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"About evening a man is known." Irish proverb "Nec pistoris
nomen erat, nisi eius qui ruri far pinsebat." Nor did the noun pistor (a crusher) exist, except for the man who ground corn in the country. Varro
Why did the chickens cross the road? One Friday, Isaac Newton walks in to a bar, and the bartender says, "what do you like?"
Newton says, "I'll have an Apple Sidecar." Bartender says okay.
A little leprechaun, smoking his pipe, enjoying an Irish coffee,
recognizes him and asks, "hey, Isaac, why did the chickens cross the road"?
Newton says, "of course, chickens at rest tend to stay at rest, and chickens in motion tend to stay in motion."
The leprechaun chuckles and says, "okay," and
"whether they are at rest or in motion, they tend to remain chickens too? Why is that? is it the chicken or the egg?"
And Newton says, "well, of course, it is the gravity of their situation."
The leprechaun enjoyed this answer but was
not satisfied with Newton's theory, and asked, "if the gravity of their situation is 'when' they are chickens, 'when' they are being chickens too, what is 'gravity' like then, the chickens and their eggs? or is 'gravity'
a supreme genus like 'when' ?" Newton looked at him quizzically. "Ens inquantum ens, is
the 'gravity' of chickens more like chickens or like 'when'? After all, there can be gravity without chickens, but there cannot be any gravity without some kind of when, quo tempore, as it would be."
Newton answered, quoting
his famous book the "Principia", p.443, saying, "to us it is enough that gravity does really exist, and act according to the laws which we have explained, and abundantly serves to account for all the motions of the celestial bodies, and of our seas."(1)
"I read your book", answered the leprechaun, "and to tell you the truth, it seems you would deprive facts for the trouble of finding them. I think you took a leap of faith in the wrong direction and fell out of one of Porphyry's trees. You are quite
into the roads of metaphysics for comparisons not natural empirical science, and your notion of absolute space -- where you say absolute and mean infinite -- is wrong for directions."
Newton was taking a drink, the leprechaun continued in his friendly
manner, "the order of the cosmos is not so much a priority in its size, as in the quality of the aspects. A dodecahedron the size of Texas is a dodecahedron, as well as another the size of a sand pebble, and the force of gravity cannot be universal without
making everything heavy. If gravity were universal, it would leave nothing light. Everything would become crushingly heavy, and that would be the end of it."
"You know Zeus became an ant to give rise to the Myrmidons of ancient Greece, the Achaean host of Achilles' crew, but I don't know who did what to give rise to the likes of you," said Newton.
"Well, I don't mean to bug you, Sir, certainly", answered the leprechaun, "but it's in the treatment of trifles that a man shows who he is, and I must say, rather, there are innumerable neutral gravity zones all over the place. I see it all the time: even between Zeus and the ants. And there also is a very powerful and extensive one between Earth and the Moon:
and the Moon does not affect the Earth's tides. It does not affect an army of ants either." "Marvelous, right on" said Newton. "With wonder the student of nature regards the microscopic
molecule of nervous substance which is the seat of the hurried and laborious soul of the ant." Then Newton asked the leprechaun, "what do you call a one hundred year old ant"? "I
don't know" he says. "An antique" says Newton. Only the bartender laughed, but the leprechaun thought about it and
said, "well, as old as the joke may be, gravity's not universal and not necessarily mutual by degrees of the inverse squared. The Moon goes around the Earth for its own reasons. It's nothing to do with the Earth's gravity. The gods to each assign a differing lot: some enter at the portal. Some do not."(2)
Part II Horologium
The next day Newton
was visiting the mall, looking at expensive watches in a little jewelry store across from the food court. The leprechaun from the day before happened to be nearby, making the rounds of the food court, tasting free samples from all the restaurant vendors, when
he spyed Sir Isaac through the Rolex glass. A later while, he was biding his time with a medium Orange Julius by the "Crepes Shack", and smoking an electronic cigarette, with nothing much else to do, when Newton absent mindedly wandered his way.
When Newton spotted
him, almost walking into him, the leprechaun asked "did you see anything you liked?" "Oh, yes. A great selection", answered Newton, "fine watches." "Like time and space, you know, mechanical clocks are in motion in stereo, illustrating that rational categories
and details of motion sort themselves out according to simplicity and kind." "Oh,
no", clucked Newton, "is this a joke"? Bowing slightly, the curious
elf of diminutions smiled, and showed him his "Quinotaur" style sport watch. "Check it out", he said, winking. "This baby's atomic. It's from over the rainbow." "Well prized, I'm sure" said Newton. "Look at
the three hands of a ticking clock. When the hands of the clock go 'round, and the clock strikes one, 30” is 30”. 30” is 30” wherever any one goes, of course, and at that time the three hands of the clock will always look the same:
a universal sign that it's 1 o'clock ... if not eleven." "Indeed, it is 1 o'clock", said Newton, looking
at the leprechaun's watch and then the big mall clock, high over the food court. "When the
hands have gone 'round more, as time slips away, and the clock strikes nine, 90” is 90”, and the three hands of the clock at that hour always look the same ... 90 degrees, and it must be nine or three." Newton looked at him and said nothing, but answered with a drawn out, "y-e-s", and a sigh, then asked "what do you want" without really noticing
what he had said. -- "People will see that ticking clocks of whatever size show the
same time in hours, minutes, and seconds of degree, when synchronized within the same time zone, because of the universal nature of their signs, and the universal qualities of motion. From one clock to another, from biggest to smallest, even with most extreme
differences in radius, each kind of hand ... minute, seconds, or hour ... turns in the type, quality, and category of its motion, all the way around, all along its length. They tick off their motive ranks in a uniform way, conforming to the origin, quality,
and type, because motion is not only a dream but an ontological character of things that are specifically real. Because
of the universal nature in time of these marks of motion, all clocks of whatever size show the same qualities and range of movements, within their different kinds, across all magnitudes.
Thus, we see that powers of similarity and likeness are in the aspects and properties first, not only the size. 'Qualitas refert potius quam quantitas'.(3) It's the same with the cosmos:
quality before quantity. --" "Ha,
old arguments from stone age Greece, retouched in a wee elf, to lecture me with a lesson about geometry, and the cosmos"? asked Newton. "Only in a small way, not to grieve you, if sometimes there comes a feeling of angst, or chemical perdition,
from alchemy or boredom. For the strangeness of secret society evolution, that's how a lot of it is nowadays, a haunting not just for you. See these people", he said, pointing to the crowd with a nod. "Many here are as lost at the food court as they are on
TV, most of them anyway: high handicappers, even a mumbling roar against reality. For example, there's
a golf instructor who's obsessed with clocks. He uses them as mental images, to illustrate points about the golf swing. He says things like, 'if a leprechaun or a giant, or one of the little borrowers out the kitchen cabinets hits a hook, it's all the same
case. It's a matter of bad timing and wrong alignment ... over the top. Over the top is over the top, and for the reverse pivot and worst things I've seen, gravity is never an excuse' ". "Not golf, please no. A good walk spoiled in more ways than one. Have you read again my book, 'The Principia', and still not grasped the science of
gravity?" "Once of that was enough for me, I assure you, and should add that occult action-at-a-distance
is no proper radial force. A slingshot is not fair comparison with the motions of the moon and the heavens around the earth. 'Gravity', as you call it, simply cannot explain celestial rotations.
There's no rotary connection up there from here. As above, so below, strictly by lines of comparison. There's poetry of the stars, illustrated in the way of speaking by math and direction,
but celestial motions in their spheres are of another order and separate from 'pedestrian'. I've seen the ends of many rainbows, and it's a different sort
of walk to go there from here. Those places are beyond mechanistic links as mortal ropes, knots and pulleys, and whatever string theories Copernican 'gravitation' has been able to devise."
"Have I gone too far then, outside of my sphere, according to one such as you? Maybe for you, but not for me: cf. Galileo and Kepler. cf. cf. Please do. cf. We are what we pretend to be."
Then for a moment Newton began to sing a pop song. Singing, he gestured an arm to the sky. "Mm, I believe I can fly. I believe I can touch the sky. If I can see it, then I can do it.
If I just spread my wings, I can fly. Hmm, fly high away, like a robin up into the sky." "Well", piped the leprechaun, "maybe the apple did not hit you on the head hard enough? You confuse separate species of motion." Newton continued to sing, "I think about it every night and day. Spread my wings and fly away. Ooh, I can fly. Hmm, fly, fly, fly."
Then he spoke to the little man in green. "Vade ad formicam. As you go, even in your kind, you may still be the half-wit end of it.
You should read my book again, until you can better understand it. Maybe you should hire a tutor from NASA? You know they say they've landed on the Moon and Mars, and fly by Pluto, and they always bring me."
Looking at him dryly, the leprechaun said, "when a radial velocity or rotary motion is of unitary and conformable origin, it is whatever speed
radius-cubitus: fast, slow, or medium, all at once, per instance of time all along the radius. And radial velocity between a wheel and a sphere is a distinction without a difference.
The world of clocks and gears, and wheels of motion, adds constantly to the proof that motion is real and a specific quality: a genus en realis, distributed in many simple kinds: from slowest
to medium to fastest. The typology of its kinds is a range full of detectable aspects and detectability --- fundamentally contradicting Galileo, and the heliocentric idea of undetectable or so-called unaccelerated rotation of the Earth." The sunlight was shining through clouds, in the windowed ceiling
of the gallery: Newton looked down at him closely, and said, "you know, this is not the end of the rainbow, this is the Mall, and I do not have all day for idle conversation with a leprechaun."
"Yet it's only a moment and a little conversation for a man who can fly. A clock the size of Texas, and another the size of Liechtenstein, and a third the size of a little child’s
hand all work at the same rates. No matter the size, stopped clocks always have the right time at least two times a day, worldwide. And like the celestial
degrees, minutes, and seconds of arc around the Earth, and out into space, the hours, minutes, and seconds of clocks that are on the wall are in stereo." Newton scratched his head. "Could I be hallucinating"? he wondered, then looking at his hands. "Is this an apparition from too much mercury"? He thought he heard another voice say, "quam
quod ridiculus hic esse," and looked around to see from where. "Am I hearing things?" he asked aloud. "In stereo not meaning loud or anything to do
with HBO, but from the Greek 'stereos', meaning 'solid' or 'complete', which means this is not an illusion. It's solid and it's real in common." "Are you not
a ponied sprite apparition of madness?" "No, of course not" answered the leprechaun, smiling
and winking up at him in his eldritch way. "Aeque pars ligni curvi ac recti valet igni". He bowed
the head and took off his hat. "Pauper sum", he said, hat over heart, tiny bells ringing. "Pateor, fateor, quod Dii dant fero(4), but our conversation is not a psychosis from alchemy, or your poison mercury. Not even if you smoked a Rubik's cube.
As you know, the math of the cosmos is logical and universal, and not from a priority of size and quantity over quality. Even 'in the embers of all things their primordial form exists'. Not from the hugeness of big numbers is it that anything categorical makes sense,
for logic is a power essential in the qualities, points, and elements from the beginning, before multiplication in properties and relations. The essence of good sense, therefore, is at work in the quality over the quantity, and the incredible hugeness of big
numbers doesn't make anything logical or valid in truth. For instance, for science, the first what of the sun is not how big it is, but the most simple and
essential operation: where and the way it's going around the Earth every day. If it were twice the size, and doing the same, it would still be orbiting the Earth." "Appropriate for all, one size fits all then" laughed Newton, "sunny days as well as money for all gifts. The sun. The sun. O the sun." "If there's a season for understanding cosmology, and the actual nature of time and space, it's not from the priority of incredible size and gigantic numbers, spread over vast distances, but the priority
of understanding angles and aspects objectively, like the essential properties of parallel and actual perspective, for instance. The cosmos is not a blob or a heap. No, no. Not so, more like a diamond." --
Newton became distracted, eyeing the peculiar crsytalled light he saw reflected in his beard, and it seemed strange sometimes that there were little sparkles. "That could be ... maybe like diamonds in
the rough, living in your own world, as you do, if science were so easy as an elvish lecture. O merrry
metals and carbon like ice, if kaleidoscope weather is nice, or whatever it was. Hooly Boo incantations" said Newton. "Are those diamonds in your beard"? -- "Numbers themselves represent
not only quantity but quality, and they are finite, of course, as much as the way we know names and values. If one said, they 'are the universal language offered by the Deity to humans', maybe so, and they count; from place and time, to place and time, and
as many places and times as there are, no one congregation adds into infinity. That way the cosmos is finite too. The cosmos is spherical, let me say, and the cosmos is the cosmos in one total by all parts, being the only one that it is in complete occurrence,
and can only be subsumed in time one unique number and very long arrow code at a time. For a given hour and day, as all the days go by, the Earth is a universal atomic clock in the middle of all that code. Natural motion cannot take place in an instant, but an aspect represented in time is formally universal and can characterize motion
as closely to an instant as possible. If someone said he had the fastest fastest arrow, with which he could tell the passing universal atomic clock time of Earth, and of the cosmos, in half a half a half a second sooner than the best available time up until
then, in the fastest fraction of a second, it could be possible. But if he got better and better at it, whittling the half a half a half a seconds down to quarter seconds of those, and then littler and littler fractions of a moment, he would very soon be left
with only another instance of an aspect of the clock on the wall. That's
what's happening with nanoseconds, one billionth of a second, like 10 to negative 9; and attoseconds, one billionth of a billionth of a second, like 10 to negative 18. The
greatest efficiencies of speedy divisons always end in another boundary set from the formal circle of degrees, from any clock, and from the days under the Heavens ... in motion up above. Nanoseconds increased by nanoseconds end in an aspect, and a degree,
bounded out of one of 360 in 3-D. This is only what they are aiming at to begin with. In
other words, there is a permanent sort of mathematical density hidden within logic, even in the sublime, such that there is always already a type of situation density in the aspects or motions and of any figures within a circle.
As much as anything, everything can fit into a circle. The Germans would call it necessity. One
of them said, 'we must admit that there is a kind of circle from which it seems there is no escape'."(67) -- "What odd vanity this has become. This is insane. People should think I'm crazy! It must be the mercury," Newton replied, looking again at his hands.
"A divine proportion comes from three," said the elf, "and there must be a center, as much as there must be one in the middle. Every aspect has its angle, with axis and center; as every to all, and all to one, all things
must have a center, even the extremes. The center must exist". He skipped a little jig and made a throw for lucky charms. His hands made the splash. "Throw a stone into a river, and the circles
that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence.(5) Domus parva quies magna. That way," he said, spreading his hands away in even calm planes, then back in circles. He could have been waxing the hood of a car. "Domus parva quies magna."
"We should prefer things in measure to things in excess, but how have I seen you twice in these two days?"
"There's no reason to feel strange
about that. It's mere coincidence, with a little curiosity. It follows us both, and we have some ontology. Predicables." "Predicables." "Predicables." "What's your name"? asked Newton. "Empidonax". "Empidonax, I'd have thought more like Elvis. Are you not following me?" -- "Don't be paranoid. What plays in Vegas, stays in Vegas, but if I've lost you, this is to say that, like an elephant in a bird cage, the size of the cosmos does not have priority over the quality of its aspects, and three prime aspects
of its character overall are 1.) the Earth is not moving and 2.) the natural order of the universe is finite and 3.) the earth is the only one body in every constellation of the ecliptic and in between all the stars and ends of the Heavens all the time.
How does anybody say that the cosmos is bigger than the elements, and that the elements in their
turn are huge? Atoms are gigantic? They are not. Atoms are so tiny. They're minscule as the littlest math in particles. How could anybody say that the cosmos is bigger than the table of elements? The cosmos is not bigger than the elements of which it is composed. The entire wheel of the cosmos is inescapably elemental, and how could the cosmos
ever have extension beyond the elements, that are the very aspects of its code? How would anybody say that the elements are the elements according to anything other than their type and quality? How does anybody imagine that the elements in total extension are not as big for a
sum as the cosmos? Therefore, the property of the cosmos is essential and small,
finite for distinction like a mustard seed. Its priority has already been set in the seal of it, the point not the size. It's in the quality and proportion over quantity. After all, it's only composed of elements, and the elements are not big." --
"Yet sometimes they are strained very much to the ends", said Newton. "If you and the elements could
buy a kingdom, only for a shetland pony, not a horse, how wonderful it all would be. Eldritch-of-the-Way, and voice
of many waters in the fountain at the mall, that would be perfect for you. You haven't lost your pot of gold from too much wandering and philosophy have you?"
-- "It should be just where I left it. And it's
so far away, in another place: I doubt anybody from NASA will find it there." The leprechaun could not help grinning, "and would it be that gold is gold, only when more than a particle of gold? Any aspect
however vanishing that's totally in gold is gold, even if only by the slightest modicum. A
collection of aspects in a diamond are the same aspects no matter the size, and the mathematical and logical priority of the cosmos is not in size, but in quality of aspects. As they say over the rainbow at Christmas, a dodecahedron the size of Texas is a
dodecahedron, as well as another the size of a sand pebble. 'The gods used it to arrange the constellations of the Heavens', and a given type of angle
is the same angle in space for a point, no matter the extension. A given type of figure is the same detail of proportions, no matter how enlarged or diminutive the specific combination. The combination to a code is the same combination to that code, no matter
size or concealment: like a crystal seal of aspects." -- "Now I can see once upon a time you were a redundant toy shop engineer, then downsized, yet the secret
gifts of models and scales go with you still. Scala Leprechaunorum, and the long lines at the post office over the holidays, and so forth." "Yes, maybe that was
it, close enough for government work, but Season's Greetings". "Splendid dreams to see how you survive, and every Christmas."
Even though there was nothing
that funny, other than a strange feeling of confusion, Newton laughed himself out of his mind, oddly for a moment, and stumbled back into the "Crepes Shack" cart. He thought he heard a cell phone ringing, not his. "Pigmy Sprite, it must be your phone: who from where is calling now?" "That's not my phone" said the leprechaun, "but you know what they say about furniture?" he asked. "What"? managed Newton, who seemed to have lost his teeth.
"That no matter how big and expensive it gets, or small the people who use it, it all always is for situations that are only in 3-D." "My word," said Newton, "that is stupid, and the midget
of letters with keys to the abyss. Where did you go to school? Illiterate Ireland in the middle ages? All this to tell me Aristotle would be a father of leprechauns, and that the sun orbits the earth? When will ye go back to your little desk at the North pole"?
The leprechaun looked wryly amused and gave Sir Isaac the straight-up middle finger. The bird all
the way from Saturn and the Oakland Raiders there for a moment as though a doctor could prick it to draw blood. "The Saturn finger", he said, "a sign of restrictions, also the ease of aboriginal government, as you know from chiromancy and the arcane arts. If the C.I.A. could put the genetic code to Johnny Cash's in a tiny quasi-invisible
pin, there it is, and each of the five Platonic solids is the same identical pattern, one to one, no matter the size. It's the same with the cosmos. Even if 'the web of our life is a mingled yarn, good and ill together', it would be very bad luck indeed, and impossible for geometry, for the devilment and all of it, if the earth were revolving
to orbit the sun. All's well that ends well, but heliocentrism is totally out
of proportion, as much as most to least, and vice versa, mixed up so bad and out of sorts that it's off the chain and insane in the membrane." -- "You rude little man", said Newton. "That's enough with due measure from you, now good day."
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