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
disquiparancy, n. in logic, a mutually implied relation, but not the same relation, as in mother-daughter. The four main disquiparant relations in a household with offspring are: mother-daughter mother-son father-daughter father-son In each case we have the mutually implied relation which is not the same relation, though in the Barry Family, firm believers in population, it is required that the categories be extended to include: mother-pack father-crew The mother of the mother-pack disquiparancy is in charge of all. Her directives are binding, her retributions swift and general. The pack yips for her approval. The father of the father-crew disquiparancy watches the listless hooves of his own mediocre spawnings as they shuffle reluctantly nearer their chores. The crew wonders if he is about to speak.
Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary Deluxe Second Edition Dorset & Baber 3000+ pp. gen. ed. Jean L. McKechnie ©1983 by Simon & Schuster, N.Y.; Maps ©1972 by Simon & Schuster, N.Y. We surmise that the Deluxe Second Edition, the standard reference here at HCE, proposes in some sense not readily apparent to be a more fully realized offering than the edition it supercedes. Judging by its aging pages, our Deluxe volume will not survive long into the present millennium. The book's passing into midden, with all its wordy dicta, is a matter of no moment here at HCE: as well it as another, at least for now, is the common view of the thing; Yes, it is a great big book, satisfyingly easy to find in the crucial moment of need, and, having met this primary requirement, that it stand out amidst otherwise undifferentiated materials in its immediate vicinity, we take it up as our own for all purposes to which a dictionary might rightfully be put. This is not to say we endorse unqaulifiedly its given judgments in every instance. It's the very nature of a dictionary to be incomplete, to truncate or elide the evershifting meanings attached to its words, to offer up a wordlist which in fact is not and cannot be complete. We don't mind that at all, as long as it's nearby. That the Barry Family holds to its own reserved list of usages must be taken into account as well. The Barry Family is historically unbending in its promotion of certain pronunciations, connotations and emendations of the English language. As a result, it is to be expected that the engagement of Barry and wordbook, any wordbook, will be adversarial, at best. A perfect dictionary is one with all the words, and thus by theory unmakeable. A great dictionary would fall just short of that, gathering some sufficient number of the things together so that all its lookers would agree that there were profoundly more than enough of them there by any sensible measure. It is the burden of the great dictionary to be too big by far. A poor dictionary would be none at all, or one with a wordlist so truncated that the needs of the likely looker would be consistently thwarted, with known words missing or so ineptly described as to make appeal to the poor dictionary's pages a constant source of that irritation arising from frustrated knowledge which the very presence of the book is meant to allay. A good dictionary is of a size which balances equably the mutual failure, of book to provide the needed word, and of looker to need the provided word, which, given how each are constituted, is as inevitable as it is understandable. To be named good, our source must provide many words we do not and will not ever use, that few, if any, will ever want, on the off chance we might stumble on the need for them someday. But it must be smaller than an ottoman, as well. Borges salutes "… the stupefying dictionary dont chaque edition fait regretter la precedecant (… whose every edition makes us long for the preceeding one …)." Perhaps by this measure we have no cause to consider our Deluxe Second Edition a good dictionary at all. But we do.
decussate, vt. to cross or cut so as to form an X; to intersect.
There's no controversy at all that the Barry Family itself does not claim the notorious Barry Coat of Arms. That distinction belongs to another group entirely, which has (confusingly and somewhat arbitrarily to our way of thinking) the same name. The confusion was predictable: was predicted in point of fact, by progenitor Barrys during the whole long and hectic controversy of the Naming.
The Barry Family had long been unnamed, and it was a selective and serious unnaming, a public posture, that they might be called things, many things, by all the others, but did not name themselves. It was a relict thing, this posture, taken in the forgotten days before the bogs, even, but it was their posture and they had held to it all that time until Ireland. What a profound thing it was, that change, and what a profound and lengthy time they had of arguing it.
It was given to the Barry Family that naming was a religious act, the central act of the human ceremony, in which and by which object and symbology received their mutual blessing. Self-naming was a reserved act, acute and private, yet sympathies turned to doing just that, to naming themselves both anyway and publicly when they got there to Ireland.
During the entire engrossing crisis of it letters were exchanged, of course, and though the materials were primitive, and do not survive, the gist of them is recalled, as they expand readily from their famous slogans in three directions.
The slogan "No We Say," is broadly applied to a class of letters, their authors and adherents in opposition to the plan of Naming. Overall this group might be described as traditionalists, if not doing something in and of itself constitutes a tradition, which in the given instance might be the case. The letters and those represented by them are commonly catalogued according to spleen (including those curt missives which tended overall to the mildest end of that spectrum: no, but nicely all the way).
Counterpoised against "No We Say" in a rough triangle of sympathies were two other herds of thought and their defining slogans.
"Tell Me What to Say" was vertex C, let us say, in this triangle, and represented those growing numbers of them who had a Christian bent. The slogan was nothing if not scurrilous to their belief, of course, suggested by their opponents in a cutting reference to the slur offered by Nonnos against their Christ.
It will take longer to describe the slur than it did to raise the ire of their number on its pronouncement. Nonnos is a bad writer: thus Nonnos with his customary inelegance simply may have blundered across the wordspace and into the cruel phrasing by mischance, a salient feature of his style being the serpentine circling of the point to be made without actually just going on ahead and saying it which afflicts his writing throughout.
He could not have said, it most likely never occurred to him to say, simply, "Crucified, He then suffered."
No. Rather, he has it that Christ in his agony turns to no one in particular and says, "Tell Me what to say . . ." before his voice trails of forever.
Exactly how profoundly heretical is this nonce of Nonnos? Very, very profoundly heretical indeed, whatever Nonnos' talentless intent, was the finding of that herd. "Tell me what to say, indeed! Oh, the insult rankled, and was meant to, yes. Like all their kind they were called Pigfondler and worse in public; the custom was to receive a name, after all, not to make one. They had been named insultingly before. It wasn't that. "Tell Me what to Say" cut somehow closer to the quick than the standard they expected of the garrulous and willful meanspiritedness of their neighbors.
They made the great effort to soften the slur, the ones called "Tell me what to say," offering up an exegesis of the phrase in which "Tell Me what I Say . . ." (or so they had it) encompasses Christ's main new commandment, that, having taken up the Word of God, the communicant is (urged? implored? advised? enjoined?) to tell it back. For who, inhabiting the place of one of those few gathered in witness of His duress, would not, even given the fact that they were not being directly addressed, that in awful truth no one in particular was being addressed, would not, out of whatever meager store of compassion was their share, hearing those words, respond by repeating back to him what He's said?
"Blessed are the meek . . .?" you might say, for example, to see if it had some palliative effect.
In the event, Christ dies, and the opportunity to inhabit such a scene is removed forever from the human scheme, leading to a magnificent nostalgia for the lost and holy chance.
Source of exasperation here for our Barry Family, everything they talked about turning back and round to Him the way it did. This tendency thwarted the discursive aims of speaking freely warranted by the matter at hand, was the firm view. The thing would not be done and the argument over Naming conclude without their attention, but inevitably a formidable sidetrack of exchange erupted just beside the point among the Christians who offered up the exegesis just mentioned and those who found Nonnos heretical from the go, and wouldn't countenance the use or mention of his words, even should it's use achieve such gloriously self-serving result as the exegetes had made of it.
Settling this and moving on took quite some time, exacerbated by the group of them, "The Peekers Behind the Veil," who sought to discredit the exegetes by violating their restriction against examining Nonnos' words directly and after doing so reporting that the quote was in point of fact, "Tell Me What To Say . . ." instead. The exegetes responded by direct refutation of the argument, denying that "to" replaces "I" in the formulation, although a telling number of them quickly began to prepare a second exegesis based on that substitution.
The consequential human acts required by myth and oracle play out; the month's madness seeks its reductive, crowning episode. Yes, there is less mold in the showerstall; no, the fennell, ah, the fennell. Is it not with us yet?
Striving after the desired madness of the civil kind as proposed by the Greeks in their great ceremonies of the agonic spirit, with all their wrestlings in competition to acheive distinctive excellence in every arena of society, is matched in our own time by the National Collegiate Athletic Association's Men's College Basketball Tournament in what we here at HCE like to call The United States of America.
Each year in March it sets out some sixty-odd teams from among colleges around the nation to compete in just the way the Greeks would have had it: for the lasting glory of excellence in competition. Enormous amounts of time and treasure must be expended by those wishing to engage at the highest level of this competition, millions of current dollars and hundreds of thousands of man (in this case) hours of time. Distilled from a season's worth of play, the sixty-some compete.
Finally four teams are left, and over three days in New Orleans in April they plan to meet to decide their fine argument over the current way of playing the thing. The madness is wrung out of it through direct resolution of the dispute. Finally the matter will process to the grand and foolish gesture that caps all such madnesses.
The Barry Family admits a residual fondess for any parade at all of fine young folk passing along the way, and from the ancient reaches of the time before the Discovery of the Barry Family (for which see The Barry Family Timeline), there are stories of the kind standing there to the side, holding in their outstreched paws the lengthy fronds of fennell, waving the stuff at the admirable ones as they go their way, oh, and the fennell itself offering not a bad mask for the usual smell of the place they lived, either, with the pigs and all. Among their longest-standing traits it's been a constant, this willing public recognition of their betters. Thus with respect to the Men's College Basketball Tournament, in spite of its reservations about the current standard of play, the Barry Family is firmly in favor.
The Barry Family has its other ways of argument beside the civilizing agon, including those that lead to no resolution whatsoever, which are all among the many purely rhetoorical devices, not excluding staves, taken up in the the long and heated exchanges characterizing the period known as the Naming, and never out of use for long in the ensuing ages.
In the Naming, the band they called "Let's Go!" contested most directly and contrarily with the one they called, "No We Say!" But of course each had the same difficulty in bringing around those they called "Tell Me What to Say," the third partner in their engulfing argument, to a useful attention to the question at hand: whether or not in fact the Barry Family should take itself a name, and, given that, what shape of sound and symbol it should be. They spelled it out, those called "Let's Go!" purposely, in an unecessarily detailed examination of the question from the perspective of those called "No We Say!" That pack insisted it would forever resist such an imposition, but there it was, the Barry name, proposed, given in theory and merely awaiting whatever ceremonial sanctification was required. A terrific amount of attention was given the subject of a Barry Coat of Arms by those of a graphic bent in "Let's Go!" as well, who could and did go on and on about the design and its significances.
The Naming had its fearsome resolutions. The pigs were out one final and decisive time. The English language was adopted, and a place on the southeast reach of Ireland was made home, despite whatever lingering concerns regarding its suitably remained. Those last few of them who proposed a return to the Paris Basin gave up that talk one final time. The Christians got their Patrick's Greco-mystical triangle of a shamrock introduced, and it stuck.
There in counties Waterford and Wexford and Cork the disparate elements of their Naming settled in, with those resistant relicts of the band named "No We Say!" entering into that age which they mutteringly and conclusively described as The Thousand Year Snit.
To celebrate a madness is a foolishness, and leads to April, cruel thing it is.
The agon is just the place for your striving grasp after excellence in competition. The Greeks had it, they gloried in the continuing, indelible effects of great human acts in the world. Was it something brought back from battling, a residue of attitude they all shared reflective of their winning ways? Why ask? All young men know that deathly exultation. Importantly, the Greeks named it, they called it agon. Naming it gave them a handle for it, and they slathered it all over their society. Seeking excellences in competitions, they invented new social forms to supply vast ceremonial stagings of its expression in every human pursuit. And, as they recognized the virtue of such glory as could be had in other fields besides that of the battler, they judged those other excellences equally immortal. Named, the spirit of the agon was portable and transferable. Glory would be had in eternal renown for human acts of surpassing excellence, that was the promise of agon.
They all joined in, it was the rage, like being hip is in our present age here at HCE. Hip might be described as uniquely striving after knowingness, in distinction to the striving after excellence of agon's sacrifice of self to competition. To be hip, to comprehend, is Semele's path, as the agon, that full engagement, is Arjuna's. The gymnasium, where the acts of competition could be practised, became its own sweet thing to the men among the Greeks who went there, for it was men and only a special class of them who qualified to engage in agon's calling. The men had their other ceremonies to be practised, too, the ritual celebrations formally certifying the nature and significance of their sacrifice.
As was Arjuna, they were well situated, these men, to spare such time as needed to the agon, in distinction to the many rest of them they had gathered there in their cities, all the women and slaves and foreigners who did the chores that left them free to pursue this highest calling.
Herodotus has the defining story of the spirit of agon, in the amused answer of Demaratus, exiled King of Sparta, to the boast of the Great King Xerxes.
Xerxes says there in the History, "There are those of my Persian bodyguard who would each fight with three Greeks at once."
Demaratus responds, ". . . I do not undertake to be able to fight with ten men or two; of my own free will I would not fight with one. But if I had to, or if there were some great contest to spur me on, I would like best to fight with one of those men who in his person claims to be a match for three Greeks."
Herodotus gives us the truth or the consummate lie, whichever serves the purpose. What he writes is just like something Demaratus would have said, bearing the attitude of all who knew the way of the agon.
Homer, e.g. the effective wordsmith of the Iliad and Odyssey as the Greeks have it, was named paragon of such excellences as can be written down. To compete there, to win that agon, you must beat Homer, said the Greeks to one another in effect. An unlikely event off any pen, and all the more glorious to pursue for just that reason. To fall on Homer's field, ah, well!
Today, in odd agreement between the widely used (it is tempting to say, paradigmatic) "Roman" system of Calendrics and that uniquely individualized adaptation of it in use by those of us here at HCE, today, which is to say "the twenty-seventh day of the month of March" by tally in both systems of measurement, today is the Thirty-Fifth Anniversary of that date on which the United States Army, excersizing its power to take up such of the citizenry as it then saw fit in order to pursue its given aims of warfare, did so take up those of us here at HCE who could then be so taken up at that time into its service.
Weekly, back then, the great ladle of conscription dipped down into the citizenry to feed the needs of a once famous war. In the week of March 27, 1968, it scooped its largest scoop yet, taking up some tens of thousands of young men from all over its nation. Still, we felt singled out.
It was an inauspicious taking for the Army, and a poor, grudging service we provided, overall.
This particular judgement was confirmed in a severe berating delivered by a Lieutenant Colonel on our final day of active service, the Thirty-Fifth Anniversary of which will not be celebrated for quite a few months now.
During the Lieutenant Colonel's tirade, it was our privilege to suddenly see his point: our presence in the military was unquestionably an affront to the Army's aims.
We did not fend off his remarks with the observation that it was the Army's mistaken choice that had brought us there those many months before, a blunder so soon to be rectified in the eye of each party by our departure, although there was some sentiment at the time for expressing just such a view.
We did not gloat that our own suspicions regarding the value of our service were confirmed by his words, although the tendency to preen is never far from us.
No. We drank in the objective truth of it.
Our service did minor harm, but what good came of it? The war was lost, by all accounts, and we did our part. That is the meager lesson we celebrate today, along with the other lessons, once more widely shared, which came out of that time.
One lesson, for example, uncontradicted until very recently, taught that it was a mistake, in principle, for the nation to drag its armed forces into a widely unpopular war on foreign soil, particularly if that soil was in some sense "Asian," presumably the most foreign soil of all. In the happiest of wars, as was forseen by those who taught this lesson, the populace would eagerly rush out to join the fray fully confirmed in its worth, with only those few left back (a class traditionally made up of women, children, the aged, and those suffering from mental, moral or criminal defect) waving their fond patriotic handkerchiefs in farewell.
The Greeks had a repository for the themes and values of such happy wars, which in any age are rare and treasured things and therefore hard to come by.
Not that lacking a good reason to fight kept the Greeks from warfare. To the contrary, they were pleased to fight for any number of base reason as well.
But they saw the glory of a happy fight, and proposed an additional means by which to test the mettle of their murderous young men at it: competition in all manner of physical activities. Races and wrestling and brandishing arms, winners crowned with the evergreen laurel of victory. A victory worth renown as lasting as any fame that battle could bring. That spirit, that striving to excel in symbolic competition with the best of them, is at the heart of what they called the agon.
We have our March Madness, of course, on similar lines.
They're in the cab of the chariot. Arjuna asks to see reality, the what-it-really-is of Allstory, paralleling in circumstance the same request by Semele in the Greek telling.
Krishna is the driver here, he holds up the progress of the steeded wagon. He gives Arjuna a long regard, as Zeus must give to Semele in that other telling.
Asked for the ungivable, the knowledges just beyond human knowledges, they each of them, gods, comply. As the story goes, Arjuna's result and Semele's could not be more dissimilar.
Semele evaporates in fire; Arjuna fully enters the field of battle. Semele, failing knowledge, embraces Allstory nonetheless, it seems, for she passes immediately and catastrophically out of the knowledges of both men and gods, as is the requirement of such nirvana.
Each god is given to a word of caution before he complies. The Greek tradition preserves a relatively laconic warning on the part of Zeus. Compared to the cunning words of Krishna, which go on and on about the charming possibilities of acting in the world, Zeus gives but a brief brusque tsk before Semele is consumed, say the Greeks. In her parting she gives up to him, to Zeus, the new god Dionysius. It is how that lively god is born, in the one telling of it.
As it is not in a man's nature to do so, Arjuna births no gods, though he's given a terrific view of Allstory himself by Krishna.
The situation of Semele is precarious, while that of Arjuna is privileged. Semele is caught up in Hera's wrath, and can hardly avoid taking an even larger chance than she has thus far taken by being with Zeus. Her embrace of Allstory has its conclusive, hopeful courage. Dionysius may be the happy comment she has made in passing on.
Arjuna, alternately, is a prince, with his own wagon to take him where he wants to go (steered by god, it is, no less), and plenty of people to do his bidding. He's well situated to chose instead the other way than Semele's: to enter fully into it, the world, to act the consequential needful acts that are to come.
His driver Krishna gives him useful direction, blows a great horn, and they set forth.
The pigs gather round the leavings of death, which they regard a bounty, with all their manner of gloriously greedy snufflings. All of their needy noises are countered by the sarcasms of the crows, who gather to take their fill as well. It's what they do, reclaiming the discards of a life.
Poor wake, in the Barry view, but a likely ending nonetheless, recalling known lifepaths leading there, to the sodden ground where the pigs and crows have at you. We here at HCE are not as quick to suppose, as the Uncle pronouncedly did in his Ratios and Sums that it's the proper path for most, given their ways. No. We acknowledge the common alternate desire of humans to go deeply to ground, be burned or in some other way be set aside from the pigs and crows in the event. But sometimes there are so many dead at once that even the sarcasms of the crows are superceded by satiety.
A pig's holiday is some great battle of humans, some golden acres just thereafter where the pig's regard for bounty is the ruling theme. To be a swine just then, ah!
It is not without its shock and awe that we bear witness to the modern means by which the myth that binds civilization avails itself of the services of murderous young men. Commonly, the civilized make use of armies of them.
"But why should not this be opposed?" a veteran writes:
"Why should we (by which I mean in sum I, a veteran, previous reluctant participant in the armed service of civilization, holder of an honorable discharge, recipient of the highest award his nation can bestow, the DD214) why, that is, should such as we be encouraged now, with what we know, to support our troops?"
Those of us here at HCE who served the armed forces during a once-famous war well recall the repugnance we felt for the aims, standards, constitution and usages of the armed forces and all their ilk at that time. Nothing in our further researches has altered the evidence of our own eyes in this regard. We remain opposed.
It is not without shock and awe that those of us here at HCE witness the current scene. Not at all.
Here at HCE we admit to our own sweet concerns, many of them entirely virtual, as well as to our taste for the reserved interests of the Barry Family itself, substrate of all our attentions after all: the perpetually preferred focus of whatever thoughts we may be pleased to have on a daily basis rise up wonted or no mainly from the ongoing boglore of the Barry Family, on close inspection.
Though we would have it otherwise, to evade consideration of the ills of the wider world when it goes wrong becomes imposssible.
One of the great shortcomings of the wider world when it goes very wrong is that successfully evading the wider world's many ills with the naturally selected elusive step so congenial to the Barry Family hoof down the ages, becomes less and less a likely possibility at all as the matter with the wider world, gathering up all its great brute bother, intercedes to induct us personally into its inexorable designs, replacing our admittedly favored paraochialities with its pared list of forced considerations.
Those of us here at HCE who admit to entry in the Bogblog, enter it advisedly, knowing always that as in the bog of Barry lore we cannot command the sharpest view of things, except as is revealed at closest hand. Even then the residue of intractable Barry Family lore here at HCE smears our best view, predisposing us to certain unembarrassed standards and denying to us forever the embarrassing certainty of other standards entirely.
Withal, we admit our inability to see purely and clearly what sense is to be made of the current course of the wider world from this perspective
We here at HCE say, "No good end will come of it" reflexively when visited by the baneful matter with the wider world, the slur usually reserved for your usual culprit civilization in common Barry parlance, though we cannot deny for a minute the felicities of civilization, even as we score it the source of the most consistently baneful of bother on the hard other hand. The food is better, particularly with regard to the potato. And the clothing, how can we honestly deny its attractions? Yet we hold to our fundamental reservations, tested and confirmed down the millennia since the slogan first gained currency among the Barrys.
Myth aspires to be Allstory's most convenient container, the summed thing most transparently matching the reach of Allstory itself, given what can be made of it by our knowledges.
Here we have now a warring in civilization's Downtown Historical District, where humans have been going on about it for their thousands of years: civilizing themselves to a nevermind, if the current way of it is any indication. Downtown, civilization has dead-ended. It has failed. It has given up the answer "Saddam Hussein" when asked what all those thousands and thousands of years at it will get for us.
We run the experiment in fact and deed and come up with this: the utter failure of civilization to prove itself downtown. Ah, well, for the grand but broken promise of the thing.
Sure, the Barry Family on the other hand is relict of a countervailing bog-related theme of humans, with all its long-held trenchant resentments forever bearing down, muddying its judgments on the schemes and ways of civilization. The Barry Family admits no objectivity in this regard. The bog is the better place to be, ideally, is the Barry Family's fundamental claim.
As for the "civil" way, it is the firm view of the Barry Family, supported by its Findings on the Civil Ills, that "In the event, no good will come of it at all." This view, to those of us here at HCE, is amply supported by demonstration in the homeland of the stuff itself. It's been field-tested over time, and it doesn't work.
It's evident that younger and more vigorous expressions of the stuff as founded elsewhere embody the same ills. At this time the Barry Family doubts that, despite their many and acknowledged charms, current paragons of the form will provide, based on currently available evidence, anything but further confirmation of the principle, given the necessary millenia.
To our knowledge, no one has successfully rebutted the opinion that Saint Patrick was a real person, and we use the term saint advisedly. His famous denial of Ireland to the snakes is that hallowed thing itself: the indicating gesture symbolizing in sum the full force and effect of the fellow in his time: The utter myth, capable of containing all reference to his day, just as his hands, so deployed in our necessary imagination of him, grasp, on the one hand, the instructive shamrock, and, on the other, the longish stave by which he directs the extirpation of the snakes of his own compelling imagination.
That the snakes were not accessible for deportation did not trouble the foundations of the fellow's views on the matter one whit, for it must be noted that the command, "Remove the Snakes!" is a universally popular pronouncement, even when made outside the actual location of the things. If there's a toolkit, say, of the portable knowledges of civilization, it rests on the prior knowledges of the camp, and down there on the checklist of setting-up-the-camp-somewhere, is
and always will be. The Saint's hallowed plan repeated the practical plan of the camp in an ideal location, although there must have been an arduous time of it describing what a snake was to them before the common wisdom of the matter could be fully received by his Irish audience. In the event, they opened their minds to his knowledges, accepting both the premise of the snake itself as described and his holiness's proscriptive plan for each and every one of them as well.
Until the Naming, The Barry Family had always had the pigs for just such reason: to remove the snakes, is what they'd say when asked to justify their practices. Oh, there were the many additional usages of the beasts that came to mind when arguing the point, but the part about the snakes was always mentioned.
The Barry Family came along to Wales with its pigs well after Saint Patrick's time (viz. The Barry Family Timeline), and there is only the vaguest hint that his lineage, the people he was from, his ilk, extends down through the foundlings of Nest of Wales to the Barry Family itself. Admittedly there is an equally vague likelihood of any given agnatic path back through Nest, and as a result much of the Barry Family lore regarding its history prior to Nest's time must presume what is not clearly in evidence. Given that caveat, it is clear that the Barry Family plan as sketched out in its use of pigs and the hallowed plan of Patrick were and are congenial in all but the salient detail of the pigs.
Ireland made unnecessary that particular practical rationale for the long association of Barry with pig. In the maelstrom of reductionism that was the Naming, pigs lost favor to the Patrician approach, and the Barry Family adopted its idealized but viable renunciation of the snake in question instead. The pigs, redundant now in this regard, were as a result themselves cast out by the Barrys, although not so far that their resentful snufflings could not be readily discerned nearby, it is true.
To our knowledge, no one has successfully rebutted the opinion that St. Patrick was a real person, although the snakes remain unconvinced. They have their own measure, their own skein of consequential events, stretching back to the beginnings of their kind, and Patrick does not appear there, in point of fact.
They are keenly aware of the chance they may be summarily removed, of course, the snakes. That knowledge is given to every living thing, and each incorporates the prudent list of tactics for eluding such event, the snakes being no exception to the rule.
St. Patrick in a rich enough symbology might represent the embodiment of that threat of complete and general extirpation to a snake: the sum of all the forces tending towards its elimination. There's no evidence whatsoever that snakes think that way. We must not impute to them a snakey hinduism in which the role of the Destroyer, Siva, is taken by the Celtic Missionary. No.
But that is not to deny their willful slithery avoidance of Patrick's hallowed plan, however little they know of it's existence. It's a feature of their design, is what I'm saying, a predisposed quality of their being. All of them built to avert such a thing from the go, as is to be expected.
The snakes weren't there when Patrick arrived. Before anybody at all arrived on the island, in point of fact, they weren't there, the snakes. Stayed away is what they did, from the very first. Prudent move.
Summed along the way are all the various motions of the players of college basketball each year. The consequential expression of their summed motions is the bracketing of sixty-some-odd teams encouraged to compete in the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament.
The Barry Family holds no brief for the game as it is now played, but does acknowledge an abiding fondness for the Tournament. Let the agon begin.
Summed along the way are all the consequential expressions of it, the thusness of the present, and its tendencies: that bit of Allstory with its conatus. This is karma, roughly.
Often enough we here at HCE do not wonder at all about the potential sound of a tree falling in the woods with no hearer near. It has no consequential meaning, in our narrow view. Aw, the sound-producing wave might knock the little bug off its leaf, yes: sure, we've read the science fiction with the bug's fate at fault for all sorts and kinds of dire result. We do recognize the residual likelihood that any tree's falling will bring about such ends, true. And that would be the consequential act, now. But we discount it.
The Barry Family does not discount the bounty brought forth by the quantifying procedures of the new sciences. Neither does it deprecate the use of qualities in place of quantities for its units of measure. The Barry Family is impartial with regard to the use of either category, and will mix and match to suit its given aims.
As human acts are part of the sum of all consequential expressions, and morality an agreed standard for judging all acts of humans, karma, when used with reference to human agency, describes in particular the total moral consequences of all actions. All individual acts of humans can be said to add, subtract, or defer to the sum total of human acts considered along this scale of morality. This is no comfort to the Barry Family.
n² + n = 2(1 + 2 + . . . n)
Here is a simple formula, which the Barry Family and we here at HCE call The Simple Formula. It is in fact the notorious Simple Formula of the Uncle's Ratios and Sums.
("n" is some arbitrary amount. It's any particular number we chose, and no matter which one, will always provide a valid expression when we put the formula through its proper paces)
We can think of morality as a formula as well, capable of being put through its proper paces and providing a valid expression with the introduction of the arbitrary value or two. One might expect such a formula to be much more complex than one calling itself Simple, and for all we know, this is true.
We here at HCE do acknowledge that the forest must make its consequential sounds as well, however much we may discount the unhearable ones it makes. All those falling treesounds made in support of that vast industry which surrounds us here with its many forest products, all of them, we say, fall in the field of karma, by definition.
The Late Scholastics had their word for it, conatus. They were busy fracturing the written Latin of classical Roman sources into all their various regional variants, flush with their ability to read and write in a secure community of like-minded fellows back then.
The cities they lived in were only loosely civilized, by either the ideal Greek or practical Roman standard of it, but many of most civilized parts belonged to the Scholastics and their clerical ilk.
The Late Scholastics (well, all the Scholastics, by definition, of course, but the Late Scholastics as well) accepted the natural world as their God's creation, and, as it is written, ". . . He looked on it and it was good . . .," they supposed the examination and elucidation of God's creation must be of the highest service to His plan. Judging one's own occupation as of superior service to His plan isn't uncommon for people who think in those terms. For the rest, judging one's own occupation as superior to that of anyone else you might run into while engaging in it is not uncommon, either. Bus drivers, by our witness, can maintain this posture for long stretches of the roadway. For the Late Scholastics it was a given, hardly worth repeated reference.
They were there to reflect it all back, to gather it up in their many nets of words and image, and say it back to Him, offering back His own as their best gift to him.
They made as needed words and phrasings to mark the extent of their new knowledges. They made the bold and necessary assumption that Greek and Hebrew and Arabic materials perforce must reflect His plan as well, and they took those sources in, to study and incorporate into what they must suppose was their own superior design.
Conatus was meant to extend on the basis of Aristotilian principles the ability of humans to describe the natural world and its processes in terms of qualities. Down at the very root of any object's being they saw the indefatigably motile quality itself, which the word conatus meant to capture.
(The language they wrote bore the brunt of their new knowledges. Late Latin corrupted the proper forms of Latin, yes, but in the sense that the flower corrupts the previously dormant bush. Later still, conatus provided a hint for Hobbes, who used and extended its sense in those rollicking decades when the Aristotilian question of qualities was being deferred in favor of the quantitative investigations of the new sciences)
You can see what they were trying to get at here, with conatus. Inexorably, they were being drawn to examine and explain concepts of motion by the same force of logic which sent Newton and Leibnitz in search of their fluxions and infinitesimals. Metaphorically these concepts are equivalent, and any robust symbology must account for them in its way. The Late Scholastics had their Aristotilian qualities. Newton and Leibnitz had their other units.
In the symbology of qualities, Myth and Oracle represent the irreducible motion of the complete telling the Late Scholastics sought. This complete telling is Allstory, as the Barry Family measures such things.
See, for example March 2, 2003.
Oracle is the core expression referencing in a compressed way all predictive formulations of the future.
Eventually the consequential path of any month comes clear. Here at HCE we accept that by its eighth day any month is well under way, an occasion for pause to consider how much of what we were about to do by the first of the month has actually been addressed in even the most preliminary, even theoretical, fashion, or is likely to be engaged now that so much of the substance of the month has been given over.
Often at these times the fennel comes to mind (deferred battle with which, op. cit.) or the ominous edge of mold in the shower stall, always favored features of our first-of-month forecast. But as spring will break, so will the endemic winter intransigence of the Barry Family hibernation procedure, and we remain confident that these features of the quotidian will be addressed after their fashion in due time.
Myth is the core expression that references in a compressed way every variation of story that might be made on a given subject. Obviously some myths encompass others, are more widely shared and acted on than, e.g., the intensely localized mythmaking of the egomaniac.
People act in their myths, is the plain point of it.
The first few days of March include Ash Wednesday this year. And in retrospect, now that the dust has settled, it's as good as begun again, the solemn forty days of it.
The first few days of March include Ash Wednesday this year.
The first few days of March include what would be Shrove Tuesday, unless I miss my guess. Unless it isn't "Shrove" at all, but "Maundy." But I think "Maundy" refers to a Tuesday during the long week's slide into death and resurrection later in the calendar, and "Shrove" refers to the day before the inaugural event of the Easter Season, "Ash Wednesday," the day forty solemn days before Easter Sunday itself.
The calendar for Easter transcends the historicity of the event. In our conventional way of reckoning time with our common solar calendar, we date an event by day and month and year. Thus the anniversary of an event falls on the same day and month of succeeding years. It's a nominally accurate way of doing business, needing only the quadrennial addition of the odd extra day to the end of February to make the sun and our way of reckoning coincide.
But for Easter there's an extension of this reckoning, calling on the cycles of the moon and its weeks of the year as well: Easter is always a Sunday, though by history's dating, weekdays are mutable. Tomorrow is the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the famous and terrible Joseph Stalin, for example, and a Wednesday as well. By the calendar of history, the fact that it's a Wednesday is irrelevant, but should we choose to follow the Easter example, measuring out the date on which to celebrate the first anniversary of the Fiftieth anniversary of Stalin's death (a date in itself fully deserving of our solemn pause), we would have it on a Wednesday, too, sometime next year.
Next year March 5 will not be on a Wednesday. Thus our 50th Anniversary calendar must appeal to some other cycle, as the Easter calendar does, for a proper reckoning. This isn't to say that the 50th Anniversary anniversary would necessarily fall on Ash Wednesday, which the full adoption of the Easter extension of reckoning would require. Deciding to celebrate it on the first Wednesday of March would be effective, and much simpler than trying to decide on which Sunday Easter falls next year, then backtracking forty days to find our 50th Anniversary anniversary date, and would avoid as well the potential revival of that momentously acrimonious debate over the true mechanics of Easter Calendrics which has violently rent the Christian world in its time.
We here at HCE have no preference in the matter. We do ruefully acknowledge the extenuating coincidence in both time and place of the controversy over the Naming of the Barrys alluded to above and the unruly manifestation in Ireland of the Easter Calendrics debate in its most virulent phase. The Barry Family Timeline provides a pictorial reference. That the Barry Family might have been so preoccupied with their Naming that they simply ignored the war of the Calendrics that had effectively brought them to Ireland in the first place (paid it no mind, as it were!), beggars the imagination, although they have always been recognized as a single-mindedly distracted group, and it is just credible that they might have been devoured in argument over what amounts to a labelling question to the exclusion of any other concern.
Clearly it's a failure of the Barry Family Myth, as given, that the Naming alone concerned them then. They took no notice and left no evident record, even among those named "Tell Me What To Say" by their opponents, of the overarching nature of their own age (summed in the question of the proper Sunday for an Easter) which led to the great, irrevocable schism of east and west churches, and the swallowing of the west church by its Roman version at the turn of the first millennium.
The first few days of March have now passed. It's not easy to say how mad the month may be, although there are signs we could be in for a big blow. It's not every March that reaches the furthest limits of the stuff. Often enough, though.