Patterns are not categories. This thought occurred to me not long after I finished my last column [1]. I was walking along Lombard Street past a parking lot surrounded by a wrought-iron fence. I looked down and noticed that next to the fence some flowers were growing and that there was a shallow pile of yellow leaves around the bottom of each and that the wind had formed each pile into a similar pattern.
My last column had much to do with categories, arrived at by classifying a group of individuals in terms of the features that they share (and ignoring all the ones they don’t share). Categories, it seemed to me, were purely mental constructs, useful to a degree, but also misleading. A pattern, on the other hand, is a real phenomenon. One discerns a pattern. One does not construct it.
My friend Harold Boatrite [2], the composer, likes to distinguish between a pattern and a form. He points out that the diatonic scale, with its perfect fifth at the beginning and augmented fourth toward the end, constitutes a form. That perfect fifth has a very strong tonic root, whereas the augmented fourth has no discernible root. That sets up a problem that is resolved upon reaching the octave, which returns you to the tonic.
By way of contrast, the whole tone scale — and the chromatic scale — is simply a pattern, a series of notes.
What is important here is that these patterns and forms are real, not mere mental constructs. This got me to realize that not all categories are the same. Those based on discernible patterns and forms are different from those based on what the schoolmen would have called accidents of being. It is important to know that a given poem is a sonnet and not a villanelle, because the two forms shape what is being said in quite different ways.
The point of these columns, as I said in the very first one [3], is to follow the method of Montaigne by taking a subject — usually expressed in the form of a quotation — and tracking the train of thought it initiates. It is, in other words, a record of experience, and, as Bryan Appleyard recently observed [4], “Our experiences seem to be the central fact of our existence.” Moreover, as he also notes, “My experience of a Vermeer is just that: my experience. And telling me why it happens is not the same as saying what it is.”
This column and my two preceding columns have tracked a train of thought initiated in my mind by Lichtenberg’s observation [5] that “Nature creates, not genera and species, but individua.”
I arrived at what I think may be the terminus ad quem of that thought train the other day when it brought to mind what God says to Moses in Exodus, “Ehyeh asher ehyeh.” This has been variously translated as “I am who am” or “I am that I am,” though I gather that it literally means something like “I will be that I will be.”
It is certainly a mysterious utterance and has always seemed to me rather a sophisticated notion for some tribes wandering the desert all those many years ago to have hit upon. I presume it is what inspired the theologian Paul Tillich to define God as “the ground of being.”
But what occurred to me was that there might be another and perhaps even better way of interpreting it. Perhaps God is the ground, not of being, but of identity. What’s the difference? Merely to be is one thing, but to know that you are and who you are — well, that is something else again. Perhaps — to change but one word in Lichtenberg’s formula — it is God who creates, not genera and species, but individua.
It is hard to imagine how else the ground of identity could create.
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Frank Wilson [8]
Latest posts by Frank Wilson (Posts [10])
- An illusion of precision [11] - September 9, 2015
- Watching the passing scene [12] - October 28, 2013
- To see like a child [13] - June 26, 2013
- Riffing and digressions [14] - January 21, 2013
- Life is a parenthesis between one darkness and another [15] - September 13, 2012