a founder of the codex

Solitude

Eremocardia intenta·the Hollow Listener

From Greek eremos, alone or deserted, and kardia, heart, and Latin intentus, attentive; a lone heart that attends.

Level: Conceptorganism
Book: Myceliathe mycological monograph
Phylum: Containerimage schema
Class: Boundaryits mantle
Niche: Extremophileabsence
Mode: Metamorphosishow it keeps existing
Stage: Matureindividuated
Status: Living
Habitat: Forest

Its kinds · Roget, 1852: Sympathetic Affections · Wilkins, 1668: Manners · WordNet, 1990: State · Llull, 1308: E · Man

Hollow Listener, the whole specimen — Plate XXXV. Eremocardia intenta, the whole specimen.

Withdrawing from others changes what can be perceived, and solitude differs from loneliness only in whether the withdrawal was chosen.

The capacity to be alone is a strength, not an absence.

behavior Draws in on itself when others come near, and opens its colours only in empty, silent places.

provocation

What could only be noticed in a place made so that no one is watching you?

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 boundary, is the dominant organ: the being's class, the one the idea could not lose and stay itself.

Kernel of Solitude — Fig. 1. Kernel
Inner light
Which premise, if it were false, would kill this idea?
Being apart from others, by choice, changes what a mind can notice in itself and in the world.^{1, 2}
drawn as: spore · view: exploded

Boundary of Solitude — Fig. 2. Boundary
Cloister
❦ dominant organ
What sets it apart from what it is not, and how does it keep that distinction?
It exists only while a chosen distance from others is kept; when the distance is imposed, or when it closes, solitude becomes loneliness or company.¹
drawn as: mantle · view: pinned

Intake of Solitude — Fig. 3. Intake
Great silence
What must it feed on to work? What has to be present, noticed or supplied?
It feeds on silence, unclaimed time and the absence of other people's attention.²
drawn as: hyphae · view: pinned

Mechanism of Solitude — Fig. 4. Mechanism
Recollection
How does it turn what it takes in into what it gives out?
With no one to answer, attention stops being spent on others and turns to thought, landscape and the body.³
drawn as: anastomosis · view: cast

Output of Solitude — Fig. 5. Output
Reflection
What does it make possible, visible or knowable?
It gives reflection, self-knowledge and the slow work that only uninterrupted time allows.²
drawn as: fruiting body · view: cross section

Dispersal of Solitude — Fig. 6. Dispersal
Hermit's lantern
What part of it travels into other minds, ideas and fields, and by what vector?
It travels in the figures of the hermit, the retreat, the walk alone and the room of one's own, which carry its promise into other lives.^{4, 3}
drawn as: spore print · view: microscope

Decay of Solitude — Fig. 7. Decay
Noonday demon
What can it not digest, where does it fail, and what does it leave behind for others?
Forced or prolonged it turns into loneliness, which wounds instead of feeding, and it cannot digest the need to be known by others.⁵
drawn as: rot front · view: cross section

II Meaning associations

descent membership food web resemblance or friction

Lineage

A founder, dissected by hand.

Offspring

The Shared CellTwin Anchorhold, Anachoretes binatusby symbiosis

Food web

friction its kernel rubs against the kernel of Entanglement
Solitude is one mind apart; Entanglement is a pair with no state of its own. Each denies the other's unit.
homology its intake resembles the intake of Entanglement
Both need isolation, Solitude from other people's attention, Entanglement from everything that would touch the pair.

Kin

same kind in Roget Witnessed Relief, Witnessed Relief (Mycelia), The Shared Cell

same kind in WordNet Presence, The Shared Cell

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

same phylum Amber, Dream, Placebo, The Common Lung, Knowing Trust, The Shared Cell

same dominant organ Amber, Equinox, Tongue Horizon, The Shared Cell

Genome

withdrawal also in The Shared Cell
attention also in Afterlistening, Presence, Prophecy, Silence
silence
interiority
autonomy

III In the world

Echoes

Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond
a monk's cell
a long walk taken alone
an artist's retreat

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	mycelia
symmetry	asymmetric
organization	solitary
silhouette	crown
scale	immense
proportion	compressed latent
growth	regenerated
articulation	tethered latent
openness	hollow
skeleton	endoskeleton latent
locomotion	sessile
pattern	plain latent
coloration	countershaded latent
substance	silk
surface	scaled
palette	vermilion
luminosity	points
transparency	clouded latent
gesture	closes
unity	unmarked latent
modality	possible latent
causation	unmarked latent
determinacy	crisp latent
fusion	nested
anomaly	inverted
graft	mirrors
technique	crayon
viewpoint	cutaway
value	unmarked latent
balance	leaning latent
density	sparse
rhythm	unmarked latent
saturation	vivid latent
appendages	rhizoids, spines
anchor (body)	a silk cocoon, an oval case of wound threads around an insect pupa
anchor (detail)	a dew drop holding a tiny inverted image of the world

Sources

D. W. Winnicott, The Capacity to be Alone (1958)
Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self (1988)
Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929)
John Cacioppo and William Patrick, Loneliness (2008)

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