h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

>>Was your communication with God more or less real than Peter Sutcliffe's communication with God, and how can you know?<<

I don't know who Peter Sutcliffe is so maybe I'm missing something, but surely it's only a problem if you want to quantify or measure penis size?

I haven't read today's backlog properly yet, but it seems like this is one problem with rationalism as god - either something doesn't exist unless it is measurable or potentially measurable (so that rules out most art), and once it is measurable it's all about comparison for validity purposes.

No. Rationalism doesn't rule out the subjective. All it suggests is that if we want to compare subjective phenomena, we have to find a common frame of reference. There's only one common frame. It's called the real world.

And yet people who speak 'spiritual' languages all the time have more than one frame.

I do agree about the need for translation, and I appreciate anhaga's clarification (now I understand what he means, it's been translated. Unlike the computer metaphor which just made my brain hurt):

>>
By all means discuss them, but there won't be actual transfer of information about the experiences until that common material ground is found.
<<

True. So maybe we are arguing about how that transfer can happen. Myself and Effers I think are saying that you can reduce that too much and when you do you lose something.

I'm thinking about poetry, which seems to me to be understandable via reason and intuition. But if you analyse it too much is it not harder to experience the intuitive? Maybe this varies from person to person - some people need one more than the other?

Also, I'm saying if your world view sees the world in reducible terms only then you miss the other languages. One can't translate something that is thought not to exist (even if it does).

Poetry.

Keats is actually very simple, under the complex language. And I didn't find the language that complex, personally.

Evan Boland (my favourite, of the poets I studied in school), has some very multilayered poems, but generally quite simple language.

Of course, a poem is about more than its "meaning". If it was just about the "meaning" the poet could have said it in a much more straightforward way. It's about the beauty of the language, or even of the sound. And imagery.

When Evan Boland talks about the War Horse,

his shuffling head

Down

She's putting the word /down/ into the next couplet because that's where it fits in the scan of the poem, but also because it brings the reader's eyes down to match the horse's head. It fits. Imagery.

I didn't find that analysing poems made me like them less. On the contrary. But I always tried to read a poem at least once straight through, without too much analysis. Then perhaps again, thinking about it more consciously, forming my own impressions. And only then looking at the notes provided.

Perhaps if you do the analysis too soon you don't get the wonder of the innocent exposure. But if you do the analysis later, after absorbing the first exposure, you don't lose it.

Or maybe I'm talking nonsense.

Perhaps I should read more poetry. Novels are really the only art form where I properly trust my own opinion. Almost everywhere else I sometimes feel I'm faking it to myself. But I feel that less than I used to. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

TRiG.

sorry about the brain hurt, kea.

On the subject of poetry:

My professional training was as a a literary scholar, specifically of poetry. I don't think that my intuitive appreciation of poetry was eliminated by the critical skills I developed. On the contrary, I think my intuitive appreciation is augmented by the rational training I received.


But I've said that before.

Trig:

'Almost everywhere else I sometimes feel I'm faking it to myself. But I feel that less than I used to. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?'

absolutely! I feel like I'm faking every time I have a success. I don't have that feeling any less frequently than I used to, I just don't worry about it and let people think I'm good at stuff (even though I know they're wrong about it).

Faking it?

I feel like I'm fake _all_ the time!

Is that wrong?

since I was quite young, particularly since my first scholarly article was accepted by Modern Philology while I was an undergraduate, I've always felt like I was about to be 'caught'.


But I still haven't been.


The rest of the world must be really oblivious.

>>And yet people who speak 'spiritual' languages all the time have more than one frame.

That's possibly true. But where their frames diverge from a real-world frame of reference...are they talking about anything more than angels on pinheads?

As it happens, last night I waslistening to an R4 feature on Logical Positivism. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime_20090702.shtml
This made the same point: can anything which is not grounded in the Material be said to have any meaning?

Going back to something earlier in the thread...I think it was you kea who spoke about the difference between the idea of owning the land and being owned by the land. I was born in Aylesford in Kent, a tiny ancient village on the river Medway. There's a very ancient tradition in the county of Kent, which before England was unified, was actually a 'country', that if you are born on one side of the river Medway you are a 'maid/man of Kent', and if the other 'a Kentish maid/man'. I find this quite interesting in that rivers are frequently boundaries in the landscape. And it's like this also draws attention to this idea of being owned by the land, in terms of identity. Kent being the identity thing, but there's a fracture in that identity of the *whole*. The river acts as that agent of fragmentation in language and meaning.

Interestingly those in East Kent, the 'ofs' are closest to the continent, and were subject to immigration and invasion from continental Europe and had to be the fiercest warriors in combating invasion.

(Aylesford is supposedly the traditional landing ground in England of Anglo Saxons...resulting in the defeat of local warlords Hengis and Horsa).

There's a flaw, though, Effers. Most of these Kentish (or wherever) folk wouldn't have owned the land. They, and the land they lived on, would have belonged to someone else.

Besides - prepositions are mutable things. In this case, I suspect that 'of Kent' more properly means 'from Kent' - a convenient way of identifying individuals when they were away from home. I'm not convinced we should read into it anything more philosophical.



(punchline to old joke:

'But I shag just *one* sheep...' )

Oh you boring old story eater, Edward


Actually the post is really more about a playful look at the way language can work...and the fact that that has become associated with landscape...no-one knows how the story came about, when it really started etc etc etc ad nauseam, ad infinitum.

I also like, that the idea was, when the harvest was due, the two sides of the river traditionally put their friendly rivalry aside, to bring it home, Kent being known as the 'Garden of England', because of all the fruit, veg and hops grown in its fertile soils.

Yes these stories maybe to a degree, later romanticising of something much older that we can never know the historical truth of...and the fact is we just can't. But these stories must come from somewhere. And I think that Kent was one of the most vulnerable places, because of its close proximity to the Channel, is connected. Invaders came up both the river Thames and the river Medway for hundreds of years in the mists of time.

Oh, I'm sure that these stories come from somewhere. All I was poking at was whether we can infer anything about feelings of belonging to the land - and what that actually means.

Am I right in recalling that fishing rights in the Thames and Medway were the subject of one of the clauses in Magna Carta? I have this mental picture of peasants toiling in fertile land, beside a bountiful river, but forced to relinquish the fruits of their labour to The Man.

> All I was poking at was whether we can infer anything about feelings of belonging to the land - and what that actually means.<

Well I have an idea what it means. Scrumping for apples and cherries was a big part of my very young life. Collecting conkers every year. My great grandmother told me stories of collecting chestnuts every winter to just get through it. People often did casual labour working on farms, even hop picking before it became fully mechanised. Most of the growing area centres on that east of the Medway. And I regularly went fishing on the Medway with my dad and brother. It was easy to catch Perch which can be eaten.

I gained a great fascination and love of nature for the first period of my life from being close to the river and farms, until we moved away...and that felt like the most enormous loss in my life. I still haven't forgiven my parents.

When kea mentions belonging to the land in a spiritual sense, I know what she means, even with my modern day, viewpoint. And interpreting it in my own way. It's about a relationship to land, landscape that gives *meaning* to your life if you grew up in it.

'Aylesford is supposedly the traditional landing ground in England of Anglo Saxons...resulting in the defeat of local warlords Hengis and Horsa'


but Hengist and Horsa according to legend were the leaders of the Anglo-Saxon invasion -- the winners -- not defeated local warlords.


'Called the first king of Kent, Hengist (449 - 488) was originally one of the leaders of a band of Jutish riders who settled in the area and became first the military elite and then rulers of the area. The transition to Jutish rule was not peaceful and two battles were fought - the Battle of Aylesthrep and the Battle of Creganford. Both resulted in defeats for the Britons' A23671172

A Marxist might understand why it was so easy for invaders. After all, why would the peasants put up a fight to defend what didn't belong to them in the first place?

Well that's myth and legend for you isn't it. I blame my local familial slant. But does it really matter about *facts* of very ancient history, which we can *never* know the truth of if they are really ancient?

Surely stories are just that, 'stories'. People know that stories are something giving meaning.


To be honest I don't know any detail of it apart from the stuff my grandad told me about Aylesford and its history, so I can't get into any sort of rational debate about it. And what I posted is from memory of what I was told.

My previous posts weren't ever intended to be about hard history, but mythology and story. I'd thought I'd made that clear.

I'm really not even the slightest bit interested in entering a debate on this particular thread about the ins and outs of historical *fact*.

Effers.

Yeah so basically I'm not interested in getting into some sort of nicely argued rational debate about Hengist and Horsa....doing a load of internet research about them etc in the context of this particular thread.

You may well be much more properly informed than me, anhaga. If so

anhaga