Serif Metaphysics

I have always loved infinity. And especially, the symbol for infinity – that Mobius strip that exists in one less dimension than it should. I don’t think of A as representing an oxhead as it originally did, but am always aware that the symbol for infinity is a visual representation of the concept of infinity. It is an endless loop, spacetime turning around itself, a conceptual ouroboros, doing a 360 twist before bending back to eat its own tail.

And I wonder what infinity has to do with eightness? Eight on its side. Is eight infinite when looked at in a certain way? What if I looked at W on its side – would it reveal something transcendent. Another forever?

And infinity makes me think of 6. A 6 is infinity broken, a forever halted halfway before the final turn.

Infinity represents the idea that something has no beginning and no end. But the writing started somewhere. Writing infinity means starting somewhere and beginning again without a trace.

The circle is traditionally the symbol for something that has no beginning and no end. When I got married, we exchanged rings. In Jewish tradition, the rings are supposed to be unadorned, a simple of endless and perfection. You don’t need chatkas to adorn your endlessnessness.

Which brings me to O. It’s nothing. Is it the enclosure of emptiness? An empty basket? A full moon but a blind eye? Is nothing a sense of getting nowhere? Is it half of infinity? O O O O that Shakespeherian dread nought.

Nothing is a sense of holeness. Of wholeness.

It’s easy to write O sans serif. But it is metaphysical to write O with serifs.

An endless serif. A hidden serif. A lost serif. An eternal serif. A secret serif. A single unbroken serif. An infinite number of potential serifs. O serifim of the possible. Font of the ineffable. O serifable O.





___________
The name for the symbol is actually the lemniscate. (And so perhaps the above is solemniscate).