视而可识，察而见意

Tenth of March, 2032, Turpan, ten in the morning. This trip he does not look at goods. In March the drying houses are empty: six hundred-odd holes in the wall, the wind going in one side and out the other, and standing inside you can hear it. Three things in the bag. A sheet of white paper. A thick marker. Two taels of last year's house-two goods in a sewn-shut bag. On the paper, drawn the night before, three vertical lines of equal length, numbered one, two, three beneath them. This is the method he and Alim worked out last October for asking a man who cannot speak and whose right side does not move. Not "is it this?" — "which is longer and which is shorter?"

At twenty past ten they wheel Abdul Rahman into the yard. The chair his brother bought last August; eight months in it, more than in bed. The left hand grips and can write large characters. The right lies on his leg and does not move. He can make sounds — the sounds have length but no words. Alim is twenty now, and some of last year's boyishness has gone out of him. Marco squats to be at eye level. These three lines are your three houses. One, two, three. How hard should next year's strings be. You draw it. Long is hard, short is soft.

Xu Shen appeared under the yard wall — about sixty, very old dark cloth with ink at the cuffs, ink on his hands too, the kind that does not wash off, a heavy bundle of bamboo slips tied with cord. He did not walk over; he was simply standing there. He looked at the paper a while and said: your three lines are correctly drawn.

Then a small thing. Do you know where the character for "above" came from? No. He squatted and drew a horizontal stroke in the dirt with his finger. First there is this line. Then he put a dot above it. That is "above." Then he moved the dot below. That is "below." And: these two characters were not drawn from anything. You cannot draw heaven and you cannot draw earth. What is drawn is the sun and the moon — that is the pictographic. And: above and below are not pictures. They are a mark, and where the mark sits against a line. The name of the class is the indicative, and its eight characters: you look and you can recognize it; you examine it and the meaning appears. They sound simple. And, and I picked up the pen: the hard part is not the dot. The hard part is the line. Why? Anybody can make the dot. Put it on paper with no line under it and it is only a dot. It is neither above nor below. It is nothing at all. And: the line has to be there first before the dot has anything to say.

So I took the sewn bag of two taels out and held it without speaking, and he looked at it. That is your line. Yes. The bite is the dot. And: a man bites and says this one will do — will do compared to what? To the string on his doorframe. Then the string is the line. And: without it he could bite for forty years and never get out one "will do." And, six times into the book: the skill is in the teeth; the meaning is in the string.

At twenty to eleven the left hand went out for the marker. The grip was unsteady and the tip stuttered twice on the paper. Nobody in the yard spoke. Beside line one he drew a stroke, crooked, a little shorter than the printed line. Beside line two, about the same. At line three he stopped. The tip rested and the ink bled into a dot. About twenty seconds. Then he lifted the pen and set it down. He looked at the sheet and shook his head. Alim said something in Uyghur; no response. Then the left hand came up and drew the circle — the same one as last July.

My first thought was that the method had failed. The second came slower: he drew the first two. Only the third defeated him. If it were the brain, all three would have. So I squatted down and asked again. Last year you said don't replace the string in house three. Was that because that string is good? He looked at me and did not move. And then the second question, which I did not plan — it came out of my mouth: was it because if it were replaced you wouldn't know it any more? Three or four seconds. Then the left hand came up, and he did not draw the circle. He drew one horizontal stroke across the third line. Then he put down the pen, sat back, and closed his eyes.

Alim understood first. He ran into the house and came out with the string off the doorframe — house three, 2031, hung eighteen months — and laid it in his father's left hand. The eyes opened. The fingers moved, very slowly. Thumb and forefinger closed on one. Two seconds. Released. Then another. And then he made a sound: short, two syllables, not a word. I could not read it. Alim could. He stood there with his eyes red and said: he made that sound every single take-down day. And: when it was ready he'd hum like that. And: I've heard it since I was small.

What it means came down in layers, and on the third layer I had to squat. One: he can still pinch. The hand works; the standard is still in him. Two: what he is pinching is the 2031 string, which he has had eighteen months and knows. Three: replace it, and he would have to learn a new one from the beginning. How long relearning takes never used to matter. It matters now. Seventy years old, right side gone, no speech, and he does not know how many take-down days he has left. In the book: he said don't replace it, and it was not because that string is good. It is because that string is the thing he can still use. Replace it and he is out.

Xu Shen's closing, while I was still on the ground. Your six characters are half answered. You know why not to replace it. You still don't know how hard next year's should be. He can't draw it. He can't draw it because that third figure is blank inside him too. Forty years of pinching, and what he pinched was "against last year." You asked him about next year, and there has never been such a thing in his life. Then leave the box empty. Leave it empty. And, hefting the slips: there are nine thousand three hundred and fifty-three characters in my book, and for some of them I cannot say where they came from. Then how did you write them? I wrote: blank. Where I do not know, I have left it blank. And, five times into the book: an empty box and a wrongly filled box are not the same thing. And: the people who come after will use what is wrongly filled. They will see that the empty one is empty. At the gate, turning: my book was presented by my son. That year I was ill and could not get up. — M.

Memo to file. Turpan, 10–12 March 2032. The six characters, half answered.

1. The instrument was designed around one fact: he can rank. Since October we have known that in rehab he sorted five cups by water level with his left hand and got it right. Speech gone, writing gone, right side gone — ranking survived. So the question was built as a ranking: three lines, long is hard, short is soft, mark them.

2. The result, and how nearly I misread it. He marked lines one and two. At line three he held the pen twenty seconds and then drew the circle — his sign, which I myself taught him last June, for I can't answer this. I read it as failure. It was not: two of three came out. A general failure would have taken all three. The circle was specific, and specific ignorance is information.*

3. The second question, which I did not plan. Was it because if it were replaced you wouldn't know it any more? — and he drew a horizontal stroke across line three. Not the circle. An answer. Then Alim fetched the 2031 string and put it in his left hand and he pinched two of them and made a sound that Alim has heard on every take-down day since he was a child — the sound the man makes when it is ready.

4. What "don't replace it" actually means, which is not what I have spent eight months assuming. I read those six characters as a claim about the goods: that string is unusually good, preserve it. I built a temperature study, a tree survey, 1,176 keyed figures and a hot-day count around that reading.* It was never about the string. It was about him. He has held the 2031 reference eighteen months and knows it in his fingers. A new string means relearning a reference from zero — which cost nothing at forty and costs everything at seventy with one working hand and no speech. "Don't replace it" means: don't take away the last part of this I can still do.

5. The part that stays blank, and why that is correct. He could not mark line three because there is no figure there inside him either. Forty years of pinching measured against last year. Next year is not a thing that has ever existed in his practice. I have been asking a comparative instrument for an absolute reading. Xu Shen's rule, and I am adopting it as policy: an empty box and a wrongly filled box are not the same thing. What is wrongly filled gets used by whoever comes after. What is empty is visibly empty. The 2033 hardness figure goes in the book as 阙 — blank.

6. The structural point, which reorganizes the whole three years. The indicative characters — above, below — are not pictures of anything. They are a mark, and the position of that mark against a line. Remove the line and the mark is not wrong; it is meaningless. The bite is the mark. The reference string is the line. Forty years of teeth produce exactly nothing without something to bite against. This is why the cross-household exchange matters and why Luo's two ends and Chang's comes back and Alim's taels lost were never four opinions — they are four marks, each against a different line. And, six times into the book: the skill is in the teeth; the meaning is in the string.*

7. What we actually did on 11 March, and it is the most useful hour of the trip. Split the 2031 string in two. Not cut — divided. Half stays on the doorframe of house three, untouched, nobody may replace it. Half goes into a sewn bag, labelled in Uyghur by Alim and in Chinese by me: 2031, house three, held in reserve. Into the cupboard. Reason: the half on the doorframe keeps drying. One day he will not be able to read it. When that day comes there is a second half that is identical to today.

8. And the thing at the door on the 12th. He pointed at the sheet, then at my bag: take it. Three printed lines, two short strokes, one ink blot, one circle, one horizontal bar. It is in the notebook now. Then I asked about the character he wrote in October. I always thought "wait" was an instruction to us. Is it you who is waiting? Long enough that I thought he wouldn't answer. Then the left hand came up, and he did not point at himself. He pointed out the door — where Alim was carrying the table back.

"In the indicative, you look and you can recognize it; you examine it and the meaning appears. Above and below are of this kind."
Eight characters defining the first of the six ways characters are made, from the postface to a dictionary of nine thousand three hundred and fifty-three characters that took its author some twenty-one years and was finally presented to the throne by his son, because by then he was too ill to go himself.
The example is chosen with care. Above and below are not drawings. You can draw a sun and you can draw a moon — those belong to the pictographic class, where you follow the outline of the thing as it bends. But nobody can draw above. There is no thing there to draw.
What was made instead was a horizontal stroke with a mark set over it, and the same stroke with the mark set under it. The meaning is not in the mark and it is not in the line. It is in the position of the one against the other.
Which puts the difficulty in an unexpected place. Anyone can make the mark. A mark on blank paper is not a wrong answer — it is not an answer at all, because it is neither above nor below anything.
The hard part is not the dot. The hard part is the line.
A craftsman who can judge by hand has the mark. What he usually does not have — what takes decades to accumulate and can be lost in an afternoon — is the line: a physical reference, held constant, that his judgment is a judgment against. Skill without it produces confident readings that mean nothing outside the room they were made in.
The same book supplies the rule for what to do at the edge of what you know. Of certain characters he could not say where they came from, and he did not guess:
"And where I do not know, I have left it blank."
An empty entry and a wrongly filled entry look equally like gaps from a distance. They are opposites. The wrongly filled one will be picked up and used by everybody who comes after. The empty one announces itself as empty, and waits.