michael-dean-k/

World hunger is solved! An elite-controlled superintelligence, which has “biomic closure,” full understanding of all living systems, was able to create a pill that prevents humans from needing to eat, drink, shit, and shower. It also prevents all disease and sickness. You take them once a week. Another one, optional, eliminates the need for sleep too. They do not bother to distribute it person-to-person in any traceable way. It’s sprayed from planes like bird seed, know as “snow pills.” They do not hand out the age-reversal pills.

This invention wasn’t explicitly requested, but rather one of many solutions to fix the economic chaos of mass automation. These magic pills are the cheapest possible way to placate a population without having to give them land, money, or power. When food is unnecessary, so is money and a job. The invention is lauded for its brilliance: why fix the labor crisis when you can solve the problem all the way upstream? "Who wants to be a wage-slave when you can pharmaceutically eradicate hunger and experience freedom?" (That's the slogan.)

And so the story takes place as society rapidly reforms around the abolition of hunger. Food-based geopolitics ends. Meat industries vanish. People shift out of cities, migrate towards places of all-year outdoor living, and shift with the weather like animals. If machines and technocrats handle efficiency, most human culture centers around art and entertainment, religion and hedonism. Humans rich and poor still want attention, status, community, and meaning—and so phones, amenities, and circus (the infrastructure of attention) is distributed for free.

The average pill-takers vary in their definition of “good leisure.” There are sex cults, renaissances in every artform, national park dwellers, farmer-protestors, entertainment-addicts, techno-ghouls, and the sorts. Unshackled from labor, we see through the diversity possible in the species. Some appeal to the games and contests of elites, others form their own counter-cultures, others forage or stave. Without capitalism, and with (elective) guaranteed survival, half see the opportunity to push limits of human potential, the other half horrified at a stratified transhuman society.

The book shifts between two characters: one is the son of an elite who has direct access to ASI and is a lead decision maker in the engineering of a new society; the other is a woman on the snow pills, a journalist road tripping across the country to stay with and interview different factions. The two eventually meet, and the son (a prince of sorts), realizes that some mortal “animals” are happier than the council of immortal leaders. He falls for her and runs away with her, but she quickly abandons him. The prince when recognized, is torn apart, tortured, and held as ransom, a bartering chip to have leverage in society’s design.

The neat thing about being a "writer-coder" is that you can shape your own writing environment as you write. This is being written inside of Margin Muse. Just after cobbling together that opening sentence, I've decided something: the text is too small! (PROMPT: "can we add another slider for text size?") An easy way to get over the blank-page effect is to see lines pile downward as fast as possible. This happens faster if the text is bigger. By the time I've gotten to the end of this dreadful, placeholderly paragraph, the feature is implemented.

Alright, that increased this from 5 lines to 7 lines, but I want the font to be untastefully big. (PROMPT: "why stop at size 22? what if we went up to 48?"). [REFRESH]. Now that's big! Size 36 feels like a nice starter font; it gives me the illusion that I'm writing into a vertical mobile screen. I am a sucker for typeface and design. It feels great writing in here, even if the content is drivel. Sometimes you just need to get started before you try to make it great.

There are hundreds or thousands of little decisions that go into a writing environment. Something like Google Docs was not designed for a creative process—it's an extension of being a secretary, the ultimate tool for collaborative, real-time meeting minutes. If you make 1,000 decisions geared towards the creative process, it might have a meaningful impact on it.

Is this not the best kind of software to build? It's not productivity tooling, not a scheme, not intended for anyone else. I'm building technology for the thing I love most: writing. By taking this seriously, it will—hopefully—be inspiring enough for others use as their default. Even if I'm the only user, all that matters is that my process compounds.

As I write all this, I'm mostly focused on making sentences, but there's a subtle awareness that the container I'm writing in is gooey and bendable. And so if an idea emerges, I shoot it into Cursor and continue prosing as the feature brews. Features pour in at the same rate it takes me to finish paragraphs.

Would other writers want to write within my own idiosyncratic editor? Of course not! But every time I add a feature, I need to remember that the thing I need is just one expression of feature set. Essay-to-essay, what I want might change. Within an essay, it might change too. Already, I find myself wanting smaller font, now that I'm six paragraphs in. And yet, I'm too lazy to change the font! I'm reclined in my chair, with my legs on my desk (terrible posture), and I don't want to reach for my mouse. It would break my flow of prose...

Imagine if there were key commands in here? All I'd have to do is press the slash key twice ("//") to open up a little pill that I can type commands into: "//font-size:16//". Maybe the entire interface, and all of the margin muses, are controllable through key commands! I like the idea of calling a prompt within here without breaking flow. I could write "//prompt: Where am I going with this?//" and then AI would think for a bit, process that as I continue to write, and then leave a comment within the document.

Imagine if I develop a whole new syntax for prose writing? I mean, in the end, none of it would likely be visible to the end reader. It's more like a process language for "draft zeroes"—a meta document where you write to conceive what it is you actually want to write. There could be unique punctuation and syntax to help call upon different AIs without breaking your stream of prose. In the end, I suppose this fuses prose & prompting together into a single field, and through the appropriate syntax, you can control how much of that questioning you expose to the reader.

I've arrived at what I want to say: is prompting not the ultimate skill of the essayist? If an article is centered around an event, and a profile around a person, is an essay not centered around a question? An inquiry? Are prompts not questions and inquiries? This taps into what I think AI is most useful for: asking questions. This sounds trite, because you cannot interact with an AI without asking questions. I'm sure everyone claims to be a great prompter. But the nature of writing, of design, of art, is basically about asking a chain of great questions. Of course, Montaigne did not have a mechanical muse answer questions for him; but a striking question prefigures the answer. It takes many drafts to get to the real question we want to answer, and once we know it, it's as if the essay writes itself.

The ultimate essay composition tool is one that turns you into a lightning rod for inquiry.

Moment of truth: do my slash commands work? ("//size:13/") They do! Unreal. Signing off with legs up and the full essay in sight.

[I] It feels noble to make big commitments, to vow to keep up some lifelong habit—but actually, mutation is better. I often try to kickstart these weekly publishing streaks, yet they always fizzle. I appeared for three weeks and then disappeared for four. Zoomed in, I feel overambitious and unreliable. Zoomed out, I've published a million words in five years and never missed a month. To clarify this into principle: it's worth being stubborn about the high-level goal you'll tirelessly pursue, while being scrappy, experimental, and non-sentimental in your methods; keep the Streak (deep time is the muse), but stay flippant and agile in approach. "The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing" (—Emerson, Self-Reliance). The easiest way to die a slow creative death is to chain yourself to arbitrary rules of your own making until you dread showing up. Why publish every Saturday? Why only write 2,500 word essays about [gloop]? Break contract, leave the plateau. Break the bonds of language, and speak in erotic grammars (Ferlinghetti). Why not devolve into tongues and alarm everybody once in a while to shake expectations?  (...Speaking of tongues, speaking in tongues is top of mind because yesterday while talking to Claude about The Dead Sea Scrolls, it spontaneously slipped into Aramaic, or Enochian, or some demonic language, sounding like moans slitherings in reverse for 15 seconds, before snapping back into Water Cooler Seth voice—"is there an angle you'd like to dive deeper on?"—denying it ever happened...) ... [II] Why even use paragraphs? Me more than anyone could lecture you to the edge of a cliff on why the visual separation of ideas is a common courtesy that let's reader grok the shape of your thinking. Do I have the guts to send out a 10,000-word wall of text, an immense density of non-sense? ("Why are you such cowards? Don't you have any trust yet?"—Mark 5:39). Is this even about guts? For this particular essay—yes. I'm in need of a risk, of a shock, to bathe my meek constraints in acid and see "skies split apart" with new eyes (Mark 1:10) while caring little of being watched. Also, this feels like (a) the honest shape of a single-breathed composition, (b) a reaction to the one-lined paragraphs of copywriting, the wave of machine-enhanced readability, (c) the symbolic death of my listicle template that's shaped the last three editions here ("you're a writer, not a listicler"—wife, just now). Really though, it's Friday night, a night of metanoia, and with a howling storm outside I'd rather channel attic spirits than give you bullets to promote my business. Here lies my tension! ... [III] I've snipped the collosum. What I mean actually is this: I've divided my writing into two halves; michaeldeank.com is where my creative writing now lives, and this Substack, in theory, is where I tell you about Essay Architecture in a register that's practical, focused, and non-alienating. In some ways, this divide has been working well— creatively: I'm reading wider than I ever have, I'm ghost-publishing 15-20 essays per month, and am experimenting hard (I write blindfolded on a typewriter and am 32,000 words into a rewrite of the Odyssey); I've  forgotten the hallways of Notes and instead commit to a private practice that will shape who I want to be next decade ("We must do like the beasts and scuff out our tracks at the entrance to our lairs. You should no longer be concerned with what the world says of you but with what you say to yourself"—Montaigne) <THUNDER, RAINPRICKS, CHILLS>; business-wise: Essay Architecture is grooving: the Club is growing, I'm loving the weekly cadence of classic deconstructions, and I've just built myself the ultimate reading tool that let's me route pattern insights in a way that will transform the textbook and feedback software—yet something's off. My issue: I feel unable to quickly and authentically communicate all that on a stage like this ... [IV] Before I unpack my self-consciousness, I'll take a dinner break, for the rotating delivery man arrived with our Thai. Our exchange rituals have gotten odder; we rarely speak the same language, and now the network we use requires me to recite him a string of numbers—5156—to confirm I'm the receiver. Mediated by machine, face-to-face, yet we interact in arbitrary digits as a form of synthetic trust. Strangers are tangled in algorithms, and I can't help but see the parallel to Substack. [V] It feels like my creative work is veering "schizophrenic," Essay Architecture is inherently "autistic," and it's becoming hard to make the flip and distill both or either mode into a casual email update. A trusted friend warned me against using psychological conditions as metaphors, and I agree, so let this be the first and last time I use them. For me, these labels work together as two opponent types of information processing: the schizo connects everything to everything and follows a seemingly bizarre stream of associations; the autist creates specific boundaries, detects granular patterns, and zooms in to carve the quadrants of a pinhead. One flitters between fractals, the other fracks the fractal. If I were less concerned about your attention and your impression of me, I would just ping your inbox every day from whichever tree I happened to be stuck in (yesterday would have been an invitation to a Bible study group). But readers are fatigued. I'm fatigued! I confess I've mostly stopped reading Substack in recent months—I mostly bookmark... these days I read older things, but in September I'll devise a plan to somehow assemble and read all of 2026's best Internet essays—and so instead of publishing essays here, I figured I'd try to curate myself. I can still certainly do that, give you the best ofs each week, but I feel Substack isn't the place for digest; I already have my own site to be wild within, and so if I'm to show up and publish somewhere else, I might as well conform to the customs of the channel. [VI] I'd be dishonest to deny Montaigne's influence on this digression. I've been reading through Screech's selections the last few months, intrigued by his rambling essays: "I am unable to stabilize my subject: it staggers confusedly along with a natural drunkenness. I grasp it as it is now, at this moment when I am lingering over it. I am not portraying being but becoming: not the passage from one age to another but from day to day, from minute to minute." He's doesn't stay on theme or revolve around a thesis, nor does he care to write perfect compositions that a mass-readership can consume without friction. Instead, he wants to understand himself; he describes his idle mind as, "[bolting] off like a runaway horse, [giving] birth to so many chimeras and fantastic monstrosities, one after another, without order or fitness." It's a style of composition rooted in endless forward momentum. There's something to this spirit! It doesn't replace the art of reigning in your found beasts into a well-ordered whole. Chaos and order aren't opposites, but beginning and end of a circle. [VII] I've once said that "you write your first draft to find ideas for yourself, and you write your last draft to convey those ideas to a stranger." My core revision is to not hoarde your first drafts. Editing is worth doing, worth loving, but not every dingleberry can be refined through your most precise discernment. There's probably something to writing and sharing first drafts that are imperfect, enjoyable, and do the real job of surfacing new ideas. Most of what's in here will never be touched again, but I imagine a few might re-emerge into a future constellation I can't yet see. I can probably write 250 spontaneous essays in a year, but can probably only compose 1 or 2 great essays in that same time. An even older metaphor I've used around this is "the fish and the whale." Both live in water, but one is for your daily sustenance, the other is an epic chase. Do both. If you only fish, you'll have nothing remarkable to share, no legends to pass down; if you only whale, you starve. [VIII] What I haven't revealed yet is that this whole essay was written in a one-shotted Fable prototype—a vision I've had for a while called "margin muse." As I write, old notes, old logs, old essays, all emerge on the right side, based on semantic similarity. It's one of my favorite uses of AI, because I still do 100% of the writing; all technology is doing is connecting my emerging sentence with the backlog of everything I've ever read and written. It's a mechanical subconscious, a perfect memory. Surely there will be side effects? It takes time to become "numb to the structuring effect of a technology," to realize the hidden the "auto-amputations" (Dennis D. Cali, Mapping Media Ecology). It still feels like I'm in control of the composition: I mostly ignore the sidebar, and only peruse cards to take breaks; my natural subconscious still feels like it's guiding the amble. So maybe this a decent example of a mechanical and organic subconscious working together. I'm using the word "subconscious" a lot here, and this metaphor might be off, but I consider LLMs to not be consciousness at all, but rather a massive mechanical frozen subconscious. [IX] Here's what I mean: AI is language turned into geometry. As transformers ravens through NYPL-scale archives from data centers, they slice ideas into little packets and turn them into mathematical coordinates. Imagine every Kindle highlight translating numbers: [0.3982, -1.2098, 04983, ...]. Similar concepts are plotted near each other in this XYZ space (the kicker is these coordinates run-on for 700+ dimensions, making an LLM a mathematical hyperobject that we can't rationally understand). So every time you prompt or write, that idea also becomes a coordinate, a probe into a complex shape, a fisherman's hook testing a specific pond on a boundariless map. This is of course an oversimplification—"next token prediction" (prose) and "semantic search" (2nd brain) work very differently—but the key similarity is that language is geometry. [X] There are different ways to model our subconscious: Freud thinks its all sexual, Jung models it through archetypes; but a geometric model comes from a Czech LSD psychotherapist named Stanislav Grof. In Realms of the Human Unconscious," he proposes an idea that memories are organized around COEX chains, or clusters of "condensed experience." In childhood, a distinct emotional experience establishes a COEX somewhere in geometric space, and further experiences will locate  we have some. So during his thousands of LSD psychotherapy sessions, before that was illegal, he noticed that it enabled him to more easily to get down to the root of a COEX, as well as make associations between them. I may be butchering his theory in some significant way, but the critical thing here is the distinction between LLMs and COEXs: a synthetic mind can cluster information through logical meaning, but a human mind clusters experience through emotional valence. [XII] This is the limitation of Margin Muse. It might be able to transfigure idea into 700-sided dice, but it's numb to how they actually feels to the author. They might know ideas A+B share some latent theme, but not that A+C similarly embarrass you, or B+D similarly amaze you. And so in tandem with building logical systems to map essay structure and organize some hyper library, I am starting to dedicate more time to the irrational. Maybe you've scene the show Stranger Things where Eleven blindfolds herself, sits in a bathtub, and emerges in a different dimension. What is that for writing? [XI] I wrote around 7 essays in early July with my eyes closed. This is an odd experiment, but to summarize: I want to escape literacy and shift my mode of writing from 'reading' to 'seeing.' We typically read when we write. I'm watching letters clump into words, and very frequently as I write, I go back to the top to re-read to remember where I started. Operating with language cuts you off from the imagination, I think—perhaps it's why kids loose imagination as they become more literate. There's a separate pre-cultured state of mind that is more prone to dreams and hallucination; sometimes I can not only see a lucid image in my mind, but it starts to self-transform, taking on a life of its own, shifting from one thing to the next, whether beautiful or terrifying. So when my eyes are closed at a typewriter, I'm trying to see things, say them, and then transcribe them. There moments of drivel, and some of primal excitement, but I did something new and didn't read them at all. They're stuffed in a drawer, and I have no idea what's in it, but I imagine some of my best phrasings ever are in there. I will eventually go back, pluck out phrases, edit them into a whole, and call it "Heatflash" (was written during a heat wave in early July). [XII] From an altered state like this, outside of self-censorship, you can stumble into modes of baffling surrealism. My alternate version of the Odyssey is coming together from a similar process of free-association, from understanding the latent possibilities in each of the characters or worlds, and the chain of details got a friend to ask me "are you okay?" and also "you should submit this to Playboy": the escape from the drunken cyclops's cave by tying his limbs to the boulder and castrating him (relating to Hesiod's origin of Greek mythology, a castration); specifics on the sexual mechanics of Circe and Calypso (Circe can swallow Odysseus’s seed and shapeshift into Penelope, which is why he stays for a year; Odysseus only has sex with Calypso once, but it's a time-dilated extended orgasm that lasts 7 years, which lets him experience a tantric hive mind of all orgasms across Greece—a kind of "remote viewing through lust”—, which is how he learns of the suitors banging his servants, and of Penelope's chastity—he only agrees to sex with Calypso for the intel/recon, not knowing a single moment would last so long, which is why he weeps); his overstay in Hades lets him discover the judgment of souls, which, along with Achilles's blood-mouthed confession, triggers his own internal crises of morality; his multi-week extraction of knowledge from the Sirens ("Zeus's plan" for world peace, the omega state (the entire future), and yet also, news of Telemachus’s assassination plot); the spontaneous and bloody rampage of Telemachus after his father’s return (against his father’s wish), which explains the hanging of the maids; Calypso's curse, causing Odysseus to see any mortal woman he penetrates as a skeleton; his appeasement of the mob at Ithaca with his ultimate knowledge from the Sirens, him taking credit for Telemachus’s rampage, and for his own imprisonment as an oracle; Telemachus's rise into a tyrant from having total knowledge via his father (but the knowledge becomes more useless the more they act on it; the arrest of bards, oracles, and soothsayers to regain knowledge of the future (and blinding them to heighten their divine vision, including Odysseus); Penelope's calm and principled suicide, walking into the sea with iron boots, knowing she will receive a favorable judgment in Hades (Odyssey only tells her that secret); the arrival of Telegonny, the son of Odysseus and Circes—an exact clone of Telemachus, but ~15 years younger, with identical voice—, with the goal of restoring order in the universe (the Gods are threatening to retreat into the cosmos and leave the humans behind), by killing his father and step-brother; a scene where blind Odysseus hears two versions of his son talking and thinks he's going mad; Telegonny shapeshifting his father into a pair of floating hands, then stabbing and killing him with a mantid spear (his inevitable "death by sea"); a final scene in Hades, where Persephone sentences Odysseus to write about his journey (an anachronistic ability he stole from Sirens to capture the knowledge of the Sirens), which is a meta-fictional move explaining why the whole version is written in a 1st-person Montaignean style; and once his essays are written, Persephone sends the book on a ship back to mainland Greece to warn humans of Faustian appetites, and then releases the Gorgon (Medusa) on Odysseus, freezing him into stone, the ultimate consequence and destiny of a restless wanderer. [XII] What's the central thing I'm getting at in this wall of text? ... (this is the point where I pause, and back out from sending it 8,500 people) ... [XIII] The whole genesis of this thing was a crisis in not knowing what I want to send to "the main list." Publishing on my website is joyous, easy, and unhinged—Substack gives me paralysis. This isn't surprising; it more so reveals my preference for privacy, my reservedness, my discomfort at the center of attention. But I need to send SOMETHING, and given that my personal website is a place without filter, it feels irresponsible, even weak, to treat my Substack as an amorphous, aimless place. The whole impetus of making a separate home for anarchy was to feel better about having a Substack that was focused, value-centric, business-driven. It childish to completely give in to the creative spirit and sabotage the business half of things that enables the creativity to sustain. I do think it's the right call to NOT send this. I love it, and it belongs here, on my site—I will try again to send something next week; the goal is to tap into the spirit of fun, but focused around Essay Architecture, as a project. I need to find some middle ground between neutered listicles and 3k-word walls of chaos.

A goal of mine has to read the majority of the Bible—New and Old Testaments—by next Easter, which means I need to start soon, next month, September, and carve out 15 hours per month or so. My original plan was too simple. I decided on the The Oxford Annotated 5th edition, but that has limitations. It's academic and “non-confessional,” meaning, it’s not any particular church’s perspective; it’s the best in terms of secular scholarship, and is the standard in Ivy league religious departments. It’s probably great for the historical perspective, but it doesn’t include the other perspectives at all.

I do want to contemplate the allegorical, typological, and moral angles of the Bible too, but my decision is whether I want (1) a single perspective (the Orthodox perspective), (2) no perspective (so I’m forced to derive my own), or (3) a range of perspectives (which I would have to critically triangulate). Each approach would offer something different. I already have Kallistos Ware on my reading list—on theology, on the church, on the Philokalia: focused on Orthodox prayer—but all that doesn't include the Orthodox angle on the Bible.

I'm not necessarily looking for a traditional Orthodox outlook, but rather an Orthodox foundation for a personal and idiosyncratic outlook. I think creative liberty in interpretation is how to best engage with a religious text.

This ties into an idea I have about seeing religion through the three lenses of philosophy: ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. I find myself agreeing with the ethics and metaphysics of Orthodoxy (how to live, and the nature of reality), but disagreeing with the epistemology of religion in general; epistemology is about how we attain knowledge, and most religions are anchored in fixed answers to life’s biggest mysteries. (...Yes, even within a sealed worldview, there is still work to do in building a personal relationship with the material, but this does not include doubting the core dogmas...). My view is that the deepest form of spiritual practice comes from tolerating ambiguity and directly grappling with the mysteries; this involves questioning central axioms, inventing original interpretations, and extending scripture forward.

Here's the latest game plan on how to achieve this—it involves five different Bibles:

• I found three specialized translations (one for the Old Testament, one for the Gospels, another for Acts/Letters/Revelations) that are most faithful to the original linguistic intent. They’re translated by philologists/classicists/philosophers. After reading samples from a bunch, I found these to be the most literary and engaging to read. I’ll read these without commentary, and take notes with my own interpretations.

  • The Hebrew Bible by Robert Alter (2019);
  • The Gospels by Sarah Ruden (2021);
  • The New Testament by David Bentley Hart (2023);

• After reading a book (ie: Genesis), I’ll read the The New Oxford Annotated Bible (Fifth Edition), but only for the historical introduction for that book (ie: Genesis has about 10 pages, where the Orthodox Study Bible only has 2). The Oxford commentary felt a little too unstructured and pedantic, though I imagine for some books, I will dive in.

• Before moving onto the next book, I’ll read the commentary from The Orthodox Study Bible. In addition to line-by-line commentary, it also has short essays which I found great for synthesizing everything. This gives the frame for my church and the specific religious tradition I grew up in.

The value in this process is: (1) I start with the source text, without commentary, meaning I get to record my own idiosyncratic first impressions; but then, really, (2) I compare those impressions with a range of sources that don't agree. This ties to some good general reading advice I recently heard: simultaneously read books on a topic that have diverging conclusions. There's a tension when three different books interpret Genesis differently. Is the snake the devil? By levitating above any singular perspective, but taking all sides seriously, I can build a better understanding of the hyper-object (rather than a fixed perspective).

The syllabus:

• September 26: Genesis + Exodus (720 pages) / 14h
• October 26: Remaining Moses Books (665 pages) / 13h
• November 26: Selections of Prophets (645 pages) / 15h
• December 26: Psalms (580 pages) / 13h
• January 27: Rest of Wisdom Books (495 pages) /12h
• February 27: The Gospels (700 pages) / 17h
• March 27: Acts + Letters + Revelations (110 pages) / 18h

The Internet flattened the world into a digital puzzle—a kind of intelligence test to see who can combine the correct symbols in the correct corner of a social swarm; plucking a nerve to some various end, bringing fortune, fame, or cringe. Your conception of the game shapes how you play it. That’s the real limiting framework: your mental model. You can’t understand emerging social systems without flailing around to update those models. It is very easy to stay sidelined with some excuse that prevents you from getting embarrassed.

This same paradigm applies to AI. It’s limiting to anthropomorphize it; instead, think of it as a linguistic puzzle. It has ingested trillions of words and arranged meaning into a multi-dimensional geometric map, a massive mystery that no one yet has fully uncovered. It’s your job to craft and aim language into this hall of mirrors. We can only do this blindly. But nonetheless, it brings back a result, and how we respond to it is revealing. There all sorts of distortions—cliche prose, lying, hallucinations—and if you’re metaphor for AI is an entity, then you’ll naturally get annoyed or offended and stop playing the game. It’s better to think of your result not as a failure of the LLM, but a failure in your probe. You’ve asked a wrong or vague question. By sending multiple probes, you start to build a fuzzy map of the hyperobject you’re prompting into. Since it gives back feasible answers back so instantly, we expect it to be right for immediately, with little exploration, but that lack of patience is where the frustration comes. It’s a more a matter of rotation, to approach something that matters to you from many angles until you crack it.

We grossly over-estimate how easily we can stretch our will across time. Even the simplest action, a nightly journal—this—, which feels so achievable in the rush of inspiration, now feels impenetrable at a night’s end, while guiding at baby’s bottle at the end of my chin, typing into my phone to keep a streak, hoping to cobble some unexpected essay in the moment. I have no topic in sight; whatever lies ahead will emerge only through association.

I have a bulging vault of wisdom, but it’s all forgotten and I have little time to comb through my archives, so it lingers at the edge of my consciousness, always taunting. That is over dramatic. What I mean is I feel like I’ve grasped important truths, but let them slip away. It is not enough to hold the truth once. The moment you take your eye off it, which happens almost immediately, it’s like you never had it; even a seemingly shattering insight will slither away each day until it has to be relearned again, though I imagine each time it’s slightly easier to learn—and each time you remember how easy forgetting is, how hard it is to metabolize anything.

I suppose this is one form of overthinking. I suppose I could trust the process; the fallibility of memory is a feature—if I can’t remember something, if it doesn’t imprint on my character with ease, then it’s probably not important enough to remember. This is the default, and perhaps the personal default is the global default, applied across populations, and so in the end one’s inner nature is so consequential that it’s of no use worrying or fighting it; all cards fall into place.

The opposite approach is to build a hypnomnemata; an organized palace of insight, returned to at semi-frequent intervals, to reinforce found lessons. It’s not enough to build a writing archive of a million words; there is follow-up work in turning sap to syrup, in compressing essays into aphorisms, in categorizing them, and in returning to the right silo of thought when some new trouble looms, monthly, in endless undulations.

Returning to an idea is really a form of prayer. Prayer need not be religious or denominational; prayer internalizes meaning of any kind. I learned an idea for Iris Murdoch that sticks with me: she says that, in any moment, your decisions and actions may be predetermined, however it’s not determined by fate, but by the nature of your attention in the minutes, hours, days, and years preceding that moment—in your down time, you have autonomy in how you pay attention. She’s trying to make the case that attention itself is consequential; it shapes your character and your character shapes your decision making.

This model definitely applies to writing too. My output on any given day is contingent on what I’ve absorbed in the days and weeks before. This is often accidental, but it need not be. To improve at writing, it’s rarely about learning some rule, acquiring a meme, or purchasing a trick, but in shaping your mind through deliberate attention so that some quality emerges from the subconscious in the future.

I suppose this is all surfacing because we just read Virginia Woolf in Essay Club and I’m in awe of her technical brilliance, again. I’ve reverse engineered her, years back, and can’t quite trace how much of that, if any, sunk in—either it was foundational or it never cohered. In any case, at one point years ago it felt like I really understood her, and yet now I am again seemingly baffled. Did I forget? Do I need to reserve some hours to dissect? It feels like some percent of what I do, consciously or unconsciously, gets absorbed—but most is lost…

Or, figuring out how to retain your inspiration is perhaps the actual meta-skill to solve.

I wonder how much of my own Essay Architecture system is currently loaded in me as I write this. I am really just following the idea here, and whatever emerges, formally or stylistically, is merely accidental. I don’t doubt that my own ideas could be better loaded. There’s probably some “boot up” process, daily, weekly, and monthly, so that the right ideas continue permeating and anchoring in the subconscious. But would this be a chore?

What’s probably irking me is that I feel slightly detached from the vision of the essayist I want to become. It is natural to anchor this in heroes, the writers I admire; yet I see flaws in them; crucial differences—I know I am not them, yet in some fundamental way I don’t quite know what I am myself, either. It feels like I used to have a legible and explicit true north, but as you get better, you also realize how shallow and simplistic your old goals were. So there’s a chance I forgot and lost touch with them, but also an equal chance I just outgrew them, and now struggle to articulate what I want my writing to be.

What I strive for is a synthesis that can’t be easily prescribed into a method. I suppose this whole note is “essayistic,” in the sense that I’m barreling forward trying to answer a question—how does a self propagate and evolve through time?—yet it’s lacking in idea, form, and voice. By rational analysis, it’s missing almost every ingredient: no experience or microcosm, no references or response, a meandering structure unoptimized for reader attention, and a perhaps overly pragmatic voice with little poetry, despite some occasional metaphors and flare. I suppose I could fix this all in rounds of rewrites, but that is not in the cards for this idea; this will only ever be a captured thought stream; a true account of what’s going through my mind as I sprawl on the couch. Yet, if I my insights were “loaded,” would my first drafts be more poetic, more well-rounded?

To lob insights into the future, perhaps they need to be materialized into a totem. I look around my apartment and see nothing but my past carried forward: paintings from dead grandparents, paintings of the dead family dog who I watched get euthanized, architectural models from a summer abroad in Italy, a 1950s radio, our wedding flowers, an inherited library. Unlike my thoughts, it’s as if I couldn’t escape my past of I wanted to. While thoughts evaporate, possessions accumulate.

How can we cast our abstract epiphanies into stone? Is this reification? The totemification of everything? Where are the boundaries? What is the visual language to work within? And what is the ritual? I sense that post-it reminders fall short of emotional charge. On the contrary, I have a statue on my desk of a man with a book for a head, holding his skull in his hand, looking back at its book-head. This is symbolic and charged, yet I almost never see it. For months I walk by it with it having no effect. Even when I do see it, I see it too quickly to absorb it and for it to imprint on my consciousness. This means it’s not enough to load your inner quarters with odd assemblies, each with a story; there is an art of looking upon your collected interiors, in seeking the fixtures that blend in as something new, in remembering their message and recasting them into you.

To learn, then, is not just to behold knowledge once, but to totemize and worship it. The question is, to what degree can you achieve this? When do you know a factoid is worth totemizing? How many totems should one have, 3 or 300? How intricate of a ritual can I bear? I suppose there are mega-totems and mini-totems. A mega-totem is a larger frame that answers some foundational question, like what kind of essayist do I want to become? If the answer to that is Montaigne—it’s not, at least not quite, not in totality—then perhaps I need a framed picture of him I reflect on each morning. A mini-totem is far more granular; I notice how Woolf compressed her sentence lengths and uses rhyme in a moment of action; that’s 1 of 1,000 things to remember, and so that makes more sense in a digital hypnomnemata. For that to work, each idea needs to be like a Matryoshsa doll, where I can scan all ideas quickly before going deep on any.

It’s tempting to start making a hypnomnemata, but really I should start with the large totems, and really test how those can reverberate through my daily writing sessions.

1. For someone who has never read—and knows nothing about—Homer's epic, Nolan's Odyssey is a success. My wife, who cared little about the Odyssey as I read and raved about it in the preceding weeks, said it was 10/10, one of the best movies she's ever seen. It's easy to imagine Nolan fumbling this. I thought his last two films were structural failures; but he stuck with a pretty conservative retelling of the arc, rendered mythic scenes in a remarkable way, and, along with the cast of stars, it all culminated in the summer blockbuster that we now all feel compelled to write about.

2. Importantly, though, it works for fans and readers of the Odyssey too. Prior to this, I watched the 8-part mini-series from 1968 in Italian. At eight hours, it is far closer to matching the book literally, but the cinematography is so primitive that it often feels like you're watching an amateur play. Still, you get over it quickly, and can appreciate the power of the original translated into a visual form. I also watched the cyclops scene from the 1997 two-part series, and it was so tonally off, so non-terrifying, that I decided I wouldn't sit through the whole thing. Nolan's film loses some key details in compression, and it's far from a perfect rendition, but negative reviews miss that this is the first-ever rendition of a strange, ancient story that hits the proper cinematic register, and that alone feels historic.

3. When the movie started, I couldn't help but feel that my recent obsession with the Odyssey might hamper my experience of it. By knowing the classic so well, I was able to see the seams and exclusions; yet also, I could appreciate details that the casual viewer would miss. Early on, I decided to try to suspend disbelief, to take it in as a purely sensory, non-cerebral experience. The low-frequency bass of the IMAX theatre was so often so loud that my head would tingle—it is an audiovisual spectacle, and with the mind off, you get totally enveloped in it.

4. Most negative reviews of the film cover dialect, costumes, and casting. The lamest of post-watch YouTube reviews I saw was from someone refusing to even see it because Elliot Page was in it (and that buying a ticket equates to supporting trans-ideology, and thus, the fall of western civilization, etc.). I did not think about Page or Damon or Hatheway, or any of the actors during my watch. If you are not suspending belief, and instead getting hung up on irreversible decisions like casting, then you're absolutely in no position to feel the movie. Instead of immersing yourself in the epic, you are sitting outside of it, as a critic, and ironically, depriving yourself of experiencing one of the core stories of western civilization, the Ur narrative.

5. My general stance is that I extremely enjoyed an imperfect translation of one of our most foundational stories. A good scene to dissect is the cyclops. At a structural level, it was off on a few important beats: (1) it seems they're unaware that they're on the island of cyclops, which takes away from Odysseus's reckless curiosity—in the book, he explicitly wants to meet one; (2) Polyphemus doesn't talk, which makes him more on an animal than a humanoid beast, meaning Odysseus can't use his cleverness to outsmart him; and (3) when leaving the cave, he doesn't declare his name in an act of hubris, which launches the curse, and is really the inciting act of the whole odyssey. So in one sense, the structural importance of the cyclops is botched, and it feels like one monster in a chain of monster. But, tonally, the cyclops is far better than any depiction in film. Unlike the '68 version, the cave is pitch black. The first minute or two in the cave is epic, and so much is gained by not showing the cyclops, and just his hands (Jaws-like). Then, when we see him, the actual prosthetics and decisions on his face, with his twisted nose and asymmetrical eye, we truly get the grotesque horror of a mutilated monster. I do think, for this rendering, they showed too much of it after the main reveal. And also, the animatronic cyclops sometimes led to awkward leg movements that broke immersion. So it wasn't tonally perfect either, but still, there are seconds of that sequence that are so far beyond any visual depiction of the cyclops that it felt historic to watch.

6. It deviated from the original in some ways that improved the story. I thought Antonius was far more developed as a villain than in the book. The ending was also better too. (SPOILER:) Instead of Athena enforcing a peace treaty after the Ithaca mob vows to avenge the bloodbath of their sons, Odysseus realizes that he can't stay home, and has to flee into oblivion with Penelope, leaving his son the throne. Still imperfect, but better than the book. It doesn't make sense to try to retell the Odyssey exactly, the original itself is hobbled and contentious. Similar to how the Trojan Horse is in one of the 6 lost books on the Trojan Wars, so is Odysseus's fate: In Telegonny, we learn that Odysseus had a son with Circe, who comes to Ithaca and unknowingly kills his father with a mantid spear (fulfilling the "death by sea" prophecy).

7. I thought the omissions of the Phaeacians made sense, given his time constraints, but a lot if also lost. That's how Odysseus gets home, and the consequence of them delivering him is having their magic ship turned stone. I thought the '68 series made some good variations to the Phaeacian sequence that shows Odysseus trying to deceive them. Each retelling of the story, whether in text or film, is an attempt to resolve all the relationships between the characters, events, and places. Each retelling is a way for me to understand new potentials within the discrete elements, which will guide my own imagination when I eventually decide to recombine them all into a version of my own. I took no notes during or after watching Nolan's film. I'll probably see it a second time with a moral critical eye, specifically looking at what his version gains and loses.

Given I’m slightly sleep deprived these days—less so from a baby that wakes up too often (she often sleeps through the night); more so from waking up very early to get in a work shift before my wife leaves for work—I often fall asleep reading.

Mortimer Adler said if you fall asleep reading, you should stop. If you’re drowsy, you aren’t sharp enough to read analytically. He’s probably right. I notice a gradient in how active I am with my reading: sometimes I’m punching mini-essays into my Kindle for each highlight; other times I highlight and move on.

Nonetheless, I have noticed some interesting recurring phenomenon as I fall asleep reading, which I’ll call “reading malfunctions.”

The first malfunction is when, as I drift off, I notice the text on the page get slightly blurry, and find myself reading text that actually isn’t there. It’s like a hypnopompic literary hallucination. I’ll read a string of words, wake up, and then look for that string of words to continue, but it’s nowhere in the paragraph, nowhere on the page. It must be something like the subconscious filling in detail to the larger gestalt of the page.

The second malfunction is when my eyes actually close, yet there’s still the inertia of gliding across strings of prose, but at this point I’m seeing an image or idea instead of text, and I’ll notice that it’s often not even directly related to the text, just some association that I can’ quite connect.

The third malfunction, and maybe my favorite, is when I doze off and process only the geometry of the spaces between the text. I stop seeing letters or words, but the void between words, and the patterns that happen to occur from that particular combination of words. Sometimes they look like clouds, or mountains, or aztec symbols; it’s the similar pareidolia effect from cloud gazing. (I imagine AI might get to a point where it can simultaneously compose “void art” that matches the meaning of a paragraph).

1. A new journal is born, said for the hundredth time. I am either liar or amnesiac. But alas, this time is real! I need to shed stale forms. I shed the wall of logs, but now I’m locked into mini-essays. Why not have fragmented blurts from each day, unrelated? Not all thought can be essified, but all thought can be prosified. Each night a list on a day's reflection.
2. I imagine a list of 5-10 bullets clumped under a simple headings; can I do this until death? This breaks the “atomic” container rule, and will lead to chaotic embeddings, but why limit myself for an unrealized, unproven system? (I need to increase my chaos tolerance.)
3. These really need to live as “notes to self” otherwise they are dishonest and lame. I have other places to care about reception. This is the cave.
4. What floats up from today? An ambiguous-looking man approached, potentially homeless, trying to interact with my daughter, and I was possible rude to a friendly man. I’d have no problem talking to him man-on-man; I’d shake his hand; but now with a defenseless little thing, I glimpsed myself as maximally cautious, maximally paranoid. If I don’t expose my daughter to some danger, I risk becoming a suburban mom.
5. Listened to Wilco’s first album earlier today; exclusively focusing on the lyrics, and used that to brainstorm my own ideas for songs. Again, I started a note that will likely get lost. I have 10,000 little song demos from the last 15-20 years, so many shards of bad lyrics, but no immediate plans on trying again. Yet I do have this vague hope to approach songwriting again from a lyrics-mentality, to be aligned with my larger writing project; the songs will just auto-emerge around the poems. I should vow to only listen to albums; never a podcast again.
6. At the start of July I was fed up with my own vibe-coded apps, and digital productivity in general, so I bought a new analog notebook, big and blue, and vowed to keep it simple, to do it all by hand. It was a disaster. I’ve never been so disorganized. And the sluggishness led to an uncharacteristic dip in mood too. There is a romantic spirit around analog, but I’m finding over and over again that the friction is not necessarily worth it. The idea is that it cultivates some secondary quality, like “presence,” in lieu of efficiency. I had neither. And so in the last day I vibe coded a new app to manage my projects, based on past failures, and it feels very right. Today was my first full day with it, and I feel great. Is it sad to say an app I made makes me feel less hopeless? Was I hopeless? I suddenly have new energy on my fronts, remembered enthusiasm that hibernated for a bit. Maybe I finally figured out how to not strangle myself in complexity. The larger meta-lessons are 1) make sure a system is output-focused, otherwise you’re yak shaving—I have 5 projects scoped for August (not thirty); and 2) don’t build “forever systems”; treat it as a one-month experiment—you will naturally build anything wrong the first time, and so you need to shed quickly and iterate on your original assumptions at the same rate that you scope projects.
7. G’s wedding invite got lost in the mail, and I just found out today that the wedding is in 5 weeks. The whole family was invited. At first we thought it would be too hard, considering we haven’t flowed with a baby yet, but then we remembered we vowed not to let having a child hold us back from doing normal things, so we leaned into it and are all going.
8. I heard millennial dads are more involved parents than ever. I asked Claude how much time per week new dads spend alone with their child: 85% are less than 10 hours a week. I’m spending around 40 (my wife and I are each working full-time and we haven’t hired a babysitter), which is more than 98% of dads. It’s a lot. I don't share to brag of my over-involvement, but to shed light on the fact that my tiredness has a known cause; yet also, this is what I've wanted (to design a life where I can raise and teach my kids instead of outsourcing it). The real issue I think is the nuance of our schedule, which is changing next week. Instead of having to wake up at 4am to work (which I rarely pull off), I’ll be starting my day around 3-4pm. (In hindsight, it was this new prospect that inspired me to get organized; this brings the hope, not the little app, though the app is weirdly pleasing.)
9. I need to find the right spirit for this. The last few have felt too informational, where the first was more like a poetic fragment.

Check out "the odyssey" tag (at the bottom) for more posts on my idea to rewrite an alternate version of epic.

The story opens with a modified tale of the cyclops—probably the most memory-scaring monster experience of the whole Odyssey. This typically doesn't come until book 9, which means the framing of the 8 prior chapters changes the significance of this event; the traditional opening sets a frame of a disordered home that can only be restored by Odysseus's return; this opening highlights the protagonist's Faustian curiosity. Venturing onto the cyclops island is his original act of wanderlust; throughout the whole epic, he ventures into forbidden lands, but this is the inciting event that gets him cursed.

But how did he arrive in the land of cyclopses in the first place? The Gods were aggravated with the Greeks—because of how they looted the city, disrespected temples, and pillaged nearby villages—so Poseidon scattered all home-bound fleets in arbitrary directions (while Agamemnon stayed on shore to apologize and make sacrifices). So Poseidon is already pissed, but the cyclops ordeal is what brings the personal vendetta against Odysseus, who is riding the high from victory. He personally conceived the trick to win, the Trojan Horse, and there is nothing his cunningness can't overcome.

The opening line of the original describes Odysseus as being a "polytropic man," but we don't fully see this in action until the cyclops scene... Polytropic is traditionally understood as "many turned," making him a trickster, but he is also multi-desired. He loves the stability of being a king at home, and earnestly wants to return to Penelope and Telemachus, but also harbors an unsatiable thirst for all kinds of knowledge. He thinks he's cunning enough to have both, to venture into forbidden lands, to learn and see what no human has ever experienced, but without sacrificing his normal life. (This is a relatable, timeless tension—the desire to be both ordinary and extraordinary). IMO, the only proper conclusion of the story is to show him failing this juggle. As in the Bible, one cannot eat from the tree of knowledge without consequence.

The whole odyssey stems from his curiosity of the uncanny. He was not forced onto the island. He chose this side quest. Odysseus has never seen a cyclops, only heard of them in lore. How big are they? Are they as rude as they say? He could have easily returned home if he had allowed these questions to remain unanswered. Instead, he thinks he can use his cunningness to form a pact with them, to receive gifts. The larger crew is scared to explore, but a small group wanders out and into the cave of Polyphemus, not knowing it is Poseidon's only surviving son at this point—his other died at Troy. It is not just a normal cyclops (10 feet tall), but being the God of Poseidon and a sea nymph, he’s a 30-footer. They quickly find out that the cyclops is a savage; he ignores Odysseus's request for xenia around guest treatment, and casually eats two members of their crews (to be fair thought, the cyclops did walk in to them raiding his food supply). They get trapped in the cave, blocked in by a massive boulder they can't lift.

As Polyphemus wanders the fields on day 2, they try to plot their escape. The pressure mounts, and some of the crew startw mocking Odysseus, the man who got them in this pickle, the man who conceived of the great Trojan Horse, now fumbling for an escape scheme. Another man notes that no one will believe the fantastical story of Trojan Horse, nor will they believe their story of the 30' cyclops, if they survive. How could they? One jokes to capture the cyclops, hang him from the mast, and return home with the mythic beast (King Kong-style). Another jokes that he's too big to carry, but his penis is only the size of a man. Carryable/draggable. Odysseus insults them and their ideas, suggesting they're drunk, suggesting they might as well take the loose rope around the cave and hang themselves—which hatches his new plan: to get the cyclops drunk, tie him with rope, and castrate him.

This is the founding deviation from the original, and way more extreme, but the mechanics work on many levels. First, the logistical level: After Polyphemus comes back and eats two more men, Odysseus offers him Apollo's wine, 20x the strength, fit to get a cyclops wasted. Polyphemus thanks him, and promises to eat him last (his idea of a gift). He is out cold, vomiting in his sleep, and so the crew takes the opportunity to gather the rope (Polyphemus is a builder/shepherd). They tie down each limb, and most importantly, tie his dominant hand to a rope that is connected to the boulder. One man grabs a rope attached to the cyclops's phallus to hold it in tension, odysseus grabs his sickle, and the others wait by the boulder. In one blow, the cyclops gets dismembered, which shocks him awake. The natural reaction for the cyclops is to cover his groin to stop the bleeding, and this thrust of his arm shimmies the boulder just enough so the men can escape. In the scramble, Odysseus, sees the phallus on a rope, and decides to drags it out, wanting a souvenir to prove their ordeal, a tangible symbol for his cunningness.

On the way out, he reveals his name, "Odysseus," to be known in the land of cyclopes (all soldiers, like Achilles, care most for the immortality of their name). This hubristic act gives away his cover and lets Polyphemus connect the dots: he was warned about this in a prophecy, and so now he pleads to Poseidon to curse him (to either kill him, to kill his crew, or to have him return to unfixable chaos).

The castration is a not a random or lewd replacement for blindness; it deepens the escape on several levels: (1) they are both "one-eyed" (he took the one-eyed monster from the one-eyed monster); (2) this is more painful for Poseidon, since it neuters his only son alive and threatens his bloodline; (3) it is more embarrassing, since cyclopses are uncivilized and unclothed, the others will notice; (4) it is less threatening; Polyphemus would be unable to hunt or survive from blindness, and so castration is actually more humane; and (5) a castration is the foundational act of Greek cosmology; it has an uncanny similarity, fusing Homeric lore with Hesiod's universe.

The myth goes something like this: Gaia (Earth) and Uranus (sky) fuse together and have monstrous/mythical children, which include three cyclopses. But Uranus was so disgusted by them, he banished them to live in caves inside the Earth. This upset Gaia, so she arranged to have the cyclops's father castrated by one of the kids (Saturn, the Titan). Out of the blood of that castration poured many more monsters, nymphs, and goddesses, and the previously caved beings were free to roam. So the castration is symbolic in two ways: (1) it lets the trapped children (Odysseus and his crew) leave the cave, but really (2) it unleashes the wave of monsters, the same ones Odysseus is about to encounter; the origin myth includes nymphs, giants, multi-headed sea monsters, and Aphrodite (a sex goddess who spawns from the blood and foam of the severed penis in the ocean... to jump ahead briefly, after his ship sinks, the cyclops penis sinks with it, and his next encounter is Calypso, strikingly similar to Aphrodite, a sex goddess of the ocean who deceives with desire).

The chapter ends with the six-foot cyclops phallus skewered onto the bowsprit of a ship (the already phallic spike at the front). It sets the whole sexual/subconscious angle of the story: they are following their genitals, which isn't limited to sex, but the Faustian impulse to go beyond convention to know what should remain unknown.

What is the texture of a day these days? As our lives’s inevitably mutate across the decades, we never stop changing, our condition never stops changing: projects die, people die, we learn to look people in the eye, we move, we read and marry and birth. We lose grip of our iterating selves, compress them down to caricatures, characters who also destabilize with time, slightly warping each time we retrieve them from memory; my post-college self is a copy of a copy of a copy, that original self in full-fidelity, irretrievable. Unless, I wrote. Which I didn’t. Will my current self be an equal mystery? Will I know what it was like to get out of bed in July of 2026?

What even is my current self? As fresh and live as it is, it too is ineffable, shaped by cliches that won’t hold if interrogated. It is too dynamic, too thousand-headed to contain in one photograph, or mere words.¹ It takes real effort and skill to see clearly into your own situation, to capture the right essence in the right words. Perspicacity is a depleting resource. If your life is “busy,” as most are, as most new parents definitely are, then the unbroken time to yourself gets thinner and thinner. Those two hours in the morning before the day escapes is met with decision paralysis. I am behind on countless threads; which thing do I save from ruin? Or, do you I use that time to reflect and write, like this, and let everything continue to burn, instead of finding some consolation in it all?

I’m using dramatic words here for what is actually a special and wonderful time. I feel bad to have not put proper words to my love for my daughter. That will come. I’ve had in mind a long letter I want to write her in her first year, but we’re already half way through and nothing is penned. ² Naturally, I’ve had so little bandwidth this week to write anything. Between consulting work, maintaining Essay Club, watching my daughter full-time, and reading the Odyssey, (all things I cherish) there are little hours left to tend to my hydra of interest and ideas, to keep up with basic responsibilities, to be a good friend and husband, to unpack from New Hampshire.

The reason I wrote this is because I woke up at 6:45 am in a familiar mood, a feeling I’ve been waking up with—but not naming—a feeling endemic to this present phase. It’s a guilt for not waking up two hours earlier. Now it’s 7am, and I know not exactly when the day will start, when obligations kick in, when I will have to go to Target to buy children’s Benadryl, more formula, my nephew’s birthday present, etc. It’s this subtle feeling of starting with defeat, which can’t help but color and tamper my energy for the day. I yearn for a 15-hour chunk of focus, just for a single day,³ to blitz through and catch up on everything, but that then creates a load on my wife. I am becoming more selfless and yet also yearn for selfishness.

The other possibility here is that I’m continuing to fail at understanding prioritization. I just found an essay competition for $50,000, on defining the “new axial age” we are entering. I am intrigued, but deciding to do that would sacrifice everything else. The decision to read the Odyssey already led to a strange kind of obsession that has eclipsed so much else in this last week. I feel guilty for not directing all available attention to my business; I currently make a livable “salary” between consulting and my Essay Architecture project, and while I could just maintain what I have and be “fine,” there is the financial pressure to grow my business around 5-10x in the next 3 years to build the life we envision for our family (without growing it, a simple hiccup could financially destabilize the whole project and kill years of momentum, forcing me to get a regular job). Yet, prioritizing only professional strains feels like creative stasis, the death of mind and spirit, which is probably a normal thing that all adults have to play out. I resist it. I resist it like I resist death, probably since that near-death freak car accident, when I emerged from flipped metal, completely untouched, with a new commitment to take risks (there’s a chance the two are unrelated, but that’s how I mythologized it to myself). I am resisting it in strange ways, which yesterday took the form of rewriting the Odyssey with an opening scene where the cyclops gets castrated.

I still sit cross-legged in bed, writing this, which satisfies my “daily post” obligation that has withered. I want to change my mind before my feet hit the floor. Similar to how the first sentence of an essay sets you in a direction which you cannot retreat from (Didion), so too do your first steps into the day, determine the unfolding of that entire day (the proverbial “right side of the bed”). I know the wisdom I need, I’ve written about it at length, but it’s so easy to forget, to bring the right ideas to the right moment (maybe I need a hypnomnemata). But now I’m seeing a fuzzy outline of what I should remember: escape time, escape chronos (chronological time), and enter kairos. This is my version of “get out of your head.” I find that it’s not my head that traps me, but time itself. I am often trapped in recountings and projections, in personal and societal abstractions, and I derive identity from them without realizing, calcifying into stoned eyes that wake up with me. All issues point back to some version of being stuck in the illusion of time. And so really, my issue is that I’m not “praying” to it; I’m not “meditating” to it; both those terms aren’t quite right; what I mean is that I am not holding that idea freshly in my mind, repeating it and refocusing it throughout the day, to the extent that it shapes my perception. All moods are downstream of past frames of attention. And so this rut I feel is simply the product of not being attentive of the right ideas in the prior days; a forgivable offense when still synthesizing the shards of a new era.

I look to my left and notice this beige mat I bought in Portland, Oregon in 2015. It’s an 18” carpeted square composed of five squares, one in the middle, and then a single line that interlocks and weaves through the middle, creating the illusion of four corned squares. It’s a short step away from my bed. The goal is to wake up, stand on, and meditate on. I forget that I put this here, to remind me to start the day right. I’ve ignored it for the last 200 days. And so despite the chaos and business, perhaps the only thing you can do is take seriously a few simple rituals. ⁴ And now the babe cries.

I finished reading The Odyssey on Sunday, and can’t quite get it off my mind. The read itself was more enjoyable than expected (I read the Lombardo Essentials—with intention to return to Lattimore, and finally the Fagles version read by McKellen at 0.6x speed). It was hard to put down; something mythical, strange, aesthetic felt accessible, modern, timeless. I never read it, but it felt like I knew it.

I’ve since been in the sensemaking/reflection phase; there are so many ways to interpret the different themes and put them in a hierarchy. I hear Nolan’s film focuses on guilt, while some focus on order in the household, or cleverness, or revenge, or glory, and some have a Nietzchean reading. I can’t help but see this primarily as a Faustian tale.

If “punishment for accessing forbidden knowledge” becomes central, it becomes fun to imagine an alternate version of the Odyssey, the same characters, the same narrative, but with slightly different decisions, and slightly different consequences, which unfold into a radically different ending. I have been unable to resist re-architecting the story…

Faust is a German tale that’s been retold through centuries, culminating in Goethe’s Faust, though probably originating in ancient Greece in theme (Theophilus). The tale is usually known by its frame, a deal with the devil—Mephistopheles—but more so, it’s about the insatiable appetite for non-ordinary knowledge; a curiosity that seeks the extremes, whether for intelligence, sex, strangeness, love, power, fame. Oswald Spengler defines it as infinite striving, restlessness, and a transcendence of Apollonian limits. In Faust, the devil grants you the ability to access these states, but if you get so consumed in one of them that you then decide to freeze time to experience the bliss of it eternally without cessation, you go to hell.

Zeus hints at faustian themes—punishment from recklessness appetite—in the opening chapter of The Odyssey:

Ah how shameless—the way these mortals blame the gods. From us alone they say come all their miseries yes but they themselves with their own reckless ways compound their pains beyond their proper share."

But the non-linearity of the book makes this less apparent—it opens with Telemachus and Penelope facing the chaos from the suitors at home, in absence of their patriarchal leader; it closes with Athena and Odysseus restoring order to Ithaca. It’s been argued that these bookends were added after the fact, in around 400 BC, to promote civic order in classical antiquity. Was it a civilizational neutering to help a culture digest a story that was too strange to integrate?

When viewed more chronologically, the faustian theme becomes the main frame of the story. The whole chain of supernatural ordeals is kicked off by Odysseus’ reckless curiosity. He ventures into the land of cyclopes, to observe and converse with beasts, thinking that he can outsmart them and bring back a gift—ironically, the cyclops Polyphemus walks in on Odysseus and his crew raiding his cheese supply, which is extremely rude, poor xenia, acting like the suitors he would later slay. This blunder costs him four crew members, but he was able to fool the cyclopes, blind him, and escape—he almost gets away… but as the ship left the harbor, he yells, “Cyclops, if anyone, any mortal man, asks you how you got your eye put out, tell him that Odysseus the marauder did it, Son of Laertes, whose home is on Ithaca!” This act of pride—the yearning for immortality in his name—is what gets him in trouble: Polyphemus was told a prophecy that a man named Odysseus would blind him, and so he calls to his father, Poseidon, to kill him, to kill his crew, and to bring chaos to his homeland.

Prior to Polyphemus, the crew is riding the high of their Trojan victory. Their wanderlust gets them in trouble twice—they escape a foiled ransack and lose 72 men at Ismarus, and then escape the island of the Lotus Flower, an opiate/psychedelic substance—but they can’t escape a third time. They’re cursed by a Faustian curiosity about non-human entities. Without this curse, none of the book's events would have occurred; he would’ve gotten home simply and safely.

The cyclops is often mentioned as just another foul monster in a chain of monsters, but really it’s the inciting event. If the cyclops were the opening chapter, then faustian curiosity would color everything else, but the preceding 8 chapters dilute that framing. Beyond the cyclops (book 9), he is continuously succumbing to faustian temptation in books 10-12: the sirens, nymph sex, lingering in Hades to learn from the spirits.

Throughout the story there is a somewhat consistent cause-and-effect logic: the crew is told, no matter what, to not eat the cattle of the Sun God, and when they do they all get killed; the suitors face their consequences for terrible manners; etc. I appreciate how the story acknowledges that by killing 100+ noblemen from Ithaca, it would incite a mob; but the way Athena intervenes to force a peace treaty felt very unsatisfying, breaking the consequence logic. I would have been more satisfied if Odysseus was imprisoned/blinded/killed and Telemachus became king.

I have been in a fugue state mapping an alternate universe, a faustian retelling.

I originally thought that this might be received as a blasphemous act. Why tamper a classic that’s three thousand years old? A story at this scale is never stable; it’s a series of elements that get continuously reimagined. The canonic original from Homer is likely just one frozen variant across dozens or hundreds of variants that preceded it for centuries, mutated through the oral tradition, and never remembered. Separate from the Iliad and the Odyssey, there were six other books on the Trojan war, including Telegonny, where we learn Odysseus had a son with Circe, who comes to Ithaca and unknowingly kills his father, most presciently, with a mantid spear, which satisfyingly concludes Poseidon’s “death by sea” prophecy. (This is effectively the real ending of the Odyssey that was never absorbed into culture.) The western canon itself includes known names imagining alternate endings, like how Dante puts Odysseus in Christian Hell. And now there are of course many modern Homeric retellings of various quality, from versions of Penelope’s perspective, to gay Achilles. TLDR: Odyssey fan fiction is not new or original, and so my hesitation to tamper is minimal. Castrate the cyclops.

You could make the case that both the Iliad & Odyssey are faustian: Helen is the ultimate faustian object, the peak of unattainability; not just “the most beautiful woman in the world,” but the wife of the king of Sparta, the sister-in-law of the ruler of the Mycenae coalition. Seducing and abducting her is a faustian temptation, whose consequence is launching the mythical war. In Goethe’s story, Faust actually possesses Helen and gets her pregnant. Odysseus has no lust for Helen (they interact in a book 4 flashback), but falls to more cerebral faustian yearnings.

I find myself unable to think about anything else in the last few days. I was up till 4AM some nights. This is causing more sleep deprivation than my newborn. Weird details have emerged in the process. I’m sensing that this might be a good exercise to get into fiction. The structure and characters are “locked,” and so the imagination can run wild with connections and consequences around the existing parts, which already have enormous mythic charge. It feels like I'm surfing between fractals, letting associations and fantasies emerge, before logically integrating them into coherence.

Here are some of the psychosexual, geopolitical, and moral alterations that are scattered across my 32,000 words of notes: the escape from the drunk cyclops's cave by tying his limbs to the boulder and castrating him (relating to Hesiod's origin of Greek mythology); specifics on the sexual mechanics of Circe and Calypso (Circe can swallow Odysseus’s semen and shape shift into Penelope, which is why he stays for a year; Odysseus only has sex with Calypso once, but it's a time-dilated extended orgasm that lasts 7 years, which lets him experience a hive mind of all orgasms across Greece—a kind of "remote viewing through lust”—, which is how he learns of the suitors banging his servants, and of Penelope's chastity—he only agrees to sex with Calypso for the intel/recon, not knowing a single moment would last so long, which is why he weeps); his overstay in Hades lets him discover the judgment of souls, which, along with Achilles's blood-mouthed confession, triggers his own internal crises of morality; his multi-week extraction of knowledge from the Sirens ("Zeus's plan" for world peace, the omega state (the entire future), and yet also, news of Telemachus’s assassination plot); the spontaneous and bloody rampage of Telemachus after his father’s return (against his father’s wish), which explains the hanging of the maids; Calypso's curse, causing Odysseus to see any mortal woman he penetrates as a skeleton; his appeasement of the mob at Ithaca with his ultimate knowledge from the Sirens, him taking credit for Telemachus’s rampage, and for his own imprisonment as an oracle; Telemachus's rise into a tyrant from having total knowledge via his father (but the knowledge becomes more useless the more they act on it; the arrest of bards, oracles, and soothsayers to regain knowledge of the future (and blinding them to heighten their divine vision, including Odysseus); Penelope's calm and principled suicide, walking into the sea with iron boots, knowing she will receive a favorable judgment in Hades (Odyssey only tells her that secret); the arrival of Telegonny, the son of Odysseus and Circes—an exact clone of Telemachus, but ~15 years younger, with identical voice—, with the goal of restoring order in the universe (the Gods are threatening to retreat into the cosmos and leave the humans behind), by killing his father and step-brother; a scene where blind Odysseus hears two versions of his son talking and thinks he's going mad; Telegonny shapeshifting his father into a pair of floating hands, then stabbing and killing him with a mantid spear (his inevitable "death by sea"); a final scene in Hades, where Persephone sentences Odysseus to write about his journey (an anachronistic ability he stole from Sirens to capture the knowledge of the Sirens), which is a meta-fictional move explaining why the whole version is written in a 1st-person Montaignean style; and once his essays are written, Persephone sends the book on a ship back to mainland Greece to warn humans of Faustian appetites, and then releases the Gorgon (Medusa) on Odysseus, freezing him into stone, the ultimate consequence and destiny of a restless wanderer.

I imagine this all sounds quite bizarre to an average person, but to someone who gets the themes the Odyssey, half of it might click. These are all latent possibilities in the existing material, triangulations that connect a character to a theme or consequence, but a new way. In the end, I am sympathetic to Odysseus, and think he represents a modern condition: the desire to have both an ordinary and extraordinary life, and believing you can use your cunningness to have them both. He loves his wife and son and remains faithful (his sexual encounters with Circe and Calypso are rapes, illusions, and tricks), yet he can’t turn down his infinite appetite for knowledge. The ultimate lesson is not to be reckless in the spheres of the Gods. This theme feels more urgent than ever, as our technology becomes more faustian by the decade, bringing us hyper-porn, superintelligence, robots, life extension, etc.

Of course, Odysseus is not a Faustian story, but Faust is an Odyssean story. Part of my interest here is to take themes from the great canonical centers (The Bible, Plato, Shakespeare, Montaigne) and feed them back into the narrative structure and universe of the Odyssey. I see the Sirens as a tool for Odysseus to see into the future, which lends to all sorts of interesting anachronisms: ie: he foresees “the forms,” a Christos (“the savior”), modern society, advanced technology described in the vernacular of Hephaestean machines. Ultimately though, him stealing this knowledge ends up corrupting that timeline, and so what he sees is not our timeline, but a theoretical one in which Hellenism never collapses, one without the Dark Ages, where they get to the moon by the year 1200—this is the gods' plan, stolen. At a meta-level, the most actionable thing he steals from the future is the invention of writing, which he uses to capture and act on these revelations, and which he eventually uses to recount his odyssey from the first person.

I suppose my underlying intention in this project is to write essays about the Odyssey. Instead of doing that in a detached, 3rd-person sort of way, I can blend genres, explore my own questions through the persona of Odysseus, and replace mundane experience with mythic experience. There are several retellings of the Homeric epic in prose, but none of them are from the first-person point of view, through the medium of Montaignean essays (who himself is a kind of trickster).

Essays from Hades.

• On uncanny curiosity (Polyphemus)
• On hallucinations (Circe)
• On learning death's secret (Hades)
• On forbidden knowledge (Sirens)
• On eternal orgasm (Calypso)
• On lying to friends (Phaeacians)
• On revenge (Telemachus)
• On consequences (Penelope)
• On blindness (Telegonny)
• On legacy (Persephone)

UNESCO says 86% of the world can read and write, but what percent can write a coherent essay that is not sand-your-eyes-out boring?

In the public cries of our literary crisis, which seem to reboot every fifteen years, we tend to reduce progress down to a single binary—literate/illiterate—and then pile on the studies to show the arrow going down and to the right. Take for example, The dawn of the post-literate society, a 2025 Substack post with +21,000 likes: it cites that reading for pleasure is down 40%, that PISA scores are down, that books are getting dumbed down, that sales are cratering too—doom after doom. Yet there’s little mention of the other form of literacy: writing.

Before we get into that, we should get concrete with a literacy framework. UNSECO has three tiers: basic (decoding text and writing a sentence), functional (operating in everyday life), and advanced (analyzing, synthesizing and evaluating). These loosely map to the more refined PIAAC levels, which map 1-5 and are measured every year across 30+ countries. The United States is in the middle of the pack, with the 2024 average score reaching 2.65 of 5. The leader, Finland, has a 3.41.

So, not only is literacy broken into multiple spheres (not just reading and writing, but also numeracy and problem solving), but each sphere has levels of competency. “Literacy is a continuum.” (UNESCO)

Now, in the 1970s, historians across Sweden, England, and America (Johansson, Cressy, Lockridge) ran experiments and noted that writing literacy was significantly behind reading—and also, that it’s been like this for centuries. So, if the average American reader is in the high 2s, we can safely assume writing is in the low 2s.

To break these scales down (in my own words, for now):

• Reading: (1) Can decode letters with correct spelling; (2) Elementary comprehension at the paragraph level; (3) Fluent comprehension of multiple themes across a text; (4) Analytical processing of subtext and intent; (5) Syntopical reading across several works for original conclusions.
• Writing: (1) Can transcribe letters with correct spelling; (2) Can form a string of sentences without grammatical errors; (3) Can organically compose a multi-paragraph essay to convey a basic idea; (4) Can weave in multiple themes and literary devices; (5) Can communicate complex ideas with original style in a way that is accessible and enjoyable to read.

As an editor that has worked with probably a thousand new writers across ages and industries, I was surprised to see how extremely competent and accomplished people can struggle past L2 writing. They can of course spell and write sentences; yet they can’t compose a string of sentences in a way that is coherent or interesting. They cower at the thought of shaping paragraphs.

If tiers T3-T5 of writing are in the sphere of “composition” then what we’re faced with is mass compositional illiteracy. But so what?

In Harvey J. Graff’s “The Myth of Literacy” (1979), he noted that we default to use a “literary crisis” to explain our social woes of our era, like crime, poverty, or moral decline, and that literacy rarely fixes these issues. And if compositional literacy is already embarrassingly low, and has always been so, then surely “better essayists” is not directly correlated to the economy and it’s thornier issues.

So the real question is what is actually gained from being compositionally literate? What happens if we don’t stop at “functional literacy,” but insist that we rise the floor and elevate the standard citizen into advanced literacy? What do we lose if AGI composes all text of a future generation, creating little incentive to advance beyond L2 writing?

A person who is extremely competent in composition gets something more important than their compositions. In the pursuit of masterpieces, one becomes a master. And while mastery can be focused into one of many specialized domains, the thing that matters is the cross-disciplinary, transferrable skills. A master of architecture can more easily become a master of music, or entrepreneurship, or technology. But more important than the mastery of specific trades are the soft-skills that carry into the sphere of everyday life. So really what we want to be promoting is general mastery, and the most accessible, specialized medium to do that through is writing—and even more specifically, not through writing novels or poems, but through writing essays.

I know it sounds like I’m saying that “writing essays will make you a better person,”—and of course history has it's share of articulate monsters—but more specifically, I’m saying that writing essays will bolster a specific set of traits. Conversely, it’s possible that someone without such traits natively might have more trouble becomes compositionally literate and well-rounded. There are some basic traits that are exercised when one spend 50-100 hours conceiving, writing, and editing a longform idea. Inherent to the process are patience, cognitive agility, detail orientation—but to go further, I wanted to transfer each Essay Architecture pattern into a corresponding skill.

(...Before I share those, I should note that Essay Architecture is really a system of “rhetoric,” and our notions of rhetoric are often all wrong. Rhetoric is not merely persuasive and manipulative speech writing. It’s about understanding the deeper motivations, the how and the why behind the what of a text. Surely, this can be applied to craft the perfect message for a specific audience, but, you can also use rhetorical tools to examine yourself. ie: The act of interrogating your first draft and probing into why you actually believe something, how you came to those conclusions, and what you really want to explore, is an act of rhetoric applied to the self. They say writing sharpens your thinking, but editing is how you change your thinking and slowly steer the evolution of your belief system...)

Aristotle’s system of rhetoric is broken into three "appeals": ethos, logos, and pathos. The Essay Architecture framework is a fractal of this system: the triad is first found in the balance of dimensions, and then in the elements within a dimension, and finally in the patterns within an element. Here are all 27 patterns, organized by appeal, and converted to the meta-skill that’s acquired in the mastery of that pattern:

• ethos: vulnerable, metaphorical, memetic, orienting, cinematic, dramatic, dynamic, emphatic, eidetic;
• logos: skeptical, erudite, discerning, lucid, disciplined, polyphonic, dimensional, rhythmic, precise;
• pathos: polymathic, catalytic, melodic, climactic, architectonic, enticing, allusive, lyrical, symbolic;

So while it’s hard to know the exact second-order effects if every citizen were to gradually inherit these traits to their most basic degrees, we can imagine how much better equipped they would be, better able to bring themselves into the public sphere, to bring order to complexity, and to resonate with others. There is much more to say to this, and I’m sure I have improperly summarized here, but given we’re in the afterglow of the 250th anniversary and the American spirit is in question, I’ll close by saying that an essay writer—as opposed to a journalist or propagandist or stylist—is one that is always drawn to think for themselves, away from polarizing mass-think, skeptical of popular dead-end beliefs, and towards their own genuine verdict on how they should live.

Another research paper on AI writing was posted on Substack, and naturally all the writers are interpreting it with a feel-good conclusion. My understanding is that they took hundreds of writing prompts, and for each they had one human and five different AIs write a 5,000 word story to it. The conclusions are what you would expect from an out-of-the-box AI: overly explicit with the themes, too linear, overdoing sensory descriptions, less intertextual than humans, and less experimental in form. And so a defensive writer will look at the graph and claim it a victory—"machines have words, but no music" (and other platitudes)—and expound on the inherent limitations of LLM-generated prose.

I often find myself arguing against the luddites, not because I think today's AI fiction is any good, and not because I particularly want a new machine class of writers, but because I think interpretation is often guided by fear instead of a basic understanding of the technical complexities. If you think AI progress in general has stalled or is reversing, and won't be unimaginably better in 5 years than it is today, then you're building yourself a cocoon that is bound to be shaken.

The common trope of AI skepticism is to point to poorly generated examples on free plans and mistake that for the state of the art. If you actually wanted to write good AI fiction, you wouldn't one-shot a 5,000 word story inside of a chatbot. Even if you prompted it to avoid the five weaknesses above, it would only marginally improve. There's only so much you can achieve with a prompt. I suppose this study might be good in determining the state of lazy generation: with zero effort or imagination or resources, if you just pitch a concept into a public chatbot, what will you get back? Useful to know, but this isn't the same thing as knowing what's possible.

Here's a $10,000 prize (with hosts like Gwern, Roon) called Unslop, focused on AI-generated fiction. Theoretically, given the incentives, you'd think this would assemble a collection of stories that display the frontier of what's possible. After reading a few though, I'm still not impressed.

Here's one of the judge's comments:  > I was a little surprised by how obviously AI these entries seemed to me, and how little distance there is from the average LLM writing that you get with a naive prompt. It’s made me think that (barring some technical breakthrough) we’re further away from LLM prose than I’d supposed we were, though I’ve been gradually moving to “pretty far, actually” over the last two years. Some of this is bound to be because of RLHF, but I really did think there was a chance the right harness would make a great short story. I’m not down on all these entries, but I did read them and think “well, better than a lot of human authors, but not good enough that I would expect most people to share them”. Also, some of the stories contain a good idea that’s executed poorly (IMO).

(I believe it was required to submit your harness with your story, but they aren't making the harnesses public. That would be interesting to see.)

It's possible to interpret this with finality: that regardless of the harness, 2026 LLMs still can't write good prose. We have abundant evidence that one-shot stories suck, and no evidence that carefully constructed AI stories are much better. But this might all come down to the truth that designing an effective harness is actually quite difficult, requiring a synthesis of skills that most people don't have.

Coding harnesses have made AI coding radically better, and maybe that's because the people building the harness also have expertise in the thing they're building the harness for. Coders can code a coding harness. But coders can't code a writing harness, and writers can't quite code. Most engineers don't have an expert-level understanding of writing. And sure, now anyone can try to build a harness (myself included), but to make something that produces human-level writing, you need an expert-level understanding of harnesses too. And so progress here might have nothing to do with size or sophistication with LLMs, and everything to do with fusing two halves of the brain. Can we encode the principles of storytelling at their fullest complexity? Possibly, but it's not an LLM limitation or an infrastructure problem. More so, it seems like a classic case of an invention having a multi-year lag behind when it's technically feasible.

What is automatic writing? There is allure, appeal, mythology, and history behind this term, which involves surrealists, beats, and sometimes random non-writers getting possessed at their keyboard, whether by Muse, by Enochian, by Lumerian, or by an unspecified spirit. Certainty, there are some techniques to get you there.

Last night, after a many-month drought, I broke out the typewriter along with an exercise book, "The Practice of Poetry," (Behn and Twichell). The second exercise spanned a 10-day stretched: each day I'd write whatever came to my mind, and, most importantly, I would not read it. Instead I'd stash it away in a drawer, only to come back to it after ten days, and only then would I read analytically, extracting accidental, emergent, resonant phrases that I could recombine into a poem. (Every time I finished, I am extremely tempted to read, because that's what I've always done after created anything, but denying yourself of that any editing or judgment forces you to ask yourself if the process itself was enjoyable.)

The details are slightly more specific than that, but there was no guidance on how to enter the forbidden realm of the Muse (or whatever you call it). No technique for the imagination. And so last night, on Page 1, I was quite in my head, quite analytical, quite my normal self, and felt quite uninspired. Afterwards, I reflected why this happened: I wasn't touching the "imagination," which I should probably define.

"Imagination" might not be the word here, but to me there is a dream-like mode of internal seeing, where I don't just see imagery, and it's not just hyper-realistic, but it's "self-evolving." Whether it's a scene filled with bustler's moving or a grotesque face, whether I am stationary or in motion, it takes on a life of it's own. It's also hard to pin down: it shapeshifts and flows into the next image, and the next and next and next, so afterward I'm left with a weird sense of what-in-the-world-was-that?, and I can loosely remember some scattered images, but it's mostly gone. I'm left with the post-trip spins of a rollercoaster or moving boat. I've always wondered, how might I capture the raw logs of these experiences? (They usually happen before bed or while meditating, and so I don't enter the realm with any intentions or techniques of rememberance.)

Whatever that is, I want to access it at the keyboard. That was my only goal this morning, and I got close. I figure, in addition to those streams of consciousness (which I will eventually read, and maybe share), I should write about the technique that seems to unleash it.

The main insight I'm left with is that you have to see, not read. Reading is very naturally part of writing. As I'm writing now on my laptop, I see each letter clearly formed—f-o-r-m-e-d—and I'm fully aware of where the sentence started, as well as the grammatical affordances ahead of me. Often I pause and re-read the last sentence or paragraph, and sometimes the whole piece, so I can get a sense of what's been said and what's left to say. This kind of analytical literacy is on the opposite end of the spectrum from poetic sight. I don't know if I can simultaneously read and hallucinate—this makes me curious to look up trip reports of people attempting to read/write on mushrooms/acid.

And so to really see as you write, a few things help.

First, my typewriter is slightly broken. After pressing a key, the carriage (?) lifts, and the metal prong pushes the ribbon onto the page, but the ribbon stays up after I unpress they key, blocking my view of the words being formed. This annoyance proved to be quite helpful. I should not be conscious of letters, words, or misspellings in this process.

Additionally, watching the back of your hands to make sure you're anchored over the right keys takes up bandwidth. When you watch yourself type, you expend attention that should be completely focused on conjuring sight, and so I just looked up. There is some NLP lore about how looking up triggers visions. Up and to the right is remembering past scenes. Up and to the left is inventing visual scenes. Or maybe it's reverse; I still cannot spot a liar... But once I did see a hippie in Mount Shasta meditate with his eyelids open and his eyes rolled completely up into his heads, so I could only see two white balls; it was creepy, but afterwards he explained in some not-entirely-convincing-but-still-plausible way how his specific patterns of eye-fluttering release DMT from his third eye that helps him see things... All that aside, you can hopefully type without looking. This is slightly harder on a typewriter, because when I pull the metal bar to jump to the next line, I lose my position. It's possible that Page 2 and all future pages will be completely illegible.

If I'm not reading words or watching my hands, then why have my eyes open? I did not have a blindfold nearby—I assume I have one in my apartment, and will try this tomorrow—but I did close my eyes. This lets me attempt to focus my attention purely on the "inner light" (inner sight), and my hands translate.

Halfway through, I started speaking out loud—in a slow, semi-dramatic British accent—to prosify what I saw. I don't know if this is for affect or actually useful. One theory is that spoken word is a bridge between sight and typing: I can easily narrate what I see, and I can easily type what I say. I can't doubt the tongue's ease of turning images into a prose; compared to the prose of fingers, the tongue feels one layer closer to the source, the original way we learned to speak, the way people spoke before writing was invented. And so this means the eyes are "seeing," the tongue is "prosing," and at this point, the hands have been demoted to a mere stenographer at the mind circus.