a founder of the codex

Chimera

Insitaria polyglotta·the Polyglot Graft

From Latin insitus, grafted, and Greek polyglottos, many-tongued, for a grafted creature that speaks in many tongues.

Level: Conceptorganism
Phylum: Part and wholeimage schema
Class: Mechanismits graft union
Niche: Symbionta partner
Mode: Fictionhow it keeps existing
Stage: Matureindividuated
Status: Living
Habitat: Dream

Its kinds · Roget, 1852: Organic Matter · Wilkins, 1668: Beast · WordNet, 1990: Animal · Llull, 1308: G · Sensitive

Polyglot Graft, the whole specimen — Plate IX. Insitaria polyglotta, the whole specimen.

One body can be made of parts from different kinds and still live, and wherever kinds are meant to stay pure such a body is read as a monster or a marvel.

A body can be many kinds at once, so long as its parts can bear one another.

behavior Moves as several creatures that have agreed to share one body, and each part answers in its own voice.

provocation

Which part of you came from elsewhere and grew in so well that you call it your own?

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 Chimera — Fig. 1. Kernel
Composite beast
Which premise, if it were false, would kill this idea?
Its premise is that one living body can be built from parts of different kinds, each part keeping its own nature inside the whole.^{1, 3}
drawn as: composite beast · view: cross section

Boundary of Chimera — Fig. 2. Boundary
Species barrier
What sets it apart from what it is not, and how does it keep that distinction?
It is defined against pure kind, the order in which each creature belongs to one class. Where that order is kept, a body that mixes classes is read as a monster.²
drawn as: species barrier · view: pinned

Intake of Chimera — Fig. 3. Intake
Scion
What must it feed on to work? What has to be present, noticed or supplied?
It feeds on parts borrowed from other creatures, a lion's head, a goat's body, a serpent's tail, or the cells of a twin or a donor.^{1, 4}
drawn as: scion · view: series

Mechanism of Chimera — Fig. 4. Mechanism
Graft union
❦ dominant organ
How does it turn what it takes in into what it gives out?
Grafting joins the parts, and a grafted shoot can grow layers that keep the cells of both stocks. In animals a graft takes where the host met the foreign cells early in life and accepts them as its own.^{3, 4}
drawn as: graft union · view: cross section

Output of Chimera — Fig. 5. Output
Monster
What does it make possible, visible or knowable?
It makes visible a creature that belongs to no kind, and the word chimera came to name any impossible fancy.^{1, 5}
drawn as: monster · view: transparent

Dispersal of Chimera — Fig. 6. Dispersal
Grotesque
What part of it travels into other minds, ideas and fields, and by what vector?
It travels as myth and image, from the fire-breathing beast of the Iliad to the composite animals of bestiaries, carvings and dreams.^{1, 5}
drawn as: grotesque · view: exploded

Decay of Chimera — Fig. 7. Decay
Rejection
What can it not digest, where does it fail, and what does it leave behind for others?
It fails where the body attacks the parts it reads as foreign, and a graft the host refuses dies at the seam. It leaves behind the study of how a body tells self from other.⁴
drawn as: rejection · view: microscope

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 Amber, Breath, Chiaroscuro, Entelechy, Iridescence, Music, Silence, Tinnitus, Vertigo, Shared Breath

same kind in Llull Aura, Awakening, Fear, Qualia, Silence, Tinnitus, Vertigo, Babelhum, Shared Breath, The Swing Door

same phylum Emergence, Petrification, Pointillism, Syllable, Babelhum, Subtractive Phenomenology

same dominant organ Dream, Fire, Love, Lullaby, Metamorphosis, Music, Presence, Resonance, Ritual, Storm, Symbol, Winter, Rushmaker, Shared Breath, Self-Ending Order, Gazeroot (second reading), Commemorative Revision, The Swing Door, Foresilence, Simultaneous Remembering, Poetry, Subtractive Phenomenology

Genome

hybrid
graft
composite
monster
tolerance

III In the world

Echoes

the Chimera of Arezzo, an Etruscan bronze
an apple tree grafted to bear several varieties
a mother carrying cells of her child years after the birth
the composite beasts of medieval bestiaries

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	pathemata
symmetry	radial 5
organization	solitary
silhouette	quadruped
scale	immense
proportion	graded
growth	moulting
articulation	imbricate latent
openness	hollow latent
skeleton	unmarked latent
locomotion	burrowing latent
pattern	labyrinth latent
coloration	countershaded latent
substance	gill tissue
surface	scaled
palette	lichen
luminosity	points
transparency	transparent latent
gesture	rises
unity	composite
modality	necessary latent
causation	formal latent
determinacy	crisp
fusion	nested
anomaly	wound bloom
graft	scaffold
technique	gouache
viewpoint	above
value	unmarked latent
balance	top heavy latent
density	intricate latent
rhythm	regular latent
saturation	accent latent
appendages	valves, frills
anchor (body)	a foraminifer, a spiral of chambers each larger than the last
anchor (detail)	beetle wing cases, hard, iridescent and finely ridged

Sources

Homer, Iliad, book 6, lines 179 to 182 (c. 8th century BCE)
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (1966)
Hans Winkler, Über Pfropfbastarde und pflanzliche Chimären (Berichte der Deutschen Botanischen Gesellschaft, 1907)
Rupert E. Billingham, Leslie Brent and Peter B. Medawar, Actively Acquired Tolerance of Foreign Cells (Nature, 1953)
Jorge Luis Borges with Margarita Guerrero, The Book of Imaginary Beings (1967)

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