Transmutations # 01
by Wellington Amancio da Silva
Let’s say the general constitutive substance of the body of all things is, as it were, probably carbon — that super malleable being, in essence, with own desires to be beyond what we think we understand. About the uniqueness of things, by mysterious convention, proper to things, carbon is treated to be a body in a desire for concreteness, from a form, dimension, content and presence, to be what we imagine seeing the thing in front of our eyes — this is the game between the desire for carbon and our suggestion about its materiality as a form, the form that we partly give. Then we transform it into a word: an element of another supra-organic matter.
The carbon in us, specialized in the deep core, circulating freely in “cellular breathing” is the condition of a will, which we gradually discover, to the point of glimpsing it with some certainty at the end of old age, when our entire structure has already it cannot express it (the will of the will to say it is our deepest existential meaning). When, at last, we intuit the general sense of all things, it would take another 50 years to investigate it.
Carbon, graphite’s brother, instrumentalized in our hands, is contained in the pencil we write with. Carbon is the intermediary entity of the hands. And graphite like a pencil is a technological instrument that we use to transform the super-unstable matter of thought into text (a matter of false stability). The contents of a mold are similar, never identical. The concept of the identical is a metaphysical flaw in the language, which aims to facilitate the impossible, that is, comparison by conceptual and not visual approximation. What we see is what might exist as possible, but we’re not sure, yet. From the original, the mold is the “negative”, and, due to its status as an object in reverse, it cannot conceive the sameness of the copied object at all. Outside of metaphysical impossibility, the “absolute” is what we have at hand.
Carbon, such a substance of the body of things, for us to survive in a broad sense, needs to be transmuted in an alchemical way as a substance to the tenuous body of words. If trees bear fruit and water flows from minerals (like Moses’ staff), what we leave on Earth are Words. Just as the fruits are renewed only for the Earth (and we are an immanent and essential part of the Earth) so the Words are only for us. Therefore, one has to think about an ecology of words, in the sense of studying them so that they can help us return to Eden, that is, to a friendly interaction with Nature (a feature not rationalized by us in the cosmos).
Darkness is flat, it’s always close to the eyes. But it doesn’t happen that the hands are also darkened, in the midst of the shadow. Hands solve the problem of the absence of light, so they work in favor of eyes, thought, memory and therefore metaphors. In other words, there would be no metaphor outside of this play of light and shadow.
Between light and dark, the monosyllabic animal does not recognize itself, because only through language can it be recognized. On the other hand, the animal that knows itself, so to speak “advanced in language” resorts to non-words, to assemblage to improvise in the area of its being that is still not fully recognized. Assemia is the meeting point between light and shadow, between light and dark, between saying and not saying, between understanding and confusing. Asemia is the zero degree of metaphor. Asemia is the first alchemical state of general carbon transmuted into squiggles, the link between first Nature and Language.
The transubstantiation of thought into word is, so to speak, alchemical, in the sense of the ancients. The matter of thought, a volatile and unstable thing, is transmuted into the matter of written signs, and in this process much of its essence is lost. But where to find what is lost, in its still amorphous state? In the sown field of assemblage. He who writes what he thinks knows that something is lost, he does not know at all what it is about and what it is, in this dissipation as a process, therefore, the author reinvents contents in order to fill in the emptied spaces, the blocks of thought dissipated during transmutation to write. However, before this deal of meanings, there is the middle ground (or the term beyond the boundaries of the meanings of words). In this term of many means, or paths, the assemia, the writer inscribes himself in a written landscape retributive to the carbonic essence of things, experiencing the state-of-things in its naturais mezzo feature of being a nameless thing, not objectified into an object and within a certain taxonomy. The writer experiences a state-of-affairs in assemblage that always anticipates the conventional word.
For Plato there are two distinct spheres of the world. The sphere of ideas and the sphere of appearances. Plato did not conceive the explanation of how an idea is transmuted into appearance, as above all ideas conceive the existence of things. Plotinus created the concept of “emanation” to resolve this lack of connection between ideas and appearances and between appearance and existence — because on the side of the person who sees and lives, the exterior is appearance and his interior is existence; the existence of the other is an appearance to consider, made dense by empathy (a more complex and profound form of bonding, but not enough).
The intermediary between idea and matter, the ligature that exposes the factual world to us, has been language, or its concrete feature — the word. However, as it has been said for so long, the word is a very fragile instrument, when one aims to organize within the world what is retained from the outside, in other words, bringing to oneself, as a sign and meaning, the concrete elements of exteriority is a process in which a large part of these elements is lost along the way. Naturally chaos is the front engine that drags the orderly world, and the function of the latter is above all to organize the trail of chaos along the way. Order is just a point of view and chaos is just the model that order denies, like the height of the dichotomous or dialectic dryness that governs the world, in the deepest core of language.
