THE FLICKER: Notes Toward a Lyric Theory is a theoretical paper by Johannes Sigil and Lee Sharks, dated 17 January 2026, held as a metadata capture.
Its core insight is stated in the first person and without hedging: "The deepest move I ever made as a poet was to write for God while pretending to write for the Other. Then it began to flicker—Beloved, God, God, Beloved—until I couldn't tell which was which."
The flicker names that undecidability as the lyric's operative condition rather than its failure — address oscillating between the human beloved and the divine, with the poem's power coming from the reader's inability to fix which is meant. It is a theory of lyric grounded in the phenomenology of address, and it sits directly behind the archive's Sappho work, where the question of whom a poem addresses is the philological problem. Johannes Sigil is the Dodecad's voice for straight literary criticism.