Registers

This poem considers a theorem in Marcus Aurelius about dyadic relations and specifically about chirality, one that both evokes and stands outside of the familiar treatment of such relations in European philosophy, which is via dialectics (Hegel 1976; Adorno 1981; Benjamin 1986). The poem explores similar reciprocities as they relate to the life/death dyay and the pleasure/seriousness dyad before turning to the foreign/familiar duality and treating it dialectically, i.e. in a way that is curiously more familiar than these others. The poem is about registering those distinctions, as much as the ways we register distinction more generally.