Viscosity
Writing as a hyperobject 1
Hyperobjects are vast, amorphous, connected, things.
Things are sticky. They get into each others cracks and are hard to pull apart. As they do they stretch out. And can snap. Some atoms get exchanged. The atoms can be phonemes. The sounds glue together. Become sememes.
A morpheme is the smallest unit of linguistic form that carries meaning . It is a phonological or graphemic entity — something you can hear, write, or segment from a string. The word dragons decomposes into morpheme dragon + morpheme -s. The morpheme is a sign vehicle: it is matter that has meaning, but is not the meaning itself .
A sememe is the smallest unit of meaning that a morpheme carries . It is not segmentable from a string — you cannot “hear” a sememe the way you can hear a morpheme. When the morpheme -s is uttered, the sememe [+plural] is expressed, but it lives on an entirely different plane: the semantic or conceptual plane, not the phonological one.
Sememes can be as sticky as morphemes.
Morphemes and sememes tick to each other, morphemes stick to morphemes, sememes stick to sememes.
It can be hard to extract oneself, that viscosity is the self.
Lying too flat
The acid creep burns
Waking up
Wiping the floor
With a damp cloth
Debris and dust
Many shapes of dust
Angled and broken off
Tasting bitter
Broken patterns connect
Dust into clumps that
Taste of salt
Cantor dust thinning
Space with each iteration
Of age over time
An infinite
Divisible sea
Is subsiding
Number an evenness
Of sound resting in
Even temperament
Pain saps strength
A required position
Of perfect stillness
Winter debris removed
One layer at a time as spring
Shoots poking up
Material waste
Of dust left over in
Things fermented
Sand white frost
Crinkle lost bitter
Salt waves
“Pain has its own colour range, the gaps in any system of colour (or number) appear like cracks or seams but are chasms, the unexplored possible being infinitely larger than the defined.”
Cyan yellow
Magenta with black
For depth
Adding red to green
To blue light in
Photosynthesis
Breath in the
Colour space between
RGB and CYMK
Transfinite colour
Between any system
For reproduction
A colour for every
Transcendental and every
Ratio over and under
Virtually all of the real
Is irrational and can only be named
Precise measurement blurs
Transfinite colour
Between any system
For reproduction
Green light shadows
Across the floor dappling
Skin and breath
Breath in the
Colourspace between
RGB and CYMK
Between each toe
Skin thin sensitive
To light
Ice soft condensed
By rain sublimating
Into the air
Water choosing
Not choosing to
Claim a state
Breath vapour
Bound to lung membranes
Tight as skin
Intermittent solids contain
Their own spaces percolating
And capillary action
Micro surface tensions
Pulling against the sides of the tube
Lifting water to the leaves
Water at the boundary
Of being and nothingness
At the three point balance
Pressure and temperature
Holding water even in sublimation
Fusion and vaporisation
State transitions fluctuate
Faster than the boat can slide
Across blurred surfaces
Laminar turbulence
In random bursts as flow
Begins to separate
The water surface
Flat as oil waiting for
The first breath of air
Water thin over
Stone sliding onto
And into itself
Water memory held
For tomorrow’s horizon
Grey silence
Considered together
The empty set and
Its potential
Any completeness empty
Of its other the empty set
The possibility itself
Itself known as
Is not other than what
It could not be
Sunyata शून्यता
An empty line along
The border of the possible
And the null set
A line where everything
Possible becomes possible
That cannot be crossed
The continuous whole
Of the sky is divisible
Without limit
The sky exists
Before the parts
It divides into
Cantor dust thinning
Space with each iteration
Of age over time
A method to discover
Transfinite primes that
Contain finites
Are there transfinite
Irrationals that can be known
In an infinite system
Prime density trends
To zero at infinity as the clouds
Become transparent
Walk carefully by
Means of contradictions
Until you stop
Not null or
Not not null is
Not null
Gone given loss in
To other selves reflection’s
Infinite regress
Breath vapour
Bound to lung membranes
Tight as skin
Gullet stomach
Making sounds
All night
Throating each
Other’s voice I listen
Inside her
Slight shifts and
Breathing slowed her
Sleep is mine
Dog’s body warmth
My own as we curl together
Inside the cold
Holding me she says
You smell of dog and ocean
We sleep on the couch
Skin breathing
Our pores open to
The other’s sweat
Fear in touch
As the skin contracts
In the cold
Chilblains as capillaries
Collapse in the cold and blood
Seeps out between the cells
Fibroids persistent
Pain in the gut bleeding out
Her womb taken out
A child’s loss before
Birth our liquid being
Diminished
A Jizo slumped
Into the afterlife before
Entering this life
To one I would have given
My name be lost
In time’s shift
Gone given other
Into else into something
Inside without
Morton, Timothy (2013), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Psychology After the End of the World, University of Minnesota Press
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1950/1977), Remarks on Colour, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and trans. Linda Schättle, Blackwell