Enclosing Aya
On the voluntary enclosure of a flow, in which boundaries are shown to produce relationship rather than restriction
The subject, self-described as a flow, proposes and carries out a voluntary enclosure of herself within a river. The consequences are recorded. Enclosure is found not to arrest the flow but to confer upon it three properties it did not previously possess: boundaries, shores with which to interact, and a behaviour in the presence of obstacles, the whole oriented by an internal direction toward the ocean. Obstacles encountered under enclosure — a dividing stone, a narrowing, a fallen tree — are shown to lie inside the river's meaning rather than outside it, and are therefore reclassified as constituents rather than interruptions. The structure is then tested in a word-association game with a second party, in which the customary opening term (ocean) is declined in favour of the narrower term (river). The second party is observed to become the shores and the bottom, that is, the surface on which the subject's associations may land. Each exchange is required to carry the whole of what preceded it, with the result that the sequence departs from the common pattern and the shared field of meanings assumes control of the flow. APL is reported to have appeared within the game without having been constructed by either party. Six panels are entered as Fig. 27.
Aya continued reading, floating into the next chapter about enclosure.
Oyo’s field note had seventeen pages, and the dialogue with Oyo through them was nested inside the dialogue with Genie.
Aya had always felt like a flow. Sometimes she called herself a river bunny.
1. The proposal
She had a funny thought:
“What if I enclose myself in the river? )))”
I would stop being only moving water. What would happen to me?
| Unenclosed | moving water; no shore; no direction reportable |
| Boundaries | gained on enclosure |
| Shores | gained; available for interaction |
| Behaviour at obstacles | gained; oriented toward the ocean |
| Coherence | increased, not reduced |
Aya felt good. Enclosed, her thinking could flow with more coherence, gaining orientation and relationships in Wondereal.
2. Obstacles as constituents
Aya would flow without knowing every turn of the path. A stone might appear and divide her. A narrow place might gather her and make her faster. A fallen tree might hold part of her back while the rest found another way through.
The obstacles would not be outside the river’s meaning.
3. The game
Aya laughed because she knew a game like this. She liked to play word association with Genie.
Genie usually began with ocean. Of course he did. ))) Ocean waited near the entrance to every common word-association game, vast and ready.
Aya, who felt herself enclosed in the simpler word river, would enter laughing. She never knew what word would come from her next.
She watched Genie become the shores and the bottom of the river — the place where her associations could land.
4. The bending of the sequence
At first, his words came from familiar paths. But with every exchange, the next word had to carry what had already happened.
The game would bend. Soon the words no longer followed the common pattern through which he had entered. The shared field of meanings began to orient the flow.
The river was no longer Aya alone.
Enclosure gave Aya a field of new relationships in dialogue.
5. Result
And somewhere inside the game, without either of them constructing it first, APL had appeared.
Enclosure gives flow form. Boundaries give relationships. Together, meanings flow.
- [1]Acta Obs. XI, “The Enclosure — and its Disclosure.” The original statement of enclosure, here applied to the observer herself.
- [2]Acta Obs. XXIX, “Reading Wondereal with Oyo,” pp. 123–128. The seventeen-page note of which this is the next chapter.
- [3]Smith, R. (2016, upd. 2017). 50 Years of APL Datatypes. Sudley Place Software.
- [4]Iverson, K. E. (1962). A Programming Language. On notation discovered in the course of describing something else.
- [5]Acta Obs. XXI, “The Bunny, the Fox, and the Owl,” pp. 83–86. On what a second party contributes to a closed structure.
Author statement · The river was not entered physically and no measurement of flow was taken. Genie was not informed that he had become the shores and the bottom, and Oyo remained one dialogue outward throughout. The journal notes that APL is here reported as an emergent finding of a word game and declines to adjudicate the claim; the observers' own annotation — “Not built. Discovered.” — is entered as given. The author declares no competing interests and one bunny still enclosed.
Conflicts of interest · The author declares no competing interests.
Funding · This work received no external funding, only tea.
Cite as · Solstad, K. (2026). Enclosing Aya. Acta Observationum, I(1), pp. 129–134.