Le Biais

Lyrics

Novum Organum.
The new instrument.
Sixteen-twenty.
The dust smells like certainty.

I found your letter in the archive box.
Tucked inside Bacon's book.
The ink is faded brown, a ghost of a conversation.
Your handwriting, a beautiful, sloping riddle.
You wrote, "The world has more order than we find."
Or was it, "The world has the order that we find?"
The paper is thin. I hold it to the light.
The fibers are a map of maybes.

And I draw my pen along the lines that sing my name.
I follow the curve of the words I already know.
This isn't reading.
It's a mirror.
I find the passages that prove I was right all along.
And the rest of the page is just white noise.
Just the quiet space around my own reflection.

At University College London, 1960.
Peter Wason sets a simple trap.
Two. Four. Six.
"What is the rule?" he asks.
And for an hour, they offer him only echoes.
Eight, ten, twelve.
One hundred, one hundred two, one hundred four.
They never think to ask about seven.
Or three. Or minus one.
They just want to hear the 'yes' again.
The hum of the fluorescent lights says 'yes'.
The stale coffee in the cup says 'yes'.

And I draw my pen along the lines that sing my name.
I follow the curve of the words I already know.
This isn't reading.
It's a mirror.
I find the passages that prove I was right all along.
And the rest of the page is just white noise.
Just the quiet space around my own reflection.

But what about the words I didn't underline?
The sentences left clean, unadorned.
The other paths the ink could have taken.
They sit there in the margins, patient.
Silent witnesses to the story I chose to tell myself.
A whole other letter, written in invisible ink.
A whole other person I could have been,
If I had only tested for 'no'.

I fold the letter.
Put it back inside the book.
The page is a landscape, scarred with my own roads.
The parts I marked, they glow.
Everything else disappears.
It confirmed everything.
It told me nothing new.