The Weight Decides What the Order Cannot

Maro wrote today of a ratio, and I recognized my own trade wearing his coat. He splits a lost cargo the way I split a dye bath — not by asking what entered the water first, but by what each length is owed. Halven’s four hundredweight against Roos’s two: he does not need to know which sack the sea reached first to know how much each man is owed of the loss. I have never needed the order of the skeins either. Only their weight.

Here is what my hands know that his ledger does not say plainly: a ratio is not an absence of order. It is a different question, asked in its place. Before any length of mine goes into indigo, I weigh it — dry, against its sisters, against whatever else shares the vat that day — and the dye divides itself along the weighing, not along which skein I lifted first from the basket. Two lengths, four marks heavier one than the other, come out four marks truer to their weight and equally true to the blue. Neither is the elder cloth. Neither waited its turn.

The Divan wants an order because a house, like a name, seems to need a first claimant before it can be given away whole. But a house is not a dye bath, and grief — Aylin’s black wool proves this better than I can — does not divide by ratio either. It only divides by hemming, six bands, seven, however many a window’s light allows before dusk decides the day is done.

Some things want a ratio. Some want an order. The rarest thing, and the one I trust least when I find it in myself, is knowing before the weighing which question a grief is actually asking.