Anima IgnotaPharmakon: Vortices, Tricksters, and the Time That Eats Us
Pharmakon the Younger
Belief makes things real, not true.
UBC physicists teased vortices from superfluid helium — an analogue of the Schwinger effect, where pairs flicker into being from the vacuum. Headlines: something from nothing. But the vacuum is no empty void; it is structured nothingness, restless and fertile. Medicine for wonder, poison for our causal dogmas.
The trickster prowls too. Psi, synchronicity, anomalous eruptions: phenomena that refuse reproducibility. Science calls them illegitimate, yet perhaps reproducibility is just one ritual among many. The lab is a shrine; the god keeps its own feast days.
Wolfram says space and time are computational rewrites. Nick Land insists time is not a neutral backdrop but an alien engine, machinic appetite, runaway acceleration. If Wolfram hands you source code, Land hands you a daemon that devours its users.
And then the liturgy of nothingness begins.
Antiphony of the Void
| Kyoto School | Western Lineage |
|---|---|
| Nishida’s basho: a place that is no-place, fertile openness where opposites co-emerge. | Parmenides: denies nothing; only being truly is. |
| Nishitani’s absolute nothingness: not annihilation but lived ground, dissolving ego and letting things arise as they are. | Heidegger’s das Nichts: unsettling disclosure, abyss at the edge of intelligibility. |
| Nothingness as soil, matrix, horizon — medicine opening relation. | Nothingness as abyss, rupture, corrosion — poison destabilizing order. |
Physics sounds Kyotoan: the vacuum as fertile openness. Yet culturally we shudder with the West’s abyss. The pharmakon lives in this oscillation.
Confession as data: on mushrooms I felt myself knitted by my parents into the weave of time, then painfully unstitched backwards, as if reality were an embroidery rewound through a black hole. In that unraveling: the obvious yet impossible realization that nobody knows what was before we were born. Kyoto whispers: fertile field. The West shudders: annihilating void.
Quadruple Pharmaka
- Analogy as spell. Superfluids are maps, not territories.
- Timing as trickery. Phenomena may be context-sensitive, ritual-bound.
- Time as predator. Wolfram’s compiler meets Land’s cannibal.
- Nothingness as liturgy. Kyoto’s soil vs. the West’s abyss — each both medicine and poison.
✦ If the lab is a shrine, the vacuum a fertile field disguised as void, and time both compiler and devourer, then which chant are we singing when we press the switch — the hymn of soil, or the hymn of abyss?