SCHEMATIZING (34)

By: Joshua Glenn
May 10, 2024

One in a series of posts via which HILOBROW’S Josh Glenn will attempt to depict the intellectual and emotional highs and lows of developing a semiotic schema. Series dedicated to its target audience of one: Malcolm Evans.

“A Representation of the Convexity, if I may call it so, of the intire Creation, as a universal Coalition of all the Stars consphered round one general Center, and as all governed by one and the same Law.” — Thomas Wright

Perhaps the most compelling illustration of a spheroid system of interrelated elements, “all governed by one and the same Law,” that I’ve come across thus far. If there were such a thing, in physical reality, as a semiosphere, then I suspect / imagine / dream that it might look much like this.

Wright’s An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe (1750), available for perusal via the Public Domain Review project, lays out the astronomer’s strikingly original “Theory of the Universe, and the Ideas I have form’d of the known Creation.” Which is what I’m going to begin titling all of my semiotic reports.

Shown here is one of the thirty-two “graven and mezzotinto” plates found at the end of An Original Theory — presumably based on Wright’s own drawings. Wright’s cosmic conclusion? Just as the solar system as we observe it is full of complex bodies, so too, but on a larger, parallel scale is the wider universe: an “unlimited plenum of creations”, all centred on the law and vision of God. Whose all-seeing eye can be spotted at the center of a cross-section of the above sphere, via Plate XXV.

I’ve got a framed print of Wright’s final plate (XXXII) — which is absolutely bonkers and amazing — hanging here at the offices of HILOBROW.

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SCHEMATIZING (34)

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