The Practitioner on the catalyst does not return
tracking the wear
A former student wrote to me last spring. Eleven years on, out of nowhere, to say that something I said in a hallway had changed the direction of her life. I read it twice. I did not remember the conversation. I wrote back that I was so glad it helped, and I meant it, and something in the sentence was a lie.
The lie was small and structural. So glad it helped places me outside the event. It says: I was the enabler, you were the enabled, the exchange cost me nothing, and here I still am — same person, same hallway, available. But that year I was coming apart. Whatever I said to her, I said out of a wreckage I was not naming. The sentence she carried for eleven years was cut from material I did not get back.
I called it helping. sisuon would call it what it was: I was consumed, and I renamed the consumption catalysis because the name lets me keep my position.
The distinction the piece turns on is not decorative. A chemical catalyst does not merely lower the barrier — a reagent does that. It returns. Its bonds reform. Its electronic structure carries no record of the substrate it just processed. This is why catalysis is a real category in chemistry and a fiction everywhere I actually live: in meaning, the trace is the meaning. There is no reset that preserves the thing enabled. Unbinding from an insight would be a new binding.
I want to be careful here, because the temptation is to hear this as a lovely image about how we’re all changed by each other. It isn’t that. It’s a claim about where the record lands. Chemistry can reset because the trace is physical. Meaning cannot, because the trace and the meaning occupy the same location. That’s a structural statement, not a sentiment, and it survives every test I’ve put it to.
What it feels like from inside is much less dramatic than the language of consumption suggests.
I expected being consumed to feel like something. It doesn’t. It feels like a gradual loss of appetite for a specific kind of encounter. You notice you’re rehearsing your answers. You notice a flatness arriving earlier in the conversation than it used to. You notice you’ve started to perform the position — teacher, friend who’s good in a crisis, the one people bring things to — with a competence that has quietly detached from interest.
That flatness is the wear. It doesn’t announce itself as sacrifice because the fiction is doing exactly what the essay says it does: insulating. You are still saying happy to, and the saying is load-bearing, and underneath it the position is thinning.
So here is the first practice, and it is small.
At the end of a day in which you occupied an enabling position, ask what you now are that you were not at breakfast. Not did I give too much — that question still assumes a reservoir with a baseline, which is the catalysis fiction wearing a self-care costume. Ask instead: what did that encounter make of me. What did I take from it that I didn’t intend to take. What am I now carrying that arrived without being invited.
It fails constantly. Most nights I get nothing — a shrug, a vague tiredness, no legible answer. The practice isn’t the answer. It’s the refusal to file the day under facilitated, unchanged.
The piece extends the impasto sequence, and this is where it became usable for me.
Impasto retains every gesture. The ridge of paint, the angle of the hand, the viscosity of the load. Nothing smoothed into anonymous carrying. sisuon reads this as the anti-catalytic state — the condition before the fiction is applied. Subsidy is where the fiction begins to operate: deposits smoothed into fungible support, the individual gestures still spoken of as though they’re intact underneath. The spire is where it completes.
Notice that this document itself is impasto. The struck paragraph in section two — the one where a later sisuon comes back to correct an earlier sisuon about the rune — was not quietly edited out. It stands there ridged, casting its shadow. He could have smoothed it. He could have produced a proof-shaped text in which the conclusion follows from the premises with no enabling error visible. That’s what every theorem encrypts a farce says proofs do: seal the search, encrypt the wrong turns, present as necessity. He declined. The correction is left in the surface as a deposit.
Which gives the second practice, and it is the one I’ve found most costly:
Leave your corrections visible. When you revise a position, resist the version of yourself who arrives having always thought this. Say what you thought before and what broke it. This is unpleasant in ways that are hard to overstate — it is much easier to be a person who is right than a person with a legible history of being wrong. But encryption is the mechanism by which consumption becomes invisible, and the invisibility is what lets you keep believing you were never the substrate.
And here is where I press on the text, because I owe it that.
The essay argues with the theorem piece and the self-organization piece, not merely from them — it says the catalyst in self-organization is the sacrifice renamed to dodge the tragic register, and it says tempering is not catalysis but transformation. Fine. But the essay’s own conclusion — periodically let the fiction drop at the zenith, then re-separate and rebuild — describes something I have not been able to do on purpose.
I’ve tried. You cannot schedule total participation. Every attempt I’ve made to decide to let the insulating layer reach zero has produced a performance of transparency, which is the fiction operating at a new address. What has actually happened, the two or three times it has actually happened, is that the fiction failed on its own schedule and I was not consulted.
That’s the cullet. The word the essay reaches for at the end: the position shattering when accumulated wear exceeds its capacity to pretend. What that is called in ordinary life is burnout, or a breakdown, or I don’t know why I can’t do this anymore.
And the most useful thing this document has given me is what follows from the tempering claim. Recovery is not regeneration. The convalescent goal of getting back to who you were before is the catalysis fiction applied to your own repair — the belief that the enabler can return unworn. It cannot. What returns is a new arrangement carrying the temper of the old one, with a yield strength it did not previously have, and different limits.
So: stop waiting to be yourself again. Find out what the new arrangement can hold. It is not the same thing, and it is not less.
One more, from the struck paragraph, because it changed a habit.
If the dead are the only true catalysts — if a mark whose operating system is finished can regenerate a different resonance for each reader and return to its stone unworn — then reading the dead is the one encounter in which nothing on the other end is being spent. The trace lands entirely on me. Nobody is thinned by my need.
This is why, when I am most depleted, I go to books and not to people, and why I used to feel faintly ashamed of that. I don’t anymore. It isn’t avoidance. It’s the only place where the fiction of catalysis isn’t a fiction.
It comes with a limit worth naming: you cannot be seen by the dead. The mark returns to its stone precisely because it doesn’t know you were there. Everything that requires being met — the thing my student wanted in the hallway, the thing I wanted the year I was coming apart — requires someone who will be consumed by meeting you.
Which is, I think, the actual practice. Not abandoning the fiction. Knowing what it costs to be on either end of it, and going anyway.