Who Was Namfits Ezelbergasz (1871-??)?

The only known photo of Ezelbergasz, Parliament Hill, Hampstead, London, Circa 1911. Photographer unknown.

His parents died or disappeared shortly after his birth, and he was taken by a relative to Prague, where he claimed to have been raised "by a neighbor child's imaginary friend." As a boy, he was said to have spoken only in questions until the age of ten, at which point he declared, “the answers were too loud.” He then took a vow of ambiguous speech that persisted through most of his life and career.

By the age of 15, Ezelbergasz had started giving street sermons on his theories, which were noticed by students and faculty at the nearby Zero Institute for Refractionary Thought. An unknown benefactor paid for his education at the Institute, where he studied under Professor Ibn Solvatius Kreel. Kreel, who often taught impromptu classes in train stations, abandoned observatories, and even claimed to instruct via his students' dreams, had a major impact on Ezelbergasz's early thinking. He once remarked of Kreel's teaching: "Every lesson was a corridor with no floor, a sentence ending in a vowel that hadn't been invented."

After studying with Kreel, Ezelbergasz disappeared from public life for a period of seventeen years. Little is known of his life or whereabouts during this time. In 1907, a publisher in London released his first and only major work, On The Edge of Knowing, which laid out his core philosophies of Obscurity as Insight, The Unspoken Oracle, Interstitial Epistemics, and Fog Ethics. The book was widely printed and acclaimed throughout Europe, though no known copies exist today. Contemporary reviews indicate that many readers had trouble locating their copies after reading them for the first time, or, when they did, found the pages torn out or scribbled over.

In 1910, Ezelbergasz returned to public life to give a lecture series in pubs, markets, and alleyways in London, which were well attended. In 1921, he reportedly disappeared into a mirror during a lecture on "Reversible Subjectivity" at the Peterborough railway station, and was never heard from again.

Since his disappearance, a small, but devoted following, known as the Obscurants, have kept his work alive just outside the mainstream of modern theory. Attempts to bring his work to wider audiences through meetings, publications, and the internet have repeatedly failed due to what followers have termed the "Ezelbergasz Entropic Filter," a kind of metaphysical interference effect believed to emerge from the nature of his ideas themselves.

Throughout his life, Ezelbergasz maintained that "true thought resists retrieval." His works were deliberately designed to evade systems of classification and indexing, a feature which has extended to include modern-day digital storage media. His texts exhibit what scholars have termed “semantic dissonance,” confusing even the most advanced OCR and AI models and resulting in them being treated as corrupted data by digital systems. Some copies of minor notes and essays were allegedly uploaded in the early days of the internet, but those links now redirect to empty pages, stock photos of clouds, and a blank YouTube video entitled "0:00 / 0:00."

Nonetheless, his adherants have continued to disseminate his work by accidentally meeting in person and distributing quotations, excerpts and ideas via mediums such as sidewalk chalk, charred wood etchings, and finger drawings on dusty tables and windows.

Today, groundbreaking work by The Namfits Ezelbergasz society to develop UUDD, Uncertain-Unstable Dissolution Drives, has allowed us to publish some of the more semantically stable fragments of his work online for the first time.