interstices |
If instead of holes formed by warp and woof we substitute points we lose the structural integrity and gain by fuzziness the ability to simulate expression. A general idea of a thing. One that can shift and reconfigure. Now tapestries are woven to resemble things perceived. The shirt or dress you wear may show a traditional pattern. Or an anomalous pattern. Whatever strikes your fancy. It may set you apart or stamp you as one of the crowd.
Your face is your fortune, as they say. So are your abilities, or lack of them. An idiot. A cripple. A wimp. A nerd. A fluke. A rogue. An outlaw. Nothing fuzzy here. Categories admixed with feelings. "Friend" crosses the barriers. Speaks of feeling without being judgmental.
"idios", in Webster, from the Greek: 'one's own, private'. Idiomatic. Individual. We are all idiots, more or less, in a continuum or hierarchy, if we must be judgmental, and unfairly; or we exhibit differences of intelligence and knowledge according to our abilities. Judgments are written because somewhere feeling has failed. The Grand Designer does not judge. The Grand Designer is not rational. If there is a grand design it is idiosyncratic, it moves in us. We, the universal non-categorical we including genus Iapeti, whose tongue we speak, and the we whose tongues proclaim "we are", this round earth that is at one with the universe within each individual entity, at one and at odds.
Webster:One God or gods, plural, multiple, a ruling caste (or cast). The one has its roots in our brains, our intellect, the others in our minds, our imaginations. I know which i prefer, but we are stuck with both conceptions. So our next definition:
Webster:"The church's one foundation is Jesus Christ, our Lord"
line from a Wesleyan Methodist hymn
I take it that gods are generally imagined, that is, extrapolated from visible manifestations seen or known by epiphany. Most of us have perceived inklings of some power greater than ourselves in the course of a natural event: walking in deep woods, gazing in wonder at the stars, getting lost in a flower, or aloft on a mountain. Even at a grave when death suddenly confronts us. Or a birth. Magical moments when we penetrate by sudden insight the gauze of common- place and feel the original pulse. As if we were stripped bare before our Maker.
Picturesque, romantic when told because the experience cannot be retold, it is not repeatable. You must experience the equivalent for yourself. Epiphanies get explained. We can't resist relating them to design, the origins of things, since origins precede any direct records. Eventually what began as erratic experience begets myth and myth is brought down to earth, made literal instead of figurative.
One explanation, mine, not yours. Who knows how stories come about and what twists they are given? Myths are generally a supernatural explanation of natural events or phenomena. Myths are by definition traditional, obscured, unprovable. Why take them on faith? What gives us enlightenment or pleasure stands on its merits.
"Theodicy". Ah yes, evil. What brands another as outside the Law. Hell is assigned as a place [underground in catacombs with fire erupting, the smell of sulphur, instead of marble halls situated on high amidst puffy clouds, or similar contrary location] of everlasting torment and fantastic agonies devised to punish those that dare to disagree with your opinions. Rather extreme.
And theology. Arguments in favour of the opinions on which a church is grounded.
Webster:Divine law. God invoked because a God is omnipotent and cannot be argued with. End of discussion.
I find the idea of One God intriguing. Why any number, surely God interpenetrates or not at all, therefor transcendent or immanent? And god is either all or none, infinite, uncountable, or a cypher. I plunge for the cypher. One god disturbs me. Especially One God. You see, a rational god seems to defy my feeling of what a god should be, beyond our knowing, certainly beyond our retelling, beyond intellectual controls, as judgments and the like. Certainties. Fie on certainties that explain the unknowable. Fie on transcendence and immanence for that matter, they too are judgments. Fie on One or the Other.
Judgments make knowledge finite. Graspable. Is god E=mc2? Is god on the left hand or the right hand? Is god one or the many? Is god whole or part? Is god east of the sun and west of the moon? What net shapes god?
Nets need not be regular, each interstice mirroring or emulating the next and the next. Nets can be warped. Made into any shape we wish. Though to track their lineaments we must triangulate, mark and measure the tangents, and the tangents must be in sequence, or else they are untrackable. Infinite coordinates require infinite recording. Who can do that but god? God has done that already; here we are simulating infinite knots and spaces, the design we accredit to god in the first place. Though i say this with tongue in cheek. The design is not -- repeat not - - rational. Each individuality is unique and fluky, anomalous. So we make our representative nets (mathematical renderings) warped in controlled sequences. For example, Mercator's projection. A useful expedient that caricatures the globe. How many anomalies compose this Creation? One more than we can think of. Beyond that we cannot go. Is god the one more; is god the lot plus one? Should we give up counting, show our hands and indicate many many fingers? But even that is counting, like infinity. These are judgments. Judgments meant to express the unknowable.
How can we get away from judgments? The truth is we can't. Not entirely. For we are locked into a system we originally devised to make sense of our world. Sense perspectives, rooted in articulation. The movements our senses make or feel. If we were made and built differently our world of knowledge would be different because our senses would be differently engaged or activated. And our judgments would be different. "The world is the same," you say. No, because the world nurtured and taught us. Isn't the world the same body we are? On the grounds of logical economy alone? I know, a judgment. Derived from our grounds, reality, what we are and what we perceive. Perplexing, isn't it? A challenge! What we were made for, presumable. Or made of ourselves out of our grounds.
These mental puzzles go round and round like the universal ouroborus. Fed on our own
hinder parts. Which is a symbol for the rational intellect. 
or 
for synthesis. But wait. How about a tangent -- thus
? 
Introverted and extraverted thought. Directed at the world, practically, or inverted, abstractedly. We deal with images or direct representations of what's "out there", manipulated things; or entertain coded information about them in our heads, as if the abstractions were what was real, as if the "in here" mattered most. Sound familiar? Rather neat, too neat to be true, making do as an analogy. For analogy, imaginative comparisons, roughly or figuratively so and thus, is how we extend our
knowledge and our grasp of what might me, what might be faithful as a copy, or useful to work with.
Let stand for any generality, fixed, final, closed, completed. We open it to exceptions. To applications; whomever or whatever may apply. Ah, such turmoil, fitting in this new candidate! Not necessarily. For it likely belongs to a pattern. The pattern of the template that gave it birth. A mutation. An anomaly. If allowed to persist, a new sequence, a regular derivation from the pattern. Regularity from irregularity. How novelty is born! The worldwide web. Ripples. Rhythms. Resonances. A stone falls into the pond and its singular motion is redirected, assimilated with nuances. As we are born and influence our fellows. Initial conditions.
"... flux-learned and locked in matrices."
C, J. Cherryh, Cyteen, Rebirth, P. 83, Popular Library, 1988
"--master the flux," he said.op. cit. or ditto
Strange singularities released. Not "rearranged to fit" a system, enclosed. Dynamic, instead. There's a place for categories, understood as categories, and a place to live and let live, where knowledge can adapt to circumstances and to new conceptions that might lead in the direction circumstances will take. Circular snakes and arrays of ladders that mould the form to fit whatever originates or develops. A linear representation of dynamic motion in reality. And by motion i mean change as well as movement, for that is in motion, too. Motions encompass us all. Motions are "what is". So we are neither the one nor the many. We are simply "what is". By "we" i indicate the eternal ouroborus: what is = what is, i am i; the closed circle our intellect takes, the closed circle of its judgments taken from the mental eye within. And by "we" i also mean this superfinite reality, the world of our senses and feelings and what they impinge upon: the sum and substance of all thing known and yet to be known.
How can one disclose the other? Because we can break the circle of these judgments by the mind's imaginative and sympathetic feeling: insight. Is god also "what is"? Ah, you name as you please. Remember some things are brought down to the finite because we survive by apprehensions. Our eyes and hands lock on. We grasp the medium of impressions as if it could be fully determined: mother, that tree, baby's cough, a lie, the world, reality; we recognize it, we name it, we record what it is, its properties and characteristics, under that name, and treat it as a good for exchange. This we call knowledge.
Knowledge can be generalized. Arrayed in patterns and clusters. Things grouped by means of their similarities and differences. Some general ideas are closed, some are left open. Yes, we can hold open or incomplete ideas in our heads. How else do we truly learn -- as against reiteration? Consider, what in this world is fixed as it is? The meanings of words change, the contents of ideas change. If our heads couldn't hold incomplete ideas we couldn't keep up with the barrage of constantly-unfolding phenomena. Thinking, that is, shifting particulars about, whether into or from generalities, couldn't take place. Even complete or closed generalities were open to begin with. We call this "induction". A completed generality is a synthesis. Induction, putting together, joining like to like, by inference joining incompatibles, the group with the anomaly, the case with the qualification, the principle with the exception. Pragmatic generalities. Nothing "universal" of "absolute" about them. No longer incompatible, embraced.
Open sequences, if you like, from to 
or
resonances, rhythms, tangents
accessing the void, what is not known, wolf terms flying off into strange space, sports,
mutations; anomalies opening out, rather than graduations between.
"In a system all problems have a rational solution."
from "The Gift of Hospitality", Community Life Project, Evanston, Illinois, U.S.A.
"In community there is room for confusion and mystery, and a recognition that some things are beyond human control."
0p. cit. or ditto
Try to grasp eternity or infinity. The mind reels. To push it brings on nausea. We have reached the limit of our brain's capacity to reckon or resolve. A larger mass of grey matter would not advance the operation. Imagine an artificial brain, pumped up with energy, a supercomputer, counting on and on obsessively. The mechanism would fail. Burnt out. We fail also because we are charged with feelings. Awe, dread, wonder, the imagination at play. These interfere with our working processes. The body intimately connected to the brain. All one. Though we try to separate them. Science fiction stories often depict bodiless brains hitched to and directing machines. Would the brain's recollection of feelings -- supposing it had any -- be sufficient to propel its headway? For without feelings there is no taste, no savour, no tone, no inflection, no mood, no timbre, no resonance and no alerting rhythms. What gives life to life. Colour to dreams. Could these bodiless intellects have nightmares? In a system all problems have a rational solution. Faced with the irrational -- breakdown!
By "system" is meant a closed institution. With closed intellects. No allowances made for difference, whether of people or circumstance. These are the rules. These are the categories. Sound familiar?
We are self-generated. We are other-generated. The other being what is outside ourselves. Not literally. What affects us. And what affects us affects our generalities, our institutions. Because some things -- most things -- are beyond human control. We cannot bull through. We participate. Yet participating means we may wander off course because the patterns are not ineluctable; "off course" can lead us through contradiction, through confusion and mystery, to paths we had not reckoned on.
Room for configuration and expansion generated by movement from simple to complex. Something simple can be at once simple and complex. And vice versa. A living cell is simple and complex, organized to both develop and reproduce.
©Laurie Ashton, 1999
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