a founder of the codex

Reflection

Anaclasia revertens·the Returned Light

From Greek anaklasis, a bending back, the old word for reflected light, and Latin revertens, turning back, light and thought sent back the way they came.

Level: Conceptorganism
Phylum: Balanceimage schema
Class: Boundaryits optical flat
Niche: Producerraw experience
Mode: Moralityhow it keeps existing
Stage: Matureindividuated
Status: Living
Habitat: Classroom

Its kinds · Roget, 1852: Relation · Wilkins, 1668: Spiritual Action · WordNet, 1990: Phenomenon · Llull, 1308: I · Elementative

Returned Light, the whole specimen — Plate XLIX. Anaclasia revertens, the whole specimen.

A smooth surface sends light back at the angle it came, giving an image of the world, and a mind can turn back the same way on its own thinking.

What comes back shows the thing that was sent and the surface that returned it.

behavior It lies flat and bright, shines only with borrowed light, and shows every creature that leans over it a second, reversed world.

provocation

When you last thought about your own thinking, what did the second look show that the first missed?

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

Kernel of Reflection — Fig. 1. Kernel
Equal angles
Which premise, if it were false, would kill this idea?
A surface sends light back at the angle it arrived, the outgoing ray mirroring the incoming one, and Hero of Alexandria showed that this is the shortest path.¹
drawn as: equal angles · view: cast

Boundary of Reflection — Fig. 2. Boundary
Optical flat
❦ dominant organ
What sets it apart from what it is not, and how does it keep that distinction?
It lives on a surface, the line between one medium and the next, and a surface polished smoother than light's own waves returns a clear image while a rough one scatters a dull glow.^{1, 2}
drawn as: optical flat · view: transparent

Intake of Reflection — Fig. 3. Intake
Incident ray
What must it feed on to work? What has to be present, noticed or supplied?
It feeds on light that arrives from elsewhere, for a mirror shines only with what falls on it.¹
drawn as: incident ray · view: microscope

Mechanism of Reflection — Fig. 4. Mechanism
Secondary wavelets
How does it turn what it takes in into what it gives out?
Each point the arriving wave strikes sends out a small wavelet, and the wavelets join into one front travelling back at the matching angle.²
drawn as: secondary wavelets · view: exploded

Output of Reflection — Fig. 5. Output
Mirror image
What does it make possible, visible or knowable?
It gives an image of the world reversed left to right, and turned on the mind it gives a view of one's own thinking, which Locke counted as a source of ideas beside the senses.³
drawn as: mirror image · view: at work

Dispersal of Reflection — Fig. 6. Dispersal
Earthshine
What part of it travels into other minds, ideas and fields, and by what vector?
Reflected light travels on and lights what its source never reached, as sunlight sent back from the earth lights the dark part of the young moon.⁴
drawn as: earthshine · view: cast

Decay of Reflection — Fig. 7. Decay
Hall of mirrors
What can it not digest, where does it fail, and what does it leave behind for others?
Two surfaces set face to face pass an image back and forth until it dwindles into the dark, and a mind turned only on itself is caught the same way, like the youth in Ovid who wasted away gazing into a pool.⁵
drawn as: hall of mirrors · view: pressed

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 Entanglement, Mimesis

same kind in Wilkins Faith, Fear, Love, Nostalgia, Silence, Volition, Knowing Trust, Witnessed Relief, Gazeroot (second reading), The Swing Door

same kind in WordNet Emergence, Frost, Iridescence, Placebo, Rain, Resonance, Resonance (second reading), Storm, Wind

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

same phylum Chiaroscuro, Equinox, Salt, Symmetry, Foresilence

same dominant organ Amber, Aura, Cloud, Diamond, Equinox, Frost, Possession, Solitude, Threshold, Tongue Horizon, The Shared Cell

Genome

return also in Commemorative Revision, Equinox, Eternity, Tide of Days, Nostalgia, Rain
symmetry
surface
self
light also in Awakening, Chiaroscuro, Equinox

III In the world

Echoes

a mountain doubled in a still lake
earthshine on the dark of a crescent moon
the ray diagram with its two equal angles
a journal kept to look back on the day

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	semaphora
symmetry	helical
organization	solitary
silhouette	bell
scale	microscopic
proportion	elongated latent
growth	swelling
articulation	sutured
openness	solid latent
skeleton	test latent
locomotion	burrowing latent
pattern	speckled latent
coloration	countershaded
substance	hyphal felt
surface	filamentous
palette	oilslick
luminosity	none
transparency	transparent latent
gesture	pulses
unity	aggregate latent
modality	contingent latent
causation	final latent
determinacy	fraying latent
fusion	seam
anomaly	one break
graft	scales pans
technique	stipple
viewpoint	three quarter
value	low key latent
balance	cantilevered
density	graded detail latent
rhythm	unmarked latent
saturation	muted latent
appendages	horns
anchor (body)	a cloud of ink blooming slowly in still water
anchor (detail)	a diffusion-limited aggregate, a feathery fractal cluster

Sources

Hero of Alexandria, Catoptrica (1st century)
Christiaan Huygens, Traité de la lumière (1690)
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Book II, on ideas of reflection
Leonardo da Vinci, Codex Leicester (c. 1510), on the ashen light of the moon
Ovid, Metamorphoses (8 CE), Book III

❦