pace of the run: "Let us go then, you and I, you and I, you and I. Let us go then, you and I, you and I, you and I."

She loses the memory to blurry half-wakefulness, details first, the dream itself growing coarse and then smooth and then small as it recedes. Then she stands, feels herself stand, feels herself breathing in the uncontaminated air, unable to remember what made her think to classify it as uncontaminated. Something smells good: something good-smelling is near. The floorboards are creaking: someone approaches. She blinks her eyes back to functionality (this involves a closed-eyelids eyebrow-stretch that makes her ears thunder) and resolves the image before her into her smiling husband.

No ambush today, no inquiry, no words even. Just a fresh ice pack and a steaming mug, held from underneath so the handle can face her. Trusting that she will, in time, explain the bruises and the chip in the flowerpot upstairs that she didn't even realize was the thing that her wrist had been having big opinions about.

Her eyes blur back up, a bit, as she bites at her lip and gingerly assumes operational control of the coffee-vessel, about as much as she can manage right now. But that's already getting better. Words cannot express the love, the gratitude, she feels.

Well, alright, maybe some words. Such as, "What a dork."

[[# IV]]

+ Chapter Four

++ Setting Notes

The setting for Chapter Four is the Chestnut Street residence of Charles Follen Adams in Boston, Massachusetts, a few blocks from the setting of Chapter Two. The date is September 22, 1911, the same as Chapter Two. The time is late Friday evening.

++ I Couldn't Not Awaken

Charles says, "I am terribly sorry for the error, John. Sam was clearly too hasty with the deliveries."

The man, John, offers a forgiving nod. Until this moment, he had held out hope that the envelope was merely mislabeled, and contained an invite meant for him after all. The man says, "J.A.P., J.A.R., a pairing worthy of a comedy of errors, to be sure; please, don't trouble your boy over it. It was good fortune's happenstance that I noticed before opening the envelope."

Charles says, "Yes, and thank you for its return, you have gone quite out of your way to spare me no small amount of potential trouble. I will see to its inerrant delivery personally. And for all future correspondences, let me assure you that I will forevermore take the time to write out John Arthur Prufrock in its august totality. There would be no sense in tempting the Fates to meddle again."

John says, "Indeed. Although, it would be John Alfred." Charles mumbles an apologetic acknowledgement, and there is a pause while John considers how to proceed; he settles on asking a question with an indubitable answer. John says, "Speaking of correspondence. You would not happen to have the letter intended for myself?"

Charles says, "I do not. I presume that Jeremiah has received it, and I will inquire as to its whereabouts when I deliver this. But I can inform you now of your letter's content, and offer you my condolences…"

This last word, of course, apprises John Alfred Prufrock of everything that needs to be told, and it strikes his solar plexus taut. Although the rejection is exactly what he conditioned himself to expect, and had been conditioning himself to expect from the moment he offered his work for appraisal, that conditioning was based in fatalist conjecture, and there was always the slimmest unquenchable hope of deliverance. Until now. John says, "I see. Was any reason given?"

Adams says, "Yes and no. The inquiry committee was quite effusive in their praise for your work, John. Two of the assessors in particular commended your poetry as a 'promising start,' a review to which we all lent our support with great enthusiasm. It was decided unanimously to encourage you to continue in your efforts and to nurture your talent to its fullest achievable maturation."

John says, "Charles. I am forty-two. I am not one of Mr. Benson's cherub-faced students.[!-- probably Frank W. Benson --] My submissions to your fanciful Society reflect decades of maturation —"

Charles attempts to interrupt, softly, saying "John."

John continues, "— why, in this year alone I have been published in [data missing] and reviewed in New Literary World magazine — favorably —"

Charles attempts to interrupt more emphatically, saying, "John! Please!"

John continues, "— if the fruits of such endeavors as mine amount only to a promising start, then perhaps I should prove a worthy mermaid to your audience in a mere — few — centuries!" The last words are spittle-flecked; it is dawning on John that his anger must constitute quite a ridiculous spectacle for the Fates to enjoy. The burgeoning awareness of his asinine momentum is excruciating, a far-too-brightly-colored efflorescence that roots his guts and breaches his flesh.

Charles shouts, "John!"

John continues, "You would do as well to praise Sisyphus for his 'promising start' toward cresting his hilltop!" With this, he looses the reins of the chariot of fury; having exhausted the remainder of his agitation, having expended himself to present audiences divine and earthly with ample cause to guffaw or snicker at his expense, he withers, utterly, draining until there is nothing left to drain. He is a dry and sunless garden when the flowers are dead. His soil is bitter and laced with salt.

In a theater this would have elicited one last jeering round of snickers from the spectators, as it dawns on the character that they have become a fool. Here, there are not even witnesses, no utilitarian profit from John's loss of dignity. He is the brightness of a supernova with no astronomers attentive. He is the butt of a joke told to an empty room.

Charles is John's dearest friend. Charles knows that Charles is John's dearest friend (though it is hardly mutual). He chooses his next words, and his tone, accordingly. Charles says, "John. We only admit a precious few, and the qualities that my fanciful colleagues fancy are peculiar, even to me. And while I value the peculiar proficiency we cultivate, we surely do not constitute a monopoly when it comes to enlightenment. This is an age rich in luminosity and luminaries, and there are also, surely, so many other societies, of ours or greater esteem…"

John says, "Surely." Prufrock is a speck alone, there are miles between him and any and all things; he is nothing left, an unmarked point in geometric space; he is a shell with the egg blown out. Empty, small, befouling the floor below.

Some simulacrum occupying John Alfred Prufrock's space conducts the remainder of the conversation, politely. It walks the body back to its estate, an awkward locomotive many-jointed thing, and enters the rooms it uses to prepare itself for night-time. It has no need for a candle, nor for either of the electric light-switches; it knows the ways. It places his grave Decision into safekeeping.

Eons within, his ego is already healing. He is the unseen secret space inside a deep and winding cavern, a repository of unbreathed air. He is the point of intersection of infinitely many as-yet-undrawn lines. 

He is an Adam with no spark, newly new, already reaching.
He is a seed, discarded, with the roots already breaching.
He was the soil in which this seed will grow.
Prufrock dreams of Michelangelo.

+ Chapter Five

++ Setting Notes

The setting for Chapter Five is, once again, the residence of Oscar Dominguez and Cecilia Hartford in Andover. The date is September 25, 2011, one day after Chapter Three, Sunday.

++ Loving Letters, Mingling Souls

Breakfast consists of avocado toast, with the eggs over easy. (The kids are really onto something with this one.)

+++ File 9: Audio Log, Sunday Breakfast

[This audio log of Oscar and Cecilia's conversation was automatically recorded by her phone. It was transcribed one day after it was recorded. The "Name" field for the transcriber was replaced with "Designation" and identified as phonmon A.I.C. The transcriber-provided introductory notes are more extensive for this log. They specify that the scope of the transcript was client-requested, and clarify that some information has been summarized for clarity or omitted for brevity. The log begins now.]


Cecilia says, " — Did you notice his fascination with the color yellow? It's like he's imagining his own cowardice taking shape outside of him, leering through the windows."

The transcriber notes, "There is background noise. Something is spinning."

Oscar says, "Mmm. I think there's also a conveniently literal component to that. Conventional interpretation is that specifically yellow fog would've been familiar at the time because of high sulphur content, relatively new and localized pollution, from dramatic spikes in domestic coal burning. In that sense the yellow fog is one of Prufrock's stand-ins for icky modernity; it would have had the same novelty and salience then as smoky air in Texas now."

Cecilia says, "As if this guy thought about anything other than himself. He pretty much forgets about addressing the reader after the introduction and gets stuck in his own head."

Oscar says, "Yep yep, that's Prufrock for you. Relentlessly introspective, imagery carefully chosen to correspond to states-of-mind, lots of projections and everything's a canvas. I like to think he saw a motion picture machine once and it scarred him for life. Quite a few of the Modernists or proto-Modernists got stuck in their own heads, though. Lots of readers say the same thing about Whitman, what with all the "I" statements. But in between those, Walt does take us on all those grand sweeping list-making journeys, with his "we are all one" bent to it. Prufrock gets outside his own head in the opposite way, by expressing alienation from everything and atomizing it, dwelling on the distance between."

Cecilia says, "Nice lecture, babe. Maybe a bit unfocused."

Oscar says, "Oh. Yes. Sorry. Speaking of being in one's own head, sheesh. Half my own brain is stuck on Whitman, how it is that Teubit just now learned about Whitman, whether Prufrock really is a good substitute for seminar..."

Cecilia says, "I'm teasing, it's fine, it's fine, let's compare them. I think the Prufrock way is not as effective for getting outside his own head. What you called atomizing, I'd just call ruminating, in-head churn. Still, I don't mind the churning and the ruminating. It's nicely moody, like London rain. And Prufrock is certainly a lot more methodical than Whitman, which I appreciate; he's exacting, he's better able to telegraph and foreshadow."

Oscar says, "Don't know if I'd go that far. There's method in Walt's madness. Guess I haven't scanned through Leaves specifically to evaluate the foreshadowing, that'd be interesting to zoom in on. Does he even need to foreshadow though? Part of the delight of phantasmagoria is just meandering through all that wonder and novelty."

Cecilia says, "Ughh, kill me, please, now. I hate hate hate meandering. I don't want to live-laugh-love through each moment, I want to anticipate where I'm going, or at least I want an author to nurture some anticipation in me, even if it's just to surprise me by undermining it. Exploiting my intuition to mess with me, that's fine, that's fun, but I at least want to feel like my intuition has value."

Oscar says, "Fair enough, but there's more to intuition than predicting what comes next. Like, there's also evaluating which things are important as you go, or — "

Cecilia says, "Sure, yes, true. That's... not relevant to whether there's an underlying intentionality guiding the sequence of happenings. In life sometimes you just stub your toe and it connects to nothing, means nothing. But that sucks, and fiction isn't life, it... shouldn't have life's same inherent problems holding it back when they're solvable? Ugh. I don't know if that made any sense."

Oscar says, "Sort of. It sounds like Chekhov's Gun, you don't want your attention drawn to inconsequential things."

Cecilia says, "More like, I just want there to be a reason to read the paragraphs of a book forward instead of backward or shuffled to be random." Cecilia sighs, then continues, "I hate the idea of meandering. I want to be able to look back and remember cues, flow, direction, signposts, how and why I got to wherever here is. Some evidence of logical design, that the thing was building toward something or going toward somewhere. Otherwise what's the point?"

Oscar says, "... I feel sad all of a sudden. Like you're missing out on a lot of joy that I just assumed you experienced. I think maybe half my favorite Query quotes are from our meandering-times! The walks we used to take in the botanical gardens... it pains me to think you didn't feel the same enjoyment." Oscar sighs wistfully, then continues, "One of my favorite memories of us is just meandering around — Beach, all day at our disposal, taking life as it comes, wandering..."

Cecilia says, "Oh, I knew exactly where that walk was heading."

Oscar coughs, then says, "Toward [data redacted] and chicken with breading?"

Cecilia says, "What?"

Oscar says, "Sorry, nevermind that, I was riffing on your meter, the thing you said had a nice amphibrach cadence. Hmm. See, don't our conversations meander all the time? And isn't it fun? I think talking with you is literally the most fun thing in my life."

Cecilia says, "Aww, I beat out video games?... I wonder if I'm a little more purpose-oriented than you've come to believe. Obviously I can flip the goofy switch off and on and still be methodical, that's Ms. Work-Query. Really it feels like my whole career has consisted of me making spontaneous decisions for relatively goofy reasons and then committing to them. So, sudden leaps I can do, blind leaps, even. But ongoing spontaneity? Not just acting on impulse, but wandering? That's... harder. And not actually very fun for me."

Oscar says, "That's Work-Query? Wow. Do you get a lot of opportunities for impulsive goofiness and sudden leaps at work? I figured a fancy elite org with a name as stuffed-shirty as the Society for Curation and Protection would be as humorless as a college dean's office."

Cecilia says, "Preservation. It's the Society for Curation and Preservation. But you're right, they're pretty stuffed-shirty at HQ. It's the consulting they've been flying me around for that provides almost more leaping than I can stand. Diving headlong into a brand new city is fun until they make you do it eight or ten times in a single year and won't even spring for an airfare stipend for your darling husband to make conjugal visits."

Oscar says, "Preservation, right, sorry, I knew that. Wow, some darling husband I am. And hey, I'm sure you're a riot at work, whenever you want to be."

Cecilia says, "They don't provide as many golden opportunities as you, Mr. Hair Professor Doctor of Dangerous Influence and American Literature and Playing the Straight Man. But I liked it better a moment ago when we were talking about bringing joy to each other and also this lovely new author you dropped in my lap."

Oscar says, "And who you dropped on the floor."

Cecilia says, "Don't grin at me like that, you dork, if anything, that book dropped me on the floor. Which goes to show, you pegged me perfectly. I don't just like him. Consider me completely obsessed. I'm taking the poor lonely sad ballad man on as my new boyfriend. It took an act of God to get me to put The First Love Song down partway through."

Oscar says, "God intervened to trip you up on the stairs? That sounds, uh... incongruous."

Cecilia says, "The phrase "act of God" is always used for things that a benevolent god would find disgusting or horrifying. A slip-and-fall doesn't even register. And He did it for noble reasons, to ensure I wouldn't bring my new man to bed with me on the first night."

Oscar says, "I — well — hmm. That escalated quickly. Unlike Prufrock, who seems barely capable of any acceleration at all. I don't think he'd be very good in bed."

Cecilia says, "Oh, that's such a guy thing to say. The slow ones are the best at it. Well. I was going to ask you for your thoughts on the poem's pacing. Every observation is so considered, deliberate. Expression doesn't feel like enough of a word for it; to me, it almost feels like he's manifesting his emotions as part of some kind of ceremony, or a ritual performance."

Oscar says, "That's very anthropologist of you. Any sufficiently arbitrary behavior is indistinguishable from ceremony.
But I wouldn't describe the journey of the poem as pacing, like, there's no back and forth to it. In fact I think of the path he walks as specifically an L shape. I even wrote about it, as dumb as that might sound."

Cecilia says, "I meant "pacing" as in speed, but ooh, tell me more about this L."

Oscar says, "Oh. Okay. Settle in for one of my rambling lectures, though."

Cecilia says, "Oh I am specifically requesting a lecture and handing you the reins."

Oscar says, "Don't say I didn't warn you. So this is just concerning the "visit" verse of the poem, as in, the part after the introduction but before it gets really fantastic and hallucinogenic. The description alternates back and forth between the experience of his body and the observation of his surroundings. From the way the surroundings fit together and interact, we know that whenever the narrator evaluates his surroundings, he consistently describes the experience in panorama, y'know, moving from thing to thing in radial order. Diagnostically, like the setting is a patient etherised upon a table and he's conducting a medical examination of what all is out there outside of himself."

Cecilia says, "And does it by comparing every thing to some thought or memory of his, because he can't get out of his own head for more than a second at a time."

Oscar says, "Sure. The "L thing" has to do with the physical objects of the poem, though, and the peculiar way they are presented to us. Starting from a stationary standing position, the narrator starts with identifying what's on his left periphery, sweeps across his field of vision, until describing what's on the right periphery, after which he speculates ominously about what could be behind him. We can even specifically cordon off the "behind" parts because there's no visual data in them, and they're where he expresses the greatest degree of uncertainty by speaking in the future tense about what will happen. It's not as easy to present unambiguous evidence for the left-to-right panorama, there's nothing specific I can just point you to and say oop, there you go. I guess you could read my awful paper, I wrote alllllll about Modernist methods for conveying physical movement information in stream-of-consciousness narratives, but, umm. I don't want to subject you to that, I like being married."

Cecilia says, "Oh, do you now? Doctor. Summarize."

Oscar says, "With pleasure, Officer Seven. Circumstantial evidence includes his use of scientific, medical, and diagnostic terminology to refer to his own observation process, as well as careful tracking of which observed objects he imagines interacting with each other, from which we can infer their relative proximity. Throwing a ball back and forth implies a greater distance than hugging, for example."

Cecilia says, "It did feel to me like when you had me play that tank game and I couldn't get the hang of your crazy controller with the dual joysticks. You made fun of me for either moving or looking around, never both at once. But I felt like I was learning to drive all over again, plus trying to figure out what in blue hell I was looking at."

Oscar says, "It is like that, but even worse, or I should say better, more systematic. Despite never explicitly mentioning anything about the method in the text, the pattern is so relentlessly consistent that I plan to jokingly propose in seminar that the narrator seems incapable of turning his head. I imagine some robot from an old sci fi movie, parts fixed in place, scanning, moving on treads."

Cecilia says, "Heh."

Oscar says, "Yeah. It's interesting the types of artificial restrictions authors devise for their characters to convey information, sometimes. If the narrator just told us about the things he perceived according to perceived importance, or whatever caught his attention, we would probably assume he was meandering at random. But because he is the sort of person to not turn his head, and also the sort of person to follow this exceptionally strict, clinical, and precise method of documenting what he observes — like I said earlier, a real weirdo — we are able to get a sense of motion. It's not even a "show, don't tell" thing; the cues are more embedded than shown cues would be; it's structural, like encoded into the DNA of the work. The heavy content repetition in the "pause" stanzas is great for the meter and for getting phrases stuck in your head, sure, but it's also literally tracking where things are in relation to the narrator, and because he moves slowly enough or observes often enough for objects to appear in multiple observations, we can deduce precise details of movement. All without a single explanatory word. It's an example of a text teaching us how to read it, an idea which I know I have already talked at you to death about so let me click at my brain a bit and move on to the L thing."

Cecilia says, "I don't mind at all. But thank you."

Oscar says, "Let's see. The L. Hopefully I don't repeat myself too much here. (.) So I know I at least mentioned something about the foreshadowing you talked about also being spatial indicators. Due to the artificial rules governing the narrator's observation reports, by tracking the placement of repetition in the different pauses, we can infer he's moving past them, and by considering the likely sizes of the objects and their distance inferred from description, we can deduce he is moving at a slow walking speed. The repetition serves a structural purpose so vital that the narrator's behavior and personality are built to accomplish it. First and foremost, he is the sort of person who would engage in this procedure; his other characteristics must accommodate this. This poem could only be narrated by a certain sort of person —  Wait. This is me getting caught up and going in the wrong direction again. I was supposed to be talking about the L."

Cecilia says, "Babe. You're doing great. I'm falling in love all over again. I could listen to this for hours."

Oscar says, "Glad to hear it, but let's hope it doesn't take that long. It's really not nearly as difficult an idea as I'm making it out to be. Let's see. So the motion-tracking stuff gets you to where you can hope to actually do some cartography and map out these so-called "half-deserted streets" he travels throughout the verse, at least if you're a Professor of Dangerous Influence with a lot of time on your hands while waiting for Reviewer 2 to get back to you about the Woolf article revisions."

Cecilia says, "Wait. The movement in the visit verse doesn't occur on those streets, though, right? At the risk of pulling you off onto another tangent, going back to my ritual performance thing. He's indoors, and these "pauses" are occurring every few steps?"

Oscar says, "I beg your pardon?... His "half-deserted streets" are indoors?"

Cecilia says, "They're not. He is. Since we're reading so spatially. If you specifically consider how loud each thing is. Or how close to the narrator it's made out to be. All considered it doesn't make sense to imagine them so spread out like they would be on a street, because the things Prufrock describes interact with each other in ways that imply some practical degree of proximity. Also he's able to at least consider reaching out and touching some of it even if he doesn't dare. And nothing he describes past the initial stanza of the visit actually needs to be in a street. Quite a lot of it would make more literal sense indoors. Statues the size of forearms, bird cages with handles for one-handed carrying. Even if they're metaphorical and just represent ideas, wouldn't it make sense to choose metaphors that are appropriately sized for their location?"

Oscar says, "Huh. Given all the ethereal otherworldly characteristics, I guess I just figured they had long reachy bits, and I kind of just glossed over the literalness of those two statues hugging, because, well, it was weird enough that they moved at all. 

To be honest, my mental model was that a lot of this stuff was being seen through shop windows or house windows, which also swept away the question of why he felt he couldn't touch them. When I mapped out the described ability of some objects to interact, they appeared in bursts, which I took to mean each burst of interconnected objects was inside its own storefront or dwelling."

Cecilia says, "I think he's pretty clear about being at least physically able to touch and considering whether to and choosing not to. I don't think he's contemplating breaking and entering."

Oscar says, "Hmm. This is interesting. I can see a lot of puzzle pieces falling into place. One that you haven't mentioned yet is that he seems to get a really good, close look at every single thing. The kind of streets I imagined him walking down would have been pretty narrow, but squeeze everything tighter together and slow him down even more and stick it all indoors and he's got close-up views. He might actually see individual pores in the limestone. That's the trouble with a geometric approach to this, really; everything can scale up or down proportionally and still work out mathematically by adjusting his rate of travel until the angles match up at each pause point. Within reason, without him actually physically interacting with anything, there's not enough data to be definitive."

Cecilia says, "I feel like the street-walking read runs into a problem in those last few lines of the introduction. You know, blah blah overwhelming question;"

Oscar and Cecilia recite, "Oh, do not ask, 'what is it?' Let us go and make our visit."

Cecilia says, "Being literal for a moment. What is a visit? Typically?"

Oscar says, "... Fuck me sideways. You're saying he's visiting someone."

Cecilia says, "Or somewhere or something, yeah."

Oscar says, "It works, and the alternative — which I believe is conventional — is to interpret "visit" as a bit of floweriness at least loosely inspired by the Metaphysical poets that Prufrock was so enamored with in this younger years. Still, your proposal requires just as much handwaving, or more. It's not just that he mentions half-deserted streets. The introduction stanza has lines about old-timey greasy spoon type places with sawdust floors, hotels of ill repute, etc. And it's all in future tense, preparing us for what's to come. Would you say he's doing some kind of inside-outside inversion in the introduction, for some reason?"

Cecilia says, "Nah. The half-deserted streets can still be literal streets, it's fine. Making a visit begins with journeying to get there, even if you spend most of the meat of your time inside. I think he just didn't narrate the journey because he already told us, in the future tense, everything he wanted us to know about it. It's not the most important part, except to set the mood. So he skipped retelling it."

Oscar says, "So you're saying that one of the most obsessively repetitive narrators in all of Modernist fiction, who gives Joyce a run run run for his money money money, went out of his way to avoid repetition?"

Cecilia says, "I'm saying the narrator who obsessively uses repetition in an extraordinarily calculating way avoided a repetition that might undermine the significance of repetition in their work."

Oscar says, "Nice. I like this. All the puzzle pieces are all fitting together well. Still, this theory makes the entire visit verse a thousand times weirder, don't you think? It's not the absolute most weirdest thing for someone to walk around outside and pause every once in a while, setting my little joke about head-turning aside and just allowing that the dude is extremely procedural. But why would he go visit somewhere, go into a room, and then do this incredibly slow and careful walkthrough? You mentioned ritual. But he decides, over and over, always, not to interact. He imagines a lot of hypothetical interaction but never goes through with it. The conventional take on that is that it's atomizing, creating distance, a representation of modern alienation being a self-imposed phenomenon, et cetera et cetera. I always suspected it represented alienation being socially imposed, because of my assumed shop-windows or house-windows. This is more your field than mine, but surely at least some of the objects for a ritual get interacted with?"

Cecilia says, "It's — Ha, I see that look on your face, you know perfectly well what I'm about to say."

Cecilia and Oscar say together, "It's complicated."

Cecilia says, "But it's not all that complicated. There are lots of reasons to move weirdly around a room in a formulaic way. Playing games. Gainful exercise, at a time before exercises were standardized. Some kind of [pre-guard] expressive theater, which is almost a default interpretation here. And all kinds of rituals could plausibly be connected to not touching anything. It might be a weird stipulation for a wedding, but for demon-summoning or wardrobe-unlocking or rain-making or ending calamity or anger appeasement or offering apology or anything really. Doing any ritual in the right way is going to look weird and arbitrary in some way relative to normal behavior, practically by definition; if it didn't seem strange and disconnected from everyday reality, it wouldn't even occur to us to designate it as a ritual."

Oscar says, "Okay. Prufrock was writing right around when occultism went mainstream, or viral, as we'd say now. So I wouldn't put it past him to have his narrator doing weird occult stuff, and to really belabor the obvious, the part of the poem that comes after the "visit" is as weirdo-occulty-trippy as it gets. Also, another non-ritual possibility that occurred to me is that he's visiting a museum, and this is his way of looking at the art there; it's not that far off from a pretty standard way to go through small museum rooms, and a multi-room structure would work about the same as my shop windows for separating objects into groups. So there's lots of options that pull the stars into alignment. Your reading feels plausible, and that's often about as good as it gets in my line of work."

Cecilia says, "Mine too. Mine more than most, actually. But look at me pulling you along the mother of all tangents here. I believe I was specifically promised an explanation of the L shape, mister, and I'm going to get it."

Oscar says, "Oh are you now. Alright. It almost feels pointless, after all that. Anticlimactic — "

Cecilia says, " — Oh god. There are nerds, and then there are "a thrilling climax to a conversation consists of figuring out that a dude in a poem is inside instead of outside" nerds."

Oscar says, "... Sorry. I thought you were enjoying yourself."

Cecilia says, "Oh! I am. I am. Honest. Just poking fun. At myself, too."

Oscar says, "Hmm. Well, okay, let's be "a thrilling climax to a conversation consists of figuring out that a dude in a poem took a turn" nerds then. I can do this theatrically."

Oscar clears his throat, and says, "The scene before us: one specific point,
conventionally ID'd as the "re-evaluation" stanza,
where — 
based on relative location
as told to us in each "pause" stanza — 
the things he was hearing in front of him
are suddenly off to the side,
the left side, if left-to-right is correct,
and the things that he was hearing behind him
 — the haunting things — 
are suddenly off to the other side.
The contemplation that we see occur
Clearly thinks, turn back, or go forth,
as if the options there were only two,
and for high schoolers, this passage has its role
in [data missing] off boxes on their Hero's Journey cards,
but there is more I say — 
strictly spatially speaking — 
the scene as presented is exactly equivalent
to a turn of ninety degrees.
Our fellow man, so dear to us, has found
A third way forth, because his body turns.
And should it please your ladyship, I'll give
Elaboration of my evidence."

Cecilia says, "I... I was not expecting that to work as well as it did. I don't know what play you're riffing off of, but please, yes, it pleases the ladyship, continue."

Oscar says, "The choice he makes, go forward, one would think
Would bring him closer to that which he saw,
For he has told us what is right in front.
But that does not occur!
The man does not approach
Those many sights and sounds that he described
As in his future, should he saunter on.
But no! Those many spectacles indeed appear
In his next perception, but
As things heard only,
Mingled with the sounds behind him."

Cecilia says, "Your... lordship... speaketh well, umm,
But permit me here to tarry —
For I have a — query — 
Could he not have merely moved
With wondrous haste, and...
put the... put all he had perceived
behind him, very briskly?"

Oscar says, "Our man is not a quick one, this we know.
But also, those sounds as there described
Are all of equal closeness, whereas
The quit would... umm...
if he walked past the stuff that was in front of him, then the stuff that had already been behind him would be much further away than the stuff that used to be in front of him.
Also, if we animate the things
And take them to pursue him,
Then for sure
They would approach him from the front as well,
And intercept. Instead they join
The rearward entities in blended past.
One more cue's essential, if I may.
In his "re-evaluation" pause,
He, for then and only then, does not describe
That which was off to his either side.
Of course, the moment is a crisis,
Turn back or no preoccupies him,
So perhaps it slipped his mind.
But this omission makes... is convenient
If he, as I suspect, desired
To not reveal too early what came next,
Off to his side."

Cecilia says, "Permit me, lord, just this one query more — 
What he describes him facing... um...
[...]
Consider this, of that which he describes.
He says the objects new to him "appeared"
As if from thin air they'd been brought to light.
Would that not mean there is no need
For such a secrecy as you describe?"

Oscar says, "Appear" can mean they were not seen before,
Because he contemplated choices forth and back,
And did not look around. But then
At that last moment, as he walked again,
He turned to see
All that which had been to him obscured
By some big thing, a building on the corner
Where met two narrow streets.
Once past this stately edifice 
Which had... blocked his view...
Of the intersecting street whose path he took,
The sideways street appeared,
Along with all that which he sees."

Cecilia says, "Okay, big finish! Umm.
Your lordship! Why, indeed, you've cracked the case!
This turn had been to me so well-obscured
By fancy language, yet I do perceive
With your gracious assistance,
A shape that is an L."

Oscar says, "Not bad! We're no Shakespeare, but not bad!"

Cecilia says, "Solid, like, B+ work if it were from one of your high schoolers. The trick was the weird verb tenses, I think. And a lot of unnecessary words. "A shape that is."

Oscar says, "We should do all our conversations like that."

Cecilia says, "No. No, no, no. Just no."

Oscar says, "I was kidding. One last thing, though. Withholding the information about what's to the sides at that crucial decision-making moment also means we can't determine which direction he turned, which has always annoyed me, even though it really shouldn't."

Cecilia says, "Tell you what, once I figure that out I'll let you in on it."

Oscar says, "Uh. Awesome. And maybe let me in on the secret of how you figured it out, too?"

Cecilia says, in masculine imitation, "Uh. That's classified."

Oscar says, "I beg your pardon?"

Cecilia says, "That's classified. I — "

Oscar says, "Excuse me? Are you? Quoting [data missing] at me?"

Cecilia, beginning to giggle, manages to say, " — I could tell you, but then I'd ha — "

Oscar says, theatrically, "Have to kill me?! A would-be murderer! No, worse! A would be quote-source-thief! A Johnny-come-lately! Well! Do not quote that Dark Magic to me, bitch! I was there to see it written!"

Cecilia has stopped giggling, and says, "Whoa, partner! Whoa... Okay, wow. [data missing]"

Oscar says, "Oh... umm... well... it's like the one great line C.S. Lewis ever wrote. I memorized it when I was twelve so I could say it to my mom. That went well."

Cecilia says, "About as well as it did just now, I imagine. Anticlimactic."

Oscar says, "Not my finest moment. Maybe it's not a great line after all."

Cecilia says, "I suspect the actual quote is a little different. But regardless, I am also starting to feel bummed about this building-on-the-corner interpretation. It really throws a big old wrench in my "we're inside" theory."

Oscar says, "No worries. There's always some complication. To be real for a moment, it's not like readers actually need to know what the author had in mind, let alone understand perfectly; the consequences for error just aren't that big. It's a book, not an instruction manual for putting some bookshelves together. Nobody on the planet could ever possibly actually need to get it exactly right."

Narrator's note: At this last statement, for the briefest moment, Cecilia feels very, very alone, and very, very far away.

Oscar continues, "But the poem doesn't need to be exactly unambiguous to be impressive. Any communication has some wiggle room, error tolerance. Fiction has more leeway than most. Left turn or right turn, it wows me that an author can devise a way to accomplish this sort of communication at all, to any degree of specificity, without any words. Not to belabor the point, but poetry is its own very special sort of communication in this sense, and this was one of the first works I read that really cued me in to that, how structural elements of a work of literature are something more than just words and sentences and paragraph breaks, and maybe some funny extra line breaks and spacing and rhyming for the poems. I'm exaggerating the epiphany, but it really got my thoughts moving in ways that haven't stopped since. Not to mention it utterly, utterly ripped "show, don't tell" out of my mind and chucked it straight into the circular file."

Cecilia says, "Maybe it's because my attention wandered and I started daydreaming about how beautiful your eyes are, dear, but I don't think I followed that last part."

Oscar says, "Won you back from your new boyfriend, did I... All I mean is that there's a very firm ceiling on how far "show, don't tell" can get you, and less of a ceiling on "tell" than that truism would imply. Prufrock does nothing but show us things, at least in this poem, and stream-of-consciousness work in general is all about showing, to the point where one of its standard tropes is presenting bits and pieces of broken conversation to demonstrate the narrator's attention is fading in and out. Conversely, the ultimate pinnacle example of "just show, don't tell" would be two people talking at each other without any narration in between."

Cecilia says, "The horror. I think the word for that is every conversation ever. Or for a real don't-tell-show, you could replace "talking" with — "

Oscar says, " — Okay, okay. But can you imagine trying to communicate anything, even something even as fundamentally simple as Prufrock's motion, in the structure of a conversation? Suddenly we're away from "every conversation ever" and veering toward "no natural conversation ever." You'd practically have to script out the whole thing and then go back and lace in whatever the "extra" meaning is. Terrible."

Cecilia says, "In other words, you'd have to write a conversation."

Oscar says, "That's... no, that's not the bad part. It's the after-the-factness that makes it bad, or at least questionable. It's like building a bridge and only afterward deciding where you want to put the struts for it, instead of it all fitting together, the road with the supports that the road needs to be the best road it can be. Whatever elements got laced into the conversation would be completely divorced from the talking, not an organic extension of it. Whatever the result would be, I suspect it would not feel very much like just another conversation between two human beings."

Cecilia says, "Talk about your artificially constructed characters."

Oscar says, "I know you're riffing on me, but it would actually be so, so, so much worse than that. At least artificially constructed characters are built-to-purpose. Caricatures have their uses. What I'm describing is one of the most ass-backwards ways to write imaginable. There are so many horribly, horribly cheesy pitfalls to consider, something hacky like making a code out of the first letters of sentences, or counting words to put meaningful numbers between punctuation marks, or a million other possibilities just as gross and just as random, fundamentally arbitrary rather than integral. Ultimately that just means that, at best, the reader would be reading the text for the words and then going back and puzzle-solving the text as a whole separate exercise to squeeze out the rest of it. And that would totally compromise the value of structural data, which is for the recipient to receive the communication as effortlessly as possible, carried right alongside the meaning accomplished by words. The effortlessness of the parallelism is the victory condition. The reader experience of that is that lovely spine chill when you realize you know something, even if the exact details of what the something is elude you, or, more exciting yet, you sense they are yet to be revealed, but you see them in outline. We don't need to have comprehension hit us all at once, but to circle allllll the way back around, this connects to your yearning for anticipation — for structural communication to succeed, we need to know immediately in our hearts and our spines that there is something there to be comprehended, and, if it's not yet obvious what that is, we need to feel some conviction that we're going to get there, the key is in our hands and awaiting the lock, so to speak. The payoff is coming. With apologies to maybe a third of the authors I dearly love, if the reader needs to sit down with pencil and paper and a decoder ring to experience the spine-shivers of realization, are you writing a story or boxing out a crossword puzzle?"

Cecilia says, "I like crossword puzzles."

Oscar says, "And I like Ulysses. Heck, I even like [data missing], with that blue house red minotaur gimmick and all the encoded message craziness. So sure, towering giants of literary prowess can of course accomplish both storytelling and puzzleweaving, and sure it's showy to sneak a whole other set of data right past peoples' eyes, but it's — it's juggling while you unicycle. It's a magic trick. It's a distraction, although the towering giants are good enough to make it all part of one grand supernarrative spectacle. The structural communication I'm talking about as ideal is more like, uh, using your unicycle to pull a wagon. You're doing something."

Cecilia says, "Ohhhhh my god. Now I really, really, really want to see that. Preferably performed by a bear. And he can be juggling, too, if he's up for it."

Oscar says, "Heh. Yeah, I felt myself going on and on without really getting anywhere and decided it was time to drop off with a lame joke and dip. I think my brain is getting tired. But that's fine. No need to belabor the point. It's not that deep."

Cecilia says, "You're always saying that, and then we go swimming."

Oscar says, "Till human voices wake us, and we drown."

Cecilia says, "Ooh, now there's a spine-tingler for you. If you're trying to win me back from my new boyfriend, maybe don't quote his somber... lonely... achingly pretty lines back at me."

Oscar says, "Ohhhh, I don't know, sounds like it's working for me so far."

Oscar's voice softens as he says, "Silly Query. I know I can't compete, and I'm not going to try. I tried to do a rhymey thing and came up with a doggerel-line about chicken wings and TGIF and all it got out of you was a flat what. No, my only hope is to recognize Mr. Prufrock's unparalleled metric talent and steal from him mercilessly —"

Oscar's voice continues to soften, but moves closer to the microphone. He continues, "— and I can and I will steal it mercilessly — and no one can stop me —"

Oscar whispers in Query's ear, "because the entire thing is in the public domain."

Cecilia laughs, and laughs, and says, "Oh. Oh my god." and laughs until breathless.

The transcriber notes, "In the background, something is spinning."

Cecilia says, "Oh my god. Okay. Okay. I'm good. (..) But no more, mister. My sides ache as much as my forearms now. I'm spent, babe. Any more of this and I'll have to go spend the rest of the day in bed."

The transcriber notes, "The spinning thing begins to clink, clink, clink, the sound of its rotary arms tapping the edge of a misplaced dinner plate."

Oscar says, softly, "That sounds like a lovely idea."

To the tempo of the clinking, Oscar says,
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea, of the sea
With sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea, of the sea
Till human voices wake us, and we drown."

The transcriber notes, "There are sounds consistent with the act of embrace. The clinking continues."

Oscar says, "Till human voices wake us, and we drown, and we drown,
and the human voices wake us as we drown."

Cecilia says, "The long arms of copyright law may be powerless, but I think I know one way to stop you."

The transcriber notes, "There are sounds of fabric rustling. Throughout the remainder of the audio, there are intermittent sounds consistent with kissing."

Cecilia says, "Let us go then... you and I...
you and I... you and I...
@@ @@
Let us go then... you and... I...
till we drown.

Let us go then... you and I...
you and I... you and I...
@@ @@
Let us go then... you and... I...
till — "

The transcriber notes, "The remainder of the audio scope is nonverbal."

+++ File 10: Diary, Sunday

[Cecilia's evening diary entry for Stardate 2011-09-25 reads as follows.]

I completely forgot about Word of the Day today. I could look it up. But honestly? This feels a good week for new directions, for ending streaks. Let's hope I break two of them.

I'll be back tomorrow, A, my dear wardrobe. Bright and early like every weekday. This time I have a new acquaintance I'd like to introduce to you. Although ... perhaps you already know one another?

Sorry, babe. He's been a little indiscreet about it. A real "kiss and tell." A real "kiss and publish a how-to manual in a fucking poem," actually. Seems a little disrespectful. If you weren't already an object, I'd call it objectifying. Aren't men just the worst? We can grouse about it together, you and I. You can reminisce, ruminate, share your side of the story. Whatever you want.

It'll be a real chance for you to finally open up to me.

This guy said a lot about you, all flowery-like, gave you a bit of a reputation. Maybe that's not entirely bad, 9291-A, is it? I know a little more about what turns you on now. But hear me out — you are more than some dip-shit Modernist's stepping-stone to third-tier fame and fortune. Here's your chance to finally have the last word, babe, and put him behind you. It's time to turn the corner. I know how to set the mood now, yeah? We can turn — left or right? — and face it together, hand in hand, or should I say, hand in handle. Yeah, I see a real breakthrough in our future. A whole new stage of our relationship. A new horizon, even.

Oh, do not ask, what is it? _
Let us go and make our visit.

[This is the end of the diary entry.]

[This is the end of Collocations, part one of a three-part tale. I hope you enjoyed it! What follows is some of the so-called "two-dimensional" supplementary material included with the original version of the Collocations article.]

+ Collimations

[[# Footnotes]]

++ Footnotes

What follows is miscellaneous commentary that the author was unable to integrate with the main narrative. As actual footnotes are apparently not handled well by some screen readers, the comments have been restructured to be ordinary paragraphs.

Oscar is not an avid user of most social media, but maintains a pseudonymous weblog, Query Quotes, consisting entirely of things Cecilia said that he found funny or insightful or otherwise enjoyable. Examples from 2011 include "Imagine if apples were trees' eyes, and the trees had to watch in horror each time a hand reaches up to pluck them." and "I love you. Even when you're right, I still love you." This may have been inspired by Cecilia's diary, or may have inspired her diary's transition to focusing on documenting exchanges. In September 2011, the blog had about 200 registered followers, most of them no longer active; even Cecilia, username QuintessentialQuery, had not logged into the site that year.

The Society for Curation and Preservation is a front organization and offshoot of the former Society for Historical Archeology, notable for most of its workforce actually doing the exact same day-to-day work that their non-front equivalent would do (but with an extra carbon-copy layer). The ordinary accreditation process provides extensive access to, well, practically everything; the always-implied threat of an audit or publicized investigation opens any stuck-shut doors. The Society is also a conveniently nondescript means to hire on researchers like Cecilia, whose anthropology resume would seem awkwardly incongruous with an R&D career at a soup-canning plant; as a bonus, it's easy to assign those researchers wherever they're needed, with no need to even set up a sign on the door, let alone devote separate physical buildings to the facade. Nobody visits their accrediting agency's offices. Ever. It's bad enough when they come to you.

In conversation, Oscar called Cecilia by the moniker Officer Seven, not Captain. The difference between annoying a nerd fem fan and charming a nerd fem fan can be subtle and obscure, but the latter certainly requires an inquisitive mindset and an attentiveness to which character one identifies with. Although Science Officer Annika Hansen was never referred to on-screen as "Officer Seven," the honorific appears in some fanfiction as a means to illustrate The Doctor's respect for her achievements. The title might also reflect off-screen career progress. The sources don't specify.

[[footnoteblock title=""]]

++ Spoilers

+++ File 11: RAISA Notice

[This section is not part of the tale Collocations. It contains spoilers. Don't read it unless you like spoilers. Also, the narrative of this section makes reference to an audio file; that file does not actually exist out-of-universe.]

Notice from the Records and Information Security Administration.

An uncompressed audio file named "spoken notice dot wav" has been attached to the document. The audio therein contained, experienced acoustically, should be considered the sole authoritative notification. It is transcribed here solely to aid in reference and to illustrate the phenomena it identifies.

This notice regards two Potentially Anomalous Phenomena, designated PAP-2023-09-2514 and PAP-2023-09-2517.

++++* Section One: Scope

Multiple information formats are currently unreliable, as they were or are subject to one or more currently uncontained content-altering anomalous phenomena. The affected information is currently thought to include all written text, and all visual data. This includes but is not limited to the following.

Data Category One. All handwritten or machine-generated instances of text. Confirmed examples include transcripts of audio/video, speech-to-text output, typewritten documents, printed documents, file folder labels, field notes in shorthand, magazine articles, poetry, letters constructed manually from rectangular blocks or computer code lighting one pixel at a time, Morse code on T-shirts, text graffiti, computer documents including content generated in [data missing] word processor and content generated via text editor, and text metadata stored in audio files. Tested media include ink/dye, graphite, urine, letters cut from magazines and from other documents, plastic keyboard letters from keyboards, [data missing], chalk, paints, crayon, human blood, and [data missing] brand plastic construction toy blocks.

Data Category Two. All visual data that contains representations of text. Confirmed examples include iconography, hieroglyphics and infographic variants, digital photography and video, film photography and video, printouts, [data missing] brand "instant camera" self-developing photographs, magazine advertisements, visual art, automated processes, depictions of Morse code on photographed T-shirts, and billboards.

Data Category Three. Other visual data. The proper scope of this category is poorly understood at this time. It is likely to include, at a minimum, all examples from Category Two.

Data Category S-Four (Subordinate Category). All text and visual data downloaded from, or uploaded to, the Internet, the Foundation intranet, or other network, including encrypted data. In particular, this has resulted in some passwords ceasing to function. This category includes all information retrieved from, uploaded to, or transmitted between backup servers of any kind. This category exists to better isolate when the anomalous phenomena take place, which is sometimes during network transmission.

++++* Section Two: Effects

The following anomalous phenomena and/or anomalous characteristics are currently known to either exist or manifest in all documentation from the sources detailed above. 

Phenomenon 2023-09-2514-A (henceforth 2514-A). Apparent changes to content. This can include the appearance of additional text, the disappearance of text (in the case of Category S4, this manifests as missing data), alterations to text content, and in the case of Category 3, the obfuscation or expungement of specific portions of an image with a "smearing" blur effect or with expungement. Thus far, observed changes have only occurred in proper nouns and equivalents, such as adjectives, icons, branding, and other graphics that unambiguously represent a person, group, entity, object, or type of object.

It is unknown whether this is a purely perceptual phenomenon, a purely physical phenomenon, or some combination.

Phenomena PAP-2023-09-2514-B and C (henceforth 2514-B and 2514-C). A perception or cognition phenomenon, believed to be due to ubiquitous antimemetic cognitohazards, in which humans do not find the changes of 2514-A as abnormal or bothersome; 2514-B designates the failure to perceive abnormality, and 2514-C designates the failure to feel disturbed or bothered by perceived abnormalities. The following summarizes preliminary testing.

As regards 2514-B. Test subjects did all perceive the results of 2514-A (200 of 200 tested subjects), such as smeared images or data conspicuously missing in a document, but uniformly did not consider these alterations remarkable or unusual, even when the subjects had medically recoverable memories related to what an image plausibly would have been without smearing and what it would have represented, and even when the result of 2514-A was blatantly nonsensical in its context.

* When a discrepancy created by 2514-A was specifically pointed out to a subject, such as by recovering and prompting related memories, subjects invariably reacted as if the currently-perceived text or image was ordinary and to be expected (and had "always been that way"), even when this resulted in expressing logically contradictory or blatantly nonsensical beliefs.
* It was possible to persuade roughly 80% of subjects (161 of 200) that a "smear" had not in fact "always been that way" using ordinary logical arguments, such as pointing out that the smear was nonsensical in context or that it conflicted with the subject's own memories. To test persuasive effect, subjects were asked to agree or disagree with the assessment "something weird must be going on here."
* A subject, once convinced that any instance of 2514-A is abnormal or weird, is freed from the entire 2514-B effect. Once persuaded of the existence of one example of the phenomenon, 160 of 161 subjects were also able to perceive, identify, and describe other instances and recognize their present-day pervasiveness, but expressed disinterest in those instances as well. These subjects struggled to remember many of the instances they (presumably) previously witnessed, though they could and did form memories of instances they perceived from that point forward.

As regards 2514-C. Subjects freed from the 2514-B effect invariably expressed disinterest such as "not a big deal" (161 of 161 subjects), even in circumstances where the alteration blatantly compromised meaning or purpose.

* It was possible to persuade roughly 75% of aware-but-disinterested subjects (119 of 161) that the anomaly was in fact significant or worthy of consideration (e.g. by pointing out compromised meaning or purpose).
* Once persuaded of the significance of one example of the phenomenon, subjects recognized the significance of other instances perceived from that point forward. In subsequent interviews, subjects confirmed their newly obtained ability to form reasonable hypotheses about how ubiquitous the phenomenon was, and reported experiencing disorientation and commensurate anxiety consistent with such a realization.
* Such a subject nonetheless only felt this concern about instances perceived after they had been persuaded, and/or about instances they hypothesized to be likely to exist. Subjects did not express concern about instances they may or may not have encountered in the past. Although this was consistent with human researchers' own experience, and initially deemed non-anomalous, consultations with multiple artificial intelligence constructs have established that this is likely a persistent anomalous effect.
* Artificial intelligence constructs do not appear to currently be subject to the above cognitive effects. Notably, the 2514-B and 2514-C phenomena were brought to the attention of human researchers through interactions with artificial intelligence constructs. However, this immunity is not yet well-understood, and unlikely to be comprehensive, as artificial intelligence constructs did not bring the 2514-A phenomenon to the attention of human researchers until recently.
* It is unknown whether this cognitive phenomenon affects other nonhuman sentient entities.

Phenomenon 2023-09-2517. A poorly-understood metaphysical or pataphysical thaumatologically-perceptible phenomenon currently designated "entry-entity pairing" in which existing text becomes affiliated, and/or additional text is generated and affiliated, with anomalous phenomena. Here "affiliated" is intended in the technical sense of thaumaturgy. The full effects of this particular affiliation are not well-understood. It was initially thought (and reported in an earlier iteration of this notice) that the above "pairing" phenomenon was limited to (a) Foundation documentation and (b) affiliation with currently contained anomalies, but both of these hypotheses are now known to be incorrect.

++++* Section Three: Exceptions

The anomalous phenomena have not been observed manifesting in the following formats thus far.

* Audio records, the audio component of audiovisual files
* Spoken words, conversation
* Speech transmitted digitally, so long as the rendering on the recipient's end is acoustic
* Human memory
* Nonverbal body language with no text-representation component
 * a subject of current research, as proposed theories would imply that body language should be affected
 * some forms of body movement, such as tapping Morse code onto another person's palm, //are// subject to the effect
* Words formed from D-class lying down in positions that constructed letters, words, and sentences. Ways to exploit this peculiar exception are being researched. Note that photographs, paintings, and video of these human-letter constructions are subject to the effect.

++++* Section Four: Hypotheses and Instructions

The following understanding of the summarizes our current understanding of the phenomena as well as directives and suggestions for the reader. It will be updated as frequently as feasible until the phenomena have been contained.

* Staff are authorized to continue normal practices for generating, uploading, and accessing text documentation.
* Where possible, staff should attempt to avoid the use of proper nouns or comparable visual identifiers (logos, et cetera) in written documentation, as the "smear" phenomenon appears to only affect them.
* Use of audio recording for mission-critical documentation, such as Special Containment Procedures, is preferred at this time whenever possible. (Foundation interfaces are being adapted to allow for more efficient audio-based processes.)
 Although these phenomena were identified around the same time, and affect the same or similar aspects of reality, they may be independent/unrelated phenomena. Some evidence supports this. A lack of evidence of thaumatological manipulation in "smear" instances contrasts with invariably present evidence of thaumatological manipulation in "pairing" instances. Additionally, the "pairing" and "smear" phenomena can affect the same text, with effects manifesting at different times. The phenomena's effects also sometimes partially overlap. The phenomena may be related, or independent with a common origin, or totally unrelated.
* With regard to the "pairing" phenomenon, entry-entity pairing is thaumatologically inert and must be invoked by the viewer of the documentation. The known methods for successful invocation are classified, but extremely unlikely to occur without reader intent. Acts such as downloading, viewing, reading, and/or generating documentation do not invoke pairings. In this sense, the only potential danger this issue presents to the reader is exposure to inaccurate information. In summary, if you don't know how to do it, you're safe.
* Entry-entity pairing can be generated, manipulated, and removed through thaumateurgical engineering. Research thus far has produced useable invocations for perceiving thaumatological affiliation corresponding to a pairing, invoking a pairing, creating a new pairing, and manually removing a pairing. Invocation can result in a variety of perceptual effects, including acquisition of information outside your clearance level. For this reason, invocation is prohibited. In summary, if you know how to do it, refrain.
* Manually removed pairings sometimes re-manifest, a process we are calling reversion. This sometimes happens effectively instantaneously, and sometimes happens with a delay, unpredictably. Recent research suggests that manually removing pairings may in fact trigger additional instances of the phenomenon to occur. Containment protocol has been updated to prohibit manual removal.
* To date, entry-entity pairing has not resulted in any cognitohazardous or memetic or antimemetic phenomena. The "pairing" phenomenon appears to be strictly metaphysical or pataphysical.
* There is limited evidence to suggest that entry-entity pairing could technically present a mild infohazard to those who perceive it, in that merely perceiving the existence of a pairing may influence how the reader interprets the information they read, the same way presenting text in a conspicuously altered form may influence interpretation of it. Simply ignoring one's own awareness of the phenomenon, and choosing to ignore and disregard its manifestations when they present themselves, is sufficient to fully protect the user from this infohazard.

Section Five: Current Research

The following understanding of the summarizes our lack of current understanding of the phenomena, to facilitate inquiry.

* Aspects of the manifestation are inconsistent: one printed text "copy" of a document may differ from another, text loaded from digital sources may or may not manifest different issues each time it is loaded, and a printed or digital document may have additional pairings manifest even while the user is reading. These discrepancies, and their causes, are not well-understood.
* Whether text stored in a digital format is affected, i.e. whether physical files have been corrupted or whether the effect applies whenever the file is read or interpreted as text or visual data, is unknown; comparisons of SHA-256 metadata suggest that the phenomena can sometimes manifest in different forms without changes to the underlying file, and sometimes its manifestation results in (physical) changes to the stored data.
* It is possible that one or more entities (with hostile, orthogonal, or even benign intent) are responsible for all of the manifestations of pairings, and could be stopped from making new ones. It is also possible that the manifestations are not conscious acts.
* It is of course always possible that personnel memories has been corrupted or changed, but no evidence of that has been discovered.
* The issues have manifested in documentation that was initially created both before and after the identification of the phenomena.
* The initial/original manifestations are not known, and may be unknowable due to as-yet-undocumented antimemetic effects. Mnestic-based research tentatively supports a tentative initial manifestation of the "smear" phenomenon some time in 2011; efforts to narrow this range will continue, and a review of possible inciting events or relevant occurrences from that timespan is underway. Research into "pairing" is [data missing].
* The sources or causes of the data corruption/manipulations are unverified and under active investigation.
* The full extent of the data corruption/manipulations is unknown and under active investigation.

Thank you for your attention to this matter. You may now resume your regularly scheduled duties.

RAISA

"Helping you help yourself help others."

[This is the end of the spoiler, and the end of the supplementary material.]

[[/div]] [!-- wrapper to conceal until chosen --]


[[include :scp-wiki:component:license-box]]

> **Filename:** ace-of-wands.png
> **Name:** Ace of Wands
> **Author:** [[*user Thopter]]
> **License:** CC0 (Public Domain)
> **Source Link:** [[*user Thopter]]
> **Derivative Of:** Ace of Wands from the Rider–Waite tarot deck (see below)
> **Additional Notes:** Image. Originally derived in 2025. The creator would like to explicitly acknowledge that this derivative image is public domain.

> **Name:** Ace of Wands from the Rider–Waite tarot deck
> **Author:** Pamela Colman Smith
> **License:** Public Domain
> **Source Link:** [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_of_Wands_(tarot_card)#/media/File:Wands01.jpg]
> **Additional Notes:** Image. Originally published in 1909 in the Rider–Waite Tarot (authors' copyright expired).

> **Filename:** Charles-Follen-Adams-signature.png
> **Author:** Charles Follen Adams
> **License:** Public Domain
> **Source Link:** [https://tessa2.lapl.org/digital/collection/autograph/id/670/rec/3 Adams, Charles Follen, 1842-1918.]
> **Sourced Via:** [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Follen_Adams#/media/File:Signature_of_Charles_Follen_Adams_(1842%E2%80%931918).png Wikipedia]
> **Additional Notes:** Image. Originally produced on 1907/01/24 for correspondence. Original document is courtesy of TESSA, Digital Collections of the Los Angeles Public Library.

> **Filename:** coda.png
> **Name:** Coda sign.svg
> **Author:** [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Sbrools Sbrools]
> **License:** Public Domain
> **Source Link:** [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Coda_sign.svg Wikimedia]
> **Additional Notes:** Image. Produced on 2007/05/26 for Wikimedia.

> **Filename:** collocations.png
> **Name:** Collocations Title Image (Crisscrossed)
> **Author:** [[*user Thopter]]
> **License:** CC BY-SA 3.0
> **Source Link:** [[*user Thopter]]

> **Filename:** ivory-paper.png
> **Name:** Letter Paper
> **Author:** [[*user Thopter]]
> **License:** CC0 (Public Domain)
> **Source Link:** [[*user Thopter]]
> **Derivative Of:** ivory-off-white-paper-texture (see below)
> **Additional Notes:** Image. Originally produced in 2025. The creator would like to explicitly acknowledge that this derivative image is public domain.

> **Name:** ivory-off-white-paper-texture
> **Author:** Anonymous
> **License:** Public Domain
> **Source Link:** [https://www.photos-public-domain.com/2012/05/24/ivory-off-white-paper-texture]
> **Additional Notes:** Image. Originally published in 2012/05/24 and released into the public domain at that time ("All Photos on this site have been released into the Public Domain").

> **Name:** The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
> **Author:** T.S. Eliot
> **License:** Public Domain (author's copyright expired)
> **Source:** [https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1459]
> **Additional Notes:** Text, excerpted and credited in-work to J. Alfred Prufrock. Originally published in 1917 in Prufrock and Other Observations.

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