a founder of the codex

Archipelago

Nesodesmia submersa·the Scattered Range

From Greek nesos, island, and desmos, bond, and Latin submersa, sunk under water, islands bound together by what lies beneath the sea.

Level: Conceptorganism
Phylum: Linkimage schema
Class: Kernelits submarine ridge
Niche: Symbionta partner
Mode: Politicshow it keeps existing
Stage: Transindividualtransindividual
Status: Living
Habitat: Ocean

Its kinds · Roget, 1852: Inorganic Matter · Wilkins, 1668: World · WordNet, 1990: Object · Llull, 1308: I · Elementative

Scattered Range, the whole specimen — Plate III. Nesodesmia submersa, the whole specimen.

An archipelago is a scatter of islands that are the summits of one submerged range, one body divided by the sea, and its separation breeds kinds found only there.

What the sea scatters is joined beneath it, and each part grows strange in its separation.

behavior It lies spread across the sea in a long curve, each island slowly growing its own kinds, and it sinks back beneath the waves one island at a time.

provocation

Which of your scattered parts are joined beneath the surface, and what has each become alone?

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

Kernel of Archipelago — Fig. 1. Kernel
Submarine ridge
❦ dominant organ
Which premise, if it were false, would kill this idea?
Its islands are the summits of one range beneath the sea, a chain built over a hotspot or an arc above a sinking plate, so the sea divides what is one body below.¹
drawn as: submarine ridge · view: transparent

Boundary of Archipelago — Fig. 2. Boundary
Deep strait
What sets it apart from what it is not, and how does it keep that distinction?
Straits too deep to have run dry in the ice ages keep its islands apart, so the plants and animals of each stay separate from those of the next.²
drawn as: deep strait · view: detached

Intake of Archipelago — Fig. 3. Intake
Drift seed
What must it feed on to work? What has to be present, noticed or supplied?
It feeds on whatever crosses the water, seeds riding currents, birds blown off course and rafts of matted plants, and the life of each island begins from these few arrivals.²
drawn as: drift seed · view: pinned

Mechanism of Archipelago — Fig. 4. Mechanism
Adaptive radiation
How does it turn what it takes in into what it gives out?
On each island a few arrivals breed apart and adapt to its ground, so one stock splits into many kinds, as among the finches and tortoises of the Galápagos.²
drawn as: adaptive radiation · view: cast

Output of Archipelago — Fig. 5. Output
Giant tortoise
What does it make possible, visible or knowable?
It breeds kinds found only on its islands, giant tortoises, dwarf elephants and flightless birds, and these island kinds were among the first clues to how species form.²
drawn as: giant tortoise · view: series

Dispersal of Archipelago — Fig. 6. Dispersal
Kula ring
What part of it travels into other minds, ideas and fields, and by what vector?
It travels as the kula ring, where shell necklaces and armbands circle the islands in opposite directions, and in thought as a way of joining scattered places while each keeps its own nature.^{4, 5}
drawn as: kula ring · view: pressed

Decay of Archipelago — Fig. 7. Decay
Atoll
What can it not digest, where does it fail, and what does it leave behind for others?
As its volcanoes cool and drift away from their source they sink, and each island ends as a ring of coral round an empty lagoon, then as a drowned, flat-topped seamount.³
drawn as: atoll · view: magnified

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 Ash, Clay, Cloud, Diamond, Erosion, Fire, Frost, Lake, Rain, River, Salt, Sand, Storm, Wind

same kind in Wilkins Erosion, Possession

same kind in WordNet Cloud, Lake, River

same kind in Llull Amber, Ash, Clay, Cloud, Diamond, Emergence, Entanglement, Entropy, Erosion, Fire, Frost, Iridescence, Lake, Petrification, Rain, Reflection, Resonance, Resonance (second reading), River, Salt, Sand, Storm, Weightlessness, Wind, Winter, Self-Ending Order

same phylum Apophenia, Entanglement, Love, Mimesis, Resonance (second reading), Symbol, Shared Breath, Witnessed Relief, Gazeroot (second reading)

same dominant organ Entanglement, Entelechy, Eternity, Geomancy, Qualia, Salt, Syllable, Symmetry, Vertigo, Volition, Weightlessness, Knowing Trust, Hesychology

Genome

island
isolation
ridge
relation also in Gazeroot (second reading)
divergence

III In the world

Echoes

the Galápagos
the islands of Hawaii
the kula ring of the Trobriand Islands
the Aegean, the first sea called an archipelago

IV Record

How it was drawn

its draw 5, a point in the morphospace (laws §8), drawn by flux-2-klein-4b.safetensors.

axis	value
book	nidi
symmetry	fractal
organization	chained
silhouette	beam
scale	immense
proportion	sheared latent
growth	faceted
articulation	jointed latent
openness	sheet latent
skeleton	unmarked latent
locomotion	unmarked latent
pattern	rosettes latent
coloration	eyespots latent
substance	ice
surface	filamentous
palette	meadow
luminosity	points
transparency	layered
gesture	sinks
unity	unmarked latent
modality	possible latent
causation	unmarked latent
determinacy	doubled
fusion	mirrored
anomaly	budding
graft	stair
technique	hatching
viewpoint	three quarter
value	chiaroscuro latent
balance	top heavy
density	unmarked latent
rhythm	unmarked latent
saturation	unmarked latent
appendages	beaded filaments, sails
anchor (body)	a sea angel, a translucent sea snail swimming on two wing-like lobes
anchor (detail)	a slime mold spreading as a veined network across a surface

Sources

J. Tuzo Wilson, A Possible Origin of the Hawaiian Islands (Canadian Journal of Physics, 1963)
Alfred Russel Wallace, Island Life (1880)
Charles Darwin, The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs (1842)
Bronisław Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922)
Édouard Glissant, Traité du Tout-Monde (1997), on archipelagic thought

❦