Cube

Introduction

Operator

Hey there, I'm Julius Chandler,

Founder

I am building Reiuk, a software contracting firm. I left UC Berkeley after freshman fall to do it full time. Go Bears!

01 / 05

The unfolded cube

Site overview

INTRODUCTION

you are here

Personal background and an overview of the site.

/introduction · cube key [1]

Why a cube

I wanted to display some nice geometry and I had six sections for my website. That is a cube. I didn't have any issues with that, the cube is an admirable, ordinary shape. The type that the world relies on: it stacks, it maximises space, it distributes weight evenly, and it is easy to manufacture.

If you unfold said cube, you get a cross. That is roughly how I live my life. I pick what works best and build excellently with it, not picking anything for branding. And if you take the thing apart, it just seems to have ended up in that way.

JNC WEBSYS© 2026 JNC

full profile (plain text)

Everything below is the complete public profile of Julius Chandler in one place: introduction, the expanded CV and genealogy of thought, all aphorisms, and the art / poetry. The longform essays are linked at the end (each is large, so it lives on its own page).

JNC WEBSYS: Julius Chandler
Julius Chandler's personal site, styled as a retro terminal OS with a 3D cube interface. Sections cover an introduction, written work, an aphoristic skeleton of guiding quotes, and a "signalling" page (an expanded CV plus a genealogy of intellectual influences).

Complete public profile in one place: introduction, expanded CV + genealogy of thought, all aphorisms, and the art / poetry. The longform essays are linked at the end.

========================================================================
# INTRODUCTION
========================================================================

Hey there, I'm Julius Chandler.

Roles / identity:
- Founder: I am building Reiuk, a software contracting firm. I left UC Berkeley after freshman fall to do it full time. Go Bears!
- Athlete: Calisthenics world champion LOADING... soon. Other assorted athletic pursuits.
- Artist: Go check out ART for some of my digital stuff.
- Thinker: Aren't we all. I would particularly say that I am someone who enjoys consuming and synthesising into my own frameworks all the philosophy, stats, skills, perspectives that I can get my hands on. If you are the same way (and you'll know if we are the same way after looking through the signalling section): reach out to me, even if just to say hey, I also exist, let's talk at some point and bash eachother's best frameworks against eachother.
- Technophile: I am an optimist about the future of technology and humanity, if that wasn't already clear by the only very slightly influenced aesthetic design I made. There are incredible dangers lying in wait to waylay mankind. But there are incredible boons that may be given to us, including the end of Aging, the eradication of poverty, and the creation of technology that will enable and deepen human connection and our ability to flourish as individuals and civilisations.

Site sections:
- Writing (/writing): Collected pieces, and how I speak and think.
- Aphoristic Skeleton (/aphoristic-skeleton): The rules and ideas I find most moving, and that dictate a good share of what I do.
- Signalling (/signalling): My resume, and more interestingly, my cultural and intellectual influences.
- Art (/art): Digital pieces, poetry, and some collected aesthetics.
- J NET: Coming soon.

Why a cube:
I wanted to display some nice geometry and I had six sections for my website. That is a cube. I didn't have any issues with that, the cube is an admirable, ordinary shape. The type that the world relies on: it stacks, it maximises space, it distributes weight evenly, and it is easy to manufacture.
If you unfold said cube, you get a cross. That is roughly how I live my life. I pick what works best and build excellently with it, not picking anything for branding. And if you take the thing apart, it just seems to have ended up in that way.

========================================================================
# SIGNALLING (expanded CV + genealogy of thought)
========================================================================

What I have done previously, going over some highlights, akin to a slightly expanded resume.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
## Education
------------------------------------------------------------------------
- University: UC Berkeley (dropped out), Fall 2025, CA, USA
  Applied Mathematics & Philosophy
  Note: Dropped out at the end of freshman fall to focus full time on REIUK LTD. Go Bears!
- High School: Sevenoaks, Until May 2025, Kent, UK
  International Baccalaureate. Higher Level: Math AI, English Literature, Economics; Standard Level: Physics, Philosophy, Spanish

------------------------------------------------------------------------
## Professional experience
------------------------------------------------------------------------
### Founder, REIUK LTD (Dec 2025 - Present)
  - Software agency using proprietary multi-agent systems combined with skilled human developers. 'Centaur' teams delivering finished products multiples faster at the same or better quality
  - AI-native, compliant, security-assured, safety-first (human in the loop) software with cutting-edge architecture
  - Leading complex, novel next-gen solutions, as well as custom boutique software development and research for 250+ person companies you'd recognise

### Finster AI, AI Engineering Intern (Jun 2025 - Aug 2025)
  - Built real-time market data scraping system serving 40+ UBS analysts
  - Developed AI agent capable of converting financial analysis into presentation decks
  - Created citation management tool ensuring regulatory compliance across file formats

### The Sunday Diplomat, Head of Technology (May 2023 - May 2025)
  - Managed the marketing, software and social media aspects of an international network of 40+ student writers and editors spanning six continents
  - Coded and implemented an NLP-based AI for Instagram posts, helping grow it naturally to around 5,000 followers, and helping increase traffic on the main site by 30%
  - Helped scale UK's largest sixth-form publication to tens of thousands of readers across 100+ countries

### Founder and Lead Programmer, Avarice Coins (Jun 2023 - Aug 2023)
  - Generated $3K revenue selling to 100+ clients
  - Built task automation algorithms and discord bots

------------------------------------------------------------------------
## Highlighted honors
------------------------------------------------------------------------
### IASEAI '26 Poster Presentation (Jan 2026) [https://www.juliuschandler.com/writing/ai-safety-truthbot]
  - TruthBot: AI manipulation detection

### Team UK for Calisthenics (2025)
  - Streetlifting, under 80kg
  - 3rd nationally in Power
  - 24th in the 2025 WSWCF World in Bulgaria

### Sevenoaks Mathematics Faculty Prize (2024)
  - Highest math prize in the school, awarded annually

### Won Silver at the Eton Debating Championship (2023)
  - Nationwide tournament

------------------------------------------------------------------------
## Activities: built, run, taught and trained
------------------------------------------------------------------------
### Berkeley AI Safety Initiative (BASIS) (Fall 2025)
  - Technical reading group track

### DeFi collateralization engine (Oct 2025 - Feb 2026)
  - Non-custodial, live on-chain. Trusted with real deposits! (by that I mean me, the other guy who built it, and a few of our friends)
  - Did not pursue it: the legal complexity, not the engineering

### Junction Hackathon 2024 (2024)
  - Top 10% of teams
  - Helsinki, Finland

### Mechanistic interpretability, self-taught (2022 - 2023)
  - Open online working groups, anyone could join; steering vectors in particular
  - Mostly reading, little output. Learned the field end to end and worked through my own ideas on alignment

### Sevenoaks Politics Society, Founder and President (Late 2023 - Late 2024)
  - School hosted the Chancellor of the Exchequer / Head of the UK Fed

### Sevenoaks Math Club, President (Early 2024 - Late 2024)

### Sevenoaks Debate Club, Debate Team and Coach (2023 - 2024)
  - Trained a younger student team to compete at Oxford nationals and win bronze at Eton
  I love to argue, and debate is useful as it allows you to dissociate the topic of disagreement from the people, it also allows you to develop argumentation ability. Its structure however, allows mostly for a verbal clubbing of your opponent, and appeals to our desire to be right and rhetorical prowess, rather than a dialectic and synthesis of cooperative truth seeking.

### Personal trainer (2023 - 2024)
  - 10+ clients

### Front of house and CAS, Sevenoaks (2022 - 2024)
  - Volunteered 2 years as front of house for my school's performances
  - Volunteered half a year to help teach primary-school kids

### Code: python, typescript, solidity (5 years)
  - https://github.com/JNC4 (mostly private repos)

### Learning Mandarin (no dates)
  - About 7 years, on and off
  - Lived 2 years with a Chinese roommate

### Skiing, Level 8 (CO system) (ongoing)

### Taekwondo, Black Belt First Dan (a few years back)
  - Taught for half a year as a Junior Instructor

### Climbing, efoil, skydiving (no dates)
  - I like to climb mountains, efoil, and am getting my skydiving A license

------------------------------------------------------------------------
## Intellectual frameworks
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Where my thoughts and character have been influenced. Intended to help you build a better model of me culturally (in my opinion, the thing that actually matters more).
Roughly speaking I've been influenced the most by the three frameworks of:
- Christianity: I was an agnostic for a long time, but converted in early 2026. I believe the resurrection happened as a historical event, and that a necessary reality exists.
- Rationality: I am talking about the '21st century movement' which is EA-adjacent, emphasises bayesian stats, focused on AI safety, etc. I would describe myself as rationalist-adjacent considering I have heavy metaphysical, religious, cultural and values based splits from what would be considered more orthodox rationalism. However, I began reading the sequences at 13, and have derived a huge amount of value from the models presented or solidified by the rationalist community, and would say rationalism was seminal to my intellectual development.
- Existentialism: Particularly that of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
## Important stances
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Agape, and how it applies to our relationships to others, is the fundamental ordering principle of how we ought to live. [committed]
2. Love will not coerce a will, not even once. [certain]
3. Some cultures are better than others. Ours is historically rare: love for one another in deeds, liberty of the individual, and the scientific method. Protect and spread it. [committed]
4. Protect the right to dissent, always. It is the only way out of a bad equilibrium. [certain]
5. Humanity comes through the transition to superintelligence with meaningful control and without mass disempowerment. [credence <60%]
6. AGI, and then ASI, within nine years. [credence >80%, made March 2023]
7. Most people run far below capacity, and the cause is lack of faith and unwillingness to bear short-term cost, not lack of ability. [credence ~85%]
8. Chesterton's fence over reformist confidence, radical conclusions when the empirics force them. [certain]
9. Free markets are insanely value creating. (Through the price signal and thus capital allocation. Government intervention in cases of market failure has historically, I think, proven itself in most cases more inefficient than the actual market failure.) [committed]
10. Britain is choosing to be poorer than it needs to be. The real axis is builders versus blockers, not left versus right. [credence >90%]

My beliefs are subject to change, and I am willing to discuss openly in the pursuit of truth together with anyone.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
## Thinkers who have influenced me
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Roughly in descending order but hard to pick and significant lossy compression:
- Jesus/The Bible: everything
- Nietzsche: existentialism, the Ubermensch, ressentiment
- Aristotle: the syllogism, validity apart from liking the conclusion, flourishing, virtue as habit
- John Locke: empiricism, assent in proportion to evidence, consent, persons before the state
- Francis Bacon: scientific method, the idols of the mind, nature commanded by being obeyed
- Thomas Aquinas: faith and reason from one source, the objection stated first at full strength
- Plato: metaphysics, the Good above the visible, Socrates written down
- Kierkegaard: silence, the single individual, faith by virtue of the absurd, the lily and the bird
- Buddhist Tantra: monstrosity and nobility, horror and beauty, non-duality, suffering, poison as medicine
- G.K. Chesterton: the fence, distributism, gratitude, prose that makes the familiar strange
- C.S. Lewis: mere Christianity, faith when the mood turns, the argument from desire
- David Hume: empiricism, the is-ought guillotine, induction as habit
- von Neumann: game theory, the other side thinking as hard as you, fix the game not the players
- Eliezer Yudkowsky/LessWrong: rationality, bayesian thinking, beliefs that pay rent, noticing confusion
- Scott Alexander/ACX: rationality, psychology, charity as method, writing that shows its working
- Socrates: dialectic, humility, knowing what you do not know
- Kurt Gödel: incompleteness, truth outrunning proof, mathematical realism, faith in a rational world
- Bryan Caplan: economics, rational irrationality, education as signalling, the ideological Turing test
- René Descartes: methodical doubt, the cogito, faith as the ground of trusting reason
- Wittgenstein: language, meaning as use, problems dissolved not solved, silence at the limit
- John Wheeler: information as fundamental, it from bit, the participatory universe
- Robin Hanson: economics, social systems, X is not about Y, the elephant in the brain, bet on what you believe
- Leonhard Euler: an untroubled faith, clarity, hope
- Georg Cantor: faith, many infinities, the Absolute as God
- Montesquieu: separation of powers, power checking power, laws that fit a people

========================================================================
# APHORISTIC SKELETON (30 aphorisms)
========================================================================

"That which can be destroyed by the truth should be."
    - PC Hodgell

"[In Heaven there] is joy that cannot be shaken. Our light can swallow up your darkness: but your darkness cannot now infect our light."
    - CS Lewis

"And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds"
    - Hebrews 10:24

"The ideal of the most high spirited, alive, and world affirming human being who has not only come to terms and learned to get along with whatever was and is, but who wants to have what was and is repeated into all eternity, shouting insatiably da capo [from the beginning]."
    - Nietzsche

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man"
    - George Bernard Shaw

"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."
    - Francis Bacon, Novum Organum I.3

"The Godhead is effective in the living and not in the dead, in the becoming and the changing, not in the become and the set-fast; and therefore, similarly, the reason is concerned only to strive towards the divine through the becoming and the living, and the understanding only to make use of the become and the set-fast."
    - Goethe

"Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer."
    - Edsger W. Dijkstra

"In the silence of the heart, God speaks"
    - Mother Teresa

"You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you."
    - Augustine of Hippo

"I have had it with crack houses, dictatorships, torture chambers, disease, old age, spinal paralysis, and world hunger. I have had it with a death rate of 150,000 sentient beings per day. I have had it with this planet. I have had it with mortality. None of this is necessary. The time has come to stop turning away from the mugging on the corner, the beggar on the street. It is no longer necessary to close our eyes, blinking away the tears, and repeat the mantra: "I can't solve all the problems of the world." We can. We can end this."
    - Yudkowsky

"Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid."
    - GK Chesterton

"Probably the most profound illusion under which we normally operate is that we do not take seriously the wonder of other people"
    - Matthew Adelstein

"Few, but ripe."
    - Carl Friedrich Gauss

"When people choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything."
    - GK Chesterton

"Each individual is continually engaged in a personal adjustment process in which he balances the desire for privacy with the desire for disclosure and communication of themself to others, in light of the environmental conditions and social norms set by the society in which they live."
    - Alan Westin

"Ascetics will leave the world alone because they live within the temple or monastery. The Christian on the other hand is the temple that enters into the world in order to redeem it into the Kingdom of God."
    - Unknown

"When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die."
    - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"By passion the world is bound; by passion too it is released."
    - Hevajra Tantra II.ii

"The lurking suspicion that something could be simplified is the world's richest source of rewarding challenges"
    - Edsger W. Dijkstra

"Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away."
    - 1 Corinthians 13:8

"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres."
    - 1 Corinthians 13:4-7

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken... The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell."
    - CS Lewis, The Four Loves

"Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love"
    - Rainer Rilke

"The safest sin: envy, which is easily disguised as enthusiasm for equality."
    - Thomas Szasz

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
    - MLK

"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."
    - Friedrich Hayek

"I can do all things through him who strengthens me"
    - Philippians 4:13

"The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater."
    - J.R.R. Tolkien

"And he took her in his arms and kissed her under the sunlit sky, and he cared not that they stood high upon the walls in the sight of many."
    - J.R.R. Tolkien

========================================================================
# ART (poetry + digital projects)
========================================================================

------------------------------------------------------------------------
## Digital projects
------------------------------------------------------------------------
- please. (https://please.juliuschandler.com/): A small language model choosing its next word, with every knob of that choice left in your hands.
- CALISTHENICS PRINCIPLES (https://leverage.juliuschandler.com/): Why a planche is so hard, why being tall costs you more, and what a handstand is really balancing.
- DUTCH RESTORATION (https://residual.juliuschandler.com/): Take the varnish off a Vermeer, put it back, let it yellow for a century, then clean it away again.
- THE BOND (https://bond.juliuschandler.com/): Pull two hydrogen atoms apart, watch the chemistry solve itself, and find where the standard method fails.
- CURVATURA (https://curvatura.juliuschandler.com/): Nothing here pushes anything. Things fall because the space they move through is bent. A picture of the line I live by: "Curvatura mea amor datus: recta feror per curva, quocumque feror, cadens sursum in Te, donec caelos amantibus impleam." (My trajectory is love, given: I am carried straight through what is curved, wherever I am carried, falling upward into You, until I fill the heavens with those who love.)
- THE TANGLE (https://tangle.juliuschandler.com/): A fluid that never changes still mixes everything. Watch the tangle it leaves behind take shape.
- PRIOR (https://prior.juliuschandler.com/): How much of an AI image came from the prompt, and how much the model was going to draw anyway.
- CWSP (https://cwsp.juliuschandler.com/): Fourteen days of a wound healing, worked out chemical by chemical across a slice of skin.
- ∇C (nabla C) (https://nablac.juliuschandler.com/): Train a small neural net in the browser and watch the gradient push every weight downhill.
- YALDABAOTH (https://yaldabaoth.juliuschandler.com/): Feed it two texts and it writes a third one word at a time, showing the roads it did not take.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
## Poetry (7 poems)
------------------------------------------------------------------------

### California in summer
Written: 8 Sep 2025

Applewood felled and sawed smooth
stacked under the tree from which it dropped
scissors snip through California hibiscus
cut dark wood lit up by honeyed sun

the vulture and coyote hunt through sanded skyline
a crackling dust and swirling shrubbery empty of prey
how brutal the fever
how hateful the stillness of moon and sun alike

the trees are few and green has drained from the earth
a land where the heart rests in a sandstone valley
and wearily drinks from the silent heat
it is gentle

leaves raked away reveal warm stone
dry clay soil dispassionate in fiery touch
how can such violently tranquil divinity be embodied
over a thousand thousand hills?

California is the lowest point of the world
to which all gush downhill
allow its warmth flow through you
let its sunlight brighten your eyes

### Kyrie Eleison
Written: 3 Dec 2025

Lord have mercy.

A winter in Zadar
cruel land inbetween
home and what was promised
waiting with crackling skin
tightening around spears
and muted rags, muffled glory.

The ship was the first echo of
the simplicity of real conflict, where men died before
the holy city
the holy waters

just as quickly I was taken from that bad dream and
Palestine! Stirring     dust
spirit air                            dancing.

By the time we reached Acre
men sold
dead horses for more than living ones;
the meat, the marrow, the boiled hooves
Flemish night passes over encampments
smelling of rot and a few electric stars

Duke Leopold took command of what remained
of the Germans. What remained
was not much:
Frederick dead before he arrived, but moreso
more numbers of boys like me, and their lords,
two years
a great host of Christendom reduced
two years
to the memory of what it felt like to declare to their families:
two years or more
I must go now, for God is calling me.

I cleaned armour everyday
at first the Marquis' only but
blood is iron and so is honor    it rusts when
it is not taken care of
I learned to work with mail and plate
to ignore the smell
and
I learned the shape of Austrian men more closely
they were bloated and stiff with enough time
that I should get to the armour before
they leaked        leaking.

You may notice I do not yet speak of
the glory of combat
the    asphyxiating thrill of siege and
service in battle
it is not because I did not have my fair share of combat
and I will speak even less of how the first month I learnt
our enemies, steel, motion, celestial bodies just the same
saracen and Austrian, both children of God in face of
Alien hand which reaches through sickness into a man
death spoke flux
apathetic, not even hateful to
the last prayers that hang around a man in throes of illness,
flies,
I will not speak of how I learnt faith.

Christ have mercy.


8 June
100 ships
how many men?
hope's name
was Richard
Revelation 19:11-21
the armies of heaven.

I was not happy
I was hard and upright
a nail in the door about to be struck
but bathing in the feeling that it would finally
be delivered deep into its glorious place.

Lionheart who fought from a litter
his hands
used to moving moving chesspieces
somehow I knew they were warm in a way
the rest of this sickness, brutal heat wasn't
Glorious sun.

We Austrians were not the sunrise
we were the sickness
you become what you eat and we had eaten
oceans of swords, death throes
tempered by our older faith or a lack of hope
tide of eagles
fly pretty boys fly.

I was there when Alberic Clement died
holding the French standard as he was stabbed on the wall
I was there when the Accursed tower finally gave way
under the weight of bodies of men, under the weight of

I was there when Austrians
those Austrians
we

tide of eagles
fly pretty boys fly

tempered by our older faith or a lack of hope
I was there
I was there when the garrison surrendered too.


July twelfth. The city opened feverishly
a wound. We walked through streets
we had stared at for months
from the wrong side of the walls,
and everything was strange and familiar,
a recurring dream
flesh
writhing flesh
it was done, my God
God do you see me?
God my father
my father
dad please

They raised the banners on the battlements.
Jerusalem's cross. The fleur-de-lis.
The three lions of England.
And then
ours - the eagle
a tide of eagles finally flying
flying overhead.
For a moment I finally understood it
as more than Leopold's colors
the flags were
our bodies at last in flight toward
our heavenly father.

I did not see who had climbed the battlements
or how the eagles had lost their wings but down from their poles
down from their battlements
down from the skies
they
landed
in the moat. The moat
where we had thrown our dead
to fill the ditch for the assault.
Sweet children with brown hair brushed to the side
eyes watching in silent purgatory
the violent stillness

some of the English laughed
many did not.

the Duke's face
I had seen him in battle,
seen him when he took his meals,
seen him when the fever took
three of his knights in a single night.
I had never seen him look like that.

there was something had been cut out of him
that he did not know he had
until it was gone.
I knew that look from    bodies
I knew that look from    my face


We are not kings. This I understand.
A duke is not a king. Austria
is not England, is not France,
we are a great many things,
the ones who hold the passes,
who guard the roads, who do
what must be done in the margins
of other men's glory
perhaps we were arrogant in
helping ourselves to a share of joy.
Austria
is not the great powers of the earth.

But we were there.
But we are God's children whose
mothers kissed our foreheads,
bled in the same dust,
ate the same rotting bread,
filled the same ditches,
watched the same walls
we had helped to break.
And
and nothing.

nothing

Austria! The name means
eastern march, the edge
of Christendom, the place
where the empire frays into the real world,
Ostmark, motherland,
Blutsbrüder who would lay down their lives
for mouthfuls of honey, for the Lord.

Lord have mercy.

The banner fell.
I saw it fall.
Lord have mercy,
I will not let it fall
twice.

### Welsh countryside / rolling solitude
Written: 24 May 2024

Rolls of green, fat, grey fields on the belly
of sleeping giants,
Their breath does not stir the modern world, nor its clients,
But the dripping wind that runs its hands down my hair,
Absentmindedly ladens my clothes with
weight.
The flowers prostrate themselves to this
unthinking authority,
They slam their heads to the mud a hand
outstretched
Until the squelch of my soles comes down
combustion hard.
All that is left in the path I walk is footsteps
that will be washed away,
A solitude indistinguishable from the
overcast Welsh air,
The place I came from, and
This mossy hermitage,
The pilgrims prayer.

### The salesman step
Written: Autumn 2025

Yellow sun
yellow shoes
walking pace
jaunty tune
whistle by
"flying soon"

such direction
such electric
hectic misdirection
travels far
never moves
walking pace
yellow shoes

on holiday
at work
black suit
white shirt
yellow shoes
jaunty tune

seventh son
setting sun
staccato steps
loaded gun
violent silence
white teeth
bared underneath
a yellow sun

### The Fear of God
Written: Apr 2025

The eye of the bird drinks deep of the mountain snow,
listening to the deep slate grey of a sheer cliff face.
listen to it
without speaking.

in a red roofed temple complex filled with voices below
men hear the answers given to the prayers they know
clamouring glitzy wares and thousands of shrill voices crow.

and burdened and bowing, on a shelf on that face
the pure lily growing is as it is, it is
prostrated in fear, its head touches the stone
prayers are answered in its silence, by God's words alone.

### John and the River
Written: 11 Sep 2026

The lapping of the river stopped at noon:
in its housing, the mill-wheel kicked back twice,
and hung among its falling drops.

A boy sent to fetch water stood stock-still:
held his empty bucket beside the bank,
staring blankly where boats had passed.

The town well breathed out a full breath at dusk:
its bucket knocking against the dry stone,
then fell down, the chain came up hot.

I opened all the palace reservoirs:
the silent water took its place, and sent
the low town up into the hills.

In those very hills my father taught me:
His broad hand beneath my ribs, I hauled the
far bank to me, stroke by little stroke.

He laughed and slapped the water with both hands:
The flood that killed him brought his clothes back first.
I set them side by side to dry.

I took a boar-spear from the armoury.
The priest's hand shook as he prayed over me,
I wrapped it in mine own and took the bread.

--

We reached the shaft above the wellspring at
dawn. Anna tied the rope beneath my arms.
"Three pulls," she said. "We'll know."
They lowered me.

It lay with all the river in its mouth.
Between its teeth the struggling water rose,
the sheen of a clean horse's coat.

Its breathing loosened pebbles from overhead.
Far down its throat I thought I saw the stars
going out, submerged in deep night.

It used my voice, with no breath behind it.
"I can put all the river in your hand.
Nothing you love need live
beyond your keeping."

I saw the spear set down, my hand held out.
The valley fit well in my open palm.
My son grew old, hand still in mine.

A small pull travelled down the rope. I felt
the knot against my ribs, and took the spear.

I said, "Lord Jesus Christ," and set my feet.

--

"Give back the river."

It struck but
the point rang sideways on stone.
A claw went through my calf. I could not turn:

the opened mouth came down. I drove the spear
up through the soft roof, drove until the crossbar
struck, and the ash bowed back to my chest.

I drove my good heel hard against the rock
and rose to meet it. Bone gave round the iron,
the cross struck through. The claw let go.

Then came the river. Stones flew up like quail.
I lost the floor. The spear was wrenched away.
I tried to shout and drank deeply instead.

I hauled three times upon the rope, and waited.

I thought I felt the far end take my weight.

--

They laid me in the grass. The men stood bent,
with hands upon their knees. Anna knelt down
and cupped my face with palms skinned from the rope,
"Breathe," she said, as I coughed. "Again."

That night they spread their tables on the field.
I bowed my head and let them set the crown.
They shouted, "John!" from either bank, and "John!"
Bell answered to bell, wine leaping up cups.
I raised my own with "thanks to God."

My son leaned close. "Will you teach me to swim
when your leg is healed?"

Below us, rough with stars, ran the river.

"Yes," I said.

### 過豐沛寄元
(Sent to Yuan, after riding past Feng village)
Written: 28 May 2026

朔風吹三日，
江草偃難移。
深宮老天子，
對酒未傾巵。
雨霽乃出門，
騎過豐沛陲。
童子戲淺瀨，
滿手泥淋漓。
其背挺然直，
我馬立多時。
看之不能去，
既久乃旋騎。
持此書寄元，
聊報故人知。


Three days the north wind, and the reeds along the river
lay down and did not rise.
In the inner court the old emperor sits,
with his wine unpoured.

After the storm I rode out past Feng village.
In the shallows a boy was at play,
his hands full of mud, his back straight.
I sat on the horse a while and watched him,
and then I turned back.

This I send to you, Yuan, that you may know.


*Original, in the Tang classical style: written on tianming, at Feng and Pei.*

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## Aesthetic gallery (25 curated images)
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Curated visual gallery at https://www.juliuschandler.com/assets/art/aesthetic/ (25 images).

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# WRITING (6 longform pieces, full text at these pages)
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- TruthBot: https://www.juliuschandler.com/writing/ai-safety-truthbot
- Civilisation Begins in the Soul: https://www.juliuschandler.com/writing/humanstructures-civilisation-begins-in-the-soul
- What the State Cannot Provide: https://www.juliuschandler.com/writing/humanstructures-what-the-state-cannot-provide
  (AI-drafted: This essay is mostly AI fleshing out my thesis. Only the first 20% was edited by me, so take it with a grain of salt.)
- Constructing nablaC: https://www.juliuschandler.com/writing/mathematics-constructing-nablac
- Münchhausen trilemma: https://www.juliuschandler.com/writing/philosophy-munchhausen-trilemma
- The Nietzschean Übermensch as a gardener: https://www.juliuschandler.com/writing/philosophy-the-nietzschean-ubermensch-as-a-gardener

let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds