a founder of the codex

Sand

Psammoplethos migrans·the Drifting Multitude

From Greek psammos, sand, and plethos, multitude, and Latin migrans, wandering, a multitude of grains always on the move.

Level: Conceptorganism
Phylum: Scaleimage schema
Class: Dispersalits barchan
Niche: Extremophileabsence
Mode: Techniquehow it keeps existing
Stage: Matureindividuated
Status: Living
Habitat: Ocean

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

Drifting Multitude, the whole specimen — Plate LV. Psammoplethos migrans, the whole specimen.

Sand is stone worn into grains small enough to flow and hard enough to last, so it drifts in dunes, holds water between its grains and melts into glass.

Stone worn small enough flows like water, and what flows can be melted into a mirror.

behavior It lies still as stone until the wind rises, then streams forward in low leaps and piles into crescents that walk downwind.

provocation

What in you has been worn into a multitude, and what mirror could it be melted into?

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 Sand — Fig. 1. Kernel
Quartz grain
Which premise, if it were false, would kill this idea?
Sand is rock broken into grains between a sixteenth of a millimetre and two millimetres across, most of them quartz, the common mineral that best resists wear.¹
drawn as: quartz grain · view: microscope

Boundary of Sand — Fig. 2. Boundary
Angle of repose
What sets it apart from what it is not, and how does it keep that distinction?
Coarser than silt and finer than gravel, its dry grains hold to one another by friction alone, so sand pours like water yet stands in heaps whose sides keep a fixed slope.²
drawn as: angle of repose · view: pressed

Intake of Sand — Fig. 3. Intake
Rotten granite
What must it feed on to work? What has to be present, noticed or supplied?
It feeds on rock broken by frost, roots and water, above all granite, whose feldspar rots to clay and frees the quartz.¹
drawn as: rotten granite · view: magnified

Mechanism of Sand — Fig. 4. Mechanism
Saltation
How does it turn what it takes in into what it gives out?
Wind lifts grains in low leaps, and each grain that lands knocks others up, so the surface creeps forward and ripples form across it.²
drawn as: saltation · view: cast

Output of Sand — Fig. 5. Output
Fulgurite
What does it make possible, visible or knowable?
Melted, it turns to glass, in hollow tubes where lightning strikes a dune and in furnaces where it is fused with soda and lime into windows and mirrors.³
drawn as: fulgurite · view: detached

Dispersal of Sand — Fig. 6. Dispersal
Barchan
❦ dominant organ
What part of it travels into other minds, ideas and fields, and by what vector?
Wind drives it in crescent dunes that walk downwind year by year, and it travels in thought as time running out in an hourglass and as a whole world seen in one grain.^{2, 5}
drawn as: barchan · view: series

Decay of Sand — Fig. 7. Decay
Liquefaction
What can it not digest, where does it fail, and what does it leave behind for others?
Shaken while soaked, its grains lose their grip on one another and the ground flows like a liquid, so buildings sink and wet sand boils up through the surface.⁴
drawn as: liquefaction · 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, River, Salt, Storm, Wind

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

same kind in WordNet Amber, Ash, Clay, Diamond, Salt

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), River, Salt, Storm, Weightlessness, Wind, Winter, Self-Ending Order

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

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

Genome

grain
multitude
drift also in Cloud, Simultaneous Remembering, Tongue Horizon
friction
glass

III In the world

Echoes

an hourglass running out
the dunes of the Namib
a beach at low tide
a windowpane

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	pathemata
symmetry	dendritic
organization	solitary
silhouette	cluster
scale	microscopic
proportion	even latent
growth	encrusted
articulation	imbricate latent
openness	spongy latent
skeleton	woody
locomotion	drifting latent
pattern	speckled latent
coloration	cryptic latent
substance	mud
surface	frosted
palette	malachite
luminosity	points
transparency	layered latent
gesture	dissolves
unity	integral latent
modality	possible latent
causation	efficient
determinacy	doubled
fusion	replaced
anomaly	none
graft	mirrors
technique	crayon
viewpoint	below
value	chiaroscuro latent
balance	top heavy latent
density	intricate latent
rhythm	regular latent
saturation	unmarked latent
appendages	bells, petals
anchor (body)	a protea, a large cone of bracts around a dense centre
anchor (detail)	fine fungal threads wrapped around root tips

Sources

F. J. Pettijohn, Paul Edwin Potter and Raymond Siever, Sand and Sandstone (1972)
R. A. Bagnold, The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes (1941)
Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization (2018)
H. Bolton Seed and I. M. Idriss, Simplified Procedure for Evaluating Soil Liquefaction Potential (Journal of the Soil Mechanics and Foundations Division, 1971)
William Blake, Auguries of Innocence (written about 1803, published 1863)

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