Question about how we look at text

[sartorias]

I’m beginning with the assumption that before print, when few in Western Europe were literate, and most texts copied laboriously, there was a sense that texts were authoritative, or truth

Comments

[sizztheseed]

I was discussing something that on first blush would seem completely off-topic, but bear with me. We were discussing the period between Edmund Spencer and Francis Bacon, and the introduction of scientific allegories to period poetry, all in the context of our niece's homework. In particular, Ben Jonson's The Hourglass and Spencer's Fire and Ice. The allegories themselves, by being so dated, show a glimpse into the alchemical view on the nature of matter. The idea of atoms moving the flow of sand, or the idea of water hardening in cold miss the key concepts of gravity and latent heat, for example. They're not wrong, just missing information

[sartorias]

Oh yes. Oh yes indeed. Avoid work some more.

I have to read this again, because my brain she is rattling around inside my skull like electrified peas after reading this comment.

[scribblerworks]

There are some good thoughts here, but... heh, you totally distracted me with "bowels of our mind"! Ummm.... is that where I want to go, metaphorically, for really good, deep thoughts?

:D

[sartorias]

Mentally I translated that to tectonics!

[sizztheseed]

Aaahhhh, all good writing finds root in the place where the absorbed and the excreted are one: fertilizer. Dark earth. Sticks of red clay. The ocher that is blood that is life.

[scribblerworks]

Hee. Now, that's an expert covering of tracks. ;-)

[sizztheseed]

Oh, damn. Did I step in it again?