In the last couple of days I have updated my “Contemplating aloud” post at least seven times since the initial publication.

Perhaps I should have preserved all the updates, but I have felt an urgency to present it in perfect form, so I keep correcting flaws and erasing the path to the current sense of deep rightness.

Maybe I will document the intuitive-thinking process by which I arrived at this point. I do still have the change log.

But the revision process itself deserves attention, because it exemplifies craft. What I am crafting here is symbols of successive transcendence. The work is related to what the best design craft does, but at multiple simultaneous meta-levels, all of which — all of whom — require a very elusive but uncompromising scalar harmony.

It is as if a composer were trying to sound precisely the right note within a chord — which, of course, needs to harmonize horizontally with the fellow notes in the chord and the harmonies around it — but also within the sonic architecture of the concerto (so far we are inside the normal relations of musical composition), but now must answer to a simultaneous perfection of his whole corpus (suspended in eternal nowness), within his genre, within musicality itself, rooted in the essential being of sound, within being itself — every level of which exacts something entirely beyond the level before, but whose relationship must be sounded and sound. A fidelity in truth and way across planes of reality — Olamot — succeeds or fails to some degree.

In this craft, every minute adjustment reverberates across a horizontal plane of wholeness, but also, and more importantly, along a vertical hyperwholeness.

It is hard to solve a three-dimensional Rubik’s Cube. Imagine trying to solve a Rubik’s Hypercube (a four-dimensional cube, also known as a tesseract). It is to this profuse dimensionality that I refer when I use the prefix “hyper-“.

Likewise, the hermeneutic circle — the meaningful iterative interplay of whole and part — is a challenging endeavor. This work introduces multiple kinds of wholeness and particularity, all of whom must crystallize into hyperwholeness and hyperparticularity. Not to do this hyperthing to death, but to say that the Jewish hermeneutic PaRDeS framework represents a hermeneutic hypersphere seems self-evidently true. And it is this hermeneutic hypersphere that I am composing in this table.

The table is a symbolic medium, meant to transmit as faithfully and “losslessly” as possible, a hyperwhole. This piece, of course, will ultimately be actualized in the sacred materiality of letterpress. For now, glowing pixels and laser prints will have to do.

The work has been pure crafting of symbol combinations, tunings, recombinations and responsive attending to the emergent meanings, and reciprocal attentive response.

It goes like this… I make a large or small change to the table and immediately intuit the implications rippling through the hyperwhole, laterally and vertically. This intuition inspires thoughts about what I just did, why I did it, what these new intuitive resonances mean. This thought process mysteriously inspires trying something else. But it is not deductive cognition, reasoning out a possible solution to a defined problem. It is contemplation, and this contemplation invites an address in response. And then it is up to me to respond back.

Any artist will recognize what I am describing here.

As I describe this process, Abulafia and his mystical symbolic stochasm feels very near to me; and with this nearness I feel that telltale inrush of rightness, to which I might respond “amen” or “hineini”.

This process I have been describing, for me, is archetypal of the craft of design.

Design “wants” to be this, to do this kind of hyperholist work.

But down here on the flattest of flat planes, the universe of design is imprisoned in a cubicle-cell on the ground floor of a glass tower prison, where every floor from foot to crown is flat, one flatness stacked upon another.

Saying this out loud, clearly, I know why I am an exile in my own land.

I could write a book, entirely in heightened English, redescribing design through the understanding this framework is meant to convey. If I succeed, a few people will intuit the full importance of design.

It would be unfair to expect anyone else to believe in the importance of this redescription, but it would be even more unfair, and cruel besides, for anyone else to expect me to doubt it.