Sexagesima

Sexagesima appears as “Frivulteeny Sexuagesima,” a deliberately distorted name for a calendrical time that becomes an instrument for thinking about sexual expansiveness, mathematical limits, and the instability of meaning. Rather than establish a dated episode, the passage turns the observance into a verbal and geometric paradox: a figure multiplies outward while tending toward nullity at its center.

A Calendar Name Turned into a Paradox

The text places Sexagesima inside an argument that begins with a “base anything” and proceeds through mantissas, limits, vectors, and units. Its pseudo-mathematical language makes the season sound at once measurable and impossible to contain. What appears to be a question of quantity becomes a question about how a person or figure can be represented by a unit when its facets keep multiplying.

The name itself is altered into “Frivulteeny Sexuagesima.” That playful deformation brings the calendar term into contact with frivolity and diminishment, while the passage’s numbered notes and mock-scholarly asides disrupt any expectation of a stable, formal explanation. The temporal reference is present, but it does not anchor the passage to a specific date or narrated event.

Sexual Geometry and the Vanishing Center

The passage describes a feminine figure who spends herself “as sphere as possible,” extending “in all directions” along an “unbridalled” curve. Her facets grow “manier and manier” even as the center contracts toward “schurtiness.” The image makes expansion and reduction happen together: the more manifold the figure becomes, the less adequate a single measure is to contain her.

This bodily geometry culminates in the claim that the whole process “comes to nullum in the endth.” The mathematical vocabulary does not resolve the figure into a clean abstraction; instead, it intensifies the comic tension between bodily multiplicity and the imagined zero. Sexagesima thus marks a time named within a passage where arithmetic, sexual suggestion, and verbal invention continually cross into one another.

Place in the Book’s Material Language

Elsewhere, the book presents its proteiform text as a “polyhedron of scripture” and dwells on writing as a material, altered object: lines run in crossing directions, marks and initials invite competing readings, and a damaged document may be interpreted through the shapes of its wounds. The discussion of Sexagesima belongs to this broader interest in forms that resist a single, fixed account. Its sphere, facets, curves, and shrinking center translate that problem into an image of bodily change.

The calendar word therefore supplies no ordinary chronological marker. It is folded into a shifting language in which a season can become a geometry, a body can become a changing set of facets, and an apparent calculation can end in nullity without settling what has been counted.