a founder of the codex

Poetry

Versicaelum condensans·the Condensing Sky

From Latin versus, a turning or a line of verse, caelum, sky, and condensare, to press together; a sky of verse that presses speech into rain.

Level: Disciplinebiome
Book: Cymatic Florathe botany of sound
Phylum: Cycleimage schema
Class: Mechanismits stem
Niche: Consumerother ideas
Mode: Fictionhow it keeps existing
Stage: Matureindividuated
Status: Living
Habitat: Ritual

Its kinds · Roget, 1852: Communication of Ideas · Wilkins, 1668: Discourse · WordNet, 1990: Communication · Llull, 1308: F · Imaginative

Condensing Sky, the whole specimen — Plate LVIII. Versicaelum condensans, the whole specimen.

Language under the pressure of form says more than its words, and is remembered because of that pressure.

What is said in a shape is said twice.

behavior Grows in layers over centuries, each new pattern laid over the old, and wakes only when it is read aloud.

provocation

What would a law, a recipe or a scientific paper become if it had to be learned by heart?

Each draw is the being derived afresh by the current laws at another seed (laws §11); the chosen one leads (where they sit in the morphospace).

I Dissection

Each organ answers one question about the idea. The framed one, its mechanism, is the dominant organ: the being's class, the one the idea could not lose and stay itself.

Kernel of Poetry — Fig. 1. Kernel
Verbal icon
Which premise, if it were false, would kill this idea?
Language can mean more than it states when its sound, rhythm and shape are made to carry meaning alongside its words.²
drawn as: seed · view: cross section

Boundary of Poetry — Fig. 2. Boundary
Line break
What sets it apart from what it is not, and how does it keep that distinction?
It is set apart from prose by the line; where language is cut by sound and shape as well as by sense, poetry begins.²
drawn as: epidermis · view: cast

Intake of Poetry — Fig. 3. Intake
Word-hoard
What must it feed on to work? What has to be present, noticed or supplied?
It feeds on ordinary speech, on experience too sharp or too vague for plain statement, and on an ear trained by other poems.⁴
drawn as: root · view: detached

Mechanism of Poetry — Fig. 4. Mechanism
Stanza
❦ dominant organ
How does it turn what it takes in into what it gives out?
It compresses language under constraint, line, meter, rhyme and image, so that every word bears more than one load.^{1, 2}
drawn as: stem · view: pinned

Output of Poetry — Fig. 5. Output
Touchstones
What does it make possible, visible or knowable?
It gives speech that is remembered word for word and meanings that cannot be paraphrased without loss.³
drawn as: bloom · view: magnified

Dispersal of Poetry — Fig. 6. Dispersal
By heart
What part of it travels into other minds, ideas and fields, and by what vector?
It travels by recitation, memorization, quotation and translation, its lines lodged in people who never read the whole poem.⁴
drawn as: pollen · view: cast

Decay of Poetry — Fig. 7. Decay
Cliché
What can it not digest, where does it fail, and what does it leave behind for others?
It hardens into cliché when its forms are repeated without pressure, and into private code when its compression no longer opens to anyone else.¹
drawn as: compost · view: series

Substrate of Poetry — Fig. 8. Substrate
Mother tongue
What territory of phenomena does it live on?
Its ground is language itself, in every tongue, spoken long before it was written.⁴
drawn as: substrate · view: pressed

Climate of Poetry — Fig. 9. Climate
Laurels
What counts as evidence and as a good result here?
Nothing is proved here; a poem is judged by whether it holds attention and comes back when remembered, by readers and by other poets.³
drawn as: climate · view: detached

Fig. 10. Keystones
Three Muses
Which beings, if removed, would make it collapse?
Its keystones are the syllable that carries its beat, mimesis that lets it show a world, and memory that keeps it.

Ecotones of Poetry — Fig. 11. Ecotones
Psalm
Where does it border other fields, and what grows at those borders?
It borders song, prayer, philosophy and advertising, and at each border hybrids grow, hymns, aphorisms and slogans.
drawn as: ecotones · view: microscope

disturbed

Fig. 12. Succession

Print culture

What stage is it in, pioneer, maturing, climax or disturbed?

An ancient field long at its climax, disturbed once by print and now by screens and machine-written verse.

II Meaning associations

descent membership food web resemblance or friction

Lineage

A founder, dissected by hand.

Kin

same kind in Roget Echolalia, Syllable, Symbol, Babelhum

same kind in Wilkins Echolalia, Prophecy, Syllable, Symbol, Babelhum, Tongue Horizon

same kind in WordNet Chiaroscuro, Echolalia, Music, Prophecy, Syllable, Symbol, Babelhum

same kind in Llull Apophenia, Dream, Mimesis, Symmetry, Afterlistening

same phylum Breath, Echolalia, Metamorphosis, Resonance, Commemorative Revision, Fear's Breath, The Festival Calendar, Simultaneous Remembering

same dominant organ Chimera, Dream, Fire, Metamorphosis, Music, Presence, Resonance, Ritual, Storm, Symbol, Self-Fulfilling Alarm, Shared Breath, Self-Ending Order, Witnessed Relief (Mycelia), Commemorative Revision, Fear's Breath, The Shaping Pause, Simultaneous Remembering, Subtractive Phenomenology

Genome

form also in Commemorative Revision, Entelechy, Metamorphosis, Ritual
compression
rhythm also in Breath, Fear's Breath, Music, Shared Breath, Syllable
image
voice also in Breath, Echolalia, Shared Breath

III In the world

Echoes

nursery rhymes known by people who cannot read
the Homeric epics, kept by singers before they were written down
proverbs
a line of verse read at a funeral

IV Record

How it was drawn

its draw 1, a point in the morphospace (laws §8), drawn by flux-2-klein-4b.safetensors.

axis	value
book	flora
symmetry	concentric
organization	stratified
silhouette	scroll
scale	hand
proportion	graded latent
growth	budding
articulation	telescoping
openness	solid latent
skeleton	unmarked latent
locomotion	unmarked latent
pattern	rosettes latent
coloration	cryptic latent
substance	scale dust
surface	banded
palette	abyss
luminosity	none
transparency	layered
gesture	emits
unity	composite latent
modality	contingent latent
causation	efficient latent
determinacy	fraying latent
fusion	seam
anomaly	echoes
graft	pipes
technique	stipple
viewpoint	below
value	chiaroscuro latent
balance	grounded latent
density	intricate latent
rhythm	alternating
saturation	vivid latent
appendages	bells
anchor (body)	a radiolarian, a lattice sphere of silica with radiating spines
anchor (detail)	a hailstone cut in half, concentric layers of clear and cloudy ice

Sources

Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (1934): Dichten = condensare
Roman Jakobson, Linguistics and Poetics (1960)
Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (1947), The Heresy of Paraphrase
Albert Lord, The Singer of Tales (1960), after Milman Parry's oral-formulaic theory

❦