Saturday, August 16, 2014
The Violets Tear It Away
The Violets Tear it Away
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)
Penelope 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,” said Penelope.
“Then I’ll choose.” Penelope primordialized prior to bed.
Penelope practiced
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: 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 ofour own experience follow
inexorably from the original act of severance.
They run after the
farmer’s wife; she
cuts off their taleswith
a carving knife.
To articulate:
originally a butcher’s
ability to separate
the
beast at the joints
with
minimum blood &
gristle.
Cleavage at the
cross
roads, tuxedo
junctions:
art &
artifice fitting &
refitting, weave
& re-
weaving rates &
ratios,
reading rites and
arithmetic: all beget,
begat, begot at the joint
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. (81)
(G. Spencer
Brown. Laws of Form, re-
formatted and
configured to fit my screed”)
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