In the Order of the Meridian, an order I am incubating for roughly the next twenty-eight years, we have an order without order. A transvaluation of orders, a rule without a rule, other than one’s own flowering. A path that has no path except the one we walk, and the view across the mountain or meadow of others walking their paths. We think they are walking their paths, but maybe they are picking wild strawberries or collecting firewood. But gathering strawberries is also a path.
The Order is durational, a long experiment in inner flowering, which may not flower at all, may not germinate, spread seeds, or engage in other extended vegetal metaphors. It is not a short order. Twenty-eight years is a long time to spend to become something or nothing.
The first rule of the Order of the Meridian was not to speak publicly about the Order of the Meridian for fifteen years. I think it was fifteen years. Here I am, not even six months in, speaking publicly about the Order. Maybe that wasn’t a very useful rule, we are throwing it out.
The Practices
In the Order of the Meridian there are rules, but first I will talk about the practices. There is a musical practice, a practice of listening to music. This week, for reasons I no longer remember, I had assigned myself Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa, which feels monastic, maybe why I selected it. Is the wholeness full or empty? A tabula rasa, a blank slate. What is it that is being cleared, and what remains?
There was an attendant exercise: map the silences. Since, of course, that is where eternity exists, and where the flower petals fall from the sky.
I have not done this mapping yet. I am imagining in my minds eye what this mapping would look like and I have no idea. What am I mapping? What is mapped to what?
In the practice of the practice perhaps I will silence the questions, and the flower petals will fall from the sky.
I opened up this space to write about another recording I listened to, which I think is also part of the order of the meridian Yoko and John’s Amsterdam Album, and Yoko has an incredible voice, but there is no order, no prescriptive to map that. Instead I meditated on peace, the plea to peace. And that would be something completely new if we all stopped for a moment and were peaceful. What is a peace action? Something peaceful. I am writing this for peace.
I opened up this space to write about another recording I listened to, which I think is also part of the Order of the Meridian: Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s Amsterdam recordings. Yoko has an incredible voice. I had no instruction, no mapping to contend with. I meditated on peace. The plea for peace. Peace as the next new thing, that thing that causes change, and transformation.
What is a peace action? Something peaceful? The recording recorded that sitting in a field is a peace action, if done for peace.
I am writing this piece for peace.
Tokens
In the Order of the Meridian we sit silently, we also move our bodies, sometimes our hands and arms, and we make marks. The first marks were scratches on the ground, arranging branches into alphabets like the Celtic Ogham. We scratched into the dirt and invented symbolic systems of abstractions.
Symbolic systems are also at the heart of the Order, although I am not entirely sure what we are doing with them. Are we manipulating the symbolic to break out into the Real, are we breaking through the imaginary to make the imaginary real. We make a mark and the mark acts upon us.
As part of this mark-making practice, I am reading Euclid. According to the Order’s schedule, I am supposed to be on Book II of the Elements, but today I am at the beginning of Book I. I will have to update the canon.
On the first page, of Euclid’s Elements a 2500 year old book on geometry, the measure of the earth, there are no drawings, only language. Greek, and in my edition, English.
The text begins with σημεῖον, sēmeion, a sign, a mark, a point. The same word from which we get semiotics. In the New Testament, sēmeion can also be a miracle, signs and wonders.
The first definition is translated as “A point is that which has no part.” Is this the emptyness?
We can also say “A sign is that which has no part.” A token, like a token in our AI systems, or an old subway token, has no part. A mark that cannot be divided, that itself cannot be marked up. Are we still talking about geometry?
The second definition begins with γραμμή, grammē, something written. It is translated as “line”, but it is associated with graphō, to scratch or to cut. It can also mean a boundary. We see this word, grammar, telegrams, diagrams, and all those apps that end in -gram.
The second definition is translated as “A line is a length with out breadth.” A boundary is a measurement without a back, without substance.
From a line, a grammē, we arrive at a diagram. Many lines arranged into a system. A diagram becomes its own language, has its own rules and possibilities for transformation. A mark becomes a sign, a sign becomes a word, a word becomes an instruction.
Peace
all of this is imaginary, or symbolic. All of it is manipulation, when we move the signs around. We draw, write, calculate, compose, and listen. We create rules and then break them. We make maps of things that include boundaries without substance, or connections without backing.
I still have not mapped the silences in Tabula Rasa. I thought I would be further along the road, but I am only on the second definition, not even at the propositions yet of which there are 13.8. I was supposed to remain silent about the Order for fifteen years.
What does all this have to do with peace? In the garden of my imagination, there is an empty space, the stillness, and a path, and some flowers, and maybe some flags, a miracle.