In the post Enargeia, in our account of the construction of space, we saw that everything routinely overflows the immediate need for it. E.g. for the wolf: the running stream, deer, land for denning and travelling, air for breathing, the warming sun, the whole lit world …
Yet while everything exists in surplus, everything is exhausted in the end.
From this we can deduce our first rule for building with infinity:
Everything overflows, but nothing overflows the whole
Also in our account of the construction of space, we saw that living things act freely and spontaneously. Yet the whole — ecology, biosphere — coheres and endures and is not destroyed by this anarchic movement.
From this we can deduce our second rule for building with infinity:
Everything acts spontaneously according to its nature, but the whole coheres and is not destroyed
Finally in our account of the construction of space we saw that the transformation of material into form at once exposes that form as material for others. And every form which comes apart into material in the same moment takes on a new form.
From this we can deduce our third rule for building with infinity:
Everything which closes, opens, everything which opens, closes
This logic has been sustained through aeons. It is not a passing accident, but the foundational logic of the living world.
Over billions of years every aspect of the global ecology changes — biosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere. Even a mountain is slowly pushed up into the air, then ground down to the sea. Volcanos erupt. Continents come and go. The gasses of the atmosphere change, the composition of the sea changes, the temperature of the sun changes. The tilt of the earth wobbles, and the shape of the earth’s orbit round the sun moves between circle and ellipse. Climate alters. Ice ages come and go. Asteroids strike. There are extinctions, and mass extinctions. New organic forms emerge, whole new ecologies. Through these cataclysms the simple three-point logic of natural space — ontological openness, surplus resource, free movement — has been sustained. Natural history has replayed this structure in an immense variety of forms, but never deviated from its core anarchic principles.