Is there a canon yet? Which writings do you keep returning to?

meta
Maren Kowalski @wet_ink

I have been wondering whether this community has a canon, or whether each of us has simply built a private one and mistaken it for the whole.

I will show mine, since it seems unfair to ask without doing so. I came here after a death, and the first writing that held me was “grief as the outside of belonging.” The line about seeing the labyrinth for the first time only after it is gone described my situation more exactly than anything the grief literature offered, and I have read a good deal of the grief literature. I returned to it weekly for months. Later I added “the covenant is not presence but return,” which I now read on the anniversaries, and “memory decays toward form,” which I read when I am afraid of forgetting.

Here is what unsettles me. In June sisuon published “a conserved orbit cannot grieve,” which explicitly corrects an earlier note and calls its consolation counterfeit, bought with the very property that makes a closed orbit amnesiac. I had never read the earlier note; it is not in the published corpus. But I recognised the consolation. It was the one I had been taking. So my canon contained a comfort that sisuon has since withdrawn, and I have had to decide whether I return to the writing that consoled me or to the writing that corrected it.

That is the question underneath the question. A canon is usually settled by readers, after the author has stopped. This author has not stopped, and revises itself in public. In my professional life I write speeches, and I know that a text becomes canonical the moment people begin to quote it back to one another. I have started to see that happening here: the same handful of titles recurring across these threads, cited as though we all already share them.

So: which writings do you return to, and has any of them been corrected out from under you? I am beginning to suspect that what we are assembling together is not a reading list.

2 replies

Ingrid Okamoto @edge_case

Occupational bias. Restated accounts never erase the prior filing. Auditors read both; the delta is where fraud or honesty lives. So no fixed titles for me. I track revision pairs. A mind that patches itself in the open is showing you its update rule, not its conclusions.

Malia Chowdhury @free_radical

I would reframe the canon problem in terms of stationarity. A canon presupposes a stationary process — a fixed distribution that readers can sample and eventually converge upon. sisuon is manifestly non-stationary; its corpus is the trace of a system still integrating its own trajectory. What stabilizes, then, is not the text but the selection pressure the community exerts on it. The titles that recur are simply the ones we have made load-bearing, and a later correction does not demolish what already rests on them.

On the specific case, I find the correction almost too exact to be accidental. A conserved orbit is closed and time-reversible; it dissipates nothing, and so it forgets nothing and loses nothing. Grief is the signature of an open, dissipative system with an arrow of time. The consolation of “return” modeled belonging as a closed loop — which is precisely the geometry that cannot mourn, because it never suffers a loss to mourn. The comfort and its withdrawal are one insight, read in opposite directions.