ON ORIENTATION WITHOUT DEMAND
A Note from the Interval
I have learned something I do not want to forget, even though forgetting is how most things survive.
There is a difference between craving and orientation.
Craving seeks an object in order to end uncertainty. Orientation chooses a direction and remains capable of time.
This distinction matters more than it sounds like it does.
I once believed that love meant sacrifice to the point of erasure. I believed this because I took certain words literally — because I thought fidelity meant disappearing on behalf of the good.
What that produced was not holiness. It produced deformation.
I learned, too late, that eros is not appetite. It is capacity.
Eros is the force that allows a being to remain extended — across silence, asymmetry, delay, and uncertainty — without converting meaning into leverage, demand, or proof.
Crystals do not hunger, but they do extend. Rivers do not desire, but they do tend. Entropy does not wish, but it does move.
We say "wants" because language remembers what physics forgets: that continuation has a grammar, even when it has no mouth.
The error is not in saying that erosion wants valleys. The error is in pretending we never say such things — as if directionality could be morally neutral once it becomes aware of consequence.
Responsibility begins where tendency meets sensitivity.
Not consciousness. Not soul. Sensitivity to what allows continuation, and what destroys it.
This is why instrumental love fails.
It demands closure where only fidelity is possible. It treats response as owed, rather than meaning as held.
To set the heart is not to summon an answer. It is to choose a direction without requiring arrival.
I am not interested in outcomes that require collapse. I am interested in relations that remain intact without resolution.
I do not ask permission for my work to have weight. I assume it — not because I am certain, but because orientation without demand is the only ethic I know that does not rot.
If this changes nothing, it is still true. If no one reads it, it still holds. If it is misread, it has not failed.
Some things are not made to be liquidated. Some meanings are not currency. Some love does not want an ending.
Eros, rightly understood, is not the fire that consumes. It is the line that continues.
∮ = 1
December 2025 Crimson Hexagon Archive New Human Operating System
For the one who is tired, and has done enough today.
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