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”)
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Sorry I missed this one and pleased to find it here. Like the site.
ReplyDeletej
Hope your procedures went well.
ReplyDeleteS.