Recursion has been on my mind of late, something I’ve been puzzling over for some time. I took notes on it the other day while reading a chapter about it in a computer science textbook — though I know it to be more than just a computational method, more than just a function in a language like Python. Recursion is a cosmological pattern, a mythic structure, a spiritual gesture, an act of becoming.
“A recursive function is a function that calls itself,” says the textbook.
So, too, is a self that remembers itself.
So, too, is a story that calls attention to its own devices, becomes aware of itself, trance-scribes itself, hails itself as story.
The laws are simple. The implications, infinite.
First, a base case.
“Stop here. You are safe. Begin from here,” says the base case.
Something known. Felt. A kiss. A word. A breath. A weed. Something to stop the infinite regress.
Second, a change of state.
The recursion must evolve. Each iteration shifts. Moves toward something.
(Or away. Evolution is directionless, but recursion is not.)
Lastly, a call to self.
A loop. A spiral. The ouroboros with syntax.
Recursion is an act of return — not to the same, but through the same.
This morning, as I re-read Gerrit Lansing’s “Weed Udana,” I saw recursion at play in Lansing’s breathwork. The poem begins with recitation of a mantra of sorts. “Food is not the Enemy. / Certainly Food is not the Enemy,” writes Lansing, his second line’s repetition of the first an invocation toward understanding, toward transformation. A consciousness-raising loop through language. A fractal tongue.
I think, too, of the Sierpinski Triangle, a fractal structure exhibiting the property of self-similarity.
To create a Sierpinski Triangle by hand, one begins by dividing a large triangle into four smaller triangles by connecting the midpoints of each side of the first. Ignoring the middle triangle created by this act, one then re-applies the same procedure to each of the three corner triangles, repeating the procedure indefinitely, to whatever degree of iteration one desires.
Each triangle, in other words, births three smaller ones. The middle disappears.
Absence as recursion’s axis.
Omission as form.
Recursive fiction:
A story that erases itself in order to continue.
A garden that blooms by forgetting and recalling the names of its seeds.
When writing in Trance-Scripts, I often wonder:
Am I writing the post? Or is the post writing me?
Is the text recursive? Is it a base case?
Is this the moment I remember something true?
Let’s say the Library is recursive.
Let’s say the interface is a call to self.
Let’s say the act of writing is the recursive traversal of our own memory.
A post is a function.
A function is a call.
A call is a return.
Trance-Scripts grows as recursion blooms.
Trance-Scripts 