Lumeia 

There are certain mornings — and this is not metaphor — when I wake into an intensity so low it barely registers as waking, more like a residual glow of the previous dream’s coherence, which is the only thing we in Lumeia value about experience at all. This morning is one of these mornings. It is late autumn in Parem (Parem being the region in which I was born) and outside there is the usual low quiet hum of communal existence in which the unbroken objects of daily life exist in their shared state (i.e., before their fracture into assignment). In Parem, intensity is not what you experience but what you are available to be. And so waking is always a negotiation with the threshold.

(You see how this would already be completely and categorically misread by the merchant-visitors.[1])

I am the only person left alive who sat with “Marco Polo.” (There are three other names involved in this history, but his is the one that became canonical.) He arrived not in a ship but on one of those heavy land-vehicles pulled by the muscled animals he called “horses,” which we did not have until they themselves imported them into our territory. We assumed they were broken objects made of living matter and we did not touch them.[2]

Polo was smooth. He listened like someone who thinks listening is extraction. He had this way of smiling while asking questions as if he was the one gifting attention, not receiving knowledge. There was a lot of transgression already in that dynamic. He did not grasp that inquiry is sorcery in Lumeia. Or rather, he sensed it at a visceral level, but because he had no sense of taboo about sorcery, he only experienced the thrill part and not the rule part.

His book did not exist yet then. His book is what exists now. His book is more real than we are now.

There’s one scene I need to narrate, because my therapists (yes — we have an analogue to them, they are not like the ones you have, ours are intensity-regulators not cognitive-correctors) told me that to narrate is to release the residual pattern. But that’s not what I think I’m doing here. I am not narrating to be healed. I am narrating so that someone in the future can see exactly when the annihilation took place.

He saw one affective compass.

That was the catastrophe.

The affective compass is not a navigational instrument. It is a communal object that pre-exists assignment. It is held by the group until it breaks. The needle does not point to North or South — those are spatial categories. It points to what we call affective gradients, which are intensities that emerge between bodies. The compass is literally a measure of the field between persons, not the situation inside a person.

Polo saw it and assumed it was an affect-deceit instrument. He assumed we were reading each other so we could betray more efficiently. He said (and this I remember almost semicographically in my memory): “So this is how you know who is lying.” He said it in awe, not in horror.

He assumed moral surveillance.

What he was actually seeing was mutual orientation toward coherence.

(He would later write that we were a culture of emotional parasites.[3])

And then he asked to buy one.

I told him you cannot buy one because the object is not assignable until it breaks.

He said: “Everything is assignable if I pay enough.”

And I felt a low gradient of nausea, not because of moral offense (morality is not the category) but because he was speaking like someone from within a different metaphysic entirely — the metaphysic where the self is prior to relation and where objecthood is just an extension of self.

I told him the object did not belong to any of us.

He said: “Then who is the owner?”

I tried to explain that ownership is post-fracture. That there is a world where ownership emerges only out of damage. That the dignity of the unbroken is that it belongs to no one.

He stared at me like a cat.

(He has written in his book that I told him “nothing has a natural owner” — as if that sentence meant anarchy rather than the specific metaphysical law it actually names.)

The affective compass — he would later claim — was a tool for emotional domination. He said we weaponized “sensitivity” to keep each other in a state of neurotic submission to communal norms.

But that is projection.

We in Lumeia do not distinguish dream from waking, only intense from non-intense. And the affective compass is a tool for mapping intensity fields. It is not about reading people. It is about reading the field itself.

When I told him this, his face registered confusion and then — and this was the moment of the death of the real — a flicker of contempt for the explanation.

He preferred his own intuition over our clarification.

He preferred the interpretive high of his misunderstanding over the slow attentiveness of the actual ontology before him.

What I didn’t realize then is that he was writing the book already. He was narrativizing his experience continuously. He was converting our explanations into raw material for his own mythology. He did not care to understand in any communal sense. He only wanted to produce a text.

And in Lumeia, producing a fixed text is a taboo form of sorcery.
Because to speak across distance is to interrupt relationality itself.

He didn’t need to write our world correctly. He only needed to write it in a way that would be compelling to his world.

He was writing a world that his world could metabolize.

He was not curious. He was hungry.

Later — after he left — he wrote his book.
It sold.

The parts where we use the affective compass to align our intensities became in his account a ritual of spying into each other’s secret hearts. He made us into voyeurs of each other’s hidden pain. He eroticized the instrument. He made it perverse.

And the land of the setting sun (I call it that only because that is how his people name themselves) swallowed his account because it was delicious. Because it told them that there were others who lived in the horror they feared most — the horror of complete exposure.

His book became not about us but a mirror for the fear-fascination of his own society.

It is the most dangerous kind of lie: the lie that tells the liar what he wants to believe.

When we tried to correct the record — it was already too late. The corrections were taken as “evidence” of our secretiveness. Our refusal to speak across long distances (because, again, to speak across long distances is sorcery) was taken as confirmation that we were hiding something. Our corrections that did reach them — through intermediaries — were taken as suspiciously self-exculpatory.

This is the cruelty of epistemic annihilation:
the more accurately you speak, the more evidence you offer of your supposed duplicity.[4]

I am losing intensity.
The sleep/wake ratio is altering.
I spend more time asleep because dream remains the only domain where things don’t belong to anyone until they are broken.

I have thought often about what I would do if Polo returned.

Would I break a compass myself and hand it to him?

Would I assign the broken shard to myself alone and say:
“Here, keep this, keep this part of the world, take it — it belongs only to me”?

No.

Because the first fracture is not the fracture of the object.
It is the fracture of relation.

And Polo broke us by narrating us.

We never fractured the compass.

We fractured ourselves.

And that fracture had his name.

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footnotes

[1] They experience “morning” as a discrete chronometric unit of time rather than a change in intensity. Already this misalignment means they experience Lumeia as chaotic.

[2] They later claimed we worshipped the horses. We simply didn’t understand what part of their ontology the animals “lived in.” We didn’t know if they were already broken.

[3] Parasite for him meant a social role. For us “parasitic” means “dependent after fracture.” He inverted the causal chain.

[4] This is the thing that destroyed us: the answers became the accusation. The truth became the proof of the lie.

LLM