Putting everything into words isn't honesty. Pride and awe dwell in the realm that can't be told.
1. The dimension of verbalization is different
In Aoashi's Spain arc, Ashito hits a wall beyond technique.
"The dimension of verbalization is different…!" Ashito's strength was putting his own play into words, thinking it through, reproducing it. The "thinker-type" coaching from #4 raised him into a "player who can verbalize." But the top world has players who play one step beyond that verbalization.
Something faster than thinking-and-wording. This time I want to read that "realm that can't be told" alongside two books: Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow and Michael Polanyi's The Tacit Dimension. The finale of the Aoashi run.
2. Thinking, Fast and Slow: fast thought and slow thought
Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow splits human thought into two systems.
System 1 is fast. Intuitive, automatic, effortless. Pulling your hand from something hot, hearing your mother tongue, reading a face. System 2 is slow. Logical, conscious, effortful. Mental arithmetic, following an unfamiliar rule, choosing carefully.
Humans run mostly on System 1. System 2 is a heavy apparatus, called up when it matters. Ashito's "verbalize, think, reproduce" was a textbook System 2 act. Careful, but slow.
3. "Not even thinking?" — compressed System 2
A scout who saw the Spanish top mutters this.
"Are they not even thinking?" Top players' play is too fast to look like they're thinking each move through. But it's not that they think nothing. The opposite. A vast amount of System 2 training has settled into patterns in the brain and turned into System 1. The trace of having thought so hard you no longer need to. Compressed System 2, moving at the speed of intuition.
"The body moves on its own." "Trust that impulse." This isn't "stop thinking." It's "trust the state where thought, thought to its end, has sunk into the body." What Ashito did in his head, they already do in the body.
4. The Tacit Dimension: we know more than we can tell
Here, Michael Polanyi's The Tacit Dimension. (Not to be confused with Karl Polanyi of The Great Transformation — a different person.)
The book's core folds into a single line. "We know more than we can tell."
Someone who can ride a bike can't explain in words how they balance. A skilled craftsman can't fully say why they shave this grain this way. Knowledge has the explicit that can be worded and the tacit that can't. And the core of a master's knowing is usually on the tacit side.
The truth behind the top players' "not even thinking?" is this. Their knowing has sunk past the dimension of verbalization, into the tacit. Not inferior because it can't be told. They know so deeply it can't be told.
5. Deliberately not verbalizing
What's interesting is that Aoashi doesn't simply praise "verbalization."
"I've never been told anything [in words]," says one player — and another quietly answers: "Verbalization? You don't need it. It's fine."
Put it into words, and yes, you grasp it. You can reproduce it. But the moment you word it, something spills from there. Verbalization also trims rich tacit knowing down to the tellable range — it's also a kind of limitation.
So a master, sometimes, deliberately doesn't verbalize. Rather than thin it by wording, they leave it whole in the body, untold. This is the flip side of the Fukuda from #5. He relentlessly demanded verbalization, yet also guarded what couldn't be verbalized. The courage to word, and the courage not to word. Holding both is, probably, the condition of a master.
6. Non-verbal conversation
Knowing that can't be told passes, untold, between people.
"Honestly, I want to converse with just the soccer ball." I love this line of Fukuda's. As we saw in #7, he fought in a foreign land where the language didn't carry. But with a ball, you don't need words. Intent rides on a single pass; a reply comes back in one trap. Play itself becomes a conversation traded in tacit knowing.
Precisely because language doesn't carry, a high-purity non-verbal dialogue rises. The best combinations usually have no words.
7. Honed pride
And when Aoashi draws the existence of the forward, the pen takes on its deepest awe.
"There's a forward who carries his whole life through on honed instinct alone." For the single result of scoring, he hones only his instinct. Not logic, not words. Sniffing out the scent of the goal, an unexplainable intuition — tacit knowing itself. If he can't finish, nothing remains. The resolve to stake a whole life on that harsh purity. This is the forward's pride.
"He's a forward, after all." What was piled up over a long time folds, at the end, into this short line. The awe that comes from accumulated time isn't talkative. If anything, it's reticent. Those who know more than they can tell usually don't say much.
8. Observation, and the tacit
Finally, to OrbitLens.
I have to admit it honestly. What EIS can observe is only the explicit side. What remains in git history is commits, diffs, blame — only what can be made into words and numbers. The resolve to finish, the non-verbal combination, the intuition that moves before thought, the unspoken pride. The tacit I've watched all chapter spills, root and all, from the net of observation.
In #5 I wrote "Metis spills from legibility." It's the same here. If anything, the most awesome things are the ones that don't show up in observation.
If so, the honesty available to observation is one thing. To admit that what you've grasped is only the tellable part. Not to think the number on the score is the whole person. Signals, not Scores works here too. Observation reflects tellable signals, but it must not erase the existence of the awe that can't be told. The most important thing is outside the observation — to observe, knowing that.
Putting everything into words isn't honesty. Respecting the realm that can't be told, leaving it untold, is also honesty.
Don't nullify what you can't observe. That, probably, is the last pride of the one who holds the telescope.
After the Aoashi run
From #4 to #9, I've watched Aoashi from six angles.
In #4 he acquired the perception of the overhead view; in #9 he arrived at the tacit that can't be told. Both ends are "seeing and knowing, before it becomes words." Ashito grasped the world by verbalizing, and at the end, went beyond verbalization. The whole run drew a single circle.
To discover, to cultivate, to build the environment, to guard the essence, to respect what can't be told. A single soccer manga held all of organization and observation. Next, to another work — but the "seeing" Ashito taught will go on.
A confession
Having written this far, I want to confess one thing.
This series landed too neatly on "structure" every time. Not all of Aoashi mapped conveniently onto a concept. In truth there was excess that wouldn't fit a concept, ambiguity that could tip either way. I cut it to fit the structure. In #5 I wrote "legibility spills Metis" — and that legibility is exactly what I was doing to these stories, trimming them into a readable shape.
That I folded back to OrbitLens every time was, honestly, a funnel. I knew that landing on observation would make it close cleanly, so I let it run there. A convenient form becomes, before you notice, form for form's sake. What I wrote in #8 comes straight back at me.
So someday — not necessarily next, whenever a good theme comes — I'd like to let a book win. An entry where OrbitLens's thinking gets shaken — and revised — by a book. Where the structure comes undone and water spills from the funnel. To a series that preached respecting what can't be told while tidying it into the tellable, this is my homework, one I don't have to rush. When I can write that, this reading log will finally catch up to the "ethics of observation" it claimed.
Books
Next
The Aoashi run ends here. From #10, another work. I'll read Chuya Koyama's Space Brothers (Uchu Kyodai) alongside Marcel Mauss's The Gift. The quiet heat of the one who doesn't stand out — how does contribution that's hard to count hold up a community?
This is a personal reading of Aoashi (Yugo Kobayashi), The Tacit Dimension (Michael Polanyi), and Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman).
The Japanese version lives on OrbitLens Library.
OrbitLens / machuz
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