fenollosa riff

I've been getting some mileage out of the ideas from
"The Chinese Written Character as a Medium For Poetry"
by Fenollosa c/o Pound, especially the bit where they say
that the prototype for a sentence is a lightning flash --

Cloud-->lightning-->ground

TERM --transfer of force--> TERM

As an example, consider the verb "comprend", which means
"take together". If you disagree, you say "I'm not having any
of that".

Looking at this in a (more) Nietzschian way, we might instead
write

FORCE --transfer of force--> FORCE

or just

FORCE --FORCE--> FORCE

so that we're ultimately led to a picture of different forces
acting and reacting on one another in a distributed, fluid, and
nonlinear way.

So instead of networks of terms, a better model might be
overlapping coloured disks of changing size and luminescence.
This model should recover the ball-and-stick model in a certain
limit, but it should also deal with issues like "reacting to an entire
conversation". It seems to me that working with e.g.
elements of the power set of nodes of a given diagram,
we're able to better understand an "outside" relative to a
given "inside". (How a "conversation" can become
a "document" or even a "testament", for example.)
As an example, consider the idea that listening to a designated
or marked outsider defines or creates a "constituent moment"
(Arendt).

The idea that we're effectively thinking about everything at
once once seems to liberate thought from most of its
mechanical and combinatorial preoccupations. Which is
not to say that these aren't important as tools. It seems
better to be clear that forces are not always "channelled",
and that the dynamics represented and conveyed by
language are often much more complicated than the
language itself would have you believe...