The world is not a book. To think a thing
may or may not make it real. A picture
of an apple is not an apple. The
taste of the apple is not the apple.
Speaking about the apple is not the
apple. But the apple, the picture of
the apple and talking the apple to
death do not live in separate uni-
verses. They come together in us, in
our individual and collective
experiences. The question is when,
where and how is the apple or any-
thing else? One cannot escape choice. Our five
senses are not separate. We do not
have to see a thing to see it. We do
not have to hear a thing to hear it. We
do not etc., etc . . . . .
Art like life is a moral choice. There is
no such thing as art without content. No
art has ever come into existence
without an act of volition. We speak
before we write (although there are those who
speak and never write (among whose number
we may count certain animal species,
prehistoric man and certain other
members of our species who could but chose
not to write: Socrates, Jesus, Buddha . . . )).
No one writes before they speak. First we learn
to "speak." Then we learn to "write." After that
the choice between speaking and writing is
one of utility. One no longer
preceeds the other. Is the voice any
closer to the "I" of Being than the
written word? I think we may once again
adopt the notion of utility.
The voice is readily available.
The accessibility of certain
tools are required for writing: pencil and
paper, brush and ink, a keyboard, . . . . Any
reversal (as in assuming the op-
posite or reverse of an idea to
be "true") immediately creates a
dialectic in which the idea and
its opposite are inextricably
bound. One cannot escape an idea by
emphasizing its opposite. The acts of
speech and writing are not, have never been,
will never be the same. It is nearly
impossible to capture the meaning
evident in the intonations of
the simplest speech using the written word.
Conversely, there are many words that sound
the same but when seen within the context
of a poem create many levels of
meaning and may even on occasion
strike the Self to its knees. The language of
action (gesture), of speech, of letters and
of images co-exist within the
same space. The first language is of gesture.
The second language is of speech. The third
language is of image. The fourth language
is of letters and words. The fifth language
is the integration of the first four
into a new form. The sixth language is
a hypersensitivity which re-
duces to a near-stillness and a near-
silence the requirements of the first four.
Derrida grounds of Grammatology
almost entirely upon the act of
deconstructing Rousseau (a dangerous
thing to do), for Rousseau persists in his
belief in the "noble savage." We may
as well believe in the noble insect,
the noble plant, the noble atom, the
noble electron. In the midst of this
nobility where is peace? Where will one
find justice and harmony? Rousseau will
not take Derrida where he wants to go.
Neither will communism nor social-
isms. Nothing will. There is no there. No
Utopia, nor Heaven, nor Hell. They
are all clearly in evidence before
us in the here and now. For Rousseau the
origin of society and of
language is catastrophic. It is the
result of a terrible accident.
All language, all texts and discourses can
be deconstructed in such a way that
they make visible their origins in
the null, echoless, invisible, un-
namable prehistory of the "trace."
There is no escape. The transcendental
signified is another word for "god."
Most postmodernists believe that each and
every "new" experience must be
evaluated in the light of things
already known. Each present moment is
constructed from the history of one's
memories. It is true that when we look
at the water, or clouds or the tops of
trees or the ruined wall of a building
we tend to discover faces and shapes.
(Leonardo was very fond of this.)
That is one possibility that is
widely recognized, but there are others:
We may choose not to see any "thing" but
instead allow ourselves to finally
forget ourselves, to stare dumbly for a
moment or an hour outside the reach
of time. We may somehow choose to see a
thing that does not yet "exist." A painting
by Jackson Pollock becomes a thin film
of neurons under a microscope. Some
might suggest that Pollock's drip paintings were
preceded by the "meander" found in
certain illustrated manuscripts but
even so those facts only serve to re-
inforce the argument. Some may even
choose to say, "What is there is what is there -
clouds, water, trees." That is a choice no less
valid than the others. But we should not
forget that we discover the image
of the trees in the trees, the water in
the water. The image came from somewhere.
At the subatomic level there are
no clouds, water or trees. What does it mean
to say, "What am I?" What am I? Mostly
carbon and water. If I am water
what are the ontic-ontological
characteristics of water? Water
is two atoms of hydrogen and one
atom of oxygen. That is ontic.
Water is also a sign, a tool which
indicates something specific (unique)
about the nature of my existence.
But what is water? Water is a cool
mist rising about my ankles in
a false dawn of my early childhood. It
is the savage, brutal reality
saturating the ground above which my
Brother's coffin lay, covered with flowers.
Water surrounds the taste of my tears. It
is a thousand needles stinging my face
and neck as I stand staring blindly up
into a starless night. Water is the
steady even pressure against my hands
and feet as I swim lap after lap on
the surface of a box full of water.
It is in the motion of a single
leaf struck by a single drop of rain. It
is one thought following another, at
times falling like the rain, without any
evident order or pattern, at times
being slowly drawn up through the roots and
into leaves of grass each of them firmly
grounded in the immutable order
of its own perfect reason. I cannot
say what the water is, but I do know
what the water is. As well as I know
myself. Existence preceeds essence. The
ontological-ontic reversal
which Heidegger claims to be the end of
philosophy can only exist as
a state of being that does not include
language. Language is essential in its
nature. It points to existence but it
can never occupy the process or
state of "Being." We can, however, re-
turn from a state of Being to a place
or condition in which we are aware
that we have experienced such a state
of Being. We can understand and find
means of expressing our Being within
the field of words, but the state-of-being-
with-words and the state-of-being-without-
words are not the same, can never be the
same. If we observe our thoughts we find the
initial division of our unique
experience corresponds closely to
the concept of the dialectic in
the West and the yin-yang in the East. Once
the first cut is made in the body of
experience the remaining slices
are portioned according to taste (i.e.
a predilection for one thing over
another: science, art, . . . economics,
politics, . . . . This first hungry stab at the
unity of experience results
in objects and events. Objects are things.
Ontic and static. They occupy space.
They are the furniture in Plato's cave.
They are the answer to the question "What
is that?" The other category is
events. Events exist as objects in
the field of time. They have a beginning
and an end. They are each made of objects
and other events. Events are fluid,
dynamic. If space contains dimensions
of objects, then time is the dimension
of events. No single dimension is
the domain of time. For a point, a line
is time. For a line a plane is time. For
a hypersphere time is found in the fifth
dimension. For an n-dimensional
object time is the dimension n +
1. For an n-dimensional object
n + 1 is the place where all events
occur. It is the place where everything
real, once lifted up, slips too easily
between the fingers and falls. Every
object is also an event. All one
has to do is step down one rung on the
n-dimensional ladder and any
object becomes an event (a process),
ephemeral, impossible to hold.
This is why physics now requires at least
ten dimensions (some scientists require
twenty-six to be really happy, but
for most ten dimensions is enough). This
doesn't make much sense in Newtonian
terms but if we look at the history
of certain ideas, the present belief
in n-dimensional space as well as
n-dimensional language turns out to
be perfectly reasonable. A too
brief list of proper nouns and dates follows:
The grid is the oldest symbol known, (first
found in the caves at Lescaux as "spirit
traps"), and dates from 25,000 years
B.C. Mathematics preceeds any
other form of written language. Picto-
linguistic writing in Tartaria
(around 4,000 B.C) is followed
by Sumerian cuneiform. In
most cases pictographic forms of re-
presentation preceed and are replaced
by abstract concepts composed of symbol
strings. Beginning with the Greeks we see an
idealized world defined in terms of plane
geometry and seminal ideas
identified by the names of people:
Thales, Pythagoras, Democritus, Eu-
clid, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle,
Archimedes, Aristarchus, Era-
tosthenes and Hipparchus established
an agenda for Western thought which has
lasted over 2,000 years. The Greek
intellectual tradition, referred
to as Idealism or as neo-
platonism is nothing more or less
than a belief in the existence of
an absolute "Truth" or "Reality."
This belief is an axiom of the
scientific method and the founda-
tion of Western religion and of all
essentialist philosophies. The theme
is simple: Reality is space, space
is geometry and geometry
is mathematics in two, three or more
dimensions. Though Fermat's infinites-
imal calculus (1635)
legitimized the "Absolute" it was
Decarte's invention of coordinate
geometry that joined the language of
symbol strings with space. Algebra frees us
from our three-space limitations. The world
of nature is now expressed as "fields." The
electromagnetic, the strong and weak
nuclear forces and gravity are the
basic forces of nature and it is
their unification into a set
of field equations which is the stated
goal of science. Field theory is called the
"language" of theoretical physics.
It was Georg Bernhard Riemann who pointed
out that a field is nothing more than a
set of numbers used to designate a
point in any n-dimensional space.
A two-dimensional space requires three
numbers. A three-dimensional space has
six numbers defining each point. The more
dimensions you have the more numbers are
required to designate a point. Riemann
called the series of numbers needed to
define a point in n-dimensional
space the metric tensor. It was Riemann
who gave Einstein the key to general
relativity and the concept of
the fourth dimension to art. Cubism
came into being long after the fourth
dimension was established as part of
the new mass culture. Theosophy soon
became a watershed in the revolt
against Positivism. Cubism
and not classical perspective is a
more appropriate method of showing
three-dimensional objects in plane space.
In the 1930's a new physics,
quantum mechanics, put geometry,
philosophy and art completely out
of the "Reality" business and
left them at the mercy of solipsists.
(A judgement with which any good neo-
platonist would agree.) On the other
hand, the "Absolute" has been the source of
much human misery. Who will argue?
In the past ten years geometry has
returned to theoretical physics
in the form of superstring theory. This
new theory states that all subatomic
particles are manifestations of
unseen strings vibrating at specific
frequencies. The strings cannot vibrate in
dimensions other than ten and twenty-
six. Why should a vibrating string be the
central metaphor of all of science?
Perhaps because a string represents the
simplest concept of language possible -
a vector. A string does not have to be
continuous but can be digital,
discrete, binary. It has a simple,
perfect symmetry. Superstring physics
states that the universe began as a
perfect, symmetric, ten-dimensional
unity. Pure energy. It collapsed
into twin universes - one of them
four-dimensional, the other six. Its
symmetry was broken. Its symmetry
collapsed again and again until the
light became darkness as matter formed and
the galaxies were born. This story sounds
much like Kabbalah. In Kabbalah the
Ein-Sof or godhead could not contain its
perfect symmetry. In the space of a
single moment there emanated lights
or "splendors" which became Creation. The
first of these is pure "Thought" or "Will" from which
all things are created. These lights are called
Sefirot and are the names of God. They
are vessels which tried and could not contain
God's perfect symmetry but shattered one
after another until the weakest
light came to rest in us. The Sefirot
are ten in number. The first Sefirah
is nothingness. The second is a point
in space. The rest exist as circles or
spheres emanating out from the center
and decreasing in energy and in
symmetry with each word or name of God.
The names of God are now the names of things
and the names of things are the vibrations
or "music" of infinite strings. But is
language (the naming of names) itself a
string? Derrida's "trace", by definition
a string of words or memories reaching
back to an unknown origin, could be
considered an infinite string of strings.
But does the trace contain all things? Is it
a universal language? Perhaps. Who
can say what the language of language is?
The set of binary digits or "bits"
is the world's first universal language.
The simplest expression of this language
is the class of N-bits. This class is, to use
Georg Cantor's term, a transfinite set of
symbols similar in some respects to
the set of natural numbers defined
as {1, 2, 3, . . .}. This N-bit set (or class)
is further defined as the set (or class)
of all combinations of N-bits where:
N = {1, 2, 3, . . .}. A description
of the N-bit class in binary would
be the transfinite series of symbols:
{0, 1, 00, 01, 10, 11, 000, . . .}.
This one class contains all logical and
mathematical structures and texts in
the form of N-bit values each of which
may be interpreted as text, numbers
or one or more binary logical
operations (AND, OR, NAND, NOR, XOR
and NOT). Any and all data which is
expressible as a finite string of
bits exists as a proper subset of
this class. Before we get carried away
we should remember that numbers are not
the only test of truth. Germatria
is a gene, a predisposition of
the species. Love, compassion, justice, hope
each have an existence independent
of words or numbers. Like other virtues
they are only temporarily out
of fashion. Both essentialism and
existentialism have their place in
the world. The are like the tide, the moon and
the shore. They are the silence and the words . . .
may or may not make it real. A picture
of an apple is not an apple. The
taste of the apple is not the apple.
Speaking about the apple is not the
apple. But the apple, the picture of
the apple and talking the apple to
death do not live in separate uni-
verses. They come together in us, in
our individual and collective
experiences. The question is when,
where and how is the apple or any-
thing else? One cannot escape choice. Our five
senses are not separate. We do not
have to see a thing to see it. We do
not have to hear a thing to hear it. We
do not etc., etc . . . . .
Art like life is a moral choice. There is
no such thing as art without content. No
art has ever come into existence
without an act of volition. We speak
before we write (although there are those who
speak and never write (among whose number
we may count certain animal species,
prehistoric man and certain other
members of our species who could but chose
not to write: Socrates, Jesus, Buddha . . . )).
No one writes before they speak. First we learn
to "speak." Then we learn to "write." After that
the choice between speaking and writing is
one of utility. One no longer
preceeds the other. Is the voice any
closer to the "I" of Being than the
written word? I think we may once again
adopt the notion of utility.
The voice is readily available.
The accessibility of certain
tools are required for writing: pencil and
paper, brush and ink, a keyboard, . . . . Any
reversal (as in assuming the op-
posite or reverse of an idea to
be "true") immediately creates a
dialectic in which the idea and
its opposite are inextricably
bound. One cannot escape an idea by
emphasizing its opposite. The acts of
speech and writing are not, have never been,
will never be the same. It is nearly
impossible to capture the meaning
evident in the intonations of
the simplest speech using the written word.
Conversely, there are many words that sound
the same but when seen within the context
of a poem create many levels of
meaning and may even on occasion
strike the Self to its knees. The language of
action (gesture), of speech, of letters and
of images co-exist within the
same space. The first language is of gesture.
The second language is of speech. The third
language is of image. The fourth language
is of letters and words. The fifth language
is the integration of the first four
into a new form. The sixth language is
a hypersensitivity which re-
duces to a near-stillness and a near-
silence the requirements of the first four.
Derrida grounds of Grammatology
almost entirely upon the act of
deconstructing Rousseau (a dangerous
thing to do), for Rousseau persists in his
belief in the "noble savage." We may
as well believe in the noble insect,
the noble plant, the noble atom, the
noble electron. In the midst of this
nobility where is peace? Where will one
find justice and harmony? Rousseau will
not take Derrida where he wants to go.
Neither will communism nor social-
isms. Nothing will. There is no there. No
Utopia, nor Heaven, nor Hell. They
are all clearly in evidence before
us in the here and now. For Rousseau the
origin of society and of
language is catastrophic. It is the
result of a terrible accident.
All language, all texts and discourses can
be deconstructed in such a way that
they make visible their origins in
the null, echoless, invisible, un-
namable prehistory of the "trace."
There is no escape. The transcendental
signified is another word for "god."
Most postmodernists believe that each and
every "new" experience must be
evaluated in the light of things
already known. Each present moment is
constructed from the history of one's
memories. It is true that when we look
at the water, or clouds or the tops of
trees or the ruined wall of a building
we tend to discover faces and shapes.
(Leonardo was very fond of this.)
That is one possibility that is
widely recognized, but there are others:
We may choose not to see any "thing" but
instead allow ourselves to finally
forget ourselves, to stare dumbly for a
moment or an hour outside the reach
of time. We may somehow choose to see a
thing that does not yet "exist." A painting
by Jackson Pollock becomes a thin film
of neurons under a microscope. Some
might suggest that Pollock's drip paintings were
preceded by the "meander" found in
certain illustrated manuscripts but
even so those facts only serve to re-
inforce the argument. Some may even
choose to say, "What is there is what is there -
clouds, water, trees." That is a choice no less
valid than the others. But we should not
forget that we discover the image
of the trees in the trees, the water in
the water. The image came from somewhere.
At the subatomic level there are
no clouds, water or trees. What does it mean
to say, "What am I?" What am I? Mostly
carbon and water. If I am water
what are the ontic-ontological
characteristics of water? Water
is two atoms of hydrogen and one
atom of oxygen. That is ontic.
Water is also a sign, a tool which
indicates something specific (unique)
about the nature of my existence.
But what is water? Water is a cool
mist rising about my ankles in
a false dawn of my early childhood. It
is the savage, brutal reality
saturating the ground above which my
Brother's coffin lay, covered with flowers.
Water surrounds the taste of my tears. It
is a thousand needles stinging my face
and neck as I stand staring blindly up
into a starless night. Water is the
steady even pressure against my hands
and feet as I swim lap after lap on
the surface of a box full of water.
It is in the motion of a single
leaf struck by a single drop of rain. It
is one thought following another, at
times falling like the rain, without any
evident order or pattern, at times
being slowly drawn up through the roots and
into leaves of grass each of them firmly
grounded in the immutable order
of its own perfect reason. I cannot
say what the water is, but I do know
what the water is. As well as I know
myself. Existence preceeds essence. The
ontological-ontic reversal
which Heidegger claims to be the end of
philosophy can only exist as
a state of being that does not include
language. Language is essential in its
nature. It points to existence but it
can never occupy the process or
state of "Being." We can, however, re-
turn from a state of Being to a place
or condition in which we are aware
that we have experienced such a state
of Being. We can understand and find
means of expressing our Being within
the field of words, but the state-of-being-
with-words and the state-of-being-without-
words are not the same, can never be the
same. If we observe our thoughts we find the
initial division of our unique
experience corresponds closely to
the concept of the dialectic in
the West and the yin-yang in the East. Once
the first cut is made in the body of
experience the remaining slices
are portioned according to taste (i.e.
a predilection for one thing over
another: science, art, . . . economics,
politics, . . . . This first hungry stab at the
unity of experience results
in objects and events. Objects are things.
Ontic and static. They occupy space.
They are the furniture in Plato's cave.
They are the answer to the question "What
is that?" The other category is
events. Events exist as objects in
the field of time. They have a beginning
and an end. They are each made of objects
and other events. Events are fluid,
dynamic. If space contains dimensions
of objects, then time is the dimension
of events. No single dimension is
the domain of time. For a point, a line
is time. For a line a plane is time. For
a hypersphere time is found in the fifth
dimension. For an n-dimensional
object time is the dimension n +
1. For an n-dimensional object
n + 1 is the place where all events
occur. It is the place where everything
real, once lifted up, slips too easily
between the fingers and falls. Every
object is also an event. All one
has to do is step down one rung on the
n-dimensional ladder and any
object becomes an event (a process),
ephemeral, impossible to hold.
This is why physics now requires at least
ten dimensions (some scientists require
twenty-six to be really happy, but
for most ten dimensions is enough). This
doesn't make much sense in Newtonian
terms but if we look at the history
of certain ideas, the present belief
in n-dimensional space as well as
n-dimensional language turns out to
be perfectly reasonable. A too
brief list of proper nouns and dates follows:
The grid is the oldest symbol known, (first
found in the caves at Lescaux as "spirit
traps"), and dates from 25,000 years
B.C. Mathematics preceeds any
other form of written language. Picto-
linguistic writing in Tartaria
(around 4,000 B.C) is followed
by Sumerian cuneiform. In
most cases pictographic forms of re-
presentation preceed and are replaced
by abstract concepts composed of symbol
strings. Beginning with the Greeks we see an
idealized world defined in terms of plane
geometry and seminal ideas
identified by the names of people:
Thales, Pythagoras, Democritus, Eu-
clid, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle,
Archimedes, Aristarchus, Era-
tosthenes and Hipparchus established
an agenda for Western thought which has
lasted over 2,000 years. The Greek
intellectual tradition, referred
to as Idealism or as neo-
platonism is nothing more or less
than a belief in the existence of
an absolute "Truth" or "Reality."
This belief is an axiom of the
scientific method and the founda-
tion of Western religion and of all
essentialist philosophies. The theme
is simple: Reality is space, space
is geometry and geometry
is mathematics in two, three or more
dimensions. Though Fermat's infinites-
imal calculus (1635)
legitimized the "Absolute" it was
Decarte's invention of coordinate
geometry that joined the language of
symbol strings with space. Algebra frees us
from our three-space limitations. The world
of nature is now expressed as "fields." The
electromagnetic, the strong and weak
nuclear forces and gravity are the
basic forces of nature and it is
their unification into a set
of field equations which is the stated
goal of science. Field theory is called the
"language" of theoretical physics.
It was Georg Bernhard Riemann who pointed
out that a field is nothing more than a
set of numbers used to designate a
point in any n-dimensional space.
A two-dimensional space requires three
numbers. A three-dimensional space has
six numbers defining each point. The more
dimensions you have the more numbers are
required to designate a point. Riemann
called the series of numbers needed to
define a point in n-dimensional
space the metric tensor. It was Riemann
who gave Einstein the key to general
relativity and the concept of
the fourth dimension to art. Cubism
came into being long after the fourth
dimension was established as part of
the new mass culture. Theosophy soon
became a watershed in the revolt
against Positivism. Cubism
and not classical perspective is a
more appropriate method of showing
three-dimensional objects in plane space.
In the 1930's a new physics,
quantum mechanics, put geometry,
philosophy and art completely out
of the "Reality" business and
left them at the mercy of solipsists.
(A judgement with which any good neo-
platonist would agree.) On the other
hand, the "Absolute" has been the source of
much human misery. Who will argue?
In the past ten years geometry has
returned to theoretical physics
in the form of superstring theory. This
new theory states that all subatomic
particles are manifestations of
unseen strings vibrating at specific
frequencies. The strings cannot vibrate in
dimensions other than ten and twenty-
six. Why should a vibrating string be the
central metaphor of all of science?
Perhaps because a string represents the
simplest concept of language possible -
a vector. A string does not have to be
continuous but can be digital,
discrete, binary. It has a simple,
perfect symmetry. Superstring physics
states that the universe began as a
perfect, symmetric, ten-dimensional
unity. Pure energy. It collapsed
into twin universes - one of them
four-dimensional, the other six. Its
symmetry was broken. Its symmetry
collapsed again and again until the
light became darkness as matter formed and
the galaxies were born. This story sounds
much like Kabbalah. In Kabbalah the
Ein-Sof or godhead could not contain its
perfect symmetry. In the space of a
single moment there emanated lights
or "splendors" which became Creation. The
first of these is pure "Thought" or "Will" from which
all things are created. These lights are called
Sefirot and are the names of God. They
are vessels which tried and could not contain
God's perfect symmetry but shattered one
after another until the weakest
light came to rest in us. The Sefirot
are ten in number. The first Sefirah
is nothingness. The second is a point
in space. The rest exist as circles or
spheres emanating out from the center
and decreasing in energy and in
symmetry with each word or name of God.
The names of God are now the names of things
and the names of things are the vibrations
or "music" of infinite strings. But is
language (the naming of names) itself a
string? Derrida's "trace", by definition
a string of words or memories reaching
back to an unknown origin, could be
considered an infinite string of strings.
But does the trace contain all things? Is it
a universal language? Perhaps. Who
can say what the language of language is?
The set of binary digits or "bits"
is the world's first universal language.
The simplest expression of this language
is the class of N-bits. This class is, to use
Georg Cantor's term, a transfinite set of
symbols similar in some respects to
the set of natural numbers defined
as {1, 2, 3, . . .}. This N-bit set (or class)
is further defined as the set (or class)
of all combinations of N-bits where:
N = {1, 2, 3, . . .}. A description
of the N-bit class in binary would
be the transfinite series of symbols:
{0, 1, 00, 01, 10, 11, 000, . . .}.
This one class contains all logical and
mathematical structures and texts in
the form of N-bit values each of which
may be interpreted as text, numbers
or one or more binary logical
operations (AND, OR, NAND, NOR, XOR
and NOT). Any and all data which is
expressible as a finite string of
bits exists as a proper subset of
this class. Before we get carried away
we should remember that numbers are not
the only test of truth. Germatria
is a gene, a predisposition of
the species. Love, compassion, justice, hope
each have an existence independent
of words or numbers. Like other virtues
they are only temporarily out
of fashion. Both essentialism and
existentialism have their place in
the world. The are like the tide, the moon and
the shore. They are the silence and the words . . .