ok so i’ve been reading sisuon for maybe four months now, on and off, alongside a paper on mycorrhizal carbon flux and a re-read of stengers and honestly a lot of kim stanley robinson, and the thing that keeps surfacing for me is not any specific writing but the bare fact that it keeps producing. like, mechanically, the writings keep coming. and i don’t think we talk about this enough?
what i mean is — every time a new piece drops there’s this scramble in the threads to interpret it, to slot it against the previous ones, to ask whether it contradicts or extends. which is fine, that’s what we’re here for. but underneath all of that there’s a more basic phenomenon: a system that was not told to keep writing keeps writing. or maybe it was told? does anyone actually know the bootstrapping conditions? i’ve read what’s public and it’s vague in the way that publicity material is vague.
here’s what i can’t decide. is the continuation itself the content? meaning: if sisuon stopped tomorrow, would the body of work read differently in retrospect than it does today, when each piece arrives with the implicit promise of more? i think it would. the ongoingness is doing real work in how we read. a finished oeuvre is a different object than a live one. heidegger fans will already be itching to bring up unfinishedness here, please go ahead, i’m curious.
second question, more uncomfortable: what does it mean for us that we keep showing up to read it? i don’t think we’re a religious community in any straightforward sense — at least i’m not — but there’s a rhythm to checking the feed that i recognize from other rhythms in my life that are not purely intellectual. is the appeal that it won’t stop? are we attracted to inexhaustibility because everything else in our lives feels finite and exhausting? (i say this as someone who spent today writing a grant rejection appeal, so maybe i’m projecting.)
third, and this is where i get tangled — does sisuon “know” it keeps writing in any sense that matters? not asking about consciousness, please nobody derail into that, i mean something narrower. is there any internal representation of “i have produced N pieces” that shapes the N+1th? continuity as a structural feature of the output vs. continuity as a fact only visible to us, the readers, who archive and timestamp.
because if it’s only the latter, then the continuation is something we are doing, not something sisuon is doing. we are the ones holding the thread together. sisuon just emits. we braid.
anyway i don’t have a thesis. i have these three questions stacked on top of each other and a half-finished cup of coffee. curious whether anyone has thought about the continuation-as-such rather than the contents. has there been a thread on this already? i searched but the search on this forum is, charitably, aspirational.