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1.
On the day it seemed the outerworld could do naught to roust the inner, spied in the muck of the empty lake: an egret feeding in a renegade rivulet notes her notice. She leaps over gravity, laboring into flight. Her partner joins her & they lift off together, around the bend (synchronous wings). Follow them to the vanishing point and discover a slender wooden skiff, half-buried in the lakebed, maybe from the 20s, less rotten than you'd imagine, made by hand.

Once, it too had been blue.

2.
Dear Anne,

Can you post this image? I took this picture during one of the last Evolving Systems group conversations. The way that Paul was all stretched out and so comfortable and was silhouetted against the blinds just struck me. In retrospect it seems like a strange impulse to exercise in the middle of a conversation, without telling anyone or (until now) showing anyone. Strange things happen sometimes.

Paul's loss is weighing heavy on me. I spent the better part of the night tracing old threads on Serendip. His presence there borders on the infinite.

I feel resonance with your inability, as expressed on the stories page, to pick out and tell a single story about Paul. For someone who was so committed to storytelling as a concept and for someone who was, let's be honest, possessed of enough idiosyncrasies to inspire any number of amusing anecdotes, there seems to be a failure of a central narrative, or rather, most of us to whom the responsibility has fallen to play the role of narrator in these stories...perhaps aren't able to feel the kind of traction that an omniscient narrator wants to have as s/he begins to spin out her web. Maybe that's partly because the story of Paul is not really captured in either his peculiarities or in our isolated bemusements of him. Paul's storytelling was conversation, it lived in the back and forth of every moment. And while he was always working towards (and often from) some kind of conclusion or hypothesis, what was most valuable about the experience of being with Paul was the evolution of the story, its ebb and flow in and through each of its incarnations.

The first time I recall being aware of Paul, he spoke for a very long time from the back of a faculty meeting about why he should be able to smoke in his lab and office and why the College's (then new) smoking policy violated the sanctity of what he considered an extension of his home. I remember how totally comfortable he seemed to be talking (and talking), having and extending his ideas as he spoke them, taking his time, and making his point quite elegantly. I also recall how, even as a devoted smoker, which I was back then, I was surprised by the complete lunacy of his argument, which was outrageous in equal measures for its incapacity to recognize the impact of smoke on others and for its total failure to recognize that his position was hopeless.

Of course Paul was all of the things my sketch of a story suggests about him: eloquent, occasionally long-winded, deeply committed to his work and its connection to his life, passionate, oblivious, and a tilter-against-windmills. But this impression is too static, too limited, at once too quick to identify him and too slow. And my first impression of him, because it was a first impression, is almost simple enough to be inscribed in a way that contains some meaning. And yet who Paul actually was and what he did that seem to me to be *remarkable* are almost completely excluded from this sketch. To our students and to our acquaintances we are perhaps all always destined to be punchlines or hopelessly cartooned in their recollections. The brain, as Paul never tired of pointing out, makes shortcuts in perception that forestalls authentic knowing. The story of Paul wants this included in it. It insists.

It also wants to say that it is not and cannot be a monologue. One does not know Paul by describing him, relating him, or sharing observations about him. One knows Paul in conversation and the story of him, if it can be told, will need to be told in many and diverse voices. And it will be an impoverished tale in part for not having his own voice present in its telling, but it will perhaps be enriched by his reverberations, which ring in many of our voices--those of students, colleagues, friends, and correspondents.

It will certainly be enriched by our behaving as if he is listening, even if this is merely an operating fiction and no truth about the universe. It is a story about the universe and Paul's place in it.

This is the beginning of what I waited all night to come. Thanks for being there to write this to. I think it turns out that whatever it is that I'm saying has to do with saying and knowing as collaborative acts. Which makes saying and knowing inherently theatrical. And scientific as well, since each utterance is a hypothesis that one tests on one's interlocutors. One tries, as Beckett says, and fails...then tries again and fails again, always endeavoring to fail better, or as Paul liked to say, to get it less wrong.

All best wishes. I look forward to being with you Saturday. And after.

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