The Word

A name is the smallest thing that can be shared without loss, and whatever is shared accumulates.

On the tenth of June 2009 a user of the Something Awful forums, posting as Victor Surge, added two doctored photographs to a thread inviting members to create paranormal images. Both showed children in black and white; in the background of each stood a tall, thin, faceless figure in a dark suit, and beneath them a caption in the style of an archival note: one of two recovered photographs from the Stirling City Library blaze. Notable for being taken the day which fourteen children vanished. The figure had no name until Surge gave it one in the same post. Within a week other users were writing its history. Within a year it had a documentary series, a game, and a body of testimony from people who reported seeing it at the edge of woods. On the thirty-first of May 2014, in Waukesha, Wisconsin, two twelve-year-old girls led a friend into a forest after a sleepover and stabbed her nineteen times, and told the police afterward that they had done it to become his proxies and to prove he was real. The victim survived. The girls were sent to psychiatric institutions, one of them for forty years.

Five years separate a caption from a stabbing. In those five years nothing was added to the figure except words, and the words were enough.

The name is the thing

The oldest accounts of creation begin with speech. And God said, Let there be light. The Gospel of John opens with the Logos, the word or reason through which all things were made, and the rabbinic tradition held that the world was made through the twenty-two letters. These are usually read as poetry about a power that only a god could have. The Slender Man case suggests a plainer reading. A name is the smallest thing that can be shared between two minds without loss, and whatever can be shared without loss can be accumulated; and whatever many minds accumulate acquires, in the field they share, a persistence and a capacity to act that belongs to none of them. The rabbis told of a golem animated by the word emet, truth, written on its forehead, and returned to clay when the first letter was erased to leave met, dead. The story is a diagram. The animation is in the letters, and it is real while the letters stand. The operation runs both ways. A power without a name moves like weather, felt and obeyed and never judged; the name that gives it an address gives the witness a place to stand against it, and the erasure of a letter is a banishing.

The traditions that practiced this knew the mechanism. An egregore, in the vocabulary of the Western lodges, is a form sustained by the attention of a group, which begins as their creation and ends by having wants of its own; the Tibetan tulpa is the same thing made deliberately by one person, and the accounts agree that it is easier to make than to unmake. A brand is an egregore with a legal department. A nation is one with an army. A people exceeds the apparatus that carries its name, and the first act of sovereignty toward any egregore is to separate the living from the vessel that recruits them. What Victor Surge did in 2009 was perform, without ceremony, the operation every founder of a religion, a corporation or a movement has performed: he gave a distinction a name, and the name a body of accumulated attention, and the body walked into a forest in Wisconsin five years later on legs he never drew.

From word to world

A name works because it is portable. A perception belongs to one instrument; a word can cross the gap between instruments and reproduce, in the second, something of what the first received. The reproduction is never exact, and the gap is where power enters. Whoever supplies the words a population uses to render its world supplies the center and the edge of that world. This is why language is the first thing an empire imposes and the last thing a people gives up; why the Church fought for three centuries over whether the Mass could be said in the vernacular; why every ideology begins by renaming. The distinctions a language makes available are the distinctions its speakers can perceive, and the ones it withholds are, for practical purposes, invisible. A tunnel, in Wilson’s sense, is built of words before it is built of anything else.

And the words harden. A name shared long enough becomes a category; a category enforced becomes an institution; an institution funded becomes infrastructure, and infrastructure trains the perception of everyone born inside it. Law is a set of names with consequences attached. Money is a name for value that has forgotten it is a name. Architecture is a name in stone, and the child who grows up in the cathedral’s shadow renders the sky differently from the child who grows up under the tower block. Each generation encounters the accumulated work of earlier minds as part of the world itself. That sentence is the whole mechanism by which a rendered world becomes an inherited one, and it is the reason the Ebstorf monks wrote the names before they drew the coasts.

The clock is a name for the present

Of all the names a population shares, the most powerful is the name of now. Until the middle of the nineteenth century every town in England kept its own time, set by its own noon; Bristol ran eleven minutes behind London, and it mattered to no one, because no one could travel fast enough to notice. The Great Western Railway noticed. In 1840 it imposed London time along its whole line, because a timetable is a promise that cannot be kept in twenty local presents, and by 1855 nearly every public clock in Britain kept Greenwich time whether the town had agreed or not. In October 1884 delegates from twenty-five nations met in Washington and, over French objection, fixed the prime meridian at Greenwich and divided the world into twenty-four zones. Since that meeting the whole species has lived in one present, and the present has a headquarters.

A shared clock is the condition of common action and the instrument of its capture, and the two cannot be separated. The railway’s timetable was also the factory’s shift, the school’s bell, the broadcast’s schedule, the market’s opening; and each of those synchronizes a population’s attention to a rhythm it did not choose. A deadline makes millions of people think of the same thing at the same hour. A news cycle makes them think of it in the same order. Agreement is unnecessary. Two enemies telling opposite stories about one object are synchronized on that object, and a standing conflict keeps a world coherent as well as any feast. A calendar, as the reform of 1582 showed, makes them keep the same obligations and remember the same dead. The clock is the name that reaches into every other name, because it decides when each of them is spoken. The Consensus Engine follows the machinery by which a shared present is produced; The Synchronometer follows the older calendars that synchronized a people to the sky instead of to the exchange.

What the word cannot do

A name can make a thing, and a shared clock can make a world; and the world thus made still answers. The girls in Waukesha discovered this in the most terrible way available. The name they served had accumulated enough attention to walk, and it could not stop a knife from cutting a real body, or a court from sitting, or a life from being spent in a hospital. The Logos, in John’s account, was made flesh, and the flesh was crucified. Whatever is spoken into the shared field acquires a life there; whatever acquires a life there is subject to consequence; and the consequence falls on bodies, which the word did not make and cannot unmake.

This is the limit of the operation and also its danger. The word cannot exempt its speakers from the world, but it can arrange the world so that a population renders the exemption as real. It can name a fence horizon. It can name a ceiling sky. When enough minds have kept that name for long enough, the enclosure it describes no longer needs a wall, and the operation by which a limit is renamed as the nature of things is the subject of The Lock.

References

Chess, Shira, and Eric Newsom. Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man: The Development of an Internet Mythology. Palgrave, 2015.

State of Wisconsin v. Morgan Geyser and v. Anissa Weier, Waukesha County Circuit Court, 2014–2017.

Idel, Moshe. Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid. SUNY Press, 1990.

Genesis 1:3; John 1:1–14; Sefer Yetzirah 2.

Bartky, Ian R. Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-Century Timekeeping in America. Stanford University Press, 2000; and One Time Fits All: The Campaigns for Global Uniformity. Stanford, 2007. On railway time and the 1884 conference.

Wilson, Robert Anton. Quantum Psychology. New Falcon, 1990. On language and the tunnel.