Computer nerds are instantly recognisable for their dog's breakfast
English, yet they prove again the sense of that cardinal rule, never use
a longer word when a shorter one does the job. Period com period eh-you,
or full-stop com full-stop eh-you simply won't stand against dot. Sweet,
cute, sharp, short and arguably the word with the greatest resurgent
usage, dot enjoys an elliptical history.
Shakespeare would have known it as a word for lump, clot, boil or other
blemish, but not as the roundish mark made with a pen, a meaning that
enters the language in the eighteenth century. No one ever told
Shakespeare to dot his i's. It was his contemporary, Galileo who altered
forever our sense of largeness. The star charts of the seventeenth
century initiated the perspective that we are a dot in the universe,
rather than its bounteous centre. Or, just a dot, as some remark
dolefully. Learning our place in the scheme of things might have been
hard, but for many today the view each night of a million Earths in
adjacent galaxies can be strangely soothing. Especially marvellous too
when we consider that they can only be contemplated. Entities that
cannot be exploited and about which there is no full-stop. More than a
few have gone dotty in the effort, of course, though dotty in this sense
does not mean seeing stars before one's eyes, but comes from a Scots
word meaning unbalanced. It is easier to imagine ourselves out there in
space than in here where we actually live and suffer.
It was a group of Greek philosophers called atomists who painted a
pointillist picture of the universe as long ago as whenever, but though
they maintained that all dots were created equal, did not see that some
dots have more gravity than other dots. This dot matrix theory of matter
depended on the idea that the smallest particles in the universe are
unbreakable and unchangeable, a confidence that we cannot share with
them, sadly. Atoms shift about in massive order, ready to be split
without a thought. The Californian computerates have rewritten the
addresses of the world, in the process rewriting Sellar and Yeatman's
oracular conclusion, ‘America was thus clearly top nation, and History
came to .' Not though that that could ever be the end of it.
The dot as monument to minimalism would mean nothing to the artists of
the Balgo Hills, the Western Desert and other parts of this continent.
Tentative study of Australian native mythic expression has revised our
definition of ‘dot' entirely, being it would seem the foundation of the
creative act and the activity of creation itself. In Cape York, the dot
means the effect of light on clear water, necessary means for new life.
Warlpiri painters use the dot for walking and movement, each colour
significant of dreaming stories and ritual. The potency of these
markings, both singularly and in sometimes superabundant plurality,
speak the language of the group and elude outside definition. But even
fringe observers of this art, not a party to its restricted information,
sense the representation of William Blake's grain of sand, a new world
coming out of ceremonial culture, its point of departure right where we
stand.
