....A./D.

[Alan Sondheim]

....A./D.


...Analog digital / analog discrete, but also Anno Domini; one can only
point out that linear time from 0 moves through both negative and positive
numbers; the years are integers, the continuum backgrounded. A/D: Monothe-
ism's gift, this or that, before or after; A/D: the continuum of time
re/produced as discrete. The year 0 of our lord, the year 1 of our lord.
This is the trouble with religions or ideologies with monolithic and
linear narratives apparently grounded in specific and human events -
everything proceeds like a white hole out of them. Of course every system,
however broken, has its accountancy; I am punning here on A./D., the
ferociousness of this division, and from the viewpoint of believers - as
if humankind were waiting for this, the insertion of our lord into
history, breaking history, remaking the codex of dates. Islam is similar.
With monotheisms it's all gone bad; the fabrication carries a suspect
political ideology, as if the world has waited for year 0 and the
insertion of a related temporal framework. This is what happens when
there's a guy - Jesus or Mohammed or whomever - involved. The construct of
absolute time is equivalent to absolute negative and positive, right or
wrong. Clearly history doesn't start or end with the guy, so one counts
forwards and backwards from him. But he's there as a stopper,
transformation, wave equation collapse, as deadly as Schrodinger's cat
might be.

Somewhere Weyl wrote about the last vestige of the self/ego in physics -
the Cartesian origin. The guy hangs out there, claims the origin for
himself/itself, refuses to recognize the tensor algebra of the thing which
isn't a thing. It's be-all and end-all for him. Time begins, marches
forward or backward, a permanent light-cone. The rest are its children.

( Note that this absolute time is _finite,_ that it begins and ends, that
the origin is _historical._ And note that so many other systems portend a
creation behind/beyond which numeracy was non-existent; the numbers begin
in mythic time. So there are configurations that are lost in essence - not
a guy hanging out, as if known by one and all. There's always the problem
of the divine with historical time; mythos turns to miracles, Jesus doing
this or that, almost like a party. Three and one is one by the way; for
any absolute finite X here, X -> 1, I believe it is called a _kernel._ )


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