Mythology

Droplet – Fri 20th Feb

‘It strikes, it strikes! Now, body, turn to air,
Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to hell!
O soul, be chang’d into small water-drops,
And fall into the ocean, ne’er be found!’ (1)

‘O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!’ (2)

‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.’ (3)

‘I’m singin’ in the rain
Just singin’ in the rain
What a glorious feelin’
I’m happy again.’ (4)

(1) Christopher Marlowe, ‘Dr Faustus’
(2) William Shakespeare, ‘Hamlet’
(3) Rutger Hauer, ‘Blade Runner’
(4) Arthur Freed & Nacio Herb Brown, ‘Singing in the Rain’

The Dark Side – Mon 16th Feb

‘Whatever’s inside that cupboard is so terrible, so powerful, that it amplified the fears of an ordinary little boy across all the barriers of time and space, through crimson stars and silent stars and tumbling nebulas like oceans set on fire; through empires of glass and civilizations of pure thought in a whole terrible, wonderful universe of impossibilities. You see these eyes? They are old eyes. And one thing I can tell you … monsters are real.’

Dr Who: ‘Night terrors’ Series 6 (11th Doctor)

Love is in the air – Thurs 5th Feb

Valentines day may have been named after St Valentine (or rather, one of at least two of them, no-one knows which one) or at least renamed after a St Valentine as an attempt to Christanize the pre-existing pagan fertility festival of Lupercalia, in which young men whipped the buttocks of young women in an attempt to improve their fertility (any excuse) but the original purpose of it was to mark the day at the end of the winter period where you would allow your pigeons to start mating.

Pigeons can, given the right conditions, reproduce all year, but the scarceness of food in the winter means their chicks are less likely to survive – not such a good idea if you’re living in a subsistence community such as England in the dark and middle ages, and relying on pretty much anything as a food supply. Apparently getting pigeons to start breeding around this time of year also means that, when their young start flying there are less hawks around. Oh, and, in more northern climes the increase in sunlight during February leads to a corresponding increase in gonadal activity in birds…

Ah, romance!

Anyway, as mentioned in a previous post (Springs – Weds 28th Jan) there’s definitely a lot more goings on in the bird world of late. I was reminded of this today when I walked past a tree so filled with pigeons I thought it was about to burst into bloom (either that or they’ve been watching Hitchcock movies through someone’s window).

Here are two lines from Chaucer’s ‘The Parliament of Fowls’ (written sometime around 1382). This is the A. S. Kline 2007 translation:

‘For this was on Saint Valentine’s day,
When every fowl comes there his mate to take’

And again in Chaucer’s original language:

‘For this was on Seynt Valentynes day,
Whan every foul cometh ther to chese his make’

I reckon that clinches it.

Watch out for my forthcoming Valentines special, with a top ten list of things to say to your beloved to entice him or her to go out for that special meal with you…

Collected stones. Dec 2014 – Jan 2015

Here’s another page of stones. There are now four in all, collected from ones I’ve found since beginning this exploration. You can find the others if you click the 3 bars icon at the head of the page, after which click ‘stone of the day’.

3 bars

And here to introduce these latest treasures, are the opening lines from Roger Caillois’s book, ‘The Writing of Stones’ first published in 1913:

‘Just as men have always sought after precious stones, so they have always prized curious ones, those that catch the attention through some anomaly of form, some suggestive oddity of colour or pattern. This fascination almost always derives from a surprising resemblance that is at once improbable and natural. Stones possess a kind of gravitas, something ultimate and unchanging, something that will never perish or else has already done so. They attract through an intrinsic, infallible, immediate beauty, answerable to no one, necessarily perfect yet excluding the idea of perfection in order to exclude approximation, error and access. This spontaneous beauty thus precedes and goes beyond the actual notion of beauty, of which it is at once the promise and the foundation.

For a stone represents an obvious achievement, yet one arrived at without invention, skill, industry, or anything else that would make it a work in the human sense of the word, much less a work of art. The work comes later, as does art; but the far-off roots and hidden models of both lie in the obscure yet irresistible suggestions in nature.’

(Translated by Barbara Brey, University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville)

Babel – Tues 27th Jan

As with every language, French has a variety of words for verbal communication. Three that have become important to linguistic theory and psychoanalysis over the last century, particularly as they have been defined and to some extent redefined by Saussure and Lacan, are ‘Langue’, ‘Langage’ and ‘Parole’. Saussure writes:

‘But what is language [langue]? It is not to be confused with human speech [langage], of which it is only a definite part, though certainly an essential one. It is both a social product of the faculty of speech and a collection of necessary conventions that have been adopted by a social body to permit individuals to exercise that faculty. Taken as a whole, speech is many-sided and heterogeneous; straddling several areas simultaneously-physical, physiological, and psychological – it belongs both to the individual and to society; we cannot put it into any category of human facts, for we cannot discover its unity.’ (1)

And a few pages later:

‘Among all the individuals that are linked together by speech, some sort of average will be set up: all will reproduce – not exactly of course, but approximately – the same signs united with the same concepts. How does the social crystallization of language come about? Which parts of the circuit are involved? For all parts probably do not participate equally in it.
The non-psychological part can be rejected from the outset. When we hear people speaking a language that we do not know, we perceive the sounds but remain outside the social fact because we do not understand them. Neither is the psychological part of the circuit wholly responsible: the executive side is missing, for execution is never carried out by the collectivity. Execution is always individual, and the individual is always its master: I shall call the executive side speaking [parole].’ (2)

Elsewhere, regarding Lacan’s ideas:

‘Lacan takes up Saussure’s theory that language is a structure composed of differential elements, but whereas Saussure had stated this of langue, Lacan states it of langage.
Langage becomes, for Lacan, the single paradigm of all structures.
Lacan then proceeds to criticize the Saussurean concept of language, arguing that the basic unit of language is not the sign but the signifier.
Lacan then argues that the unconscious is, like language, a structure of signifiers, which also allows Lacan to formulate the category of the symbolic with greater precision.’ (3)

And:

‘The French term parole presents considerable difficulty to the English translator because it does not correspond to any one English word. In some contexts it corresponds to the English term “speech,” and in others is best translated as “word.” … Lacan’s use of the term parole owes little to Saussure – whose opposition between parole and langue is replaced in Lacan’s work with the opposition between parole and langage – and is far more determined by references to anthropology, theology, and metaphysics.’ (4)

I was reminded of these ideas recently when I came upon a small French Protestant church tucked away behind the Metropole Hotel (despite having lived in Brighton for decades, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this building before. How easily we take for granted the places we live, sticking to the most efficient routes while ignoring many others because they don’t seem to offer enough to warrant our time or attention). The church is tiny and as you can see from some of today’s pictures, made of brick, with terracotta ornamentation, including a sculpted book over the door, upon which the following legend is inscribed:

LA PAROLE ETAIT DIEU
JEAN 1:1

My French is rudimentary but I can remember enough (augmented by memories of religious studies at school and occasional attendance at church services) to be able to translate this to ‘The word was God’ and to spot that the ‘word’ used in this instance was (in French of course): Parole.

I see it as an advantage that, because English has no direct equivalent translation, this actually gives more scope for exploration in finding an equivalent. In English, we speak, we say; but also: we utter, pronounce, invoke, give voice, whisper, enunciate, deliver…

My understanding of the above arguments, is that for both Saussure and Lacan, ‘Parole’ is an intimate and intensely personal act, a way we reveal our innermost selves in our communications. And yet also (perhaps more for Lacan) because it is so personal, so loaded with private associations and history, it is, to some extent, always unknowable.

This simple phrase in the first verse of the gospel according to John, re-translated via French, now becomes so much more complex, more pregnant.

And, of course, the French version would have been translated from a Latin or Greek text, and the original manuscript by John, was probably written in Greek but could have been Aramaic or Hebrew, and would certainly have owed much to far earlier Hebrew, or Assyrian or Babylonian creation legends (these languages possibly even owing something to early Sanskrit, a language considered by some ancient chroniclers to be so perfect that to utter a name using that tongue, would be to bring the thing it signifies into existence). And how would the notion of ‘the word’ of speech as an intimate act have been understood, and used then, so long ago?

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (5)

Notes
1. ‘Course in General Linguistics’ Ferdinand de Saussure. Edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye In collaboration with Albert Riedlinger. Translated by Wade Baskin. McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, Toronto, London. p9
2. Ibid. p13
3. ‘Encyclopedia of Lacanian Psychoanalysis’ http://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Language
4. Ibid. http://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Speech
5. ‘John 1:1’ (King James version)

Appropriation – Mon 26th Jan

The rats dropped the rolling-pin, and listened attentively.
“We are discovered and interrupted, Anna Maria; let us collect our property––and other people’s,––and depart at once.”
“I fear that we shall be obliged to leave this Pudding.”

The Tale of Samuel Whiskers
or
The Roly-Poly Pudding
Beatrix Potter

Atlantis – Mon 19th Jan

They say that somewhere out in the middle of the Atlantic, lies a vast floating island made out of millions of tons of the plastic bags, bottles, bin liners, nylon ropes, nets and all the disposable containers we have jettisoned over the years. Gaily coloured and rotating slowly with the currents that gathered its component pieces, it is both a death trap to myriads of marine creatures and a monument to our unsupportable lifestyles. And yet if someone said to me, let’s go and see it, I’d jump at the chance. In my imagination I am already there.

Does this make me a monster?