In the Beginning was the Word

I have dreamt about this line before. But it is no falsifying dream that is expressed in this phrase; rather, it is truth of a specific kind. It is Greek truth. En arche en ho logos, as they say.

And here I must make a key digression. In Latin, truth is veritas. The flavour of truth thus described is one involving 'verity' — truth that can be verified by faith or by epistemology. In Greek, truth is aletheia — 'that which is not lost', or 'that which is not forgotten'. It is a Holmesian kind of truth. [1]

The main thing is that truth is established by words. The use of words fixes structure, logos. The use of words creates a kind of baseline from which the degree of truth can be measured because the datum (Latin: 'that which is given') remains fixed. It is the reason why this blog is pretty sparse on graphics, pictures, videos — I think that they are less assessable for truth than words are.

Of course, that's a debatable idea. But again, the fact of debatability establishes the primacy of the word. You can debate in words, you can argue in words — it is harder (though not impossible) to argue with graphics, pictures and other visual material. Even in sign language, the signs stand for words.

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Note: [1] — in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of the Four, Sherlock Holmes says, "Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth." He says five chapters later, "How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?" This kind of truth is thus truth by elimination — aletheia.

The Dynamics of a City State

Moriarty, J. (1886). The Dynamics of an Asteroid. Self-published. Cited almost 300 times in surviving publications. Most famous citation is found in Watson (1914), The Valley of Fear, London: The Strand Magazine. [LINK]

I am aiming a good deal lower. I intend to write a paper on The Dynamics of a City-State, in which the theoretical city-state aims at an intended target and misses. Why does it do that? And how? What wonderful questions!

Selective Agriculture

The interesting thing about my new lease of life is that I get to choose the crops I cultivate, and earn quite a bit more with these boutique crops. The reason that I can charge more is that I genuinely feel I am putting specific personal effort into each of these plantings, and the quality shows.

In the past, I occasionally felt like a rice farmer. In the faraway days of my youth, we used to sing this song, which I think is possible Filipino in origin:

Planting rice is never fun,
Bent from morn till set of sun:
Cannot stand and cannot sit,
Cannot rest a little bit.

Of course, being naughty little primary school boys, we used to modify the line to take into account the possible discharge of natural fertiliser and other things like that. But the key point about feeling like a rice farmer is that in rice farming, you more or less have a huge acreage with what seems like little control over quality because it is such hard work and you have little time for reflection over individual stalks or plots.

In some ways, my previous life reminds me also of Auden's infamous poem, Roman Wall Blues. In that poem, he constructs simple doggerel which bears a huge burden of existential angst, much as any soldier on duty in a distant and inimical place must feel. It's not that I am ungrateful for comrades and shared striving and the wonderful manifold fruits of our labours over the years; I am quite happy to remember all those times.

The similarity lies in the feeling that there never seemed to be an end in sight. You just served tour after tour for years until you were invalided out, invalidated out, or otherwise reduced in validity. And at the end of it, like the Roman on Hadrian's Wall, you would like down on the turf in some more summery clime and look up at heaven's eye with your own single eye.

Currently though, I feel I have caught my second wind. Like the great detective Sherlock Holmes, a retirement to bee-keeping on the Sussex Downs is only the beginning of another story. This time, it is one that is largely off the books and into the mists of legend.