What Is a Lullaby

Contents

1. The picture under the word
2. Three cases the picture cannot hold
3. The neighbours
4. What the foundation holds
5. What a lullaby is made of
6. The singer goes first
7. Where the song ends
8. The verse after it worked
9. The shop
10. What it costs
11. An ordinary Tuesday

At ten past two Tomás sits on the floor beside the cot with his back against the radiator. Lucía went under during the first verse. He knows because her hand, which had been holding the bar, has let go. He is on the third verse now, the one about the boat that stays in the harbour, and he sings it exactly as softly as the first. If you asked him why he has not stopped, he would say that he does not want to wake her. That is true, and it is not the whole of it.

The word for what he is singing carries a job. A lullaby is a song that lulls: soft, slow, repeated, sung to a child so that the child sleeps. When one fails we say it did not work, and when it works we say the song did it.

Underneath that is a picture, and it has been good enough to run on for a long time. The effect is in the song, so a softer and slower tune sends anyone off more surely. The measure is the outcome, so a lullaby is as good as it is quick. And the song is for the child, so a verse sung to a sleeper is spare: a habit, or a comfort to the singer.

Three cases the picture cannot hold

The seam is in where the picture puts the effect. In the first case it is not in the mark. In the second it is strongest at the maker. In the third the tune is unchanged and the effect is another one. A property of the song does none of these. A reading does all three: it is in someone, it is smallest where the record of the song is longest, and it changes when what the reader holds changes.

The neighbours

Several earlier pieces stand close, and a reader could think I am repeating one.

What Is Unmoved is the nearest. It owns the point that being unmoved by the hundredth is the record of having been changed by the first ninety-nine, so that a low surprise is the product of the updates that lowered it. I use that mechanism. What I take it to is a form that is made to be met at almost no size, by a hearer who has no complaint about it, where the smallness is the use of the thing and not a loss to be diagnosed. What Is Boredom owns the feeling of a world the expectation has already covered. I do not say a lullaby is boredom, and I do not take the felt flatness. What Is “It Worked” owns the two rulers, the outcome read against what you expected and the mark read against its exemplar. I rely on both in words and add only the case where the first ruler stops while the act goes on. What Is Silence owns the point that a silence takes its size from what was predicted, and I lean on it once, for the end of a song. What Is Revenge owns the author reading an act smaller than the person who receives it, which I use for the floor of the nursery. What Is Rest takes stillness as unavailable to anything that exists. A lullaby is not a route to stillness, and I leave rest alone.

What the foundation holds

Six numbered things and four parts of the section on acts and artifacts carry this piece. Records update expectation forward and are never reopened (R2). The expectation a host carries is made of subconscious prediction and ideas (P4), the host experiences only the quotient (R8), and the denominator is not ours to command (R10). Every condition has an exemplar against which any artifact can be measured (P10), and the evaluative question is fidelity, not success (R11).

From the section on acts and artifacts: an act is a process and an artifact is a mark. The magnitude of an artifact is surprisal, how far the actual departed from the prediction. Phase is relational, fixed by which idea has the actualizer and not by the mark and not by the maker. And a host’s own act lands on a denominator that its own making has helped to train, so the maker’s reading is the smaller. That last is a direction and not an amount, and the foundation has no expression for how much smaller.

The foundation has no row for the word, and it has no account of sleep. Everything below is about reading. What a small reading does for a sleeper is not something the foundation says, and I do not say it.

What a lullaby is made of

Take the first night. Tomás sings the boat song to a newborn who has no record of it. The sung lines are a mark, and the child meets it against a prediction that holds voices, rooms and slow sounds in general and nothing of this tune. It is met at whatever size that prediction gives. I give no number; the foundation has none.

On the second night the first is in the record (R2). The tune now sits in the prediction as a kind of thing, the boat song, and the second night is met against a prediction that holds one. It reads smaller than the first. That is a direction, and I do not say by how much. On the four-hundredth night it is met against four hundred. The lines have not changed. They did not get softer. What changed is the denominator, one mark at a time, and by R10 neither Tomás nor Lucía can set it directly. He cannot make the reading small. He can sing the song again.

So the word does not pick out a kind of tune. Soft, slow and repeated are what tunes sung to children tend to have, and softness may well matter: the foundation says nothing about it. But a stranger who sings the same lines in the same voice has made a song, and Tomás’s nights have made a lullaby. The word names a tune together with a hearer’s record of it.

The singer goes first

This is the second case. Tomás has made the boat song some four hundred times, and Lucía has heard it as many. The two records are not the same record. His includes the making. The foundation’s section on a host’s own act in its own denominator says that the maker’s reading is the smaller, because the act lands on a prediction that the host’s own making has trained. The revenge piece applied it to an act and its return, and it holds for a song. The tune lands on Tomás at the smallest size in the room.

I apply that, and I do not extend it. It gives an order, the singer ahead of the hearer, and it does not make the order certain. It also does not say a small reading is what sends anyone to sleep. It says that if the work, whatever it is, is done by a reading that has become small, the person with the longest record of the song is the person to expect it of first. Tomás on the floor at four is the expected case.

Where the song ends

Now the end. A run of marks, each predicted by the one before, is a room with a sound in it, and the sound has become part of what the hearer expects of the next minute. Stopping is a change in the actual against that expectation. The silence piece owns the point that a silence takes its size from what was predicted, and I apply it to the end of this song. The size of the stop is not found in the stop. It is found in how well the continuing was predicted.

That has an odd consequence. The better the run has been learned, the larger its end reads against it. A hearer on the edge of leaving, who is still reading at some small size, meets the stop at that size. A run that reads at almost nothing therefore ends in the largest mark it contains, unless the singer builds the ending out of steps that are each close to the one before: slower, lower, a last line repeated, a hum with no words, a breath. Each step is predicted by the step before (R2), and the last is predicted by all of them.

Tomás does this without deciding to. By the end of the third verse the boat is barely moving, and then he is humming, and then there is a breath, and then he is sitting very still on the floor.

The verse after it worked

The taper explains some of the third verse. It does not explain all of it. Suppose the taper is done, the hum is done, and Tomás stays for one more verse, sung to a child who is not reading anything.

The first ruler is the outcome read against what the maker expected. It ended at the end of the first verse, when her hand let go. The second ruler is the mark read against its exemplar (P10, R11), and it needs no hearer. Each verse he sings is a mark and is in the record whether or not anyone is reading at that hour. It has one reader, Tomás himself, who reads it smaller than anyone and who can read it against the exemplar of whichever condition it serves. It will be a miss, as every artifact is (R10). His voice cracks on the high line at two in the morning, and the standing shape of the relation is that the reading outruns the making.

Which condition does it serve? The notes do not say. Phase is relational: it is fixed by which idea has the singer, and not by the mark. The same sounds sung while counting the minutes until he can leave are the same sounds, and a different phase from the same sounds sung with his attention on her. I do not say the child can tell. I say the notes cannot.

The shop

The third case closes the way the second opened. R2 says the four hundred nights are in the record and nothing since reopens them. Lucía in the shop meets a recording: a thinner voice, the old tune. The mark is of the same kind as the nights. The prediction it lands on is not the one the nights trained. It holds everything since, including that the nights are over. The tune is met at a size it never had at the cot, and nothing in the notes accounts for the difference (R8). I give it no size and no name. The foundation reads the quotient she meets and does not say what she should feel.

A recording has a second thing in it. Pressing play is the host’s own act, and it leaves its own mark. The voice is an older mark, made by someone else on some other night, and it is read now. A parent who plays a recording of her own mother at the cot has two marks in the room, and the phase of the first is set by what has the parent that evening.

What it costs

It takes away the sentence the song put her to sleep, or the part of it that belongs to the song. What happened on the cot is a reading in the one who slept, and the foundation does not say what produces sleep. A lullaby cannot be composed in an afternoon either: a perfect tune sung once is a song.

It also takes away a verdict. A night on which it does not work is the outcome ruler moving with the hearer’s denominator, and the other ruler did not move (R11). That is relief for the person on the floor at three, and it is not a licence to stop. The singing still has a ruler, and it is the one that does not depend on the child.

The harder cost is a gap. The foundation cannot say why slow and soft would help, or whether they do, or what a small reading does for sleep. That belongs to a physiology the foundation does not contain, and I have left it empty and named it below.

An ordinary Tuesday

1. Sing the same one. The sameness adds the marks. A new tune begins its own record from nothing.
2. Judge the singing by the singing. Did you sing it as you meant to, slowly and there? That ruler does not move with the child’s night.
3. Make the end out of small steps. Slow the last line, lower it, hum, breathe out. Do not stop on a note.
4. Sing one verse past the point it worked, if you can spare it. It may have no reader but you and the record, and then it can only be read by fidelity.
5. Notice what you are singing for. The notes do not say. If the answer is to be done, that is a reading of the phase and not a charge against you.
6. A recording is fine, and it is two marks. Pressing play is your act. The voice is older. Use whichever you mean to.