Pattern Language Script

In the Transcription Ritual, The Keepers render Pattern Language into a script composed of interlocking lines and seemingly random curves. The lines resemble the branchings of a tangled incestuous family tree, in which the names have been left out, as if only the relationships, not the relatives themselves, were worth recording. There are also free-flowing curves independent of the network of lines. In a calligraphic act of caprice, the curves imply that the domain mapped by the lines is only one among many. Line and curve thus assume the roles of world-lattice and Synapse respectively, and play out their roles in endless variations. The resulting script is more texture than text. It has no discernible characters or words, but in the patterns that emerge over long expanses of script, it does appear to have a grammar. Even a language without content still requires a form. And form is all The Pattern Language is designed to convey - all that can be conveyed intelligibly from a neighbor-world.

The distinctive lines of the Script appear not only inscribed on objects possessed (and discarded) by the Keepers, but also within phenomena totally beyond the scope of an interpretive artist's hand. Synaptic fragments and loci often show concentrations of Synaptic material along microscopic lines that precisely mirror the Script. The very same lines may be global in scale. The Diaspora of the Keepers seems to have followed thousand-mile script-like lines along the routes of their exodus and eventual settlement.

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