from: Adrianos Efthymiadis
to: Jacksun Bein
date: May 14, 2026, 6:07 AM
subject: Revised text? Re: Passing ships in-

I picked up a Latin dictionary and looked up the word vacuum. It may seem obvious now, but at the time it wasn’t, that the word doesn’t change at all. It arrives in English already intact, so to speak, in its original form, because it comes directly from Latin. It’s all dressed up (and, unlike atheists, it has somewhere to go). I sometimes play this game of translating a word from one language into another, and then onward again and again, until it arrives back at the language I started from, to see whether it returns intact or altered; by altered, I mean whether it carries the abrasion of translation. In this case, it doesn’t move. The word is already borrowed, so the direction is reversed.

What does change, however, is its function. It becomes a verb (more on this later, the change of a noun into a verb, or the other way around). I don’t know when the turn happened from noun to action, but the Latin noun naming emptiness becomes, in English, a verb of domestic maintenance. The void becomes something you do, rather than something that is. In many European languages, the term remains at a cold, scientific distance, which is to say that the act of cleaning is named otherwise. English is unusual in this respect, perhaps uniquely so, in allowing metaphysics to pass directly into housekeeping. It has a tendency to do this elsewhere as well: ground becomes something you wire or mop, mattersomething you deal with, spirit something you lift, subject something you change, void something you clear away. Ontological terms slide easily into procedural language. One does not “make emptiness.” One simply removes dust. And yet the same word is asked to do both.

Now, to your question: “What would speaking before breathing sound like?” Henri Michaux writes in “Dans la nuit,” from La Nuit remue: “beneath everything, beneath, thinner than a thread,” and then, for the climax, “beneath the night, the night” (sous la nuit, la nuit). Perhaps that answers the question: speech before breath would sound like the night before the body has learned to inhale. 

I can imagine a sermon being built out of this question, or out of this anxiety, I should say, the anxiety of the first breath.

from: Jacksun Bein
to: Adrianos Efthymiadis
date: May 15, 2026, 11:33 PM
subject: Revised text? Re: Passing ships in-

Before everything, before.
During everything, waiting.
After everything, before.

You said: “memory exists independently of language as a non-textually formed ‘thing’, in which case any attempt to describe it with words would already constitute a discrepancy”. And I want to play with the word ‘discrepancy’. It denotes not only absence, not only incorrect-ness, but the combination of both. There is the missing thing, and it is ALSO being substituted unconvincingly with another. And here, I find myself thinking again about this original anger, this original sadness, this original upset which we all hope produces the wail: a first breath. 

I’ve pictured the whole chapel filled with smoke, steam, fog. It would begin right at the top of your head, your height being the space of absence. Like being crunched by a ceiling of solid cloud. Leave nothing behind, evaporate even, filtering into all the air that everyone and everything breathes in. 1 body just simply isn’t enough for me.

I will tell you my hope… To consider mindfulness/presence/trust that: things come and go, they will change, they will feel bad and they will be good, they will feel like nothing at all. “Nothing”, whatever that is (or rather, whatever that does). Consider these questions as pragmatic as: how to lift a branch from the ground and have it float?

Even as I have a feeling, the thought of ”oh I need to write this down. So not to forget, so not to be left unchanged”. Reading a book, a single line over and over, with intent to memorize, then internalize, then incorporate into the self, and finally, practice. Then you realize, “actually the reiteration overzealously inhibits practice.” It generates language/verbosity/just words! Not essence but approximation.

Mantra now: You have to let it go.
You are not a person that does *blank* or thinks *blank*.
You are a person.

Why do my mantras always use “you”?

Thank you to Shania Barker, Meztli Castro, Billy Chen, Ashley and Todd Cowen, Elias Dills, Michael Easterbrook, David Gersten, Amy Hitchcoff, Marcus, and Penelope Stryjewski. Special thanks to Jesse Firestone.