PATAPHYSICS-THE-POETICS-OF-AN-IMAGINARY- SCIENCE_C_Bok

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h h o l provides a "patsphysical explanation of a
weathermap, arguing that such a chart is not a map of a
protean climate, but an act of "alphabet worship," plotting
"the movement of gigantic airborne H's & L's over
continental North ~merica" in "a time when the letter (&
hence the word) f are] present in the world as thing, as
visible fact in the land & air scapes" (Writers 24-25).
The
alphabet in effect represents the record, not of speech
itself, but of living beings, sublime letters, now extinct,
but nevertheless remembered by a cabal of secret agents.
'~c~af fery argues that " just as fossils verbalize
so words fossilize" (1986:191): both of these "blind forms"
signify an absence (which has in turn corne to signify the
essence of Canada itself: its desertedness). Like fossils,
letters constitute a meteoric detritus, whose sedimentation
can be studied by a nomadic science: "What remains after
erosion is often desert, and in desert often lie hidden
important fossils.
That is an appealing narrative of
sediment-perhaps, but one occluding an important fact:
that
to the true nomad there is no desert." (TRG 1992:19).