Pure Becoming

March 19, 2018April 6, 2018 ~ Piece, of the Sky

cdsz

The rain drummed harder on the thatch roof. Ran and Alli went inside the cabana.

White drapes hung silently. Raindrops ran down the back windows. There was a kitchenette, and a bathroom, hidden off to the side.

Alli walked around the circular room. The wooden floor was covered in faux thatch mats. There was a TV, in a mahogany stand. A NutriBullet stood on the counter. She looked at the large plastic jars of protein powder. A small photo frame had been set on the night dresser. It showed a kindly, older woman with graying hair and spectacles, probably Ran’s mother.

The tide was coming back in, flooding the tunnels and the caves in the cliffs, further down the shore.

Ran came in from the woods. The fire in the cast iron stove had burned low, down to glowing coals. The curtains were drawn. Alli lay on the lower bunk, under the knitted quilt. She was turning a page when Ran walked in, knocking the nettles off her boots.

The cabin smelled of the ginger tea Alli had brewed earlier. Ran extinguished the candle sputtering on the kitchen table. She sat down on the bench, undid her boots, pulled her flannel shirt out of her jeans and yanked off her high-thread count socks.

Down the mountain, moose were traipsing through the wilderness. Foxes were running, to and fro, in and out of the underbrush.

Ran came home, hurrying in from the New York rain. Her shoulders drooped with weariness. She’d forgotten her umbrella and her pewter jacket was soaked. She set her keys down on the table by the door.

Alli moved across the hallway and peeled the sopping jacket off Ran. “Come on, let me draw a bath for you, before you catch a cold,” she said.

She filled up the bathtub, with hot water and bubbles smelling of lavender. She wasn’t satisfied until Ran was sitting in the scalding mixture, saved from the chill.

Later, Alli and Ran were watching Wheel of Fortune on the couch, drinking green tea. Alli was reclining at one end and Ran sat on the other side.

At the end of the show, they fell asleep, spooning in the gentle light of the summer evening.

It was raining outside. The wind lashed the bay window, which rattled with every gust. Ran and Alli sat on the couch watching TV, but every so often the downpour would cause the cable to cut out.

During one of those ‘No signal found’ moments, Ran turned to Alli and said, “I’m falling in love with you.”

“No, you’re falling in love with the idea of me,” Alli said, with a self-conscious grin.

Ran held Alli’s hands, “No, I am actually falling in love with you.”

Rain water clattered down the window panes. Alli squeezed Ran’s hands in return, “I love you too, Ran.”

Ran hugged Alli to herself. She looked down at Alli, and Alli looked up at her, and locked in this embrace, on this wintry day, they had never felt so warm.

dartmouth

Music

Khachaturian – Spartacus, ballet & concert suites: Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia

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