Reading Wondereal with Oyo
Aya was reading a paper about APL datatypes with her friend Oyo from Aplogos.
Oyo liked to think in nested arrays and binaries. Aya always felt related to binaries. She imagined them as sleeping and awakened bunnies.
They began with months.
There was an ordered array of twelve:
January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December.
Aya selected three:
January, May, September.
As names, their shapes had lengths:
7 3 9
But as months, they belonged to positions:
1 5 9
When Aya extracted the three names and placed them together as nested character arrays, she preserved their spellings and their different shapes.
But something had disappeared.
January was no longer visibly the first month.
May was no longer visibly the fifth.
September was no longer visibly the ninth.
They had retained their bodies but lost their visible relationship to the calendar that had given them meaning.
Oyo showed Aya another way to select them:
1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0
Now January, May, and September were the awakened bunnies inside the field of twelve months.
The other months had not been erased. They remained as sleeping positions, preserving distance, order, and belonging.
Then Aya thought about letters.
What if each letter were not stored only as an isolated character, but as a mask over the alphabet of its language?
The letter J would be one awakened position inside the whole alphabet.
The name January would be a nested array of letter masks. Each letter would remain related to the alphabet, while all seven letters together formed a name.
The name would belong to the month.
The month would belong to the calendar.
And the chosen month would belong to the selection.
An extracted thing could still carry the relationships of the larger structures from which it came.
“Nested belonging,” Aya said.
That night, Aya looked at a small part of the sky where only three separate stars were visible.
“How many stars are really there?” she asked Oyo.
Aya looked again at the small chosen part of the sky.
In reality, she thought, that space must contain many more stars than she could see. The sky was immensely deep, and in that depth more invisible stars might appear. If Aya could see infinitely far, perhaps every sleeping bunny would awaken.
The small dark patch would become solid light.
Aya transferred the thought to the whole sky and became deeply grateful that she could not truly see into infinity. A sky made of uninterrupted light felt blinding even in imagination.
“Oyo,” Aya said, “I just saw all your binaries awaken into ones. It was frightening. I am glad there is a mask over my vision, so I can see only three stars there — three awakened bunnies in a field of sleeping ones.”
The three stars were not isolated as an array of three lights of different sizes.
They belonged to the invisible ones between and behind them.
The darkness did not mean that nothing was there.
It meant that nothing there had become visible to Aya.
A zero was not an absence.
It was a sleeping relation.
The three visible stars remained nested in the chosen patch of sky, the visible sky, the galaxy, the deep universe, and Aya’s act of seeing.
Their light belonged not only to the stars.
It belonged to the encounter:
the universe,
distance,
time,
light,
and Aya’s eyes.
If every position became visible at once, distinction would disappear. There would be no star and darkness, no figure and field, no signal and interval.
Everything would be present.
Nothing would be articulated.
Aya understood that the mask over her vision was not only a limitation.
It was what allowed the sky to speak.
The alphabet held its letters.
The calendar held its months.
The darkness held its stars.
Nothing appeared alone.
Wondereal was made of nested belonging.