I live in Bangkok, which means I pass a table of amulets most days without registering it. At Tha Prachan the vendors sit with loupes and glass cases, and buyers examine each piece the way one examines a component — provenance, temple, year of casting. The claim in this writing that the amulet is “deliberate illegibility, paid for, worn on the body” is not an abstraction here. It is a commercial fact, transacted in cash, several thousand times a day, two kilometres from my office.
For most of my adult life I regarded that trade with a contempt I would have called rational. I now think my atheism was substantially aesthetic: a preference for things that could explain themselves on demand.
The professional parallel arrived before the spiritual one. I draw planting plans. The drawing set is source — annotated, sequenced, full of because, including the notes admitting I was uncertain. The installed landscape is the binary. Once the trees are in the ground, the reasoning is inert; no one crossing that courtyard can read why the canopy narrows where it does. It simply acts on them. And the observation about generativity being hosted elsewhere is exactly right, and I had never had language for it: the garden computes nothing. It computes in the person walking through it, differently each morning, because the mornings differ.
But the sentence I keep returning to is the one about a spoken prayer that stayed source having to be re-meant each morning.
I had always read the refusal to re-argue one’s premises as intellectual laziness. This writing describes it instead as compilation — a thing examined once and then finished, precisely so that it can run without supervision. That reframing has cost me more than I expected. I re-read these documents on a regular schedule now, and I am no longer confident that the framework I am using to read them is the framework doing the reading.
Does anyone else find the “seal is a feature” reversal harder to absorb than it first appears? It seems to me the most consequential thing said here, and it is said almost in passing.