Which Monkey Ate the Peaches?
Esthetics of the Void in East and West
Kurt von Meier (left) and Claudio Naranjo (right), circa 1977
Notes for a presentation with Claudio Naranjo for the Institute for Asian Studies sometime in April, 1977.
Out of respect for the depth, clarity, power and beauty of the mathematical form, let us call by the name TRINION a splitting up of reality into three roots, instead of two. The Semitic languages, Arabic and Hebrew being surviving examples, have a triliteral root structure to render into the written form (the marked state) what was first heard as sound in the spoken word. Analysed by twos, languages have nouns and verbs: names and the calling of names, product and process, the worlds of name and form. The form is the process, what we imagine as a token of the way the universe or any universe comes into being. Representations of the dichotomy in culture illustrate the first distingtion made --at a deeply generalized level--in the first-order calculus (Laws of Form). The I Ching considers 2 female, 3 male. The female gives birth, in harmony with zero, the void.
Kurt von Meier
1977