INFINITE BALLS

BOP #7

Apr 27, 2024

That God would be as the orb, a most sacred geometry…

For the Pythagoreans and later greeks, the sphere held a special significance as “the most complete theophany”. As Iamblichus puts it, the sphere “is both itself one and capable of containing multiplicity, which indeed makes it truly divine, in that while not departing from its oneness it dominates all the multiple”. The sphere was the concrete expression—the hieroglyph—of the One itself, revealing the all-containing power that eternally converges on itself…
…The erotic circulation of Plotinus’s universe is, according to Iamblichus, an unfolding of numbers descending from the One into the density of the material world, revealing a vast net of proportions and numerical relations. Despite their multiplicity and division, all numbers and proportions remain united with the One by the bonds of love. (“Eros and Arithmos”; Shaw, 1999)

The circled dot was used by the Pythagoreans and later Greeks to represent the first metaphysical principle, the Monad or the One.

Once, long ago, Aristophanes tells us in the Symposium, “our nature was not what it is now…the shape of each human being was completely round, with back and hands in a circle”.
The Pythagoreans identified our limited self-consciousness geometrically with the line and our lost wholeness with the sphere, a shape without beginning or end. “Whenever the soul is especially assimilated to the Divine Mind,” Iamblichus says, “our vehicle is made spherical and is moved in a circle.” Iamblichus speaks for a tradition that imagines the soul’s salvation in the recovery of the sphere: the line curved back upon itself, mortality entering a consciousness without beginning or end.
In geometric terms, the existence of the gods is circular: their essence inseparable from their activity, their beginning identical with their end. In human souls this circle is broken: having entered generated life, we fall into rectilinear existence and become creatures whose beginnings are separate from our end. When we animate bodies we lose our original spherical vehicle and become trapped in oppositions: the divisions, collisions, impacts, reactions, growths and breakdowns that Iamblichus says are the unavoidable consequences of material life. (Ibid)

The eyes of your lover, the shoulder and hip joints with which you embrace, the stars which light your lovely forms, the planet on which you reside, the testicles and the egg cells which will birth new lovers…

Does it not seem strange that Nature’s most fundamental forces—gravity, the nuclear strong force, electromagnetism, LOVE—all act to produce BALLS or beings that can PLAY with BALLS?
BALL IS LIFE. BALL IS LOVE. BALL IS ALL.1

Though you came from balls and were, in the very first moments of existence, a ball, you think now that you are a human, with a body, with arms, legs, and a head.

But you are mistaken.

You are still only a ball, a ball through which the world flows.

There is one final way in which you and God are both as the ball.

On the surface, there is order, there is logic. Form and formula. But beneath that surface, deep within, there is that which is none of these things, that which is beyond all system, beyond all definition. There is a seething formlessness. There is a wild infinity. There is an ineffable madness at the heart of all being.

In the ball, it is an irrational transcendental number.

In you and in God, it is the soul.