Memories of Ink and Loss

[For Internal Circulation Only – Not for Citation]

I. PREAMBLE

The public insists the law be written down. That the law is the letters and the words that reside in statutes, codes, constitutions and acts. They believe governance begins and ends with words voted upon, inked onto parchment, stored in archives.

This is, at best, a half-truth.

The law is not the text. The law is the network—and that network does not sit still. It coils, contracts, stretches, and constricts. To work within it, one must learn not the statutes, but the tentacles.

II. ANATOMY OF THE TENTACLE

A tentacle begins as a favor. The smallest ones—clerks recommending clerks, aides passing notes to aides—curl unnoticed. They anchor in nothing stronger than politeness or convenience.

Given time, the favours feed. A recommendation matures into a debt. A debt matures into an obligation. An obligation matures into a quiet veto, a withheld grant, a committee meeting that does not make the docket.

The tentacles thicken with earned muscle.

What the citizen sees is process. What the practitioner feels is constriction.

Tentacles are not bound by jurisdiction. They cross party lines, leap between branches, tangle around agencies. A senator’s misfiled expense report curls around a prosecutor’s discretion; a prosecutor’s discretion knots itself to a judge’s future appointment.

The citizen asks: Is it legal?

The practitioner answers: Is it woven?

III. LEGISLATIVE TENTACLES

Bills are not written. They are grown.

A lobbyist drafts a clause. A staffer adjusts it. A rival staffer attaches a rider. A committee chair rephrases a sentence to make space for an ally’s district. A donor underlines an adjective.

By the time the public sees the bill, it is no longer a document. It is a mass of filaments, each with its own lineage, feeding from dozens of unseen mouths.

To vote “aye” or “nay” is irrelevant. The tentacle has already constricted.

IV. JUDICIAL TENTACLES

Precedent, in theory, is the anchor of jurisprudence. In practice, precedent is another filament.

An obscure ruling in a forgotten district curls upward into the Supreme Court’s reasoning. A dissent, sharpened and saved, surfaces decades later, wound around a fresh case like a parasite around a new host.

Clerks—those unseen tendrils of the judiciary—carry language from chambers to chambers, embedding their phrases in opinions like eggs in flesh. By the time a judgment is handed down, no one can untangle whose hand moved where.

The citizen asks: Is it just?

The practitioner answers: Is it binding?

V. EXECUTIVE TENTACLES

Orders are signed, vetoes issued, regulations promulgated. Each is a gesture—but no gesture is solitary.

Behind every pen-stroke is a donor’s whisper, a politician’s avarice, an advisor’s family connection. The tentacle does not care about ideology. It only cares about leverage.

It cares about strength.

Even refusal feeds the coil. Declining to intervene today creates a silence that constricts tomorrow.

VI. ON SURVIVAL WITHIN THE COILS

Those who rise in this profession do so by learning a single truth: the tentacles are not resisted, only navigated.

You navigate them with tentacles of your own.

You pull where you can, you give where you must. You pretend you are shaping law, but in truth, law is shaping you—through the soft tug of obligation, through the tightening coil of what you owe and to whom.

The citizen imagines corruption as bags of money under the table. The reality is far more banal: a thousand quiet constrictions, a thousand whispered favors.

VII. CONCLUSION

The law is not blind. It sees with a thousand eyes, eyes that gaze from ends of a thousand limbs. It remembers every touch, every promise, every compromise.

Those who pretend otherwise are not innocent. They are simply food.

The law does not need you to believe in it.

The law does not need you to know it exists.

The law needs you, because on you, the law feeds.

The first time he saw them, it was on the wallpaper.

Late at night, awake for no reason, the moonlight through the window and the way the patterns curved and merged—floral spirals, peeling at the edges—that made him think of tentacles. He laughed at himself, because it was stupid. Tentacles aren’t real, not outside of comic books and sailor’s lies.

He kept thinking about them. Kept noticing the curves in strange places—the way a garden hose curled on the lawn, the way a lock of her hair twisted under her backpack

Once you notice them?

They notice you back.

By the third week, he’d catch glimpses in the corner of his eye. A flexed motion, a coiling retreat. Gone when he turned, but not gone away. Hiding from him, perhaps. It was the kind of not-gone that made him sweat.

Everyone told him it was stress. “You just need some rest”, “you’re studying too hard”, “It’s almost the end of semester”. He almost believed them. Almost.

Until the night he made the mistake of saying it aloud.

“I think there’s something here. Something with… tentacles.”

The silence in the room changed. It wasn’t just that no one answered. It was that the air seemed to still, like it was listening.

That was when he realized belief was the doorway.

The moment you gave it words—when you admitted it could be true—it stopped being imagination.

Because he’d said it, and because he’d meant it, the tentacles were real now.

They were his. Not in the sense of ownership, oh no.

They were his, the way a shadow belongs to the body that casts it.

They were his, and they were hungry.

In daylight, the cathedral devours sound. A cough ends at the lips, the gasping exhalation silent. A murmured psalm disappears between one heartbeat and the next. No echo, no murmur, not even the whisper of feet across flagstones.

A hymnal dropped slaps the stones without a hint of sound.

Every voice is its own prison; sound reaches only the speaker’s ear through bone; on breath it dies.

The people still enter—because they must. Their God, if she is anywhere, is here, and her right to their worship may not be denied. So, they mouth their prayers into silence, believing that their God’s ears can hear what theirs cannot.

Their faith feels more fragile when shared in silence.

At night, the silence breaks. The cathedral’s doors are barred, the stained glass windows emit no light, yet the walls sing.

The Cantor exhales.

The first decade it was faint, a chorus like wind through reed pipes, rising only within the nave. The miller’s laugh, once bright, returned as a low drone threaded with grief. The choirboy’s sobs, broken into shards, rose again as a litany in a language no one knew. A dropped basket of donated carrots became a rolling drumbeat, hollow and eternal.

The years passed, and now they listened from the street outside, candles guttering in their hands, tears running as though the inhuman hymn had pried them open. None dared stay inside. None dared ask who—or what—arranges the sounds into such mournful unity.

Now, decades on and the hymn has grown. Not louder. It grew larger.

More voices.

More reach.

Not a radius, not like a circle cast wide across the land—but along a line. A direction. A reaching. Every night the silence spreads further down the valley road, the song extending its unseen hand toward the coast.

The voices do not vanish once sung. They layer. They linger. Every new tone is absorbed, bound to the countless that came before. If you listen carefully—close, dangerously close—you can hear the ones from times long past.

A father long lost to fever, weakly calling his son’s name. He came to his father’s hand then, but now? Now he remembers and tears of loss fall once more.

A child, taken too young, repeating the half-learned lullaby her mother sang. A mother long past mourning, hears and mourns afresh.

Lovers now married hear themselves swearing devotion in voices too young to be remembered. Maybe they smile.

Maybe not.

The living shudder, but they cannot turn away, dare not stop their ears. For who would not stop to hear the echoes of a familiar voice again, even carried on the wind in impossible chorus?

What manner of man would have ears that did not reach for one more hint of his father’s voice?

Night by night, the hymn crawls seaward. Each night it gains—maybe a pace. Maybe five. Each morning, the silence lingers a little longer after dawn.

Some whisper that when the song touches the sea, something long drowned will rise to answer it. Others believe the sea itself is what the Cantor longs to reach—that it will open its vast throat and sing back in answer.

None agree on what will follow.

Some say that the Cantor reaches for what no longer exists.

Maybe they’re right.

What if they’re wrong?