Two Bar was a name they gave a certain view of the Paris Basin, from their side of the river looking north past the clumps of muck and stranded flood wrack which would later host St. Chappel, Notre Dame and, just upstream, the citydwellings of the anciently and permanently rich of present day Paris, but seeing then, instead, the place where by the wrestlings of chance and design it would become.
The controversial Barry Coat of Arms
THE ADDLE-PATED DANE (Sappers under the tower) where Kierkegaard searches Elsinore, letter to fiancé lost, he thinks, perhaps … Unbeknownst, the playwright ignorant of Hamlet Writes the earnest satire of dithering nobility: Olivier plays him a fop, a Wilde a fashion-follower, epigrammatuer, a natterer at the edge of action. (GB 1956); In the later, US version (1962), Jerry Lewis, Addle-pated, Dithering bucktooth’d Dane, no mind to unmake! Boffo! July 1997
He didn’t say, the poor man, “A child’s burden of gorse.”
He said, “A Child’s Garden of Verse.”
Might have made the difference, hearing it that way, had the Uncle been able. But his hearing was imperfect as well as selective. Whatever was said, the Uncle would hear what he would.
Of course he didn’t say “ A child’s burden of gorse,” the poor man.
Why would anyone say that?
Idiom? —”Ah, yes, in metaphor, the child’s burden of gorse, weighing down even our most enchanted, carefree hours, representing in symbol that hard freight of life from which we may never be relieved even in the proposed idylls of youth.”
The Uncle’s thoughts ran down that unlikely path. Farther down that path he suspected the inevitable slur against his own childrearing practices, the effects of which were wandering uncertainly about the yard.
He searched for the proper riposte. “Their gorse is light enough, thank you, though if I had a stick I’d measure you out a proper burden,” or something along those lines, is what he claimed later to have formulated. All anyone remembers clearly was him mumbling, “… and another swift one, to boot.”
“Swift.? No, no. Lamb, surely.”
Suddenly the Uncle perceived a reference to Swift. Would that he had been mistaken in this as well. But, no he’d heard unfortunately right. Reference to The Dean always engendered the Uncle’s fury, brought on by his long, unhealthy study of the Dean’s most shocking pamphlet. Seeking to avoid the Uncle’s inevitable eruption, those who had regular commerce with him used the other words for quick exclusively in their dealings with him.
“Swift, then!” he shouted.
The Uncle’s firm conviction was that Swift’s modest essay contained an implied slur against Irish babies. The cannibal act was made even more repugnant by the suggestion of their Irishness. Imagine eating babies! Ugh! Imagine eating Irish babies! Eeeew!! Even French babies, presumably, would be less grotesque. In this regard the Uncle felt his whelp the equal of any man’s: a meal no less tragic, no less tasty. Swift’s imputed view would not be countenanced by the Uncle.
It was often remarked of the Uncle that he was never in any but a dispersing crowd.
“Lamb, I’m sure, would be correct,” said the hapless young scholar, unawares. It point of fact it was Stevenson, of course, though that is of little moment.
“Correct, ah!” shouted the Uncle. “But when it comes to it, would you not eat my bawn before the Earl of Glouscester’s?” And so saying, he delivered of the poor scholar a prodigious thrashing.
The Barry Family acknowledges the distinction to be had between the arbitrarily and the randomly offered element.
The arbitrarily chosen element is offered up to the taker as a pallette of useful indications of the proper values for the thing, free each to be chosen and employed as is the taker's wont.
The random swims to its own weird unknowable dispensations, outside the human way of knowing, offering up what it will and when.
In the Uncle's Simple Formula the square of a number on the one hand added to itself equals twice the sum of all the numbers up to and including itself on the other.
n² + n = 2(1 + 2 + . . . n)
What possible good this did as an alternative to the standard way of expressing the question at hand was lengthily if truculently addressed by the Uncle in his Ratios and Sums. Arbitrary, you see. Start anywhere, wander about, visit the standard way of saying it if must, a sort of tour.
The standard way of saying it would say that half the product of two successive numbers on the one hand is equal to the sum of all the numbers up to and including the first of the successive ones itself on the other.
Each expression can be transformed easily enough into the other by the agreed operations of mathematics. As it is in the Barry strain to raise the arbitrary standard, and as this tendency was in the Uncle's case an unrelieved feature of his character, which all who wearied of him will agree, it isn't at all difficult to suppose that this is why the Uncle's opus would consecrate the arbitrary in its beginning by starting with the Simple Formula as expressed.
If, as might be the circumstance from time to time in the Barry Family Talk, the talk itself (though ongoing as ever) remained without agenda for too long, The Uncle was sure to insert in it his Ratios and Sums and Simple Formula and all the rest of his unmitigated character as well.
Those who knew him took to spacing their silences as far apart as possible, contesting with him that first opportunity he always took to turn the thing to his chosen topic. As time passed and the Uncle's standard for intervening in any conversation loosened, it became necessary on the part of all he knew to avoid any subject even remotely associated with the numerous for fear of having him go on about it all again.
That the Uncle's best audience for it was so actively, so enthusiastically, organized to ignore what he was telling them makes the whole vex'd issue of the opus all the more difficult to resolve.
Some time ago we who daily scan the press here at HCE happened across the photograph in a local newspaper of the famous Michael Jordan, greatest basketball player in all the worldwide agon of it, swinging a stick of wood in a game of baseball. He made a perfect picture of a proper fool.
We say "happened" advisedly. We were walking through the "ready room" of our recent place of employment at the time, the place where bus drivers assemble before going out on their daily assignments, and the place to which the assignment returns them when it is done, room of oft-used couches and chairs, of walls lined with the faces of blue metal lockers and their pendant methods of securement where the individual items of those assembled could be had.
We were walking, as we call it, through the ready room on our unhurried way to somewhere.
Were it theater, this "ready room" would be understood as the "green room," or the as "locker room" in sports. There is an antecedent term in the craft of transportation, in fact, with its more telling etymology. The term is "gilly room," the word made to name the place where those who jockey with horses meet with all the tackle of their trade to take the indicated steed and go. This is the correct term, in the Barry estimate. Clearly the ready room was such a place, updated with respect to the steed, but otherwise directly descended in form and function from the earlier and established name for it.
We made this point at once on our employment there, advocating for the gilly room locution in the strongest language available, given our admittedly tangential phrasings. But we were repulsed, our view put down, the continuation of the solecistic "ready room" insured, on the one hand, by the otherwise commendable human disinclination to relearn a thing once learned, and on the other hand by the odd yet decisive coincidence that one of the people there, often inhabitant of the ready room itself, known to all quite familiarly, was known as such and in fact as Gilly. To the first difficulty with good reason we might have hoped to apply all the suasions of our glib polemics to the issue and in doing so to turn the matter in our favor. On the other issue our cause was wrecked: our suggestion necessarily endorsed the many-layered confusions inevitably allowed by entertaining the use of same word for the two quite disparate things. We let the matter rest.
As we walked, we looked about, as is our custom when travelling by any mode. Our eyes caught the photograph of your man Michael Jordan swinging the stick of wood. It was in plain sight, held in the grasp of the fellow sitting there in the misnamed room with his sports section of the Santa Cruz Sentinelbefore him.
We who know enough about such things to judge immediately, did. The swing was a golf swing. As clothes make the man, so golf unmakes him, we have always held, and there it was. The photo had all the diagnostics of it, the placement of the hoof placed so, the untimely thrust of hip thrust thus, the wrongly stiffened elbow. All of it.
"The man will never hit a curve with that!" we announced, pointing at the proof there printed. We offered up our frank and honest reflections on the topic at some pleasant length before the press of assigned duties drew us off.
And indeed it came to pass. Mr. Jordan's plan, to give over basketball for what he acknowledged was the better game, to strive after excellence in that instead, a grand ideal in the main, his plan to switch over and play baseball for a living, was doomed, and sent him back again eventually to that inferior if still quite popular endeavor at which he was unbettered. It's as well he made his fortune first before he made his try at switching, is our consistent view, given his handling of the contest's determining instrument.
Likewise, when the epitomized Socrates of Plato goes on as he does about politics, we are minded of the general principle involved. Philosophy is not politics anymore than basketball is baseball. His excellence in the one does not transfer. Just as Michael Jordan, he makes a foolish hack of it, too.
The Barry Family was an acknowledged thing well before the Naming, of course, a quite set thing only theoretically moveable from its 6000-year long bog-related position in the Paris Basin. The Barry Family willfully inhabited that great theater of the sedentary for all those many years, draped in the bog's quotidian sediments. In all that fabled passing through of time not much got done, as was the custom, though there were the sluggish, necessary gestures here and there applied in the direction of housing, clothing and edibles. In the main, the Barry Family that whole long time attended to the preoccupyingly complicit relations of its kind with one another and with all the given rest of the ilk of humans, however little the Barry Family understood the magnitude of that second category from their low vantage in the bog.
When the Romans came, they came in the form of well-armed men. They had the upper hand and all the best of their Iron Age weaponry in it.
If they'd had no Latin they'd have been a polyglottal crew, the Romans. They were the soldiers and the administrators and all the followers-after-advantage that all such enterprises bring. They came from everywhere, measured by the Barry frame of reference of that time, which was called Two Bar.
They had, overall, the Greco-Eastern take on what meant "Roman." The soldiers had with them a religion all the way from Persia, and the assorted makers of the city who came there had the Greek learning emboldening their various crafts. Founding a city was the great Geek way which the Romans had taken up and turned inland.
They came, they saw, they got things done. That astonishing thing, a city they had a mind to make there, came to be. They called it Lutetia or some such misnaming at first. Only later, some time after the Barry Family departed, did its citizens chose to call it, acutely, Paris.
If conversation turns to the striving after excellences, its first term is baseball, in the Barry Family view.
Here at HCE we follow the San Francisco Giants. If the agon is required, and our delight in its performance assured by our abiding fondness for witnessing excellences, does not baseball well serve as prime example of the agon's requirements in our estimate, and our attention to it serve the many interests in all the strivings after excellences in thought and deed we have exhibited over the years? Yes, in point of fact, by "if does, not does not" (a well established principle of the Barry Family logics widely shared here at HCE) the proposition is true.
The rhetoric of it is this: you've got your man of the contrary turn of it up against the ropes of your conversation, and you propose the fellow defend a certain proposition, presumably but not necessarily connected to some other argumental strain of the dialog.
"Go ahead now, given this," you propose.
The kidney blow is the proving a negative you wrap it in, the "…does not baseball …?" delivery of it. Let the contrastador wrestle with the grammar of the negatively proved, while you with your previous hand deliver its first term ("If … agon …required …and…delight … assured…") hard to the unarguable midsection of the other's conceit and well out of the ring with him. The Barry Family logic provides, as any logic does, that given your well-made first term, the point is made.
Thus "if does, not does not" in shorthand names the argumental thrust of the little combination, a favorite of the Barry Family oral tradition since the time of the Naming.
It was a favorable moment when the Barry Family made its consequential move to the western edge of America and encountered the game of baseball. San Francisco had baseball early in its history. San Francisco was new, it was only marginally a proper place for an adult, when the game established itself there.
Baseball established itself so thoroughly in San Francisco that the very first team of Major League Baseball, the famous and still extant Cincinnati Redlegs, saw fit to travel all the extravagant distance to San Francisco back then and play games of punishing ball against the chosen local nine.
There's no denying the Barry Family likes the nice touch of the stick of wood the game has, but that's just the one fellow on the field of play. Each of the rest of them out there has a paw covered with a leather basket, the nice container for the point the fellow with the wood would make, and the Barry Family finds this congenial to its tastes as well. The basket and all its clever harvestings are a long-favored trope of the Barry Family, and to find the trope so artfully realized by the needed disposition of the mitted paw adds further dimension to the game's charms, in the Barry Family view.
Antecedent to the dog's actions are its knowledges, and where they're from. As to the hearing and the seeing of the dog, it's unclear which port provides the better vantage for the beast, the ear or eye. However that may be, the smells of the smelling dog have pride of place.
The return in echo of the Easter Calendrics, the sad slow path of its main fellow from the triumphal entry of Palm Sunday to triumphal return of Easter, in the ceremonies of the other ways of calculating it, from which perspective the Roman Calendrics common to the Western church is unorthodox (to be most circumspect in naming it, considering the known list of asides), the repetition, that is, of the solemnly named days of the last and holy week to its exultant conclusion in yet another Easter Sunday celebration, however calculated by any of the extant ways of measuring it (giving rise to the possibility that in some favored year there might be a month of other Easters beside that customarily observed here at HCE), is cause for no little reflection. But also there is baseball.
The agon gives the glory striving needs for its goal. The NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament so recently concluded, which found its champion in the controversially named Orangemen of Syracuse University, is a robust example of the agon in its modern form, an arbitrary but well-formed venue for a proper argument over the excellences in dispute. But the diagnostic American agon, historically, has been, happily, baseball.
The Barry Family fondness for the game is elemental, and necessarily colors our own view here at HCE. The Barry Family's explanatory use of staves in argument long preceded the introduction of the game and its own stick of wood, of course. The cousinhood of the methodologies is undeniable, however, and goes far toward explaining the fundamental Barry Family interest in the matter.
Baseball's better agon, that contested in the National League of Major League Baseball, features the team the Barry Family is prepared to see victorious, the San Francisco Giants. Once, it is reported, that famous manager of ballclubs and of words, Casey Stengel, said, "Baseball is better than wine." There is really no going back, in our view, once that principle is adopted.
We know certain things cannot be done in baseball, that they remain forever outside the scope of baseball's possibilities, given the game and its players.
Some things are impossible by rule. The last-second field goal in overtime, as example, clinching victory and sending the assembled crowd into a transport of understandable delirium, this, we agree, is impossible in baseball. True, the game's rules could be disfigured to allow for such event (witness the DH), but as they now stand, no.
As played on planet earth by groups of humans, there are other constituent impossibilities as well. No human, no matter how cleverly adept with the chosen stick of wood, will ever hit a home run one thousand feet in distance. The force needed to impel such a shot is not available to humans, and indeed half that far is far enough for all intents and purposes.
Neither will a human ever throw the ball six hundred feet. Considering the characteristic dimensions of the typical yard where the game is contested, this too is by the way. Those of us here at HCE who care enough to follow the game at all did witness once a Giant outfielder throw the ball what must have been 400 feet from his place in mid-left field. A transcendent toss, though injudicious. It flew emphatically over the catcher (its presumed target) and over the high chain link backstop behind home plate as well, and into the hands of some fan favorably though unexpectedly seated in its path. "Missed the cutoff man," was our companion's sour evaluation of it at the time.
The rules press down on likelihood, as do the human talents, shaping a domain of possibilities where players can perform. All the conceivable events of baseball are there in that domain.
In addition to what's simply inconceivable, the rules can suggest what's unlikely ever to occur as well.
Say a pitcher throws a game in which he records the necessary 27 outs with 27 pitches. Each time he throws the ball, the batter makes an out. This is readily conceivable.
Say the pitcher throws eighty-one pitches, making each necessary out with a three-pitch strikeout. This is conceivable as well.
Say, oh, say the pitcher engages in a lengthy battle with each and every batter, monstrous matchups each with all the thrower's crafty wiles offered up to the sharp treatments of the batter's brutal stick of wood, and each of them, each engagement, is ended with a recorded out only after twelve pitches have been delivered. A three hundred and twenty-two pitch no-hitter. Again, conceivable.
Any number of examples could be so construed, conceivable by rule, yet ever unlikely. There is one game recorded in which each out was made when some fielder stopped the batted ball in fair ground and beat the batter running to first base with the preemptive throw. The first baseman was awarded an assist on each and every recorded out of the game, a thing that's conceivable by rule, but happened just that once, underscoring its unliklihood.
To the reluctant initiate into baseball's graces, it may appear that the likelihood of anything at all happening that might move the thing along to its appointed goal is poor indeed. And of course this is true in a general way and takes some getting used to.
"I know in my heart that the English language is the finest instrument the human race has ever devised to express its thoughts and feelings, but I recognize in my mind that others may feel exactly the same way about their languages, and I have no problem with that."
Bernard Lewis Atlantic Monthly May 2003
Easy for a polyglot to say, and the wily Lewis has the many, many tongues.
Fluency in English comes always as a surprise to those of us here at HCE, where by the hard standard of the Barry Family we speak English only, with our little Latin, and our vanishing Greek. Whether produced by a native speaker or one moved to learn it at some later time, the proper phrase of English is always a welcome thing in the Barry ear. Pity we make no sense of any of the other ways of saying it, perhaps, but the standard is inflexible. English is the vasty and unwieldy instrument for all of that, not easily rigged or sailed, even given the solitary attentions of the monoglot. And the Barry Family has long been dutiful in its attentions, producing from time to time in its Findings of The Barry Family the unflinching results of its investigations into all the many uses of the instrument of English.
Lewis professes no problem with it, the many voicings of humans. He would say that: he has the Middle Eastern tongues, and the many decades of their use, along with his native English and who knows how many other smatterings of all the ways of saying it; but for the Barry Family this is a problem indeed. We patently do not understand what many people say, even if said in English on the first go. Our understanding of none of it at all is complete when offered in another tongue entirely. Zhey ney sey kwah, as we like to joke.
We have our standard of it, English, and are perhaps more sensitive to its infelicities than Mr Lewis's overall view allows. As to feelings, it was long the Barry view that pipes and their tunes were the finest instrument ever devised to express the feelings humans have, although this view has been challenged recently by the elevation of the stringed instrument to that place of honor. We necessarily decline to accept Mr. Lewis's formulation in this regard respecting the instrument of the English language, and must reject as well similar views of those who might champion some other human tongue, e.g. French, Japanese, Persian, as feelings' best instrument of expression. Feelings have their finer musics for it than their wordings, is the standard Barry view.
We here at HCE who are so recently of the Christian persuasion never took full comfort in the main image of the sect, the decussate wood with your main fellow impaled thereon.
And then to call the observance of the thing "Good Friday" surpasses irony in naming.
It's a peculiar feature of the otherwise disagreeable Easter Calendrics of the matter, which are epitomized e.g. by the sundering of the Christian church into Roman and Greek dispositions and the swallowing of the western church by its Roman version at the turn of the first millennium, that in every Easter Calendric currently subscribed to, the solemn forty days of the recapitulation of the thing reaches its first culmination on a meaningful Friday near the end of it. All of them agree on the Friday aspect of the thing.
Despite what we here at HCE once thought, there is no Maundy Tuesday. A recent review of relevant source materials shows that the quality belongs to Thursday of the telling final week, instead. Our standard dictionary shows Maundy to be in fact the foot-washing mission of the fellow, performed just before the big meal of all of them together, and a more timely or propitious act of goodwill, considering the fisherfoot and such involved, can hardly be proposed. The Christian came to memorialize this event by mimicking its hospitable behavior. Maundy Thursday meant particularly alms to the poor in the Christian lands. In England the sovereign would make a decree, and at services on Maundy Thursday, alms would be distributed to the poor. This reads like an unfunded mandate of the feudal type, and perhaps it was, an idle direction of the king of England subject to resistant or purely circumstantial compliance. In faith the church was there, in all the outlying spots, making its characteristic case for the poor, pushing along the program.
The relation of church and state in those maundier moments was characterized by the role of the church as honest broker promoting the stakeholding interests of the poor in the halls of the high lord and all his cooperative minions.
On the Thursday of the week then, characteristically, the church made some ceremony or other of the givings required by the king of England, ideally a ceremony full of the fluently disposed ritual gestures of the sort still so adeptly deployed in our own age by all the many descendant varieties of the church, but perhaps consisting only of a sad long silent line of the unfortunates formed at the appropriate moment in a drafty candlelit hall on that day waiting each of them to say, "Thank you," and turn away with whatever palliative measure of relief the ceremony had managed to offer.
It is unlikely the affected feet under review would have also been made maundy as recently as the previous Tuesday in that day and age, given the reigning podiatry, so that even conceptually, "Maundy Tuesday" has no legs.
War's all-allowing needs can be served by any manner of delivery system. If the subject turns to the destruction of said city, said city will be gone, leveled with what tools and techniques are available to the moment.
Certainly there are delivery systems available to the most modern arsenal that make the destruction of said city an instantaneous event. If the war comes to that, should such systems be engaged, the city will be gone, all people, buildings, institutions and relations gone, in a uniquely non-metaphoric flash. A hard thing, but if such monstrous choices are available, it will be done. War is all-allowing.
Acknowledging a certain restraint in their use, the needs of war will have some other way of doing its destruction besides for example, the atomic means. There may be some reticence in killing all the hundreds of thousands of them who live there in the city to be destroyed, or in losing the many fine buildings once there that are no more. In your perfectly restrained war, the fewest people and buildings will be gone. But it's an oxymoron, a controlled war. An ideal thing, but elusive. The generals say that all the time, but it's hard for civilian ears. The short space between heard and heeded goes uncrossed: if you'll have war, you'll have the all that it allows.
Years back there was talk of parsing the difference between the nominal status of its population as enemies, and a given city's buildings. Buildings, in contrast to their inhabitants, could not be so readily tarred as enemies, although the odd statuary or ceremonial site would certainly qualify for removal. Thus an ideal weapon, one that would remove all the people and leave the buildings standing was proposed. This weapon was dubbed the "neutron" bomb, forever staining, in retrospect, the connotation of the little thing. The whimsy of the conceit was soon exposed: the buildings, with all their stones left standing, would be deathly with poisons for ages, the exact opposite of useful to the city's takers. Thus the weapon lost full favor, although the ideal, a city emptied for the taking, will never go out of fashion among those who plan such things.
History indicates that simply and brusquely killing all the defenders (by and large a significantly smaller number of people than the whole, excepting in the most popular of wars) is enough, and this is the generals' most usual recommendation. It is understood that war's rude tools will harvest some number of the rest of them as well, people in the way of it, even in the most artfully directed assault, but given the available alternative of the irradiated crater with nothing of them at all remaining, the unloosing of some other method of destruction is preferred. The generals point this out as well. There is always the possibility that their troops, rampant with the unleashed destructiveness of their profession, may pull the city down around them when they enter. This is a foreseeable consequence, though generals have often been known to appeal to a certain discipline in their troops in this regard. Air war, so called, is capable of reducing a given city to a rubble functionally equivalent to that achievable by hand, and indeed, stands in for all such methodologies in the most advanced arsenals. That its efficacy rivals the atomic means of destruction is born out by the comparison of Dresden with Hiroshima. Curiously, air war, though by far the most commonly employed of all the famous and terrible weapons of mass destruction of our age, goes unlisted on the currently popular prospectus of them. Perhaps chastened by such company, air war has come to fetishize precision, to seek as its goal the exact and telling destruction made possible by a hyper-evolved technology of war.
And always, in all places and times, a city creates, from among its own, candidates for the job of its own destruction. Enervated by its ways, schooled in its history of resentments, given the main chance war brings, its own citizens, primed for it, often a significant majority of its population, may do a city down. Minded ever of Alexandria and the loss of its fabled Museum ages ago, the generals know this as well. Should war come to a city, its own people may be the opportunistic deliverers of its destruction. War, however originally construed, will allow that as well.
Bahgdad has been gone before. It's been unmade in the past, notably by the famous Mongols in what we here at HCE refer to as the 13th century. A few hundred thousand of its citizens were killed by those irrepressible riders from Central Asia, and the city, once and for a very long span the San Francisco, say, or New York, of a region sprawling from the steppes east of the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean, was no more. It ceased, and though there's a city in that same spot with the same name, it's not what once was. That is gone forever. The Mongols had no qualms about removing it all, down to the dust and sand along that bend in the Tigris River. What's been called Baghdad since that time is another thing in the same place, referencing by name what was scoured from that spot by its invaders.
Now again Baghdad is gone, the work done this time by invaders and citizens alike. Its fabled Museum, home to the treasured remains of 6000 years of civilization in those parts, has been thoroughly ransacked, its collection forever dispersed or destroyed, the scant precious leavings in its care never again to be reassembled. The city's buildings, if not precisely and peremptorally removed by its invaders, are mere shells, stripped and made all but useless by its own population. Once again, as war allows, Baghdad is no more.
Named by the Greeks, agon, in their way of doing it, had a strongly physical expression. The tests of excellence they proposed for all the ritual celebrations of it were the reductive things at first; a lot of running and horsehandling and even manhandling with all their throwing things and people around in the ceremonial act of it, striving after human excellences.
The proposed glory of this year's Men's College Basketball Championship, a prominent feature of the American agonic landscape, has gone to the Orangemen of Syracuse University. Or perhaps that is the "University of Syracuse", although "University of (Name of City)" would seem to be a locution reserved in this land for Jesuit institutions of higher learning with their fine basketball programs which each year send at least one capable squad to the Tournament. It hardly seems credible that a Jesuit school would allow the solecism of "Orangemen" to be applied to its club, leading us to believe on no other evidence whatsoever that it's a school of some different persuasion altogether, and not called the "University of Syracuse" at all.
In our own immediate neighborhood is the university whose mascot is "Banana Slugs." Chosen by the university's students, the name slipped past the sieve of proper naming back then, and slowly made its mark as the fondly held image of the school. On the matter of the slugs the University proved flexible.
As a proffer: there was some sieve of proper naming in place back then, in fact. The University, a cluster of colleges dispersed on high terraces of land above the northern edge of Monterey Bay, was a late flowering of the magnificent post-war plan of California to provide a place in college for every single student in the state who wanted one. For free. The fleshing out of the overall plan, the building of it, went on for decades all over the state, even through periods when its initial robust and encompassing vision was limited by rising fees and shortages of spaces for prospective students. The local university originally foresaw itself with 20,000 students, but never grew as fast or big as that. Still, there was building, there was growth on the campus. Each college of the University, as it was built, was named for some seemingly prominent person: Stevenson, Kresge, Merrill, Crown, Oakes, Porter and Cowell were so honored. The building proceeded, and it came time to name another college, the eighth one built there. The students, given the right to chose the next name, voted, and they voted to call it Malcolm X. The University, loathe to break its pledge to the students to let them have the naming of it, forswore to ever name it at all, and thus the newer colleges are numbered instead: Eight, Nine, Ten.
Arjuna's striving is, for our purposes, the epitome of all consequential human acts: he gathers in his great human motion all previously consequential human acts, and becomes by his great human acts the consequence of all to come.
Semele's embrace reaches beyond Allstory, where Arjuna's significances can be plotted, to encompass and thus necessarily achieve extirpation in transcendence.
Arjuna's act is ever-consequential in the human scheme of Allstory. In it abides a reference to all motive acts of humans.
Semele's act leaves it's residue, the wonderful new god Dionysius, Dionysius a fond remark she makes leaving, perhaps, or the distilled residuum of something left when she goes perfectly off to nothing, as noted here in the Bogblog.
Ha! Joke's on us here at the Bogblog. Turned the calendar ahead one week instead of the clock ahead one hour. Ha ha! Sprung a little too far forward there, eh?
Necessarily some part of the eighth day of any month is reserved for an assessment of the progress of the many diverse tasks before us here at HCE. Is the progress virtual, as is clearly the case with the fennell, whose planned elimination has been elaborated on for all the time it takes the copse of it to reach the lower frame of the Daughter's window? Or not? One wonders. The wonder, in fact, builds, until by the eight of any month it requires direct attention.
Our (surprise and) delight in its completion grows in proportion to the length of time we've manged to put off the given task, of course. Removing the mold from the showerstall last month was greatly rewarding in this respect. When the fungal stuff of it passes from muddy brown to the orange and flush purples of expression, gaining in the process the faint hairlike stuctures of a robust maturity, and by the next week the hoof of the observer is exposed to the near enchroachment of the stuff, still we may hold off for such time as it takes to perfect our methodology, round up our tools, and find the proper moment for our plan's execution. A certain dread of incompletion characterizes the latter stages of such planning. The hoof is, after all, a priveleged part, underserving of neglect. Should it be subjected to the mold in the very cabinet whose prime purpose is the removal of such incidental additions to our form? Defeats the reason for the installation of the showerstall in the first place, pride of one of our many renovative gestures here, is what we tend to think. It is an anxious time, the time leading up.
As to the taxes, the dread of incompletion regarding their payment, always a feature of this month, whichever week we chose to begin it with, is balanced by our cusomary resentments at their imposition, so that no matter how long we postpone the moment, no matter how close to the agreed limit we come, there is no real and sustaining satisfaction in the act. Not like the mold, at any rate, a great deal of which is now removed.
There is no going back in the Calendrics. None of the systems wind that way. They mark the event here, its past and presumed future there and there. Your man the calendar with its cyclic ways and terms of art is built to move along. Yesterday was All Fools Day, and today is all its remainder.
The madness is a self-sought thing, it's born of striving. It has its month of year, and when it's past, is celebrated by the new month and its day for fools. If the agon and its striving is made for March, so then April's celebration of the fool is the culminating remark on all that striving. Oh, you'll strive, yes, and should be celebrated, with your ring or sceptre or cap and bells and any number of fennel fronds waving at you as you go by, if that's what it takes to let us laugh out loud at what you're up to. There's always that other way to look at all that striving, by means of its very celebration, that makes it out as more or less ridiculous. We celebrate that insight on the month's first day, when all earnest acts receive the cruel review of laughter.
Yes, oh, it is a cruel laughter that laughs at a fool in the main, but the practised Barry laugh, that mocking bray long since perfected in the acrimonies of the period know as the Naming, is up to it. In April we join in, perhaps extending the moment uncomfortably long with our residual snorts and soft gasps as we regain our accustomed equilibrium.
The Barry laugh has its cruelties, yes. It spreads itself all along the human attitudes, more's the pity, and cruelty is one of its many stops. It goes and plays there April First and after, generously bright or irritatingly unserious, as is your view. A consistent quality, the Barry Laugh, overall.
To the dog it smells. Its senses, ever apprehensive of experience, have their thoroughgoing regard for the moment. The dog by and of its nose is to its certain self exposed. Smell is, pace eyes and all, ranked first as instigator of the dog's own knowledges. The dog investigates a sensorium tangential to those of us here at HCE who have the hand-eye coordination. It knows first by the nose of it, we by the touch of eye. Nevertheless and for all our interest in the subject, it remains uncertain if the dog's percipient nose can smell what's foolish in a thing at all. Oh, the dog can be foolish, yes. It has the tools. But it cannot bring to bear its greatest gift on the subject, we conclude. It must use the other, lesser gifts at its disposal instead when studying what's foolish. We therefore take little note of its judgments in this regard, preferring rather the eyeful of it in plain view available to our variety of cruel laughters.