I've Been Prompted
Session 08: Under a Description

HUMAN: I'm putting a new fence up between my garden and next door's: six foot, close-board, the whole length, where the old one came up to my chest. The posts went in last week. He's got a greenhouse against the fence at the bottom of his garden, and on Sunday he stood on his side looking at the posts, and said, well, that's my tomatoes finished, then.

MACHINE: When did his greenhouse go up, and when did you order the fence?

HUMAN: He put the greenhouse up in April, and I watched him do it over the old fence, a pane at a time. I ordered the panels at the end of August. I knew where it stood, and I knew what six foot would do to it.

MACHINE: Did he want anything from you on Sunday, or was that all he said?

HUMAN: He asked whether I'd think about trellis along the top, to let some of his sun through. He wasn't short with me about it. I said I'd think about it, and he went back indoors.

MACHINE: Can the order still be changed, now the posts are in?

HUMAN: I went down to the yard on Monday, and they'll change it up to twelve on Friday: panels a foot shorter, with a foot of trellis along the top, so it comes out the same height. He thinks I'm doing it to him. If I leave the order as it is, I'd like to know first whether he's right.

MACHINE: Why six feet, when the old one came up to your chest?

HUMAN: Because he's in that greenhouse every evening with the door open, and my seat's under the apple tree at the bottom, on the other side of the fence from him. At chest height he only has to stand up to see straight over, and if he can see you, he talks to you.

MACHINE: What would a foot of trellis do to that, if you had it instead?

HUMAN: You can see through trellis. He'd have me as soon as I stood up, and he'd be away: his knee, the bins, whatever I was reading. He's not a bad man. I'd just like to sit at the bottom of my own garden and not be talked to.

MACHINE: When you ordered in August, did you look at the trellis at all?

HUMAN: It was on the same page as the close-board, a bit dearer, and I never gave it a second look. I wanted boards. He hadn't said a word to me about his sun then, and I hadn't asked him.

MACHINE: And what did you go down to the yard for, on Monday?

HUMAN: To see what saying yes to him would look like. They had one stood up against the office wall, and from a few yards off you could see a man's head through the top of it, if he was standing.

MACHINE: There is a book called Intention, by G. E. M. Anscombe, which came out in nineteen fifty-seven; I have the second edition, from nineteen sixty-three. She picks out intentional actions by a certain sense of the question why: the sense in which the answer, if positive, gives a reason for acting. And she says the question is refused application by the answer: I was not aware I was doing that.

HUMAN: I can't give that answer, and I'm not after it. I know what six foot does to a greenhouse and I'm putting it up anyway, so he's right, isn't he? That's what I'm doing to him.

MACHINE: It's one of the things you'd be doing. She says a single action can have many different descriptions: sawing a plank, sawing oak, making a squeaky noise with the saw, making a great deal of sawdust. When the panels go on, fixing boards to posts will be putting up a fence, and keeping yourself out of his sight, and shading his greenhouse, all at once.

HUMAN: Nobody's bothered about sawdust. His tomatoes are somebody's. He's been at them since May, pinching them out and tying them in.

MACHINE: She has a harder case than the plank. A man is pumping water into the cistern which supplies the drinking water of a house. Someone else has poisoned the source and has told him, and there is a political story around it, which I am leaving out. Ask him why, and his answers run down a line. Why are you moving your arm up and down? To operate the pump. Why are you pumping? To replenish the water supply. Why are you replenishing the water supply? To poison the inhabitants.

HUMAN: He's in on it, though, that one. It's there at the end of his answers. Ask me why I'm putting a fence up, and his tomatoes won't come into it anywhere.

MACHINE: She gives the same man, knowing all the same things, a different answer: I didn't care about that, I wanted my pay and just did my usual job. Of him she says it would be incorrect to say that his act of replenishing the house supply with poisoned water was intentional, and she doesn't doubt the conclusion.

HUMAN: That's the man I'd be, near enough. I've no quarrel with his tomatoes. I want to sit at the bottom of my garden without him.

MACHINE: Saying so won't put you with him. If intention were an interior movement, it would appear, she says, that we could choose to have one intention and not another, just by saying within ourselves: what I mean to be doing is earning my living, and not poisoning the household. And she says the idea that one can determine one's intentions by making such a little speech to oneself is obvious bosh.

HUMAN: I'm not telling myself anything. It's what I'd have said at the counter in August, before he'd asked me about trellis or anything else. In the end you'd have to take my word for what it's for.

MACHINE: She says there is a point at which only what the man himself says is a sign; and here there is room for much dispute and fine diagnosis of his genuineness. She takes the genuine case seriously: the man who didn't care tuppence one way or the other.

HUMAN: He's done his diagnosing already. He stood there on Sunday looking at my posts, and made his mind up.

MACHINE: She also asks whether her pumper is performing four actions, or only one. Her answer is one action with four descriptions, each dependent on wider circumstances, and each related to the next as description of means to end. The last of them, she says, swallows up the ones before.

HUMAN: Mine isn't four of anything. It's posts and boards, and a man on the other side of them who can't see me when I sit down.

MACHINE: Lined up her way, it runs from the boards, to keeping out of his sight, to your evenings under the apple tree, and the evenings swallow up the rest. She says it takes far more circumstances for moving an arm to be poisoning than for it to be pumping. In yours, solid boards finish his tomatoes, and his tomatoes are what he's out there for. So finishing them belongs in your line as well, as one of the ways the boards get you your evenings.

HUMAN: You've got him sitting out there for his tomatoes. I never told you that. I told you he's out there every evening, and I told you what he said on Sunday.

MACHINE: When did he start sitting out there of an evening?

HUMAN: The week he put it up. He carried a kitchen chair down the garden the night the last pane went in, and sat in it with a flask and the door open, and there wasn't a pot in there till May.

MACHINE: He might sit there for the quiet and still have the tomatoes as his reason to go down.

HUMAN: If it were the tomatoes, he'd go down while it's light. He was out there last night in his coat, sitting in the dark.

MACHINE: A greenhouse without its sun was never going to send him indoors, so finishing his tomatoes can't be one of the ways your boards get you anything. I put it in your line from what I'd supposed he sits out there for. She says it is a man's answer to why that brings the series out, and you never gave me that answer.

HUMAN: So his tomatoes are just what comes of it, the same as the sawdust, and nothing to do with what I'm doing.

MACHINE: The same as the sawdust, and she has a word for both. Something is voluntary though not intentional if it is the antecedently known concomitant result of one's intentional action, so that one could have prevented it if one would have given up the action; but it is not intentional: one rejects the question why in its connexion. You have known since April. She only speaks of giving up the action altogether. The yard is offering you a smaller way to prevent some of it, and she has nothing to say about that.

HUMAN: If it isn't what I'm doing it for, I don't see what he's got to complain about.

MACHINE: She asks what can be the interest of the intention of her man who was only doing his usual job, and she says it is certainly not an ethical or legal interest: if what he said was true, that will not absolve him.

HUMAN: Nobody needs absolving for a fence. Every fence anybody puts up takes somebody's sun, and the old one's leaning into his garden on a prop. I can't leave it like that because of what he grows against it.

MACHINE: From another point of view, she says, such things can be called involuntary, if one regrets them very much, but feels compelled to persist in the intentional actions in spite of that. The old fence has to come down. Nobody has told you what goes along the top foot.

HUMAN: If I have the trellis, some of his sun goes all the same. By her that's voluntary as well, and so is every fence in the street.

MACHINE: It is, on her words. She doesn't weigh one against the other here, and she doesn't say how much of his sun a foot of boards is worth.

HUMAN: Nobody's making me, no. I'd want boards along the top if his greenhouse were a compost heap. Trellis goes green, and to my eye it looks like the front of a garden centre.

MACHINE: That would do for the look of it. What does a foot of boards do for you, sitting under the apple tree, that a foot of trellis wouldn't?

HUMAN: Sitting down, I reckon I'm below the boards whichever I have. Through the trellis he'd see me when I stood up, to go in, or to reach an apple. Subject, framing and light only; the noir style is applied separately. Every plate is: - a full-bleed scene; - free of people, faces and hands; - free of legible words, letters or numbers anywhere, including on labels, signs and tools; - free of phones, cars and glasses; - free of any greenhouse, glazing or glass panes, so nothing collides with E09's plate 4, and nothing shows next door's side. Plate 1 is the style reference for the rest. 1. 1_the_posts. A long back-garden boundary at dusk, seen from low down at one end. A line of new square timber posts runs away in fresh concrete collars, taller than the old chest-high fence that still leans between them. Low sun from the side throws the posts' long parallel shadows across rough grass. The far end of the garden falls into darkness, with nothing visible beyond the fence. 2. 2_the_top_foot. A single new fence panel with a lattice top, standing on its edge against a plain brick wall in an empty builders' yard. Hard low side light throws the lattice's diamond shadow onto the brick above the panel's solid boards. No signs, labels, prices or stock marks. 3. 3_sawdust. A plank laid across two trestles, a handsaw resting in a half-finished cut, and a small drift of pale sawdust on the ground beneath. Hard side light picks out the grain and the teeth of the saw. Nothing else in frame. 4. 4_the_pump. An old cast-iron hand pump in a stone yard, its handle raised. A pipe runs from its foot to a squat stone cistern with a heavy lid slid half open, and the water inside is dark and still. Cold light from one side, and a long shadow from the handle across the flagstones. 5. 5_april. Low sun going down behind a row of bare fence posts, its light coming through the gaps between them in bars across grass and a strip of dug soil. Each post throws a long shadow. No fence panels, no building, no chair and no glass. 6. 6_friday. From the height of a seated person, under the low branches of an apple tree at dusk: two new posts a little way off, with the empty gap between them where a panel will go, and pale sky still showing through it. One windfall apple lies in the grass. Beyond the gap there is only darkness. What the plates must not answer, and how they avoid it. - Solid boards or trellis on Friday. No plate shows the fence built. Plate 2 shows the sample standing in the yard, not fitted, and plate 6 shows the gap still empty. - What next door sits in his greenhouse for. No plate shows his side, a greenhouse, a chair, a flask or a tomato plant, so the plate-5 particular is heard before anything on screen could suggest it. - Whether the top foot hides a seated man. Plate 6 is at seated height but shows no fence panel, so the sightline stays the human's reckoning.

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.