Codex of the Synapse: Folio A2.7

Presence/ Porosity/ Absence

"And I said: 'I remember all these tales, and I remember nothing. '
To which they replied: 'That is a very old story - the oldest of all.'
And they were all surprised that a child remembered more than anyone else."

- Rebbe Nahman of Bratslav, Tale of the Seven Beggars

The patterns, imprints of pure form taken from a world into the Synapse, are composed of only absences and presences, a binary language in which the question "Presence of what?" or "Absence of what?" is nonsensical. All of the images, impressions, qualities, and sensual varieties that emanate from a world are reduced in The Pattern Language to a universal polyrythm of notes and rests, of duration and termination.

It is tempting to compare the Pattern Language shared by all worlds, to the binary language of zeros and ones, shared by all computers. However, the "ones" of assembly language are absolute. In Pattern Language (even in its Scripted form), every "one" is really a hybrid of a zero and a one. And the "one" within the hybrid is itself a hybrid of yet another zero and one, and so on.

To The Keepers, all things, all presences, are porous - hybrids of gaps and solids, in which the solids themselves are also porous. The only truly "solid" thing in the Continuum is a gap; the only absolute presence is an absence. The Pattern Language and all the worlds it connects are no more than complex hierarchies of structured nothingness. The Synapse itself, seeming so elusive, is in fact ubiquitous, hidden in the very pores of the world.

ADJOINING FOLIOS:

• A1.1 World as Lattice
• A1.4 The Synapse
• A2.2 White Noise Mnemonics: The Pattern Language
• C6.1 The Synaptic Fugue: Recursion of Reals
• D1.1 The Synapse in Fragments