Category Archives: Letterpress

Math weirdness

Autobiography, Design, Geometric Meditations, Letterpress, Philosophy

I feel that The New Math: a Political History might hold the keys to the mystery of my own bizarrely qualitative and intense relationship with mathematics.

It is a weird thing, and I do not understand it, but it matters. It is inscribed in my codeset.

I have always been appallingly bad at doing math. I cannot calculate anything without making dumb, careless mistakes. (I am a disaster in the letterpress studio!)

I cannot remember times or calendar dates. I cannot retain even short sequences of figures or of anything. No kidding! — it all evaporates from my mind on contact.

It seems like some kind of quantitative dyslexia.

The only math I excelled at was geometry. I couldn’t memorize proofs, but I could derive the hell out of them them. My teacher indulged my differently-ablement, and allowed me to work on my geometry tests through lunch. I needed this time because I memorized only the barest minimal set of proofs and had to manually derive all the derivations. This was a shorter cut than to attempt memorization of arbitrary strings of shifting symbols. I was also good at computer programming, and was briefly a comp sci major in college before discrete math drove me out of the program. I coded intuitively. My classmates always came to me to help them debug their programs.

My abilities were existent, but narrow and beyond their limits dropped instantly to zero.Yet, math haunted the primitive roots of my weird soul.

An exhibit of idiosyncrasies:

James Gleick’s Chaos was the only book I owned when Susan met me in 1989. I was obsessed with the M-Set, and Mandelbrot’s preternatural pattern-recognition talents. That was an ability I prized and desired for myself.

When I read Shapinsky’s Karma I was taken by Nicholas Slonimsky’s ability to hear a piece of music once and to be able to recall and reproduce it years later — not by remembering the sounds but by grasping its structure.

All my visual designs are — and always have been — composed to OCD-level exact grids and ratios. I do not let the measurements override my eye, but my eye is never allowed to overrule the measurements. Every finished piece reconciles visual and intellective beauty.

I prized an early, dilapidated copy Roycrofter’s chapbook edition of a legendoidal “Little Journeys to Homes of Great Teachers” bio of Pythagoras. The fact that it was hastily, sloppily and semi-factually tossed off from the semi-reliable myth-drunk memory of Elbert Hubbard was not a bug, but a feature. It was only the myth I wanted. Math mysticism harmonized with my own subsonic resonances.

For a few years I sought a way to translate musical ratios (mainly tone frequencies in melodies and harmonies, and rhythmic patterns) essential to a song, graphically as spatial and color-frequency relationships. I wanted to design record cover art that, when contemplated while listening, would fuse with the music to form a panperceptual gestalt. I failed, but the hours I sat in the USC music library studying music theory books, listening to stochastic and serialist music, straining (and failing) to find elusive structural beauty in the sonic nonsense, did something good to me.

In Brian Eno’s A Year with Swollen Appendices, I was intoxicated to learn of his project of watching Conway’s Game of Life in order to train his intuition to trace the morphing organisms.

Most recently, I’ve letterpress printed both pi and phi to the myriadth place. I don’t even know what e is, but now that I know of it, I will be printing that, too. I might do a kickstarter to print these irrational constants as a series.

There’s more, but this gives a sketch of the general family of tendencies.

I should also mention: All my best thoughts originate as intuitions that first crystallize as visual diagrams, preceding language. Words sometimes lag relational gnoses by years.

I’m damn near innumerate, but some quality of quantity has a shimmery, mystical, dreadful hold on my heart.

I don’t know what is going on in my head-heart, but I think New Math in my early education somehow activated it.

ASCII sigil

Esoterism, Everso, Fables, myths & parables, Kabbalah, Letterpress, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Trefoil, Wheel

The Mercury symbol emoticon, an abstracted caduceus — used to mark a localized omnipresence of Hermes — also precisely represents the great triad, earth-man-heaven.

+O(

Plus… The four directions. Earth.

O… Cyclical life. Man.

Open parenthesis… Enveloping transcendence. Heaven.

And the dome of heaven is faithfully everted!

A static symbol articulated grammatically. A sentence collapsed into a glance. A true ASCII sigil.

This must be handset and printed. Digital ASCII art pressed into wood pulp by Gutenberg’s crusty invention, conveying truth before and beyond words, chronologic blasphemy.

Phi print

Letterpress

Yesterday, I went back to the letterpress studio to print my latest project: Phi (the golden ratio) to the myriadth place, printed with golden ink — a blend of glow-in-the-dark and gold, mixed, of course, in a golden ratio — set in a golden ratio text block on a golden ratio sheet of paper — paper and block in golden ratio to each other — with golden ratio margins above and below the text.

The internet is the rock tumbler of quotations

Chord, Design, Letterpress, Philosophy

I’ve said it and texted it so many times I assumed I must have posted it, but I can’t find it: The internet is the rock tumbler of quotations.

Many clumsy verbosities have been massively improved by the battering wear of bad listening, faulty memory, careless paraphrasing and aesthetic rounding.

Two examples. First rock tumbled William James:

When a thing is new, people say: “It is not true.”

Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: “It’s not important.”

Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say “Anyway, it’s not new.”

The raw rock:

I fully expect to see the pragmatist view of truth run through the classic stages of a theory’s career. First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.

Another is from Hannah Arendt. Rock-tumbled:

Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them ‘children’.

Raw:

Human action, like all strictly political phenomena, is bound up with human plurality, which is one of the fundamental conditions of human life insofar as it rests on the fact of natality, through which the human world is constantly invaded by strangers, newcomers whose actions and reactions cannot be foreseen by those who are already there and are going to leave in a short while. If, therefore, by starting natural processes, we have begun to act into nature, we have manifestly begun to carry our own unpredictability into that realm which we used to think of as ruled by inexorable laws.

But because I’m such a repetitious and arrogant person, happy to quote and requote myself poorly, subjecting my own clumsy words to “battering wear of bad listening, faulty memory, careless paraphrasing and aesthetic rounding” until they become nice smooth gems. For example, “The internet is the rock tumbler of quotations.”

I’ve been playing with the idea of making a letterpress book on design lifted from Jan Zwicky’s brilliant Lyric Philosophy and Wisdom & Metaphor. Each entry will be a quotation, accompanied by an extended reflection on how it illuminates some facet of design. I will be using the improved, rock tumbled version of quotations, not originals.

I love long collaborative traditions. No one person could have made anything as perfect as a bicycle.

Red Card

Ethics, Letterpress, Politics

There is room for disagreement on immigration policy.

As a staunch agonist, I honor even extreme, bitter conflict on such issues.

Those who disagree with current policy have every right to protest it publicly.

There should be less room around enforcement of current policy. Policies are designed to narrow possibilities into practical particulars of enforcement.

Protesting policy by actively interfering with its enforcement is a dangerous line to cross, if we wish to preserve rule of law, which is a fundamental precondition of liberal democracy.

But enforcement outside the bounds of policy is at least equally dangerous, and repugnant to any decent citizen of a liberal democracy.

Civil rights are non-negotiable and sacred.

This is why I have donated to the Red Card Campaign, and why I think every decent American liberal or conservative, ought to donate, too.

I am compelled to letterpress print Red Cards. All sacred ideas call me to the press.

“What is Design?” chapbook

Design, Letterpress, Philosophy

I’ve been mulling over a project involving letterpress printed design wisdom.

Today, I am fantasizing about letterpress printing a chapbook, in an aphorism-reflection format inspired by Jan Zwicky’s beautiful Lyric Philosophy and Wisdom & Metaphor.

Here is my aphorism list so far:

  • “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” (Winston Churchill)
  • “Design is everything. Everything is design.” (Paul Rand)
  • “Design should be invisible.” (Beatrice Warde)
  • “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
  • “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
  • “In true love it is the soul that envelops the body.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)
  • “Men who love wisdom should acquaint themselves with a great many particulars” (Heraclitus)
  • “The best design tool is a long eraser with a pencil at one end.” (Marty Neumeier)
  • “You can’t decide the way forward. You have to design the way forward.” (Marty Neumeier)
  • “Compete to be unique, not the best” (Joan Magretta, channeling Michael Porter)
  • “Usefulness, usability, and desirability: A useful design is one that people need and will use. A usable design is one they can either use immediately or learn to use readily. A desirable design is one they want.” (Liz Sanders)
  • “We think with our hands.” (Tim Brown)
  • “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.” (Anonymous)
  • “Behind a desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.” (John LeCarre)
  • “Conflict divides the world into four halves.” (Anomalogue)
  • “Craft is material dialogue.” (Anomalogue)
  • “A problem well put is a problem half solved.” (John Dewey)
  • “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first fifty-five minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.” (Albert Einstein)
  • “The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.” (Bertrand Russell)
  • “Start anywhere.” (John Cage)
  • “Nothing happens without a plan. Nothing happens according to plan.” (Anonymous)
  • “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.” (Carl von Clausewitz)
  • “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.'” (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
  • “The aim of philosophy is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” (Willfred Sellars)
  • “He who sees badly sees less and less; he who listens badly hears more than has been said.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)
  • “What has a name is real.” (Basque saying)
  • “Never mistake motion for action.” (Ernest Hemingway)
  • “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” (Alan Kay)
  • “The first minute of action is worth more than a year of perfect planning.” (James Clear)
  • “It is often easier to fight for principles than to live up to them.” (Adlai Stevenson)

I need more design-related aphorisms. If you have any, please share.

Messenger

Autobiography, Letterpress, Love

In the autumn of 1989, my weirdo friend Rob approached me and, without comment, handed me a slip of paper, upon which he had typed out a quotation:

“Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see each other whole against the sky.”

The words were from a letter written by Rainer Maria Rilke, the year his love affair with Lou Andreas-Salomé “ended”. In truth it did not end, but had consummated and rebirthed itself — and Rilke, too — as something novel and beyond the range of talk.

While this quotation is credited to Rilke because the words flowed from his pen, the capacity to conceive it came from Salomé. This message was one of their many children.

I still don’t know why Rob decided to type this message, nor why he chose me as its recipient. I’ve asked Rob, and he doesn’t remember doing it. He did a lot of mysteriously transmissive things like that back then. He was a medium, passing things along. He was a mailman.

But that message from the past was exactly the one I needed at that moment. I was suffocating my future wife, and I was set to lose her. This message gave me an entirely new future — a future for which I am grateful — filled with children.

Of course, this is now a magical letterpress project.

The first step is to reproduce the slip of paper Rob handed me. It will be hand-set in lead type and hand-printed. The second step is to sneak up on Rob and place a slip of paper in his hand. The third step is to get away without ruining it with explanation.

Rob deserves to receive the message he delivered.

She was already root

Fables, myths & parables, Kabbalah, Letterpress, Love, Symbols and diagrams

Reading Lou Andreas-Salome this morning I made an obvious connection that I’d missed.

Two facts are characteristic of the problem of the erotic: First of all, that eroticism should be considered as a special case within the sphere of physiological, psychical, and social relations, rather than independently and separately as is often the case. But secondly, that it once again links together these three kinds of relations, merging them into one, and making them its problem.

Rooted since the beginning in the substrate of all existence, eroticism grows from a soil that is ever the same, rich and strong, to whatever height it grows, whatever the immensity, the space occupied by the marvelous tree in which it flowers — subsisting — even when that soil is entirely overrun by edifices — below them, in all its primeval, obscure, and earthy strength. Its immense value to life consists precisely in the fact that, capable though it is of imposing its hegemony widely or of incarnating noble ideals, it has no need to do so, but can draw a surplus of strength from any humus, adapt to serve life in any possible circumstance. Thus we find eroticism associated with the almost purely vegetative functions of our physical being, bound closely to them, and even if it does not become, like these functions, an absolute necessity of existence, it continues to exert a powerful influence upon them. That is why, even in its elevated forms and manifestations, even at the topmost point of the most complex ecstasies of love, there remains in it something of the simplicity and profundity of its origins, always present and ineradicable — something of that healthy gaiety which experiences the life of the body — in the specific sense of the satisfaction of the instincts — as always new, always young and, so to speak, like life itself in its primitive sense. Just as all healthy beings rejoice at awakening, or in their daily bread, or in walking in the fresh air, with a pleasure that is constantly renewed, as if at a joy that is born anew each day, and just as the beginnings of neurosis can often be accurately diagnosed in the fact that these daily joys, these fundamental necessities, become tainted with “boredom,” with “monotony,” with “nausea,” likewise, in the existence of the erotic, behind and beneath the other moments of happiness that it entails, there is always present a happiness which, hardly felt and impossible to measure, man shares with everything that, like himself, breathes.

I cannot help but recall a simple, startling line from Rilke’s “Orpheus. Euridice. Hermes.”

She had come into a new virginity
and was untouchable; her sex had closed
like a young flower at nightfall, and her hands
had grown so unused to marriage that the god’s
infinitely gentle touch of guidance
hurt her, like an undesired kiss.
She was no longer that woman with blue eyes
who once had echoed through the poet’s songs,
no longer the wide couch’s scent and island,
and that man’s property no longer.
She was already loosened like long hair,
poured out like fallen rain,
shared like a limitless supply.
She was already root.

Phisophistry

Autobiography, Letterpress

On January 6, 2018 I spent the entire day failing to recognize the only Phi Day of this century, and the only one that will occur in our lifetime.

I will be haunted forever by a faint regret over this negligence.

From this year forward, on every January 6th, I will commemorate my obliviousness and renew and intensify my faint sadness at missing something so momentous.

And this sadness will misdirect my attention from other, equally momentous occurrences, which happen every instant of every day.

For example, I’m sure I missed the the exact golden ratio point between my birth and death, too — maybe both of them.

38.196601125% of my life probably passed a long time ago. If it is passing right now, I’ll live to 149, and die on September 17, 2118.

61.803398874% might have come and gone as well. If it is passing right now, God willing, I’ll die March 6, 2061, having lived to 92 years old.

I may have to consummate this sad awareness by letterpress printing Phi posters.

I will sell approximately zero of them at the price I will demand.

Kabbalistic everso

Everso, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Letterpress, Metaphysics, Philosophy

I spent all day Monday (Dec 22, 2025) printing two Sefirot pieces — one safely orthodox and one riskily extra-orthodox (or maybe postorthodox, but probably flat-out wrong).

Now I want to sanctify what I printed by using it to say impossible things.

For years, I’ve been working out a topological conception of modes of knowing. The topology can be expressed clearly in Kabbalistic language. Apologies for the repetition of recent posts. I’m rehearsing. I might fold Everso and Exnihilist Manifesto together into a short Kabbalistic text.

Natural knowing is cognitive comprehension (etymologically “together-grasping”) and conception (“together-taking”) of finite forms, defined as something against an indefinite field of everything else. Object: ob-ject “thrust-before”.

Let us call this kind of objective understanding Pshat, the subject who understands in this mode Nefesh, and everything given by this kind of understanding Assiyah. Assiyah is a world of convex objectivity — material or nonmaterial — physical, psychic, conceptual, ethical, etc. In Assiyah, even subjects have objective form.

Objective form as opposed to what? This, precisely, is the problem. Few people transcend Pshat, in order to have something with which to compare it — mainly artists, poets, mystics, philosophers, literary connoisseurs and weirdos.

To transcend Pshat we must apperceive our acts of perception, conception, comprehension, and our failures to conceive and comprehend, and our changes in perception, conception, comprehension. The grasping of comprehension and the receiving of conception are not forms that can be comprehended or conceived, but rather formative acts, which participate in one of myriad possibilities of formation.

Formation is known only indirectly by the forms they produce. They are trees known by their fruit. They are media known by their content. Behind all objectivity — “thrust-beneath” it, “under-standing” it — is subject.

Let us call this kind of understanding Remez, the subject who understands in this mode Ruach, and everything given by this kind of understanding Yetzirah. Yetzirah is a world of concave subjects, each an ontology with its own objectivity.

Expressed topologically: Forms are convex; formation is concave.

Transcending form altogether (both form and forming) is the supraformal ground of form and forming, which enters awareness when formative modes destabilize and recrystallize, and entirely new givens are revealed ex nihilo. New givens are received in a luminous flood of meaning and wonder. Reality is profoundly strange and infinitely meaningful.

What is pragmatically comprised by the word “everything” is surprised by more-than-everything.

Let us call this kind of understanding Drash, the “subject” who understands in this mode Neshamah, and the more-than-everything given by this kind of “understanding” is Beriah. Beriah is a world entirely beyond subjectivity and objectivity — the ground of both and neither.

The luminous influx of meaning is Sod, the “subject” who receives it is Chayah, and it emanates from Atzilut.

Confessions of a material misogynist

Autobiography, Design, Kabbalah, Letterpress

As a kid, I was a bad painter.

While painting, whenever a brush stroke offered me something interesting or beautiful to me, I would be slightly offended, because I hadn’t envisioned and ordered it myself, and then I’d go in and try to make it my own, snuff out whatever had been coming to life with my explicating brush. In Gen-X playground parlance, “If I wanted your opinion, I’d beat it out of you.”

And that, precisely, was what made my paintings bad and boring and dead to the eye. Good painting is precisely collaboration with the paint’s own ideas. It is a dance of activity and receptivity and reciprocity.

Each medium has its own optimal center of gravity, which is the heart of its own craft — what draws an artist to work in that medium, rather than in another.

So, I was much better suited to pen and ink. I listened better to what ink images suggested to me — maybe because those images emerged from materials more obedient to my hand’s will. These suggestions came from something that felt under my control. Paint defied control, and I was too materially misogynist to accept that kind of resistance. I wanted a nice submissive material, not a raging mood-swinging lunatic with a headful of intuitions of who-knows-what ambushing (ambrushing) me with her visions.

(Damn. Maybe I should try painting again!)

But all this is preface to another idea.

The same thing can happen with ideas — especially symbolic ideas with visual origins.

It is entirely possible to “have” thoughts with their own agency — ideas who can collaborate with you, or who might refuse to collaborate — or who can haunt, mock or reject you. Visually inspired ideas can sit, silently watching, waiting for you to wake up.

There is still the bad painter’s impulse in me. Something intellectually misogynistic in me wants to control my more autonomous ideas with explication — to hold them until they are clearly, explicitly understood — to not stop short at poetic opacity.

But is poetry really opaque? Maybe poetry is unclear because instead of transmitting ideas, or reflecting them, they emit living light of their their own. Poetic speech is autonomous speech.

I feel that this strange dialectic Sefirot I drew is trying to tell me all this.

She started out with someone else, but with me, she started intimating new truths.

I think I will print this new Sefirot.

The plate arrives today.

Some quotes I’ve quoted before:

Bob Dylan:

At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempt to shovel the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means

At times I think there are no words
But these to tell what’s true
But there are no truths outside
The gates of Eden

Nietzsche:

Supposing truth is a woman — what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? that the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman’s heart? What is certain is that she has not allowed herself to be won: — and today every kind of dogmatism is left standing dispirited and discouraged. If it is left standing at all! For there are scoffers who claim that it has fallen, that all dogmatism lies on the ground, even more, that all dogmatism is dying. Speaking seriously, there are good reasons why all philosophical dogmatizing, however solemn and definitive its airs used to be, may nevertheless have been no more than a noble childishness and tyronism; and perhaps the time is at hand when it will be comprehended again and again what actually was sufficient to furnish the cornerstone for such sublime and unconditional philosophers’ edifices as the dogmatists have built so far — any old popular superstition from time immemorial (like the soul superstition which, in the form of the subject and ego superstition, has not even yet ceased to do mischief), some play on words perhaps, a seduction by grammar, or an audacious generalization of very narrow, very personal, very human, all too human facts.

Latour, a good Mary-adoring Catholic boy:

We should not decide apriori what the state of forces will be beforehand or what will count as a force. If the word “force” appears too mechanical or too bellicose, then we can talk of weakness. It is because we ignore what will resist and what will not resist that we have to touch and crumble, grope, caress, and bend, without knowing when what we touch will yield, strengthen, weaken, or uncoil like a spring. But since we all play with different fields of force and weakness, we do not know the state of force, and this ignorance may be the only thing we have in common.

One person, for instance, likes to play with wounds. He excels in following lacerations to the point where they resist and uses catgut under the microscope with all the skill at his command to sew the edges together. Another person likes the ordeal of battle. He never knows beforehand if the front will weaken or give way. He likes to reinforce it at a stroke by dispatching fresh troops. He likes to see his troops melt away before the guns and then see how they regroup in the shelter of a ditch to change their weakness into strength and turn the enemy column into a scattering rabble. This woman likes to study the feelings that she sees on the faces of the children whom she treats. She likes to use a word to soothe worries, a cuddle to settle fears that have gripped a mind. Sometimes the fear is so great that it overwhelms her and sets her pulse racing. She does not know whether she will get angry or hit the child. Then she says a few words that dispel the anguish and turn it into fits of laughter. This is how she gives sense to the words “resist” or “give way.” This is the material from which she learns the meaning of the word “reality.” Someone else might like to manipulate sentences: mounting words, assembling them, holding them together, watching them acquire meaning from their order or lose meaning because of a misplaced word. This is the material to which she attaches herself, and she likes nothing more than when the words start to knit themselves together so that it is no longer possible to add a word without resistance from all the others. Are words forces? Are they capable of fighting, revolting, betraying, playing, or killing?

Yes indeed, like all materials, they may resist or give way. It is materials that divide us, not what we do with them. If you tell me what you feel when you wrestle with them, I will recognize you as an alter ego even if your interests are totally foreign to me.

One person, for example, likes white sauce in the way that the other loves sentences. He likes to watch the mixture of flour and butter changing as milk is carefully added to it. A satisfyingly smooth paste results, which flows in strips and can be poured onto grated cheese to make a sauce. He loves the excitement of judging whether the quantities are just right, whether the time of cooking is correct, whether the gas is properly adjusted. These forces are just as slippery, risky, and important as any others. The next person does not like cooking, which he finds uninteresting. More than anything else he loves to watch the resistance and the fate of cells in Agar gels. He likes the rapid movement when he sows invisible traces with a pipette in the Petri dishes. All his emotions are invested in the future of his colonies of cells. Will they grow? Will they perish? Everything depends on dishes 35 and 12, and his whole career is attached to the few mutants able to resist the dreadful ordeal to which they have been subjected. For him this is “matter,” this is where Jacob wrestles with the Angel. Everything else is unreal, since he sees others manipulate matter that he does not feel himself. Another researcher feels happy only when he can transform a perfect machine that seems immutable to everyone else into a disorderly association of forces with which he can play around. The wing of the aircraft is always in front of the aileron, but he renegotiates the obvious and moves the wing to the back. He spends years testing the solidity of the alliances that make his dreams impossible, dissociating allies from each other, one by one, in patience or anger. Another person enjoys only the gentle fear of trying to seduce a woman, the passionate instant between losing face, being slapped, finding himself trapped, or succeeding. He may waste weeks mapping the contours of a way to attain each woman. He prefers not to know what will happen, whether he will come unstuck, climb gently, fall back in good order, or reach the temple of his wishes.

So we do not value the same materials, but we like to do the same things with them — that is, to learn the meaning of strong and weak, real and unreal, associated or dissociated. We argue constantly with one another about the relative importance of these materials, their significance and their order of precedence, but we forget that they are the same size and that nothing is more complex, multiple, real, palpable, or interesting than anything else. This materialism will cause the pretty materialisms of the past to fade. With their layers of homogeneous matter and force, those past materialisms were so pure that they became almost immaterial.

No, we do not know what forces there are, nor their balance. We do not want to reduce anything to anything else. …

Nietzsche, again:

Alas, what are you after all, my written and painted thoughts! It was not long ago that you were still so colorful, young, and malicious, full of thorns and secret spices — you made me sneeze and laugh — and now? You have already taken off your novelty, and some of you are ready, I fear, to become truths: they already look so immortal, so pathetically decent, so dull! And has it ever been different? What things do we copy, writing and painting, we mandarins with Chinese brushes, we immortalizers of things that can be written — what are the only things we are able to paint? Alas, always only what is on the verge of withering and losing its fragrance! Alas, always only storms that are passing, exhausted, and feelings that are autumnal and yellow! Alas, always only birds that grew weary of flying and flew astray and now can be caught by hand — by our hand! We immortalize what cannot live and fly much longer — only weary and mellow things! And it is only your afternoon, you, my written and painted thoughts, for which alone I have colors, many colors perhaps, many motley caresses and fifty yellows and browns and greens and reds: but nobody will guess from that how you looked in your morning, you sudden sparks and wonders of my solitude, you my old beloved — wicked thoughts!

A last sad reflection on the professional work I am trying to do.

I too love to play with materials, and they are some very strange materials.

The materials I love are perplexities — that soul-wracking migraine liminality, hovering like a heat mirage on the outer edges of intelligibility.

Organizational conflict, chaos, anomie, dysfunction generate collective perplexity. So this is where I go.

My job — though nobody knows it, or even knows how to know it — is to air-drop into perplexed organizations, figure out the lay of the land, waters, forests, and navigate my way out by finding new ways to understand — all the while mapping what I find.

Meanwhile, I am dodging both hostile and friendly fire. I am shouted at: “Show us where you are going! You are supposed to be an expert, so where is your map? What is your route? Show your turn by turn directions!”

Some clients figure it out, and become travel companions.

Some refuse to come along until you’ve shown them what can only be shown when the work has been done.

Some frag you in some muddy ditch somewhere on the edge of a frozen forest. “You are drawing a map as you navigate in places you don’t even know. Not only do you not have the answers, or a solution — you don’t even have questions. You don’t even know the problem!”

ack ack ack ack

One last quote, perhaps my most overquoted quote of all, Wittgenstein’s definition of a philosophical problem:

A philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about.”

You cannot say this, so I do say it to anyone with ears that hear.

My life sucks, and it is glorious.

Letterpress design wisdom

Design, Letterpress

I’m adding this to my backlog of useful design wisdom to letterpress.

“Conflict divides the world into four halves.”

The current backlog also includes:

  • “Nothing happens without a plan. Nothing happens according to plan.”
  • “What has a name is real.”
  • “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.'” – Ludwig Wittgenstein

I may also want to do a Useful / Usable / Desirable venn diagram.

I’ve already printed two pieces in the series.

And

Ten, no more, no less

Kabbalah, Letterpress

I sent off for three plates yesterday. The ultra-thick Crane’s Lettra I ordered is supposed to arrive day after tomorrow. I have studio time scheduled for the week after Christmas.

My first priority is the Jacob’s Ladder reference sheet.

Another piece is the (extremely cool-looking) circular Sefirot (Iggulim), which depicts the ray of Divine Light (Kav) penetrating the bubble of finite Nothingness within Infinitude (Tzimtzum), shattering it. I tried a Hebrew-English version, but it looks better with just Hebrew, so that is what I am printing.

And finally, I may be printing a highly unorthodox and questionable — possibly heretical — Sefirot, of occult, non-Jewish origin, which has been sternly rejected by every Kabbalah expert I’ve shown it to. I have found a way to bring it into better alignment with the tradition, though, through strategic use of parentheses, indicating non-sefirah status of some of the beings included in the symbol, bringing the number to yod.

My hope is that what seems unorthodox through the template of convention, might eventually turn out to be postorthodox.

But most notions like this are just wrong.

My guts, though, tell me it is right.

But contrary to mystical romantic prejudice, guts are quite capable of being wrong.

Isolated guts are as unreliable as isolated brains and isolated hearts and isolated hands.

Only when guts and brains and hearts and hands converse in conflictual mutual respect, and unite the whole self in sensus communis of heart, soul and strength — and then, together, a whole community of united bodies convene in conflictual mutual respect and unite in greater sensus communis of hearts, souls and strengths — and with this thoroughgoing imperfect oneness approach the perfect Oneness — now we have a fair chance at clear, meaningful, practical, sharable, common-sensical truth.

Kabbalah is not a set of canonical truths. It is a language by which truth that needs saying — which cannot otherwise be said — may be said. It is a container, not contents. It is a medium whose speech is the message.

Sefirot reference sheet

Kabbalah, Letterpress

This is the latest version of my Sefirot reference sheet. I’ve made both layout and content refinements, and I’m close to ordering a plate and scheduling time in the letterpress studio. I may print this over the holidays.

Dialectic sefirot

Kabbalah, Letterpress

I got the idea for this Sefirot from whoever this is via whoever this is. I might have to letterpress it.

I made some changes to improve the aesthetics and to make the dialectic even denser.

(Note December 21, 2025: I have redrawn the dialectic Sefirot, using parentheses to losslessly bring this rendering into line with the greater tradition, by having no more and no less than ten Sefirot. While I’m appending this post, I also want to note that the “upward” superscending theosophic path is clearly an Apollinian one, and the “downward” subscending ecstatic path is a Dionysian one.)

The original image was designed to highlight the thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic structure inherent in the Sefirot. The addition of the Kav penetrating directly into Malchut makes even more explicit the synthesis of the Iggulim and Yosher forms of the Sefirot in the original diagram.

A third synthesis occurs between Malkhut and Shekhinah, and (fourth) worse — possibly incorrectly — between Shekhinah and Keter. (These two might be an indirect expression of Moshe Idel’s idea that Kabbalah is a synthesis of antithetical theosophic and ecstatic traditions.)

Additionally, this diagram synthesizes the traditional vertical (higher-lower) conception of metaphysics with one that is eversive (inward-outward), by bending the verticality around the egoic center of Malkhut, from which all finite beings receive the givens of revelation.

I wonder if this image was influenced by having Berenice Abbott’s “Interference of Waves” as my desktop image for the last five years.

Berenice Abbott. Interference of Waves. 1958-61 | MoMA

Insight bombs

Autobiography, Kabbalah, Letterpress

“It lies beyond the scope of this study to deal in a comprehensive manner with the issue of [y]… for a comprehensive study of this matter would require a separate study. But for present purposes, suffice it to say [x]…”

Whenever an author starts a sentence this way, I am on the edge of my seat, because I just know the author is winding up to deliver an insight bomb that I will be obsessive-compelled to put in my insane quotation wiki and/or letterpress print into pulpy paper.

To steal Jerry Seinfeld’s “why don’t we make the whole airplane out of the black box” joke, I would like a whole book made of matters requiring a whole book to study comprehensively.

(And this is exactly what Nietzsche and Borges did in their respective hyperfictional genres! Which is exactly why I adore them both. I read them with an ecstatic part of “myself” who feels entire unborn worlds within a sentence, word or letter.)

Letterpress “theory-practice” print

Autobiography, Design, Letterpress, Star

Helen and I spent yesterday parallel printing at the Stukenborg Press with art saint Bryan Baker.

I printed a third, more realistic version of the “Tend the Root” print, requested by Susan and several others who missed the realism of my first screenprinted version, and preferred it to the abstracted asterisk version. I still prefer the asterisk, for visual and symbolic reasons.

More significantly, Bryan has, after months of gentle nudging, managed to persuade me to return to manually setting lead type, which has made my letterpress obsession considerably worse.

(Last time I did this was in 1992, when I handset my wedding invitation, framed with a wood-engraved decorative border of pomegranates and dogwood blossoms. Susan and I pulled a literal all-nighter in the printing studio hand-producing the invitations. Before that, I handset the ingredients of Doritos. Legend has it my Grandpa Dave worked as a typesetter in some kind of association with Frederic Goudy. I’m also apparently somehow descended from someone connected with the founding of Charles Scribner’s Sons. I blame my ancestors for the visceral craziness I feel around books and letterpress. I also blame my design professor Richard Rose for waking this weird impulses lurking in my blood.)

I set one of my favorite aphorisms, frequently misattributed to Yogi Berra:

In theory, there is no difference
between theory and practice,
but in practice there is.

This is one of the wisest and most radically conservative and designerly utterances I have ever heard, and I love it. It demanded to be smushed into the pulpiest of papers.