The Aliquid

March 29, 2018April 6, 2018 ~ Piece, of the Sky

Wotan, Odin

The mist came down from the wooded mountains, hugging the gnarled slopes. Once over the lake, the hoary cloud ghosted the glass-like surface. Ran and Alli rode their mountain bikes through twists and turns in the Maine woods. As the sun set and the first stars came out, they braked on the gravel beach of the lake.

The body of water lay behind Kaan’s cabin. Kaan and Beth were in the city for the weekend, for a book signing Beth was doing for the second edition of her novel.

They built a small fire on the beachfront. “Why don’t you release another edition of your book?” Alli asked, “It has been five years, hasn’t it?”

Ran snapped a handful of small twigs in half, to better feed them to the flames, “I just never thought about it. I didn’t feel like I had anything new to say.”

“That’s alright,” Alli said, hanging a pot of water over the fire, “I probably won’t make it out to my five-year college reunion. Sometimes, even a half decade later, you haven’t really taken everything in.”

Ran nodded. They brought wooden chairs from the porch over to the water’s edge. The forest grew darker. The moon rose, like an ice crystal hanging in the hard, unyielding cobalt sky.

Alli went into the cabin for some ingredients. She cooked the tagliatelle al dente, strained it and placed it in two bowls. Ran added some prepared foie gras and shaved a few large flakes of black truffle on top of the mounds of pasta.

They sat watching the clouds float through the blue-violet milieu, eating their supper and listening to the lull between the lapping of the waves.

“Do you ever think of Dallas?” Ran wondered, “Sorry to ask about exes, but you mentioned she had come back to New York?”

Alli shook her head, “No, it’s OK. Kaan never saw her again after that. Yes, I think of her sometimes but really not that much.”

“Were you ever really that close?” Ran opened a bottle of wine.

Alli sighed, “I felt we were – but of course, I was wrong.”

Ran handed her a glass, “Do you think she’s sorry for what she did to you?”

The fruity notes in the merlot were sweet and dry, “No, she doesn’t think about me.”

The first trills of the nightingale sounded through the wood. A group of crows on the other shore rose up, and flew off, in the direction of the mountains.

Ran poured herself another glass, “If I met her, what would you want me to say to her?”

Alli was leaning deep into her chair. She blanched, balancing the wine glass on her belly, over the flannel shirt she was wearing, “Nothing. It’s over. I don’t think about it anymore.”

Another crow cawed in the distance, across the water. An otter slipped into the waves, not far from them, crawling off a log, its serpentine body leaving nary a ripple in the water.

“There must be something you want to say to her. Something that needs to get out.”

Alli closed her eyes, sinking deeper into the cushions, “Not a thing. I’ve moved on. I have you.”

Ran drained her glass, “You know that I care for you, right?”

Alli didn’t open her eyes, “Always.”

The shadows joined the night. The bulbous moon, threw the two figures into sharp relief. The otter slunk back out of the water, sleek as a feline, hair slicked back against its minute skull.

jotun-frost Titans

Music:

Gounod – Faust, opera: Salut, demeure chaste et pure (Act 3)

A Donation of Sense

March 17, 2018March 19, 2018 ~ Piece, of the Sky

hibiki_saka_gunbu2

An instance of denotation, manifestation and signification failing to support sense, is Alice losing her name.[1a] Alice loses the name that denotes and signifies her. Hence, sense is separated from the three dimensions of proposition. There is a regressive denoting of further senses.[2a] From Latin, and later, French – doner, donnes – comes the English word, “donate.” We are donated the “givens” in a problem. [3a] The problem preexists the answer. Alea, a game of chance,[4a] runs on lack and excess. There are no Ideal Forms, only forms, casts, events – points, sets, series, pips on a die. You have sets and series, with lack and excess moving between two sets.

In an identity, x = x. Sets hold various identities, including limits and singularities, placeholders, like zero. A singularity is a point or a non-point, like the eye of a storm or the center of a whorl of hair. In physics, black holes are singularities, rips in space-time. You could say singularities are points of pure becoming. A singularity is another point in a set; a point has zero dimensions.[1] Humpty Dumpty, an egg, has no organs; he is made of singularities instead. He lacks identity.

In losing her name, Alice gives off her incorporeal double. Doubles involve two entities going in two directions and good sense. There are the doubles, Tweedle-dee and Tweedledum, the Hare and the Hatter, but also the liminal in between. We have the Stoics’ Chrysippus effect and the law of the excluded middle, the infinite set, the limit and the convergence toward a limit. In the present, is the event, a point connecting to the infinite line of Aion, the ideal game, a line on a flat surface, the width, a frontier. The zero, the empty space, a floating signifier, is the ‘something,’ the aliquid, between the two sets. This given, in the problem preexisting answers, is the doner, the donation, between the two sets. Sense is that donation, the given – ‘that’s a given.’

Sense is the empty square between the two sets, the two series. Lack and excess define the two series, and the singularity is the event that provides coordination between the two sets. There are two sets, the signified and the signifying.

In the opposition between the surface and depths, the surface, the membrane between bodies and words, things and propositions, begins to break down and have holes. The body is a cavity with a broken surface; it is porous, with little holes. If there were no separation between propositions and things, words would enter bodies. Of course, this is not the case. In the world of depth, bodies are penetrated by other bodies, mixtures – this is a wound. On the other side, in a separate set, is sense, the event, an incorporeal effect, a surface effect. The surface effect, the pure ideal game is set apart; words are set aside from bodies.[2]

There is also the organism without organs, a body without organs, an egg, like Humpty Dumpty, or an embryo with undifferentiated organs, or a zygote with poles of cells, thresholds of potential. On the zygote are the animal and vegetative poles, active and passive poles of cells. The egg and Humpty Dumpty are points, singularities. They take in both sets of aspects – that of bodies but also skins, peelings, surface effects, events, sense – a body but a body without smaller, internal bodies, encased in membranes: a body without organs.

In the egg, this body without organs, there is no surface, no frontier, no difference or differentiation. The fish become a part of the sea, thus alluding to Humpty Dumpty’s poem including fish.[3] Are the fish apart of the sea or are they separate bodies? In this body without organs, between surface and depth, words enter bodies. Fire, water and air, classical elements, combine. Body and words become one – a strange amalgamation, like the portmanteau word.

Hecate is the goddess of the crossroads, the liminal and facing three ways. Circe, is an expression of Hecate, who is also the goddess of the moon. Circe turned the lotus eaters into pigs, a moment of pure becoming. There are lost pigs and other animals on Peter Pan’s island. Hecate and the nocturnal, connect to seemingly nonsense words: “lost pigs of the moon.”[4] Water and fire, classical elements, combine again. The combination of opposites points to the duality of the body: the fragmented body with separate organs and the body without organs. Peter Pan releases his shadow; both Peter Pan and Alice release their incorporeal doubles.

There is a difference between the nonsense of the surface and the two series, and the nonsense below sense and the surface, the nonsense of the depths, when the two series collapse into one. Sense slides along the surface width, between the two sets of signified and signifying. Meanwhile, there is no surface or difference between continuous bodies surrounded by their surface membranes, only depth. The lotus eaters are the nexus, the connection, between pigs and eating. Eating entails a digestive track from end to end, a tube, a hole, a tunnel, a surface of epithelium, running through the body, continuous with its surface; skin on the outside and the meeting of internal and external, inside and outside – one giant surface, running through a depth.[5]

Sense is the bi-directional line, like Aion, the divider between language and the body, protecting the body from language – when words pierce bodies, a wounding. Sense is the barrier, the mirror, keeping words, the incorporeal, proper names – and the body, bodies, the depths, separate. Sense is a singularity, an empty square, a supernumerary zero, moving between the two series of propositions and things, eating and speaking. There are two series, the body versus language and words.

Telescoping, Aion and Alice are unfolding, along an infinite line. Common sense, identity, is being eroded. The body goes back to being an egg, an undifferentiated body without organs. Doubles and doppelgangers appear in tandem – Hatter, Hare; Tweedle-dee, Tweedledum. The nonsense of depth is pitted against the nonsense of the surface.[6] The nonsense of depth, is corporeal; there is no surface or frontier – words pierce bodies and wound them. The surface collapses, pierced with many holes; it is porous.

The nonsense of the surface is the logic of sense, language, the incorporeal, the surface, the dividing line between the two series of language and bodies. The surface is like the surface of a body of water – it is easily pierced. Bodies pierce mixtures, producing surface effects, ripples. Sense is produced on the surface; when the surface collapses, sense collapses.

Sense is produced at the intersection of identity and direction. Sense doesn’t say its own sense – like nonsense – it further denotes in a serialization: n₁, n₂, n₃; infinite regression, eternal return. Sense is the surface between words and bodies. A surface and the liminal space before it, are indivisible; they are two sides to one whole, like two-faced Janus: a double causality. There are two forms: the general and the individual, two perspectives,[7] surface versus depth. There are two series of singularities, with empty square and esoteric words, circulating between objects and words, bodies and language, signified and signifying.

Faro