Truly God alters not what is in a people until they alter what is in themselves.1

You did not slay them, but God slew them, and thou threwest not when thou threwest, but God threw, that He might try the believers with a beautiful trial from Him.2

This beautiful trial, tension and contradiction. The opposition established here: each as acting, deity as sole actor. Much the same is explored by the Marquis de Sade, there often surfacing theological in his Juliette: “As our will always expresses itself in some movement, gesture, or impulse, God is consequently obliged to concur in what we will and sanction what at our will’s behest we do: God hence dwells in the parricide’s murdering arm, in the incendiary’s torch, in the whore’s cunt.” What are we to make of this? Nothing at all, rather that it be accepted as such: ultimately resolved in terms of metaphysics and not epistemology. This the nature of being, of becoming, in itself.

A brief history of dialectical logic: The first philosophy was born of spoken language, a game played for love of some invisible. The dialogue is a naturally dialectical form, but this gives way with the rise of writing. Thereafter the meaning of contradiction is altered: no longer literally to speak against, or rather that the speaking against now attains to a simultaneity. This contradiction compels a sorting, deciding, defeating. The syllogism thus a spatial structuring intended to order the universe. The heights of this in Hegel, a grand synthesis ultimately futile. His return to dialectic, however, is a necessary even if unsteady truce; there placed being over becoming, that jagged in its effort to return an original movement. This necessitated now as a conscious method where at the earliest philosophy, at the precipice represented by the Socratic dialogue—written but oral, turning point of the ages—was once an inevitable dialectic in the form of language as living activity. This against the dead ontology of his inscription.

What are we to do with contradiction? The living movement which was its meaning prior, which is our only return. This being the way of holding a tension, not as a thing external; not as something to be settled and then imposed upon the self but rather felt and moved through as such—there, hold yourself just so and follow. Taking up again our point of departure: that we are powerless to change ourselves; that we are granted this power only to the extent that we change ourselves. Either pole of this opposition is a threat to our freedom: that we cannot act, that we alone can act. The same tension here as wu-wei: while effortless action is grasped readily enough at the first level, it is nevertheless swallowed by a tension between effort and action in order and emphasis. 

Take then the Jain tradition as a further falling short: in some respect we are certainly powerless, in some respect we are certainly powerful—and again, in some respect we are certainly powerful, in some respect we are certainly powerless. These two orders as a matter of emphasis, of meaning; to the extent that it occurs through language the whole is necessarily linear and sequential: this then that, that then this, position and negation. And yet we lack any word by which to simultaneously assert a thing and its opposite—or we lack such a word but for that the Jains gave: avaktavya, inexpressible.

This is the truth of that contradiction contained in the Quran, contained alike in our hearts, contained in all language of effort and action, of desire and obedience, and this further the same shape which recurs ever as the practical question of free will: that we fall short so often in our encounter with that vast mass of tangled habit which is our earthly form, that we war with this to wipe the mud from our face, that there is no single movement but suicide (and that a false promise) which can assert the whole in an instant. This twining dance of devotion and despair is decided only at death.

There is a town somewhere with a castle overlooking the countryside, there nestled below the sheer rock which serves as its seat is a small house, a building, hardly a dwelling but for the fact that there dwell two young boys. If you had asked any in the town they would tell you there was only one boy, that he was not really so young, that their parents had been wanderers and fugitives.

This somehow house was built upon black rock, a boulder uncommon in the area, a stone deposited by time, or thrown by a giant as others said, some aeons ago when the world was far more full of movement and magic, whichever you prefer, and such things were yet possible if not wholly probable. Whatever the case the rock thus sat there, and upon it a house of smaller stones, more common for the area, cream-white rock as that of which much else was built in these surrounds. The roof of this home was built likewise of stones, a little longer and darker but much the same, and the whole sat slanted into the soil which was its support. It was difficult to tell whether the little house had been built thus or if it had collapsed into a more comfortable position, whether steadily with the years or all at once in one of the earthquakes that intermittently shook the land in which this story takes place.

Those of the town did not know or care, the eldest of its inhabitants when asked as often denied that such a dwelling existed, whether for another claimed category or forgetfulness or some third thing none could ever tell. To ask the boys themselves, or the boy as it seemed to them, would be no help either for the one did not speak and the other was deaf. While perhaps one may yet communicate the inquiry by gesture or dance, this would work solely with the young brother, for the other deaf was also blind.

It was not this deficit, these deficits, which explained the obscurity of this second son in the slanted house, rather his temperament, his nature, explained the fact that he was so rarely seen, so wholly unknown to those beyond. There was, of course, the further aid of circumstance to this fact, for the only cause that the townspeople had once had to travel near this dwelling was the old well which sat a while below down a precarious path. More recently, however, a deeper well had been driven into the earth within the town itself and few now travelled down this way. This further followed from the general age of the townspeople, with little in the way of youth, and fewer yet nimble enough to navigate with pail or pair thereof the path which passed this place.

The older brother did not mind this, or he might have said as much had that been in his nature, rather it was known by the sole communication that prevailed between these two. The younger ever watched older carefully, in the silence of their environs was attuned to his slightest movement; for him the subtlest sign was stern imperative and treated with the authority not of brother but father, or somehow even more.

Despite the silence and darkness which characterised his reign, the older was not ignorant of the world around them, nor particularly of his young brother’s needs, not to mention his own, and so despite himself he allowed the littler to roam the area around their home. There was not much here, little in the way of people, little in the way of speech, not that it would have been any use to either, for none had ever taught them speech, not even the younger who might yet have learned readily, let alone the older for whom it would take concerted effort and a rare sort of intellect which was unlikely to be encountered in this forgotten place. Still they had no need for speech.

The younger in his own way spoke instead to the trees, to the lizards with their green armour, to the birds and the bats, which he knew not as separate taxa but rather as united by their lofty mode, differing only by hours, and indeed all here was of life. There was little in the way of dissatisfaction for these two, with the water from the well which was solely theirs and milk from the few lost goats that they accumulated over the years. The townspeople broadly knew these goats were there, but they either saw the loss as a sacrifice ordained, else were encouraged sternly by the priest to this view of the touched, and on the whole the boys thus went without any inconvenience.

There was no notion to either of them that there might be anything missing from this place, aye no notion at all, nothing in the world but that with which it presented them. Nor was the older dissatisfied with the scantness of his world; to him it was full, there being no other world to which he might compare. Their separate ideas of this realm being beyond the possibility of plain comparison, and there even the notion of species or fraternity was foreign, such that the distinction between them seemed not of deficit but nature. They simply were, and this was enough, more than enough, for both.

Of the two, their temperaments differed both between and in the contrast of inner and outer with each. The older was cautious beyond measure, rarely ventured even into the light which fell through doorway or the window which sat above, the light which he knew first for the feeling, and through which feeling he knew the day, as also the seasons, by that combination he would taste carefully with a finger each morning as one might test for the direction of wind. This done, thus satisfied with his knowledge, he would retreat then to the corner which was his immediate domain and there lay flat upon the cool black stone which was his home. The world was known to him thus not through sight or sound but rather by the echo of events which this rock communicated to him, and thereby he kept an eye of sorts upon his younger brother who was prone to range a way, whether for purpose or pleasure, even beyond the door.

Their temperaments, we have said, differed both between and in the inward and outward aspects of each. The older brother, all caution in his outward behaviour, was inwardly sturdier of the two. He knew the world to be a certain thing, had in this absent place a sense for the continuity of things which the younger lacked. His brother, with boldness apparent to match his youth, with sight and sound alike, was too often misled by these senses into believing that the realm had changed, for the world did seem over the course of days and years to differ plenty for one with eyes to see and ears to hear. The deaf-blind brother, in contrast, knew his world solely through the rock which was its medium, and in this the whole was a thing as solid as stone if not well nigh eternal.

This younger brother, meanwhile, though not animated by a desire for anything further as we have noted, for he knew nothing further, for there was nothing further, was yet hungry for the whole of what he could he see and hear. His days were spent ranging the land allotted to him as fief by his older brother, tending thus to the goats as necessary that he might provide this necessary tribute to his king. Else besides he would wander the area on and around this great stone which marked their realm, would commune there in his way with the birds and the lizards and even the varied insects which were his beloved people. This younger brother thus occupied often did not rest for the day entire, and it was through the play of his feet upon stone and soil that the older brother knew this world world and maintained a watch over his vassal.

When night came at last then the younger would join his older brother in the house, would there curl up with him in the corner which was their bed, and the older would tell him stories as they fell asleep. These were not stories of any ordinary sort, were not told as such in the strict sense but were rather communicated by the shapes and figures that older would trace upon younger’s back. Thus he would tell of his dreams, waking and daylight, and of all the stone had said to him that day; thus the younger would recall the day, would find in this a memory of the patterns which were his own: his hurry that morning at the sound of a goat stuck somewhere, the later leap and landing of having caught a lizard. These forms would turn from touch to image within the younger’s mind, would trail off smoothly into dreams as his mind moved further through the signs that were their sole communion, drifting there into the sea unseen.

Of course, the boys had never seen the sea, did not even know the name, but the younger had once glimpsed something blue in the far distance, his eye caught at first by a glint of light which seemed to signal something self-important and foreign. As it happened, it was while staring at this, squinting to make out that form which would not coalesce into meaning, that the older brother felt something further in the stone.

There were other things before, of course, besides that low hum of the earth which was the constant backdrop of his silent, sightless knowing. This tone varied through the year, varied with the warmth and length of the days, further interspersed with the activity within that realm: the familiar movements of his brother, of the goats, of the insects and even the trees and birds of that place. Time to time, and the first noted especially, there had been the soft vibration of a movement somewhere deep below, a scratching intermittent with pauses of varied length, of which that night the older had told the younger, had danced upon his back, the movements of some subterranean creature travelling far below. We would know it as a mole, to them it was a dream.

This new sensation, however, differed even from that, foremost in its placement, for it was not below the surface, nor within and above as the trees and their swaying spelled out by the wind, rather it was a pattern alike but not the movement of his brother, a gait unfamiliar which gave him pause. At this the older, as he had so rarely, indeed as he could hardly recall having done before, but which was known as a strict imperative to the younger, thumped his childlike hand upon the stone. At this the younger came running without having even heard the noise of what it was that approached, without even having caught a glimpse the girl with a pail who came quietly that way.

They remained for a while within their dwelling then, the younger quiet and satisfied, safe in the certainty of his brother, and thus together they stayed as the movement passed, as the girl went down the path and to the well which had seemed solely theirs, who went that way and back again with ample speed and sure steps. The younger did not even look, nor could they have been seen from outside through the door, for the older lay in the dark where no light fell, an angle obscured entirely from outside world.

The next day, this movement unfamiliar long since gone, the older tasted the morning once more and with this reassurance let the younger back into the sun. Of this new presence he had told little in the prior night’s stories, though not for having hidden this, rather that the telling was muddled, mixed as it was with the boy’s own steps, with his movements, for the shape so resembled that pattern which was his when seeking water, yet there was enough of a difference here within those events to wake something in this brother and when the dream came at last it held subtly new colours for them both. Thus the younger went into the day once more but now with a sense nebulous of unknown expectation, while the older listened to his stony world anew.

—

The town above was a dry place, water never being plentiful, usually in short supply, but on the whole their new well provided what was necessary. This far more so than in earlier days when it had been more inhabited than now, before the young had been drained away by those great cities whose distance was counted in sleeps and moons.

While there was usually water enough for that small population, for the quiet town upon that rocky face, below that castle which was only so in name, there were drier times that yet came intermittent. This had been the cause for that girl to come their way, an orphan of sorts who lived there with grandparents that looked nothing like her. The grandfather, the grandmother, they claimed that she was her own, but so unlike was she that the people of that town disbelieved them. When the drought came that month they refused her an allowance equivalent to those who were properly of this place. Surviving yet the while, only once, with her grandparents guidance, did she have cause to go to that old well which sat below the castle. Young yet she was strong enough to carry to and fro a single pail, and this held her fast until the rain returned.

When going down that day she had not seen the boy, the younger, let alone the elder who had lay quiet in his dark dwelling. She had not heard the thump which had been his call, had only caught the faintest footsteps of littler hurrying to the home. Coming upon the house itself she had been frightened, knowing nothing of this place, though abandoned homes were nothing new for a town with so few remaining, still those at least were within its sphere. This she felt was something else, foreign despite itself, distant in placement and design. The black rock which was its seat disturbed her, and she skirted the outside of this marker, barely even glancing at the doorless opening beyond which our brothers now lay quietly. She saw the goats, of course, and paid them no heed, they moved to avoid her and she went quickly on her way to the dark well where a bucket and rope sat beside those stones which were the water’s marker.

Having taken up water from below, she again returned by skirting the building, now daring to peek at its structure, its dark portal and the sole square window which sat above, but even then she saw nothing here. Turning onward then, hurrying back, what water she had taken enough for the month, as being a small girl she needed little, even gave some of what she had to her grandparents, asking all the while nothing in return.

Nearly a moon passed before she spoke to her grandparents about what she had seen, her thinking then of the bucket and rope, that these had been old and worn yet clearly cared for, and more, that they seemed to be slightly damp. She asked then whether any other had use of that faraway well, and separately received from them two stories.

The grandfather first cautioned her against that place, that it was abandoned for good reason, that no other knew or remembered or would even dare to use the well, not merely for the precarious path but further for the darkness of that place. None came from there for the church, he said, and no other went that way but for in times of true desperation where the ways prior had cause to be recalled. He spoke to her of wild creatures that lived beyond the confines of the town, of things human-like but wholly uncivilised, nature in its bestial aspect, not of flowers and fields but fire and storms.

The grandmother spoke otherwise, and this more quietly for her having heard, said there had once been a family who lived below the town. She knew little of their cause, only that they had been kindly people, elderly with a daughter who had returned from the cities on the plains below. The daughter had died, her parents soon after, and the place had been abandoned since, but she had heard further rumours of lost goats and an intervention by the priest. Some said the girl had come with a child, or that she had given birth before her death, none knew precisely, only that whatever remained after was not of the town and if living must by now be dead or half-animal to survive down there.

It would be several moons again before drought struck once more, then again the girl was barred from the further rations which were allotted to its people, then again she had cause to visit the water hidden below, and when she went next it was with both stories in her fairy-tale mind: dark creatures and wild children, nature unkempt.

—

After her first visit to the well, the younger had the very next day returned to his wandering, had returned to the light, to the realm which was his care and sole concern, to the place and time beyond the dark where his brother dared not travel. This place so unlike that which his brother inhabited, not merely for preference but further for the worlds they knew. The world of his older brother was a whole born of cool black rock, that all was known only through its entanglement in matter’s union. There was change, of course, but such alterations were known foremost as rhythm, as continuity, patterns held together like the motion of stories told by a dancing hand.

The world of the younger, in contrast, was a place of distinction, of light and darkness, distance and separation, and in this it was change which came foremost to his mind, with all held together if at all by the simple continuity of the stories his brother traced. Where the older brother was eternal, then, where he spent his days splayed and feeling through himself the slow movement of water which filled the well below, a place in which the soft thrum of the earth’s sleep was his waking world, the younger knew this as something else entire, as a movement with many centres. The goats, yes, but also the lizards with their darting, the birds that swooped, their song, the whole was here a thing of extension and motion, at last was held together only by his mind.

When first the two had heard, or the one had heard and later told, what know as a mole moving far below, that soft rumbling at a distance, then closer as scratching intermittent, it had been as if a new dimension were opened in the dreams of the younger. The world below had prior existed only in the distant darkness of the well, as if the water had created this other place, as if it existed foremost by virtue of that gift, a wet hollow amidst blasted rock. There had likewise been the motion of water prior, but how foreign this for the younger brother, how difficult for him to dream the form of this third thing alien to the realm of distinction, of an eternal flowing movement which he had never known but for the rivulets which sometimes came in heavy rain.

With the girl that day, though then he did not know her as such, there was yet again the first opening of a further dimension. This movement that did not obey the laws that he had come to know, which seemed to operate according to unknown rhythms, which he had not seen and could not understand, not even from the footsteps danced that night which he mistook instead as his own. There had been since then a sense of something else, for young as he was he knew his realm adequately, nigh perfectly for the time he had spent there, for the curiosity which led him to inspect every creature that came within the bounds drawn in shadow by that black rock.

This sense brought about in the boy a certain restlessness, known less even to himself than to his older brother, that it was felt to the latter in a new gait which echoed through the rock. He had thought this a disturbance of youth which would dissipate, although if he had known himself then he might have felt the same there, that there was a new rhythm in this place. While the sense softened with time, the alteration wrought by that day never wholly disappeared. There was something new in their world, and while the thought never occurred to either that it might be sought, for such seeking was not in their nature, for their knowing did not exceed this place, yet there was something of a new and steady anticipation that now coloured their state.

—

The heat returned some moons later, at which we might see again the scene with girl in the town, the queues at the well and priest’s solemn disavowal repeated again, again felt the same as first. With this, having in mind the stories she had been told, she was at first to go back to that place, the dark portal and single window sat uneasily in her mind. This did not displease her grandparents, for her question and the tales it had woken weighed uneasily on them as well, but in time she began to see the cost that her requirements in water caused them, at which she felt with growing certainty the need to visit that place, and with this found, foreign to herself, foreign alike to her cautious nature, a sense of curiosity which arose with this cause.

Whether only to ease the dark requirement, the necessity of this journey in the face of the thirst that followed inevitably as she took less and less from her grandparents rations, the drought this time lasting longer than the last, she felt herself drawn to that place, thinking then of the soft footstep she had heard, the dampness of that old bucket and rope, the goats which seemed content despite their desolation.

It was with this spirit then that she took up her pail and made the descent, tracing first through the smooth stones of the town until its edge, clambering over the walls at the edge of the cliff which served as the castle’s perch. This time, however, instead of moving only with the well in mind she took a more careful path, moved close along the cliff face and peered all the while down at the slanted house which rested there as if relaxing against a wall.

Soon enough she spotted a figure there, wild hair knelt upon the ground and leaning over something, then lowering herself to the ground and even leaving the pail behind her, she crawled as quietly as she could manage to get a better look at this figure, first to discern that it was, in fact, a boy, and further to see what it was he seemed to be inspecting so intently. There was nothing in his demeanour which matched to her mind the madness of a storm, that but for his hair perhaps and the disarray of clothes which seemed more akin to wrapping, as they were in fact, than any sort of tailored.

This day the elder whether by some distraction, as if the waters below whispered more distinctly than usual, whether deceived by her careful crawling, though he was more than familiar with the motion of all living things in the place, whether perhaps it was a slip of his own curiosity that caused this apparent lapse, whatever the cause, the older brother did not thump out his command that day. The girl thus came nearly upon the boy before she was heard, and this then by the younger rather than the older. It was only at this leaping that the elder, sensing then this plain disturbance, thumped out his clear command, thumped once, twice, three times, but all to no avail. The boy was caught in the sudden fulfilment of unknown anticipation, a form here seemingly crumpled and thrown to the ground before him, and eyes that shone out from the dust.

He stood then, ignorant to the thumping, perhaps for his being still less attuned than his brother to this means of communication, likely for the fullness of his other senses, for the image which overwhelmed and came entirely from outside, and most of all for what he saw in the eyes of this creature that was like but not him: for the first he saw then sight. This not the sight of the goats, that he knew, nor the alien eyes of lizards and insects, rather the steady sight which prior had only through him fallen upon this place. He saw there himself in her eyes, not as the rhythms traced and tapped but in the mirror of recognition, even of knowledge, and a further hint of something more.

Neither said anything to the other, the girl caught awkwardly in her crawl, the boy standing still with hands clasped as if to carve an orb from the air, at which, in the absence of anything else to do, he simply opened his hands. The egg he had made of his palms thus cracked, out crawled a lizard with dappled green stripes, and this lizard too, albeit with the frenetic attitude common to its species, blinking at the sudden birth of day, glanced back and forth between the two still staring.

The older brother had ceased to thump out his command, not thrice but seemingly countless, at first with the steadiness of a sure sovereign, then with panic, finally at last in acceptance, even trust, for he felt within him still the situation out beyond, and though he knew little of what had come, still he knew enough to sense that there was no immediate danger. Eventually, for the two stood staring a fair while, he even went so far as to lift himself temporarily from his scrying stone, went so far as to taste the light with his finger, not so far as to emerge but further than before, and finding that this at least was all as expected, he returned carefully and quietly to his throne.

It was then that the girl spoke, and though sound be a sort of vibration it was not such that the older could hear, nor the younger in his own way, a sort of song was all he took it for, and his eyes took on an air of surprise at this girl-bird that had seemed so alike and yet, in every other way, in mere presence, in aspect, in her mode of dress, in the drawn out squawking which was her song, was wholly other than anything which had prior entered his realm. There was little of beauty in her song, but it was not so much a matter of being in some way lesser than that of other birds, rather it was alien entirely, and in this he felt more the spirit of his brother’s dance than the rhythm and regularity of the many birds which now perched silent above this scene.

With this sound the older brother then thumped once more, and this the younger heard, this he took as imperative not so much for the appeal of its command but rather for the lack of knowing anything else that he might do. He did not turn suddenly, did not hurry as he had the first time where she had been but an unknown and distant encroachment, rather he placed the lizard down before this girl, there still laid flat upon the ground, in which aspect she reminded him somehow of his brother, and then turned at last to move towards the house. She squawked a few more notes as he walked away but he did not turn, taking this to be a farewell akin to that of other birds rather than the entreaty and inquiry that was intended from her perspective.

With the boy gone then she was alone with the lizard which now sat likewise on all fours before her, mirroring her posture, and there continued to stare for a moment before it too, yet with somewhat less repose, darted away into the nearby bushes.

She did not go for water that day, had not told her grandparents that this was her intent, instead clambered back up the hillside and collected her pail, walked to the house which was her home and put it away quietly. This she did not with any intent to return to that place, not with anything much in the way of thought beyond the moment, and there of those eyes which seemed to see some novelty in her own, which seemed to be recognising something for the first time, and it was this sole memory that remained with her of the day, which followed her that night even into dreams.

The next morning this girl woke without remembering her dreams, a fact not unusual for her, but stranger still she barely remembered the day prior in any self-conscious sense, and in the heat of the sun with dry mouth and little in the way of water, she went to fetch the pail and return to complete the task which she had forgotten the day before. The same path as prior, the same steps even, but now with something new.

—

That night the younger brother rested there in the corner of their dwelling, there against his brother, and between them a distance. This was a thing foreign, for the older brother had always spoken in his way, with the dance of hands upon back, and yet now it seemed that the younger had something to say, but this meant nothing to him, and so he sought a way through in the only method he had ever known: he tapped the older until he turned, and there began to trace out a figure upon his back.

This was the first time that the younger had ever done this, not for any law but rather for it never having occurred to him, always the older had seemed to know the world foremost in its reality, only now did there seem to be anything beyond him. The younger had recognised on his walk back to their dwelling the pattern that his brother had tapped out however long ago, though he had not seen her walk or felt its rhythm, yet it was the same sense as had confused him then: this which was like but not me. Now he traced out this figure, a face, upon his older brother’s back, at which the elder turned and lifting his hands, placed them upon the face of his younger brother, upon the face of the boy, and felt inverted a form akin to that which he had just sensed upon himself. He then took his hands to his own face and felt there, and again detected this likeness which was not quite identity.

The older brother knew many things in his own way, was familiar with the recurrence of patterns in their subtle distinctions, held in his own way a set of categories, but for these did not divide the world; rather they were a mirrored unity. This which he felt now might well have been the same but for the sense of a shift in his brother’s bearing, the unfamiliarity of this conduct, the reversal of roles. He did not understand what it was exactly that the younger had come to know, could not grasp this, and felt then a sense of despair at this first intrusion of distance into his world. This was not a thing known cognitively, let alone with language, for we find thought a fragile flame without the glass of language to contain it as lamp. There was only here the first faint sense of some change which had come into the world.

This night, for the first that either could remember, the older brother did not send the boy to sleep with the dancing stories of echoes played out by hands. This night, the elder did not even turn to sleep, instead lay upon the black rock a while longer and listened as if the waters below might whisper to him of what had happened, as if they might explain to him the faraway sense he now felt within himself: that the change had not been so much in the world but in his relation to the world, more so in his brother’s relation to the world, to himself, their relation to one another.

The elder fell asleep splayed upon his rock that night, the boy in turn quietly in the dark, that there was here a new distance between the two, here in the night that they both shared, that treasured place, which, perhaps even more than this dwelling of stone, was their true home, that there was for the first time a separation.

—

That summer was long, the drought went on, the girl came to visit more regularly seeking water from the well below. She came with this at first as her sole cause, later merely as a convenient excuse, and eventually even as the drought ended she would still take up her pail daily and venture down and around castle and cliff.

Their third and fourth meetings were irregular as the first, still moving carefully down the hill, quietly but now not crawling, she would spy the boy as he tended to the goats or inspected some other face of his domain. At first they would simply stare at one another, at which eventually either he would turn to depart, having heard the silent thumping through his bare feet, else she would break their gaze herself and head for the well. This continued for the first while without much in the way of change, though less and less did she try to speak to him, a fact which the boy felt a shame having come to appreciate her strange squawking, not for being any closer to understanding, rather for it filling the space with a new sound, a new song, and even beginning to sense the regularities within its pattern, though never truly grasping any notion in this as might be known as meaning.

Eventually the boy seemed to expect her, even to wait for her, and always at these times he would come to her with something, an insect in red and black, an injured bird, and he would he bring these in delicate hands without ever a word, would simply hold them out to her, not as gifts, not with a hint of the thing as property that might be handed over or otherwise exchanged, but rather as a means of showing her, of sharing in sight, and in a sense sharing of himself. The boy was undoubtedly wild, that she knew, but he was closer to the story told by her grandmother than that of the grandfather, there was nothing here in the way of that violence brought by storms, nothing of thunder or lightning, always a quietness, even a fragility, in his movements and manner.

Later the boy would even lead her to places and point in his strange manner, never having had cause for this before, rather with the gesturing of a backward hand, and it was a long while before he came to mirror the fashion in which she indicated for her attention, as she came to know this place, came to share in his realm. For while the boy had been here a long time now, had thought himself to have thoroughly inspected all within his domain, still there is something in the eyes of another which brings new things to light. She came herself to gesture tentatively at first, respectful of his prior rights, and then slowly to even lead him to what she had encountered along her way.

It was around then that the boy, wholly silent thus far, first uttered a noise which was recognisably human to her. She had led him to see what she had found that day, where having forgotten her pail she had gone to return for this piece of act lest he suspect, and there beside a tree on the way up the hill had found an egg fallen from a nest that they had observed together in its construction some sleeps before. Hurrying to find him, leading him there, she had carefully shown him the egg laying still whole upon the dirt. He smiled at her as if affirming her position alongside him as custodian of this place, and leaning down had delicately lifted the egg from the ground. Climbing a little way up the hillside, he reached into the tree and placed it back into the nest.

When he returned to her side, still smiling, now both, she looked to him, pointed, and without consideration gave him a name. This alone of all her words seemed to have a meaning beyond mere squawking, here alone he turned to her and repeated her words, gestured at himself and repeated them again, and then he laughed. The first human sound from him, a thing elicited by smiling name, a joke shared between these two, the memory of this event, and he repeated the word again, half mumbled at first and then clearer as she guided him, laughing between with perfect clarity. She did not know whether he had truly grasped this sound as name, whether he knew at all what this might mean, nor did it seem to her a proper name, and yet his speech and the laugh were pure and bright, were a moment distinct amidst many.

Throughout these occasions, in the midst of their meetings and times together, the boy would often slip away suddenly, usually just as she was looking at something he had pointed out, squinting to catch what it was he intended, she would turn to find that he was not there, at times could be spotted in the distance heading towards the dwelling. These turnings mystified her, for she could find in them no rhyme or reason, nor did her calls cause his return, at most he might glance back, even smile at her, only to turn back again and enter the dark portal of that stone dwelling which still she never approached. To her there was no clear cause for these, they seemed necessarily to come from within the boy, animated by some quiet thought or movement else mysterious. She did not sense the soft thump of command to which he was attuned, not only for her wearing old shoes, not only for the various other vibrations which were present in the place, but most of all for the fact that this was not a language which held for her any meaning. Just as her squawking reminded only of birds, so the brother’s thumps tended to disappear into the manifold movements of nature.

This time was not without difficulty for the brothers, the distance felt that first night waxed and waned with the moons but there was never again the simple alignment that had reigned prior. The lines of authority remained clear, and yet the brother felt that he had somehow lost access to an aspect of his younger sibling. This he had, for the world was now split in two. Where the whole of his environs had prior been passive, even with the obvious agency and purpose of the animals to which the boy attended carefully and understood with a sense well beyond his lack of learning, there was yet something new in the sight signalled by this third pair of eyes. Though it was not the fault of the brother, though he understood this in some way, still there was something missing from his eyes, something which was only faintly translated and transferred through that dance of hands which grew less and less regular as the summer endured.

They still spoke in their own way at night, had returned to sleeping beside one another, had returned to sleeping and even to dreaming in this same way, but this introduction of distinction had troubled his brother. Despite this sense for the existence of something new in the world, despite the apparent interest it held for his young sibling, still he never came further than to taste the light with his finger each morning as he always had. Instead he turned more and more to the stone, more and more to listening intently, and in this he could not help but sense the movements of these two in the place beyond, for as their comfort increased so did their play, the regularity and ease of their motions came to be a new rhythm in the echoes which were his world. This did not trouble the brother in itself, and he was not unaware of the importance this held for his sibling, the joy, even the still silent and in some sense unknowable meaning that this held for him, but he came to feel himself as further from that bright-lit world which seemed forever beyond his home echoed in stone.

At first the boy tried to communicate something of this to his brother, tried as he had the first night to draw upon his brother’s back, not at first, not for some while after the initial that had been such a disturbance, but eventually he would tap his brother upon the shoulder and clumsily seek to dance out some sign in the way which had so often been reversed in earlier times. This the brother accepted at first with some mild interest, but more and more it seemed only to disturb him until at last he shrugged off the boy and subsequently refused thereafter to turn his back to him.

With this there came a further turning in the relation, that the brother would spend even more time, even throughout the night, splayed upon his black rock and listening with singular intensity, in the day alike he pursued this with a sort of restlessness that had never before characterised his scrying. This came to be not a thing of simple unity but rather a striving for something in the black that seemed to exceed him, and with this inward disturbance he further came to thump more and more regularly for the return of his sibling. These were not in signs of danger, nor even to share any news, and when the boy returned, as he still did promptly on the whole, there would rather be a new silence between them, nothing but the dim dwelling to hold them together.

The increase in these commands was not initially noticed by the girl, that they did not shift suddenly but rather became more insistent over the course of time. By now the drought had ended and yet she came still to this place, still with her pail to play the part, though her grandparents did not seem to notice or mind, and at these ever more frequent interruptions she came to think the boy was simply bored of her, that she had overstayed her welcome, that something had soured or else she had otherwise come too often. She too began to limit herself, came less regularly, and yet whenever she would eventually return, for her time away was not without care or interest for that place where at last she had acquired some sense of home, some sense of a world which could and would encompass her, she would find the boy waiting, as often as not with a look of joy upon his face at seeing her, with some new sight to show her, a peculiar rock or a home newly established by birds, anything at all he had to share with her, anything of himself that she might come to know.

She would even see in him a restlessness when she approached without his notice, something that only dissipated at first sight of her, which melted away in her sight, and yet just as surely he would as often disappear again when she had hardly been there a moment, when she had not even had a chance to share in his presence and the little realm they explored together beneath that imposing castle. There came then some further sense, that there was something she did not understand, and at this the thought of her grandfather’s story came to her, that there was a fickleness in him akin to the weather, that the nature could likewise turn in a moment, clouds might just as suddenly block the sky and a storm unheralded crowd out the horizon.

These thoughts began to gather in her mind, contradictory and unsettled, for there was simultaneously a certainty and a doubt here, a sense of something unknown and even unknowable, and worse yet that despite her best efforts she could not ask him a single thing. He smiled when she spoke, attended carefully to the sound of her words, but never did he reply, learning only after some time to nod in response, mirroring her mannerisms again in this, and yet but for his naming all never with a sign of meaning grasped, rather in a simple acknowledgement of her being and action. She soon grew frustrated at this felt contradiction, yet noticing that the boy was not unaware of its effect on her, and he in turn began to ignore for one or several turns that thumping of command which issued noiselessly from the dwelling stone.

There was for a while after this a peace, that he would remain with her for longer and longer periods, that with this came a further disturbance of the brother’s state, that the boy noticed this when he returned in the evenings having spent the day with her, that somehow despite their plentiful supplies of milk and water he yet grew weaker. Though lacking language the boy understood, having once seen a mother goat stand over the corpse of her child, having seen the wasting that followed and her refusal to move, the heat that bore down upon her and the suffering she endured for this loss which ought to be nothing. This despair unyielding which followed from losing to the world a part of herself.

These conflicting impulses thus warred within the boy, for the girl, for his brother, himself torn between, and in time began to bear on his aspect. This likewise did not go unnoticed, that the girl saw his demeanour shift and become heavier as the days went by. He began again to listen to the commands, but this always with a newfound frustration, with an expression of the anxiety and tension he felt worn plainly on his face, and at this the girl resumed her fears from earlier, that now she must surely have outworn her welcome, that she had intruded into this place, that this just as the village could never be a home for her, that she was equally alien and foreign here.

These thoughts heavy upon her, still she continued to visit, for there seemed enough in his smile to assure her despite the stormy aspect of his frequent turnings away. There was further grew in her a desperation at the impossibility of communication, that she could not understand and nothing in her could ask, that the whole seemed an absurdity born only of this lack. When next he turned to disappear, without any sense of premeditation, the idea never having occurred to her prior, she simply followed him. She squawked after him and when this time he did not even turn, rushed angrily at him as he approached the dark entrance with the dim window above, reaching him only as he began to pas through the portal to that black place hidden from the sun.

There she grabbed him by the shoulder, pulled by his motion seemed half as if to enter with him, at which he turned violently and pushed her away, half threw her backwards into the dirt as with a storm bursting in his eyes he emitted the first sharp sound from his mouth in all the time they had known each other. With true venom he growled at her, his face contorted with tension and rage, this the storm as had been promised, the lightning and thunder predicted, all of this crashed over her and left her scrambling backwards amidst the brush. He glared with dark eyes until certain that she was retreating, that she intended to leave, at which he disappeared at last into the black.

—

The next day the girl woke and decided, not even due to the event prior, with mind to no specific cause, not by reason or thought, simply felt and chose with this feeling that she would not again visit the boy. The drought was long over, water was adequate again in the village, and her isolation now did not seem so intense. Though there were no other children in the town, still there were birds and plenty else to see, still there was much that had been awakened in her by that time down by the stone. This was enough for her, she thought, and she believed this honestly, that she had yet received enough from the place that they shared, and that it was only greed which compelled her to return for more. She would take nothing further from him, would intrude no longer into his peace, and so she stayed away for several moons, wandering instead with borrowed eyes.

For the while, so long as it lasted, she was happy there in this town which was not her own, walking the cobbled streets and stopping to inspect all the moments which went unseen by the many who took it simply as a place, as their place, and it was perhaps only for her feeling so foreign, further only for having first encountered the meaning of a place as such through the eyes of the boy, that she came to see what it really was.

She saw there countless sights, in each of them shared with the boy, if not in presence then in spirit, and though she delighted in these she yet grew restless for the lack of anyone to share them with. While telling her grandparents, even when showing them what she had found and describing what this meant to her, the patterns of birds or the strange intelligence and activity of insects, she felt that words were nothing more than sounds, a squawking they shared, which were ultimately little in the way of any shared sight, which meant nothing compared to the silence that she had known.

This growing sense came in time to detract from her wanderings, happy as they were, until one day she spotted a goat entirely out of place, a thing walking precariously, as they were wont, but somehow further yet, there along a cliff near the castle. She knew this goat as one of those belonging to the boy and thought then of him with a further pang, a sense that she did not sully with words, for which she sought no further communion but the sight itself and that shared knowing, despite its lapse in time and space, despite the distance at once implied by this presence.

It was not until she saw another of his goats, and then another, that she began to feel some sense of concern. The goats were well tended to down below the castle, that they were wandering so far as to encroach upon the town seemed to imply some disorder in the affairs of that careful and quiet place below. With this she came, not all at once but ever so slowly, to consider that it had been long enough now and that she might return, if only a single time, to check upon him, to ensure that the remainder were alright, and subtly, without clear intent, perhaps to see him at least one further time.

With this she collected her pail, thinking at least to use the excuse if it proved necessary, that she could hurry through to simply retrieving water if her presence seemed wholly unwelcome, thus she climbed the wall by the cliff and descended down the soft hill to that old stone dwelling which still sat leaning softly against the dirt.

At a distance she could not see the boy, nor could she make out any sign of him in the area, and even coming closer there was nothing to indicate his presence. When she at last reached that smooth black rock which surrounded his home, she saw then that the place was out of sorts from that which she had known. The goats were now not set happily in this proper order, some several were even missing, those that she had seen but more besides, and her heart began to tremble for thinking of the boy and their last encounter. The storm which had raged then, that darkness which swallowed his eyes.

She walked then around the home, turned to look at the doorless opening where he had frightened her so, and despite herself, thinking the goats at least some excuse, steeling herself against the memory of that violent reaction, of her flight and the many moons which since intervened, stepped to the entrance and called out his name.

There was no reply, as well she might have expected, but neither a laugh nor even the bare sound of movement issued from that place. There was only a blank silence which was beyond even that she had come to expect here, not the wholesome silence of quiet presence but rather a distinct absence which seemed to linger in the air.

The portal where he had glared at her, where had frightened her away with evident intent, lay open as ever before her, and coming closer she could caught sight of the outline of a figure within splayed upon the dark rock which was its ground within. This figure did not move even when she called again, seemed not to even hear her, and with worry in her heart and fear in her mind she took the single step necessary to breach the entrance which had last so fiercely repulsed her.

There she found the boy lying naked flat upon the rock, then speaking his name quietly at first, the name she had given him, their name, at which he had laughed so clearly that day, then repeated again louder alike to nothing. At last approaching him with all care and quietness, with the hesitation of one coming close to a flame, she moved towards him and placed her hand upon his back. He was warm and familiar yet far frailer than the last she had seen him, the outline of bones protruding through pale flesh, a shape to which her hand only vaguely confirmed as if some unnatural form.

She took his shoulder then, slowly turned him to see his face, saw with shock two pale eyes in the dim light of that dark stone dwelling. The face looked at her but the eyes did not see, and after steadying herself and placing him against the wall, she ran then to fetch water in her pail to bring him something to drink. Then returning she found the boy as she had left him, no longer pressed to the stone but instead leant against the corner, and with cupped hands she brought water to his mouth, to cracked lips beneath vacant eyes. He did not react to any sound, neither name nor anything else, not even to her tears, and when she cradled his head in her arm to give him water, though he faced her it was plain then that with milk-white eyes he saw nothing.

Taking his hand in hers, she then traced the letters of their name upon his palm, and the boy, finally feeling fingers which were not his own, smiling at last began to dream.

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At the 1968 Symposium of Taoist Studies, a contradiction was raised between the philosophical and the practical in Taoism. Where the latter, the alchemists and adepts, sought eternal life, the former were inclined—and this is plainly apparent from the text—to reconcile oneself to death. This theme can be found throughout, that death is not be overcome by exclusion as through eternal life but rather that life and death are each alike eternal in their role as aspects of the heavenly cycle.

It is said, for instance, that “he who knows how to nourish life … has no place of death” (chapter fifty). This gives rise to the notion ascribed to Taoism by some that there are magical wards, means of preventing death by a violence external or internal. Against this, we may trace life and death in the Tao te Ching as a whole. Following this leads us to a more metaphysically consistent interpretation, at least in this context, in which as elsewhere and otherwise in the Tao te Ching, as with all such polarities, life and death are as aspects ever-turning in that singular face of the nameless Tao. 

There is nothing in the way of permanence within the Tao but for its whirling, in which all polarities are intertwined impossible as an aspect of this dynamic. The dynamic itself, moreover, is that which sustains its own basic dichotomy between static and dynamic: that movement is the only law, that it is the endlessness of this motion which is the eternal rather than any of the ten-thousand things that issue forth from this origin. We might here trace some of the several basic polarities within the Tao te Ching: dynamic and static, life and death, being and non-being, self and selflessness, the Tao itself and the ten-thousand things. All of these are aspects of the whole, images of the imageless.

Taking this final turning, aspects of the whole, we find a further polarity in the relation known by the scholastics (and to some since) as mereology: the relation of the whole to its parts, of the parts to their whole. This is that which stands between, which holds together—as to cleave can be a movement in either direction, together or apart—the Tao and the ten-thousand things. For this we can consider it in terms of the anthropic principle, for lack of a better term to capture this: that were there not the ten-thousand things, then there would not be the Tao te Ching. The text itself, as the human that interprets this, as the world to which this interpretation seems to refer, are of the ten-thousand things. Were it not for these then there would be no need for the Tao te Ching, at which we might ask of the theodicy implied by this text, by this relation between source which seems and the substance of its existents.

We have thus far neglected what may be for many the more immediate polarity of good and evil, and this perhaps for the fact that the Tao te Ching is foremost a work cosmological rather than ethical. The ethical aspect here follows from the cosmological, and further that there is a meta-ethical position which situates the ethical-psychological in contrast to the ethical-cosmological. Early in the Tao te Ching there is the notion that to distinguish between goodness and evil is itself an evil, that there is an unnatural aspect to this act of distinction. Here we may note a further perspective, perhaps tangential, through a consideration of the nature of ontological primitives in the Chinese language.

There is in Chinese syntax as resistance to making objects and containers of the abstract, as against English where this is happily done. A key example here is the treatment of the word for ‘race,’ as in English one might happily refer to someone being in a race (hence, treating it as a container) whereas in Chinese it is more appropriate to deal with this in terms of a verb (hence race as activity or process). This can be taken as indicative of a wider tendency, noted by Rouzer, to avoid the positing of abstract containers in the Chinese language. The particular example for which we are raising this point, however, occurs in the context of translating the Bible into Chinese, particularly the book of Genesis:

to know good and evil (3:5)

分别善恶

fenbie shan e

distinguish good and evil

We find here that this tendency manifests in a distinct difference of meaning, that it is not a matter of knowing good and evil as entities but rather treating of these as relational terms constituted by the act of distinction. From this we can see that our own perspective is even further from that which the Tao te Ching addresses, that our tendency to fragments in ontology only increases our need for the Tao.

The central polarity with which we are here concerned is that of life and death, and further all others to the extent that these are implicated in this basic concern: self and selflessness, being and non-being, and so on. These must be conceived of in terms of this as an act of distinction rather than the objectified notion which is common today, which is not merely an artificial exercise in understanding some distant culture but rather captures our own state more accurately than the delusions of Plato.

It is perhaps inappropriate to blame Plato so directly for this, that another would have served just as well in this world-historical role, in the necessity of this movement, and further that it was not his by chance or fault but rather determined as the role he was to play. This metaphysics, moreover, is not, as in Nietzsche’s treatment in the Twilight of the Idols, so much an error strictly conceived as it was a necessary movement for our being at all. The attitude which I am outlining here is precisely in line with that of the Tao te Ching, where the movement must proceed through its own opposite if it is to arrive at its proper end—and here, returning to theodicy at last, we find that it is the refusal of this this end, namely neglecting to leave the stage at the end of one’s scene, which constitutes a wrong.

The very notion of a wrong here seems further inappropriate in this context, that it is not a wrong in the moral sense, not in the earthly sense, that it is rather a movement against the laws of heaven, and to this extent it may, as friction produces heat, result in suffering thrown off from its contradictory motion. To the Taoist, therefore, this may well be considered a ‘wrong’—but it is so in quite different terms, it is not a wrong in the sense of demanding some action of human authority to right it, rather is simply a disorder in the necessary movement of an earth encompassed by the laws of heaven.

With that quite unsatisfactory view, that it is and is not at once (ultimately avaktavya in the Jain sense of the inexpressibility of simultaneous asserted contradiction), we may then ask: how is this possible? This is truly the question of theodicy, not moral but cosmological, and it is within this context that we must frame any answer. There is within the Tao te Ching certainly a sense for the inevitable heavenly law, that the Sage must (or ought) move with this motion, and yet there is the further possibility of resisting this, that which is regularly cautioned against: “When work is done, the person retires, such is the Tao of heaven” (chapter nine). Similarly, or contrarily, “because he does not contend with any, he commits no wrong” (chapter eight).

There is in this a basic contradiction, and this is the same contradiction as that which animates the broader notion of wu wei or ‘effortless action.’ The question here is which term the emphasis is to be placed upon, either effortless or action, with the meaning of this single concept varying significantly according to the location of this stress. We can observe with Slingerland that this placement, both in the strict from of reference to wu wei and the family of metaphors which surround this basic tension in Chinese ethical thought, has varied with time. He notes that in the Analects, for instance, that while the concept of wu wei is presently strictly only once, there is nevertheless the common notion of effortless moral activity—and yet that this is found simultaneously with and alongside elements of exertion and even violence.

This tension is never resolved within the tradition, at most some final version may be approached within a single text, albeit often in a somewhat forced manner. The situation thus suits the conclusion given by Padmarajiah in quite a different context, namely when it comes to this contradiction between effort and action in moral activity: “Unless the claims of the two brothers are evenly accommodated philosophy becomes a haunted house constantly assailed by the ghost of the maltreated brother.” Of course, to evenly accomodate these aspects seems in itself to be an impossible aim, and here we may return at last to another polarity noted earlier as central to the Tao te Ching: of the static and dynamic.

Before doing so, however, a point arises quite of its own accord, as that neglected ghost, and this perhaps for the neglect implied necessarily by the structure of language, by the attempt here to name the nameless: the various polarities that are addressed here in turn, perhaps not in an orderly way, one vying to press forward against the other and the whole queue shuffling time and again as this and then that come to the fore—that in this there is a falsity of their division, that this would be akin to my describing movement in the world solely within a single dimension at a time. There are rarely, likely never, any movements in actuality which adhere solely to single dimension, hence these are described falsely first by the one movement and then by the latter. This difficulty is itself appreciated in the Tao te Ching, where the Tao alone is that which “unties the tangled” (chapter four); since it is nameless, however, and yet we persist nevertheless in our vain effort, the muddle here will have to make do.

Taking up again the polarity of static and dynamic, here framed with reference to our discussion of effortlessness and action, we find there are two perspectives on this solution: the first is an answer in words, the second is necessarily also but aspires more to the status of a gesture. The former conceives of the solution in terms of either the stress on effortlessness or action, that it thus seeks a rule by which to guide oneself. This may be conceived in the simplest sense as a prescription of either effortlessness or action as the essence and true ‘first term’ of wu wei, but it might as well also imply a whole system of morality arranged as a sort of decision tree where one may trace out the answer entirely. These are alike of the same spirit in that they seek some answer that can be framed in words, and thus which are defined with reference to other words, a self-contained system that attains to static truth. This is the view which conceives of language as somehow separate from the actuality to which it refers, which indeed views the word as somehow superseding or even sustaining this actuality as linguistic reality.

The static view outlined here is that of a closed system, that the structure of language can enclose itself and the world, that there can be certainty framed within these terms. Earlier Plato was blamed for one aspect, and here perhaps we can peel back a layer of the error attributed to him by noting the importance of Euclid’s Elements and geometry in general for the Platonic school—that being plain for the school itself as a physical and historical, even if perhaps partly fictional, entity, but moreover also for the school which followed in the sense of tradition, wherein it is not so much a place or container, to take up again the matter of Chinese syntax, but rather a thing distinguishable solely by the aligned movement of its many fish. The former announced this influence quite plainly: “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter“—whereas the latter has rather been aligned to this influence more or less subtly.

Taking this view, turning our gaze then to geometry, we may first note an interesting difference between the Greek and Chinese schools in terms of their areas of mathematical expertise. The former, the many varied Greeks, were known particularly for their geometric thought; the Chinese for their work in algebra and number theory. This is to say little, but to my eye glints in response to Needham. To continue our more immediate point, the Platonic school explicitly invoked the place of geometry in the learning of philosophy, and yet we do not find it there explicitly so—where then was the essence, the critical role, of this work such that it served to bar any unfamiliar from entering that place?

Taking up Plato’s Meno, the demonstration of anamnesis, from the doctrine that all knowledge is recollection, we find Socrates proving his point by a slave boy on the beach, that there he marks out a series of geometrical exercises on the sand and has the wholly untrained youth answer these in turn. The fact that this boy, without having any prior education in the art, is yet able to do so successfully is taken by Socrates to prove this doctrine of anamnesis: that it is possible for the boy remembers that realm from which he came, that there he was more intimately acquainted with knowledge and all in this realm merely hearkens back to that prior state of absolute knowing. There is in this basic story much with foreshadows the philosophy to follow and, so long at it is turned sideways at angle, plenty also in the way of truth. This is not our immediate concern.

Instead we are concerned with the structure of these geometric forms, the interplay between the material representation of forms in the sand as drawn with limb of man or tree and those which are thereby inculcated in the minds of entrants to the Platonic school. The ideal realm thus sketched in this example is one which is ultimately proved, so to speak, sustained, and structured by the nature of its geometric origin—and it is in this that we find a sort of eternity, a static realm separate from that to which it refers, one in which the whole can be assured by internal relations and applied to the world.

This is not our world, nor is it the world to which the Tao te Ching refers. I do not call this a strict error, nor do I ask for it to be overturned, I suggest only that in modern questions of metaphysics we have perhaps reached its limits. This is then to apply that earlier principle, that a thing must relent in acknowledgement of its own limits, and in this I also demonstrate the dynamic view which we hinted at earlier: that there may be another answer to the contradiction implied by wu wei, effortless action.

We suggest then a static solution, one which pulls from the Tao te Ching its own solution, that frames the whole within familiar terms. There are three parts to this solution, but this is not the tripartite structure of a dialectical process, such would be to risk implying an end to this movement. Instead the parts are these: one, the other, and the tension between. The focus then must not be on either one or the other but the tension between these, and it is this which compels our movement. Of course, there must in this be a further contradiction: when we take this tension as our aim, we must yet believe in the truth of the angle it compels. There can be no halfhearted pursuit of effortlessness or action in this movement, that would be false, would ultimately fall short; rather we must take each and every of these turns to be in itself the answer—and yet all the while to remember this tension.

There is thus a tension which doubles within itself, the tension of effort and action, the tension within each of these frames between truth and its limits; nowhere here can we be allowed to slack. This is, of course, impossible—and yet there is this further tension between the impossibility of this aim and its absolute requirement, that this again is the source of our movement, that it must be felt. It would be a lie to say that this is not impossible, worse yet that we think that this could be achieved, for if it has been achieved, or we think as much, and rest thus upon our laurels, then all is lost.

This same balance of tension is that which must animate our attitudes in all of these polarities, and it is this we can be felt as the true meaning of avaktavya. Such a thing cannot be spoken, can only be felt, and it is in this feeling that we find the source of what must come—not as a tension which stalls us, not as the anxiety which brings us to a stop, rather in that which compels the tightrope walker to constantly place one foot in front of the other in order to remain in existence. The void waits hungry below.

Zarathustra, however, remained standing, and just beside him fell the body, badly injured and disfigured, but not yet dead. After a while, consciousness returned to the shattered man, and he saw Zarathustra kneeling beside him.

“What art thou doing there?” said he at last, “I knew long ago that the devil would trip me up. Now he draggeth me to hell: wilt thou prevent him?”

“On mine honour, my friend,” answered Zarathustra, “there is nothing of all that whereof thou speakest: there is no devil and no hell. Thy soul will be dead even sooner than thy body; fear, therefore, nothing any more!”

The man looked up distrustfully. “If thou speakest the truth,” said he, “I lose nothing when I lose my life. I am not much more than an animal which hath been taught to dance by blows and scanty fare.”

“Not at all,” said Zarathustra, “thou hast made danger thy calling; therein there is nothing contemptible. Now thou perishest by thy calling: therefore will I bury thee with mine own hands.”

Where does a circle come from, where does it rest? I ask these aloud, am told at first by a pleasant girl that they come from the sundial, then this proving mistaken for its imperfect form, from the wheel. The notion of cyclicality is different from that of circularity. The word chronological comes from reference to the mill, the similarity of root sound to grain being no coincidence: time the devourer with scythe and gnashing teeth.1 This great sacrifice of order to ourselves. The harvest as buffalo jump.

The tree, I think; that is where the circle comes from, that likely also the wheel from the first forms of movement in this way. Consider other means of moving vast figures: to roll it upon logs, or to walk it with ropes. The latter is the algebraic method, and this in the fullness of its metaphor: to move through ropes and points. These ropes anchor and execute transformations of the original figure.

The geometric method then, what is that? Here the object rolls, there is a continuous aspect to this movement. This is a thing determined by contact between two, by the movement of an object over a surface. The algebraic likewise implies a surface, but this is framed discontinuously in terms of points. Consider the continuous function: it is a method which seems to produce a curve, but what is that really?2

There are a series of points with a sufficient regularity that we blur discontinuity and consider them as motion.3 Supposing we had never encountered a curve, then what would be the defining trait which held together this regularity? It would, far as I can tell, be a non-entity. The defining feature of a shape is its negation, here the shape tells us what is not like this; that this excludes the structure we take to be a curve.4 

It is defined ultimately in this way because it is necessarily defined incompletely. The incompleteness of an entity is its life, that only the dead are complete. This is the forward-facing aspect of the idea, by virtue of which it can touch the world. 

The edges are not defined by rule or system but rather by taste and discernment. While the structure of mathematics may be mechanical—hence rational—ultimately it is rooted in an intuitive base with the sole credential of being repeatedly and improbably true. This the foundation of all mathematics.

Here the question is how this moves, how does development occur with regularity in mathematics when it rests ultimately upon intuition? There is the sense that we are describing some sort of truthfulness, something that is beyond us. This is true, and it is for this reason that it matters most where we get the circle.

The circle is seen twofold as a matter of morphological computation and physical constraint. For the latter, there is something in the basic law of things, something below or above our notion of physical law, which tends towards the circle—as also the curve—and such constraints manifest regularly in space. 

This can be seen in the tree, and this form corresponds with its peculiar characteristic of rolling.5 All of this can be explained in its own terms but not beyond that. All here takes by necessity an axiomatic basis in the structure of these shapes, these symbols, and this is necessarily taken for granted. 

There are certain shapes that we find in the world. I do not believe that the nature of our ideas is divinely created, but I cannot find any better cause for the nature of the world. The argument here is that the nature of the world is such as to allow not only the development of life but further of its peculiarity, precisely what it is we find.

I recall once writing on theology, on the teleological and cosmological problems: that the universe is such, in terms of its fundamental constants, as to allow life; and that the universe exist at all. My argument was that these collapse into a single term: that anything is is indistinguishable from the fact that it is this way and not some other.

Some say that we can explain the whole in terms of processes, and the extent of this truth will illustrate out point: the process cannot justify itself. The process does not cause itself, rather is posited as cause. The process follows from how things are and draws lines of string between aspects in time and space. This is its power.

This string construction, however, as any other, is held together entirely by that to which it is attached; in this case, nothing. The fact it holds together is our basic requirement. We need only suspend our disbelief and he will handle the rest.

I’m pleased that. . . you advocate a cautiously Platonistic point of view. To me a Platonism of this kind (also with respect to mathematical concepts) seems to be obvious and its rejection to border on feeble-mindedness.

Platonism properly understood is a question: how can this be possible? For we find impossibility here. The old line is better turned: any sufficiently advanced product of evolution is indistinguishable from magic. This is merely to accept that it is what it does, that the principles of the world are indeed this way. We must accept that the mathematical realm is improbably true. There is a sense in which aligns with the subtle laws of this world, that it seems unified and invisible in a way unlike any other sphere of practical knowledge. Mathematics seems to take place of a piece, entirely together, and this in a way outside the world—and more: that it does not enter the world. It is perhaps this final feature which is most surprising: that mathematics, despite its importance, despite its preeminence in Western civilisation, only ever enters the world indirectly. This is precisely what makes mathematics so perfect, for in this we find it is timeless, even universal. The question then is the precise ontology of this structure: what does it have to do with the world, with us?

To answer this we must know where it comes from, as all things are best known. This is a notion formalised by Spinoza: essential knowledge of an object comes best from its practical description.1 The circle, for instance, is best defined by a compass. Something similar is so more generally: a thing is best known through its origin. The fact that this is so rarely asked in the history of philosophy is for the thing being unthinkable then. The notion of evolution, of our being produced in such a fashion, is of recent vintage—and yet it is not really, for we find much the same shapes in even the earliest mythologies. All of these tell us about the faculties by way of their origins. The whole is situated in a story. Some shame these stories, “just-so” tales, and they are that, but it is with humility that we must accept them as about the best we have.

These stories are our best option if we intend to really know anything. The other way is merely to know locations; that this is how consciousness is described, for instance: the frontal cortex, the parietal—or they may likewise tell us when it is: 170 milliseconds, 230. So much of science is the identification and arrangement of fragments, an aesthetic which analytic philosophy apes. I do not advise the excess of continental philosophy as its alternative, not the mere telling of stories, but I do accept this influence. I accept these both as elements of the proper image: evidence, yes, but also characters and plot. This is the key also to understanding mathematics.

Who are the characters in this play? They are the living tradition of mathematics, of course. It is found first in them, only then the world. They find it in the world only when they go looking. It is in the world also, of that there is no doubt, but it is found first by them. It is thus a thing discovered, but it is not akin to any object. If anything, it has the image of an ancient civilisation. We feel ourselves to have encountered something sublime, seemingly eternal. There is something in mathematics which still resembles the old perfection of Platonism—indeed, this has always been the truth of Platonism, for Socrates in the Meno grounds his anamnesis in geometry. 

Socrates draws upon the ground, there the boy follows him. That the boy can follow him in the territory of mathematics is taken as proof that he remembers a previous place, that we once were of a world wherein these truths were certain and not obscure. The notion that all truth is recollection. This narrative of the spirit coinciding with epistemology, if such a word can be used to describe anything prior to Kant; it can, that is our advantage. We have the advantage also of evolution, but even Socrates explains by the genesis of this capacity, it is known in terms of its origin.2

The slave boy was remembering in a sense, if we accept a much broader store of human memory. This is true. There is a human head beyond ours, a whole of which we are part. This is true in Hegel, although only half understood for his standing on the other side. We can see both sides because we are over here, because we have followed Marx. The idea is not the cause of the world except in the sense of the child; in the sense of Man, the world is the cause of the idea. The idea has been negotiated with the world by man, an innate ritualism has brought it into being.3 Every word is an egregore summoned in this way, every institution, every human activity and object.

Winnicott said that there was no infant without a mother; that is, the infant is co-constituted by maternal care as an ongoing act. What there is without a mother, even if it be a man, even if it be a wolf—well, that he does not say. Soon it will be a corpse, we know this much at least. The child must eat, but it is unable to provide for itself. Say, I heard once of a child that starved when its parents were away because it could not find a spoon. There was plenty of food, but they did not eat because they had no proper implement. This is not stupidity or even an absurd arrogance, rather they simply did not know there was such a thing as food without a spoon.

By the spoon we enter the world of mankind, that our needs are the thread by which we are pulled into this world. This in the story of Enkidu also, that he is brought into civilisation by desire. This may be how man is civilised, but the child is made human through his stomach. Hunger is the way into the world, the whole built upon hunger. This is its basic prerogative. Kropotkin knew this, saw further how it held us here, a people will never be free so long as they cannot feed themselves. This is the way we are dragged into their system, just as each is from the first.

The spoon would not exist without man just as mathematics would not. This does not mean that spoons cannot be used to eat, nor does it mean there is not such a thing as steel, nor that there was not the possibility of work and heat and the calories necessary and all that preceded this in its production. The spoon is produced in a factory, alright, but it is more importantly produced in the activity of its use. This latter might be considered reproduction, though really these are one and the same.4

The spoon is produced through its activity; it is not real until it is realised. This follows the form of the world, fits the structures of embodiment and homeostasis. The spoon is conditioned by the hand, by the requirement of caloric intake, by the sort of food we eat, hence the geography, the wider trade situation, etc. The child is conditioned by their environment, in this way learns the meaning of the spoon, in this way learn its truth, come to understand how it can be used; only thus is it made real.

There is footage of a deaf-blind child learning to use a spoon. They sit on a stool at a table with a bowl before them. They wear a little bib and there is a woman behind them. There is food in the bowl, the woman has a spoon. She leans over, places the spoon in the hand of the child. She wraps the child’s hand in her own, holds the spoon within this. Here Ilyenkov notes the child’s response in stages: at first they resist the imposition, then their hand goes loose and is carried through the activity, at last they enter into the activity themselves. This the process by which we are born.5

This is the way in which mathematics enters the world also. The child is brought into the activity which constructs mathematics. This is an activity wrought fundamentally of signs. The early history of mathematics follows from geometry, that the first efforts were there. The Nile would flood yearly but farmers were taxed regularly according to their land. When the floods washed away the stone markers that had been placed, then it was necessary to measure and assign an equivalent area.6

Piaget describes the learning of geometry in children: that their intuition here is first a practical affair, is initially dependent on virtual actions. They construct the truth in much the same way as that slave boy from the Meno, by the creative recombination of embodied practices. The defining feature here is that this activity involves a plane, it occurs by way of inscription. This is the case even when we surpass geometry, when all is abstracted into the pure signs of algebra. The same structure underlies each of these, both alike deal with signs but the plane fades ever more into the background.

The same movement is apparent in the development of sign languages. They begin with an early iconism and then tend increasingly towards abstraction, that likely due to the degrees of freedom this allows, effected by creative recombinations of prior aspects. Meaning is scaffolded by its own structure, thus grows upwards as a plant.

This art, however abstract, remains a matter of inscription; in other words, a variant of written language. The question here is how language contains any truth, with mathematics seen only as a last redoubt, a particularly universal phenomenon, one which cannot so easily fall victim to relativism. Though we may use a different base system than them, say—still these languages are perfectly and precisely translatable. That much can be said for hardly any other; this because of its extreme abstraction.

The perfection of mathematics is its distance from material affairs: that it encounters our world only indirectly, that it floats behind reality and portrays a vast connective structure. There are principles within this that simply work. The same is true of a boat as much as a spoon: the boat works, displacement—what is this natural law? It is simple: it is a regularity in the world, one which language can comprehend but never grasp. This is easy enough to say, but why this way and not some other?

I come this far but no further. There is no answer here, only necessity. We find these things within ourselves, within mankind, but they are not our own.7 Life has taught us to dance, and that is something more—

One must admit that perception and what depends upon it is inexplicable on mechanical principles, that is, by figures and motions. In imagining that there is a machine whose construction would enable it to think, to sense, and to have perception, one could conceive it enlarged while retaining the same proportions, so that one could enter into it, just like into a windmill. Supposing this, one should, when visiting within it, find only parts pushing one another, and never anything by which to explain a perception.

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… two completely identical phenomena may very well coexist side by side and even come into certain contact. This contact, however, will not yield anything new at all until it elicits in each of them internal changes which will transform them into different and mutually opposed moments within a certain coherent whole.

There is in primate society a certain sameness which prevails, despite the simple variation of hierarchical and parental ordering; that thus the individuals within these structures never attain to a complexity which we may think properly deserving of the title ‘society.’ The difference with man is that we are incomplete and that this limit is precisely what binds early man into the complex organic forms which have unfolded into what we now face. This incompleteness is still plainly apparent today, in that few individuals are self-sufficient; indeed, few nations attain to anything like the ideal state of autarky. We are thus bound by our limits, that without others we would not be; hence properly considered ‘we’ exist only as the whole.

The topic with which I am immediately concerned, however, is the evolution of complex forms of social ordering; it is the marked difference between human and primate societies. There are a group of langurs that live in the trees outside my window, sometimes they will come and eat the miniature watermelons which populate these trees; and then sitting there, they will watch me and I will watch them. This ‘society’ of langurs is simple in that they are all more or less the same—that they are identical and therefore stable, inert.

Of course, they are not truly identical. There are basic differentiations, most notably of the sexes and with regard to parenting roles. The infant langur is raised primarily by its mother for the first two years, after which the females of the group share in this role. This is a particularly prominent difference insofar as sustenance for the infant depends upon the routing of needs through the mother. There are further male-specific roles, such as the strange alarm calls issued on encountering a predator.

Beyond this, however, there seems a simplicity to the basic structure of these langurs’ lives. They wander between trees and pick at fruit where they find it, their needs are closely coupled with sustenance and survival as immediate aims. To the extent that there is an instability which drives the motion of these groupings, it is the same thermodynamic inversion which everywhere characterises life. Yet we find that this movement, and the contact between individuals within it, does not manifest any process of significant differentiation.

Here we may return to the quote at our outset, for we find in this the origin of human society as a distinct category. The complexity of human society arises from the exaggeration of basic differentiations within the social order, that the structure comes to be characterise by a far more radical incompleteness; it is bound ever tighter by the necessity of maintaining various lines of complex behaviour within a division of labour. Human society, even for all the similarities between the oddly templated nature of modern men, is characterised by a degree of variety which far exceeds anything obvious in the ‘natural’ world. We find that, at least in this sense, it is precisely true that diversity is our strength; indeed, that it is a defining characteristic of mankind.

The principle of our initial quote, however, is that it is precisely this diversity which is also the specific unity of humankind. This is not merely a diversity of sameness, rather must be a true diversity which binds the structure of social order; it is based on need, in other words, and the flow of basic desires through the social forms into which they have been entrained. These bonds will, of course, be stronger where they run through the fundament rather than entailments long spun off from this base.

Whatever the case in this relation between diversity and unity, we must note that there is a further distinction between the human and primate orders which we have here discussed. This is that the langur society is stable, that variations may result from external influences but as a whole the sameness of its internal components renders the whole inert. Human society, in contrast, is characterised precisely by its distance from this. The step which made us what we are has also freed us, or some may say cast us out, from the stable simplicity of our prior state.

The multiplicity which is human order exhibits a twofold continuity: first in the basic requirement of its being bound as a unity by the incompleteness of each aspect; and second, by the lines which constitute this vast net of developmental complexity. This total social order is woven of threads which trace back by way of necessity and exaptation to the very origins of productive labour, that what follows has been built upon this basis and every generation has proceeded by initiation and then extension.

What seems to characterise human society as much as the internal variation of parts is the temporal variation in this process of historical development. While this may seem to some a trait peculiar to the modern age with its doctrine of progress driven by an intense dissatisfaction with whatever merely happens to be, still the development of human society seems to follow a trajectory entirely unlike anything else found in nature. There seems to be an instability built into our particular mode of social ordering which causes it to yearn in vain for this lost stability by way of ceaseless various and permutations of parts and whole.

This is perhaps why the problem of human social order has never been solved to perfection, that every answer has contained some flaw in its instantiation which ultimately resulted in its downfall and the birth of something new. If ever a stable solution was found then this would be precisely the death of man.

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The man was back again, drunk again. This heard from the cloud surrounding footsteps rolling down the stairwell. There the child sat in darkness, listened above. She had been here some several years now, knew enough of his rhythms to understand this shape. The day had been as follows.

He had woken early, immediately checked his phone, saw nothing, sought else and saw nothing there either, sat naked in bed and stared at nothing, an empty expression, scrolled through mindless without reacting, a snort at most here or the hint of a smile flitted across his lips. This was the way he woke each day, not from pleasure necessarily, even that a sadness, a hollowness, came of this, rather from falling simply through some rut, the same shape repeated throughout the day, again the same, a hollow thing yet repeated incessant. This the way he started his mornings until at last the hollowness had encompassed him, until at last he could taste it in the back of his mouth, the dry and stale breath of dead air, recycled breath, then he would throw down the phone and swear to forgo this rut, recall his former promises, swear again despite himself, despite his doubt.

This the shape of the morning, or most mornings, apart from those that came just enough to be a promise, just enough to seem something else, that those days he would leap from the bed, would throw himself into the day, would strike out sailed taut and dragged forward until at last some doldrums would return him to his listless point of departure. The doldrums then, what was his crime.

So the day began as always, that there he would see the shapes he would be, could be, or most that he would not, which he despised, but even this gave him little any longer, less by the day, that there was not enough energy in him anymore to even strike, only in abstract, that he retreated back into the realm of images and daydreams, that in this fantasy he struck the mass entire, all without ever lifting a hand, all without the energy necessary for a single act. This lifeless image, an empty ideal.

There was work to be done, always this work and that, never anything in particular, never an order to the process but for that impressed by panic, a set adequate to sustain him and then the dreams which he wove around this, all that he wove around this to paint himself, to colour himself some other way. These threads of gold he wore, which in the darker days seemed only gaudy, which in a softer light were all that got him by, and the pretensions that these were made of, all of this was the core of his being, so he felt, and to strip this away—well, what then would there be, what then would he be, not even naked, a skeleton, less than, a gust of air just passing by.

This ephemerality contradicted by the activity necessitated by sustenance, by the flesh which seemed yet false to him, by the activities required by existence. These the sole thing felt worthwhile and that alone for physiological cause, that curse the world as he may still hunger held his heart. These simply facts, that there was even some comfort in this, that he would hold himself from urinating for hours, however long, for time then seemed to stretch as well as his bladder, for then in this tautness, for the accumulation of energy in his groin, that here he felt some sense of fact remained. There was truth to this, direction, certainty. These the things he lacked were found sufficient at only the cost of his kidneys, some vague cost, a thing heard of but not understood. He thought that his addiction, for perhaps it was, that this was the coward’s equivalent of any other, that in their substance of choice, in the acquisition of this, in its effect, that here alone there was enough of a life for anyone, enough of meaning, that the addict was primarily addicted to this. They at least had a reason immediate upon waking, an orientation in life, tasks which pressed with the certain state of physiology, a material existence, that they were not alienated from themselves; though that perhaps this being some inverted counterfeit, that somehow the words were lost in this saying—and yet, no, that they were brought in line with themselves in this way, that they felt their labour immediate, a return to tradition, the addict a hunter-gatherer of old, cans upon the wayside, whatever it took, and then like those nomads also, days spend in quiet reverie. He had read once of the workload prior to agriculture, felt that the addict had returned to this Edenic state.

His was no such addiction, cowardice came first, but it was something, it held something of that fact, and so he held to this, warred with himself, held onto the single certainty of that fact: I need to piss. This at least I need, this I know. This the way he woke each day, and then the pleasure of everything else doubled, that in acting otherwise he found a way to avert himself, that this thing a magnet which pointed his attention inwards or pushed it away otherwise, the greater pleasure of a thing when others pressed. The play he held with necessity, until at last, at last it would be too much, and he would throw down whatever he had, whatever sleep he had woken with, would throw this down and stumble naked from his bed, eyes half-closed would clack the toilet seat against the wall, turn and lower himself into a fall, forearms rested upon his knees, release.

This was the way each day started, always the same, and always this excess of waiting, of out-waiting himself, for when night came he would need to urinate and then would not, would push himself to sleep despite this, would hold against that fact, would refuse existence, at once affirmed and rejected necessity, at once felt the assurance of its truth and enacted its denial. He had never once pissed himself in the night, though he felt that with age, were it given, which often seemed in doubt, yes, that with age surely he would piss himself eventually, oh to be young again, and yet this the other side of that curve, his parabola now descends as arrow sure to target.

Where would he go in the day? What did it matter, the child never knew. The child knew only that which was heard in the movements within the house, that rarely when he went beyond the door then it would be something else, and when he returned in whatever state, always alone. The child would wait for him below those stairs, there in the dark, the man who was her warden here.

This man did not hold the child for any depravity, rather caught her there for fear, that she had somehow come into his possession years ago, the girl had long forgot herself, the man barely seemed to care, but the fact remained that she had seen him, that was too much, that she had been here now too long, that yet he could not kill her, had tried once or twice, that he simply could not, and so he put up with her and she, in her way, with him. The fact was that she loved the man, had always, and this from the moment she first saw him, even knowing what he was, even along with all she saw then and since, that she loved the man with the simple purity only possible of a child, not of some suffering syndrome, not some cause that need be explained by psychiatrists in a court case of later years, rather with all the simplicity of an angel, that there was in this quiet love a perfection, despite the dark.

The man himself did not love, did not know love, perhaps never had. Those that he loved, those that he spoke of as loving, for whom he wailed, they were always absent, having all abandoned him whether by death or more ordinary means, that these alone were those for which he knew love, and there was a truth in this love, that the depth of affect itself was beyond certain, and yet—and yet there was something in this, for there were those alike who loved and offered presence, but these were never the objects of his love, it was rather always the absent that he loved, and this perhaps for the fact of their lesser demands, and this alike for the fact of their increased suffering, for the child saw with sadness that what the man really loved was his own pain. He loved himself and could only love others to the extent that they heightened his sense of self, and so the stark absence of these various loves served as a tuning fork that set him vibrating in such a fashion that he felt himself alive, for which reason alike they had a tendency to leave him, not that the deaths could be blamed on him, however fortunate.

There was alongside this only the violence, that and the hollowness which reigned between, that his days were spent in transit between these two queens, emptiness and despair. The latter came in its flavours, first the silent scream, the suffering of absence, the pleasure of this, and then the frantic flailing, the dancer madcap frenetic, whatever shapes would bend or twist his brain into something resembling feeling, would contort him into strange shapes, not always pleasant, not always anything at all, long hours spent staring at walls in day-drunk states, yet all of this, the raging which came in early mornings left along, the fear which followed, the sickness—that again here in the simple necessity of this, in its waxing and waning, in the immediate demands it made, that here there was all the concreteness of a life which was for him otherwise foreign.

The child would hear all of this, its varied sounds, would hear this and understand, and this in a way without words, would understand that he was missing something, and in the tenderness she felt for him, in the simplicity of love, in that love which overcame all disgust, all fear, all that would be thought appropriate for the state of one imprisoned in the dark below, that cared not for the stench which emanated from the house, for the rot which ate away at him, which knew none of this but for that simple love—that somehow if she could only communicate this to him, could only take his hand, then it would all be washed away, then if he could see himself in her eyes, then if he could only see another person, for she felt, and this again in the sense of a child known without words, that she felt this was the core of his isolation, that he was imprisoned alike with her, and if only somehow he could see himself, could see another person, then he might not be so alone.

The man did not come to the stairs anymore, some weeks had passed now. Water dripped from a crack in the wall, tasted of mortar and left a grit in her mouth, coated her gums strangely, that there was this water which she lapped from the wall, but there was no food.

He was born the last of three in the largest city in the world, the only city in the world, for it had long ago eaten all the others, still they called it the largest, but that is not our story. He was born to two parents loving and kind and altogether human, here had a happy childhood though he was often alone. His two sisters, much older than he, had gone away to study and he saw them only in summers when they would take him with their father’s rod and go down to the river, there they would sing to the fish and ask them to bite. They never did catch any fish, for the fish were not so silly as they might seem, but all the life of that area came to listen to these songs. Over time the great trees even leaned their heads to listen to the little songs that these three would make up as they fished unsuccessfully, in turns coaxing and chastising the fish as they sat and waited all the while for what would never come. That they never caught anything seemed hardly matter, and indeed it was the singing which they wished for, this game they played together, and all this with rod and hook a mere pretence. 

The boy was happy when his sisters were there, but when they left again he was not prone to despair. They had never been around enough to be expected but were rather received each summer as if a gift. This was a gift he treasured more than anything, as he would often find himself humming one of the silly tunes they’d sung that summer, and yet he was himself sufficient without their company. The city in which they lived for all its size was a quiet place, and for this he had to find things of his own to pass the while. Now the boy’s mother would stay at home, there she sewed, and the father was away, where as a child the boy could only imagine him swimming and diving in rooms full of paper, that the way he spoke of drowning in paperwork and finding files conjured this image, and so the boy imagined that his father would arrive at work each day and put his suitcase and lunchbox in a locker, would slip inside a diving suit and attach to his head the large helmet with a little glass window, to which his assistant would attach a tube for air and then the father would bravely open the door to that room he had so often spoken of with fear at home, the archives, and he would slip into the files for hours on end, returning only with the precious item held high in triumph! This the boy imagined with pleasure, but there was nothing there for him. 

He looked around instead and saw upon the floor and in the corners that there were other inhabitants of the house, for his grandmother had given him a little magnifying glass. This he took and wandered around the house, back bent as if he were his grandmother even with her gift, and after several hours of this he would even stretch and groan like her, that they made precisely the same motions, the same way of holding the aching backs, the same sound exactly echoed down the ages here and when his mother first heard this she laughed so hard that she knocked over a potted plant. It was this fortuitous circumstance which led the boy to make his grand discovery, for with the crash he heard outside a yowl which blurred into an uneven scrambling, another crash of something striking tin, and then at last a silence. He rushed outside to see what there might be, and all he saw was the chaos of their metal rubbish can which had been knocked over. There was nothing to be seen now, not any sign of what that pot plant had startled, only the soft noise of his mother sweeping up the mess inside as she chattered on the phone to his grandmother, and he heard her make an exaggerated version of their groan and then laughing just as loud again. 

He heard all this, but there was nothing to show what had made that other set of sounds, which had knocked over this bin and caused such a racket. Carefully he moved towards the bin with his magnifying glass up to his eyes, half as if to better see, half to protect himself, and he stepped steadily to approach this bin, then planting his feet leaned himself around the side with magnifying glass in the lead, and as he leaned all of a sudden in the darkness he found himself face to face with a massive eye, it must have been half the size of his face at least, and at this eye he stood frozen, and the only sound he made was a single involuntary gulp. He stared stuck at this eye stiff with terror and the eye stared back equally still, wide and strangely yellow, they stared at one another for what must have been a minute. It was towards the end of this time that the boy remembered the magnifying glass, and at this he carefully moved it away from his face while still keeping it between him and the hovering eye. With this the eye fell away much reduced in size, and he found himself staring at a little grey kitten.

The kitten stared at him and he stared at the kitten, and seeing that it was just as scared as him, he further lowered the magnifying glass slowly between them as if disarming himself, thus rendering them equal. The little boy and the kitten continued to stare, and he noticed that it was in a shabby way, fur stuck with mud and grime and stranger still the way it sat. When his heart had stopped beating quite so fast, when he had forgotten all visions of that vast disembodied eye, only then did his mind began to work again, with this he saw the creature now in new light. The kitten here covered in rubbish, skinny and seeming quite lost. He thought of the little cans of tuna that his father took to work, and first explaining his plan to the kitten he turned and went to fetch one. There he found his mother was still busy with phone pressed to ear by her shoulder talking to his grandmother as he sewed, and she did not even notice the boy mount the little stepladder and take down a single tin of fish.

The boy returned to the rubbish bin with the fish, and he was quite surprised to find that this kitten had seemingly not moved at all, had not even there relaxed. He took the tuna tin and cracked it open, placed it on the ground before this little ball of grey fluff and grime, and so as to give it some space went then to fetch a little saucer of water. When he returned, the kitten had moved only slightly, had tentatively pulled itself forward, but at seeing the boy returned it tried to reverse course with little success, and it was then that the boy saw the reason for the state of this sad little creature, for he saw its back legs were bent unnaturally and appeared more hindrance than help in its movement. Noticing this, the boy thought he might be further help to the little kitten, and again explaining his plan to the creature and even consulting on the details, taking the twitch of its whiskers to indicate any qualms, he picked up the little tin of tuna and carefully placed it before the kittens face. 

It was in this way that there came to be a new member of the family, with the father each day saving a little of his tuna and rice for when he returned home, and though he claimed to be irritated by this, huffing and puffing about how he was hungry, the boy could see in his eyes when he returned each evening from this great sacrifice that he loved the little kitten dearly. By now the kitten had come to trust the family, and while it could drag itself around, it had come to accept even being moved, in this way it came to sit the day inside in an old fluffy slipper on the windowsill next to the potted plant whose predecessor had been the cause for his discovery. There the kitten lay cosy in the sun that fell through the window, and as the boy would move around the room the kitten would follow him with its eyes.

When spring came the boy began to play outside again, and he would carry the kitten with him from time to time, but this was difficult for the both of them. Increasingly the child felt that there had to be some solution, with which began some weeks of experimentation in their little garage. The boy would take the kitten there and peer around at objects, discussing their possibilities aloud. The kitten would meow and participate as best he might, and the boy would taken into consideration any comments but tended to reserve to himself the right for final judgment. This was the case for the first method he tried, at which the kitten meowed quite insistently and even hissed his dissent a little. The plan was simple: he would put the kitten into a little toy bus, and then he would tie a rope from the bus to his waist so that the kitten could follow along with him. 

He was so confident in this plan that he ignored the kitten’s sternly worded criticisms and that Friday they enacted this in the evening when he went out for an evening walk around the neighbourhood to see what might be found. All went well at first, and the kitten even seemed to relax a little, although it was far from relenting as to its concerns, when at last they came to a slope that led down the bus stop. Here the kitten began to pick up speed, but being pulled behind him the boy at first did not notice. He noticed only when the kitten, meowing loudly as it could, overtook him moving down the hill. The boy ran after the kitten as it accelerated, yet this only allowed the kitten to accelerate also for not being bound by the rope. The two careened madly down the hill until at last they were saved by the good fortune of a well-placed hedge, in the wreckage of which disaster they sat like aside one another for a little while dazed before at last the kitten began to chastise the child. This was precisely what he had expected would happen, what he had warned, and besides, the solution was hardly better than being carried about for it gave him little in the way of freedom! If he had had a little then he might even have been able to stop himself, or at least steer into the grass which might have slowed him. With that the pair picked themselves up, and turning to collect the toy car he noticed that it had broken in the crash, with the metal of the back axle snapping the plastic clips that had held it in place, so he collected the various parts and together they returned to the house. 

Disheartened the boy avoided this work for a while, leaving it aside until the next week when he returned to the garage with kitten in hand intent on solving the problem once and for all. This time he listened more carefully to the kitten’s specifications, with the key being that whatever the construction it had to afford him some degree of freedom. The boy looked around, at first was entirely stumped until at last his eyes came upon the broken toy car and the little set of wheels with metal axle between them. With this in mind, and he went to fetch a few things from the house. He took a piece of polystyrene from some packaging and carefully carved it, then he unscrewed one wheel from the axle and pushed it through the polystyrene before screwing the wheel on where it emerged on the other side, then took a piece of elastic that his mother used for her exercises and cut from this a small band. He placed the kitten into the polystyrene slot which had been carved especially to accommodate its hind legs, and then wrapped the little band of elastic around the kitten and fastened it with a clip. With this done he picked up the kitten and contraption whole and placed them together upon the ground, with the wheels at one end and front legs at the other. The kitten stood tentatively, looked suspiciously at him. 

Carefully the kitten move one foreleg and then the other, motions familiar to it from having dragged itself around so long, and yet with this it found the whole easier by far. It began to happily pull itself forward with one leg, then the other, until with a burst it tried to run and found itself rolling forward head over heels. There, caught upside down by the little contraption, which the boy thought was good fortune to be made of polystyrene, he found himself trapped as a turtle. With this the boy leaned over and, warning him to be more careful, placed the kitten rightly up. The kitten now tried again, more steadily this time, until it became used to pulling itself with the wheels rolling behind. Here the boy opened the garage door and walked together triumphant behind his charge, watching carefully as the kitten fumbled for a moment to adjust to carpet from the concrete of the garage, before the procession paraded into the living room where his mother and father were sitting together. The boy gleamed with pride and the kitten trotted its way in little circles and figure eights as if to demonstrate to the whole family, and at their laughter and clapping he almost seemed to bow. 

The man remembered all this as he sat behind his little desk, the shelves and tables crowded with every sort of object around him. There were wheels and electrical parts and gears and wires and tape and glue and all manner of pieces of wood and plastic and metal and tools aplenty lined walls. He thought back to that garage, the feeling he had first had then, and as he smiled and looked out of the glass shopfront before him, a little grey kitten walked on by.

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Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.1

It is often asked: how much better can LLMs get? This piece started as an answer to that question, although it has since ended up concerning a more specialised aspect. My sense of language models is that—apart from any broader limitations in terms of their exclusively modelling language—their limits will ultimately be those of language itself. Here I want to explain what I mean by this, in which I will consider specifically the difference between solidifying and extending performance.2 The former is more important for integration into existing society, the latter for more radical visions.

Supposing that unsupervised learning works by acquiring primitives, the key is that they acquire reliable access to a flexible set of these. This allows for their sampling more or less creatively from the space of all possible sentences. There are two desires in terms of improving performance here, either to ensure their reliability for tasks which are already within their ambit—thus solidifying their performance—or to extend the tasks of which they are capable, an aim which may take several forms.

I am concerned here less with their augmentation but rather such extension as occurs in their own terms. The theory of flexible priors thus has a second aspect, at which we encounter the specific sense of extension in these models: the models learn not only priors but also the shape of their distribution; or really these cannot be separated, as meaning inheres in the wider shape—there are no isolated units in such systems.

The problem of creativity follows from this structuring of movement in logical space. Language models currently learn to move through this space in terms of probability, that this allows them to acquire the shape of meaning. They provide what an answer would look like, and the form of prompting here has proved surprisingly powerful. Based solely on this set of primitives we have been able to direct them into new areas.

The trouble is that their movement tends to follow the probability distribution, so when it comes to creative activity they will tend to reproduce the patterns that are already well-established. This is excellent for learning, even essential, but it is much less impressive for actual intelligence. We can examine this dynamic with reference to the elements that constitute a tree: heartwood, xylem, cambium, phloem, and bark.3

The heartwood is dead, what was once xylem has become calcified with compounds that ensure its resistance to decay. The xylem serves to transport water and nutrients from the roots to the cambium, which is the thin layer where growth occurs. The bark protects the structure as a whole, while the phloem transports sugars from the leaves.4

Applying this to language, we see that the bulk of language is heartwood and serves a structural purpose. This is the land of dead metaphor and literal language. All of this is obviously essential for the functioning of society—and hence the continuation of language as species—but this is not the place where we ought to expect any creativity.

We can see the xylem and phloem in turn as providing the structures which prepare the cambium, and here these must be related to the individual. The xylem can be considered akin to the institutions which support creativity, that these are the ties between the structure and the living individual. The phloem, in contrast, might be considered as akin to the specific experience of the individual. This is the qualitative source of nutrients for growth: their life—all that they have felt, witnessed, been.

The creative individual, nourished thus in life and mind, exists only at the very edges of this structure.5 This is the case in every field, and it ought to be so: the whole structure depends on this balance.6 The primary value is the survival of the species.

When it comes to creativity the specific area which we want to emulate is altogether rare. The actual creative action is entirely improbable, for its occurrence definitionally occurs at the edges.7 While the results of this creativity have come to serve ultimately as new rings in the heartwood, they do not originate there; nor can they thus be found.

The task, in other words, is to somehow make the improbable probable. This can be done with careful prompting, but even then I have noticed a tendency for inference to be torn between shapes that it recognises. Where there is a novel movement, it cannot follow the line smoothly; moves instead in a jagged manner. There is even a sort of schizophrenia here, a split between the two aspects that it cannot know as one.

We will undoubtedly see incredible advantages in terms of solidifying of performance, but whether this will translate into true creativity is unclear. The sort of experimental tests concerning creativity which are oft touted really reflect nothing of the sort, they test only the creativity we would expect from a relatively intelligent servant. The real question is whether it can be creative in the highest sense of human ingenuity.8 This is yet to be proven, and it is reasonable to believe that they will struggle with this task.

The sum of human science has been an interplay between solidifying and extending the fruits of its labour. While the bulk of the effort may well have been scientific and often enough algorithmic, the cutting edge of this process has always been poetic and inherently heuristic. These aspects are equally necessary for all that has followed from this joint enterprise—and it is perhaps more than anything the fact that this has been a joint enterprise which characterises the peculiarity of mankind. Whatever the major names of history, they have been supported by the whole edifice of human effort in all its necessary aspects: from the specifics of food, clothing, and shelter through to the whole material and spiritual structure that raises each infant to the heights of history.

This general structure has been our particular advantage, but it exists only as filtered in each instance through the particularity of an individual. Here is the contradiction at the heart of this process: that the particular becomes an individual only through being subsumed by the universal, that this assimilation is necessary for individuality in a truly human sense. Those wild children forgotten by the world or otherwise born of neglect are not individuals in this sense, are merely echoes of biology in an inert environment. The miracle of humanity is that we become individual through imitation.

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We tend to think of attention in terms of a resource, in terms of force of will. The idea is that we can have an attention deficit, but this is a contradiction in terms; it is not a deficit of attention but rather of its direction. The attention itself is fine, if it were not then we would be babbling. What we lack is the capacity to direct this attention as we will—and so really it is a problem of will, whatever that means for your self-concept.

The matter of attention must further be related to memory, here our purpose: take a shopping list. We inscribe upon paper a set of items, our shopping list, and then we take this to the supermarket. We have noted these down, we say, so that we might remember them. The list functions in this sense as an external form of memory—and what does this mean? My argument is that the list functions not as memory but rather to structure attention: it connects between items, and from items into the world.1

We look to the list, see an item: coffee—then look to the signs at the end of aisles, or walk along the row towards where we think this must be. This can be described alike in terms of memory and attention, either works. Truly these are intertwined: attention is the principle of structuring, while memory provides the content that fills this form. 

Suppose that we had mistaken our list somehow for that of another, a person apparently of some Asian descent. We see that this alike is a list, unmistakably it follows that pattern, and yet the structure of this is entirely meaningless to us; it is probably a language, we assume, and based on some sort of pattern recognition we presume further that it must be an Asian language—Korean?

The impediment here is not properly in terms of memory, for it is not that we do not remember what these symbols mean; it is rather that they cannot function as attentional links. We retain access to the structure of the list, that this is what directs us between equally confusing shapes on the paper, and yet none of these symbols go anywhere; or rather, they do not take us anywhere.

Suppose that we are in Korea, that after scrutinising the list we recognise one of the symbols from an aisle in the supermarket. We walk to that aisle now, examine its contents; and take it as a further presumption that this list has some reasonable referent, that we are staying with an elderly Korean man who is kind-hearted and intends to cook for us, but who forgets that we are ignorant.

We look at the list, and we look at the items, and we try to determine which of the symbols on these many items matches that upon our list. Eventually we find the item, and we remember that we were out of coffee—now what has happened here, is this a matter of memory or attention? The answer is both, and that through this somewhat contrived example we have separated these elements in time.

Memory seems to function as an internalised link, that the above process with the signs could as well have been conducted—indeed, was as well conducted (if not better) in the earlier case—by way of the internalised sign-system we call language. The trouble was that in this second case we did not have access to this language, or that we could not move through it; yet we made our way.

We made our way because of a further system: the structure of supermarkets, the nature of lists, our knowledge of the household, etc. Supposing that we had the same object but no knowledge of lists, that we did not know what a supermarket was, what one was meant to do there, and so on. Then none of what we had would have been any use, these attentional links would not have existed.

The sign directs us within a space, our understanding—that this is a shopping list—directs us to search within the supermarket. This structures our attention, which in turn structures our behaviour; each item opens a loop which is closed by the next: list, sign, aisle, object, etc. The sign structures the movement, is structured by the space of meaning through which it moves. 

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For as each man has a union of the much-wandering limbs, 
So is mind present to men; for it is the same thing
Which the constitution of the limbs thinks,
Both in each and every man; for the full is thought.1

Anaxagoras claimed man is intelligent for having hands, while Nishida suggests that man has hands for his being intelligent.2 This second seems doubtful on the face of it, at least considered ontogenetically—for the child plainly does not sprout hands upon acquiring reason—but we may follow another angle for a more sympathetic account. 

Take the closest creature having hands, trace their phylogenetic development through to the nearest ancestor which we would say did not have hands. See these have hands, and then this does not. This creature has—something, some stubs which end their arms at least. Likely they have some sort of hand-like composite, a branch of little limbs. What is the difference then, what is it that these are not hands? 

The difference between humans and our closest primate relatives seems to be the range of motions of which our hands are capable, that there is a qualitative difference in terms of the capacities of the human hand. That one have an opposable thumb is taken to be the definition of a hand, but here there are more candidates than we might imagine. Revesz distinguishes these so-called thumbs by the fact they “cannot bring all the finger tips into contact with it because of its small size and low position”—for which reason, he continues, the thumb “loses much of its mobility and usefulness.”3

The specific distinction is that the human hand has a thumb positioned just so, that this allows the human hand to carefully and efficiently explore an object. For the lower apes, the size and positioning of their thumbs limits them to rolling an object if they wish to sense its aspects entire. The human thumb, in contrast, serves perfectly as a flexible scaffold for manual action. We are thereby able to execute all manner of dexterities: “to bring things into a desired position, to change them quickly and accurately, and to adapt oneself to the continuously varying pressure relationships.”

We might here compare the human hand to the grasp of soft-limbed creatures—of the octopus, for instance. The octopus conforms to the object grasped, and yet it does not maintain itself in the face of this; rather their form is assimilated to that of the object. This is in contrast to man, where the grasp manages a contradiction: assimilation and accommodation are here united in the human hand.4

This is the minimum of what it is to be a hand, qualities which are mirrored in human activity—including thought, really a subspecies of activity. The hand thus corresponds to all it renders possible, in which sense we are intelligent for having hands. Here also the contradiction in humanity: that for all our violence, we are the gentlest animal; that even our violence is unusually delicate, all the more so in its grandest forms.5

Yet we opened with the view that man may have hands for being intelligent; to which end we may see all this from a different angle. The hand is no mere appendage, rather the form of its activity is constitutive.6 This can be reflected and construed mentally as being—that is, as a static notion—but the hand exists foremost ever as becoming.7 The human hand is not the shape of an appendage, rather the form of this becoming.

The individual who is paralysed has hands, but they do not use them. They do not really have hands anymore, rather these hands merely belong to them. They are hands in no proper sense, are no longer animated by intelligence. As the contrary of a deaf-blind child we might imagine an individual born without hands, or either way without their use, and wonder about the paedagogy proper to such an individual.8

My sense is that this has been the problem for dolphins, that a lack of hands was their undoing; or perhaps their salvation, for Eve could not have picked that apple had she only had no hands. Were hands thus as Judas given by some dread necessity? And yet consider here the shape of prayer, whose form we have forgotten: “With hands held out as to touch or embrace a protector, to receive a gift, to ward off a blow, to present a helpless suppliant, unresisting or even offering his wrists for the cord.”9

Recently I watched a lecture by Ilya Sutskever, his topic was a question: why does unsupervised learning work? He proposed a solution based on an analogy between prediction and compression. Suppose that we have two datasets, that we concatenate and jointly compress these—what would an optimal compressor do? It would use patterns in one to help compress the other and vice versa, that this would mean the joint compression was more efficient than the compression of either alone. 

Here he introduces the notion of Kolmogorov complexity. The name refers to Andrey Kolmogorov, the Soviet mathematician, and the concept is this: for a given object (e.g., a string), the Kolmogorov complexity is the length of the shortest program that would reproduce this object in full. This is a measure of complexity to the extent that a very simple object, for instance, can be reproduced by a very short program. 

Cilibrasi gives an example: 1415926535897932384626433, and so on—what is the shortest possible program to reproduce this in full? If we do not recognise the nature of this sequence, then we may think it impossible to reproduce this with a short program. If we recognise, however, that this is a slice of π then we could quite easily write a simple program to reproduce precisely the same string. 

Kolmogorov complexity can be considered a measure of randomness, that the randomness of a string corresponds to the length of the program necessary to reproduce it. We might imagine that some strings require a program almost equivalent in length to reproduce. The idea here is that these strings lack underlying patterns which can be leveraged to reproduce them from simpler primitives.

We can return here to the case with which we begun, that of jointly compressing two datasets. Here we can measure the gain in efficiency that comes from concatenating and jointly compressing them, and we can understand this increase in efficiency as corresponding to similarities between the two sets.1 The idea is that there are shared primitives which can be reproduced using simpler functions, that these can then be combined to reproduce each whole more efficiently.

Sutskever speaks of Kolmogorov complexity as “the ultimate compressor”—and it is this, if only analogically in that it is not computable; yet it is a crucial notion, an important idea.2 We can, however, approximate this Kolmogorov compressor. This is the case with compression algorithms, but our interest is artificial neural networks.

He goes on to describe the neural network architecture as constituting a possibility space in terms of compression programs, and then stochastic gradient descent as a search algorithm which operates within this space.3 The training process thus seeks to approximate a Kolmogorov compressor for a given dataset, that it succeeds in this to the extent that it can leverage simpler patterns and recombine these. 

At this point we can diverge from Sutskever’s line, although still tracing the rough trajectory that we have followed so far. The idea is to further investigate the implications of this way of thinking about unsupervised learning. Here our specific interest is in the difference between compression and prediction.

When it comes to compression, we are dealing with a finite object. The object is compressed, and we can consider this—even for stream-based compression algorithms, even for the fact that ultimately all objects are at their basis comprised of strings—as fundamentally concerned with the two-dimensional form of the object. The object is bounded, and it is defined by these bounds.

Prediction, in contrast, is an infinite game; and here we are dealing instead with a one-dimensional object, a string. The relevance of all we’ve spoken about above changes slightly in this case, because we don’t simply want to compress and then decompress a given object. We are concerned instead with creativity, with generalisation.4

The opening from Sutskever is an argument for why this generalisation is possible: that the Kolmogorov compressor would leverage basic patterns in the dataset, that the extent to which it learns these primitives and the principles of their recombination corresponds to its success during training.

Training is the closest to compression, that it can be considered a funny form of lossy compression: we slice the end off a dataset, and we ask it to infer the next token based on what it has seen previously. This aims merely to reconstitute the existing string, hence it is compression.

Inference is different, here prediction is not used for compression but rather is valued for its generalisation. The idea is that now we can feed it partial strings that it has never before seen, and then—based on the primitives and principles of combination that it has learnt—that it will continue these in a meaningful manner. 

This differs fundamentally from compression, and this in the way we described above: that compression is finite, whereas prediction is an infinite game. 

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There he lay, the most pathetic scrap of a human being. Blood intermingled with mud as laughter fell down the hill, soon silence but for the rain. Soaked through he still weighed little more than a boy. Even put together he was hardly a respectable sight, a fool that sought escape his foolishness through more; as if the tool that got him there might yet get him out. Of course, it was not entirely his doing that brought all this; so what plan was this of God, why make him so? The Rabbi had nothing but platitudes in answer.

This was not so much a matter of theodicy, not the problem of evil but rather of weakness. What use could God have for this? Yes, He works in mysterious ways—but this? He could barely walk up a hill without growing tired, often sat down halfway up. If ever he stood too fast, he would quickly fall down; to counter this had become very good at crouching. He was good at crouching, he thought, but this could hardly be God’s plan for me; that night he still wrote it down, for he kept a small notebook in which he contemplated his manifold lack.

The boy found much in himself without worth. Thus he turned over each aspect of himself, taking a piece in hand—his health, temperament, complexion, apparently even the balance of his humours—all of this was first taken up, then inspected, and always each was ultimately found wanting. Of course, that he had something of a talent for such exercises was never noticed; or if ever it was, was surely also found wanting. All things were, in the end, found wanting. He would go weeks now between a new aspect of this worthlessness occurring to him; whereas once it buried him for weeks on end and came thereafter in varying waves. Then something would happen, he would say or do something; then he would note this down, add it to the collection of which he was sole curator.

None ever knew of this, of course. All recognised that he was physically pathetic and somehow lesser but still they did not think him worthless. His very weakness was their advantage here, as most things take very little; and while he was thought inept at complex tasks, he could be readily convinced to do quite a number of small but helpful things. Indeed, the people as a whole—perhaps but for they who all the while laughing had left him at the bottom of this hill—most people, in fact, quite liked him. They did not see the nature of the dynamic at all and merely thought of him as a somewhat touched fellow to whom they were doing a great favour by entrusting him with little bits of real life, you know, that he might have at least a taste of it all.

Few knew anything of what he did with himself, nor did they care; but had they asked, they would have realised he was an informal runaround for half the town and barely had any time for himself. And yet this suited him, as all he would otherwise do was continue his malevolent self-analysis or otherwise distract himself from this. These were the poles of his existence, and so the existence of another was a welcome place to be buried. There he was given a reason and continued comforted by the warmth of an encompassing purpose; it was not quite that he felt useful, as his analysis soon proved even this an illusion, but that this was at least a sound distraction. He knew that he was dreaming, at least rationally, and yet accepted this comfort nonetheless. He was weak here as well perhaps.

See, the problem was that this pathetic individual believed strongly in God; that he thought somehow this meant his life had purpose in a higher sense. Everywhere he saw the purposes of men; and the Rabbi had told him these were the purposes of God, for the Rabbi often had need of a messenger—yet he thought there must be something more. This foolish belief was his downfall and, indeed, was the obscure crown of his pathetic nature; it was that others sensed this in him, that thus they pitied him. This pity was the nail in his coffin, beyond everything else it was their response to perceiving this delusion which struck them most forcefully; that this was no man but a scrap. They did not hold him to their standards, instead lowered these to pity the touched boy—thus they doomed him. None would ever interact with him thereafter as an equal, hence cursed him to wallow but a pet below.

Of course, nobody knew anything of this in any abstract sense; it was apparent only to the audience. Each actor played their part appropriately and perhaps glimpsed a little. The Rabbi, for instance, knew much more than most—albeit was peculiarly blind to his own benefits in this scheme. For indeed he made the most use of the boy, or at least most regularly; sometimes others would borrow him for days and yet always he returned to the Rabbi. He came here and asked questions until he was asked to do something, then he would come back to ask more question; ad infinitum. The Rabbi found the best way to manage this was to keep him constantly busy. He discovered this quite unconsciously, merely tending towards it in spite of his concerted efforts to think kindly of the boy. Yet this merely obscured his motives and so, when he finally noticed the pattern of their interactions, he scrambled to understanding it in terms of some vague blend of student and assistant.

Indeed, the town understood the two thus; with it variously being said that the boy aspired to be a Rabbi himself or, among those who considered him more thoroughly touched, that the Rabbi had taken to kindly entertaining this notion in the boy, for he could not in good justice dash his dreams. Either way, the people did not perceive that the particular interest which motivated his pursuit, and it was a pursuit, of the Rabbi. He came incessantly to ask questions, to which the Rabbi mostly directed him to this book or that. Sometimes he would engage more seriously, for he was a scholarly sort; it was not any obvious lack that bred his reluctance but simply that he saw the boy as beneath him. The attitude he brought to their conversation was always masculine, never allowing himself to take the boy’s ideas as a seminal impulse and think in these terms; instead the boy was seen merely as a vessel to be filled.

While this was the aim, or its underlying form as only vaguely sensed by the Rabbi, and perhaps an admirable enough one at that; still the Rabbi was a busy man, or rather, he valued his time and preferred to keep his own company or that of those considered peers. He was warm towards the boy and yet unconsciously tended away from him, understanding this as only natural in light of their working relationship as it was still vaguely conceived. Nevertheless, the Rabbi was always willing to palm the boy off on a book or otherwise send him to the library—which had the further and fortunate effect of buying time between these lessons. Yet the boy was not frustrated by this, at least not at first, but rather relished in his reading and, indeed, began to venture beyond what he was suggested.

Here he tended to keep at first to the lines he was provided, but in his discussions he soon came to see that these paths were slow-moving and seemed very likely without end. This became more obvious as he read around the works which his Rabbi suggested, venturing further and further with time and as his interest grew. At a certain point his lines firmly diverged in several directions and he started to ask different questions in their discussions. The Rabbi was learned and soon began to think the boy more touched even than he had imagined. At this, assuming also that the boy truly understood nothing of his inquiries but for the stories, then he thought little of it and began to tell obscure tales rather than even attempting to engage in conversation. He would use any response to segue between stories based sometimes only ever so vaguely on cues provided by the boy.

Thus he came to tell the boy of the Rabbi of Prague, that is, the tale of the golem; of a power wrought from mud. This the boy had not heard, for his studies thus far had been almost entirely exoteric; what esoteric aspects he had investigated were nevertheless along lines determined by the direction in which he had begun. He had come to a certain understanding one way, but had never thought of it from the other side. The story he heard here gave him new ideas. They say the Rabbi left town some weeks later, that shortly the boy left also and grew to manhood in Paris—further where, it is said, he somehow made an outrageous fortune. At his wealth the town acted precisely as before, albeit now with far more platitudes and efforts towards politeness. Nevertheless still they wanted much the same and, indeed, expected it; yet he rarely returned and when he did, hardly contributed but for public purposes and the arts. The people were, of course, quietly irritated by this boy they felt themselves to have raised.

One man in particular had often borrowed the Rabbi’s boy, as he thought of him, for various tasks. He ran a small business and was then doing well, so sent the boy hurrying about with scraps of paper to make orders, pass on messages, and so on. All this our businessman had considered quite the kind deed to this boy, for he was always warm to him upon completing a task; indeed, he had conceived of these interactions as an education in manhood for the boy, that he might thus inculcate a strong work ethic and overcome his apparent incapacity, whatever it was—of which the man was never precise, but for sensing somehow he was a boy and ought be something more. Our businessman nonetheless came to think himself having done quite the good turn by this boy in his youth and, indeed, when drinking often boasted he had taught him everything he knew.

Of course, the boy had learnt nothing from this bumbling fool. The man was not so much a businessman as a man who had inherited a business and while a friendly enough fellow, behind his corpulent red face was a mind entirely incompetent to manage his own finances—let alone also those of a company. Thus it had long fallen to his wife to cover these, albeit quietly, while trying to contain his more expensive habits and keep the ship afloat. She was limited in this to the extent that he still thought himself its captain, though by now the whole town but him knew he was not, and when others gestured to this so as to taunt him he would often feel the need to make brash business decisions simply to announce his legal authority. These would regularly rock the boat, but still she was a good captain and nevertheless managed to keep a steady course.

Sadly for all, she had since the boy’s last visit fallen sick and just as suddenly died. The man had mourned her a while, though at first he did not know how much he had to mourn; and indeed, he never understood the depth of her contribution. Without his wife’s careful steersmanship, he was quickly overwhelmed and the whole enterprise drifted dangerously into the red. He had so long been reduced to his simple acts of rebellion that these were all he knew to do, thus blindly he made brash moves hither and thither. The whole thing seemed to resemble the last shakes of a dying body corporate; and so it was—at which the boy returned to town.

The man was already a drinker, and he had been drinking when this news arrived. He remembered then that he had taught the boy everything he knew, and he thought of such ingratitude. What was this that he had been treated thus? He had taught this boy everything and never does even check in on him, that he hasn’t even asked after his wife! In fact, the boy knew the wife and thought more kindly of her than most. He had felt in her a kinship, as each lived within a world which belonged to others; each served and recognised this in the other. She had died while he was away, and he was at that very moment searching for our businessman to pass on his condolences; having heard in one of the many letters he received from townspeople sending regards and hinting at financial difficulties or public works. The mayor in particular kept up frequent contact, having also considered himself a father figure to this poor orphan.

Thus it was that the boy was to enter the inn precisely when our businessman was ruminating upon him, and at first he was so deep in dark thoughts about the boy that he did not even notice his arrival though he sat himself facing the door. Yet the boy saw him there and at the look on his face was overcome for the man. He thought how altogether useless here his money had been, that he could do nothing faced with death. Somewhere below the surface a sense of his own worthlessness returned, a voice whose throat had long been choked by wealth. Here he saw despite all yet still he was but a boy before the Lord.

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“Let me make you beautiful, granny!” she cried. The older woman had come round a corner, at encountering the younger and hearing this—immediately she turned to flee. The younger quickly made chase, a syringe in raised right hand while left reached grasping. Thus the two went one another for the length of one hallway, turning, two, turning; out onto the road and, each slowing only a little to move through traffic, thus they crossed the street. The younger slowed a little less, was even almost struck by a car at the last yet leapt to tackle her victim. Two crumpled upon pavement, the first crunched against a curb neck broken; second stands, inspects a moment then withdrawing her phone walks away.

“Another, I’m sorry.” The response is brief: “Come home now.” A car pulls up beside her, she gets in; it leaves without a word. The older woman was meant to be in the backseat, instead another vehicle was on the way to retrieve her corpse. Sitting silent, she thinks to herself: whatever had that woman so wished to flee? None could want be older, that was obvious—but still there was resistance, those that failed to attend the necessary procedures at their thirtieth. These few fled the flowchart which was their way, that at thirty a series of procedures would be begun that stalled the aging process for at least a further thirty years. The consequence, of course, that they would die when this wore off.

This was taken by all as a fair trade, more that it gave to life a pleasing symmetry. Those that wished could at sixty further have themselves recorded and provided a character. Men felt themselves in some sense to have thus conquered death, at least seen at a distance, though the forms they met there on the wires were not them. They die with their bodies, only an image lived on as determined by a lifetime of data. These the lives lived by those today, she thought with an easy pleasure. The miracles mankind had accomplished!

And those few that fled—plainly paranoid, obsessive types fixated upon some element or another of the prevailing system. This they believed to be inhuman, unnatural—whatever they called it, a thing worth fleeing. Fleeing even unto death, obviously; a thing terrible then, at least like to evoke a panic in those physically pursued. None of the reasons given were sufficient to that which they followed, many even recognised this. They accepted quite happily that their reluctance was irrational; that any semblance of rationality was merely the relative success of rhetoric in terms of after the fact rationalisations. They knew this and yet they claimed still the truth of their cause. Absurdity, a sickness.

The lady who had died today, an unlucky fall. Humans were sturdy beyond measure and yet still somehow so fragile. Men had lived falling from planes as often as died by a toothpick tripping in the living room. The same was so today, the same so in side-effects of their solution. A further thirty years acquired at the cost of—what? The benefits to society were plain, thus averted any inequity as regards age. The whole rendered uniform in this final frontier of progress. Death conquered by the transubstantiation of silicon. Man reigns supreme at last. Necessity had been reinstated, contingency was expelled.

Yet the few that fled were flies in the ointment, still taken only as exceptions to prove the rule. Their madness apparent an argument for the cause. See the look in their faces, that ugly end bunched up against a sidewalk. This was nothing hale or hearty! This an end malevolent, of course; it could be none other with such a scene. The shape of a nightmare, all of this.

She fled at the sight of this frightening bitch, fled at the thought of what they would do to her. Thirty-two she was now and proud of her purpose, an invisible person in this world of numbers. She a number also but remained of that her own, thirty-two; everything else set zero. This world overwritten as if data were thus to be deleted more securely. Zeroes written time and again to ensure an empty disk. The whole made cleaner thereby, a world thought perfected. This hell she would never inhabit, would flee to any end.

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Here I will deal in brief with the relationship between history and myth, and in this I will treat of issues of time in a like way as I once dealt with space. The basic principle of differentiation remains the same here as it was there: egocentric and allocentric, as presence and representation. This distinction is never absolute but rather reflects a whole swathe of historical processes, of which our understanding—and alike of those that went before us—is but the product.

The specifics of these processes must be dealt with further elsewhere, and here I intend to pursue treatment for space first, but we can see the same lines converging upon time in the overturning of myth and the emplacement instead of history—or rather of our eviction from myth, thus our placement now in history.

History is precisely that in which we must place ourselves, that its particular form is the chronological—from which we may trace its origins to the process of inscription that rendered as much first thinkable. History thus exists outside of any individual man, in which man is placed in relationship to a further arrangement of events. This is nigh definitional of the allocentric mode: that it is existence held at arm’s length, it is the relationship between objects in a space—a mode in which the objects foremost have meaning for one another rather than in any immediate relation to the individual.

We may here compare this to myth, in which the individual is placed immediate within a living time. The events of myth did not happen then or there, nor may we feel entirely comfortable calling them events; rather they are eternal and recur endlessly in the present. These are not distant events to be placed and analysed but rather shapes that echo throughout, and thus we see that they do not hold their place according to the dictates of any ordering or chronology; instead inhabit the whole.

Myth refers then to the living cosmos understood in its temporal aspect, and in this the comparison is akin to that between cosmography and cartography. Of course, the distant horizons remain yet within the realm of myth—and here we see how theology has retreated to these furthest reaches, likewise that even our cosmic cartography remains as yet only an aspiration; still it is this aspiration which is essential, that the realm of cartography and history aspires to achieving by brute force the totality which cosmography and myth once knew with ease. We were evicted from time and space, now seek construct anew; yet never more than a pale image of once living form.

This matters only because of its import in terms of men, of morals. History is now too large for men, is seen as something beyond mere individuals. The whole has been come to seen as the sum of men quantitatively considered, history as water boiling. Here the unity of units, an inverted counterfeit of its origin: that the unit is precisely that which is plural. This raises the individual only to subordinate them to the sum, in this sense Hegel was right; and in the sense of Marx, it is true.

These were not thinkers of men, they were thinkers of man. The sole solution cannot be found in either writer, only with the rise of existentialism does philosophy come to speak of the individual as such. Here the origin is plain, and in this a twofold choice: Kierkegaard or Nietzsche, Christ or Antichrist—I tell you, both answers are the same. They are in such absolute contradiction that they align entirely, in each we are asked to return to ourselves; a spiritual materialism, that the only way out is through.

See Kierkegaard against Hegel, see Nietzsche on the history of an error; each of these point us to a new relationship with time. Kierkegaard presents the Hegelian form of a dialectic, Nietzsche is more organic—in either case we have the same, Abraham and Übermensch. Nietzsche’s tightrope is continuous, Kierkegaard presents a jagged dialectic: aesthetic, ethical, religious. This is a basically Hegelian form: the individual is negated by their integration into culture, and yet it is only this assimilation which provides the basis for ethical action; that is, the individual can only be through society.

This is apparent in language, that the poet must absorb the form of spiritual culture before he can work creatively at its edges. The importance of poets in all their forms—for poiesis is the operant principle in all true confrontations with life, whether mother or poet, scientist or priest—is precisely that they contribute actively to history. They alone are the source of fresh water for the whole, without which time grows stagnant.

The early Egyptians fancied that this ball was a symbol of the earth, and that all the Scarab’s actions were prompted by the movements of the heavenly bodies. So much knowledge of astronomy in a Beetle seemed to them almost divine, and that is why he is called the Sacred Beetle. They also thought that the ball he rolled on the ground contained the egg, and that the young Beetle came out of it.1

We know now that the second claim is false while, strange as it sounds, the first is partly true. The ball itself is merely their store of food, the female is elsewhere making her own structure—a form more closely resembling a pear than a sphere. This sadly defies the Egyptian belief that there were only male beetles, a fact further lodged as support in their mythology of Khepri, the self-created scarab deity; the sun created all things, that the sun created itself.2 Here we may even see the faint threads which led ultimately to the theology of Akhenaten—but that is not our purpose now.

That the beetle is in fact a marionette of the heavens, however—this much is true. The beetle climbs upon their ball and there performs a ritual dance, in this process orient themselves. By these celestial signs they navigate in straight lines upon clear nights; a skill they lose only when conditions are overcast.3 We might wonder how this could have been known so long ago, may well seek dislodge this uncomfortable fact as mere chance; it seems strange, after all, that they could ascertain such a subtle sign and yet not notice the female form, nor that eggs were placed not within the spherical ball but the pear-shaped production of the female.

The beetle is born in this pear-shaped structure, they then eat their way through this storehouse carefully at first and grow by stages to become the form we know—along the way traversing various unfamiliar shapes and states. And when they at last break free of the structure in which they have developed, we may note Fabre’s observation:

At first he shows no interest in food. What he wants above all is the joy of the light. He sets himself in the sun, and there, motionless, basks in the warmth. … Presently, however, he wishes to eat. With no one to teach him, he sets to work, exactly like his elders, to make himself a ball of food. He digs his burrow and stores it with provisions. Without ever learning it, he knows his trade to perfection.

We may marvel here that this little beetle, having prior known only the darkness of his pear-shaped accommodation, comes into this world a consummate craftsman.4 They pause a moment to give thanks and then shortly begin their careful work. The source of this is yet unknown, alone we know that they did not learn it like men from one another. Somehow it is a knowledge embedded in the individual at birth; that it might well have been put there by the stars.5

Where once the solely male beetles were considered signs of Khepri, then, where once Khepri was considered through this sign, now we have the mundane facts of science.6 Yet this negation is only apparent, for we find in the beetle a return to its origin: like Khepri, who created himself from nothing, the beetle too carries itself within itself; an intrinsic knowledge of its nature, a blueprint for behaviour born of the cosmic void.7

The design of an agentic apparatus is the zone of proximal development for artificial intelligence. This seeks to realise the most with extant tools rather than waiting for architecture to save us. Earlier there was great excitement about this, with AutoGPT and BabyAGI and even the idiotic ChaosGPT. These were all ultimately failures, or perhaps this disenchantment is simply that of an AI winter in miniature. These means fell short of their initial promise, now interest has been attracted by other hopes.

Of course, the history of this game shows success to be rarely in the wheelhouse of the majority. They tend to tinker endlessly while pressure accrues elsewhere, which eventual developments have all the appearance of earthquakes. These occur when the conditions have been accumulating all the while; that pressure builds and then gives in an instant, echoes long with aftershocks.

The present hope is that advances in architecture and training will finally carry us to the promised land. These people want to build themselves a god, presumably that they might worship; hence what is perhaps more important than whether we really build a super-intelligence is whether people believe that we have done so. We can only pray that the dominant cohort of technocrats and oligarchs end up picking the right God.

The great hope here is the apparent importance of scaling, that we might reach the sky simply by ever greater data and compute. We might be given cause to doubt this hypothesis by the recent leaks as to GPT-4’s alleged architecture. The use of a mixture of experts here suggests a desire to maximise performance within some limits.

Of course, these limits may merely be in terms of compute—what are our prospects here? The fact that people are buying so many chips doesn’t seem too promising. We might suppose that this will be overcome, and here we could see substantial gains in the possibilities for these systems. If the cheque of quantum computing is ever cashed then it may well bring about unheralded advances.

The risk here is the sensitivity of these systems to the slightest perturbations in their starting conditions. This is the case already for the larger constructions of machine learning, let alone with entanglement. These systems seem more fragile the larger they are, and this may play some role in the mixture of experts architecture. What we can perhaps expect more reliably is an increase in inference rate and context windows.

While increased context length seems a strong solution, there is already reason to believe that performance decreases with longer context windows.1 Instead I am more optimistic about inference rate. The fact that I can already run LLaMA 7B on my dirt cheap MacBook Air is absurd. GPT-3.5-Turbo is very fast, and GPT-4 really isn’t so bad; it is often faster than most people would be able to speak, let alone comprehend.

The real gains from inference rate, however, will be in the possibilities of bureaucratic intelligence. This is the theme with which we began: rapid inference allows networks of specialised language models to act in concert as artificial cognitive systems.

There are those that simply want to scale a single model until it cracks some sort of qualitative threshold and becomes a machine super-intelligence. The problem seems to be that most of the work in language models as artificial intelligence is not done by computing but by language itself. Much of the trick seems that we have managed to latch onto this miraculous phenomenon—as originally with speech and later writing.

These prior advances have been similarly fundamental for the story of humanity, and it is only right that we accept the present shift as foreboding like changes of our own. We have endowed language itself with a generative aspect that once required human mediation, that now language can give rise to further language outside of the human mind. This is a step in line with that of writing, especially as enhanced by the printing press—that there we saw the first instance of asexual reproduction in language, where information was simply replicated without variation.

The difference with language models is that they operate as nodes akin to human language users, that they enter into the dialectic with us. They effect a transformation only understandable in terms of a language user, that like us they perform a black box operation upon incoming data. This is particularly prominent with instruction-tuned models, that somehow within their machinations they manage a turn of the dialectic.

The implementation of this turn is not limited to the singular form of call and response; here we arrive at the topic of our outset: what is a bureaucratic intelligence? The bureaucratic structure is a universal of our age, while many decry these—surely they must have a purpose. It is simply that their limitations are known while their advantages have been forgotten, that further the institutional form has an inherent tendency to decay. The same was so with cavalry and it was not the fault of any horses.

Likewise the bureaucrat ought not be blamed—or rather, the bureaucratic form. This is a structure which can well be applied to the pursuit of artificial intelligence. It has been already, albeit not in so many words, by projects such as AutoGPT and BabyAGI. These all share in the aims of bureaucracy: efficiency, consistency, specialisation. The principles of their success are likewise accountability and transparency, that the sum combination of these aspects endows them also with scalability.

This is the zone of proximal development for artificial intelligence, that already there have been quiet efforts in sphere. The idea is to develop artificial cognitive systems in the form of networks integrating language models and various resources: embeddings, strings, state machines, etc. Here the essential principle, however, is the interrelation of specialised language models—whether by prompt engineering alone or fine-tuning.

The possibilities of this method have yet to be fully explored, but they promise more certain results than simply expecting solutions to coalesce from compute and masses of data. The answers in these machines will always be limited by their training data. This is not their radical newness. They are not merely a new mode of query, although they are that and significantly so, but are rather a revolution in language itself.

This allows for language to come alive, that these are the self-assembling echoes of human gesture. The task for the engineer now is to choreograph this dance, to bring order to the various characters summoned to its stage. They are to be given scripts, parts to play—all that from this society something resembling a mind might emerge.

In true obedience there should be no ‘I want this or that to happen’ or ‘I want this or that thing’ but only a pure going out of what is our own. And therefore in the very best kind of prayer that we can pray there should be no ‘give me this particular virtue or way of devotion’ or ‘yes, Lord, give me yourself or eternal life,’ but rather ‘Lord, give me only what you will and do, Lord, only what you will and in the way that you will.’1

Thus Eckhart exhorts us to doff our sandals, to cast off ourselves and rest assured in His will. This obedience, he says, this mode of prayer, is “as far above the former as heaven is above earth.” There is here, however, a radical self-abnegation; it is that we seek be annihilated by the light of God. The Sufis speak of a love in which lover and Beloved alike cease, in which all that remains is Love Itself. This Eckhart urges also.

Suppose we love another and we go to pray—in moments of turmoil we may ask of Him: “Lord, grant me this love of mine which is dearer to me than any other thing.” We may seek beg of Him to act as eternal guarantor of our earthly love. We would ask that He bind us to our beloved, that by His power we are rendered inseparable; yet how do we know what we need, how do we know which the way?2 Temporal love is a muddled thing. Our hearts are not clear waters, murky depths with who knows what which lurks below. The lover may sense for themselves a certainty in love, an overwhelming passion by which they are fixated—but what is the source of this, what is its end? Fear may seize the heart at times like this, may drive us up to madness. Love covers all manner of sins; such doubts as these may well overcome us.

We may then go to pray and perhaps resign ourselves to the impossibility of knowing, of holding—we may follow with Eckhart and say: “Lord, give me only what You will for me.” Thus we make a movement of resignation, that we may reconcile ourselves to whatever comes. And yet there is a gap here, a choice to be made. There is the first movement that we may resign ourselves, that we may accept His will in place of our own—but then we are left at a precipice, alike we may either slide or leap.

The one that resigns themselves to His will may thus renounce all claim to their love, thus give up that which they felt to be the entirety of their life; and in this they may feel great pain, may bring this suffering to their Lord and alone before Him weep a while upon the floor. They may then find within themselves then a choice, for how are they to treat this object now? The beloved has become a thing, has been placed at a distance; in this there is a choice.

They will find the easiest option, of course, is that the thing be denigrated; that we deny it was ever the entirety of our lives, that we dismiss our prior ecstasies as mere illusions. We must be very careful in this, for such a stance can easily arise of the ego. Those that let go of a thing may comfort themselves by telling themselves it was nothing, by seeking to turn the beloved so that only their other side is seen—a possibility, of course, only if their behind was nothing to speak of; some may not be so lucky. Nonetheless, we may thus cast in shadows what was once our only light.

Suppose that Abraham did this on his way to Mount Moriah, suppose that he rode upon his donkey and all the while reflected upon what an ass Isaac was. Say, ‘He was God’s gift to myself and Sarah in our old age, no doubt, and in this a miracle; but we are quite old, and really he doesn’t help out around the house nearly enough; even when he does, there is an irksome sense of resentment in his conduct.’ Thus may Abraham persuade himself along the way that what will come is really no loss, that in fact he may be better off without Isaac; and then what happens?

He has built the pyre, bound Isaac and placed him upon it, drawn the knife—and then the angel speaks to him, points out the ram which is to be the sacrifice in Isaac’s place: “Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me.” How readily then will Abraham embrace this son, the same that he had denigrated so long to disavow his suffering?

Here we see plainly the tension between desire and obedience: “he has not kept the wish young by his pain.” The task is that this must be maintained ever as a living tension. We cannot simply cut the cord, cannot let the rope run slack to save ourselves. This is no true obedience but an inverted counterfeit; it is a pride that would degrade His creation, and worse might well pretend the while that all this was only that we may better honour Him!

We see alike as this in even ordinary things, when we desire a thing and yet—knowing that it is not certain, knowing that it is perhaps impossible; then we must find a way to manage this tension. The way is not to diminish the desire so as to make our eventual obedience easier, from a purely practical standpoint we may well thereby ensure the impossibility which this path presupposes. We must somehow manage to at once desire with our entire being, and thus to act our utmost in ourselves, and yet at the same time with our whole hearts to will for ourselves only what He wills; only thus do we maintain the proper tension between desire and obedience.

This seems, of course, a tricky manouevre; it is tricky to even think, trickier still to enact amidst torrents of actuality. We may well reflect upon this, find it perfectly rational; yet says Kierkegaard: “When one would learn to make the motions of swimming one can let oneself be hung by a swimming-belt from the ceiling and go through the motions (describe them, so to speak, as we speak of describing a circle), but one is not swimming.” Blessed are those that are never thrown into the water! Beware those that would dream themselves on land while really drowning.

These movements towards which I have been gesturing are those which Kierkegaard describes in Fear and Trembling, which he outlines with his two characters: the knight of infinite resignation and the knight of faith. They that would wish dull their pain only make the first movement, that of resignation, in which they reconcile themselves to impossibility; thus they disregard the temporal, take up instead the eternal as if a consolation prize. They even persuade themselves, perhaps, that this was all the while what they really wanted. The knight of faith, meanwhile, makes a movement even more marvellous:

By virtue of resignation that rich young man should have given away everything, but then when he had done that, the knight of faith should have said to him, “By virtue of the absurd thou shalt get every penny back again. Canst thou believe that?”3

A great shambling mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millenia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing.1

Our origin was an inversion of the ordinary way, that we stand as islands against the laws of thermodynamics; it is war and strife alone which assure our continuance. The first forms had their simple means of this, mere irritability by which they adapted their functioning to the environment. The principle of life is scarcity, hence are we directed to the future by a rumbling stomach or madly outward as a starving fiend. This relation with the environment—striving for existence—is in its peculiarity, life.

A stone is merely worn away by the world opposed, what differentiates life is that it opposes of its own beyond the merely passive. This activity entails a leaning into the gradients of decay, that in exertion we first consume ourselves in order to consume another. There need then be some tactics for this warring, that the organism must be adapted to its environment; it is here that receptivity comes to mediate between life and its end— that an end in the sense alike as aim and death, the ordinary flow of things from which we are ever only borrowed.

The simplest forms of this adaptation are by way of mere irritability, and here I borrow a term; that this is the form of receptivity common among creatures of a homogenous medium.2 We imagine these first forms of life reacting to the diffusion of a nutrient, of an acid—each indicates a proper response, a path viable for further life and carved over time by the death of alternatives.

This carving in time gives rise to newer and more complex forms, a topic which is of immense interest but not ours today, and we come eventually to a world in which the medium assumes a secondary state. Man and beast exist alike within the same, but the various media that encompass us—air, water, whatever—are taken now as carriers of signals rather than instantiating the signal in their own right. We can imagine this as following the development of multicellular life, that food now came packaged; thus we come to orient ourselves instead to objects existing in an external environment.

The second stage, again with borrowed terminology, is that of sensitivity; it is this which Leontiev argues must be explained. We know this in ourselves, but the trouble is in inferring the existence of such a subjectivity in others—whether animals, plants, even men. There are further gradations within this form, complexities that need be known before we can even speak; still we could hardly start here.

Take the simple sea urchin, for this creature exists as a contrary to our own idea and experience of sensitivity. There they are not a person whole but rather in Uexkull’s terms a ‘reflex republic’—that they are constituted as unity in their activity only by a material wholeness, but the regulation of their activity, what we might think mind, operates according to wholly independent arcs: spines, fangs, tube-feet and so on. He quips thus to explain the difference: “when a dog runs, the animal moves its legs; when a sea urchin runs, the legs move the animal.”3

This seems an intermediate stage in development of receptivity, between irritability and what we might call sensitivity proper; still the sea urchin is oriented towards objects in the environment, their enemy the starfish calls forth a lunging assault. The movement here, however, has no point at which it is integrated—hence properly we cannot consider the thing a mind, at least in any sense subjectively recognisable.

Of course, this might be thought ordinary enough for such an unusual and distant creature. Take now instead a mother hen; while avian yet she is a far-sight closer to our own and consciousness in our ordinary understanding, now consider this:

If a chick is tied to a peg by one leg, it peeps loudly. This distress call makes the mother hen run immediately in the direction of the sound with ruffled plumage, even if the chick is invisible. As soon as she catches sight of the chick, she begins to peck furiously at an imaginary antagonist. But if the fettered chick is set before the mother hen’s eyes under a glass bell, so that she can see it but not hear its distress call, she is not in the least disturbed by the sight of him.

There seems some absence of what we ought expect, that the sound and sight are separate in a way unexpected according to our understanding of sensitivity. The fact seems better explained on a model according with that of the sea urchin, that there is as yet not an integration of the various arcs; with each sensory modality, or so we might consider them, a mere bundle of arcs wrought of a specialised thread. There are eyes here, yes—but is there sight?

Something tangential of relevance is found, accepting here another leap, in damage to the primary visual cortex; and this in macaques, yes, but alike it seems in humans. The specifics are this: that there is apparent blindness, that their reports indicate a total absence of sight; yet when they respond by force-choice, either this or that, to questions concerning presentations within this blindness then their success far exceeds what ought be expected of chance. Hence the name it is given: blindsight.

There are two pathways, it seems, or so one theory goes, that route from eyes through to the brain: the retino-geniculo-striate and the retino-tecto-pulvinar-extrastriate pathways. Now here the names are not so important, what matters is the phylogenetic priority of this pair; that the latter is much more ancient than the former, that when the latter is impaired then blindsight is absent as with sight. The sense seems then that there is some stream which runs below the reflective pool that we call consciousness, that there is a movement in the deep which yet serves adequate to the purposes of bare survival; for blindsight need not impair movement in one’s environs.

What then does it impair, and what is the purpose of this puddle which takes up all our eyes? This the question why of phylogeny, recapitulated in ontogeny, and an open question itself; that it seems at some point the mere arcs strengthen into streams and converge, at least partially, upon this reflective pool—and perhaps it is here that the secret is shown, that there is something in this essential for the reflective aspect by which man is so elevated above the animals.4

Yet this is perhaps an improper metaphor, for we find alike this capacity in those that have only ever lived in the land of silence and darkness. Deaf-blindness does not impair access to this particular reflective surface, though they may never have known such a thing in their ordinary waking. The fact that this is so further suggests the nature of this particular feat, that it is a general integration of the sensory, not necessarily grounded in sight, nor perhaps even in our heads; it is a miracle of some strange sort, and yet we hardly even know what it is.5

The body was found burnt to a crisp, a room of glassy walls; one hundred-million laser diodes lined this space. His family traced his form to the cloud, a set of writings stored on his Dropbox. Files in a format for something called ‘Scrivener.’ There saw he so feared the dark as to seek fill his room with light entire, the resulting to be seen.

At first he had merely increased the amount of light over a period of weeks, then it seemed as if he wished it saturate him ever more rapidly. The whole initially an unconscious affair, only later when technical concerns became predominant did he begin to concern himself with the theoretical. These signs thus arrayed in notes surrounding a series of technical documents concerning the ever-greater production of light in search of saturation. The final project was that which lined the walls, meanwhile the bathroom was filled with a complex of wires and what the police identified as microwave transformers. These drove the lasers which were his end.

His death seemed unlikely an accident, or rather as expected incidental of some other necessity. The later days show a concern with the darkness within, implicit a desire to be ‘broken open’ such that light may be pervade his very being. Here the plain motive was overt fear, a calmness overcomes these notes only in their deepest meditation on technical matters. The two danced together ever onward, problems and solutions; that the only way out was through. The same with his anxiety, for his deepening technical knowledge dragged with it his theoretical concern; and with this, his fear of the dark.

The shape of the world was reduced to two poles, cosmic forces warring eternal. He sought the order of light over the darkness which everywhere prevailed, a darkness that he saw was for most not even salient; it was this compromise which he abjured. The remainder, no less safe for their ignorance, were satisfied to share this world with darkness. He wished it definite one way or the other. This at least he seemed achieve.

Limitation is the actuality of the real, or the reality of the actual; it is the point at which thought becomes possible. This contradiction at the heart of all knowledge: at most we crowd truth into a corner. There remains a darkness that no light will annihilate, which must remain for it is all else. The whole depends upon this single point. There was a man who so feared darkness that he filled his room with light.