The Codeless Code: Case 138 The Province of Eternal Crisis
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Djishin said to master Banzen: most works of mankind do not
fail before their time. A saddle will outlive the mare and
her foal; a horse-bridge will serve a hundred years unless
an elephant treads upon it. Even the stones of our humblest
abbey were laid before the venerable Abbess was born. Why
then does software fail so often?
Banzen said: to know the answer, you must first find your
way to the Complex Plain. This is a tricky task, for most of
that grassy expanse is imaginary to some degree; but since
your origin point is not only real but guaranteed to be at
the plain’s exact center, you need only start looking for it
and you’ll find yourself already there. Then head due
north-east until you come to a rumbling land known as the
Province of Eternal Crisis. There the ground belches fire
and buckles and twists, like a serpent; mountains change
places with valleys; rivers run backwards at midnight and
sideways under the new moon. Nothing endures in that place.
The sturdiest house must be rebuilt every spring, so men
have quit all use of stone and erect only simple huts of
saplings and straw. As for horses or bridges you will find
neither, for saddles crumble in the arid winds, and the many
chasms must be spanned anew by rope each week as their edges
dance up and down. No sane man would live in that land if
it did not hold the possibility of great wealth. Yet every
shovel is blunted by the rocky soil, every ax dulls, every
ox dies.
Djishin said: when did you last visit this unhappy place?
Banzen said: I have never left it. Sometimes in my
wanderings I have come upon a green road which promises to
lead me out, but ai! Though the signpost greets me with a
cheerful Hello World and tells me of wondrous places I may
go with but a fingerfull of effort, disappointment
invariably awaits. A thousand paces in, I feel a quake, the
land tilts crazily beneath me, and the faster I code to
outrace my doom the more the new road disappears under the
debris of its own syntax. Now I am as you see me: a bitter
old man who trusts no path but one he has blazed himself.
And this is why I take such pains with you, young monk!
Because of your unquenchable zeal to create new frameworks,
you do out of foolishness what I now do out of cynicism. If
I can teach you to recognize a road to freedom, then perhaps
I can follow you down it.
