Building the Tower

Work has begun already, a great deal of work has gone into the project, no-one can reckon as of yet how many man-hours have gone into it (though I expect a reckoning will come at the end of time), and we are all as busy here in the Office of Planning and Development, which is located in our corporate headquarters some two hundred and sixteen tambules away from the work site itself. Although in the evenings we workers are absolutely free to pursue whatever hobbies or interests we may have made for ourselves (of course, said hobbies and interests cannot be outside standard organizational permissions), most of us‑‑a good 90% of us‑‑find it altogether too difficult to entirely switch away from the project towards which we've devoted so much energy and time. Consequently, when the metaphorical whistle blows, we're forced to leave, sadly and reluctantly; it's not that we can hear the thunderous hammering on the mountain from down here in the valley (although we sometimes can, if the wind is going the right way); rather, it's because all hobbies and interests pale in comparison to the project; we hardly ever look at clocks the whole day through, as people in other lines of work might, and we only remember to eat when we get prompted by physical pangs of hunger. Naturally, by the middle of the night everyone has left the Office of Planning and Development, and all is quiet (save for the hammering noise if the wind is right), but the action and bustle begin again a few hours later, when we are all drawn back to the immensity of it all, perhaps with one or two new ideas that have been drawn out of sleepy idle dreams, and eager to examine cursorily or minutely the accomplished activities of the group, as a whole and as individuals. At such times, in such early mornings, before the morning team meetings, we circle the room without making a sound, trying to glean such information as might be gleaned from creased blueprints, pen-and-ink flowcharts, and always-undated memos of a vintage that may be, for all we know, weeks, months, or years old; and note here that all these documents are not, strictly speaking, 'undated,' but rather that all documents in the Office of Planning and Development come to be assigned a key-code, perhaps from their inceptions, and that there exists, so we all believe, a Great Book, somewhere, that keys each and every official production to a particular date. One might think that a bureaucracy such as ours would require something of a transparency in which we could all work more closely and collaboratively, but it has been decided that a happy balance between collaboration and individualism had to be set somewhere, since too much of one to the negligence of the other would necessarily cause problems, and all the philosophers have agreed on this fact since the watery time of Thales of Miletus and his idea, or so I've read, that a liquid can neither be individuated nor collectivized. Thus, in those times when we are not absorbed with our own some-or-other structural problems of material fact or economic cost, we are able to come together (albeit through media) to expand our minds through other people's problems, and thus to perhaps solve their problems or to receive a solution to some problem of our own, and this, I say, is the productive balance we have verily stumbled upon, as if by chance, or as if by some transcendent principle that is totally beyond any single person's comprehension. We rarely speak to one another during these our investigations‑‑not that that's not allowed by our bosses, heavens no; rather, it's as through a kind of immaterial inertia that's meant to keep us focussed on our problems-at-hand‑‑and yet we have the ability, or so we're told in our monthly pep booster sessions, to see the bigger‑‑indeed the biggest‑‑picture: what we are doing here, in our massive organization in which really everyone takes a part, is, in this our silent (when not hostile) universe, ipso facto the single most important project for the entire universe (though sometimes they get modest and only say: galaxy). (I recall here parenthetically that some time ago I was wandering from table to table in search of signs when I spotted a colleague's yellow pad upon which were drawn perfect and interlocking circles of an ochre hue; four circles in all, with two overlapping, another almost overlapping with one of those, and another circle entirely outside the ambit of the other three; I made a quick sketch of their configuration before their creator returned, and when their creator returned he blithely put his coffee cup down on the yellow pad without so much as a by-your-leave, and thereby created a fifth ochre circle.) In any case, regardless of the scope of the magnificence of the project in which we are engaged, our lives as planners and developers runs around a rather routine hamster wheel, what with each problem adjuncting every other problem, which is somewhat funny, if you think about it: that this the greatest project ever is getting accomplished by an unknown number of individuals who appear perpetually to be as if walking through a dimly-lit cave, touching walls every two minutes, uncertain which way to turn, uncertain of the cave's size even, listening with all ears for anything like a word of guidance: that though we are embarked on this endeavour we have neither sextant nor compass (nor can we be assumed to even know the very meanings of the words 'sextant' and 'compass'). I work from nine to five, officially, though I have to admit to you, since you're my confessors, that we keep those hours; we're never in the office an hour or so before nine, and we never stay an hour or two after five, SUCH is our interest in the project of this building, up and up, into the sky, for we know that if we work, and work, we will get there even if we're just nine-to-fivers. I mean: how far away is the sky after all? We can all see it, and if we can see it, it seems natural and normal that we can get to it, and if we can get to it, with all its promises, why shouldn't we try to get to it, and won't all that happen without bothering with overtime? There it is, the sky, and the sky changes from day to day, but we can get to it; there's theoretical documents to prove what I'm saying here, but I guess you know about all of them, they're all published in the journals, you know of them, cit, On the Proven Lack of Philosophical and Technical Limitations, Journal of Theoretical Knowledge, volume IV issue 2, Technical Review of Hard Structures, Hard Science Studies, volume II issue 4, How Much Can a Load Bear?, Commonplace Book of New England Knowledge, issue 19. I myself seem to be most interested (because I'm told to be, har) and specialized in the logs of the x and the y axes that are oh-so-important to the keeping of it from falling down before it is finished, and I have to say that the work I do is vitally important to the entire project, since if I make a mistake some million or so people will be crushed to death when it falls; but hey isn't there a risk in everything? This morning, coming to the office, I nearly stepped out into the traffic of what I wrongly thought to be a one-way street; I don't want you to think it was an especially close shave, because it wasn't: I, for a single dark moment, had confused one street with another, no more no less, and I caught myself from stepping out with plenty of time to spare. Nonetheless, what I mean to say is that there could come a particular day when you forget where you are, perhaps even who you are, and your life will then be in bloody peril at that particular moment; so when we are building what we are building, we know there are risks involved, and, yes, it could tumble to the ground at some moment, because it is a very complicated structure and you can't plan for everything, you know; that said, we take a great many precautions, almost to an unnecessary excess, since we really do want to succeed. In any case, and in furtherance of the idea, certain poets who shall remain nameless take a kind of glee in the possibilities of failure, bringing one pessimist so far as to say any action is a hopeless action, since the whole cosmos will come to a grinding halt one day, and this project can't ever overcome the gravitational forces that will analogously bring down also, given enough time, the tallest mountains in the whole world. I know these people are poets and all, taken to exaggeration and hyperbole‑‑I've even dabbled in verse myself many years ago‑‑but still I believe they are doing a great disservice to the very principle of progress with their clever rhymes and newly-discovered metrical patternings; however, there's little to be done about them, live and let live is what I always say, and I make no bones about it and I don't apologize either, neither. I liked the older poetry better, the kind that kind of meandered without rhyming or having a proper metre, before everything got to being boringly so formal again, back when they where they were more interested in the symbols that could be conjured up out of ink on paper; we even ban certain poets, at least informally, here in the Department of Planning and Development, as far as I know, and it's only three particular poets, as far as I know, and I know you'd recognize their names if I told you, but I don't dare tell you. The structural engineers, with whom we have daily contact, don't know a thing about our informal bans, so closely do we keep the bans secret; the structural engineers are the stars of the show, as you can well believe, or do I have to tell you that the structural design is at the centre of everything we're doing here? I don't think I have to tell you that; anyway, these structural engineers are really quite bright, not just in the engineering department but about most everything else too, which intimidates a lot of people in the Department of Planning and Development, since technically we're above them and able to tell them what to do and what to design, not quite brick-by-brick but something quite close to it: we make sketches, imperfect and suggestive by design, and we hand it over to them and say: "Something like this is what's wanted, it's what we're passing on, this has gone through who-knows-how-many committees, and we have supreme confidence in your abilities to build pretty much anything anyone would ever want." The engineers look over the plans, ask about this-or-that mark of measurement, go away with a look of deep understanding, phone us up for some details a couple hours later, consult with us again the next morning, and finally we're going places, and it's only a matter of time before the finished plans are sent off to a different department, which I think is called the eventuation office, and we consider that a job well done. Once, I recall, I was called, along with three others, to the engineering department to have one of our meetings (but only called there because they had built a prototype of a component which was, ironically or not, too fragile to make it down the stairs in one piece); we'd never been there before, and I don't know if my fellow planning-and-developers thought the same as me‑‑I never asked‑‑but I was of the opinion that their office was only slightly, only slightly, better than our own, only because they had an extra coffee-maker. The engineers, who may or may not have been the same engineers as the ones who had met with us earlier, proudly presented us with their prototype, asking us to keep our distance from it and not breathe too heavily in its presence, which we quietly and breathlessly circled, trying to judge if it was what we had written and drawn up in the earlier days; finally, one of us braved enough to say that it didn't look at all like what we'd drawn, and the engineers were puzzled enough to produce for us the drawings, and one look at the drawings brought us all to a enjoy a good laugh, since they weren't our plans at all, they belonged to some other department though no-one knew which. In any case, we went away, chuckling mostly to ourselves, but still the sight of the extra coffee-maker disturbed me, not because our two departments may have the same number of workers‑‑it would take more than a couple triplicate forms to find out for sure‑‑and thus should have the same number of perks available, but rather that I did not know how exactly they'd come about to have one more than we did. Was is a special requisition, were there extraordinary circumstances, was it grandfathered in, was it a temporary replacement that never got returned, did they borrow it from another department and forget to return it, was it the personal property (unauthorized in itself) of one of their team members, did we have another coffee-maker hidden away in some cupboard, had we failed to get ours from the requisitions department, or had a notice not arrived at some point in the past informing us that we were being given another coffee-maker? I thought that day about finding out how this unexpected turn of events had come to pass, perhaps by notifying the department superior to our department (and possibly also reigning over the structural engineering department) about this conundrum, and though I knew for a certainly that I would receive a prompt and clear reply as to why things were as they were, I knew that the department superior to our department (the name of which escapes me at the moment) was an incredibly busy department with plenty of pressing matters to deal with in a project of such an unprecedented scale as ours, and that to reply to every little mewl from every little subordinate could not be done, despite their massive intellectual power and their dedication to perfection in all matters no matter their smallness. I imaginarily foresaw my query passing from desk to desk in that department, each position honing a little my question‑‑sometimes cutting out some language, at other times expanding my phraseology (perhaps by adding adjectives or adverbs), or, to be novel, adding and removing letters here and there, until what I had queried had become a bundle of paragraphs far removed from what I had written‑‑now, don't get me wrong, for this process was the process that had to be followed from desk-to-desk and department-to-department, since, not only would it be the case that my memo had been badly written‑‑I'm not a good enough writer to not be edited‑‑but also each of these desks and departments would have a purpose far beyond mere notices about coffee-makers. In fact, with each one of those edits, the desks would be slightly improving their skills in their usage, even concerning something as insignificant as a kitchen appliance, and, let's not kid ourselves here, any large organization is dependent on insignificant tasks and procedures in order to arrive at 'the big picture' in its most important measure; as it has been wisely noted by someone-or-other, there is a great deal of ruin in a nation, and that goes triple-fold for a giant international endeavour such as the one that we're attempting in the vast and measureless, horizon-stretching even, nature of the work of myself and my department-mates and my parallel-department-mates and the higher-ups and the lower-downs who draw their paycheques from the Grand Exchequer (whose office is I-know-not-where). The problem of the coffee-maker, I knew, paled in comparison to the deeds of my department, which are, in case I haven't mentioned it already, the development and the implementation and the organization and the brainstorming and the feedback processing and the measuring and the reporting of pretty much any task given to us through memos and pneumatic tubes and even computers with their shiny lights that blink on and off, though offering no-one any clue as to whether their blinks are meaningful or ornamental; the messages we receive (which come every second day sometime before ten in the morning) aren't always signed and aren't always addressed, but they come to us, and we must act on them ASAP. We'd pass the messages around the office, from team member to team member, and read the messages, but‑‑and this is something quite curious‑‑I've often found that the message, once it had gone through everyone's hands and had been returned to me, read differently from the first time I'd read it, as if in the process of reading the text it had changed to suit someone's suitability, either the suitability of my colleagues who certainly hold views different from mine, or because I myself have gone through a slight change in perspective whilst the note was circulating; in any case, I've only noticed this effect on a handful of occasions: most of the time, maybe two-thirds of the time, the message remains stable and fidelious and these messages we have no difficulty bringing into a process of definitive action; however, the messages that change during circulation always pose the greatest difficulty, and they seem the most pressing, seeing as the two-thirds that are most easily understandable and lacking in all ambiguity present little problem to our intellects and abilities. Furthermore, the mysterious every-third-message that comes from departments so high above ours that in almost every case we've never even heard of said department, and in a third of the cases the departments are identified only by ciphers or abbreviations or acronyms which no reference book can satisfactorily resolve, and in a third of those cases it's almost impossible to tell if action is necessary or if thanks is being given for the solution to some problem that had been solved months or years back; in those latter cases, if it's true that gratitude is being given or if seems likely that gratitude is being given, we have ourselves a little party, with coffee and cake, and these coffee-and-cake parties happen, oh, requests come every second day, and every third request is unstable, and in a third of those we don't know where they come from, and in a third of those the name of the department is hidden from us, and in a third of those it seems gratitude is being given, and in half of those gratitude is truly being given, so that's 2 by 3 by 3 by 3 by 3 by 2, which means we have coffee-and-cake every 324 days, which, absenting weekends, means it could very well be an annual event. Isn't that a co-incidence.... We're organized into teams, as I've hinted, our department is, teams of four, as it works out, and each team gets tasked to work on a particular aspect of a problem; now understand we have two days, more or less, to solve each problem that gets presented to us, so we really have to be organized in our little quartets; and meanwhile it's somewhat miraculous that when one person is unexpectedly absent through illness or childbirth we manage to self-organize into quartets all the time and seldom is there any odd-man-out to whom we have to task minor tasks such as cleaning the kitchen or the coffee-maker, those damn coffee-makers, or sometimes we make the odd-man-out run personal errands to the laundry or the grocery or the liquor store, depending on the day of the week. We go into what's called a 'huddle', and we swear ourselves to molecule-level secrecy such that each quartet cannot communicate, i.e., pollute with information, any other quartet regardless of whether they are in the next room, on the same floor, or (perhaps [though unlikely]) a million miles away; there we huddle, puzzling over and brainstorming the portion apported, via pure reason and analysis, us, of the mysterious communique we had received at some point in the past, sketching on whiteboards and blackboards with chalk and sharpies mysterious and arcane triangles, pentangles, and septangles meant to represent loci and foci acting upon the central problem: and this is only the first step in the solution of the problem! Look: there's Chuck, wearing his blue shirt and his jeans, with the glasses he bought at a second-hand shop and had re-lensed, with his red ballpoint pen touching his chin, ready to point out that a particular angle is a little too obtuse; and there's Trudë, in a faux-camel-skin blouse and dressy pale green slacks, reaching for her foam cup of foam coffee which is looking out the window at nothing at all; and there's Angela, light o' me life, leaning back with her eyes on the ceiling tiles whose composition is of some kind of drywall with large and small holes all over them and divided by what I believe to be aluminum plathes (if that's even a word), and she's wearing clothes that suit her to a T; and me, with my eyes roaming absent-mindedly over the creases and wrinkles of Angela's blouse, noting how they bunch up beneath her lovely breasts yet are entirely absent in the areas above her... nipples...; and the problem has gone unapproached for something like twenty minutes already, each of us has a different idea of what the problem is exactly, but we know we're making progress, because we're always making progress. It's built into the pie, this certainty of progress, and when the team of which I am a member finishes up a project, regardless of how plain or complex it is, we sign our large names to it, then one of us, chosen by lot, leaves the room to deposit the finished product in the outgoing slot, then returns to our room whereupon we immediately give one another gold stars. Now you may want to know what happens to the solutions we so proudly send off, for I'm sure you want to have some evidence to back up your opinion that we are doing such a wonderful job in the Planning and Development Department, and the evidence is as follows: months or years or decades later, we will receive, in a new batch of assignable problems, the same problem again, but the second time around it can be seen and is plainly evident that whatever solutions we provided in the last round had been taken into consideration in a major way or a minor way, which signifies quite obviously that we're moving things ahead and they wouldn't be moving ahead were it not for us and our small manageable teams. It's not all high-fives and cakes, of course, even though our great effectiveness is plain to anyone who can add numbers together; when we leave for the day at five o'clock on the dot to go home to our personal lives (leaving our personnel lives behind), when the last one out turns off the lights, as we go through the vast building of which we know only selected bits, meeting also at the same time people we've never seen before, we (I assume the others too) are dwarfed and awed sublimely by the beauty of the whole enterprise and once we are actually outside we en masse turn back wistfully to look at the magnificence of it all; and we all go home, and nothing important happens there; and we return to the workplace with gratitude bursting our hearts to overflowing. Back in the building once again, first one in turns on the lights and though we make small-talk about the events of last night we know we're talking about matters of no significance whatsoever, knowing that is rather here in this Department of Planning and Development that our real lives and our authentic purposes lie; we blow at our desks to blow away whatever little bits of the wasted overnight time have managed to settle upon them, and it's time to catch up on the mail (for the mail-bot has already arrived for the first time of the day, in our department at precisely this time and then in the next department [I think it's accounts payable] at precisely the next time and so on throughout this quarter-or-so section of our floor), and it's time to have some little contact with the departments parallel to ours in the organizational structure. O, and we also gossip about who is in and who is out, and sometimes we say words of regret for those who have been fired or who have retired or who have died, for there's a certain amount of turn-over that happens in the building, and even if we're only faintly familiar with the he in question or the she in question, we feel sad for them knowing they've lost out big-time, no longer having any connection to this the greatest endeavour in the history of the planet which is known as Earth. We prepare our notes and queries in preparation for the morning team meetings (which, though they have been known to stretch into late afternoon or on occasion into the next day, we still call 'morning team meetings', the phrase being, grammatically speaking, something of a redundancy twice-told, since there are no afternoon meetings, and the meetings are always team meetings), happily and joyfully we prepare our notes and queries until it is ten o'clock, and time to assemble in our morning team meeting rooms; and we go into the room with smiles on our faces, knowing that over the next indeterminate period we will be exercising our minds as never before, or at least not in the last eighteen-or-so hours, puzzling over some problem that had been sent to our department from places unknown that though unknown knew we were the right people for the job. Copies would be handed around: Chuck, again in his blue shirt and jeans, leans back in his ergonomic chair (all our chairs are ergonomic) to scan the text; Trudë, in her ladies' lunch outfit, is scratching her knee and patting her hair, all the time reading with a knit brow; and, of course, Angela, whose eyes are clear and blemish-free, and her mouth is twitching enchantingly as she precociously is already coming up with unspoken suggestions and unvoiced ideas; and I am there too, as you can well imagine; and outside across the campus plaza the sun is shining down obliquely (for the room's window faces south-by-southwest), and the problem concerns the routing of building materials meant to be used in the construction of somewhat larger assemblages in a place or a state or a province none of us have ever heard of: though that's never stopped us before, and it certainly isn't going to stop us now. We take out the white- and black-board erasers and make a clean sweep of the remains of our last project (which none of us can recall the first thing about anyway), and we're drawing imaginary maps with ideal lines connecting several points to several other points, not to scale in the least because that matter of measures, of tambules, is completely unknown to us (though the problem may be revised to include tambule measurements in days to come in order to perfect the solution we are going to eventually arrive at), and I come to see that these drawings or sketches or whatever are in fact also describing something else, something I can't quite put my finger on, and if in a state of divine inspiration I go to the board, saying: "This is a more elegant way of putting the problem," whereupon I clean off one particularly knotty bit of representation and replace it with a slightly less knotty bit of representation, whereupon Chuck and Trudë and Angela are silent for a moment as if taking it all in then and there, whereupon Trudë says: "That makes everything a whole lot clearer now, doesn't it?, whereupon they start writing notes, notes on the notes, in the margins, whereupon Angela says