a founder of the codex

Presence

Adessia lucens·the Here Glow

From Latin adesse, to be here and at hand, and lucens, shining, the glow of whatever is here.

Level: Conceptorganism
Book: Humoresthe apothecary's book of humours
Phylum: Centre and peripheryimage schema
Class: Mechanismits still
Niche: Symbionta partner
Mode: Religionhow it keeps existing
Stage: Matureindividuated
Status: Living
Habitat: Ritual

Its kinds · Roget, 1852: Formation of Ideas · Wilkins, 1668: Natural Power · WordNet, 1990: State · Llull, 1308: E · Man

Here Glow, the whole specimen — Plate XXVI. Adessia lucens, the whole specimen.

Presence joins the body's being here to attention on what is here, and that joining turns the passing moment into a lived one.

To be somewhere, the body and the attention have to arrive together.

behavior Settles in one place and glows faintly while it attends, and dims the moment its attention wanders off.

provocation

In the last hour, for how many minutes was your mind where your body was?

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 Presence — Fig. 1. Kernel
Here and now
Which premise, if it were false, would kill this idea?
Presence is being here in body and in attention at once, within reach of things and of others, in the moment that is happening.⁴
drawn as: essence · view: microscope

Boundary of Presence — Fig. 2. Boundary
Peripersonal space
What sets it apart from what it is not, and how does it keep that distinction?
It is set against absence, the body gone elsewhere or the mind drifted off, and it holds only while both stay near.⁴
drawn as: meniscus · view: pinned

Intake of Presence — Fig. 3. Intake
Sensorium
What must it feed on to work? What has to be present, noticed or supplied?
It feeds on the senses, on light, sound, touch and the felt weight of the body, which give the world as it is now.²
drawn as: wick · view: magnified

Mechanism of Presence — Fig. 4. Mechanism
Attentional spotlight
❦ dominant organ
How does it turn what it takes in into what it gives out?
Attention takes one thread out of the many the senses offer and holds it clear, and what it holds becomes the here and now.¹
drawn as: still · view: transparent

Output of Presence — Fig. 5. Output
Saddle-back of time
What does it make possible, visible or knowable?
It makes a lived moment, a present a few seconds wide in which sights, sounds and feelings are held together as one now.¹
drawn as: tincture · view: at work

Dispersal of Presence — Fig. 6. Dispersal
Collective effervescence
What part of it travels into other minds, ideas and fields, and by what vector?
It passes by co-presence among bodies in one place that sense each other and know they are sensed, at a vigil, a performance or a meal.³
drawn as: scent · view: in situ

Decay of Presence — Fig. 7. Decay
Mind wandering
What can it not digest, where does it fail, and what does it leave behind for others?
It fails to distraction. A waking mind drifts from what it is doing almost half the time, and leaves hours lived through without being lived.⁵
drawn as: sediment · view: series

II Meaning associations

No relations recorded yet.

descent membership food web resemblance or friction

Lineage

A founder, dissected by hand.

Kin

same kind in Roget Apophenia, Dream, Faith, Memory, Placebo, Prophecy, Knowing Trust, Afterlistening, Commemorative Revision, Simultaneous Remembering, Hesychology, Subtractive Phenomenology

same kind in Wilkins Apophenia, Dream, Memory, Afterlistening, Simultaneous Remembering

same kind in WordNet Solitude, The Shared Cell

same kind in Llull Echolalia, Memory, Nostalgia, Placebo, Prophecy, Solitude, Volition, Knowing Trust, Self-Fulfilling Alarm, Tongue Horizon, Witnessed Relief, Witnessed Relief (Mycelia), Commemorative Revision, The Shared Cell, Simultaneous Remembering, Hesychology

same phylum Geomancy, Qualia

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

Genome

here
attention also in Afterlistening, Prophecy, Silence, Solitude
senses
nearness
now

III In the world

Echoes

Marina Abramović's The Artist Is Present (2010)
the Real Presence in the Eucharist
a vigil at a bedside
a meditation bell calling the mind back

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	humores
symmetry	amorphous
organization	nested
silhouette	bell
scale	immense
proportion	elongated latent
growth	regenerated
articulation	jointed latent
openness	spongy latent
skeleton	endoskeleton latent
locomotion	drifting
pattern	speckled
coloration	disruptive latent
substance	mesoglea
surface	filamentous
palette	abyss
luminosity	points
transparency	transparent latent
gesture	sinks
unity	composite latent
modality	unmarked latent
causation	final latent
determinacy	fraying
fusion	carried
anomaly	inverted
graft	scaffold
technique	watercolour
viewpoint	above
value	low key latent
balance	top heavy latent
density	graded detail latent
rhythm	clustered latent
saturation	accent latent
appendages	sails
anchor (body)	an aurora, hanging curtains of coloured light
anchor (detail)	a bronchial tree, branching airways ending in clusters of small sacs

Sources

William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890), chapters 11 and 15, on attention and the specious present
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945)
Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places (1963)
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (2004)
Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert, A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind (Science, 2010)

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