A few weeks ago, I sent the pamphlet to the publishers. At that moment, I genuinely believed the work was finished. I didn’t feel it was rushed or incomplete; the structure seemed clear, and the argument had settled into its place. Only afterwards, when I began to read the text again, did something unexpected happen. The theory revealed a flaw — not in the writing, but in the structure itself.
The issue appeared in the chapter placed around the millennium of 1000 BCE, the moment I had called the “rising action” of history. I had positioned there what I described as the birth of the narrative — the formation of the Torah, the emergence of Hebrew, the consolidation of identity. But as soon as I looked at the text again, it became obvious that none of these can be located in a single point in time. They are long, layered processes, unfolding over centuries. And a process cannot serve as the dramatic hinge of a rising action. A rising action needs an event. And there is an event.
The construction of Solomon’s Temple (957 bce.) — the embodiment of the Covenant in stone and space — belongs precisely to that millennium. It is a moment, not a process. A symbol, not a gradual emergence. A visible form that gathers meaning into itself and alters the course of a people’s self-understanding.
The Temple is not the birth of the narrative. It is the manifestation of the Covenant. And it is the Covenant — made visible in the Temple — that gives the rising action its force.
Once this became clear, the old structure dissolved instantly. A new structure appeared with focused clarity — not because I reasoned my way into it, but because the theory refused to accept anything else. It moved, and I had to move with it.
This is what I mean when I say the theory is self-correcting.
It wasn’t the first time this happened. The same shift occurred in 2012, when I tried to complete my graduate thesis. I pushed the material into textual form until it became undeniable that the form was wrong. What I was studying was movement — and text freezes movement into marks. At that point, the research slipped out of the frame of the thesis and continued as film. I didn’t understand it then. I do now. A cave painting preserves an image. Text preserves a moment. But film preserves change.
And the story I am following is made of change. This is the part that touches the personal level most directly.
To live inside a story that moves faster than I can name it creates a quiet tension: the comfort that comes when the structure becomes visible, and the loss of control that comes when the structure begins to lead. There is a strange moment when one realises that the story one is trying to write is already moving ahead of its writer. The theory begins to rearrange itself. The narrative starts to follow its own logic. I find myself tracing a line that I did not draw.
It gives clarity — the sense that something aligns, that language falls into place, that the world has a hidden order. But that same clarity takes control away. The movement does not wait for my decisions. It exposes the illusion that I am shaping the work. In reality, I am following it.
This tension — between understanding and the loss of control — is not a problem in the project. It is the project. It is the experience the theory is trying to describe: the movement of life inside the structure of time. To try to capture that movement in a fixed, textual form is to stop the very thing I am attempting to describe.
And perhaps this is why I can still write here, even while saying that the story cannot be written. A blog entry is not a theory. It does not try to fix the movement into a final form. It is only a marker — a trace left at the edge of the process, a way of noting where the story passed through me today.
A theory seeks closure. A blog post allows incompleteness. It records the motion without trying to contain it. The writing here does not stop the story; it lets the story leave a footprint as it continues on.
laurentiuspaulus 