a founder of the codex

Poetry

Versicaelum condensans·the Condensing Sky

From Latin versus, a turning or a line of verse, caelum, sky, and condensare, to press together; a sky of verse that presses speech into rain.

Level: Disciplinebiome
Phylum: Cycleimage schema
Class: Mechanismits stanza
Niche: Consumerother ideas
Mode: Fictionhow it keeps existing
Stage: Matureindividuated
Status: Living
Habitat: Ritual

Its kinds · Roget, 1852: Communication of Ideas · Wilkins, 1668: Discourse · WordNet, 1990: Communication · Llull, 1308: F · Imaginative

Condensing Sky, the whole specimen — Plate LXXXVI. Versicaelum condensans, the whole specimen.

Language under the pressure of form says more than its words, and is remembered because of that pressure.

What is said in a shape is said twice.

behavior Grows in layers over centuries, each new pattern laid over the old, and wakes only when it is read aloud.

provocation

What would a law, a recipe or a scientific paper become if it had to be learned by heart?

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 Poetry — Fig. 1. Kernel
Verbal icon
Which premise, if it were false, would kill this idea?
Language can mean more than it states when its sound, rhythm and shape are made to carry meaning alongside its words.²
drawn as: verbal icon · view: cast

Boundary of Poetry — Fig. 2. Boundary
Line break
What sets it apart from what it is not, and how does it keep that distinction?
It is set apart from prose by the line; where language is cut by sound and shape as well as by sense, poetry begins.²
drawn as: line break · view: cast

Intake of Poetry — Fig. 3. Intake
Word-hoard
What must it feed on to work? What has to be present, noticed or supplied?
It feeds on ordinary speech, on experience too sharp or too vague for plain statement, and on an ear trained by other poems.⁴
drawn as: word-hoard · view: transparent

Mechanism of Poetry — Fig. 4. Mechanism
Stanza
❦ dominant organ
How does it turn what it takes in into what it gives out?
It compresses language under constraint, line, meter, rhyme and image, so that every word bears more than one load.^{1, 2}
drawn as: stanza · view: pressed

Output of Poetry — Fig. 5. Output
Touchstones
What does it make possible, visible or knowable?
It gives speech that is remembered word for word and meanings that cannot be paraphrased without loss.³
drawn as: touchstones · view: magnified

Dispersal of Poetry — Fig. 6. Dispersal
By heart
What part of it travels into other minds, ideas and fields, and by what vector?
It travels by recitation, memorization, quotation and translation, its lines lodged in people who never read the whole poem.⁴
drawn as: by heart · view: at work

Decay of Poetry — Fig. 7. Decay
Cliché
What can it not digest, where does it fail, and what does it leave behind for others?
It hardens into cliché when its forms are repeated without pressure, and into private code when its compression no longer opens to anyone else.¹
drawn as: cliché · view: cross section

Substrate of Poetry — Fig. 8. Substrate
Mother tongue
What territory of phenomena does it live on?
Its ground is language itself, in every tongue, spoken long before it was written.⁴
drawn as: substrate · view: pressed

Climate of Poetry — Fig. 9. Climate
Laurels
What counts as evidence and as a good result here?
Nothing is proved here; a poem is judged by whether it holds attention and comes back when remembered, by readers and by other poets.³
drawn as: climate · view: microscope

Fig. 10. Keystones
Three Muses
Which beings, if removed, would make it collapse?
Its keystones are the syllable that carries its beat, mimesis that lets it show a world, and memory that keeps it.

Ecotones of Poetry — Fig. 11. Ecotones
Psalm
Where does it border other fields, and what grows at those borders?
It borders song, prayer, philosophy and advertising, and at each border hybrids grow, hymns, aphorisms and slogans.
drawn as: ecotones · view: in situ

disturbed

Fig. 12. Succession

Print culture

What stage is it in, pioneer, maturing, climax or disturbed?

An ancient field long at its climax, disturbed once by print and now by screens and machine-written verse.

II Meaning associations

descent membership food web resemblance or friction

Lineage

A founder, dissected by hand.

Kin

same kind in Roget Echolalia, Glossolalia, Pointillism, Syllable, Symbol, Babelhum

same kind in Wilkins Echolalia, Glossolalia, Prophecy, Syllable, Symbol, Babelhum, Tongue Horizon

same kind in WordNet Chiaroscuro, Echolalia, Glossolalia, Lullaby, Music, Prophecy, Syllable, Symbol, Babelhum

same kind in Llull Apophenia, Dream, Mimesis, Symmetry, Afterlistening

same phylum Ash, Breath, Echolalia, Lullaby, Metamorphosis, Resonance, Commemorative Revision, The Swing Door, Tide of Days, Simultaneous Remembering

same dominant organ Chimera, 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, Subtractive Phenomenology

Genome

form also in Commemorative Revision, Entelechy, Metamorphosis, Petrification, Ritual
compression
rhythm also in Breath, The Swing Door, Music, Shared Breath, Syllable, Trance
image
voice also in Breath, Echolalia, Lullaby, Possession, Shared Breath

III In the world

Echoes

nursery rhymes known by people who cannot read
the Homeric epics, kept by singers before they were written down
proverbs
a line of verse read at a funeral

IV Record

How it was drawn

its draw 3, a point in the morphospace (laws §8), drawn by flux-2-klein-4b.safetensors.

axis	value
book	humores
symmetry	radial many
organization	stratified
silhouette	filiform
scale	immense
proportion	elongated latent
growth	budding
articulation	tethered latent
openness	solid latent
skeleton	unmarked latent
locomotion	unmarked latent
pattern	labyrinth latent
coloration	disruptive latent
substance	paper
surface	veined
palette	oilslick
luminosity	none
transparency	translucent latent
gesture	pulses
unity	fragment
modality	necessary
causation	final
determinacy	crisp latent
fusion	nested
anomaly	echoes
graft	scales pans
technique	crayon
viewpoint	cutaway
value	flat latent
balance	unmarked latent
density	intricate latent
rhythm	alternating latent
saturation	muted latent
appendages	lanterns, comb rows
anchor (body)	a beaver lodge of sticks and mud rising from water
anchor (detail)	a coccolithophore, a sphere armoured with overlapping disc plates

Sources

Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (1934): Dichten = condensare
Roman Jakobson, Linguistics and Poetics (1960)
Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (1947), The Heresy of Paraphrase
Albert Lord, The Singer of Tales (1960), after Milman Parry's oral-formulaic theory

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