立天元一

Fourteenth of January, 2034, Chengdu. The box from the end of last year has sat for two weeks — the one I marked with a hollow circle, and annotated: the other blanks are things I have not yet measured; this one I don't know what instrument would measure. What made me turn back to it was small. At the bank that afternoon there was a field on the form: principal business. I sat over it a while and wrote purchase and sale of agricultural produce, and it looked wrong on the page, because what I have actually spent five years doing is neither purchasing nor selling — and there is no field on that form for the other thing, and I cannot say what it is either.

On the fifteenth I stopped trying to name it and went looking for something else instead: which things did these eight people do that brought them no benefit at the time? A morning's search, and I found seven. Tursun posting a string to a man he had never met. Chang taking down a string the day after he heard Tursun had died and posting it to a dead man's grandson. Imin nailing another family's half-bag outside his own grid. Luo travelling two hours to stand for three days, forty-seven days after surgery. Abdul Rahman touching the back of my hand. Gul's six notebooks that nobody asked for. Ali picking three times and writing down that the three disagreed. I looked at the seven a long time and could not see anything they had in common.

Li Ye came that afternoon. Past eighty. A very old cloth robe, not official dress. Eyes half closed, as though he could not see well. A dozen counting rods in one hand, and a wooden board cut with a grid. He looked at the sheet and said: you are trying to see what they resemble.

He began with a question. The thing you want — do you know what it is? No. Then what are these seven for? I want to see it in them. You won't. Flatly. Those seven look nothing like each other. One posts goods, one nails up a bag, one takes a bus to stand for three days. Stare at them for a year and no name will come. Then what? He set the board down. Give it a name first. I don't know what it's called. You don't need to. He took one rod and laid it flat in the middle square of the grid. This is it. I call it the celestial element, one.

What does that stand for? The thing you are trying to find. But I don't know what it is. Of course you don't. If you knew, you wouldn't be looking. And, and I picked up the pen: setting up the celestial element is not defining it. It is giving it a position. And: once it has a position, the other things can be set out beside it.

He read the seven lines aloud, slowly, then: now write beside each one what you actually do know. Which is? What benefit that act brought the person doing it, at the time. Tursun: zero. Chang, to a dead man: zero. Imin's nail: zero. Luo's three days: negative — he had just been operated on. The touch on my hand: zero. Gul's notebooks: there is a benefit — she uses them to buy in next month. Ali's three picks: a benefit — he uses it himself next year. Two of the seven have a benefit. Then make it two piles.

Five left. Now write one more thing: who each of these five was done for. — A man he had never met. A man who had died, so it was really the grandson. A sixteen-year-old with only one cell. Two boys who were watching and could not yet read what they were seeing. And the last one: an answer to my own sentence, every year you are here, we will weigh it. I stopped at the fifth and put the pen down. All five have the same thing in them: the person receiving it was not there. He nodded and pushed the rod forward. Then you may write on it now.

What I wrote in the square was not a noun. It was a sentence: something done for a person who was not there at the time. He said: that is not a name. I know. But it can be calculated with. A name cannot; that sentence can. And, six times into the book: you can go and count with it. And: count how many such things happened in five years. Count who did them. Count which years had more and which fewer. And: a name can only be hung on a wall.

Last, his own book. One hundred and seventy problems. All of what? A circle and a right triangle, fitted together. A hundred and seventy ways of asking. The same thing a hundred and seventy times? Yes. Why? Because nobody can do this from one telling. You have to watch it set up a hundred and seventy times before you dare set it up once yourself. And from the preface: let the reader simply take what I have said and use it to seek what I have not said. And: take what I did say and go find what I didn't. And, five times into the book: however complete a book is, it can never be as complete as what happens to the person reading it. — M.

Memo to file. Chengdu, 14–22 January 2034. The unnamed box, and what came out of refusing to name it.

1. The blockage. At year-end I had a thing I could not name: whatever holds eight people to this when the accounts ran negative for four years. Four candidate names written and struck out — trust, interest, friendship, the work itself — the last one struck slowest, annotated too much like a fine phrase.

2. The method, and it is the opposite of what I was doing. I was trying to find the thing by inspecting instances. Seven instances that look nothing alike will not yield a name, however long you stare. Instead: give it a position and reason around it. Not a definition — a slot in the grid, so that the things you do know can be laid out next to it.

3. Two filters, applied in order, and the second one did the work. — Benefit to the doer at the time. Seven become five (Gul's notebooks and Ali's three picks both have real, near-term use to the person doing them — they belong in a different pile, not a lesser one). — Who it was done for. And all five come out the same: the recipient was not present. A man never met; a man already dead; a boy with one cell and no second point; two boys watching who could not yet read it; and a future year.

4. What went into the box, and it is a sentence, not a noun. "Something done for a person who was not there at the time." Li Ye's justification for accepting that, which I am adopting: a name can only be hung on a wall; a sentence like this can be counted with — how many, by whom, in which year.

5. The count, 16–20 January, and it is the finding. 2029: 0. 2030: 1. 2031: 2. 2032: 5. 2033: 9. (2030's single instance is Chang handing Luo fifty thousand in front of me, on a twenty-six-year-old account neither man had ever mentioned.) Against the money line — −70,525 / −58,092 / −31,400 / −8,400 / +4,200 — the two curves have roughly the same shape: slow, then steep. I have watched the money line every year for five years. I had never once counted this one. In the book: the line I count every year, I think I am managing. The line I never counted may be the one managing me.*

6. Filed as class twenty-one, alongside the six heads, nineteen classes, and last year's unfiled. Seventeen entries, five years' worth. Rules on its first page: no averaging, enters no calculation; record only who, when, for whom, and whether there was a benefit at the time; the last field is compulsory and anything with a benefit does not belong here.

7. And the thing I found putting it beside last year's column. Looking at each other* now holds eleven entries, ten ticked, one still marked with a cross and the two numbers 79 and 46. Nine of those eleven also belong in the new class. I named that column "looking at each other" and thought I was creating a miscellaneous drawer. It was the first nine entries of this. — The name I gave it was too small.

8. What I asked the five for on the 22nd, after one withdrawal and rewrite. First version was a single line and unclear. Sent version: this year you did something that brought you no benefit at the time; it was done for someone who was not there, or did not know. Write one line. If there is nothing, reply "none." Ali first, with a question: does this count as bookkeeping? Yes. Then: should I record what my grandfather did? Yes. Because when he did it, the person receiving it was not present either. And now he is the one who is not present. And: sooner or later this class will hold entries where neither the doer nor the receiver is there — and then that one line is the only thing still in the room.

"Let the celestial element be one."
The phrase opens the working of problem after problem in a book of a hundred and seventy, all of them about the same figure — a circle inscribed in a right triangle — asked a hundred and seventy different ways. The formula means: here is a quantity I do not know; I will give it a place on the counting board and proceed as though I did.
The move is so familiar now that its strangeness is easy to miss. You are permitted to reason rigorously about something you cannot identify, provided you can state relations it participates in. The unknown does not have to be understood. It has to be positioned, so that the things you do know can be written down beside it — and then, often, it resolves.
What it is not is a definition. Naming a thing and locating a thing are different operations, and only the second one lets you calculate.
The author is also unusually frank about how the technique is transmitted. A hundred and seventy problems on one configuration is not thoroughness for its own sake; it is a teaching decision, and his reasoning is that nobody acquires this from one telling — a reader has to watch the set-up performed many times before daring to perform it once.
And the instruction in the preface puts the limit of the book plainly:
"Let the reader simply take what I have said and use it to seek what I have not said; then he will have more than half of it."
The claim is not that the book contains the answers. It is that the book contains enough worked instances for the reader to handle a case the author never saw — which is the only form in which a method, as opposed to a result, can actually be handed on.
There is a remark elsewhere in his work worth setting beside it, because it says who the method is for: even the common man and the humble servant can reason out the principles of number.