loxodrome - rhumb line -- a sailor who has chosen a direction on the compass and keeps it steadily is following a rhumb line.

rhumb line -- line on the surface of the earth that make equal oblique angles with all meridians, that is, a spiral coiling around the poles but never reaching them, and that is the path of a ship sailing alway oblique to the meridian in the direction of one and the same point of the compass

How is one to make a life, to be a life, when there so often seems to be just:

BLANKNESS

SILENCE

BOREDOM

DEATH

INCOMPLETION

CRACKS

FRAGMENTATION

NOISE

INTERRUPTION

TOO MUCH

TOO LITTLE

you might say it requires navigational skills (at the very least) on the order of sciomancy, a communication with the dark inert matter of the universe, the dead, shades, the past , with the intent of divining the future; a reading of bones in etheric bodies, charred remains in teacups, battered shores, and shattered psyches. In the glare of a 'bad infinity' as Hegel called it, all I want to do sometimes is cling to the shoreline--which IS the bad infinite, seeing only the grain of sand in the world, NOT following Blake's dictum. One way to move is...to follow the cracks, rather than stepping over them.

Some 4200 years ago (when the Hale-Bopp comet first appeared) Yu, father of the first emperor of the Xia dynasty, saw rising out of the Lo River a turtle with certain markings and cracks on its shell and meditated on their significance.

3100 years ago King Wen formalized these cracks and markings in blackened and fired tortoise shells as the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching or book of changes. King Wen (declared king posthumously by his son who became the first emperor of the Zhou dynasty) created the hexagram arrangements while imprisoned by the Shang emperor; it was not an arrangement to describe abstract principles, but to describe his life and how it could be useful in overthrowing the corrupt Shang emperor and setting up a better government.

Rather than divining the space of the other, the 64 cracks were arranged as a navigational tool toward and around the other, infinitely extensible formalized auratic handholds; a strategy of optimization to force the attention of the inanimate, the inert, in a return animation of blank mute matter but now gifted with language, a talking shell, bone, reed...

(Perhaps the crack and the aura or halo are not unrelated. The aura, keeping in mind Walter Benjamin's concept of aura as "the unique phenoma of a distance however close that may be " would thus be evidence of an infinte, abyssal crack in the idea of 'surface'. This crack, as Gilles Deleuze describes it, "...runs its course in a continuous, imperceptible, and silent way, [and] that which it transmitts does not allow itself to be determined, being necessarily vague and diffuse, transmitting only itself, it does not reproduce that which it transmits. It does not reproduce the 'same'. It reproduces nothing, being content to advance in silence and follow the lines of least resistance. As the perpetual heredity of the other, it always takes an oblique line, being ready to change directions and to alter its canvas". p 325, Logic of Sense

In the 20th century, even the angelic tradition has become cracked whether in the distance and separation of a Rilkean angel or the progressive piling of debris of Benjamin's backward facing angel, pushing it into the future almost against its will: "A metaphysical fracture intervenes in the angeological tradition. Instread of being the guardians of a threshold, here angels appear to be unsurpassable demons of the Limit." Cacciari, Necessary Angel/p. 9)

The 64 cracks, in transmitting only themselves and the contingencies of the crack, become the forcing medium for the 'future', a bolus traveling through the gullet of the world's space/time line (remembering that bolus comes from: 'to throw a mass" and means a large pill in veternary medicine); just as the 32 chromosome pairs, transmitting through a space/time matrix (means mother), a coded matter, germ plasm, finding outlet through a thin scrim of flesh, matter spoken, then speaking, gossamer DNA strands converting-machinery for matter, bringing into pearlescent relief axiomatic flesh, mute matter linguified, navigational beacons coding movement loxodromically, cutting across all meridians, pursuing its own path, irrespective of monkeys, automatons, pomegranates...