Below is Reichmann's poem on the concept of natura naturans, a generative conception of nature, which should counterposed to the term natura naturata, a metonymic structure of nature (trees, rivers, etc.). Fascinating here is the connection between the generative center and a series of metaphors that try to get us to think about the idea of no-place. (How could we ever point at this "manantial en el centro de todo"?) Reichmann raises the stakes through a speculation on each creative point, creativity as a point or point of creativity as a center. Part III does not necessarily comment on equivalences between lo creado: lo manantial: lo centro:, but rather uses the colon to beg the question of their relationality and the implications of such a belief system. The terms are severed and left with the lovely vague pronoun, lo.
This generative approach to the generative view of nature (natura naturans) starts to look a lot like Borges writing on Pascal's sphere:
He deplored the fact that the firmament did not speak, and he compared our life with that of castaways on a desert island. He felt the incessant weight of the physical world, he experienced vertigo, fright and solitude, and he put his feelings into these words: "Nature is an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere." Thus do the words appear in the Brunschvicg text; but the critical edition published by Tourneur (Paris, 1941), which reproduces the crossed-out words and variations of the manuscript, reveals that Pascal started to write the word effroyable: "a fearful sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere."
The expansion outwards of generative points precludes the center as a place, or the place of centrality. I, of course, find this fascinating in relation to Lezama's (almost naggingly) persistent proclamation through Pascal: There is no Nature, so mankind created sobrenaturaleza, supernature, overnature. This is followed by a more fascinating corollary: sobrenaturaleza is a composition of elección and paisaje -- things that we have in monstrosity. This mourning and fear has been an obsession at least since the darker side of the Renaissance, the Baroque.
I
Hay un manantial en el centro de todo lo creado
II
creación donde cada punto es centro, pues en él un manantial
III
lo creado: lo manantial: lo centro:
This generative approach to the generative view of nature (natura naturans) starts to look a lot like Borges writing on Pascal's sphere:
He deplored the fact that the firmament did not speak, and he compared our life with that of castaways on a desert island. He felt the incessant weight of the physical world, he experienced vertigo, fright and solitude, and he put his feelings into these words: "Nature is an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere." Thus do the words appear in the Brunschvicg text; but the critical edition published by Tourneur (Paris, 1941), which reproduces the crossed-out words and variations of the manuscript, reveals that Pascal started to write the word effroyable: "a fearful sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere."
The expansion outwards of generative points precludes the center as a place, or the place of centrality. I, of course, find this fascinating in relation to Lezama's (almost naggingly) persistent proclamation through Pascal: There is no Nature, so mankind created sobrenaturaleza, supernature, overnature. This is followed by a more fascinating corollary: sobrenaturaleza is a composition of elección and paisaje -- things that we have in monstrosity. This mourning and fear has been an obsession at least since the darker side of the Renaissance, the Baroque.
To end again with Borges (I just finished teaching him - so referencing him becomes obsessive):
"It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors."
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