“For that I blame the craven desire to speak, to write, to be heard.”
-Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet-
Nerve Language by Daniel Schreber
Semantic Animals
It goes on. Seduced (sickened and soothed) by symbols, I read. I write. In dilettante-like forays into advanced mathematics, physics, cognitive sciences and biology, I learn:
“The first message is that there is disorder”
(-James Yorke, attributed with naming the science known as Chaos)
So back to first principles (they have a habit of coming in threes, and splitting into fragments). I take out a blank sheet of paper, filled with lines. A patterned absence. Boundarying void. I write “seduced” because I’m thinking about language. Thinking instinct and survival and desperate need. Thinking overload, “more than you could possibly imagine.” Semantic animals.
When I last saw the snow fall, it was raining, offering an impression of “wet.”
She is far from me in two dimensions. Only two, of multiples of three. I count by the “trick of the nines.”
If only there were a way to collect accurate data. Then adequately calculate and organize. Unfortunately, life is mostly made of problems existing on continuums of countless dynamic variables, most of which – unsolvable. They call these “differential,” or Derrida’s Infinitude of Differance. Professionals finally agreeing: “regularity is aberration.”
We search for patterns. Even in chaos we find them (or create). Seduced (sickened and soothed) by symbols, we “read.” There are so many oscillating signals that even the few we don’t inherently tune out we call “noise.”
Philosophically, on the other hand, where I feel more like an amateur or novice, I understand the problem/hypothesis/theory equation to be: EVERYTHING goes into EVERYTHING, that we’re only ever engaging possibilities. That probables are fleeting, and certainties are few: You are limited, peculiar, and definitely will die.
In other words, “the very process of cutting up and cutting off, opens up and opens out,” or some of us are developing “a belief in the musicality of creative disjunction” (Lance Olsen), because, seduced (sickened and soothed) by symbols, we select and collage our own inspection.
It’s easy to forget the first things that we find, i.e. that all positive statements and beliefs are built on “that there is disorder,”
and seduced (sickened and soothed) by symbols,
we go on from there.
In the snowstorm white noise of the brain’s television ( its only apparent way to know outside of itself) faces and voices emerge from an unknowable space and time. Even the purest mathematics is storytelling by stripped archetypes, gods without attributes or names. What we don’t know, what we fail to identify is the true mass of the universe, dark matter, dark space. Photographing Fairies. The truth is a joke, so were vere towards a portentious fsbrication. Cosmology, jigsaws, maps, hearsay.
somethings like that, indeed, it would seem
Have you come across Electric Animal: Towards a Rhetoric of Wildlife, by Akira Lippit? He also wrote Atomic Light and a recent book on experimental film. For some reason your recent posts have reminded me of his scholarship. Great posts, thank you.
I have not! Thank you. I will surely look into them.