The Calibrated Alphabet – Cipher for a Moment    PDF
Poetry and the Natural Sciences                         

Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance… [it is] a vision… focused on the impact of mind upon objects, an autonomous act, it creates not so much a fusion as an elevated awareness of their relations.
Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill, 1930

In writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what… From this I reach what I might call a philosophy…that behind the cotton wool is a hidden pattern; that we – I mean all human beings – are connected with this: that the whole world is a work of art, that we are parts of the work of art… we are the words; we are the music; we are the things itself.
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being, 1941

 

Pattern-forming Processes as a Principle of Life

In poetry, image motifs find expression in the way they relate nature and the world, with an immediacy best described as the first nature of poetry. Therein is decided, not what is understood as true or false, but what is experienced as coherent or incoherent. For this purpose, memory chambers are laid out associatively in order to track down hidden patterns.

 

The interaction of poetic forms and metaphors creates a sort of circuit of alternating current, in keeping with the assumption that the basic pattern-forming processes of nature that have shaped the human hand and mind also can be found in the works the hand and mind create. (01) Because the various forms and rhythms of existence follow an order, on which the principle of all living is based.

 

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