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, set just upstream, the favorably disposed 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
goof, n. [prob. from or akin to ME. gofisshe, goofish, foolish.]
a stupid. silly, or credulous person. [Slang.]
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.
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April Fools
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 with that hard weedy freight of life from which we may never be relieved even in the proposed idylls of youth.”
Unfortunately for all concerned the Uncle’s thoughts escaped down the path of that unlikely idiom. 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. Something along the lines of “Their gorse is light enough, thank you, though if I had a stick I’d measure you out a proper burden,” is what he claimed later to have formulated. All anyone remembers clearly was him mumbling at one juncture the not unexpected phrase “… and another swift one, to boot…” familiar point along the line of truculent points describing the common arc of the Uncle's conversation.
“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! Gack!
French babies, 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 [In 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 up to the poor scholar a prodigious thrashing.
April 30, 2005
The apposite tale, the salutary digression endemic to all human conversation, is always ready take the lead as any conversation rounds the quarter mark.
The as-yet unended conversation of the Barry Family is notoriously well-stocked with the apposite tale, dragging the story of your other man entirely into the midst of what they were seeming on about, and binding said conversation to the qualities and claims of that story instead.
Often enough among the Barry Family when conversation turned to consider the fool, once more the story of the Uncle was entered by whoever cared to bring all that up again and for whatever good it will ever do, with all its irritating qualities and claims entered into once more as well.
The Uncle had the motivating misbelief universally recognized as the hallmark of the proper fool there in that story. He acted resolutely on that misbelief, engendering embarrassment of a thoroughgoing and lasting kind.
There are those among the fools who play knowingly with misbelief in the same way the English lyric poets played knowingly with the gist of Greek lore, knowingly offering up the most appealing artifice of the stuff imaginable from materials that might as well be untrue for all it really matters.
The mischief managed by the fool by design or no may be immense, may lead past embarrassment of its target to true catastrophe for all involved. Ah, well.
We are not to suppose the Uncle was engaged in ironic mischiefizing, oh no.
No, he goofed. Aw, that was the thing, he was that other kind of fool in the story they always told of April: he goofed.
April 29, 2005
The Ongoing Embarrassment of Apostrophe of the Uncle
apostrophe,n. [Gr. apostrophe, a turning away, from apostrophein, to turn away from; apo, from, and strephein, to turn.]
1. In rhetoric, a digression in a speech or writing; strictly, a turning aside from the course of a speech in order to make a short address to a person or thing whether present or absent.
…produces at the right moment in parliamentary harangue a pocket crucifix, with the apostrophe, "Will ye crucify him afresh?" —Carlyle
2. In grammar, (a) the sign ( ' ) showing the omission of a letter or letters from a word; as don't for do not. (b) this sign to indicate the possessive singular or plural; as, a girl's dress, girls' dresses; it originally showed the omission of the letter e in the inflectional ending of the case; (c) this sign used to mark the plural of letters, figures or other characters; as, mind your p's and q', several 2's; numerous ¶'s
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.
An article reviewing the argument of Culler and the rest over Culler's own On Apostrophe as argued by Culler and the rest could not help but divert the Uncle.
To be set free upon the other subject entirely was forever congenial to the Uncle's unrelinquished plan of rhetoric which sought to turn all proceedings toward his own sweet Ratios and Sums on sensing the least conceivable provocation possible, as is known.
Apostrophe, addressed exclusively to some other matter entirely in the midst of the ongoing matter with the conversation, forever appealed to the Uncle with its brisk round methodologies as a likely enough first feinting step offered under the influence of his own known ulterior lean toward the Ratios and Sums, though it is a commonly recognized blessing and a great grace entirely agreed to by all that the Uncle's lack of sure command of brevity fell so far short of that minimal amount required of a properly abrupt apostrophe that his briefest remarks fell off deficiently toward crypticism rather than sufficiently on toward the fine round summary nicety expected of the least apostrophe.
Apostrophe was rarely if ever successfully enjoined by the Uncle himself in conversation, to the minor though not unacknowledged relief of those burdened by all their other reasons for disdaining what he always wanted to talk about in the first place.
At first blush apostrophe seems the parenthetic thing, but this is not the case.
In rhetoric, parenthesis presents that gratifying exemplum of closure unavailable to the ordinarily uncompleteable conversational chat of humans, which common chat, for all it will, does not fail to go on and on unended in resumeable snippets continuously offered up over time and conceived from empirical evidence as being in general and in each instance continuous until exhaustion, whenever that might likely be. Deployed, parenthesis gives empirical proof in situ of the possibility of bounds around some feature of human conversation at the very least. Parenthesis is set within the conversation as a whole, but not so apostrophe.
In rhetoric, apostrophe means to make formally parenthetic by its summary O any conversation which might elicit it.
By apostrophe the offerer proposes the possibility of eliding the complexities of the ongoing whatever of the conversation in favor of the short round stroke of apostrophe's brief nicety.
However endless and manyfolding the immediate grudging claims of ongoing conversation are, the self-nominated O of apostrophe proposes instantly to oversee all the whatever of ongoing conversation briskly and at once and put it on its proper path with the summary shove suggested by the forthright direction of its pronouncement.
The quote from Carlyle found in the Standard Dictionary's definition of apostrophe troubles to aptly illustrate the form. The speaker in the parliament deploys all that's fervidly suggested by the pocket cross he unveils, confronting the ongoing whatever of parliamentary conversation in the instant with all the reductively summary customary apostrophe of the rugged thing's considerable display.
Left unremarked is the context of the parliamentary conversation eliciting this fine standard in apostrophe dug out by the trenchant Carlyle in the crisp quoted words of the parliament member abetted by his fastened fist on the thrust crucifix.
Naturally, if the ongoing matter of the parliamentary conversation eliciting this standard apostrophe had been by chance your right honorable member's amendable motion to dig a ditch from Bristol, such sudden recall of that other admittedly overriding matter which all members must at least formally admit is always germane, e.g., such famous suffering as can be imagined even absent the remorseless reminder of the distractingly outthrust pocket-sized artifact of visual aide, might produce groan itself throughout the hall just then, that groan gone out under the resumed burden of the lot of them subjected once again to the admittedly forever germane matter on its reentry there. They might dig from Bristol and back before the parliamentary matter of the ditch itself resumed, given all that might be said on any subject that is admittedly forever germane.
Often enough to be a distinctive feature of all the discharge of lyric poetry proliferating in England for a time, apostrophe on the page rested its summary O on a broad appeal to a figure, say, some nominally common wood-nymph or other in one of the easily retrievable examples of the stuff, a figure unbelieved from the go, as contraposed e.g., to the forever formally admitted matter of the sure-fire crucified one above.
Unquestionably such apostrophe grafted from the gleaned Greek convention onto English lyric poetry was formally unacceptable as a summary of generally admitted belief given conditions in England at the time, except where the maker of the apostrophe and whoever might attend to it shared among themselves a belief that the willingly acquired taste for the abjectly literary pleasure posed by apostrophe in and of itself was sufficient motive for its enactment there.
By offering to wind up Boreas instead of Golgotha the lyric path of poets of that age eluded the readily contestable connotations of apostrophe founded on the reputedly believed stuff of the time in England, attempting instead to steal the sweet resultant nourishment known to flow from the artifice of apostrophe itself without respect to the fundamental believability of the figure at all. O, it's a sweet move well made, apostrophe.
In rhetoric, parenthesis is bounded by originating conversation, and originating conversation by apostrophe, as roughly schematized:
[Apostrophe {conversation (parenthesis)}].
Parenthesis is within the ongoing conversation and the ongoing conversation within its apostrophe. This, of course, is with best practice; often enough the all-gathering inclination of apostrophe is embarrassed in some inanity of failed inclusive phrasing for all to see, and parenthesis, too, is easily stayed, left formally unclosed by incident subparenthetic divagation.
Available materials suggest Culler's regard for the quality of embarrassment engendered by apostrophe.
Clearly Culler insists embarrassment and apostrophe are joined. The wince that greets the wording of embarrassed apostrophe marks the place in ongoing conversation where apostrophe has failed. But who owns this embarrassment? Whose moment is it, this winced moment of embarrassment peculiar to the formal failure of apostrophe?
A move is made to construct and then pronounce by the brief summary artifice of apostrophe some overruling perspective giving proper vantage to the ongoing conversation.
The move fails, ruined by some recognized defect for all to see. The wording lapses into abstrusity of reference or crashes against the minimal standards of the form or careers off into irrelevance in some other way. Perhaps the sorry thing does not really apply, or perhaps its application is so baggy a fit against the ongoing conversation that a huge vacuous gap opens up between its summary round and the ongoing matter at hand. Certainly this is embarrassing.
O, it is not properly summary in the least, bad apostrophe.
April 24, 2005
Let the assumed reader be defined here as the very next reader in the known queue of absent readers addressed by the maker of the questioned text, the absent reader being the proper reader of the thing in almost every case.
Forever desiring the good view of the absent reader the willing author inclines in any age to adopt for good or ill whatever rude tools of formal methodology may be coupled with the task of meeting word with absent reader.
The written word is but one of the many gestures to which the seeker after audience may commit. Even the page of literature itself may be marked up with willed illustrations that go well beyond what can be formally writ to effectuate the willing author's point.
By written word the author gains the proposed permanency of the material page, a vantage lost in the last echo of the most stentorian of shouts, which must die out eventually even in the ear of its most avid listener.
As to length, width, encumberment with willed strokes deft or no, the material page is acquiescent. Literature bottoms out at the page, its substrate. There, worded, illustrated, page by page, the maker's intent to find its absent reader is left over to the fortunes of such good view as it may ever meet.
Right there in the planned construction of what's literate, set out in the fundamentally familiar fashionings illustrating the indicated thing given in the commonly understood forms whose wan strokes must forever pale perhaps in comparison to the instigating impulse of the author but for the most part decently preserve the thrusted gist of the thing overall, are the deployable grammars of the created thing whose particulars the page preserves.
The wily author formally bends as needs be pure authorial intent to the requirements imposed by the grammars of communication on the proposed permanent page. If it will be written, it will take up the written forms and if by chance illustrated, drawn up as close to the perceptions of the absent reader as the author's talent and toolbox may allow.
April 21, 2005
The Uncle has at the lasting laugh. It has right back at him.
Always on the glum, once-occupied side of any crowd, the Uncle held to his suspicion of the humors, sensitive he always was to the potential appearance of the stuff suddenly launched his own way out of the wit of the garrulous rest of them.
And often enough unsurprisingly some slight slung out especially for him did duly arrive at the Uncle's portending ear.
In the main, the rude refrain was endemic in the conversation of the crowded rest of them most likely to be near enough the Uncle in the first place to succumb to that instant inclination to depart commonly coincindent with any casual contact with the Uncle.
Over time a select pack of them, "Parthians," banded together to experience just that salutary thrill of rushing away from the area known to have its Uncle in it, at first entering the reserved space guarded by the humorless suspicions of its host, and then rushing away in a entertaining hail of ripostes, japes and merry contrarieties occasioned by the rush of the Uncle's own rude uses (match for any man's, the Uncle's uses, though couched in language crafted by a temperament rarely if ever inclined to appeal to any sort of humor whatsoever).
The Uncle was keen on the humors, yes, guardedly attentive at all times for the dark hint in the steady steam of the stuff coming off the casually disposed lips of the rest of them of the meerest hint of indication that some sort of it was meant for him.
Worrisome outbreak of the stuff from an unexpected quarter, in the Uncle's view, glancing at the title of the piece in First Things by David B. Hart called The Laughter of the Philosophers.
The Uncle's notorious mathematics compelled him to attend almost exclusively to his famously abjured Ratios and Sums, precluding him from adequately addressing the subject of humor except in the brusk sketch of his Theory of the Laughing Class.
Nevertheless, even the most generous reading of that curt monograph cannot support the notion that the Uncle seriously considered the possibility of the laughter of philosophers at all.
Pointedly, Mr. Hart has this:
Which yields the—to my mind—gratifying conclusion that, to be both a “lover of wisdom” and an accomplished humorist, one must almost certainly be a Christian; or, rather, that only a Christian philosophy can be truly “comic.”
Gaah! Aw, grant the Greeks mismade the thing at first, comedy, like they mismade their mathematics, which took all the millennia to put on a decent basis after they had their way with it. Still, the vigilant Uncle spied accomplished humor everywhere his suspicions fell among the humans of the world.
The sentence as crafted by Mr. Hart is false, and all its many suggestions must be swept away in the firm view of the Uncle when it comes to humor.
Certainly Mr. Hart does not maintain that Christian philosophy, of all the known philosophies, is the only truly laughable philosophy. He does not imply that and history does not support that claim at all.
Mr. Hart elides the matter of mystery and belief when he observes that "one must almost certainly be a Christian," for that connundrous perception, that exquisite tension of almost certainty it takes to be a Christian, has driven many an avid Christian mind to the seek the mutable luminous space within themselves where almost certainty commingles with certain mystery to produce what is believed to be a Christian almost certainly.Alternately, to suggest that before Christians ministered to it comedy was untruly present in the practices of all the other unChristian places and times humans have had thus far is contradicted sufficiently by the empirically observed human inclination to fashion from whatever rude tools are peculiar to their circumstances a comedy true enough given place and time. Even the Greeks made their move in that direction, publicly assembling for what they took to be true comedy from the likes of Aristophanes and his ilk.
Admittedly it may be claimed by some that the Greeks never successfully conflated the philosopher who loved wisdom and the accomplishment of humor at all, but this curious assertion is refuted by the simplest reference to the words e.g. of Aristophanes, which survive in likely reproductions in all the many fine written languages.
(Let it not be said the Uncle himself foreswore completely and without exception the use of the baseless utterance given for tactical reasons in argument without regard for evidence. To the contrary and as a matter of personal privilege the Uncle admitted the provident things as necessary in the larger scheme of talk he was always on about.
(The Uncle knew as well as any man prepared to speak that often enough in the unfurling of even the most rationally bounded discourse there comes a point which may be sweetly swayed in the utterer's direction by the suasive application of the well-formed yet baseless utterance, as countless of his own attempts attest.)
If even a Greek can contradict the claim of sovereign Christian Comedy being endorsed here by Mr. Hart, it's not necessary to send in the first team led by your ferocious man the laughing Buddha himself, with all his known cohort of tricksters, fools and Catskill–trained Jews without which true comedy wouldn't be conceivable in this age.
April 20, 2005
Oh, yah, sure, the unexpected happy hundred dollar bill may well appear, avers the Uncle. On good authority that's what drew them all there to California and to San Francisco from all over the globe in the first place, dancing their way there to the place with all the gold. Scads of true real gold, and a city there to make of all the true real gold what might be willed of wealth.
April 19, 2005
The expected day will never be had, in the glib concessionary view of the Uncle. Inexorable slights forever assault the sufferant's stock of useful misbeliefs, forever bending the made day away from what's expected of it.
The summed total of useful misbeliefs motivating an arbitrary human day will never square perfectly with the day as realized in the event, no.
It need not be catastrophe that comes or that happiest accidental $100 dollar bill that startles the known resultant day out of its sufferant's expectations, no.
It need not even be the supreme embarrassment of earned derision or haughtiest accolade visited on the sufferant that acts to flense away the fatted misbeliefs and have at the revealed fool therein, no.
Each realized day entertains its pointed corrections waving away the proposed event. Many of these corrections can be easily enough absorbed, given the sufficiently robust scheme of misbeliefs of the arbitrary sufferant. Things go on in the main in the expected way from day to day, the way known to be potted with the useful misbelief here and there.
Ten years ago catastrophe struck the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Many scores of people died in the terrible bombing planned and carried out by a small misbegotten cadre of fools including Timothy McVeigh and all his legions of misbelief.
This was a catastrophe of the drear genus of willed catastrophes of human agency, one grim example from just ten years gone now, of all the manyfolding examples advanced of willed catastrophe of human agency in the decade since the sad day of that terrible willed catastrophe in Oklahoma City. Many sufferants did die that day and have died since, and many myriad sufferants yet remain to carry with them the cruel pointed corrections of willed catastrophe ever after.
On a happier note, just today as these things are measured the supreme embarrassment of highest accolade has been bestowed yet again on the next in an as-yet continuous line of Popes of the Roman Catholic Church. Those of us among the Barrys who still bother to suspect the motives of anything Roman do acknowledge the lovely foolishness of choosing the next in that yet–unbroken line of Vicars of Christ, the inhabitant of which office is forever denied the entirely useful "Well, jayz, I'm not the Pope," excuse for inapt actions so readily at hand for the rest of humanity. Foolish to drop that one from the toolkit, in the Uncle's curdled view.
April 18, 2005
The Uncle Visits the Cited Catastrophe
Ninety-nine years ago today as measured out in the standard of the Roman calendric, the great momentous catastrophe of earthquake sloughed off the earnest misbeliefs of San Franciscans who recieved the full unexpected measure of earthquake on that day, April 18, 1906. The Uncle's earlier words:
All up and down the central spiney coast of California on that day the solid earth itself sprung up, up, and over.
A good long minute of the momentary thing irreparably revoked what had previously been considered San Francisco in those parts. The generally adequate conception of the place ho longer held; the buildings of the city were all of them dashed to bend and ruin, and many dead offered up to the cruel disinterested contradictions borne out in that day's tumultuous activity. It was the great and immediately evident catastrophe there in San Francisco on April 18, 1906.
Aw, hard day,
hard day!
All tipped expectancies downed
by lowing landwave,
Ah!
But no, the crucial cruelty of April 18, 1906 in San Francisco was the immediate and comprehensive subsequent unveiling of yet greater catastrophe still on that same bad day, far greater catastrophe initiated in but surpassing the apparent great catastrophe of earthquake itself. All the distinguishing obliterations of uncontrollable fire just then visited themselves directly on what yet remained of much of San Francisco, sound or shattered as it lay, the very rubble held as evidence of a great catastrophe itself expunged forever from existence by flames full acres wide, the conflagration's loosed particles of the city crowding the air in a great resultant stream of smokecloud set off east toward the Sierra.
Carefully the distinguishing sufferers of that catastrophe in San Francisco named it "the Fire," that day, saluting the utter catastrophe entailed by the otherwise acknoweldged catastrophe of earthquake in San Francisco on April 18, 1906.
Spill you too
ravenous flames
from what stays you
and contains
your burnt
exterminations?
Oh, catastrophe!
April 17, 2005
The Uncle Evaluates the Purported Misbelief
A salutary specimen of the useful misbelief came to me just the other day.
Briefly put, wasn't your man off to the front paddock to mow the lawn, just this past few days ago now?
Wasn't he confounding in his unexpected act the reasonable and current and useful misbelief that it would never be done, that the lawn would stay unmowed, that it was essentially an unmowed lawn generally speaking, admitting of the scant few cases arising from the fleeting appearance of that usually absent visitor and his tools against the far greater number of cases in which the needed mow arose ignored?
The man nevertheless meeted out the plain and contrary mow with his electrically-assisted mower on this one recent occasion, is what I'm saying. There he was, having a go at the green in the daylight.
(The mower's instrument isn't the instrument the mower has ever used to mistakenly cut through the power cord, no. That lapse is owned by the rarely-hefted hedge trimmer: in a hard blink one day the purchased 100-foot cord of the fellow became the 87-foot cord of fond memory, and then, successively and swiftly in one bad stretch of a day, the 78- and then the 73-foot cord by virtue of the hedge-trimmer's consistently disinterested machinations. So this is not a story about that, no. The power cord remains uncut by the mower. In point of fact the mower has thus far successfully returned each time with the same-sized cord as was set out, and even has a sort of mower's plan in force for dragging the cord along beside but never underneath the disinterestedly swiping blades of the mowing tool itself, based naturally on all the empirically successful previous dispositions of the necessarily continuous cord vis à vis the ineluctably intercessionary modus of the machine made out for mowing)
So he's hard at it, the mower, see, pushing the big wheeled tool with the revolving blades all along and through the green mass of species there in the front paddock, fine full green mat of a lawn promoted by a lush wet winter and early spring. Not denying the still-evident tall fescues of plain and simple grass in that lawn to this day, which likely descend directly from the originator of the lawn itself, by now the lawn is more inclusively and accommodatingly green than that, when it is green at all, bearing any number of supplementary species. A good thick rain of water in season establishes the right greenery of the lawn, subject to the arbitrary constraints of your man the mower.
But so here's the thing, you see, even with all of that. Your man's mowing the lawn, so–called, in his way. He looks down beside his instrument there in the front paddock and what do you expect he sees? Lawn, sure. Oh, aye. That's established.
He spies the $100 bill, folded twice over lengthwise, is what I'm saying on good authority. Just there on the lawn of the front paddock!
One succinct paper hundred dollars American, rather than, e.g. the common dross of scat much more likely to be imagined found there! One hundred dollars!
To proceed in his misbelief, having once palmed the palpable paper of its materiality, the mower would have had to deny the $100 bill all the great raft of other significating misbeliefs so ideally attached to it by law and custom. But not for a moment did the mower consider the possibility that this particular $100 bill so suddenly at hand, unlike the rest of its ilk, was not backed by the renowned full faith and credit of the government of the United States of America, despite all the necessary myriad of compiled misbeliefs underlying any admixture of faith, credit and government known to the mower. No, he held to the firm unquestioned essence of the overarching misbelief the thing in and of itself immediately evoked: $100!
April 16, 2005
The Exhausted Misbelief of the Uncle
So, here is a short list of some books that opened my head like a can, that had I not read them, at least, when I did, I would probably be different somehow. Here is a list of my own greats, books I would defend to the death (fair warning):
Doris Lessing, The Children of Violence series; The Four-Gated City
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Samuel Delany, Dhalgren; Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (in translation)
In the press of all the perfectly fine novels made in the world over time it was not long before the Uncle realized that all your other modalities of literature's other figurations were being passed over in a list of such great books trembling with all their literature reduced to the implicit question among those perceptive enough of the worthy novel to have any opinion at all on the matter naturally to the list of the five finest novels among all the many fine novels made over time.
The Uncle was your man for the Elements. He could countenance in his way a supposed list of five great books without the poetry, if it came to that, but the lack of the literature of Euclid from a list limited to five galled a man normally inclined to spleen, the Uncle.
In the Uncle's known inclination the list of the great books of literature is incomplete without Book I of the famous Elements of Euclid. The Uncle forever maintained that however exclusively populated that set of great books of literature is, once proposed, be it limited to five or seven or eighteen or a hundred greatest books, the listed list of greatest books of literature must always count among its members Euclid's famous Book I of the Elements. And didn't the Uncle trundle out the decisive argument on the matter at the feeblest hint of a chance? Yes, he did. It was commonly understood that he would have at the matter swiftly and freely, branding Book I of the Elements the least upper bound of great books of literature, given the good opening.
Even conceding that four great novels would amply answer for the arbitrarily great four other books on the proposed list of five of Jones, the Uncle had to have the Elements in there.
Which is not to say that the Uncle, when confronted with all the foundational fol-de rol leading to the the legendary absurdity surrounding the definition of a straight line as given in the Elements, did not ruefully admit that his affection for the whole enterprise of Euclid was founded rather on the principle of the usefulness of the marvelously misbelievable thing, plane geometry, as given there. e.g. in Book I of the Elements, than in any firmly convicted belief in the necessarily straight line offered there.
"Aw, it's all curves, true," admitted the Uncle, when pressed. "Curves, sure now. The straight line's just the ready shorthand for it all, yes."
April 15, 2005
The Modalities of Misbelief of the Uncle
It is often convenient in the rush of events to adopt a useful misbelief whose untruth pales in comparison to its utility.
Those San Franciscans who suffered earthquake on April 18, 1906, knew from past experience of like earthquake there in that young city that earthquake must arbitrarily continue to arise, and yet naturally they ventured to believe otherwise on a day–to–day, case–by–case, so–far–so–good basis in all the years leading up to the day of the famous catastrophe, propelled by the inevitably unfounded untruth that earthquake would not happen oh, say, just yet today, and especially not in the desireable next visited moment itself. Sadly enough that was not the case in the indicated moment of April 18, 1906 in San Francisco.
If we turn to the postulates of Book I of Euclid's Elements, we spy the notoriously sound philosophical manuever behind the classic wording of the document's proposed Fifth postulate, the postulate which outlines what's parallel to Euclid.
That, if a straight line falling on two straight lines makes the interior angles on the same side less than two right angles, the two straight lines, if produced indefinitely, meet on that side on which are the angles less than the two right angles.
It's the famously arguable announcement of what's parallel, the Fifth postulate, an announcement which takes this curious form: it comprehensively describes and then excludes every other condition except a condition of parallel lines.
What's left, after the good reading of the Fifth postulate of the Elements, is parallel.
Not explicitly parallel, but parallel by the exhaustion of all the other possible conditions so adroitly laid aside by the plain meaning of the postulate's wording. Euclid might have said it directly, but the evidence is that he chose otherwise.
What a parallel line meant to Euclid may be described succinctly enough without engaging all the cunning logics of the notoriously sound philosophical manuever Euclid makes with his Fifth postulate. This plainer way is the preferred path of the pedagogy in the modern age. Often enough in the rush to move along into the vasty articulations of the mathematics of the new sciences, the pedagogy of the modern age makes short shrift of what Euclid positively did say, which has been preserved with some care down the ages by transcription into passable equivalents of the original wording in all the may written languages to which it has been subjected, in favor of what Euclid positively did mean by way of a parallel line instead, promoting a useful misbelief that harms the project of geometry not at all, and with any luck glosses over the debilitating mischief the actual wording has let loose down the ages.
Euclid's saying of what a parallel line assuredly is not is thus transformed in modern understanding into an equivalent description of what that line most assuredly is, and this positive equivalent is mistakenly given in the syllabus as "Euclid." No harm, except that the opportunity to explore the notoriously sound philosophical manuever Euclid makes of the Fifth postulate is removed, the cunning turn of logic which seeks to comprehensively describe and categorically deny at once the alternative to the exclusive truth of what's parallel which this adroit step leaves unfailingly in its wake.
The Fifth postulate describes all straight lines that meet, leaving those that never do as an easy exercise for the student. In and of itself it's the "Non-parallel Postulate," the Fifth postulate, not the "Parallel Postulate" at all.
Aw, evaluating any pair of straight lines on the plane, it's clear the straight lines will either meet or not meet, should the lines be produced indefinitely on the plane.
Straight lines have this signal binary advantage over the averted meeting of all the other lines steering toward hyperbola or of the conchoid persuasion which in some piquant circumstances forever approach and yet forever fail to meet with the given straight line as a condition of their placement on the plane: straight lines, starkly compared one with any other, will meet or not.
There is no "nearly meet" troubling straight lines indefinitely produced. They meet, or no. "Nearly meet," that quality offered up by the conchoid curve brushed on the plane adjacent to the indicated straight line, is not at all an issue with your couple of straight lines, not at all. Produced, straight lines shall meet or they shall not meet and that's all there is to it.
When lines nearly meet, as when the hyperbola has at the straight line, or, e.g., as when the conchoid itself settles closer and closer, there will always come eventually a distance between the two lines that simply doesn't matter anymore to the casual observer, willing to believe them the same or close enough to the same for whatever purpose caused the observer to trail along after the forever averted meeting place of the two described lines in the first place.
Approaching nearly, never meeting, the nearly meeting lines tend inexorably toward the useful misbelief that they do meet at least the exhausted interests of the observer. Just before that point of misbelief, the two lines are not believably the same, and beyond it they just might as well be the same for all it matters. "Nearly" begets "near enough," foundation of the most useful misbeliefs.
Alternately, it's never nearly with your two straight lines on the plane, it's either meet or no. Euclid's famous Fifth postulate describes all the straight lines that must meet, the one of the only two possible results that can ever be produced of straight lines on the plane, we believe, denying "nearly" all the happy suasions of its misbeliefs.
It was misbelieved by San Franciscans for quite some time that the earthquake of April 18, 1906 would never happen. People depended on that misbelief, which exhausted itself in the event.
The unhappy date did meet with earthquake, more's the pity, the evident confounding the believable in that great tumultuous instant.
April 9, 2005
The Continuously Interrupted Belief of the Uncle
If by the suasions of an avowedly instrumental philosophy there emerged a frame of mind in the odd human being given to that philosophy, a frame of mind in which ideas pragmatically form plans of action serving as instruments for adjusting the organism to its environment, still, the odd human being given to that philosophy in that plain sense of the word, using whatever rude measure of consideration seems pragmatically suited to the task of forming the decent plan, still, the framed framer of that nice design has nowhere to go with the cunning thing itself without belief. The ideal plan is an instrument sacrificed to belief. However pragmatically laid out, when executed, the plan does die away from its ideal when greeted by the active hefted heritage of beliefs delivering the story of the plan's executioners thus far.
Catastrophe categorically denies the assumed continuity of beliefs, however strongly held, however widely shared. Those beliefs are struck down by catastrophe, reduced down to the last particular belief of an individual sufferant: that generally fundamental belief in continuity itself, threatened with complete disjunction by catastrophe.
That the sensed beliefs of humans may be bruised and broken by a whole quarrel of other instruments beside catastrophe is well known. In addition to catastrophe there is embarrassment, the seeming least of these instruments, mortal to beliefs though it has proved to be down the ages in its many excruciating instances.
The banana skin provides typical embarrassment to the believable probity of the next planned step of foot. How far this embarrassment removes a given sufferant toward catastrophe is left to the launched hoof alone. Matters may go very poorly indeed when reduced to the discrete embarrassment of the banana skin or any of its ilk.
The fooled belief is the residue of catastrophe, of embarrassment.
April 6, 2005
The Interrupted Belief of the Uncle
Beliefs inspire the comprehending myth humans make about their consequential acts. But these beliefs may be interrupted in part or at once, occasion permitting, by the immediate or general application of catastrophe.
Should there be an earthquake in San Francisco on April 18, 1906 (registered as a catastrophe by the rude contemporary tools of it own day, and supported in this conclusion by measured results interpolated from the remains of that same sad day as gathered by the finest instruments of our own advanced age as well), the unfortunate shaken humans must be loosed of what passes casually commonly and credulously for belief among citizens, all of them, each and all confounded in the event, the citizens encountering something comprehensively not to be considered believable and yet required by dire circumstance to be utterly believed that day, tipped by the conclusive disproof of an overlooked assumption at the foundational core of beliefs shared, mistakenly as it happens, by all.
Catastrophe is the near thing always, imposed direct contrary to the mythic tug of the story thus far endorsed by its sufferant's continuing beliefs.
By the startling act catastrophe makes rubble of previous belief. The sufferant, denied now the effective path of action presumptively posed by previous belief in all its graceful generality, is at once relieved of that sensed continuity along a serviceable storyline and forced to bear the onus of a fundamental renavigation based on the utterly unanticipated worst of it that catastrophe has become the byword for down the ages.
This can happen, too. All the plain practical matter of belief engendering the daily acts of humans may be swept away in one salient instant of catastrophe, replaced by catastrophe's own mean subset of possibilities. The story may stop or it may be bent irredeemably away from the prospective finished path as imagined by dashed beliefs.
Catastrophe proposes the uneludable end of the owned storyline of its suffering human. Catastrophe is notorious for ending human lives, and from that known singular perspective granted each human, it is foregone that the personal catastrophe of uneluded ending must be abjured, extinguishing as it does in passing the functioning of all serviceable beliefs completely.
However indisposed to catastrophe by their beliefs, humans may meet their end that way, some by direct encounter singularly fit to extirpate them from existence, and some by experiencing what will always be understood in the end as personal catastrophe in concert with the simulataneous experience of that same causal endpoint by all and everyone about.
April 5, 2005
The Uncle continues on belief:
Is it any wonder that bands of dissenters started taking the dangerous voyage to America at the beginning of the 17th century? They didn't want to have to worry about what the king thought about purgatory or a celibate priesthood. They just wanted to worship God according to the dictates of conscience and, not incidentally, avoid getting burned at the stake for so doing.
—Jon Carroll at sfGate.
All those dour selfserious puritans so irritating to Shakespeare in his time who only decades later resolutely congretated in all the ports from Plymouth to the Low Countires in their drab garb to set sail ideally with clear conscience for the freedom of worship availing them from another shore, they were the people Shakespeare made round mock of with Malvolio, his penned puritan in Twelfth Night.
The puritans certainly brought with them the helpful store of functional beliefs which underwrote the success of their resolved efforts irrespective of the resolution of the the overarching argument of puritan belief itself. That argument had not always gone well in the lands of its origin, suffering the discomfiting of opponents with powers far more malignant than Shakespeare's, opponents all too well-disposed to use those powers in advancing their own arguable beliefs.
The desire for free exercise of puritan beliefs was resolved by the pragmatic removal of puritans from the locus of the fray to a land where people could not be expected to follow the argument of puritan beliefs at all and away from its troubled location in a Europe hounding those beliefs at every turn.
It would have been repugnant to puritan beliefs to acknowledge a corresponding right in Europeans who for their own reasons harried them to be gone, a corresponding right of other Europeans to believe their mistaken beliefs as well.
The idea that government could be separated from religious principles to manage a society in which religion and politics were transparent to one another in their acts was as foriegn to puritans as was the newly entered home of farwandering puritans itself. That idea took a later type of people to work out, the American idea of removing government a tolerable distance from religion by concieving of a new dimension disposed to operate without interference in the most unendable arguments so comprehensively entertained by religion.
April 2, 2005
We take on the fool here at HCE, bringing to the Bogblog this month the Uncle's weighted words, as subsequently trasnscribed:
Isn't all this "overidentification" circling around to light on another definition of camp? Doesn't "overidentification" subcategorize camp? Is the motive of the proposed term "overidentification" not the same enrapturing motive of camp entering into an enthusiasm for its object irrespective of its intrinsic value, motivated mainly by delicious enthusiasm itself?
"Overidentification," it is explained in the article linked above, effectively embarasses the object by its attentions. Camp has no such purpose, mainly, though it may be so accessorized to suit the occasion, under the generous provisions of camp itself. It might as well be argued that this long lettered word "overidentification" is at best some little de minimus of a sidetrack of the more comprehensive nuances of camp, for all the good it will ever do to put it down that way. "Overidentification" can compete with camp for all its rightful scraps of description.
With luck, irony may prove the proper remove, or, "overidentification" may as proposed enthusiastically negotiate its unsettling distance nearer the object, but in point of contrary fact and often enough to be disturbingly evident even to the casual observer, people in the main act on what they believe, with no remove and no negotiation to speak of between their motive and their act. Most acts of people are engendered by belief, not irony or "overidentification."
It would take an act of considerable will to gather up each instant act of a given day from ironic distance, and why bother? People don't do that, mostly. People often fix the shoe on the foot with no great enthusiasm, as well. They don't ironize or overidentify much at all except as respite from the intended consequences of mostly doing what they believe they'll do all the livelong day.
People reach for the shoe, lift the mug, go on about their days each satisfied in the suitable belief that led to being shod, being fed and being on about their usual ways.
Often enough there may be explicable reasons for a given belief, but by the grace of belief the reasons need not be present for belief to underwrite the intended act. I, for example, come from a long line of people who believe in putting on a shoe.
Based on previous experience, should it happen that my established belief in the efficacy of the shoe is confronted by its shoeless contrary in the person of someone unconvinced by the superiority of my views, I might expect to acquit myself persuasively in describing the useful advantages of the advisable implement, in spite of whatever suspicion might be entertained by the unconvinced.
The shoe make a better way, is what I do believe.
Adhering to this belief, naturally I advance or defend the adopted shoe in argument when it comes to that. In the past I've faced the wearying need to unpack a rationale coiling back all the millennia to the first convincingly advanced principles for the adopted shoe in the presence of just such a disputant, whose own beliefs ran directly contrary to my own, with successful result.
Alternately, on occasion inclined by the constraints of time or temperament, with precisely the same disputant, I have resorted to the summary report informed by nothing more than what I believe about the shoe in a nutshell, a nugget of a slogan completely referencing the impressive belief in all its succinct glory, eliding all the explanatory millennia of good evidence entirely.
"Oh, put on the shoe," is how I've framed my belief when tried.
Under other conditions, "No shoes in bed," might come the rejoinder, testing the functionality of a belief I carry with me almost everywhere with respect to the advantageous shoe by explicitly exposing the advantage it lacks under new circumstances.
Generalizing, I have come to acknowledge a more widely realized domain of the declined shoe than just the bed, where only the shoeless unshod foot is meant to fall. They are out there, I understand, other places aside from the bed where even I might be led to acquiesce in the antithesis of my default the shoe.
By the summary graces of belief it is not necessary in the motive moment to trot out the paces of the rationale, repeat the succinctly framed slogan, or wrest with its alternative each and every time a human act is committed. The satisfying belief simply inflicts its motive on the object and this one thing or the other is accomplished in the course of the livelong day.
There are of course the fundamental beliefs of humans, which if plainly spoken in every case of portended action would outstrip the carrying capacity of human conversation with all the incessant "I believe I'll beathe again here," and "I believe I'll put this shoe on now," or "guess I'll lift this mug right up," which go nicely unsaid for the most part, encapsulated in the agreeably unsayable graces of even the most elabotately endowed belief.
Prodded by belief I take up the shoe, and once done, prodded by another equally compelling belief, lift up the mug, and for other reasons entirely, I believe, go on about my daily ways.
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