Time Machine Argot: Sexing the Cube

[salimondo]

I'm interested in outcomes. Generate a cubic environment. To the extent to which your space mirrors the world -- that is, to the extent to which you will avoid the autodidact's embarrassment -- it will conform to the right-hand rule along with other fundamental principles. This is why, for example, your cube should resemble a die even when rolled.

Comments

AB BC CA | AC CB BA

[salimondo]

The few classicists I've had call to talk to socially fret that Ahl is completely and dangerously sane. I find his book really useful as an argument that Saussure may not have been nuts and that the "gai savoir" or alchemical language of various recent thinkers springs from a deeper source than one might initially suspect. Varro was a practicing genius. What does he teach us about language and the world? Can we say with any certainty whether this ars is antiqua or the bossa nova? What does this entail for our own generous/grudging poetics that evade silence?

Ahl on "Addressing a Multiple Audience" says:

Ovid knew, presumably, that he would not have his every reader's entire attention (or understanding) all the time. His Metamophoses, like Mercury's tale of Pan and Syrinx in Book 1, may lull the reader -- especially one who regards Ovid as an ancient Hans Andersen -- to sleep before the story is complete. And we should recognize that Mercury intends his narrative as a soporific so that he can put Argus to sleep and kill him. Even a bedtime story may be a very potent weapon ... "rhetoric" is often qualified by epithets such as "empty" and "mere," and we are sometimes deluded into thinking that rhetoric really is only simple speech ornamented. We often assume, for instance, that a story is "simply" a vehicle for conveying information.

Re: AB BC CA | AC CB BA

[ineffabelle]

"And we should recognize that Mercury intends his narrative as a soporific so that he can put Argus to sleep and kill him. Even a bedtime story may be a very potent weapon ... "rhetoric" is often qualified by epithets such as "empty" and "mere," and we are sometimes deluded into thinking that rhetoric really is only simple speech ornamented. We often assume, for instance, that a story is "simply" a vehicle for conveying information."

That quote is enough to convince me that Ahl is on the ball, or at least that I'm nuts in the same way he is, which for me amounts to the same thing almost...

To cross personae, I think it would be interesting to contrast this sort of attitude toward the ancient with that of Strauss, who unfortunately is the perfect product/producer of the modern Poison Mythoi.

right hand rule

[salimondo]

This winds back to the sex of the cube, fortuitously. Sometimes the resultant vector points one way; in others, the opposite. Sometimes an Ahl, sometimes a Strauss. Sometimes the inflationary universe, sometimes stagnation. The results of the machine made of time depend on how the thumb points.

Ahl: Greek and Roman poets do not always share our concern for describing sequences in time. No one theory of time claimed everyone's allegiance in antiquity ... Ovid's treatment of time is remarkable in a number of ways. He does not omit the word "time" as Hesiod does and he does not set his work against a sequential or quasi-historical backdrop as do Vergil, Lucan and Silius. He simply does not use sequential Newtonian time as a structuring principle at all.

Re: right hand rule

[ineffabelle]

I produce my curves with calculus.
Glad to see you take note of parallel tracks.

Varos, Ahl, Saussure

[ineffabelle]

you've also given me much food for further study...