a founder of the codex

Ash

Favillaria nutriens·the Fertile Remnant

From Latin favilla, glowing ash, and nutriens, nourishing, the ash that feeds what grows after the fire.

Level: Conceptorganism
Phylum: Cycleimage schema
Class: Dispersalits dust veil
Niche: Decomposerwhat is dead
Mode: Religionhow it keeps existing
Stage: Matureindividuated
Status: Living
Habitat: Ruin

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

Fertile Remnant, the whole specimen — Plate IV. Favillaria nutriens, the whole specimen.

Ash is the mineral remainder of a burnt body, and it returns to the soil as food for the next growth or rides the wind far from the fire that made it.

What fire leaves behind becomes the food of what grows next.

behavior It settles soft and grey where the fire has passed, lifts on the first wind, and sinks into the soil with the first rain.

provocation

Which of your burnt thoughts has left ground where something new now grows?

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

Kernel of Ash — Fig. 1. Kernel
Calcination
Which premise, if it were false, would kill this idea?
Ash is the part of a burnt body that stays behind when fire sends its carbon into the air, the calcium, potassium and phosphorus a plant drew from the soil while it lived.¹
drawn as: calcination · view: microscope

Boundary of Ash — Fig. 2. Boundary
Char
What sets it apart from what it is not, and how does it keep that distinction?
It is defined against char, the black half-burnt matter that still holds carbon and can burn again, and fire ecologists read white ash as the mark of a complete burn.²
drawn as: char · view: cast

Intake of Ash — Fig. 3. Intake
Leaf litter
What must it feed on to work? What has to be present, noticed or supplied?
It feeds on the fuel a fire burns through, the dead wood and leaf litter of a forest floor, and the more fuel burns, the more ash is left.²
drawn as: leaf litter · view: magnified

Mechanism of Ash — Fig. 4. Mechanism
Lye
How does it turn what it takes in into what it gives out?
Rain dissolves its potassium and calcium into an alkaline lye that sinks into the soil, sweetening sour ground and feeding roots.¹
drawn as: lye · view: in situ

Output of Ash — Fig. 5. Output
Swidden
What does it make possible, visible or knowable?
It feeds the next growth, so swidden farmers sow in the ash of a burnt clearing, and fireweed spreads over burnt ground in the summers after a fire.²
drawn as: swidden · view: cast

Dispersal of Ash — Fig. 6. Dispersal
Dust veil
❦ dominant organ
What part of it travels into other minds, ideas and fields, and by what vector?
Eruptions hurl it high enough to circle the earth as a veil that dims the sun, and it travels in rites of mourning and penance, ashes strewn on the head or scattered on the wind.^{3, 5}
drawn as: dust veil · view: series

Decay of Ash — Fig. 7. Decay
Tuff
What can it not digest, where does it fail, and what does it leave behind for others?
Fallen too thick it smothers what it should feed, as when Vesuvius buried the towns and fields around it in 79 CE, and in time the buried ash sets into tuff.⁴
drawn as: tuff · view: pressed

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

same kind in Wilkins Amber, Clay, Diamond, Petrification, Salt, Sand

same kind in WordNet Amber, Clay, Diamond, Salt, Sand

same kind in Llull Amber, Archipelago, 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 Breath, Echolalia, Lullaby, Metamorphosis, Resonance, Commemorative Revision, The Swing Door, Tide of Days, Simultaneous Remembering, Poetry

same dominant organ Breath, Miracle, Pointillism, River, Sand, Wind, Witnessed Relief

Genome

residue also in Dream, Subtractive Phenomenology
mineral
renewal also in Fire, Oblivion, Spring
mourning
wind

III In the world

Echoes

ashes on the brow on Ash Wednesday
fireweed on a burnt hillside
Pompeii under the ash of Vesuvius
the phoenix rising from its own ashes

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	minerals
symmetry	radial 8
organization	solitary
silhouette	cluster
scale	microscopic
proportion	compressed
growth	encrusted
articulation	jointed latent
openness	solid latent
skeleton	endoskeleton latent
locomotion	rolling
pattern	speckled latent
coloration	plain latent
substance	crystal
surface	perforated
palette	meadow
luminosity	inner glow
transparency	clouded latent
gesture	gathers
unity	aggregate latent
modality	contingent latent
causation	efficient latent
determinacy	fraying latent
fusion	replaced
anomaly	echoes
graft	wax
technique	gouache
viewpoint	motion
value	low key
balance	leaning latent
density	unmarked latent
rhythm	unmarked latent
saturation	accent latent
appendages	lanterns, beaded filaments
anchor (body)	an earthstar, a spore sac sitting on a star of split outer skin
anchor (detail)	a hailstone cut in half, concentric layers of clear and cloudy ice

Sources

Justus von Liebig, Die organische Chemie in ihrer Anwendung auf Agricultur und Physiologie (1840)
Stephen J. Pyne, Fire: A Brief History (2001)
H. H. Lamb, Volcanic Dust in the Atmosphere, with a Chronology and Assessment of Its Meteorological Significance (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 1970)
Pliny the Younger, Letters, book 6, letters 16 and 20, on the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE
Job 42:6

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