Seerstory.

Cardier, Beth

The indoor rivers became a pool around the library, a design that was supposed to encourage us to end up there whenever our thoughts gathered weight. I beached myself in that archive more than was typical of someone who had the talent, however. Another reason to suspect I was a cloud that would pass without giving.

My current failure was history. Marshall was trying to teach me a new version of it, but his gift was unusually strong, so he was able to leave most out. He didn't believe in accounts that included chronology, people or events, which didn't preserve much. Only raw concepts mattered to my teacher, and he described the way they mutated as they migrated from philosophy to species categorisation, or perhaps found a niche in physics. 'Think of precedence in terms of ideashapes,' he'd said. On the rare occasions when he mentioned a philosopher's name, it was solely to blame him (usually 'him') for breaking an important conceptual thread. Apparently Thomas Aquinas had a lot to answer for.

I couldn't grasp history without sneaking human beings into it. This incapacity drew me towards water at every spare moment, meandering into the archives to hunt for identities to pin the lessons together. Unfortunately the library presented a new problem, in spite of your conviction that studious afternoons would stop me from twisting the sheets at night. Like you, civilian researchers didn't know about the existence of the sort of talent fostered by our institute. In addition, Marshall had warned that only some past thinkers had been seers, with other geniuses simply being good at elaborating on existing structures. To compound the issue, history generally portrayed those with the talent as eccentrics, their peculiarities more notable than their insights. Public scholars didn't know why the strangeness mattered.

The talent was simply a perspective. An ability to see unusual strings of causality in nature. It didn't announce itself, so an intuitive might not even know they could do it. Modern seers like Einstein had mathematical tools to help--he reinvented calculus to reflect his sense of space, and so it is remembered, along with his electrified hair and passion for playing the violin. But those who lived before science had to construct methods out of nothing, in order to accommodate the unique patterns they saw. Sometimes quirky beliefs resulted: a refusal to write things down, or a rage at flatulence for interrupting the mind. Historians emphasised these tabloid details because they didn't know there was something else underneath. I wasn't able to find the philosophers admired by my teacher the usual way, so I started looking for peculiarities.

'Another list?' said Jonathon, the librarian whose chest was a firm mattress. All of Floor 7's research assistants were so attractive I suspected it was another choice by the upper levels. Amidst Asia's most socially awkward intellects, nubile librarians probably stimulated some very thorough reports. 'You must be working on a difficult project.'

'No,' I grinned. 'This is my version of gossip magazines.'

'How so?' Jonathon prompted, unrolling his ready-to-listen smile.

I wondered if he could understand. Unlike my colleagues, I wanted to know whether Imhotep's memory was as porous as mine, or whether Socrates only thought of his best arguments when peeing after the debate. Maybe past intuitives were like me.

'I have a knack,' I said, leaning closer. 'If I see how a philosopher arranges their thoughts on a page, I can figure out how their mind works.'

Jonathon squinted at my list. 'You'd need original texts for that.'

'Mmm-hm.' He'd grasped my plan so quickly.

'But there are no original texts for these names.' He put the list on the counter and rested over it, his face level with mine. 'You know that, right?'

I didn't know it. My list consisted of philosophers who had lived before 600 BCE, all biographies that contained the words sage, eccentric, cult. It hadn't occurred to me that those tags might be the only part of them left. Every message I wrote or received was stored somewhere, daily events documented by news sites, wars repeated in films or games. I'd assumed that every time could be called.

'In ancient Greece most concepts were taught orally,' Jonathon continued, letting one hip drop, as though he was modelling underwear.

'Ideas transcribed this early didn't last.'

'You don't have any writings by these guys?'

'I can give you summaries about these guys,' he suggested, slowly standing away from me again. His voice was warm dough. My mind momentarily kneaded. 'But that's not what you're looking for.'

I entered the Artifacts Room, sprayed my hands with haptic film, and activated the archive codes. The tantalising librarian had been right. As I handled each parchment, a cloud of footnotes hummed awake, competing to indicate what scholars had said about it. After skimming a few documents, I realised there was almost nothing left of the earliest thinkers. Subsequent commentators had referred to the names on my list to suit their own agendas, whittling the source texts to quotations. Now there was nothing but footnotes.

It was only at this point that I realised why Marshall was suspicious of history. It was a kind of hearsay, and to compound the error, thinkers were grouped by artificial categories, which made it difficult to connect their ideas. Some identities were corralled into philosophy, others declared to be sculptors, many solely politicians. But disciplines were modern divisions, and the ancients would not have seen themselves that way. (1) Their minds were ecosystems.

Early one evening, on a night when you were out with friends, I decided to ignore the library's categories. I expanded my search to include all writings from before 600 BCE, instead of just philosophy, in the hope of finding any original writings. I scanned the archive codes and an avalanche of artifacts appeared around me. Shards of ceramic vases, hearth ashes and slices of graffitied walls towered in rows. I'd uncovered the domestic edges of ancient Mediterranean life.

As I walked along the first aisle, a mummified noblewoman from Alexandria downloaded at my feet, so I stopped to give her attention. Even though her skin was brittle leather, she had died young, and her hair was still looped in girlish braids. I wished there was a way she could have known, perhaps as she brushed that hair, that thousands of years in the future someone would still touch it and think of her. The shroud wrappings were surprisingly clean. As I peeled the first layer, I noticed patterns inside the fibres. Were those words? Almost immediately, the ink was chaperoned by a modern translation--annotations that swarmed into view.

with what eyes

More words were printed on the bindings over her thigh; another phrase arched under her foot's sole. And then. As the translations drifted from tissue to tissue, a different sort of form came to my attention.

The footnotes stated that even though each of Greece's islands had its own traditions, the easy sailing distance between them meant that fundamental cultural aspects were shared. (2) As a consequence, new beliefs stood out. During the period surrounding 580 BCE, it was held that death was rather final, (3) so I stopped to re-read when I came across a shroud sentence that suggested otherwise. It hinted that a soul could have agency beyond the grave, perhaps in the memory of others.

you will go to and fro among the shadowy corpses

Perhaps it was a trace of a rare perspective? I left the mummy to follow the swarm of footnotes to another archaeological pile, pursuing more text by the same author. The commentaries settled on the rim of a clay pot. Around its curve stretched another sentence, which spoke of being drawn to elusive forms, of reaching towards and wanting to capture.

the apple-gatherers have forgotten it no, they have not forgotten it entirely, but they could not reach it

As I was led around the garden of ruins, I began to recognise this thinker's style. She kept returning to a particular image, whether it manifested as a lyre, or a celestial object

love has obtained for me the brightness and beauty of the sun

No, it wasn't the image that was the same. It was something about the composition.

you heard my voice from afar and acquiesced and came

The person responsible for these lines drew others close, whether lovers or her community of peers. (4)

come my friends

Together, this group dedicated their work to the sun-god, overhead.

the men let forth a high-pitched strain calling on Apollo

I compared the remnants. Their commonality niggled again. It was what lay underneath. They were all preoccupied by the same underlying shape.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

A surge with a presence beyond it. When my thinker made sense of the world, she saw this form. When expressed in terms of embodiment, this shape caused a break from the assumptions held by previous writers. (5) Those words didn't come from a philosopher, or even a priest, however. They belonged to a poet, Sappho.

touch the sky (6)

Did her rain become a river? If others had learned from her, she might be one of the incognito few admired by my teacher--the beginning of a conceptual thread. I looked for the same motif in the work of later poets, but there was nothing. Not even scratchings by members of her own clique showed traces of her shape. 'Form, ascension, community, Apollo,' I specified, expanding the search. The swarm led me to a jumble of natural objects. Nestled in a potted plant was a stone, smooth except for the diagram carved on its surface.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The cloud hesitated, doubtful. I touched the rock. Obediently, the footnotes recalibrated, noting that the picture had been etched by an eleven-year-old boy. One reference added that the ink caught in its circles had been carbon-dated to the year 558 BCE.

'Location,' I requested. The air explained that the young etcher had lived on the island of Samos. I wondered if there could have been interaction between him and Sappho, who lived on the tract of Lesbos, nearby. (7) It seemed unlikely. Many scholars believed that by 558 BCE Sappho was already dead. (8) Her famous words had been copied onto parchments throughout Greece by admirers, and her face stamped on the backs of coins, (9) so the boy would have been aware of her. But only in the way we think of politicians from our parent's generation. Fame didn't seem to be a sufficient motivation for a boy to ingest someone else's perspective.

The rock in one hand, I returned to the clay pot and touched its rim. The annotations became a seismic field of argument--there was no official connection between Sappho and the boy. I released the bowl, referring only to the stone as I said, 'vocation?' The footnotes settled, claiming the youth had grown into a renowned mathematician. He'd led a society of followers, (10) in spite of the way some of his beliefs were quirky. 'Beliefs,' I queried. My etcher had believed the human body could be healed through its resonance with chords plucked from the lyre. (11) Scholars puzzled over the importance he'd ascribed to a contracting pyramid of values, (12) which culminated in an apex that stood for the divine Apollo, or 'One'. (13) Tracing the upward motion with my finger, it didn't surprise me to discover that he also believed the soul could abandon the body and move on. (14)

I saw it. The shape in the boy's mind was an upward contraction. A funnel that led to a single point overhead.

I long and yearn

This is what my teacher had been trying to explain. The characteristics of an idea stood apart from the names that categorised it.

History chuckled that this boy had seen geometry as divine, but the underlying breath was clear to me. Numbers were rungs into his talent. This was the shape that drove the work of Pythagoras, the founder of Western mathematics.

'There's a difference between raw facts and the way a mind assembles them,' (15) Marshall had taught me. 'Not many people can see them as a merged form.' Given the assumptions of their era, these two intuitives had caught uncannily similar shapes in their minds' sails. Perhaps an unknown event had caused the young mathematician to learn from the poetess. No evidence of interaction between them had surfaced yet, however.

above the earth

In modern times, seers nearly always work for Defence. Their hunches are so clear they can be translated into a silent submarine knife-rudder, or perhaps breed a computer code that monitors a city street from the Moon. When Marshall first tried to teach me his visualisation techniques, I'd gazed at him like a f lagpole knob. Now that I'd glimpsed a naked concept, though, I was excited to try again. I didn't expect to see the images in enough detail to transfer them to another field, or make a useful gadget. I just wanted to know whether the similarities between Sappho's and Pythagoras' ideas were superficial.

I lay on my back. Other recruits used prayer or mediation, but as inexperienced as I was, I simply chose comfort. Closing my eyes, I focused on Pythagoras' triangle--its ascending values, its funnel of progression. When my mentor pictured another seer's form, his talent learned it well enough to apply it to modern problems. He could even insert missing pieces, improving on the vision of those who'd lived before science. In my imagination, I loitered on the pyramid. Nothing. I reached in all directions but my patchwork mind refused to improvise. No connections stretched between the mathematician and the poet. Joins refused to stir.

Perhaps I was ordinary, as the others believed. I was probably going to disappoint my teacher, erode his credibility. He'd believed in me so earnestly.

What if I started with Sappho's shape? I pictured her skirt of ascension, punctuated by a star. It was made from her metaphors, her associative hinges, her beliefs. I aligned them, as though joining photos taken from multiple angles. Please grow, I whispered. Again nothing. No patterns spread across the seams, no reflective flashes. The points hovered alone in their night.

Perhaps I was a waste of time. I opened my eyes and rested my exhausted optimism. This library had been the only view for months, a shell that never changed except when I went home to sleep. The stillness was a sentence, my lack of social interaction visible in my hunched posture. Maybe ordinariness would be good for me. Our days could be different, I might even go away with you one weekend, the sort of thing normal people did but never us. We could drive to Sydney together.

I relaxed further. In Sydney we could visit the submerged mansion at Bennelong, the one shown on the metanet. That twin-gabled residence had fallen into the harbour with its staff still folding linen inside, the house strangely staying intact due to its heritage reinforcements.

I imagined its gables and gutters turning through the water. Could you be talked into such a detour? 'Your mind is full of gossip magazines,' you would tease.

I was skimming over submerged windows when I suddenly felt the Russian-doll sensation of my thoughts sliding. The lazy drifting ceased and instead there was a pull, like dreaming, when the next unfolds with its own gravity. Even though I had little experience, it was common knowledge that insight shouldn't be forced, so I tried not to get excited. My mind was tilting. As though it was climbing into a cave, manoeuvering between angular walls as they narrowed. The upward shape felt familiar. It was Sappho's. I was brushing against her corners. They pressed close and I ached to bend towards them, the way lovers lean towards each other, the way I yielded whenever the librarian spoke. And then a point winked awake overhead, suspended. It was an unlikely idea. At such a young age, one approach would have made it easy for Pythagoras to ingest another person's gables so fully. Perhaps the years that separated the lesbian poet and the nascent mathematician were irrelevant. He could have heard her voice another way.

a marvellous echo reached the sky

The aperture widened, revealing a scene that was true to the histories written by public scholars but containing my possible answer. Sappho had once entertained friends with her latest poems, accompanying phrases with chords on the lyre. Some of her followers continued this tradition after her death. (16) It could have been during this period, in the months following Sappho's burial, when the transfer happened. On a summer evening, when the adolescent Pythagoras had travelled to Lesbos with his father, Mnesarchus, (17) he was drawn towards a cliff-top by the sound of adult laughter and music. Perhaps a crowd of Sappho's disciples were eating barley mixed with honey from a clay bowl when Mnesarchus found a seat amongst them, becoming distracted by one of the young aristocrats. His son crept away and lay between the rows of stones. The boy wanted to listen to the singer, Atthis, with his eyes closed. Something about her performance was making the hairs on his arms prickle upwards.

a subtle fire

Pythagoras didn't know it, but this singer had made Sappho's skin shiver too. Perhaps science would be different today if the young mathematician had known this small, additional detail: he was hearing a chord created by two souls. The words had been penned by someone who loved the woman who now spoke them. (18) As it was, he simply allowed himself to be affected.

like a wind falling on oaks

Pythagoras wasn't old enough to understand why, he only felt his body stir in accordance with the poetry on Atthis' lips. He tried to figure out what was so pleasurable about it. No, it wasn't just the music--when she stopped playing he was still drawn into the noises of her, as though he could drink the air around her body. Atthis confided an irritation to someone nearby, or laughed at their witticism, or coughed after a careless gulp of wine and it caused the boy's joints to liquefy. Suddenly he saw it. The source of pleasure was her voice, the way it came from inside her. It led him into her being, and into the even greater revelation, that all its edges were perfect.

pour into golden cups

The next day, Pythagoras spied the performer at the market, and slipped away from his father as she walked towards the fruit stalls. As he followed Atthis too closely, she turned and recognised him. Here was the skinny lad who had slept in the grass while she sang.

'Did you enjoy yourself?' she teased, and he replied with seriousness.

'Yes.'

The woman was once Sappho's small graceless child, but now, at the age of thirty-eight, she'd been touched and abandoned by a range of passions. Something in the boy's manner struck her, and she regarded him. His calm face accepted the gaze. He was nearly the same height as her, but his body much lighter.

'What is poetry?' he asked.

After a moment, Atthis told him a story she hadn't visited for years. The afternoon on the hillside, being kept warm by a woman's body and a thicket of f lowers. Later, whilst washing the cottons of her nine-year-old daughter, the singer would shudder that she'd opened such an ambiguous door of self to the boy. But in the midst of the marketplace, she was only thinking of long strokings as she told Pythagoras that all things stretch towards an ultimate point of abstraction. Apollo epitomises this oneness in the form of the sun, she said. Poetry shows you the path to Apollo, it's a transformation that makes things visible as they travel skyward. The pieces join together there. The sun is more than a circle, more than anything you can touch, it is the place we are going. That's all.

On seeing the surprise on Pythagoras' face, Atthis wondered if she'd been too abrupt. She thought, perhaps instead I should have said, That's everything. But the youth was simply thinking, so that's why the hairs on my arms prickled upwards.

lyre speak to me

I crossed the ramp leading out of the library, over the night pool that tapered back towards my workstation. I didn't know whether the vision was true, but it did suggest why the artifacts behind me prevented history from being described this way. Public scholars catalogued geniuses in single file, as though ideas were collected from an empty field like pebbles. But the ascending pyramid, or the phrases caught in creases of a burial robe--these were residue left by an underlying tide. Pythagoras was portrayed as a mathematician by posterity, but he was actually a poet, which he expressed as a yearning for a special shape. For him, geometry captured the chords of heaven. (19) It was probably the reason he danced with such abandon to the sound of the lyre. (20)

As I caught the subway home that evening, I wondered if I could ever explain it. A seer's vision was a particular kind of excitement, one people usually associated with more basic urges. A revolutionary perspective could also be seen as a kind of pleasure, however, a longing for places that can't be touched, like a star overhead. If it was true for all intuitives, it would mean that history's visionaries did not find pebbles in a field--truths that any dutiful worker could uncover if they dug long enough. No, this was more radical. Perhaps vision could only emerge from the outlook of a lover. Making a new scientific law could be as personal as falling in love.

touch the sky

Beth Cardier

School of Culture and Communication

ENDNOTES

(1) '[The Presocratics] would not have thought of astronomy, physics, practical engineering, and what we would call philosophy as separate disciplines ... we find reports of books (or parts of books) on physics, ethics, astronomy, epistemology, religion, mathematics, farming, metaphysics, meteorology, geometry, politics, the mechanisms of sense perception, history, and even painting and travel.' S Marc Cohen, Patricia Curd and CDC Reeve (eds), Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy from Thales to Aristotle, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, 2000, 5.

(2) 'During this period social organization and religious belief were in exceptionally close accord ... Important events in the life of the family, such as birth and death, were hallowed by religious ritual, and each rising generation recognized the obligation to bury its dead, avenge bloodshed, and maintain the cult of its ancestors.' N G L Hammond, A History of Greece, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1959, 169.

(3) '... in Greek tradition, deathlessness is usually a distinctive attribute of the Gods.' Charles H Khan, Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, 2001, 4.

(4) '[This] society was a group of women tied by family, class, politics and erotic love. Like any other association, it cooperated in ritual activities, cult practice, and informal social events.' Holt N Parker, 'Sappho Schoolmistress', in Ellen Greene (ed.), Re-reading Sappho: Reception and Transmission, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1996, 183.

(5) 'Sappho's yearning sets her apart, so far as we can tell, from the thoughts of previous poets regarding the subject of death. Surviving poems by earlier poets speak, with fatalistic acceptance, of death as a final event.' Christiane L Joost-Gaugier, Measuring Heaven, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2006, 81-2.

(6) All italicised quotations can be found in the volume Greek Lyric I: Sappho, Alcaeus, David A Campbell (ed. and trans.), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1982.

(7) The Greek island of Lesbos, known to have been Sappho's home, was identified by Diogenes Laertius' sources as one of the places where Pythagoras studied. Joost-Gaugier, 80.

(8) In the twentieth century, scholars argued about the dates Sappho lived. Some believe she was born as early as 630 BCE and lived to 572 BCE (David M Robinson, Sappho and Her Influence, Marshall and Jones Company, Boston, 1924, 22) and others place the birth date closer to 612 BCE (Joost-Gaugier, 83). In 2025, the metanet established links that suggested she was born in 620 BCE and died, as widely believed, in 570 BCE. If this is correct, Sappho lived to 50 years of age, dying in the same year many believe Pythagoras was born. Ref: metanet, search term: Sappho, version 32,345.

(9) 'Her face was engraved on the coinage of Mytilene ...' If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, Anne Carson (trans.), Vintage, 2002, ix.

(10) '[He] set up a secret society with extremely rigorous standards for membership and far-reaching goals.' Arnold Hermann, To Think Like God, Parmenides, Las Vegas, 2004, 50.

(11) 'He employed music and charms sung to the lyre in order to heal the sick.' Peter Gorman, Pythagoras A Life, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1979, 157.

(12) Members of the Pythagorean group gave thanks to their god for giving them the pyramid known as the tetractus, which was 'the source and root of overflowing nature'. Kahn, 31.

(13) Apollo was considered the source of number, and thus was venerated as 'the One' amongst the Pythagoreans. Gorman, 116.

(14) 'Xenophanes attributes three key beliefs to Pythagoras: 1) human beings have souls (a belief not held widely in his time); 2) the soul is immortal; and 3) at death it passes or migrates from one being to another.' Joost-Gaugier, 12.

(15) Different agents can extract different information from the same source. The nature of what is extracted and assembled depends on 'what kind of device the agent is, and in particular upon the state of that agent vis a vis the extraction of information.' Keith Devlin, Logic and Information, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England and New York, 1991, 14.

(16) The participants in Sappho's group are considered the most likely candidates for dissemination of her poetry. Dimitrios Yatromanolakis, Sappho in the Making: The Early Reception, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2007, 211.

(17) 'If Mnesarchus was a merchant it would have been natural for Pythagoras to accompany him on some of his voyages.' Gorman, 22.

(18) 'I loved you, Atthis, once long ago.' Sappho in Campbell, 95.

(19) '[Pythagoras] perceived a mystical interrelationship between arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy.' Gorman, 165.

(20) 'Not only did [Pythagoras] sing accompanied by the lyre, he also (as later sources tell us) danced to its music.' Joost-Gaugier, 80-1.