"I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact." Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Structural Study of Myth TOWER OF BABEL constructions of structures doré MYTH, LANGUAGE, STRUCTURE, ETC "There is no art to find the mind's construction in the face." W.Shakespeare, Macbeth I iv 11 brain, or mind what is mind? doesn't matter what is matter? never mind An image of the world as paradox has stayed with me since about age fifteen. With no purpose to life except the death of death, then if death die, our occupation's gone. (cf Othello, III iii 359). Truth lies in the fathomless depths of a bottomless well. The fundamental truth is, truth just lies. There's no end to the quest, while wheels turn within wheels, and circles spin inside spirals. Everything (and I said this to Andrew Osmond in 1959) is its own opposite. The model is one of man sited at the exact centre of a path describing the shortest distance between two points. These points are located at infinity, and are both equally far apart. With miles to go before he sleeps the traveller is stuck at the centre. It's never jam today. See Heracleitus, 500 BC. Push on regardless; smite the furrows: monað modes lust mæla gehwylce ferð to feran þæt ic feor heonan elþeodigra eard gesece. Not much of a pursuit, though; more a fumbling in the darkness, groping for clues. Late in the day we stumble across Lévi-Strauss, in the form of two small books: Claude Lévi-Strauss: An Introduction, by Octavio Paz, Cape 1971, pp.101, and Lévi-Strauss, by Edmund Leach, Fontana 1970, pp.126. Leach is jocular but flabbergasted; his pages shower exclamation marks. Paz is reverent and poetic. Brief they may be, but both books are stuffed with nutrition. If a poem needs no more than 125 lines, no book needs more than 126 pages. The table below comes from Leach's summary of Lévi-Strauss, p.71, and seems to offer a useful template for dismantling The Seafarer, especially if one is prepared to look upon all religions (and all history) as myth, in successive stages of development. Immediately after its occurrence, any event accelerates into the past, becoming progressively more distorted as memory fades. Oral history converts into myth, something few believers can accept. "Mythical thought always progresses from the awareness of oppositions toward their resolution." Claude Lévi-Strauss But this is to think there is a source, a mother-face of meaning. There's none, only the sense of structure and the sound of untaken air in empty vaults. from Teaching the phonemic transcription, in Time Signatures, Carcanet 1993, by Chris McCully   Language Trees constructions of babel Notwithstanding the eminence and prestige of the authors who instance them, the trees depicted below (scroll down) seem to bear only a faint resemblance to actuality. It must be asked whether they could possibly have been drawn up by anyone with genuine oral fluency in, say, three or four of these languages. Language transmission has to be mainly oral, since man is born with a capacity for speech, but not for reading or writing. The main defect of the charts is that they promote the illusion that languages relate to each other genealogically. The analogy does not hold, since language kinship, unlike that of human individuals, is fluid. There is constant cross-fertilization from one language to another, especially between those already closely linked, as here. Many other flaws are apparent by comparing the trees. The net result is a complete muddle. GRAMMAR under construction   CHESS "a symbol or paradigm of the working of the human mind" from The Glorious and Bloody Game, by Arthur Koestler   KNIGHTRIDER þæt he gewyrce ær he on weg scyle fremum on foldan wið feonda niþ deorum dædum deofle togeanes My fellow man I do not care for I often ask me what he's there for The only answer I can find Is reproduction of his kind   Ogden Nash commentary       annotation back to this version essays and papers main index