Weil: ‘“The One that alone is wise”. That is the infinite. A number which increases thinks that it is getting nearer to infinity. It is receding from it.'
The inhabitants of the Lye Planet held their world to be infinite insofar as it was an immortal, self-rejuvenating living organism impervious the passage of time, consisting of countless unknowable transmigratory entities both within and alongside the physical realm (not that such a distinction would have been readily made in the pre-Decline era: see Dualism). As discussed in Harmony, inhabitants did not subscribe to a utopian view of the ecosystem, but at least understood its periodic cycles of chaos and tranquility as variable aspects of a unified body.
With the onset of the Decline, infinity is the first concept to be shaken. Suddenly, it becomes necessary to limit the unlimited: to anchor one’s self in an individualised identity, to take shelter, to demarcate history and fend off the future with attempts at independent linear narrative. In their studies of LPA327.314.01, Dr. Frances Whorrall-Campbell has observed how the drawings offer no single, concrete sequence of events, despite clearly depicting the progressive transformation of objects. They therefore suggest any number of speculative arrangements; a new and unpredictable world of limitless change.
In other words, instead of articulating the positions of planetary ‘stems’, inhabitants have to define themselves against a now-inhospitable exterior. In artefact-making, this leads to changes in musical structure (e.g. the increasing lack of harmonic resolution throughout LPA210.045.42), and in everyday language: S A Leach, in reference to LPA186.480.26 (the Moorland diary), describes this transition as ‘a fall from a great whole to which everything belonged into partiality and separation: their simple speech a harbinger of a world where words and things could no longer be held together but instead had to be thrown violently at each other’. In this sense, the planet’s ‘fall from infinity’ is what triggers the dramatic rise in artefact-making during the Decline: the appearance of a void and a mass of untethered voices left speaking in its wake.