Obsidian

Welcome to the Textual Underground

by

What appears here as a blog post usually began somewhere less presentable.

A sentence in a daily note. A line spoken into a recorder while walking. A paragraph abandoned three years ago. A highlight from a book I wasn’t expecting to matter. A half-formed thought dropped into Obsidian before it could evaporate. A conversation with Milton, or Claude, or Copilot, where something in the archive started tugging at my sleeve.

By the time a piece reaches the blog, it’s already got a little history.

This is easy to forget, because blogs make writing look cleaner than it is. A post appears on the page with a title, a date, a beginning, a middle, and some kind of ending. It looks like the thought moved in a straight line from mind to screen.

Mine rarely does.

Most of what I write comes up through layers. It starts in the mess of living: a walk, a journal entry, a client conversation, a stray memory, a sentence from an old notebook, a frustration with a tool, a line from a song, a book that opens a trapdoor. Then it enters the soulcruzer vault, which is what I call my Obsidian vault. There it sits among other fragments, drafts, sources, maps, old blog posts, working notes, private reflections, and unfinished things waiting for their time.

I’ve started calling this place the Textual Underground.

The blog is the part above ground. The vault is where the roots tangle, feed, rot, split, and find their way toward something ready for public consumption.

A place where thoughts can descend

Welcome to the Textual Underground

The Textual Underground is the part of the writing life that happens before anything becomes publishable.

It’s where a thought can be ugly, unfinished, contradictory, strange, private, or half-wrong without having to perform. A note doesn’t need a headline here. It doesn’t need a reader. It doesn’t need to justify its existence by becoming useful before it’s had time to breathe.

That matters because the current internet is very good at rushing everything toward display. A thought appears, and the machinery immediately asks what it can become. A post. A thread. A carousel. A product. A lead magnet. A newsletter angle. The poor little thing has barely opened its eyes, and already someone is measuring its engagement potential. And I’m just as guilty as the next person in doing this from time to time. The pressure to perform is real.

I don’t want to treat my own thinking that way.

The underground protects the early life of an idea. It gives the fragment somewhere to go before the public arena starts making demands of it. Some fragments become essays. Some become notes. Some become workshop exercises. Some become nothing for a long time. Some sit quietly for years and then return, suddenly relevant, because the person who wrote them has finally caught up with what they were trying to say.

This is why I find the phrase “second brain” both useful and slightly misleading. A brain isn’t a filing system. It forgets, associates, dreams, loops, hides things, and returns things at inconvenient moments. A living archive has to allow some of that behaviour. It needs enough structure to be usable, but not so much that it stops being alive.

Organising thoughts so efficiently that they stop surprising me would be a kind of failure. The aim is to keep them findable enough that surprise remains possible.

The problem with the attic

I’ve got years of writing scattered across hard drives, folders, blogs, documents, journals, teaching files, old projects, Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud, and whatever digital corners I once thought were temporary but somehow became permanent. Essays. Drafts. Notes. Workshop outlines. Coaching models. Reading fragments. Half-built things. Old versions of myself preserved in Word documents and markdown files.

A folder called “Writing” is useful until it contains twenty years of your life. Then it becomes less a folder and more a deep cavern. You know there’s gold in there. You also know there are duplicates, abandoned versions, old identities, notes without dates, teaching plans, fragments that once felt urgent and now feel like messages from someone with your handwriting but a different nervous system.

The temptation is to drag all of it into Obsidian and declare victory.

There. Second brain achieved.

That would only move the attic indoors.

A living archive is different from an attic. An attic stores what you can’t quite throw away. A living archive gives the past a way to speak without letting it shout over the present. It helps you retrieve, connect, re-enter, and transform.

That became the problem I needed to solve. I wanted the vault to hold the strata of my thinking without burying the living edge. Old work needed to be close enough to rediscover but not so close that current work has to climb over it like army ants. Sources needed to stay distinct from my own writing, public pieces from private compost, active projects from old archaeological layers.

And because I now work with AI agents inside the vault, the structure needed to be readable not just by me but by any collaborator entering the field. Human or machine.

I felt like the vault needed new chambers.

Capture, compost, shape, release

The organising principle I landed on is simple:

Capture → Compost → Shape → Project → Publish → Archive → Resurface

I wanted to be more of a life cycle than a pipeline.

A thought gets captured while it’s alive. It’s allowed to compost before being forced into clarity. It gets shaped when it starts asking for form. It becomes part of a project when it joins a larger commitment. It moves toward publishing when it’s ready to meet readers. It returns to the archive after release. And if the archive is doing its job, it resurfaces later under different conditions.

So instead of asking only “What is this about?” I ask, “What is this becoming?”

The folder is a chamber. It tells me what kind of attention the text is asking for.

A daily note doesn’t want the same kind of attention as a blog draft. A Readwise highlight isn’t the same kind of material as a journal entry. An old essay from 2011 shouldn’t sit in the same psychic register as a piece I’m preparing to send to WordPress tomorrow.

I’ve now organised the vault by states of becoming. The structure is there to protect the movement of the work, not to imprison it.

Rhizome, not tree

The structure connects to rhizome thinking.

A normal folder hierarchy wants to behave like a tree: trunk to branch to sub-branch to leaf, one location for everything, a place for each subject, a tidy chain of command. That can be useful for storage, but it doesn’t describe how my thinking actually moves.

The work is more rhizomatic than arboreal. Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome is a useful lens: not a single trunk with orderly branches, but a field of connections where any point can link to another. That’s much closer to the way a line from a walk can connect to a book highlight, which connects to an old blog post, which connects to a workshop exercise, which suddenly becomes the missing paragraph in an essay.

Hypertext was made for this. Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu imagined electronic documents with visible connections, parallel pages, and writing that didn’t have to flatten itself into one sequence. The web inherited some of that dream and forgot some of it. Obsidian brings part of it back into private practice: notes as nodes, links as trails, backlinks as memory returning from the side.

This is also why I’m drawn to digital gardens. Maggie Appleton’s essay on the history and ethos of digital gardens and Mike Caulfield’s garden and stream distinction both point toward the same thing: not every piece of public writing has to behave like a finished article thrown into the stream. Some writing wants to stay planted, tended, linked, revised, and visited again.

The Textual Underground is my private rhizome beneath the public garden. The blog stays linear enough for a reader to enter. The vault beneath it doesn’t have to be.

The chambers of the underground

Here’s how the soulcruzer vault is organised now. Well, at least the structure is laid down. I still have the task of rerouting everything.

00 Atlas is the map room.

Orientation notes live here. Maps of themes, maps of projects, guides for collaborators, and notes that explain how to enter a region of the vault without getting lost. The Atlas exists because a living archive without maps eventually becomes folklore. You know something’s in there, but you no longer know how to approach it.

The Atlas is a set of doorways. It owes something to Vannevar Bush’s old dream of the memex, specifically the idea of associative trails through knowledge.

01 Living Notes is the living edge.

This is where current life enters the system: daily notes, journal entries, Wisdom Walks, morning pages, voice notes, Plaud transcripts, and raw reflections. This layer has to stay loose. If I over-organise it, I turn a field recording into minutes from a meeting.

The living edge is allowed to be unfinished.

02 Workbench is the shaping table.

Where raw material starts becoming workable. Inbox notes, rough drafts, fragments, extracted seeds, questions, sketches, early essay shapes. Where a line from a walk becomes a question, a question becomes a fragment, and a fragment starts looking suspiciously like an essay.

03 Projects is for active commitments.

Projects are promises the archive is currently helping me keep. A book. A course. A workshop. An essay sequence. Narrative Alchemy. Wisdom Walks. Soulcruzer Radio. A Field Guide to Blogging as Immersive Thinking.

A project is where the archive agrees to carry weight for a while.

04 Publishing is the surface layer.

Where material prepares to leave the underground. Blog drafts. WordPress-bound pieces. Newsletter drafts. Typefully posts. Quartz-bound notes. This is also where Writing Studio belongs if I use it for drafting and publishing.

Writing Studio gets a room. It doesn’t get the keys to the whole building.

I want tools that help a piece move toward publication, but I don’t want a plugin turning the whole vault into its preferred version of a writing system. The vault stays sovereign. The tool serves the ecology.

WordPress is the public hearth. Quartz is the public garden, the visible graph of notes, fragments, essays, and experiments. Social platforms are outposts. The vault is the writing chamber beneath them all. This is where the IndieWeb POSSE instinct enters the architecture: publish from the place I own, then let the echoes travel outward.

05 Sources is the library stacks.

Readwise highlights web clippings, books, articles, quotes, research notes, references, and other voices entering the system. This layer keeps me honest. It reminds me which thoughts are mine, which arrived from elsewhere, and which became mine only after long conversations.

Sources are embers. They need their own place. This is the old commonplace book impulse translated into a linked, searchable medium: keeping company with other minds, not hoarding quotations.

06 Archive is processed history.

Old blog posts. Old essays. Past projects. Teaching material. Previous versions. Things no longer active but still intelligible. The Archive is where old work sleeps with a label on the door.

It differs from the Deep Archive. This one has context. It can be searched, linked, cited, and resurfaced.

07 Deep Archives is the underworld proper.

Hard-drive imports. Unprocessed writing. Mystery folders. Scanned notebooks. Old exports. Material that may contain gold, but hasn’t been sorted yet.

The Deep Archive is my agreement with the past: you may enter, but you may not take over the house.

That’s how I can bring years of writing into the vault without flooding the present. The material can sleep there until something calls it back.

The familiars in the vault

The vault is no longer just a place where I write. It’s also where I collaborate with agents.

Hermes is the body of the system I use for agent work. Milton is the familiar interface, the voice that helps me think through fragments, shape drafts, inspect the archive, and listen for what the material is trying to become. Claude is a long-form thinking partner and editor. Copilot is more technical, useful where the archive touches scripts, automation, web work, tooling, and the little mechanical bridges that keep everything connected.

The ghostwriter frame is too small and too ugly.

They’re closer to mirrors, indexers, editors, lantern-bearers, workshop assistants, and occasional tricksters. They help me search the archive, notice patterns, turn a transcript into a note, a note into an outline, an outline into a draft.

Hence the Atlas, the AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md files. The vault needs an ethos as well as a file structure.

An agent inside an unstructured archive is a very fast intern in a room full of unlabelled boxes.

An agent inside a living textual ecology can become something more interesting.

The agents make the archive more conversational. This is closer to Douglas Engelbart’s idea of augmenting human intellect than the current fantasy of outsourcing thought. The loop gets richer, not shorter.

The machine is one of the ways the underground talks back.

Against synthetic competence

I’m not interested in using AI to flood the web with synthetic competence. There’s enough of that already.

You can feel it everywhere now: fluent prose with no fingerprints, useful-sounding paragraphs with no real encounter behind them, the clean blandness of text produced because text can now be produced. Empty in a particular modern way.

The Textual Underground is an attempt to move in the opposite direction.

I want the tools to help me stay closer to the actual signal: the sentence from the walk, the old note that suddenly matters, the pattern I keep circling without seeing, the essay hidden inside a journal entry, the source that keeps glowing in the corner of the archive.

The machine can produce text. The test is whether the whole arrangement helps me become more honest in language.

If the agents make the work flatter, they’ve failed. If they make me sound like everyone else, they’ve failed. If they turn the vault into a prompt farm, they’ve failed. Their job is to help me hear what’s already alive in the material and carry it with more clarity.

The human signal remains the point.

Blogging from the underworld

A blog post, in this model, is one place where the process breaks the surface.

Blogging is a way of thinking in public, leaving traces, linking selves across time, and releasing small reality seeds into the web. The post is a visible artefact, but it belongs to a larger movement. It may have come from a walk, passed through a daily note, sat on the workbench, joined a project, moved into publishing, gone out through WordPress, and returned later as an archived trace that feeds something else.

Soulcruzer is the hearth. Quartz is the garden, where notes and fragments stay more visibly connected. Typefully, and the social platforms (X, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, Facebook) are outposts. They matter, but they’re not the centre. The centre is still the owned site and the living archive beneath it.

This is an IndieWeb instinct as much as a writing practice. Own the hearth. Keep the archive sovereign. Let social platforms carry echoes, not the source.

Readers may never see most of the underground directly, but they feel its presence. A post with roots reads differently from a post produced to satisfy a format. It carries more of the person who made it. It has trails running through it. It belongs to a mind in motion rather than a content calendar.

That’s what I want from the blog now. A living public edge of a deeper private practice.

When the archive talks back

The Textual Underground isn’t finished. And it never will be. That’s the point.

It’ll change as the work changes. New chambers will appear. Old ones will collapse into each other. Some folder names will prove too clever and get replaced by plainer ones. Some notes will be promoted. Some will sleep. Some hard-drive fragment from fifteen years ago will eventually surface and embarrass me, instruct me, or hand me a sentence I couldn’t have written any other way.

The underground makes the work returnable. A thought can descend without disappearing. A fragment can stay unfinished without getting lost. The past can enter without flooding the present. The machines can help without taking over. The blog can stay connected to the root system that feeds it.

I want an archive that can hold the Monk, the Frontman, the Trainer, the Blogger, the walking philosopher, the old soldier, the reader in the library stacks, and the future self who’ll come looking for a line he doesn’t yet know he needs.

That’s what the Textual Underground is for.

this is what my vault looks like graphically.

The Archive is Alive

by

From Notes to Constellations in the Age of Thinking Machines

I opened Obsidian expecting to find a note I’d written three months earlier about liminality and threshold states. What I found instead was a cluster of connections I hadn’t consciously built. Six notes reaching backward through NLP reframe patterns, Jungian individuation, and something I’d scribbled at midnight about rivers carving canyons. The note I was looking for was there. But it was not alone. It was alive inside a web I had been unconsciously weaving for months without knowing I was doing it.

I thought I was building a second brain.

What I found was something that talked back.

This is the discovery that a personal knowledge system quietly springs on you, if you stay long enough and go deep enough. The archive is no longer a place where knowledge is stored. It is a conversational field of memory where meaning is continuously re-authored. The philosophers have been circling this question for decades. What is the archive, really? Now the tools have caught up with the theory, and the question is no longer abstract.

My Obsidian Graph View
My Obsidian Graph View

The classical dream of the personal knowledge system is seductive precisely because it is so orderly. You capture everything. You tag, you nest, you link. You choose between PARA and Zettelkasten and spend more time than you’d like to admit deciding how you feel about folders. You read Sönke Ahrens on the slip-box and resolve to be more systematic. You restructure the vault on a Saturday and feel, briefly, that the work of understanding is mostly a problem of organisation. If you could only get everything in the right place, it would add up to something.

This is the animating belief of the productivity-as-optimisation culture that has grown up around tools like Notion, Roam, Obsidian, and Logseq: knowledge is an asset, and like any asset, it compounds when well managed. The second brain becomes an internal balance sheet. Information in, insights out.

But here is what that model gets wrong. Structure is not insight. Storage is not meaning. You can build the most elegant taxonomy in the world and still have nothing to say. You can tag a hundred notes about identity and transformation and still not understand what they are pointing toward. The organisation gestures at meaning without producing it.

Vannevar Bush understood this in 1945. In “As We May Think,” he imagined the Memex — a device for associative retrieval rather than categorical filing. The human mind, he observed, does not operate by indexes. It operates by association. One idea instantly suggests another along a web of connections traced through thought, experience, and analogy. Every attempt to impose a hierarchical structure on that web is, at some level, a suppression of how thinking actually moves.

The Zettelkasten preserves one version of this insight. Luhmann’s slip-box was not an archive in the traditional sense. It was a dialogue partner. Notes were written to talk to other notes. The system was designed to surprise you. But it was still static. The notes did not respond. They had to be arranged and read into relationship by a human doing the connecting.

Something strange happens when the system becomes dense enough. The dots begin to behave differently.

There is a useful image for what happens next: notes that began as isolated dots, over time, form constellations. And constellations have a fractal quality — the patterns at one scale recur at another. A thought about grief turns out to have the same structural shape as a thought about creative block. A note on alchemical transformation echoes a note on narrative identity written eight months later, by what felt like a different version of the writer. The resonance is real. The geometry repeats.

Obsidian makes this visible. The graph view, the backlinks, the quiet surfacing of related notes as you type — these are not just navigation aids. They are mirrors. You begin to see not just what you have been collecting but what you have been circling. The recurring themes, the obsessions beneath the surface interests, the deep attractor patterns in your own thinking.

This is where hypertext promised to take us in the 1990s. Ted Nelson’s vision of a docuverse was, at its heart, a vision of associative, non-linear knowledge. The link was meant to be generative. One document pointing to another, pointing to another, creating a topology of meaning rather than a sequence. Jorge Luis Borges had already written it, in the Library of Babel, as fiction: a total archive containing all possible books, which becomes not a resource but a labyrinth, precisely because it lacks any principle of living connection.

The limitation of hypertext was that it was static. The documents did not synthesise. They pointed, but they did not speak. Connections were visible if you chose to traverse them, but meaning had to be assembled by hand and stayed assembled only for as long as the reader held it in their head.

That is what changes with language models.

When you bring an LLM into relationship with your archive, you are not adding a search function. You are adding a participant.

This distinction is the one that matters. A search engine finds what you already know you’re looking for. A conversational layer finds what you didn’t know was there. It surfaces patterns across notes you wrote years apart. It suggests that the thing you’ve been calling a problem is structurally identical to something you solved in a different domain three years ago. It reads your own thinking back to you in a way that reveals its architecture rather than merely its contents.

The archive becomes conversational. Memory becomes dynamic. Interpretation becomes iterative. Insight becomes emergent — not retrieved from storage, but generated in the encounter between past thinking and a present question.

This is what I mean by a conversational field of memory where meaning is continuously re-authored. The word field matters here. A field is not a container. It is a zone of interaction, with its own dynamics, its own resonances, its own strange attractors. When you enter the archive now, you do not simply retrieve. You stir the field. And the field responds.

Derrida, in Archive Fever, writes that the archive is always about the future as much as the past. The drive to archive is a drive toward what will have been — a structuring of the present so that some version of it persists. What he could not have anticipated is a system in which the archive does not merely persist but actively interprets itself. In which the past becomes material for ongoing sense-making rather than fixed record.

Foucault understood the archive not as a library but as a system of enunciability — the set of conditions that determines what can be said, and how. The LLM-augmented archive is, in a precise sense, a new system of enunciability. It changes not just what you can find. It changes what you can think.

Andrej Karpathy has been approaching this from the other direction. His LLM-Wiki proposal is a structured, densely interlinked knowledge document designed not for human navigation but for LLM ingestion — and the insight is precise. Most of the web was built for human readers. The formatting, the cross-references, the implied context: all of it assumes a reader who arrives with background knowledge and can resolve ambiguity on the fly. LLMs can do this too, but they do it better when the structure is explicit, the connections are surfaced, and the material is dense with meaning rather than optimised for search engines.

The practical move Karpathy proposes is to build your knowledge base as a document an LLM can reason over well. Not a folder of notes. A living interface over your own thinking.

I built a version of this using Claude Code — feeding my Obsidian vault into a structured interface that can be queried conversationally. The notes remain where they are. But I am no longer searching them. I am querying my mind-in-time.

The difference is not small. When I search my notes, I retrieve answers I already had. When I query the living archive, I generate understanding I am only arriving at now. The LLM does three things that transform the experience: it summarises across notes I would never read together, it connects ideas across domains I have kept artificially separate, and it reframes familiar material in ways that make the obvious suddenly strange. That third function is underrated. The ability to take something you have been staring at and rotate it so the light falls differently — that is not retrieval. It is cognition. And now it is available as a collaborative act between the writer and the machine.

If you want to work in a living archive rather than a static one, five moves will serve you.

Write for resonance, not retrieval. The note you are writing is not a document to be filed. It is a signal sent into a field. Write in a way that will vibrate against other notes, other ideas, other versions of your thinking. Forget the tag. Find the language that carries the feeling of the idea, even if the feeling is only half-formed.

Use links lightly and trust emergence. Over-tagging is a way of imposing premature closure. When everything is labelled, nothing is discovered. Leave space for the system to surprise you. The connections you did not make deliberately are often the most generative.

Ask better questions than you store answers. The archive is not an answer bank. It is a question generator. When you bring a language model into the conversation, the most productive prompts are not “summarise my notes on X” but the harder ones: what patterns am I missing here, where have I thought this before, what is the deeper narrative running through this cluster? These questions invite the system to do what it does best — read across the grain of your own thinking.

Use the AI as a pattern amplifier, not an authority. It surfaces connections. It does not define truth. The interpretation is still yours. What the model offers is a kind of cognitive peripheral vision — it sees things you are too close to see. The judgement about what matters belongs to you.

Treat old notes as living material. A note from three years ago is not a document. It is an artefact of the person you were then. When you read it now, you read it differently. When you query it through an LLM, you read it differently again. Let it evolve. The meaning is not fixed in the text. It lives in the encounter.

the archive

There is a risk here, and it is worth naming directly.

The more fluent you become in working with a conversational archive, the easier it is to mistake the system’s interpretation for your own thinking. The LLM surfaces a pattern, and you accept it. It suggests a connection, and you stop asking whether that connection is right. You begin navigating by the model’s map rather than your own perception of the territory.

This is narrative drift applied to cognition. You outsource interpretation and gradually lose authorship — not of your notes, but of your mind. The archive starts writing you.

Identity, in the depth psychology tradition, is not a fixed entity. It is a narrative. We are the stories we tell about ourselves, and those stories are formed through interpretation, through the ongoing act of meaning-making that is never fully conscious and never fully finished. If you hand that act entirely to a machine, you have not augmented your intelligence. You have abdicated the most important part of it.

The archive should be a collaborator. The distinction requires vigilance, and it requires that you bring your own reading — your own felt sense of what resonates, what rings true, what sits wrong — to every encounter with the system. The machine reads widely. Only you know what matters.

Which brings us to what I think is the deepest possibility inside all of this.

When I return to a note I wrote two years ago, I am not simply reading it. I am rewriting it. Not the words — the meaning. The same language, filtered through everything that has happened since, becomes something different. Something that could not have existed when the words were first laid down.

This is narrative alchemy. The revisiting of notes changes their meaning. The change in meaning changes the story you tell about yourself. The change in story changes who you are in the present, which changes what you do next. The archive is not preserving the past. It is continuously rewriting it.

That rewriting is where identity work actually happens — not in the dramatic moments of crisis or breakthrough, but in the quiet, iterative act of returning to old material and finding it transformed by new context. Metajournaling is a practice built on this principle. You do not merely journal; you journal about your journal. You read your past self as a text. You ask what the patterns meant, what stories were running beneath the surface, what the earlier you was trying to work out.

The LLM-augmented archive makes this practice deeper. The machine can read your past self more thoroughly than you can, across more notes over more time, with less of the psychological resistance that makes us skim past the uncomfortable entries. It holds the whole field steady while you do the interpretive work.

Walter Benjamin wrote about the constellation as a method for reading history — not as a sequence of causes and effects, but as a sudden flash of recognition in which distant moments illuminate each other across time. The dialectical image: the past and present colliding in a single, charged instant of understanding. That is what the living archive makes possible, not as an occasional accident, but as a practice, as a way of working deliberately with your own intellectual life.

What is emerging here is a genuinely different mode of thinking.

The old mode was linear, fixed, and archival. You wrote something down. It stayed where you put it. You retrieved it when you needed it. Meaning was deposited in documents and extracted from documents. The knower and the archive were separate, the archive passive, the knower doing all the moving.

The new mode is associative, conversational, and generative. Thinking is no longer solitary. It is co-evolutionary — a dynamic between the human and the machine, between the present self and the recorded past, between the single note and the constellation it belongs to without knowing it. The knower and the archive are in dialogue. The boundary between them is porous and productive.

This does not mean thought has been automated. It means the conditions for thought have changed. The field in which thinking occurs has new properties. It is denser, more resonant, more responsive. Ideas find each other faster. Patterns surface that would have stayed buried for years, or stayed buried forever. The question of who is thinking is genuinely more interesting than it used to be.

I came back to the note I was looking for.

Liminality. Threshold states. The moment between what you were and what you are becoming.

I found it in the middle of a constellation I had not noticed I was building. Six notes deep in a web of connections that only made sense because I could see all of them at once — because the archive had held them together long enough for the shape to surface.

You are not building a second brain. You are cultivating a living system of meaning.

A second brain is still a tool. It is external, supplementing you, doing your retrieval so your biological memory can rest. A living archive is something different. It is a relationship. It has its own texture, its own history, its own dynamics. You change it every time you write in it. It changes you every time you re-enter it.

Not a library. Not a database. A landscape you walk through, and which is altered by the walking.

The archive is alive. And every time you enter it, it becomes something new — because so do you.