Nothing in the world stands by itself. Every object is a link in an endless chain and is thus connected with all the other links. And this chain of the universe has never been broken; it unites all objects and processes in a single whole and thus has a universal character. We cannot move so much as our little finger without “disturbing” the whole universe. The life of the universe, its history lies in an infinite web of connections.

— A. Spirkin, from Dialectical Materialism

How is the universe bound up with itself, and we and everything else, as denizens of it? How are we connected to each other, and with all the other things in the universe? And how is all that stuff related to itself, and with all the other stuff that it shares space and time with?

In a previous post I mentioned chains, grids, cycles, and blocks, and associated them with the Four Causes and my fourfold Structure-Function. As I thought more about what those terms meant, I decided that they were bindings.

At first I tried to enumerate how four things could be arranged in exactly four ways. I didn’t get very far with that, but I ended up with this fourfold. It’s a gift.

References:

When I looked up “universal connections”, the first thing I saw was the following link:

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/spirkin/works/dialectical-materialism/ch02-s05.html

Alexander Spirkin / Dialectical Materialism

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/spirkin/works/dialectical-materialism/index.html

Sylvia Plath / Love Letter

http://allpoetry.com/Love-Letter

[*9.27, *9.102]

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