"Flying anuses, speeding vaginas, there is no castration."

That's my new rallying cry.

Anyhow, I was really interested in Plant's talk about counting systems, how Roman numerals consist of lots of phallic I's just added on top of each other, and how 1 in the Sanskrit system is not so special in a scheme of numbers each of which has its own identity--in this way, the Sanskrit system is a more lateral and plural one (though Plant admits that the West was pretty much able to retain strong senses of oneness and nothingness).

Plant recognizes zero as that which appears as nothing but which bolsters, reproduces, and gives value to other numbers, much in the way that women operate as invisible means of reproduction and organization. The introduction of zero, that multitasking figure, makes coding possible as it introduces a nonlinear manipulation of numbers, a complex operation beneath a surface of hard value. (I'd never really thought about the advent of zero, but I like the image of the Church panicking about its introduction, even if it was eventually subsumed under the old system.) Plant argues that zero is not absence, that it is "neither something in particular nor nothing at all." As emphasis is shifted to code and process (the product of weaving is process, pattern, code), zero gains its value as a kind of movement (a flickering?), a flow of electrons. (Interestingly, zero comes from the same Arabic and Sanskrit root as the word cipher, which refers to coded messages and the transposition of symbols, a secret writing--herein, perhaps, lies a way for zero to be linked to a structuralist scheme.) I really like the idea of holes being "charged particles running in reverse"(57), despite my ambivalence toward pseudo-science. This idea hearkens back to that notion of Ada's inventing in reverse, of reinventing invention (26). Time's linearity challenged.

Time to dream about flying holes.