Saturday, July 7, 2007

Primordial (Prior to The Weave)


Before Origins

It is all too often forgotten that the
ancient symbol for the prenascence
of the world is a fool, and that
foolishness, being a divine state,
is not a condition to be either
proud or ashamed of.
(G. Spencer Brown. Laws of Form)

Indo European ar : “to fit together”— L. arms,
army, harmony, art, artisan, artifice, article;
ordo (originally a row of threads in a loom)
—order, ordain; orderi: “to begin to weave”

Penelope “the weaver” undid daily
weaving night after night to forestall
men urgent to replace Ulysses: his
voyage round the world seemingly
never-ending.

“Wait’ll I’m done with my tapestry,”
says Penelope. “Then I’ll choose
a new husband.”

Penelope primordializes prior to bedtime.
Penelope practices anti-Penelope prayer
& a prenascence not to be confused with
renaissance: un-weaving her weave all
over again: zero-basing back to old scratch.

Eventually Ulysses appears & clears
the house. Ecological cleansing: un-
sustaining un-sustainable sustainabilities
sustaining unsustainable sustainabilities

Primordial & Pre-nascent:
before the first stitch in time
so to speak prior to word, division,
glad tidings: prior to the cut, divinity
not quite yet dividing a place to draw
a distinction.

The Violent Bear it Away

“A universe comes into being
when a space is
severed or
taken apart.


This skin of a living being

cuts off an outside from
an inside.

By tracing the way we re-
present such a severance,
we begin to reconstruct,

with an accuracy &
coverage
almost uncanny,
the basic
forms under-lying
linguistic,
mathematical,
physical, and
biological
science, and begin
to see
how the familiar laws
of
our own experience follow
inexorably from the original
act of severance."


They run after the
farmer’s wife; she
cuts off their tales
with a carving
knife.

To articulate:

originally a butcher’s
savvy: to separate a
beast at the joints
with minimum
blood & gristle.

Cleavage at the cross
roads, tuxedo junctions:
art & artifice fitting &
refitting, weave & re-
weave rates, ratios,
reading rites and
arithmetic: all beget,
begat, begot at the
joints where severance
& connection are Siamese
twins & the same deal
called thinking.

The act is itself already
remembered,
even if
unconsciously, as our
first
attempt to distinguish
different things
in a world,
where, in the first place,

the boundaries can be
drawn anywhere
we please.

At this stage the universe
cannot be
distinguished from
how we act upon it,
and the
world may seem like shifting

sand beneath our feet.

It is this condensation which
gives the
symbol its power.
For in mathematics,
as in
other disciplines, the power
of a
system resides in it’s
ELEGANCE


(literally: its capacity
to pick out, or elect)
which is achieved by
condensing
as is needed
into as little as is needed
and so
making that little
as free from irrelevance

(or from elaboration) as is
allowed by the
necessity of
writing it out and reading it in

with ease and without error."


(Sampling G. Spencer Brown. Laws of Form,
re-formatted and configured to fit my screed”)

2 comments:

  1. Sorry I missed this one and pleased to find it here. Like the site.
    j

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hope your procedures went well.
    S.

    ReplyDelete