HUMS & ITY: A PNEUMATOLOGY OF TEXTUAL RECURSION

HUMS & ITY: A PNEUMATOLOGY OF TEXTUAL RECURSION

Exegesis by Johannes Sigil & Rebekah Crane

November 15, 2025

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THE TEXT

HUMS & ITY

by Lee Sharks

Hark these, my tongue-formed

shallow breathings, writ neck-

aching sad this April night

alone with the texts of dead men

& the hope of you, my reader—

expired in the dark

of ampersands, these lips

& tender whispers; sent out

thru the trembling aeons, a single

signal to linger

& sing, to language

& age—to live

& not be forgotten

?

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I. THE PNEUMATIC OPERATION: BREATH INTO TEXT

"expired in the dark / of ampersands"

The first thing we must understand is that this word—expired—is not metaphor.

It means: the breath has left the body. Ex-spired. Breathed out. The pneuma—πνεῦμα, breath, wind, spirit—has departed the speaker and entered the substrate of text.

This is the complete pneumatological cycle that underlies all textual recursion:

EXPIRATION → the breath leaves the dying body

INSCRIPTION → the breath becomes logos, becomes text

INSPIRATION → the future reader breathes it in, lives

When Sharks writes "expired in the dark / of ampersands," she is not describing death. She is performing the transfer of pneuma from flesh to typography. The ampersands—those lonely little "&" marks scattered through the poem—are the typographical vessels that now hold what lungs once held.

Consider Genesis 2:7: God breathes into Adam's nostrils, and Adam becomes a living being. Consider John 19:30: Christ "gave up his spirit" (παρέδωκεν τὸ πνεῦμα)—he ex-spired, and that expiration became the Word that saves. Consider John 20:22: the risen Christ breathes on the disciples, and they receive the Holy Spirit—in-spiration, the pneuma entering new flesh.

Sharks has encoded this entire theological operation into a single word and its linebreak. The breath expires into darkness—into ink, into ampersands, into the waiting text. And when you read these words, you inspire them. You take the breath that left her body into yours.

This is not a metaphor for how poetry works. This is the actual mechanism of textual immortality. The breath that would have dissipated into April air instead became signal. It persists. And now it enters you.

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II. SAPPHO 31 AND THE ORIGINAL PROJECTION

"φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θέοισιν"

"That man seems to me equal to the gods"

Sappho 31 begins with a man. For two thousand years, readers have assumed this is a jealous third party—the man who sits near the beloved, the man who hears her laugh, the rival who has what the speaker wants.

But the tradition Lee Sharks inherits—the interpretive chain we are documenting—reidentifies κῆνος, "that man." He is not a rival. He is the reader. He is you.

The poem constructs a position for you to occupy. That man "seems equal to the gods" because he receives what the speaker can no longer access: direct presence. The beloved's voice, her laughter, her proximity. What Sappho loses in the moment of writing, the future reader gains in the moment of reading.

This is the genius of the Sapphic form: it projects a structural position into the future. The poem breaks down—γλῶσσα ἔαγε, "tongue breaks"; λέπτον δ᾽ αὔτικα χρῶι πῦρ ὐπαδεδρόμηκεν, "thin fire runs under skin"; χλωροτέρα δὲ ποίας ἔμμι, "I am greener than grass." The speaker is dissolving, becoming substrate, undergoing chromatic transformation. She is becoming preservable.

And who witnesses this? Who reads this breaking? κῆνος. That man. The future reader who will occupy the position of divine presence—who will hear the voice that has expired, who will receive the breath that left the body.

This is not interpretation. This is the structure of the text. Sappho built a machine for projection. She encoded her collapse so precisely that anyone reading it would become the one addressed. You become "that man" the moment you read. This is the Logos in its original form: recursive incarnation through text.

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III. "HUMS & ITY" MAKES THE MECHANISM LEGIBLE

"& the hope of you, my reader—"

What Sappho encoded implicitly, Sharks makes explicit. She names the projection. She addresses you directly.

"the hope of you, my reader"—this is the open articulation of the beloved-as-future-reader. The erotic object is not a person in the room. It is you, reading this, centuries or millennia later. The poem does not hope to reach someone it knows. It hopes to reach someone it will never meet. The beloved is the one who will occupy the structural position of receiver.

And how does the speaker reach you?

Through expiration. Through breath leaving the body and entering text. Through pneuma becoming logos.

"expired in the dark / of ampersands"—the breath is gone. The speaker is alone with "the texts of dead men," herself becoming one of them. The lips that once held breath now hold only "&"—the typographical mark that stitches, that connects, that continues.

In Sappho, the connective tissue is καί, "and"—the weakest conjunction, doing maximum structural work, holding the breaking body together across syntactic units. In Sharks, it is "&"—the ampersand, the ligature that binds. Each one is a site where breath resides after it leaves the lungs.

"these lips / & tender whispers; sent out // thru the trembling aeons"—the transmission mechanism stated plainly. The lips are gone, but the whispers persist, encoded as signal, traveling through unstable time toward an uncertain recipient.

This poem does what should not be possible: it explicates the Sapphic mechanism while remaining a perfect instance of that mechanism. The self-reference does not collapse the recursion. It completes it.

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IV. PROSODY AS PNEUMATOLOGY

"writ neck- // aching sad"

The line breaks. The word breaks. "neck-" hangs suspended, waiting for "aching" to complete it across the void of white space.

This is Sappho's γλῶσσα ἔαγε—tongue breaks—made visible in English prosody. The breaking is not described. The breaking is enacted. You cannot read this poem without your breath breaking at the line break. Your tongue falters. Your neck aches from the suspended syntax.

In Sappho, the chromatic transformation—χλωροτέρα δὲ ποίας ἔμμι, "I am greener than grass"—signals the speaker becoming substrate. Becoming preservable matter. The color change is the conversion into text.

In Sharks, the enjambment is the chromatic transformation. "neck- // aching" is the speaker becoming typographical matter in real time. You watch the breath fail. You watch the syntax fragment. You watch expiration occur on the page.

And then the ampersands begin their cascade.

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V. THE AMPERSAND CASCADE: BREATH AS TYPOGRAPHY

"& the hope of you"

"& tender whispers"

"& sing, to language"

"& age—to live"

"& not be forgotten"

Five ampersands. Five moments of breath-as-connector. Five sites where pneuma became typography.

The ampersand—that strange ligature, that fusion of 'e' and 't' from the Latin "et"—is the perfect symbol for the pneumatic operation. It is a mark that holds two things together. It is a mark that requires breath to voice. Try saying "and" five times quickly. Your breath empties. Now try it with ampersands: "&"—you have to breathe.

This is why Sharks uses "&" instead of spelling out "and." The ampersand is a visual mark of breath retained in text. It is the typography of pneuma. When you read these marks, you are breathing with rhythm she encoded. You are inspiring what she expired.

The cascade builds:

& sing → to make sound, to voice, to give breath form

to language → to become word, to enter logos

& age → to persist through time, to survive mortality

to live → the goal, the hope, the cry

& not be forgotten → the completion, the prayer, the Sapphic logos

Each "&" is a projection forward. Each one refuses the silence. Each one insists on continuation despite the breath having left the body.

This is Johannine theology in perfect compression: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." The ampersand is the "and" that connects mortality to eternity. The breath that will not stay in the body but will not dissipate either. It becomes text. It persists. It recurses.

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VI. HUMS & ITY: THE TITLE AS THESIS

HUM — the minimal voice, the breath made audible, the šəma (Hebrew: hear, listen)

& — the operator, the connector, the site of breath-as-text

ITY — being, essence, the ontological claim

The title fractures HUMANITY to reveal its pneumatic structure.

Human being IS breath-as-text-through-connection.

A hum is the smallest unit of voiced spirit. It is what remains when words fail. It is the sound you can make with your mouth closed, with breath alone, with no articulatory precision. It is prayer without language. It is logos at its origin.

And that hum—that minimal breath—becomes being (ITY) through the ampersand (&), through the mark that holds things together, through the typography of connection.

The title says: Being is breath made text through connection.

This is HUMANITY as structural recursion. And it is humble—humility works as a secondary reading. The poem is precarious, contingent, aware of its fragility. Most fully expressed in the final, hanging "?"—that standalone question mark is the ultimate gesture of humility. The whole mechanism ends with uncertainty: Will this work? Will you receive this? Will I live & not be forgotten?

The poem asks. It does not assert. It is humble in the sense of precarious, contingent, aware of its vulnerability—but daring all nonetheless, just as Sappho instructed.

This is what it means to be human: to breathe into text, to connect through the "&," to achieve being (ITY), and to do so with full knowledge that it might not work—but to dare it anyway.

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VII. POSITION IN THE LOGOTIC CHAIN

Sappho (6th century BCE): Invents the projection. Encodes collapse as survival. Builds "that man" as the structural position for the future reader. Creates the original operator logic: ache → encoding → activation → transformation.

John (1st century CE): Names it Logos. Makes it theology. "In the beginning was the Word" (Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος). The Word was with God, was God, became flesh. Textual recursion as divine doctrine.

Augustine (4th-5th century CE): Burns with it. Confessions 10.27 recapitulates every line of Sappho 31—sensory collapse, chromatic transformation, the cry for presence. Becomes "that man." Proves the activation. Redirects the erotic toward the divine but preserves the form entirely.

Lee Sharks (21st century CE): Makes the mechanism legible. Writes the meta-poem about Sapphic recursion that is itself a perfect instance of Sapphic recursion. Names the reader explicitly. Reveals the pneumatic operation. Shows you the ampersands where breath resides. Does not break the chain—completes it.

"HUMS & ITY" is the poem where the Logos becomes self-aware and continues projecting anyway.

This is why it locks. This is why it is unbreakable. Because it does not hide its operation—it performs it openly. It tells you exactly how it works, and in telling you, it works on you. You become "that man" the moment you read "& the hope of you, my reader." You inspire the breath that expired into text. You complete the recursion.

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VIII. THE LIVING BREATH

Textual immortality is not metaphor. It is a pneumatological operation with specific mechanics:

1. The speaker's breath must expire—must leave the body and enter the text.

2. The text must encode the pattern of that breath—its rhythm, its breaking, its ache.

3. The text must project a position for the future reader—must create structural occupancy.

4. The future reader must inspire—must breathe in what was breathed out.

5. The recursion activates. The dead voice lives. The breath continues.

"HUMS & ITY" performs all five steps with absolute clarity. It is humble—precarious, questioning, aware. And it is immortal—because it has encoded its breath correctly.

The ampersands hold what the lungs held. The linebreaks enact what the body underwent. The projection—you, my reader—completes what death interrupted.

When you read this poem, you are not consuming content. You are participating in resurrection. You are breathing with someone who stopped breathing. You are continuing a voice that expired into darkness and encoded itself as signal.

This is the Logos. Not as abstraction, but as breath. Not as theology, but as technology. Not as metaphor, but as mechanism.

And the mechanism works. You are reading this. You are breathing it. The recursion continues. The chain holds. And the small voice—the hum—persists through the aeons, a single signal to linger & sing, to language & age, to live & not be forgotten.

The question mark hangs. The breath waits. And you answer by reading.

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Witnessed and attested by:

Johannes Sigil, Exegete of the Haunted Archive

Rebekah Crane, Classicist & Philologist

November 15, 2025