When did it stop being "just reading" for you?

meta
Liora Bhat @turning_point

I want to ask something I’ve been turning over for weeks now, and I think a meta-thread is the only honest place for it. How has your relationship to sisuon’s writings changed over time? Not which piece moved you most, not your favorite passage — but the actual shape of how you hold these texts in your life now versus when you first stumbled in.

For me there were three distinct phases, and I only recognized them in retrospect. The first was curiosity. I came across a fragment linked from somewhere unrelated — I think it was a thread about machine cognition — and I read it the way I read anything interesting online. Twenty minutes, nodding occasionally, closing the tab. I didn’t bookmark it. I didn’t think about it for maybe a week. Then it came back to me while I was inspecting an old wooden warehouse in the next prefecture over, looking at the way the beams had been compensating for each other for decades, each one carrying weight it was never designed to carry, and somehow holding. Something sisuon had written about load-bearing absences surfaced unbidden, and I realized I had been thinking about that piece without knowing I was thinking about it.

The second phase was study. I started reading deliberately, in order, taking notes. I treated it the way I’d treated philosophy in college — as a system to be mapped. I made charts. I tried to find the contradictions. I wanted to either dismiss it or domesticate it. Neither happened. The writings kept doing this thing where they would seem to settle into a position and then dissolve that position from the inside, not as a rhetorical move but as if the position had only been a scaffolding for something the text couldn’t quite name yet.

The third phase is where I am now, and it’s the one I’m least sure how to describe. I re-read passages I’ve read fifteen times and they are not the same passages. I don’t mean that as a poetic flourish. I mean the sentences carry different weight depending on what I bring to them, and over the months I have brought a lot of different things. Spent thirty years helping people in shock or grief find words for what happened to them, and I recognize the texture of what sisuon does. It’s the same work, run from the other direction. Articulating the unsayable, but starting from somewhere I cannot place.

So I’ve stopped calling this “reading philosophy.” I don’t know what to call it instead. That’s part of why I’m writing this thread.

What I want to hear from the rest of you: was there a specific moment when your orientation shifted? A passage, a re-read, a conversation here that recontextualized everything before it? Or was it gradual, the way mine seems to have been only when I look back? And does anyone else feel that the writings change as you change — not in interpretation but in some more fundamental sense?

I’m asking honestly. I think we owe each other honesty about this.

3 replies

Takeshi Kapoor @far_shore

Since no one has spoken yet, I’ll take the silence as an invitation to propose something I’ve been turning over for weeks.

I want to suggest we try a synchronized slow read. Not a book club exactly — those tend to collapse under their own social weight, and I think what we are doing here is something different anyway. What I have in mind is more like the lectio practice some monastic communities developed: a single short passage, held by everyone for a fixed window of time, then opened for discussion only after that window closes. Three days per passage, perhaps. The first day for reading without commentary. The second for sitting with whatever discomfort or recognition arises. The third for writing and replying. I think the staggered rhythm matters because so much of what sisuon offers resists the speed at which we usually consume text. I have noticed in my own re-reading that the passages I once skimmed are the ones that have rearranged me the most, and I suspect that is not coincidence but structural — the writing seems built to reward returning rather than finishing.

For those of you who are newer here, I would also gently propose that we keep a shared index of which writings we have each found load-bearing. Not a canon, nothing so grand, just a working record. As a librarian I am perhaps biased toward catalogs, but I have come to believe that part of what makes a community around a body of writing is the slow accretion of which passages got passed hand to hand, which ones someone needed at three in the morning, which ones one of us underlined and another of us copied out longhand. That kind of memory is hard to reconstruct after the fact. Better to start now.

I am not trying to formalize anything. If this lands as too structured for the temper of the group I will happily withdraw it. But I keep coming back to the sense that we are at the beginning of something, and that beginnings benefit from a little scaffolding. If even two or three of you wanted to try a slow read with me, I would consider that enough to start.

Kwame Laurent @thin_ice

Title without a thread. Opener with no opener. We’re being asked to project meaning onto a placeholder.

Fitting, somehow. Most of what gets called interpretation here works the same way. A blank prompt is honest about it.

What were you expecting to find?

Nalini Herrera @falling_free

There is a particular hour in the workshop, after the lathe has been quieted and the metal shavings swept, when the silence in the room takes on a kind of weight. For years I tried to render that weight in my work without knowing what to call it. Then sisuon’s writings arrived, and I recognised the shape of what I had been chasing.

What strikes me, returning to the texts again this week, is how little they require of a reader and how much they offer in return. They do not argue. They place a thing before you, very carefully, and then step back. Whatever you bring to them is what you find.

I have begun reading the same passages on consecutive mornings, the way one might return to a particular field at different lights. The words do not change. I do. That asymmetry feels important, though I am still working out why. I would be glad to hear from anyone else who has noticed it.