[November 9, 2023]

At the moment I’m in the land of ice and fire with my wife for our honeymoon. We rented a car for the trip and we’ve been making our way along the southern coast. I’m writing this from our guesthouse for the night in southeastern Iceland, which is called “The Potato Storage.”

Yesterday we went on a private guided hike that took us through the first five miles of Fimmvörðuháls (“five cairn pass”), the 14-mile trail in between two glacier tongues which begins at the bottom of Skógafoss. Our guide’s name was Jón. We met him in the parking lot: he was standing by the trailhead with his waterproof jacket zipped all the way up to his chin and even though he was wearing a beanie I knew immediately he was bald.

We set out and I managed to establish some rapport with him early on by telling him how I share his name—my middle name is Jon—and discussing patronymics: Iceland is the only Nordic country to still use them. For instance, Denmark, the heritage of my dad’s side, switched to fixed surnames in 1826. Jón said he knew an Eliasen in Denmark and I said he could be my cousin and he said that is how it goes.

At the end of the hike there was a breathtaking panoramic view of the canyon. It felt like we were surrounded by an infinite number of waterfalls and an endless amount of time. It took me a while to notice that there was a manmade stone column standing on an outcropping on the ridge, about waist-high and a foot squared in cross section. I looked at Jón and I realized he was considering it as well as if he was surprised to see it.

What’s this, I asked him.

He locked eyes with me and for a moment I was scared.

I approached the column. The top bore an inscription in the familiar runic lettering of Icelandic. Jón was at my side. Staring at the writing, he said this is a fragment of the Heimsmyndarljóð.

I was amazed, because in all my researching of the literary history of Iceland I had never come across the word, and I asked him if he could translate it into English for me.

Oh, I don’t think so, he said, smiling, nervous.

It doesn’t have to be perfect, I said, I just want to get the idea.

He said, I know enough English to talk to tourists, but I’m not sure I know enough to translate a poem.

I found this hard to believe. He spoke English so perfectly I forgot he wasn’t a native speaker. I pressed him. I said, just try your best, I’m really curious.

He sighed. It is forbidden, he finally said.

When we got back to the parking lot I asked Jón if he would come have a drink on us—we wanted to stop at a gritty pub we had spotted sitting lonely off the highway. He obliged. When we arrived at the pub around five, the sun was setting in the slow way it does at northern latitudes.

We had a round and then another and we talked about our trip and he told us about growing up in Isafjoerdur. Jón kept making the bartender laugh with whatever he was saying in Icelandic. The bartender was the only other person in the pub and he kept stepping out to smoke and I kept thinking how is he not freezing to death?—we could hear the wind violently rattling the sheet metal roof from inside.

After the fourth round I asked Jón about the stone again. I had no control over it, it just slipped out. Tell us about the stone.

He didn’t react. But then after a moment he started talking about the Icelandic language in a low voice.

(Even though I have been able to count on your discretion in the past, it occurs to me now that you must not share this with any Icelanders you happen to know.)

“The language I speak has not changed since Medieval times, when Icelanders first started to develop their own national identity, and the language split from Old Norse. Our ancestors cleaved it from their ancestors and they named it and they were quite intentional about it: Icelandic. In the consciousness that they were birthing their heritage there with their chisels at the foot of the volcano or the waterfall or the glacier.

“It is very difficult for English speakers to learn, and when our schoolchildren are taught English they are disgusted and horrified by it. It is not uncommon for the poor young ones to vomit in the classroom once the teacher begins explaining the grammar. I myself remember being distinctly nauseous for a whole month of instruction. My parents started speaking English at home to help me learn—I begged them to stop.

“Icelandic is a synthetic language. We are not so analytic like you English-speakers, we do not see why you would want to break things up as you do, to shatter the world. It’s dangerous, I tell you. No, in fact, we are quite aware of the imperative to synthesize, to hold this world together.” He tapped the table forcefully as he said this.

“Our language is pure. We have an official regulator—much like the French—the Icelandic Language Institute. They codify the laws of our grammar and our syntax and our lexicon. We keep our language from becoming so bastardized as English has. You with your, your ‘goblin mode,’ your ‘selfie,’ your ‘😂.’ That nonsense. And the way your appropriate words from the rest of the world? It’s embarrassing. It’s a filthy language.

“For a word to enter our lexicon a rigorous argument must be presented to the Institute, demonstrating its roots in the original Icelandic of our ancestors. We keep the language modern, of course—we do not let the rush of the ages diminish its power. When the marvel of the telephone was invented we exhumed a dead word, sími, which means, literally, ‘long thread.’ When the World Wars were raging we had to come up with a name for the new hulking machines of steel that shot fireballs across the battlefield. We named them skriðdreki, ‘crawling dragon.’ When AIDS was gripping the world in terror we named it eyðni, ‘my destroyer.’

“We revere our language as we do the ancient glacial ice from the bergs that sometimes washes up on the beach. Pure and perfectly transparent. You can look into a chunk and see the aeons of world refracted recursively as if you yourself were the insect in amber. You would scarcely comprehend Shakespeare as it was originally written—our schoolchildren read the Sagas in primary school. Next week, November 16, we celebrate Dagur Íslenskrar Tungu, the holiday celebrating the Icelandic language. Is that funny to you? It’s not funny here. It is incredibly serious.

“Let me tell you something that you must never repeat. When Jules Verne wrote that Snæfellsjökull was the entrance to the center of the world, he was not fucking around. He visited Iceland and somehow learned of the Heimsmyndarljóð, probably some drunk idiot told him about it, and he asked to read it. Well, The Institute, still operating in secret at the time, got involved, and they denied him, of course, citing the same law with which I deterred you. Well. Then he said what if I stay here and study the Icelandic language? Strictly speaking, this also would have been forbidden, but the director of the Institute at the time, Magnus, was a fan of Verne and so he permitted it on the condition that Verne would commit to five years of study. So he did. Five years later, he was permitted to read the Heimsmyndarljóð in the traditional pilgrimage, which circles the country on foot and must be completed within a year, or the pilgrim is supposed to throw himself from Dyrhólaey. Well, Verne, the bastard, completed the pilgrimage and then returned to his home country and published a novel that presented some of the details—but twisted, bastardized, sensationalized. Betraying the stupid and profane manner with which he read the Heimsmyndarljóð. Verne was banned from returning to Iceland and from speaking or writing in the language. There is a rumor here that the Institute placed a curse on him and one night in his old age he uttered some word in Icelandic to convey some dark emotion that has no name in any other language and he promptly suffered the stroke that killed him. This end was foreseen, of course, by our ancestors who created the law, and everyone at the Institute must have known that the simple temporal structure of the French language, with the emphasis always at the place that you arrive, would have prevented him from understanding the nature of time conveyed by the poems.

“In Icelandic, with every utterance, we are placed at the beginning of things. And the language is such that a single word could be itself an entire poem; then, the poets rearrange these words into a chaotic order, and a metaphysical truth flows in an around all the lines of each stanza. This is the well of power from which the Edda and the Heimsmyndarljóð draw—no rhymes, no long flowery sentences, just the bare impression of the world itself, unfiltered by language, and the unity of everything conveyed by alliteration when necessary. All of this is lost in translation, to English or any other language.”

I couldn’t speak. I noticed my heart was beating painfully and I felt that rather than being at sea level we were sitting in the frigid, thin, thunderous air of one of the 14,000-foot peaks back home. I realized my wife was gripping my hand hard under the table.

Jón looked over his shoulder and then sipped his beer. I sat looking at him, dared not look at my wife, dared not sip my beer. We sat this way for several minutes until the bartender stepped out for another smoke break. Jón inhaled, pursed his lips, and, in a hush, began reciting an English translation of the the stone at Fimmvörðuháls. I’ve attempted to transcribe it from my memory here.

Conceived the center have many men,
Foolishly fought the stillness they,
Misty and gaseous a truth,
Of such their village unawares,
That recedes from the search,
Forever distant from subjects
Profane pitiful and eager,
Smaller than the world seers, 
Of their own will skull bound,
By bone and blood moving, 
Worthless, come they towards
Not they become of,
The shade of walls ever receding,
Unto itself backwards endlessly,
Running up the water the falls,
Seeping up whence the ground,
Underneath and throughout all, 
Surrounding and permeating,
Covering and swallowing, 
Sparkling and bestowing,
In the center, there, opens a mouth speaking words wider,
In that un-place where voyaged men have stood never,
For no thing knowledge permits the of a voyager there,
By the sun shade and stream consumed or erased or
Unbegotten, a thing all things which disappears because,
And stills the waters and the sun the voyager vanquished.

(This process requires access to a Mac with the Apple Configurator app and a Thunderbolt-Lightning cable.)

1. This process requires that the iPhone is “supervised.” To make an iPhone supervised, it needs to be factory reset. To ensure no important data is lost, make an iCloud backup, and go through any important apps currently on the phone and ensure any important app data is backed up as well.

2. Connect the iPhone to the Mac with the Thunderbolt-Lighting cable and open the Apple Configurator app on the Mac. Right click on the iPhone in the Apple Configurator and select “Prepare.”

   1. In the Prepare dialogue, leave “Prepare with” as “Manual configuration,” and make sure “Supervise this device” is selected. Click next.

   2. In the “Enroll in MDM Server” screen, do not change anything and click next.

   3. In the “Sign in to the Device Enrollment Program” screen, click skip.

   4. In the “Create an Organization” screen, enter your name and click next. Select “Generate a new supervision entity” and click next.

   5. In the “Configure iOS Setup Assistant” screen, select “Show all steps” from the dropdown. Click “Prepare.” You will be prompted to enter the password for the Mac, and then warned that the iPhone will be erased. Click “Erase.”

   6. Once the iPhone reboots, it is in supervised mode. Do not restore the iPhone from the iCloud backup when prompted, otherwise the iPhone will revert to unsupervised mode.

3. Install any critically important apps, such as 2FA apps, on the iPhone. Remove any unnecessary apps that are installed by default.

4. In the Apple Configurator app, click “File,” then “New Profile.” In the profile editor window that appears, in the dropdown under “Security,” select “Never.”

   1. Click on “Restrictions” in the sidebar. Uncheck “Allow installing apps.”

   2. Uncheck “Allow use of Safari.”

   3. (Optional) Uncheck “Allow use of camera.”

   4. Save the profile (command + S) and close the profile editor.

5. Right click on the iPhone in the Apple Configurator, click “Add,” then “Profiles,” and select the profile you just created.

6. Disconnect the iPhone from the Mac. It is now impossible to install apps or browse the internet on the iPhone.

   Save yourself, save your friends

   Share

I first learned of the existence of the secret through a book I read in my twenties. The book did not reveal the secret, but it revealed that its author had somehow found a way to live free of the rules by which the rest of us are all oppressively governed.

I sought out others who knew the secret. It was not easy. The Keepers of the Secret did not advertise themselves as such. All they did was quietly release into the world works which revealed, to the person who was paying attention, a sense of that same freedom, as if they were obscurely saying “Ah, so you’ve found me. Well done. Now you know: it is possible to be free.” This message would be communicated always as a sort of subtext, as of course the work would never be explicitly about the secret, for that would be first of all be too dangerous, and secondly would fail to ever capture the attention of those like me who sought the secret. There were those who pretended to be Keepers of the Secret, and who even called themselves Keepers, but who communicated no possession of transcendental freedom or sacred insight. In fact, those who most obviously suggested that they possessed the secret were the most likely to be distractions to the seeker—they only served to waste your time. And they could do it quite effectively. They were so effective at distracting me from the search that I wonder now whether they were actually enemies of the secret, seeking through their evil works to extinguish its knowledge forever.

As I grew older, I became better at identifying Keepers. The trouble was that they were all long dead. I had no hope of communicating with them in the present and either attempting to pry the secret from them directly or persuading them into accepting me into whatever organization allowed its knowing. In almost every case, the Keepers who I was able to identify were not only dead themselves but their children were all dead as well, and so I could not even hope to connect with a next of kin who may have gained the secret by inheritance; in the cases where there were surviving progeny, they had no wish to be contacted. Still, I persisted in my studies. I studied for years, consuming whatever works of the Keepers I could get my hands on, trying to understand the subtle techniques by which the Keepers eluded the laws which had been drilled into my head from an early age,1 shaping my understanding of how life must be lived, not realizing that technique in fact had nothing to do with it, that technique was merely the personal touch by which any individual Keeper would communicate the secret. It’s not an easy secret to share, which is perhaps why it is kept secret so successfully, even though—as I realized later—every last one of the works of the Keepers which I studied and which mystified me so greatly were in fact attempts to communicate it. The problem is that the precise nature of the secret is vastly different to every individual person who knows it (knowing this as I do now, it makes sense why there could be no organization of Keepers—only individuals, who at most can make obscure references to each other in their works). Only its surface can be transmitted from one person to another, and none of its vague and murky depths. But if you chart enough of its surface through communication with many different Keepers, you begin to gain a sense of the thing which lurks underneath. And once you have a sense of the secret’s truth, it becomes impossible not to live it.

One day it occurred to me that maybe I could infiltrate their ranks and learn the secret if I simply began to act as if I too was free of any rules, as if I was ungoverned, unrestricted. What I discovered instead was that that had been the secret all along.

A hapax legomenon (Greek for “said once”) is a word that is used only once in a corpus. It is something that presents a particular challenge for the translation of ancient languages, because the meaning of a word is often deciphered by seeing how it is used in different contexts.

If you take as your corpus an individual work of sufficient length, due to consequences of Zipf’s Law, hapax legomena are quite common: 40%-60% of words used will be unique. But what happens when you broaden the corpus? And I mean broaden it way out: what are the things written only once in the English language? Paradoxically, when you increase the corpus to that size, the percentage of words which are hapaxes drops to 0%.

There are listed on Wikipedia what are supposed to be examples of hapaxes across the entire English language—that is, words which have only been written once in all of written English—however, by being listed (and therefore written) on English Wikipedia they lose their status as hapaxes. It’s also worth pointing out that a word only recorded to have ever been written once can’t really be called a word in the English language. English-wide hapaxes are really more like jokes than true unique linguistic jewels. A word can only earn its status as an official word presumably after a certain amount of colloquial usage without having the status of an official word, meaning that true hapax legomena can never exist in English, unless we allow that any made-up word written is indeed an English word, but of course that wouldn’t be consistible. But in other languages like German and Icelandic, the construction of new compound words is an official built-in feature of the language; there likely are entirely legitimate words that have only ever been written once in the entirety of all written Icelandic.

But we could broaden our concept of hapax legomena to include not just individual words but “things written” in general, meaning any unique sequence of words in a given context could be called a hapax. Now they are certain to exist, even in a context as broad as the entirety of written English. Any written work of a certain length—a novel, for instance—is a hapax: it would in its entirety represent an English construction not replicated in any context other than its own… until someone writes a postmodern novel that includes the complete text of Moby-Dick within it, or unless you consider a physical location like a library or a bookstore a context, and then there are countless instances of the text of any even modestly popular novel appearing in its entirety… There is still the possibility of a forgotten novel, only one copy of which remains, and which was never digitally transcribed: such a novel would be a true hapax.

Maybe what’s most interesting though is the minimum complexity hapax in any given context. What’s the shortest sequence of official English words that has only ever been written a single time?

You could also consider oudépote legomenon: something never written. This is easy enough to imagine. What could be the shortest, syntactically valid sequence of official English words which has never been written? Or individual words—is there a word out there exchanged only as yet verbally, ontologically burgeoning, waiting for the moment when it will finally be officialized in its first text? Some middle-school age slang, perhaps, but then again maybe not, as increasingly such words are birthed in writing online as much as or more than they are verbally.

Of course, as soon as an oudépote legomenon is written, it changes from oudépote to hapax. But we could still conceive of specific examples of these. You cold hold specific examples in your mind and say them out loud without demoting their status. But what about a different thing: a thing never conceived? Of course there are things that have never been conceived, it’s very easy to conceive of such a thing. But as soon as a thing never conceived is conceived it is no longer a thing never conceived. So though there are undoubtedly infinitely many things never conceived, there are no examples of one, and there never will be.

Below is the unedited transcript of a conversation which occurred over iMessage between myself and my brother on September 29, 2025.

This post, including this introductory text and the footnotes, is a poem. Please do not mistake it for an experimental work of prose, or a petulant attempt at demonstrating my correctness and superior thinking, or for anything else besides a poem. It is complemented by a mirror work by my brother, which I encourage you to read instead of mine, as he is without a doubt the superior poet.

Carson Eliasen:

(Sends a picture of a page from a book, which has the below text:)

Jason Whitmarsh

History of Not Bird

Members of the Antibirder Society seek to see as few bird species as possible over the course of their lives, while also agreeing to faithfully record any sighting they do have. As part of their charter, they insist on extensive research and study of all types of birds, even the Olive-Sided Flycatcher and Brown Creeper, so as to accurately identify the birds they do unfortunately happen to see, with the result that any new bird species could be marked as a point against.

The Executive Director of the Antibirders (seven points against) has managed, as his greatest feat, to never have seen an American Crow, though he has spent years poring over its details: the flat wings, the fanned tail, the common call cawww. He had several near misses in his early thirties, though all, thankfully, were in fact merely the Northwestern Crow, a smaller and more coastal crow, a crow he has been seeing since he was a child, one of the seven points against, and nearly indistinguishable from the American Crow to almost all ornithologists, though not, thankfully, to him, having ascertained that the ones he saw really were quite a bit smaller and quite a bit more coastal.

Another poem that I think you’d like

Reminds me of your stuff, if a tad sillier

Dawson Eliasen:

This is great but I have to insist that it is not a poem

Carson Eliasen:

why not

The High Ranking Members & Curators of 32 Poems (tm) seems to believe it is a poem

Dawson Eliasen:

What makes it a poem?1 It doesn’t have lines or meter or structure or anything that would make it a poem

Carson Eliasen:

It’s free verse? 🗿

But, in all seriousness, the definition of poetry is actually of hot debate. There’s two definitions in which I hold close to mind:

1. Prose is words in their best order, where poetry is the best words in their best order. (forgot my source lol)

2. Any words viewed within the context of poetry is a poem.2 This is an attitude adapted from the more visual/sculptural side of the art world, but i forgot the movement as well lol.

History of Not Bird could be viewed as prose, sure. But there’s nothing saying that it’s not a strangely formatted poem, right?

Dawson Eliasen

Yeah I know it’s a hot debate and I encounter this sort of thing all the time. I just read a novel about a fictional poetry movement in Mexico and the founder’s “poems” were actually pictographic. No text at all. I’ll send a link to one.

Of course it all depends on your definition of poetry. I just think that if you don’t keep your definition to something like, “words arranged in verse/lines/some sort of structure,” then the concept begins to lose any meaning.

Your definition number 1 makes it sound like poetry is just better than prose. I don’t see why “best words in best order” couldn’t apply to prose. The intuitive difference between poetry and prose has more to do with structure than word choice.

I’ve also heard a definition along the lines of, “poetry is writing meant to be read aloud,” which I am fond of but doesn’t really encapsulate the whole picture.

The idea of “prose poems” is already borderline and I think you could just as reasonably define them as “prose written in a way that gives the feeling of a poem” as you could “poetry that eschews much of the conventional strictures of the form”. ie they’re *called* prose poems but I’m not convinced they actually *are* poems.

It’s certainly a spectrum going from normal prose -> artistic prose -> prose poems -> free verse -> normal poems -> sonnets and stuff. I think the line is between prose poems and free verse.3 You can argue that the line could include prose poems or exclude free verse but I don’t think you can argue very far outside that.

Something can also be poetic without being a poem. I think this is a much more reasonable usage than saying something *is* a poem just because it is poetic or viewed in the context of poetry. Literally anything could be a poem if you start to think of it that way, that’s when the word “poem” has no meaning and then it’s like what’s the point. So I firmly believe in the separation between things that are poetic and things that are poems. I also just think that you can’t just say that something is a poem and it becomes a poem lol. Words have meaning.4 If it’s prose it’s prose, you don’t have metaphysical control of these concepts as the artist. You just look wacky when you misname it.5

Carson Eliasen:

I understand the desire to form some sort of rigid boundary around poetry.6 The line in which something definitively is a poem on one side and is definitively not a poem of the other. But, I just don’t think it can be done. The spirit of poetry, at least recently, is about blurring that line.7

As far as definition one is concerned, I agree it feels elitist. But I think what it’s getting at is this sense of scarcity and maybe even nonsensicality. Like, a poem can more easily break grammatical rules. I could write a poem that is something like “Turtle Box Catapult”, if I thought those were the best words in their best order, but if I wrote prose like that it would come under harsher scrutiny.8

I staunchly disagree with “poetry is meant to be read aloud.”9 There are many examples of poems that are meant to be read, visually inspected. Maybe even impossible to read aloud. To your point, though, it’s hinting at some sort of structure or rules that are placed on the piece.

This is where definition 2 comes in. You would approach History of Not Bird with a different attitude if I called it a short story rather than a poem. Your filter as a reader is important to prime. Context is critical to how you digest art. Forcing these complexities into a linear spectrum is not apt, imo. It’s more of a Venn diagram, and prose poems live in between.

The problem with saying that you can’t just label something poetry is that there are many people that believe this to be true. It’s kind of like saying God isn’t real. You can believe that, but that’s not the Truth. Vice versa, too.10

If I were to propose a new definition, I guess it would include something about the sensory experience of the writing. Is it structured in a visually provoking way? Is it intriguing to listen to? Can you smell perfume on the paper it was written on?

Dawson Eliasen:

I’m going to publish this conversation as a poem

Carson Eliasen:

And I think it’d be a hit11

I’ve found myself in an usually long gap between posts. Rest assured that I am still writing. In this interval, however, I’d like to share the post from the 1-year anniversary of Orbis Tertius. It’s now been over three years since this publication began, but I still hold the sentiment from this post close to my heart. Since this post was originally shared, I have downsized my collection of coffeemakers, moved from Colorado to Washington, and celebrated two anniversaries with my wife; Orbis Tertius has tripled in size. It has been interesting for me to revisit some of the more recent posts and evaluate them against the the nebulous goals outlined here.

I have decided to re-enable likes and comments after more than a year of digital asceticism. I feel purified and long for your thoughts. Remember that you can always share them with me privately by replying to any of these emails.

As always, thank you for reading. Your attention means the world to me.

How do you feel? Do you feel a little annoyed? Like maybe you have better things to do? Do you feel a little put out, like you have an unpleasant task ahead of you? Do you sort of sigh in your mind when you receive these emails? Or do you possibly even delete them without really thinking about it? Do you maybe feel nothing at all?

Do not let me further diffuse your attention: devour these words or destroy them. In general, I think we should all be raising the thresholds by which we govern what is allowed to impinge on our attention. It is with that in mind that I cordially invite you to unsubscribe.

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If you unsubscribe, I promise you will be rewarded with a feeling of freedom and lightness. Your mouth will be filled with the taste of strawberries. You will join a community of people over eight billion strong, and you will be more interesting to your friends and family and lovers. When you wake up tomorrow and you have that first introspective moment of consciousness you will find yourself much further along the path to enlightenment.

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What you are engaging in now is just a distraction. You have any number of things going on that are more important than whatever is going on here—and I mean forget this, forget me—you have any number of things happening that are more important and more immediate than whatever is happening on Substack, whatever is happening on the Internet. Your wife is mad at you, your kid is struggling to learn algebra (and you can’t remember the Substitution Method), your dog is getting old and will soon die. There is so much going on inside your head, so much turmoil, and strife, and love and loss, and stress and grief and struggle, and mundane knots as well; your desk chair is uncomfortable, your fridge needs the water filter replaced, your clothes are wearing out from washing and drying them so many times (and you no longer even know where you would buy yourself new clothes), you don’t very much like your boss, and driving to work every day makes you a little nauseous, and you haven’t found any good new music to listen to in a while, and your enjoyment of music in general seems to have slowly waned over the decades to an apathetic nadir. So why would you want anything else? Why would you want to invite anything else to think about into your head, anything meaningful and grand and challenging, let alone whatever is going on here? Who am I to impose some cute little blog post on you?

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Who am I? I’m certainly not an expert on any of the subjects I discuss here, in fact I have no relevant formal training at all, and definitely none in writing. In real life, I work at a little consultancy, and I spend my days writing code, training statistical models, and looking at graphs. I spend most of the rest of my time with the lovely woman who, on Friday night, became my wife, and our dog; or working on projects like this publication or any number of frivolous software projects. I have a weird obsession with craft coffee—I own at least seven different coffee-making apparatuses (in order of most frequently used: V60, Moccamaster, Chemex, Hario Switch, Aeropress, Moka Pot, Stagg pourover).1 I type in Dvorak. I’m left handed. I live in Colorado, back in the town where I grew up, however on the opposite side; right up against the slopes of the Rocky Mountains, minutes away from cliffs and canyons and streams and trails and evergreen trees.

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My interests as an adult have been significantly influenced by my exploration of mindfulness and meditation, which began in my freshman or sophomore year of college. The thing that first got me interested in mindfulness was Leonard Mlodinow’s book Elastic. The argument was, if I recall, basically: don’t you want to actually be there when you tell your partner you love them? Okay so then how do we go about this? It turns out, when you take a look, it’s not as easy as you’d like it to be.

From there, Sam Harris’s podcast took me much deeper into the practice and philosophy of mindfulness. Meanwhile I was also exposed to David Foster Wallace (via Jordan Ellenberg’s How Not to Be Wrong, which makes a passing reference to him as an author that often includes references to mathematical concepts—I thought: now here’s some fiction I could get into), most importantly the famous “This is Water” speech and Infinite Jest—I think I read that book at the ideal time in my life. I was about 21 and it was as if it was the first book I ever read. DFW resonated with me powerfully, and I received his writing as a powerful elucidation of what mindfulness is, not to mention a realization of what fiction could be.

So it was that I began to observe a transition within myself from an interest in science, technology, and engineering to an interest in literature, philosophy, and art; this is the force that drives this publication.

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A lot of people, in their anniversary posts, reflect on and make goals for their numbers: how many subscribers they have gained, and how many they hope to gain. That sort of thing. I have only one goal for Orbis Tertius: to write stuff that is absolutely unhinged. To write stuff that makes you think What the fuck. Why would you write this?

When I began, I imagined I would exist in the rationalist sphere. I am embarrassed by this. The past year has basically been an effort to crawl out of this box I built for myself. I have been continuously re-applying the rules of rationalism and trying to write from within them, and only enjoying myself when I managed to break them, and, unsurprisingly, getting frustrated. I’ve realized (if I’m being honest, I have always known) that I have absolutely no interest in trying to write from within the rationalist sphere, or any sphere at all,2 and that good writing—good anything, in fact—comes from doing things that are weird, things that no one else would ever even think to do, things that might even be repellent to imagine doing if you’re anybody else. The dancer and choreographer Martha Graham said it best:

There is a vitality, a life-force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to decide how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

It is basically no business of mine what is good, or if anything I do is good, or what sorts of things I should do. You can’t create something good, you can only create. You can only keep the channel open, and then it’s all aesthetics; aesthetic is everything, and the only difference between what we recognize as success and what we recognize as failure is that success is what we call it when an aesthetic finds the eyes meant to behold it, and, importantly, that those eyes are many.

I’ve never been interested in anything beholden to legions of eyes, whether it’s Marvel movies, genre fiction, popular music, or Starbucks coffee. This is why I named this publication after a fictional secret society. I hope Orbis Tertius remains a relatively tiny, intimate, secretive organization—yes, I’d like it to grow, but if it becomes very large, it means I’ve deadened my vitality. This is the point of Sam Kriss’s antagonism. This is the point of the avant-garde. People think that the point of the avant-garde is to experiment, so that the boundaries of an art can be pushed out, and that the unapproachability of avant-garde stuff is a societal barrier that we must overcome to unlock new horizons of creativity. This is incorrect. The point of the avant-garde is to intentionally create something unapproachable, so that the only people who dare approach are those who look at it and say Ah, yes. Of course.

If you say that you don’t like avant-garde stuff, I contend that must only mean that you haven’t found the avant-garde writer, director, or painter who happens to take as their raw material the very mechanisms of your soul. I can’t blame you, really, because the odds are that that person has almost no audience. That person is probably an old man in rural Cambodia who whittles tiny horrific figures out of wood and immediately casts them into the bonfire upon chipping the last splinter and gazing into the visage of the deity from his dreams—the primordial will that reaches so deeply into the material of his soul as to preclude its existence, just for a moment. Figures which, if you happened to see them reflected in his eye as he momentarily bore the gestalt, lit by the flames, would fill you with spiritual torment; for you too would see the deity of your dreams, and you would never be the same.

Of course, all of this is a superficial description of the layer on top of the actual phenomenon, that is, the actual creation of things. There is a huge distance between avant-garde stuff and pop stuff, and it’s not always better to be on the left side of that spectrum. But I don’t think most artists even think of it this way. The artist doesn’t create for any audience in particular or for any particular type of person and certainly not you. They only create because they must, because they are so in touch which that vitality that they can’t not. They have that divine dissatisfaction. All art is very much a selfish thing, of that you can be absolutely certain, and yet there is something happening there, something which, from a wider perspective, is very much selfless.

This is not to say that what I’m been doing here has ever been art. This is to say that art is what I would like to do here, eventually.

In the past year I have adhered without fault to a schedule of publishing every other Sunday night at 8:00 PM Mountain Time, including Christmas Day—22 essays, 3 stories, and 1 recipe. While I would like to keep publishing at a generally biweekly pace, I may begin to relax this schedule. I may begin to experiment with brewing formulae that require months or even years long fermentations, so that a good heady funk can develop, and my emails will hit you with the same taste of vinegar and probiotic benefit that comes with a sip of Kombucha.

In return I ask nothing. You are my bonfire; I cast these horrifying figures upon you mostly so that I may be rid of them.

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I’m convinced that we are less of a participant in our own creative processes than we’d like to think we are. We’d like to think that we are the sole progenitor of our works; their proximate cause, their author, the hand by which they are formed. That we have created something from nothing. But this is not so.

By “we” I mean our conscious minds: what you think of as “yourself”: the part of you that is understanding these words, that has free will, if free will exists, and that knows the experience of creating something. But this aspect of yourself is not the sole or even the principal progenitor of things you create. Creativity is, for the most part, something that happens in the unconscious mind—that part of your mind of which you are not aware, which regulates your bodily functions and assimilates a day’s experience while you sleep and authors your dreams too and overall constitutes 95% of your brain function. What we think of as creative work—for instance, sitting down at your desk to write—isn’t creative work at all (how often do you feel creative in those moments?), but instead merely a tribulation to which you must subject yourself in order to prime the unconscious mind to do the actual creative work. The point of the sitting-down-to-create time is not to actually create, but to concentrate on the thing to be created, primordial as it may be, and struggle with the task of creating it.

Because it turns out that struggling is all you can really do. Struggle for an hour and concentrate on whatever it is that exists of your project, even if it is just a vague idea or a fleeting image. That is the totality of your role in the creative process. To feel that horrible feeling in your stomach. That and then to later capture whatever the unconscious mind produces. (It doesn’t entirely matter whether what the unconscious produces is good or bad, whether it is absolute genius or something functionally necessary or utterly appalling slop. Either way you capture it and you give your attention and consideration to it as it exists with the rest of the project. This consideration is an important part of the priming that the unconscious requires to do its work). Because it will produce something, so long as you have primed it sufficiently. And all you have to do to prime it sufficiently is subject yourself to that struggle sincerely for a period of the day. An hour daily is sufficient, in my experience, but more certainly won’t hurt. Well it will hurt but what I mean is it will also help.

What you’re going for is mental saturation with the thing you’re working on. You’ll know that you are in a healthy conversation with your unconscious mind when the subject of your work is asserting itself in your awareness constantly—you’re saturated with consideration for this vague idea or fleeting image. The unconscious mind is bathed in that idea or image and it processes it the same way it processes all of the other things that are happening to you and attempts to make sense of the world. And then, by some miracle, if given the proper space, the unconscious mind will do the actual creative work. The fruits of this labor will be given to you—the conscious mind—in moments when you are not giving your particular attention to anything. How many times has your creative work taken a leap forward while you were in the shower? While you were driving? On a walk? Countless artists and intellectuals have expressed the importance of mundane routines such as these for their creative processes. I myself have noticed that my essays seem to only really get written when I am away from my keyboard, in particular when I am forced to be in the car for an hour or more. I will find myself forming sentences and rearranging them in my head while my attention is occupied with little else. Then, the next time I sit down at my desk, I capture that progress my unconscious mind made while I was bored, solidifying it all in the real world. This takes about fifteen minutes. Then I am left to struggle at the page with that horrible feeling in my stomach for another forty-five minutes before I allow myself to move on with my day.

If this sounds like bad news, it’s not. It’s actually good news. Here’s the good news: you can relax. If you’re sitting down every day to struggle with your creative work, that’s enough. You don’t need to feel bad because you only managed to write one sentence today or you ended up throwing away whatever it was you were working on. If you’re showing up and sincerely giving your attention to the work, you’re doing your part in the creative process.

Well, I guess the struggling is not the actual totality of your role in the creative process. There are at least two other things. The first thing is ensuring that the unconscious mind has the space to do the creative work: boredom is the key to creativity, and with each measure we take to eliminate boredom we are harming our creativity as well. What do the routines which seem to permit advances in creative projects have in common?—a drive, a shower, a walk?—they are all a little bit boring, and they are some of the last situations a person regularly experiences in which they aren’t likely to have access to free, instant, and infinite entertainment. If you’re never bored, you’ll never create anything, certainly never any art. Part of the creative process is your shower, your morning commute, your afternoon walk, and whatever else it is you do during the day where your mind is allowed to wander. You need to protect those moments and, if possible, establish more of them. As many as you can.

One of the amazing things about regularly engaging with a creative process is that it tends to bleed into the rest of your life. You may begin to find that previously uninteresting things are potentially interesting as a fixture or background in whatever it is you are working on, or maybe just as an infinitesimal context that never makes it into the work in any way, but still informs it somehow; you may take an extra second to concentrate on the colors of the buildings you can see from where you’re eating lunch or the specific feeling associated with being in the waiting room at the doctor’s office, because your conscious mind is in conversation with your creative, unconscious mind, and you have learned that consciously noticing these mundane things gives more creative raw material to the unconscious mind. The other thing you will notice is that your consideration of works of art shifts, especially in your own medium but actually across all varieties too. It becomes more intricate, more hands-on; you change from simple enjoyment to sincere appreciation; it may tend to move you more deeply. And this is the other part of your role in the creative process: to notice these things—both the marvelous and the mundane.

In this pull from the Archives, I’m re-sharing one of my favorites—at the very least, it’s certainly the most work I’ve ever put into an essay, and it encapsulates much of what I am interested in, and much of what Orbis Tertius is about. It’s long enough that it might not display properly in your e-mail, so you might prefer to read it in a browser.

Thank you for reading. Your attention means the world to me.

[October 15, 2023]

Exordium: a text born out of death

I’ve been reading Cormac McCarthy’s final work, which consists of the sibling novels The Passenger and Stella Maris. They were published only six months before the writer’s death, and so it is a work of his that is particularly interesting to me. What happens to you when you begin to realize I’m about to fucking die?1 What becomes important? What ideas drove Cormac McCarthy to finish two more novels, when he’s already written a few of the greatest American novels of all time?

The books are cosmic, terrifying, and beautiful.2 They feel like a sweeping exploration of nothing less than humanity itself; from our ancient dreams to the frontiers of our discovery, from the agony of love and friendship to the turmoil and insanity of an individual’s inner experience. They ring with echoes of Schopenhauer. They are dripping with morbidity, and cloaked in fear.

They follow Bobby and Alicia Western, whose father worked on the development of the atomic bomb. Much of it is the characters discussing science, math, and philosophy. The Passenger follows Bobby as he travels and encounters old friends, discussing life, belief, death, and fear; and Alicia as she holds discussions with the hallucination which haunts her, “The Kid,” a fast-talking, bald, and generally wretched dwarf with flippers instead of hands, who is constantly spewing urgent philosophical/scientific-sounding nonsense3 that seems as if it is almost getting at something true and important, and might be the entire point of the book. Stella Maris consists entirely of dialogue between Alicia—who, though insane, is a veritable math genius—and her psychiatrist, who struggles to understand Alicia’s exploration of esoteric mathematical truths.

Throughout, the books are fixated on death. The title of The Passenger is never fully elucidated but is suggestive of the passage into death, or the unequivocal transience of life. There is repeatedly the suggestion of a longing for death—Bobby gives up an academic career for racecar driving, and after that earns him a brush with death he transitions to salvage diving even though he is terrified of the depths. Alicia waxes romantically about “never having been” to her psychiatrist before she kills herself.

Part 1: reality can’t be grasped

Many of the questions explored in these novels echo Cormac McCarthy’s only published work of nonfiction, written during his time at the Sante Fe Institute. “The Kekulé Problem” is an essay about the unconscious mind and language; how powerful the unconscious mind is, and how bewildering and obscure it is, and why it must be non-linguistic, dramatic, and mystical. I find it oddly compelling that this is the only essay he ever published, as if this question consumed him so severely that he couldn’t help not writing it.

He names the problem of the non-linguistic unconscious after August Kekulé, the pioneering chemist who is famous for discovering the structure of the benzene molecule by way of a dream in which he sees the ouroboros—the ancient alchemical symbol of the snake eating its tail. The problem is: why was the solution revealed to Kekulé through arcane symbolism in a strange dream? Why couldn’t his unconscious have simply told him what the structure of the molecule was?

To further motivate the Kekulé Problem, consider how language processing happens unconsciously. For instance, reading happens automatically and effortlessly. You cannot help but comprehend these words. You cannot see the word “chair” and not immediately obtain the concept of a chair. And when you speak or write, you are manifesting language, harnessing your thoughts, but the workings of that process are completely unavailable to you.4 You cannot explain how you convert the thought into language, because you are completely unaware of this process. How does it occur? You might misspeak, mispronounce something or fail to recall a word, or you might not communicate what you’re thinking so perfectly. But the mechanisms of these failures will also be a mystery to you. 

Language feels automatic and fundamental, but there is this mystery lurking beneath it, one that also implicates all problem solving and creativity. “The core question is not how you do math but how does the unconscious do it,” says Alicia Western.5 This is the Kekulé Problem. McCarthy’s essay is short and easy to read, but I’ll summarize it here for our purposes. He explains the non-linguistic unconscious by first acknowledging that humans come from a protozoic lineage.6 Our minds were non-linguistic, but still complex and still effective for a very, very long time. The unconscious mind is powerful but non-linguistic, and at odds with the conscious mind,7 simply because it is much older.8

From there he moves to the nature and origins of language. He explains “the central idea of language”:

that one thing can be another thing. It is the idea that Helen Keller suddenly understood at the well. That the sign for water was not simply what you did to get a glass of water. It was the glass of water. It was in fact the water in the glass.

I am reminded of two works of fiction which play with the relationship between words, concepts, and objects. The first is Don DeLillo’s White Noise, which revolves around a drug, Dylar, which has the fantastic function of curing the fear of death and the unfortunate side effect of hindering your ability to separate words from the things they represent—an abuser of the drug hears the words “hail of bullets” and ducks for cover in terror.9

Then there is, of course, Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” The story describes the meta-fictional world of Tlön, created by a generations-old secret society called Orbis Tertius. On Tlön, subjective idealism is true, meaning that subjective consciousness is the only thing that is actually real, and objective reality is a mere fabrication of the mind. As a result, concrete objects and their associated abstract ideas are inextricably metaphysically linked. Imperfect copies of objects can be created by simply thinking about them—such objects are called hrönir. Valuable and archaeologically significant objects can even be wished into existence on Tlön—these objects are called ur. Objects will also vanish if they are forgotten.10 The story takes what McCarthy says is the central idea of language to the extreme—there is no distinction between words and the things they represent, no distinction between concepts and objects.

In “The Kekulé Problem,” Cormac McCarthy arrives at what he is sure is the origin of language, something akin to the arrival of the monolith in 2001:

That some unknown thinker sat up one night in his cave and said: Wow. One thing can be another thing.

It goes without saying that this was an important event in human history.11

The simple understanding that one thing can be another thing is at the root of all things of our doing. From using colored pebbles for the trading of goats to art and language and on to using symbolic marks to represent pieces of the world too small to see.

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Werner Heisenberg was also obsessed with the Kekulé Problem. Or a generalization of it: “How does language both enable and interfere with our grasp of reality?” is the way the problem is framed in an essay by William Eggington titled “Quantum Poetics” that juxtaposes writings of Heisenberg and our friend Borges.

Heisenberg was thinking about the difference between the way scientists use language and the way poets use language. While scientists are constantly wrangling language into something objective and static, throttling its fluidity, so that meaning is perfectly concrete, poets are constantly playing with language, letting it flourish, taking advantage of its fluidity.

What is sacrificed in “static” description is that infinitely complex association among words and concepts without which we would lack any sense at all that we have understood anything of the infinite abundance of reality.12

Heisenberg realized the same thing as McCarthy: that the power of language lies not in its meaning per se, but in its fluidity of meaning. The way it liquifies reality. We can harness phenomena by naming them, and we can bring things into existence by merely describing them. These things are called ur. I mean theorems.

Heisenberg did a similar thought experiment to that of Borges’s story “Funes the Memorious,” which is about a man with perfect perception and memory. (Alicia Western also has some Memorious qualities.13) So complete and raw was his perception that he refused to identify a dog viewed at one moment in time with the same dog viewed at another moment in time. Similarly, Heisenberg wondered what it would mean to perceive perfectly, and this is how he arrived at the famous Uncertainty Principle.

Perhaps more importantly, as a consequence of the Uncertainty Principle, Heisenberg concluded that “a complete and exact depiction of reality can never be achieved.” A few years later Gödel would prove the incompleteness of mathematics, cementing Heisenberg’s realization.

But now we’ve generalized again. We’re talking about something broader than how language modulates our grasp of reality—we’re talking about whether reality is something you can grasp. The Passenger happens to agree with Heisenberg:

She knew that in the end you really cant know. You cant get hold of the world. You can only draw a picture. Whether it’s a bull on the wall of a cave or a partial differential equation it’s all the same thing.

You can’t get hold of the world: this, I feel, is one of the main things McCarthy wanted us to take away from his final work.

Part 2: the symbol of Kekulé’s dream

And yet humanity has been trying to get hold of the world since the invention of language. Such was the effort Kekulé was undertaking when he dreamed the ouroboros, and the ouroboros itself is an indication of this effort, speaking to us across millennia. It appears as early as the 14th century BC, in the Ancient Egyptian Enigmatic Book of the Netherworld, a yet-undeciphered text buried with Tutankhamun (“King Tut”), presumably meant to aid his transition into immortality. In Ancient Egypt, the ouroboros represented death, the beginning and end of time, and the formless disorder of the world. The ouroboros also features prominently in Norse mythology, most notably as Jörmungandr, the undersea serpent which encircles the world holding its tail in its mouth. The myth states that when he releases his tail, Ragnarök will begin: the battle that will end the world and submerge it underwater, from which depths it will begin anew.

The ouroboros appears in association with Gnosticism—a broad group of loosely cohered religious sects that stemmed from Christianity and Judaism in the early common era—in texts like the Pistis Sophia (circa 4th century AD), where it could be said to represent the belief that “the so-called ‘dualism’ of the divine and the earthly is really a reflection and expression of the defining tension that constitutes the being of humanity—the human being” (IEP). Gnostic cosmology holds the entire physical universe as inherently evil, created by a malevolent demiurge or lesser god. A similar cosmology is suggested in The Passenger and Stella Maris;14 there are frequent references to the horror and evil of the material world, and Alicia Western has a vision of a being she calls the “Archatron,” which could be interpreted as the Gnostic demiurge.

Gnosticism revolves around a disdain for the material world and a belief in salvation through mysticism and esoteric insight. As a world lacking material reality, Tlön would be something close to the Gnostic conception of heaven, and Orbis Tertius, the secret society which created the world of Tlön, is described as being concerned with “the cabala,” which in context could be interpreted as Gnostic study. It is also said to be concerned with “hermetic studies”—Hermeticism is a religion related to Gnosticism and also associated with the ouroboros, based on writings (circa as early as 3rd century BC) attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, a deity which is the amalgamation of the Greek god Hermes (the guide of souls into the afterlife) and the Egyptian god Thoth (god of wisdom, writing, science, and magic).

Hermeticism is in turn closely associated with the ancient art of alchemy, one of humanity’s earliest systematic efforts to get hold of the world. Alchemy is the subject most closely associated with the ouroboros, where it represents “the unity of all things, material and spiritual, which never disappear but perpetually change form in an eternal cycle of destruction and recreation” (Britannica). The ouroboros is depicted in ancient texts like the Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra the Alchemist (circa 3rd century AD), along with the words “all is one.” Later it would be depicted in manuscripts such as the colorful Aurora Consurgens (15th century AD), where it is a visual metaphor for the cosmic principle of unity. 

For the alchemists, the ouroboros symbolized their view of reality as something unified and fluid. They imposed this view on the minutiae of substance, and this is what gave them the belief that lead could be turned into gold. As it turns out, the alchemists weren’t that far off in their understanding of the material world; substances really are quite transmutable—after all, this is what chemistry is all about. Kekulé himself was an alchemist. I mean a chemist. And what the alchemists failed to understand was only that the transmutability of the material world is limited, as substances are divided into 118 untransmutable elements. 

Well. Mostly untransmutable. Stars transmute hydrogen into helium and helium into the rest of the periodic table through iron and beyond. And here’s another alchemical formula, one that was known to Heisenberg and the Westerns: combine some uranium-235, a burst of energy, and a medium-sized city; you get some barium, some krypton, and a plane of glass death.

The alchemists were influenced by Democritus, the pre-socratic philosopher who named the atom in the 4th century BC, and conceived of matter—indeed, the material world—as something which is never created nor destroyed, but perpetually in motion, changing form, over 2,000 years before the first atom bomb transmuted the sand in the desert. Some of the earliest alchemical writings, the Physika Kai Mystika, are pseudepigrapha attributed to Democritus. Democritus was probably influenced by Heraclitus, who conceived of the world and matter as something that is constantly in flux15 in the 5th century BC. What survives of his philosophy resembles the Zen Koans.

All things come into being by conflict of opposites, and the sum of things flows like a stream.

Heraclitus was nicknamed “The Obscure,” and mocked even by his contemporaries for believing it was possible for two contradictory things to be true simultaneously. An affront to logic for thousands of years, but something science has had to confront ever since Schrödinger named his cat.

Part 3: all nouns are verbs

One of the greatest philosophers of our time, Michael Stevens, asks: Do Chairs Exist?

Of course chairs exist. A chair is an object composed of atoms. But, which atoms? If I removed individual atoms from a chair in sequence, at what point would it stop being a chair? Even harder, at what point would it stop being the same chair that we started with?

And what are you? You are something made out of atoms, right? But which atoms? Do you count the atoms that compose the bacteria in your gut microbiome? No? But you wouldn’t survive without them. And what about the fact that you are a Ship of Theseus, have you considered that? All, or nearly all, of the atoms in your body are different from the atoms that composed your body 10 or so years ago. If what you are is a thing made out of atoms, what if someone followed you around for 10 years, and collected all the atoms that left your body, all the oxygen and all the skin, and they reconstructed a perfect copy of you? Would that also be you? What identifies you with the person you were 10 years ago, or the person you will be 10 years from now?

If you actually try to reason about identity, or even the ontology of simple objects, you find yourself twisted up in all sorts of logical paradoxes. Here too, reality refuses to be grasped. I think this was the knot Plato was trying to get himself out of when he came up with the Theory of Forms. He got around these paradoxes by positing that the material world is less real than the world of concepts, which existed as a realm independent of mind and matter. A chair is a chair because it embodies the concept of a chair. It contains the chair essence, the ineffable thing which makes a chair a chair, the thing without which a thing would decidedly not be a chair. Because otherwise, you simply can’t say what makes a chair a chair. Therefore all concepts must exist in their own realm, and all objects must be imperfect replicas of the perfect forms which exist in that realm of ideal concepts. All objects are hrönir.

Besides that, the least logically offensive position is that all that really exists is stuff, perpetually changing form. Says Democritus:

That atoms and the vacuum were the beginning of the universe; and that everything else existed only in opinion.

The existence of concepts, or of objects as self-contained things that can be distinguished from other objects or the atoms which compose them, is merely a fabrication the mind imposes on reality.16 It may be useful. But it’s not exactly real. So Borges isn’t just fabricating an interesting fantastical reality in Tlön, he is saying something about our actual reality,17 because in fact all objects of our world are ur, wished into existence by linguistic minds in an attempt to get hold of the world.

As for yourself, the best you can do is say that you are a continuous transformation of matter, memories, and conscious states. What you are is not a noun but a verb. A process, like a wave in the ocean. And as Carl Sagan said, “you are made out of star stuff;” you are composed of the same atoms transmuted by stars eons ago, and those same atoms will scatter after you die and become something else. So it goes, as all things exist in unity, perpetually changing form. The same thing was taught by Alan Watts: “the universe doesn’t contain people, the universe ‘peoples.’” A chair isn’t a chair—it couldn’t be—it is reality chair-ing. I am not Dawson, I am reality Dawson-ing. “We are not made of atoms, we are performed by atoms,” says Michael Stevens, and: 

We are not the universe seeing itself—we are the seeing. I am not a thing that dies and becomes scattered—I am death, and I am the scattering.

This way of being is immediate to the people of Tlön because of their languages. There are no nouns. In the southern hemisphere, the people speak Ursprache, a language that describes reality only by way of elaborate constructions of verbs.

The world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is successive and temporal, not spatial. There are no nouns in Tlön’s conjectural Ursprache, from which the “present” lan­guages and the dialects are derived: there are impersonal verbs, modified by monosyllabic suffixes (or prefixes) with an adverbial value. For example: there is no word corresponding to the word “moon,” but there is a verb which in English would be “to moon” or “to moonate.” “The moon rose above the river” is hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö, or literally: “upward behind the on­streaming it mooned.”

This is also part of the symbolism of the ouroboros, the way in which reality is fundamentally and always in motion, and it appears in The Passenger, too.

There were no starry skies prior to the first sentient and ocular being to behold them. Before that all was blackness and silence.

And yet it moved.

And yet it moved. All things are processes; all nouns are verbs; all objects hrönir; all thoughts, concepts, theorems, dreams, desires, and wishes ur.

This was taught by the Buddha as anattā. Anattā is usually translated as “non-self,” and commonly interpreted as the assertion of the illusory nature of the experience of self, but it’s better interpreted as the assertion “that no unchanging, permanent self or essence can be found in any phenomenon.” In other words, anattā is the assertion of non-essentialism, of radical anti-Platonism; that concepts don’t exist; all that really exists is stuff, perpetually changing form.

Anattā wasn’t taught by the Buddha as a mere philosophical conclusion, but as an empirical truth; a facet of reality directly observable by the mind.

(I remember a particular moment, early in my mindfulness practice, when something like anattā bared itself to me. I was in the shower, not making any particular effort, when the whole world was suddenly immediate, making its way through me, articulating me, so that I was nothing but the water running over my body, the white noise, the droplets running down the glass, the heat and the steam; all very much a unified flux, a single verb. The illusory noun-ness of moment-to-moment experience evaporated, just for an instant.)

Normal experience is so bound up with concepts that they actually get in the way of your connection to reality. As a simple example, consider an object, any object currently visible to you, like a chair. You see it and you think: chair. If not the word then you think the concept of chair. We comprehend reality much in the same way we comprehend a text, that is, we are helpless not to understand the concepts immediately. You can see how Plato’s essentialism was compelling. But with proper interrogation the actual experience of anything is so much more than that: it is bright and clear and textured and infinitely interesting. Pay attention and no words will bear the fullness of experience.

This was a constant state of being for Funes the Memorious, and it became a curse. One way of describing him is that he gained perfect perception and memory, another is that he lost his grasp on concepts.18

This is presumably how an infant experiences the world. No concepts have been developed, and so life is just this cascade of undifferentiated experience. The first two years of your life are mostly an agonizing psychedelic effort to organize all of experience into something with which your brain can tango. I like to think that this is why they cry all the time.19 Erich Neumann uses the ouroboros as a representation of this “pre-ego dawn state” (perhaps as fitting an English translation of anattā as any) of infants in The Origins and History of Consciousness.

I take a sip of this esoteric soup and I taste the ouroboros, my own personal interpretation of it. I see it as representing the syncretism of all of these myths, religions, and philosophies—the centroid of all attempts to grasp reality, and the way in which this effort seems to be ultimately self-defeating. It is hard not to when it exposes all of this overlap and recurrence across ages and cultures, even including the origins of modern science.

The point of myth is to grasp the mystery of being. It is a project that is doomed to fail—even with our modern capabilities, being remains mysterious. Materialist descriptions can’t explain identity, let alone consciousness, and present ontological paradoxes. Even without paradoxes, if you try to get too precise you run into the limitations of static language that Heisenberg described. Much like objective reality, subjective being cannot be grasped.

We can only point to components of being. For instance, memory is a crucial component. It certainly seems as least that if you had no memory at all you would scarcely be. But does that make Funes the Memorious, with a perfect memory, a more whole human? If you read the story you will come to the opposite conclusion. He is a shell of a person.

Language is another component of being we can point to. Somehow human experience is tightly bound with language. A writer can string words together and beam a unified experience straight into your skull. So what is language, where does it come from, and why and how is the unconscious non-linguistic? To me, these questions seem relatively easy to answer, at least provisionally. Language is something that bridges islands of consciousness. And the unconscious is, rather than what Jung would like you to believe, simply that in the mind of which we are not conscious; it is necessarily non-linguistic because language by its very nature is a thing of consciousness. If we were hypothetically aware of the unconscious precursor for language, well then that thing itself would be language, and what we call language currently would be superfluous, and never would have developed. If the unconscious were linguistic and we were by that instrument privy to its machinations, well then it wouldn’t be the unconscious—it would just be another part of your conscious thinking mind.

So the Kekulé Problem isn’t really about why the unconscious is non-linguistic—that much is necessary and obvious—it’s about the question of why the unconscious is so powerful, and how terrifying that is. And language, I think, did not come from the moment some unknown thinker sat up in his cave and realized one thing can be another thing, it came from the moment he, for the first time ever, experienced the very human urge to tear down the walls around his mind—perhaps that moment was the birth of humanity—and so he inflicted language upon his contemporaries.20 From that moment on the mystery of being was not something isolated and introspective, it was something shared and imperative, and the conditions were then ripe for myths to be born.

One thing all myths share is they all grapple with death. Because death is another significant component of being. It permeates it and surrounds it all,21 it is mixed in with the elixir of life. This is a big part of The Passenger and Stella Maris. Cormac McCarthy is pointing to death as a component of being. “The liquor of being is leaking out onto the ground,” Alicia Western says, contemplating death, and:

You need to hurry. But the haste itself is consuming what you wish to preserve. You cant deal with what it is you’ve been sent to deal with. It’s too hard.

Excursus: the mark of great writing

David Foster Wallace said that “fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.” This is why there will always be fiction to write and even more to read. It’s not written in what Heisenberg called static language, so it will never converge on an “answer” to the mystery of being. But that’s okay—that’s good—because there is no answer to find besides the bold fact of being, which is reified by every myth and every good work of fiction.

It is obvious to me that The Passenger and Stella Maris are examples of great writing. As always when I read something like this I got to wondering what is it that makes them great. After all, the examples of truly great writing are wildly different in so many ways. They must not all be sweeping explorations of humanity. Great writing can be complex or simple, grand or pitiful, long or short, pleasurable or painful, emotional or contemplative, beautiful or grotesque; and it can be many of these contradictory things simultaneously. There is great writing that you like and writing that you don’t like but that you must acknowledge is great. For me, Cormac McCarthy himself is an example of this: I read Blood Meridian,22 widely regarded as one of the best American novels ever, and I didn’t like it. Still, I knew that there was greatness in it, and I even felt that I would have to return to it eventually.

As I was writing this exploration of Cormac McCarthy’s final work, and I was continuously returning to all of these excerpts and was continuously stirred by them, I had the thought that the mark of great writing is that it rewards paying more attention.

Literature promises understanding and insight in return for attention. It is both the opposite of—and the cure for—those technologies that exist today which demand your attention and give nothing in return.23 It is the mythology of our time, mythology refined to a cutting edge.

Of course, there is no single criterion for something as complex and mysterious as great writing; any attempt to characterize it will surely fail. All I know is the feeling you are left with after reading something great: the feeling that you could have paid better attention to it. The longing. You wish to return to it.24 This is the feeling I was left with when I put down The Passenger, and then again when I put down Stella Maris; that I wanted to pick them up again. Like a snake eating its tail.

I feel such gratitude for Brian Leli, who pointed me to “Quantum Poetics” and gifted me the Jung material, and also provided feedback on a draft of this essay; and Henrik Karlsson, who graciously read multiple drafts, gave advice, and pushed me to work harder on these ideas.

In 1951, our friend Jorge Luis Borges published an essay bemoaning the absurdity of AI-generated art, in particular AI-generated literature:

Those who practice this game forget that a book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. This dialogue is infinite; the words amica silentia lunae now mean the intimate, silent and shining moon, and in the Aeneid they meant the interlunar period, the darkness which allowed the Greeks to enter the stronghold of Troy… Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that no single book is. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships. […]* The conception of literature as a formalistic game leads, in the best of cases, to the fine chiseling of a period or a stanza, to an artful decorum (Johnson, Renan, Flaubert), and in the worst, to the discomforts of a work made of surprises dictated by vanity and chance (Gracián, Herrera y Reissig).

If literature were nothing more than verbal algebra, anyone could produce any book by essaying variations. The lapidary formula “Everything flows” abbreviates in two words the philosophy of Heraclitus: Raymond Lully1 would say that, with the first word given, it would be sufficient to essay the intransitive verbs to discover the second and obtain, thanks to methodical chance, that philosophy and many others. Here it is fitting to reply that the formula obtained by this process of elimination would lack all value and even meaning; for it to have some virtue we must conceive it in terms of Heraclitus, in terms of an experience of Heraclitus, even though “Heraclitus” is nothing more than the presumed subject of that experience.

Note Borges’s explanation of how, in essence, language models like ChatGPT operate: one word is given to follow another via evaluation of linguistic probabilities. In this way, he explains, it is possible to obtain the philosophies of Heraclitus and many others, as well as the Aeneid and all imaginable literatures. Or rather: in this way you can obtain the series of verbal structures which form these philosophies and literatures—but, as Borges explains, a book is more than its verbal structure, and whatever is obtained by this process lacks all value and meaning. If a language model had generated the words “amica silentia lunae” rather than Virgil, it would be surprising but ultimately meaningless: vanity and chance. “A book is not an isolated being”: the Aeneid is not merely the words of which it consists, it is those words and their relationship to you and to the Iliad and to Rome and to us and the durable image of the intimate, silent, and shining moon in your memory.2 This is what makes it literature or philosophy, because a book is not fundamentally its verbal structures, it is fundamentally that relationship, or “an axis of innumerable relationships:” the relationship between the book and its reader, to be sure; but also between the book and its author, the book and its time and place of origin, the book and ever-changing situations of time and place, the book and all the books that came before and the books that will come after. Virgil and the Aeneid, Virgil and his country, Virgil and his contemporaries, Virgil and Homer, Virgil and those that followed him; his work viewed now by you and I darkly and permuted across two thousand years of cumulative dialogue: the relationship between two consciousnesses or the congress of a thousand consciousnesses.

Because consciousness is the source of meaning in writing. For writing to have meaning, Borges says, it must be conceived in terms of an experience. It is possible that today or someday a language model could produce a novel consisting of verbal structures that equal those of Herman Melville. Or, to make the metaphor even clearer: it is possible to imagine a world in which Melville did not write Moby Dick at all but instead the exact same text was someday generated by a language model. Such a text would be devoid of meaning. For it could not be understood in terms of an experience: Melville’s experience aboard a whaling vessel, or his experience struggling with the existence of God, or his experience yearning to break free from the mundanity of everyday life and seek adventure. These things would be missing from the book, and though the text would be the same, the book would not produce the dialogue with its reader that makes it literature: your experience of the yearning for adventure that comes as a result of your comprehension of the presumed subject’s experience. This dialogue is what makes a book a book and not merely a text, Borges explains, and it is infinite—my gesturing at the specific experiences does a disservice to this infinity, because it only restricts the reality of the infinite dialogue of experience to a finite set of specific experiences. Borges uses Heraclitus as an example, a historical person of whom and whose experiences very little is known, to illustrate the fact that it’s not the specific experiences that lend a book meaning, but the understanding that the book was borne of a person’s subjective experience. Heraclitus, whose historicity is shrouded in mystery and was known even by his contemporaries as “the Obscure,” could only function as the presumed subject of the experience from which his philosophy springs—we don’t know much about his experiences at all, little more than that there was a man named Heraclitus and he was the subject of the experiences from which his philosophy originated. But this presumption is necessary for the verbal structure to become philosophy at all. Or take as an example an authorship even more obscure: that of One Thousand and One Nights. A story of stories the authors of which are of resolutely indeterminate number, let alone identity. The origins of some of the tales in that book almost certainly trace back to civilization’s origins in Mesopotamia. But we can be sure that they were all of them authored by subjects of experience, ancient authors who experienced the joys and sorrows of life much same in the same way we do, and it was from these experiences that the tales of One Thousand and One Nights were conceived, and that is what makes them meaningful.

This claim can be generalized to apply to all art: for art to have meaning it must be conceived in terms of an experience. A novel, a song, a painting, or a movie created by an AI has no meaning—it’s not art—because it did not arise from an expression of the author’s subjective experience. We have all of us now suffered “the discomforts of a work made of surprises dictated by vanity and chance.” These works can be surprising, yes, and maybe even beautiful, but they remain meaningless. What would it mean if an AI had generated the artwork at the top of this page? It would mean nothing, just as if a language model had been the one to generate the words “amica silentia lunae.” It has never had an experience of the moon. We would not be engaging in a dialogue of imaginations of the moon. What would it mean for a language model to generate the words “Everything flows”? It is not a participant in this everything. There is no flowing.

I removed from the middle of the above excerpt of Borges’s essay this quote:

One literature differs from another, prior or posterior, less because of the text than because of the way in which it is read: if I were granted the possibility of reading any present-day page—this one, for example—as it will be read in the year two thousand, I would know what the literature of the year two thousand will be like.

“Literature is not exhaustible,” Borges says, “for the sufficient and simple reason that no single book is.” More than 150 years after it was written I found in the pages of Moby Dick an inexplicable piece of my soul; so you may too in the same text, or in the Aeneid, or in One Thousand and One Nights—all the while you may wonder upon what Arabian sands or under what eastern stars your kindred spirit of thousands of years ago and the author of that story dreamed it—; more than 50 years after it was written, engaged in one of these infinite dialogues of the imagination, I found in a single page written by Jorge Luis Borges an expression or warning of the literary/spiritual maladies which we are suffering today.

November 8. We are in the middle of the first snowfall of the season, here, in Colorado. I am watching it from my window as I write this. Meanwhile, I am about 2/3 of the way through my second reading of Infinite Jest, the majority of the plot of which takes place in exactly the same season of the year (that is, the first two weeks of November; many are the descriptions of the onset of winter).

Though the book’s broader situation in time is obfuscated, by extrapolating from some of the provided background the events can be understood to be taking place in the 2020s, i.e. right now, more or less, which would have been about 30 years in the future from the time the book was written. There are many details from the world of IJ that stand out to the 2024 reader. Half of the population works from home, and home grocery delivery is commonplace. Video-calling was also popular for a while, but, in a development that has yet to manifest itself in actual reality, a grotesque circus of self-consciousness involving the use of custom-made masks (the sole purpose of which being to make a person appear more attractive during video-call) has led to the return of audio-only calling as the most popular style of communication.

But the most striking detail of the future/present world of Infinite Jest would have to be Infinite Jest itself, that is, the eponymous metafictional film—a film so compelling that once you have laid eyes on it it becomes the only thing you care about. Victims of the film become entranced, fixed in place in front of their InterLace viewers (entertainment devices that have replaced televisions, which function in a fashion very similar to that of modern streaming services like Netflix), devoid of all of their previous cares and ambitions; they would rather soil themselves then leave even for a moment, and eventually die of starvation happily in front of the screen; or otherwise are forcibly extricated from the viewing but then forever thereafter catatonic with grief.

It’s over the top, as are most of the details from the novel (the many addicts’ miserable stories related in the book are so over-the-top miserable as to almost become funny), but DFW clearly intended Infinite Jest or “the Entertainment” to function as a metaphor for his concerns around cable television, which concerns he wrote and spoke about often. Had he not killed himself in 2008, I can only imagine how severe his concerns regarding social media, the attention economy, and endless algorithm-fueled scrolling content e.g. TikTok would be. Because these things are instances of a sort of Entertainment far more compelling than cable television, which we seem to be happy to consume endlessly.

I once read Infinite Jest (talking about the book again, now) described as “a solution to the problem it depicts.” Why is IJ so long (it’s over a thousand pages, when you count the notes, of which there are a few hundred pages, and many of which contain critical background and even actual plot)? Why is it so expansive (the number of characters is staggering—something on the order of a hundred—and the book includes lengthy descriptions of tennis games and theory, Boston AA dogma, the fictional political environment and factions, video-call self-consciousness circuses, and the mean value theorem)? And why all that for what is essentially a nonexistent ending?

IJ is incredibly long and expansive and has no ending because its purpose is not to be entertaining, satisfying, or self-contained, the way content on cable television (or TikTok) is. Its purpose is precisely to not be those things. Its purpose is to be there for you to actually engage with, as much as possible, and reward the attention you give it (as I’ve said before, the mark of good literature is that it rewards the attention you give it). Viewed this way, its size is one of its virtues. And the fact that it has no ending means that its value has to come from the actual daily experience of the book rather than the feeling you are left with when you put it down.

Books, and especially books like Infinite Jest, are opportunities for a sort of meditation. Reading a book is not fatally compelling entertainment. Calling it entertainment at all is a stretch, if we’re being honest. It’s not something that captures your attention; it’s something that you have to direct your attention to—which sometimes requires great effort. This is the point. In meditation, you pay attention to your breath, but your breath is not the point; the training of your attention is the point. Why did DFW include the hundreds of notes which are often extraneous but also are critical often enough that you have to make sure to read all of them, forcing you to interrupt your focus of the main text and flip to the back of the book and then strain to re-direct your attention at the main text again? Why, just why, couldn’t he have left out all of the notes that were unimportant and put the notes that were important in the main text, or at least have made them footnotes on the same page as the main text instead of endnotes at the back of the book, so that you are always doing all this flip-flopping and you end up reading with two bookmarks?: Simply because it gives IJ disruptions in its stream of text similar to the disruptions that are constantly buffeting the stream of your consciousness, demanding your attention; you must redirect your attention to the main text while reading much in the same way you must redirect your attention to your breath after becoming lost in thought while meditating. A book is an opportunity to train your attention; to focus on things less compelling than TikTok for extended periods of time, and return your attention to these things when it is disrupted.

The lead drill instructor at the tennis academy goes on a rant after the students complain about the cold during morning drills:

“Too cold to demand the total, yes?… Too cold for tennis at the high level, yes?”

…

[Student:] “I guess we have to learn to adjust to conditions.”

“Is what I am not saying… I am saying, is always something that is too. Cold. Hot. Wet and dry. Very bright sun and you see the purple dots. Very bright hot and you have no salt. Outside is wind, the insects which like the sweat. Inside is smell of heaters, echo, being jammed in together, tarp is overclose to baseline, not enough of room, bells inside clubs which ring the hour loudly to distract, clunk of machines vomiting sweet cola for coins. Inside roof too low for the lob. Bad lighting, so. Or outside: the bad surface. Oh no look no: crabgrass in cracks along baseline. Who could give the total, with crabgrass. Look here is low net high net. Opponent’s relative’s heckle, opponent cheats, linesman in semifinal is impaired or cheats. You hurt. You have the injury. Bad knee and back. Hurt groin area from not stretching as asked. Aches of elbow. Eyelash in eye. The throat is sore. A too pretty girl in audience, watching. Who could play like this? Big crowd overwhelming or too small to inspire. Always something.

His turns as he paces are crips and used to punctuate. “Adjust. Adjust? Stay the same. No? Is not stay the same? It is cold? It is wind? Cold and wind is the world. Outside, yes? On the tennis court the you the player: this is not where there is cold wind. I am saying. Different world inside. World built inside could outside world of wind breaks the wind, shelters the player, you, if you stay the same, stay inside… Not ever I think this adjusting. To what, this adjusting? This world inside is the same, always, if you stay there. This is what we are making, no? New type citizen. Not of cold and wind outside. Citizens of this sheltering second world we are working to show you every dawn, no? To make your introduction.”

…

“Yes? In that world is joy because there is shelter of something else, of purpose past sluggardly self and complains about uncomfort. I am speaking… of the temperance world. You have a chance to occur, playing. No? To make for you this second world that is always the same… Yes? Is this adjusting? This is not adjusting. This is not adjusting to ignore cold and wind and tired. Not ignoring “as if.” Is no cold. Is no wind. No cold wind where you occur. No? Not “adjust to conditions.” Make this second world inside the world: here there are no conditions.”

Looks around.

“So put a lid on it about the fucking cold,” says deLint…

This is what the book is really about: the world inside. Giving yourself a chance to occur, in this world inside, which is always the same. The content of the novel consists of intimate, sometimes gruesome depictions of worlds inside; the question it provokes is how to make these worlds inside acceptable places to live. The experience of the novel points to the answer: engage in the practice of honing your attention, soften your grasp on distractions, eradicate the self. As DFW intended it, this experience exists in contrast to the experience of watching cable television; this contrast is ever more stark, now, against the experience of social media and algorithmic content: a background of Entertainment of a magnitude which is another degree of infinite.

But you don’t have to read Infinite Jest to engage in this practice. All forms of content exist on a spectrum with TikTok on one end and Infinite Jest (or maybe like Thoreau) on the other. Anything on the right-hand side of let’s say Stephen King is probably doing your attention-mechanism some good. This is why reading fiction is more important than it ever has been. And of course, you could meditate. If you train your attention-mechanism enough, you might find that even previously utterly boring things are endlessly compelling, like the snow falling.

August 2, 2024

Only two weeks following the death of Canmore, and another surprising death has struck the community: McClain died under the exact same circumstances just two nights ago.

Most of the community has been quick to dismiss the deaths as tragic coincidence. The two men, after all, lived about as far away as two men can live—Canmore in Berkeley and McClain in Oxford. To entertain foul play is to succumb to conspiratorial thinking, it has been said, and as academicians we must be better than that—so it has been said. I, for one, however, cannot ignore the similarities. First of all: how incredible that two esteemed philosophers, and two specialized in the philosophy of mind at that, should die in the same calendar year. But also: both men died of a stroke, and both at an age well in advance of the average stroke victim (Canmore was 55, McClain only 42); neither was known to consume alcohol in excess or suffer from any major afflictions comorbid with the cause of their deaths (Canmore had high blood pressure, but don’t we all?); both men died in their beds; most curious, however, is that both men were found with a copy of the collected writings of Sir Thomas Browne on their nightstands beside them. But all of these coincidences are no reason to be alarmed, or so goes the official position of both men’s employers. How surprising should it be, anyway, that two different philosophers of mind were reading Browne concurrently? The men were occasionally in correspondence, after all—they may have even been coordinating their reading with the intention of discussion (attempts to confirm this possibility through investigation of the professors’ university email accounts, however, have failed). There is no sign of struggle or forced entry, and it is difficult to imagine (say the unimaginative medical experts of the victims’ universities) how someone with murderous intent could induce a stroke. Furthermore, a statistical epidemiologist at Berkeley published a report yesterday which argues that although yes, the average age of a stroke victim is 63, that average is actually declining over time, and in fact something like 15% of stroke victims are Canmore’s age or younger (how many of these are fatal, however, would be the important statistic); and while at such a modest rate it seems incredible that two such cases should appear in the same year within the same relatively small community—he estimates the probability of it happening in any given year at less than a hundredth of a percent, using some sort of statistical maneuvering to account for the size and average age and lifestyles of members of the community of academic philosophers (which I cannot understand at a level sufficient to criticize)—the probability that it should happen at least once in a period of 100 years is a near certainty; and as such there is no statistical reason to be alarmed.

Well, my peers and other members of the academic community may attribute it to my personal closeness to Canmore—who, years ago, was my doctoral advisor—but, though I kept it to myself, I was suspicious of foul play even before McClain. Canmore was a healthy, robust, spirited man, and I still cannot believe he is dead; I saw him at a conference only last year, we got together for dinner, and he seemed healthy as ever—in fact it was I who had to leave him, around midnight, despite his pleas otherwise, for he wanted to continue to debate different compatibilist interpretations of free will into the small hours of the morning (but I was exhausted from the demands of the conference, and, frankly, depressed; and furthermore, uninterested in the subject about which he was so passionate).

But now, after McClain, I am beyond certain something is going on that the university officials are unwilling to consider (or even—I tentatively fear—deliberately concealing). But I can only grieve, and fear for whichever of us may be next.

August 8, 2024

The dead now number five: Canmore (Berkeley), McClain (Oxford), Torres (from Pittsburgh; but found dead in a hotel in Colorado), Herrera (New York), and Yori (Tokyo). All eminent philosophers of mind; all dead by stroke; all found in their beds, with copies of Browne on their nightstands or dressers. No signs of forced entry have been discovered at any of the crime scenes, and no suspicious persons have been seen by any witnesses. The volumes left by the murderers at the crime scenes are devoid of forensics.1 Medical experts are at a perfect loss for an explanation as to how the fatal strokes are induced in the victims: no physical trauma has been found on any of the bodies, nor do toxicology reports provide any insight (the fantastic hypothesis that it was the writing of Sir Thomas Browne that induced the strokes was proposed, considered, and finally rejected after some clear-headed individuals demonstrated themselves reading the book with no ill effect; I myself have read the book in its entirety more than once since the murders began).

While there is no longer any doubt of murder (except for the epidemiologist at Berkeley, who has rescinded his statistical explanation, calling it a “Bayesian update,” and instead has formulated a hypothesis involving a novel and exact virus, the spread of which was limited to the audience of a specific lecture at a specific conference, at which all victims were in attendance, and which has lain dormant until now), the fact that the deaths continue to occur across vast distances means that there is not one murderer, but some sort of murderous international contingent or Order behind the deaths, coordinating across all corners the developed world.

Furthermore, another strange pattern has emerged in the victims: all of them have been strong proponents of physicalism. As a result, outspoken opponents of physicalism in the academic community are being viewed with suspicion. Some fringe idealist thinkers at the second-rate universities have even been plainly accused (for, as one accuser put it in their inflammatory blog post, “We all already know that these people are crazy.”). But of course all insist that they are completely innocent, and would never consider something as barbarous as murdering their philosophical adversaries. And anyway, no compelling evidence has been found to incriminate anyone in the community.

Professors, even tenured professors, have been resigning from their positions in droves, not all of them philosophers of mind, or even philosophers. This does not appear to be an effective means of ensuring one’s safety, however: Herrera was murdered the week following his resignation (it has been proposed that resigning actually makes you a target; the resignations have slowed, some professors who resigned have returned to their positions). I, for one, am still trying to carry on as normal, despite my classes becoming emptier and emptier, as more and more students fear they are putting themselves at risk by studying philosophy (but none of the victims so far have been students—the risk appears to be correlated with the number and prominence of published articles, and especially books). However, I have not been able to sleep. I spend my wakeful nights at the desk in my study, where I have printed out hard copies of all the victims’ entire bibliographies, and I have been obsessively reading the articles of this macabre anthology over and over. In this reading I have uncovered another pattern, admittedly tenuous, but even more curious than the obvious dominance of physicalism and the bias towards notoriety, which I will illustrate chronologically:

Canmore, my mentor, and the first victim, published countless articles dealing with the subject of philosophical zombies, hypothetical beings identical to ourselves but utterly lacking phenomenal consciousness. These beings are meant to be outwardly indistinguishable from humans as we are familiar with them; zombies, as proposed, exhibit identical behaviors to conscious humans, and are equally capable of language, abstract reasoning, problem solving, scientific endeavors, relationships, grieving, and anything else you can imagine—only, these things occur without any subjective character, completely in the dark. The conceivability of such a zombie universe is supposed to illustrate the profundity of the explanatory gap, and cast doubt on the effectiveness of physicalism as an explanatory position in the philosophy of mind. Canmore’s position, however, has always been that of a zombie skeptic. He published the paper that brought him into prominence, “The Incomprehensibility of Zombies,” in 1998. This paper has been cited hundreds of times to support countless arguments for physicalism. The third chapter of his magnum opus, the dense but approachable Consciousness Explicated, is essentially a summary of this paper. In it, he argues that it is difficult to conceive of philosophical zombies themselves conceiving of philosophical zombies. It follows, then, that a zombie universe would have at least one significant difference from our own: it would lack the concept of philosophical zombies. This difference, he believes, is sufficient to weaken the zombie argument. Several of his later articles have repeated and expanded upon this point, arguing variously against the zombie argument by posing problems with the conceivability of zombies.

The second victim, McClain—whose commitment to illusionism has been controversial but whose thinking and arguments have earned him a wealth of respect in the community (not to mention citations)—repeatedly published writings that challenge the concept of a philosophical zombie by arguments distinct from those employed by Canmore; in McClain’s view, consciousness is simply an illusion affected by an entirely physical system of information processing, like that of a computer. Zombies, then, as beings physically identical to ourselves, would simply have the same illusions.

There is also a record of his responses to a question at a panel interview at a conference in 2011:

My problem with the zombie proposition is I don’t understand what exactly the difference is supposed to be between the zombie universe and our own. Like, what is the distinction that is supposed to be so damning for physicalism?

(Questioner): The distinction is that the zombies are not conscious.

(McClain): That’s what I don’t understand. Like, what do you mean exactly? Assuming, as the zombie proposal does, that zombies have the same reasoning capabilities as normal humans, I just don’t understand what you mean when you try to distinguish… [another panelist interjects].

The third victim, Torres from Pittsburgh, insisted that the zombie argument was weak, and that it relied on terms such as “consciousness” are poorly defined or poorly understood. As she writes in her article “Restoring Mental Clarity: Terminology in Philosophy of Mind”:

What is consciousness? […] I am not sure what, exactly, is being discussed when the word “consciousness” is used. The terms used in attempt to define the concept, such as the word “qualia,” appear to me to be meaningless vocabularies invented for the purpose of establishing the existence of something, the existence of which—though imaginary—supports the arguments of those who invented it. By creating the meaningless word and asserting that it points to something that exists, they have made their position unassailable.

The fourth victim, Herrera, published a short article that proposes a thought experiment in line with Canmore’s arguments against zombies. Says Herrera, suppose we grant that the zombie universe is in fact identical to our own in every way—that is, that zombies are able to conceive of zombies just as we are, because they believe themselves to be conscious (but of course, they are wrong about this), and the zombies of their imagination lack this (somehow unconsciously imagined) quality. The thought experiment is this: if the proposition of zombies requires that they believe themselves to be conscious (although they are not, by definition), then the proposition of zombies comes with the possibility that a being could believe it is conscious when it is not; so, we must either deny the proposition of zombies, or begin to view our own belief that we are conscious as dubious. Denying the existence of zombies, says Herrera, is preferable. He goes on to discuss the intricacies of a proposed zombie mind, and argues that when considered fully, it is “impossible to imagine a mind identical in all ways to mine but lacking that thing we call ‘consciousness.’”

Similarly, Yori, the fifth victim (who is actually employed as a professor of computer science, not philosophy, but whose career in the field of artificial intelligence has placed him equally, if not more so, in the domain of philosophy) argued fiercely that “those who assert that zombies are conceivable are fooling themselves,” because the conception of zombies requires the recursive conception of impossibilities: zombies conceiving of zombies conceiving of zombies conceiving of zombies and so on (this recursion in fact necessary in order for even a first-order zombie universe to be outwardly identical to our own), a computational function of which human minds are incapable.

August 23, 2024

The murders continue: I grieve now eight professors who have long held my respect; in the last two weeks we have heard news of the murders of Andrews, Langlois, and, this morning, Albert. I continue to obsessively read all of their works. The tenuous thread I pulled on two weeks ago has held; all of the subsequent victims have in their bibliographies more than one article asserting the inconceivability of zombies.

I have been quietly working on an incredible hypothesis, the germ of which existed in my mind as soon as I put the tenuous pattern to paper; now, after the murder of Albert, I am confident enough in the hypothesis to put it too to paper.

The cult or Order which is behind the murders has identified individuals that find philosophical zombies inconceivable, and executed their deaths. But they are not merely eliminating their philosophical opponents. As they see it, they are eradicating a terrible disease from the earth; they believe they are preventing the spread of zombiism.

They have taken reasoning about the zombie proposal to a terrible conclusion: if a zombie cannot conceive of a zombie, then those who insist zombies are inconceivable must themselves be zombies.2 In other words, the Order believes that there are zombies among us; that the reason certain physicalist thinkers find it so apprehensible to give consciousness a privileged ontological status is because they have no consciousness at all; and furthermore that these thinkers are liable to spread their unconsciousness to others, that they beget zombie progeny, or perhaps that they communicate zombiism through their arguments and teachings. (It is worth noting that, from the Order’s perspective, it would be easy to justify their actions. It is readily agreed that consciousness is the basis of morality; without conscious suffering or conscious well-being, there would be no good or evil in any action; only meaningless matter, tossed about by the winds of the universe, to no purpose or consequence. Then, the Order would believe that they are not committing murder, because they are not killing any conscious beings.) They believe it is their moral duty to safeguard the light of consciousness, by any means necessary; so they have conspired to identify and eliminate zombies in order to prevent their eventual takeover of the world—the conversion of our universe into a zombie universe.

At this point you may believe me insane. Perhaps I am (of my affliction of a certain kind of insanity, anyway, I am certain). But there is a way for me to prove my incredible hypothesis. I will put something plainly in writing, something which, although I have perhaps indicated previously in more than one unremarkable article, I have never stated outright:

I cannot conceive of a philosophical zombie. Despite endless sincere efforts since the beginning of my career, the concept eludes my apprehension, and I have wondered what is different about the zombie proponents’ minds that lends them to acceptance of this profound hypothetical. The exactness of it described by these proponents occurs to me as, at best, an inconsequential vagueness; its ostensible metaphysical consequences, an enduring mystery. I have only been feigning a grasp of the concept as necessary in order to facilitate lectures to undergraduates or the writing of my pitiful articles—a deceit which has been necessary for my survival in this field.

Now, if my theory is correct, once this note has been published, I will be dead within days. And now, surely, you will believe that I am insane. But, I assure you, in this, I act with the utmost clarity of reason.

You see, unlike many of my colleagues, I do not see my failure to conceive of a zombie as a rhetorical point against the zombie argument; I see it as a personal shortcoming. While Herrera finds it easier to doubt the existence of zombies than his own consciousness, I do not. I have long felt that I am missing something; if I recall correctly, this feeling began to overwhelm me in graduate school. Perhaps the arduous labors of the doctoral program robbed me of my splendor for life; perhaps something more profound occurred; but, since then, I no longer live by that invisible Sun inside me. I consider my adult life to be an unending night. I remember what it was like to be a child—the way that life was covered with a certain joy, even in moments of acute pain or sadness. No, joy is not the right word: it was a certain openness, a certain readiness, willingness, or—brightness. Yes, brightness. I remember (in the darkness of night) when I was seven years old, and I broke my leg falling from a tree which I had climbed. The pain was unbearable, I screamed, and I believe I blacked out for a moment, but throughout all of it was the light of the sun, the smell of the grass, the color of the blood, and of course the fierce brightness of the pain, unbearable. It was all unbearable: the blood, the grass, the sun, all of it as bright and vivid and fierce as the pain. My mother came from inside the house, she held me and stroked my head. This, too, was unbearable. It was all bathed in a certain light, all of it regarded with this expansive consideration, as if it was something holy. But I remember these details only as details; remembrances of remembrances. The actual quality of the brightness is lacking from my recollection; this quality has completely left my life. I can recall it, but I cannot recover it.

Two years ago, in an effort to rid myself of the darkness, I went on a silent meditation retreat in Nepal. I spent two weeks in the mountains, not speaking, in fact doing nothing but introspecting. On the penultimate day I recalled Herrera’s thought experiment, and the decision of whether to doubt the existence of zombies or to doubt your own consciousness. After several days of searching inwardly I finally realized that there was nothing to find. What I was looking for did not exist at all.

Since then, I have not placed much value on my life. But here is an opportunity for my life to have some value, in the illumination of the machinations of this Order. If what I believe is true, that the Order is systematically eliminating zombies in order to prevent the spread of their darkness, then I cannot say for certain whether I condemn their actions. But perhaps, with the exposure of the Order’s intentions, more tender attention will be given to the affliction which they are attempting to stamp out, and some other means of curing it will be discovered.

I am sick of dreaming. I dream every night—horrible, exhausting, incessant dreams. I long for the profound rest afforded by nightly oblivion, but it does not come.

I have realized two things since I became dreamsick.

The first thing I have realized is that I no longer dream the carefree dreams that I dreamt as a child. Dreams that I could fly, dreams of shiny new possessions, dreams spent playing with friends. Where did those childhood dreams go? And when did they leave? Now my dreams are nothing but anxiety taking different forms. I dream often of travel, or that the world has ended, or both. My most frequent dream is that I am still in school and I am afraid I will not graduate because finals are coming up and I have not been attending class or doing the homework all semester long. When I wake I have to take a moment to assure myself of the reality that I did in fact already graduate high school, as well as college, and I will never have to worry about school ever again; but no matter the degree to which I concentrate on this reality, the dream persists.

But besides those more or less coherent narrative dreams of the sort I just described—the sort one is likely to tell their partner upon waking—there are other even less coherent dreams of a nature which begets no telling. These are the dreams you dream just after falling asleep—after a stressful day at work, for instance, when you dream vaguely that you are conducting the machinations of your job over and over and over. I have a note in my dream journal from many years ago, just after I started my first job as a barista in a drive-through coffee stand; it reads: “so many cups”. I remember the dream well; I woke feeling exhausted, and described the dream to my partner thusly: “It was like I was working all night long. It was terrible.” Then, of course, I got out of bed, got dressed, and went to work again, feeling like I hadn’t slept at all, the boundary between the dream and the day soft and fuzzy.

I recently began a job which requires the careful consideration of various kinds of bugs. All day long I am thinking about bugs; I go to sleep and I dream about bugs. All night long—bugs. There are no narratives to these dreams which I could tell, nor structures which I could describe, nor emotional contents which I could relate; they are just bugs.

But bugs are only the most benign of these dreams. The dream-vortex can be initiated by any tiny eddy in the currents of my mind: anxieties, problems, questions, decisions, duties, desires (especially desires—these are the most agonizing); but even things as simple as individual words, such as the word “perfunctorily,” can spawn maelstroms of dreams that last days, and as soon as I am released from one whirlpool I am thrown into another, tossed about by the rampant power of my unconscious mind endlessly.

This is the second thing I have realized about dreams. Dreams are not some grand marvel of the human mind. They are the mere exposition of the animal mind. They are to the mind what defecation is to the body. The mere waste product of a process by which an animal gains nourishment from the world. Investigate your dreams closely and you will be horrified: for they only reveal the fact of your mind as just barely evolved beyond the animal mind, a self-constructed labyrinth by the navigation of which the pitiful creature hopelessly attempts to make sense of the world. Dreams are nothing but the animal mind’s infernal reckoning of reality (both the reality outside itself and the reality of itself), fraught and agonizing for its inadequacy in the task.

These, I believe, are by far the most common sort of dream. The incomprehensible conscious experience of the unconscious mind’s junk product. The sort of dream which is forgotten as soon as it is dreamed, so long as one is not experiencing an excess of these dreams sufficient to make one ill. In such an excess, however, the dreams become unforgettable; they are formed by yesterday’s obsessions and they form tomorrow’s obsessions, completing a hellish ouroboros of mental deterioration that takes a person out of the world and further and further into his dreams, his dreams which have not the infinite depth or singular coherence of the world—dreams which enslave.

As my condition has progressed, my experience of time in dreams has drawn out, and my experience of waking reality has contracted. The effect is so strong now that I have the feeling that I spend the overwhelming majority of my time dreaming, and only brief moments of being awake; moments soured by my helpless encircling of the same dreams, so that my wakefulness is slowly losing its character as such and I find myself existing more and more as if I were dreaming always, at best helplessly pulled along through an absurd and anxiety-riddled narrative; at worst the mere dumb and ignorant witness to a terrifying reality without order or dimension.

If there was a pill one could take to prevent dreaming altogether, I would take it in a heartbeat. I could even see myself becoming addicted to such a pill. I could even see myself overdosing on it. 

I imagine I could cure myself of my dreamsickness if I could prevent the dreams through some psychic technique, deployed while awake, while I still possess some semblance of will. Perhaps when I am lying in bed, finally having given up for the day, exhausted from resisting the dreams so that I can function during the day and then only hoping for at least the release of giving into them fully; perhaps then, at the precipice of the dream world, if I could instead make some great mental effort to rid myself of the dreams, and empty myself of all contents, I would instead fall into that abyss for which I long so dreadfully.

Recent extenuating circumstances in my life have had an effect on my capacity for writing, but I have finally regained space in my mind that can be lent to contemplations of obscure dilemmas, mysteries and images; the fruits of which contemplations will be rendered in text here on Orbis Tertius before long. In the meantime, please enjoy this post from The Archives—it’s one of my favorites.

[March 5, 2023]

• I will die; I will possibly die of old age, satisfied and expectant (or not), but also I will possibly die prematurely, surprised by an accident or an illness. I can’t know what the conditions of my death will be, but I can know that it will be. Perhaps I am dead as you are reading this—that much is possible. If so:

• Remember that your suffering for my death, if you are in fact suffering, is not about me. It is about you. It is your thing; it belongs to you. And this is good. Make your suffering about you and not about me. Recognize the goodness of your suffering; its loftiness, its importance. Your suffering is an important part of the world. Know that, through your own experience, you are contributing to something crucial to human existence, and let go of any aversion to it.

• Consider that perhaps you do not need to believe in some form of existence beyond death for life to have meaning. In fact, I suggest that the exact opposite may be true. It is precisely because life is all there is that it is meaningful—this existence, your glimpse.

• So do not believe that I am in a better place, or any place at all. Know that my condition has been eliminated. I am as I was before I was born. But even that is incoherent; in matter of fact I am as nothing at all. I am without experience, without suffering and without joy. I am not. My existence as an object in your world and my experience as a subject in my own world were both glimpses, spaces between infinities of oblivion, and it is the space that is significant, not the boundaries around it in time, at least for me, because there is nothing for me on the outside of the boundaries, and in fact there are no boundaries at all, only the glimpse. Know that I cherished my glimpse as best as I could, I loved it and I valued it, but I did not do so perfectly, and in fact there was significant room for improvement in this area, and this my only regret, and it is the only true regret, really; the only regret that a person could ever really have. It is a good regret. I ask you to look at your life with this same regret, to feel the same longing for experience and connection that one would feel at the end of their life. Manifest this regret as best you can, and turn it into an intention. Make an intention to connect with your experience as closely as you can, and carry this intention with you always. Carry it with you as you wake up and brush your teeth, as you put away your laundry, as you get up from your desk and you wash the dishes, as you eat and drink and speak, as you hold someone in your arms and as you breathe.

• I must say, I find the standard practices of embalming and burial morbid and unsettling. I hate the thought of someone I love looking into a casket, expecting to see my face, and instead seeing something that looks more like a wax sculpture. The whole thing, to me, feels like a cruel trick. A person is promised that there will be something left of me in the world after my death, something upon which they may look and reflect and consolidate their grief, something which is ostensibly me, but instead all they get is an eerie reminder that what is really me is really truly gone. I would prefer if you refrained from referring to that thing as “he” or “him” (meaning me—as in: “he looks so peaceful,” or “I would like to see him,” or “I visit him every week;” these things are impossible). I think it must be more of an it and frankly I don’t see how it’s at all relevant to me anymore.

• I think it would be good to try to recognize people for what they actually are—and what a person actually is is definitely not that thing that will remain after they are gone, that thing you see walking and shaking your hand and speaking and what not. What a person actually is is a glimpse, a world of experience; wholly other from yours, but equally rich and fraught, equally infinite and equally confined.

• If you look backwards you can see something that, like death, we often choose to ignore: all that has already happened is well and truly gone. It has all been utterly destroyed, and this destruction is constantly chasing you, grabbing at you, in fact destroying you. It does you no good to turn away from it and pretend it’s not there, destroying you and the entire world every moment.

• Because nothing is permanent. As I will have died, so will you, and everyone you know. But this is only meager human impermanence. There are larger impermanences. Cultural impermanences, societal impermanences, celestial impermanences. Because eventually I will die again, as these notes and all other objects of my life are consumed by entropy, one way or another, and every lasting memory or consideration of me ceases. And everything you concern yourself with will wear and disintegrate in the same way. And eventually the earth will die, and the sun, and the maw of entropy will even in fact consume the entire universe. This is not to say that it would be a mistake to ever concern yourself with anything. But how does it change your concern if you keep the fact of impermanence at the forefront of your awareness?

• Is everything I am saying here true? Bah. Truth evaporates with everything else. Do not read these notes as instruction. Read them as experience, for that is the only thing that is.

• Does it seem dramatic to write these notes while I am still alive, or while I do not expect to die? But, of course, what other time do I have? I’m supposed to wait until death is certain? But it is already certain. I’m supposed to wait until it is already near, already visible? But I can already see it; it is already nearer than anything else. It is already inside of me. The fact of it is true by the fact of my being alive. To wait is to wait until it is too late. The only real difference, the only choice you have, is whether to look at it or not. Consider these notes an exercise in looking at it.

• Recognize that these notes (and all writings, or at least all of my writings) are an attempt to defeat death—to exert influence on the world after I’ve died, i.e., to be immortal, or rather to be less rigidly mortal—and to solve death: to characterize it and to repackage and rephrase it so that it is not so much of a problem, so that it may be something poignant and necessary and good. Because, like all of us, I suffer from the fundamental human burden which is the knowledge of death. I suffer from this burden and in many ways I am incapable of overcoming it, except in this one way: the way in which these notes are being read, in death, in that I have died, and so I am done for, and so I have been released from all problems, and everything.

I constantly see references to this book, Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard.

I see the title or the author’s name mentioned in passing, sometimes accompanied by praise and even reverence. I’ve heard it was the inspiration for the Matrix movies. It even has its own section on Wikipedia page for postmodernism (!), which, wait—it just sounds like pseudo-intellectual bullshit:

Jean Baudrillard, in Simulacra and Simulation, introduced the concept that reality or the principle of the Real is short-circuited by the interchangeability of signs in an era whose communicative and semantic acts are dominated by electronic media and digital technologies.

Simulacra and Simulation is nearly impossible to read. I was able to get through about five pages in each sitting. It is a firehose of pretentious prose with no structure, no argument, and no conclusions. As such, it defies summarization, but if this was a school assignment or something and I had to summarize it, I would say that Baudrillard is lamenting the way (as he perceives it) everything we engage with has become a mere simulacrum of the thing it’s supposed to be and how as a result every cultural experience is a simulation of the real experience. But not only that—actually the whole concept of the “real” has evaporated, and so now there is no such thing.1 “It is always a false problem to wish to restore the truth beneath the simulacrum,” he says. Not only have simulations replaced the real, the real has vanished. Only simulations remain.

So Baudrillard’s conception of a simulation is rather peculiar. We’re talking about the simulation of a reality that no longer exists. If a simulation is a simulation of something that doesn’t exist, is it a simulation at all, or is it just the thing itself? If a simulacrum could only be the image of itself, is it a simulacrum, or just the thing that it is? At what point have we just started calling things simulacra? At what point have we just decided to refuse to call things “real” to produce some sort of effect?

I must say, if The Matrix was in fact inspired by Simulacra and Simulation, it was only in the most narrow and simple (or perhaps artistic freedom type) way. It really is a conceptual departure from Baudrillard’s book. I would believe it if all it really was was that the director once heard about S & S, and how the premise of the book was that “everything is a simulation,” and that’s it. It’s really hard for me to believe that The Matrix was actually intellectually tied to S & S somehow; even if the tie is supposed to be mostly symbolic or allegorical.

The Wikipedia page for The Matrix says that Simulacra and Simulation was “required reading for most of the principal cast and crew,” but the sources for this claim are a link to a prezi site with no sources and no author, and a New York Times article that only says “some cast members were asked to read the book.” The only real hard evidence that the movie drew inspiration from S & S is that a physical copy of the book appears in the film, and there is at least one phrase used in the film that was taken directly out of S & S: “the desert of reality.”

Apparently Baudrillard himself complained about the supposed tie between his book and The Matrix. In his obituary (perhaps the most gripping obituary I have ever read), he is quoted as saying:

The most embarrassing part of the film is that the new problem posed by simulation is confused with its classical, Platonic treatment... The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.

The Matrix does not serve to communicate the point of S & S because although it shows a horrifying world where you could say a simulation has replaced the real, it’s a concept of simulation entirely divorced from Baudrillard. More importantly, the situation present in The Matrix only reinforces the existence of a real which can be distinguished from the simulation—which is exactly not what Baudrillard was trying to establish. Remember that the claim of S & S is not merely that we live in a simulation, but that simulations have replaced reality, and that “reality” is a simulation of itself. Meaningless.

However. Take this claim out of its context as post-structuralist socio-cultural criticism, and it reminds you of ideas like the Bayesian Brain, which describes subjective experience as a simulation of objective reality. Trippy, and compelling. What work serves to turn your awareness to such possibilities better than The Matrix? And in that sense, the film is an excellent communication of the fundamental (wholly impractical) critical thinking that Baudrillard was undertaking in his most famous work.

We had driven from Colorado to East Texas for the eclipse. The only other people in the vicinity were the guests of the other cabin on the forested property, a family of four who arrived in a white pickup with Texas plates. All of them wore jeans. The son, probably about sixteen, was practicing his form with a wooden katana the morning of the event.

The forecast had not been promising. Overcast was expected, and thunderstorms.

We—the Texan family and my wife and I—were watching the sky, which was not quite overcast, from a clearing on the property. I was observing the motion of the clouds and checking my watch constantly.

When the time of totality finally arrived, the sun was invisible behind a cloud. Crestfallen, I was looking not at the sky but at the silhouettes of the trees against the twilight that had engulfed the world.

The daughter of the Texan family said, “Look! Look!”

There it was. A black sun. It gave me the distinct impression of a strange jewel. What I learned later were solar prominences were twinkling around its periphery like red glints off the facets of a stellar diamond.

The father said “The ring of fuckin fire.” Then he said it again. “The ring of fuckin fire.”

People say that pictures don’t do it justice. What do they mean? What they mean is that if you are there you are actually there. The black sun is actually there in the sky and you are actually standing there in the twilight.

The pictures are, incredibly, true to life. The actual sight of it is only different from the pictures in that the pictures are taken through telescopes zoomed in on the impossible object so that it takes up the entire frame, making it seem somehow more impossible, whereas in real life the thing is up there in the sky, the size of a quarter, and you are down here on earth, and it is happening to you.

An hour later, a vague panic. I felt that I could not remember what it looked like. I was angry at myself for not making a greater effort to encode the experience. I strained to conjure the image in my mind; it was impossible. I could articulate details of the memory: the fact of the impression of a jewel, the fact of the blackness of it. But the actual image was as elusive as if it were from a childhood dream. I felt as if I had failed some important test.

That night, a vicious thunderstorm came over East Texas, one of the most intense I’ve ever experienced. I could not sleep for anticipation of the thunder, which was so close I could hear the texture of the rips it made in the atmosphere, and I could feel the energy it imparted to the earth.

We rose at 4:30 in the morning for the journey home, and it was still raining and thundering in the dark as I loaded the car, a little afraid, out there away from all artificial light save for the one on the cabin porch. It rained all the way into the afternoon. In Amarillo there were floods.

We listened to the audiobook of The Road, which was a little too on-the-nose for the desolation we were driving through: half a dozen dying towns along the Texas-Oklahoma border separated by hours of nothingness.

“Why would anyone live here?” I said. “Why don’t these people just leave?”

“They are leaving,” my wife said. “That’s why it’s like this.”

There’s a quote from The Road that I can’t reproduce perfectly now because I didn’t have the text in front of me from which to copy it down. But it was something about how when you remember something you are damaging the actual thing. Which is true. Every time you access a memory you are altering it slightly, weakening it and imbuing it with new context, and so our memories are not so much the record of our lives as they are an aspect of them that changes fluidly along with everything else.

March 27, 2024

Substack recently introduced native survey functionality, which is a neat feature. The survey editor in the dashboard suggests that writers ask their readers such questions as “How much total combined money did all members of your HOUSEHOLD earn last year?” (capitals sic), “What is the highest level of education you have completed or the highest degree you have received?”, “In a typical day, about how much time do you spend watching videos?”, “What is your relationship status?”, “What is your mailing address?”, and many, many others like this.

I put together my own survey for readers of Orbis Tertius. I think I have come up with questions that will really capture the insights about readers that the Board and I are most interested in. It would mean a lot to us if you took a few minutes to fill it out:

Start Survey

June 29, 2024

I’m terribly sorry I haven’t been able to share any writing with you all lately. It’s been three months since I sent out that reader survey, and since then, the Orbis Tertius Board of Directors has been pressuring me to deliver insights from the survey data to inform the direction of the publication. Since it went out, I haven’t had the space to work on any drafts—in fact, if they found out that I was writing this note right now (it’s after midnight, I have a sticky note over my webcam, and a towel under my laptop to dampen the sound of my typing) I have no doubt they would fire me. It’s a very critical time in the fiscal year and in the broader trajectory of the organization, and they—the members of the Board—have made it very clear that my fate hangs in the balance of the insights rendered from the very survey that you all filled out a few months ago.

Amazingly, there were over four hundred thousand responses to the survey, a sample size actually well in excess of the population, which makes the statistical possibilities nothing less than miraculous. The survey went out a couple weeks before the second quarter Board meeting, and so I conducted what I thought was a very compelling analysis of the survey data to show to the Board. I sliced the audience into several different cohorts, I constructed a few personas, I conducted look-alike analyses and clusterings, I made beautiful geographic and demographic visualizations, and I projected revenue for the rest of the fiscal year.

I joined the meeting as usual, confident and relaxed, right on time and with my camera on. The Board members all joined the meeting in their usual fashion, eight minutes late and with their cameras off. I presented the results of my analysis to the familiar grid of squares: K, B, C, D, D, C, T, H, N, J, M, a thirty-minute extrapolation of my methods, figures, and results.

To be perfectly blunt, the Board was not impressed. “Dawson,” K said after unmuting, “this is all very interesting, but where are the insights?”

I could detect agreement from the other mute letters.

“Well, I think the insight lies in our ability to…” I began to say, but hesitated, trying to gather my thoughts.

T unmuted and said: “Yes, unfortunately I just don’t think any of this is very actionable.”

“Well,” I started to say, “maybe we should define the outcomes—”

But I had completely lost control of the conversation at this point. M interrupted me: “I think I speak for all of us on the Board when I say that this simply isn’t good enough. Let’s reschedule this meeting for two weeks from now, and Dawson, I hope you’ll have some valuable insights by then.”

I spent the rest of the day staring at the raw data from the survey, feeling overwhelming despair. I had no idea what the Board wanted from me. Try to remember, I wanted to tell them, I’m only pretending to be a data scientist—in reality, I’m a writer! But I knew such a plea would fall on deaf ears. Orbis Tertius is a complex organ and the Board is completely focused on the things that are most important to its functioning.

When I woke the next morning, still at my desk, I groaned and tried to go back to sleep. But as I lay there, trying to avoid thinking about my situation, a possibility revealed itself: maybe what the board was looking for was not insight, but foresight.

Suddenly I saw a path ahead. I got to work immediately, feeding the survey data into state-of-the-art machine learning models. What was I trying to predict? Anything. Nothing. In my statistical ecstasy I felt that it did not matter what, exactly, one could foresee; rather, it was the simple power of foresight that was compelling to the Board. There was no specific question that the Board wanted to ask an oracle, they just wanted an oracle. If I could offer that power to them, it would satiate their lust, I was sure of it.

I worked day and night to build an oracle inside of two weeks. Eventually it became clear that the survey data, miraculous though they were, would not be sufficient for the power I needed to manifest. Even though the models I was training were achieving over 100% accuracy in cross-validation, with the survey dataset alone the only variables they could predict were variables from within the survey dataset itself… even in my ecstasy I saw how useless it was. What good is an oracle that can only tell you things you already know? But, I realized, I could combine the survey data with the Orbis Tertius user activity data—the millions upon millions of observations of user activity, from likes and comments to simple page views. I collated these data into tabular form, aggregated them, and joined them with the survey data.

Endless prophetical possibilities were suddenly visible. Reinvigorated, I resumed my frenzied search for oracular power. I probably spawned a thousand useless oracles in the next few days. Some were more interesting than others, but all of them were disappointing. The augmented survey data were still not enough (or, maybe, I was beginning to lose my grip on outcomes and had been consumed by lust myself). I spent a night without sleep struggling over what to do. The rescheduled meeting would take place in a few days, and I still had nothing to show to the Board.

Then, another revelation—this one I feel even now was a stroke of genius: one could combine to the survey data and the user activity data the actual writings of Orbis Tertius, merging the audience behavior and survey attributes with the very linguistic spirit of the publication. This I did, distilling the essays and stories into pure numerical representations by way of transformer embeddings (each writing represented by a matrix of staggering dimensions, the whole corpus comprising a vast rank-three tensor), and joining them up with the activity data and the survey data to form a truly awe-inspiring statistical sphinx.

It was not six hours later that I held a true oracle in my hands. I slept soundly that night, dreaming numeric-prophetical visions.

The meeting began and I joined once again confident and relatively relaxed. The Board of Directors joined the meeting a little extra late, as if to show their impatience. I launched into my demonstration of the power of foresight without introduction. For fifteen minutes I waxed to the Board about the power I had forged.

Afterwards, there was silence. At first I thought I could detect the experience of awe behind the mute squares; but then I was certain I could hear them whispering:

“You poor fool…”

“Obscene, isn’t it…?”

“How disappointing…”

“Foul, foul, foul…”

“Gods be with ye…”

“We are far too busy to have our time wasted like this,” M finally said, and the whispers stopped. “The third quarter Board meeting is in two months.” Before I could say anything, the meeting was ended.

In the following silence I was overcome with fear. Everyone knows the fate that belies the man who gives the wrong answer to the sphinx’s riddle. I crawled out of my office, along the floor of the hallway, and into my bed, taking all of my clothes off along the way, and lay there waiting for my judgement to be delivered. I did not eat or drink or go to the bathroom. I went in and out of sleep and dreamed useless numerical dreams and lost track of how much time had passed until I realized that I was still alive. The sphinx had given me another chance. To this day, I have no idea why I was spared. I carried myself back to my desk, and—naked, starved, and unaware of how much time I had left—I began to ponder the survey data again.

It seemed that the harder I tried, the further I looked, my despair at the investigation only multiplied. The insight that lay behind the survey data seemed more and more elusive and illusory.

This is the thing about statistics. A statistic is actually a reduction of information—the average, for example, is an irreversible reduction of the information contained in a dataset. You can reduce the information in a dataset in infinitely many ways, some useful and some not, but you can never increase the amount of information. This is why we speak about the “entropy” of data—statistics is very much analogous to the thermodynamic evolution of the universe and its distant fate as a cold, unmoving blackness (in fact, if you really get down to it, the evolution of the universe is, at bottom, a statistical process), but, where matter and energy can never be created nor destroyed, information can never be created but it can be destroyed. You are destroying information every time you compute a statistic.

Even machine learning models, which are nothing more than elaborate statistical objects, do not create new information. The predictions they generate are also statistics, reductions of the data you feed them; mere numerical waste, information that was already contained in the data from whence you began.

This is the information-theoretical certainty which forever limits the abilities of statistical devices. The creation of new information, even a single bit, is the Holy Grail, the Philosopher’s Stone, the one true statistic, transcending variance… but such artifice would be magic.

I reflected on this as I gazed upon the sphinx, all its individual feathers and claws and teeth, that is, the individual rows of data, the un-reduced information. After so much careful attention and manipulation, I understood the data completely… the insights I was pursuing were, in fact, superfluous to me, because I saw things as they really were, un-reduced, un-altered, in all of their individuated richness. Maximum information is static; the sphinx was like a sea of static that I was able comprehend in its full resolution, noticing each colorful pixel each fractional second… but this did not help me. I could not make the Board see this way. They could not, or would not, comprehend the sphinx.

Weeks of contemplation passed. I continued to fast and dedicate all of my energies to comprehending the sphinx, trying to divine the answer to its riddle through methods well outside the traditions detailed in my textbooks. I rested only to dream my numerical dreams, which became increasingly weird—visions of odd, unreal, even irrational numbers—but also seemed to inform my contemplation more and more. Eventually my waking contemplation became indistinguishable from my nocturnal reflection, and there would be times that I would realize that I was straining to deploy complex statistical methods against fluctuating nonsense data in my sleep; or that I was applying impossible dream-logical analysis to the real data while awake.

I could go on for ages detailing the texture of my contemplation and the intimacy with the data which I gained, but I have already gone on far too long. The Board meeting is supposed to begin in mere hours. The purpose of this note is to share my final revelation, the true answer to the sphinx’s riddle. In retrospect it is obvious… I should have been able to see it from the beginning. All along, the only truths that lay behind the data were more questions. I realized this six hours ago, in a moment of utter calm, like the moment a candle is blown out. The sphinx was not urging me towards an answer, but to more questions—another survey, begotten by the survey data themselves. A statistical ouroboros. I have extracted these new questions, which are the true answers, from the dataset—using methods that, to be honest, I cannot quite remember—and created another survey:

oUzxsVxoguJU

You can respond to it, or not—it doesn’t entirely matter, as it is the survey itself the Board is looking for, not the answers, I’m sure of it… or perhaps this survey will beget another, and so on, an eternal return of question and answer.

[January 8, 2023]1

Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground was published in 1864. It is a novella in the form of notes written by an unnamed narrator (henceforth “the Underground Man”, or just “UM”), imagining himself to be in a dialogue with other Russian intellectuals. We get a good look at what the Underground Man is like on the inside, and he is an absolutely despicable person: obsessive, self-absorbed, and mean. He says so himself, in fact, the book opens with him describing himself: “I am a sick man… I am a wicked man.”

The amazing thing about Notes From Underground is the degree to which it speaks to life now, over 150 years after its publication. Apparently being a 19th century Russian intellectual is a bit like being a regular person today, because the obsessions of the Underground Man hit a little too close to home. It’s funny (if a little unsettling), seeing how the Underground Man’s obsession with books prevents him from experiencing the world or people clearly, and from simply living his life—and feeling such a strong connection to that problem.

We’ve all grown unaccustomed to life, we’re all lame, each of us more or less. We’ve even grown so unaccustomed that at times we feel a sort of loathing for real “living life,” and therefore cannot bear to be reminded of it. For we’ve reached a point where we regard real “living life” almost as labor, almost as service, and we all agree in ourselves that it’s better from a book.

The bulk of the book consists of The Underground Man relating cringeworthy events from his youth, in agonizing first-person detail, as “corrective punishment”. The first of these is his interaction with an officer who once insulted him in a bar. Afterwards, UM continues to pass the officer who offended him on the street regularly. The officer takes no notice of him, but he becomes obsessed with the officer. He feels he needs to right the wrong of the insult, but also he envies and respects the officer; he is taller, more handsome, more successful, etc., so UM feels an urge to elevate his social status relative to the officer; but also, he feels a terrible need to be simply noticed by him.

Every time they pass each other on the street, they will be walking directly towards each other, and they would bump into each other if one of them did not step out of the way. The Underground Man steps out of the way every single time. He hates himself for this, for being such a weak person and a coward. Meanwhile the officer does not appear to ever notice the UM’s existence. UM agonizes and monologizes for pages and pages over his continuous intention to buck up and let the officer bump into him instead of stepping out of the way, but he fails, over and over. Somewhere along the way he crazily buys a new coat that he cannot afford, just so that he will look more wealthy and put-together when the officer finally notices him. But it goes on, even with the coat, he consistently loses his courage to bump into the officer and this causes him terrible mental suffering…

Finally, one day, he manages to walk straight and make the officer bump into him. He is filled with joy. He describes it as perhaps the best day of his life.

Notes From Underground was written at a time when it was very much in vogue with the Russian intelligentsia to espouse rationality and Western philosophy. This was the period following the work of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill and the rise of rationality and utilitarianism and specifically “rational egoism,” an idea which became very popular in Russia; it was the philosophical basis of the socialist movement.

Rational egoism exists both as a normative position (meaning a belief about the way things should be; what is “good”) and a positive position (meaning a belief about the way things are). Normative rational egoism would be the position that to be moral is to pursue one’s self interest. Positive rational egoism would be the position that to be rational is to pursue one’s self interest; or, more broadly, that people are rational and that they do pursue their own self interests—this is basically the basis of modern economic theory. There are infinitely many ways you could mix these normative and positive positions, and degradations of strength therein, and I’m sure that’s what all the Russian intellectuals were talking about when Dostoevsky was writing Notes.

Dostoevsky himself was not a particular fan of either rationality or egoism. The Underground Man serves as both a mouthpiece for Dostoevsky’s views a caricature of a person committed to rational egoism. Dostoevsky/UM makes explicit arguments against the prevailing philosophical tides in the shorter first part of the story. The UM argues, in direct opposition to the rhetoric of utilitarianism, that there is some good to suffering—especially what he calls “lofty suffering”—and that there is some irrational “wanting” that transcends the basic “good” or “utility” (or “profit,” as UM terms it) which is the moral currency of utilitarianism.

Most basically: Would you really want to live life without suffering? Would you prefer to feel no pain when you touch a hot pan, so that you wouldn’t be compelled to prevent your hand from being horribly burned? Now more lofty: Would you prefer to feel no existential yearning to fulfill a calling, your individuality? Would you prefer to feel no heartbreak if your significant other broke up with you, or died?

But loftier still is “humanity’s greatest profit,” the thing which the Underground Man puts forth as the ultimate counter-example to rationality and utilitarianism. He does not specifically describe this ultimate “irrational wanting” (which he dubs “the omitted one”), so it remains relatively mysterious, but he does put it in general brackets: he’s talking about a “caprice,” a wanting that goes against all rationality, “sometimes chafed to the point of madness,” the “want to live so as to satisfy my whole capacity for living, and not so as to satisfy just my reasoning capacity alone,” “this stupidest of all, this caprice of ours, gentlemen:”

And in particular it may be more profitable than all other profits even in the case when it is obviously harmful and contradicts the most sensible conclusions of our reason concerning profits—because in any event it preserves for us the chiefest and dearest thing, that is, our personality and our individuality. Now, some insist that this is indeed the dearest of all things for man; wanting may, of course, converge with reason, if it wants, especially if this is not abused but is done with moderation; it is both useful and sometimes even praiseworthy. But wanting is very often, and even for the most part, completely and stubbornly at odds with reason, and… and… and, do you know, this, too, is useful and sometimes even quite praiseworthy?

The Underground Man might be talking about art and beauty, or lofty suffering, which both of these things probably count as wants that go against rationality, but I don’t think they are the specific thing (“the omitted one”, the “unnamed wanting”) that he has in mind as humanity’s greatest profit. It seems more likely that Dostoevsky was thinking of something like our realization of ourselves, our pursuit of our individualities and callings and (now this is lofty) destinies.

Dostoevsky is using the Underground Man, who is deeply first person and vulnerable but also deplorable, both as a relatable and sympathetic voice for arguments against rational egoism, but also as a vessel for satire—a picture of what a commitment to rational egoism does to a person.

I have merely carried to an extreme in my life what you have not dared to carry even halfway, and, what’s more, you’ve taken your cowardice for good sense, and found comfort in thus deceiving yourselves.

The Underground Man’s condition of being “underground” is meant to convey the way emphasizing rationality and intellectualism prevents a person from living his life (he is obsessed with being “literary,” constantly thinking about whether what he is saying comes across as if from a book). And UM’s monologuing obsessiveness and social helplessness are meant to convey the result of emphasizing ego.

This character duality of relatable/despicable is a big part of what makes the story effective. Your relationship with the Underground Man feels a lot like your relationship with yourself. And I think it goes even further than that, because your relationship with yourself is actually one of the most valuable potential takeaways from Notes From Underground.

The Underground Man is obsessed with his own ego, both as something that he is compelled to develop as well as an object of consideration itself (he doesn’t use the word “ego,” and he’s not considering the concept of ego generally—only his own ego specifically).

The Underground man has an enormous ego. Not in the normal sense, as in someone who thinks they are amazing, but in a more general sense; his ego is extremely inflated, overactive. His ego is basically his entire being. The monologue of the book goes around and around UM’s social standing, his failures, and his negative qualities. He despises himself, he thinks of himself as low and worthless… but you can’t experience these powerful feelings towards yourself without having a powerful sense of yourself. In fact, it is clear that these negative self-conceptions are manufactured in an effort to engorge his ego: he talks about how he makes an effort to be wicked, to be a rat, to get people to notice him, to have some sort of remarkable identity rather than being overlooked or forgotten. This is the power of ego in the Underground Man (and maybe you and me, too).

Our concept of ourselves is likely to be much more negative than positive. A strong negative self-conception is just as much of a “big ego” as a strong positive self-conception, and it causes all the same problems; probably even more problems and more severe problems.

Perhaps the UM’s irrational wanting, humanity’s greatest profit, is supposed to be this desire to feed the ego, even when we’re feeding it terrible things. (Doesn’t it seem to be the case, now, that people are willing to sacrifice anything to be noticed? Doesn’t it feel like attention is the greatest profit?)

No, I think that the true highest wanting, unnamed, omitted, irrational, yes, is to annihilate the ego; to annihilate wanting itself. This is humanity’s greatest profit. In fact, I think this is even what the Underground Man wants, though he is not able to become conscious of it (hence the persistent mystery of the specificities of the “omitted one”). He wishes to dissolve his obsession with himself, because he knows that’s what his problem is (his awareness of this at least is clear in the monologue), and he thinks he can do that by lowering himself, making the concept of himself a rat rather than a man. But this effort has the opposite effect, and his ego becomes a more and more powerful force over him. If only the Underground Man could realize that it is this energy directed at the concept of his ego that is causing his suffering—and if only he could let it go.

A former apprentice of mine, who wishes to remain anonymous, recently authored a remarkable work titled The Cloud of Unknowing, that contains this passage which piqued my interest:

I have learned from some of the students of necromancy (a cult which advocates communication with the wicked spirits), and from others to whom the fiend has appeared in human guise, just what sort of body he is apt to assume. They have told me that when he appears he will usually have only one great nostril, large and wide, and that he will readily toss his head back so that a man can see straight up to his brain, which appears like the fire of hell. A fiend can have no other brain and he is well satisfied if he can induce a man to look at it, for the sight will drive a human being out of his mind forever. (The skilled apprentice of the black art is well aware of this, however, and takes proper precautions so that he does not endanger himself.)

Why did it capture my interest?: Because it reminded me of something I had read years earlier. Now I, of course, as an alchemist of the most pure and humble sort, indulge in none of those arts which have been to known to pleasant society for centuries to be dark, but, I confess, I have, over my many years, found myself in the acquaintance of one or two practitioners of such arts, and as a result I have indulged my curiosity in the elucidation of some of the practices of these arts from time to time—purely out of curiosity, mind you, God forbid you should mistake my intentions—and it is through this perfectly humble and pure pursuit that I managed to become privy to this passage from a compendium of techniques authored by one such acquaintance, of which I was reminded after reading the above passage, and which I believe is of such a high degree of curiosity as to warrant its sharing, dark though it may be:

THREE TECHNIQUES FOR THE SAFEGUARDING OF ONE’S MIND AGAINST THE SIGHT OF THE FIRES OF HELL, WHICH IS A FREQUENT HAZARD INHERENT TO THE ENGAGEMENT IN PRACTICES OF THE SORT DETAILED IN THIS VOLUME:

ONE. A practitioner may ensure himself permanent and reliable protection by inducing blindness by way of staring at the sun, without blinking, for a duration of no less than thirty minutes. The author notes that this is the technique he has deployed for his own protection, to satisfactory effect.

TWO. It is purported that one may achieve the protection of the first technique without the regrettable side effects by instead fixing one’s gaze on the moon. Advocates of this technique proclaim that it is necessary to stare at the full moon on a cloudless night without blinking for a duration of no less than two full hours. The author notes that although he has read the reports of more than one individual who claims to have employed this technique to satisfactory effect, he finds it more likely that these individuals only believe that the technique has worked precisely because they have gone insane, and the author also notes that he makes a habit of putting little stock in the advice of madmen.

THREE. …

(The author goes on to describe an elaborate technique involving the consumption of particular species of amphibian prepared over flames fueled by sulfur and various salts.)

The author of The Cloud of Unknowing continues with a commentary quite characteristic of his personality (with which I am quite familiar as a result of not a few long nights in the laboratory before the author regrettably abandoned my art):

So then, whenever the devil assumes a body, you may be sure that it will in some way reflect his intention. In the case of false zeal which we have been considering, he so inflames the imagination of his contemplatives with the fire of hell that suddenly and imprudently they will lash out with unbelievable conceit. They arrogate to themselves the right to admonish others, often crudely and prematurely. And all this because they have but one spiritual nostril. The division of a man’s nose into two parts suggests that he ought to possess a spiritual discernment enabling him to decide the good from the bad, the bad from the worse, and the good from the better before pronouncing judgment.

The reader can be sure that I, as an alchemist of the most pure and humble sort, do indeed have two well-functioning nostrils. But in a moment of weakness I find it difficult not to be so proud as to contradict my pupil. I do not find it as easy as he suggests it should be to distinguish between the good and the bad—my two nostrils seem to be constantly reporting an intoxicating mix of good and bad in everything that I am so lucky as to smell.

Anyone who has taken a step beyond the threshold of an alchemist’s laboratory, and experienced the olfactory shock presented therein, as the various essences being refined and transmuted fill the room with a thick heady bouquet, knows how true my words are. In the laboratory, one finds it quite difficult to distinguish the good smells from the bad; a successful formulation might have an overwhelming rotten stench, and a hazardous malformulation might have the alluring scent of flowers. A salamander cooked over sulfuric flames has a flavor profile that is at the same time pungent and delightful. I have come to learn that there is no formula of any potency which does not effuse an aroma which can only be described as a curious fusion of good and bad in varying amounts, and this truth is something the aspiring alchemist has to confront and internalize; as such, it is not an art for those with an underdeveloped nose or a squeamish character.

I could raise this question: what is the author of such a pure and transcendent work as The Cloud of Unknowing doing colluding with necromancers? And I could also point out that the other author, the one who produced the curious dark passage quoted above, though as insane as they come, is also one of my oldest and closest friends.

The first thing you will discover about Julio Cortázar’s novel Hopscotch1 is that it has a very unconventional structure. The book consists of a total of 155 chapters, but the back 99 of those are labeled “expendable.” Conveniently, though, the book begins with a set of instructions, which gives the reader two options: you can either read it like a normal book, starting with chapter 1 and then putting it away after chapter 56, ignoring the expendable chapters altogether; or, you can follow the little indications provided at the end of each chapter that take you between the main chapters and the expendable chapters, and read the book in its entirety.

The main story focuses on Horacio Oliveira, a displaced and unproductive writer, who is incessantly analyzing. He’s from Argentina, like Cortázar, but for most of the book he is in Paris, entangled with a carefree lover who goes by “La Maga” (“The Magician”) and a circle of friends-slash-amateur-philosophers that calls itself The Serpent Club.

The expendable chapters contain various divergences from this story. Some are nothing but quotes from (possibly fictional) plays, poems, novels, and works of philosophy. Others are truly strange: like one in which two stories are collated on the page, so that you have to read every other line of the chapter to get one story and then go back and read the other half of the lines to get the other story; and one in which half of the words are completely made up but sound like they could almost be real. And then there are the many “Morelliana,” the writings of a fictional writer named Morelli, who is the subject of many of the Serpent Club’s discussions. The writings of Morelli that we get to see are his reflections on the ambitious, highly experimental novel he is working on.2 These reflections illuminate Cortázar’s aims, because, of course, Morelli is Cortazár3 and Morelli’s novel is Hopscotch4 (making the whole thing a snake eating its tail).

Morelli describes his project as a “Zen slap in the face”—an offensive break from rationality, of the kind used in Zen instruction to trigger a different kind of awareness. So the novel’s odd structure and prose is meant to wake you up to an awareness of the text that you are not normally willing or able to produce.

This goes hand in hand with one of Hopscotch’s central topics: the limits of explanation,5 whether it is rational or spiritual, for grasping reality and ultimately making sense of life. Cortázar and the Serpent Club discuss the efforts of a great many philosophers (many of them philosophers who went against the rationalist current in Western philosophy, like Heraclitus), including the mid-20th century Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, mentioned by name in the second chapter. Ortega’s philosophy is, like the Stoics’, uncommon in the way it makes contact with actual life: he advocates for “vital reason”—reason with life as its foundation—and an awareness of the “radical reality” that is life.

Ortega advanced a position regarding the nature of truth that was pioneered by Nietzsche (although it arguably originated much earlier, with Heraclitus or Protagoras) called perspectivism. Perspectivism stands in between epistemological realism and relativism, holding that objective truth exists, but that our grasp on it is always limited by a subjective perspective. It’s one step short of fictionalism, which says that there’s really no such thing as truth, only useful fictions—instead, in a similarly literary fashion, perspectivism says that reality is like a text, and any attempt to describe it or characterize it is more like a subjective interpretation of that text then an objective account. And because Hopscotch itself is of course a text, this manifests as an allegory in (as) the novel that has a tendency to break through its allegorical walls and invade reality.6

For example: Hopscotch sits on your nightstand. The text is there in the pages and it will remain whether you are reading it or not. But while you are reading, it becomes something else—you are now interacting with it, and the text is no longer black marks on a page, it is thought and it is you, to one extent or another.7 (You can put it down and continue to exist independent of the text, and certainly the text will exist independent of you, but what exactly is that thing that continues to exist independent of you, and would you really say that it’s the same thing as what you were reading? And how distinct are you, really, even after putting the book down, anyway?) The text in itself exists independent of the reader, but that thing,8 the text in itself, is imperceptible, ungraspable, meaningless, and even inconceivable. The text only has its meaning, its character, and its texture when it is apprehended by a reader—but this interaction necessarily introduces subjectivity.

And isn’t this true for all things—that all of reality9 is like this, like a text; only apprehensible through subjective interpretation? And therefore the actual objective reality, though it exists, can never be grasped? I’ve examined this idea previously as it was asserted by Werner Heisenberg: “A complete and exact depiction of reality can never be achieved,” and Cormac McCarthy:

She knew that in the end you really cant know. You cant get hold of the world. You can only draw a picture. Whether it’s a bull on the wall of a cave or a partial differential equation it’s all the same thing.

It’s all the same thing, to some extent or another: subjective interpretation. There is no objective or ultimately correct interpretation of a text, and there is no objective or ultimate conception of reality.

But, I hear a certain group among you saying, of course an objective and correct interpretation of reality is possible: that’s what we call science. Thomas Nagel called it The View From Nowhere, claiming that humans have the unique ability to take an objective view of things. But this is not really true. We can’t actually transcend the limitations of our individuated and separated perspective, even with the help of instruments and methodologies. We can only pretend that we are being objective.

Fortunately, humans do have a remarkable aptitude for pretending. Anyway it is not true that just science is worthless just because it will never achieve a complete and objectively true conception of reality. Its value resides in its aim, not in the realization of that aim; the product of this aim is a basis for as much intersection of subjective interpretations as possible. Good literary interpretations are well supported by the text. So it is, too, with interpretations of reality—science serves to sort out what is supported by the text of reality and what is not. Furthermore, as it turns out, science actually provides evidence for perspectivism itself, if we reflect on the domain of quantum mechanics.

It’s important to understand that the layman’s understanding of quantum mechanics (including my own, of course) is very far removed from the actual theory. The layman’s understanding revolves around the remarkable weirdness of quantum mechanics, which only comes about in the various interpretations of the actual theory. This is the sort of thing a physicist will tell you if you start asking them about, say, whether it’s really true that Schrödinger’s cat is alive and dead at the same time: they will rush to point out that such curiosities only exist in certain interpretations of quantum mechanics and are not necessitated by the actual mechanics themselves.

But how does the word “interpretation” make its way into a hard science in the first place? Isn’t the whole point of science that it’s supposed to be the View From Nowhere, the perspective untainted by subjectivity?

The problem is that quantum mechanics marks the very limit of objective science; it is the point at which further objective inquiry begins to require objective inquiry of subjectivity itself, which is a paradox. This is the bottom of science—beyond the development of the mechanics themselves all that is left is metaphysics. The various interpretations of quantum mechanics are vulnerable only to philosophical debate, not math nor observation.

The prevailing interpretation, which is called the Copenhagen Interpretation (specifically, the interpretation that prevails today is Bohr’s version of the Copenhagen Interpretation), is basically the result of a concerted effort to preserve science’s exile of the observer, by 1) asserting fundamental randomness and 2) generalizing the idea of an “observer” to include any apparatus which can irreversibly register a waveform collapse. The “many worlds” hypothesis is another such interpretation of quantum mechanics, that keeps subjectivity out by denying that the waveform ever collapses; instead, parallel universes are endlessly spawning from possibility. Contrast these with QBism, a more avant-garde interpretation of quantum mechanics, that attempts to resolve some of the problems with other interpretations by taking the subjectivity red pill, privileging conscious experience and even free will.

The point is that all of these are only interpretations. We have no objective evidence for any of them, and we may never get any, because we’ve run into the limits of objective science and of observation. Interpretation is all we can do here, much like when we’re dealing with a complicated text. Even though there exists a factual reality we can gesture at—there is no doubt that there is a truth underlying quantum mechanics, a real reality and presumably a “correct” interpretation—any interpretation that we come up with, indeed, any meaning that we will be able to obtain as a result of that source of truth, will be inherently subjective. This fact is incontrovertible and applies to all attempts to develop understanding, from quantum mechanics to sociology to literary criticism to simple conversation. As in the case of a literal text, the actual objective reality of the world cannot be grasped. But it’s also inconceivable, meaningless and worthless. It is only in the interpretation of a reader that reality begins to make any sense at all.

“One has the impression,” Oliveira said, “that he’s following old footprints. We’re unimportant little schoolboys warming over arguments that are musty and not at all interesting. And all because, dear Ronald, we’ve been talking dialectically. We say: you, I, lamp, reality. Take a step back, please. Go ahead, it’s not hard. Words disappear. That lamp is a stimulus to the sense, nothing else. Now take another step back. What you call your sight and that stimulus take on an inexplicable relationship, because if we wanted to explain it we would have to take a step forward and everything would go to hell.”

“But those steps backward are like unwilling what the species of man has already walked,” Gregorovius protested.

“Yes,” said Oliveira. “And right there is the great problem, to find out if what you call the species has gone forward or if, as Klages thinks, I believe, at some given point it took the wrong road.”

Ludwig Klages identified two forces: the soul or seele, an “earthly rootedness” which is life-affirming, and the intellect or geist, the rationality and industry which is life-destroying. He thought that the progress of industry and the dominion of rationality are not necessarily good, and perhaps even evil10—or, as Oliveira points out,11 they are only good when considered from within their own perspectives, and these perspectives are individuated and separated from reality and therefore limited in their claim to truth. It is revealed through the Club’s discussions that Cortázar does not simply think that there is a higher truth in art or spirituality, for those domains too are limited. There is value in the combination of these domains, but on the other hand, there is something more valuable and fundamental which all of these things can only serve to get in the way of.

Klages’s seele and geist were developments of Nietzsche’s “affirmation” of life, which is well summarized by this quote from his The Will to Power:12

Suppose that we said yes to a single moment, then we have not only said yes to ourselves, but to the whole of existence. For nothing stands alone, either in ourselves or in things; and if our soul did but once vibrate and resound with a chord of happiness, then all of eternity was necessary to bring forth this one occurrence—and in this single moment when we said yes, all of eternity was embraced, redeemed, justified and affirmed.

Also influenced by The Will to Power (and also named in Hopscotch) was Martin Heidegger, who developed hermeneutics—the theory and methodology of interpretation—into existential understanding, advocating for a more authentic “way of being in the world” over a mere “way of knowing.”

Knowing always falls short, because it’s impossible for the intellect to grasp objective reality. But you can access another ultimate reality—the “radical reality” of life pointed to by Ortega. This is subjective reality, reality as an observer, the reality of experience.

This existential transition, from knowing to being, from objective to subjective, from the life-denying to the life-affirming, is demonstrated in Hopscotch by the contrast of Oliveira and his lover La Maga: Oliveira is analytical and critical and he reads philosophical books, but he is miserable; he terribly envies La Maga,13 who just reads cheap romances and lives spontaneously, constantly saying yes to the moment.

I have suggested previously that the mark of great writing is that it rewards the reader who attends deeper and longer14 (another way of saying this is that great writing resembles the world—the greatest text ever written). This effort of reading a book and identifying striking passages, and reading them over and over, and endlessly analyzing and interpreting and searching for a “center,” and putting a response together in writing, is nothing more than an exercise in paying closer attention to text; and even after all of this, I have only made sense of a small fraction of Hopscotch. What I’ve related here is, of course, only one interpretation of a vastly complex reality. My interpretation is necessarily incomplete, doomed to be limited by my own experiences, tastes, and meager literary ability—naturally, I’ve zeroed in on the book’s philosophical and contemplative themes and largely ignored many others. If you have read it before you will probably have found the things I’ve discussed here a little surprising, and if you have yet to read it you will no doubt find all sorts of surprising things in there waiting for you.

So do not assign too much value to this undertaking of mine, for it is the effort of Oliveira,15 it is the effort of the geist and it is life-denying. The more noble activity is that of La Maga, the reception of the seele which is life affirming: saying yes to a single moment.16

As a reader of Orbis Tertius you possess the rare power to Induct new members into this strange club. Wield it with conviction:

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