a founder of the codex

Patience

Patientaria maturans·the Slow Ripener

From Latin patientia, endurance, and maturare, to ripen, for an enduring creature that ripens what it waits for.

Level: Conceptorganism
Phylum: Scaleimage schema
Class: Intakeits dripping water
Niche: Extremophileabsence
Mode: Habithow it keeps existing
Stage: Matureindividuated
Status: Living
Habitat: Body

Its kinds · Roget, 1852: Individual Volition · Wilkins, 1668: Habit · WordNet, 1990: Attribute · Llull, 1308: K · Instrumentative

Slow Ripener, the whole specimen — Plate XL. Patientaria maturans, the whole specimen.

Some goods ripen only with time, and patience bears that time while the nearer reward is left alone, for as long as the promise looks worth keeping.

What is worth having often comes only to the one who can bear the wait.

behavior Stays in one place for seasons, swaying a little, and grows heavier at its tip each year.

provocation

What in your life is still ripening, and what would picking it now cost you?

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 Patience — Fig. 1. Kernel
Delayed gratification
Which premise, if it were false, would kill this idea?
Its premise is that some goods come only with time, and that the waiting and its pains can be borne while the good is held in view.^{2, 3}
drawn as: delayed gratification · view: series

Boundary of Patience — Fig. 2. Boundary
Marshmallow test
What sets it apart from what it is not, and how does it keep that distinction?
It is set against haste, the reach for a good before its time, and it holds that line each time the nearer, smaller reward is left untouched.⁴
drawn as: marshmallow test · view: cross section

Intake of Patience — Fig. 3. Intake
Dripping water
❦ dominant organ
What must it feed on to work? What has to be present, noticed or supplied?
It feeds on time, and on trust that the promise will be kept. Children wait far longer for a treat when the adult offering it has kept an earlier promise.⁵
drawn as: dripping water · view: magnified

Mechanism of Patience — Fig. 4. Mechanism
Averted gaze
How does it turn what it takes in into what it gives out?
It works by restraint held steady, with attention turned away from the reward. Children who looked away or thought of something pleasant waited longest.⁴
drawn as: averted gaze · view: exploded

Output of Patience — Fig. 5. Output
Precious fruit
What does it make possible, visible or knowable?
It yields what only time can ripen, the farmer's crop after the early and late rains, the larger reward, a skill formed over years.¹
drawn as: precious fruit · view: detached

Dispersal of Patience — Fig. 6. Dispersal
Cloud of witnesses
What part of it travels into other minds, ideas and fields, and by what vector?
It travels by example, as the Epistle of James holds up the farmer and the prophets as patterns of endurance for others to follow.¹
drawn as: cloud of witnesses · view: magnified

Decay of Patience — Fig. 7. Decay
Last straw
What can it not digest, where does it fail, and what does it leave behind for others?
It breaks when the promise looks unreliable, since waiting then stops paying off. Held past all reason, it sours into resignation, an endless wait for nothing.⁵
drawn as: last straw · view: pinned

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 Volition

same kind in Wilkins Geomancy, Innocence, Music, Hesychology, Subtractive Phenomenology

same kind in WordNet Aura, Innocence, Symmetry

same kind in Llull Chiaroscuro, Faith, Geomancy, Innocence, Lullaby, Music, Pointillism, Ritual, Syllable, Symbol, Foresilence, Tide of Days, Subtractive Phenomenology

same phylum Entropy, Frost, Iridescence, Sand, Silence, Trance, Hesychology

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

Genome

endurance
waiting also in Threshold
restraint also in Silence
ripening
time also in Amber, River

III In the world

Echoes

the marshmallow test
a farmer waiting for rain
a bonsai shaped over decades
a vigil at a bedside

IV Record

How it was drawn

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

axis	value
book	minerals
symmetry	radial 3
organization	chained
silhouette	cluster
scale	microscopic
proportion	sheared latent
growth	swelling
articulation	seamless latent
openness	solid latent
skeleton	unmarked latent
locomotion	sessile latent
pattern	plain latent
coloration	warning latent
substance	chitin
surface	beaded
palette	saffron
luminosity	none
transparency	translucent latent
gesture	hardens
unity	composite latent
modality	necessary
causation	material
determinacy	crisp latent
fusion	graft
anomaly	scale clash
graft	scales pans
technique	crayon
viewpoint	below
value	chiaroscuro latent
balance	grounded latent
density	unmarked latent
rhythm	alternating
saturation	vivid latent
appendages	beaded filaments, comb rows
anchor (body)	a comb jelly, an oval glassy body with eight rows of beating iridescent combs
anchor (detail)	a hailstone cut in half, concentric layers of clear and cloudy ice

Sources

The Epistle of James 5:7 to 11
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, question 136, on patience (c. 1270)
Simone Weil, Attente de Dieu (1950)
Walter Mischel, Ebbe B. Ebbesen and Antonette Raskoff Zeiss, Cognitive and Attentional Mechanisms in Delay of Gratification (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1972)
Celeste Kidd, Holly Palmeri and Richard N. Aslin, Rational Snacking: Young Children's Decision-Making on the Marshmallow Task Is Moderated by Beliefs about Environmental Reliability (Cognition, 2013)

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