What acquired brain damage has taught me about human intelligence is that it behaves less like a monolith and more like a composite frequency structure—stacked capacities, each tuned to a distinct operational band. When one of these layers is lost, the system doesn’t fail outright. Instead, the remaining functions persist, but with distortions—subtle misalignments, delays, unexpected tensions. These are not direct signals of loss; they are deviations, bending the behaviour of what’s intact. It’s through this skew—through the particular way things don’t quite work—that the missing structure reveals itself. The system, still coherent, now casts a shadow shaped by absence.
And that absence isn’t neutral. It draws the surrounding system into a new alignment, warping function around what’s no longer there. My philosophy has always treated loss as structural—not decorative, not rhetorical. Now it’s embodied. The thing that’s missing becomes a kind of gravitational centre, not seen but felt in every compensatory curve. Reflection doesn’t sit on top of this—it emerges from it. To think is to circle a void. The shape of thought is disclosed not by presence but by the pressure of what cannot be restored. I modelled this in abstraction. Now I live it in motion.
Daedelus Kite 