Mapping the gap: Why don’t you use more definition?
Beginning to define my usage while gapping-up the maps of us. Matt Carney & me.
When I was learning how to pour molten bronze into lost-wax hollows left in slapped-over investments of plaster, in order to create Consorts to the Mountain Goddess, my teacher in metal Matt Carney would say to me, looking at…
—my dad-bod figures of Gog & Magog (from a series of Deloraine Adonides never poured):-
“Why don’t you use more definition?”
This was an instruction not a question, nor a ‘crit’.
Matt pointed into the corner of the workshop, where his bronze ¾ life size archer arose out of no-form. The base hid its grounding purpose with nothing.
His delineated muscles contracted into beauty, full 4K definition, while his fully compressed open bow aimed an arrow at the sun that desperately tried to find a way into freezing cold damp workshop sinking into South Hobart’s dank rivulet, just down from the Female Factory, itself built in the valley of the shadow of death. The archer waited to be collected by a collector.
Matt was paying off a mortgage, raising a family, by making and selling art. This was remarkable in Tasmania in the noughties.
I watched the archer’s sweat glisten, I wrapped my winter jacket around me more tightly, and nodded to Matt.
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<!-- the gap… —will just have to suffice-->Definitions are an animal thing. We make them in order to make ourselves comfortable, safe, sheltered, fed etc.
Beautifully understood.
With regard to language and words and meanings agreed on, we can also use usage to defer such definitions, those that are based directly on an animal's notice.
<!--just nod here-->The instinct to survive and judge what in the world there is, thus survives, and so cursively intensified: the language instinct looking at instincts, including: language, instinct world, thing, the… gap.
The glistening sweat of art making the day shine in a cold dark workshop of love.We use usage, as chatty animals instructing others in the art, as if a use, a practicality is not a animal's notice. But it is.
If only because we are too elevated to be ourselves as animals, we will say, honestly, forgetfully, selfingly othering: "I just don't like it." (To judge and move on without appearing to be anything other than indiscriminate.)
City sophisticates try to be better than the beasts that we hunt, and that's also why we should though, another example of this selfsame thing, this is animal thing— world-building.
We like stories about Robin Hood, but forget the archer in the wilds said a pray for the prey hunted down.This brings us to mapping, but firstly, to definitions based on negative forms.
A book is not a tree.
A tree is not a rock.
A rock is not alive.But there is so much to negate, but even so, we use the negative space to hollow out a comfort zone for our intentions. Regularly, habitually, instinctually… —etc.
A map is a way to define the world by including the ground as something other than a negative space. You can call this context experience and wisdom.
Definitions will focus on one use to be clear, to resolve the difference, as if the terms used to defined are not likewise distinguished in the same way greatly deferred within the entire system or dictionary of interdependence… —in order to to be clear, every word in the dictionary should have its own entry, a different mark, or scar on experience.
This is why neologisms hurt, they are a fresh cut and some cut deep as an arrow.
“Why don’t you use definition?”
Why don't we?The structuralist agreement of recent decades, put it thus: all terms in a dictionary require most of the other terms in the dictionary to be already used and defined as a vocabulary, even if such lists are only used in later, more adult language learning. The usages rub and grind against each other, each word is ground to another words figure, wriggling away on our tongues. A dictionary is a photograph of the poetry in motion.
In contrast, the grammarian, a hard-nose collector of hardened beauty in the search of meaningful comfort, see each definition in a handy list as very, very particular object within a proper way to save the world. The grammarian world-builds with a sense of clarity, particularly as the eyes age and degenerate.
Babies don’t care.
The grammarian is an adult who cannot remember how they learned language in the first place, but instead uses an animism of meaning the grammarian selects as proper, as if they had no bias, and world-building consists mostly in correcting other. This animism is still, sadly, an influence in the structuralists’ grind and polish collections of figure/grounds of usage.
The grammarians forget the gap when they build/correct. (Or, forbid it, perhaps like Whitehead and Russel wanting to ban self-referencing sets in their world-building enterprise Principia Mathematica.)
This forgetry is a common move/mistake/opportunity. The grammarian’s forgetting is a gap of sorts, even as they seek high definition of use, where the measurable outcome in their view is a good resolution, if not agreement. A kind of systematic energy that builds wonderful things, even when it is wrong.
Such is the world-building urge, it’s a baby, it doesn’t care about correct. Or even correctly correct. Until it does.
The world is a child.
Dictionaries/languages can wear themselves out.
Teenagers then pick up the pieces and re-purpose them into new uses, like the way worms compost scraps into food for plants. Plants? Or. Do I mean babies.
People have been complaining about grammarians since at least Sextus Empiricus (early centuries CE). The grammarians hold on the past is a quaint hobby for retirement.
For grammarians, like the poor, like empires, are always with us. Successful babies become successful teenagers, become middle-aged Karens, trying to maintain self-respect by attacking all that they were. Their world-building is askew.
Anyway, to help the grammarian-within here on this blog, below are some 3.1 definitions. They arise in my own movements with regard to the… —gap. Indeed some arose before I venture near, and as such indicate the method, the trace, the track how I got so close to nothing.
Thing – this will have it’s own entry/post/book or three --- thing indicates a (composition) movement meeting with another, it is an element of the world. I am resuscitating old use recorded in etymologies, where meetings were times appointed to discuss and decide…. things/affairs/matter. Things are decided, agreed, resolved in moving together, belonging in composition. The negative space for this word 'thing', i.e. what it is not referring to, are those meanings used by classing 'things' as objects (itself defined negatively in relation to subject — except those meanings have reversed their import over time ¸ ugh). I object to 'thing' being use to mean ‘object’. Do so at you own risk as I may get all invert-Karen on your arse. (It's compositional movements all the way down.)
World – this is the noun form of worldbuilding and refers to all those things we do/meet/make/agree as we live our lives. It is as mystical as it gets for me. If only because it is nebulous and is why we call soft science well soft. Part of the… —gap for me, that I skirt, lies in its current mystery, and currently, with my current knowledge I suspect is as difficult to explain as consciousness itself, and that they are in direct relation. That they compose each other is a suspicion I cannot quite suspend. The world does not exist but we world-build as if we can perceive it. You can also call this hope, or indeed anything you feel like throwing into…
The… —gap —includes a number of varieties or miscellany of (not)things we don’t know, missing bits, known unknowns, unknown unknowns, systemic incompleteness and aporia. This is not to say they are all the same thing (meeting/s) but that we often treat them the same way (chucking in our favourite preference for mysterious explanations in order to de-gap the world, see above).
<!--insert another image of Matt Carney's archer-->So, Matt’s advice? Let’s see if definition will sell the work and practice better.
<!--allow a gap-->New version of this at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com.