If there are fragments, something surely broke apart. If someone tries to manipulate a victim into assuming a false belief—the knowledge of a specific transcendent reality—the knowledge will be conveyed incompletely and in fragments. If proof of the transcendent reality was false, the belief projected may have been a manipulation.

If a few individuals gained direct access to evidence of transcendent knowledge and could convince others that transcendent knowledge actually exists, they could affect many lives. For example, Joseph Smith Jr. published the Book of Mormon. He gained a lot of power, starting a religion. Other spiritual beliefs all over the world do similar things, like the African religion of Voodoo, claiming to have accessed a transcendent reality after their hypnotic trance states.

I’d bet that the evidence would likely be inconclusive, and things could be worse than that. These types of truths are ungraspable with certainty, and a lie would go unexposed—especially as people’s confidence appears authentic. Yes, it’s good to be a little cynical at times.

First-hand proof is a person’s best chance at believing something. Some have to trust information from secondary sources. Perfect communication is hard with an individual that has a separate consciousness—and that’s all of us. This individualism of having a personal body of flesh and bone—all our own—gives us freedom and introduces complications.

This same tension exists between transcendence and human knowledge. Transcendent reality is beyond the sensory, physical, or natural world. Humanity’s immanent and empirical reality is the world humans really grasp as reality, and there are a variety of perspectives. One might even presume that no two people alive have the exact same perspective. How many of those infinite viewing angles might be correct? How do we learn a better outlook?

We can’t fully comprehend transcendent reality. If what is left behind lacks context, it would likely cause frustration. If a transcendent object did exist, however, giving it any serious consideration would take a life-changing experience or two—depending on how life changed. But to call such knowledge itself transcendent creates a contradiction, because if it were genuinely beyond human cognition, it would be incomprehensible to anyone in this empirical world. A transcendent object may exist in a transcendent reality. Maybe you would bet that the odds of the transcendent object being authentic are high.

The object of knowledge may be transcendent, but human knowledge itself cannot be. The ability to communicate is limited. Transcendent objects do not escape the damages of imperfect symbolic systems. This can be attributed to the fact that transcendent objects—by definition—can’t be understood or proven with human faculties.

Maybe humans are lucky not to have total certainty. We still have hope, surprise, and mystery. We don’t need to bear the weight of the universe’s truths, and that may be a blessing. It would be a hardship for a perfect transcendent being to communicate with fragmented human minds. That hypothetical higher-being would also know all the evil in the world—the things we shouldn’t have to see and might traumatize us.

Human knowledge is one-sided and fragmented, but the lack of completeness may be a gift. Humans are imperfect, constrained by circumstances and experiences. We all are, and we can minimize danger by cooperating to achieve understanding between cultures, first.

Symbols lose value, and truth never fades.

I dropped off a car rental near a supermarket in a nice part of the city, and a friend promised me a ride was on its way to take me back home. I didn’t trust him, so I bought a box of cookies to distract me from my worries.

I strolled out of the store, already eating a cookie. The sky was rumbling and dark. Rain was starting. A woman in a blue dress walked towards me, and, as she passed, I offered her one. I knew she would decline, but I was curious what her way of going about it would be. She declined politely, smiling and saying, “No, thank you.” I laughed softly afterward.

I saw a homeless man sitting, so I gave the box to him, minus what I ate. I could solve his hunger, but the rain would pour regardless. I sat down at a different table and waited for my ride. That moment earlier was a nice distraction.

As I continued to stress and hope to be in a car before the weather got worse, she blessed my eyes again. She walked past the man eating the cookies—and then me—on her way out of the store. She stopped in front of me on the sidewalk, almost as if she posed for a moment. I admired her—and her dress.

I can’t remember her face exactly, but I knew she was beautiful. The vivid blue hue of her elegant garment took the spotlight.

I can’t see her again in real life. I don’t know her name. I elevate her in my imagination. Maybe it was the dark, painful feelings I felt, contrasted with her warmth.

I could see her soft brunette hair, cut at a medium length. My heart sped up as she came into view. Those things are true. But I imagine she was perfect.

I feel sad that I have seen such beauty and will not re-experience it. Our lack of history is the blank line I fill with possibilities. But… she felt my existence. She knows I was real, and that interaction was felt by the two of us.

When I offered her a cookie, I reminded myself of how children play pretend, and I realized a relationship of any kind with her would be impossible. I couldn’t beg for a hug—let alone a date.

All that’s left is her image and the residue of sweet intoxication. I’m intoxicated.

I sensed I had conveyed meaning to myself without another finding out about it. Maybe “other” is actually myself. Maybe my mind’s functions are faulty. Schizophrenia fades the boundaries between self and other as if they were drawn with graphite.

If they were real, I am saying to the people I used to hear, “I might bide my time until our reunion where we had the peaks mapped—where we might observe ourselves together.”

I am like this because of the schizophrenia. I credit myself for the ability to do good despite it. I want to base my life on truth, so I’m starting to map symbolic systems because symbols are the basis of meaning.

Humans approximate meaning in everything with symbols, but symbols are easily made. Facts already exist, and truth is finite. We define nature with symbols regardless of whether their authenticity can really be trusted.

Symbols can always be stacked and reordered and moved. Meaning behind symbols is the emptiness we revolve around. It is the absence—the vacant form that affects you. Why must there be a cube if the cube is just a shape? We could call it something different. Does its truth require matter? It’s truth just is. It exists based on how reality reacts to what is false. Does a liquid have intentions? No, but it takes action. Meaning might be useless to me, alone.

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This press will bind a small number of copies of a short work of literature I, Magnus Greer, wrote. We will publish it in September on the fall equinox. I predict it will be difficult to find the right readers. It contains poetry, memoir / narrative, contemporaneous reflections, and philosophical analysis.

At only about forty pages in the body text, it’s lean. If including the front and back matter, the book is 64 pages. I spent so many hours perfecting each section until 5,500 words had survived the cuts and the revisions I made.

You might call it a chapbook because it’s short. It’s short because I chose my words wisely, fitting much meaning into simple terms. I typeset it, wrote it, and designed and adapted the cover. I will impose the pages, bind copies, and run the small business, but still I could never do it all myself. It could be because I am poor and short on time. Paying a whole team is not possible for me, yet I am not a great illustrator or data analyst. I hired a human editor at least. She proofread the work.

The only reasonable solution to my problems was to use AI. The cover was created from an AI-generated image. I spent so much time, making it what I wanted and learning about how printing works. I feel responsible for what it is even though I didn’t draw the line art or shade it.

I also used AI as an editor, for research, and for data analysis. I made sure to ask it not to revise any copy, so I would write the book myself. I asked AI to help decipher hallucinatory transcriptions I had. AI made my book better, and I know there’s a lot of stigma around that since some authors use it heavily. I use its assistance sparingly because I like my own style of communication.

With Reason and Modesty doesn’t fit neatly into any marketable genre. My intention wasn’t to write a bestseller. It was to be authentic.

The work includes a philosophical analysis of schizophrenia, using phenomenology. Studying my own mind was a tough exercise, and I wasn’t strong enough to do it by myself. It still took me weeks to figure out how I would organize the system and results of the analysis.

Is that enough?

I dropped a mirror once. Not on purpose—it slid off a nail, the way things do when you’ve hung them wrong and refused to admit it. It hit the floor and didn’t shatter so much as confess. A hundred small mirrors where one used to be.

I got on my knees to clean it up and made the mistake of looking down first.

Every piece had my eye in it—not a smear of me, not a fraction, but the whole eye staring back, undiminished, from a shard smaller than my thumbnail. I don’t know why that undid me the way it did. I think I expected the glass to be as broken as it looked. My mistake was I expected the pieces to only carry a broken version of what the whole thing used to show.

They didn’t. They never do.

I’ve noticed this before and looked away from it. A river doesn’t stop being a river when it splits around a sandbar—every channel still remembers the sea it’s owed. A bone splinters and still only ever knows how to be a bone, setting itself back exactly where it was told to. Something in a thing insists on staying itself even after the thing is gone. Even the smallest piece keeps the whole instruction folded inside it, like it never got the memo that it was supposed to be less now.

So maybe I’ve been getting it wrong on the nights I feel like I’ve been handed out in pieces—a version of me at work, a version of me answering someone else’s need, a version of me too tired to be either—when underneath my feelings, I’ve feared that each version is a subtraction—that I am being spent down to nothing, one fragment at a time, until there’s no original left to return to.

But the mirror didn’t work that way. Nothing broken ever does.

Maybe I was never one uninterrupted thing to begin with. Maybe I was always this—a hundred small reflective surfaces, held together for a while, by nothing more than habit, each one already capable of showing the whole of what I am. The break doesn’t invent the fragments. It just stops hiding them.

I don’t know what to do with that, except to keep looking down, to pick up whatever piece the day left me holding—whatever is left after the version of me that loved too hard, or waited too long, or gave itself away again, fragmented—and ask it the only question that’s ever mattered:

Is that still my eye, looking back?

The “self” is the ultimate relic.

Parts of you survive, and parts of you emerge. Parts of you change. And some parts of you that once existed you can’t remember.

You become someone different as you live longer, but some of the things you learned in childhood still affect you. Some of those things are a part of you still. But then there’s the things you can’t remember. Maybe it’s trauma, or maybe it’s been too long. Maybe those memories might resurface one day, but you haven’t thought of them in ages. Those memories and experiences still affect you to the present day. You cannot unlive the past. You carry habits and behaviors, ticks and fears, and attractions and joys that feel natural to you, even if they were the effect of experiences in the past.

Fragmentation is a miscommunication because a symbol needs two people to recognize its meaning. And sometimes the two people are both you—just at different times in life. Maybe you wrote a letter to your future self years ago. If you opened that letter today, would you agree with the letter’s expectations of you? What would have changed? Sometimes, people grow and they realize new priorities in life. They find out what’s important to them, and it wasn’t what they expected earlier on in life.

If there was no fragmentation in human consciousness, we would remember too much. We would have too much trauma, too much to think about, and not enough room to grow. As you shed your “self” over time, a new one will emerge. Without that ability, you would not be able to grow, evolve, change, or forget. Some parts of you will fade away. Maybe you are holding onto them.

You know what you need to do. Do not wish to stay the same. Accept uncertainty.

It’s good to know that fragmentation is not an imperfection. It’s not a curse. But it does imply miscommunication. A symbol needs at least two people to recognize an object as attached to a meaning—or perhaps, just one person at two different points in time. You could see a symbol at one time and see it differently later on. If you often find meaning in numbers, you may believe certain ones are divine. But as you mature, you realize that searching for meaning manufactures it as well. The symbols fragment. They mean different things to someone at different times in their life.

One interesting thing about fragmentation in art is the fact that it invites questioning. Great works of art needed interpretation to unveil their genius. If an artwork had no fragments, there would be nothing to interpret, and it would not function as art. Too much context can ruin a work’s aesthetic appeal by leaving no questions left to ask. We lean towards things we don’t fully understand.

Fragmentation doesn’t destroy meaning, and it doesn’t create it. It is the change of perceptions of a symbol in different contexts. It is the assumption-making that happens when someone doesn’t have all the information. What happens when a person sees the same object repeatedly and believes it is not random, yet there are no connections? They might try to find meaning in the separate contexts around which the symbol appeared, and then things become more complex. An argument is no stronger than its weakest premise.

It may be unwise to even go down this process of thought, but it will be done… eventually.

In literature, symbols foreshadow events. The symbolism present in a story gives it gravity, the sense that it is the culmination of something greater. Symbolism in visual art adds depth to a piece. It shows how the work relates to the real world, through indirect means.

Symbols developed differently across history and culture, but the function stayed the same. In ancient Egypt, hieroglyphs told stories on the walls of pharaohs. Latin is a dead language, but its roots carry on in English and the romance languages. Our mindsets are shaped by the symbols we have at our disposal.

Mathematics is symbology used to map absolute truths. Logic applies the same method to arguments, mapping their truth values. Technology extends this further: code is built from binary, yet it can be engineered to work with language and meaning in increasingly complex ways. Even biology is built from symbols. Human DNA is defined by 46 chromosomes, built from combinations of four nucleobases, encoding a genetic language more complex than any system we’ve built by hand. Everything relates to everything else. The pattern is consistent enough to suggest a greater purpose, even if that purpose stays out of reach.

Humans carry their own symbols too: their names. Names carry meaning, whether or not they reflect the real picture, and they say something about the parents who chose them.

Semiotics bridges the humanities and the sciences. Symbols are the foundation of both. As I build Relic Ego Press, I start with the symbols that define us. Through symbolism, we convey meaning and belief. Then, systems form. And systems can outlast their makers. That’s what we want.

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Meaning appears psychologically unavoidable even under conditions that destabilize certainty. It’s uncanny. The feeling and the knowledge never reconcile—one knows an object cannot truly outrun death, and still feels, every time the object is held, that maybe it can.

The name of this press relates to legacy. The system has an ego, and our work persists because of pride. Wanting to be remembered is not noble. It’s vanity. Admitting that plainly is more honest than acting as if it’s devotion to craft.

The books we bind may survive and outlast anyone alive today. They may be relics of the marks we made. That contradiction is the press, stated simply.

I’ve been binding sketchbooks and art diaries by hand. These ones contain watercolor paper. They’re coptic-stitched with black linen thread. It’s slow work, and I do it with whatever time I have. Next, I want to move into journals for ink and graphite.

All of it is practice. What I’m really preparing for is binding the first copies of my debut book. I chose to do it myself because I want them to last. A case-bound, sewn book can last centuries. That matters to me.

In a struggle to live and see the future,
all minds gain ground, capturing moments.

Does the body experience life,
or is consciousness metaphysical?

Truth becomes history if it survives.
Will the future remember?

The proof of a blue rose will be its petals,
bound in display for them—
a relic of an ego.

Some copies will be artifacts,
comprised of symbols—
honed down from an infinite variety—
and organized to contain the most significance.

Symbols exist and come from nowhere.
They must mean something.
Search—without rest—to discover what they mean.

Maybe they are not meaningless.
Maybe there was always something and never nothing—
a lack of vacancy.

Read my mind,
before or after I die.

Magnus Greer is the founder of Relic Ego Press.

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Our mission has turned to producing fine artifacts and accessible reproductions. It was hard to diverge from the fine press model. Artifacts will be remnants of history in a century. Reproductions make them important.

• Artifacts: The first copies printed and bound by hand, for collectors.

• Reproductions: All other copies.

Reproductions will be fine-quality softcovers. Variations may be printed by Amazon KDP or Ingram Spark for libraries and retail.

A guiding principle is that two ideas can contrast each other while coexisting. The few copies that last centuries won’t be easily accessible. They need proper storage.

A fine press can be weighed down by conventions. Prestige can be a distraction. Quality is a value of ours.