Tag Archives: dots

Joining up the dots?⤴

from

We’re all thinking about dots. Sheri reminds us that this is not a new conversation. Terry responds and starts teasing out the metaphor. Dots and lines, or overlapping circles? Maybe both, maybe more. We don’t have the words to represent to ourselves this complex conceptual scheme. (A recurring memory: in a philosophy of science lecture we are described as three dimensional slices of four dimensional space-time worms.)

Wendy sees pictures in poems. I see pictures in my head – pictures I can’t translate onto paper because they are too transient – shape shifting wisps of mental smoke that drift at the edge of my mind. Blobs of ink dropped into water – blending with others yet keeping their shape. I try to represent what I see, but I just make a mess.

We bounce ideas off each other and they ricochet off in unexpected tangents (Wendy, again). (Another memory from philosophy of science – Newton’s “billiard ball” theory of causation.)  A wirearchy, not a hierarchy.

Dot dot dot⤴

from

Mashing together two prompts today: Wendy’s post for #MoDigiWri and the Daily Create also for today.

I visited the Dotsies site and grabbed the bookmarklet up to my tool bar, then headed over to Wendy’s blog and applied it, screen shot the result and pasted the image into Paint to crop it. The resulting image, here on the left, is her poem translated into dots.

Wendy’s post is reminding me of Bertrand Russell’s distinction between surface grammar and depth grammar. Is the grammar of the surface more misleading, as he thought? Is the underlying structure of our thought really dots? (Russell didn’t say that, he was talking about philosophical logic – I am applying a poetic licence to his idea that I am sure he would not have approved of.)

Where is all this talk of dots leading me? Watch this space … and remember that “A Line is a Dot That Went for a Walk“.