071: The Great Work
There are aspects of Gematria which fascinate me --- well, aspects of any attempt to reduce our comprehended breadth of knowledge down to a single luminous moment is fascinating, when you get right down to it -- and the effort to reduce language to a series of inter-related numeric sequences is one of my favorites. Now, a proper technique of Gematria -- the art of reducing words and phrases into numeric values -- really requires a knowledge of Hebrew because the art is based on the idea that one is attempting to pierce the veil of mystery surrounding God's words which have been set down since antiquity and since God's words were transcribed in Hebrew (and I'm only really talking about the Torah here, anyway), performing gematric valuations on sentences and words in any language other than Hebrew is already removing yourself one step from your solution.
However, the basic idea is this: distillation. It's the alchemical Great Work all over again: attempting to distill the unpure into a single drop of purity.
[And I'm distracted for a moment by consideration of that phrase "single drop of purity." If you define this as a brief dollop of Godhead, then you can call it a "single drop of God's blood." What about our blood? A single drop from you or I contains enough coded information to recreate the human race. Your DNA stand (which is evident in every cell of your body) identifies your individuality, but it also preserves our identity as a species. How's that for singular purity?]
So, distillation. The argument follows that we would recognize a more pure state, we can distinguish between more and less pure (and I use these terms instead of "simple" and "complex" because I don't think it follows that "more pure" is necessarily "less complex" -- it's that DNA thing again). And "recognize" may be the wrong term; we are "cognizant of" greater purity, we understand the possibility of greater purity. We "know" greater purity.
What I've been circling for a few weeks is the idea of a single core language, a pre-Babel lingua franca that was universally understood and known by all mankind. God's own tongue, if you will. Some will say -- and there may even be a quote by Einstein or some other historical scientific luminary to this effect -- that mathematics is the pure form of language.
writing
This is a reasonably comprehensive list of my published work, both virtual and physical.
THE MISFIT LIBRARY
I am Nine of Thirteen, one of the members of the Misfit Library, a writing collective which puts out a quarterly journal of our respective work. We are scattered across the globe and determined to change the face of the planet one story at a time. The link above will take you to Misfit Central where you can acquire copies of the journal as well as read exclusive online material.
SYMBOLIC
I wrote a column for OPi8.com's Transmit blogs: journals of the new dark underground. SYMBOLIC tracked the novel I was working on, referencing the process and the research materials which mad up the backbone of the work. In addition, SYMBOLIC busied itself with ruminations and considerations on the nature of language and communication. And a wee bit of mythology. The first 100 entries of SYMBOLIC can be found here on this site as well as at OPi8.com.
LITERARY REPRESENTATION
I am represented by Scribe Agency as my literary agents. Please contact these gentleman if you have any queries about my work.