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OzHouse

The Skeleton of an Artist's Dog.

The more closely you look at grammar, the more precisely you attempt to formulate language regularities, the more your list of “exceptions” grows. You are forced to face the fact that no system of grammatical regularities covers the whole system. It cannot ultimately be reduced to laws. The grammar of the universe is written in math. And apparently the same thing applies here: the better your math, the more closely you observe, the farther away the total system gets. (Paradoxically the more you cover the less gets covered, or is it just that the further you spread you tarp, the larger the field is revealed to be?) It is the familiar problem of the particle and the wave or of general and special relativity. Reality, to follow and perhaps expand the metaphor of Schrodinger’s Cat, does seem to exist not only when but also only as you look at it. (It’s not just neither alive nor dead it’s not even a cat until you open the box.) A word gets its meaning from its use, from the context of other words, at the moment when meaning is inscribed or extracted. Between times there is no meaning. There aren’t even any words. Think of sticks, which are just sticks (sticks that are just sticks do not exist, but you can still think about them) until they are contextualized in some way, as indicators of arboreal infection or the skeleton of an artist’s dog.