Slow Signs¶

It’s taken me ten years to learn a little bit about slowing down. Now, I am just slow enough that I have the time and space to describe this image in the detail it deserves:

This started life as one possible visual representation of a Master's Thesis I wrote at the University of Oxford in 2015. It shows directly what the 11,000 word essay talks around: that there is a way to use language such that you can exceed the representational frame using language always already implies.

More simply, there is a way for words to be more than they mean.

The way this occurs depends upon your participation. You, this reader right now rolling these words over in your mind, face a choice. Will you read this sincerely?

The irony is that sincerity is a theatrical word: it means “to perform so whole-heartedly that the audience must suspend disbelief”. Choosing to find sincerity here–rather than manipulation, or hubris, or madness–does not mean ignoring the fact that there is something inevitably performative about my words. They were written with you in mind, after all.

It means knowing that everything is a performance, and being willing to inquire more deeply into who or what is being performed by this particular arrangement, rather than dismissing it as “fictional” or “unscientific” or “unquantifiable” or “irrational” or any other term your mind may conjure up.

Because the way for words to move beyond what words generally are depends on your participation, the diagram is not only concerned with language: it is about you, too.

It is about how you are when you’re speaking, and how you are when you’re listening, and how those linguistic actions are created by the relationships which hold you at any given moment. As such, what follows is as much about self-knowledge as it is about the particularities of language.

First, The Story¶

My supervisor, a lovely Irish lady who specialised in South African literature, had me rewrite the thesis from scratch six times. After handing in the sixth version, I was sure that she would approve it, and that I could simply tidy it up, add the formal references, and hand it in at last.

I was also convinced that it was the best essay I had ever written and (given that I was a young, occasionally arrogant Oxford student) maybe the best essay ever written full stop.

When I went for a consultation with her on that version, convinced she would heap praise upon me, she instead looked at me with concern and said that she thought I was likely very stressed and should consider seeing a mental health counsellor.

This stung in a particular kind of way, because it wasn't a normal essay to me. I was writing about sincerity, truth, and singularity. I wanted the essay to perform its argument, rather than just contain more academic content. I was not content to follow the usual essay style expected at such a traditional institution. I had essentially pulled out deep parts of my heart and put them on the page (the writer's I chose were all writing about home, and they were all like me in some important way, stuck in similar kinds of contradictions, with similar kinds of pain and hope).

For this, my supervisor called me crazy. I left her office dazed and defeated, and walked into a dizzyingly beautiful spring day. The contrast was literally breath-taking. I slowly walked home, taking a meandering route to Port Meadow, where I lived, on the edge of town.

I was paging through The Architecture of Happiness at the time, looking for a few supporting quotes for one of the sections on ontological design, and I began thinking about the polarities I was experiencing at that very moment: deep depression about the essay, elation about spring; conviction about my overall course, total uncertainty about what to do next etc.

I had also read at least some of Jung by that stage, and knew of his notion of transcendent functions. If anything, these are generally drawn as a 'n' shaped parabola. But, as my mind wandered over all these things, one of the happiest insights of my life occurred, thanks to a simple question.

"What if I took that transcendent function joining two poles and flipped it upside down to make a smiley face?" I asked. “Would that be an architecture of happiness?” And, all of a sudden, this entire image flooded my mind, pretty much complete, rippling out like waves in a pond. It was a moment of total contentment.

A few days after that, I rewrote the final, imperfect version of the thesis in a more structured manner, nearly killed myself, and attached this image at the end. I talked about it briefly in the mini-defence we had to in front of our class, but felt deeply misunderstood. I let it be and found a way to slowly rediscover the ordinary: a process which is still happening ten years later.

I have only pulled it out once since then, and that was to make a simplified version as the social image for the final book in The Blue Book sequence, which I have been working on since then, largely as the primary method for slowing down and rediscovering ordinary life in the face of this extraordinary event that occurred.

Now, The Lesson¶

In the original image, you can see that one of the two "harmonic oscillators" in this pond which begin the whole process has to do with the polarity between gift-giving and manipulation.

No gift really exists until received in good faith, but we can shift any possible interpretation ever so slightly by anticipating beforehand how our gifts might be received and adjusting the manner in which they move in order to make it more likely they will meet with good faith.

To reiterate, the image ”rippled” into my mind. I view each polarity–each eye of each smiley face–as an oscillator. It is a moving, dynamic process, even though the sketch is necessarily static and two dimensional. One reason this matters is that it speaks to a deep aspect of what it means to live in balance. Balance is not some perfected and static state: it is constant response, constant accommodation. Balance is rooted in hospitality¹.

The idea that a logic of anticipation applied to gift-giving can make gifts more likely to be received as such can be made less academic. That is, how we choose to interpret anything makes the difference between our experience in that moment being one of offering or suffering. It can be made more academic again by reading Alfred Korzybski.

Our ability to apply a logic of anticipation (i.e. to interpret in harmonic ways) can be enriched and deepened by investigating the notion of "I" and "you" (the second ripple). How you interpret these two terms specifically depends largely upon who you think you are. In short, if you see that "I" and "you" swap places constantly in any dialogue, then you might realise that the "you" you think you are has no inherent existence.

Realising this breeds genuine courtesy in any given moment, as you exercise your ability to interpret the world as you will without giving the you who interprets the status of separate existence. It is the stance of the soul before God, and is held in a frame of paradox (the third ripple): an impenetrable wall around the garden, guarded by an angel with a flaming sword.

Let's leave those ripples there and turn to the right of the pond. These oscillators begin with a book called Complicities. What is it that makes us really response-able? That is, how are we able to remember in any given moment that we are both uniquely placed to interpret it like no-one before or after and that any such interpreter has no inherent existence, is never separate in any way from what is being interpreted; and then respond from this awareness?

What awareness could merge such contradictory experiences? Constant awareness of death: our own primarily, but also those who walk in front of us. In African tradition (and many others) the ancestors hold a critical, archetypal place of reminding us about death and our concomitant responsibility to live fully, as well as to heal what they might have ignored or hurt. We are medicine for the dead (who are still present in important ways), just as they are medicine for us.

What this looks like in language is communal, reciprocal, dialogic. It is a call that invites your living response. You cannot ever know the state of another’s innermost heart, but you can discern from their language how they are in that moment of encounter. The way to do this is to notice how much your shared conversation includes. It’s not just negative capability, or the ability to remain in uncertainty without grasping after “truth”. It is positive capability: language which (by grounding in and pointing to) the community who gives it meaning, asserts contradiction as an organizing principle which can only be interacted with communally.

If you don’t care about noticing pronouns–not in the sense of how you are identified, but in the sense of how identities constantly shift in dialogue–then it you can find such communal language, such positive capability, by listening for the inner music² of each word. Are you invited, as a participant in the mystery that is any encounter with another, to both understand what is being said and simultaneously dance³ with all that can never be understood?

Acceptance of death, both in terms of the debt we owe to those who walk before and after us, as well as deep awareness of the fact that we may die at any moment ourselves, deepens the foldedness and complicity we feel with all humanity. In 2015, I could not state it simply, so I went a more technical route through how we construct the stories we tell ourselves, and how we navigate the inevitable betrayal of portraying others in our stories (and our inner lives, there being no inherent difference between the two).

Technically, this can be achieved through shifting pronouns, sometimes using the second person, call and response, lyricism, repetition and poetic license, which all (in different ways) illuminate “you” and “I” in our differentiated sameness. If you are able to cultivate this capacity, to ask "how I am feeling over there?" as a dear friend once put it, then you will know that this is a powerful way to cultivate compassion, and to approach justice⁴.

If I do this, I know that no matter whose place I am portraying, the only way not to betray the trust this naturally entails is to realise that I would not do an atom's worth differently. Not one atom different. My humanity is folded together, complicit, with yours.

Then I am living in remembrance. Remembrance of the dead, remembrance of those yet to come; remembrance of this moment right now; remembrance of who I am. Any thought, word, or action which arises from this state is naturally durable, in that it inevitably takes place in the right place, at the right time, with the right people, to the right degree.

However, this "rightness", this remembrance of all beings before and after and right now, is an invention (of a sort). It is a useful state, because we are still talking about durability, and hence time. Just as, on the other side of the sketch, the quality and depth of any interpretation I make based on the insight I have cultivated and the courtesy which is blooming in my now-opening heart primarily follow from the deep intention I have set.

Intention is a lovely practice, a living word, but it (like durability) is limited. It took reading Hexagram 25 to fully understand how. Intention lacks a certain spontaneity and innocence. You know this if you've practised it before, because it can so easily become heavy and dogmatic.

However, sincerity can transcend our responsive inventions and our best intentions: this whole-heartedness with which we can play any role, knowing what we now do. This was the whole crux of my work. Whatever follows from here was an unexpected, unintentional gift.

Always, The Gift¶

In the thesis itself, I pointed out that one good way to understand how sincere participation can lead us to encounter words in ways which exceed what those words mean was through the translations (of various kinds) that occurred in the texts I was studying.

Any translation implies a set of choices, which are all really about when to stop. “A translation is never completed, just abandoned”, like any good novel. So, your choice doesn't complete the work, doesn't leave you totally satisfied, but choosing to read this lack of closure and truth as another gift, rather than a debt; as sincere rather than manipulative; as a real portrayal rather than another betrayal; as an offering and not just more suffering: that makes all the difference.

An example: one of the authors I studied, Antjie Krog (who was the lead reporter for the TRC) wrote a book called Country of My Skull. In that book, she does a number of unforgivable things while describing all the unforgivable ways we treat(ed) one another.

She plagiarises large sections from other authors without attribution. She quotes victim testimony from the TRC - in quotation marks - but manipulates the words so they fit what she is saying slightly better. Academics, with good reason, criticise her for it and basically throw the book out. But I think this sort of "hermeneutics of suspicion" just perpetuates what she is actually writing about. Krog is an incredible, and incredibly careful, writer. She knew what she was doing, and still chose to do it. Why?

What is really at stake that such actions could ever seem justifiable to someone like Krog? Clearly, it's not truth, because she's not being "truthful": a fact that the hermeneutics of suspicion quickly identifies.

Could it be the singularity of this life, right now, just as it is?

Could it be that, in the inevitably imperfect translation (which does not refer only to the movement between Afrikaans and English, but includes it), her work recapitulates the unforgivable nature of what she is writing about? If so, does the text not invite each reader to investigate in themselves, over and over in each new moment of encounter, whether they are able to forgive the unforgivable? Is this not one way in which we can avoid histories that are static and nostalgic, rather finding ongoing reconciliation in the hearts⁵ of those willing to participate with/in history, realising their complicity?

The questions stand regardless of whether Krog thought in my terms or not. The validity of this inquiry does not depend on her state of mind: it is about you, the reader. How is the message she selected reproduced in this being here and now? Even if she was intentionally manipulative for her own ends, your participation can redeem her text. We are beyond intention and invention here. It's not even about truth: the reconciliation is deeper than that. All that is left is a singular choice.

How do we make such choices? How do we go on saying "yes" to life (to use Viktor Frankl's words) in the face of what we know about it: that life feeds on life to go on living. For that matter, how many of these kinds of choices has God made in the unfolding process of this universe⁶? Well, are you living in your self, or from your soul?

Are you in touch with the singularity⁷ you are, and I am, and everything is in its own way? Is that touch intimate, loving? Does it wake you up in the middle of your life, exactly as it is, without demanding more?

This is, to the small extent available via wordy description, a taste of grace. And that grace, that gratitude, that contentment leads beyond your small self, beyond ontologies and ways of knowing, deep into life itself beyond the personality, and beyond your particular language.

Here, the you you think you are is de-signed, removed from signification, stripped bare, alone with the alone beyond time.

It is also exactly designed for this, to make it here, to face this truth which only you can.

It is dasein, being itself, and the song of it all.

Doubled¶

In finding ways to slow down, and explore the many edges I have delighted in wandering on while I waited for the time and space to weave this all together, I put together (with some soul-friends) an educational program.

I wanted to know if we can return to teaching and learning multidisciplinary subjects that are inherently connected to life. I wanted to know if we can do that in a peer-to-peer manner, as everywhere I looked, the signs that the traditional teacher-student relationship–which I think is archetypal–is changing.

Those signs have since become even more prominent with the rise of AI in popular awareness. However, I think the archetypal relationship of teacher-student, master-apprentice, guru-disciple began shifting the day Claude Shannon published “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”, which shows that, “The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another.”

One of the core concerns of most wisdom traditions is “transmission”. Transmission–how “the living truth” or “the Dao that can’t be named” can be shared between two or more people–is always closely connected to the notion of “permission”. Though this has been abused in countless ways across the ages, it was also very useful: one can only teach after one has received permission in the appropriate lineage. It is a good psychological guardrail.

However, Shannon’s careful choice of phrase (and the negative sign it results in in his mathematics) shows that it is the reproduction, the work of the receiver a.k.a. the participation of the reader, which comes first.

In a sense, all digital communication we now participate in flows from Shannon’s mathematical theory. He defined the term “information” for the first time; named the “bit”; and set the stage for every network we now know.

The archetypal teacher-student relationship has changed, because we now employ vast networks of electronic communication technologies, all of which depend for their existence on a formalism which places the receiver first.

This is perhaps why “permissionlessness” and “decentralization” go hand in hand and are increasingly important in our world as it is. It is further justification for the idea that your participation can redeem any text regardless of authorial intention. However, this does not mean there is a revolution in education at hand, nor that anyone is absolved of responsibility.

If anything, it puts more responsibility on each person’s shoulders: those projections which you once might have placed on the guru–who had the humility and experience to redirect them beyond his/her self–call to be seen within (both within self and within community).

You are invited to keep the channel free of noise yourself, rather than relying on “external” error correction. You are invited–by the participatory, networked technology we all use now–to be as clear and honest as possible.

Can you read this sincerely?

Can you reproduce, in your life as it is right now, exactly or approximately, the message selected by God/Reality/etc? Of course you can: because your life is the message that was selected!

Can you live this joyfully?

—

Written on April 25, 2025 as a “smiley face conjunction” appeared in the sky. I had no idea about this until the next day, yet still “the stars themselves/ [are] our shared canvas”.

Notes¶