​Chapter 4. The Attractor

An attractor reverses the ordinary relation between will and residue: what the will laid down begins to organize and issue later acts.

Attractors are not all built the same, and the deepest of them are made of meaning. An ontovirus is a captured meaning: a construct installed in a will, raised into an account of what is, armored with a morality, and thereafter fed by the acts of its host. It differs from a mere idea. An idea is entertained; an ontovirus metabolizes, living off the rituals, professions, and daily observances of its host even where private conviction has thinned. What makes it the strongest of captures is that it installs itself across several levels of will at once, and the layers it occupies hold one another up. It supplies an ontology, a map of what exists and how it is ordered. On that ontology it raises a morality so that the map now issues commands. The morality in turn guards an identity, a "who I am" assembled from obedience to it. And the identity confirms the ontology, since to doubt that account of reality would be to unsettle the identity organized around it. Pull at one layer and the others answer for it: the questioned belief is defended as a moral duty, the moral duty as a matter of who one is. Thus, unlike a single habit, an ontovirus cannot be removed by breaking any one of its holds; the remaining layers restore the one attacked.

How deep such a capture runs shows best in a life taken over gradually. A man encounters a faith, and at first there is only interest, an attraction to something that answers questions he had carried open. He studies, and the research is still his own; he could set the books down. Then he begins to live by the rule, ordering his days to it, and the ordering starts to order him back. A threshold is crossed when the faith becomes the lens through which everything else is weighed: old friendships are reassessed and some found wanting, loyalties reranked, a marriage measured against the creed and kept or broken by that verdict. Whatever cannot be fitted to the faith is now cast off as worldly, and the casting-off is the attractor sorting its intake, dividing what serves its continuation from what does not and manufacturing, in the leftover, a category of the fallen and the enemy. The nearest heretic draws the hottest hatred, since a near-variant proves the construct might have been drawn otherwise. Further along, the man can no longer picture himself outside the faith; to leave would not be a change of view but the end of him. And at the far edge he will give his body for it, counting the loss of the flesh as less than the loss of the construct, which by now acts through him as though it were his will. The layers have closed into a circle with no outside, and each act he pours in deepens it.

Beside this is a smaller and simpler capture, made of flesh rather than meaning. Gluttony is an example: eat past need and the body learns to want more, the appetite wearing a groove and demanding the next filling. A dependency runs the same way, the craving renewing the conduct that feeds it. These vortices are real captures, and a will can be as truly held by an appetite as by a creed.

An appetite alone occupies a single layer. It offers no ontology to justify itself and no identity to be lost in leaving it. Yet these layers can be built around it. A bodily pattern can be named as an identity, defended as a moral status, and supplied with an account of reality that disqualifies pressure to change it. At that point the vortex has recruited the architecture of an ontovirus: what began as appetite can no longer be pressed directly, as every pressure on the habit is answered from another layer as an attack on the self.

The two usually enter by different routes, and this helps explain how common each is. A vortex is homegrown. The will engraves it through repetition, each indulgence cutting the groove followed by the next, so that the capture is the sediment of the will's acts. An appetite typically accretes; it does not arrive as a finished system. An ontovirus is mostly received. A whole layered system, an ontology already raised into a morality and fitted with a self to wear it, is the work of many hands over a long time, and the incline that favors ready-made meaning favors the finished construct over a system the will would have to build. The construct is not of his making; the capture is, for his acts keep renewing it. A meaning-system a will builds and holds contingent, owning each cut and lifting it at will, is not an ontovirus yet; it turns into one when the builder swears to it as law, sinking into the structure he raised. The same holds for a construct received, since what decides the case is the swearing and not the authorship — which means no account can settle in advance what it will become in the man carrying it.

Capture is graded before it is divided by kind. A mild attachment and a fanaticism can be one process caught at different depths; read across its life, the capture runs from first interest to the readiness to die. Where captures do divide is in their build: the ontovirus laced through many layers and held fast by their mutual support; the vortex, at its simplest, lodged in one. Lehavah is neither, since it is not a capture. It keeps its deposits without letting any of them take the source's place, and no arrangement of layers closes over it.