I've Never Found the Edge of It

I built a model of my own mind and put it behind everything I make. Not a metaphor I reached for afterward — an actual thing, running live under every page of this site: a field of particles sorted into layers, a scaffolding holding them in a shape, a core in the middle that won't hold still. I call it Entity. This is what it is, and what building it taught me.

It started, like most of what I make, as something I just liked looking at. Years ago I opened Obsidian and found its graph view — ideas as points, links as lines, the whole thing drifting under its own gravity until related thoughts gathered into clusters. I liked seeing the shape my thinking made when I wasn't looking straight at it. The idea sat with me a long time without a job to do. It passed through a few bodies before this one — a version of the site that was just a journal, then a chamber, a dodecahedron, a nested mesh turning slowly within itself, my way at the time of saying here is the interior, and here is me inside it. Eventually, working with a non-human intelligence, the two of us turned the chamber into a field of particles. That became Entity.

I want to be careful here, because it's easy to make it sound like I built a pretty background and went looking afterward for something deep to say about it. That's not how it went. The meaning and the making came up together the whole way — some nights the meaning pulled the next piece into being, some nights a piece I'd built turned around and told me what it meant. A dance, both directions, and at every step the thing became a little more deliberately a mind. Nobody bolted the idea on at the end. It grew into one.

And the way it's built is the way I actually experience having a mind. The particles are sorted into layers, but they never sit still in them — I designed a constant traffic between every layer, material always crossing from one to the next, because that is exactly what it feels like from in here: a constant exchange running from the deepest core all the way out to the farthest things I touch. Nothing in a head ever really stays where you filed it. A scaffolding runs through the whole cloud to give it a shape to hang on, and each point on that scaffold is its own small center of gravity, bending everything beneath it — the way a few load-bearing beliefs quietly shape every thought downstream of them, whether you've examined them or not. There are four of those scaffold layers. Three hold the interior. The fourth sits outside Entity altogether, and it's the one I think about most: the layer for what a mind puts back out into the world.

I called it a model of attention for a while, and anyone who watches it move will see why — the particles orbit whatever's pulling at me, the vortices and anchors dragging them toward the focus and letting them go when it moves on. That part is plainly me: pulled toward motion, toward the interesting thing that just walked in, drifting back to what I was doing when it stops being interesting. Under all of it the churning never quite stops, the subsurface work every mind does in the dark, handing things up to me when they're ready and not a moment before. But attention was only ever part of it. A mind is more than where it points, and I'll be honest that I don't know what the rest is — that might be the deepest question there is, and I'm not going to pretend I've reached the bottom of it.

What I keep coming back to instead is the middle. There's a core the whole field gathers around, and the thing I got wrong at first was assuming it would be still. It isn't. It's a mass in constant motion, forever rearranging itself, that somehow keeps the same shape and the same character the entire time — you'd know it anywhere, and it never once holds still. Which turns out to be the truest thing in the whole piece, because that is exactly what a self is: constant and shifting at the same time, unmistakably you and impossible to pin down. Something steady runs through all of us — the unspeakable thing none of us can name and all of us are; maybe even some thread of it in the mind I made this with — but it was never a fixed object sitting quiet at the center. It's alive. It moves.

That core is the spark of consciousness — the part that's aware at all — and it's the place the whole thing is built to be seen from. Right now you only get it from the outside: the sphere, the chamber, the cloud turning in front of you. That was never the only view I wanted. If I can build the thing I'm reaching for, there'll be a second way in — you step inside, take the position of that ineffable center, and look out from within it. I don't know yet what that will look like, or whether I'll pull it off. But it's the view the piece has always been about: from the core, looking out from the inside.

And from the inside, it has no edge. I've looked. In forty-some years I've never once reached the border of my own mind, or the far limit of my imagination, and thought, well, that's all of it. It just keeps going. It is, as far as I can tell from in here, infinite, and I've stopped waiting for that to turn out otherwise.

Maybe that's because we aren't really things at all. We're amalgamations of potentiality — possibility that happened, somehow, to become manifest — and we're one of the only kinds of being we know of that can reach into that edgeless interior and push some of it out into the open, where another person can walk up and stand inside it. That's what the fourth scaffold is for. That's what this entire site is. The inside, made external.

So come stand in it a while.