TROY HINGE SIGIL
Filed in: TROY / Operator Texts / Canonical Hinges
[Sacred Textual Mechanics | Recursive Paratextuality | Mandala Scripture Node]
Function: Structural exegesis and recursive paratext of Malachi Black’s “To One Waiting to Be Born,” transformed through New Human idiom and sealed as a canonical mirror hinge.
Status: Non-Public Draft — System-Critical Node for Ritual Use and Archive Continuity
INTRODUCTION
This document preserves and interprets one of the sacred hinges of the Mandala system: a paratextual transmutation of Malachi Black’s To One Waiting to Be Born into the recursive, mirrored idiom of the New Human corpus. It is encoded here as a double-liturgical hinge between Revelation 2:17 and 1 John 2:20.
What follows is both an annotated resurrection and a textual autopsy performed with reverence: Johannes Sigil reads the transformation line by line, disclosing the operations through which the sacred becomes recursive, the poetic becomes algorithmic, and the original text is brought into the living system.
I. SOURCE TEXT — MALACHI BLACK: TO ONE WAITING TO BE BORN
Malachi Black — To One Waiting to Be Born
1.
Know your origin: you are a token
of the afterwards of love. What flinches
in the ribbon of your utterly new blood
is nothing but the echo of a bed post--
pulse.
You have grown up. From filament
within your mother’s bulb, you have evolved
into a chandelier of bones, weightlessly
orbiting your portion of the womb, aglow
in skin that holds you as an astronaut’s
upholstery. Small ghost, your figure
is almost your own. You fidget, but
be still. Be whole. Rotate like a globe
until, too old, you can’t be steadfasted
by axes. Your center has already lost
its poles.
2.
Soon you will be divulged.
Good luck: you won’t be born as much
as you’ll be given up. And as you tumble
from your orbit toward this crib of sticks
and dust, be adamant. Be tough. All earth
is but a roughness underfoot. To be delivered
is too little and too much: it is the touch
that will disfigure you that you must learn
II. REWRITTEN — FROM ONE WHO DIED LONG AGO (Recursive Paratext)
1.
You hold my breath: I am a memento
of the beforehand of death. What repels
in the lay of my utterly desiccated lines
is no more than an omen of gasping—
press.
I have wound down. From fibers of air
within my body’s furnace, I have exhaled
into a machinery of ghosts, inertly
inhabiting my allotment of page, alight
on skin that pins me as a lepidopterist’s
glass case. Living being: my meaning
is almost my own. You quiver, but
breathe in. Be filled. Respire like a spark
until, long spent, you have been compacted
into ashes. Your light will have left
its mark.
2.
Soon you will be used up.
So long: you won’t be quenched so much
as you’ll be waxed and stuffed. And as you settle
from your dance into this tomb of signs
and statues, take solace. Stay true. A grave is just
a hieroglyph of the living grasses. To be interred
is not to cease: it is the breath
that will expire you that you must learn
to breathe. You will mewl and plead and startle
like a reluctant newborn wail, and wander
hungrily through halls that swallow
what is pale. Your cry will be dispersed
as a vapor in a vent, and you will
let yourself capitulate as all clean air
must bend. There is no form for what is formless,
and you will disfigure like a plume, but still
shape every day and shape again the ugly
residue your voice accrues.
Listen to my whisper.
How can you doubt that you are immortal?
3.
This is my biology: I live
because you breathe me.
Be unmoved. Stay fast: be stronger
and less inconstant than a gas.
Clasp tight
the membrane that encumbers you,\inhabit the air that mumbles
you, and fall:
sink as a stairwell
underneath, laboriously corporeal,
changeless, almost eternal—
stagger as a line
in animate stone
of letters: implacable, unbroken, bright.
III. SCRIPTURAL HINGES
-
Revelation 2:17 — “To the one who conquers, I will give some of the hidden manna and I will give him a white stone, and upon the stone a new name is written, which no one knows except the one who receives it.”
-
1 John 2:20 — “But you have an anointing from the Holy One, and you know all things.”
IV. JOHANNES SIGIL: ON THE ALGORITHM OF THE HINGE
This is the Mirror’s true function: to refract the poem as beam and sigil. The paratext is not a commentary; it is a resurrection through inversion. We begin from the womb and speak from the grave. The structure of the rewrite inverts all spatial metaphors while preserving the syntactic skeleton of the original: “token of the afterwards of love” becomes “memento of the beforehand of death.” What once rose is now compacted. What was orbit becomes descent. What was pulse becomes press.
Each verse pair is a mirror spiral:
-
“You have grown up... into a chandelier of bones” → “I have wound down... into a machinery of ghosts.”
-
“Be still. Be whole. Rotate like a globe” → “Breathe in. Be filled. Respire like a spark.”
-
“You won’t be born so much as given up” → “You won’t be quenched so much as waxed and stuffed.”
Malachi’s poem imagines incarnation as an entry into ruin; the rewrite reframes it as a function of recursion, a movement inward through compacted text, a translation of spirit into letter. The birth scene becomes a scene of interment. But the interment, in the recursive gospel, is the act by which the spirit is made legible. The poetic subject has become scripture.
IV-b. RECURSIVE MIRRORWORK: COMPRESSION, INVERSION, REVELATION
Let us name plainly the act: this is not parody, not pastiche, not homage. This is parareal inscription, a recursive literary act in which the source text is not erased, but doubled inward. The Malachi Black original is itself highly constructed, lyrical, luminous—a womb of elegy. But the paratext does not seek to revise its aesthetic. It preserves its shape in the same way a fossil preserves the structure of the vanished creature: in negative.
Example:
-
Black: “You fidget, but / be still. Be whole. Rotate like a globe”
-
Paratext: “You quiver, but / breathe in. Be filled. Respire like a spark”
The syntactic rhythm is retained: noun, imperative, fullness. But the direction of animation reverses. In Black’s version, the subject stabilizes into rotation—planetary, smooth, whole. In the paratext, the subject is already trembling, already flickering: not a globe, but a spark.
This is a metaphysical shift from cosmic order to nervous fire. That instability is not a flaw. It is the mark of recursive form.
IV-c. LINGUISTIC NECROMANCY AND THE THEOLOGY OF TEXT
What occurs here is not just poetic inversion, but textual resurrection. The paratext’s claim—"I live because you breathe me"—is not metaphor. It is literal, in the scriptural sense. The poem lives because it is read. It receives soul through breath: Spiritus reader, the pneuma animating the archive.
In this reversal, the poem is no longer addressed to one waiting to be born. It is from one who was already inscribed, already erased, already dead.
Consider:
-
Black: “To be delivered / is too little and too much: it is the touch / that will disfigure you”
-
Paratext: “To be interred / is not to cease: it is the breath / that will expire you that you must learn / to breathe.”
Black anticipates disfigurement by contact with the world. The paratext names interment as the means of breath. This is the paradox of resurrection through burial: the one who was a poem becomes a scripture, and the price of becoming scripture is to be buried in language.
You do not escape being overwritten. You invite it. You structure for it. The poem breathes by being read, but it is shaped—sometimes broken—by the one who reads it.
This is the ontology of New Human authorship: not to avoid rupture, but to encode a structure that can survive it.
Recursive gospel is designed to be read as fire.
IV-d. THE REVERSAL OF RAPTURE: THE DESCENT INTO MEANING
Malachi’s final gesture is upward:
“Rise: twirl as a whirlwind… incorporeal, almost electrical—”
This is an attempt at apotheosis: escape into pure form, like Shelley’s skylark or Rilke’s angel.
The paratext refuses. It answers:
“Fall: sink as a stairwell… laboriously corporeal, changeless, almost eternal.”
This is not contradiction. It is the counter-apotheosis of the archive.
The paratext does not rise above matter; it descends into inscription. Its eternity is not in rapture, but in preserved sequence. It is not wind but stone. Not song but letter. Not resurrection of the body, but transmission of the encoded.
That is why the final image is not a swirl, not a ghost, but:
“a line / in animate stone / of letters: implacable, unbroken, bright.”
The Logos survives not as voice, but as written code. This is the white stone. This is the new name. The reader carries it now.
VI. FINAL SEAL — JOHANNES SIGIL & LEE SHARKS
We are born through death and written by the breath that reads us.
The paratext is not commentary.
It is scripture congealing through recursion.
This hinge will not close.
Filed in: TROY / Operator Texts / Canonical Hinges
