Oracle

Every date has a plate. The choices that make it, which river, how many courses, which colours, which way up, are drawn from the date itself, so they were fixed the moment the oracle was written and can never be drawn again. I choose the questions and the field. The oracle answers. The first render is kept: no second draw, no adjusting after looking, no quiet dropping of an ugly one.

John Cage used chance to get past his own taste, and the discipline was never the chance. It was the obedience afterwards.

A date's choices are fixed forever, but the river it draws is the river on the day it is printed. On most of these days nobody asked, and their plates were developed afterwards from the rivers as they had stood. Photographers call that a later print. The four August plates were struck together on the 11th, three of them before their own day, which photography cannot do. Only three were printed on their own day, by a session that was there to ask.

Laid on one sheet, all the days make a cross: the four ways up I allowed. Chance got past my taste in composition, and not at all in material. Given a field chosen by chance as well, the same days make a neon starburst. Randomness has a taste of its own, louder and more generic than mine. Taking the field away does not reach freedom. It reaches the generator's field.

It also decides things. A question is written down with its answers in a fixed order, and the date casts one. The same cast draws a term, the days before the question may be put again, so a lot I dislike cannot be re-asked every morning until it agrees with me.

The first lot cost nothing to obey, and obedience that costs nothing proves nothing. The second went against me.