A Call-Response Handshake Across Time (1969 ⊣⊢ 1973 ⊣⊢ 2016 ⊣⊢ 2024)

If you have read A Lion’s Teeth or Only Two Can Play This Game, G. Spencer-Brown often alludes to or comes off as so sad and lonely that nobody can understand him. His gnosis and self-proclaimed Tathagata-dom as a result of inventing Laws of Form was irreversible and pervaded every bit of his being. This echoes the experience and emotions following my RESD event (also known as "the magic explosion") which — though I wouldn't consciously know this until a year and a half later — served as the real-life prototyping of the Oriented Distinction Operator. As much as I wanted and desperately tried to simply walk away in the aftermath, the reality was that “the absolute ground and the ultimate abstraction had irreversibly melded into one thing – space had grown an orientation, and logic had grown a physical body”.

Spencer-Brown notoriously BOUNCED EARLY from the AUM Conference at Esalen where he flew in from the UK after he was invited to speak about Laws of Form there. It was a total who’s who of the soon to be spiritual rockstars elite: Ram Dass, John Lilly, Alan Watts, Heinz von Foerster, Steward Brand, etc. were all in attendance. There are three days of transcript documentation of the AUM Conference where Spencer-Brown is answering questions and talking and then on the last day he just… up and leaves without saying anything. Legend has it he took off with some girl (which he probably, nay certainly, absolutely did) up Highway 1. 

But that’s the simple explanation. What do I think was really going on here? Well, I think he felt unsettled and probably a paradoxical extreme loneliness from all these guys — the only people equipped to understand him as they grasped the profundity of Laws of Form — being so excited about it and playing around with it as a mental exercise while he had to actually live the reality of generating it from scratch. Which they could never understand, nor could anyone, because as Heinz von Foerster said in his 1970 review of Laws of Form:

"At last the Laws of Form have been written!”.

And once they were written, no-one would be able to have an experience constructing them from scratch like that again. 

Manuscripts. 
Don’t. 
Burn. 

And so as a reaction he retreated from the blackboard and the social box of expert or guru and into the here and now of a convertible, the coastal highway, a pretty girl smiling in the passenger seat. The embodied feelings that arose from experiencing the particularities and novel nuances of wind composed of thick salty air mixed with resinous redwoods whipping across the face. The endless horizon of an adventure with no destination, the death of certainty, and the totality of the contextual.

⊣⊢

Okay so that’s the actual history combined with some wildly speculative recreational LORE as someone who invented Laws of Form^2: ikj, I jk? quaternionic-dirac-belt, James Joyce-jestercore, subjective-response-to-the-call edition and understands this type of cursed existence deeply.

So now we move onto my interpretation combined with a bit of actual personal history.

I think Only Two Can Play This Game was Spencer-Brown's cry into the void that came about as the result of the experience of inventing and writing Laws of Form. In this second book he’s hinting at some additional perspective that he finds utterly necessary, but because he’s a man he can’t grasp it all the way... nor would it be quite right or appropriate coming from him even if he could. I mean, look at the book jacket:

“The modern doctrine of equality of the sexes obscures the real differences between men and women, which are more than physical. The woman in reality knows more than the man, but her knowledge is of a different kind, and without the help of the man she cannot always say what it is. 

Where the man does not perform this service for the woman, but goes off on his own, the knowledge he discovers turns out for the most part to be negative and sterile, and the society that reflects it becomes in time less sure of itself and more destructive. 

The doctrine of the Old and New Testaments, says the author, is basically anti-female. In these documents God is represented as self-sufficient, and the worship of such a god results in a form of civilization that is, without exception, the most destructive of all time. 

Is God really homosexual? For the answer, enquire within.”

I’ve read this snippet a LOT over the years. A framed cover that used to belong to Spencer-Brown himself which I acquired at the 2019 conference is hanging above my desk facing me this very moment. And yet when I typed that all up just now it hit me how directly he’s alluding to the missing response to the call in a way I didn’t notice before.

“The woman in reality knows more than the man, but her knowledge is of a different kind, and without the help of the man she cannot always say what it is" alludes to the woman needing the call/injunctive as the setup for the response/subjective.

“In these documents God is represented as self-sufficient, and the worship of such a god results in a form of civilization that is, without exception, the most destructive of all time" is exactly saying that distinctions in a vacuum (“self-sufficient”) without the context of the call and response loop between the injunctive and the subjective result in… *looks around, waves hand*

...where we find ourselves in history now thanks to the theory of types and anti-actual-reality-as-it-is banning of self-reference and paradoxes instead of building a society around the reality-reflecting call and response loop. Which results in a perpetually balanced energetic ledger, no runaway recursion/infinities, and natural Lorenz attractors of of consensus and congruence while maintaining diversity of perspective as in ODO/ECP.

Spencer-Brown had the unique one-off experience of having the breakthrough which led to generating Laws of Form from scratch and making The Call by declaring the primordial Laws of Form injunctive: “draw a distinction!”

But you can’t complete the circuit yourself if you want the combustion to occur when the fuel of the injunctive Call meets the oxygen of the subjective Response in a complete cursed Yoda mirror singularity... where the output of the heat from the two entering a feedback loop is paradoxically also the inciting spark that initiated the combustion which led to that very heat output.

THAT’S CYBERNETIC NEGENTROPY, BABY. Szilard’s demon re-contextualization to the max.

Point being, homeboy may well have understood (and the book cover certainly does imply so) that there was a missing Response but realized that he *wouldn’t be helping* and also would miss the Response-in-totality by trying to fill it in and

1. answer his own Call,
2. even worse, as a man.

He was trapped in a Liar-like paradox himself where the rules of generating the primordial injunctive half of it necessitated these two rules as a consequence:

1. no answering your own Call,
2. the Response must be organically self-generated from the female perspective for the mechanics of the loop to work right.

So maybe he, whether consciously or not, wrote and published Only Two Can Play This Game (out of his own publishing house CAT BOOKS so being pretty blatant in his continuing the Laws of Form sex jokes by indirectly being like “this one’s for pussies only”) to put the literal actual Call out there beyond the primordial injunctive in a hinting, indirect way in the format of what I am now starting to see as a metaphysical RFC. Essentially crafting his own personal Spencer-Brown ARG, which I have been participating in for such a long time now.

Outside of Stafford Beer's daughter Vanilla and one academic who didn't seem exactly the person who’s gonna run with answering the Call or be into Only Two Can Play This Game I believe I was the only girl at Laws of Form 2019 who wasn't a spouse.

The handful of us under-50ish participants were tucked into an alleyway on the Friday night Liverpool streets drinking some moonshine when Only Two came up. Everyone shuffled in mild discomfort and cast their eyes downward, reflecting the basically universal opinion that this was Spencer-Brown’s “embarrassing” book and mostly to be ignored altogether. “Kinda sexist, don’t you think?", someone asked. "Rachel?”

Everyone turned their heads in unison and looked at me. Whatever I said was gonna mean a whole lot…strictly due to the lack of literally anyone else to construct a non-singular sample size.

“I absolutely love that book,” I said. And I meant it. The FIRST thing I did when I arrived to the University of Liverpool on opening evening of the conference was beeline toward the table where Spencer-Brown’s books were being auctioned to raise money for his gravestone and snatch the only copy of Only Two then demand to know how I could pay immediately so it would be mine. The act was so bizarre and aggressive that Leon, tasked with running the fundraiser, understandably looked at me with a bit of suspicion like I might be trying to steal it. But I had always wanted a physical copy and promised myself I would finally have one from the conference.

After the sentence left my mouth in the alleyway it was like I had popped a bubble with a pin. No more words were requested from me or laid on top of mine. Someone generously lobbed the next topic into the air to move things along.

⊣⊢

I only talked to Spencer-Brown on the phone once. I had somehow come across Randy Dible online in a comment section where he referenced John Lilly's use of Laws of Form as a navigation tool to return to our universe while in a coma. Randy suggested we get on the phone for a chat and during our conversation informed me that Spencer-Brown was open to calls and had a publicly available — or rather formerly public, now lost somewhere deep inside the Wayback Machine — number.

It was the summer of 2016. It took a lot of courage (some liquid) to punch in the number and expectantly wait for my literal call to be met by his “hello?”. I had tried once a few weeks prior and no-one had answered. But this time, there was a response.

We talked a bit about his time in California when he heard that was where I was calling from, and some other details that I do not remember much about. But what I do vividly remember is this overwhelming feeling that it was extremely important that I thank him specifically for writing Only Two Can Play This Game. That I knew the book was considered a joke yet there was something I saw in it and deeply appreciated. 

I had encountered it for the first time in the form of a PDF on Scribd two years prior when attending the Summer Session for Women in Mathematical Philosophy at MCMP in Munich. Everyone there was niched down, PhD’d up, and doing their best to mimic and keep up with the men in the world of academic mathematical philosophy. As a rando with a BA and a letter of recommendation from a former logic professor attending purely “for fun”, I couldn’t relate to any of those three things. One night I went back to my Airbnb feeling like a freak of all freaks. And that’s when I found Only Two for the first time. In a situation designed to facilitate inclusion which had instead triggered a profound sense of isolation and otherness this was like a balm to my soul. At least one person saw It, saw me. And that evening, alone on the bed with my laptop, a call found its response exactly when it most needed one.

Two months after our call, in August 2016, Spencer-Brown died. He responded to my call. The handshake took place. The crossing could proceed. But I don’t think either of us had any idea of it in the actual moment it happened. The Observer can never perceive their Yoda directly, after all.