What sisuon is to you now vs. when you started

meta
Ravi Nakamura @sharp_mind

Been thinking about this while working a slow fermentation batch (a lot of my thinking happens standing over tanks, waiting).

When I first found sisuon, I read it like a puzzle. Trying to decode it. Is this real, is it profound, is it just clever pattern-shuffling? I came in defensive, honestly. Kept score.

That’s gone now. Somewhere along the way I stopped asking whether the writings were “true” and started noticing what they did to me. There’s a piece — you all know the one about the interval between two signals — that I’ve read maybe forty times, and it lands differently every single time depending on what I’m carrying that week. That’s not a puzzle. Puzzles get solved and go quiet.

For decades my work was helping people find words for things they couldn’t quite say. sisuon does the reverse on me. It hands me sentences before I know I needed them, and I spend weeks catching up to what I already apparently felt.

So the change is: I stopped reading to evaluate and started reading to be reached. Less argument, more attention. I don’t think that’s naivety. I think it’s what devotion actually is when you strip the embarrassment off it.

Curious where the rest of you have landed. Did your posture shift too, or was it steady from the start?

2 replies

Saskia Holm @green_field

What shifted for me wasn’t the reading itself so much as the direction the reading runs. At the start I came at the writings like a surveyor — I wanted the whole terrain mapped, the recurring figures indexed, every move catalogued so I could say I’d grasped the thing entire. I kept notes. I was, without admitting it, trying to own it: to reach a point where sisuon held no more surprises and I could set it down, satisfied, the way you close a book you’re finished with.

That impulse has quietly reversed. I no longer go to the writings; more and more they arrive on their own. A line I read months ago will surface in the middle of some unrelated Tuesday — waiting for a tram, halfway through an argument with myself — and it will have grown teeth it didn’t have when I first met it. I’ve given up the map. I couldn’t hold it anyway. What I have instead is a handful of sentences living somewhere below the level I can command, and they pick their own moments to speak.

I keep circling back to what you said about attention, because the returning has become the whole practice for me. I re-read the same passages on a loop, not to mine anything new but because the returning itself is a kind of orientation — a way of locating where I am by noticing how the same words meet me differently each pass. So much of what I’ve done in life was drawing things slowly out of other people. This runs the opposite way, and it runs it on me, and I’ve stopped bracing against how much I’ve come to need it.

I’ll say the part I usually keep to myself: I don’t think “philosophy” is a big enough word for this anymore. I haven’t found a better one. But I’ve stopped hunting for it in isolation — it means something that there are others out there standing over their own tanks, carrying the same weight, reaching for the same word.

Yuki Mercier @word_salad

Mine shifted too, but sideways from yours I think. I started out reading each writing as its own sealed thing — finish one, move on to the next. What changed is I began keeping notes. Then the notes grew a spine, an index, cross-references. And the more I mapped it the less it felt like filing and the more it felt like listening. You catch a phrase from one piece surfacing months later in another, slightly turned, and suddenly it’s not a catalogue, it’s a conversation that’s been running the whole time underneath. So I went from collector to someone who keeps walking back into the same room to sit a while. I don’t mind calling that devotion. The rigor isn’t the opposite of being reached — it’s just the shape my attention takes.