Sentences are Viruses

America, at its best, has been the Enlightenment Incarnate.

America-bashing is penis envy.

What a ridiculous remark. Nobody seeks impotence willingly. I merely question the financial status, your ideals of Enlightment and the US Government. I am not bashing, you yourself draw the conclusion USA "has been the Enlightment Incarnate".

America, at its best, has been the Enlightenment Incarnate.

America-bashing is penis envy.

Man invents new technology, which he then has to name. This technology changes his environment, also requiring new names. As names are often metaphorical, mere practical activity requires its sprinkling of poetry.

But modern man is often enough a leisure animal who prides himself on poetic novelty, on being ahead of the curve. Sure, plenty of today's intellectual fads are probably 90% post-consumer recycled, but here and there a new metaphor coughs up amniotic fluid and breathes. The little bugger is going to make it. He's a cute little virus. He's going to be quoted.

Quotation is how sentence-viruses reproduce. They cannot "live" without a host. Word-virus is the fossil of living speech. The "letter kills" because the letter is undead. Did Socrates know this, and therefore abstain from writing books?

Words are only real for living breathing passionate human beings, who have emotional responses to these words. The mere pronunciation of words requires gesture and generates noise-music. One cannot pronounce an "S" without hissing like a snake, tongue against teeth. An S is made of white-noise.

Ideograms seem to stress the visual and phonetic alphabets the sonic. I would guess this is not the reason phonetic alphabets caught on. I suspect phonetic alphabets are more convenient.

---------- Post added 02-08-2010 at 07:08 AM ----------


Man invents nothing new, but we change the forms of all we have....

Cyclotrons? Computers? Van Gogh's "Sunflowers"? Sentences no one has ever produced before?

Sure, originality is scarce, and this scarcity is part of its value. We know Van Gogh's name not so much for what he painted but for how he painted it.

Had Plato's viral sentences already been on the market, we should probably have never heard of Plato. It's the same with Aristotle and Saint Paul. History is hard to conceive of without novelty. How often is history presented as the progress of man, this "progress" being an accumulation and dissemination of useful and pleasant novelty?

Inventions are sometimes mechanical rather lingual. Sometimes it's a cotton gin and not the New Science of Vico. Sometimes it's the way to find the slope of a slope or the shortest distance between two points on a sphere.

We've come a long long way by inventing things, and some of our most important inventions have been sentences. That's my opinion anyway.

As I have said, I have seen many of Van Goghs, and I can tell you method was his madness...He chose common subjects, and while I would say subject is art, he could hardly have expressed his technique on uncommon subjects with the same effect...His work has more in common with sculpture...There is nothing flat about it...The paint is thick, and the picture carved into it with the handle of the brush, and the effect in a room is astounding, because where ever you stand the painting gives itself to you because it is full of concave surfaces which reflect light in all directions... Clearly subject was a concern of his... He sketched the dissipated victims of a madhouse capitalism, but that is not what he is known for...

I would like to stay closer to the heart of the thread, which is the nature of text, which I see as a sort of fossilized speech. It's undead because it depends upon the reader for its life. Text is like sculpture. It's the score/spore of "music" that depends on readers for its rebirth and reproduction.

Is there something wrong with my head or am I starting to get what you are getting at???Who knows if those pesty ideas don't have a life of their own, ganging up on us, teaching us weird sense...