The Glyphosphere, maybe



And what about the notion of 'the glyphosphere', the entire rhizomatic ecosystem of marks? Or, perhaps, not rhizomatic: we could imagine a glyph, a textual entity, to be like an atom which doesn't connect to everything else in the universe, but may find itself over the countless ages, part of other structures from one end of the expanding, inhaling universe to the other.

(And, indeed, the textual universe is expanding, and it has been since the initial big bang of 'reading,' when a creature first had that mental flash that the sign could be intelligible.) In one age, the atom was part of Shakespeare. In another, part of a super nova inconceivably distant from Cymbeline.

Still, I imagine forces at work in the glyphosphere (whether strong, weak, gravitational, electromagnetic) across the endless dark matter of the framing page, where page or frame is what the dark of the sky is to stars. And what force is 'reading'? The distance between a glyph and its reception, a certain distance reckoned in 'meaning-years' for reading and sign are as connected in the way that time and space form the single fabric of spacetime.

Indeed, I imagine a 'readingglyph' continuum. A warping of sign, or of reading at certain speeds, or under certain conditions, or in the presence of certain other forces. In the glyphosphere, nothing can go faster than the speed of meaning. We can read anything.

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