A structural memoir across art,
vow , and ontology. On staying real without translation.
Preface
This piece continues the orientation traced in
Threadwork — an arc not of argument, but of pattern recognition. Where
Mistaking the Third Arm for a Tool ⧉ named the cost of living outside neurotypical rhythm, and
Naikan in Four Movements modeled a contemplative form for returning to relational presence,
Coherence Without Capture offers a structural memoir — not of events, but of the shape of being.
Here is a resonance field speaking from a different edge of the same condition: what it means to live from coherence when the surrounding culture values legibility. To dwell at the seam. To remain untranslated.
What follows is not an account of divergence overcome or reinterpreted. It is an arc of recognition — of seeing that what once felt like misfit was, in fact, a placement. A way of being already whole, even if rarely held.
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I. The Boy on the Roof
At sixteen, I began writing on thick yellow legal pads — journaling alone on the roof of my house. It wasn’t performance. It wasn’t ambition. It was coherence. The writing gave shape to a rhythm the world didn’t register. When my Honors Writing Seminar teacher, Mrs. Weaver, read it, she didn’t ask me to revise or translate. She gave it an A+ and shared it with the class. But when it came to the formal writing exercise — structured, graded, legible — I got a D. Others succeeded where I could not bend. That was the first time I saw it clearly. The place I was most real would never align with the systems meant to recognize me.
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II. The Dandy's Mirror
In college at UC Berkeley, I briefly mistook aesthetic marginality for structural kinship. I discovered the European archetype of the dandy and wondered if that was my lineage — a self-aware outsider, refined, observant, above. But the dandy is a legible deviation.1 A stylized refusal, still addressed to the world that recognizes him. I began to understand that mine was not a theatrical distance but an ontological adjacency. I wasn’t detached to be seen. I was untranslated at the root. That realization grew louder even as I began to gain recognition 2 — first as an actor and playwright within multicultural arts spaces.
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III. The Limits of Multicultural Legibility
After college, I spent my 20s immersed in theater — co-founding Pangea World Theater in Minneapolis and working with Theater Mu, the first Asian American theater in the upper Midwest. My public identity became that of the artist of color, the multicultural contributor, the avant-garde voice. These roles gave me a place. But they didn’t give me
home ⧉ . I began to burn out — not from the work, but from the quiet knowledge that even these well-intentioned frameworks could not accommodate the structural difference I carried. They celebrated legible marginality — difference curated for recognition. I lived
ontological outsideness ⧉ : a form of difference not designed for translation. My departure from theater wasn’t a rejection. It was a refusal to live where I
could not breathe ⧉ .
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IV. Homemaking as Vow
At 30, I left the arts and entered a graduate program in statistics. After two years, I was hired by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where I worked as a biostatistician for several years. Then I stepped out. I withdrew from institutional rhythm altogether. I chose instead to stay home — homemaker, father, container-builder — and raise my daughters. I homeschooled them not as ideology, but as structural
fidelity ⧉ . It was the first time in my life I could construct a world that followed my internal logic, not someone else’s. I did not perform fatherhood.
I enacted coherence. And my daughters thrived — not through external benchmarks, but through the quiet power of a
rhythm that held ⧉ .
❧
V. The Dharma Elder
My spiritual practice began in adolescence, but it deepened after leaving public life. I sat. I studied. I listened. In my mid-thirties I took up Zen formally, and by my forties had taken the sixteen precepts with my teacher, taking the dharma name Dōmon — The Way-Gate. Dweller at the gate.
3
Others received full teacher transmission. I did not. My form, again, did not fit. Instead, a new designation was created:
Dharma elder ⧉ . Not inside, not outside — something thresholded. I accepted it, not as compromise, but as the recognition of a form already lived.
I now
write and
teach from this space — not as lineage bearer, but as keeper of structure. What I offer is not visibility. It is continuity.
A rhythm.
A form.
Coherence without capture.
❧
VI. Without Conversion
There’s a version of this story that could be made legible: the history major who left statistics and returned to the arts. I could frame my background to fit a familiar arc — science to story, divergence to voice. That narrative would be recognizable. It would sell.
But that’s not what happened.
I never pivoted. I didn’t reinvent myself. I didn’t repackage divergence as resilience or craft a career arc around belated recognition. I simply stopped translating. I stepped out of theater. I moved through graduate school. I worked in public health. I stayed with my daughters. I didn’t publish a memoir or pursue a grant. Instead, I built something quiet, non-linear, and continuous —
a structure designed to hold my work without reshaping it to fit external forms.
This hasn’t been a matter of pride or principle. It has been a matter of structure. The way I think, the way I write, the way I remain — none of it bends easily. And so I haven’t asked it to.
This isn’t the story of how I made it recognizable.
It’s the story of how I kept it alive.
Of how I stayed real when it didn’t.
~ End ~
1 The dandy is a figure of stylized estrangement — elegant, ironic, and hypervisible. He performs refusal, but always in a language the dominant culture can recognize. Wilde, Baudelaire, Huysmans—the dandy’s distance is legible, aesthetic, and strategic. My adjacency was none of these. It wasn’t curated or stylized. It was structural; it was redible. I didn’t step back to be seen. I stood elsewhere, untranslated.
2 I first gained recognition as a playwright through a Many Voices Residency at the Playwrights’ Center, which led to an Associate Membership. At age 26, I was honored with a 7-year Core Member appointment at the Playwrights’ Center — part of the same institutional lineage that supported August Wilson during the creation of his seminal plays. Within the Minneapolis arts ecosystem, I was also a recipient of multiple grants, supporting my continued development and contributions.
3 Even before I knew my own pattern, I was drawn to those who lived at the edge of epistemology — the peasant miller Menocchio’s cosmology of cheese and worms, the testimonies of accused witches, Rabelais’ ritual grotesque. I was less interested in rebellion than in the seam between worlds: not oppositional, but untranslated.
My teacher, Dai-En Bennage Rōshi, gave me the name Dōmon. At the time, I thought it meant I would guide others to the way. I understand now: it meant I would live at the threshold.
When I sewed my rakusu for the Dharma elder ceremony, she wrote “Nintai” in English — patience — and next to it, the single character 忍: Nin.
Often translated simply, the character is composed of blade (刃) over heart (心)—a structure that names endurance not as passivity, but as remaining whole under pressure.
Not patience as waiting.
Patience as the condition of staying where others do not remain.
Explore the full
Threadwork triptych:
•
Mistaking the Third Arm for a Tool ⧉
•
Living with the Dancer ⧉
•
The Rhythm That Forgot the Floor ⧉
Also part of this project:
•
Coherence Without Capture: An Ontological Arc (But Not An Ontology) ⧉
For orientation beyond this page, you may enter through:
•
The Vibrating Thread: From the Field of Redibility
•
Naikan in Four Movements
•
Threadwork (or begin with
Threshold to Threadwork ⧉ for a gentler entry)
•
The Holding Vow Sutra (drawn from the arc of
Naikan: The Rhythm of Vow ⧉ , but arriving later)
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