a founder of the codex

River

Potamorpha manens·the Passing Form

From Greek potamos, river, and morphe, form, and Latin manens, remaining, a form that stays while its water passes.

Level
Conceptorganism
Phylum
Pathimage schema
Class
Dispersalits stream of consciousness
Niche
Symbionta partner
Mode
Referencehow it keeps existing
Stage
Matureindividuated
Status
Living
Habitat
City

Its kinds · Roget, 1852: Inorganic Matter · Wilkins, 1668: Element · WordNet, 1990: Object · Llull, 1308: I · Elementative

Passing Form, the whole specimen
Plate LIII. Potamorpha manens, the whole specimen.

A river is a form that lasts while every drop in it moves on, so it stays the same river through water that is always new.

A shape can last while everything it is made of passes through it.

behavior It keeps its course for centuries while it shifts its bends, swallows its tributaries and carries everything loose down to the sea.

provocation

What in you has kept its shape while everything it is made of has been replaced?

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

Kernel of River

Fig. 1. Kernel

Standing wave

Which premise, if it were false, would kill this idea?

A river is a shape that holds while all its water moves on, so, as Heraclitus said, those who step into the same river meet other and other waters.1

drawn as: standing wave · view: detached

Boundary of River

Fig. 2. Boundary

Natural levee

What sets it apart from what it is not, and how does it keep that distinction?

Its banks hold it apart from the land, and each flood that spills over them drops its heaviest silt at the edge, raising natural levees above the plain behind.2

drawn as: natural levee · view: cast

Intake of River

Fig. 3. Intake

Headwaters

What must it feed on to work? What has to be present, noticed or supplied?

It feeds on rain, snowmelt and springs gathered from every slope of its basin, small streams joining larger ones as twigs join a bough.3

drawn as: headwaters · view: magnified

Mechanism of River

Fig. 4. Mechanism

Meander

How does it turn what it takes in into what it gives out?

Water runs downhill under its own weight, wearing the channel where it flows fast and dropping silt where it slows, so the river swings into bends that wander across its plain.2

drawn as: meander · view: at work

Output of River

Fig. 5. Output

Delta

What does it make possible, visible or knowable?

It cuts valleys, spreads fertile silt over its floodplain and delta, and gave the first cities their water, fields and roads, so that Egypt was called the gift of the river.4

drawn as: delta · view: exploded

Dispersal of River

Fig. 6. Dispersal

Stream of consciousness

❦ dominant organ

What part of it travels into other minds, ideas and fields, and by what vector?

It carries silt, seeds and stones down to the sea, and it carries its own figure into thought, where time and the mind are each pictured as a stream.5, 1

drawn as: stream of consciousness · view: series

Decay of River

Fig. 7. Decay

Oxbow

What can it not digest, where does it fail, and what does it leave behind for others?

Where a bend is cut off it leaves a still oxbow that fills slowly with mud and reeds, and dams and thirsty fields can drain it before it reaches the sea.2

drawn as: oxbow · 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 Archipelago, Ash, Clay, Cloud, Diamond, Erosion, Fire, Frost, Lake, Rain, Salt, Sand, Storm, Wind

same kind in Wilkins Cloud, Fire, Frost, Lake, Rain, Storm, Wind

same kind in WordNet Archipelago, Cloud, Lake

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

same phylum Entelechy, Memory, Music, Nostalgia, Prophecy, Ritual, Threshold, Wind, Tongue Horizon, Afterlistening

same dominant organ Ash, Breath, Miracle, Pointillism, Sand, Wind, Witnessed Relief

Genome

III In the world

Echoes

  • the Nile in flood
  • a standing wave below a rock
  • the river of Heraclitus
  • an oxbow lake left on a floodplain

IV Record

How it was drawn

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

axisvalue
bookmycelia
symmetrydendritic
organizationchained
silhouettesac
scalemicroscopic
proportionsheared latent
growthfaceted
articulationseamless latent
opennesslattice latent
skeletonendoskeleton latent
locomotionundulating latent
patternlabyrinth
colorationplain latent
substanceobsidian
surfaceribbed
palettemeadow
luminosityinner glow
transparencyopaque latent
gesturesinks
unityunmarked latent
modalitypossible
causationefficient latent
determinacyunmarked latent
fusiongraft
anomalyknotted
graftnets
techniquesilverpoint
viewpointprofile
valueflat latent
balanceunmarked latent
densityintricate
rhythmalternating latent
saturationunmarked latent
appendagesrhizoids, tentacles
anchor (body)a passionflower, a corona of fine filaments in rings around its centre
anchor (detail)a hailstone cut in half, concentric layers of clear and cloudy ice

Sources

  1. Heraclitus, fragments (c. 500 BCE), in Hermann Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (1903)
  2. Luna B. Leopold, M. Gordon Wolman and John P. Miller, Fluvial Processes in Geomorphology (1964)
  3. Robert E. Horton, Erosional Development of Streams and Their Drainage Basins (Geological Society of America Bulletin, 1945)
  4. Herodotus, Histories (c. 430 BCE), Book 2, on Egypt as the gift of the river
  5. William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890), chapter 9, on the stream of thought

❦