a founder of the codex

Clay

Pelotypus retinens·the Pliant Earth

From Greek pelos, clay, and typos, imprint, and Latin retinens, keeping, the earth that takes a print and keeps it.

Level: Conceptorganism
Phylum: Containerimage schema
Class: Intakeits seal impression
Niche: Producerraw experience
Mode: Fictionhow it keeps existing
Stage: Matureindividuated
Status: Living
Habitat: Archive

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

Pliant Earth, the whole specimen — Plate X. Pelotypus retinens, the whole specimen.

Clay is earth fine enough to take any shape when wet and keep it once dried and fired, so it became the first material in which people made vessels, figures and written records.

What yields to every hand keeps the mark of each, and fire makes the mark last.

behavior It sags and yields while wet, stiffens as it dries, and after the kiln holds its shape and every fingerprint for thousands of years.

provocation

Whose hands have left their prints in you, and what fire has set them?

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

Kernel of Clay — Fig. 1. Kernel
Phyllosilicate
Which premise, if it were false, would kill this idea?
Clay is rock weathered into mineral flakes finer than dust, and water between the flakes lets them slide and then hold, so a wet lump takes any shape and keeps it.¹
drawn as: phyllosilicate · view: transparent

Boundary of Clay — Fig. 2. Boundary
Glaze
What sets it apart from what it is not, and how does it keep that distinction?
Unfired, it slumps back to mud in water. Fired at low heat it stays porous until a glaze, a skin of glass melted onto its surface, seals it.²
drawn as: glaze · view: pinned

Intake of Clay — Fig. 3. Intake
Seal impression
❦ dominant organ
What must it feed on to work? What has to be present, noticed or supplied?
It takes the press of any hand or tool and keeps the print of a seal, a reed stylus or a thumb down to the finest line.³
drawn as: seal impression · view: in situ

Mechanism of Clay — Fig. 4. Mechanism
Kiln
How does it turn what it takes in into what it gives out?
Drying draws the water out until the flakes lock, and firing in a kiln fuses them, turning soft earth into ceramic that keeps its shape for thousands of years.²
drawn as: kiln · view: cast

Output of Clay — Fig. 5. Output
Earthenware
What does it make possible, visible or knowable?
It gave humanity its first fired things, figurines, pots and bricks, and the small tokens with which Mesopotamians kept accounts before writing.^{2, 3}
drawn as: earthenware · view: pressed

Dispersal of Clay — Fig. 6. Dispersal
Golem
What part of it travels into other minds, ideas and fields, and by what vector?
It travels in stories of beings shaped from clay and woken to life, the first people kneaded by gods and the golem roused by a holy name.⁴
drawn as: golem · view: microscope

Decay of Clay — Fig. 7. Decay
Potsherd
What can it not digest, where does it fail, and what does it leave behind for others?
Fired clay is brittle and breaks, yet its shards outlast almost everything else people make, so potsherds are the commonest find of archaeology and date the layers they lie in.⁵
drawn as: potsherd · view: cross section

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

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

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

same kind in Llull Amber, Archipelago, Ash, 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 Amber, Dream, Lake, Placebo, Possession, Solitude, Tinnitus, Winter, Knowing Trust, The Shared Cell

same dominant organ Faith, Fear, Lake, Patience, Prophecy, Resonance (second reading), Silence, Tinnitus, Trance

Genome

plasticity
impression
firing
vessel
making

III In the world

Echoes

a potter's wheel turning
cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia
a fingerprint fired into an ancient pot
the golem of Prague

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	meteora
symmetry	dendritic
organization	segmented
silhouette	columnar
scale	hand
proportion	compressed latent
growth	encrusted
articulation	imbricate
openness	spongy latent
skeleton	spicules latent
locomotion	sessile latent
pattern	spots latent
coloration	cryptic latent
substance	ice
surface	crackled
palette	gilt
luminosity	inner glow
transparency	translucent
gesture	sinks
unity	integral latent
modality	necessary latent
causation	formal latent
determinacy	crisp latent
fusion	nested
anomaly	tenant
graft	origami
technique	gouache
viewpoint	below
value	chiaroscuro latent
balance	grounded latent
density	sparse latent
rhythm	regular
saturation	muted latent
appendages	valves
anchor (body)	a soap bubble, a sphere of iridescent film
anchor (detail)	manganese dendrites, fern-like black branching on stone

Sources

Ralph E. Grim, Clay Mineralogy (1953)
Bernard Leach, A Potter's Book (1940)
Denise Schmandt-Besserat, Before Writing, volume 1: From Counting to Cuneiform (1992)
Gershom Scholem, Zur Kabbala und ihrer Symbolik (1960), on the idea of the golem
W. M. Flinders Petrie, Sequences in Prehistoric Remains (Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 1899)

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