Colophon
Filed under MPSoL, Honolulu, 1963.
Issued as a continuation of symbolic training protocols initiated in
Volume 1: The Reawakening of Symbolic Intelligence.
Printed for field distribution in environments where symbolic literacy
is required for survival and advancement.
This volume is prepared for those who have completed the foundational
exercises of Volume 1 and are ready to extend their perception into the
cultural and linguistic layers of the symbolic field.
This text is released under the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. You are
free to share and adapt the material, provided you give appropriate
credit, do not use it for commercial purposes, and distribute derivative
works under the same license.
Chapter 1 – Signs Before Speech
Before words, there were marks.
A line drawn in dust.
A stone set upright where no stone should be.
A notched bone passed from one pair of hands to another.
Long before any tongue formed a repeatable grammar, humans were already
navigating their world through signs—some deliberate, others accidental,
all capable of becoming meaningful when perceived in the right
frame.
The World as a Field of Cues
Imagine a day without language. Not silence, exactly—there is still the
rustle of wind, the creak of wood, the movement of bodies—but no shared
words to map these into agreed concepts. You must rely on what you can
point to, show, or leave behind. Every meaningful act must be anchored
in the physical: gesture, object, placement.
In this pre-verbal environment, survival depends on recognizing
patterns: a bent blade of grass might signal a trail, a dark stain on
stone might signal water nearby. The people who could see these signs,
and teach others to see them, became the first symbolic
technicians.
The Proto-Contract of Meaning
Even without speech, there was agreement—an invisible contract binding
the sign-maker to the sign-reader. This contract was simple:
If you understand this mark, you belong here. If you can make it, you
protect the belonging.
To the outsider, the mark might look like nothing: a scratch, a pile of
rocks, a string tied to a branch. To the initiated, it was instruction,
warning, or permission.
This proto-contract is still at work today. A spray-painted tag, an
unmarked doorway, a peculiar knot in an urban fence—these mean nothing
to most passers-by but can be a complete sentence to those inside the
symbolic circle.
Icon, Index, Symbol
Semiotics, the study of signs, later named these relationships:
- Icon – resemblance. A carved fish means fish.
- Index – physical connection. Smoke means fire.
- Symbol – arbitrary assignment. A red ochre dot means ritual space, not
because it looks like ritual, but because the group agreed it
does.
Icons are the easiest to learn; indexes are the most immediate; symbols
are the most powerful, because they are portable and adaptable—they can
stand for the invisible or the imaginary.
The leap from icon to symbol is the birth of abstraction. The moment a
mark could mean something absent—a herd that will pass in spring, an
ancestor never met—it could also be used to hold together a culture, a
memory, or a threat.
The First Symbolist’s Toolkit
The earliest symbolic practitioners did not have pens or paper. Their
toolkit was small, but precise:
- Materials – charcoal, ochre, stone chips, animal bones.
- Gestures – pointing, miming, tracing in air or water.
- Placement – the where was as important as the what; a mark on a rock
by a river meant something different than the same mark in a dry
cave.
Once placed, a sign became part of the landscape. It could be read later
by someone who had never met the maker—meaning could leap across time.
This temporal extension is one of the most potent features of symbolic
communication.
Signs as Invisible Infrastructure
To the untrained eye, signs fade into background. To the trained
symbolist, they form an invisible infrastructure, as real as the bones
of a building. Consider:
- A sequence of stacked stones that align with sunrise on
solstice.
- A road whose curves match the old river that no longer flows
there.
- A weaving pattern that appears in clothing, walls, and baskets across
generations.
These patterns anchor a culture’s memory, and
once you learn to see them, you realize how many such anchors you’ve been living among without knowing.
Training the Eye Without Words
The modern novice must relearn pre-verbal perception. The exercises are
simple but demanding:
1. Walk without naming. For thirty minutes, see without mentally
labeling. Let objects exist without words.
2. Note anomalies. Record anything out of place—a single red leaf in
green grass, a door painted differently from its neighbors.
3. Track repetition. Count how many times a specific object, shape, or
gesture appears in a single day.
The goal is not yet to assign meaning but to recover sensitivity.
Interpretation comes later; first, we must reawaken the ability to
notice.
Why Start Here?
Language is an extraordinary technology, but it can also dull other
channels of perception. By beginning with the sign before speech, we
re-enter the symbolic field at its broadest point—where meaning is made
not by grammar but by deliberate contact between human attention and the
physical world.
In Volume 2, we will follow the sign into more complex arenas: how
cultures codify meaning into systems, how words carry symbols across
centuries, how power uses language to structure reality. But if we skip
this step, we will build on a cracked foundation.
The early sign is pure. It says: I am here, and I mean something. It
does not yet argue, persuade, or distract. It exists as a bridge between
the visible and the understood. Learn to cross it without words, and you
will be ready for everything that follows.
Chapter 2 – Language as a Symbolic Field
Language is the first great symbolic field most humans enter. Long
before we can consciously reflect on it, we are already moving within
it—receiving signals, responding to sounds, and learning the patterns
that make meaning possible. Every word is a symbol, standing in for a
concept, object, or action. But language is not a fixed inventory of
these symbols; it is a living, shifting field.
Within this field, individual words gain power not only through
definition but through position. A word in isolation is a potential, a
container without a current. Once placed in a sentence, it joins a
sequence of other containers, and the current begins to flow. This flow
is shaped by grammar, rhythm, and the unspoken rules that govern tone
and emphasis.
Semiotics—the study of signs—reminds us that the relationship between
word and meaning is arbitrary, held in place only by collective
agreement. The word “tree” could just as easily
mean “cloud” if enough people agreed to the
switch. This is why shifts in meaning can happen so quickly in language:
slang, metaphor, and technical jargon all operate by altering the
agreements in small, localized fields.
The symbolic power of language lies partly in its double life. On one
level, it is transparent: we look through words to see what they point
toward. On another level, it is opaque: the words themselves carry
weight, history, and emotional charge. Poets exploit this opacity;
bureaucrats often try to erase it. In both cases, the symbolic field of
language is being shaped for a purpose.
Language also serves as a cultural mirror. The presence or absence of
certain words can reveal what a culture values, fears, or ignores. A
society with ten words for rain is not merely obsessed with weather; it
has embedded the observation of rain into its symbolic survival kit.
Likewise, the loss of a word can mark the fading of a concept from the
shared imagination.
The Soviet of Letters has long regarded language as both a carrier and a
battlefield for symbols. In this view, words are not neutral tools but
contested spaces where meaning is negotiated, secured, and sometimes
sabotaged. Mistranslation, deliberate or accidental, is one of the most
common ways symbolic fields are distorted. So too are euphemisms, which
hide or soften realities, and technical jargon, which can build walls
around meaning.
In symbolic analysis, the smallest unit is rarely the most important.
While individual words matter, the deeper patterns—syntax, metaphor
chains, rhetorical habits—tell us more about the state of the field. A
culture that favors passive constructions (“mistakes were made”) may be signaling an aversion to
accountability. One that favors direct address (“you must”) may be operating under a different symbolic
logic altogether.
Language, then, is not merely a reflection of thought but a terrain on
which thought is built and contested. To work within it consciously is
to enter a long-standing game with shifting rules, where every move can
ripple outward through the field. For the Soviet, the task is not to
control the field outright—an impossible goal—but to map its currents,
note its storms, and preserve its uncommon flora against the erosion of
time.
Chapter 3 – The Structure of Symbolic Systems
Once symbols extend beyond individual use and into culture, they
inevitably arrange themselves into systems. A single gesture, word, or
image can be powerful, but its full potential is realized when it is
part of a network—a pattern of relationships that gives it context,
stability, and adaptability.
A symbolic system is, in essence, a grammar. It may be the literal
grammar of a language, the scoring rules of a game, or the ritual
sequence of a seasonal festival. Each part of the system derives meaning
not only from its intrinsic form but also from its place in the whole.
In chess, the movement of the knight makes sense only because of the way
pawns, rooks, and bishops move. In mathematics, the symbol “+” is meaningless without the concept of numbers and
the agreed-upon rules of addition.
Mathematicians, linguists, and logicians all recognize that these
systems require a balance of constraint and freedom. Too much rigidity
and the system becomes brittle, unable to adapt to new realities. Too
much looseness and it loses coherence, becoming noise. The most enduring
symbolic systems—Arabic numerals, Western musical notation, even the
traffic light—strike this balance almost invisibly. They change slowly
enough to preserve continuity, but flexibly enough to incorporate new
conditions.
Mathematical and logical symbolic systems provide a particularly clear
window into how this balance works. They operate on formal rules, with
precise definitions, yet they can generate infinite variation. Algebra,
for example, is not just a list of equations; it is a symbolic framework
that allows those equations to be manipulated, transformed, and applied
across disciplines. The symbols themselves—x, y, =, √—are stable, but
the structures they build are open-ended.
The same principles apply in cultural symbolic systems, though the “rules” may be implicit rather than codified. Consider
ritual: a wedding ceremony may include an exchange of rings, a shared
drink, or a blessing. These elements are not arbitrary—they are
recognized symbols within the culture’s shared
system. But the sequence, the phrasing, and the surrounding customs can
vary, allowing the ritual to adapt while remaining recognizable.
The study of semiotics teaches us to distinguish between syntax (the
arrangement of symbols), semantics (their meaning), and pragmatics
(their use in context). A symbolic system thrives when these three
layers reinforce each other. For example, in traffic signals:
- Syntax: red always follows yellow, which follows green.
- Semantics: red means stop, green means go, yellow means prepare to
stop.
- Pragmatics: drivers know how to respond appropriately in the real
world.
Break any one of these layers, and the system falters. If the syntax
changes unpredictably, meaning collapses. If semantics shift without
warning, confusion sets in. If pragmatics fail—if drivers ignore the
signals—the system becomes irrelevant.
Logical systems offer another lesson: minimal symbols, maximal reach.
Mathematics achieves universality not because it has thousands of
symbols, but because it has a small set of stable ones used with
precision. The cultural equivalent is a lean symbolic vocabulary—a flag,
a handful of gestures, a few core myths—that can be recombined endlessly
without losing identity.
An often-overlooked feature of symbolic systems is redundancy. At first
glance, redundancy seems inefficient, but it is a safeguard against
loss. In oral cultures, a story may be told slightly differently by
different speakers; the variations ensure that if one version is
forgotten, another will carry the core message forward. In modern
symbolic systems, redundancy might mean having a written record, a
pictorial record, and a living practitioner all holding the same
knowledge in parallel.
From the perspective of preservation, redundancy is not waste—it is
insurance. In the preservation of mathematical systems, this may mean
storing proofs in multiple formats. In cultural systems, it may mean
teaching songs both in formal settings and in casual, family
gatherings.
Mapping symbolic systems requires attention to both form and flow. The
form is the stable part—the symbols themselves and their agreed
relationships. The flow is the movement of these forms through time and
space: how they are taught, repeated, altered, or dropped. Without
understanding both, one cannot fully grasp the system’s health or trajectory.
Ultimately, symbolic systems—whether logical, mathematical, or
cultural—exist to transmit meaning in a way that endures beyond the
individual. They are the scaffolding for shared reality. Without them,
meaning fragments. With them, even complex ideas can be handed forward
across centuries.
In the next chapter, we will move from the structural to the dynamic:
how symbolic systems evolve, adapt, and sometimes fracture under
pressure.
Chapter 4 – Symbolic Collapse and Recovery**
Symbolic systems are not indestructible. When they falter, the breakage
can be sudden and obvious, or slow and invisible. Either way, the
collapse of a symbolic framework changes how reality feels—and how it
behaves.
A collapse can happen when symbols lose connection to what they
represent, when too many competing meanings overload the system, or when
the group sustaining the symbols disperses. In semiotics, this is
sometimes framed as the loss of the “signified”—the symbol remains, but the shared sense of
what it means evaporates.
---
**4.1 Fracture in the Chain of Reference**
The stability of any symbolic system depends on a chain of reference—how
a sign points to a concept, how that concept relates to reality, and how
others agree on this mapping. When this chain fractures, even slightly,
meaning begins to drift.
A word that once carried weight may become hollow. A gesture that once
united may now confuse. The symbols are still present, but their meaning
shifts in unpredictable ways.
---
**4.2 Overload and Saturation**
Too many meanings can collapse a system as surely as too few. When a
symbol is loaded with multiple, conflicting interpretations, its
coherence erodes. This is common in political language—terms like “freedom” or “justice”
accumulate so many definitions that they can be claimed by opposing
sides without contradiction.
This saturation can create cynicism, where participants withdraw belief
entirely, or it can splinter the audience into factions that no longer
share a symbolic world.
---
**4.3 The Loss of the Sustaining Community**
A symbolic system requires an audience—people who believe in, use, and
reinforce its signs. When this audience disperses or loses interest, the
system withers. Ancient languages and forgotten rituals illustrate this:
without active participants, the symbolic framework cannot sustain
itself.
---
**4.4 Methods of Recovery**
Recovery is possible. It often begins with reattaching the symbols to
lived experience—restoring the chain of reference. In practice, this
might mean reintroducing old rituals in meaningful ways, refining
language for clarity, or rebuilding trust in the system’s custodians.
Recovery can also come from outside influences—new participants,
cross-cultural exchanges, or deliberate reimaginings that refresh the
symbolic structure without erasing its history.
---
**4.5 Accepting Irreversibility**
Some collapses cannot be reversed. In these cases, the work shifts from
restoration to transformation—finding what elements of the old system
can be repurposed into something new. This is not defeat; it is
adaptation.
Even when a symbolic system disappears, its fragments can seed new ones.
Collapse is not the end of symbolic life—it is the beginning of another
cycle.
**Chapter 5 – When Language Builds Worlds**
Language is not only a mirror of reality—it is a tool for building it.
Cultures have risen, expanded, and reshaped themselves through shared
phrases, slogans, stories, and formal declarations. The words chosen to
name a place, describe a people, or outline a rule can change how the
world itself behaves in response.
In semiotics, this is called performative language: speech acts that do
not merely describe but enact. In daily life, the effect is so common
that we barely notice it. A wedding vow alters legal status. A
judge’s sentence changes a person’s freedom. A company’s mission
statement shapes decisions for years.
The deeper skill is in noticing the quieter world-building that happens
all the time—through casual conversation, through repeated narratives,
through the symbolic sediment that settles around a phrase until it
becomes a fact.
---
**5.1 Naming as Claiming**
Names anchor meaning. To name a place “New Hope”
or “Dead Horse Gulch” changes its symbolic charge
before anyone sets foot there. This is not a poetic flourish; it is a
mechanism of orientation.
Colonial powers often renamed territories, replacing indigenous names
with their own. The effect was not only practical but symbolic—erasing
one layer of reality and imposing another. Modern branding uses the same
logic. A product is not simply “soap” but “PureClean,” an idea that carries a world of hygiene,
purity, and control.
Understanding naming as world-building helps the observer see how
linguistic choices prepare the ground for belief. Once a name is widely
used, it becomes difficult to imagine the thing without it.
---
**5.2 Stories as Architecture**
Narratives give structure to events. A bare sequence—this happened, then
that—becomes a story when cause and effect are arranged, when characters
are given motives, when the end is made to seem inevitable.
Stories act like scaffolding: they hold meaning in place while it takes
shape. A revolution can be framed as a heroic struggle or as a breakdown
of order, depending on the story chosen. The facts may not change, but
the frame does.
Cultures are built on repeated stories: the origin myths, the cautionary
tales, the accounts of victory or loss. Each story is a symbolic
building, a place the culture can enter and inhabit. Over time, these
structures become so familiar that people move through them without
noticing the walls.
---
**5.3 The Ritual of Repetition**
Repetition is the mortar of world-building. A phrase said once is a
suggestion; said a thousand times, it becomes a truth. This is not
limited to propaganda—it is a property of human cognition.
Children learn language through repetition. Adults learn values the same
way. National mottos, religious chants, advertising slogans, political
catchphrases—all work because they repeat, and because they repeat in
consistent contexts.
Ritualized repetition binds a community to its world. The phrases become
part of the background hum, like the walls of a house—rarely noticed,
but always enclosing the space of thought.
---
**5.4 Words as Boundary Lines**
Language does not only build worlds—it also draws borders between them.
Specialized vocabularies mark membership. Lawyers speak in a legal
register, soldiers in a military one, scholars in the dialect of their
field.
These vocabularies can protect knowledge from outsiders, but they can
also create a sense of belonging for insiders. The use of certain words
signals, “You are in the circle.” The absence of
them signals, “You are outside.”
Boundaries are not inherently negative—they can preserve the integrity
of a tradition, a craft, a discipline. But they also mean that entering
a new world often requires learning a new tongue.
---
**5.5 Maintaining the World Once Built**
World-building through language is not a one-time act. It requires
maintenance. A name can lose its power if abandoned. A story can fade if
not retold. A vocabulary can dissolve if not used.
Maintenance can be deliberate—through ceremonies, anniversaries, and
publications—or unconscious, through daily conversation and habit. The
strongest worlds are maintained on both levels: they have formal
structures of renewal and informal cultural habits that reinforce
them.
For the observer, noticing how worlds are maintained can reveal the
underlying priorities of a group. Some worlds are maintained through
constant praise; others through warnings and prohibitions. Some require
elaborate formalities; others survive in the casual rhythms of
speech.
---
World-building through language is not the work of poets alone. It is a
collective act, distributed across every speaker in a culture. We are
each both builders and inhabitants of the worlds our words sustain. The
question is not whether we are participating in this work—it is whether
we are doing it consciously.
CHAPTER 6 — The Edge of Formalization
1. The Cultural Saturation Point
Every symbolic system embedded in a culture eventually encounters a
saturation threshold. Words lose their sharpness, metaphors calcify, and
shared references become relics more than tools. At this point, the
culture either re-invents itself linguistically or begins to draw from
outside reservoirs of order. Historically, those reservoirs have often
been mathematical and logical frameworks—not because people suddenly
became enamored with numbers, but because they sought a precision the
living language could no longer sustain.
This is the moment when oral traditions give way to codified scripts,
when legal codes are drafted in rigid structures, and when religious
texts begin to borrow the logic of proof and proposition. The instinct
is not to abandon poetry, but to enclose it—sometimes to save it,
sometimes to neutralize it.
2. The Gravity of Precision
A word, in ordinary speech, is a compromise between infinite possible
meanings and the one meaning required for the present conversation. A
mathematical symbol, by contrast, is designed to minimize compromise. It
declares its definition once and then demands adherence. This is both
its strength and its weakness. In culture, symbolic flexibility ensures
adaptability; in formal systems, rigidity ensures coherence.
When a society begins to formalize, it does not simply add mathematics
to its toolkit—it rewires its symbolic metabolism. Meaning becomes
something that can be not only felt or intuited but also verified,
counted, and constrained.
3. Semiotics at the Border
Semiotics—the study of signs—sits precisely at this border. A traffic
sign is not a poem; a mathematical equation is not a parable. And yet,
they share the same root condition: a mark standing in place of
something else. At the border, the two domains begin to exchange
methods. Mathematics borrows metaphors (infinity as a line, sets as
containers). Culture borrows precision (calendars, architectural
measurements, liturgical timing).
This exchange has happened so often, and across so many centuries, that
we rarely notice it anymore. The Gregorian calendar is as much a
mathematical artifact as it is a cultural one. A musical score is as
bound to formal notation as it is to cultural taste.
4. The Psychological Consequence
To live in a world saturated with cultural symbols is to navigate a sea
of ambiguity. To live in a world permeated by formal symbols is to
navigate a grid. The shift from one to the other can feel liberating or
constraining depending on the symbolic temperament of the individual.
Poets may mourn the loss of interpretive space; engineers may celebrate
the gain in predictive control.
But in both cases, the effect is real: the self begins to internalize
patterns of thought that mirror the systems it inhabits. In this way,
mathematics and logic are not simply tools—they are environments, and
living in them changes the organism.
5. The Unfinished Conversation
If this volume has been an exploration of symbols as they appear in
language, art, ritual, and shared cultural life, then it has also been
an unspoken preparation for what comes next. We have circled the
boundary without crossing it: the place where symbols stop being
primarily cultural and begin being primarily formal.
To cross this boundary is not to abandon meaning for calculation, nor to
trade ambiguity for sterility. Rather, it is to acknowledge that the
human impulse toward symbolic order manifests in multiple, equally
legitimate terrains. The mythic and the mathematical are not enemies.
They are different modes of the same deep act: the mapping of experience
into a form that can be carried forward.
6. Toward Volume 3
In the next volume, we will enter the architectures of formal symbolic
systems—algebraic notation, logical proofs, geometric constructions—not
as outsiders looking in, but as inheritors of a long lineage of symbolic
practice. We will not ask “what do these systems
calculate?” but “what do they reveal about the
symbolic mind itself?”
Volume 3 will begin where culture leaves off: in the rigor of the
designed sign, the symbol that cannot shift without breaking the system.
It will ask what happens when we apply that rigor back to the flexible,
ambiguous world from which it first arose.
In this way, mathematics will not be a digression, but the continuation
of the same symbolic journey we began with the first mark in the
sand.
Appendix A — Selected Readings in Language and Cultural Symbolism
(Filed under: MPSoL-HNL/SYM-02/A)
The following list has been compiled for Compilers and Sub-Assistants tasked with observing symbolic transmission in linguistic and cultural domains. The works named are not exhaustive; rather, they have been field-proven to provoke recursive consideration.
1. Ferdinand de Saussure – Course in General Linguistics
Foundational for understanding the arbitrary relationship between
signifier and signified.
2. Roland Barthes – Mythologies
On how culture encodes ideology into everyday objects and
narratives.
3. Umberto Eco – A Theory of Semiotics
Dense, but vital for mapping symbolic systems in communication.
4. Jorge Luis Borges – Other Inquisitions
Useful for seeing how language and fiction distort or replace the
real.
5. Claude Lévi-Strauss – The Savage Mind
For understanding cultural classification systems.
6. Victor Turner – The Ritual Process
Field studies on liminality, transition, and symbolic order.
7. George Lakoff & Mark Johnson – Metaphors We Live By
On the deep structure of conceptual metaphor in everyday thought.
8. Yuri Lotman – The Universe of the Mind
Semiotic space as a cultural generator.
Note: Where original copies cannot be secured, reproductions may be field-acceptable if properly annotated.
Appendix B — Exercises for Symbolic Observation in Culture
(Filed under: MPSoL-HNL/SYM-02/B)
The following exercises are intended for silent, unannounced deployment in the field. No results need be reported unless specifically requested by the Plenary Committee.
Exercise 1 — The Signifier Hunt
Select a public space (market, transit hub, street corner). Catalogue
the recurring visual motifs on signs, packaging, and advertisements.
Identify the most common glyph or shape, then note its color variations
and placement patterns.
Exercise 2 — Idiom as Code
Listen to a casual conversation in your own language. Isolate one
idiomatic expression and record how it frames thought. Translate it
literally into another language. Observe what meaning is lost or
gained.
Exercise 3 — Ritual Time Check
Observe a recurring event (church bell, train schedule, opening hours).
Map the symbolic weight of its timing. Is it tied to tradition,
commerce, religion, or convenience?
Exercise 4 — Symbolic Substitution
Replace the word for a common object (e.g., “chair”) with another symbolic term (“throne”) in your internal narration for a day. Record
how the shift changes your perception.
Exercise 5 — Semiotic Drift
Locate a borrowed cultural symbol (e.g., an imported festival, fashion,
or slogan) in your area. Trace its origin and note how meaning has
shifted in local use.
Exercise 6 — Object Reversal
Identify a functional object (e.g., a key) and treat it for a day as
purely decorative. Observe the shift in perceived value.
Afterword
AFTERWORD — CSAIT / 14
They told me this volume would be about “semiotics.”
I pretended to know what that meant until someone explained it was just
the study of signs and symbols. I didn’t admit
that I thought we already did that in Volume 1.
Apparently, Volume 1 was about what symbols do to you, and this one is
about what they do out there in the world. Different battlefield, same
war. You learn the terrain this time—how symbols move through a culture,
how they sneak in through words, how they hide in architecture and radio
jingles. I’m still figuring out whether the
symbols know what they’re doing, or if they’re just… accidents with good aim.
One thing the senior compilers keep saying: “Language is the most dangerous symbol set because you
can’t turn it off.” I didn’t get it until I caught myself saying something I
didn’t believe, and realizing it was still
shaping the way I thought. Turns out, the moment you speak, you’re already halfway into someone else’s system.
My assignment now is to watch—not just for obvious propaganda or big red
billboards, but for the little patterns in casual conversation, the ones
you only notice later. It’s like spotting a
hidden glyph in the corner of a mural. Once you see it, it never
disappears.
I’m not sure yet what Volume 3 will bring. They
say it’ll involve mathematics. I’m hoping it’s not just
equations, because I’ve seen the way these people
turn numbers into traps. Either way, I’ll be
here, trying to keep my notes straight and my head above the
flood.
—/14,
Compile Sub-Assistant in Training
MidPacific Soviet of Letters