“Centos & the Problem of Reference”

further thoughts & conjectures

                            

              Shaka, when the walls fell  --Star Trek, “Darmok” episode

How much work the story of story is! Easier to take up the thread farther down the line, from where it’s already mostly done for you. “In medi res” is our “Once upon a Time”--in all but the maddest narrators. Since Parry & Lord we have come to view Homer as a quiltmaker: but all of us alike are such. ChapGPT continues the process, not terminates it.

Imagine, as might have been true (once upon a time), there was a book that everyone read, a tale that everyone knew. It was like a sky of constellations. You could look up & find where you were in it. For centuries they had the Aeneid  by Virgil, so much so that it was possible--& even a vogue (say, in North Africa around the Second Century C. E.)—to assemble pieces of Virgil, lines or half-lines, into a new work, making it say what you wanted. “Centos”, for the longest time, in our latter-day Classical view, were a kind of shameful secret; they weren’t real poems, even degraded ones in bad Latin.  More like a moustache on the Mona Lisa.

Well, lately scholars have been more willing to entertain that outlandish travesty, as a thing in itself. McGill finds considerable thought went into the Medea of Hosidius Geta, for example; it wasn’t enough just to cobble together something with a more or less even flow (the consistency of elevated language notwithstanding, he already was making a leap between genres, from epic to tragedy); the place in the source-text where you find a phrase, carries over its context with added meaning at the new location. --As we are rediscovering, & calling it “intertextuality” this time around.

What does this remind me of? The Tamarian language, of course, from Star Trek. (the original series). They invented a culture in which supposedly every utterance could only be a reference to their shared myth-system. That’s some fancy dancing, for sure. “Picard ultimately recognizes Dathon's words of ‘Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra’ as an allegory of two people fighting together against a common enemy” (Šekrst). That’s become rather a famous episode, by the way: “Shaka, where the walls fell” (or “Darmok”) itself is now a shorthand for this whole linguistic trope.

Any poet who uses ‘incarnadine’ is probably (if they know what they’re doing) invoking Macbeth. At least, you used to be able to assume your readers would pick up on it. Now…I don’t know…has everyone seen Star Wars? (I will never forget the day I realized a junior co-worker didn’t know who the Eagles were--.) But you can’t really skip from allusion to allusion very far like that. Even in Shakespeare. The best you can do is go as a Hippie at Halloween.

Not “Poe with his Raven, like Barnaby Rudge…”

Yeah, so what has this to do with sign & signifier? The games (some) poets play are but the aestheticized version of things we do with language in our everyday lives. Outside of signalling intent, there is a use of language which language wasn’t really invented for, & calls upon increasing ingenuity to be able to do it with any precision: description. Something I like to say to a student who is trying to write, is: “How would you describe this object, so that if you lost it & wanted it recovered at the police station” (bear with me) “someone else would know this is your particular object, & not anyone else’s?”

The self is a collection of such identifying marks.

I had a red Fiestaware saucer, since broken & glued back together, which for an exercise of my own invention I described in Philosophy class: applied Phenomenology. I think I filled two pages with details, as I began to notice more & more. This isn’t how we talk to each other, of course. “Wherefore art thou” (notice how its adoption misreads the adverb)—rather than “Juliet, at the balcony” (a pseudo-Darmokian trope used by several commentators)—doesn’t require a particular actress or a specific stage-set to be intelligible. Wherefore do we call an orange color “red” in Fiestaware?

Uranium, as I came to learn. The chain of association never ends with the madeleine. Orthogonal to this process, & taking place, really, prior to language, is insight. But it’s hard enough to try to describe that Fiestaware saucer with Tamarianesque literary allusions—the shape of “Friz me the Frisby”, the color of some “Autumn leaves”, & radioactive like “X-Men”—without having to come up with conventional epithets for something that has never been put into words before… The insight of Newton wasn’t really a story about Malus pumila, but the insight that the Moon, like any falling object, was falling in its orbit around the Earth.

The practice, though, of Philosophy (as it is practiced) is rather to construct discourse around what has already been said; to tweak an existing formulation, contradict it, or synthesize that with another previously-stated view. In other words, its thought only exists in the form of making reference to other statements. This is what I call the Problem of Reference. How do you make a new story in the context of existing stories? Do the Tamarians even have Philosophy?

Perhaps all along it has only been Homer’s job to sing; insight, like Cupid or lightning, picks its targets perversely. The apparatus that has grown to surround, explain, & ultimately neutralize these insights has a purposeful social existence, sometimes serves artists but often does not, & in the long run does not know one little pumpkin-hued dish from another.

"The idols imposed by words on the understanding are of two kinds. They are either names of things which do not exist (for as there are things left unnamed through lack of observation, so likewise are there names which result from fantastic suppositions and to which nothing in reality corresponds), or they are names of things which exist, but yet confused and ill-defined, and hastily and irregularly derived from realities." --Francis Bacon, The New Organon, Book 1

The problems, nevertheless, remain to be solved.

                             References

McGill, Scott. Virgil Recomposed: The Mythological and Secular Centos in Antiquity. Oxford University Press: 2005.

Mooney, Joseph J.  Hosidius Geta’s Tragedy “Medea”: a Virgilian cento. Latin text with metrical translation  with an outline of Roman Magic. Birmingham: Cornish Brothers, 1919.

Šekrst, Kristina. “Darmok and Jalad on the Internet: The Importance of Metaphors in Natural Languages and Natural Language Processing.” In: Star Trek: Essays Exploring the Final Frontier (edited by Emily Strand and Amy H. Sturgis). Jan 2022 preprint.