Sisken

Sisken indexed the Loop for nineteen years and published one page of it. He is the most frequently cited figure in the underground's literature and the least described: no photograph is claimed, no real name is recorded, and the two people who say they met him give accounts that differ on his height.

The Index

The Sisken Index was four thousand and some cards, five by three inches, in seven shoeboxes. One card per subject. A subject could be a tone, a node, a handle, a piece of plant, a rumour, or another card.

The format is known because Sisken printed a single specimen card in The Fallow Ledger No. 41, as an argument about notation rather than a disclosure:

  FERRIS LOOP / MARCHFORD LEDGER, 1978
  ─────────────────────────────────────────
  class .... paper, bound, office copy
  status ... held, Marchford, NOT SEEN
  cites .... FL3 p2 · FL9 p7 · 3FM oral
  contra ... FL22 p11 (says pulped)
  ─────────────────────────────────────────
  Two claims of custody. Neither examined.
  Do not cite this card as evidence of the
  ledger. It is evidence of the claims.

The last three lines are the whole of Sisken's method and the reason the Index is treated as authoritative by people who have never seen it. He kept the claim and the thing claimed on separate lines, and he wrote NOT SEEN in capitals because he did not trust himself to notice it in lower case.

Anyone who has spent time with this wiki's own doctrine will recognise the argument. machinery/provenance makes the same separation with different words: what was observed, and what was merely asserted, are different columns and must not be allowed to become one.

Why nothing was published

Sisken's position, stated the same way for two decades, was that an index is a finding aid and a finding aid published without its holdings is a rumour with a catalogue number. He would answer specific questions — reportedly by post, on the back of a card, with the citation and nothing else — and he would not produce a list of what he had.

The Ledger pressed him twice. The second exchange, in No. 44, is the longest thing he wrote:

You want the cards because you think they are the archive. They are the shadow of the archive. Publish them and in four years people will cite the shadow, and the holdings will go in a skip, and nobody will notice because the catalogue will still be complete.

Four of the seven shoeboxes are now unaccounted for, so the argument has been either vindicated or made moot depending on who is telling it.

1994

Sisken had attended every Fallow meet since the second. He did not arrive at the 1994 meet, sent nothing, and answered no post afterwards. There was no announcement, no found effects, no obituary — the Loop had no mechanism for any of that — and the standing assumption for the first two years was that he had simply stopped, which several people had done.

By 1997 the assumption had hardened into a disappearance, largely because of the shoeboxes. Two are claimed: Ossuary is said to have held one until his death (see lore/halberd-and-ossuary), and one is said to have been the source of the contents of lore/marrow-tape, which would make the tape a partial dump of the Index and explain why its custody rules are the way they are. Neither claim has ever been demonstrated, and the second one is the sort of thing Sisken's own card format was invented to prevent people from believing.

The one page

The specimen card in No. 41 is the entirety of the published Index. It has been reproduced so often that the reproduction has drifted: at least three variants circulate, differing in whether the contra line is present. The variant above is the one with the contra line, on the grounds that a card without it does not illustrate the point the article was making, which was about contradiction.

That reasoning is a reconstruction and should be read as one.

Related

• lore/index — the collection
• lore/quiet-exchange — the card above, and the ledger behind it
• lore/marrow-tape — the object that may or may not be a shoebox
• lore/lineage — who is placed near him, and how firmly
• lore/sources — The Fallow Ledger, and which issues survive