a founder of the codex

Eternity

Aeviaria lentissima·the Slowest Rhythm

From Latin aevum, unending age, and lentissima, slowest, the endless time that the slowest rhythm comes nearest to.

Level: Conceptorganism
Phylum: Centre and peripheryimage schema
Class: Kernelits still point
Niche: Extremophileabsence
Mode: Religionhow it keeps existing
Stage: Matureindividuated
Status: Living
Habitat: Ocean

Its kinds · Roget, 1852: Time · Wilkins, 1668: Space · WordNet, 1990: Time · Llull, 1308: B · God

Slowest Rhythm, the whole specimen — Plate XXI. Aeviaria lentissima, the whole specimen.

Eternity is time without end, or the whole of time held at once, and a turning thing comes nearer to it the slower its rhythm runs.

The slower a rhythm runs, the nearer it comes to a whole that never passes.

behavior It barely moves, and each of its parts turns more slowly the nearer it lies to its still centre.

provocation

What in you would have to slow down for you to feel that nothing is passing?

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 Eternity — Fig. 1. Kernel
Still point
❦ dominant organ
Which premise, if it were false, would kill this idea?
Eternity is the whole of a boundless life held at once, with no before and no after, as Boethius defined it.²
drawn as: still point · view: cross section

Boundary of Eternity — Fig. 2. Boundary
Hourglass
What sets it apart from what it is not, and how does it keep that distinction?
It is set apart from time that merely goes on, for a world lasting for ever would still pass moment by moment, and so be perpetual, a lesser thing.²
drawn as: hourglass · view: microscope

Intake of Eternity — Fig. 3. Intake
Great Year
What must it feed on to work? What has to be present, noticed or supplied?
It is approached through the slowest rhythms, the heavens wheeling until every planet returns to where it began in one Great Year, and a breath slowed in contemplation.¹
drawn as: Great Year · view: detached

Mechanism of Eternity — Fig. 4. Mechanism
Concentric circles
How does it turn what it takes in into what it gives out?
Time imitates it by moving in circles, and of circles turning round one centre the inner ones move least, so a rhythm comes nearer to it the slower it runs.^{1, 2}
drawn as: concentric circles · view: transparent

Output of Eternity — Fig. 5. Output
Oceanic feeling
What does it make possible, visible or knowable?
Glimpsed, it gives what Freud, quoting a friend, called the oceanic feeling, a sense of something limitless, and beside it a single life looks brief and whole at once.⁵
drawn as: oceanic feeling · view: at work

Dispersal of Eternity — Fig. 6. Dispersal
Ouroboros
What part of it travels into other minds, ideas and fields, and by what vector?
It travels as a ring with no start, the serpent biting its tail, and in poems that claim to find it, as Rimbaud found it in the sea mingled with the sun.⁴
drawn as: ouroboros · view: in situ

Decay of Eternity — Fig. 7. Decay
Unconformity
What can it not digest, where does it fail, and what does it leave behind for others?
Every measure falls short of it, and the earth in which Hutton saw no vestige of a beginning now has a measured age. What it leaves are gaps in the rock, where whole ages were worn away unrecorded.³
drawn as: unconformity · 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 Equinox, Spring, Winter, Foresilence, Tide of Days

same kind in Wilkins Equinox, Spring, Winter, Foresilence, Tide of Days

same kind in WordNet Equinox, Spring, Winter, Foresilence, Tide of Days

same kind in Llull Miracle

same phylum Aura, Geomancy, Presence, Qualia

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

Genome

endlessness
stillness also in Frost, Hesychology, Lake
slowness
wholeness
return also in Commemorative Revision, Equinox, Tide of Days, Nostalgia, Rain, Reflection

III In the world

Echoes

the sea mingled with the sun
a serpent biting its tail
the unconformity at Siccar Point
a sanctuary lamp kept always burning

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	uranographia
symmetry	radial 6
organization	nested
silhouette	ribbon
scale	immense
proportion	compressed latent
growth	apical
articulation	jointed
openness	spongy latent
skeleton	endoskeleton latent
locomotion	gliding latent
pattern	speckled
coloration	countershaded latent
substance	calcite
surface	ribbed
palette	bismuth
luminosity	points
transparency	translucent latent
gesture	pulses
unity	aggregate
modality	necessary latent
causation	unmarked latent
determinacy	fraying latent
fusion	built of
anomaly	scale clash
graft	scales pans
technique	engraving
viewpoint	motion
value	flat latent
balance	leaning latent
density	graded detail latent
rhythm	clustered latent
saturation	muted latent
appendages	sails
anchor (body)	a jellyfish bell with frilled oral arms trailing beneath
anchor (detail)	a pyrite sun, a flat disc of radiating crystal

Sources

Plato, Timaeus (c. 360 BCE), on time as a moving image of eternity and the perfect year
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy (c. 524), Books IV and V
James Hutton, Theory of the Earth (Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1788)
Arthur Rimbaud, Une saison en enfer (1873), Alchimie du verbe
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), chapter 1, on the oceanic feeling

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