Meta-
(Beyond)
Something’s
joining us to everything.
You’re
breathing in, you’re breathing out –
How
does what comes in come about?
‘Tween
seen and known, the provable and shown
Is
something even genius can’t do more than hint at:
Something
meta-.
Breath-tools,
breath-excused
Designed
to live here in this atmosphere
Extracting,
giving, taking,
Driven
to survive:
A
generational archive.
Where,
from, why?
Breathe -- Makus Art (Justina Maku Bisset)
The Greek "meta" was a prefix meaning "after," "beside," "with," or "among," but also "adjacent," "self," and "beyond." Its use in English is a back-formation (the creation of a neologism by removing actual or supposed prefixes or suffixes) from the word "metaphysics." In the 1st century BCE after Apellikon, tyrant of Athens, was defeated by the Romans, his extensive library was taken to Roma by general Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix; Andronikos ho Rhodios (Andronicus of Rhodes) then published a new edition of the works of the 4th-century-BCE philosopher Aristoteles which formed the basis of the extant texts, who named one of his books "Metaphysics" because it followed the book that was listed after "Physics." Because that book discussed natures that exist beyond physical reality, "metaphysics" came to mean "the science of what is beyond the physical" rather than "the book that comes after 'Physics.'" In modern times the prefix has been employed to indicate a concept which is an abstraction behind another concept, used to complete or add to the latter. For example, "metadata" are data about data, or a meta-joke would be a joke about jokes. This usage only dates back to 1917; the mathematician David Hilbert proposed the study of metamathematics in 1920, and by the end of the decade meta was regularly being added to specific nouns. Logician Willard Van Orman Quine coined "metatheorem" in which 'meta" was used to mean "an X about X" for the 1st time. This meaning was popularized by Douglas Hofstadter in his 1979 book "Gödel, Escher, Bach." he also used "meta" as a standalone adjective and as a directional preposition (he coined the phrase "going meta" to describe the rhetorical trick of taking a debate to a different level of abstraction). He also associated the term with strange loops (cyclic structures that go through several levels in a hierarchical system in order to return to the beginning, as in the drawings by M. C. Escher or in Johann Sebastian Bach's "Canon 5. a 2"
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