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.

coil The controversial Barry Coat of Arms

The controversial
Barry Coat of Arms

coil

December lees

Forward into the everpresent moment the Barry Family conversation pursues its immemorial ends, so far. The words of the Barry Family conversation as imposed by or in the event expressive of events provide a continuous coating over what's done, and reach just far enough into what's undone to shore up by all the bounty of misremembrance and foreguessing available there the as yet unended commentary called that conversation.

The argument over the Naming, the bitter elixir of long simmering retorts decanted through the millennia finally finding its sublime and fitting container (the name of them on every one of their lips at once!) in the hard contentions of that summary era when the Name of them was first made, when came the perfect time in Ireland for that odd-collected crew attending the Norman invasion of its southern parts with all their continental talent for talk and talk and talk turning into the very English language itself among them there as they went on and on and on about the overriding thing Naming had become, with the some of them opposed on certain principle to the adoption of a name at all, and the others split between those who quite favored the move and those who, consumed by other cares, attended not at all to the instant question, but instead obtruded their own concerns directly into the culminating chatter, necessarily suspending the direct and immediate resolution so sorely wanting in the argument by interposing some ancillary matter insistently in its way.

The controversy of the Naming was the hard long grueling thing, and they had their good long go at it, the arguing of it, those about to be "Barry" in that southern part of Ireland, fully complemented in the task by their own otherwise deprecated talent for furthering argument itself which they had scrupulously honed by daily usage in their many millennia in the Paris Basin following the Discovery, making nominally a cottage industry of argument in those parts long before the actual cottage industry of making cottages occured there.

The controversy of the Naming well-suited their aptitude for arguing, too, for they had innately that: freely offered argument independent of the matter at hand being one of the salient characteristics of their kind, consistently among the first features noted by such other people as happened by them in their long millennia in the Paris Basin, for example.

The pigs, of course, were almost always the matter at hand on visiting the Barry Family in earliest times, though the intracable querulousness of Barry Family never went unmentioned in such visitors' reports, howevermuch their comments turned naturally to the pigs.. The visitor's initial approach was forevever challenged by all the thicket of naturally extruded dispute continuously offered up in the Barry Family's conversation since the time of the Discovery itself.

The Barry Family from the first argued it out endlessly in their dauntingly familiar conversation. Seemingly each among the Barrys when in concert with the rest of them would arbitrarily pronounce whatever glib fey acrimony the occasion demanded and then all at once go braying some one of the inappropriate laughters so common to their kind at the collective commentary.

The difficultly with the pigs was irritatingly hard to introduce into the native rhetoric. No matter how deftly intrusive the visitor, the matter at hand, the matter of the pigs, the satisfactory telling of the thing with all due disaprobation, understandably the intitial impulse of the vast majority of visitors there, however they approached the matter, was never readily addressed, forever hedged by the ongoing concerns of the Barry Family conversation (though the consistent subjection of the Barry Family to pigcentric introductory materials on the part of visitors down the ages did lead the Barry Family in time to the serious and lengthy exercise of putting the whole pig on the table and finally having at it in a comprehensive and thoroughgoing way with all the gathered tools of Barry Family boglore at their disposal).

The familiar animal thus excluded both in theory and eventually in practice from the housing of the Barry Family is the evercommon pig of the earlier lot of what is acknowledged now to be the Barry Family all the way back to its Discovery.

It cannot be denied that the inclination to exclude the pigs, settled standard of the Barry Family now, was constantly influenced in what we now concede was a positive direction by the cumulative suasions down the ages of offered words of visitors, however weakly attended those words may have seemed in the event.

December 19, 2005

December 19, 2005

Horace, in his snide update of the dialog between far-wandering Ulysses and Tiresias, gives us a cynical Tiresias, Tiresias the famously figured blind Theban soothsayer Tiresias, that is, who in the summary words of the shorter Smith's Classical Dictionary "…acts so prominent a part in the mythical history of Greece that there is scarcely any event with which he is not connected in some way or other."

Homer's Odyssey famously falls in this category, the Odyssey's events wandering their eventual way to the meeting of wide-travelling Ulysses with oh, yeah here he comes again into the story Tiresius(Odyssey xi.) himself the familiar Tiresius entered eventually into almost any Greek telling of the thing. In Homer's famous Odessey Tiresias foretells the stark particulars of the future of Ulysses, the two of them there with the pool of blood between them, the pool of blood poured by Ulysses into a small sump scooped from the earth, the pool of blood offered to refresh when drunk in, the words of the dead.

caduceus

Tiresias carried with him into any entered event the exalted staff of the caduceus (famously figured thing it is with its twinned snakes twining around the stout long shaft of wood as shown), and with it all its associated meaning, the caduceus as so roundly denounced in the unfortunate telling of the Judeo-Christian Genesis but otherwise honored by a vast swath of earthly cultures, a commonplace unimpeachably signalling the best medicines in a succinct and servicable sign for the stuff itself easily enough discernable in almost any event, the staff with the snakes around it, the caduceus. Homer refers evasively to the staff of Tiresias as "golden." We are meant to understand the snakes of it.

Implicitly rebuked from the go in the Judeo–Christian telling, nevertheless the caduceus has not yet lost its utilitarian power. It still means best medicines far and wide, carrying it does into our own age its restricted sense of what medicines might be permitted to mean, as contrasted with the originally encompassing claims packed in with all the symbolic baggage of that well-known snakey sign in times gone by.

Unpacking all that symbolic baggage was the move critically resisted ab orgine in Genesis, offering up there as it does such a damning role to the singular snake on a stick that any sensible audience for its story might suspect, with such misfortune as is measured out in snakes there, one being sufficiently ill-met, an even greater sorriness must surely accrue from taking up the additional other of them wrapped about the caduceus, a necessary early inference drawn up right there in the beginning of the contrary written belief of Genesis, aimed at the rival staff of shamans and magi and peripatetics and the odd druid or brahmin or other with whom the snakey symmetry of the thing was so commonly associated.

The staff of A, the staff of Asclepius with its singular snake symbolically implicated in the sad story of Genesis, represents of course the subtraction of one of the snakes from T, the staff of Tiresias, or more formally, A = T–x for some value of snake.

It is this symbol's value, that of A, not T, which is so misfortuately described in the initiating pages of Genesis. In spite of its cool reception there in Genesis, the problematic snake on a stick was readopted, publicly reintroduced on the authority of Moses himself back into best practices in the Bible, to the considerable annoyance of those who devotedly argued from first principles for a whole millennium against what they called Nehushtan, before finally succeding in their plan to eliminate the derided thing forever from the paw of the orthodox believer.

By beginning with the words "Beside what you've just said," Horace hints that his words are the directly continuing further words of Ulysses in the famous conversation given in Homer's Odyssey xi. between that notable fellow and Tiresias.

The prophecy of Horace's Tiresias elicits only the too-vivid pragmatism of Romans in the bespoke Latin Horace was hobbled with. The best a Romanized Tiresias, fabled fellow he was for seeing clearly into the future, can do for his Ulysses is repeat the Latin for plain practical advice on how to get as rich as surely possible in the tested Roman way: sidle up familiarly to the rich.

Sure he's a snide one, Horace, putting those merely pragmatic words in the peerless seer's mouth of Tiresias.

Go on, flatter your way to wealth and reputation, Horace would have Tiresias say. Apt advice, that, for all the flock of flatterers who have found it so efficacious down the ages, but a thin go at a seer's peer overall given Tiresias himself working out the main chance of that wiliest of heroes, well-weathered far-travelled Ulysses. With all the many mastered challenges of the man, is there no prouder course in Latin but this, to fall in with the flock of flatterers? Horace formally grants the best guess to Tiresias, elsewhere famed for his sooths, and Tiresias, at least in Horace's Latin, answers no. Even brave Ulysses will strike no better path than this.

The "d' sound made saying the word Odysseos in the Greek of Homer was habitually misrecieved as more of an "l" sound to the Roman ear, the Roman ear attuned to the harder stronger "d" sound of Latin's own to compare against the languidly pronuncced "d" made of it by the Greeks, whose dialects spoke a "d" wilfully aspirated toward the confused soundings separating in the Roman ear what they must take to be the sounds for "th" and "l," which sounded in Latin as no "d" at all, but "l" itself instead. The word Ulysses is Odysseos, repeated as misheard by Romans, the unlikely sound given in the Greek transposed by the substitue of sound Latin for the fellow.

December 4, 2005

December 4, 2005

In time the controversy of the Naming among the members of the Barry Family reached a local maximum. The maelstrom of the controversey drew all who bothered to attend to it, so that at that time in the as–yet continuous conversation of the Barry Family, almost all bothered to lend a contending word as the opportunity to speak it arose.

December 1, 2005

December 1, 2005

The Presidential plan for victory

Looking ahead we must plan for victory, given the commanding words of the President of the United States on the subject yesterday before the assembled cadets of the Naval Academy in Annapolis.

Much as we would rather Iraq suffer peace or fellowship or comity or some other equally unlikely quality than the victory insisted on by the President, we must, acknowledging the primacy of his will in the matter, defer to his greater say. He will have his plan, although the nature of what victory may be announced from his sorry invasion of Iraq clearly awaits further elucidation.

Unquestionably at this present time the president's minimum vision of victory in Iraq includes the establishment of a state just stable enough to support the continued presence of American military and economic forces there on into the indefinite future.

He calls out to the cadets to plan for victory, gathering them by word and gesture.

He stands at his lecturn gathering cadets before the projected image behind him, the sheild-shaped image a sort of mega-Power-Point slide the like of which is made from repeated tiles of a somewhat smaller image of curious and presumably purposeful design, chosen to represent ideally by all its cleverly iterated ideography the mega-powerful point of the president's words.

on the one hand of the plan for victory on the other hand of the plan for victory

The iterated image has the rivets, as on a ship, rivets which from one iterated version of the image to another align with one another to mark a banded section of ship's plates joined as if to make the ship shape.

Each image repeats what we must conclude in such naval context must be meant to stand for a porthole with its welcome and uncluttered view of outside, where in the seeable distance of each porthole (unfocused unfortunately here in our best reproductions) are the golden words Plan for Victory in plain sight tiled in rows and columns in the sheild-shaped larger image.

Stereoptically if the presumed portholes of the sheild–shaped image behind the president are all in the same plane, and Plan for Victory positioned singularly on some other distant plane, the view of Plan for Victory being made equally visible through each porthole is impossible. The laws of perspective are dispositive in this regard. Through each porthole, then, its own equal and independent Plan for Victory is spied, each arguably the self–same sought–for Plan for Victory as the others.

Ah, but what of the hologram or the self–similar mandelbrots these tiled images might represent which imaginatively contain some formal declaration of the whole barred to normal perspective? Certainly there are geometries by whose deformities the singular Plan for Victory on some distant plane might be projected equally through each porthole. But we're confronted by at best a mega-PowerPoint of an image here, and can easily dismiss such representations as beyond the purview of such a program. Bullet points and ornamentally tabulated lists, oh, yes. But not the hologram.

Woefully but necessarily we here at HCE who attend to television with all the sad time–consuming devotion required in this age are minded instantly here by this image of the oft–viewed game of Jeopardy!, whose playing board of similarly tiled rows and columns spring distractingly enough to mind at the least hint of a table, along with our own plan for victory at that game.

Thus predisposed we would seek to flip tiles arbitrarily chosen from among those titled Plan for Victory behind the President in order to spy the variously challenging answers revealed there. At Jeopardy!, even with our admitted lapsed store of knowledges we find most answers readily questionable, which is the point of the exercise by the rules of that game.

Unquestionably the point of the President's exercise is to preserve the presence of military and economic forces in Iraq indefinitely on into the future by inciting the cadets of the Naval Academy at the very least, as is his wont as their commander–in–cheif, to plan for victory with him.

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