Legacy

1. Overview [edit]

Gangwar's legacy, when it arrives, will be the legacy of someone who did not wait for permission. He built a wiki about himself before anyone else would have. He coined words for experiences that did not have them. He wrote a thesis about a fictional society and published the raw draft with the margin notes intact — which is either scholarly transparency or the most honest thing a writer has done with his process in recent memory. Possibly both.

The body of work is small by conventional standards and large by the standard of saying something true with precision. It is the kind of work that does not accumulate a large audience during its author's lifetime and then becomes quietly indispensable afterward — or it is the kind that remains exactly as read as it is now, which would be consistent with his philosophical position on the indifference of the universe, and would not particularly bother him.[citation needed]

2. The Razors [edit]

The seven Razors will be remembered as the most teachable part of the work — the part that can be extracted from the compendium, written on a wall, and used immediately. Lucian's Razor in particular — "if a belief comforts more than it explains, it is likely a disguise for fear" — has the quality of a sentence that, once read, cannot be unread. People will use it in arguments without knowing where it came from, which is the highest form of philosophical influence and requires no attribution to function.

The Prometheus Razor will be quietly deployed against anyone who presents an inherited idea as an original one — which will happen constantly, and will always be applicable.

3. The Codex [edit]

Mouraxis — the belief held on the basis of common sense rather than examination — will prove the most durable coined term, because what it names is so common and so rarely identified. Every generation produces Mouraxes. Every generation believes its Mouraxes are simply true. Having a word for it is the first step toward seeing it. That is a modest but real contribution to how people think.

Konkara will be used as a thought experiment in ethics seminars, attributed to "an early 21st century thinker," which is accurate and will irritate no one more than people who already know whose it is. Blossom Blue will be used by people describing the very specific emptiness that arrives without warning inside an otherwise good life — which is, it turns out, an extremely common experience for which there was previously no name.

4. The Konkara thesis [edit]

The Paradox of Perfect Life will be read by people who are building utopias and need to understand why they keep failing, and by people at 2am who are in the middle of a very good period and cannot understand why they feel nothing. For the latter, the concept of Blossom Blue will arrive with the force of a diagnosis.

The raw draft — with its crossings-out and its marginal note reading "it won't end, it won't flourish, it stops" — will be studied separately from the polished version as evidence that good ideas arrive rough, and that the willingness to show the rough version is its own argument. Publishing both was the correct decision. It will eventually be recognized as such.

5. The poems [edit]

Of the eight poems in Volume I, Sticks and Stones will last longest — specifically the image of words sinking below the skin and waiting for "the hour you're most alone." This is the kind of line that gets underlined, photographed, sent to people at difficult moments. It will travel further than its author and arrive in inboxes of people who have never heard his name, which is exactly how it should work.

Sympathy for the Devil will be the most quoted in public contexts — the image of evil aging gracefully by learning better grammar is too precise to stay unshared. She's Gone will be the most reread in private ones. The Life Is Yours — "you choose the door / I carve the frame" — will be used by people who have just understood something about a relationship they were in, and will be ruinously accurate at the moment of use.

6. The compendium itself [edit]

The decision to build a Wikipedia-style compendium about himself — complete with a satirical talk page, a login page that goes nowhere, an edit page that saves nothing, a privacy policy that cheerfully admits there is nothing to protect, and a legacy page written in the future tense while the subject is still alive — will be remembered as either very funny or very ahead of its time, depending on when it is encountered.

It is an unusual document: simultaneously a serious archive of real work and a joke about the seriousness of archives. The joke does not undermine the work. The work earns the joke. The combination is harder to pull off than either alone, and it was pulled off on Neocities, hosted under /port/, which is either humble or exactly as confident as building something real and putting it where people have to look for it.

7. What remains [edit]

What remains, after the work is read and the words have done what words do, is the evidence of a person who felt things precisely, thought about them carefully, and found the existing vocabulary insufficient often enough to build a new one. That is not a small thing. Most people accept the words they are given. He did not.

He also wrote, in the middle of an essay about humanity's self-defeating progress: "we scroll endlessly, finding temporary peace, yet punishing our souls in the process." He wrote this and published it on the internet, where it is found by scrolling. He knew this. He published it anyway. That irony — precise, self-aware, and completely committed — is the most Jalaj Gangwar thing in the compendium, and probably the truest summary of what the legacy will be.

The rest is still being written. He is still here.