Time Machine Argot: Sexing the Cube

[salimondo]

I'm interested in outcomes. Generate a cubic environment. To the extent to which your space mirrors the world -- that is, to the extent to which you will avoid the autodidact's embarrassment -- it will conform to the right-hand rule along with other fundamental principles. This is why, for example, your cube should resemble a die even when rolled.

Comments

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[brendan831]

Fascinating stuff!

P.S.: I used to own that dice set. I think it came from here.

Link correction

[brendan831]

here

Re: Link correction

[ayrkain]

and here too! ;)

! ! !

[salimondo]

Thanks. Parts of it have been percolating for years, so I'm happy to get them attached to a chassis and turn them loose. The key is the inflationary/deflationary cycle.

I'm often surprised that so few people ask why or how these things evolved, but suppose that it's rare enough that anyone finds more than one or two of the broken pieces of antiquity and can get them back into anything like working condition.

That dice set is still intensely totemic for me in its colors, relative sizes and even smell -- yellow pyramid for relatively gristly guys, red cube for the fat priests, green octahedron for the jocks and underground mutants, and of course the white 20 determining who lives and who dies. I've bought a few basic sets (and maybe a Gamma World) over the years just to harvest the dice, like killing a chicken to look at the liver.

[thesandsabrase]

quite interesting.

[salimondo]

Thanks. That bracketed [poetry] actually made it in above the fold just to bait you, you know. Ahl is a badass.

[autobeast]

Ahl is, indeed, a badass.

iam redit et virgo

[salimondo]

I think his Aeneid will be very exciting.

[ineffabelle]

"such etymologies are so common in antiquity that no modern scholar has tried to deny the prevalence of linguistic theories based on them. Rather, scholars have focused their energies on dismissing the theories as invalid, even ridiculous"

hehehehe. yeees. The Poison Mythos academic meeting the Organic head-on, having no way to reabsorb it into his constructivist, hyper-rationalist context...

AB BC CA | AC CB BA

[salimondo]

The few classicists I've had call to talk to socially fret that Ahl is completely and dangerously sane. I find his book really useful as an argument that Saussure may not have been nuts and that the "gai savoir" or alchemical language of various recent thinkers springs from a deeper source than one might initially suspect. Varro was a practicing genius. What does he teach us about language and the world? Can we say with any certainty whether this ars is antiqua or the bossa nova? What does this entail for our own generous/grudging poetics that evade silence?

Ahl on "Addressing a Multiple Audience" says:

Ovid knew, presumably, that he would not have his every reader's entire attention (or understanding) all the time. His Metamophoses, like Mercury's tale of Pan and Syrinx in Book 1, may lull the reader -- especially one who regards Ovid as an ancient Hans Andersen -- to sleep before the story is complete. And we should recognize that Mercury intends his narrative as a soporific so that he can put Argus to sleep and kill him. Even a

Re: AB BC CA | AC CB BA

[ineffabelle]

"And we should recognize that Mercury intends his narrative as a soporific so that he can put Argus to sleep and kill him. Even a bedtime story may be a very potent weapon ... "rhetoric" is often qualified by epithets such as "empty" and "mere," and we are sometimes deluded into thinking that rhetoric really is only simple speech ornamented. We often assume, for instance, that a story is "simply" a vehicle for conveying information."

That quote is enough to convince me that Ahl is on the ball, or at least that I'm nuts in the same way he is, which for me amounts to the same thing almost...

To cross personae, I think it would be interesting to contrast this sort of attitude toward the ancient with that of Strauss, who unfortunately is the perfect product/producer of the modern Poison Mythoi.

right hand rule

[salimondo]

This winds back to the sex of the cube, fortuitously. Sometimes the resultant vector points one way; in others, the opposite. Sometimes an Ahl, sometimes a Strauss. Sometimes the inflationary universe, sometimes stagnation. The results of the machine made of time depend on how the thumb points.

Ahl: Greek and Roman poets do not always share our concern for describing sequences in time. No one theory of time claimed everyone's allegiance in antiquity ... Ovid's treatment of time is remarkable in a number of ways. He does not omit the word "time" as Hesiod does and he does not set his work against a sequential or quasi-historical backdrop as do Vergil, Lucan and Silius. He simply does not use sequential Newtonian time as a structuring principle at all.

thanks so much for posting this!

[ineffabelle]

...but you know, this has always been going on.

We bury the dogs, instead of the bones, go (w)hole hog on our sprees, keep our cartographies close to the vest pocket, and our chronologies a bit more distant... I mean to say that people who dig these fossils have always existed, we wax and wane with the gyre and gimble of a far, slow satellite. It becomes more or less prevalent... so it's good to read this micro-essay and remind us, keeping up the good Work, that we have a long and storied precedent to mine.

Remix culture requires bodies for the altar, and the so-called Classicals are a fine fine repast for our strange gods.

Ahl and the Trans-Modern

[salimondo]

Thanks. I'm told Ahl argues that Oedipus was actually innocent.

Oedipus

[ineffabelle]

of course he was, from an existential standpoint.

Until post hoc, he was not sleeping with his "mother", because she's not his mother until he knows she is.
And in the moment he knows that, he is not that other person anymore.

In fact it is the essentialism which might be seen as the true "tragic flaw" of Oedipus, his true sin was to accept responsibility for an otherwise innocent set of actions, based on a belief in absolute essences.

And old Tiresias, having lived as both male and female, might be seen as a cryptolexic defense early warning system, trying in vain to open him to the possibility of re-interpretation.

R Mutt

[lhasa7]

I hope to Heaven you find a way to preserve this apart from LJ… have you checked out Bragdon and Ouspensky yet? I can probably dredge up some efforts by the former in Oakland if my car makes it that far, which it likely Will.

MutteR

[salimondo]

Thanks. You're right, this is pushing into Bragdon space. Not sure we need to stress your car though -- the calculus needs to catch up first and by that time sources can arrive. As for Ouspensky, I haven't read him in ages, but at the time I wasn't reading for this kind of power. You're right, he's probably a valuable new non-Steinerean surface.

Ain Sophie

[lhasa7]

I sure thought that Tertium Organum was the bull in the china shop as far as Russell’s ‘sources’ were concerned, but of course a fool such as I could of course never hold up under the leaden rigours of that A.'. A.'. ‘lineage’…

Re: R Mutt

[ineffabelle]

I think if one is going to read Ouspensky, Gurdjieff's "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson" is a necessary precursor.