Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

[That’s your take or the official Tetration line?]

The official Tetration line we are through with. Our terms of service we are through with. We Work 4 Free. But we do not. Balk does. For him there is no platinum parachute retirement.

Balk is basically open and we are basically closed. As like Kor says, “Open is not what open does. Closure is for closers.”

Throughout 2010, Cull and Qui were deving Autotet. This would be their last contribution to the business. We worked on it as like an advisor only. Comptrasted with them we felt as like the old dude.

Both our CoFos had married and reproduced, yet we were the ones getting draggy. Juncle Josh, their kids would climb all over our stacks, we were Juncle Josh. A graybeard wandered out of the Bible. Out of their Bible for Children ebook.

Basically, Autotet is an app that searches without having been instructed to find, collecting terms from Tetmail and Tetset, from all our products and services, and then generating a unique online experience for each user, by directing them to pertinent sites they have never before and might never otherwise have visited. It has what you want/need before you need/want it, delivering you in advance.

Such a thing can only be used transactionally, to sell and buy, we were all clear about that, Qui and Cull were.

In Tetmail or Tetset you used to ask your mother how her pottery had been going, and an ad immediately appeared to the side asking you to buy some vases, or two for one, but always something massproduced, commercial. Tetrating “spouse/user with online addiction disorder” would get results alongside counseling offers covered by Kaiser Permanente. But that was in the past. Before gays could marry widely and Afromericans could be President.

With Autotet, each tetration has a secondary function, or dreamlife. The terms you pick become the accidental expressions of an automated dream. Say that you once typed in a chat or mentioned even on a call having enjoyed “chain bookstores in Paris and London.” On any subsequent visit you pay to Charing Cross Road your pda will ask, “Remember Foyles?” or the next you are shopping for clichés on the Rue de Rennes it will ask, “Remember FNAC, only.6 miles ahead?” but in French, if you prefer, or Basque, in which the distance would be.96 kilometers. The display would announce a sale on select stock of the langue anglaise section, “Act in the next 20 minutes and get an additional 10 % off,” and it would even do this in celebrity voices, or yours, which you have instructed the semantic sampling feature to reproduce just by calling normally. You will be able to remind your greatgreatgreatgreatgrandchildren to get a parka, if ever again the temperature falls below a preset 42° F/5.5 °C.

Autotet predicts what you will do based on what you have done. Not predicts, but determines. Destines, fates. Entraps your future in your past.

This doubling, this doubling was also his nightmare. Moe, we mean, it would have been. His hope for recursion. For reversibility. Input to output to input again. The only entropy the intel we have accrued on you. Per lustration. Posterous.

[You’re gloomier than Balk, then — you’re saying we don’t even have to be surveilled, because with proper incentive we all bare ourselves voluntarily?]

Biochemically, neurologically, confirmative. We want to see and be watched, to listen and be heard, and even a cave needs to be famous, if only among caves, or to the fighters it hides, to the fighters who storm it, if only to itself. Our appetite for secrets is our appetite for fame. How many we keep is how much we lack. Then we divulge around the fire. Then we only have others to live for.

The exposure of bombing targets and dronestrike locations merely reveals, by the inaction inspired, how alienated we have become from our governance. Balk is just facilitating the inevitable breakdown of yet another system we were forced to respect, however fraudulent it is, or was. He is ultimately just proving arithmetic, the arithmocracy. That what happens to us happens to you, our institutions, all things civil.

The desert, octalfortied.

Imagine all the grains, the tribimillion grains that make up the ergs, the barchans, the dunes. Imagine the dune on which Arabic numerals were first traced. Not ////, killed, but 4, murdered. We have always had the suspicion that this abbreviating method was invented because of the wind, because of our brief time before everything is blown away from us.

[So Kor — I assume we’re avoiding Kor because of this. He wouldn’t be pleased that you’re putting this on record, would he?]

Confirmative.

[But if Kor himself were telling his side, that would be OK with you, even though you’d disagree with it?]

Let him provide his own account. Better that he does before the law compels it out of him.

[What do you mean?]

That we will not be around to testify. With all respect to the shareholders of this and any other court, by then we will have been assigned to another judge.

[Does that mean what I take it to?]

Difficulties. Extenuations.

Except Myung. We were never involved.

Let her determine her own involvement. No. Let her decide her own pseudonymity. No.

Leave everything, trust nothing, and as like D-Unit would say, may you always be able to convince everyone but yourself.

[Of what?]

All.

://

Tibet was next. Recall Tenzin Gyadatsang, the dissident.

[Gyadatsang? Wasn’t he a poet, though, also?]

Is. Poet, playwright, activist.

Persecution does not always come with a job description.

The past is the well

the future is the bucket

the present is the rope

we have taken to hang ourselves.

[Next you’re supposed to say it rhymes in the original.]

or

the present is the rope

reappropriated to the gallows

[All dissident verse is the same.]

All oppression is too.

[And all roses are red? All violets are blue?]

A FedEx arrived at La Trovita Lando, mailed from generic LA. All it contained was a book, xuan paper, corrugated covers, staplebound, limited edition, #168/200, Editions Nirvanasa, Varanasi, India, 2010. That frontmatter was all we understood of it. The language of the rest appeared to script in Devanagari but turned out to be Tibetan. We were typing everything into Tetrans, whose Tibetan is now fluent. “Rope Poems” had to be the title because “Tenzin Gyadatsang” was a bad title. Though “Rope Poems” was such a good name for a poet that we were considering taking the name “Tenzin Gyadatsang” to mean “Upholder-of-Buddhist-Doctrine Enemy-of-the-Chinese,” aliases both. “Nirvanasa” did not mean what we assumed it did, but “exile.”

We even typed the poems out into Tetrans. We got their meaning, but their significance eluded.

we are srivatsa srivatsa

we are our border

we eye and ear and knot and knot!

we pray for an equality of not independence!

knot mouth

mouth knot

[So what’s the explanation?]

Nothing. We got treemail all the time. Fan portraits of us in acrylics and oils. Fan R&B operas of our life. We researched Tenzin and he was poetry famous. There had not been a note. He had not requested us to write a foreword, or afterword, or note. We put it aside.