What About the Fox

This week, I read the Fables of Babrius in microfilm online,* and wondered what it must have been like for students for centuries after the 4th to have begun their education in rhetoric by recreating fables. And how, too, certain tenets of those fables were revived in Erasmus' Adagia, also a popularised didactic tool. By tenets of fables, I of course mean maxims: illustrations of both good and bad character. Scampering throughout Babrius' Fables is the fox - a tricky character, reminiscent of the trickiness Chesterton gets at when he writes: " But if you are going to mend an innkeeper, you must do it tenderly, you must do it reverently. You must nail an extra arm or leg on his person, keeping always before you the Platonic image of the perfect innkeeper, to whose shape you seek to restore him." The wily fox has a place in the story of perfecting images.
Some of the fables depict the fox in situations reminiscent of Wile E. Coyote, playing tricks on the Road Runner (which gives pause for thought: did fables inspire some Looney Tunes?)
But there is a curious one in which the fox, having (literally) fallen on hard times, is offered help from a hedgehog that it refuses: musing that to rid himself of his plight would be to expose himself to worse. The fable opens by being lauded for its ethos: Aesop used it to sway a crowd!
It was at that point that I could no longer refrain from wondering about Berlin's hedgehog/fox essay - specifcally, how he made the fox so one-dimensional as compared to how the fox appears in the fables: as immoral as cunning - and even wise. It turns out that Berlin said of the essay: "I never meant it very seriously. I meant it as a kind of enjoyable intellectual game, but it was taken seriously. Every classification throws light on something else, this one was very simple."
The idea from an Archilochus fragment that the essay opens with, about a fox knowing many things and a hedgehog one, also appears in Babrius - although with a twist: it is a hedgehog's boasting that prompts the fox (reynard) to say that it "possess[es] a mind of more variety than thy skin or mind". The fable ends with the maxim: "Each magnifies that which within his own possession lies."
* Please note since I did not make this clear: Babrius collected Aesop's fables. I do not know why I insist on reading Babrius and not Aesop.

There is an interesting thread about where Berlin got the Archilochus reference from at languagehat, which came up as I was doing topical reading to make sure this post I wanted to write was at least somewhat original. One of the commenters links to Bowra's paper on how Archilochus used the reference, postulating that he was comparing himself to the fox when he did.
The difference between the Arhilochus fragment and the Babrius fable illustrates that knowledge of a corpus of references does not stifle creativity, as some contemporaries seem to argue - lacking a shared vocabulary of possibilities for thought voiced through the safe remove of the animal.
What about the fox is partly explained by the Chesterton essay cited above. It questions whether the original nature of things is good or whether it is bad or "lost all power of being good". What the fox is about is the quest for what makes good or bad, how hard it is to pin this down, how the definition can change in an instant, in a different retelling, in a different context.
Building thought on the fox seems useful, not just paper dreams.

Magazine in background: Marie Claire Idées; brush: misprinted type.

Facts of Fiction

It struck me as strange the other day when I realised how much argument has to go in to defending certain modern works as specific genres, when in the past, much liberty was taken in applying Aristotle's work on dramatic theory, Poetics, to literary theory as a whole. After all, though, the work seems to privilege meaning, if we take 1451b into consideration, where Aristotle calls poetry more "scientific and serious than history" because it illustrates what could be, i.e. what is possible through types, rather than what merely was. Hadot, in "Physique et poésie dans le Timée de Platon", finds a connection between this later statement and the creation myth in Plato's Timaeus, which is also a could - of the Best - placed over the was - of Necessity. Vis-a-vis this problem of "genre", Gadamer writes in Truth and Method that the main distinction between poetic and scientific (i.e. scholarly) prose is "the distinctions between the claims to truth that each makes". He continues: "It is not mere chance that the concept of literature embraces not only works of literary art but everything passed down in writing."
To look at art in terms of truth claims makes genre merely one form of vessel chosen over another to reach another shore - providing they are popular enough to work, which I add because it seems to me myth, for example, is not particularly popular at this time (which is not to say they do not subscribe to them; also, the winds of culture have blown on different courses since David Strauss, once admired by Nietzsche, among others). John Herman Randall describes mythologies as the consideration that moral adventure, artistic activity, and participation in the class struggle are the most important things in the world. (It is noted, though, that he wrote this in connection with romantic idealism.) Myth, in this respect, is a serious genre, though playful for the make-believe, and so is perhaps too light for this heavily jaded age.

This evening, I watched the end of Three Faces of a Woman, starring the Persian Princess Soraya, which led me to watch the last interview with the Shah of Iran, briefly educated at a Swiss boarding school I once went to during summer, and remembered some things that suggested to me that a world can shrink, but never go away, entirely. As for me, these days I live in a relatively impoverished place, where some people would curiously spend their last money to dance the tango or merengue. And this latter point illustrates the penultimate point in this post: the wish, among some, to belong to something greater, maybe I could add, to something with flair, too. This sentiment is rather like what is suggested in the pop song, "Je veux pleurer comme Soraya". She had a rose named in her honour (a grimpant tea-rose, in 1955 or 1960). It seems the rose, grown for l'impératrice by Francois Meilland, is not trademarked. Could or was?
Ultimately, though, and moving on, whether a hero is written or lived, and whichever comes first if ever, it seems a lot of imagination or vision is required to dream up an alternative in the face of the harsh Necessity that is sometimes called reality. Hadot writes that one such vision is given to us, as a choice (between Best and Necessary) in the Timaeus. What I find fascinating about that dialogue compared with a generalisation of the work of romantic idealists (both serious about best possible visions) is that the former, while idealistic, is also critical.

Book in background: Boucher's 20,000 Years of Fashion;

brush: ewansim at DeviantART.

Beyond Myth?

Jean-François Champollion was the son of a bookseller, who by his teenage years knew Greek and Latin, and some Herbrew, Abraic, Syriac, Chaldean, Chinese, Persian, Coptic, Ethiopic, and Sanskrit. At 16, he presented a paper providing a clue to the Hieroglyphic script, based on his suggestion that Coptic was an ancient Egyptian language.
Literary critic Guy Davenport called Claude Lévi-Strauss "The Champollion of Table Manners" in an essay on the latter's The Origin of Table Manners. Davenport considers Lévi-Strauss, "the most dilligent interpreter of our time", "a reader of riddles and a rediscoverer of the primacy of human behaviour in our knowledge of the world". And the knowledge Davenport focuses on? "'It remains to be seen,' Lévi-Strauss writes at the end of this intricate study of primitive civility, 'whether man's victory over his powerlessness, when carried to a state out of all proportion to the objectives with which he was satisfied during the previous millennia of his history, will not lead back to unreason.' That is, have we moved irrevocably beyond the ethics encoded in archaic myths; and if so, where are we?"
Apparently, a similar point was also raised by Antonio Rosmini in Theodicy, of which I learned from Brandon's summary of a passage about how moral progress is not inevitable, particularly if new generations do not build on what has been learned from preceding ones. Lévi-Strauss' "out of all proportion" here means too much abstraction of concrete, particular expressions of virtue - if I may be permitted to rephrase a summary. If these expressions get lost, they have to be learned all over again, the hard way, by trial and error.
An example of particular messages that may be transmitted are those Davenport says may come to us through the power of myth: "how to marry, how to eat, how to be brave". He posits that when myth loses this power, "it becomes a narrative that does not know how to resolve itself. Everything, says the contemporary novel, comes to a bad end ... We are no wiser than man has ever been about our helplessness in nature. Our fate with love, death, despair, doubt, wealth ... is no different ... it is unanswerable to ask if we have remained human ... Our past is forgotten. We can forget it again."

Human existence is a riddle, which may be encoded in myth. To be beyond myth is to attempt to surpass the need to come to terms with humanity. Gadamer writes about this attempt at transcending conditionedness in Truth and Method, affirming that the focus on subjectivity is a distorting mirror and that history does not belong to us, we belong to it (278, there is no such thing as a point outside history from which the identity of a problem can be conceived). Also, the "overcoming of all prejudices ... will itself prove to be a prejudice." The way around this is to acknowledge one's own particularity, i.e., to know that one has a horizon: learning to look beyond what is close at hand by seeing it better, not by looking away from it (303-4). In a passage that I think beautifully explains the relevance of historical texts, he writes:

When our historical consciousness transposes itself into historical horizons, this does not entail passing into alien world unconnected in any way with our own; instead, they together constitute the one great horizon that moves from within and that, beyond the frontiers of the present, embraces the historical depths of our self-consciousness. ... Our own past and that other past toward which our historical consciousness is directed help to shape this moving horizon out of which human life always lives and which determines it as heritage and tradition.

The emphasis here being on collaboration, as man is always subject - to history. To discount or deny this subjectivity is actually to forget how to speak. To discount the story as Forster did is to deny the answers that are attempted in narrative (he called it primitive: "The more we look at the story, the less we shall find to admire ... Neanderthal man listened to stories…"). Gadamer writes, "It is not that the understanding is subsequently put into words; rather, the way understanding occurs ... is the coming-into-language of the thing itself." (370-1)
Stories and myths are this birth place, and there are myths that are as sophisticated as dialectics.

One anthology of stories on human comport that does not presume to rise above the conditions when it was written, that rather speaks to them, is Valerius Maximus' first century Memorable Deeds and Sayings, which I learned about most through Henry John Walker's introduction to his translation: "It is his very refusal to perform a historical critique of Roman ideals that makes Valerius Maxiimus such a valuable historical source for the worldview of the Romans." Indeed, Walker notes that Maximus does not claim to present an accurate description of the past (which Walker's footnotes reveal) but to provide moral guidance for their inner lives. Walker quotes Maximus' preface: "What person in his right mind would hope that he could record the course of Roman and foreign history, which has been treated by previous writers in an elegant style, and do so either with greater attention to detail or with more striking eloquence?"
We learn from Walker's footnotes that the liberties Maximus takes are quite amusing, for example, he calls Aristotle "thirsting for glory", allowing his "student" Theodectes to publish his work on rhetoric as his own, later revoking this honour - when really, Theodectes was his predecessor, and Aristotle had written a summary of his work, later referring to this summary. Perhaps this is an example of what Walker defines in the beginning as the Roman "fairness" in citing "foreigners" where they were great, yet at the same time, often portraying the same as being boastful, compulsive liars, and corruptly decadent. And as such, a portrait of the Roman world is achieved.
This may demonstrate Gadamer's point of the use of not looking away from - if not looking beyond.

This week I was musing over the number of guidebooks for behaviour that I know of from the ancient world (nb. dilettante that I am). Memorable Deeds and Sayings was one such guidebook, but another that I learned of from Lendering's AHM (which I'd like to plug) is second century Aulus Gellius' Attic Nights. It begins similarly to Maximus' work in its modest claims. In an entertaining passage on the titles of other books, he explains that his is "merely from the time and place of my winter's vigils; I thus fall as far short of all other writers in the dignity too even of my title, as I do in care and in elegance of style." He explains that his work is to furnish "a quick and easy short-cut" and "lead active and alert minds to a desire for independent learning ... or would save those who are already fully occupied with the other duties of life from an ignorance of words and things which is assuredly shameful and boorish."
Indeed, it was once boorish to be without knowledge of tradition.
But as I was typing all these things down, prepared to add to a list of books on behaviour works like the Enchiridion, it occurred to me that all of these books bear a stoic bent. Which may be just coincidence as this list is random and not reflective of a knowledge of the field - but does raise the question of who is concerned with "the riddles of mankind" and the objectives of his quondam ethics (for, ethics are often the part left unsaid in modern narrative: the unsaid being one of the features of modern prose).
What one derides as priggishness another calls the economy of action, according to which freedom, like the horizon around a person, comes with limits, e.g. the concessions a ruler must make to retain power - to return to the message that Champollion deciphered. Though it sounds like an old story, the only reason I can think of why we would find "less to admire" in it the more we look at it is if we were tired of the human experience and horizons; of having a place and speaking from it.

Book in background: Amy Butler's Midwest Modern; 

brush: fall foliage by Creature Comfrots.

Little Vines on Paper

I have finally found the books with which I want to spend the rest of my life. But there is not enough time in the day, for the moment, to draw wisdom from their pages. So I miss them because it's become apparent how necessary it is to revise good ideas: it is not enough to merely encounter them once. Yet the ideas are not only in those books, the point of the good idea is that it is timeless and can be found in that Stoic idea of how people live, easy to locate if one is looking to people.
So here are some vignettes of what I have been doing when not checking contextual vocabulary for the book I am supposedly copy editing, but let's say that any translation happening as fast as this book is being translated means that the translation needs to be checked and retranslated in places, too. Anecdote one: I would perhaps be frustrated by this, or the ever more arcane deadline (though not on my end), but I am working with people whose haste is making something come together in months, as opposed to the years it would take me. So I may be losing sleep these days checking all these things that will not be revised enough but at the same time, I have become part of something that is powered by a will that I have not encountered in ages.
And I encountered the Wizard of Oz-like project manager, who took me away from hours on the job for coffee with the author who never showed and ended up remarking offhandedly at some point, "It is better to work on solving the small problems if we want the larger ones to be resolved." That is just like the opening to Epictetus' Golden Sayings, which asks man to focus on the things that are in his control: "The things in our control are by nature free, unrestrained, unhindered; but those not in our control are weak, slavish, restrained, belonging to others. Remember, then, that if you suppose that things which are slavish by nature are also free, and that which belongs to others is your own, then you will be hindered." If something is beyond our control, we are taught to say to such, "You are but an appearance, and absolutely not the thing you appear to be" and say to such that it is nothing to us. The little things are far more accessible, like how I talk to the cleaning ladies at the university; what is not accessible is whether I will be hired again next year.
By talking to the cleaning lady after the exam I held, I gleaned this nugget from her, "It appears," she said, "that some people have forgot that they are people."
Indeed, people we are. Not numbers, not parties, but people who laugh and cry, eat and discard stems or bones. Messy material. Problematic.

So as I was walking through the farmer's market today, one of those quiet, overcast days when it seems that every vendor I know calls me over to exchange a few words—no matter which, I stood the longest at the fish stall, where the lady talked about her brush with politics, how by not getting involved, she became an outcast and lost her job, only to be hired soon afterwards, with two children to feed, at a newspaper. She had been some kind of IT worker in the early days of such...and today she plunges her hands in the ice to release the fish that become people's meals.
Her main comment was that the sooner people understand that fortune comes and goes, if they have the fortune to see this in their own family, they are better adjusted to the way of things. That those too focused on the material are quickly disappointed and have little to teach others (viz. the way of things). That if one lacks such teachers, one has books (says the fishmonger-if you understand my interjection): books, not just one book but many books because all one needs is never in a single book. She was talking about how it is never enough to live by worrying over material existence, but that it helps to do the useful or enjoyable. And she did not use the contemporary stock phrase positive energy as she spoke, but the phrase, to fill the soul.
So much of what annoys passes quickly: one may even reach old age and regard past experience with that grain of salt that may or may not be used to freeze things (to link to a marvelous blog I discovered today via languagehat).
Freezing is an interesting concept. It is most useful for its opposite, heat, as in, the hot months of summer. From these opposites, I take time from little time to reflect on these anecdotes that serve as substitutes for books for as long as the tome of history I am working on occupies me. But does not control me. Because I still have the little things, and if they are not books they are at least placeholders to the texts that await me: the itses in want of context.

Brush: Ewansim Grunge at DeviantART.

Bookstore:  Erato Books

A Likely Fable

Can we know nature through a poem or a book?  We have been left with examples of this, like in Plato's Timaeus-Critias, but also in the more basic idea of there being a "book of nature" that initially stems from Pythagoreanism, according to which it was assumed that the book of nature was written in the language of mathematics.  We note that in the Timaeus-Critias, a knowledge of mathematics is inextricably linked to the knowledge that may help man to become a better person, i.e., one not diseased by an excessive drive towards pleasure (including gluttony and exaggerated carnal activities) but who studies in order to learn what is good and how to reach it.
Hadot, in The Veil of Isis (HUP, 2006) pp. 156, writes that the Timaeus is "presented as a poeisis, that is, as both discourse and a poem, or an artistic game that imitates the artistic game of the poet of the universe, the divinity". Timaeus is scientific, philosophical, and artistic but above all it is about a beautifully-ordered universe planned and constructed by a Craftsman whose Intellect mankind is encouraged to emulate.  Perhaps one does not agree that behind the universe is a Good Idea - but who can argue with this premise when presented as a likely fable? Timaeus says that should anyone refute his discussion, "we begrudge him not the prize" (54b).  Still, the man who does not see the singularity of vision behind the universe is to be allowed to "pass" (55d).  Such is "unversed" - a play on words implying also "unskilled".
In this way, if one prefers traditional orderly narrative, one is making a political statement: preferring order and symmetry to Other.  The Other in Timaeus represents the principle of plurality.  May it be noted that plurality has its place in this universe: such as at the connection of the joints, for its presence allows for movement (74a).
Everything has its place in this account, despite man only being able to arrive at what is reasonable or likely (29c): man can at best try to unveil the meaning of the universe by composing a poem of the poem of the universe by acting with it, through mimesis.
This poetic endeavour is addressed by Aristotle in Poetics, where he writes that it is the poet's object not to tell what actually happened but what could and would happen (1451a).  Hadot cites those who consider the Timaeus ahead of its times for having a "starting point in axioms that are indemonstrable in themselves but are capable of helping to construct a reasonable and likely representation of the universe; that is, ultimately, to 'invent' it" (159).  It may not represent the world as it is but as it would appear if it were made rationally (158).  If that is true, fair enough, but we are still left with the idea that the rational is good and requires discipline (of the pleasures, etc.) and education to reach.  The former is particularly relevant for Timaeus notes that "what is good merits description more than what is evil" (87c) but who among us consistently cultivates their attention to focus on the good?  Do we dislike a good fable?

Book: Amy Butler's Midwest Modern; Brush from Lauren Harrison.

Two Retellings of Mythology

I was most graciously invited to join a reading group in their consideration of Pindar's First Olympian Ode alongside Ovid's first letter in Heroides. Let us hope that the works may speak to us if we lack the foundation of guidance for better comprehension. Still, as the Pindar ode is elusive, I did have to do some extra reading to gain a better grasp of it (see links). The two works are written in different genres and their authors lived almost half a millennium apart.
Despite this, the pairing makes far more sense than exemplifying the modern almost oxymoronic concept of intelligent clashing. And while I retain Gadamer's warning in Truth and Method that the mind of the modern man becomes ever like a museum—everything assembled there removed from its original context—it cannot be denied that both of these short works are examples of retellings of mythology. In this respect, we can read them to appreciate the options open to the writer of today who need not feel entirely divorced from myths by the chasm of time.
Pindar's First Olympian Ode, as all of the odes in that collection, follows a fixed format, wherein victory is proclaimed, including the name of the victor and his parents, place of origin and similar; myth is used as ornament and to demonstrate moral lessons (these may be proverbial); prayers are made. The (limited) points I would like to pick upon here, in order, have to do with the refashioning of myth; 'slander'; victory (and writing).
Pindar claims that humans distort traditional stories, which brings to mind the barring of tragedy in Plato's Republic, which nonetheless uses some of the tropes of these stories itself. Pindar writes: "Tales/ told and overlaid with elaboration of lies/ amaze men's wits against the true word" (trans. Lattimore, I think he translated it best, 28-9). Socrates couldn't have put it better! Pindar, however, is writing here to "speak well of the gods". For this reason, he retells Pelops' story. He warns of what I wonder might be described as ὕβρις, for it is a result of an exaggeration, the loss that comes to those who speak slander, ἀκέρδεια λέλογχεν θαμινὰ κακαγόρους (53). So he changes Pelops' myth and Pelops is not served to the gods but snatched away by the desirous Poseidon (it is better to desire a person and metaphorically snatch them up than to eat them? I mean, the trident is also a glorified fork!)
Finally, Pindar shows how victory is achieved through dangerous acts (in the illustration of Pelops and the chariot race), yet it is precisely the overcoming of such challenges that mean that fame may shine from afar. Here, he connects victory to poetry and explains that just as the victor "walks on this height" it is the poet's role to "stand beside" the victor with his "skill" (i.e. of poetry). Thence the aphorism lauding the importance of the writer to the person performing the feat.

Ovid's Heroides—judging from the limited commentary (Showerman) I read—does not follow a fixed form so much as demonstrate Ovid's working within the genre of the epistolary elegy from the vantage point of heroines. Showerman writes: "What the Heroides lose by ... being the portrayal of legendary characters in language removed  from ordinary life they gain from their ... constant stimulation of literary reminiscence ... they should be judged on the basis of their connection rather with literature than with life."
I do not read Latin and only read the Showerman translation, which appealed to me immediately for how well it lent itself to being read aloud. My favourite parts were Penelope voicing a woman's anxiety (women may be situiationally more vulnerable); the hope of the letter; the woman's perspective of war and victory—connected finally to absence.
I do not know if this is a trope of the worries we fall to, but nominate it to become one if it isn't: "When have I not feared dangers graver than the real?" The chaste woman is "wroth with vows" she herself has made. The woman who runs the household fears she may be seen as "too rustic" by he who is technically bound to her by wedlock but abroad and may be "captive to a stranger love". Since Penelope has no news of Ulysses, she lives "on in fear of foolish things like these".
It is a beautiful touch, I think, to have Penelope write that she gives this letter to all of the strangers who come to their shores, in case they happen to see Ulysses anywhere. Talk about message in a bottle (cue the Police song—the hopeful message 'fishing' for love).
Finally, from the woman's perspective, Penelope asks what the use is of all the destruction of war if she is to remain alone, i.e. without Ulysses. Further, she muses that if the enemy had not yet fallen she would at least know where her husband was (fighting in Troy) "and have only war to fear".  As it is, Penelope writes, "A victor you are and yet not here" and concludes criticising his "shameful absence" after depicting his son in need of guidance and his rivals growing fat in his halls with no one there to repel them. "My heart is being torn, your substance spoiled"—so it is that absence is not a requisite of love despite that adage about the heart growing fonder.
If I had to draw comparisons between these two works, I would first focus on the concept of victory: Pindar includes warnings of victory (it is dangerous) and Penelope demonstrates some of the cost of war (uncertainty, a son with an absent father). I would also discuss the effects of retelling: to be pious; to take another vantage point, etc. Both of these works also happen to conveniently point to greater questions, like, what is the truth of events, whose narrative should count, and so on.

Magazine: Maire Claire Maison. Brush: Ewansim floer grunge at DeviantART.

A Monster and a Line

In Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, "Myth and Literary History: Historical Philology," Vernant writes of the dangers of philology's having usurped study of classical mythology due to its positivist tendencies. Myth is reduced to chronological and typographical analysis that ultimately assimilates myth to history. Furthermore, mere literary analysis of myth, focusing on genre, function of literary type, personality of the writers using them, etc, obscures its specificity. A linear understanding is read into even the religion, robbed of its internal logic and instead seen as composite, syncretic, 'heteroclite' of individual portraits "as if in a dictionary, alphabetised". These portraits are explained by fusion processes among different elements of origin that may have come into contact. Vernant points out that the function of a god in practices, beliefs, myths, religious conscience, may diminish the relative importance of the problems of origins.
So, myth then assembles for these historians causal or etiological explanations; deposits history has left in the legends, and the "imaginary" which is their appellation for anything that does not correspond to event or in which they fail to find reflections of the real. In sum, "In the line of logic of a certain traditional philology, any attempt to decode Greek religion and mythology risks appearing as a desperate enterprise. How can one pretend to look for order in that which is, by nature, an incoherent free-for-all?" Paradox is inscribed from the beginning, in the opposition of logos and muthos. Vernant writes that the same civilization that gave us the virtues of clarity, intellectual rigour, lived, on the plane of religion and myth, in a sort of chaos.
Socrates addresses myth in Phaedrus: when he is asked by Phaedrus (229c) whether he believes in a river myth, he begins by saying that he "would not be extraordinary" if he "disbelieved, as the wise men do". These wise men, it follows from his account, furnish rational explanations (positivist?), which requires much cleverness and is unenviable because there are "multitudes of strange, inconceivable, portentous natures" that all need explaining. What is more, "to explain each in accordance with probability" requires "a great deal of leisure".

Socrates says he has no such leisure, because he barely understands the Delphic maxim to know thyself, so he ought not "investigate irrelevant things" (230). Regarding the monsters that may be attributed to fancy by the historians mentioned above, Socrates says, "I investigate ... myself, to know whether I am a monster more complicated and more furious than Typhon or a gentler and simpler creature, to whom a divine and quiet lot is given by nature." It is possible at least in this example for the monster to be a referent in a heuristic metaphor.
Time and again I think of Gadamer's opening to The Beginning of Philosophy where he writes that where we set the beginning of things is relevant as this can even determine to some extent the outcome. I wonder if this can be compared to geometry, where a line is infinite unless it has the additional information related to the beginning or end point. That information contextualises the line, just as the chosen beginning does the following narrative. The positivist's line wishes for infinity (in its implicit suggestion that as time goes on, ever more will be known of the laws that may be discovered) but it tampers with beginnings.
The diversity of examples of a subject can diminish the relative importance of beginnings. One example is the relative importance of the myth to Socrates: less important than self-knowledge. Because maybe if we knew our own selves better, we would come to a better relationship to this line that may not have a beginning point that can be rationalised.

Brush: Ewansim Grunge at DeviantART.

Connecting the End to the Beginning

While I have never posted excerpts from a book before, I would like to do so in this post. The excerpts were of interest to me because this weekend I had been discussing the possibility of having a synthesis with which to understand Dante's Divine Comedy. Georg Lukács came up, who forwarded in The Theory of the Novel that the work may be seen as an epic consisting of various ballads of individual fates. I am inspired by his holistic view of the work, not least because of the Aristotelian approach that runs throughout: of beginning with something that is near before going to what is far; starting with the easier before progressing to the difficult. One may see the books as breaks but also as the promise of integration that is implied by the unification that is already the 'collection into a work': the reader may unify the lessons of the ballads in the horizon of their own lived life. One of the many complexities of Divine Comedy is the inclusion of so many philosophies, natural and otherwise - even Arabic thought makes it into heaven, albeit through their interpreters. But a thought influence that might not have occurred to me (not being an expert and therefore not well read in this area) had I not been reading Jean-Pierre Vernant at this same time may include Pythagoreanism and ancient Greek eschatological mythology.
I have chosen three excerpts where he writes about these themes, from "Aspects mythiques de la mémoire et du temps" from Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs, Paris: Éditions la Découverte, 1988. They are my translations - and unless I am inspired to rework them tomorrow and update this post, they have not been slaved over or even edited and are therefore lacking.

At no time does the reaching back through time make us depart from actual reality. In distancing us from the present it is only in relation to the visible world that we are distanced; we exit from our human universe, to discover behind it other regions of being, other cosmic levels, normally inaccessible: what is below, the infernal world and all that peoples it, beneath the world of the Olympic gods. The “past” is a constituent part of the cosmos; the explorer is to discover that which conceals itself in the depths of the being. The History that is sung by Mnemosyne is a deciphering of the invisible, a geography of the supernatural.
What then is the function of the memory? It does not reconstruct time; it does not abolish it either. In collapsing the barrier that separates the present from the past, it makes a bridge between the world of the living and the beyond which returns all that had left the light of the sun. It realizes for the past an “evocation” comparable to that which the Homeric ritual of the ἔκκλησις carries out for the dead: the appeal of the living and the coming of day, for a brief moment, of a defeat in rising above the infernal world; comparable also to the voyage mimicked in certain oracular consultations: the descent of one who is alive into the land of the dead to learn – to see – that which he wishes to know. The privilege that Mnemosyne grants to the aiodos is that of contact with the other world, the possibility to freely enter and return from it. The past appears as a dimension of the beyond. pp.116

In the context of these eschatological myths Mnemosyne is transformed. She is no longer she who sings the primordial past and the genesis of the cosmos. The power on which the destiny of souls after death depends is from here on connected to the mythical history of individuals, to avatars and their successive incarnations. At the same time it is no longer the secret of origins that she brings to mortal creatures but the means by which to reach the end of time, to bring a termination to the cycle of generations. pp.118
…
In Pythagoreanism, anamnesis plainly realizes that which in Hesiod is only outlined: an initiation into a new state, a radical transformation of temporal experience. In fleeting and elusive time, made up of an indefinite succession of cycles beginning ever anew, the recollection of previous lives finally presents its end, its τέλος. It substitutes for it a time reconquered in its totality, a cycle entirely completed and finished. In this way it clarifies the enigmatic formula of the physician Alcmaeon of Croton, associated with the Pythagoreans: “Men die because they are incapable of connecting the end to the beginning.” In permitting the end to reconnect with the beginning, the exercise of memory makes itself the conquest of salvation, deliverance with respect to becoming and death. On the other hand, Oblivion is intimately connected to human temporality, the time of the mortal condition of which the flux “that never ends” is synonymous with “inexorable necessity”. He relates how the Pythagorean Paron, hearing recited at Olympus a eulogy to Time “in which we learn and in which we remember” asks whether the opposite isn’t true in time that is made by oblivion and proclaims time the king of ignorance. pp.126
If you do not consider this translation a disaster (I find Vernant hard to read in French to begin with and I think it would take me a long time to smooth out what I've 'translated' here) there is another section from a different book by Vernant about myth and philology that perhaps I could post in the next few days. 

Magazine: Mairie Claire Maison. Brush: Ewansim tape at DevientART.

Book of Experience

One of the gems from the second-to-last edition of On the Shoulders of Giants (which will now migrate to a weekly post here) was the discovery of a blog called Conciatore written by Paul Engle about 17th century glass maker Antonio Neri, who was, as per the blog title, a "specialist in alchemy who formulated glass from raw materials".
The most recent post, a very interesting guest post by Maria Grazzi, is about how Neri was plagiarised by a Jesuit scientist - but the part I want to respond to are her describing the "'scientific' mindset" as the study of the "book of Nature" and knowledge being acquired "with the practice of many experiences" (emphasis added).
Pierre Hadot in The Veil of Isis reads the book of Nature as follows: "Bernard Silvester reserves the word integumentum to designate myths intended, as in Plato's Timaeus, to explain a natural phenomenon (they reveal a true meaning hidden beneath a fabulous story), as opposed to allegoria, which is proper to the explication of biblical texts (it reveals a new meaning in a veridical historical narration). We find this distinction again in Dante. It corresponds to an opposition between the two books written by God, the Bible and Nature, both of which can be deciphered only if one uses an allegorical exegesis, which, in the case of the Bible, refers to sacred texts and, in the case of Nature, to myths. This Nature, we must recall, was conceived in the Middle Ages as a power subordinate to God but enjoying a certain autonomy."
Hadot later notes the resurgence of viewing Nature as a language or code, signature, hieroglyph and book in the seventeenth and also eighteenth centuries (the latter in Kant, Hamann, Goethe).
There are precedents of viewing nature as a book, like in the Pythagorean view of nature as being written in the language of mathematics. One might also observe that Homer's description of Achilles' shield fabricates the world as a reduced symbolic model.
While I understand combining the study of the book of nature with knowledge of such gained through experience to describe 'science', I wonder how many scientists actually fit this simplified model.
On Engle's blog itself, we read in From Beads to Belief Reprise that not only did Neri read Psalms by way of keeping time for his extraction of colours and dying but that he made glass beads that were not only material but of spiritual value: "they served as sequential placeholders in prayer, as objects made by man in the fashion of natural stones or gems, which were physically held and invested with hopes and dreams".
Similarly, and to choose an example of a later scientist whose narrative also addresses allegoria and integumentum,  J. C. Maxwell wrote, "We may use our knowledge of such truths for purposes of deduction, but we have no data for speculating as to their origin." This complies with Engle's observation of Neri in Beads: "At first blush, it might seem that religion would be at odds with alchemy and glassmaking. In reality, practical elements of Neri's religious life integrate seamlessly with his work at the furnace and in the laboratory."

In another context, Maxwell wrote: "I would be very sorry if an interpretation founded as a most conjectural scientific hypothesis were to get fastened to the text in Genesis, even if by doing so it got rid of the old statement of the commentators which has long ceased to be intelligible. The rate of change of scientific hypothesis is naturally much more rapid than that of Biblical interpretation, so that if an interpretation is founded on such an hypothesis, it may help to keep the hypothesis above ground long after it ought to be buried and forgotten."
That the distinction between the 'two books' may be seamless can be seen by Maxwell explaining, "and I think Christians whose minds are scientific are bound to study science that their view of the glory of God may be as extensive as their being is capable of. But I think that the results which each man arrives at in his attempts to harmonise his science with his Christianity ought not to be regarded as having any significance except to the man himself and to him only for a time, and should not receive the stamp of a society."
To this very day, there are bishops ready to cite science for change or scientisimists who are ready to say that scientists cannot possibly have faith if they are to be successful.
What Maxwell writes might also be considered as advice against the trend of scientistic social interpration. I was thinking about that when I read Engle's post on Turquoise where Neri stresses the importance of experience when making the "sky blue" of turquoise: this privileging of science applies only to this very particular work in the laboratory. It does not apply to a life figured out through experience only.  Ἰωάννης τῆς Κλίμακος writes about such an approach to spiritual progress, saying this is a long (possibly uncertain) path, as opposed to learning via υπακοή - which I would describe as the leap of love, where one is devoted to the person, place, instruction not so much for what it is, but as a form of anchor to a type of flightiness that might otherwise get the better of one. (Maybe this is not an accurate description.)
Viewed as a book or books, the natural life of man contains so many rich stories. To return to Engle's blog, we learn of the 'evil spirits' of cobalt (kobald - this is particularly amusing if you are learning German here), which were the toxic fumes released in its making; the insects used in crimson dyes and for medicinal purposes from the Mediterranean and later from Mexico; the "as it is" in perspective painting and in science; trade agreements blocking access to raw materials - know-how unto itself may not always be enough, though the blog, being about alchemy, frequently stresses the rarity or non-existence of published know-how. But today, Conciatore, the blog about a book in part about the book of Nature, is to become a book. We say well done, and wonderful guest contribution by Grazzi.

Book: Midwest Modern. Brush: Ewansim tape at deviantART.

The Able Course

Water always follows the easiest course, and one such course appears in a documentary of the Zambezi River. To tell the story of a river, like telling the story of a road, is an intriguing concept and if done ably, necessarily pedagogical in that the movement of a course or journey points to something more. Indeed the documentary made generous detours to the birds and tribes aligning the river; one tribe with their god Nyaminyami, who they momentarily felt had abandoned them in modern times, faced with displacement by a man made dam, but then it seems he may have caused it to flood not once but twice. The cameras went back to history, to non-digital shots of the Noah Project, and then came back to the present as animals rested at a grassy oasis at the adjacent Mana Pools. Lions and zebras and a host of other animals all feed at that paradisaical piece of green among the dust. The story of the river ended at the ocean, except it was observed that it then evaporated, entering the atmosphere to begin the river story all over again. It was a great narrative model, and brought to mind verse viii of the Tao, that the way is like water, which gives life to the ten thousand things without trying. 
The message of the verse, about trying without forcing things, may sound antithetical, perhaps because of the number of people who are good at following the grooves in life but aren't aspiring to perform their actions ably and so confuse the natural course of things. A professor active also in the media pointed out this week that even in academia, there are many who may look good on paper, but deliver little in the classroom or in terms of lasting (meaningful) work. 
In the mean time, people get older and to many it may seem that life is not meeting expectations. I am beginning to think again about the talking cure though not in the original sense but in terms of the critical (and humourous) possibilities opened up to the mind and thumos through stories. For not to be able to at least articulate (if not practice) ideas of when and how to act is to become brittle, hardened, quite the opposite of water. No sooner had I thought this that I realised how many narratives are based on the theme of reality (or 'fortune') vs. expectations.
It has been argued that to reflect on ideals, such as versions of utopia, is a useful way to exercise the imagination and inform choices. Learning how to address ideals may help with 'career paths,' adolescence, and mid-life crises - except learning is associated in the popular mind with childhood and adolescence, as if one could ever be finished with figuring things out. Joseph Epstein wrote that, “People who have read with love and respect understand that the larger message behind all books ... is, finally, cultivate your sensibility so that you may trust your heart. The charmingly ironic point of vast reading, as least as I have come to understand it, is to distrust much of one’s education. Unfortunately, the only way to know this is first to become educated, just as the only way properly to despise success is first to achieve it.”

One does not learn to learn but learn to live - but surely we may wonder at how many writers, teachers, movie makers fail to live up to this point. The instructor is to make it possible, through slow attention and effective comparison, for the themes they address to be worked into the everyday reality of their audience. The attentive audience, the one that has tried on more possibilities, will then have a greater foundation for future learning, and also ripple beyond their initial ring, which announced their existence. 
To become concentric seems an act of both generosity and trust. To exit one circle and enter another, I think too that one becomes more transparent either to others or to oneself. One is also at the mercy, to the extent of being open if discerning, of others, a plot, a lesson. It takes courage, but by circling out, one may contain more within oneself and is that much the richer.
Like to teach a class of the disciplinarily challenged and be told to get their attention and to imaginatively begin a class with karate, like the protagonist of Dangerous Minds (the title seems to include the mind of that teacher, a 'danger' to the system, not to the students, not to learning). To be open to the experience, to go through with it, to use what one already has: to be resourceful in and with life. 
"You can't save me from my life," says one of those students from the film. There is no safe way, but there is a Way: to really look around for the good with deeply still eyes, and to act orderly, with ability, and in a timely fashion, residing in a suitable place - according to verse viii. This has been translated as 'doing what you love,' which is interesting because 'able' once designated that which was fit for a purpose in that it was easy to be held. To be able is also to be easy. Suitable.
In the programme on the water of the Zambezi River, I saw the bee-eaters living along its sides, those birds may be the very ones that summer where I live!The breadth of a good programme leaves something for everyone that can be held on to, applied. It may sound idealistic to write in favour of an easy course - particularly given the difficult obstruction of so many man-made grooves, and idealistic it is, for the ideal is an ongiong direction, not a destination.  

Brush.

Isle of Σειρήνων

Let us imagine that a life is like a journey across the seas and that these seas, in the educated mind, could be mapped out if not in particulars then in general symbols, as in the 16th and 17th century maps described here. They present a full alphabet of demonstrative monstrōrum, conveying moral warnings and oracular tripods: the pensive old man of the sea next to a mermaid next to a "grotesque sea-orc, breathing out fire." We imagine that when we see the mermaid, we might feel glad - but adjacent is a misfortune ablaze. It is a map that is not a system, but a language.
The system is defied by even beginner's drills: ὁ, τοῦ, τῷ, τόν - there is barely correlation in that, it is learned by repetition. Ambergris, aspidoceleon, atoll - symbols are assimilated through practice. One may speak of rudiments and but the suggestion, never ownership, of the system. To know of the sea-dragon is not the same as claiming the victories of Odysseus.
We ask how men have progressed in their reading, whether their intellect is drawn ever back to the whirlpools where they feel the most energy, triumphant as they sink while thinking. Few make it through the maelstrom. Perhaps to travel around it man develops some sort of criteria, κρίσις, not just judgment and the ability to distinguish but development through trial of strength, through reaching the turning point in a disease. Those are criteria, if clear only 'on paper' where beasts correspond not to life. Beasts erased by the systematic mind that thinks work ends with intellectualized definition, pleased with such out-of-body experience as if the vortex did not also have its non-physical component to trap it there, in thought or among the spirits sampled here.
If you were to give an overview of a writer of the map of words and the writer's reception via translation through time, what would you do? One might create a system, or focus on how the extant translations defy understanding, how messages get lost, how we are in essence all drowning in a sea of words.
Or, you could work as the fisherman. Carne-Ross's overview of Horace was governed by "no one principle;" "instead the net has been cast as widely as possible, bringing in a variety of fish". As to criteria: "Judging how far a translator's enlargements, his liberties with and additions to his author's poem, are a wanton intrusion of his own substance, and how far (in Dryden's words) they are 'secretly in the poet, or may be fairly deduced from him', is a delicate business best decided case by case." The question of authenticity is therefore valid in this context, yet allowances are made for deviations - which are judged according to a different set of criteria.

Authenticity may be equated with historical accuracy. Just as translations may be instead liberal transformations, the text of history may be similarly transformed. One may ask why knowing history matters. The answer may be clearer if we ask instead why it matters that a vague imitation not pass as translation. We could say that it is not learned, that it is something new - and worse, pretending to stand on the authority of precedent: its ethos is false.
But the practice flies today (no need to sail the ocean) because this is not an age that is particularly concerned with authenticity, which takes too long and raises pesky questions of ownership. We say of our Western map that all roads lead to Rome, erasing Constantinople and centuries of other legacies that exalted that which now seems like myth. We say defensively, our museums have a Byzantine Wing, but it is a double-headed bird's wing that has been clipped. And what of the Seven Years' War or the numberless other battles that might explain to us better who we are. But like the Sirens' promises in the Odyssey, the clues to our past may be obstructed by danger. Many are the types of fanatics, sea dragons.
The text of history is like translation, "never a substitute for the original but rather a parallel text that brings to the fore new aspects ... while playing down others." This means that our journey across the mapped out seas will include some deception, some not getting the right idea, especially today when we are told there is no right idea, as debate and articulation cede to apparatus. But history, like the individual life, is messy. History, in my opinion, is a better teacher to the modern man who is uncertain of how to cross the waters than the contemporary because it shows how ideas have fared in practice and which are likely to recur. The ideas are not the same, but who does not hear that familiar leitmotif - it is there, but we are warned not to listen while on autopilot as we pass by the crags beneath the Siren birds in their meadow. We would clip their wings but we do not know how to anoint our ears with silence. So it is that the demonstrating monsters stand for a past that endangers our lives if misread.

Brush.

Hands of the Tongue

The imagination seeks not things but merely a setting of choice nature: water-carved stone, muted clay, scented woods, verdure, words. And let us speak of friends who bring stories like song to hang in the air like provisional ornaments.
Last night, one such story related how my friend, who I think looks like a tall mermaid, was standing at the bus stop at around 7:00 p.m., and was joined by an elderly man in a worn but clean shearling coat and boiled wool hat, who muttered just loud enough to be heard "and in such fine vocabulary," how tall women are manly, gain weight as they age; "But you," he said to my friend, "defy my prior observations." The bus arrived, she entered via the back door, he the middle. She watched as he sat first next to one person, quietly, and how the person slipped him some change, then next to another, to the same effect.
When he finally approached my friend, she had already taken ten dollars from her wallet, which she placed in his hands. His eyes opened wide and he said to her, "You are a dame of generosity and grace."
As I write that, I think of the word χάρις which can mean "grace or favour felt, whether on the part of the doer or the receiver." My friend's observation was that despite the fact that circumstance had pushed this man, who might have been about eighty, to the edge of existence, he had not lost his dignity. Nor had he lost his feeling for the good word.
When my friend tells me stories like this, I wonder at all kinds of things. But I have decided that she is a magnet to circumstance that can act as seeds of transformation.
I've been thinking about Samuel Johnson because of the recent BBC radio series based on Boswell's Life, and wonder about that dry bone he picked with Plutarch - that old bone that has to do, too, with the general 18th century move away from imitation conceived as the representation of exemplary subjects of both the sacred and profane. Subjects were no longer to be presented in an ideal light, but "as they were." Interestingly, this coincided with a linguistic shift wherein rhetoric was divorced from poetry, which became more impulsive and subsumed to the cult of genius as opposed to universals.

Who is this "as we are"? Isn't that the photo of self from that not so great period that people hide at the back of albums or discard altogether? Is that picture of verity not also in defiance of the strength of transformation and the elusive aspect of self which always seems to escape being held between lines?
In contrast is the biography based on Sir Arthur Help's phrase: to "employ our imagination in the service of charity." And in the mean time, the image of the old man: dignity throughout, remembering the power of the good word, living by Prov 18:21 Mors et vita in manibus linguae: life and death are in the hands of the tongue. 
We might think of entire nations depressed if lazily into lack of zeal to comb their own outskirts and record the tales from their perspective, or biographers who have changed the contours of people's lives in the name of truth but to their own liking. One of the best posts on the task of the historian in this respect I found here, which in part awakens Gadamer's concern from Truth and Method about how there ought to be the attempt to seek the truth of what we read. It is also seeking this truth that might often lead one to cross-disciplinary conclusions. 
Perhaps one could think of Rev. Henry Carey's sentiment (in Riley) Multae terricolis linguae, caelestibus una, meaning the inhabitants of earth have many tongues, those of heaven have but one. We know that this latter statement resonates with the original concept of mimesis. It was written by a man who worked for many years as the assistant librarian at the British Museum, whose translation of Dante's Divine Comedy won the privileged stature of a standard work (you may recognise it). The very idea of a standard work of translation supports this idea this idea of tongues and the approximation towards originals. 
It is all very fine to attempt to take the objective stance towards the subjective man and the works of his ψυχή, but on the other hand, it is easy for the small-minded to have a field day, as per Juvenal's Lingua mali pars pessima servi; "If a servant is unprincipled, the opportunities which he has for slander render his power for evil ten-fold greater" (Riley). The good word and good principle: the ideal light for the subject of yesteryear and possibly for the truth-seeker in that examples reach above the detail of circumstance to celestial abstraction depicted in 天 where the great man reaches the sky: it is the hands of the great man that imitate the sky, in a word.

Brush.

Words from Fennel

It has been a holiday season of spices, I even perused the market looking for a better mortar and pestle; among the brass handiwork was a stall of postcards, some from the 1920's, carefully arranged beneath a magnificent cigar box, causing me to wonder at the vendor. Those travellers' words, in such neat little stacks at such an inconspicuous stall, for whom?
I remember long ago seeking out the shell of a 19th century spice store in Ravenna; there it was, it, Dante's grave, and the flooded church crypt, the Basilica di San Francesco, tied together in my imagination, for it was the waters that brought the spices across such long distances, navigated by the pattern of the Galla Placidian sky. Who would not also think, in connection with sea and the trading of spices, also of Elizabeth I, the gathering together of aromas like so many tesserae.
I have been making masala chai and harissa, as if these spices could calm the sea in the bones. I think back to Gloriana's explorers, looking for passages around continents in all that darkness of the unknown. Perhaps there is no need for the symbol of our shared horizon when, as Rebecca West once wrote, today the laziest person has but to recline into the already established grooves of transport. Other types of travellers, though, may take the line of Io in Prometheus Bound: "My far-roaming wanderings have taught me enough." (PB575)
She, as Prometheus, is εσμώτης - chained, fettered, considering herself to be bound to misery. In fact the play could be seen as commentary on how man's dreams and imagined futures blind him to the present and bodily restraint: the characters are bound despite their machinations. The Chorus says to Prometheus: "Sweet it is to pass all the length of life amid confident hopes, feeding the heart in glad festivities. But I shudder [540] as I look on you, racked by infinite tortures. ... Did you not see the helpless infirmity, no better than a dream, in which the blind [550] generation of men is shackled?" They reprimand him for his lack of humility - and he, he is not allowed to die, having transgressed normal bodily constraint (PB742).
Io's misery, too, was beset by visions, dreams, and aggravated by the oracle: ἧκον δ᾽ ἀναγγέλλοντες αἰολοστόμους χρησμοὺς ἀσήμους δυσκρίτως τ᾽ εἰρημένους (661-2) "oracles, riddling, obscure, darkly worded" (literally: an oracle that is unintelligible, hard to interpret, shifting in words).
The answer of an oracle, χρησμός, is related to the proclamation of the gods in the oracle, χράω, a word with many other meanings, including to furnish to the senses. Gadamer writes that the oracle proclaims a multiplicity of meanings to be interpreted (RB69). As opposed to this is the emphasis on speech that is truthful and telling plainly in simple language without riddles (PB640,609).

But even a μῦθος is a saying: a saying that possesses reality only through its being said (RB70). We are also wont to remember the opening to the Theogony: the Muses tell as much truth as they do lies.
Io is seeking the truth. Alone, she "cannot discern how to escape" her sufferings (PB575). She begs Prometheus to tell him her future but he declines, not wanting to crush her spirit. (PB609) So she implores him again after telling her tale and revealing how much of it was riddled (see above). "Do not, from pity, seek [685] to soothe me with untrue words; for I consider false words to be the foulest sickness." The Chorus replies: "never, did I dream that words so strange would greet my ears; [690] or that sufferings so grievous to look upon, yes, and so grievous to endure, a tale of outrage, would strike my soul". (PB697)
It is at this point (PB 696) that Prometheus begins to talk like a guidebook. But as he talks, he does not tell the simple truth Io wishes to hear, but a "prophecy," that is "not easy to understand" - i.e., οὐκέτ᾽ εὐξύμβλητος ἡ χρησμῳδία (literally: no longer easy to divine/a good omen [is your] answer of an oracle). He calls his words "tales" λόγοιν. He then continues to speak in riddles, offering her an account that may be hers or that of his deliverer.
Gadamer writes that something may be intimated but not intended. "Interpretation seems to be a genuine determination of existence rather than an activity or an intention ... The meaning of the oracle in this sort of tragedy lies in the fact that the hero provides an exemplary illustration of the ambiguities of fate that hang over ever one of us. As human beings, we are essentially caught up in the attempt to interpret the meaning of this ambiguity." (RB71)
Io cries that she has learned enough from her travels, and wishes for them to end. But such was not her fate, caught between the simple speech she longs for and the words of others. Perhaps a life is made up of as many such tesserae: some of our own making, and some of context.
But what of the spices, you ask? Maybe you know. Prometheus used a stalk from a fennel plant to steal fire from the gods. Fennel is used in 五香粉 which came to the West via the diaspora. There are many sorts of travellers, not all just following grooves. Perhaps the danger is not in the travelling but the will of the traveller. As the Chorus says, may Zeus' power never be set in conflict with one's will (PB 526). If one could but go with the flow, or live as the guest-friend.

Magazine. Font: Deftone Stylus.

Tzitzikas

"The forests were cleared to afford a prospect for observing whence came the auspices of the eagles, who fly higher than all other birds," writes Vico in New Science. He notes the architectural terminology that connects birds with pediments and battlements. Yet birds belong to the poetic age, "wings which the Greeks in their fables attached to all the physical objects signifying the heroic constitutions" along with barbarians in plumed helmets and Indians adorned with feathers. I don't remember whose idea it was as I come from a rather cycnical family, but I remember releasing my own birds as a child at the Wat Pho Temple. There is something to the bird.
And insects. It has been pointed out that both Callimachus in his Aitia prologue and Plato in the Phaedrus identify themselves with the cicada. In the latter work, Socrates and Phaedrus speak beneath a tree of cicadas (258e) Socrates posits are those who are older than the Muses (the musical Ligyans, λίγειαι Λιγύων 237a) and can bestow their wisdom from the Muses on men (259b-d). It is the listening to the music of the Muse-locusts that brings the gift of speaking. Except it is not any kind of listening: to merely be lulled by their voices they would fall asleep: to receive their message they must not be "moved by the charm of their Siren voices." (259a)
Both Callimachus and Plato invoke Calliope and strive to make the “sweetest” music, namely that of divine thought and philosophy. Those who are dear to and love the Muses are brought signs by them.
Imaginative Callimachus, too, discerns between sounds, not between being lulled and listening, but between the bray of the ass and song of cicada, for he wants to: "Sing living on dew drops, free sustenance from divine air" - like Plato's locust intermediaries who report on those "concerned with heaven ... whose music is sweetest". Passing their lives in philosophy (or song like C.).
This is a timeless answer to Vico's 3 ages, which may be the myth for the modern man: no monsters, but a new rewriting of history with more literal metaphors that the scientific man can understand. Myths are discarded as childish. Martial criticises Callimachus, "Here you will not find Centaurs nor Gorgons and Harpies ... But you, Mamurra ... you should read the Aitia of Callimachus." As Martial thought Callimachus the best Greek epigrammatist, he was really arguing for Mamurra to focus on things that may be seen in Rome: instead of thinking of the monsters of myth, observe the monsters that may be seen walking the city streets. Martial's dedications to the gods change with this shift in literary mode. The modern myth must draw from the streets. Or, man becomes his own myth in an allegory teaching moderation and measure. "And here we  have a luminous proof of the fact that the first fables were histories"

To see how man can become his own myth, we may note how Socrates retells the story of the λίγειαι, the Muse-locusts: "these locusts were once men, before the birth of the Muses, and when the Muses were born and song appeared, some of the men were so overcome with delight [259c] that they sang ... forgetting food and drink, until at last unconsciously they died. From them the locust tribe afterwards arose, and they have this gift from the Muses, that from the time of their birth they need no sustenance, but sing continually, without food or drink, until they die" - just like Callimachus' "sing living on dew drops".
But another story could be told. That of half the Ligyans standing aside during battle and singing. Or the Ligurian who helped Marius. What is the point of the story? The end, as Gadamer has shown about history, determines the beginning we perceive - and what we perceive, how we tell it.
By extension, flying, singing creatures, crickets, may be part fulfillment of New Science if they point to the golden mean.
In ancient Greece, crickets were kept "in little houses like singing birds in the apartments of women" for their song; it was fashionable to wear a golden cricket in the hair. Socrates connects them to the Ligyan-muses - but the Swan is connected to the people of Ligya, too, having brought from there "its dying song which was afterwards derided as a fable to the well  known seats of the god ... and at Delphi". There is something to the bird. And insects.
The poetry of the cicada may be kept, if we are not lulled to sleep by it. Just like Vico warns that, "Learned fools[fall] to ... false eloquence, ready to uphold either ... sides of a case indifferently ... malicious wits [turn] them into beasts made ... inhuman by the barbarism of reflection ... a base savagery, under soft words and embraces, plots against the life and fortune of friends". This calls to mind Dalrymple's contemporary observations that moral relativism can be the deception of an egotistical mind to mute conscience, and that the entitlement of rights replace the far deeper attitude of gratitude and mutual responsibility. Tzitzikas - the more difficult thing. To make sacrifices: staying awake on hot afternoons, hearing the conscience, being moved by the indebtment to others. Making the "sweetest" music administered to the needs of the day.

Brush. Magazine.