Crop Rotation - 014 - Denis Johnson - The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

A discussion of the short story The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, by Denis Johnson.

Transcript

SPEAKER_05 0:01

Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears while we all stop sorrow with us. There's a song that will linger forever in our ears. Hard times come again. Tis the song the side of the week. Hard times, hard times come again. Many days you have lingered around my cabin door. Oh, hard times come again. No more.

SPEAKER_04 0:47

Welcome to Crop Rotation, an ad hoc seminar discussing works of art and intellect. Before each meeting, one of us gives the group an assignment. This leader is also responsible for asking an opening question to begin the discussion. This meeting's leader is Matt.

SPEAKER_07 1:02

Hello. So I assigned a main course and then two appetizers. So I'm just going to say a little bit about each one of these. So the first appetizer is, I believe, 16 poems from the Kokinshu, which is the second imperial anthology of Japanese poetry. The first imperial anthology was the Man Yoshu, and it's like very strange. And then they formalized a lot of things, including their language, and created a second imperial anthology, the Kokinshu, which is what we read some of the poems in. I don't know this translator or anything. The other smaller assignment was the first two chapters of the Shunra and the Schmetterling by Joel Hoffman. And Joel Hoffman is an Israeli writer and translator. Actually, I believe that I'm correct about this, that one of the first books of Haiku that I owned was translated into English by Joel Hoffman. So he's a prolific writer, thinker, translator. The Shunra and the Schmetterling was originally written in Hebrew, and we're reading obviously the English translation. But it's it's quite it's quite an interesting book. I would describe it as extremely or very experimental, using a lot of fragmentation and interesting literary devices. The main course is the story by I always forget the author's name. I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_02 2:32

Dennis Johnson?

SPEAKER_07 2:33

Dennis Johnson. The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Dennis Johnson. I first encountered this in the New American Stories anthology, which I'll talk a little bit about. There are two of these. They're edited by Ben Marcus. These are something like the canon, if there could be said to be a canon, of contemporary American experimental literature. If you were to read all the stories in these collections and then read all of the other things by the those authors, you would have read almost all of published experimental fiction in English. From, I would say, maybe the 90s to the mid-2010s or so. Something like that. I don't know when the most recent one came out. Um Ben Marcus is a is a creative writing professor at uh at Ivy League College in New York. Columbia, he has written The Flame Alphabet, which I read, and a bunch of other stuff that's pretty cool, pretty experimental, very strange, very interesting writer. Dennis Johnson, I believe, got a really big literary prize for a tree of smoke, maybe. I didn't like Tree of Smoke as much as I liked Train Dreams, but I do recommend Train Dreams. I haven't read the short story collection that this is from. Okay, so that's a little sort of introduction to these books. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to, just for the sake of listeners who have not read The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, which you should, but if you haven't, and also just to sort of remind my friends here uh about how it goes and what it's like, I'm gonna give like a sort of short uh summary of what happens in the story, and then I'm going to ask my opening question. So the Largesse of the Sea Maiden takes place over the course of 10 sections, and they are titled, but not numbered. First one is called Silences. In it, the protagonist and his wife are hosting a group of friends for dinner. They're discussing significant life events. One is a veteran who lost his leg just below the knee. He sort of dares another guest to kiss his stump. She doesn't kiss the stump, but later the two are married. In the section called Accomplishes, the protagonist is at another party, which is being hosted by a rich man who used to be his boss. This guy apparently makes it a habit to get drunk and threaten to throw a very important and valuable painting that he owns into the fire. He says, I own it, I can destroy it if I want. And he does this again, but this time the guests at the party refrain from pleading with him not to destroy this irreplaceable work of art. So he does throw it in the fire and the painting is destroyed. In the next section called Adman, uh, the protagonist goes to work. He is an older guy, he works as an advertising executive or something. He works in advertising. He has a pinched nerve in his back. He lives in San Diego. Later on, he has to travel to New York City to receive an award for his advertising work. He goes to the chiropractor in this chapter, and it is Halloween. Everybody he meets is wearing some sort of costume. The next one's called Farewell. In this one, the protagonist answers the phone and it is his first wife. She's calling from the hospice. She's dying and wants to settle things with him. He apologizes profusely for everything he did wrong to her. Then he realizes that he's not actually sure whether he's talking to his first wife or his second wife. One is called Jinny and the other is called Jenny. He goes for a walk, and something called The Mystery winks at him. Next one's called Widow. The protagonist has lunch with his friend Ellis, who tells him this story. He interviewed a man on Death Row. Then, after the man was put to death, he went and interviewed the man's wife, who he found working at a peep show. She had lied to the executed man for their entire relationship to make him proud of her and happy. But actually, her life is very squalid. Next one's called Orphan. We are introduced to a friend of the protagonist named Tony Fido, who's a sort of schizophrenic outsider artist painter with like delusions of grandeur, or maybe he's actually amazing at painting. We find out that he has just killed himself. The next section is called Memorial, where the protagonist goes to Tony's memorial service, where a few of his friends reminisce about him. He receives Tony's mother's recipe book, which displays her own long-ago descent into madness before she had also killed herself. Next one's called Casanova. The protagonist travels to New York City. At first, he has a fantastic time walking around the city, eating rat dogs, but then he has bad diarrhea during the award ceremony because of the rat dogs, and he spends a lot of time in a bathroom stall. He also still has the pinched nerve, or the pinched nerve comes back at that time. But while he's in there, he is propositioned by a man in the stall next to him. When he finally gets out of the bathroom, he meets the son of a friend and co-worker who has since died, and he embarrasses himself by, you know, saying farewell in the manner of saying, Tell your dad I said hello. Or something like that. But the dad is dead. So he's very embarrassed. Next one's called Mermaid. It snows in New York City. The protagonist wanders the city. He goes into a bar and enters what feels like a very cinematic scene. There's music, there are glamorous women, there's a saxophone sitting on stage, and that's what happens in that section. The final one is called Wit. We finally learn his name, Bill Whitman, I think. We learn about the most famous advertisement that this guy ever made, which is the reason he got the award. It's a pretty unusual advertisement, and then he summarizes his life and talks about how he sometimes reads old folk tales at night and goes walking in his bathrobe. So here's the question with a little context. The footnote to poem four in our Kokinshu reading has a sentence that goes like this. I love the sentence. This poem is the first of a series treating elegant confusion as to whether plum blossoms or snow whitens the branches, right? Uh, this is the simplest, most archaic version of a literary technique that I think of as combining two things. You can do it in a lot of different ways. Sometimes it's juxtaposition or simile or calling one thing by another thing's name or mixing properties of two things. But in this case, the poet is sort of combining the plum blossoms and the snow, and in a way, sort of mixing winter and spring. The most advanced avant-garde use of this technique that I know of is in the Schunra and the Schmetterling, which makes liberal use of it. Everything is combined with everything else. Just for example, the apartment that the narrator grew up in is combined with the world and like the creation of the world in Genesis. Like it rises up out of primordial chaos, the ceiling is the sky, the neighbors above are in heaven, the distance between the mirror and the bed is the whole universe. Says a lot of stuff that's sort of making the apartment into an entire world or universe. His grandfather's voice is on the right side of all creation, because his bed is on the right side of the bedroom. So that establishes a kind of spectrum from I wonder whether that's snow or plum blossoms, all the way up to the veranda rises up from oblivion, and the ceiling is the sky, and the neighbors live in heaven. So the largesse of the sea maiden is somewhere in between. So to ask this question, I'm gonna read a very short section. This is in the farewell chapter. He's just said goodbye forever to a woman who was his wife, and he doesn't know which one it was, and he goes for a walk. So here now I'm reading from the story. I wonder if you're like me, if you collect and squirrel away in your soul certain odd moments when the mystery winks at you. When you walk in your bathrobe and tasseled loafers, for instance, well out of your neighborhood and among a lot of closed shops, and you approach your very faint reflection in a window with words above it. The sign said, sky and celery. Closer, it read ski and cyclery. So this is obviously this is like the same thing. Sky and celery become ski and cyclery. Something that's very like poetic, sky and celery is actually very sort of mundane. It's like a distortion or a mixing. So my question is, is all this just a trick? Is it just a literary trick? Or is there actually such a thing as the mystery? Is this something which is genuinely real, or is it like stage magic, but with language instead of cards and coins and things? That's the question.

SPEAKER_02 11:26

What is so is all this real? What is this?

SPEAKER_06 11:30

What's the antecedent? Combining things.

SPEAKER_02 11:32

So the things are the things that are being combined real?

SPEAKER_06 11:35

What I mean is combinations. No, is the combined.

SPEAKER_07 11:38

He says that he sees one of these things where he mistakes something for something else.

SPEAKER_08 11:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 11:44

Like in the in the old poems.

SPEAKER_08 11:46

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_07 11:47

And he says that it's that is the mystery winking at him. And I'm asking, is this just a trick that writers do? Or is there actually the mystery?

SPEAKER_02 11:56

So the this that's real, is there a mysterious thing that this is hinting at? It's a symbol of. Yes or no? I'm asking.

SPEAKER_01 12:02

I would ask the question, is this an authentic or an insincere numinous device?

SPEAKER_07 12:09

Numinous might be a good word. I'm I'm thinking, like, is there something real captured in the story, or is it just a trick? Maybe, maybe I shouldn't say the other part of that sec of that question. Maybe I should just say, is this a mere trick? Or is there more to it?

SPEAKER_04 12:26

Just a couple of quick observations. The note that you started with on the footnote, the sentence in the footnote, I guess I should say, about the elegant confusion as to whether plum blossoms or snow whitens the branches. I only see that in poem six. I don't actually see that particular thing happening in the other poems. Uh at least explicitly, maybe it's implicit somewhere. That's fine. And the way in which it appears in poem six is if there is a confusion, it's at least an ambiguity, and it's happening for the bird, right? Because he has come to see, which I think is the crest, right? Or the thrush, I mean, has come to see if those are not spring blossoms rather than that. So I just want to point out that I'm not I'm not saying it's not in the other ones, but I'd love to be shown in the other ones how it's ambiguous. Then as far as the reflection goes, can you can you tell me what page it was on? Page 328. 328. Great. Um so um I think this is gonna come to me making some sort of hypothesis about your question. Uh I think that he's doing the same things in seeing his reflection and seeing the words. And the reflection has to be recognized, and so do the words. But before they're recognized, there's something else, and so is he. Um, and so I'll bring something out that I it's just a line from a song that I really like that has, since I was a teenager, I just thought it was a really well-made one. But uh it's Simon Agarfunkel from the Parsley Sage, Rosemary, and Time album. But the line goes, There's a mirror on my wall, it casts an image, dark and small, and I'm not sure at all. It's my reflection. It's a great line, and I think it has some of the stuff going on here. It has the same ambiguity that the thrush is seeing, and it has the same, you know, it has the reflections. And it seems to me that what's happening in the three of these is okay, short answer is I think it's real. It's not just a literary device, which is to say, I think that the effect that the literary device has on me is in my mood and specifically recollection of mood rather than current mood. And it has to do with the mood that I am in, but I'm gonna be generous enough to us all to say that one is in when one romanticizes and then is confronted with the world. I think it's an experience that is. I think what literary devices in general do, maybe not every single one, but in general, is they pull a person into an experience of life that is better not articulated analytically, but synthetically through a set of things happening in their soul that they recall.

SPEAKER_01 15:00

So the ambiguity of the nightingale is a function of composition of the possessive particle no and then naku. And in Japanese, you get this weird overlap of meaning because they are a civilization that made their own set of meanings for all the characters, but they came out of the continuous context of Chinese. So where Chinese has a bunch of different character readings in like a tiered set, they all kind of collapse down to their own flat top layer meaning. And that top layer meaning maps to one of the two layer meanings for Japanese, the own and the kun. And so if you look at the ambiguity of the homonym Naku, then you get a lot of really crazy stuff about things being without and things crying and things being in. And so the that top level meaning is in, though. So the the ambiguity of the placement of the nightingale is of an in. And that's it's uh that's the way that the language actually gives device to the ambiguity.

SPEAKER_10 16:08

Is the nightingale a mountain threshold are those the same things?

SPEAKER_01 16:14

And that's a fun thread. If you follow it through, you'll notice that there are these different terms for the species, but they're all talking about different kinds of birds up in the mountains, yeah.

SPEAKER_10 16:25

My translation doesn't have anything but mountain thresh, but I believe you.

SPEAKER_02 16:29

I think that it always uses the word uisu, which is Japanese for nightingale.

SPEAKER_01 16:35

Is there not any other kind of bird name in there? I thought in one place there wasn't an uisu, but maybe I hope maybe I hallucinated that. But it's a bird, right, that shows up at the springtime, right? And so what is the nature of spring? Spring is when a bunch of things happen together. So what does it mean for the togetherness to be decoupled? What does it mean for the herald to be out of place? Does the thing that it heralds can it be said to have changed? Um, and especially when the nature of the longing of the experience now at a time when I should look forward to it and it should be satisfying me, that that's a really, really beautiful attention space that it creates. So, Sir Robert, you asked how does it happen in the other places? I would say that there are all these kind of similar ways that that of and in being used to describe how the a thrush, how the yeah, how it's among the branches. There are things that happen in and out of time, and there are things that can be said to be true because two things are happening. And when you start to decouple them, how does the thing decohere? I think that's the device that you'll see throughout that'll answer your question.

SPEAKER_04 17:45

I that sounds great. Don't sorry, the Japanese is inaccessible to me, but I'm so I'm going with the English part. And I do know that uh what I'm seeing here, the language of the English, I'm I'm not discounting anything you're saying, Josh. I just can't access the that directly.

SPEAKER_01 18:01

It's not accessible, it's not accessible, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 18:03

But the the language of these poems, the ones around it, just don't have the ambiguity. They they say things from a privileged point of view. And in in English, and it definitely does some really cool blending, like for example, the first one has spring beginning, which is a sort of biological new year. Spring begins before the end of the solar year, and then you know there's lunar stuff happening as well. And there I think that I see the blending stuff of that, but I thought the note was really interesting because I don't actually see it for the snow and blossom part, which maybe I'm just missing it.

SPEAKER_01 18:40

Also, do you see the wind driving, right? And the wind melts things, and so the time and order of when and how the wind is melting things, that's another kind of fundamental ambiguity player.

SPEAKER_07 18:51

I think uh Sir Robert is asking a more specific question, which is for instance, in poem four, the English is rendered, Spring has come amidst the icy lingering snows of winter. Surely now the frozen tears of the mountain thrush will melt away. And the footnote says, this poem is the first of a series treating elegant confusion as to whether plum blossoms or snow whitens the branches. In that poem, there are no blossoms, there are no trees, no plants are mentioned. So it's not wrong for Sir Robert to say, what is this footnote talking about? That's what I'm wondering. That particular confusion.

SPEAKER_02 19:28

So sorry. Isn't it related? Isn't it related to poem five in which plum blossoms are mentioned?

SPEAKER_07 19:35

No, I can understand it for five, six, and seven.

SPEAKER_10 19:38

Yeah. So we're introduced to the mountain thrush in poem four. The series treats the elegant confusion. It is not necessarily in each poem in the series, but like four. Yes, exactly. And then five, and then six, and maybe seven, I'm not sure, are the series.

SPEAKER_07 20:03

That makes a lot of sense. So it's a little bit like what that form of linked verse.

SPEAKER_04 20:08

Renga. That makes more sense to me if Dwight, if we call those one, let's say, story or something uh across several poems.

SPEAKER_07 20:17

Yeah, I think that and that that exactly is what the translator is trying to communicate, and Dwight got it, and me and you didn't. Somebody has to pay attention to I'm surprised.

SPEAKER_10 20:30

I'm I'm so bad at poems. Uh the for me, the poems were really the only place my mind had much traction. And it seemed like when I read about the elegant confusion, I was thinking just about how every spring, now that I'm old enough to pay attention to weather, I sort of pretend, but not really, like I'm surprised that it's it's spring. No, now it's cold, now it's hot, now it's cold. That's that's what spring always is. But every year I say, look at this. It rarely snows again, but you know, it'll get cold, it'll freeze, I'll go out and my car will be frozen or something, and I'll be like, Oh, I thought it was warm now. Even though I don't really want it to be warm. I don't know. That that's just what I was thinking about when I wrote that.

SPEAKER_01 21:23

This is what I was trying to speak to, and it's in the Japanese that the the most normal way that you would hear the word naku in Japanese is meaning without or to cry. But in this particular context, you can read the actual characters and know that it means in. So the homonym that you'll hear is crying without, and what it's actually doing is being the word in and coupled with of, that's the way that the nightingale is in the tree. So it's so you're supposed to hear the longing of the lack of the thing in the Japanese. It's like a poetic. Trick.

SPEAKER_02 22:00

Not quite what I got from that. No, I read and translated it when I was uh reading through this, and I got a really different translation too. And the interesting thing to me was that there's that sense of there's this thing that's happening that without which this other thing that's happening would not be what it is. So without the nightingale song, spring is not maybe spring, or it has no method of becoming what it's meant to be. So without one symbol, there's a fact that won't exist. And that's sort of what I got from all the readings was to answer Matsy's question. I think there is mystery, and I think that the device proves the mystery just like you see light bending around a black black hole. You don't see the black hole, you see stuff bent around it. The mystery exists. And all since mystery is incomprehensible, we have to have symbols and devices that clutter around it. And they echo each other and contradict each other because we can't say the is that can't be said. But these literary literary devices imply or even prove that there's something there. There's the mystery winking at you, and you do it, you wander round and round it and can't put your finger on it, but you can say there's this thing that won't exist without this other thing.

SPEAKER_04 23:15

CJ, first I like that. And what if you're wrong? Not you. What if the one encountering the mystery is as the name of the guy who I can't rem recall at the moment, who I've known, I've known several of these guys, is on some really good drugs.

SPEAKER_08 23:32

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_04 23:33

Yeah. I guess I'm asking an epistemological question here.

SPEAKER_02 23:38

Is how do you know that what you know is true? How can you know that you're knowing is true?

SPEAKER_04 23:43

No, not quite. I'm much more comfortable with that question.

SPEAKER_02 23:46

Okay, good.

SPEAKER_04 23:47

But your articulation of it, which I don't object to at all, is it is a discussion of the real, right?

SPEAKER_08 23:55

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_04 23:56

And I don't know if it was implicit or not, but my reading is is kind of similar about like I said, about the mood I have, and I have to recall my experiences, synthesize them. And I I wouldn't have said it the exact same way just because I didn't have the words that you said it for, but that there is quote unquote the mystery. But mine has a kind of epistemological doubt in it, and yours didn't have that, and I'm curious why. I'm not objecting.

SPEAKER_02 24:19

It's a good question. Why does it not have doubt in it?

SPEAKER_04 24:22

Yeah. Because you're saying the mystery is there. You encounter these things, and that's how we see the mystery or how we articulate.

SPEAKER_02 24:28

Well, no, how we know that there is a mystery there because there's this hole around which these things gather.

SPEAKER_04 24:33

Okay, there's the epistemology then, how we know that there is a mystery, which is a little different than how we believe that there's one or something like that.

SPEAKER_02 24:41

Oh, yes, very different. That's a subjective experience, and the other one is an objective reality.

SPEAKER_04 24:45

Well, maybe.

SPEAKER_02 24:57

I approve of that.

SPEAKER_01 24:58

It was good.

SPEAKER_07 24:59

I'm interested. CJ gave us an alternate translation or something or explanation of one of these poems.

SPEAKER_08 25:07

Yes.

SPEAKER_07 25:08

But not which one it was.

SPEAKER_08 25:10

Oops.

SPEAKER_07 25:11

And also, I didn't understand it. Can you use maybe like five times as many words?

SPEAKER_02 25:17

But you murder stuff when you use too many words.

SPEAKER_01 25:20

I've never met anyone as diametrically opposed to my fundamental metaphysical disposition as you, CJ, but I like you, so that gives me hope.

SPEAKER_02 25:28

Thanks, Josh. We can be friends on opposite ends of the spectrum.

SPEAKER_01 25:32

We will subsume the category. Go on.

SPEAKER_02 25:34

Sure. Poem 14. Was that the one that I talked about, Matt?

SPEAKER_01 25:37

I don't know. You didn't say.

SPEAKER_02 25:40

The Ugisuno tan yorisuru. Koinakuba Haruakorukoto, Tarika Shirimashi?

SPEAKER_07 25:46

That sounds like poem 14.

SPEAKER_02 25:47

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 25:49

I think that's a different one than the one that I was looking at, but it may be.

SPEAKER_04 25:54

I think 11 captures your point better.

SPEAKER_02 25:57

You think 11 captures my point better?

SPEAKER_04 25:59

I think so.

SPEAKER_02 26:00

Let's see.

SPEAKER_04 26:01

We'll do both. I agreed with your point, by the way. That was my reading of it too, CJ.

SPEAKER_02 26:06

I think they echo each other. They're very similar.

SPEAKER_04 26:09

How did you actually, you know what? 11 is about doubt, you know, the epistemology aside, and 14 is more concrete.

SPEAKER_02 26:16

14 is more concrete.

SPEAKER_07 26:18

For the sake of any listeners who may not have these poems in front of them, and since the poems are very short, when you refer to one, go ahead and just just read it.

SPEAKER_02 26:27

I will read the one that I just said in Japanese, now in English, this English translation from whoever this is.

SPEAKER_07 26:33

So this is 14.

SPEAKER_02 26:35

Yeah, 14. Were it not for the song of the mountain thrush that rises from the glen, who would even suspect that spring has at long last arrived? And then I will do my translation. One second, I've got it here. Oh wait, no, I've got it on a sticky note.

SPEAKER_01 26:53

Matt, you didn't tell me she was a real thug.

SPEAKER_02 26:55

I'm a thug. Absolutely. Watch out me watch out for me in Boston Allees. Where is this? I think it's in a text.

SPEAKER_04 27:03

I'll read it.

SPEAKER_02 27:04

No, you can't read my translation. And you can't read my writing.

SPEAKER_04 27:08

You doubt my skill.

SPEAKER_02 27:10

I doubt your skill. Okay, here it is. My translation is the nightingale's voice from the valley emerges, and without that, spring's coming has no method of announcement. Also, the Tarekah method, if I recall correctly, has the implication of something that makes something else concrete. So it's a way of ushering something in and making it real, sort of the way you move an idea from ideation into practice or form. Um so again, that harks back to the without this symbol, this concrete thing would not come to exist. Spring, concrete thing, nightingale as symbol of spring. And we have that theme in the Large S. My experience of and how I read this was you've got this fellow who's haunted by symbols surrounding the mystery of his life, but he's really bad at reading symbols. He just doesn't get it. The silences, the noises, he he keeps stumbling around and he's like, that. And the mystery winks at him, and he's still stumbling through his life, like, can't read the symbols.

SPEAKER_04 28:17

So let me, I don't speak Japanese at all, but my translation, based on what you read and your translation, is I'd like to offer a different interpretation of Tareka, and you tell me if it's actually legitimate, or if the Japanese had not yet realized this yet.

SPEAKER_02 28:35

Okay. Which is I might not have a good answer. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 28:39

It sounded like what from what you said. I thought, and I thought you were gonna say this because it it really fit well for me, was that the Tareka was a performative speech on behalf of the bird. In which case it is not ushering it or heralding or bringing it in, but by the fact of speech that's the mechanism by which the method of the actual invocation in the sense of almost like the the classical meaning of nomination, right? Giving it a name, calling it to being. So anyway, that's what I thought. I thought that and I think that's really cool. And so I agree with your translation since I think that's what you said.

SPEAKER_02 29:14

Okay. No, that's well said.

SPEAKER_01 29:17

You've created a kind of a formal structure there that is similarly implemented in Christianity with witness and death, that you have to die to be a true witness. And there's this this question with the thrush of declaration from a place of authority to in the act of declaration make and make and do the real thing as the same thing, versus hauntingly cry be there, sing, and yet the conditions where authentic heraldry is performed, those aren't met underneath you. And so there's a lack of fulfillment of the rule.

SPEAKER_02 29:56

That was a lot of words, Josh.

SPEAKER_01 29:57

Didn't file follow all of it. Thank you, CJ. I appreciate that.

SPEAKER_10 30:01

I'm glad someone finally told him. Thank you.

SPEAKER_07 30:04

More the words, the less the meaning, and how does it profit anybody?

SPEAKER_01 30:11

Well, I didn't know what I was saying when I started saying it. I'm sorry. Thrushes are sincere and witnesses are sincere in Christianity.

SPEAKER_02 30:19

Thrushes sincere.

SPEAKER_01 30:23

Thrushes sincerely or insincerely herald spring, and then witnesses sincerely or insincerely witness Christ.

SPEAKER_02 30:32

I like the idea. I I'm not quite catching the connection. I when you said biblical, I was thinking you would go back to like Genesis, where things were named to become what they like. God names things and calls them into being by speaking them.

SPEAKER_01 30:45

And in so there's a question, yeah, there's a question of whether or not the one with authority to speak. Well, I don't I don't know how to articulate. I'll have to sit with that and then try to articulate the question.

SPEAKER_02 30:56

Bring it back around.

unknown 30:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:57

Yeah, yeah, I'll have to bring it back around.

SPEAKER_07 30:59

Anyway. I thought I might mention, since we're dwelling on the Japanese so much, there's a really fun poetic device that they use that I cut an explanation of this from my question context because it was already too long. But this is called a kakekotoba, kakekotoba, I guess. Which is where uh there is one present in poem nine, and it's one word that is used in two different senses. And the word is only used once, and it links two parts of the poem. So in this case, in poem nine, it's the word haru, which means spring and also to swell.

SPEAKER_02 31:44

It's a verb, yeah.

SPEAKER_07 31:46

And so the poem is those are the same. When the warm mists veil all and buds swell, while yet spring snow dri snows drift downward, even in the hibernal village, crystal blossoms fall. But yeah, the word spring and the word to swell are not both in there. It's just one word. So I attempted this in English to try and like make the point. I don't know if I did a good job. Here's my here's my attempt.

SPEAKER_09 32:15

Yes.

SPEAKER_07 32:15

If you offered him a treat, the dog would bark, multicolored, skin of the twisted tree. You see how dog would bark?

SPEAKER_02 32:24

Yes.

SPEAKER_07 32:24

Is the dog would bark? But then also dog would bark.

unknown 32:27

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 32:28

It's really hard to do it in English.

SPEAKER_07 32:30

Like a wheel of fortune clue.

SPEAKER_01 32:32

So the first two words of the poem haru tateba, haru means to spring or to swell, but the next word, tateba, means elapsing.

SPEAKER_07 32:44

Sorry, John, could you say which poem you're talking about? Number six.

SPEAKER_01 32:48

Thank you. Amiron. Shirayukino kakareru. So those first two words, haru tateba, spring elapsing. That next word, I wonder, Matthew, if that isn't really intentional, because it is speaking to the very lack of the other reading of swelling. It is only elapsing without any growth. Tateba does not mean getting bigger. It means like progressing. From what I unless CJ, unless you have a very a different reader, can challenge that.

SPEAKER_02 33:18

Tateba elaps as in uh I want to say that the connotation is not bleeding out, but like seeping out.

SPEAKER_00 33:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:28

Like water drinking. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:31

Um But the funny thing is the translation that we have doesn't say any of it. This was like spring spring or the swelling seeping away. The flowers that we see.

SPEAKER_01 33:44

Flowers, are they seen white snow as of snow?

SPEAKER_02 33:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:50

I think the word no there means as. You can't you really can't read it as of. It really does mean as.

SPEAKER_02 33:57

And then the mountain thrushes or the nightingale weeps. Huh, but that also means the nightingale seeps, so the word there for tear is like seeping away, too. That's a funny way that they've heard top and bottom.

SPEAKER_01 34:09

And interestingly, Matthew referred to the device of kakeraga or whatever it is, and the the verb kakeruru is that load bear is uh hanging.

SPEAKER_08 34:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 34:20

Well, this is very interesting. And also what you can see in it is that all of these different literary devices are ways of combining things.

SPEAKER_08 34:29

Yes.

SPEAKER_07 34:29

Like the one that you just found, CJ, where the word for like going on or progressing is also a word for leaking out.

SPEAKER_08 34:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 34:38

And then there's a bird crying. It's sort of combining the branch with the bird.

SPEAKER_02 34:42

Yes, it is. And it's combining the event of winter fading into spring with the bird crying at the same time, both letting something go.

SPEAKER_07 34:52

Right. I mean, I'm not gonna just rephrase my original question. Yes and no.

SPEAKER_02 35:01

Is it a real thing?

SPEAKER_04 35:03

I mean this is uh a wild accusation, by which I mean no accusation, Matt, but you're prejudicing the the concepts by the construction by saying that it's the combining of two things, instead of perhaps articulating it as the articulation of a thing in its parts or something like that. Right?

SPEAKER_07 35:23

So the world is actually a big undifferentiated mass, which language cuts up into pieces, and these poems just are not cutting it as much as other ones are. They're leaving some of the connectedness in.

SPEAKER_04 35:37

I wouldn't exactly say undifferentiated, but I'm gonna make I'm gonna make a case that I'm not set on, but I I like it, so why not? By which I mean I am adamantly opposed to all else. Um I would say that I could reasonably argue here that what it is for spring to come is the thrush to sing, the snow to melt, the buds to blossom to whatever. And in some reasonable articulation, so that I can communicate something to you by pushing air through my meat in my throat, I can say things like spring and thrush, and I can mean particular things, but I could also argue that none of those things are sufficient to capture the experience of being in the spring, right? And so I can give you shadows of that by combining things together, if you want to call it combining. Or I could say, let me, what's the word? Kinsuge, right? The the pottery thing with the gold?

SPEAKER_01 36:35

Kinsuke. Kinsuke.

SPEAKER_04 36:37

Yeah. Maybe I can uh take the things broken by my language and bind them together again with a little gold into these poems, and then you'll see a thing that's more useful.

SPEAKER_02 36:46

Or that's more complete.

SPEAKER_01 36:47

Can we back up to the question about whether or not what's happening is the way that we're breaking the problem space and using language and blah, blah, blah. I think that it's a real question. That's valid. We could ask that question, but I think it deserves to be stated that right now the types of literary devices that we're talking about seem to very natively come out of the topology of this Asian language. It is a language of character sets that have direct and then other category levels of meaning that they belong to. And of course, as devices and particular meanings entwine, they're going to give rise to different shapes of meta-device, semantic meta-device, that become literary device, or at least they lead to the shapes of literary devices that you can have. Like that kind of stuff is defined by the Asian language itself, not by the way that you're having to split up the issue of language and human experience and articulation and whatnot. That's what I was trying to say.

SPEAKER_02 37:48

No, I think the question is that we use symbols, and Japanese and Chinese use images as symbols more than we do, but it's still a symbol, and what is the symbol doing?

SPEAKER_01 37:58

No, that's fair. How are they fundamentally using symbols? We have uh the same thing in a different work from Hebrew.

SPEAKER_07 38:05

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 38:07

Yeah, this is a universal thing. Humans use symbols to touch reality, but it's still an intermediary. It isn't the thing.

SPEAKER_04 38:14

So humans are symbols.

SPEAKER_02 38:17

Humans may be images, yes.

SPEAKER_07 38:19

The mystery is the fundamental unity of all being. And that language and life and capitalism or whatever split it apart. Thought I threw capitalism. You tell them that communism. You keep explaining it until it gets it gets split apart. But then in literature, you can combine it back together and get a glimpse of that original mystic unity. Let me read you an obscure text.

SPEAKER_01 38:51

Because of homuncularity. But while you're looking at yeah, because of homuncularity.

SPEAKER_07 38:55

That word you just used, dwat Josh, was so insane that it made CJ crack up. Because she doesn't know you like we do.

SPEAKER_00 39:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_10 39:03

I love that somebody is finally pushing back on old Joshi Poo.

SPEAKER_02 39:08

I'll fight all of you.

SPEAKER_01 39:09

Stop selling yourself short, Dwight. You've been pushing for 20 years. Okay. Need somebody to help. Go ahead, Sir Robert.

SPEAKER_04 39:18

Okay. Let me make sure I got the right. So this is uh Romans 1. Let's go with 19 and 20. What can be known about God is evident among them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, that is, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what he has made. And I could I I could go on and on and I certainly will, but there's a there's a real way in which there's an argument here, I should say, that, and I I make it and I agree with it, that God is saying things about himself through his word that expresses much like a thrush brings spring, and in the saying, he creates things that point to him, symbols like us, who show things about him, and interestingly show things about him to us. We get to see we the symbols. And so, in a way, there is one thing, like I would say, there is a thing, but in a different way, wisdom, which is a cutting action, is how God makes everything through his speech. He cuts us into symbols so that we can then, as the pieces, apprehend the one thing again. I think it's very real. And I agree about the symbols, but I just want to point out that there are orders of symbol, and the symbols get to apprehend the symbols.

SPEAKER_10 40:48

I guess my question, Sir Robert, would be when you say it's very real, are you talking about the bits in these writings, or are you talking about this is a real thing that happens in the world? Or both?

SPEAKER_04 41:04

I think the writings are not stilted and weird because doing this is a symbol of a greater thing, and it's echoing down like the right-hand rule, right, in uh electromagnetism, right? The the currents that create magnetism, which create currents, which create magnetism, and so forth. It's a recursive thing, which is how you know something's got life. I know I'm making a bunch of wild claims here, but I'm like I said, I'll go on at great length later.

SPEAKER_01 41:31

Uh, you're just reading dictionary entries from the philosophy dictionary.

SPEAKER_07 41:35

So when Dennis Johnson decides that he thinks it would be funny for his poor set-upon character to receive a phone call from a dying woman, and it's from one of his ex-wives, and he realizes he can't tell which one, because there's two ex-wives that he sinned against horribly, that that is pointing to a deeper unity between the ex-wives.

SPEAKER_04 41:56

Yeah, he's explicitly, first of all, explicitly saying that there's a deeper unity between them, which is him. Which is him.

SPEAKER_03 42:03

They both picked the same guy to sit against them, and he sinned against them, and you know, they there there is a real unity. Though they are the same woman, and he picked the famous.

SPEAKER_07 42:11

They don't have to descend all the way down to the level of the cosmos. Yeah, that's right. To get this one.

SPEAKER_10 42:19

So for me, that that just when I read that, I think the protagonist is a shallow, vapid idiot who can't tell the difference. Like he's apologizing.

SPEAKER_09 42:31

He can't read symbols or people.

SPEAKER_10 42:35

Yeah. Like I I don't I don't get a deeper unity from that. I get a guy who needs to apologize to two people now instead of one. And he says, nah, I'm good. I I apologize to her. We don't need to talk again.

SPEAKER_04 42:47

So let me make a case after CJ says what she wants to say.

SPEAKER_02 42:50

I I don't there's no unity there. This is a guy who still can't read the symbols. He's like, I don't know what's going on in my life. There's something going on, maybe God is trying to get a hold of him in this stuff, and he's like, I don't even know which woman this is. I clearly can't figure out what anything is pointing at. Someone has a finger, it's pointed at the moon, and I'm looking at my butt. He's like, I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 43:12

How does he try to get out of it? He calls his wife and tries to get his wife to pick up the phone so that like his wife can figure out who it is, right?

SPEAKER_02 43:21

He's a pretty passive individual.

SPEAKER_01 43:23

And that's why he's in a chair with his head hung because he's in the chair being convicted. He's under the weight of conviction. He is being fell in the I think he's being he's being tortured to it's no, no, no, no, it's not. It's not, and that's the difference. It's purgatorial, and it's not improving anything, it's just like wasteful purgatory or something.

SPEAKER_02 43:46

Well, by definition, purgatory is not supposed to be wasteful, but exactly. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 43:51

It's like it's like purgatory that's weeping and leaking out. There's it you're in the space of purgatory, but there's no compressive force to push you up out of it to. Purify you up out of it. You just stay in the space because there's no tension to it.

SPEAKER_02 44:04

So he's still in life, not in purgatory.

SPEAKER_07 44:06

He says, I mean, okay, so I don't know if we believe him, but he says, now 15 minutes into this call, I couldn't remember if she'd actually said her name when I picked up the phone, and I suddenly didn't know which set of crimes I was regretting. Wasn't sure if this dying farewell clobbering me to my knees in true repentance beside the kitchen table was Virginia's or Jennifer's. So he does say that he's experiencing true repentance. He's confessing and repenting to her and she's forgiving him.

SPEAKER_02 44:38

There are objective signs of the difference between repentance and regret, right? This is a question in the story too. What's regret and what's repentance? And he gives a definition, but he's wrong, I think.

SPEAKER_07 44:47

What is what is where's the definition?

SPEAKER_02 44:50

Let me find his because I have mine.

SPEAKER_04 44:52

While you're looking for it, I'll point out that he's currently married.

SPEAKER_02 44:55

Yeah. That's true.

SPEAKER_04 44:57

Yeah, who, just to say, is a completely different kind of woman, both phonetically and she's still married to him.

SPEAKER_02 45:04

So that is potentially a sign of repentance.

SPEAKER_04 45:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 45:09

Because repentance requires a change of action.

SPEAKER_01 45:12

Listen to how he talks about his marriage with her, though.

SPEAKER_07 45:15

I think he he left New York and moved to San Diego as a way of getting out of like the evil that he had been living in.

SPEAKER_02 45:22

Well, did he face it or did he pull a geographic?

SPEAKER_07 45:25

I mean he definitely pulled a geographic.

SPEAKER_01 45:26

Yeah. He didn't do it with his career.

SPEAKER_02 45:28

Alright.

SPEAKER_01 45:29

He says that explicitly.

SPEAKER_02 45:35

Regret. You repent the things you've done and regret the chances you let get away. Like that's not. No. When you regret something, you're gonna do the same thing again, possibly. When you repent the things you you repent the things you've done, no no no. You repent and change what you're doing. He doesn't really give a full definition of either. And then he's interrupted by a beautiful young woman selling roses, and he doesn't get that either. He's like, whatever, that just happens.

SPEAKER_04 46:02

How about we do it the other direction?

SPEAKER_02 46:04

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 46:05

By the way, I agree with your definition of repentance and regret. Regret is is backwards looking and repentance is forward looking.

SPEAKER_02 46:13

Exactly.

SPEAKER_04 46:14

But how about and I don't know where this will go, I don't have a conclusion to this yet. We enter into his lexicon. Let's take what he means by regret and repentance. I mean, let's see what happens, right? And maybe there's a maybe it's a matter of mere semantics, and he's saying something real but foreign to our language. So if we do that, and he's saying something like, repentance is about the things that you did, and regret is about the things that you didn't do. So he's he's fundamentally slicing that in a different way than I do. But let's just let's let's grant him that he's different, making a real thing and using those labels for them. Though he doesn't seem to say it exactly, he's on his knees with a bunch of grief in repentance, which means not because of something he let slide by, the one that got away, or something he some opportunity he missed, but because of how terrible he was or something like that. I think we can I I would feel comfortable if somebody were saying this to me in person, saying to them, you know, obviously it would depend on the details of them in person, but I would feel comfortable saying to them, like, hey, what you're going through is real here. I might also prefer a standard Christian set of definitions.

SPEAKER_10 47:23

If the person though said I was on my knees in true repentance, and then I suddenly realized I didn't even know what I was repenting of.

SPEAKER_04 47:39

No, no, no. He's he's pretty clear that he's repenting of the the right thing. He just doesn't know to whom, but he's filled with grief at his philandamus.

SPEAKER_02 47:54

But it's so he's admitting a crime, but he doesn't really know which one.

SPEAKER_04 47:57

He murdered somebody, right? And the person's metaphorically, he he did some evil thing. Murder is very concrete and easy to talk about in a certain way, because there's a life ending. But I mean it says what he did. He lied about money.

SPEAKER_02 48:09

He lied about money, he cheated on people.

SPEAKER_04 48:11

He cheated on them, yeah. Lots of various things, right?

SPEAKER_02 48:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 48:14

But there's more okay, I'll I'll use those. That's fine.

SPEAKER_02 48:18

The things men do.

SPEAKER_04 48:20

Sure.

SPEAKER_02 48:21

Sorry, that was totally tongue-in-cheek.

SPEAKER_01 48:23

You're not gonna find any men's club advocates here, it's okay.

SPEAKER_04 48:27

Maybe. Depending on what a men's club is. I don't know what a men's club is.

SPEAKER_01 48:31

Exactly. Just keep talking. Just I'm trying to save you here.

SPEAKER_02 48:33

Just keep talking.

SPEAKER_04 48:38

He has cheated on his wife. He's actually cheated on multiple wives.

SPEAKER_02 48:42

His first wife, his second wife, or probably not his third wife, we hope.

SPEAKER_04 48:47

That's what it seems like, right?

SPEAKER_02 48:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 48:49

And so he's at a point in which he's done the same wrong enough in his life that he's repeated the pattern. He's confronted with it, but the muddled past and not knowing who he's talking to is so unclear. This is just me offering him some, you know, some greatness, the character. He's it's so unclear that he's not actually sure, but he knows that it was wrong to do all of that whole thing was wrong. And because she's dying, and it would be a faux pas to say, sorry, wait, which wife are you again? Right? He lets her have the honest repentance from him, and he lets himself contain the ambiguity, right? So she gets what she needs because she's dying, whoever she is. But he's articulating a genuine, like those actions were wrong, and look at me, not even able to, you know, have clarity about it during this thing. I I I see a generous interpretation of this that does not require him to be, you know, false about this.

SPEAKER_01 49:49

That's a really wild collapse of sincerity and successful load-bearing work that happens when between the two parties one of them doesn't know who it is, but because the other one does, everything works because of the sincerity of the other party's uh position. That's crazy. Yeah.

unknown 50:09

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 50:10

Yeah, that sounds very human, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_04 50:12

Wow, we were yet sinners.

SPEAKER_01 50:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 50:14

Yes. Yeah. Going back though to the definition of regret and repentance, what I hear you saying is that the ambiguity there is you would give him the benefit of the doubt, and that this is his subjective experience of repentance and regret. So it's okay to interpret it a certain way because he's talking about how he experiences them in his life. Because that's that's more or less what his definition is, you know, you repent the things you felt you've done, and you regret the chances you felt regret about because you let them get away. It's not a definition of what these things are so much as how he felt towards things in his life, objects in his life.

SPEAKER_04 50:53

Where are you getting the feelings part?

SPEAKER_02 50:55

That it's implied. You repent the things you've done because you feel bad that you did them, and you regret the chances you let it get you let get away. This is a feeling response. I think that's inferred, not implied. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 51:09

What if he's repenting of the things he's done because they were wrong and hurt her? Let's just say.

SPEAKER_08 51:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 51:16

I'm asking where you're getting the feelings part, because the feelings part I don't think is implied. It might be true. I'm just saying I don't think it's implied.

SPEAKER_02 51:23

Perhaps I'm thinking you implied it as you were talking about, like when you giving him the benefit of the doubt of his experience of these things. You're saying, let's go into his language. So this is his language about his experience of these objective realities. Yeah. So that's where I'm getting the this has to be a somewhat subjective, and in c if it's subjective, it's a felt response rather than an intellectualized or considered response. Yes?

SPEAKER_04 51:46

No, I don't think so. He's having uh I think feelings certainly do have a subjectivity to them for sure, of course, but so do the realizations of, you know, truth. Right? I get to have my experience of the realization and maybe accompanying feelings as well. But I can repent of something in my own understanding.

SPEAKER_07 52:06

Let me add a little twist to this from the text. So that line about the difference between repentance and regret comes after he's he's at lunch, he's talking to his reporter friend who has interviewed this woman who has been doing to her husband basically what this guy, the protagonist, was doing to the dying ex-wife. Which is to say, you know, letting her get a kind of false understanding, maybe not completely the same. But there's deception deception, deception a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 52:41

Um explicit. I mean, it's explicit. He lies to her and tells her that he knows who she is. It's a lie.

SPEAKER_04 52:48

Yeah. I don't I think that comes later. I don't think he, once he realizes the ambiguity, goes back and says, but trust me, I know who you are.

SPEAKER_01 52:56

But it's lying from that point on. Anything not done in faith is sin.

SPEAKER_07 53:00

He's lying by omission to the to his his ex-wife, and the woman that is getting interviewed was lying to her death row husband by commission. He, the the interviewer, wants to make love to the widow.

SPEAKER_08 53:17

Yes.

SPEAKER_07 53:18

At the time, the story goes, the idea of telling her what he wanted had seemed terrible. Now he regretted his shyness. In the play, as he described it for me, the second act would end differently. Before long, we wandered into a discussion of the difference between repentance and regret. You repent the things you've done and regret the chances you let get away. So the actual sort of subtext of the difference between repentance and regret is that repentance comes after you have done a sin, and regret comes from wanting to do a sin that you that you didn't actually do. So whether you sin or not, either you get repentance when you if you do it, or you get regret if you didn't do it.

SPEAKER_02 54:01

And this is a fail fail.

SPEAKER_07 54:03

Yeah, because righteousness is nowhere in the option set. It's straight from it's straight from either or. Take a nap and you'll regret it. Don't take a nap and you'll regret that. Whether you take a nap or don't take a nap, you'll regret it either way. Take a nap or don't take a nap. Either way, you'll regret it.

SPEAKER_04 54:20

So I'm not a fan of the character, but I'm gonna defend him one more time. And first, I I like the context that you added, Matt. By the way, all of the things I'm saying, I hold lightly or don't hold at all. I'm just enjoying the taking the position. And I may take I may hold them. But I like the context you provided, Matt, because it actually added an additional ambiguity that I that I thought was really neat, which is whose definition of repentance and regret that is. Again, I could make a case that since he's having that discussion with what's his name, the play guy, that it's an emergent thing that he hadn't really considered before. But having had this conversation, he's like, oh, I came out with this set of definitions, which is interesting. And also, um, it is not only the righteous who repent of things. It's a human experience prior to I think there's no such thing as someone who's righteous.

SPEAKER_02 55:18

There are no good men.

SPEAKER_01 55:20

But what about the guy who got his leg blown off and the woman marries him? He's a good man.

SPEAKER_02 55:25

I'm talking literally theological. None is good but God. No man or woman is good.

SPEAKER_01 55:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 55:32

Yeah. So the the the thing about that when I'm saying uh it's not only the righteous who repent, right? There's I'm just to go off on a little tangent there, the we're not able to do anything good at all, right?

SPEAKER_08 55:45

Not with that.

SPEAKER_04 55:46

We are imputed Christ's goodness and are able to do his righteous acts in his power. And in so doing, clothed in robes of righteousness and all that, we take on that form. We become children of God, he becomes sin. So when I say it's not only the righteous, what I mean is even people in a s in a quote unquote state of sin can have that repentance thing, and it's not salvific or part of a salvation experience. I totally concede your point, CJ, that uh none is good but God alone.

SPEAKER_07 56:17

I mean, dogs feel guilt and try to repent. Right. They do something bad, you stick their nose in it, they whimper and whine. This is an animal thing.

SPEAKER_01 56:27

I stop doing it, I'll do what you want. Yeah. I wanted to I wanted to ask about something. So the guy shows his prosthesis uh point and she doesn't kiss it, but then they kiss later at the altar. They do kiss. There's a not kiss and then they do kiss. Whereas, but at first they don't kiss, right? And then the guy who interviews the widow, she's completely naked. He doesn't go into like great graphic detail about her nakedness, but he does give the point about her red heels that she's wearing, and he brings it up to say that like she's like not closing her body language at all. And so that guy is totally, totally just thinking about wanting to do it with her during this exchange. There's this really beautiful inverse of, you know, in story A, it's not only is it desexualized, it's the opposite of it. There's there's this opportunity to accept someone at their most disgusting point, whatever, their gross point, and she misses the opportunity because a spell is broken by somebody else. And then in the other one, you've got the two that don't come together because of the glass. And so there's a thing keeping them from being able to come together. There's just, I don't know how to fully articulate why he does all these pieces of symmetry, but I just wanted to talk about that side of the story and the relationship between that craving for wanting to sexually get what you want out of that other person versus being able to enter into a state of, you know, actual closeness and union and stuff.

SPEAKER_04 58:07

I'm interested in in as much as I'm interested in that guy with uh stump, in his motivation for wanting her to kiss it. She asks him, remind me what it was, I'll tell you something. What was the thing he was going to tell? I can't remember, and I'd say that.

SPEAKER_10 58:21

They were talking about silences. And then the quietest sound.

SPEAKER_01 58:27

He was the one that proposed the new category.

SPEAKER_10 58:30

No one knew he was even missing a leg.

SPEAKER_02 58:33

No, well, no one no one contributed about silences, though, until this guy I said a landmine was the yeah.

SPEAKER_10 58:40

And I thought when I read that, huh. I would think that that was the loudest sound you had ever heard, because I'm a fool.

SPEAKER_07 58:47

Well, I mean, this is the question is um, to what extent are conversations in this story actual? Like literal.

SPEAKER_08 58:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 59:00

I'll give you an another example. When he he's this mysterious scene where all that he does is go into a bar. It's in the the um Yeah, with Merida. Second to last section, it's called Mermaid. And ten feet away at her table, the blonde woman waited, her shoulders back, her face raised. She lifted one hand and beckoned me with her fingers. She was weeping. The lines of her tears sparkled on her cheeks. I am a prisoner here, she said. I took the chair across from her and watched her cry. I sat upright, one hand on the table's surface and the other around my drink. I felt the ecstasy of a dancer, but I kept still. Do we think she really said that? Do we think they were really talking about silences and loud sounds? Or is he reflecting these conversations or distorting them in some way?

SPEAKER_10 59:52

He symbolizes I I will admit I'm terrible at reading this. When I read this, my picture is this guy goes into a weird, sad bar, and he starts talking poetically about all the things that he sees that are actually weird, gross, and disgusting, but he romanticizes them, and then this thing happens that doesn't actually happen. So I guess I'm on side, no, it doesn't actually happen.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:19

I had the same mood from it, and I read it almost as a retelling of Billy Joel's piano man.

SPEAKER_09 1:00:25

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:27

Yeah. Yeah. And just want to throw out there as far as things that didn't didn't happen. In the section entitled Uh Crazy Man Writes Letters on Drugs, a bit where he is writing a bunch of letters to a bunch of people. Remember that? No.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:42

The second story? The second story in the book?

SPEAKER_04 1:00:44

Yeah. Did I read too far?

SPEAKER_02 1:00:46

So Sir Robert also read the book, I guess.

SPEAKER_07 1:00:51

Sir Robert, I was I just assigned the story, the largesse of the scene. Nelson. I'm not intending to assign the entire collection of stories.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:01

They're weird. Okay.

SPEAKER_07 1:01:02

Yeah. I already'm gonna read it sometime.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:05

I think you'd I think you'd like it a lot, Matt.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:08

Ignore what I just said then, because I was pulling in from a different story. Or don't ignore it, I don't actually care. You can do what you want.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:13

So how does this come around then to the whether the mystery that winks or the thing that might not be in these poems or all the things that all of the images in Joel Hoffman is surrounding because they cluster around something each section there? I have to do that.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:32

Yeah, I had an experience of the mystery while reading the story. Maybe it's right, maybe it's wrong, but one of the things that I've been looking into recently was things like Hilbert space and dimensional bounding, and eight is like the biggest number it goes to. And he drives down I8, which is kind of weird because he drives to a place where he throws himself off of a suspension bridge. It's interesting. You don't have to talk about the E8 supersymmetry or stuff or anything like that. You can just talk about the fact that the kind of bridge that he threw himself off of was a beam, a cantilever suspension in-place engineering bridge. Like all the pieces get arranged and then put in together like a Roman arch, and it's the first one in the country. So he chooses to go to a place of extreme, you know, very arcane, very complex engineering over a huge chasmus space and step out into air, and he dies this way. And so to me, that whole I8 thing was kind of weird. Maybe it's just a synchronicity that the author didn't know that, you know, E8 supersymmetry exists, but um, it was kind of interesting that eight was the number of the interstate that he would got him to this cantilever bridge where he steps out into air. So I thought that was kind of a neat little mystery synchronicity.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:55

That's the guy who committed suicide.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:57

Mm-hmm.

unknown 1:02:58

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:59

Painter.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:59

So the question is, why did the author pick that number? Did I just notice that because I had been reading articles? Is it just synchronicity? Does the real actually mean the same thing?

SPEAKER_02 1:03:08

It is a real interstate, I believe.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:11

It is. And what's interesting is the interstates that run east-west are the even numbered ones, and the ones that run north-south are odd.

SPEAKER_10 1:03:19

Where what is this? Where is this going?

SPEAKER_07 1:03:22

Well Josh is saying that the reason that the author chose this particular bridge is to remind us of the extremely esoteric and obscure maximum number of dimensions possible in Hilbert space.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:40

Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's called a highway on I-8. That's why he chose the highway I-8. That's why he chose San Diego. That's why he talks about Armenia.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:58

None of the other I mean to be But none of those are there. There are authors who I could totally imagine doing that.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:09

Sorry, what were you saying, CJ?

SPEAKER_02 1:04:10

Um, I was saying there are authors that I would totally be suspicious of trying to put that kind of thing in. I don't think it's Dennis Johnson. Fair enough.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:18

I just wanted to.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:20

Not to harp on it or anything. Hilbertspace is n-dimensional. It's not restricted to eight. Well, supersymmetry hypothesis isn't they're two different things.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:30

I'm conflating those terms.

SPEAKER_07 1:04:32

So he also would have had to get it confused in the exact same way that you just now got it.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:39

The E8 thing I didn't get confused about. E8. The number eight doesn't have to do with Hilbert space, it has to do with something else, but I conflated him in my mind. I'm cutting all of that. Keeping me honest. Takes a team to keep me honest, as you'll see, CJ. I try to get away with a lot of things.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:54

I think it takes a team to keep everyone good and honest. Well, human beings aren't prone to going well without good friends.

SPEAKER_07 1:05:03

Amen. We have something like two hypotheses, and one of them, Sir Roberts, I feel some accord with that there's a sort of fundamental unity in the universe, and that these poetic devices recollapse something that was divided artificially by our incorrect, unmystical thinking.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:26

Whether the author knows it or not.

SPEAKER_07 1:05:27

Whether the author knows it or not, and that therefore what might seem to be a mere trick to the author is something like a signpost to the mystical unity of all things. And then CJ said something about metaphor or symbolism, which I think didn't get fleshed out well enough, but seemed like it could contain a possible answer as well.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:47

Which part was that? When I talked about symbols being how they cluster around mystery that we can't see?

SPEAKER_07 1:05:54

And then also how the protagonist of Largessa the Sea Maiden. Is living in a world full of symbolism, but he d can't recognize it.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:05

He can't read it. He's conscious.

SPEAKER_07 1:06:07

He does see the mystery.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:08

He sees the mystery. He's haunted by it, but he keeps he keeps missing it anyway.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:14

CJ, let me ask you I'm I'm not asking for rigorous, although rigorous if you had it have it. That's great. Will you define what you mean by symbolism?

SPEAKER_02 1:06:24

Very simply, that something that is a reflection or something that points to something else is not itself the thing. You're using something and as an intermediary between something that you cannot touch or explain without that.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:39

How much sorry, the second way you said that, that you're using something as an intermediary that you can't whatever. So how much is intent or agency involved in something being symbolic as opposed to something being a reflection or less than symbolic?

SPEAKER_02 1:06:57

So what do you mean by agency? Who as in someone making a symbol? Symbol has to have something behind it?

SPEAKER_04 1:07:02

I'm asking you, is that what you would you say a symbol has to have one with intent using it as a symbol?

SPEAKER_02 1:07:09

Well, because symbols have to presuppose meaning, something has to be behind meaning, yes? No?

SPEAKER_04 1:07:14

That's part of what I'm asking you for, and uh let me say a slightly different way, although maybe I'm misunderstanding, but meaning or reference versus something more neutral like similarity or congruence.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:28

Are you saying that a symbol could just be a way of showing similarity between two things rather than an intermediary between a not thing and a thing?

SPEAKER_04 1:07:38

No, I'm actually asking, not saying. I'm not asserting anything here. But let me ask it this way. I'll just use a few more words.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:47

Concrete words.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:48

If a symbol is um used as a something like reference to something else, right? The symbol stands in place of like a name or something like that, standing in place of a person, would you say that that requires an interpreter or one who takes the symbol that way or maybe intends the symbol that way? Is that the same sorry, is that and that might be the same question as, just to triangulate on it a little bit, that might be the same question as would you say that uh something can have meaning without comprehension or intention, I guess. Either side of it. Comprehension or intention.

SPEAKER_07 1:08:29

Real quick, I just want to add some context in case CJ's not maybe in the same space as us computer engineers. The uh, you know, uh there are dumb, unintelligent machines that function on the basis of something that seems to a meaning-imbued human, very much like symbolism, but the world will do what it does, regardless of whether we know that it's a symbol or not. So, like your variable refers to a particular portion of of memory, and whatever value is stored in that memory, and that reference is merely mechanical. So whether you know what the variable refers to or not, the reference is just a purely mechanical thing that doesn't need to have any meaning. It would it would continue having the effect on the world that it has, regardless of anybody understanding it or not.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:21

So I think Sir Robert's trying to get you to And humans will do the opposite as well, Matt. I was thinking about that girl I knew in the eighth grade, but I didn't know whether I should call her. I looked at the clock and it was, you know, 858, and it was a sign. It was a symbol.

SPEAKER_08 1:09:38

As you're looking for meaning.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:40

Yeah. And so I'm asking in CJ's interpretation, what are the delineations of meaning and not meaning when you have things like coincidence or congruity or similarity? How much are you meaning?

SPEAKER_02 1:09:56

So isn't the difference between you're like, okay, I've got fool's gold and I've got gold, and I can mistake one, it doesn't mean there's not such a thing as gold. So yeah, there can be congruence and similarity, and that exists, but the only reason we mistake it for gold is because there is gold. So the only reason we might see similarity or congruence and say meaning is because we're meaning machines and there's meaning there in which we use symbols to reach.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:19

So if Dennis that sounds fine. I I that's a great answer. That helps me to understand where you're coming from. If Dennis Lumpkin or whatever his name is, Johnson. Johnson. Yep.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:28

I like Lumpkin though.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:30

So close, dude. You're so close. If Dennis writes a thing, and let's say unwittingly, maybe he's a brilliant writer and all these things, great, but maybe there's a particular one, and whether or not we can prove it, he actually, in fact, wrote something that indicates some greater thing in human nature or human experience or something. Is is he creating a symbol?

SPEAKER_02 1:10:52

Creating a symbol or using symbols that perhaps he doesn't know how to read it.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:55

Using a symbol? Sure. Is he using a symbol that he doesn't know how to read? Can one use a symbol that one does not know how to read as a symbol?

SPEAKER_02 1:11:02

You put a kid on the floor and they almost always write an H. They don't know it's an H.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:06

Is it an H?

SPEAKER_02 1:11:07

Is it an H? It's the same symbol. Is it gonna be useful?

SPEAKER_04 1:11:11

That's interesting. Okay, I hear where you're coming from. I wouldn't have called that a symbol. I would have called that a glyph, but I get what you're saying.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:18

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:19

I think symbol is glyph with meaning. So my question then is I I'm really asking something like um, because I think this is really important. I I really like this. And I'm really asking uh CJ, how needful is the knowing or the you know the intending for a symbol to point to something real?

SPEAKER_02 1:11:40

The symbol is going to point whether there's a knowing or comprehension on one side or not. The world is written, but not by us, and it takes a lot of practice to learn to read what's there, just like it takes a lot of practice to learn Japanese. Those things that are written down are images of something that exists, but we don't always recognize them. And that's not a matter of the symbol or of the reality or the meaning behind it. It's a matter of the fact that our perception is either untrained or our heads and hearts are stupid. It exists objectively, whether there's comprehension on one side or not. There's always an intention on the other side because we're not the one that started any of this.

SPEAKER_07 1:12:19

I would like to bring in a poem that I almost assigned, but I didn't. Please can I read a poem?

SPEAKER_08 1:12:25

Yes.

SPEAKER_07 1:12:26

So this is called The Beautiful Changes by Richard Wilbur. And I might read it twice just to let you maybe get it, get it differently the second time. One waiting a fall meadow finds on all sides the Queen Anne's lace lying like lilies on water. It glides so from the walker it turns dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of yew valleys my mind in fabulous blue lucerns. The beautiful changes as a forest is changed by a chameleon's tuning his skin to it, as a mantis arranged on a green leaf grows into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves any greenness is deeper than anyone knows. Your hands hold roses always in a way that says they are not only yours. The beautiful changes in such kind ways, wishing ever to sunder things and things selves for a second finding, to lose for a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:31

So the reason why you're always holding a rose in a way that is not your own is because it's always a thing that you're holding to give to someone else. And so there's a because there's a ubiquitous rule on it in your hands, it is always a kind of thing that is different to you because it is for another.

SPEAKER_07 1:13:50

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed by a chameleon's tuning his skin to it. As a mantis arranged on a green leaf, grows into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:07

Where's that green coming from if a mantis on the leaf is growing with the same greenness and making it look even leafier than it was without the mantis being part of the leaf?

SPEAKER_07 1:14:19

Is the mantis a symbol for the leaf? Is the chameleon a symbol for the forest?

SPEAKER_01 1:14:26

So you have creep beings that at a fully genetic identity level and at a morphological level uh are able to be in and of the forest, right? The mantis from birth it grows up looking like a leaf, and uh chameleon can change himself to look like whichever part of the forest he's in.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:48

So I think you just have to stop at that last line that says turns all that it touches what back to wonder? That's where you hit the mystery and you stop talking.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:56

Okay, I don't like that part.

SPEAKER_07 1:14:57

Go on. Is the green a symbol? You said before, is the mantis a symbol? Is the Queen's and Queen Anne's lace a symbol for lilies? Is the nightingale a symbol for spring?

SPEAKER_02 1:15:10

I mean, in this poem, in some ways, everything is pointing to the beauty of her, right? I don't think that means the green is not itself, but it seems the poet is saying that.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:20

Anyway, I don't think so. I don't think it's no I don't think the Queen Anne's lace is is a symbol. I don't think symbolism is in the eye of the beholder.

SPEAKER_08 1:15:28

Well said.

SPEAKER_07 1:15:29

I think this this poem troubles the distinction between dumb reflection and meaningful symbolism.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:36

Interesting. Can you are are can you handle this problem by looking at it as um accurate, sincere, insincere in terms of comprehension and like being right and uh crud. It's really hard to talk about. Yeah, being well, two axes about uh well being right and being wrong as a function of both accuracy of perception about the thing itself, maybe, and then your perception of it or some way. You need to create some more, you need to create another layer of tension, uh, of separation. But I was just trying to think about how to separate that to um articulate that problem.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:20

I mean he's reflecting on beauty and it changes, but is still beauty.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:24

Yeah, it's funny. I have a poem about this subject matter that has stuck with me for years. It's just one phrase from the poem, just Rhodora, if the sages ask thee why this charm is wasted on the earth and sky, then tell them that if eyes were made for seeing, then beauty is its own excuse for being, which I can't even fully articulate how that is part of this, but I feel like it's uh getting at a lot of the same kind of fundamental mystery.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:48

So you probably all know that the Greek symbolon had the connotation of like a seal on something or token of recognition uh recognition, something like a key between people, even. Is there a way that this poem talks of makes some conveys that?

SPEAKER_01 1:17:03

It's yeah, that's interesting that you you're talking about key. You're now talking about conformity of of uh the shape. You talk about conformity in nature, right? I forgot where this came in, but the symbol for logos is that of a stick being broken and the two faces of the stick socket back together after the break. I think that speaks to something of the nature of what a logos is. It's that relationship between the two things. Okay, what did you say?

SPEAKER_02 1:17:35

Separation and reunion. Josh was saying logos. I don't know what you're talking about in terms of the symbol, I know what it looks like in the Greek alphabet. Is a symbol for logos?

SPEAKER_01 1:17:44

No, no, no. No, I'm saying logically, the concept of it, the concept of logos at this level is that it is if you take an object and you break it, whether it's a stick or anything. Sure, sure, a metaphor. There's the a metaphor for understanding what logos is, and that Matt gets at it. I do need to say metaphor because it gets to CJ's point about the key, right? CJ is talking about a lock and a key. I'm talking about a stick breaking. They're both trying to get at a way of talking about touching and real continuous adherence to a rule of expression of either the it's a real object. And so when you break it and take it apart and bring it back together, what CJ spoke to about separation and coming back is a function of the authenticity of the object, that it can break in a real way, or a lock and a key. The key is the shape of the lock in one way and in another way as it engages its nature as it rotates. They're they're both talking about sincere, continuous, real relationship.

SPEAKER_07 1:18:44

The the reason the broken stick is a symbol for a word is that the reason the sticks fit together is that the two broken ends are the same shape, yeah, but one of them is the negative image of the other. The same way that uh a mold that you're that you're reproducing some, you know, a shape in is the negative image of the shape that you're making with it. So the word is like the negative image of the thing. It's not the thing supposed to have an identical formal equivalence.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:15

But you did the same the same thing there in your list when you talked about mold or something else. The other the first one had to do with just the physical nature of the thing itself, whereas a mold is a regularity that comes from a process and a laying up on gravity causes the regularity of it, as opposed to one thing as being ripped apart into two. The other is there's a sincere way of filling up the relationship of the face. Breaking a stick is taking a whole thing, you're starting with whole continuous nature, and you're finding a way to differentiate the interiority of the nature of a thing and make two, but make the separation a thing as opposed to just having something and then finding a way to make another thing whose otherness fills up some there's a rule that you have to follow, and the way that you follow the rule as it comes into being proves the nature of the thing that you made it in relationship to, and it becomes a symbol of a thing.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:17

So what what you're trying, I think are you saying that logos or a word meaning uh a word is something that was once whole and then was broken, and you fit it back together, and that's why it should be the stick?

SPEAKER_01 1:20:31

Or what's the alternative?

SPEAKER_02 1:20:33

Alternative to that conception or metaphor for the alternative would be there's no stick.

SPEAKER_10 1:20:38

I think there is no space exactly there is no stick.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:41

There is no spoon.

SPEAKER_07 1:20:42

The alternative is that it's just form and shape, and the stick is just a way of talking of expressing the concept of shape.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:50

Like getting deeper into a you like it there's metaphor in there. It's too complicated, it's not the minimum sufficient idea.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:56

I don't think the negative nothing actually exists. We all live in a dream.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:00

I don't think that the idea of the negative is n is necessary for the logos. I think a thing that's proportional to another thing, you know, it's is sufficient.

SPEAKER_10 1:21:10

Yeah, I've never heard of the stick thing. Is that something you created or something that you've heard of before?

SPEAKER_07 1:21:17

I've heard of it before, but I might have heard it from Josh.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:21

I thought again, please I I'm probably hallu I'm probably hallucinating this out of the ether of memory, but it's an Indo-European root thing? I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:30

I mean linguistically speaking is a theory about language in terms of things being broken apart, but I don't I never heard of a stick being broken apart.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:42

But the idea of be something that is a object with interiority, so and then the the way that you define the interior the breakage of the interiority is the relationship.

SPEAKER_10 1:21:53

What does interiority mean?

SPEAKER_02 1:21:55

I was about to ask that.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:57

Yeah, just the in the the y there's a thing.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:00

Do you mean liquidity?

SPEAKER_01 1:22:01

No, it's everything that's inside of it. It's everything that is interior with the stuff.

SPEAKER_04 1:22:07

Well, I think Josh is using it to mean interior with structure. Okay, interior with structure.

SPEAKER_07 1:22:12

Yeah, that's it.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:13

That's it.

SPEAKER_07 1:22:14

Usually the word interiority is a psychological word, talking about a person who's able to think about their own thoughts.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:20

It's being self-aware.

SPEAKER_07 1:22:22

So it's confusing to use it of sticks.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:24

Well, I I gathered what's fascinating though, Josh, is that that would make a great myth. You've just described a way of talking about the world that you could tell a great story about that would give some truth about our experience of words and meaning in a s in like folklore story fashion. It'd be really interesting.

SPEAKER_04 1:22:44

The myth of Ur esque. Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:47

Yeah. Because that's interesting, because in the Babylonian myth, you start with freshwater and salt water, whereas this you would start with one thing and break it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_10 1:22:56

I've never heard that Babylonian myth.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:58

Yeah. There's the freshwater and the salt water, and like I think one of them impregnates the other, and that's how you get started, right? I believe you.

SPEAKER_04 1:23:07

CJ, I think that one of the things that I was surprised by and interested in when what you were saying before about symbols, is that you're using symbol more broadly than I would have than I have. And I I don't think that's wrong. You'll be relieved to know.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:26

Very, very.

SPEAKER_04 1:23:28

But I using the broader definition that I that I think you're using changes a lot of the structures of what we're saying about some of these poems. So I was trying to reframe, I was trying to understand what the boundaries of the way you're using the word symbol is so that I could map it to the conversation we're having. Uh I think that symbol for me requires some kind of agent to be causing the bearing of meaning. But I am interested in the idea that a symbol can exist as the word in itself. Which I th I wouldn't have said, but I think that's interesting. I'll have to I'm gonna have to mull that over.

SPEAKER_08 1:24:05

Excellent.

SPEAKER_04 1:24:06

Okay, cool.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:07

Well And you should too, audience.

SPEAKER_07 1:24:14

Thank you for answering my question thoroughly and completely. Although I still think that CJ had some form of answer that I we weren't quite able to suss out. I think I think I got it. I feel like there was something there that I couldn't get to.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:33

Um you can ask me again sometime or put it in the show notes. I see something an angel sees.

SPEAKER_07 1:24:39

Exactly. I see an angel that sees it. A cherub. There you go. A cherub. CJ, there's a mathematician called Helm Slev who we had to read at St. John's and Got to read. We got to read. Well said. And he's he proved something by means of something else.

SPEAKER_08 1:24:57

And his twisting discs.

SPEAKER_07 1:24:59

In in the book that we had that contained his essay, there was a reproduction of a rubbing of Hilmslev's tomb, which has a quote from Hamlet on it, it says, I see a cherub that sees it. Good. Whoever put that together thought that thought that that would be a a nice little treat for us.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:25:25

That's in our vernacular at work when we're trying to design something for one of our systems, and we're really close, we can intuit it, but not there yet. We haven't articulated it precisely. We say, I see a cherub that sees it. I don't I think the Hamlet reference is not flattering.

SPEAKER_07 1:25:41

Doesn't matter to me.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:42

Just like do you think someone quoted it?

SPEAKER_01 1:25:45

Angels bearing you to your sleep or whatever. Matthew, that's a wild thing for you to say, because I was just about to say, I'm not sure I've ever seen anything other than an angel laid over objects. So that may be one of the problems with me trying to be intelligible to you guys.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:00

I see a cherub that sees them or they are there or something.

SPEAKER_07 1:26:04

Them, I think. Hamlet Act 4, scene 3. Yeah, like Hamlet is saying that he knows that Claudius is gonna kill him, but he doesn't know it directly. He knows it by you know means of some subterfuge.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:17

Maybe just intuition.

SPEAKER_07 1:26:19

Or just intuition. Yeah. And he's pretending to be crazy. So he doesn't say, ah, I intuited it. He says, Ah, I see an angel that sees it.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:27

Anyway. Okay, well, hang on. That means that intuition, that means that intuition is explained as a fundamental mechanism that's a decoupling of recognition of where inside of yourself it's coming from. I don't understand that sentence at all, Josh.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:42

Sorry, would you rephrase that?

SPEAKER_01 1:26:43

So that means that intuition in this understanding is perception coming from a coming from inside of you, but not being able to recognize the source. But it's still coming from inside of you.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:57

Well, it's not analytical. You're right, if that's what you're saying.

SPEAKER_10 1:27:00

For me, this whole conversation has been me as Hamlet to Claudius saying I see a ch Maybe. I might have gotten to the point where I saw that.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:14

Yeah. I heard some crazy people talking about angels over there. Right. Not if I see it first.

SPEAKER_05 1:27:24

Not if I see it first as wild.

SPEAKER_07 1:27:27

Hopefully, Sir Robert will give us an assignment for next time that will be more in accord with your pleasure and understanding.

SPEAKER_04 1:27:36

No, I think y'all are great.

SPEAKER_07 1:27:38

This is a fun one.

SPEAKER_04 1:27:39

I actually have a question I have to ask about its fitness.

SPEAKER_07 1:27:42

The only rule is can you ask a good opening question?

SPEAKER_04 1:27:45

Well, it's long. It's not super long, but it's it's dense.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:48

The reading is dense or the question is dense?

SPEAKER_04 1:27:51

Well, we'll see about the question, but the reading for sure. I'll do my best with the question.

SPEAKER_07 1:27:56

You're gonna make it as dense as possible.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:58

The question is pages pages 19 through 200 with a question mark at the end. A neutron star of a question.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:08

What's that guy, Laszlo something, who wrote the book that's all one sentence? It's like two.

SPEAKER_07 1:28:12

Thrash Nahorcai. I have that book.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:15

Yeah, it's really it's it's a heart attack, but it's really good.

SPEAKER_07 1:28:18

He came to Brown. I don't know if I met him, but I was at a reading that he did. So you say.

SPEAKER_10 1:28:23

What's your reading?

SPEAKER_04 1:28:25

The uh next reading is going to be the first half, approximately, of Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief by Jordan Peterson. It's his PhD work as a book. I don't know if he modified it at all or not. But for those of you who want to follow along, it is chapters one, two, and three, which is the first 187 pages. Uh, and then we'll do the second half of the work subsequently. And then I should do the next part. Don't cut that, Matt. Thanks for joining us for this discussion. You are dismissed with the following valediction from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Now the hungry lion roars, and the wolf howls the moon, whilst the heavy plowman snores, all with weary task foredone. Now the wasted brands do glow, whilst the screech owl, screeching loud, puts the wretch that lies in woe in remembrance of a shroud. Now it is the time of night that the graves, all gaping wide, every one lets forth his sprite in the churchway paths to glide. And we fairies that do run by the triple hectates team from the presence of the sun, following darkness like a dream, now our frolic, not a mouse shall disturb this hallowed house. I am sent with broom before to sweep the dust behind the door.