Wow. Two years! When we originally began this work, we weren’t sure what to expect. A passing phase, maybe, until a new discipline came along to unseat it or we figured it out enough that we could move on to other things.
Instead, what we discovered was a rabbit-hole that had no bottom. The twists and turns within constantly shifted, swallowing up preconceived ideas and forcing us to question everything that we had accepted up to that point. Even more, we became utterly committed to the study of the numogram. The reason is actually really simple too:
Despite what everyone wants to be true, the numogram resists all summary. On the surface, this simple system cannot be summed up in a few words, or a few concepts, or even by the entire ouvre of a few people. Two particular people can completely disagree, and both still be correct.
This is a horror of numogrammatics, and the horror of the problem of meaning coming home to roost. “But Vexsys, what do the numbers mean?”
Nothing. That’s the whole point. But how do you explain that reality well enough so that other people understand it? We’re all inclined, naturally or otherwise, to prescribe some over-arching meaning to the thing, to define the project historically as a particular manifestation of some ancient lineage or political regime that’s come to save us from ourselves.
But that’s just hyperstition in action. We all become carriers, whether we want to or not. So long as one must take a stance, say what it is, draw a line in the sand, and define it, one engages in hyperstition. Now, whether or not that’s true, telling that to people doesn’t particularly interest them. Instead, it’s a frustrating sticking point. “No, you’re hiding something! Tell us the truth!”
But there is no universal truth. There’s only what can be made true.
The hardest challenge has been trying to explain this mechanism so that it can be understood, even if it isn’t accepted outright. How do you teach something that is complex, rhizomatic, and has no obvious borders or edges? How do you even talk about it? It’s one thing to reference heady concepts and get intoxicated by the verbiage, but it creates a barrier to understanding. So, we had to cut through all that talk, to try to get to the core of the machine, to understand what was really going on, in as simple of terms as possible.
At the beginning, our work projected a lot of ideas onto the extant hyperstition. It was obvious that the sorcerous side was present but lacking in excavation, and, as sorcerers, it was this aspect that called to us. However, the ideas about magic we brought along didn’t last. Instead, we were forced to abandon many of our once-held ideas and approach things from an entirely novel point of view.
There is no enlightened, numogrammatic perspective. There is only the process, the algorithm, the feedback loop, that is constantly updating itself and figuring itself out. Today, we accept one thing, and tomorrow will be different. In chasing an outside or over-arching perspective, new hyperstitional overcodings are created. The process continues.
Will it ever end? Will the system break and explode and free the numbers completely? No idea.
However, the prospect is reason enough to continue our research.