[lit-ideas] Re: Rudy and the Myth of Origin
- From: "" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Redacted sender "Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx" for DMARC)
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 4 May 2014 10:13:32 -0400 (EDT)
My last post today!
Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it.
Nice report, thank you, D. McEvoy.
In a message dated 5/4/2014 8:05:04 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:
Rudy is singing to Hello, Goodbye, interspersed with comments about the
passing world. Rudy sees some sheep in a distant field and comments: “Sheeps.”
He then adds: “Those sheeps have babies in their tummies.” At this
distance, this comment cannot possibly be based on empirical observation. It
is
possible that this comment reveals the cataclysmic psychic disturbance that
Rudy now endures about “tummies” and “babies” – that “sheeps” operates
as a means of “transference” for a disturbance that may now possibly
cripple Rudy into adulthood and beyond.
To check this, Donal asks a few questions.
“Rudy…” “Yes.” “Rudy, you know about sheeps...
The utterance:
i. Those sheeps have babies in their tummies.
allows for various implicatures other than the non-inductivist reading, as
it were, proposed by McEvoy.
Cfr.
ii. Sheep, as a matter of principle, need to carry babies in their tummies,
in order to the species 'Sheep' to survive. (*)
There is a further implicature:
iv. Homo sapiens is like Ovis aries (Linnaeus, 1758) in reproductive
matters.
(*) The words "in order" to express purpose in "in order to" are usually
redundant, and can be removed to leave just "to" as an expression of purpose.
However, the full expression is required in the negative ("in order not
to") and occasionally to avoid ambiguity.
While McEvoy does refer to the myth of origin in the Bible, it may do to
explore the specifics of 'human birth', or the phenomenon of birth in the
Human Species in the Bible, and why, not Graeco-Roman literature (if not
Germanic).
The Holy Ghost is not too specific (in terms of Grice, "Be as informative
as is required", seeing that this is the first account of the first
'natural' birth) on the matter:
"Now the man [Adam] had relations with his wife Eve, and she conceived and
gave birth to Cain, and she said, "I have gotten a manchild with the help
of the LORD." Again, she gave birth to his brother Abel. And Abel was a
keeper of flocks, but Cain was a tiller of the ground."
I'm less sure which is the best account in the Graeco-Roman tradition
(never mind the Germanic) but I choose Athena, since her owl is supposed to be
the emblem of philosophy.
The story of Athena's birth comes in several versions.
In the one most commonly cited, Zeus lay with Metis, the goddess of crafty
thought and wisdom.
But Zeus, immediately feared the consequences.
It had been prophesied that Metis would bear children more powerful than
the sire, even Zeus himself.
In order to forestall these dire consequences, after lying with Metis, Zeus
put hMetis away inside his own belly.
He swallowed her down all of a sudden.
It was too late: Metis had already conceived.
Two days later, Zeus experienced an enormous headache.
Prometheus, Hephaestus, Hermes, Ares, or Palaemon (depending on the sources
examined) cleaved Zeus's head with the double-headed Minoan axe, the
labrys.
As a result, Athena leaped from Zeus's head, fully grown and armed, with a
shout and and pealed to the broad sky her clarion cry of war.
Cheers,
Speranza
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