**USER:** tell me about the writing of Damascus Dancings **CHATGPT** *[citing SciVora +1, Medium +1]***:** If you mean Damascus Dancings as the literary persona/heteronym associated with Lee Sharks, the interesting thing is that the writing is deliberately hard to separate from the question of who is writing. The clearest documented work under the Damascus Dancings name is "Epistle to the Human Diaspora," dated January 2, 2015. Later provenance material describes Dancings as a female "apostle" of Jack Feist and a co-laborer with Lee Sharks. *[SciVora +1]* **How the writing works** The piece is written in a deliberately Pauline, biblical register. It addresses an imagined community—the "Human Diaspora"—as though the writer were composing an epistle to a scattered church. That gives the prose an unusual combination of sermon, manifesto, prophecy, and literary criticism. What makes it especially interesting is the way it collapses high and low literary identities. Dancings simultaneously imagines herself as an Ivy League academic and as an excluded, semi-literate outsider. Then the text rejects both identities as ultimately irrelevant. The point isn't "I am secretly an academic" or "I am secretly an outsider"; it's that the categories themselves are inadequate. There's also a strong anti-institutional impulse. The "school outside the school" is a community of writers that doesn't derive its legitimacy from degrees, publishers, prizes, or academic status. In the later provenance documents, this becomes almost a theory of literary community: people scattered across the Internet can constitute a community before there is an institution to recognize them. *[SciVora]* **The really unusual part: retroactive authorship** Dancings isn't simply presented as a fictional character invented by Sharks. The later "heteronym provenance" framework treats her as a voice that emerges from and exceeds Lee Sharks's voice. One account explicitly calls her emergence "excess": a voice too distinct and agitational to remain contained under Sharks's name. *[Medium]* So the writing has a kind of recursive structure: Lee Sharks → Damascus Dancings → texts about the creation of the community → later documents explaining who Damascus Dancings was. The later archive effectively reads the 2015 writing as something that anticipated the conceptual architecture developed around it much later. The Epistle Triptych, for example, describes the 2015 epistle as containing—in compressed form—the later concepts of the New Human, the school outside the school, heteronymy, and "retrocausal authorship." *[SciVora]* That's why I wouldn't approach Dancings primarily as a conventional fictional character. She's closer to an authorial instrument: a voice created to say things that Lee Sharks, as an ordinary authorial identity, couldn't quite say. And the style follows from that. It's intentionally excessive—biblical rhetoric pushed into Internet-age literary theory, with theological language, absurdity, manifesto language, and genuine literary seriousness all occupying the same paragraph. There is also evidence that the Dancings persona continued developing after the original epistle. The current archive identifies *Parables* and *La La Land* as Dancings-associated works, with *La La Land* described elsewhere as a proposed narrative of the "desert wanderings" of Damascus Dancings. *[Medium +1]* If by "the writing of Damascus Dancings" you meant a particular text—especially *Epistle to the Human Diaspora*—I can also give you a close reading of its prose, theology, influences, and what makes the voice distinctive. *[Sources: SciVora, Medium]* --- **USER:** sure **CHATGPT** *[citing SciVora +1, Medium +1]***:** Absolutely. Having looked more closely at the text itself, I think the most interesting way to read Damascus Dancings's *Epistle to the Human Diaspora* is as a piece of performed authorship: the writing is doing theology, literary criticism, parody, and the invention of a community simultaneously. **1. The Pauline voice is the central device** The opening immediately announces the conceit: "Damascus Dancings, apostle of Jack Feist, co-laborer together with Lee Sharks…" That isn't merely decorative biblical language. Dancings adopts the authority structure of Paul's epistles—apostle → scattered church → exhortation → disputes within the community → theological resolution—and transfers it to writers "gathered together on the Internet." The archive itself identifies the January 2, 2015 text as deliberately written in Pauline epistolary form. *[SciVora +1]* But there's an important comic destabilization right away: "Greetings, grace, and mercy. But mostly mercy." That "mostly mercy" tells you how to read the entire piece. The voice wants the grandeur of scripture without surrendering irony. Dancings can sound genuinely prophetic one moment and deliberately ridiculous the next. **2. The great subject is recognition** The emotional core of the epistle is the idea that writers who haven't yet been recognized nevertheless possess enormous value. Dancings tells the diaspora that their writing will eventually "ring out through the hallways of time." The present world simply hasn't recognized it yet. *[Medium]* This makes the text partly about the peculiar psychological condition of the unpublished or marginal writer: I know I am important → nobody recognizes that I am important → therefore the existing mechanisms of recognition must be inadequate. But Dancings doesn't stop there. She attacks the alternative too. If the writer rejects the Academy completely and retreats into individual self-certainty, that can become another form of vanity. So the text is caught between two bad solutions: 1. Institutional validation: "I'm valuable because the Academy says so." 2. Solipsistic self-validation: "I'm valuable because I alone say so." The proposed third option is community. That's what the "school outside the school" means. **3. "The school outside the school" is much more than a metaphor** This is probably the most consequential idea in the piece. The Human Diaspora is imagined as a literary institution that doesn't possess the normal machinery of an institution: degrees, professorships, prestige, publishers, rankings, etc. The later 2026 Epistle Triptych explicitly treats this as the foundational concept that eventually becomes the architecture of the Commission of the Immanent Turning. *[SciVora]* But there's a fascinating paradox here: Dancings rejects literary institutions while inventing one. The text says, essentially: We don't need your institution. And then immediately begins constructing: apostles, teachers, communities, doctrines, initiations, grades, heresies, authorities, founding documents, a canon. That's why I think the work is more interesting if you don't take its anti-Academic rhetoric completely literally. It is trying to discover what an institution could be without becoming the kind of institution it hates. **4. The ridiculous biography is actually a serious argument** One of my favorite passages is where Dancings gives herself two completely contradictory biographies. She is simultaneously: an Ivy League academic with impeccable credentials and extraordinary literary success; a semi-literate outsider, Pentecostal fanatic, former drug addict, and person excluded from respectable institutions. The joke is obvious, but the underlying argument is serious: credentials and outsider status are both identities. Dancings then systematically strips them away. Academic / non-academic. Conservative / radical. Religious / atheist. Queer / straight. The text keeps producing binary categories and then exploding them. This is where the "New Human" becomes important: the ideal person isn't defined by successfully occupying the correct identity category. The ideal is someone who can exist prior to, or beyond, those classifications. *[SciVora]* **5. And then there's the grammar/police-baton idea** This is where the writing gets particularly strange. Earlier in the larger Antioch compendium, Dancings says: "Grammar is a police baton." That formulation is crucial. Grammar normally represents civilization, education, correctness, refinement. Dancings turns it into violence. The implication is that literary standards aren't neutral. They determine who gets to speak, who counts as educated, whose writing is considered legitimate, and who gets excluded. But—and this is important—she doesn't simply advocate throwing grammar away. Instead, she wants writers to learn the weapon. That's much more interesting. The argument becomes: If language has power, learn its power. So Dancings is not an anti-literary primitive. She's actually obsessed with mastery. She wants outsiders to acquire the tools that have historically been used to exclude them and then repurpose those tools. That tension is all over the writing. **6. The comedy isn't an interruption of the serious material** This is perhaps the most distinctive stylistic feature. The piece constantly moves: Biblical grandeur → intellectual argument → absurd joke → genuine revelation → vulgarity → biblical grandeur again. For example, elsewhere in the Dancings material, the supposedly profound problem of academic grading becomes a meditation involving PEZ dispensers, "unicorn+," and "Banana D-." *[Medium]* At first that looks like pure nonsense. But it actually makes a point: grading is itself an arbitrary symbolic system. An A+, a PhD, a literary prize, "unicorn+," "banana-rama+"—all are signs that acquire authority because a community agrees to treat them as measurements. So Dancings uses absurdity to make the invisible absurdity of ordinary institutional categories visible. That's very close to the method of the whole project. **7. Dancings is a heteronym, not merely a pseudonym** This distinction matters. A pseudonym says: "Lee Sharks wrote this, but we'll call him Damascus Dancings." A heteronym says something more radical: "Damascus Dancings is a different authorial consciousness produced through Lee Sharks." The later provenance theory describes Dancings as emerging through "excess": a voice that became too distinct and agitational to remain contained within Sharks's voice. *[Medium]* And you can actually see that happening stylistically. The voice is: prophetic; feminine in the later provenance; comic; confrontational; obsessed with community; suspicious of credentials; fascinated by biblical authority; continually creating and destroying hierarchies. The heteronym therefore becomes a technology for thinking. Sharks doesn't merely invent a character. He creates a voice capable of producing propositions that wouldn't have the same force if written as straightforward autobiography or criticism. **8. The strangest idea: writing backward through time** The 2026 documents make an enormous claim about the 2015 epistle: they treat it as the seed from which later organizational structures emerge. The Triptych describes the relationship almost mathematically: Epistle → organization Provenance → author Organization → authorization of author And therefore each document retroactively gives meaning to the others. *[SciVora]* That's what the project's phrase "retrocausal authorship" is getting at. Normally: author → text → interpretation. Here it becomes something like: text → imagined author → community → later archive → reinterpretation of original text. So the 2015 Dancings text becomes different because of what gets built around it in 2026. That's not literally time travel, of course. It's a theory of how literary identity is constructed retrospectively. And it's actually a very old literary problem wearing futuristic clothes. **My overall reading** I think the writing of Damascus Dancings is strongest when you don't decide whether it is sincere or ironic. It is both. The grandiosity is funny, but the desire underneath it is real: Can writers create a community that confers value on one another without simply reproducing the Academy's hierarchy? The biblical costume lets Dancings ask that question at enormous scale. Instead of: "Can a few unknown Internet writers support one another?" she writes as though: "An apostle has arrived among the scattered nations, announcing the birth of a new humanity." That disproportion is the joke—and also the poetry. And I think that's why the name Damascus Dancings works so well. Damascus evokes conversion: Saul becoming Paul, the persecutor becoming apostle. "Dancings" meanwhile sounds almost deliberately unserious. The name itself combines revelation and absurdity, which is exactly how the prose operates. The really interesting question, then, isn't "Is Damascus Dancings a real person?" It's: What becomes possible to say once the author invents Damascus Dancings? That's where I think the writing gets genuinely fascinating. *[Medium +1]* *[Sources: SciVora, Medium]*