Rerum concordia discors

Ángel Ortuño

Writer and poet. Bachelor of Arts from the University of Guadalajara. He is the author of more than five poetry books. He has published in Tierra Adentro, La Tempestad, Cuadernos Salmón, La Colmena, Cantera Verde and Letras Libres.

In the twelfth epistle from the first book (circa 20 BCE), Horacio uses this phrase to refer to the philosophy of Empedocles, and more specifically, to the formula relating the four elements that as was believed at the time made the existence of the entire universe possible: water, fire, earth, and air all existed in “the discordant order of things.”

The baroque syntax of Beatricia Braque’s poetry employs hyperbaton to induce significant alterations in the verse’s syntactic chains, in a twist that causes us to question the functioning of meaning itself, or what we understand of it, only to recover it with clarity when further confusion would seem to occur. Language here is a code that mutates before our eyes, with the notion of order constantly shifting.

In her poem, Tania Carrera offers an interesting analogy to game theory. As we know, the prisoner’s dilemma fundamentally operates on discord, on the disparity between two beating hearts: the mysterious behavior of those who refuse to cooperate with one another, even if their reluctance ends up harming them. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes that, “all ordered society puts the passions to sleep.” Just a few lines later, the German philosopher refers to the important role of behaviors considered “evil” in the vital modification of social codes. The discordant order of things appears once more.

Inti Santamaría’s illustration synthesizes and the choice of verb is more than metaphorical this volume’s main premise: the highly relevant and yet underrecognized role that the women of science have played, throughout human history, in brilliant inquiry, in the sharp questioning of orders that were once thought immovable, in a fundamental contribution to sciencebased thought and action.