683
being, liquid, gas, solid, particle, sub-particle, self, other. But in every event, knowing
and unknowing, intuition, experience, ignorance, inspiration is each confined,
somehow. We don’t understand the constraints. We want to hope, to believe, to build
edifices of certainty that argue in favor of tomorrow, of learning than merely the
past, of ameliorating pain and maximizing pleasure. Basic behavioral norms, as
well as those transcendental feelings we possess for purposes of an individual or
community interest, and in which we normally prefer to remain immersed, render
our everyday an ambiguous transcript out loud, in the living of it toward some other
combinatorial truth.
Whether we fatally or masochistically adhere to our invented verities, thus far,
history tells us that the outcomes are unvarying. This is the human problem: We are
incapable of escaping the numbers by which we define and defend ourselves. Our
aggressions are numeric. Our weapons calibrated according to their arithmetic damage potential. Our greed, every probability, progression, statistic, and accounting
take stock according to this mental scaffolding, unstoppable towers of numerology
that will not quit until the very sub-sub-atomic temptations subside. Hence, the love
affairs with Pi (Π, π) and its trillions of digits, as first intimated by Archimedes and
Pythagoras (Fig. 74.3).
Our theories of knowledge that attend upon such mathematical entities, as surrogates for biological units—individuals, species, populations, etc.—place in great
peril all Other remaining life forms. Our counting is fraught with contradictions and
the actual terror induced by zero. To hit zero is to see, for example, a bankruptcy, not
a balanced equation. Zero equals extinction and can be tracked back in time throughout human behavioral history or something else entirely. The zero is also not four
but five, or six. It is the horizon which humanity needs like never before.
There, for example, is the Victory Stele of Naram Sin, ruler of the Akkadian
Empire from c. 2254 to 2218 BC, obsessed with the outright conquest of his
“Mesopotamian” mountain, spear in hand,
11
one of the early, documented emblems
of ecological superego, his army’s subsequent reiteration in every historical guise.
The empirical shadows of our yardsticks, telescopes, and microscopes. But no
match for a dragonfly, or the true tenderness we know might yet emanate.
74.3 Evolutionary Latitudes
Does evolution, as articulated by every side of its tired exegesis and hermeneutic,
remain part of this sentimental equation? Let us subscribe to a hypothesis well
tested, of biosemiotics that is, or always was, this earthly jewel of destiny, at least
more than four billion years-worth. And then add to that assumption a complete
absence of anything like what we take to be evolution. We can easily imagine a nonevolutionary collective where change, transformative flux, seed dispersion, every
11 See https://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/victory-stele-naram-sin, Accessed June 23, 2020.
74.3 Evolutionary Latitudes
being, liquid, gas, solid, particle, sub-particle, self, other. But in every event, knowing
and unknowing, intuition, experience, ignorance, inspiration is each confined,
somehow. We don’t understand the constraints. We want to hope, to believe, to build
edifices of certainty that argue in favor of tomorrow, of learning than merely the
past, of ameliorating pain and maximizing pleasure. Basic behavioral norms, as
well as those transcendental feelings we possess for purposes of an individual or
community interest, and in which we normally prefer to remain immersed, render
our everyday an ambiguous transcript out loud, in the living of it toward some other
combinatorial truth.
Whether we fatally or masochistically adhere to our invented verities, thus far,
history tells us that the outcomes are unvarying. This is the human problem: We are
incapable of escaping the numbers by which we define and defend ourselves. Our
aggressions are numeric. Our weapons calibrated according to their arithmetic damage potential. Our greed, every probability, progression, statistic, and accounting
take stock according to this mental scaffolding, unstoppable towers of numerology
that will not quit until the very sub-sub-atomic temptations subside. Hence, the love
affairs with Pi (Π, π) and its trillions of digits, as first intimated by Archimedes and
Pythagoras (Fig. 74.3).
Our theories of knowledge that attend upon such mathematical entities, as surrogates for biological units—individuals, species, populations, etc.—place in great
peril all Other remaining life forms. Our counting is fraught with contradictions and
the actual terror induced by zero. To hit zero is to see, for example, a bankruptcy, not
a balanced equation. Zero equals extinction and can be tracked back in time throughout human behavioral history or something else entirely. The zero is also not four
but five, or six. It is the horizon which humanity needs like never before.
There, for example, is the Victory Stele of Naram Sin, ruler of the Akkadian
Empire from c. 2254 to 2218 BC, obsessed with the outright conquest of his
“Mesopotamian” mountain, spear in hand,
11
one of the early, documented emblems
of ecological superego, his army’s subsequent reiteration in every historical guise.
The empirical shadows of our yardsticks, telescopes, and microscopes. But no
match for a dragonfly, or the true tenderness we know might yet emanate.
74.3 Evolutionary Latitudes
Does evolution, as articulated by every side of its tired exegesis and hermeneutic,
remain part of this sentimental equation? Let us subscribe to a hypothesis well
tested, of biosemiotics that is, or always was, this earthly jewel of destiny, at least
more than four billion years-worth. And then add to that assumption a complete
absence of anything like what we take to be evolution. We can easily imagine a nonevolutionary collective where change, transformative flux, seed dispersion, every
11 See https://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/victory-stele-naram-sin, Accessed June 23, 2020.
74.3 Evolutionary Latitudes