Reading unexpected meaning, systems that triggers Mysticism, Art and Philosophy.
Interesting to see, according to Florian Cramer, why games are forbidden by religion:
- The game by contast is a central model of 20th century computation, both in the arts and in technology. The main ontological difference between theosophic and game computing is that games can do without a reference to higher powers—which is why religions declared many games, dice and card games for example, sinful—and may impose arbitrary restrictions that do not logically follow from a higher natural order. A game, in other words, can be its own autonomous, self-contained world.
Words made Flesh, Florian Cramer, p57
Games as God Killers. That’s a pretty nice idea.
Swift, in Gullivers travels, describe a word combinatory machine as such:
- Everyone knew how laborious the usual method is of attaining to arts and sciences; whereas by his contrivance the most ignorant person at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labor, may write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, law, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.
Leaving all knowledge text production to a words-combinatory machine, the people from the academic island of Lagado accomplish finally what can be seen as a total poetic life, based on interpretation of “reading signs”. Can we see here an link with XXth century “Art as Life” concept, such as Joseph Beuys?
Interpretation: Divination-like text, where “unintentional poetry” and strange relations between words force the interpretation of the reader, can be automaticaly generated by a software. We are fundamentaly “interpreting machines”. Historicaly, we can suspect that sacred text, as the bible for example, had kind of parasite “langage meaning” due to multi redaction and multi translations (from hebrew to greek, greek to latin, latin to vernacular) even if human translators where hight intellectuals, and tools as “multi language bibles” () where developped. (Figure out that Hebrew has no vowel! Pnk: Punk or Panik?).
The Oracle-like discourse. The interpretation of an obscure sentence, is supposed to give an “answer” to a specific question. The pythie was the most important Oracle person in Antic Greek. Her obscure quotes were clues given by gods to human. It seems she was in a trance caused by sulfuric vapors. Nice parallel with practices of Burroughs (again) where drugs played an important role in writing practice, combined with the fact that some readers (interpreters) found the book forecasting –with eerie prescience–such later phenomena as AIDS, liposuction and the crack epidemic.
The sudden appearence of mystic through interpretative reading reveals the need of meaning and the magic of words. Dada tried to break, with a very romantic approach, this mysticality through cynicism, with cut up technics as well, more game like… Destroying as well the idea of the Genius, and the idea of meaning:
- Tristan Tzara’s advised To Make a Dadaist Poem as follows:
Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article the length you want
to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you.
And there you are—an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.
As a matter of READING, the sentence given by the pythie to Socrates triggered his philosophical research.
- “According to the version of his defense speech presented in Plato’s Apology, Socrates’ life as the “gadfly” of Athens began when his friend Chaerephon asked the oracle at Delphi if anyone was wiser than Socrates; the Oracle responded negatively. Socrates, interpreting this as a riddle, set out to find men who were wiser than he was. He questioned the men of Athens about their knowledge of good, beauty, and virtue. Finding that they knew nothing and yet believing themselves to know much, Socrates came to the conclusion that he was wise only in so far as he knew that he knew nothing. Among the others, only the artisans came close to having true knowledge of their trade; the remainder of men made false claims to knowledge.”
“The Socratic method is a negative method of hypothesis elimination, in that better hypotheses are found by steadily identifying and eliminating those which lead to contradictions. It was designed to force one to examine his own beliefs and the validity of such beliefs. In fact, Socrates once said, “I know you won’t believe me, but the highest form of Human Excellence is to question oneself and others”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates
Enthusiasm etymology comes from Greek meaning “God in us”. It was the surnatural inspiration pushing the Greek priest to give the oracle. Plato, relator of Socrates life, used it as a fundamental element to define the poet.
This is some thoughts in order to modulate quotes such as Poetry is lost in translation.