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TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Despite the large epistemological[1] debt[2] our own culture owes to this text[3], it remains one of the most challenging[4] documents facing the antiquarian translator. So that I might avoid repeating to the refined reader the countless lamentations of my predecessors, I will simply list my obvious technical methods, and with great severity, state my purpose in translating, both this text and in general, as inspiring those who follow in my footsteps with the benefit of my mistakes to take up this work with an uncompromising vigor:
TECHNICAL METHADOLOGY FOR THE CURRENT TRANSLATION:
— William Harvey [1] The epistemological influence is considered in this discussion to be primary. For a discussion of the spiritual and social influences of this text, please see the works of Lomasch Sorounin, et al. [2] While it might seem misleading to credit a ‘text’ as responsible for an influence enacted largely through an ‘oral tradition’, it is, nonetheless, this text from which both the oral tradition and subsequent influence are derived. [3] As well, of course, as the entire body of writing of which this presented text is only, in our terms, introductory. [4] My esteemed colleague perhaps described it best when he said, “What struck me immediately and above all was the manner in which the grain of the ancient and crumbling paper itself seemed integral to the anonymous author’s original project. I felt I’d failed as soon as I saw my translation in the stark black and white of our modern press.” (Sorounin, Lomasch. Separation Anxieties: My Life as a Translator, Worldwind, Geneva, to be printed in May of this year.) [5] Grey-Turner, Nigel. From the preface to SSOBTME, Samuel Weiser, Inc., New York, 1979.
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“Secrets of Fascinating Womanhood”
WE KNOW SHE PRESSED HERSELF INTO THE WALL. We know that She must have firmly grasped the embankment, becoming a cement and blood mixer; from this original solution She generated all of the golden citadels of antiquity. We can hear, head to stone, Her dissolving body. Her immense, millennial effort thus informed the raw material of humanity, and would be for us equivalent to the act of brushing a small insect from our motionless legs. How did She come to perform this role? What forces were at work before and during this extraordinary event? Where is She now? The geographical location of Her eternal contact is of course highly disputed, with nearly every church and government claiming their own congested capitol as coincident with the primordial center, yet none are offering the proof; the fault of these solipsistic organizations is in their strategic nature, for we know that Her choices were not based on strategy in the least. My own belief is that over the incalculable distance of human history, geographic scale has either grown or contracted so extremely that the debate should actually be formed around the disparity between the quantum and relativistic theories of physics. That having been said, much can be deduced from the current state of things. In point of fact, while the sphere of human consciousness has mutated beyond recognizability between Her time and ours, the basis of the reality She engendered is traceable through a finite set of determining principles, which have been, alas, subjected to the ever increasing linguistic entropy of our society. We will here rename them in Her image.
1. DIFFERENCE When the air is severely cold, perfectly inert, the atmospheres of hearts and of planets retain the memory of friction regardless of their temporal location. She had no other possible trajectory, no other possible relationship to existence than that of pressing against. This is the basic unilateral force what preordains all other possible relationships while excluding them, as has been mathematically proven. You will notice then that all unilateral imagery is deceptive, such as ‘the darkness’ or ‘the infinite’. In any state of existence, the exhumable corpse of historical events is contained yet unknowable. In this way, we say that She cried to Her self and breathed in deep sympathy with the cold stone structure without knowing why. We can analyze Her actions preceding the action as one analyzes the color of the sky for sign of storm… She had tied Her shoelaces and brushed Her black hair that morning, dancing around Her fate in an elliptical orbit and at a slight axial ascension: She moved closer to and farther from the action in a seasonal pattern while in no way can She be said to have moved towards or away from it. She thought, “I feel okay today, a little tired, we’ll see what happens,” while at other times She was overcome by a wintery pessimism. Of course, She could never see what was happening while it was happening because She could only see it unilaterally, that is to say She was a one-dimensional creature. Her friends were of no objective value because they had no spatial relationship to Her by which She might triangulate Her own or their position. All She understood of them was that they existed outside of Her self. She went to school and later work, accumulating a trail of possessions that became visible only as Her speed decreased and they fluttered magically before Her eye before receding again in Her wake. When once a coworker remarked, “You have very lovely hair”, She could only understand Her own body as the sum of the processes She exacted upon it with the various hygienic products thrust upon girls of Her age. So naturally She dreamed of a Polaris, a radioactive body which from Her one-dimensional eye She imagined as a counterpart, as I have already said, to press against.
2. ABSTRACTION How could She sense a counterpart, a lover, in the cold motionless wall? The shift from potential to actualized existence resulting from Her heavy embrace is inextricably linked to the activation of meaning. All meaning is illusory, as it exists only at dimensional levels of experience. To use an obvious example: Existence (E) can be described in this equation (where N = nonexistence): E = EN and reciprocally N = NE In this equation, the left side represents a dimensional experience, the right a spiritual experience. All experience is an abstraction (=) of eternal, spiritual reality. At the biological level, the same principle can be expressed: Organism (O) can be described in this equation (where E = environment) O = OE and reciprocally E = EO From the initiation of consciousness, of meaning, abstraction (=) is necessary to wrench experience from the infinitely repeating self-reflexivity of the absolute. Her decision, Her dedication is therefor the moment of the generation of meaning through the bilateral destruction and institution of abstraction. A logician might argue, and have, that such a gesture is a grave mistake, while to a pragmatician it is a necessary evil. Neither could deny the warm sensation in Her mind, which at this state we should call Her heart. You know the feeling: that unbelievable energy that could either throw you into an embrace or off of a cliff. Yet Her sensation was only a modification of a static state, a motionless change. It was as if Her Polaris had always been there, and She had only just recognized him, in the corner of the room at a party or on the train reading a book by himself. She started to feel that She could feel where She was because he was not with Her. And who could blame Her? Where is the flaw of logic in a hope you know is foolish? It was at this point, when he looked Her in the eye, that the idea of measurement spurred violent contractions in the scaling of the universe. These contractions were non-spatial, and should therefor be called shifts to clearly distinguish between the quantum nature of abstracted experience and the more familiar analogy of fluid movement per se.
3. MOVEMENT We know that She was aware of it to some degree; at the very least, She was aware of its suppression. It was mentioned if not crudely in Her books, if only as an anachronism. The variety of meaning the word ‘movement’ occupies as we use it today is involved in the renaming process I mentioned earlier, and can aid us in our translation of the events of Her life. For instance, we use this word to signify excretional and political impetuses alike, and with good reason. We also give this name to the discrete section of a piece of music, that is, a measurable and thereby abstractable aural experience. Then common meaning among these phenomena is the characteristic of approximation, a working hypothesis, a sacrifice to a larger reality that escapes hypothesis by being unhypothetical. Notice the discernible structure of the dimensional universe (as referenced earlier) at work, in the infinite possibilities of human life punctuated by the finite approximations of excretion. All at once and by the minute; She fell inward. Her unbounded gravity with metamorphosis was refracted by the cyclical nature of stasis. Once he was there, Polaris occupied Her entire field of vision that had formerly been occupied by uncertainty. “Where are you going?” he would ask. “How are you?” he would deploy like a mirror, and when She looked for the space in front of Her She saw only Her self, one-dimensionally, as another distinct observing eye. She was appalled and confused. Yet this situation removed all of Her pressure, and cancelled out Her exerted force. She was left numb, lazy and bored in his gaze. He too was apathetic, for he was just the same as Her, pressing in one direction, the same one. “We cannot help but agree,” he would console Her, attempting to divert Her restlessness into himself, into the infinitely receding paradox. She could not say that She was unhappy or happy, just trembling with the perception of Her imminent phase shift. Its not that Polaris represented anything unpleasant or frightening — he represented nothing at all: Her self. She had no intention of hurting anyone. The spontaneous realization that flashed through Her body: that he had been and would always be a non-event, that they had never shared a single moment of existence, and that they were neither giving or receiving any energy from each other is ultimately unexplainable. I will offer no theories, as it should remain, unexplained, the only viable constant in the universe. The endless repetition of mirror images was exposed to Her, and as a function of that exposure, a divergent vector was traced behind Her unfolding eye. From this new angle of observation the myriad reflecting planes of possession, pride and individuality became discernible as the spectrum of abstracted energy, the black rainbow. She could see above and inside Her self Her Polaris, locked in his incandescent smiling at the miracle of Her abandon. With Her future forced into tangibility by Her own labor and Her body enshrouded in the physical processes that occur at the temporal level of reality, She appeared to have drowned Her self in time. Yet the moment, the event of Her departure into an activated universe that offered the saturation of pressure She had longed for exists eternally outside of any dimensional perspective. It is in this way that we say that She tied Her shoes and brushed Her hair before becoming the earthquaking loess and the implacable bedrock.
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a The Heart: Arteries and Veins, edited by ed. J. Willis Hurst, Robert C. Schlant, Charles E. Rckley, Edmund H. Sonneblick, Nanette Kass Wenger; McGraw-Hill Information Services Company, New York, 1990; L.H.S. Van Mierop M.D., Lynn M. Kutsche, M.D, Chapter 1 “Embryology of the Heart”, pp.3. b Ibid., pp.5.
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