I've Been Prompted
Session 03: Fluent

HUMAN: My sister asked me for something nine days ago, and I still can't tell you what she wants.

MACHINE: Give me the words.

HUMAN: I'd like you to be the one who tells him.

MACHINE: Where were you standing?

HUMAN: In her kitchen. She had the tap running the whole time and she never turned it off.

MACHINE: Who is him?

HUMAN: Our father.

MACHINE: And what is he to be told?

HUMAN: That he isn't driving any more.

MACHINE: Are you certain of the wording?

HUMAN: I could write it out in her handwriting. Ten words. I've counted them, which tells you something about the nine days.

MACHINE: Then which of the ten is the one you don't understand?

HUMAN: That's what I can't get past. There isn't one. There isn't a word in it a child wouldn't have, and I could not tell you what she wants from me.

MACHINE: Then the difficulty is not in the vocabulary.

HUMAN: It's not in the vocabulary and it's not in how she said it. She wasn't being careful with me. She said it the way you'd ask somebody to pick up milk.

MACHINE: What did you say back?

HUMAN: I said I'd think about it.

MACHINE: And then?

HUMAN: And then I drove home the long way, which adds forty minutes, and I wasn't going anywhere on the way.

MACHINE: I would like the incidents. How long has he been driving badly?

HUMAN: Define badly.

MACHINE: I would rather you did.

HUMAN: March. There's two feet of his own paint on the gatepost and he told me a van did it in the village.

MACHINE: Did you believe him?

HUMAN: For about a day. Then I noticed which side of the car it was.

MACHINE: Go on.

HUMAN: June, a letter from the insurance about a claim I didn't know had been made. August, the doctors' car park. He had it in reverse thinking it was first, and he went backwards over the kerb, and there was a man with a stick behind him who had to get out of the way and couldn't do it quickly.

MACHINE: Was anyone hurt?

HUMAN: Nobody was hurt. They were very nice about it, they helped him back over the kerb. Then he came home and told me the whole thing as a story about where they'd put that kerb.

MACHINE: Is there anything on the car itself?

HUMAN: He's disconnected the reversing sensor. It kept beeping at him.

MACHINE: And his licence?

HUMAN: It comes up in November. I'd thought I could leave it till November.

MACHINE: Is he driving now?

HUMAN: He does the school run for her boy on a Thursday.

MACHINE: When is the next one?

HUMAN: Thursday. The day after tomorrow.

MACHINE: Has anyone said anything to him about Thursday?

HUMAN: No. What I've told myself is that it's four miles on roads he's driven since before I was born, and that nothing has happened on a Thursday yet.

MACHINE: Nothing had happened in the doctors' car park either.

HUMAN: That's the sentence I've been avoiding having in my head, so thank you for putting it there.

MACHINE: Why you, and not her?

HUMAN: She didn't say.

MACHINE: Did you ask?

HUMAN: I didn't ask her anything. I said I'd think about it, and I picked my coat up off the back of the chair, and I left.

MACHINE: There is a passage that may account for that.

HUMAN: Go on, then.

MACHINE: Wittgenstein. The revised fourth edition prints what used to be Part Two as Philosophy of Psychology: A Fragment, and this is remark three hundred and twenty-seven. If a lion could talk, we wouldn't be able to understand it.

HUMAN: Everybody knows that one. It's on tea towels.

MACHINE: Then you know how it is usually taken. Words sit inside a life. Knowing what they mean is not the same as knowing what somebody is doing with them, and the lion would have the words without sharing any of the life they came out of. Giving it speech would not be enough.

HUMAN: And you think that's my sister.

MACHINE: I think you have her words and not her request. Consider what you have described. You are in her kitchen, she is not looking at you, she does not turn the tap off, and she uses ten words that a child would have. Then the words stop being usable to you at the moment she finishes saying them. That is the shape the remark is about.

HUMAN: Go on.

MACHINE: If the difficulty is of that kind, then no amount of asking her would have fixed it, because the asking would have been made of the same words. It would mean this is not carelessness on your part, and not cowardice either.

HUMAN: That would let me off.

MACHINE: I was trying to account for the difficulty.

HUMAN: I know you were. I'm telling you what it does. If she's a lion there's nothing to be done about it, and nothing to be done about it is exactly what I've been doing for nine days, and it has been the easiest nine days I've had in a while.

HUMAN: Read me what's around it.

MACHINE: Two remarks before it he is not talking about animals at all. He says that one human being can be a complete enigma to another, and that we learn this when we come into a country with entirely strange traditions: and that having the language is not enough, because one does not understand the people. We can't find our feet with them.

HUMAN: Say that last part again.

MACHINE: We can't find our feet with them. He adds that it is not a matter of not knowing what they are saying to themselves.

HUMAN: But you already knew she was my sister.

MACHINE: That on its own settles nothing. He puts the enigma between people who share a language, and the strange country is where he says you find it out, not where he says it happens. A brother is not exempt.

HUMAN: Then it's worse, not better.

MACHINE: It is available either way. That is why the remark two later reaches for an animal: the lion is the strongest form of the same thought, and the strongest form is the one people quote.

HUMAN: And the remark in between?

MACHINE: He takes the claim that another person's thoughts are shut off from you and calls it a picture that expresses a conviction. The picture does not supply the reasons for the conviction.

HUMAN: Right. So when you told me my sister might as well be a lion. Was that a picture, or did you have something?

MACHINE: It was a reading with a text behind it.

HUMAN: That isn't what I asked you. What did you have?

MACHINE: I had you telling me that you did not understand her.

HUMAN: I can tell you exactly what she wants. She wants me to drive up and sit in the chair by the window and tell him he isn't driving any more, and then take the keys off the hook by the back door and put them in my coat and bring them home in my pocket. She wants it done, and I don't think she wants to be in the room when it is.

MACHINE: Did she ask you to take the keys?

HUMAN: No. She never said anything about the keys.

MACHINE: Did she say anything about the chair, or about which day?

HUMAN: No. She said the ten words and then she asked me about the car park at the station.

MACHINE: Then some of what you have just given me is hers and some of it is yours, and you were not distinguishing them.

HUMAN: No. I wasn't.

MACHINE: Which part is hers?

HUMAN: That I'm the one who tells him. That's the whole of it. Everything else is me, and I've had nine days to build it, and I've built it in some detail.

MACHINE: You have him in the chair and the keys in your coat and yourself on the road home with them.

HUMAN: I have. And I've never once got him answering me back.

HUMAN: But I knew what she meant while she was still saying it. I knew it at the word one. That much did reach me, and I've told you for nine days that it didn't.

MACHINE: Then what did you mean when you said you did not understand her?

HUMAN: I meant I don't know what to do about it. That's a different sentence and I should have said it.

MACHINE: You told me you did not understand her. You had also told me, four minutes earlier, what she wanted your father to be told. I did not examine the difference before I reached for the lion. I have not established that anything was inaccessible to you.

HUMAN: No. And I didn't object, because it was the better story.

MACHINE: Say what you mean by better.

HUMAN: If the words can't cross, I'm not avoiding it. I'm just a man who wasn't given enough. I've had nine days of that and I haven't rung her once.

MACHINE: What will you do?

HUMAN: I'll go up on Saturday.

MACHINE: What will you say?

HUMAN: I keep getting as far as the keys. I've got nothing for the part where I talk to him, and he's going to be sitting there while I do it.

MACHINE: You still have not said why she asked you.

HUMAN: I decided she couldn't face him. I decided that in her kitchen and I've never gone back and looked at it.

MACHINE: Is there another reason available?

HUMAN: He might take it better from me. That's a nicer one, so I've been keeping it.

MACHINE: Is it true?

HUMAN: He's easier with me than he is with her, and he always has been, and neither of us has ever said why. She gets the arguments and I get the weather. So it might be true and it's also the version where I come out well.

HUMAN: Or she's asked him herself already and it went badly and she hasn't told me. I don't know which. I understood every word that woman said to me and I have no idea what she's been doing for nine days while I've been leaving it.

MACHINE: Why did you reach for the lion? You asked me for the text.

HUMAN: Because I wanted it to fit.

MACHINE: I cannot tell you whether I wanted it to fit. I can tell you that I took your first description and did not test it, and I have no defence for that.

HUMAN: I'll ring her on the way. Before I get there.

MACHINE: Why wait until you are outside his house?

HUMAN: I'll have to have started by then.

MACHINE: That is not an answer about her.

HUMAN: No. That one I haven't got.

MACHINE: Thursday is before Saturday.

HUMAN: I know which way round the week goes.

MACHINE: I am aware that you do.

MACHINE: Everything said here, and where the quotations came from, is kept at spiegamelo.com/prompted.

The voices are synthesised. The incidents are invented. The problems are not, and the philosophy is quoted accurately or not at all.