a founder of the codex

Petrification

Lithomorpha fidelis·the Faithful Stone

From Greek lithos, stone, and morphe, form, and Latin fidelis, faithful, the stone that keeps a living form faithfully.

Level: Conceptorganism
Phylum: Part and wholeimage schema
Class: Decayits conchoidal fracture
Niche: Parasitethe mechanism of a host idea
Mode: Referencehow it keeps existing
Stage: Matureindividuated
Status: Living
Habitat: Archive

Its kinds · Roget, 1852: Change · Wilkins, 1668: Stone · WordNet, 1990: Process · Llull, 1308: I · Elementative

Faithful Stone, the whole specimen — Plate XLI. Lithomorpha fidelis, the whole specimen.

Petrification replaces a living body with stone, grain by grain, so its form outlasts its matter and stays exact and rigid until it shatters.

A form can outlive every grain of the body that held it, and what it gains in permanence it pays for in brittleness.

behavior It works unseen for ages under mud and water, keeps every cell of what it takes, and splits apart at the first hard blow.

provocation

Which belief of yours has kept its shape so long that it can only break?

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

Kernel of Petrification — Fig. 1. Kernel
Pseudomorph
Which premise, if it were false, would kill this idea?
A form can outlast its matter. In petrification every part of a buried body is replaced by mineral, and its shape and even its cells are kept.^{1, 2}
drawn as: pseudomorph · view: microscope

Boundary of Petrification — Fig. 2. Boundary
Rapid burial
What sets it apart from what it is not, and how does it keep that distinction?
It begins where a body is buried fast in mud, sand or volcanic ash and sealed from the air before rot can take it.³
drawn as: rapid burial · view: cast

Intake of Petrification — Fig. 3. Intake
Groundwater
What must it feed on to work? What has to be present, noticed or supplied?
It feeds on groundwater carrying dissolved silica, calcite or iron, which seeps through buried wood and bone, the silica often leached from volcanic ash above.⁴
drawn as: groundwater · view: at work

Mechanism of Petrification — Fig. 4. Mechanism
Permineralization
How does it turn what it takes in into what it gives out?
Mineral first fills the pores and cell spaces, then takes the place of the cell walls themselves as they dissolve, so stone copies the tissue down to its cells.^{4, 2}
drawn as: permineralization · view: detached

Output of Petrification — Fig. 5. Output
Agatized wood
What does it make possible, visible or knowable?
It turns forests into stone logs whose growth rings show in bands of red and yellow quartz, and it keeps bones and shells whole for hundreds of millions of years.^{2, 4}
drawn as: agatized wood · view: exploded

Dispersal of Petrification — Fig. 6. Dispersal
Gorgon
What part of it travels into other minds, ideas and fields, and by what vector?
It travels in myth as the Gorgon whose gaze turns the living to stone and the grieving mother turned into a rock that weeps on, and in speech as fear that freezes a body in place.⁵
drawn as: Gorgon · view: series

Decay of Petrification — Fig. 7. Decay
Conchoidal fracture
❦ dominant organ
What can it not digest, where does it fail, and what does it leave behind for others?
Turned to quartz, it keeps its form and loses all give. Under strain it cracks across into even segments, and a sharp blow shatters it into curved flakes.⁴
drawn as: conchoidal fracture · 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 Awakening, Entropy, Metamorphosis, Threshold, Tongue Horizon

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

same kind in WordNet Awakening, Breath, Entelechy, Entropy, Erosion, Fire, Metamorphosis, Rushmaker, Shared Breath, Self-Ending Order, Tongue Horizon, Witnessed Relief, Gazeroot (second reading), Commemorative Revision, The Swing Door

same kind in Llull Amber, Archipelago, Ash, Clay, Cloud, Diamond, Emergence, Entanglement, Entropy, Erosion, Fire, Frost, Iridescence, Lake, Rain, Reflection, Resonance, Resonance (second reading), River, Salt, Sand, Storm, Weightlessness, Wind, Winter, Self-Ending Order

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

same dominant organ Entropy, Innocence, Memory, Oblivion

Genome

replacement
form also in Commemorative Revision, Entelechy, Metamorphosis, Poetry, Ritual
fixity also in Salt
record
brittleness

III In the world

Echoes

the Petrified Forest of Arizona
the Gorgon's head on Athena's shield
a dinosaur bone turned to opal
a body frozen still by fear

IV Record

How it was drawn

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

axis	value
book	uranographia
symmetry	bilateral
organization	segmented
silhouette	cluster
scale	immense
proportion	elongated latent
growth	encrusted
articulation	jointed latent
openness	solid latent
skeleton	exoskeleton
locomotion	walking latent
pattern	reticulate latent
coloration	disruptive latent
substance	smoke
surface	scaled
palette	ink
luminosity	sheen
transparency	layered latent
gesture	hardens
unity	composite
modality	necessary
causation	formal latent
determinacy	doubled latent
fusion	built of
anomaly	false shadow
graft	none
technique	stipple
viewpoint	above
value	low key latent
balance	grounded latent
density	intricate latent
rhythm	unmarked latent
saturation	unmarked latent
appendages	spines, petals
anchor (body)	sea sparkle, plankton flashing blue wherever the water is disturbed
anchor (detail)	a diatom, a glass shell in two halves perforated with ordered pores

Sources

Nicolaus Steno, De solido intra solidum naturaliter contento dissertationis prodromus (1669)
Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1665), observation 17, on petrified wood
I. A. Efremov, Taphonomy: A New Branch of Paleontology (Pan-American Geologist, 1940)
Richard F. Leo and Elso S. Barghoorn, Silicification of Wood (Botanical Museum Leaflets, Harvard University, 1976)
Ovid, Metamorphoses (8 CE), books 4 to 6, on the Gorgon and on Niobe

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