Year 4: Quarter 2

You know what?!

I have been silent. I have been silent for too long! Well, no more! It's about time I spoke up and stood up for what I believed in! Actually, on second thought, that can wait. It's time for a quarterly update -- a reasonably short one, at that!

---

Goals of the Previous Quarter

[✓✓✓] Work on Becoming.

I don't have anything particularly concrete that I'm willing to share, but I think this quarter has been exceptional in regards to progress!

To put things into perspective, "Becoming" is going to be, for all intents and purposes, an artbook called Metaforma. For those that are curious, "metaforma" is the butchered conjoining of two words in Greek and Latin (just like "Nexumorphic" is). Meta is intended to mean "after", while forma is intended to mean "form." Metaforma would then be intended to mean "afterform."

Metaforma will be a fictive work that places the reader at the center of (what is essentially) a void and subjects them to the unfurling of a boundless, dynamic world and all of the emergent forms that come to persist within it. The entirety of the work is and will continue to be treated as a work of design. Significant amounts of research, trial and error, and exceedingly careful execution has gone into this construction and it is being built to be as self-contained, internally consistent and as wide-sweeping as it could possibly be.

As for what has been researched, significant amounts of focus has been poured into philosophy (specifically of mathematics and language, as well as ontology, phenomenology, hermeneutics), geometry, dynamical systems, physics, astronomy, biochemistry, psychology, and by proxy of psychology, ethics and "consciousness." There is more that I have to look into such as how populations of individuals interact, the emergence of a civilization, its inherent progression, and what comes after once it all inevitably falls, but these will be reached in due time!

The reason I'm unwilling to share anything concrete from the work itself is due to the requiring increasing amounts of context in order for it to appear coherent. What is written in the book is very structural and continuously builds off of the previous section, and thus, taking anything out of the book requires just about everything that preceded that section. That said, I do feel inclined to provide an example of how this is being constructed.

In short, each bullet point is (more or less) a sentence and each sentence is straightforward and to the point, but with enough flare to not be too dry (hopefully). Makes things easy to organize and provides less chances to get completely lost, though, if someone is comfortable reading walls of text (like a paragraph that takes up a whole page in a book, this may not be an issue to begin with).

Needless to say, this is not the final product (as these previewed sections are actually complete, and thus, longer)! These four sections, together, amount to 16 pages of actual text -- [I] is 1 page, [II] is 2 pages. [III] is 7 pages and [IV] is 6 pages. This book will be profoundly short and will probably, barely, be considered a book by writing standards.

Looking forward, this book will likely not have any more than 50-60 pages of raw text (and this is if sections [V] and [VI] turn out to be longer than expected, because I think these could account for a significant amount of the page count), but illustrations can probably push this closer to 80-100 pages. Factoring in printing, this number, of course, would be halved.

I was expecting an extremely dense book when I was just starting, but I highly doubt it'll be that dense. Though, I suppose it doesn't really matter -- I'm aiming to strike that balance of being concise and impactful.

I also feel inclined to mention why I find all of this to be necessary. Last quarter, I did mention that it was an attempt to breach into academia, and well, that died. This does not change the nature of this work, however -- it still very much began as an honest attempt at conceptual unification -- why stop entirely when so much work has been put into it already? In short, I have deemed this as preparation for Transcendent -- the next and final part of The Astral Triptych.

Metaforma, despite it being a reflection of this world we persist within, is work of fiction, and I will continue to place great emphasis upon this. It attempts reflect what is the case, but will make no pretenses that anything stated is actually true, and can, in no way, fully determine all things in this world (as such as task would be madness) -- only their general, underlying pattern. It is to build the foundation of a fictional world that, by design, is supposed to mirror our own. It is an exercise of worldbuilding, applied to our own world, for an accurate reflection and ongoing simulation of another.

Metaforma would not only be a reference to draw from when the development of Transcendent begins, but would also serve to be the foundation of this fictional world and a bridge between the world of Transcendent and the world that we, as humans, persist within, rendering Metaforma's very nature and structure to then become, in some part, "metafictional."

And this, in my mind, is far more satisfactory than trying to be an academic.

---

Goals of the New Quarter

• Push the writing of Metaforma towards completion.

I'm unsure how long it will actually take to finish writing Metaforma. It took about 3-4 months of (rather obsessive) thinking, research and refinement to get this far, but now that I'm at a point that reeeally just needs to be reorganized and properly contextualized (which would be "psychology" section; a proper reformatting of the Astra and their interactions with each other), the "largest section" of the book might not actually take that long to complete.

I'm suspecting at best another 4-5 months from now for absolute completion, illustrations included, but we'll shall see how it all develops.

---

Until the next one,

January 15th!