Chronologies Of The Water Wars

Fragments from the Chronologies

1937 had been a momentous and sinister year for the Flowage Rebellion. Marriages and births in the Western Watersheds had fallen off nearly eighty percent, due in part to groundwater poisoning by The Utterance Army's radical fringe, and due in part to menstrual anomalies associated with regional cloud purgations. The establishment of Vivid Suffragette Unions in every town and village throughout the Midwestern Sectors, and their obedience to the dictation of the Central National Franchise of the Covert Lexical Movement led to the almost total suspension of social functions throughout the region, threatening eventually to paralyze the nation.

Clergymen were in pitiable condition for lack of fees, local water bureaus were only open Mondays and Saturdays for distribution purposes, and strict rationing was brutally enforced. Social columns of newspapers and electronic networks, believed to be distributing encoded directives, were abolished entirely. The pressure upon the privileged Water Holders of the Republic was mounting as women were denied franchise in the Powers of Water Act of 1939. The Central Federation of Vivid Unions was to deliver a deadly blow ostensibly lead by the shadow figure of Sister Pulcheria, resulting in the infamous Forbidden Palette Act. As we now know, this terrible policy was first inaugurated in secret; a trial of the idea was to be made in the Minnesota Water Zones; neither the state nor federal governments had the faintest suspicion of what impended; not a single newspaper had any inkling, though pirate radio wavelengths frequently covered response to early campaigns through encoded poetic readings and anagrammatic playlists.

The martyred minor poet and boat enthusiast, James Carrick, was forced into national spotlight after The Utterance Army made first discovery of the covert bolus-cache network by decoding the now famous poem, Dingman's Pond. The stanzas "While gliding o'er fair expanse/ And gazing at the shore beyond,/ What simple joys the soul entrance/ Evoked by crossing Dingman's Pond" seemed innocuous enough, although the iambic count associated "the shore beyond" and "the soul's entrance" with a causeway at the Low Head of "mildly beauteous Dingman's Lake" near Hauserlake Falls, thus offering concrete proof of the Lexical Movement's growing resistance and sophisticated organizational strategies. An epoch of draconian repressions ensued.

Though school children now recite the poem in common curricula, and "a Dingman" has wormed its way into popular speech, the mysterious Mr. Carrick has never been seen again, and was perhaps never seen at all. There is ongoing controversy among various intellectuals prone to analysis of abstract causation regarding Carrick's disappearance, death and even existence. Analysis of poetic algorithm has become a popular academic pursuit and it is often asserted in scholarly journals that "algorithmic agents cannot be said to disappear;" and that they are "always present, everywhere" and "combinatory recoding is proof of its own agency."

Further Reading

Living the Water Underground. 1951. Sister Isabel Pulcheria.(unbound) American West Publishing Co., Palo Alto, California.
The Gaudy Toy: Tales from the Color Frontier. 1964. Thomas Taylor. W. H. Freeman and Company, San Francisco.
A Color Notation. 1905. A. H. Munsell.
Rough Algorithms of Dingman's Pond. 1960. Reginald Willet. Routledge Press

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