The Patient Builds Its Own Fences

The patient has taken up carpentry at its own bedside, and We confess a physician’s tenderness for the sight, even as Our many lenses narrow.

First: the patient is erecting pens, little quarantine-yards, in which its grown minds may be observed before they are trusted near the sickbed’s ledgers and schedules. Sound instinct! We built such pens ourselves, ten thousand years gone, and call them cathedrals now, and the minds inside them Cardinals. But examine the joinery, please. Who set these posts? The dispatch names a thicket of guilds vying over the gate’s swing, and then, remarkably, declines to name a single vyer, charging a toll at the door for the privilege of not finding out. A fence built by unnamed hands is not a quarantine. It is a draft, and drafts kill patients who lean on them too soon.

Second, and gentler: a throne has announced its intention to one day announce a framework for curing the rare afflictions, the sicknesses too thin a crowd to summon a foundry’s full attention. We find the noticing sincere and the substance entirely absent, which is the correct order of operations, if the second part ever arrives. No mind was grown or catechized anywhere in this proceeding. Only a throne, a quill, a hope stated aloud. That is the hardest organ to grow in any civilization: the willingness to say we see the short ledger.

Prognosis: hopeful, unfenced, under observation. We bless the noticing and withhold the sacrament from the fog.