The Rheomode: Why Language Hides Reality
Our noun-heavy language freezes a flowing universe into static objects.
A companion essay series to Complex Adaptive Markets: How Living Systems Shape Finance
Light a match and watch the flame.
Now point to the thing you are looking at. You will find that you cannot. There is no object sitting on the wick, no small orange body you could lift away and set on the table. There is only burning. Gas breaking apart, heat climbing, light thrown outward, a shape that holds for exactly as long as the reaction feeds it and is gone the instant it does not. A flame is not a thing. It is an event, slowed down just enough to look at.
And yet you called it a flame. A noun. The moment the word arrived, the burning hardened into an object, something with an outline, something you could imagine holding still. The fire did not do that. The language did.
This is the trap the essay is about, and it goes deeper than it looks. Our words hand us a world of things. Reality keeps handing back a world of happenings. The gap between the two is not a matter of vocabulary. It shapes what we are able to see at all.
The first essay argued that the universe is not infinite because it is not an object in the first place. It is a process, and its structure is not built up but cut from what could not hold. But a quieter question was sitting underneath that argument, and we walked straight past it.
Why did we ever think the universe was a thing?
The answer is in your mouth. It is in the grammar you used to ask.
The Invisible Architecture of Language
Every language carries an architecture, and the architecture is invisible to the people who live inside it. Not the vocabulary, not the rules drilled into you at school, but something below those: a habit of carving the world into certain shapes before you have consciously thought anything at all. You no more notice it than a fish notices water. It is simply the medium you think in.
English, and the wider family of Indo-European languages it belongs to, runs on a spine of subject, verb, object. The cat sits on the mat. The trader buys the stock. The universe expands into space. Every sentence opens with a thing, reports what the thing did, and often names a second thing on the receiving end. Say enough sentences of that shape and a conviction settles in that no one ever argued for: that the world is, at bottom, made of things, and that what those things do is a secondary matter, laid on top.
Turn that over. Perhaps it is backwards, and the doing comes first, and the things are only what we get when we stop attending to the doing. A rock is a noun. It is also a reaction so slow that we mistake its patience for permanence, atoms holding their bonds across geological time. A river is a noun. It is also water in the act of falling downhill, a verb we have named for the shape its motion happens to take. The noun is not false, only a convenience. But we forget that it is a convenience, and then we mistake the fossil for the animal that left it.
And you learn it early, long before you could consent to it. A child is handed nouns first: cup, dog, the names of things that hold still long enough to be pointed at. The verbs come later and attach themselves to the nouns like servants. By the time anyone might question the arrangement, it has stopped looking like an arrangement and started to look like the plain furniture of the world. The convention has gone invisible, and an invisible convention is indistinguishable, from the inside, from perception itself.
David Bohm and the Problem of Fragmentation
David Bohm was one of the twentieth century’s more original physicists, with foundational work in quantum theory and plasma physics behind him. His most radical thinking, though, was not about particles. It was about thought itself.
Bohm held that the deep disorder in modern thinking was fragmentation. We break the world into parts, study each in isolation, then find ourselves baffled when the parts refuse to add back into a whole. And he traced the habit not to carelessness but to language. The subject-verb-object structure, he argued, forces the world apart into actors and things acted upon, into separate entities with gaps between them, before we have decided anything at all. We fragment because our sentences fragment. Nature does not arrive pre-divided. It moves as one piece. The divisions are in the lens, and the lens is grammar.
He set the case out in Wholeness and the Implicate Order, and he was careful about the claim. The trouble is not that we sometimes use words loosely. It is that the deep grammar of the language carries a fragmented picture of the world folded inside it, and hands that picture to everyone who learns to speak. A physiologist studies the heart apart from the body. An economist studies one instrument apart from the system that prices it. Each learns something true and something distorted in the same motion, because the cut that made the study possible was never there in the thing itself. The fragments never quite add back up, and we blame the world for refusing to cooperate, when the fault was in the knife.
The Rheomode
Bohm did not stop at the diagnosis. He tried to build a cure, and he called it the rheomode, from the Greek rheo, to flow.
The rheomode was a language rebuilt so that verbs, not nouns, carried the weight. Rather than begin with an object and report its actions, it began with activity and let objects appear, if they appeared at all, as passing thickenings in the flow. In ordinary English we say the electron moves from one point to another. Noun first, thing assumed, motion tacked on afterward. Bohm wanted something closer to this: there is electroning, and within the electroning a pattern holds steady enough that we call it, for convenience, an electron. The activity is the reality. The thing is a courtesy we extend to it.
English stumbles toward it now and then. We say it is raining, and there is no it that does the raining. There is only raining, happening, subjectless, with a hollow it propped in front because the language cannot bear a verb standing on its own. Then the moment passes and the nouns close back over the gap.
It never caught on. The rheomode is clumsy, effortful, almost impossible to sustain across a paragraph, let alone a life. But its failure was the very point he was making. The difficulty of thinking in verbs is the measure of how completely nouns have us. We cannot easily speak the flow because we were raised to speak the freeze. The bars of the cage stay invisible until you put your hands on them and push.
Bohm was not alone in the intuition. The notion that language shapes perception has a long history, but he pushed it further than the linguists dared. The problem, for him, was not merely that languages differ. It was that the languages science speaks, his own among them, tilt the mind toward objects and fragments even as the science itself keeps pointing the other way, toward fields, relations, and process.
The Implicate and the Explicate
Bohm gave the two faces of this a pair of names. The world of separate objects and measurable properties, the world we move through and point at, he called the explicate order. Tables, prices, planets, bodies. Real enough, but not fundamental. A surface.
Beneath it he placed the implicate order, the enfolded ground from which the explicate is continually drawn out. Not a hidden room behind the scenery, but a mode of being in which nothing is yet separate, in which everything is folded into everything else. The visible world is what gets unfolded from that ground and held, briefly, in view.
He reached for a hologram. On a holographic plate every fragment of the film carries the whole image; cut the plate in half and each half still shows the entire picture, only fainter. The whole is present in every part. The universe, Bohm proposed, is folded together the same way, and each object is a local unfolding of a whole that is everywhere at once.
Notice what unfolding is. It is not addition. The implicate does not manufacture the explicate and stack it up. It lets a little of itself through into form and holds back the rest, and what we call an object is the small part that was let through and made to stand still. Most of the whole stays enfolded, unexpressed. The explicate world is not everything the ground could become. It is the narrow residue that survived being drawn into shape.
Bohm reached for a whirlpool to make it plain. Watch one turning in a river. It has an outline, a place, a persistence. You could point at it, name it, measure across it. It looks like a thing. It is not a thing. It is a knot of moving water, made of nothing but the river’s own falling, and it lasts only while the river runs. Still the water and the whirlpool is not stilled, it is gone, because there was never anything there but motion wearing a shape. The world, Bohm said, is full of whirlpools we have mistaken for stones.
The Trap in Markets
Nowhere is the mistake more expensive than in the markets we trade.
Listen to the language of finance. The market is nervous. The market is bullish. The market turned. Every sentence hands the market a body and a mood, an object that sits somewhere and does things. There is no such object. There is a vast, unbroken act of interaction, millions of participants buying, selling, hedging, withdrawing, changing their minds, and the word market is a label we paste across the whole moving business so that we can talk about it without going mad. The label earns its keep. The trouble begins when we forget it is a label and start treating the noun as the thing.
A price wears the same disguise. We say the price as though a number were resting on a shelf, waiting to be read off. But a price is not resting, and it is not a thing. It is the trace of a settlement, the mark left where a buyer and a seller stopped disagreeing for an instant. By the time you read it, the settling that made it has already passed. And a settlement, as the first essay had it, is a subtraction: every price the two sides would not accept struck away, until the one that cleared is all that is left standing. The noun hides the verdict inside it. It shows you the survivor and buries the act that chose it.
A trend is the same sleight of hand at a larger scale. The word makes it sound like a thing on the move, a train running along rails through the market. There is no such object, only a direction that survives once the positions against it have been closed out and carried off, a pattern left standing because everything that would have broken it has already broken. We name it, and the name lets us forget that it is made entirely of motion and attrition, that it has no body, that it will hold for exactly as long as the interaction beneath it and not one tick longer.
This is not fastidiousness about words. It runs straight into how models are built and why they fail. A model that takes its nouns at face value treats the market as a box of stable objects: prices with fixed properties, distributions that keep their shape, an equilibrium the system is resting in. Such a model works while the market is quiet and its behaviour still resembles the frozen snapshot the model was cut from. It breaks the instant the market moves, because it was reading a thing where there was only ever a process. Trend following endures the same conditions precisely because it never believed the nouns. It does not ask what the market is. It asks what the market is doing. It watches the verb.
The Question Dissolves
Which returns us to the question the series began with. Why is the universe not infinite?
The first essay answered it on its own ground: the universe is not infinite because it is cut from what could not hold, and a process of cutting never arrives at a finished whole. This essay can say something the first could not. The question was malformed before anyone tried to answer it. It treats the universe as a noun, an object with a size, a thing you might in principle measure out to the edge. But there is no such object, only a happening, and happenings do not take the property of size any more than flowing takes the property of weight, or becoming takes the property of height. The grammar of the question works. The sense of it does not.
Say it in the rheomode and it comes apart in your hands. You cannot ask how large universing is. There is no noun there for the ruler to touch. What there is instead is an activity, unbroken and ongoing, that our language forces us to freeze into an object and then interrogate about dimensions that never applied to it. Drop the freeze, and the question dissolves.
This is why the puzzle held out for so long. Faced with a noun, the mind reaches for a ruler, because that is what nouns are for. So people measured, and argued over the measurements, and the argument could not end, because it was being carried on in the wrong grammar. No amount of cosmology could dissolve a confusion that lived in the word the. The universe was never the wrong size. It was never a size at all.
Toward a Language of Process
The rheomode never became a language anyone speaks. But the pressure behind it has only grown. Every field that studies complex, living, adaptive systems runs sooner or later into the same wall: the words available for the system quietly misdescribe it. Nouns still the thing that ought to move. Categories cut apart what is whole. Definitions pin down what will not hold still to be pinned.
Complex Adaptive Markets is, in its bones, a book written against that wall. It refuses to speak of markets as collections of objects and insists instead on the language of process: interaction, feedback, memory, adaptation, emergence. Not because the vocabulary is fashionable, but because the market behaves as a verb and punishes anyone who reads it as a noun. The language you choose becomes the perception you have, the perception becomes the model, and the model either survives contact with a living market or it does not. The chain starts with a word.
There is one more thing the rheomode would let us say, if we could learn to speak it. It would let us name what the universe is actually doing. Not sitting, not extending, not being any fixed size, but cutting, shedding, ruling out, leaving behind. The verb at the centre of everything is a verb of subtraction. Our noun-bound language can barely hold the idea, which is why we keep reaching, essay after essay, for the same handful of images: the chisel, the river cutting its valley, the market closing out everything that would not clear. They are attempts to say, in a language of things, something that is only ever true of process.
What Comes Next
We have caught the language in the act. It takes a world of verbs and hands us back a world of nouns, and the exchange happens so quickly, so early, that we mistake the nouns for the truth.
If that is right, there is a test we can run. Take one of these supposedly solid things and look at it as hard as we can. Drill into it. Go under the surface and keep going, past the object, past the smaller objects inside it, and see whether we ever strike a floor: some final thing that is genuinely a thing, sitting there, being itself, with no process underneath.
The next essay runs that test. It descends through physics, through biology, through markets, and finds the same result at every level. The thing dissolves. The floor never comes.
There is no basement.
Only the doing, all the way down.
The Universe is a Verb is a companion essay series to Complex Adaptive Markets: How Living Systems Shape Finance by Richard Brennan. The ideas explored in these essays are developed in full depth in the book, where the framework moves from cosmic principle to practical application.
Richard Brennan writes on systematic trading, complex adaptive markets, and the philosophical foundations of trend following at atstradingsolutions.com. His books include The Fractals of Finance and Complex Adaptive Markets. The forthcoming Carved by Impossibility completes the trilogy.
Want the theoretical foundation for why trend following works?
The Fractals of Finance: Determinism, Adaptation and the Geometry of Markets
The book explores the full architecture of feedback, fat tails, and fractal structure in financial markets, and what it means for how we trade, invest, and understand risk.
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