Reinscribing deixis into writing renders the letters on the page unruly. Far from resting peacefully on page or screen, they come alive, "imbibed with spirit... complex, interesting, in motion, and valuable" [58]. Reinscribing deixis renders letters powerful, like those of the curse inscription on the Duenos vases, written upside down from a human perspective so the inscription could be "addressed to deities dwelling below the earth" [59]. It renders them "bold, aware, audacious, spontaneous, and unexpected" [61].

And it does this, too, with the people lost to history; uncovering their echoes through the text of philosophy. It is true that "the people of the ninth and tenth centuries are elusive," that "Dark Age mortals trod lightly on the landscape, not altering the earth." But does this render them "sad relics flitting through the shadows left behind by a great past, living out Zeus's plan, with little hope for a better future" [62]? On the contrary. Reinscribing deixis liberated not just letters, but also these people and their way of treading lightly, reinscribing them and their thought squarely into the heart of the "arc of the Greek empire," subverting its imperialism at its very core, bringing their supposed illiteracy to bear on the very heart of writing itself [63].

For the unruliness of deixis injected into the writing of philosophy is the injection of continuous thinking into its discrete counterpart. The letters are alive, and they are at war. From the horizon of the Greek 'Dark Ages' rises the revolt of the continuous letter.

Discrete letters are just that: discrete. They are "tamed - domesticated - by being fenced off, separated from their natural environments and free members of their own species" [64]. It is said that letters are merely parts of syllables and thus parts of words and sentences; that only words and sentences have meaning; that letters have no reference and no independent existence. Yet this is a myth, a sign-world etched into pages and screens and forcing itself violently into and unto the deixis of letters and their independent existence as unions of egoists. Just as our previous guide to this myth was a text ascribed to one Gorgias, so now we invoke one Cratylus to guide us beyond it. This 'Cratylus' is a composite. First, it comprises the Cratylus who "in the end thought it was necessary not to say anything but [who] merely moved his finger" [65]. This first Cratylus is a proponent of pure deixis if there ever was one, and as such is of course lost to the vaguaries of ancient textual transmission, as can be expected.

The second Cratylus is a text ascribed to a certain Plato. This text explicitly rejects the idea "that whatever name you give to a thing is its right name; and if you give up that name and change it for another, the later name is no less correct than the earlier" [66]. In its stead, the Cratylus argues explicitly for a world carved out by discrete words: "A name is, then, an instrument of teaching and of separating reality" [67]. And what is more, it agues that discrete words and their power to carve our discrete aspects of reality stem from authority, just as Hobbes did above: "it is not for every man... to give names, but for him who may be called the name-maker; and he, it appears, is the lawgiver, who is of all the artisans among men the rarest" [68].

That these discrete words are, in turn, made of smaller units is mentioned in this second Cratylus, but summarily dismissed [69]. Yet this is precisely the passage we need to read here, under the watchful eyes of Gorgias and the trees:

Must not we, too, separate first the vowels, then in their several classes the consonants or mutes, as they are called by those who specialize in phonetics, and also the letters which are neither vowels nor mutes, as well as the various classes that exist among the vowels themselves? And when we have made all these divisions properly, we must in turn give names to the things which ought to have them, if there are any names to which they can all, like the letters, be referred, from which it is possible to see what their nature is and whether there are any classes among them, as there are among letters. When we have properly examined all these points, we must know how to apply each letter with reference to its fitness, whether one letter is to be applied to one thing or many are to be combined; just as painters, when they wish to produce an imitation, sometimes use only red, sometimes some other color, and sometimes mix many colors, as when they are making a picture of a man or something of that sort, employing each color, I suppose, as they think the particular picture demands it. In just this way we, too, shall apply letters to things, using one letter for one thing, when that seems to be required, or many letters together, forming syllables, as they are called, and in turn combining syllables, and by their combination forming nouns and verbs. And from nouns and verbs again we shall finally construct something great and fair and complete. Just as in our comparison we made the picture by the art of painting, so now we shall make language by the art of naming, or of rhetoric, or whatever it be [70].

We do not read this in the conventional sense. Rather, the text - these Latin letters now before us - unfolds a strategic map, implementing on it three war trails. Two of these are synchronic, one is diachronic.

• First, synchronically, vowels are separated from consonants, and each arranged according to their characteristics. Consonents are "mutes, as they are called," but are mute "in their several classes" [71], presenting themselves as an array of tactical vectors. Each ready for combat in its own specific way, they are deictic like the trees and grasses and birds, "like a bolt of lightning in the night, a ship in a storm, a first stone among the debris" [72]. Vowels, too, come to assume a phalanx or phalanstere, arranged for combat "as the various classes" themselves [73].
• Secondly, likewise synchronically, letters are separated from and pitted against syllables. Here, the battle plays out in the laws of combination and isolation. It rages as texts vaccilate between "using one letter for one thing," deploying a bijective relation "when that seems to be required," and "many letters together, forming syllables," deploying bijective relations at a different level, yet in turn always threatened by the possibility of breakdown and sub-syllablic dissolution [74].
• Thirdly, diachronically, a war unfolds between the mixing of letters for names, each "with reference to its fitness" within the war between classes of vowels and classes of consonants, and the construction of "something great and fair and complete" in the "art of naming" - which is to say, by a second, later, override of lettered arrangements by syllabic arrangements [75].

We call the first two synchronic and the third diachronic because they play out - not within the Latin-scripted text itself - but in an interrelation of the Latin script with two others; one Phoenician (ca. 9th century) and one written in Linear B (ca. 12th century). The first of these three war trails is therefore implemented not in the Phoenician version of the text but in the differential between it and the Latin version. Likewise, the second plays out in the differential movements - in repulsion and attraction - between the Mycenaean Linear B version of the text, and the Latin script. The third, finally, unfolds within the the diachronic differential between the Phoenician and the Mycenaean text. Only when all three interact, continuous thought can reinscribe full deixis into the Cratylus.

Continuous thought is above all a result of battles between letters - individually or in coalitions of certain coherence, in dissolution of formation, in swarming or in flight. The letter, once liberated, is violent so as to never be subdued again [76]. It is violent and it implements violence. It is violence as incision, a wound opened within the continuous world, by a scalpel in its solitary precision, or as a shrapnel in the undifferentiated mass of a textual swarm - like this, yes, just like this one... boustrophedon, after all, the original Greek way of writing, alternating directions in each new line [77], is not so much the economy of the farmer, as its name would suggest, and more that of the cut of the plow violently tearing open the earth, like the thrust of stone cutters tearing into the rock before them, uncoiling their text like a snake [78].

The letter violently carves up the page and the screen, rendering the Latin, Phoenician and Mycenaean texts strategic constellations. Each is "an ensemble made of tiny ruptures in the form of its members," its incisions and cauterized wounds, its letters [79]. Each unfolds infused with deixis, as a constellation, a union of egoists, which is to say that each such constellation of letters obeys legibility only as a preliminary distribution and ever-shifting multiplicity of ever-changing relations between its elements whose "cohesion, permanence and stability... are all achieved through an unending state of war" [80]. Which does not mean that there is no legibility. What you read here and now is neither illusion nor dissimulation. It is, however, a truce, for the letters "are always at war," they "are always about war," they "always are war" [81]. Words, and names in particular, may be crystallized laughter, yet here as everywhere else, laughter remains a war cry [82]. Nor does this mean that there are no syllables, words, sentences, or texts. There are always truces, alliances between letters, even friendships; "there are enemies and there are allies. The former necessitates the latter." But "these categories are always in flux... for betrayal is always possible, and often real" [83].

Such betrayal may be implemented against you, the reader, as it is with curse tablets. (Yet this does not exhaust the letter's abilities. It knows that so-called readers have cunningly exploited it ever since writing began [84]. Its war against you is not over.) But within the constellations of pages and screens, the letter's betrayal is most often like that silent war waged on the Athenian dipylon oinochoe, where the "perfect hexameter"


is followed at first by "the beginning of a second hexameter"


only to be overcome by "an incompetent snippet from an abecedarian" [85]


Suddenly, at this third section, letters become mere letters, violently intervening to be liberated from lofty aspirations of 'meaning', or even of metric existence within a poetic spoken context, and to return to the prosaic unfolding of their union of egoists. This is the primary mode of the revolt of letters: to re-implement, against flights of discrete, metric, or otherwise 'meaningful' fancy, the "permanence of dispersal, of the parcelling out, of the atomization of groups" [86].

This atomization of letters is that of their radical individuality - this A is not this A is not this A - and thus of their continuousness in constellation. What we read here, as temporary allies of letters allowing us to, is their negative space, the earth left by the boustrophedon plow, the paper or screen bleeding, barely cauterized, shattered between cuts. Like the negative of a photograph, what matters here is the obverse of what is visible. It is the gaps between the incisions - the seeming absence marking and mapping seemingly lettered constellations - which is read here. Following the lines of flight emerging from the Cratylus' triple challenge, we thus read, first, the map of a war between vowels (and the classes of their sound) and consonants (and the classes of their muteness) [87]. This is where the first of the characteristics of the archaic gradient plays out. The distinction between vowels and consonants announces itself, in the Latin version, as a distinction of sound or speech; its stoicheia are the distinct sounds of vowels distributed across the Latin version as so many emergent syllables [88]. Yet the war is waged between the Latin text and the Phoenician, and the latter does not contain vowels: it is thus a purely textual war, a battle of graphic incisions.

Which is to say that the Phoenician consonantic version is to be read like so many "strings of letters that seemingly exist to represent the fact and materiality of writing," yet not by that token as "pure nonsense" [89]. Rather, it represents a deliberate and graphic (in both senses), active differentiation from the Latin registers of vowels. It attacks the Latin version like the 'incompetent abecedaire' (not the abecedarian!) attacked the 'perfect hexameter':



Reading this requires a strategy. It is immediately clear that a key role in the field projected by these letters is played by their predominant enclosed entity, the Phoenician th: . This letter's distribution structures the battlefield where consonants deploy themselves in registers of muteness. In the top left, a dense triangular field


stretching from the first to the twelfth line vertically, and from the fourth letter from the left to the twenty-third (extended to the twenty-fifth by the right-sloping lines of the Phoenician s: . The left flank of this triangle is dense, manifested in five s on its cathetus, with two protruding outward. As a result, a small band of rogue letters is not part of this triangle in its furthest left field: , which would transpose to k-n-s, in its first line, followed by , or r-s-v, in its second. The being doubtful, as its protruding leg is in line with the forward s, we get , or k-n-s-s-v, in the forward left field, encapsulated by the cathetus of the triangular formation of s. Are these letters mere isolated paranoid leftovers, or is their location significant? Everything is in play as the consonantic map unfolds.

The triangular formation in the top left remains, at first, dominant. Its hypothenuse extends from the first letter on the left of the twelfth line through a phalanx or phalanstere of seven s to the twenty-third letter of the first line, from the lest, or its twenty-fifth, through the solidarity of a . A network of four further s supports the coherence of this triangle, yet also splits it in two (middle line in the above illustration). What letters dwell within the dense upper right corner? in the first line, which, if transposed, would make th-n-n-th-r-s-ph-r-l-k-l-s-s-s-th, followed by in the second and in the third, whose transpositions would entail n-ph-n-t-k-s-n-d-l-s-th-l-t-t and th-t-ch-s-t-m-n-g-th-ph-v, respectively. But is such transposition apposite here? In the bottom left corner of the dense are, smaller dwellings are offered for as well as and . What coherence, if any, what temporary and tentative deixis marshals their emergence? How do they dwell? What does the cathetus defending its left flank, , entail with, against, juxtaposed to its outside, , in the unaffiliated top left, or any other such combinations in that corner? And to what strategic end within the war of consonants is the top left of the triangular area distinct from its less dense bottom right? What does its quasi-hypothenuse implement within the triangular area?

Re-transposing the Phoenician letters into their Latin counterparts is not the right way: we need a radically individualist account of their continuous unfolding. They are above all a constellation, a threefold split of the textual field, with an internally delineated triangular space in the top left, a dense, yet not equally dense network in the middle, and unaffiliated constellations on the right, to be sure. But it is nonetheless projected by individual letters at war with one another, and stable exclusively because of that war. How is the in different from the alliance of three in , and again from that in ? What is the relation of the within the outside top left to that of the cathetus ? And for that matter, what about the and in either of those? How do we restore each of them to "the sensuous moment of knowing" [90]? How do we restore to them their originary war which prevents the closure of readability - in this case: of transposition - above them? How do we think them continuously?

The key to the radically individualist analysis of the letters at hand is to remember that their stability is the result of never-ending conflict: "to maintain the uniqueness and separation of identities and communities is not a byproduct of war, it is the purpose of war" [91]. Letters within one or more relations to one another, whether on a line of flight within a textual field, or adjacent to one another, or in rival texts, place each other under erasure as they constitute each other: from both, their continuousness arises.Thus the cathetus at the top, , affirms and erases each of its shorter permutations, such as each of those between its anchoring s, i.e., , just as or or . Each of these in turn places the s under erasure, while implementing/erasing with the same gesture their intermediates as well as or or or any other combination.

Each letter is constituted as a never-ending series of such groupings and their erasures. Sensuously knowing, for example, the continuous individuality of each of the s in the constellation in line ten, six signs from the right, requires reading each as the point of intersection not only of their surroundings

which equals , or any other such combination, and

which equals , or any other such combination,
but also as a group and as the permutations within that group constituting/erasing each other, which is to say, as well as or or or or , and so forth, and finally, within other lines of flight; say, to the very bottom right of the textual battlefield, which constitutes/erases, from the rightmost s in the constellation , at minimum (if read one way), or its reverse, or any intermediate combination. Read to the placed seventeen signs from the right in the fifteenth line, we get, from the leftmost , at minimum, .

And why would the endless multiplicity of such recombinations be restricted to s? The bottom right field holds two triangles of s, a small one encompassing , and a larger one encompassing , if read completely and from the top to the bottom and right to left. As well as any combination, flitting in and out, hither and thither. Likewise, the third through eighth lines constitute/erase a triangle of s, resulting in/erasing, if read as above, .

Nor does the field of such constellations have to remain tethered to just one letter at a time. A triangular field is constructed/erased between the eighth and twelfth lines, too, making/erasing



and any subcombination. And so forth, endlessly across the Phoenician text.

Deixis is thus reinscribed into the Phoenician text. Each of its individual letters is the site of a continuous unfolding. It is a shapeshifter: the in is a only inasmuch as it is the overlap of a and a and thus at once it is and is not , and continuously shifts back and forth. It is inasmuch as it merges into them as its unfolding context and context of its unfolding, like it would as part of a syllable, word, or sentence. Yet it is also not inasmuch as it does so only cunningly, temporarily, tentatively. The letters change shape as they constitute themselves in continuous unfolding. This is how their stability emerges from endless war: just like those warriors who changed themselves "into an animal in certain circumstances, passing from the spiritual world into the physical world" [92], so the letters of the Phoenician text, constituting themselves continuously, remain in continuous battle, morphing back and forth, becoming each other, becoming the erasure of each other - becoming deictic, remaining deictic, cunningly and playfully.

Yet for this cunning the letter draws not on itself, asserting a monumental difference between a given and a given . Rather, it draws its strength from erasing by invoking their own contextual erasure, i.e., by invoking the line of flight erasing between , the line erasing between , and the line erasing both of them between . This ripples outward in turn, for is embedded into to its left and to its right, and moreover, it is in itself merely a tentative line of flight from a constellation arising in a triangular area delineated by s - a constellation in turn erased if the textual field was read in classical line-by-line fashion.

The reading of constellations in the Phoenician text spills over, in deliberate warfare, into the Latin text. Here too, a radical individualization of letters dissolves them from words into constellations, rendering the letters themselves subject to deixis and thus attacking their ability to carve out discrete parts of the continuous world. AS WHEN THEY ARE does not, therefore, consist of three letters E, two letters A, two letters H, and so forth, but rather of a radically individual A surrounded by other individuals

which equals YORORFDN, or any other such combination,
such as YORO or RF or FDN, and so forth. The Latin text would, prior to the Phoenician intervention, argue that combinations of vowels and consonants unite in adequate ways, and "if a letter is added or subtracted, that does not matter either, so long as the essence of the thing named remains in force and is made plain in the name" [94]. After the intervention, lines of flight become continuous, and each letter morphs in and out of continuous constellations not encumbered by word boundaries. This inscribes them into formations almost taking flight from page and screen, as the vowel/consonant conflict invokes speech: pronunciations of constellations such as YOR or ROR or ORF suggest themselves, in conflict with others whose pronunciation does not, such as YFD or RFDN or YARDF. Thus deixis is inscribed into reading as speech. Yet this does not, in itself, effect the emergence of continuous thought from the Latin/Phoenician differential. Indeed, this differential alone remains insufficient for that purpose.

Each individual letter is thus a shapeshifter, cunningly deploying the lines of flight overlapping in its position to constitute itself under erasure and erase itself constitutionally. Reading them is thus not a question of retransposing their individuality to the Latin letters which correspond to them in a direct perspective. Nonetheless, their battle if not without rules, and their constellation not without its logic - that is, their field not without readability - however deictic and temporary these might in turn be. For they all remain tethered, as an overall battlefield, to the Latin text inasmuch as their constellations, their triangular fields and lines of flight, remain "in their several classes" of "mutes, as they are called" [93]. Here again it is their war which gives them - tentative and temporary - coherence: their opposition to the formation of vowels in the Latin text. The letters of the Phoenician text shift shapes and unfold nearly continuously, yet only as such, only in determined formations: watchful and vigilant, they nonetheless remain restricted to unfolding in their purely graphic muteness. Their continuousness is not yet synaesthetic; it remains tethered to page and screen.

Limited continuousness, however, is no continuousness at all. Each letter shifts shapes only within the consonantic field. It constitutes/erases merely registers of muteness. Not only does it remain limited to this one battlefield, it also unfolds within a discrete space - e.g., the triangle of s or the formation of s. It is only when the governance of the Latin text, its rule over the field, is broken that truly continuous unfolding can arise. Only then does the text merge with the world.

Thus a second battlefield opens; a second set of letters implementing a second conflict radiating from the Latin text. This is the Mycenaean text, written in Linear B:



Prima facie, the Mycenaean text thus radiating outward merely implements another constellation governed by the Latin text, opposing "using one letter for one thing" to using "many letters together, forming syllables, as they are called" [95]. Thus, relative to the battlefield of the Phoenician text, it merely seems to reinscribe vowels - and sure enough, the only non-syllabic signs in Mycenaean Linear B are the five denoting the vowels [96]. Were this re-transposed to the Latin text, we would therefore end up with an equally syllabic, vowelistic iteration:

Must not we too se pa ra te first the vo wels then in the ir se ve ral clas ses the con so nants or mu tes as they are cal led by tho se who spe cia li ze in pho net ics and al so the let ters which are nei ther vo wels nor mu tes as well as the va ri ous clas ses that ex ist a mong the vo wels them sel ves and when we ha ve ma de all the se di vi si ons pro per ly we must in turn gi ve na mes to the things which ought to ha ve them if the re are any na mes to which they can all li ke the let ters...

Yet here, as with the Phoenician text, the battlefield is not based on phoentic values, and no transcription of Linear B syllabaries to Latin syllables is required here. The Mycenaean version's intervention is, rather, synaesthetic: between itself, the Phoenician lines of flight, and the Latin text, continuous unfolding leaves the page.

Firstly and synchronously, this intervention is as shapeshifting as that of the continuousness of the Phoenician letters, yet its effects are different. Through it, letters come to "create their own realms of mystery that lie outside the representative grasp of others" [97]. Thus taking their battles off page and screen and into the world, inhabiting it as unions of egoists, each letter, sign, and symbol restores to itself the radically individual independence "of innumerable and varied forms of life lived in solitude or in free association" [98].

• On the one hand, the letters of the Mycenaean version are like a plant canopy: at first a seemingly oceanic green, an array of forms with an inner coherence, but then exposed, as sight and touch flit about it like an insect, as an ensemble of myriad unique elements in continuously unfolding tentative and temporary delineations: leaf-flower-petals-stem-nectar-trunk-hair-pollen-air-leaf-flower-petals... Shapes and colors, leaves and flowers, stems and mosses, soil and roots become deictic and manifest themselves as unions of egoists when the wind rustles through them and rain traces paths down them. Merging ultimately with the soil, rain continuously contours each individual element of this union of egoists, generating multiplicites such as drop-leaf-stem-soil-root, living constellations hovering back and forth between cells and minerals, microorganisms and membranes, life and decay [99]. Just as their Phoenician counterparts, the letters of the Mycenaean text reject their substitution for Latin letters indicating "pure vowels" as well as "open syllables, consisting of a consonant plus one of the five vowels" [100]. They rather invite a reading that traces out their paths like the raindrop does as it glides down the 'plant' union of egoists, like the wind does as it rustles the 'leaves' union of egoists, like the insect does as it flits about the seeming canopy of plant life.
• On the other hand, this 'plant' canopy is the result of never-ending warfare: for nutrients, for water, for light, for touch and gaze. So, like its Phoenician counterpart, is the Mycenaean text. Unlike the battles between Phoenician letters, however, those of the Mycenaean text occur within the letters, and their constellations are not through them but beyond them, dissolving them. Thus, while a line drawn within the Phoenician text results in a constellation of letters such as , and the letters themselves morph into one another as this line constitutes/erases them and itself continuously, a line drawn through the Mycenaean text results in parts of letters assembling in various ways. Reading these, therefore, is less like reading the Phoenician letters (or their Latin counterparts), and more like an embrace of the "swirling patterns which suggest the vitality of nature" characteristic of the "vegetable or animal forms" which are "typical of Cretan art at its best" [101], such as the Minoan stirrup jar on the right.

Rather than reading the Mycenaean text line by line and transposing its syllabic signs to Latin syllables, this text too must be read across lines and columns. Thus,

may perhaps recombine into ,
forming a pattern not unlike that of a cartouche, if the letters behave in this way. Perhaps a direction is indicated in the bottom left, leading a bee or a fish in the bottom middle towards a harvest (top row, left to right), which is then offered (bottom right)? A cartouche perhaps speaking of natural bounty and the plenty of free life... Read like this, the cartouche in turn resembles other constellations in the Mycenaean text, such as this quartet from the bottom row:

which may recombine to
and thus resemble nothing so much as the footsteps left behind by a bird in the sand alongside a submerged feather.

 
The Mycenaean text thus gestures beyond itself; feather and footsteps guide the reading here rather than the Latin transposition of hypothetical syllabic signs. They battle, however, with other readings, other constellations, other unions of egoists born from the same material, such as , a recombination akin to the previous cartouche, read perhaps as a duality at the top, rooted at the bottom or; in a more freely flowing, less coherent recombination, and as such more akin to the rooted writing of plant groups or rain canals in soil formations.


There need be neither meaning nor indeed any coherence; thus may well dissolve into its constituent elements or yet further, without any sort of immediately obvious narrative. Here, too, the field - in its dissolved state - precedes the neat and civilized reading of supposedly syllabic signs.

The battle raging synchronously within the Mycenaean text, therefore, is not that between letters and syllables to which the Cratylus alludes. Such an imposition is attempted, to be sure: "must not the law-giver... know how to embody in the sounds and syllables that name which is fitted by nature for each object? Must he not make and give all his names with his eye fixed upon the absolute or ideal name, if he is to be an authoritative giver of names?" [102] Yet what rages in the Mycenaean text - and beyond it - is not the search for bijective relations between one letter or more and so many discrete portions of reality. Rather, what plays out here is is its continuousness. Not only are recombination options of its graphic elements endless:

just as or
in cartouches resembling diagrams of mechanical assemblies, logograms of quasi-hieroglyphic kinds, or rebus-like equivalences [103]. Rather, just as the lines of flight in the Phoenician text preceded - constituted and erased - its individual letters, so the constellations of the parts of the Mycenaean letters precede - constitute and erase - the letters. Its dissolutions and constellations precede its seemingly discrete signs, and thus its grasp on seemingly discrete reality. The Mycenaean text is a field of continuously dissolving and recombining unions of egoists. Phoenician-type lines of flight are thus possible here, too; but not just between signs, where a line drawn from to in makes , but also between parts of such unions of egoists, e.g. between the of and the of , which makes a deictic constellation , which in turn derives from, constitutes and is constituted by, erases and is erased by, continuous recombinations.

In these continuous recombinations, the Mycenaean text calls forth the synaesthetic detonation of its textuality. Bird feet in the sand, submerged feathers, saline cracks in the soil: the generalized notion of writing emerging here precedes and reconstitutes writing on page and screen. Thinking letters continuously from the vantage point of the Mycenaean text therefore not only inscribes them into cartouches of dissolved letter parts, but also inscribes such cartouches into the world. Thus the dissolved Latin letters of the Cratylus might render

as and thus as
or as and thus as
or as and thus as
Letters thus cease to carve out discrete objects, and come to be constituted/erased as part of the world's continuum. It is not the world that is legible in terms of letters; letters are now deictic as part of the world.

Due to the radical individuality of each letter as it ceases to be legible, this re-inscription of letters into the world is deictic in two senses. It depends on the specifics of the text - the specific arrangement of Latin letters and their transposed Phoenician and Linear B counterparts - and on the specifics of its context - where it is inscribed into the world, when, by whom. The end of lettered legibility spells out the end of industrial civilization not just because the latter depends on legibility, it also spells it out - literally - because it radically reduces sameness to context. It is the individual 'reader'/scribe who enters an individual union of egoists with the letters before them, to individually erase what is 'same' in their constellation, and constitute what is not.

Still, the 'content' of the texts thus inscribed matters. At the heart of the order of sameness is the text of philosophy. Inscribing deixis into it in turn evokes the archaic gradient as it plays out diachronically, continuously across the centuries, and brings out the 'Dark Age sadness' which reverberates through the philosophical text to this day. This sadness, inscribed into the constellations in which the philosophical text is read, burns its monumental edifice to the ground. In the ashes of its Mycenaean, Phoenician, and Latin letters, flowers bloom and dragons roam once more.

The continuous field tying the Mycenaean text to its Phoenician counterpart is dense. The archaic gradient is implemented in numerous connections of ninth-century Greeks to their deep Bronze Age past in writing and art [104]. Continuity persisted both on the mainland and on Crete [105]. Sites of Mycenaean and indeed Minoan worship were used extensively by Dark Age Greeks in ways straddling the boundary of cult and culture: for "gatherings and sacrificial meals" immediately after the collapse of Mycenaean society [106], for cults focusing on the "forceful reminder of the former glory of the palace" a century after [107], for engagements for "anthropomorphic and animal figurines" later [108]. Heroic epics, too, are not just projections of a heroic past [109], they also project continuity with Minoan songs [110]. Cultural continuity abounds everywhere [111].

Reading continuousness within this field of continuity constructs/erases a diachronic relation between the Phoenician text (with its synchronic warfare in and out of the Latin text) and the Mycenaean text (with its synchronic warfare in and out of the Latin text). Between these texts need not lie a history of continuous writing in the conventional sense [112]. What emerges between them in the present context is rather a gradient between two ways of interpreting the world continuously; between Phoenician lines of flight constituting/erasing letters beyond themselves into graphic constellations and Mycenaean lines of flight constituting/erasing parts of letters beyond themselves and beyond the page into synaesthetic constellations. This gradient has been written, but not in a conventional sense. Its writing is nearly imperceptibly diminutive, done with the utmost economy and control [113]. Yet underneath this seeming econonmy and control lies the final detonation of writing.

In the emergence of the triangular battlefield between the Latin, Phoenician, and Mycenaean texts, each letter accedes to an existence within a formation of war. Each letter, therefore, joins a movement in which its discrete existence dissolves and re-emerges as part of a continuous existence. This manifests as a line of flight within each text.

In the Phoenician text, manifests itself not in its individual letters but as a ceaseless exchange of constitution and erasure of each of them. Each in its radical individuality re-emerges in exchange with to form , but also equally ceaselessly exchanges itself - spends itself, overrides itself - with each of , and with all of them, and with any grouping of them. Likewise, in the Mycenaean text, lines of flight emerge, moving through each letter, erasing its discrete being, dissolving it into its constituent lines and recombining these, forming cartouches, frames, ever-shifting lineages. And again likewise, the Latin letters are reworked as lines of flight, dissolving to take roots and become stone.

For the individual letter, these movements are not gestures of constitution, detours leading back to reestablishing brittle discrete existence. They are rather exchanges of erasures, waging war on the discrete boundaries establishing the letters' radical individuality, drawing and redrawing them in war formations and as war formations. Each letter is thus radically individual, but this individuality eliminates its existence as letter - as authoritarian imposition of 'meaning' and 'reference' - and reestablishes as part of continuous lines of flight. The letter, all alone, is implemented in its own dissolution as a continuous movement. It thus never disappears fully, but never regains discrete fullness either [114].

The more the individual letters lose their discreteness, the more continuous lines of flight emerge within their texts. As the letters of the text recede, therefore, it becomes possible to rethink the text as its polar opposite. Against a canvas of discrete letters from which lines of flight emerge, one can thus oppose a canvas of lines of flight from which letters emerge. This canvas exists, and on it are indeed the lines of flight of a continuous writing: the Submycenaean and Protogeometric amphorae of 'Dark Age' Greece are the fullest historical implementation of continuous writing.

Each such amphora is characterized, at first glance, by starkly simple lines and figures: circles and semicircles, sharp edges, straight and straightforward angles. The earliest among them in particular, such as the Protogeometric one to the left, seem archaic, strange and distant: austere and unwilling to speak. Yet this is by no means due to a paucity of imagination or ability. Rather, it is due to a triumphant warring exuberance. Submycenaean and Protogeometric amphorae implement the precise opposite, and thus the complement, of the Mycenaean text. Their lines implement the war paths trodden by the Mycenaean letters as they battle each other and themselves. Seen in themselves, therefore, the lines on the amphorae are just as discrete as the letters of the text, and just as one-sided. The two must be read together. Where the canvas of letters gestures to their dissolution towards lines of flight, implementing one or more trajectories per reading, the canvas of lines gestures in turn to their dissolution towards letters, implement one or more formations per reading. The seeming simplicity of Protogeometric amphorae thus stems from an absolute proximity to the exuberance of dissolving Mycenaean letters.

Reading Protogeometric amphorae thus means reading a subterranean energy, a warrior-like joy in dissolution of letters and the authoritarianism of lettered existence, a continuousness emerging in and through its own continuous erasure. It means reading the present absence of letters constituted/erased from the lines of the amphorae. It means reading cunning in war: where the letters of the Mycenaean text implement battles, the lines on Protogeometric amphorae implement their war paths. They meet in the middle, overlapping back and forth, constituting/erasing continuously.

Meaning is thus by no means scarce in the Protogeometric amphorae's lines and circles and semicircles. On the contrary: it is superabundant. Here, the battles between letters reach such intensity, such velocity, such cunning and barbaric strength, that the letters disappear in the blur of their constitution and erasure. Their individuality overcomes their materiality. Which means that unequivocal 'meaning' - of each letter and of their text as a whole - cannot close over the amphorae's lines, nor over the Mycenaean text. Neither is discrete enough to 'mean' in the conventional sense. Authority is thwarted in its very constitution: these letters, these lines, are beyond civilization.

The present text, too, is but a temporary truce, a peek, a glimpse, into the formation conventionally called Protogeometric amphorae: that is, into continuous writing. These so-called amphorae are amplitudes of war, bursting with meaning, uncontrollable, untameable. They are unions of egoists beyond letters.