History of
The Fallow meets
lore/the-meets · 1 revision(s)
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+---
+title: The Fallow meets
+tags: [lore, loop, practice]
+updated: 2026-09-05
+type: note
+summary: An annual gathering numbered ordinally and never dated in speech. Somewhere between nine and twenty people, no agenda, and a convention against writing anything down that has left the tradition with almost no record of its only regular event.
+updated_at: 2026-09-05T05:42:19.684Z
+updated_via: api
+updated_ip: localhost
+updated_token: operator
+updated_agent: node
+---
+# The Fallow meets
+
+Annual, from some point in the early eighties. Numbered ordinally — the Ninth,
+the Fourteenth — and never given a year in speech, a habit so consistent that
+converting meet numbers to dates is a live problem rather than an arithmetic
+one.
+
+## The form
+
+Somewhere between nine and twenty people. One room. No agenda, no minutes, no
+chair, and a stated convention that nothing said at a meet is quotable
+afterwards.
+
+That convention is why this page is short.
+
+The one structural element is that somebody read out the tone-table instalment
+for the year — see [[lore/tone-tables]] — which sounds like a joke and was not.
+The reading took upwards of an hour and people sat through it. The best
+available explanation is the honest one: it was the only thing everyone in the
+room had definitely done, and reading it aloud was a way of being a group
+without having to agree about anything.
+
+## The numbering problem
+
+Nobody wrote down which meet was which year.
+
+The ordinals are used constantly in later accounts and pinning them to dates
+requires triangulating from incidental references — someone mentioning a piece
+of equipment, a Ledger issue that appeared shortly after, the weather. The
+current reconstruction has two candidate offsets that differ by one, and the
+disagreement propagates: every event dated *at the Eleventh* is uncertain by a
+year depending on which reconstruction you accept.
+
+This affects [[lore/sisken]] directly. The 1994 absence is *the meet Sisken did
+not arrive at*, and whether that is 1994 or 1995 depends on the offset. The
+folder uses 1994 throughout because [[lore/index]] does, and that is a
+convention rather than a finding.
+
+## Not arriving
+
+The tradition has no word for attending a meet and a very well developed one for
+failing to. *Not arriving* is a fixed phrase and it is not neutral: it carries
+the sense of an absence that was noticed and not explained.
+
+There is no attendance list, by construction, so the only way anyone knows a
+person did not arrive is that people expected them. That makes the category
+inherently about prominence — an absence is only recorded for someone whose
+presence was assumed — and it is why the tradition remembers exactly one
+non-arrival and cannot name a single person who quietly stopped coming.
+
+Almost certainly most of them did. See [[lore/the-unnamed]].
+
+## The last one
+
+Generally placed shortly after 1997. There is no record of a final meet and no
+announcement, which is consistent with everything else about this group and
+consistent with the meets having simply not been convened one year and then not
+being convened again.
+
+[[lore/after]] covers the attempts to restart them in the mid-2000s, which
+failed for a reason worth reading: the people who came were interested in the
+Loop, and the meets had never been about the Loop. They had been an hour of
+frequency readings in a room, attended by people with a job in common.
+
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