Words&Dirt

“We had been speaking for some time in a dull monotonous strain before I realized that we were discussing The King in Yellow.  Oh the sin of writing such words,––words which are clear as crystal, limpid and musical as bubbling springs, words which sparkle and glow like the poisoned diamonds of the Medicis!  Oh the wickedness, the hopeless damnation of a soul who could fascinate and paralyze human creatures with such words,––words understood by the ignorant and wise alike, words which are more precious than jewels, more soothing than music, more awful than death!

We talked on, unmindful of the gathering shadows, and she was begging me to throw away the clasp of black onyx quaintly inlaid with what we now knew to be the Yellow Sign.  I never shall know why I refused, though even at this hour, here in my bedroom as I write this confession, I should be glad to know what it was that prevented me from tearing the Yellow Sign from my breast and casting it into the fire.  I am sure I wished to do so, and yet Tessie pleaded with me in vain.  Night fell and the hours dragged on, but still we murmured to each other of the King and the Pallid Mask, and midnight sounded from the misty spires in the fog-wrapped city.  We spoke of Hastur and of Cassilda, while outside the fog rolled against the blank window-panes as the cloud waves roll and break on the shores of Hali.

The house was very silent now, and not a sound came up from the misty streets.  Tessie lay among the cushions, her face a grey blot in the gloom, but her hands were clasped in mine, and I knew that she knew and read my thoughts as I read hers, for we had understood the mystery of the Hyades and the Phantom of Truth was laid.  Then as we answered each other, swiftly, silently, thought on thought, the shadows stirred in the gloom about us, and far in the distant streets we heard a sound.  Nearer and nearer it came, the dull crunching of wheels, nearer and yet nearer, and now, outside before the door it ceased, and I dragged myself to the window and saw a black-plumed hearse.  The gate below opened and shut, and I crept shaking to my door and bolted it, but I knew no bolts, no locks, could keep that creature out who was coming for the Yellow Sign.  And now I heard him moving very softly along the hall.  Now he was at the door, and the bolts rotten at his touch.  Now he had entered.  With eyes starting from my head I peered into the darkness, but when he came into the room I did not see him.  It was only when I felt him envelop me in his cold soft grasp that I cried out and struggled with deadly fury, but my hands were useless and he tore the onyx clasp from my coat and struck me full in the face.  Then, as I fell, I heard Tessie’s soft cry and her spirit fled: and even while falling I longed to follow her, for I knew that the King in Yellow had opened his tattered mantle and there was only God to cry to now.”

––The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers, pg. 70-1

“The value of a message lies in ‘what might be called its buried redundancy––parts predictable only with difficulty, things the receiver could in principle have figured out without being told, but only at considerable cost in money, time, or computation.’  When we value an object’s complexity, or its information content, we are sensing a lengthy hidden computation.  This might be true of music or a poem or a scientific theory or a crossword puzzle, which gives its solver pleasure when it is neither too cryptic nor too shallow, but somewhere in between.

Mathematicians and logicians had developed a tendency to think of information processing as free––not like pumping water or carrying stones.  In our time, it certainly has gotten cheap.  But it embodies work after all, and Bennet suggests that we recognize this work, reckon its expense in understanding complexity.  ‘The more subtle something is, the harder it is to discover,’ Bennet says.  He applied the idea to logical depth to the problem of self-organization: the question of how complex structures develop in nature.  Evolution starts with simple initial conditions; complexity arises, apparently building on itself.  Whatever the basic processes involved, physical or biological, something is under way that begins to resemble computation.”

––The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, by James Gleick, pg. 354