AtDDtA1: Permanent Siege

[David Casseres]

On 1/25/07, Dave Monroe <monropolitan at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> --- Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> "Beneath the rubbernecking Chums of Chance wheeled
> streets and alleyways in a Cartesian grid, sketched in
> sepia, mile on mile.  'The Great Bovine City of the
> World,' breathed Lindsay in wonder.  Indeed, the backs
> of cattle far outnumbered the tops of human hats.
> From this height it was as if the Chums, who, out on
> adventures past, had often witnessed the vast herds of
> cattle adrift in ever-changing cloudlike patterns
> across the Western plains, here saw that unshaped
> freedom being rationalized into movement only in
> straight lines and at right angles and a progressive
> reduction of choices, until the final turn through the
> final gate that led to the killing-floor."  (AtD, Pt.
> I, Ch. 2, p. 10)


It's a stunning passage, but it moves me to comment on the irony of the way
we remember Descartes, as if his great project had been to construct a grid
and to see all of reality against it.  In truth, his grid was just an
abstraction that allowed him to express the familiar, sensual forms of
classic geometry as equations made of arbitrary symbols.  Removing all
visual content from geometry, as it was felt at the time that pictures
tended to mislead more than they explained.

I wonder how quickly non-mathematical thinkers in the following centuries
seized upon the "Cartesian Grid" as metaphor for the rationalization of
civilization?
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