Sunday, June 29, 2003
"Start at the beginning": if it worked for Alice, perhaps it will work here.
There's a deeper point than simply the first words of my first weblog entry: written words have a quality not granted to ordinary everyday speech: a tinge of permanence in a transient world. One of the earliest uses of writing was written contracts or agreements between rulers: around the time of Homer's Illiad, a treaty would be created in the form of a embossed bronze bracelet or armband, which would be rolled accross a slab of wet clay leaving the marks describing the treaty: this way, many copies could be created so long as the original bracelet/armband existed.
Three thousand years later, rulers still play games with symbolic tokens: consider the platinum/irridium cylinder which is the reference ISO kilogram and the official copies made for each nation at the start of last century, which have been surrendered to the victors when a nation loses a war. What happens when you remove a symbol from someone, particularly a reference value by which other truths are gauged? Sometimes the principle of a thing matters more than the thing itself: after all, there are enough 1-kg reference weights available that their local Department of Weights and Measures undoubtedly could still do their jobs, even without the official platinum/irridium reference copy. Not all reference values are as easy to replace, unfortunately.
Always, the principle of a thing matters more than the thing itself. People who think about these things might do well to read some David Drake ("Paying the Piper" just came out), or perhaps even Celia Green's "The Human Evasion": http://www.deoxy.org/evasion/toc.htm, of which here is the forward:
"One way of seeing reality is to see the appearances we usually take for it inside-out, back-to-front or looking-glass fashion. This is very difficult to do, considering how habituated we are to those appearances. It is also very difficult to be witty about vital and essential matters, though that is one of the best hopes we have of seeing them objectively, which is about the only hope we have of seeing them at all. Miss Green has achieved the looking-glass vision and the wit. Many, therefore, will call her too clever by half, forgetting that one of the things she is saying is that we are not half clever enough, for the very reason that we lack her witty vision because we wear the blinkers of our belief in appearances. So anyone who reads this book (as opposed to merely reading its words) must be prepared to be profoundly disturbed, upset and in fact looking-glassed himself; which will be greatly to his advantage, if he can stand it. Few books, long or short, are great ones; this book is short and among those few. One day, perhaps, it will become part of holy writ: a gospel according to Celia Green. Which kind of "insane" statement belongs to the book's own kind of truth. —R. H. Ward"
Still with me, Gentle Reader, or have you vanished elsewhere into the web or [of?] your own personal concerns?
Oh, yes: the Dr. Seuss tie in. Anyone who's followed the Celia Green reference and apprehends it deserves and probably needs a mental break. Dr. Seuss had a perspective that I admire in the hindsight of, well, everything that I've written above. I forget which story it was, but there was one about the people who had stars on their belly, and the ones who did not (cue in Peter Gabriel's "Not One of Us"): and, of course, the businessman who would charge a price to add or remove the star.
The Sneetches, maybe? Anyway, the story ended with the Sneetches franticly running in a figure eight between the machine which added stars, and the machine which took stars away, until they all ran out of money. Heh...I'm not sure whether to compare that by analogy to the way the WWW has been working, the way the economy has been working (anyone need a Sysadmin/Network Manager in New York City?), or to the way people seem to operate in general.
Resonance, anyone? Lemme know,
-Chuck
There's a deeper point than simply the first words of my first weblog entry: written words have a quality not granted to ordinary everyday speech: a tinge of permanence in a transient world. One of the earliest uses of writing was written contracts or agreements between rulers: around the time of Homer's Illiad, a treaty would be created in the form of a embossed bronze bracelet or armband, which would be rolled accross a slab of wet clay leaving the marks describing the treaty: this way, many copies could be created so long as the original bracelet/armband existed.
Three thousand years later, rulers still play games with symbolic tokens: consider the platinum/irridium cylinder which is the reference ISO kilogram and the official copies made for each nation at the start of last century, which have been surrendered to the victors when a nation loses a war. What happens when you remove a symbol from someone, particularly a reference value by which other truths are gauged? Sometimes the principle of a thing matters more than the thing itself: after all, there are enough 1-kg reference weights available that their local Department of Weights and Measures undoubtedly could still do their jobs, even without the official platinum/irridium reference copy. Not all reference values are as easy to replace, unfortunately.
Always, the principle of a thing matters more than the thing itself. People who think about these things might do well to read some David Drake ("Paying the Piper" just came out), or perhaps even Celia Green's "The Human Evasion": http://www.deoxy.org/evasion/toc.htm, of which here is the forward:
"One way of seeing reality is to see the appearances we usually take for it inside-out, back-to-front or looking-glass fashion. This is very difficult to do, considering how habituated we are to those appearances. It is also very difficult to be witty about vital and essential matters, though that is one of the best hopes we have of seeing them objectively, which is about the only hope we have of seeing them at all. Miss Green has achieved the looking-glass vision and the wit. Many, therefore, will call her too clever by half, forgetting that one of the things she is saying is that we are not half clever enough, for the very reason that we lack her witty vision because we wear the blinkers of our belief in appearances. So anyone who reads this book (as opposed to merely reading its words) must be prepared to be profoundly disturbed, upset and in fact looking-glassed himself; which will be greatly to his advantage, if he can stand it. Few books, long or short, are great ones; this book is short and among those few. One day, perhaps, it will become part of holy writ: a gospel according to Celia Green. Which kind of "insane" statement belongs to the book's own kind of truth. —R. H. Ward"
Still with me, Gentle Reader, or have you vanished elsewhere into the web or [of?] your own personal concerns?
Oh, yes: the Dr. Seuss tie in. Anyone who's followed the Celia Green reference and apprehends it deserves and probably needs a mental break. Dr. Seuss had a perspective that I admire in the hindsight of, well, everything that I've written above. I forget which story it was, but there was one about the people who had stars on their belly, and the ones who did not (cue in Peter Gabriel's "Not One of Us"): and, of course, the businessman who would charge a price to add or remove the star.
The Sneetches, maybe? Anyway, the story ended with the Sneetches franticly running in a figure eight between the machine which added stars, and the machine which took stars away, until they all ran out of money. Heh...I'm not sure whether to compare that by analogy to the way the WWW has been working, the way the economy has been working (anyone need a Sysadmin/Network Manager in New York City?), or to the way people seem to operate in general.
Resonance, anyone? Lemme know,
-Chuck
