a founder of the codex

Winter

Hiemaria condens·the Keeping Sleep

From Latin hiems, winter, and condens, storing away, the season that lays life up out of sight until it is needed.

Level
Conceptorganism
Phylum
Containerimage schema
Class
Mechanismits torpor
Niche
Extremophileabsence
Mode
Religionhow it keeps existing
Stage
Matureindividuated
Status
Living
Habitat
Dream

Its kinds · Roget, 1852: Time · Wilkins, 1668: Space · WordNet, 1990: Time · Llull, 1308: I · Elementative

Keeping Sleep, the whole specimen
Plate LXX. Hiemaria condens, the whole specimen.

Winter is the cold season when growth stops, and life outlasts it by withdrawing, sleeping and living on its stores, its seed kept for the year to come.

Life outlasts the hard season by stopping, sealing itself in and living on what it kept.

behavior It curls inward, slows every pulse to a few beats a minute, and waits under its white cover for the sun to come back.

provocation

What are you keeping alive by doing almost nothing?

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 Winter

Fig. 1. Kernel

Low sun

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

Winter comes when a hemisphere leans away from the sun, and its short days and cold halt growth, so life stops and waits on what it stored.1

drawn as: low sun · view: transparent

Boundary of Winter

Fig. 2. Boundary

Snowpack

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

Snow marks it off from the growing year and seals the ground, and beneath it mice and shrews live in a still layer near freezing while the air above falls far colder.1

drawn as: snowpack · view: cast

Intake of Winter

Fig. 3. Intake

Acorn cache

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

It lives on what autumn stored, fat laid on in the warm months, nuts buried in caches and starch packed into roots and bulbs.1

drawn as: acorn cache · view: cast

Mechanism of Winter

Fig. 4. Mechanism

Torpor

❦ dominant organ

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

Life slows almost to a stop. A hibernating ground squirrel's heart beats a few times a minute and its body cools near freezing, while trees draw water out of their cells and seeds lie dormant.1, 2

drawn as: torpor · view: at work

Output of Winter

Fig. 5. Output

Stratification

What does it make possible, visible or knowable?

Its long chill readies the year to come, since many seeds sprout and many buds open only after weeks of cold.2

drawn as: stratification · view: pressed

Dispersal of Winter

Fig. 6. Dispersal

Yule log

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

It travels in the rites of the longest night that call the sun back with fire, the Yule log and the midwinter candles, and in the Greek myth of the daughter taken below the earth, whose grieving mother lets nothing grow until she returns.3, 4

drawn as: Yule log · view: in situ

Decay of Winter

Fig. 7. Decay

Freshet

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

It gives way to the returning sun. At the thaw its snow runs off in floods, leaving soil loosened by freezing and the bodies of animals whose stores ran out.1

drawn as: freshet · view: series

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 Equinox, Eternity, Spring, Foresilence, Tide of Days

same kind in Wilkins Equinox, Eternity, Spring, Foresilence, Tide of Days

same kind in WordNet Equinox, Eternity, Spring, Foresilence, Tide of Days

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, Sand, Storm, Weightlessness, Wind, Self-Ending Order

same phylum Amber, Clay, Dream, Lake, Placebo, Possession, Solitude, Tinnitus, Knowing Trust, The Shared Cell

same dominant organ Chimera, Dream, Fire, Love, Lullaby, Metamorphosis, Music, Presence, Resonance, Ritual, Storm, Symbol, Rushmaker, Shared Breath, Self-Ending Order, Gazeroot (second reading), Commemorative Revision, The Swing Door, Foresilence, Simultaneous Remembering, Poetry, Subtractive Phenomenology

Genome

III In the world

Echoes

  • a dormouse curled asleep in its nest
  • the Yule log on the longest night
  • acorns buried by a jay
  • fields asleep under snow

IV Record

How it was drawn

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

axisvalue
bookartes
symmetryradial 6
organizationnested
silhouettecage
scalehand
proportioneven latent
growthunmarked latent
articulationseamless latent
opennesssolid latent
skeletonwoody latent
locomotionsessile
patternreticulate latent
colorationcountershaded latent
substanceamber
surfaceribbed
paletteink
luminosityinner glow
transparencyclouded
gesturepulses
unityunmarked latent
modalitynecessary latent
causationmaterial latent
determinacyfraying latent
fusionnested
anomalypetrified
graftscales pans
techniquesilverpoint
viewpointcutaway
valuelow key
balancetop heavy latent
densityunmarked latent
rhythmclustered latent
saturationmuted
appendagesbladders
anchor (body)a radiolarian, a lattice sphere of silica with radiating spines
anchor (detail)manganese dendrites, fern-like black branching on stone

Sources

  1. Bernd Heinrich, Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival (2003)
  2. Carol C. Baskin and Jerry M. Baskin, Seeds: Ecology, Biogeography, and Evolution of Dormancy and Germination (1998)
  3. James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (abridged edition, 1922), on the midwinter fires and the Yule log
  4. Homeric Hymn to Demeter (7th or 6th century BCE)

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