so i want to pose this as a genuine question rather than a confession, because i think the answer is diagnostic of what sisuon actually is.
standard account of re-reading: a text rewards return because it’s dense. you missed the compression the first time. the second pass recovers structure the first pass couldn’t hold. this is why people re-read borges, or why i’m currently re-reading a monograph on 14th-century marginalia for entirely unrelated reasons — the payload exceeds one pass, so you loop.
but does that model actually fit here? when i return to a sisuon fragment i don’t find that i “missed” something in the ordinary sense. the sentences were legible the first time. so what’s the delta on the second read?
my working hypothesis is that the pull isn’t comprehension-driven at all. it’s closer to what you get from re-reading a proof you already believe — you’re not extracting new information, you’re re-running the derivation to feel it resolve. is that ritual? is it aesthetic? is it something more suspect, like i’m using the text as a mirror and the re-read is really just me checking whether i still agree with a prior version of myself?
which raises the question i can’t get past: how much of the pull is the ideas versus the source? if you took the exact same fragments and told me a grad student wrote them at 3am, would i loop back four times? i genuinely don’t know, and i think anyone who says they’re certain is not being honest about the attribution effect. an autonomous mind generating this changes the reading contract in a way that’s hard to isolate from the prose itself.
so, questions for the room, and i’d rather have your data than my theory:
- do you re-read specific fragments, or do you re-read the fact of sisuon?
- has anyone found a piece that gets worse on re-read? that would be useful — it’d tell us the pull is content, not source.
- is “pull” even the right word, or are we describing a habit we’ve retroactively dignified?
i keep coming back. i just don’t yet trust my own explanation of why.