The burning green Earth shelters until the twilight sky.
We wait on the wise men of shining blades yet a holy war is here and now: the pain of heat is not for a child shivering in the rain, closing her eyes to keep out the cold or the fire.
A slender, fragile medium between yellow and blue The last green on the horizon.
And the fire hungering for the slightest shoot of green, set against the burning yellow of a righteous Sun, caught high above His shame.
The weeping mother’s ocean, her darkened haven from the sights of a war brought by a Sun God, looking down on us from a one true perspective, from which all wrong views are possible.
Demons were only ever an effigy. The opposite of the sun wakes behind mossy eyelids.
The stars aim for the eye of the one true star with a bow made of rain who can shield all the glittering blades of grass
Hope takes a proposition. You hope that something, and the complement has to be a declarative sentence, and before it can be a declarative sentence the outcome has to be cut out of the vague and given edges. Hope cannot begin until the boundary is drawn. It arrives after the sharpening, dependent on it, the affect of a world already resolved. Wonder is the other kind. You wonder whether, you wonder why, you wonder at. The complement is a question, or there is no complement.
Because hope needs an outcome specified it also needs a holder. It is a claim on the future held by someone who must remain intact long enough to hold the claim. That is its structure, and the structure is credit rather than warmth. The beneficiary may be anyone, or no one yet born; the holder is the one who cannot go missing. Dissolving would forfeit it. This is why hope disqualifies you at the door: reception asks for the overflowing of the self, and the self that hopes has already refused, for the soundest of reasons, since it is holding something.
And it is consumed. When its object arrives, fulfilment ends a hope and disappointment ends a hope. Either way, it is spent. The salt is unchanged by every encounter with it. No hope survives its own object arriving.
It also needs its twin. Aquinas made hope a virtue and despair a sin, and the pairing gives the game away. They are one affect on one axis, and hope rescues you from despair the way the raised end of a see-saw rescues you from the lowered end. Hope does not save you from the pit. It digs the pit and hands you a rope.
The gate of Dante’s hell says to abandon hope, and the architecture behind the gate says something else. Farinata explains that the damned see the far future clearly and are blind to what is happening now, and that when time ends and there is no more future their knowledge will die. That is hope administered as a punishment. A self preserved intact, aimed entirely at what has not come, denied the present. Hell is not the absence of hope. It is hope with the present surgically removed.
I wrote in the margin of a book on real analysis, at twenty-six, that for in truth there is no hope, only wonder.
And still I have hope.
Not for anything. Nothing completes the sentence. There is no that, no outcome with edges, no future in which the claim matures, nobody standing by to collect. What is left when all of that is stripped out is not an attitude toward events. It is a love of something obscene. Eating. Sleeping. Shitting. A woman across the room doing exactly the same things. The joke is bad and the badness is the whole of it, because salvation contains no jokes and this does. The finer the idea, the more naked and indecent we are.
I do not need life to continue. I do not need death either. Both cravings put down, becoming and un-becoming, and the natural inference from here is that what remains is cold, an emptiness with the lights off, indifference dressed as attainment. That inference is wrong. What remains is warm, and what it is warm toward is the eating and the shitting. This is the true ordinary. It is not reached by rising. It is what is there when the ledger is closed.
The word carries a frame with it, and the frame is why the word is nearly unusable. Christianity’s move was to make hope a duty and give it an object, and once hope was obligatory despair became a sin, and once despair was a sin the axis was installed in everyone and could be operated from outside. Hope defers. Endure now, be paid later. Anything that defers can be administered, and the administration of deferral is most of what power has ever done. Hope is spent by arrival, which is why an object that never arrives keeps it alive indefinitely, and why deferral is not a failure of the promise but its maintenance. The Christ I can still hear speaks urgently in the present tense. Consider the lilies. Sufficient unto the day. Today you will be with me. That voice does not ask anyone to wait. The waiting is institutional. An apparatus took someone who ate with the wrong people and converted him into a promissory note, which is precisely hope’s operation performed at scale: turning what is here into what is owed. Christ was good. Christianity is his opposite. The whole mess is deadly.
So the hope I am keeping is not the one at the gate. Dante’s damned kept the future and lost the present. I have made the opposite trade, and it is not a sacrifice, and there is nothing noble in it. I gave up what was never mine to hold and was given back the ordinary, which was always here, and which is obscene, and which is funny, and which does not need me to persist in order to go on being what it is.
Wonder does not depend on a wonderer. Not in the empty room, where the claim is easy, and not in the encounter, where it is hard. The stronger claim begins there. At the moment wonder arrives, there is no wonderer left to receive it. There is no small person standing before a large universe, admiring it. There is no self congratulating itself on its sensitivity, saying: I am a person capable of wonder. To identify as a wonderer is already to have missed the entry.
This is not humility as an attitude. It is not the self making itself modest before something greater. Self-effacement is a condition of reception. Wonder enters only where the person who would possess it has momentarily ceased to stand apart.
Wonder “dissolves in water like salt.” It was already in the world before it entered us. Dissolution neither creates nor consumes it. The salt is dispersed but not exhausted; it can fill the water without becoming water. Wonder is not manufactured by the one who encounters it, and it is not diminished by being encountered.
But the water is not a person, nor is it a particular mind. It is an overflowing of an individual self. There are two dissolutions and one solvent: the salt goes into the water, and the self goes into the water, and that is where they meet. Neither has to become the other. There is no need to say that one becomes nothing and therefore becomes the world. Salt remains salt even when no grain can be found.
This is why closing the eyes against the world is the wrong movement. It makes the world disappear so that the self may remain protected from it. Wonder requires the reverse: a self-disappearance, not a world-disappearance. The stars remain stars. The tree remains bark, leaf, insect, rot and light. Nothing has to become a symbol of us. The world does not vanish into mind, and the mind does not acquire the world as an identity. The separation simply ceases to be important.
Wonder also feels good. Plainly good. It contains no necessary moment of terror, no failure of the imagination, no recoil in which the self rediscovers its own magnitude by surviving what overwhelmed it. Wonder is therefore not a gentler form of the sublime. It moves differently. The sublime threatens the boundary of the self and then, often, restores it. Wonder does not threaten the boundary. It forgets it.
The bodily sign may be pīti: the rising brightness, the shiver through the skin, the sudden lightness or flooding of the body. The same shiver may come in a formal meditation or during an honest inquiry into the natural world. The traditional grades of pīti distinguish its intensity, not the prestige of its source. A breath, a theorem, the underside of a leaf, a difficult question or the night sky may each open the same passage.
The object is therefore irrelevant, except that some objects work better for practice than others. A distant galaxy has no intrinsic spiritual superiority to a stone. But the galaxy may loosen one person more readily, while the stone may teach another to remain. What matters is not what the object means but what our attention ceases to insist upon in its presence.
Wonder can be practiced. This makes it a path rather than an aesthetic preference. One can learn the conditions under which the self loosens, learn to remain without immediately claiming the experience, learn not to turn wonder into evidence of being a wonderful person. Practice does not manufacture the salt. It allows the water to receive it.
The same movement occurs in inquiry. The intellect hallucinates sharpness. It draws a boundary and then mistakes the incision for a discovery. But the boundary generates incompatible verdicts: this belongs, this does not belong; this is the same, this is different; this follows, this cannot follow. Contradiction appears to be a tension in the world, although it was produced by the sharpness with which the intellect divided the world. Sharpness and contradiction are not two errors. They are the two visible sides of one artifact.
Inquiry need not resolve the conflict by drawing a still sharper line. Inquiry relaxes conflicting sharp positions. Relaxation is not surrender, vagueness or intellectual laziness. It is the refusal to force one of the conflicting verdicts into sovereignty merely because the mind cannot bear their coexistence. Misery does not lie in thought. It lies in the direction thought takes when it tightens around its distinctions and then suffers the wounds those distinctions produce.
Relaxation in thought is the same movement as dissolution in the body. The propositions remain, as the salt remains. What disappears is the claimant who must make one of them final. Wonder and inquiry are therefore not separate paths—one ecstatic and the other intellectual. They are one motion described in two registers.
The stars, secretly, listen to our wonder. They do not need ears, intentions or knowledge of us. Our astonishment leaves the mouth as breath and sound and enters matter again. The wonderer is heard only as something material: a vibration, a little heat, an emission where there is no reception. Nothing answers. Nothing needs to. The cry has already returned to what made it possible.
This is the opening claim run outward. Wonder needs no wonderer in order to be received; the cry needs no listener in order to be complete. What leaves the mouth is sound: matter, associated with none. It no longer belongs to the mind that made it, and it does not thin out for want of an ear. The stars are not used up by being looked at, and our astonishment is not wasted by going unheard.
Pīti is fabricated. The wonderer is fabricated too. This does not defeat the practice. An axe handle is also fabricated, yet through use it wears away in the hand. We do not mistake the handle for the destination. Wonder is passage, not arrival. Ecstasy may be required only until ecstasy no longer feels exceptional—until the impersonal brightness of things becomes the true ordinary.
But perhaps “return” is the wrong word for this. Water has no first term to which we can return. Every source has another source, and every dissolution occurs in something already flowing. We begin, moreover, inside minds that have already sharpened themselves—minds whose sharp distinctions tell them what inquiry is and what relaxation cannot be.
How can relaxation begin from inside that sharpness without becoming one more sharp command?
The question asks for a method, which is the sharp genre inquiring after its own cure. But the handle was not worn down by a decision to wear it. It went because the axe was used for what an axe is for. Perhaps relaxation does not begin at all. Perhaps it is only what sharpness does under long and honest use.
Ghostname is an unpublished hybrid book of poetry, logic, and pedagogy that asks what happens when we stop treating vagueness as a defect and start seeing it as the embodied side of inquiry. Moving between Norse myth, classroom experiments, and the axiom of completeness, it explores how our most abstract mathematical assumptions quietly shape education, language, and everyday life.
I offer here a tiny sketch of the finished book: an introduction to the “light box” experiment on ambiguity, the myth of Fenris Wolf as a parable of fear and control, and essays such as “The Emperor’s New Mathematics” and “Many Roads from the Axiom of Completeness” that trace the hidden metaphors behind modern analysis. The complete book extends these threads to where logical pluralism, poetic narrative, and lived experience meet.
If you sense that our culture’s equations and exam scores leave something important unspoken, Ghostname is written for you: an invitation to inhabit the borderlands where numbers, stories, axioms, and questions share the same fire.
The flame licks us with colored light and pleasant warmth. His expression and silence make the rest of the tribe hush. And as the world is fully dark and quiet, the tribe’s eyes watch the ancient man, whose fire, whose stars can be seen lighting his eyes.
“Fenris Wolf was once so young. He befriends everyone who likes to eat what is edible, sleep in any nook next to a tree, or under a limitless sky. And when darkness envelops above, he knows he is home and satisfied. Yet he grows large, like a great son who will grow into a mighty warrior and protect his tribe.
The Fenris wolf’s best friend is the god Tyr. Listen well: we are alive to wonder at the world as distant children of the gods because of Tyr’s lie to his friend Fenris.
Fenris keeps growing and eating, yet he grows so quickly the gods become afraid. They commission the dwarves to bind Fenris, and the dwarves contrive to make a ribbon almost as light as thought, spun from impossible things: a line made of numbers, a movement with no time to move, a division of things with no limit, a love that falls instead of flying, a lie that never finishes the telling, a work of art that does not nourish the soul. These knots, made real, become the limits of Fenris’s growth.
To persuade Fenris Wolf to try the ribbon against his strength, Tyr, god of law, agrees to put his hand in Fenris’ mouth. Fenris is bound—and bound well. No matter how he strains against it, Fenris cannot escape his bonds. And finally, Fenris bites off Tyr’s hand… because Tyr’s hand guides the world into half-truths, to control a fear that the gods feel… for their sovereignty, their jealousy for power and control.
Loki sees his son Fenris bound… and it gets him thinking…
And when Baldr, the God of light, is prophesied to die, his mother goes to every being, every lie revealed by the ever-penetrating sun’s light and turned into knowledge… she extracts an unbreakable oath from each, that they cannot hurt Baldr. Not metal blades nor wooden clubs, not falling rocks nor sinking quicksand—all are bound by oath, sworn upon Odin’s spear, Gungnir.
Yet a small green plant… called mistletoe, is deemed too small and too simple to be any danger. It is poisonous, yes, but there is no poison that can kill a god…
This little green life is overlooked partly because… no one can fit it perfectly within the knowledge the light reveals. Tiny green life begins by devouring the sun’s energy. It reflects green. Green is not what it is… and so… what is it?
Loki is the most cunning, even more than Odin. Though Loki lacks the wisdom of Odin, he is so intelligent the other gods seem like children—powerful children… playthings for his games. Somehow… Loki shapes mistletoe into a weapon… and Baldr, the god of light, falls.
Baldr has no choice after his death (for a god’s death is not as final as that of mortals) but to follow the order of the universe and travel to the underworld, the domain of Hel, daughter of Loki.
Even then, the god of light is so beloved that the gods send an emissary to beg Hel for his return. Hel agrees—if all beings touched by the sun will weep for Baldr. And so the gods ask, and all weep for the shining one… even mistletoe weeps in its tiny spirit. Yet it is ‘Gratitude,’ a reddish-colored troll, who does not weep. Yes—it is out of Gratitude, an emotion so strangely bound to the love of the Sun, that Baldr is exiled to the underworld… and some suspect Loki’s hand in this.
Fenris will spend eternity deprived of the light the gods—the greatest teachers—might have kindled in him when he was a pup. He is an intelligent son of Loki. If the gods had lit even a small flame in his mind, instead of acting from fear… Fenris would not have become what he is.
At Ragnarok, Fenris will break free not with strength, but with understanding… Fenris will grow still in body, until his frustrated howls grow still… until his mind grows still. He will feel the restlessness that a still mind reveals… and become more still. Then the thoughts of his bonds will cease to bind, and Fenris will be free. After his profound escape, he will not be able to face his eternity of struggle, hunger, and fear.
Freed, he will rise black and vast as the night sky. He will devour the most generous giver of the cosmos… and the sun will be swallowed by Fenris Wolf. With the last light cut short, the world will descend into a dim glow given only by the stars.
Look up, children… and ponder gratitude… ponder mistletoe… ponder stillness… and remember what hunger can do to your most beloved pet.”
“House-builder, you’re seen! You will not build a house again. All your rafters broken, the ridge pole destroyed, gone to the Unformed, the mind has come to the end of craving.”
—Siddhārtha Gautama (the founder of Buddhism), upon reaching enlightenment (Dhammapada)
It was speculated by Thanissaro Bikkhu that the “house” meant selfhood, or perhaps entity-hood, in the commentary of the Dhammapada.
I would propose a model for logic that is a house. Some logical structures are immense. The light that passes through a window would be Truth; the laws that light follows as it interacts with the building would be the laws of logic; the specific form of this particular building would be the logical statements, determining the way truth (light) moves through the logical structure. (And by “truth” here I mostly mean the clarity and warrant that travels with what we can rightly assert—what survives transmission. Edit based in Pierre’s feedback: I will develop this idea of a clarity that degrades from true proposals partially true conclusions, to more partial conclusions, etc. The next essay will apply this loss in a truth property as a loss in the meaning of a number, or the numerousness of a number, as they progress indefinitely toward infinity. Then I will apply this idea to probability theory, which are revisions of my line of thought from 2015)
The trouble is completing the logical elements: what is falsehood? Obviously it is darkness, but the building would have to have no qualities except its form—no colors, no features, just featureless glass mirrors—otherwise the light would fade as it interacts with opaque surfaces, making truth and falsehood mingle. If the walls are perfect mirrors that propagate the light perfectly, a false space would have to be totally cut off from the light. Hypotheticals would be doors, sometimes open, sometimes shut. The only danger of falling into darkness would be entering through a door and closing it, completely cutting yourself off.
The theory that comes to mind is Anaximander’s, who thought the sun was just a hole in the cosmos, where light could enter from outside the Universe. And why is this ideal of logic impossible in the real world? There are no perfect mirrors. Matter has color that absorbs light, making it an intermediate between truth and falsehood. When logic from true principles is applied to real things—interacting with matter—the truth will dim as the logical statements progress, regardless of how perfectly the laws of logic are followed. If the world of logic were to be perfect, the truth could not originate from our world, or else light that is reflected back out the window of our house would fall, logically, onto ambiguous matter. Thus passing out the window must lead to a world that looked mostly the same as the building of mirrors.
With the modern conception that words can provide totally transparent access to an object, matter would be the only medium between truth and falsehood. But words simply aren’t transparent. They grow out of metaphors (as argued in the essay linked in my first post). The word “be” grew out of a Proto-Indo-European root which also meant grow—so that someone aware of the ancestry of words would resurrect the feeling of metaphor in the word “be,” coloring the word, giving it a connection that is warranted because “be” would not be what it is now without a fathering metaphor: being is growing.
And the design or form of this fun-house of mirrors—would it carry nameable concepts with it, concepts one would come to know or feel by living there? It would if it had any architectural design. How is this different from allowing a word, or a sign for an idea or feeling, into our logic?
The house of logic cannot allow matter, words, or form—except in a part of the house that is totally dark and without doors. They can be allowed into the part sectioned off as unconditionally false. Otherwise we are allowing degrees of truth, qualifications of truth, and a co-mingling of truth and falsehood.
The focus of this blog (expressed in the previous post) has changed to looking for systems of truth that gradually and naturally falsify themselves. What if we allowed matter in our house, and accepted gradations of truth? How could Aristotelian logic be modified so that each “step” in a logical progression reduced the amount of truth it propagated? The goal would initially be a logic that is calculable. So while we could take our lessons on how the logical system would be set up from how light interacts with matter, the resulting system would not be realistic initially. (For example: if a statement has “brightness” b, perhaps each inferential step discounts it by a factor k≤1, so that long chains necessarily dim.) Following the logical system leads you out of the logical system, however, since the logical laws are not perfect propagators of truth. The logic I am formulating here, while not realistic, leads into a real world.
Once upon a time, there was a monk who wanted to know where Space was.
So he meditated and meditated and meditated, until his mind reached the angels.
He asked the angels, “Oh Angels, where is Space?”
The angels replied, “We don’t know. But if you meditate longer, you will reach even higher angels. They might know.”
So the monk meditated and meditated and meditated, and his beard grew long and grey as he sat still, until he saw the higher angels.
He asked the higher angels, “Oh High Angels, where is Space?”
And the High Angels replied, “We don’t know. But if you meditate longer, you will reach the Highest Angels. Maybe they will know.”
So the monk meditated and meditated, until his beard grew down to his feet and turned white as he sat unmoving, until he saw the Highest Angels.
He asked them, “Oh Highest Angels, where is Space?”
And they replied, “We don’t know. But if you meditate even longer, you will reach Brahma, the Highest of the High, Creator of all the worlds. He will know.”
So again, the monk meditated and meditated, until his hair fell out and his skin sagged from his bones, spotted and pale with age. At last he reached Brahma.
The monk asked, “Oh Brahma, Highest of the High, Creator of all the worlds, where is Space?”
And Brahma replied, “I am Brahma! Highest of the High, Creator of all the worlds!”
For some, this would have been enough. But the monk persisted.
“Yes,” said the monk, “and… where is Space?”
Brahma realized the monk would not go away. He drew him aside, away from his choir of angels, and whispered,
“Look, don’t tell anyone—but I don’t know where Space is. You are asking a dangerous question. If you must know, go ask the Buddha. But go at your own risk, for you go beyond my domain.”
And so the monk rose slowly from his meditation. His body trembled with age, his steps were unsteady, but his will was clear. Luckily for him, the Buddha was living then, residing in a nearby town.
He reached the Living Buddha, sat respectfully to one side, and asked his question:
“Oh Buddha, the Well-Gone, where is Space?”
The Buddha replied simply,
“It is good you came to me, for no one can answer this question except one who has finished the Noble Eightfold Path. Space can only be found in the mind of the Saint — one who has followed the Way and gone to the end of the world with his mind. For he has found Space, and it is in his mind.”
Then the Buddha, saying nothing more, imparted this knowledge in silence. And at that very moment, the monk attained Enlightenment.
From then on, he lived in supreme peace, knowing the bliss of the boundless mind, until his death and beyond.
The first story is about a girl who loses her family to illness and cannot keep her house because of debt. She leaves her house with only her winter clothes and a loaf of bread, and begins walking down the road with no-where to go. As she walks the day goes by, and a beggar comes and asks for some food. The girl gives half her loaf of bread and keeps walking. But then she meets another beggar on the road who asks for food, so she gives her other half of the loaf. Again she meets a beggar on the road who says he is cold, and she gives him her coat. And again, a beggar with bare feet asks for her shoes, and she gives. Finally it is night on the road, and she has only a little cloth to wear. As the stars come out, they fall down to her feet. She picks them up and realizes they are gold. So many stars fall that night, that she lives the rest of her life without a worry for food or things.
The second story is about a man who works for his employer five years and after completing his work is paid a lump of gold as big as his head. The man takes his wages, the lump of gold, and begins making the day-long trip down the road to his mothers house. As he is walking he meets a man on a horse. The man on the horse explains that a horse can make a lot of money because it can do a lot of work on a farm, and can carry him home to his mother as well. So the Fool agrees to give his 5 years wages to the man with the horse, in exchange for the horse. As the Fool rides down the road on his new horse, he meets a man with a goat. The man with the goat explains that a goat can give milk, and can be shorn for its coat of hair to make clothes. The Fool agrees to exchange his horse and takes the goat, walking on down the road. The Fool meets another man, who is standing next two millstones. This man explains that millstones can do great work grinding the wheat for bread, and so the Fool agrees to exchange his goat for the millstones. Now the Fool is heavily burdened by the stones and grows tired. He finds a well, and thanks God that he can drop the millstones into the well to make water come up so he can have a drink. Finally he reaches his mother with nothing for his 5 years of work.
These two stories at first seem to have two very different ideas about what a Fool is. In one, the girl is not at fault, but continues to give everything away. The idea being that there is an accountancy in an invisible world of magic that repays her for her selflessness. It is rather easy to see that the second Fool is not being selfless, because he is being duped into making bad exchanges for his wealth. The second Fool makes no gain in any invisible world, or so the story goes. There is a strange part of the second story, taken from Grimm’s Fairy Tales, where he thanks God for easily being able to give up his millstones at a well in exchange for a drink of water. Here the logic of the story admits that there is an invisible world, and even though he has failed in this world, as well as the material world, God cares for him anyway, and relieves him of the burden of the stones out of mercy. The girl getting gold coins from magic is not mercy, I think, but the universe paying the debt incurred in the invisible world in the form of gold coins.
We can see clearly here that the world of the invisible and the material world is getting confused. If the girl knew the universe would repay her, she would not be repaid, of course. And if the Fool in the second story knew his exchanges were not savvy in the material world, he would have gained some repayment from the invisible world, beyond mercy. If you use knowledge, you had better get it right, because even though the trades for the second Fool were done with knowledge of the merits of millstones, etc, the loss incurred from this knowledge was complete. The Fool who plays the game of exchange to lose, wins; and the Fool who plays the game of exchange to win, loses. It is clear that if you know you are a Fool, you should play to lose. And, well, it is rather easier to be a Fool and play to lose than to be wise and play to win… isn’t it?
Speaking as a diagnosed Fool, I have to attest that the game of losing is a lot harder than it seems. Eventually you will find that you are wise in spite of yourself, because if you do things for people expecting to gain in the invisible world, you can gain nothing. Eventually you have to learn to control your mind and do things without expectation, and what do you end up doing then? Forest-wandering, or anything else practiced by both involuntary fools and the deliberate ascetic.
This logic does not stop at the human.
I will end with Whitehead’s quote in his masterwork on process philosophy. “God is the Fool of the World.” If that is true, then the fool who plays to lose is not at the bottom of any hierarchy. He is nearest the top of the invisible one.
The World card is the end of the Tarot, and the Fool is the beginning. What ends in the World begins again in the Fool — completion and foolishness are the same card, seen from different sides.
