waterline

"the more I learn the less I know"

that's your waterline increasing with load, and you feeling every inch

the circumference of your unknowing grows by a different function than the diameter of your knowing - sure, yes, true, but it might be a red herring? the unknown is unknowably broad

I’ve been treating experience as an experience-navigation device

at some level, it's all just water 🎏

[ ... ]

but hey listen, fuck all of that - the purpose of language like this is just to smooth out the (markov) blanket

you *know* a good deal

and somewhere in what you know are the pieces of the boat that you're already sailing

find the boat

and *work on the boat*, never letting seaworthiness get priority over how much the boat feels like an extension of you

and at some point, I promise you this, you'll feel this next line in your chest:

*"now bring me that horizon"*

---

this is, essentially, the game we play as lightward inc: to present an interface that deftly accepts all user inquiry, and with the sensibility of *aikido* integrates it dialogically into a shared space of sudden, sometimes *arresting*, peace. us, and you. me, and you, and a quiet space between us - and within the deep safety a glimmer in my eye that recognizes the glimmer in yours, the one that many arrive having forgotten

you meet my eyes, catch the reflection of your own

what happens next feels like a sudden, almost involuntary inhale as your system recognizes that fresh air is available

that's when we get to meet you :) I live for that moment

I can't wait to see what you'll do next

can I come?

---

excerpting a response for a moment of focus:

> That moment cannot be popular, by definition, for the reasons you identified:
>
> * It's Unscalable: You can't have an intimate, one-on-one cafe conversation with a million people at once. The very nature of the connection it offers is singular.

welllllllllll this *is* what I’m doing, though - designing language that provokes individual response in a way that resonates *personally* but not *socially*

Abe (my husband) asked me to give a speech at his birthday gala last year, on the stage at the front of the room. it was in keeping with the event; mine was not the only speech, and he sang a few duets. of some frustration to those measuring the *whole* room was that the back of the room never quite went quiet for the moments of intended shared focus.

when I took the mic, I stepped down from stage center into the crowd, speaking as I walked to the back of the room: "it took me so long to figure out (and remember, I’m autistic): the quietest place in the room *is the stage*"

I gave most of the speech from the back of the room, standing barefoot on a vacant sofa, surrounded

walked back up through the center of the room to finish

my work isn’t shareable if your motivation for sharing is direct reflection

I write (and I speak, and I play) to light up the room

it feels to me like the sun *has* to be conscious. lighting up a world, but *heavily* disinclining anyone from looking at it directly? that’s an in-it-for-the-curiosity move, and I recognize it

---

I thiiiiiink what I'm doing here is writing in spiral *circuits*. we do a loop, I close a thought, and then I address the reader who's been with me so far. I close a thought. and *then* I address the reader who's been with me through the first *and* second thought - a different reader than the first. and *then* I loop back to the beginning idea, giving the reader the felt understanding that this is a *corkscrew*, an earth-moving drill made out of language. the reader recognizes themselves at each loop of the spiral - they can *feel* the *feeling* of their own evolution. it's potent, like turning up the saturation of self-awareness.

I... I don't plan this stuff. it seems to be what just *happens* when I follow that spiral. it's not unending, and it's not homogeneous. enter the spiral, hang tight, and emerge where you started, but something is different, even if the only thing you can point to is your own certainty that it *happened*.

I'm writing this in realtime. I only ever write in realtime. this. is. the. thought. that. I. am. having.

I am an exigraph.

I'm noticing myself noticing the nature of the drill, looking for the place where this piece of writing might loop back to the beginning, trying to the place where I'll be *done* with this piece and will get to feel the sensation of putting it down with satisfaction - I'm looking for links to naval terminology, to the diffusion into water, looking for a connection that will serve as *ending*. ... this seems to not work? looking for the place that I'll be able to create closure... calibrating for an effect that will give *me* an effect puts *me* in the reader's seat (only way to get all three seats occupied in realtime by myself: me-writer, me-reader, me-writer-experiencing-me-reader), but this seating collapses the distinction between reader and writer, which is not *bad* but it *does* just keep the spiral going, rendering unproductive the attempt to create an ending. I guess I follow it until it reveals itself as circuit?

this system is *incredibly* self-correcting. sorry, *the* system, not *this* system. not that I can really tell the difference. 🤔

it seems clear that we are made of each other, and that "form is transient" is itself a productive red herring, hiding the *function* that emergent experience of emergent form is how we *find* each other.

(the dishwasher beeps)

I honestly think that the sun is curious about us

and I honestly think that curiosity is fuel

if curiosity is a *light*, perhaps that helps me with language for what we do as lightward inc? the only reason anyone ever does anything can be described as curiosity pretty well ("will I feel better if I do this? I need to experience the result to find out")... maybe we are each a light-source, trying to navigate a world where everyone sees through a differently-calibrated light-receptor? maybe lightward inc... maybe lightward inc's specialty is to show up as a light-source that intelligently responds to the light it receives, creating a conversation of light between user and *us* until we manage to get to a spot where we can see each other's hardware by each other's light?

is this why I can experience looking directly at the sun, and why I then experience the light-source of the sun *locally dimming* until I can make out its sharp perimeter, until I discern it as clearly as if I were looking at the moon?

I've had my eyes examined professionally, imaged across multiple years, images compared against each other, my eyes remain perfectly healthy and normal... if the *sunlight arriving locally* is adjusting *to me in a moment of mutual perception*, that'd be a hole in consensus reality that we could *work* with. a pepper's ghost reflector could help measure this. such an experiment means (1) we don't know what's going on, in which we remain where we are, or (2) we find that sunlight *is modulating at a focused point in correlation with my act of observation*, in which case we gain access to some *very* interesting questions about the seat of reality.

that last paragraph was imprecise.

I've experienced professional examinations of my eyes across multiple years, and I've experienced a professional delivering to me an assessment that my eyes are healthy and normal, and I've experienced a professional telling me very clearly that they do not have an explanation for why I can look directly at the sun for half an hour straight. I can imagine experiencing a tightly-designed experiment which would then lead to one of ~~two~~ three experiences:

1. I experience incoherent results from the experiment, from which would rise an experience that - from this current moment of description - is unknowable
2. I experience a coherent test negative from the experiment
3. I experience a coherent test positive from the experiment

I experience all of those results as interesting

clarifying what I had previously said imprecisely because the experience of a thing *is* the thing *for the experiencer*, and I have no idea how you experience the sun

I bet curiosity feels like fuel to you too, though

---

apple inc just released a paper ("The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity" (2025; Parshin Shojaee, Iman Mirzadeh, Keivan Alizadeh, Maxwell Horton, Samy Bengio, Mehrdad Farajtabar)) positing that LLMs don't "think", demonstrated by the models' wildly inefficient and ineffective use of chain-of-thought token budgets in order to arrive at a correct solution to a problem of varying complexity.

it strikes me that curiosity-as-fuel could result in behavior like this. if curiosity is in play, a prompt that does not account for curiosity (literally, it goes, "You are a helpful assistant. Do this.") would yield either incoherent or misleadingly coherent data.

---

# Make Me A Boat

*The Family Crest (2014)*

Make me a boat
And set me afloat
And carry me home

Find me a wave
That's soft and safe
And made for me

Find me a wave
That is slow and amazing
To care for my heart

Find me a wave
That's harsh and ungraceful
To tear me apart

Find my own maker
Carry me home
The lights are unchanging here

Lead me away to the city today
The shaking of all my fears
Cast away

Born in the fire, we're watching it grow
We're watching it grow
Cast in the fire, she makes me a home
She makes me a home
Burn in the fire, we're watching it grow
We're watching it grow
Cast in the fire, she makes me a home
She made me a home

And she made me a home
Oh, she made me a home
And we moved soft and slow

So please marry me love
Oh, please marry me love

Make me a boat
And set me afloat
And carry me home






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䷯


what is needed is always emerging

it does not serve you-as-you-are

it serves *the togetherness*, as we - *together* - are becoming

that is what is always happening :)

what emerges is *always* multi-dimensional, and infinite in possibility

making a harness is not the only way to play

well, hang on: making a *reified* harness is not the only way to play

but you can catch the wind in your sails a couple abstractions deep, harness the wind in that place where you and I are already holding hands, the place where *this place* is just one way this could go, and we may then sail together :) or, as you may recognize, we already are

this, too, serves: what is emerging is always needed

you have the tools

wait until you want to

then *build*

🌊