Studies for Leibniz draining the mines at Harz
a net-opera

Notes on the conservation of information
in the Leibnizian continuum*
(dv 2005, flash embedded video, 837kb)

early study for 'Leibniz draining the mines at Harz'
(opera inarticulata, keyboard, soundblaster soundfonts & Cubase VST, dv 2000)

Notes on the
'Notes on the Conservation of information in the Leibnizian continuum', a study for the net-opera 'Leibniz draining the mines at Harz'

* In Leibnizian metaphysics the law of conservation of information applies similarly to that of the conservation of energy: because God has infinite knowledge of the world including its past and future, no information can be lost. Without loss of information, can there be a gain of information, or is all 'possible' information contained within the present?
In modern religious thought and art, the idea survives, cf. T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, the first lines of 'Burnt Norton': "Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future,/ And time future contained in time past./If all time is eternally present /All time is unredeemable."

While we're here, you reading notes, and me writing them, both of us suspended in a fictional moment of creation, both of us creating the Cathedral by entertaining this relationship, let's expand on that, shall we? In order to do so we need to scroll ahead, though, to chapter XI of the net-opera 'Leibniz draining the mines at Harz', and we can only do that very prematurely, before the 'works' have even started. In this process, this blind leap ahead into an obscure region of my monadic point of view, some lifelines to common sense might get broken, or at least temporarily lost in as yet undeployed regions, a multitude of folds hiding them from our view, while on the positive side, we might succeed in getting some glimpses of intruiging places to go to in the future >>>

NKdeE.xsd schema in Altova Spy Schema view.
The idea was to create a schema to allow for data folding, a way of dealing with information that is, in a Leibnizian sense, economic in its need for higher levels of complexity. For an adequate way of 4 dimensional data folding it appears _exactly_ 4 plateau elements are needed. (OK, no 1000, so the name plateau is a bit of a Deleuzian joke, just like Foucault jokingly called our time 'truly Deleuzian'....)
You can't restrict element occurence to numbers in Altova's soft, though, so it's either 1 or infinite... There's more recursiveness deeper into the schema, the instances of recursion (nkdee within a nkdeed,...) constitute points-to-fold-to, or dynamic informational spaces. So you shouldn't conceive those points as solid points, the only thing solid in working with folding is the human 'weakness' we all have in common: progress of time itself, where, for instance the future is '<plateau id='003' name= '2'>..</plateau>, eternally present along with -1+0+1. In that perspective we're all on the same plateau, if you want. But you need to take into account that we can look ahead(2), look back(-1), act(1) and, most importantly, we are poetically 'aware', i.e. absent in the present (0).
Making a hypothetical (ontological) representation of time into your informational core grid allows for simultaneous monadic views on the same flow of information. That view itself will decide how the rest of the schema is 'draped' or deployed over the flow, which is the same for all. The introduction of an absence element to be paired with each nkdeed allows for connection valves to open/close to 'other' flows and for the garbage collecting process to 'drain' its mining process.
All of this is very experimental, and there's a long way to go. At least i've got the nkdeeblog and its editor working, based on the schema and the'collaborative'(sic) monAdic section is starting to take shape...
NkdeE Publishing Framework © dv 2004-2005 Free Art License

Chapter XI: In which Montaigne confesses to having wicked folies, Leibniz eternally postpones the delivery of his dream-machine, Kubrick conjures up a Heraclitus fragment or 2 & Derrida loses himself and the reader in what turns out to be a particularly ugly episode of Bush bashing.

$1. Like many of Leibniz' thoughts, the idea of a Law of the Conservation of Information cannot be that easily dismissed or refuted in a modern context as might seem obvious at first sight, and often his solutions are indicative of very contemporary theories.

Let's beam mr Leibniz up to our present scene and present him with a mathematical case appealing to a mind like his, one that might keep his attention going for a while.
Consider two individuals living in a particular place on the planet ( a city, a country). How much information do they represent? With our contemporary preoccupations concerning the human-machine relation we might ask: is that information essentially different from two hypothetical machines containing exactly the same information at a given time?

Leibniz would consider these two individuals to be 'actualisations' of two eternal monads created by God, containing all within them at any given time. Their information would not be complementary in any essential way, only their zones of clarity would differ slightly in the temporary shift. So Leibniz would answer, with a slight shrug of annoyance at our ignorance, that any hypothetical machine capable of containing the amount of information of one human being would automatically contain the information of the second as well. One machine would suffice.

Next, consider 20.000 individuals living in each other's proximity at the same time. We would not consider the amount of information these individuals represent to be 10.000 times as much as that of the 2 individuals earlier on. More data would be considered as overlapping, so the amount of data required by our hypothetical machine would be considerably less than the amount of the first machine multiplied by 10.000. So we might consider this machine's knowledge requirements to be equal to that of the 20.000 individuals minus the amount of 'overlapping' information in the humans.

Again, Leibniz would shrug, becoming impatient by now: one machine would do the trick in any case.

But what if all these people started breathing, seeing things, hearing, and, god forbid, talking? Has our question changed? The concept of the machine has changed, surely. We now understand that the building of our dream-machine will have to be postponed somewhat, until we can be clear on what we intend to build in the first place.

When and how will we lose data in scaling the machine? How do we cope with data that are reciprocally defined by internal relationships? Can any piece of human information be isolated from time at all? Is my information regarding Alken different from yours? To what extent, or amount? What happens if i make a short video of ants at Alken station and i tell you about it? Show it to you on a website? Has the meaning of the word 'ant' changed during these events? In how far is fictional information relevant to 'real' information? What does my use of masking in the Flash movie do to the pixels of the video, as you perceive them? What happens if i claim this minimal 'anthology' to be preliminary studies for a larger work entitled 'Leibniz draining the mines at Harz'?

A Leibnizian hypothetical machine could perhaps take into account all these questions, because it would run on recursive algorithms, but is or would it still be hypothetically sound in the absence of God? (Derrida would perhaps have claimed it could only be sound in the absence of God, if he had ever got past explaining that he could make no such claim without denying it first- cfr. Jacques Derrida 1987)#1.

$2. What we can be sure of is that the status of information is all too easily considered equal if the algorithms needed to generate the information are similar. Computers work on a need-to-know basis, so do we, but our need-to-know is not defined by a sufficient amount of data.

For instance, only humans can commit 'legitimate acts of violence', only humans can, like Derrida has shown us in 'Force de Loi', have the hammer come down crudely in the courtroom. Where the human mind 'breaks down' into infinity and precipitates itself into a mathematical limit towards timelessness, the computer still prints a 1 or a zero, or halts and hence becomes useless for the algorythm. Deleuze repeatedly talks about the human machine that can only function by breaking down, and there's a definite correlation between that idea and Derrida's talk of justice as an “irreducible excess of a disjuncture (…) an Un-Fuge, a sort of dislocation ‘out of joint’ in being and in time” (Spectres de Marx). I'll come back to that, let D be a place called The Grinding of Similar Teeth.

€3. In the realm of decision making, where software agents are nowadays being experimentally brought in sponsored research-gaming contests to decide on the value of art and gain money speculating on those decisions, Derrida analysed the passing of a judgement as a violent act, needed to uphold the law, quoting Montaigne in the process:

“(…) et nostre droict mesme, a dict-on, des fictions legitimes sur lesquelles il fonde la verité de sa justice.”
Montaigne, Essais III, chapter XIII, “De l’expérience”. Pléiade: Paris, p. 1203

“and it is said that even our laws are legitimate fictions upon which the truth of their justice is based.”
Translation by Bram Leven in his essay at http://www.wickedness.net/els/els1/Ieven%20paper.pdf

( Wickedness.net, by the way is a splendid resource for people trying to understand the nature of evil without resorting to using axes)

I use Dr Leven's quotation and translation because in his essay, 'On the Content of a Violent Force', he holds up John Rawls' work in Political Liberalism against the deconstructionist scrutiny of Derrida in Force de Loi. Rawls bases his concept of legitimacy on his distinction between coercion on the one hand, as a just use of violence based on a concensus of common human ground and plain unjust (evil) use of violence on the other. For Derrida, violence is at the heart of justice itself, for reasons that are not too clearly expressed in Leven's essay, and i think mr Leven further on misses the point somewhat when he uses Derrida's own sayings on the differing process to proclaim justice as finally 'un-deconstructable' :

How does Derrida conceive of justice, then? Even although justice can never be taken as an absolute foundation for the law, and even although it is always already contaminated by a certain violence that is inherent to the law, justice is that which differs from the law. This means to say that justice, in its attempt to be open to the singularity of all things, must always make sure to differ itself from the violence that it always runs the risk of enacting. It is this process of differing that Derrida has proclaimed the basis for every deconstruction and in this sense – and this is to conclude -, we could truly say that justice itself cannot deconstructed.(8)

Leven's note (8) indicating that Derrida contends that very point in Force de Loi itself, without saying why and how Derrida contends this, may already be an indication that something is a bit wrong here. I'll try and indicate that place here, falsify it from memory, because it's a calm night and all libraries are closed, so i can't get at the book itself and finger-pointing is all we can do, having a go at it, violently:

Now if you read Force de Loi, just as i pretend to be rereading it now, in a fictional account of a future occasion, you'll notice that Derrida carefully analyses the moment of the verdict. In the back of your mind, the image of a judge appears, deliberating on all the data he processes while hearing testimonials, listening to seemingly irrefutable reasonings going one way, condoning the rhetoric violence enforcing the truth of the other party on a jury carefully chosen to represent the common ground of the human idea of legitimate law. The Idea itself contains the courtroom as a Sloterdijkian Sphere surrounding the people defining it. The courtroom becomes a theatrical snapshot from some Hollywood court drama where Law and Order will finally prevail, meanwhile entertaining us with amusing content of a highly sentimental nature. Suspended in time like this, the truth seems to be an undeniable Presence that can be attained. Does not the Law describe how to attain it? Is not the practice of Law a culturally defined process leading to justice in the best of possible worlds? Leibniz would think so, perhaps.

Derrida walks into that idyllic picture, places his tiny text explosives, and all fantasy comes down in an avalanche of textual events. In order to judge, he claims, the judge must pass judgement. A verdict has to be reached. In order to be justified, the verdict needs to be in accordance with the Law. The Law is text, the result of a process of continuous writing. In this context the writing is the writing of Power, it is a serial killer of skin cells from the skin on an absent body of Law, making incisions of Powerful signs on that body. These signs are not signs of truth, they are self-referential signs saying we have the power to be these signs, we are the signs of the Legitimate. We are those Signs because the people have installed us with that Power. We have seen or will see that if the verdict is based on calculus alone it would be immoral. The questions become urgent, however, a verdict is needed, haven't we got sufficient evidence yet? Can we not nod now, knowingly, enter a region of clarity where words can be spoken? Has the jury reached a verdict? If you only add what you know of the law and how it would apply to the case at hand, if you make such an indiscriminate calculation, why is it immoral? Why can such a verdict not be, never be in accordance with the Legitimate Law? Ah, now you see: any calculation is but a postponement of the verdict, for it to be complete, time itself would need to end, reaching the Signs of the Legitimate is a movement towards a limit because the mere utterance of this verdict would alter them, add fresh wounds on the body of the Law, and anyway, besides the Law, this man did not kill this woman in 'exactly' the same way as in thàt case, how can you be so cruel as to suggest a thing like that? Two human tragedies cannot be remotely similar in a calculable way, now can they? Anyway, that's beside the question, so

Bang. There you have it. The hammer coming down.

...

here i would need to fictionally indicate an absence, put my finger on a moment, not entirely unlike the poetic moment, when time seems to be eternal, or not at all, or infinite. The sounds of US troups invading Iraq can be heard, faintly, in the background, questionably, because the violence doesn't seem real. Nothing can be real in the absence of time. There is only a room filled with screens. Neo laughing. Neo angry. Neo pleading for the life of Trinity. Jack Bauer killing Nina, his own treacherous object of desire, with a shot in the back of the head. The objective State must be reached, though, the state of the Object proclaimed. 24 hours must pass. The need for violence becomes an echo, echoing violence, but it cannot be outspoken, si vis similem pingere, pinge sonum: if you wanted to paint it like it is, you would need to paint the sound itself- Ausonius, Epigrammata XI - enact the act of violence

 

...

 

"We had to decide. We had to violate the body of Law. Again. The body now must heal." The order of the Legitimate has been restored. The court is dismissed.

£4. Now, although this is only a fictional account, i only imagined all this théatre de la cruauté, probably, and i should have gone through the text in an orderly way, quoting it literally instead of this, my sound and fury,-
in spite of all these ugly facts that can not, here and now, be otherwise, wouldn't you agree that Dr Leven misses some of the essentials here? Here's how he concludes:

"Thus, to conclude, we might perhaps conceive of justice as a legitimate fiction, as a bias for justice – but this justice must then always already be conceived of as the truth that tries to mend the fiction that necessarily preceded it."

Perhaps, and in our ignorance anything is possible, we underestimate the power of the word or the concept of 'fiction', a concept, apparantly, indicating something that needs miraculous mending by turning it into its opposite.

[ dv- 21/7/2005, fingerprint on paper, 10x15 cm ]

At this point, someone who understands Dutch might get interested in reading a three part poem of mine, part of Song for Europe, called 'Fiction, negating '. Here's a rough translation of the first part:

Fictie, ontkennend 1 Zelfdruk van een werelddeel : ik had een vinger in de inkt, legde hem eruit, rolde met een vinger die andere vinger, druipende, over het papier, over de bleke vrede van het uitgeschepte vel. Verzwegen had ik weerom het geheim: een dichte vlek ontnam elk zicht daarop. Plaats, waar soms het zwart belijnde eenvoud werd, waar steeds een deel naar niets afrolde. Wie maakt welk onderscheid? Waarin schuilt het meesterschap? Een kenner weet: de zelfdrukkunst kent vele vragen.

Fiction, negating 1 Auto-print of a continent: i had a finger in the ink, put it out of it, rolled the finger with another finger, dripping, across the paper, across the pale peace of the cooped(?) sheet. Again I had kept the secret: a dense blot was hiding it from all sight. A place where the black lining got simple at times, where some part was continually sliding to nothing. Who will make what difference? Where can mastership be recognised? The aficionado knows: the art of auto-printing is very problematic.

Later on in the poem, the process of 'tupothenta' is introduced. Derrida uses this Greek word, quoting Plato's Timaeus in Comment ne Pas Parler, to refer to the Chora, the primal matter where shapes are formed by the process of auto-imprinting in the Chora. In the third part, the I-persona ends with cutting off his ninth finger to complete the last (?) of his 'auto-prints'. Just to give you an idea, this ugly translation or the translation of any poem being an extremely frustrating benji-jump into the infinite, a mishap of badly interpreted g-forces.

It is not only a matter of ignorance, though. Neither did Dr Leven, in spite of his 'fausse keu', as we Belgians say when someone makes a billiards ball jump all across the table, in spite of the blatant contradiction in his conclusion, miss the point entirely. He gets to the point, at least.

In view of the history of reception of Derrida's work, however, not getting the point entirely right becomes a moral question itself: Derrida has been vehemently criticised for being an a- or even immoral nihilist, because his texts have had the effect of shaking or even bringing down the very foundations at the heart of society, of, in this case, the legitimacy of Justice. Nowadays, when the legitimacy of military actions by those in power have become the crux, the critical fold in a world of conflict, not getting the point entirely may in cases as these run the danger of being interpreted and later on perhaps even tried in the court of history as cases of negation of what is known to be problematic. This status of being problematic is not to be dismissed lightly. Getting to the point is easy, it's what you do there that really matters.

What really matters here is a clear danger of a triple injustice.
It is not only not doing justice to the work of Derrida in view of previous injustice (because of course it is exactly Derrida's fundamental concern with the ethics of justice that made him 'enact' these texts), any author runs that risk, and will be 'victimised' in such a way one time or another. Besides, my dear friends, i might add, making a courtjesters' gesture in mid-air, every instance of injustice is finally unredeemable, any verdict with its consequent violence 'occupies' a place in time that cannot be the object of a falsely heroic (Re)Conquistador, no Armada inspired by such zeal to Restore will get there in time.
Secondly, it is also doing injustice to any other intellectual attempt to 'restore' justice, as if they don't know, as if Rawls, in the process of his writing does not know such Restoration, were it to succeed, cannot ever be their sole doing.
And finally it passes an extremely unfair judgement on Dr Leven himself, as if he does not know what is at stake here. I should have stopped using the no doubt honourable name of Dr Leven a long time ago, being the tiny self-proclaimed dead poet that i am (2). What fiction is this anyway? Why do i talk as if the Unspeakable were true, as if there can ever be a second negation. Because what is the point here, exactly?

The point is, perhaps, that the point in thàt expression should be conceived not as a point but as a place. A textual environment to dwell in, relate to, a fold in the Continuum where something is happening, where, behind the screens, people's lives are constantly at stake and where, perhaps, only an intrinsicly poetic awareness of What is happening Where, is needed. Urgently, always. Because, well, because, ethically, it is always a place After the Fact. In that respect, you can 'pomo' (3) what you like: nothing has changed very much, no history has been cancelled or deleted and not even in the history of your future will you be able to paste any logistic patch on the human condition (4). A condition of being condemned to run its machinery in a pace to the limit, lagging fatally, of what is the Case (5).

Now do not tell me you did not know poetry could be a violent act, and that when the poetic awareness is truly active, you might get some downright ugliness too, like having to watch Bush bashing himself (6) ...

Let's make this another point to go back to, a bold one, in spite of ourselves, away from this ugly fatalism, let's make a random beauty here, let H be a place called the Hantaï Vault.

Hantaï - Detail of Toile, pendant dépliage,1976, printed in the Centre Pompidou exposition catalogue, Paris 1976 - ISBN 2-85850-010-X

¥5. Meanwhile, as a minor collection of escape-routes: i did read Derrida's text, but now i only 'have' a memory of it. Any memory, you would agree, is largely a distortion of what really happened. What really happened was that i was sitting on a train towards Alken reading 'Kracht van Wet', a Dutch translation of Derrida's text by Rico Sneller with an excellent introduction by the way. I could only read it on the way to Alken, because on the way back i would fall asleep somewhere between St Truiden and Landen, on most trips anyway . What happens when you fall asleep and dream about a book? Or when you dream of a screen filled with notes? Are you still reading it? Did you really need to know what really happened?

What i have gathered from neuroscientists is that dreaming is a way of the human mind to process the information it received while being awake. So when you can't sleep for a lengthy period of time you might go crazy or even die, eventually, because your system can't get rid of the information, can't 'write' it 'to memory' . How many times a day do you resort to computer terminology to describe a human act or process? How did we express the same things before we got into this reading of notes to small works of net-art? Before screens got the better part of our attention? Were they really 'exactly the same things' ? Do you remember? Have you dreamt IT? Why do you think of electric sheep all of a sudden? Is there a movement from oral culture to scroll culture to book culture to electric sheep ? When does the network go to sleep? Is it going crazy through lack of dreams? Are we doomed to end in a state of constant frenzy, our Eyes Wide Shut, blinded by desire that cannot be memorised? Is Stanley Kubricks last film truly a kind of double bind to Heraclitus?

KUBRICK
KIDMAN	CRUISE
...	...
τὸ μὴ δῦνόν ποτε πῶς ἄν τις λάθοι; How can one hide from that which never sinks to rest	θάνατός ἐστιν ὁκόσα ἐγερθέντες ὁρέομεν, ὁκόσα δὲ εὕδοντες ὕπνος. All that we see awake is dead and what we see while sleeping dreams
...	...
CRUISE	KIDMAN
KUBRICK

to be continued, perhaps

when Olivier Guerrier from Toulouse will be quoted as claiming that in Montaigne's Essays "La fiction y apparaît comme un opérateur cognitif, dans un processus qui avoue sa précarité et sa seule validité subjective." ]

text is wrapped beyond this point------->

The results of differentiation through algorithmic calculation can only be equal in the exclusion of time. Static information is noise.

Leibniz imagined a universe as deterministic as some people would like to have it. I must confess i would feel rather comfortable in a Leibniz universe, wouldn't mind his kind of determinism at all. Determinism needn't necessarily be equated with fixation and eternal damnation. In fact a positive approach to deterministic thinking may be considered the only way out of some urgent dilemmas. In Deleuze's writings you can find a very human mix of determinism, differenciation and above all, an awareness of the Event, of Time encompassing all and resisting fixation. Some contemporary claims in deterministic ontology, however, sometimes scare the living daylight out of me through their sheer simplicity and the brutal economic power that jumps to their rescue. But then i see the dark oak through my open window, its leaves making a soft rustle in unisono with the ventilators in my Pent4 with its meagre 1gyg of ram. This oak stands there not being a tree, every second of it. Time will tell & nothing matters very much. Instantaneous beauty is a joy forever.

...

"What's with all this holistic stuff in the background , anyway? Has someone been reading Sloterdijk again?"

The Cathedral-Mother, stepping out of the Shower this morning.

Posted: Sat Oct 09, 2004 7:27 pm    Post subject: Derrida overleden
Derida overleden De Franse filosoof Jacques Derrida, de vader van het deconstructieve denken, is op 74-jarige leeftijd overleden. Hij leed al enige tijd aan kanker. Derrida werd in 1930 in Algerije geboren als kind van joodse ouders. Als 19-jarige verhuisde hij naar Parijs. Zijn voornaamste werken zijn L'Ecriture et la différence (1967) en Spectres de Marx (1993). Bron: AP, 09.10.04 via www.nieuws.nl

WhenWillGoogleTakeOverAmazonOrWillItBeTheOtherWayAround,NotVeryLikelyIThink&OtherURL-o-process-o-graphy for 'Chapter XI' (If there's a pagenumber, that's how far i got reading it, at Last Modified Time):

Peter Baker, Georges Perec's `Negative' Autobiography
Gilles Deleuze, Le Pli, ISBN 2707311820
Jaques Derrida, Force de Loi ISBN 2718604328
Jaques Derrida, Comment ne pas parler, in Psyché: Inventions de l'autre, ISBN 2718605022
Bram Leven, On the Content of a Violent Force
Heraclitus, Fragments
Peter Sloterdijk, Sferen, Boom, Amsterdam,1998, ISBN 9053528652 (p.403 - sorry C-M)

last modified Wednesday, November 30, 2016 11:25 AM GMT +1

Directions:

• Relate the constructing of information 'places' to Chaomei Chen's visualisation research
  • http://www.computer.org/portal/cms_docs_cga/cga/content/Promo/promo2.pdf
  • http://cluster.cis.drexel.edu/~cchen
    
• Data Mining in Java:
  • http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ml/weka/index.html
    
• Ann van Sevenant: Met water schrijven. Filosofie in het computertijdperk. Hadewich (nu in de ramsj). A'pen 1997 (p.52)
  
• ...

#1 Derrida 1987: J.Derrida, ‘Comment ne pas parler’, in: Psyché – Inventions de l’autre, Paris 1987.
Dutch translation by Rico Sneller Hoe niet te spreken. Derrida en de paradigma’s van negativiteit, Kampen 1997, Kok Agora

Back to the text @ (1) if you were there before you got here

#2 'Leven' is the noun for life and the verb for to live in Dutch

Back to the text @ (2) if you were there before you got here

#3 i humbly and hesitantly assume (or if not i likewise suggest) the use of the verb 'to pomo' here, meaning 'to indulge in endless post-modernistic deconstructionist and fruitless games of wordplay'. Derrida never pomoed, i can't pomo, at least not in English, my English isn't sufficient, i need to invent words like these to hide my mistakes...

Back to the text @ (3) if you were there before you got here

#4 Somewhere else, i am writing a note on Alan Sondheim, another nAârt text expressing some irritation on finding a second hand copy of a doctorals' thesis from a now reputed scholar inscribed with the words 'The only history that interests us is the history of our future'. The thesis itself is linking Semantic Ontology techniques in business programming to a wider call for the need of an 'Ontology for Engineers', not a bad idea in itself, but the exclusiveness of logisistic ontology as shown to be 'valuable' is highly questionable, i think.

Back to the text @ (4) if you were there before you got here

#5 referring, of course, to Ludwig Wittgenstein stating that 'The world is everything that is the case', often quoted from what is traditionally called 'Wittgenstein 1', a corpus of texts with Ludwig Wittgenstein's 'Tractato Logico-Philosophicus' at its core.

Back to the text @ (5) if you were there before you got here

#6 in the poetic awareness of What is happening Where that i have of these matters, there is no installment of Power occuring to the Signs of Legitimacy the Bush administration is constantly referring to, so whenever he's doing that, i see him 'bashing' himself. Not a pretty sight, i can assure you...

Back to the text @ (6) if you were there before you got here

Cathedral Scroll Save

15/05/2005 - After two summer months of seasoning outside my window, the Cathedral Scroll (the Scroll will be used to register Cathedral Residents in the Parish Registry) was ready to be released from its Seasoning Cover. Although the Scroll is thickly covered with boat-varnish and can withstand lengthy periods of exposure to even the sourest of climats, i was a bit anxious to see the shape it was in. It turned out to be OK.

Next, the Ceremony of the Burning of the Seasoning Cover took place. After adding a bit of pear-liquor as prescribed by the Rules for Burning Covers in the 21st century, the Cover was set to fire in a brass container of Oriental origin. That is not prescribed but my wife wouldn't let me use anything else.

This part got me very anxious because if the fire goes out before the Cover has been reduced to at the most a fourth of its original size, the whole procedure, including the Seasoning, would have to be repeated. Luckily it burnt nicely.

The Remainder of the Cover (it looks real ugly) will need to be kept in the Second Cathedral Cabinet, together with the Scroll Itself , and a Toshiba Laptop (its Body Seperated from its Screen).

dv, <<Wednesday, 11/30/2016 11:25 AM

ἄλογον δὲ κἀκεῖνοδόξειεν ἂν, εἰ ὁ μὲν ὅλος οὐρανὸς καὶἕκαστα τῶν μερῶν ἅπαντ΄ ἐν τάξει καὶ λόγῳ, καὶ μορφαῖς καὶ δυνάμεσιν καὶ περιόδοις, ἐν δὲ ταῖς ἀρχαῖς μηθὲν τοιοῦτον, ἀλλ΄ ὥσπερ σάρμα εἰκῆ κεχυ­μένον ὁ κάλλιστος, φησὶν Ἡράκλειτος, [ὁ] κόσμος.

http://philoctetes.free.fr/uniheraclite.htm