O nome de tudo

There is a scene that poetry has repeated over six centuries. A man is allowed to see the whole universe, assembled like an engine and laid out at once, and it falls to him, and to the poem, to say what he saw. In the last canto of the Comedy, Dante sees gathered into a single volume (note) what is scattered through the universe. In canto X of The Lusiads, Tethys leads da Gama to the top of a hill and shows him the machine of the world (note) reduced to a globe. When the scene returns, in 1949, in a poem by Drummond, the machine opens before a man walking along a road in Minas Gerais (note), and he turns it down.

The arc part I

Read in sequence, the three scenes descend. Dante receives the revelation beyond the last heaven, at the end of a climb that began in the crater of Hell, Camões sets it on the top of a hill, on an island the goddess raised from the sea, and Drummond, as I read him, brings it down into the Cauê (note), the iron mountain at Itabira that mining kept eating away over the twentieth century until it was left inverted. What each one does with the vision descends with it, and between Dante, who can neither hold it nor say it, and Drummond’s walker, who could gather it and walks on, stands da Gama, who takes it as a lesson and leaves at the rim of the globe whatever escapes him. From the first scene to the last the confidence that the whole lets itself be seen dies, and the second part asks what a machine of the world can be after that death.

From World to Universe part II

The name the tradition gave the whole was born in a line of Lucretius that announced its ruin, in a poem bent on proving that no god made the world for us, and yet Copernicus, dedicating the book that took the Earth out of the centre, speaks of the machine of the world built for us by the best of craftsmen. That the whole was made to the measure of whoever looks at it was the promise kept in that pronoun. Today’s cosmology describes, with an efficacy no age has had, an expanding universe (note) made mostly of what cannot be seen, and it has made the observer’s place indifferent. If world promised a home, universe names a whole in which neither reason nor imagination finds a place to live, and the distance keeps growing between knowledge, an archive no single life runs through, and understanding, what a finite subject manages to grasp and inhabit. In that distance figures grow scarce, and the scarcity that results coexists with the wish to see the whole and with the images by which science itself makes up for it, locally and provisionally. The inherited question then changes shape and becomes that of what figure suits totality before an understanding that knows itself to be finite.

A minimal figure part II

In place of the old machines I propose a minimal figure, two axes and a curve that approaches them without ever touching them. That one axis stands for objective knowledge and the other for subjective inquiry is a stipulation, which nothing in the mathematics requires, and what the figure offers is a bearing, that of a frontier which recedes as we approach it and guides knowledge without letting itself be possessed. The figure can be realized with such intensity that it comes to expose the excess of what it meant to contain, and that overflow takes geometric form in Gabriel’s horn (note), which holds a finite volume within an infinite surface. At the origin of the axes, where knowledge of the world and knowledge of oneself would coincide, lies an epistemic singularity known only through its effects, and the name thrown against it comes back twisted upon itself, in an onomastrophe that the word universe already performs, by including itself in the whole it names. When the outline of that limit comes to count as content, discourse fabricates a noemaphage, a name that circulates as evidence and ends the chain of whys.

Inhabiting the edge part III, being written

From that figure follows a position, which the final chapter, still being written, calls asymptotic realism (note) and which recognizes the asymmetry of positions before local regimes of verification and the symmetry of subjects before the incompleteness of the totality. Error once recognized stays recognized, and Ptolemy’s model, which Camões was still handing to da Gama in 1572, does not become valid again because its successors are fallible too, just as none of them occupies the place of the whole. The tradition gives this position an emblem in the gesture of Drummond’s walker, who lowers his eyes before the totality offered whole and keeps to the road, a gesture that reaches us only because it was made into verse. The poems of Noemáfagos, written as a pair with the thesis, answer the same limit with forms, and twenty-one of them make up the digital work published at noemafagos.com, where each poem asks the reader for a gesture.