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🦋 Each second is a universe.
 I'd like to quote at length a paragraph from "t zero," below the fold -- so we can observe and appreciate and meditate upon the crystalline beauty of the writing and of the ideas, you and I, and so that I can briefly mount one of my favorite hobby horses.
So now that I have decided to inhabit forever this second t0 -- and if I hadn't decided to it would be the same thing because as Q0 I can inhabit no other -- I have ample leisure to look around and to contemplate my second to its full extent. It encompasses on my right a river blackish with hippopotamuses, on my left the savannah blackish-white with zebras, and scattered at various points along the horizon some baobab trees blackish-yellow with toucans, each of these elements marked by the positions occupied respectively by the hippopotamuses H(a)0, H(b)0, H(c)0 et cetera, by the zebras Z(a)0, Z(b)0, Z(c)0 et cetera, the toucans T(a)0, T(b)0, T(c)0 et cetera. It further embraces hut villages and warehouses of importers and exporters, plantations that conceal underground thousands of seeds at different moments of the process of germination, endless deserts with the position of each grain of sand G(a)0 G(b)0... G(nn)0 transported by the wind, cities at night with lighted windows and dark windows, cities during the day with red and yellow and green traffic lights, production graphs, price indices, stock market figures, epidemics of contagious diseases with the position of each virus, local wars with volleys of bullets B(a)0 B(b)0... B(z)0 B(zz)0 B(zzz)0... suspended in their trajectory, bullets which may strike the enemies E(a)0 E(b)0 E(c)0 hidden among the leaves, airplanes with clusters of just-released bombs suspended beneath them, airplanes with clusters of bombs waiting to be released, total war implicit in the international situation (IS)0 which at some unknown moment (IS)X will become explicit total war, explosions of supernovæ which might change radically the configuration of our galaxy...
I'm interested in what it means to take an instantaneous slice of reality this way. As Calvino/Qfwfq noted in the first volume of Cosmicomics, in the story "The Light-Years," every object is, to observers, a sphere expanding at the speed of light -- the observer perceives the object at the instant when the skin of that sphere crosses his/her location. The instant t0 has to be identified with Q0's location in space, and the subscript zero as applied to zebras, hippopotamuses, bullets, international situations, if it is to mean the same thing as the subscript zero applied to Qfwfq and his instant, has to refer to the surfaces of their spheres, all intersecting at locus Q. But at the moment when this happens (again, as pointed out in "The Light-Years"), that zebra over there is no longer Z(n)0, it has gone on to become some Z(n)a which will at some later tx become visible to Qx...
posted morning of Saturday, October 8th, 2011
➳ More posts about Cosmicomics
➳ More posts about Italo Calvino
➳ More posts about Readings
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