notes on the speck

[excerpt]

The ellipsis unfolds as a set of points. Three dots (or two, or four) signify its contents. The orthographic shorthand opens to reveal, in the words of one admirer, an “infinitude of thoughts and associations.” The ellipsis was born and grew up in the seventeenth century. In England, the site of this monstrous birth, the ellipsoidal “ll” was more often subsumed by a hard “c.” To write “…” was, thus, to speak of eclipses. If Erasmus described the parenthetical curve as a crescent moon, or lunula, then the ellipse—the eclipse—conjured its recession, “heralding a brief darkness,” or the roll of Tristram’s “black waves.” With the ellipse, one waits for the sun to emerge. And one counts. Staccatos, counterpoints, rests: the ellipse invokes ancestral amanuenses as it whispers of elliptical, Keplerian durations. Johannes Kepler: it was the German polymath who, after all, dreamt of a cosmic vision, a superterranean Somnium (1608), in which he and all earth-dwellers were reduced to “specks of dusts,” were reduced, in other “words,” to … . 

In 1610, Kepler wrote to his friend, Matthäus Wackher von Wackenfels, of a most peculiar speck. The speck was a stella nivalis, a snowflake. Crossing a bridge in a Moldau snowstorm, the nearsighted Kepler hastened to see a miracle unfurl upon his sleeve. There an abundance of stars gathered. Each of the stellae, Kepler realized, was distinct. Yet all were six-sided. Kepler wondered. Why do such specks emerge with lattice-like regularity? In his letter, Kepler attempts to describe procedures which could result in such a myriad of hexagonal forms; averse to mere typology, he conjures a crystal’s formation in space. The letter, upon its 1611 printing as the Strena seu de nive sexangula, depicts a series of spheres (spherulae) which—turned upon the page to diagrammatic circles—liken the results of this “formative faculty” to those which shape, for example, a pomegranate’s globular seeds. His “faculty” would be hailed, three centuries later, as a “revolutionary anticipation of molecular models.” Still, Kepler did not fail to find humor in his own myopia. With a wink to von Wackenfels, he wrote: non sim nescius, quam Tu ames Nihil. “I am not unaware that there is nothing you love more than you.” Kepler’s “nothing,” his Nihil, proves duplicitous upon his readers’ translations. The Latin nihil turns to the German nichts. Passed once more between friends, nichts returns to its Latin homonym—now as nix, as “snow.” The meaning unfurls between tongues. One rereads. Denotation slips. Nothing (nihil, nichts) turns to snow (nix) and snow turns to nothing. Kepler sends a letter of snow. His gift melts.