User:Klasovsky

Bespoken Foolery

Charles Churchill wrote a long poem back when good English royalists were afraid that the libertarian (sic) spark that had so recently ignited France would leap the channel. He didn't say what side he was on, just said he was a patriot and a poet and would say aloud what all around him feared to say. The oft repeated chorus of his poem goes "Should I be King and shall not all Gotham sing?" He was referencing his country, his fatherland, comparing it to the town of wise fools and foolish wisemen of English legend. Have you heard tales of Gotham? (Depending on your culture heritage you may know the place by another name- Chelm or Cockaigne, for instance.) Here's one story: once, the townspeople, in order to convince the King that they weren't responsible enough to be taxed, fastened their best cheeses to the axle rods of their carts and rode off to market.

Anyway. . . The year prior to the publication of Churchill's poem, saw a seminal edition of Mother Goose hit the street. It contained a new ditty among the many old favorites

Three wise men of Gotham

Went to sea in a bowl

And if the bowl had been stronger

My song had been longer.

There's no doubt in my mind that that those three men were meant to symbolize the continental spirit of revolution (embodied as Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality) spectacularly failing in an invasion of England. But where's my proof?

And I've no doubt that a few years later Washington Irving, spinning fond tales of the folly of New York's (even then) polyglot community in his magazine Salmagundi meant, when he began referring to the town as Gotham, to set himself up as the City's defacto king and poet laureate. He would make them see themselves. And laugh, if not sing.
New Yorkers- Gothamites- got the message. And they've prized both Mr. Irving and his chief fictional fool, the crusty historian Diedrich Knickerbocker, as their own ever since. I'm as sure as I can be of Irving's intent and just as sure that Churchill was the source of his inspiration. But who on Wikipedia will believe me without a certified historian's published opinion to second mine?

Pete the Royal Liberty Morris fool

To continue my line of heretical thinking (heretical in that conventional proof is lacking and my logic's fuzzy): Gotham itself is well prefigured in the Sufi tales of Mulla Nasrudin. The British Isles already had a living dervish tradition in the Celtic relic of Morris Dancing. So when Sufism came home with the Crusaders, its spiritual moralism was easily grafted in. Sound like a tremendous ideational leap, that? So what? I believe it, and if I get the chance (life is short) I just may make an effort to try prove my points in conventional ways.

The Aesop tale of the Goose and her Golden Eggs, has an elaborate Gotham version in which the town's single knife, kept communally in a tree stump on the town square, is never available when the townfolk decide- as they do periodically- to kill the bird and have her gold all at once. . . By the way, it seems crystal clear to my cataracted eyes that that fabulous fabelist Aesop was connected to the same tradition that gave root to Sufism. . .

"A person who seeks God through logical proof is like someone who searches for the sun with a lamp" the Sufis say to disparage scholasticism in their ranks.

Which is not to say that I want anything from Wikipedia but the facts.

The Relevance of the Fool

In the hard sciences every measurement is relevant, whether pointing towards a result or to a source of interference. In the Humanities too; every scrap of knowledge, wisdom or hearsay is not just admissible, it's necessary, properly speaking. Opinions must be registered as such; conjectures too; suppositions, theories, hypothesis all have their places; these are tools of the careful researcher, though using and sorting through the chain of implications might seem to make life more complex. Likewise, making the effort to understand whence arose conventional wisdom (however flawed), is difficult. But holy. To the open mind, leaping to conclusions is anathema; while paradoxically following hunches is de rigueur; to exclude evidence due to prejudice is perhaps the only unforgivable sin.

Similarly, to state categorically that one understands the impetus of statements from foreign cultures is absurd; it defines prejudice; how long has it taken anthropologists to achieve the methodology needed to apply a proper measure of disinterest to their work? We need to continually refine our calculations of distance between ourselves and what are considered merely subcultures or sub-genres of fields we have familiarity with. Problems with observers changing what they observe are solvable, even in retrospect; but that's cutting edge, one percent stuff, and may always be.

We can now measure a quantum's spin without disturbing its location or speed; impute planets to stars based on the smallest inconsistencies of observation. In historical research I reckon that something equivalent is possible. Examine every word of a novel or a play, ride your theories a while and then discard them. Change horses as often as you see fit, in stream or out. Research well, I command thee, every association that the author might have made. In the end you will have a cross-sectional snapshot of both the conscious and the unconscious mind of your subject; you will be on the way to grasping the zeitgeist under which the work was done.

We examine the fruits of consciousness with the mind. That's like taking a magnetic screwdriver to an iron clockworks.
It's well-neigh impossible to get one's work into the correct time zone without techniques for demagnetizing or other forms of compensation at hand.

The above noted Sufi distrust of scholars researching religion has a corollary in Wikipedia's set of guidelines. Disinterest is mandated both in true spirituality (one looks for a higher agency's will to supplant the effects of one's own, often insidious ego) and in research, as well. Yet replacing opinion with scientific method demands more than a set of what amounts to philosophical rules. Too often the sciences become the refuge of innocents who are bright enough to see the inconsistencies of religious dogma who yet lack the- shall we say- humanity? to fully grasp the important role faith plays in unstructured lives, and so fall prey to the worship of another form of dogma.

Perhaps that's inescapable. But hidden among the other rule of Wiki writing, there's this Notability Requirement thingy that really calls in the nutters. Might-could act as shunt, diverting fanatic types from other areas of the Wiki world where they might cause real damage. But future historians are for sure being deprived of a boatload of observational data.

Alright, alright! I confess to harboring an Inclusionist bias.

Klasovsky (talk) 22:16, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

My (foolish) Wikipedia Past, part 1

Visconti-Sforza tarot deck. The Devil card is a 20th-century replacement of the card missing from the original 15th-century deck

In the penultimate Crusade [1396 C.E.], the Alexandrian, Viennese and Cypriot mercenaries destroyed mosques, synagogues and Coptic churches; they looted the library; and they gathered up some 5,000 slaves for resale to the feudal Lords of Europe; and then quick as Jack Sprat the conquering armies returned back home. It is speculated that Tarot decks were among the assorted knickknacks the invaders carried away. We know that not long afterwards, wealthy Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan and his successor Francesco Sforza commissioned 15 hand painted decks of highest quality, replete with gold leaf. Many of these cards have been preserved, but curiously time seems to have swallowed up all of the extant Devils and Lightning Struck Towers. A replica deck, with historically sound replacements for the missing cards, has recently been produced. And yet the curiously captioned illustration seen here on the right will be found today on the Visconti-Sforza Tarot Deck Wikipedia page.

Note that there is no Devil card in the picture; it appears to have been edited out.

The U.S. company that produced the deck would doubtless appreciate the free advertising an online display of their Devil would engender. I'm sure it was a most carefully researched project. But, no, there are rules: this would fall under the entirely reasonable strictures concerning copyrighted images. There are minions here to remind you of the rules; minions myriad; but there is none among these who is assigned to thinking laterally; not one with an eye out for the elegant solution. This's the sort of thing that drives me crazy about Wikipedia. But the poetry of that blank space remains; and its no little compensation. The bureaucratic beanstalk giant lurches about, trying not to step on anybody while setting its house in order. Doing a little dance of frustration, it manages to express its ineptitude, its ambition and, at one and the same time, the essence of the music playing in the background (by which I mean the mystery at hand: what the devil has become of that Devil?): it's hard not to feel a little fondness for the big-hearted lunk.

Maybe it's time for me to quit harping on Wikipedia's weak points and inconsistencies and take a look at my own insufficiencies. After all they are conveniently close at hand, available for the world (and me) to see and study on the talk tab of this my user page.

What you'll see there are relics of a younger me. Like others I had my own ideas about what Wikipedia could be. I had an idealistic, maybe even mystical vision: a great upwelling of knowledge and brotherhood was beginning. Surely I had a role to play. But, confounding matters, I was profoundly, horribly lazy; and arrogant to boot.

In the Tarot The Fool (The Holy Fool) is depicted as a vagabond with his satchel on a stick and his head in the clouds. He strides heedlessly along the edge of an abyss.

Along similar lines of symbolic thought, Erasmus, railing, in his Adagia[1500], against the unchristian behavior of warrior priests, reported a Roman creation myth he'd lately stumbled on:

"Jupiter gives to each of us, the Poet says, two wallets,
the one filled with the errors of our neighbors, the other with our own.
That containing the errors of our neighbors, hangs to our breasts,
but that filled with our own, rests on our backs."

I've been critical of Wikipedia's bureaucratic fumbling, for sure. But my own work here has ranged from spotty to totally lame.

Klasovsky (talk) 09:22, 3 March 2014 (UTC)