no global section
Local meaning, global consequence
A sheaf assigns local data to overlapping regions and asks whether the local pieces agree on their overlaps. When they do, the local data glues into a global section. When they do not, the mismatch is classified by a cohomology class. This playground takes that picture and applies it, deliberately informally, to a small set of human figures who fail (or refuse, or break) the global gluing.
The tragedy of humanity is that our meanings are local, but our consequences are global.
Why no global section
Odysseus is offered the stars and chooses Ithaca. Faust refuses every local boundary and unravels across an inflating cover. Kafka's K. lives in a world that asserts a global order without ever evaluating it at any local point. Dante alone finds something close to a clean global section, but only by accepting an authoritative cosmology that does the stratifying work. The other figures are accounts of how the gluing fails, and what survives the failure.
What the model is and is not
The six-axis basis (locality, abstraction, desire, institution, trauma, knowledge) is a deliberate compression. The scoring formula has no business cycle, no time, no narrative arc. It is a comparative instrument, not a predictive one. The lens choice frames the reading but does not change the numbers; the configuration is the model. The calibration table compares the model's emergent obstruction on each figure's canonical profile to a reader-provided expected obstruction. Close agreement means the model's shape matches a careful reading. It does not mean the model has read the text.
The figures, briefly
Odysseus (return), Orpheus (descent), Gilgamesh (mortality), Aeneas (transfer), Dante (cosmic order), Faust (infinite appetite), Kafka's K. (bureaucracy), Balzac (social gluing), Musil (over-possibility), Sabato (pathological collapse). Ten figures, ten ways the local and the global fail to align, ten different residues left behind.
Model changelog
- Ten narrative figures with canonical axis profiles drawn from scholarly readings, not implementer preference.
- Six-axis basis (locality, abstraction, desire, institution, trauma, knowledge) chosen as the smallest set that distinguishes the figures while remaining intelligible.
- Obstruction model: pressure from desire, trauma, abstraction, and local-global tension; containment from institution and knowledge.
- Derived metrics: glue, mythic charge, modernity pressure, germ persistence, monodromy twist, local-global tension.
- Five lenses (sheaf, stalk, monodromy, obstruction, derived) frame the reading but do not change the numbers; the configuration is the model.
- Calibration compares model-predicted obstruction against a reader-provided expected obstruction for each canonical figure.
- Obstruction map: six axis nodes placed on a hex, gluing edges weighted by minimum-pair value times overall glue, rupture arcs activated by obstruction.