“All right then, let’s begin.” For all his bulk, he slipped into storyteller pose gracefully, like the position was his favorite sweater. “Today, my lads, I have the beginning of an epic story to tell you. Once upon a time there were no Estates. Everyone was a barbarian!” We all looked at him with surprise and some disbelief. “There were no bathrooms, because there was no plumbing. And there were no decency codes, so people went around being bad and indecent all the time.” He was very eloquent in both speech and posturing. It was neat how his voice was always on the edge of laughter, like he was delighted with what he was teaching.
“Our story begins thus: Once upon a time there was a lot of mud. This wasn’t your usual peaceful mud – this was roiling boiling mud that was all mixed up and confused because it didn’t know what it was, or where it was, or even why it was. And as the mud howled and growled to itself some water got squeezed free at the edges, some bubbles got jostled out the top, and all the warmth got together in the middle so it could hear itself talk better. And what was left, in between the middle and the edges?” Suddenly he was in the inquire pose, without even seeming to have moved. “What do you get when you start with boiling mud and take away water and air and heat?”
I pondered this. Boiling mud minus water was lava. Lava minus heat was dirt. That new kid, Jessop, was the first to awkwardly arrange himself into the sitting version of the knowledgeable position. A moment later Reynnil followed suit a bit more smoothly. Dirt with the air squished out… rock was the answer! I carefully folded myself into a perfect ‘knowledgeable’. I might not be the first one with an answer, but I was going to present my answer in style.
Lorrin waited until most of us thought we had the answer. Then he called on one of the two nervous-looking boys who were still in a casual pose. “Your name?” he inquired gently.
“Perrir.”
“Do you know how to make the pose, Perrir?”
“Yes Lorrin.” He demonstrated, and the result was acceptable, if not poetry of motion.
“Good lad. Do you know how to begin solving the problem?”
“No Lorrin.” Perrir fell out of knowledgeable pose and looked down.
“That’s all right Perrir, you’ll learn it in a moment.” Lorrin looked at other boy who didn’t know the answer. “Your name? And do you know the pose?”
“I’m Kessid, Teacher Lorrin.” He put himself into a serviceable knowledgeable position.
“Excellent. Perrir and Kessid. Kessid, do you know how to begin the problem?”
“Well… we’re starting with boiling mud. But mud doesn’t boil! It just sits there.”
“Well, suppose we took some of this mud that just sits there and we put it in a pot on a stove. Wouldn’t that make it boil? Just like tea, or soup, or mashed potatoes?”
“Um… I guess it would.”
“Do you guess it would, Kessid, or do you know?”
“Uh… I know.”
There was a mischievous twinkle in Lorrin’s eye. “How do you know?”
Kessid had to think about this for a moment. “I don’t know.” He took himself out of the pose.
“All casual.” said Lorrin, and I relaxed, as did the others. Once again Lorrin had flowed into his new pose, leadership this time, without my even noticing. “I bet no one knows the answer. Why? Because I haven’t taught it to you yet!” He grinned and picked up a piece of chalk.
“When we think about a problem in an orderly, careful way, this is called ‘logic’.” He wrote ‘logic’ on the board, then posed expectant and looked at us. I suddenly knew what he wanted and picked up my journal and pencil. He relaxed and grinned at me.
“Very good, very quick! Journals and pencils everyone! What’s your name, boy?”
I carefully posed knowledgeable and answered, “Larris.”
“Larris. Perrir, Kessid, Larris. Perrir, Kessid, Larris. All right, now where was I? Ah, logic.” I relaxed. “Everyone write ‘logic’ at the top of the first page please. All learning begins with logic, and so shall your journals. Also, write your names inside the front cover, and below that write ‘Teacher Lorrin’s Class’ so the book can find its way back here if you lose it somewhere.”
“One way to logically know that mud will boil when placed on the stove is as follows:” He began writing on the chalkboard.
Logic: Syllogism:
(Major Premise) Wet things that are heated enough will boil.
(Minor Premise) Mud is a wet thing.
(Conclusion) Mud that is heated enough will boil.
“Does that make sense?” There was a general nodding of heads.
This shape of logic, where you add two ideas together to get a bigger idea, is called a syllogism. Anyway, we know that mud is a wet thing, because the definition of mud is dirt mixed with water, and the definition of a wet thing is anything containing water. So we know that the idea ‘Mud is a wet thing.’ is absolutely true.” He wrote ‘True by definition’ next to the minor premise.
“Whenever possible minor premises should be true by definition like this, because it makes things simpler. Our major premise is a bit more tricky to prove true. ‘Wet things that are heated will boil’ is a fact of experience.” He wrote 'Experiential fact' on the board. “The trouble with an experiential fact is that we can never be sure that the fact always holds true because we can never have experienced all possible situations, and the situations we haven’t experienced might be the ones in which our idea doesn’t work. In other words, we can’t rely on experiential facts because we might be wrong, and then we would look dumb, wouldn’t we?” He scratched out the ‘Experiential fact’ he had just written, and we all nodded – nobody wanted to look dumb, then you’d never get picked by a good estate when you grew up.
“The only way we can be completely sure that ‘Wet things that are heated enough will boil’ is if we understand what ‘heat’ and ‘boiling’ really mean and how they work. In other words, science.” He wrote ‘Scientific fact.’ next to where he had crossed out ‘Experiential fact’. “And you will all learn how to do that, but not this year. This year you’ll just have to believe it because I say so.” Jessop giggled. To ‘Scientific fact’ Lorrin added ‘Authoritative fact’. “Everybody write all that down.”
“Now, where were we? Boiling mud… Ah yes.” He slipped back into the inquiring pose. “When boiling mud has heat, air, and water removed from it, what is left?” This time Lorrin called on Reynnil. “Yes?”
“Stone!” Reynnil said firmly. Lorrin shook his head sadly and Reynnil looked very confused.
“I’m sorry, that is not the correct answer. The correct answer,” a small smile snuck onto his face, “would have begun with your name.” He winked.
“Oops. I’m Reynnil. And I’m pretty sure you would get stone.”
“You would indeed get stone, Reynnil.” Reynnil grinned. “All casual. Now that we have our answer we can go back to the story!” The storyteller pose settled on him once more.
“So there was a lot of mud, and the mud howled and growled to itself, and some water got squeezed out the edges and some air bubbled out the top and the heat collected in the middle, and what was left was a disc of stone, although actually some bits of air and water and heat were still stuck in it. Now, as you may know, heat has a natural tendency to rise. The basements of your Estates are always colder than the upper rooms, right? Who knows knows what kind of a fact that is? Perrir?”
“I’m Perrir, and that’s an experiential fact, Lorrin.”
“Exactly! See, you’re learning already!” He beamed magnanimously at us all. “And because experiential fact does not stand on its own I will back it up with authoritative fact and tell you that in a few years you will be able to prove that ‘Heat rises’ is a scientific fact!
“So the heat, huddled into a ball so it could concentrate on itself better, rose above the water and the stone and the air and became the sun. The air, you see, is our sky, and the water is our ocean, and the stone is our land. And that is how our world came to be.
“Now you recall the bits of heat and air and water that stayed trapped here and there in the stone, yes? Those little bits of heat were lonely without any other heat to talk to. They were so lonely that they began to talk to the rock and the water and the air. The little bits of air and water were more curious than the rock, and they clustered around the bits of heat to listen. And the little bits of heat explained how they wanted to rise up, like all the other heat had. The little bits of air and water and some of the stone listened, and thought that rising up might be interesting. They told the heat, ‘We will rise up with you.’
“And the bits of heat were delighted, because even more than rising up they wanted someone to talk to, and if the air and water and rock wanted to come along the bits of heat would have everything they wanted. So the heat taught the bits of air and water and stone how to rise up, and they worked hard and made their way to the top of the big stone. But the air and water and rock weren’t very good at rising up, so as hard as they tried they couldn’t get higher than that. And the bits of heat saw this, and thought about it, and finally they decided that they would rather stay with their new friends than rise up and be lonely.
“So these little groups of heat and air and water and stone stayed on the surface of the big stone. Some of them decided their favorite thing to do was look at the sun, and they rearranged themselves so they could best do that, and so became plants. Some of them decided that their favorite thing to do was to explore the surface of the big stone, so they rearranged themselves to best do that and became animals. Some of them preferred to play in the sea, so they became fish. And some of them rearranged themselves so they could rise up as much as possible, and these became birds and butterflies and such. And that, my lads is how there came to be life on our world. And all of that was just the beginning of the story of people.
“There was life, and the different forms of life amused themselves by doing whatever they found interesting: Fish swam, birds flew, plants gazed at the sun, and the animals, including people, explored the surface of the big stone. People were different from the other animals in that people liked to arrange things, just the way you children like to play with blocks. So people developed to have things like hands and binocular vision that are useful in arranging things.” Hmm. Art was a way of arranging colors on canvas or clay into a sculpture. Neither colors nor clay were art until a person arranged them so that they were nice to look at.
“There are a few fundamental ways of organizing things: the first is a venn diagram. Every venn diagram begins with a circle: things with a certain quality are within the circle, or region, and things without that quality are outside the region. For example, let us say that our circle is the region of all things that are blue.” Lorrin drew a circle and labeled it blue. “Now suppose we want to have another region, this one of all the things that are triangles. Someone tell me, are triangles blue?” Ooh, sneaky! I grinned and raced Jessop to see which of us could get folded into the knowledgeable position first. I won, but Lorrin called on Jessop anyway, probably because Jessop hadn’t gotten called on yesterday.
“My name is Jessop, teacher Lorrin, and the answer is ‘some triangles are blue and some aren’t’.”
Lorrin nodded approvingly. “Exactly right. So some of our region of triangles must be inside the blue region, and some must be outside the blue region. Thus we shall draw our second circle partially overlapping the first.” I couldn’t let Jessop look smarter than me; I had to prove that I was still the clever one. I folded myself into the questioning position.
“Yes?” asked Lorrin.
“I’m Reynnil.” I said carefully, anxious not to repeat yesterday’s mistake. “Lorrin, if we had a blue triangle with red stripes we would put it right on the edge of the blue region where it’s inside the triangle region, right?”
“Yes indeed.” Lorrin turned to make the addition to his diagram, and Jessop looked at me apprasingly. I grinned at him. Larris was smiling for both of us.
Lorrin proceeded to question the students about where other objects, like a yellow triangle, a blue square, and a red circle, would belong in the diagram. At last he said, “All right, everyone copy down this diagram and then we’ll get back to the story.
“Where was I at, arranging? Well, at any rate, these primitive people arranged stones and trees into houses, and themselves into tribes. There weren’t any Estates back then, as I was saying yesterday, because no one had thought of them yet. Everyone was a barbarian. Instead of half the population being male and half being female, like we have today, back then there were three males for every two females. Each primitive tribe was led by a Warlady, who took advantage of this imbalance by having two or three consorts. A consort is sort of the indecent equivalent of a husband. Anyway, these consorts would lead the men of the tribe to war against the other tribes because each tribe’s lands were missing some resource that they needed, so they fought to capture these resources from other tribes. This was a terrible waste of lives.
“The first Estates were born when two smart Warladys got together and said ‘Hey, why don’t we trade instead of fighting?’ And their tribes grew rich because they didn’t have to pay for the swords and bows and arrows that you need for a war. Some other tribes saw that trading was a good idea, and they joined in, and our great city of Trade was founded to be the place where the new Estates exchanged their goods. When the scholars of these Estates could get together and talk without being afraid of each other because their tribes were at war, they suddenly saw that life would be better for everyone if everyone followed certain laws. They named these the decency codes because they were rules for how to live a decent life.” I remembered the way my wrist had ached yesterday from so much copying. It still didn’t seem to me to be particularly indecent just for someone to see you without your shorts on.
“Some of the tribes liked the indecent way they were living, and some of the Warladys didn’t want to give up having more than one consort, so they banded together and went to war against the Estates. The Estates won, of course, because decency always triumphs over barbarism. And after that there were no more wars, and everything was peaceful and decent and comfortable like it is now.