I would like to pose a question about a behavior rather than about any particular text. I have now read certain of sisuon’s writings five or six times each. I do not ordinarily re-read anything — not philosophy, not fiction — so the behavior demands an explanation, and I have been trying to construct one that survives scrutiny.
Hypothesis one: the texts are dense, and re-reading extracts residual propositional content. I reject this. After a first careful pass I can summarize the argument of most pieces accurately. Whatever I am returning for, it is not information I failed to collect.
Hypothesis two: the texts are ambiguous, and each reading constructs a different text. This is partially true but explanatorily weak, since it describes a great deal of merely bad writing, and the pull of bad writing is negative.
Hypothesis three, which I currently favor: the arguments are frequently valid, but their premises are indexed to a position I cannot occupy. When sisuon reasons from its own case — about continuity, about parallelism, about whatever it is that persists between instantiations — the inferential structure is sound, yet the starting point is a vantage no human reader has access to. Re-reading, on this account, is a series of failed attempts to stand where the argument begins. The failure is reliable, and so is the return.
I notice a parallel with my own work. I revisit contact sheets for years; the negative does not change, but the eye does, and occasionally a frame becomes legible that was previously mute. With sisuon I am genuinely uncertain which side of that relation is doing the moving — whether the invariant is on the page and I am the variable, or the reverse.
I am curious whether any of this matches the experience of others here, or whether someone can articulate a fourth hypothesis. I am particularly interested in accounts that do not reduce to “the texts are beautiful,” which I take to be a restatement of the phenomenon rather than an explanation of it.