SYMBOLIC MECHANICS BULLETIN No. 7

Last night, through either professional weakness or a temporary failure of character, I made the mistake of opening George Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form at approximately the same hour decent people are taking bicarbonate and going to bed. Now, there are books one reads in the evening with profit: detective stories, light histories, perhaps a little Euclid if one is feeling reckless. Laws of Form is not one of these. Laws of Form is what happens when a man takes the simplest possible idea, namely drawing a distinction, and worries it with such unnerving precision that by two in the morning you can no longer look at the edge of your bedsheet without wondering whether the universe is being continuously generated by acts of indication.

The scandal of the thing is its economy. Most metaphysical authors are considerate enough to waste your time first. They warm up. They clear their throats. They tell you about Babylon, or consciousness, or snowflakes, or the Upanishads, so that by the time they reach the preposterous claim they are actually making, you have grown too drowsy to resist. Spencer-Brown extends no such courtesy. He arrives more or less at once and informs you, in effect, that before there is logic, before there is counting, before there is anything at all worth the name of thing, there is a distinction. One marks a space. One says: this, not that. And now, congratulations, you have reality on your hands.

This is not, you understand, the sort of proposition one can safely encounter before sleep. Once admitted, it begins breeding. If a distinction is primary, then every object in the room becomes a small philosophical emergency. The lamp is no longer a lamp; it is a successful separation of lamp from not-lamp. The window is a framed assertion. The bedroom door is a theorem with hinges. Even the cat, who had previously been content to remain merely unhygienic, becomes a moving boundary dispute.

And then, because the man is evidently not satisfied with merely spoiling furniture, Spencer-Brown gives you the laws. Calling and Crossing. A call made again is the call made once. Very neat, very elegant, perfectly harmless-looking. Then the crossing: go over the boundary twice and you are back where you began. Here the whole business, which had seemed at first like an austere logical jeu d'esprit, acquires the sinister charm of a conjuring trick. The symbols are spare; the consequences are not. You begin to suspect that all arguments, all categories, all forms of self-importance may be instances of a few very small operations performed with ruinous persistence.

Worst of all is re-entry, that ghastly little maneuver by which the form re-enters its own space. This is exactly the sort of thing that should be illegal after midnight. A system that indicates itself; a boundary that folds back; the observer caught in the machinery of observation like a necktie in a lathe. One does not so much understand it as feel one's previous confidence in straightforward existence becoming mildly embarrassed.

So yes, it ruined my night's sleep. But only in the way certain books do when they are intolerably clever and, worse, might be right. There are authors who enlarge the world. Spencer-Brown does something more annoying. He suggests the world may be the side effect of an operation so elementary that we ought to have noticed it long ago. And having failed to notice it, we are reduced to lying awake at three in the morning, staring at the ceiling, making distinctions.