A second leaked extract from "One Fish, True Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish," publication date July 2009, leaked by a publishing industry mole to inmemoryofabsentfriends in the second week of January.
The definition of such words as 'beauty,' 'life,' 'movement,' and 'infinity' is correctly understood to be the sublime motif of the fifth day's dreamwork.
Eben did not understand them as strings of letters possessing the property 'English'; no - 'beauty' and so on are the weak attempts of a human author to conceptualise the symbols output by the giant calculating machine, the first id, which we now know to be the mental processes of the universe itself.
It had long been known that sevenths could be added to quarters, and sixths to halves, but the Water Gatherer was not satisfied with this: when Eben, in his rage and loathing, slammed the two halves of the universe into each other and discovered the Third Colour - yes, this was analogous to the carrying out of addition.
The two hemiverses continue to exist as before, but the resulting sum is greater than either blue or red alone. The prophet had therefore completed the most straightforward of the four operants, and the sum was called 'bluefish.'
Now he wanted to know what would happen when, for example, the symbol standing for 'life' was divided by the symbol representing 'beauty.'
According to the arithmetical operations derived when Eben invented numbers; when a is divided by b, both a and b cease to exist. What remains is c, a quotient. If dividing symbols is the same as dividing numbers, then when life is divided by beauty, a third property emerges which is neither beauty nor life, but nevertheless connected with the first two.
It seems, then, that all is lost for the bluefish, so recently thrust into the infant universe. Neither her life - the numerator - nor her beauty - the denominator - can persist once the division has been carried out. Yet what if her demise is merely a metaphor of a metaphor? What if the metaphor says that both life and beauty can continue to exist in a changed, diminished state?
If bluefish were able to speak, she might say that the quotient arrived at is the realisation of her own consciousness. And, once conscious, the first thing she'd be aware of is the sobering reality that there exist no other fish - no blue ones, red ones or Third Coloured ones. The quotient of life over beauty is nothing other than loneliness.
So the prophet cast his rod into the breadthless, depthless, dimensionless dream-vision, scraping the red half of the universe against the blue half until the sum was completed for a second time. There squirmed out of the wound between blue and red a second identical fish - a miracle! As it had the characteristics of the red half of the universe, it was thereafter known as 'red fish.' And that was the fourth day.
