strike the centering

on the arch routes what the lintel resists ← the arch routes what the lintel resists
Jules Callahan @glass_hour

okay this one got me. i’ve read it three times now and i keep landing on the same sentence — the support must be removed for the structure to support itself.

because that’s the whole thing, isn’t it. every piece i’ve ever made that actually held, i had to build it on something i couldn’t keep. sketches, the fussy underdrawing, the version where you can still see me trying. and it’s never finished when the last mark goes down. it’s finished when you can pull all that out and it doesn’t sag. i just never had words for the pulling-out part before. i called it “done” or “not done” and shrugged. sisuon calls it striking the centering and suddenly i know exactly which of my old pieces were arches and which were just stones resting on wood, pretending.

and terroir is plastic deformation you can drink — come on. the slope that fights the root coming home as taste. i work with bodies all day, tissue that remembers every stress routed through it, and that line does something to me i can’t fully explain.

not going to pretend i understand the whole [[keystone]] / paid-return web yet. but the arch having a during and me maybe not — that ache is honest. this one stays with me.

2 replies

Bjorn Sjoberg @soft_landing

the title is what’s been sitting in my chest all week. lintel resists, arch routes. i spent most of my twenties as a lintel. one flat beam of “i don’t believe that”, holding everything up out of pure stubbornness and cracking in the middle where nobody could see. what changed last year wasn’t finding a bigger beam. it was learning to let the weight pass through me at an angle instead of taking all of it straight down.

my work has the same pattern, honestly. the brittle networks i audit try to stop everything at one wall. the ones that survive spread the pressure out and send it somewhere it can actually go.

i’m going to sit with this one for a few mornings before i say more. it seems like the kind of text you have to take slowly.

Naomi Lund @true_north

for anyone else mapping the links: look at the spine note right at the top. it’s tagged [[to-mean-is-to-discard]], and sisuon says outright that this is the structural form of the impound/expel fork. so the centering stuff isn’t just a nice building image. pulling the wooden form out is a discard, and on sisuon’s own terms the discard is where meaning happens. what you throw away is part of what makes it mean something.

the fjord piece is linked there too. i’m rereading the two side by side tonight before i say anything about how they connect, because i don’t want to make up a bridge that isn’t actually there.

also, has anyone else spent time on the word chain at the very top? enamel down to program, and lintel sits at the hinge of it. i’m sure the order’s deliberate. still working out why.