What's Red, White, and Blue and Syndetic

imitate the riddle, I trust my intention to be playful is clear. It is not to the riddle but to the flag, which most of you have doubtless surmised to be the answer to this faux-riddle, that I shall devote my attention-or some of it at least, for in fact, I am interested in that banner only insofar as it provides convenient access to a larger order of phenomena. What I wish to write about, to be quite direct, is syndesis, a dynamic I named in Wellspring (Armstrong 1974) and whose features I have continued to search out in The Powers of Presence (Armstrong 1981) (Fig. 1). Syndesis is the order of being of a vastitude of the things we encounter in the world-and the order of much of our experience of them as well. Indeed, perhaps syndesis denominates the existential field we most often inhabit. It is the order of phenomena constituted of adjacencies rather than of entailments. The syndetic pervades our being-from the inexplicable contiguities of accident, repetitious crystalline forms, and aspects of what we ordinarily call the work of art (including, indeed, the definitive one of presence), to the pot, and on to the timeless present of ecstasy. Syndetic are the relationships among the planes and angles of the natural facets comprising the surface of a stone; syndetic, as we shall see, is the character of various of the aspects of the flag. Syndesis is the order as well of the myriad intimate contiguities that constitute lived moments and lifetimes. There is little doubt to my mind, therefore, that the study of syndesis is essential to the folklorist. Indeed, one suspects that it is more the phenomena of syndesis that confront the folklorist than those of its alternative order

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