Adrian Hester

Really now. I always thought the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid were poetry, but I guess not.

Okay, I think I've got them all. One book that has a good section on poetry and meter is The Enjoyment of Literature by Bernard Grebanier. Two books entirely about poetry that I got quite a bit from are The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide by Robert Pinsky and A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver, both well-known poets. Mind you, I haven't read either book in its entirety, only the first two-thirds or so of each, and don't agree with all they say, but for the purpose of getting used to meter and its interaction with stress and word length, they're quite good (especially the Pinsky).

Milton's Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and lots of Samson Agonistes, Wordsworth's Prelude, Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight," Keats' Hyperion, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, Tennyson's "Ulysses," and Browning's The Ring and the Book; that's beside its use in drama by such greats as Shakespeare and Marlowe. A number of good moderns have used it too--Frost and Yeats, for example. (And Wallace Stevens for that matter, whom I like very much but whose poetry does require a lot of concentration and a good deal of imaginative sympathy.) In general it's found a lot of use by poets writing extended poetry that's to report dialogue (or monologue), and in some of those cases it's actually arranged as drama though never meant to be performed (Prometheus Unbound, for example). Give me a day to jog my memory. There are two or three that are just on the tip of my brain but I can't dislodge them right now.

The barbarian invasions in general are considered a prime cause of the fall of Rome, but the Huns weren't as significant as many other peoples who invaded the Roman Empire, not directly. The Huns ruled a state situated outside the empire proper (based in Pannonia, north of the Danube in modern-day Hungary) and most of the time extorted tribute from the empire; when Attila did invade, he didn't go much beyond northern Italy and he didn't stay too long. It was the invaders who settled inside the boundaries of the empire who were really important in its decline, such as the Vandals, Franks, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Burgundians, Lombards, Angles, Saxons, and Jutes--though several of these tribes settled in the empire (around 406-411) in order to escape being conquered by the Huns, which was probably the greatest long-term influence of the Huns on European history.

It's not that unstructured, actually. It lacks rhyme, certainly, but so does blank verse, which includes some of the finest poetry in English. So look at the meter, is it blank verse (unrhymed but metrical)? No, not in any strict sense. But the meter's structured well to go with the content. The poem falls in several sections (three, most basically) with a tension between iambs (duh-DUM) and anapests (duh-duh-DUM); the former quickens the rhythm like pounding feet while the latter gives a more leisurely, even pace like a coasting bicycle. The middle section has the most obvious effects: my own mouth rounding in surprise when you pulled ahead down the curved path of the park, I kept waiting for the thud of your crash as I sprinted to catch up, - * - *- - - * - - * - * - - * * - - */ - - * - - - * - - * - - * - - * -/ The first line has two iambs and a feminine ending (unstressed syllable outside the foot), and the section ends on another iamb, and the rest of it (six lines and an extra foot) is a series of anapests (again, one with a feminine ending) with significant shortening in the first three lines--the stress keeps pulling ahead of the even flow of the meter just like the little girl is pulling ahead of the mother on her bike. In the next three lines the mother has stopped running, expressed metrically by the stresses suddenly standing on the same position in each line after a strong pause at the comma following "at the park," until suddenly the mother starts sprinting ahead (note the way "sprinting" ends its foot but begins its next line) to catch up with the girl, causing the meter to "jump ahead" and try to catch up. The line breaks in that second set of three lines are chosen in the usual way to give special emphasis to the last word of the line--you have a feminine ending in "waiting," which adds a pause that evokes waiting, while "thud" ends the line with a thud and "crash" ends its clause with a crash. The other sections have meters suited to their contents as well. In other words, there's an artful, conscious use of traditional metrical techniques that is intended to evoke one person running after another riding a bicycle; it's that that makes it a poem. Sure, it's not a standard form and it might take some thought to get the structure, but if you take the trouble you'll probably find it works. (Of course, that's not true of much free verse.) Actually, I think it's a fine poem of its kind, and I've enjoyed Pastan's poetry for a while now (I first read her a bit over a year ago).

Actually, it's an open question whether the 2nd Law can be taken as applying to the universe as a whole. If I remember correctly, Landau and Lifshitz have a discussion of this point in one of their textbooks. First, it's thermodynamics, not thermal dynamics. More to the point, just because the universe is eternal, that doesn't mean that it is unchanging on a gross level. If the standard model is correct, then about 15-18 billion years ago, all matter and energy were confined to a very small region from which they started expanding. What likely happened before then can't be said in our present state of knowledge, but in any case the evidence points to some very major change in the condition of the universe as a whole, even if everything has existed eternally in some form before that moment. And in any case, let's take the statement you seem to be implying, that an entity usually named God is necessary to explain how the clock of thermodynamics started flowing. What does that actually explain? Nothing. How did God start everything going in the first place? What process was involved? What evidence can you point to for any of it? If there is none, then you don't actually know anything about the nature of this entity whose existence you imply to be necessary. There's no basis for your claim of knowledge, only a leap into the unknown (and presumably unknowable-by-human-reason) on the basis of utter ignorance. So there's a gap in our knowledge--what you're having recourse to is the old god in the gaps, in which any gap in our knowledge is taken as evidence of God...until the gap gets filled by naturalistic knowledge. Perhaps God does exist in one of those gaps--but how can you prove it? If you don't know why something is the way it is, then you can't, by that very fact, know enough to say that what lurks in that gap is unknowable by human reason rather than just currently unknown. In short, you're just pasting the name "God" over current ignorance; science recognizes the same ignorance but doesn't make the unsupportable claim that what's there is unknowable or transcendent. Perhaps it is, but we'll never actually really know that, will we? We'll just get closer and closer, but whether that last little passel of gaps can never be filled by the sustained exercise of human reason is not something we'd be able to say--and, more importantly, neither can the theologians, since being human, they have the same limitations as other humans. Because there's still a lot of uncollected gas and dust out there from the Big Bang (whatever its nature) that is all the time slowly condensing to produce stars. How does positing a god explain the organization of existents? Because God made them that way? Why? How? Well, He just did--that's how, that's why. That's not an explanation, it's just pasting a name to our ignorance. Mental entities like concepts are distinct from what they refer to "out there," and being symbolic representations of some sort, they can be abstracted from or combined in other ways. ("Oh, what a beautiful horse! Imagine a horn on its head--my, is that not a beautiful thing!") By the same token, the resulting combinations do not imply the existence of any referent. In this respect, it's somewhat like taking modeling clay that's been molded into shapes of other things, then glomming them together, or shaving off clay from one in accordance with the shape of another of the lumps, or what-not. The original shapes can be taken as referring to other things, but after modification they need not. I doubt that's an earth-shattering analogy for you; the point is that while the nature of consciousness is not entirely understood, the basis of such creativity is probably the capacity for symbolic representation. That is, the capacity to associate a referent with an arbitrary mental unit, such as a string of sounds (or, rather, the mental units that encode the articulations of the vocal tract to produce those sounds and their corresponding acoustic features), and the capacity to manipulate the resulting mental unit as a unit--perhaps by arranging it in a hierarchical network of contrasts and associations, or by abstracting away certain of its qualities and manipulating the result, and so on. It's the fact that this association is arbitrary (in the sense that the mental unit as such needn't have any properties that are the same as those of the referent, but simply represents the referent) rather than iconic or indexical (to use the terms common in cognitive science) that makes creativity possible. (Which is why the analogy of modeling clay is ultimately too limited--the modeling clay would be a case of iconic representation, where the association between referent and representation is not arbitrary at all, but is instead one-to-one in the same property, extension. By the same token, you can't say that a symbolic representation is "composed of" symbolic representations of the parts that compose the referent and into which the representation of the whole can be broken down; instead, the referent's component parts would have their own distinct symbolic representations, if it is necessary to refer to them, that are associated mentally with the original symbolic representation.) --Well, I hope that wasn't too unclear. You might want to check out the first part of Terrence Deacon's The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain for a thought-provoking discussion of all that.

A correction and a couple of amplifications, now that it's not near my bedtime. Oops! That was Khurasan, not Khorezm. They're both in the east, but they're distinct places. The big event in all that was the establishment of the Fatimids in Egypt starting in 969. They were a dynasty of staunch Ismaili Shiites who led a long, drawn-out war (military, commercial, subversive, and ideological) against the Caliphate. It was in response to their ideological and religious propaganda that the madrasa got its start; it was a kind of school established to expound the Sunni response to the Ismaili arguments of the Fatimids. Sunnism at this time became a body of positive doctrine supported by the Seljuqs that was expounded in response to Shiite doctrine as espoused in Fatimid ideology. Many Ismailis from around the Islamic world flocked to Cairo to drink straight from the well and even if they didn't enter the service of the Fatimids they expounded their doctrines when they returned home; one of them, the founder of the Assassins, followed their example. This is what Bernard Lewis writes about the situation of the time: "In traditional Islamic states, the business of government was carried out by two main groups, known as the men of the sword...and the men of the pen...The former were the armed forces, the latter the civil bureaucrats. Their relative importance and influence varied according to the type of regime, but the two together were commonly agreed to be the twin pillars of the state. The Fatimids, for the first time in Islamic history, added a third--the Mission. In the Sunni Caliphate, the professional men of religion had stood aside from the state, neither serving it nor accepting its direction. The Fatimids organized them into a third branch of government, with its own functions, structure, and hierarchy, under the direction of the Chief Missionary and the ultimate authority of the Caliph in his capacity as Imam. The Fatimids thus created something previously unknown to Islam--an institutional church. Their example was followed by some later rulers, who found in this new relationship between religion and the state a powerful reinforcement of their authority." (70) "One of these [functions of the Mission] was what we nowadays call ideology--the organized and exclusive system of ideas adopted and propagated by a movement or regime. Generally speaking, Islamic regimes had no ideology other than Islam itself--and that in the broadest and most tolerant definition. Muslim governments took care not to impose, or even espouse, any intellectual orthodoxy, but to allow, within reasonable limits, the co-existence of diverse opinions. The oft-cited saying, Ikhtilafu ummati rahma, difference within my community is part of God's mercy, accurately reflects traditional Islamic attitudes and practice." (70) "The Fatimids [unlike the Abbasids, who came to power as a vaguely Shiite movement] did not abandon their distinctive doctrines, but on the contrary gave them a central importance in their whole political system. Isma'ili theology provided the basis on which the Fatimids rested their claim to the Caliphate and denied that of the 'Abbasids. As long as the 'Abbasids survived, the Fatimids were engaged in a religious--i.e., an ideological conflict, in which doctrine was one of their most powerful weapons. In a sense, they were caught in a vicious circle. Because of their initial failure to win over all of Islam, they were obliged to maintain their ideological challenge; yet, by doing so, they isolated themselves from the central consensus of Islam, and thus ensured their own ultimate defeat and disappearance." (71) "The Isma'ili message had considerable appeal, to many different elements of the population. It was a time of great upheavals in the Islamic world--of economic change, political disruption and intellectual malaise. As in late Umayyad times, there were many who felt that the Islamic community had gone astray and that a new leader, with a new message, was needed to restore it to the true path. There was a withdrawal of consent from the existing order, a loss of confidence in hitherto accepted answers. The 'Abbasid Caliphate, and with it the Sunni order, seemed to be breaking up; some new principle of unity and authority was required to save Islam and the Muslims from destruction. To many, it seemed that the Isma'ilis could offer such a principle--a design for a new and just world order, under the Imam." (72) This is from his essay "An Interpretation of Fatimid History" in a recent collection, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East. It's well worth reading, especially that essay and one called "Some Notes on Land, Money and Power in Medieval Islam."

Good question. There are certain internal social and political factors to take into account, first of all. For example, you can't speak of just one Muslim culture; the Arabs, Persians, and Turks had rather different cultural traditions. (The saying in Islam is that Arabic is the language of religion, Persian the language of government and poetry, that is, literature and the arts, and Turkish is the language of the military.) Many of the great lights of Muslim culture were from or flourished in Persia (Nishapur, Herat) and Persian central Asia (Bukhara, Samarqand, Tashkent, Merv and so on)--in part this was due to the Samanid dynasty (900-1000 or so), the first important Islamic Persian dynasty, and some of its successors; they followed rather liberal cultural policies that hearkened back to pre-Islamic Persian traditions. Even earlier, the Abbasids (who ruled as caliphs from 750 to 1260 or so) got their start in eastern Persia (Khorezm), and the caliph who spearheaded the translation of so many works of Greek antiquity, Al-Ma'mun (ruled 812-833), started out in the same region, if I remember correctly, as a governor for his father, and he tried ruling the Caliphate from Merv for six or seven years before moving to Baghdad (which his armies had wrecked in a civil war against his brother). The Persian influence on the Abbasids was quite important for Muslim culture. --You should keep in mind that the spread of Shiism into Iran is much later; it occurred under the Safavids (1502-1722 or so), who started out in Azerbaijan and conquered much of Iran by 1510 or so. Earlier, Shi'ites made up maybe a third of the population in Iran, but the Safavids forcibly suppressed Sunnism and in fact eventually collapsed when they tried to force certain Afghans to convert to Shi'ism and provoked a major rebellion. (Before that time, Iran and Persian Central Asia were a cultural unity, but they went their separate ways after that.) Similarly, while the Arabs and Turks were both traditionally nomadic (or semi-nomadic), the Arabs were in general more accepting of many aspects of trade and commercial life. This was important because by the mid-800s, the Caliphate had come to rely on Turkish mercenaries in place of the old Arab armies, and for much of the time after that the mercenaries (Mamluks) had real power in many of the various states that the Caliphate started splitting up into. Because of civil war in the early 800s, the irrigation systems in Iraq and the surrounding regions had been damaged and allowed to silt up, and with the rise of the Mamluks there was no strong drive to restore them, which crippled agriculture in the area directly controlled by the Caliphate; the Mamluks were also less interested in a flourishing trade than the earlier Arab rulers had been, which also helped the Caliphate to splinter. Finally, the Turks of the time also tended to be quite strict Muslims with a narrow view of culture, as were the Berbers, which had an increasingly depressive effect on the Islamic cultural world from about 900 to 1200 (the Berbers were important in the history of Islamic Spain; they were invited in to fight the Christians in the 11th century and came back later to overthrow the Moorish states that were already there because they were too tolerant of and cooperative with Christians and Jews--more specifically, the Moors were themselves largely of Berber origin, but the later wave was led by a new dynasty based in Morocco, the Almoravids, who saw themselves as religious reformers). With the fragmentation of the Caliphate you eventually had frequent wars among the various successor states, as well as the rise of a somewhat feudal sort of system (based on the 'iqta, a land grant) and the penetration of much of the Middle East by semi-nomadic tribes among the different cities; they levied high tolls and could easily fall on the towns to extort tribute. That was the social and political situation in the Islamic world, near as I can fathom it, by the beginning of the Italian Renaissance. However, it's not my specialty, so I'm sure there are important points I've skipped or missed. More fundamentally, the impression I have is that the spread of the frontiers of Islam under the early Abbasids fed a cultural confidence that encouraged the spread of a more worldly, enlightened view of things, a pure curiosity about things that didn't impinge on religious sensibilities overmuch, as well as providing an inflow of booty and tribute that kept the state afloat. When that faltered and the state started hurting and decentralizing, more recent converts not acculturated to the cultures of Baghdad and Persia got the chance to start running things and militarism spread throughout many parts of the Islamic world; along with that a feeling of crisis and religious division spread that made many Muslims turn back to a less worldly strain of religion (note that while there were self-declared Shi'ites from the death of 'Ali in 661, Sunnism as a distinct self-declared alternative to it really only dated from about 1030; it was another line of division coming into prominence about this time), which was heightened by the actual loss of territory to non-Muslims later during the Crusdaes and the Mongol invasions. I remember I got a lot out of Albert Hourani's History of the Arab Peoples (he was one of three brothers, western-trained Arab scholars, who did important work on Islamic history), but that was well over a decade ago and I can't remember it well enough to discuss it more thoroughly. If you're seriously interested in Islamic history, a book I've found essential is Hugh Kennedy's The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the 6th to the 11th Century. He gives a solid political history of the period with excellent discussions of more general themes, as well as the necessary historiographical discussions for what we know and what we have to infer from the records. It's thick going because it's intended as a primer for professional historians of the period, but that makes it a valuable reference work. Unfortunately, I don't know of a similar work for the period after the Mongol conquests.

No, that's the definition of (sexual) reproduction.

That's an impressive feat of psychologizing. I don't consider homosexuality immoral--so now we know that's because I'm secretly homosexual (and never even knew it!) and refuse to admit that I'm immoral! The very fact of disagreeing with you is evidence of immorality and dishonesty! How Freudian of you.

Except that that's not a relativistic effect. It's due to the tidal forces of the Moon. As the Earth rotates, it pulls the tidal bulges created by the Moon's gravity out of the line connecting the centers of the Earth and Moon; the bulges in turn pull the Moon forward in its orbit (because they aren't symmetrical about the Earth-Moon line), which increases its energy and thus the size of its orbit by about 3 cm/yr. (It also slows the Earth's rotation by about 1 second every 60,000 years because of the friction caused by the Earth rotating under the tidal bulges.)

In logic, statements are sentences that must be true or false. Orders and questions would be sentences but not statements. Well, if it's a declarative sentence in a specific language, then I suspect logicians would say that therefore it's precisely a statement.

Sanskrit hasta and Persian dast might go back to the root g^hes 'hand' that you find in Greek kheir.

That's what I'm wondering. I suspect you and I don't understand "ridiculous" in the same way.

Well, in Reform Judaism many of the 613 commandments of the Torah (mitzvot) are held to be up to the individual conscience (such as the dietary restrictions), but certain of the moral ones are binding on someone who would be Jewish. Many (all?) Reform Jews adhere to the Pittsburgh Platform (1885), which puts it this way (Article 3): "We recognize in the Mosaic legislation a system of training the Jewish people for its mission during its national life in Palestine, and today we accept as binding only its moral laws, and maintain only such ceremonies as elevate and sanctify our lives, but reject al such as are not adapted to the views and habits of modern civilization." More than that I don't know enough about to say, so you might want to make the acquaintance of your neighborhood rabbi for more information.

That's not the situation I was describing. I was referring to a scene in which two characters have different understandings of the circumstances and have a conversation that is fully coherent for each of them but which each understands entirely differently.

"For instance, if you have a scene with two characters who have different 'understandings' of the circumstances and have a conversation that is thoroughly coherent from either's point of view but which each of them takes completely differently, that can be quite funny, especially if their ideas of what is going on are quite divergent." What is ridiculous in that? What in that is "absolutely beneath contempt and not worth giving thought to"?

You mean this? "Something is ridiculous in regard to both context and humour - it is what they regard, in respect to context, as absolutely beneath contempt and not worth giving thought to (silly is a synonym for ridiculous)." I paid it quite a bit of attention and told why I disagreed with it in that very same paragraph, which for some reason you didn't consider worth reading down to. So let's get down to brass tacks here--are you actually interested in a discussion or just in an uninterrupted stream of applause?

Not necessarily. Humor involves a contrast between what you expect given the situation and what actually happens. This often involves ridicule, but not always. (I'm taking comedy in a broad sense as simply meaning humorous art and humor in art, which seems to me how you mean it. If not, what is your definition of comedy?) For instance, if you have a scene with two characters who have different "understandings" of the circumstances and have a conversation that is thoroughly coherent from either's point of view but which each of them takes completely differently, that can be quite funny, especially if their ideas of what is going on are quite divergent. If one of the characters has a foolish understanding, then of course it works to ridicule that character. If both misunderstandings are natural given the earlier circumstances of the comedy, then it's a real stretch to say there's something ridiculous there. You're prejudging things by saying it's an unexpected connection between the ridiculous thing and the context. First, even on your own terms, it could be the context that's shown to be ridiculous by a piece of humor. Second, not all humor and not all comedy involves the ridiculous. Yes, I agree. What about ridiculous things that are logically connected? Anyway, that's only a subset of all comedy. Certainly comedy can be used to undercut values or judgements (whether your own or those you infer for the characters, which I think is an important distinction you have touched on too lightly), and it's essential to pay attention to that when it happens. However, I've known far too many people whose response to humor is to assume that there must be something undercutting or malicious in every joke, and as a result they misinterpret comedy, sometimes grotesquely.

Yes, they are; another favorite of mine is Double Star. Also, Tunnel in the Sky is well worth reading. And he wrote many excellent short stories and novellas.

So, would you agree then that attempting to reconcile "You have the right to take hard drugs" and "It is immoral to take hard drugs" is also trying to have your cake and eat it?

You know, taken out of context, that sounds really funny.

Ah, gotcha.

11, surely.

You're equating "willful suspension of consciousness" with even a slight impairment of one's faculties. I don't think that was Ayn Rand's view, and I don't think it's the view of others in this thread.