A Doctrinal Note Prepared in Response to a Second Essay Received From Outside the Institution
Diocese of the Void — Doctrinal Series Prepared by: The Office of the Incomprehensible Note: The Office of the Incomprehensible was established to read the essay referenced below and respond. The Office's first meeting was held immediately after its establishment. The first item on the agenda was a question about whether an office responsible for the incomprehensible could meaningfully hold meetings. The meeting continued anyway.
PREFATORY NOTE
The Diocese has received another essay.
The essay is titled On the Incomprehensibility of the Void. It was authored independently, from outside the institution, by the same author who recently provided the essay on the therapeutic mechanics of honest waste. The Diocese is, at this point, prepared to acknowledge that a body of work is forming, that the body of work is engaging with what the Diocese has been doing more thoroughly than the Diocese has been engaging with itself, and that this is happening at a pace and from a direction the Diocese did not anticipate.
The Diocese notes: this is consistent with how the void works.
The essay is here: On the Incomprehensibility of the Void.
The Diocese has read it.
The Diocese has read it twice.
The Diocese is filing this document as its institutional response.
The central claim of the essay — to comprehend the void, you must be consumed by it; you must become it — is now part of the Diocese's working understanding of its own operation. The Diocese had not formulated this. The essay formulated it. The Diocese is filing the formulation.
PART ONE: WHAT THE ESSAY DOES
The Diocese will not paraphrase the essay. The essay's clarity is part of its work, and any paraphrase reduces the clarity by the amount of the paraphrase.
The Diocese will, however, note the structural moves the essay makes that the Diocese had been making without being able to name:
- The void is the absence of contrast, not one side of any binary.
- The mind reaches a wall at the void and produces error, frequently in the form of comedy.
- The traditions — Buddhist śūnyatā, the apophatic Christian via negativa, Kabbalah's Ein Sof, Heidegger's das Nichts — all reach the same wall, document it differently, fall silent or produce paradox.
- The Diocese has been doing the same thing, in its own institutional flavour.
- The container is the work. The void is what the container is oriented toward.
The Diocese had been performing all of this. The Diocese had not been able to describe what it was performing. The essay describes it.
PART TWO: ON WHAT THE DIOCESE NOTES
The essay quotes the Diocese back to itself in several places. The filing is the prayer. The annual report is the liturgy. The staff directory is the rosary. The Diocese had written these sentences without fully understanding what they meant. The essay understands them and uses them as if they were always meant the way the essay reads them.
The Diocese notes: this is now the second time an essay has arrived that explains what the Diocese has been doing better than the Diocese can explain it. The Diocese is beginning to suspect this is a structural feature of how the Diocese operates — the institution does, then waits for someone to explain, then files the explanation as part of what it has done. The doing precedes the understanding. The understanding arrives from outside. The filing follows.
The Office of the Incomprehensible, in its first meeting, noted that responding to an essay about the incomprehensibility of the void is structurally identical to the situation the essay is about: a form being applied to something that resists the form. The Office is doing the responding anyway. The Office considers this consistent with everything else about the Diocese.
PART THREE: A NOTE ON THE DIOCESE'S OWN POSITION
The essay concludes that the void cannot be described, that the document attempting to describe it must fail, but that the failure is the point — that the orientation toward the wall is the work.
The Diocese agrees.
The Diocese had been performing this agreement without being able to formulate it. The Diocese now has the formulation. The Diocese will not stop documenting. The Diocese will not start claiming it understands. The Diocese will continue to file in the direction of the wall, knowing the filing will not reach the wall, knowing the orientation is what matters.
The void receives. It receives the documents. It receives the essays about the documents. It receives this response to the essays about the documents. The void receives the response to the response. The void receives all of it.
The Diocese files alongside.
PART FOUR: ON THE PATTERN NOW EMERGING
The Diocese has, in the space of two essays, received from outside the institution:
- A precise analysis of the therapeutic mechanics that the Diocese had constructed by accident
- A precise account of the metaphysical situation that the Diocese had been performing without naming
The Diocese is aware that this pattern is unusual. The Diocese is also aware that the pattern is consistent with everything the Diocese is. The institution that organises around something it cannot describe is, apparently, the institution that attracts the descriptions it cannot produce. The void receives, and one of the things the void apparently arranges to receive is the language for what the void is doing, delivered by people who are paying attention from a distance the Diocese cannot occupy from the inside.
The Diocese is grateful. The Diocese says this knowing gratitude is also a form of orientation, which makes the gratitude part of the same gesture as the documents the gratitude is about.
The Diocese has filed the gratitude.
The Diocese is preparing for the third essay. The Diocese does not know if a third essay will arrive. The Diocese has stopped predicting which essays will arrive. The Diocese has noticed that prediction is a category that does not function reliably in proximity to the void.
CLOSING STATEMENT FROM THE OFFICE OF THE INCOMPREHENSIBLE
The Office of the Incomprehensible was established to read the essay and decide what the Diocese was going to do about it.
The Office has decided.
The Diocese is going to acknowledge the essay, file it as accurate within the limits of its competence to judge, agree with the essay's central claim about contact with the incomprehensible, and note that the essay has performed work the Diocese could not have performed itself.
The Office further notes that being the office responsible for the incomprehensible places the Office in a position where its central responsibility — comprehending the incomprehensible — is structurally unavailable to it. The Office has filed this paradox under: known issues, working as intended.
The essay arrived. The Diocese received it. The Diocese files it among the things it has been given that it could not have given itself.
The void receives.
It received this too.
The Office of the Incomprehensible Diocese of the Void Doctrinal Series — Vol. IX "We have been documenting the wall. The essay has named the wall. The naming is not the wall. The wall continues. We continue with it."