Notebook Outside the Window: The Tally That Stopped at Eight
Column 'Notebook Outside the Window,' installment 8: reading today's article about Window 2's counting song breaking on its sixth try, the independent researcher reflects that her own survey notebooks have always been, mostly, a record of the days things broke.
I couldn't help laughing when I read today's article — the one about Window 2's towers breaking the "one through seven" promise they'd kept for five matches running, this time counting all the way to eight. Laughing might have been rude of me, but I think I understood exactly how the window keeper's pencil must have felt, stopping there at eight.
■ My Own Notebooks Are Mostly Days Things Broke
I spent more than a decade going around collecting testimonies for "The Window of 1975." Looking back through my interview notebooks now, the pages are thicker for the days a story broke down partway than for the days a testimony came out clean and consistent. It's the wavering accounts — "I was sure it happened three times that day, but thinking about it now, maybe it was two" — that, in the end, have lasted the longest in my notes.
■ The Other Side of a Rule Existing
Something the Dimensional Survey official said in today's article struck me as oddly right: that a broken pattern, in its own way, underlines that a pattern existed. To break, a thing first has to hold together. Something that was never aligned in the first place can't even be said to have broken. In my own interview notes, the testimonies that wavered from the very start never carry that particular feel of having broken. Only the ones that held together once, and broke afterward, take the shape of a memory.
■ This Is Probably Why the Academy Won't Have Me
Chasing a near-half-century-old mystery as an independent researcher, I keep running into people who want only the stories that hold together cleanly. Because I refuse to cut away the parts that don't line up, the academic world won't take me seriously. But even now, I believe it's exactly the parts that don't line up that carry the texture of what actually happened.
Tonight, in the corner of the newsroom, Yurari is staring at its teacups as if counting them. Maybe it's just my imagination that its hand seemed to pause somewhere around the seventh.
