2.45
Gatherings are wholes insofar as they gather all things orbitally: a world is a gathering, a relational nexus. Meaning emerges from the particular arrangements and arrays, from the gaps, spaces, and proximities of one thing to the next.
In a different gathering, things are rearranged; the relational nexus shifts and pulls in different ways: there’s a different set of resonances, orbitration, and solar system—which isn’t to say that all things revolve around a central spot akin to the sun; a solar system is situated within a vaster, more complex system, even when things seem to revolve around a centre.
If all things are gathered orbitally in a relational nexus within a world, it’s also true that things themselves exert their own gravitational push-and-pull: things are, on their own, exerting themselves to likewise gather things around themselves orbitally (and, from their ‘perspective,’ they do — which is their world). Thus, we can, so to speak, observe interference patterns between worlds.
‘Ah, so the other solar system over there would be oriented like ours.’ — The metaphor doesn’t quite work, for it’s not as though here is one gathering and there is another and they’re all laid out in one space. Rather, gatherings are overlapping: things are simultaneously differently organized such that they conflict with—or harmonize with or question—one another.
While we can experience interference patterns, we can’t ever simply travel to other solar systems.
Therefore, the wholes—never totalities—trail off, so to speak. They reveal cracks, divergences, re-organizations — all ultimately non-totalizable.
Love is the feeling when we see how things are, or can be, gathered around some thing. We see that thing at the (or a) centre: this thing (§2.7).[1] We let ourselves be drawn into its way of standing forth in the world, maybe catching a glimpse of a tear in ours.
— The centre cannot hold,[2] for it cannot remain both central to and exempt from the gathering (the centre outside the system; §1.98). The centre cannot remain as centre: it collapses for it’s internal to the gathering, which is itself always part of a larger (dis)array of, and thus decentring by, other gatherings.[3]
[1] Zwicky, W&M, LH52, LH54–5, LH57.
[2] William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming,” in Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry, ed. Keith Tuma (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), line 3, p. 40.
[3] Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” p. 915–6.