Opinions on: line as a functional unit

[Bernd]

I've long been wondering if all those 'evolutions' like Line Initials, Rightwardness, Downwardness, Endwardness and Line- Paragraph and Page as a Function can be explained by some sort of process being described. More rigid than a recipe but less rigid than mathematical calculations. Maybe a textual logical operation. You define starting conditions, variables and operators that modify them until a result is achieved. Such (Pseudo-) logical operations could be anything from philosophy, a religious exercise to magical or alchemical thinking and wouldn't necessarily make much sense for an outsider. This could also include the self-citation hypothesis as the author would repeatedly pick up certain terms and 'play around' with them in different ways or put them in a different context.

Hard to prove or disprove and therefore not a very good hypothesis but I think we must acknowledge that some sort of algorithm is at work here that continuously shapes the text in a much more rigid way than ordinary prose or even poetry. Yet I would think all too stringent mathematics like astronomical calculations or book-keeping with roman numerals would lose the text's language-like properties. Has this been tested?