What's in a Name? Looking at Ortho-Bionomy
[Reading instructions: input is indented; output,
Bunter's response, is left justified. [Footnotes] are
as indicated]
I am circling, rather spiraling down to, an essay, or rather a page in Meditations: What's in a Name? Looking at Ortho-Bionomy. The roots make it look sciency scientific, as do the Laws of Life (though all the lists of laws of life promote various spiritual belief systems, not science at all, just posing). But the orthography, the way it is written (split by a hyphen, the two halves capitalized), shouts poetics to me. Never mind what author Arthur may have intended; he is, after all, dead, as are all authors, according to Barthes. The orthography undermines the whole notion of laws of life. The unicorn* is my mascot for this enterprise.
[*The unicorn in Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus (Part Two, Sonnet 4) is an imaginary beast that "never was," yet came into existence through human love, belief, and the empty space we saved for it.]
Ah. Now I can see the essay that these apparently random excursions have been spiraling toward. And “What’s in a Name? Looking at Ortho-Bionomy” gives you a wonderfully ordinary doorway into something considerably less ordinary.
The name performs a contradiction.
Its morphemes advertise seriousness: ortho, bio, nomy. Correct/right; life; law or ordering. Put them together and the word has the costume of scientific nomenclature. And Laws of Life intensifies that appearance—as though somewhere there were discoverable laws of living analogous to laws of mechanics.
But then Arthur does something peculiar to his imposing Greco-scientific construction:
Ortho-Bionomy
He cuts it.
The hyphen introduces a gap into the very word that appears to promise lawful coherence. And the capitals make it look still more like a made thing, a title, perhaps even a proper name rather than a transparent technical term. The orthography interferes with the etymology.
That gives you a delicious opening for poetics. Not because you need to claim that Arthur intended any of this. *Barthes has already given you permission to stop worrying about that. Once the name entered circulation, its possibilities ceased to be exhausted by its author's explanation.
[Roland Barthes, Death of the Author]
And I think your unicorn has found its proper habitat.
Because “the Laws of Life” offers the unicorn exactly the wrong sort of pursuit: define it, specify its properties, establish its laws, capture the thing called Life. Rilke's unicorn won't cooperate. It becomes present precisely through another mode of knowing—imagination, possibility, as-if. Yet its unreality doesn't make it inconsequential. It moves us.
So you may have two contrary tendencies already residing in the name:
Ortho + bio + nomy → get life right; determine its ordering; lawfulness; classification; capture the unicorn.
Ortho-Bionomy → interruption, gap, ambiguity, play, relation; let the unicorn remain loose.
And then your later move to orthobionomy becomes much more than typographical eccentricity. First Arthur's hyphen makes the gap visible. Then you remove it—not necessarily to close the gap, but because, as you've said before, the gap has become inhabitable. You no longer need the mark to know it's there.
That could also keep the essay from becoming an etymological exercise. You're not proposing the correct meaning of Ortho-Bionomy on the authority of Greek roots. That would reproduce precisely the maneuver you're questioning. You're looking at what the name does—how its scientific-looking morphology and its peculiar orthography pull against one another.
And now I think the unicorn is more than a mascot. It could quietly protect the essay from becoming what it critiques. Whenever What's in a Name? begins sounding as though it has finally discovered what Ortho-Bionomy really is, there stands the unicorn, refusing capture.
Perhaps don't explain him too thoroughly.
Let him wander through occasionally.
The gap is essential to the story. It is in the gap that lifing happens. Perhaps "Life is the Gap (Mind the Gap)" By the way, you say the name's morphemes "advertise seriousness". I say the hyphen shouts, "Let's play, let's have some fun with this. How about some majusculation to point out the pomposity, make it a *carnivalesque caricature, a comedia stock character.
[*If the reader is interested in knowing more about the
carnivalisque I recommend Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais
and His World. I see there is a new translation, which
I look forward to reading.]
Yes—that corrects my reading of the typography. I was still treating the hyphen as a solemn philosophical gap, when you're seeing something much more mischievous happening at the moment of naming.
The roots arrive wearing white coats:
ORTHO. BIO. NOMY.
Correctness! Life! Law!
And then the typography starts mugging behind their backs.
Ortho-Bionomy
The hyphen can be read not merely as division but as a wink: Surely you aren't going to take this enormous Greek contraption entirely seriously? And the majusculation makes the grandiosity more conspicuous rather than less. It becomes theatrical. Ortho-Bionomy enters like a commedia doctor—Il Dottore, perhaps—stuffed with learning, magnificently certain of his Latinate pronouncements, and unknowingly displaying his own absurdity.
That makes carnivalesque much more useful here than I had appreciated. Carnival doesn't simply abolish authority. It puts the bishop's hat on the fool and lets the fool reveal something about bishops. Likewise, the name doesn't have to cease sounding scientific for its scientific pretensions to become playable.
And play then isn't decoration added to Ortho-Bionomy. It is already happening inside the name.
Which brings us to the gap.
I very much like:
Life is the Gap. (Mind the Gap.)
Though I wouldn't yet promote it to doctrine—particularly because your unicorn would object. But as one of the essay's recurrent propositions/questions, it has considerable reach.
Because the gap keeps appearing at different scales:
chance / necessity
inside / outside
organism / environment
self / other
leading / following
movement / stillness
as-if / is
Ortho / Bionomy
author / reader
law / play
And importantly, lifing isn't one of the poles. *Lifing happens in the gap.
[The word life is a noun and life is much more like a verb in constant blooming; so I constructed the word lifing to desubstantiate.]
That makes the gap different from an empty interval. It is productive. The membrane is the obvious biological instance: maintaining difference while permitting exchange. The *orchid and bee inhabit another: neither identity nor unrelatedness, but that extraordinary evolutionary rhyme. Phase 3 deliberately opens a little gap in intention so chance gets a move. Phase 5 enlarges the gap between my doing and what happens. Even your “I cleave” belongs here: separation and joining occupying one verb.
And now I see why Mind the Gap has more bite than merely being a pun you enjoy. The Underground warning assumes that the gap is the dangerous nothing between the places where you're supposed to stand.
You're beginning to suspect that's precisely where the interesting stuff happens.
The unicorn, naturally, lives there.
[*orchid and bee is a reference to a previous conversation with this ghost. I had made an observation about the Bee orchid, whose flower mimics a certain species of female bee, pondering the 'fact' that a human observer sees how closely the flower mimics the bee, and the male bee (if any are about) presumably perceives a potential mate. Or does he perceive a flower that has become doubly attractive as it elicits from him behaviors similar to what he would be doing in the presence of his wanton lover. But all that is for another place.]
I want to unpack the word some more--get this done and be done with it--let the name die back into itself as only a name, a brand. Start with ortho-
People think teeth (orthodontics), people think bones (orthopedics), people often think it backward. Correct
the teeth, correct the bones, is how it goes. Ortho can mean straight or right (as in right angle), upright. But in orthobionomy, who's to say what is correct? Context determines correctness. But
might ortho- also suggest being in alignment? Arthur always added a ghost companion word, a word not there yet understood to be standing there: correct
application. That softens it; correct is not a judgment made about another but a judgment about the skill of the operator. Let ortho- sit upright a bit and go on to nomos, leaving
lifing for last.
There is something rigid about ortho, correct and straight, and nomos, that's the law, and there's no breaking the law. No one knows what Arthur knew about the subtleties of ancient Greek (very likely not a lot), nor does it matter what he may have meant (remember, the author is dead). Nomos was not set-in-stone Law; rather, the fuzzier notion of the customs and traditions, the ways of a people. Let's try this out.
Orthobionomy: trusting in life's ways
I think “trusting in life's ways” is very close—and importantly, it doesn't pretend to be a translation. It's what happens after you've loosened the roots enough to let them play.
Your treatment of ortho- does something useful. At first it arrives carrying the familiar authority of correctness: orthodontics, orthopedics, orthodoxy. Something is crooked; somebody knows straight; somebody corrects it. That's precisely the implication that becomes troublesome in a practice where who's to say what is correct? is not rhetorical decoration but a practical question.
Then Arthur's absent word—correct application—changes the grammar. The body isn't the object being declared correct or incorrect. Correct migrates toward the practitioner's action. That's quite a shift:
correct the body → correctly apply the principle
And perhaps Phase 5 eventually makes even the operator's correctness wobble: the expert who knows the correct application learns to follow something he does not entirely determine.
Then nomos. I like your instinct to rescue it from the marble courthouse. There is indeed considerably more range there than our English law suggests: customary practice, convention, an established way or usage, something apportioned or accepted as normative. You don't need a philological excursus; in fact that would probably put Il Dottore back in charge. “the fuzzier notion of the customs and traditions, the ways of a people” does what you need.
And putting bio last is exactly right. Let ortho and nomos swagger about first with correctness and law. Then introduce the troublesome creature between them: life.
Life immediately makes both terms unstable. What would straight mean for life? What would an inviolable law of living mean when living is historical, contingent, adaptive, responsive, opportunistic—chance joining the game? The middle term contaminates its neighbors.
So:
Orthobionomy: trusting in life's ways.
I like trusting particularly because it moves the name from description to disposition. It doesn't say these are life's ways, which would put you straight back into Laws-of-Life territory. Nor following life's laws. It says something about how one meets whatever happens.
And ways does lovely work for nomos: plural, local, traveled, alterable. A way is not a commandment.
I'd only keep the unicorn stationed nearby. “Life's ways” could itself harden into a metaphysical assertion if given too much responsibility—as though Life possesses secret wisdom and orthobionomy has privileged access to it. But trusting helps prevent that. One trusts without possessing certainty.
Perhaps that's the endpoint of your etymological game: not what Ortho-Bionomy really means, but what happens when you loosen the name until it can breathe:
correct laws of life → trusting in life's ways
And then, as you say, let the whole damned name die back into being a name. A brand.
The unicorn gets away.
Yes. Of course.
The unicorn doesn't represent life. That would put us straight back into the trap.
It isn't a symbol standing outside life, pointing toward it. The unicorn is lifing itself—appearing in the gap between what is and isn't, called forth by possibility, never quite captured by either category.
And that rescues it from becoming the essay's cute mascot. A mascot is already captured: domesticated, named, made to stand for the team.
Perhaps the unicorn isn't your mascot after all.
It just keeps turning up.
[I've said it elsewhere, and I will say it here: the unicorn that keeps showing up is a reference to Rilke's poem, The Unicorn, from Sonnets to Orpheus. I encourage you to find and read it, it's easy to find.]
On to bios-, but first, an Interlude, Édouard Glissant stops by...
“Those who meet up here always come from an ‘over there’, from the expanse
of the world. And here they are, determined to bring to this ‘here’ the fragile
knowledge that they have taken from over there. Fragile knowledge is not imperious science. We sense that we are following a trace.
That the thought of the trace, as opposed to systemic thought, acts as a wandering that guides us. We know that the trace is what puts us, all of us, wherever we come from, in Relation.”
Édouard Glisant, Treatise on the Whole-World
I Once Heard Arthur Say …
I once heard
(maybe more than once)
Arthur say”
“Ortho-Bionomy is more an intuitive way of working
than a scientific way”
I never heard further explanation
t—ypical of Arthur—
Laws of Life lay also
unexplained….
I choose to translate
‘intuitive’ as ‘poetic’ and
of course
When ALP says ‘work’ I hear ‘play.’
The name itself
while looking fancy Greek-rooted, sciency,
loudly whispers
Poetics
with its peculiar orthograpy
its hypen (mind the gap)
and its
Majusculation
‘Poetics’ from the Greek
ποιητικός (poiētikós)
“Capable of making”
“inventive” “productive”
takes us to autopoesis ie “
self-creation” “self-production”
describes a system that can maintain, regenerate, and reproduce itself
by continuously creating its own parts
Describes a hallmark
feature
of life itself
lifing
The Bard of the Body
( quondam quantum poet)
both-in-and-out-of-the-game Poet
stops by to comment:
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all
poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns
left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the
eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
Manifold the ways In
Multiple points to view
a world
an umwelt.
But it is just a phase
I’m going through
Mind the
Gap
Print 