https://caerjar.github.io/SigilStudio/
In writing Emu Butch each section had a particular image associated it it. Rachel called these colophons, I began to call them sigils. They lacked a uniform look and idea, one chapter may have an image of Meret Oppenheims fur mug.
One Chapter the stained glass window of Chartres’ cathedral.
What is the purpose of these images anyway?
Diagrammatic Immanence
This is the title of a book by Rocco Gangle, which I came through via an Introduction to another book on category theory and philosophy. Category theory is very popular branch of mathematics these days, and in part, I think, it is because of its charismatic reclusive anarchic figure Alexander Grothendieck, that all the young and not so young men seem to love these days. At the core of it, category theory presents mathematics as the relationship between things (the original ratio), rather than the quantification of things - if this opposition could even be used. I call it mathematics without numbers, which is really all math.
Behind the term diagrammatic immanence, I read, what is the information or knowledge contained within the diagram that cannot be communicated with language or number.
A Picture
My original manuscript contained pictures, and diagrams. Pictures are not diagrams, what they contain is not only information but style and vibe.
In the above cryptic diagrams from category theory, which become less cryptic after spending time with the material, we have the formal diagrams that represent how one thing transforms into something else: 2 and 3 through the morphism of multiplication become 6, to illustrate a concept from figure a.
Letters Like Lines
Is there a diagrammatic immanence to letters? As myth has it the I-Ching comes from the back of a turtle, Egyptian hieroglyphs from the footsteps of the Ibis, the letter A comes from a depiction of an ox.
Michel Serres writes about the Ox and language. The Ox that is the original A. The Ox pulls the plow and creates furrows similar to the lines on the page, each seed planted, a letter or a word. In Rome, the first of Serres’ foundation trilogy, the letters are traces, they are the hoof prints of the oxen. And they are manipulated. In the myth, Cacus steals Hercules’ cattle and he drags them backwards by their tails into the cave, confusing how we should read their sign. The sentence is a lie. It is worse than Plato thought in the Phaedrus. Judy Grahn what would you say? The first sentence is the moon cycle.
There is no immanence, there is no history, there is just the moment and the hooves, or the image or the sigil, and how we respond to that. I do not think I will have images in my manuscript, but I will have them in my readings, and maybe in a ZINE. And I have had fun playing with a new ritual toy to transform language into diagrams and maybe pictures, but sentences are diagrams too.