[...]ce of a fixed point of view that is external to what is reproduced” (--no--> it is about saying what you say attached to a temporary fixed point [for example an identity], in order to be able to be proven wrong)


categorical apodictic apparatus
[category = intrinsic concepts]


content is (not?) always conformist (<-- Julia was never)

Alex: imperium of true thinking --> capture, seizure, binding, constituting the efficacy of a foundation (= myth) ==> [*]logos: sanction of a ground

modern state: *realized reason*, the rational and reasonable organization of a community
-what are the exchanges that take place between the State and reason
modern state reason --> “the more you obey, the more you will be master” (for you will be only obeying pure reason) --> philosophy assigned itself the role of ground

common sense: the unity of all faculties at center

(in the archaic model imperial State:) poet = image trainer =/= (toady's) artist: (Deleuzian) *private thinker* (making counterthought, destroy images) =/= public professor
-problem with private thinker is that it exaggerates interiority when it is a question of outside thought --> the question of how **to place the thought in an immediate relation with the outside, with the forces of the outside** (to make thought a war machine?)

(Alex in search of) maxim =/= aphorism (always awaits its meaning from a new external force, a final force that utilizes it) <-- my interest

(?which) image inspired by State apparatus

[*]method: the striated space of the cogitatio universalis ==> path (=/= bridge)

thought ~= vampire (has no image)

(in the smooth space of Zen) the arrow does not go from one point to another but is taken up at any point, to be sent to any other point, and tends to permute with the archer and the target (#my bow and arrow --> it takes no aim but hopes the arrow will stick somewhere)
-whenever a “thinker” shoots an arrow, there is a man of the State, a shadow or an image of a man of the State, that counsels and admonishes him, and wants to assign him a target or aim (#my bow and arrow joke @apass)

pathetic texts: thought becomes pathos (=/= logos =/= mythos)


(a lot of poetry today is like this:)
(an antidialogue between brother and sister:) one *speaks before knowing* while the other *relays before having understood*
--> the necessity of not having control over language ~ (Chloe:) the necessity of being a foreigner in one's own tongue
--> “bring something incomprehensible into the world” --> in the form of exteriority
--> the becoming woman of the thinker ~ the becoming thought of the woman
--> (Chloe =) the Gemüt [feeling, heart, soul, mind] that refuses to be controlled ==forms==> a war machine : a thought grappling with exterior forces instead of being gathered up in an interior form
--> operating by relay =/= forming an image @Rob--> a thought that appeals to government ministry
--> event-thought =/= subject-thought
--> problem-thought =/= essence-thought, theorem


striating of mental space =/= Sina's textures and lectures

@Pierre: is horizon a striation?
Deleuze and Guattari: a horizonless milieu --> smooth space

the true name of race: bastard, mixed-blood
-a race is defined not by its purity but rather by the impurity conferred upon it by a system of domination


[(aspects of) war machine or] machine:
•spatiogeographic
•arithmatic
•affective


principle =/= consequence
-in nomads life what is a principle and what is only a consequence?
{migrant --> goes principally}=/={nomad --> goes as a consequence}
{(sedentary) road --> parcel out a closed space to people}=/={(nomadic) trajectory --> distributes people or animals in an open space, indifinite and noncommunicating}


(space) in the manner of a vortex

migrant leaves behind a milieu that has become amorphous or hostile

forest and house --> both striated?
pigs --> pragmatism or expertise

-the pigs story might not predict the coming of the nomad wolf, but it constitutes the principles of architecture for which an incoming is striated. striated space is the result of the pigs story

عرفان همیشه بیابانی است؟
does mysticism always requires deprivation of life? mysticism ~=? symbolism

[*]godzilla: dramatization of where the mountain recedes, of the earth deterritorializing itself ==> providing the nomad with a territory
*vectors of deterritorialization and local operations* that:
•wolf adds to the forest
•godzilla adds to Tokio
•

#video concept
in tiktok comedy style, a group of iranians (talking Farsi, all acted by one person?) are personifying a govermental response to a godzilla who is roaming in the city.

localized =/= delimited

[the spot where the forest recedes] or the desert advances
گرگ در جنگل / آل در بیابان

.... .\ ____ _
  ... \_____
. .... \ __ __
.... . \ ____
. ...\ _ ___ _


assigned direction =/= direction of the crossing

(for Deleuze and Guattari) religion: a technique of converting the absolute, making the absolute appear in a particular place --> the sacred place of religion is fundamentally a center that repels the *obscure nomos*[= Bayazid بایزید]


vagabond monotheism

Sascha's relation to the absolute through the space of the machine
electrically tampered ~= electrically tamed

از چادر نشین به هجرت reterritorialization of the spiritual ==> همدستی مهاجر با چادر نشین ==> war machine

/*[khawarij خوارج during the first fitna فتنه اول --> arbitration =/= war machine in which anyone can be Imam]


...when religion becomes a war machine (==> absolute deterritorialization) --> Isis
...a society reduced to the military enterprise --> Avengers
...gravitational verticals --> forest
...generalized parallels --> agriculture


three little pigs can be nomads? --> creating the house and then leave it (as an empty stronghold)


animal raising for the most part outside the control of sedentaries

orient: absence of State-form (!)
various components plied by escape vectors ==> despotic formation (in orient)

oriental State (sheltered in striated space) =/= nomad war machine

revolution --western--> transformation of the State
revolution --eastern--> abolition of the State

the empires of the orient, africa, america run against wide-open smooth spaces that penetrate them and maintain gaps between their component (*the nomos does not become countryside*, the countryside does not communicate with the town, large-scale animal raising is the affair of the nomads, etc.) =/= Black Panther's fantasy of the african State

psychoanalysis of the dream of the State ? and its relation to its reality

(to establish) a zone of rights over an entire exterior --> rage & innocence

Neon Genesis Evangelion anime series --> war machine striated final merged in a cyber-flux with its human counterpart --> nature dominated (battle to occupy the smooth space)

[what now people want in Iran: not the smooth space a deterritorializing State, rather:]
capture of flows
(need for) fixed paths
well-defined directions --> restrict speed, regulate circulation, relativized movement
--> polics = management of the public ways =/= fluidity of messages and masses

silk road...

Iran State = smooth + striated

State translates: “moving bodies” --to--> “moved bodies”

” ” --> ” “
Star Trek transportation system
sedentary kind of tey-ol-arz طی الارض

what homeless/drunk people do in cities --> reconstitution of a smooth space = a manner of being in space as though it were smooth

***rebellious space is always smooth space***

virtual space is neither striated nor smooth space

multiplication of relative movements ==> smooth space --> the sea becomes the place of the ‘fleet in being’ --> nomadism accompanying a worldwide war machine
@Jassem's rebellious nature =/= Pierre's staying with the striated space (with the trouble, with the institution, )

decimal grouping --> comes from the nomads

three major types of organization:
1. lineal
2. territorial
3. numerical

number ==> lineage

spatium (differentiated space with depth and levels) =/= extensio (immanent center, divisible homologous parts, and symmetrical and reversible relations)


[title]
numbering of numbers

census
taxation
election

(Deleuze and Guattari are wrong about numbers serving to gain mastery over matter --✕--> Verran's work on number in Africa)

State = a teritorial principle (of deterritorialization that links the number to metric magnitudes) --D+G--> “we don't believe that the conditions of independence or autonomy of the number can be found in the State (--> Deleuze and Guattari leftist tendency to purity the State)

(operating war machine -->) numbering number : autonomous arithmetic organization

*numbers appear as soon as one distribute something in space =/= distribution of space (that is more the State's business)*
independence of the number in relation to space --> concrete nature of smooth space
--> number: a means of moving =/= means of counting

*middle ages curse sheets and taxa:
•geometry of smooth space
•a minor, operative geometry
=? [*]ajayebnameh: geometry of the trait between the rumers of the world, senses, and writing

vector --> directional number =/= dimentional number =/=? metric number

directions are everywhere

rhythmic =/= harmonic (--> setar / is my whole work about harmonic? horror-nic)

order of displacement

concentration-camp society: ‘people = deterritorialized numbers’ (--> fantasy of full despotism in The Handmaid's Tale)

**the question is not one of good or bad but of specificity** (<-- when i say who what artists say could have a chance of being disputed)

complex = articulated

the Roman legion was a number made up of numbers, articulated in such a way that the segments become mobile, and the figures geometrical, changing, transformational


logistics: the art of external relations

Genghis Khan --> composition of the steppe
Moses --> composition of the desert


nomads as child stealers


(commissars, diplomats, spies, strategists, logisticians) cannot be explained away as a “whim of the sultan”

special numerical body

slave-infidel-foreigner is the one who becomes a soldier and believer while remaining deterritorialized in relation to the lineages and the State --> نظام‌الملک سیاست‌نامه

*nomads have no history, they only have geometry*

Iron Man's technological definition: “weapon (destroying people) =/= tool (producing goods)”

weapon --> projection, anything that throws or is thrown
@Pierre *the notion of “problem” is related to the war machine*

introjective: preparing a matter from a distance, in order to bring it to a state of equilibrium or to appropriate it for a form of interiority
(projection: appropriate it for a form of exteriority)


#bow and arrow --> hunt (when speed is associated primarily with the hunted animal) =/= war (speed is an independent variable)
prey =/= enemy
prey =/= motor
(#bow and arrow does --> *abstracts the idea of motor and applying it to itself* =/= generalize the idea of prey by applying it to the enemy)

the economy of hunted animal


ecosystem situated at the origin --> garden of eden / heaven
ecosystem situated at the end --> apocalypse / end-time

discovery of a projecting and projectile system ==> war machine

war machine
breeding + training
insitutes an entire economy of violence
--> *a way of making violence durable*



two ideal models motor:
work =/= free action
•(let's) work: tool meets resistance
•free action: operates only upon the mobile body itself, is not consumed in its effect(?), continues from one moment to the next [--> style of artistic research]. the way in which the elements of the body escape gravitation to occupy absolutely a nonpunctuated space

weapon is moving
tool is moved
tool presupposes work, tool does not define work

***the principle behind all technology is to demonstrate that a technical element remains abstract***, remains entirely undetermined --> as long as one does not relate it to an assemblage it presupposes

tool
-one cannot speak of weapons or tools before defining the constituent assemblages they presuppose and enter into @OSP
the tool is essentially tied to a gensis, a displacement, and an expenditure of force (whose laws reside in work) =/= weapon concerns only the exercise or manifestation of force in space and time (in conformity with free action)

when speed added to displacement ==> ?

tools & weapons = consequences ~/=? causes


the morning star and the battle-axes

variable assemblages of human, animal, and thing

*assemblage*: (passional) compositions of desire[=/= natural determination, spontaneous determination] --D+G--> there is no desire, but assembling/assembled desire
assemblage ==(bring into play)==> [*]passion: effectuations of desire that differ according to the assemblage [=/= Germany]
man-animal-weapon
man-horse-bow
assemblage of speed
...

(what Game of Thrones TV series missed:) military of men --> homosexual eros replaces the zoosexual eros of horesman [--> اسب امام حسین]

State ==>{(training of) worker --to--> (apprenticeship of) soldier}

{affect: active discharge of emotion --> projectile ~ weapon}=/={feeling: displaced, retarded, resisting emotion --> introceptive ~ tool}


martial arts: the not-doing of the warrior ~ the undoing of the subject
effectuated in the void (=/= nothingness)


form-matter =/= motif-support
(the support is as mobile as the motif)


goldsmith's and silversmith's is the barbarian art par excellence


picto-ideographic

short war
live messages

[text that is] ornamental (a way of encoding) =/= scriptural (according to a sacred writing)


tools
weapons
signs
jewellery

jewellery/sign --> expression
model --> free action / work
direction --> projection / introception (#bow and arrow)


(for Deleuze and Guattari:) ***architecture and cooking have an affinity with the State =/= music and drugs have differential traits --> on the side of the nomadic war machine


schizophrenic taste for the tool that moves it away from work and towards free action --> a schizophrenic taste for the weapon that turns it into a means for peace (<-- i prefer not to do this)

everything is ambiguous

rebel: a transitional figure of worker-solder (drawing the worker, on the one hand, and the soldier, on the other), a shared line of flight: “i seek a weapon & i am looking for a tool”
‘line of flight’: communication with smooth space

my work on ajayeb: to figure a transhistorical assemblage (that is untimely =/= eternal =/= historical) ==> encounter the myth anew =/= demystification: re-conquer the myth


the empire
•communicates with
•conquer
•integrates with


communication (of secret) --?--> adaptation, propagation


saber =/= sword

the flow of matter-movement
conveying singularities and traints of expression

assemblage --differentiates--> phyla (major taxonomic class) ~= flow ==> division into many different phylas + introducing selective discontinuities


technological vitalism

*refract differentiates*, retains, selects, draws together, causes to converge, invents

region of vague and material essences --> essences that are vagabond yet rigorous ==> situate fuzzy aggregates =/= fixed distinct and formed essences

corporeality = formed and perceived thinghood
•inseparable from processes of transformation
•inseparable from expressive qualities

vague = intermediary --> autonomous, stretching itself between things and thoughts --establish--> new relations (--> this is what Manning has adopted from Deleuze and Guattari)

variable intense affects

topological =/= geometrical

hylomorphic model =/= active and affective... (matter-flow can only be followed)
hylomorphic: imposing a form upon matter =/= materiality possessing a nomos : material traits of expression constituting affects (for example surrendering to the wood, then following where it leads by connecting operations to a materiality...)
-the critique of the hylomorphic schema is based on the existence between form and matter, of a zone of medium and intermediary dimension, of energetic... [and what about digital technology?]--> we need more artisan (follows the matter) =/= artist (invents/breaks the matter)
*artisan* --> one who is determined in such a way as to follow a flow of matter, of *machinic phylum* (@OSP, for example metallurgist = one who works inside the mold, the consciousness of thought of the matter-flow + metal the correlate of this consciousness)
[follow a flow of matter = to itinerate, to ambulate]
artisan =/= farmer
artisan =/= animal raiser
[*]artisan: take up craft activity + follow the matter-flow as pure productivity

continous development of form, chromaticism --> a form proper to matter [-->? not in middle east: metaphysics --> metallurgist =/= metamorphosist poet --> chaotic =/= harmonic, nomadic]

not everything is metal, but metal is everywhere (--> what would X-Men say about this)

--D+G--> *thought is born more from metal than from stone*(!!)
metallurgy is minor science, vague science, phenomenology of matter

metal is neither a thing not an organism, but a *body without organs*
(on the symbolic value of metal and its correspondence with an organic soul but on the immanent power of corporeality)


smiths (Sina, OSP?)
their space is neither the striated space of the sedentary nor the smooth space of the nomad (--> my room and computer desktop) --> #tent, in the manner of a cave or a hole
--> *they are cave dwellers not by nature by by artistry and need*
internal itinerancy, their vague essences ==> their relation to others
--> *smith* [follows the flow of matter ==> (surplus value:) ‘resist the State’, Tamar Yaen Pierre Sina Goda]
=/= *migrant* [existence depends upon and constrained by the logic of the State (with its boundaries and borders) ==> (surplus value:) ‘residual gold in the ruins’, Hoda Sana Rui Flavio Quinsy Elen]
=/= *nomad* [occupies and inhabits smooth space beyond or bellow the State ==> (surplus value:) ‘alternative’, Deborah Xiri Leo Isabel Aela Agnes]
=/= *pastoral transhuman* [rotates through a circuit ==> (surplus value:) ‘erotic inclusivity']


vital forms of nonorganic life

[title]
your strength and your nothingness

transpierce =/= scaling
excavate =/= striating

...vagabond sign of itinerancy سيارى

from hole to hole
a line of variation

***the hybrid metallurgist, a weapon- and toolmaker, communicates with the sedentaries and with the nomads at the same time***

phylum:
--connected-to--> nomad space
--conjugates-with--> sedentary space

(we have both:)
*war machine*:
•opening
•rhizome
•gaps
•detours
•holes
•stems
=/=
*state apparatus*:
•capture phylum
•play the lines of flight
•into code
•into form


war machine collides with States and cities (forces of striation) ==> war

Deleuze and Guattari ask:
-how will the State appropriate the war machine?
(appropriate: subordinates it to its political aims)

from encasement قفسه --to--> (forms of) appropriation تصاحب

Genghis Khan and his followers were able to hold out for a long time by partially integrating themselves into the conquered empires, while at the same time maintaining a smooth space on the steppes to which the imperial centers were subordinated

Timur who constructed a fantastic war machine turned back against the nomads, but who, by that very fact, was obliged to erect a State apparatus all the heavier and more unproductive since it existed only as the empty form of appropriation of that machine


the peace of terror or survival
-the postfascist figure that takes peace as its object directly
-we have seen war machine assign its objective a peace still more terrifying than fascist death
*the unspecified enemy* we have seen it put its counterguerrilla elements into place


two poles of war machine:
1. it takes war for its object and forms a line of destruction prolongable to the limits of the universe
2. when it, with infinitely lower qualities, has as its object not war but the drawing of a *creative line of flight* (the composition of a smooth space and of the movement of people in that space)

an ideological, scientific, or artistic movement can be a potential war machine, to the precise extent to which it draws, in relation to aphylum, a plane of consistency, a creative line of flight, a smooth space of displacement

...................................

0.99993

Daston history of reason
Daston asking: how reason became rationality?

rationality (~= universal calculus of) =/= reasoning

•(a more) ancient ideal --> reasoning [with recourse to the faculty of judgement]
•modern ideal --> (cold war) rationality: a finite well-defined set of rules that can be applied unambiguously in specified settings without recourse to the faculty of judgement

cold war: crystalline + generality + conclusivess could cope with a world on the brink
--> algorithmic rules as the core of rationality
--> sacrifice of [precious to philosophers] ‘insight’ and ‘understanding’ ascpects of reason
--> automatic: you don't need to understand them to execute them

*the posiblity of a mechanical mind*

Turing's [*]programming: constructing instruction tables

(1794 early French revolution) universal school for future French citizen with arithmetic [3 + 4 = 7] at its core --teach-> “exactitude of the mind” --> children are going to learn:
•the meaning of self evidence [of arithmetic propositions]
•the meaning of justified belief
•formation of ideas
•judgement
•reasoning
}--foundation--> quanitative science of a human realm

first reliable calculator --> 1850

rationality عقلانيت
•history of ever more sophisticated mechanical computers
•how rules themselves became increasingly identified with algorithms
•how algorithms became increasingly identified with mindlessness

Kant --> science as mechanical skill that can be mastered by diligence and determinate rules
tacit knowledge: a manul labor [styles of knowing] that cannot be captured by algorithms

---> go to Encyclopedie (Diderot)...

deskilling calculation ==> economic rationality (economic rationalization): you take the task, decompose it into simplest possible steps, you divide the labor, you hire the least skilled and cheapest labor possible ==Babbage==> increase the efficiency and the costs

•game theory
•rational choice theory


(memory + understanding + judgement + imagination)
*judgement (Daston) and imagination (Sina) are integral to the exercise of reason*

reason in rationality: algorithmic rule governed =/=
•passions اشتياق تعصب
•fantasy وسواس
•sloppy thinking درهم وبرهم
•ignorance بى خبرى
•superstition خرافه
•self-deception خود فريبى


the human factor
there is something about human that has always been in odds with reason

Nozick (~ Terminator) --> the rules of procedures that constitute rationality would be valid, would be efficacious, but algorithmic. executed by machine, but opaque to human understanding
~ Wittgenstein --> to follow a rule: a practice taught by example =/= precept
}--> *to understand rules in an algorithmic sense* =/= model, maxim, tacit knowledge


Daston --> there is no simple way, in which historical context determines the form and content of the thinkable. but (as in the case of algorithmic rules and cold war rationality) historical circumstances do light up some parts of the intellectual landscape and darken others

our current understanding of what it means to be rational owes a great deal to the power of place and time
•for Kant: judgement = highest faculties =/= for modern (us) judgement is problematic


...................................

[the horror of the contemporary German art:] to deliberate: کنکاش سنجیده و عمدی =/= Janina
(art of [ironic] deliberation =/= chaotic venture, Sina's lecture-performances)
deliberation: thinking then doing it =/= doing then thinking about what you have done (~= communication, intimacy)

...................................

metaphysics of natural law

Daston's rigor: trying to understand why is it so persistant (almost irresistible) that we **extract social and moral norms from nature** (rather than jumping up saying that it is a doomed idea)
[--> got to fable; ikhvano safa court of animals; panchatantra Kelile Demne]
•to merge natural and social orders together
•to make nature meaningful
•to invoke nature to buttress human values of: true, good, beautiful
•

devil = collective human imagination of chaos

formless and lawless
land of no promises
past is no guide to the future
at the mercy of chance

the axiom of modern thought: society =/= nature [of which trespassings are rife]

[#fable]
to extract some sort of politics from:
•beehive
•physics of liver
•evolutionary theory
•organic specialization [--Aristotle--> slavery]
•

1. how conceptions of natural order sustains specific norms & the model of any kind of norm <-- historical + empirical
2. appeal to nature capture something profound about values in general regardless of their specific context <-- philosophical

(the human) impulse to *make nature meaningful* --> psychological + epistemological + ethical necessity


(1)
(specific) [*]nature: the ontological identity card : that which makes a particular thing what it is (what makes skwerl a skwerl)
the idea of ***fixed natural kind ==inspire==> the ideal of justice***
--> the idea of organic specialization [organ: ‘tool’ in greek; for Aristotle: “injustice = violation of specialization” (of citizen's tools or honors) <-- an order of nature]

rose wanna be skwerl ---> go to bestiary
“good consist in each being striving to be the best of its kind not the best of all”

(2)
[*]nature: the will of God (~ edict of God) --Augustine--> “sodomy = crime against nature (~ against God: the author of nature)” [--> unnatural =/= sacrilege توهين به مقدسات]
•a Roman custom (and a Roman intuition): when you are in a place you try to adapt to the local ways of doing things <-- (with Augustine) we are preserved in a proverb [#integration] --grant--> nature with supreme authority as God's proxy


seeking norms in nature --Daston-->
•is this (examples) why we should stop it (at best nature authority is borrowed whether overtly from God or covertly from social conventions ==> it is redundent and we don't need it)
•it is a dangerous weapon in the arsenal of the most repressive and aggressive elements of society

content of norms =/= [*]normativity: a justificatoin that gives any and all norms their force : the quality of telling us what should be (=/= describing how things actually are)

“the starry heavens above ~/= the moral law within” --> Kant's awe: the regularity (of both human law and natural law)
حيرت awe [<==evoke== the cosmic: all encompassing order & exquisitely designed ornament] =/= horror [<==evoke== the unnatural (ajayeb)]

**the recognition of an order** --Daston--> the key to all kinds of norms (--> awe = wonder + fear + respect)


(ancient greek cosmopolitan traverler ethnographer) Herodotus's fable of ‘custom is king of all’ <-- داریوش perian king Darius's anthropological experiment: Greeks won't eat their father's dead body, they burn it =/= Indians won't burn their father's dead body, they eat it

•chaos: nature without order
•anarchy: society without order
}--> past is no guide to present and future : *there are no regularities (of human promises or natural cycles) to support either justice or knowledge*


why duplicate the moral order with an analogical natural order?
why turn to nature for your raw materials (to construct moral order for themselves)?
--> ...

are we now in the position to reclaim norms from nature?
--> yes <== nature exemplifies so many different kinds of order:
•order of the stars and plant =/= order of weather
•order of specific natures =/= order of universal natural laws
•order of local ecologies =/= order of cosmological unities of gravitation
•
which nature? --> any order of nature can be countered with examples of another order equally natural }--Daston--> [*]nature: repository (or wunderkammer) of all imaginable orders****

terror + randomness --> most effective weapon of dictators (you never know when it strikes again)
-horror of Kafka's bureaucracy: negation of regularity, destruction of order, institutionalized anarchy
-one of the most dehumanizing experiences: being completely subject to the will of another (~ slavery) [--> this is the most pleasurable experience in sex and sado masochism]

•nature never insults (its inhumanity)
•nature provides the raw material for meaning <-- *because we are embodied organisms we must incarnate our orders* (~ we must find a way to display them to ourselves)
•animals can feel terror, but only humans can feel horror: the emotion that registers a deep disruption of an order (no matter what kind, a two-headed baby [natural monster] or a mother who kills her two babies [moral monster])


...................................

[title]
itchy eyes

...................................

16th and 17th centuries
times of extraordinary religious, economic, and intellectual upheaval (Europe was deluged by novelties of all kinds: birds of paradise, armadillos, anomalies: solar eclipse, comet, narwhal tusk, etc.)
(Daston >) Bacon [standing on an extremely unstable scientific ground] used monsters and marvels (as a sort of intellectual hygiene) to jolt people out of their assumptions about the natural world
=/= Aristotelian natural philosophy
--> anomaly took center stage of scientific explanations ~= art's investment in the exceptional
==> curiosity becomes a virtue =/= vice
•nature is allowed to joke
•nature has the freedom to experiment =/= God
--> ended by:
•18th century's *division of labor*
•19th century's *institution of science*

(two-headed cat's) deformations --> terrifying + electrifying
[*]bestiary = Telegram media from God:
•sign of end
•sign of fecundity, creativity, variety of nature

.../horror/wonder/horror/wonder/horror/wonder/...

“everyone was trafficking in marvels in the 17th century”
Daston

... --> premodern sci --> age of wonder --> modern science --> ...

cabinets of curiosity
(Daston's) chambers of wonders
•to overwhelm you
•to impress the ambassador


for Aristotle, philosophy starts with wonder, but you make it disappear as soon as possible (“wonder = sign of ignorance” of the unlettered and illiterate)

genre of natural history involving the marvels of insects --> domesticate the emotion of wonder for things we can explain

Daston =/= (early 20th century) morose and elegiac discourse about the disenchantment of the world

...................................

pessimism ~= realism
(optimism ~= idealism)

...................................

(to move from) eternal truths --to--> eternal archives
(an aesthetic:) archival monuments

despite computer's hype and undeniable capacity and flexibility of computerize databases, the practices of collecting, inventorying, describing, image-making, collating, and publishing have remaining stable since the monumental projects of 19th century: corpus inscriptionum latinarum, carte du ciel, botanical gardens, etc. --> archival projects

...................................

popular and learned interest in monsters

(in the 16th century & 17th century Baconian scientific programm:) treatments of nature and natural history must have included (with rigorous selection) monsters (~ aberrations in the natural order: new, rare, and unusual nature, both exotic & domestic)
[*]nature: an ingenious craftsman --> [*]monster: nature's most artful work (--> they bridged the natural & the artificial)
•corresponded to the activities of nature =/= types of subject matter, methods of investigation
•interest in irregularities (=/= end of 17th century interest in nature's uniformity and order)
•

Lazarus exhibition, the parasitic twin (the italian conjoined twins who toured freak shows in 17th century europe)

(Daston --> a case study of) the changing relationship between popular & learned culture

legal status of monsters
infanticide in antiquity


earlier tradition of interest in monster:
•Aristotle --> Albertus Magnus
•divine sign --> Cicero, Augustine, Isidore of Sevill
•cosmographical & anthropologic --> Solinus


monsters in a context of a whole natural phenomen (bestiary):
earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, celestial apparitions, strange rains (of blood), stones, and miscellanea

(monsters --> shift from) signs of God's wrat --to--> signs of nature's fertility
(by the end of 17th century) --to--> comparative anatomy and embryology (teratology)
(from) اعجوبه prodigy --to--> examples of medical pathology

*peasant and professional had participated to a significant extent in a shared culture of intellectual and religious interest* --✕-->{
(literate culture evolved far more rapidly ==> sharpening of social boundaries of)
city dwellers =/= peasants
urban literate elite =/= unlettered day laboure
--> for the educated layman: (religious associations of) monsters = another manifestation of popular ignorance and superstition --fostering--> uncritical wonder =/= sober investigation of natural cause


prodigy --> contrary to nature --> attributable directly to God (divine displeasure)
-the sunne shal suddenly shine againe in the night, and the moone thre times a day. blood shal drop out of the wood, and the stone shal give his voyce [...] There shalbe a confusion in many places, and the fyre shal oft breake forthe, and the wilde beastes shal change their places, and menstruous women shal beare monstres[...]

•monstrum = prodigium ==> monstrat [monstro: i wonder --> i indict --> i teach, demonstrate] = god's will
•apocalyptic association --> world reformation, the overthrow of the wicked --> vindication of god's elect

(bestiaries were a lot commentaries)

various bestial parts...

bestial vices and errors (of...)

ephemeral literature
displayed and recited publicly
characteristically illustrated
appeal through spoken word & image to the illiterate


Pierre Boaistuau [<== Peucer, Lycosthenes, Swiss surgeon Jakob Rueff, naturalist Konrad Gesner, Pierre Belon]
histoire tragique
histoire prodigieuse (monster literature, bestiary?)
•two-headed woman seen in Bavaria in 1541
•three-legged Siamese twins from 1552
•calf without forelegs reported in 1556
•celebrated monster of Cracow
•
ghoulish tone, religious didacticism, erudite آموزنده, monsters as polemical weapons
“nature's wonder?” --> to “discovre the secret judgment and scourge of the ire of God”

The Scripture sayth, before the ende
Of all thinges shall appeare,
God will wounders straunge thinges send,
As some is sene this yeare.
The selye infantes, voyde of shape,
The calues and pygges so straunge,
With other mo of suche mishape,
Declareth this worldes chaunge.


...monsters began to lose their religious resonance
it was unlawful to “delight” in the undesirable
portentous meaning of monster

(from) fear --to--> delight
(from) prodigy --to--> wonder
(from) sermon --to--> table-talk
(from) horrible, terrible, effrayable, espouventable --to--> strange, wonderful, merveilleux (marvelous جالب)
(from) final cause --to--> proximate cause (physical explanations and the natural order)
}==> nature began to assume the role of an autonomous entity with a will (and sense of humour of her own) ~~> natural wonder



wonder literature ([lavishly illustrated bestiary, cosmography, travel literature, geological curiosa, herbal and astrological lore,] of later 16th and 17th century Daston) --> secularization of an interest in (monsters as) prodigies
--part-of--> the great body of common culture
--affinity--> popular 16th century genre of diverses lefons (selections from famous authors)

catalogues of strange instances or hidden properties of animals, vegetables and mineral
(middle class culture in elizabethan england)

prodigies denuded of their supernatural aura & (presented) to surprise and entertain the reader =/= to acquaint the reader with imminent apocalypse and judgeme

Certaine Secrete Wonders of Nature

portentous events بد شگون

(crocodiles) to be granted honorary monstrous status by virtue of their rarit

many will reade them [monsters], heare them and haue profit by them, that otherwise whould neuer haue knowen them. For many (I suppose) will buye this Booke for the things whereto they are affectioned, that neuer coulde or would have bought, or looked on the bookes, wherein all they are. -Lupton

common and popular forms of escapist literature: *travel books* and *chivalric romanc*
(--> don Quixote)
monstrous races (men with a single giant foot, or huge ears, or their faces on their chests, giants and dwarfs)

medically oriented monster literature

[Daston:] Pare was forced to eliminate a section on lesbianism, with a graphic description of the female genitals, before including Des monstres in later editions of his collected work


A Helpe to Memorie and Discourse (of Wonders, Foreign and Domestic)
*the passages and occurrences of the world* #ajayeb
•the creatures thereof
•the casualties therein

little-known properties of... (wine and water, fish, dogs, cuckolds, hunchbacks and monsters)

popular ignorance
solitary efforts of the professional scholar
culture of the educated layman (lawyer, businessman, government official, and their wives and daughters)

[change in sensibility (&-=>? change in interpretation)]
beginning of the withdrawal of the educated classes from more popular culture
@Goda

monsters (familiar canon of prodigies) became a subject of great fashion and not vulgar

(Daston tracing how) “in the wonder literature, then, monsters--along with the rest of the canon of prodigies--began to cast off their religious associations. this trend was accompanied by a movement to emphasize natural causes over supernatural ones.”

Pare represented [the causes of monstrous births] an elaboration on the natural explanations offered by Aristotle and writers in the Aristotelian tradition (too much or too little seed, maternal imagination, a narrow womb, a traumatic pregnancy, hereditary disease, bestiality and so on) + a new causal category: artifice (to include fakes and children mutilated by their parents to enhance their take as beggars)

shift in *causal thinking* --> (expanded the power of) maternal imagination covering eventuality ==> a new way of talking about nature
{(from) in the prodigy literature nature was effectively transparent (a veil through which God's purposes could be discerned)}--to--> nature gained a new autonomy ( fertility of invention =/= wrath) --> *nature personified* (the artisan) [Pare: “chambermaid to our great God"], monsters were treated as jokes or “sports” (lusus) of a personified nature

transcorporeal fields of sensoriality =/= boundedness of isolated bodies and things

nonanthropocentric zoological studies



Bacon's (tripartite division of) natural history:
1. *natural: the study of nature “in course”, or natural history
2. *preternatural: the study of nature “erring”, or the “history of marvels” --> a coherent category (=/= miscellaneous collection of phenomen)
3. *artificial: the study of nature “wrought, or the history of arts

nature's aberrations for the finest examples of her workmanship

nature imagery of the wonder book

renaissance thought -->{ (antithesis of) art =/= nature }--> art may aid, imitate, modify or surpass nature
--✕--> Bacon: art (formal and final causes) should become more natural & nature (material and efficient causes) should be made more artificial --> monster: nature's artificial work
•nature in extremis =/= conventional wisdom
•monsters: models for the novelties of art

--Bacon--> enrichment of both speculative and operative natural philosophy (=/= books of fabulous experiments and secrets)

**wonder literature sacrificed accuracy to admiration**

corroboration


xxxxxx

...................................

to take echoing abstractions (reason, nature, etc.) and try to cash them out in concrete practices
(transformation of) extremely abstract --to--> extremely concrete
-why is it so irresistible to reach analogies between the moral and the natural orders?
other orders of nature [**every order of nature sustains a moral order**]:
1. local nature (what happens when we scale up)
2. ontological identity card (what makes a squirrels)
3. universal natural laws
aggregation of these forms of orders ]**each provokes a characteristic cognitive passion** : they involve judgment + emotional reaction to its transgressions]:
1. disequilibria (--> terror: fear saturated by guilt) --> local nature
2. monsters (--> horror) --> specific nature
3. marvels and miracles (--> wonder) --> natural laws

[(a very recently) forceful kind of] argument to anchor moral or political order in a natural foundation

--Daston--> we are species that represent (**we must model our orders** : to make visible & external) --{with an appeal to a natural analog}--> *nature: the richest source of models of all kind of orders

[!!!today task of artist:] ***to give back humanity its childhood*** (that was lost in the age of objectivity) @Sina, Sarah

...................................

Schutz
social nature of knowledge
how people grasp the consciousness of others while living within their own streams of consciousness

absent friends:
•his brother whom he has described to me
•the professor whose books i have read
•the postal clerk
•the Canadian Parliament
•abstract entities like Canada herself
•the rules of English grammar
•the basic principles of jurisprudence
•
--Schutz--> more one goes into the contemporary world, the more anonymous the contemporary inhabitants become

...................................

wonder
and its marvels

(Paris wall slogan from the student rebellion of 1968 -->) “every view of things that is not strange (bizarre, foreign) is false” --Bynum--> to jolt her listeners nad readers into encounter with a past that is unexpected and strange

past --> answer questions we haven't asked

-could “wonder” be the special characteristic of the historian?

wonder & marvels --> a medievalist's topic

Bynum represent a rearguard action to claim back from early modernists the irrational and grotesque and to “re-enchant” (if not the world, at least) the historical professional

1180-1320
a great increase in stories of marvels, monsters, miracles, ghosts
medieval europe awash in wonders


*the circumstances under which medieval men and women felt wonder*
•wonder-talk
•wonder-behavior [==>? empowering them]
•the *web of actual horror & delight* we can decipher in medieval texts (and on instagram, telegram, whatsapp) (=/= the idea of “knowing = appropriating” ==> knowing is impossible)

medieval theorist [& my bestiary research] --Bynum--> wonder: (admiratio) cognitive, nonappropriative, perspectival, particular, (not merely a) physiological response
[*]wonder: recognition of the singularity and significance of the thing encountered

‘thing =/= knower’ (in a context + from a particular point of view) ==trigger==> wonder

telegram bestiary --> capacity to be shocked by the singularity of the event (==Sina==> search for significance ~/= cause, explanation)


scholarship on (early modern age of) wonder
1- enthusiasm for wonders = *expropriative & appropriative* (ضبط و سلب) --> *orientalism: projection of self or construction of “other” as self --> the rape of the New World seems implicit in wonder at it
(early modern europe) impulse to *collect & explore*:
◦collection of narwal horns and jewels, deformed fetuses and human captives (made by rulers, missionaries, and naturalist)
◦origins of museums in the wunderkammer (wonder cabinet)
◦voyages to the New World with their attendant goals of *conquering & missionizing* (=/= Sinbad)
◦use of inquisitors and questionnaires by government to assemble information for juridical *processings & taxation*
◦Columbus's “desire to know the secrets of the world” (glossed with) Jode de Acosta's praise of proselytizing curiosity
2- Aristotle's Metaphysics: “wonder = ignorance and doubt” { desire to seek causes (it did not understand) ==arose==> wonder (admiratio) ==> replacement by knowledge (scientia or philosophia) }--> miracula (marvel: natural effects we fail to understand) =/= mirabilia (unusual and difficult events [produced by God])
3- Descartes’ wonder: (first of all passions) a sudden surprise of the soul ==> tend to consider attentively those objects (which seem to it rare and extraordinary)
◦*begining of the tendency to reduce emotion to physiology*
◦Charles Le Brun's drawings of the passions
◦Darwin's wonder: a reaction ==> making the animal see and breathe better in crisis ==> increased its chances of survival (...raised eyebrows, opened and protruding lips, a hand held up, palm out with fingers open)
◦early modern physiology --> wonder: (~ startled response,) paradigmatic emotion
4- (the horrible) philosophical understanding of wonder: ignorance rationalized or erased by knowledge
a wondering desire that collects and appropriates what it endeavors to know or project its self onto an imagined other --> a passion that reduces to a startle response at the unfamiliar

}=/= historian (and teacher [and performance-lecturer]) vacation (or responsibility) --> (we must aspire to) imagine the kind of nonappropriative perspectival *intensely cognitive* response

middle ages (how they characterize their difference:)
1. theological-philosophical understanding of wonder <== university intellectuals {
◦admiratio =/= scientia ==> knowledge
◦admiratio ~= diversitas (diversity) =/= solitum (the usual, the general)
2. religious discourse about wonder <-- sermons, hagiography, devotional writing, enormously popular genre of *saint's lives* (tazkirat تذکره نویسی) {
◦admiratio =/= imitatio (imitation جعلى) [the readers were urged to wonder at and not immitate the power and extravagant asceticism of holy men and women (in Attar?)]
◾admiratio ~= paradox (coincidence of opposites) [one finds mira (wondrous) again and again in the texts alongside mixta (mixed, composite things, chimera)]
◦admiratio ~/= curiositas (curiosity کنجکاوی)
◦admiratio ~/= disputatio (disputatiousness ستيزه جويى)
3. literature of entertainment: travel accounts, history writing, collection of odd stories called by one author
◦admirari (to wonder at) =/= rimari (to pay into)
◦(collected stories ==> amuse, instruct, move their aristocratic listeners -->) wonder =/= inductio exemplorum (generalizing)


12th 14th centuries
(twin authorities for middle ages) Aristotle + Augustine ==> tradition of understanding wonder as perspectival & psychological ==> theological-philosophical discourse
•Augustine: marvel =/= what we know of nature (=/= nature) --> *lodge the wonderful-ness of things (not in our reaction to them but) in their ontological status*
•Anselm of Canterbury: marvelous =/= natural =/= artificial (voluntary, made by humans)
}--> miracles are objectively wonderful (because produced by God's power alone)


[1]
early middle ages latin texts --> mirabilia (wonder) ~= miracula (miracle)
13th century --> mirabilia (wonder) =/= miracula (miracle) ==ontological==> flatten the impulse to wonder:
1- (tends to) separate out (with hair-splitting distinction) a small number of phenomena as objectively wonder-inducing (*whereas all others no matter how odd are wonderful only to the ignorant*)
2- (suggests that) most events have natural causes: *if philosophers are diligent enough ==> wonder will cease* [= Sherlock Holmes]
◦(1235) William of Augergne --> people do not know how to go about investigating the cause [--> detective]
◦(1325) Oresme --> *vigorous imagining of a retained species + small external appearance + imbalance of some internal disposition ==> marvelous appearance* [--✕--> himself was fascinated and enchanted by the “marvelous properties” of animals and the *diversitas of human experience* especially of tastes in *food and in sexual positions and partners*]
◦a 13th century treatise “on the marvels of the world” (Qazwini?) --> a great part of philosophers and physicians believe that: natural things ==> marvellousness of experiences and marvels
◦Roger Bacon --> naturalistic explanation of saints who lived without eating... charms and amulets... *waxed lyrical over the infinite complexity of the common fly* (<-- is this what i did in telegram bestiary?)
◦Albert the Great --> physical manifestations of admiratio = "constriction and suspension of the heart” confronted with something “great and unusual”
◦Aquinas --> connect wonder with pleasure = a desire that culminates not so much in knowledge as in encounter with majesty, *wonder: the best way to grab the attention of the soul
◦
}--Bynum--> distinguishing ‘miracle =/= marvel’ ontologically =/= psychologically, perspectivally (or attributing marvels to natural causes) --✕--> eclipse of wonder

wonder as a response was not devalued or dismissed (even in a philosophical and theological tradition that de-wondered anomalies by insisting on an increasingly ordered world, whose laws were decipherable by the wise)



[2]
in the discourse of the homiletic موعظه and hagiographical تاريخ انبياء (tazkirat) --> wonder =/= imitable قابل تقلید (--✕--> the known, the knowable, the usual)
“non imitandum sed admirandum” (not to be immitated but to be marveled at)
heroes and martyrs =/= ordinary faithful
--> (Attar [master of rhetorics] in تذکرة الاولیا uses) a kind of *humility topos* intended to express an author's conviction that the miracle-working charisma of a saint was far beyond the capacity of author and reader alike (channel the attention of the faithful... towards the emulation of ordinary virtues: to control credulity ساده لوحی, extravagant asceticism, straining after flamboyant religiosity)
}--> nonappropriative nature of wonder

Bernard of Clairvaux (medieval piety)
(rhetoric of) wonder =/= curiosity
praying to the affairs of others
praying to the secrets of the universe
wonderful deformed beauty (of Romanesque sculpture)
--> ****imitatio (جعل) = appropriation = being in society with [---> go to drawing mimetics, literal CG 3D modeling], experiencing, learning, taking into oneself, consuming****

“we, when we take the deeds [of others] for imitation, ought to make the lofty things hidden and humble ones manifest” (like the shape of the seal: sculpted inward is appeared concave when printed) --> mimesis

*the encounter is made possible because an ontological similarity to that other is built into the experiencing self*

golden goblet 🏆
we consume, absorb, incorporate the drink (~= imitate the virtues) =/= we give back (~= we wonder at) the goblet, we wonder at what we cannot in any sense incorporate, or consume, or encompass in our mental categories --> we wonder at mystery, at paradox, at admirabiles mixturae <==Bernard== three hybrids:
1- mixture of God and man
2- mixture of woman and virgin
3- mixture of belief and falsity (in our hearts)


(Attar seductively drawn to the wonderful deformed beauty of saints of early sufism)


[title]
failed exorcism


[3]
(Bynum providing a) medieval theory of wonder in the *literature of enlightenment*:
history writing
travel accounts
story collection
عجایب‌المخلوقات ajayebnameh: the encyclopedic tradition of the ancient world known as *paradoxology: collection of oddities (monsters, hybrids, distant races, marvelous lands, [telegram beasts, instagram animals]) + antique notions of portents or omen: unusual events that foreshadowed the (usually catastrophic) future + accompanied by a vague sense of dread [it gives you goosebumps]
+ (Ehsan master of) [*]fabulae: (story) told without claims to their ontological status =/= historia
}==> theory of wonder: [@apass]
1. *response to facticity*
2. *response to the singular*
3. *is deeply perspectival*

•William of Newburgh --> (some sort of) probatio (testing, evidence) --base--> rimari (probe, pry into فضولی، با اهرم بلند کردن) =/= admirari (to wonder at)
•Gervais of Tilbury --> facts ==induce==> marvel ~= res gestae (deeds or historical accounts) =/= stories (fabulae, lies) [~= *you cannot be amazed by what you don't believe* (stories of ghosts, vampires, migration of quail, flight of squirrels, etc.)]
•John of Salisbury --> *marvellous singularity* (collection of advice for courtiers and princes) ~ wonder: response to majesty (hidden wisdom, significance) =/= generalizing = moralizing (inductio exemplorum, citing of instructive general causes --> forensic)
•

credible deeply unusual singular event ==> admiratio

[*]perspectival: reaction of a particular “us” to an “other” that is “other” only relative to the particular “us” (<-- this is why ajayebnameh is interesting)
•James of Vitry --> ***cyclopses who all have one eye marvel as much at those who have two eyes as we marvel at them*** (1200)
•Gosswin of Metz & John Mandeville --> turning such perspectivalism into gently ironic comments on themselves
•William of Rubruck --> barefoot travel through harsh terrain and climate required by Franciscan asceticism seems as monstrous a practice in the East as certain Eastern customs appear when reported “back home”
•



**(how? can we simply?) study medieval emotion** =/= wonder stated by historians, travelers, theologians, philosophers, preachers, devotional writers

*traces of emotion* that survive are mediated through texts, pictures, artifacts --Bynum--> we are not entitled either to assume a sort of Darwinian universal emotion, or to think that emotion-behavior is culturally constructed (as to exist only where we find words for it)

***texts may give us access to reactions less through adjectives attached to nouns*** (by calling something “wonderful” or “dreadful” =/= indicating the responses of an implicit reader/viewer)
•a keyword search for “anger” will tend to turn up set pieces on how to control it --> discussions of where it is not
•reactions such as wonder, delight, or terror (do not simply occur) they are *evoked*, sometimes even *staged* --> we can explore what evoked them

finding wonder-words =/= finding wonder (complex semantic field)

wonder-reaction:
•terror
•disgust
•solemn astonishment
•playful delight

in medieval accounts wonder often has:
•a mischievous quality
Bernard of Clairvaux --> spice of stories
11th century --> (naughtily) impish girl saint jokes
Gerald of Wales --> nature's pranks
}--> moralizing bestiary tradition (taking more pleasure in the animal tales than in theology)
analogies between animals and humans are anything but solemn and didactic
•a dreadful quality
(Attar's accounts of saint torture)
Gerald of Wales --> recounting some of the earliest warewold stories to survive in european literature, he glosses the admiratio felt by those inside the story as stupor خرفتی, timor بیم, horror خوف
◦shape-shifting violating nature
◦tales of metamorphoses --> the real change of substance in the eucharist عشاربانى + the terrifying possibility that sexual intercourse between humans and animals might produce monsters


(Bynum asking) what in medieval accounts or artistic representations tends to trigger wonder? *where do the surviving source give us access either to intensely heightened reactions or to events and objects calculated to evoke or stage such reactions?*
--> where wonder is not?


(didactic purposes of) miracle collections
*hovering significance* (of unusual natural events: eclipse, earthquakes, famines) --> sometimes listed as clipped matter-of-fact prose
William Auvergne + Oresme --> natural causes can be found for marvels tend to flatten the language of some accounts of natural world as well
}==> miracles, portents فال بد, oddities are sites and stagings of wonder less often than we might suppose


12th - 14th century --> narrative accounts tell us of objects and events carefully constructed to elicit awe, delight, dread
*rulers (secular + ecclesiastical) --competed--> display of power and splender including tricks and automata --calculated--> to amaze and tantalize:
•(13th century) خانه وحشت 🏰 evidence of a count of Artois who built an elaborate funhouse with distorting mirrors, rooms that simulated thunderstorms, hidden pipes for wetting unsuspecting visitors and covering them with flour
•puppet shows in pastry (sotelties)
•food was often planned as an illusion or trick for the eye (---> go to instagram cake baked in the shape of ordinary objects)
•changes in church architecture in liturgy (آئین نماز) + fabrication of monstrances --> define the moment in the Mass when *the consecrated host (the devine installed in food or flesh or matter) was elevated as a sudden revelation of the unexpected and paradoxical*
◦collection of relics and their **elaborate containers** (reliquaries محفظه عتیقه) [--> similarity and historical connection to wunderkammer of early medieval princes]
•
--> theologians and many of the ordinary faithful continued *to value the supernatural power mediated through bone chips or dust* more than the intricate workmanship or sheer novelty of the container --> *object = a means of access to an other tham as a singularity fascinating in itself*
--> *relic cabinets ~= cabinets of novelties*
}--underlying--> ***impulse to collect***

mirabile visu!
****(12th century) abbot Suger of St. Denis describes the crowd (more desperate to touch, possess, appropriate) that is frantic over access to a power not only *beyond* but also in its nature *other than* what contains it
(God lodged in decayed body, manifested and hidden behind the crystal and gold)

narrative accounts not only described objects and events that were staged or constructed to produce wonder + they also *teemed with complex wonder-reactions*
--> hagiographer (Attar's) detailed in emotional sensual language the extravagant asceticism and para-mystical manifestations holy women experienced + the amazement such manifestations engendered in others {beauty was not merely referred to as wonderful, *it was also described in loving and lyrical language* as signaling a deeper pattern or purpose}

(old Augustinian idea that) the world itself is a miracle --> (homilist Aelfric) wundra (marvels) of God
•it requires no sorcery that the moon waxes and wanes, that the sea agrees with it, that the earth greens in response to its power 🌙
•(recounting the migration of salmon upstream to spawn) they leap from bottom to top with a leap that is marvellous, and except that is is proper to the nature of fish, marvellous


سندباد Sinbad
[fantastical] travelers’ tales (recounted) the *fearsome* and the *ugly* --as--> *wonderful*
to Marco Polo almost every animal he met was a marvel (the horrible crocodile, beautiful giraffe) [described with an earnest and urgent facticity --> ajayeb's tone]

in later middle ages (and in toda popular media) *strangeness appealed* --> stories abounded:
•of fabulous palces
•of stones with marvellous powers
•of monsters
•of mermaids
•of fairies
•of bizarre races with eyes in their chests or enormous umbrella feet

•Marco Polo's awkward and impoverished prose
•Mandeville's credulous tale-telling
•Sinbad: [a powerful sense that] what is wonderful: (is not chickens and peacocks, even cyclopses and cannibals per se, but) **a world that encompasses such staggering diversity** --Bynum--> ******the impulse to chronicle (such things) ~= a critique of the impulse to possess them******

“If you [Alexander the Great] had a body that matched your greedy mind and heart that know no bounds in their desires, or if your body equaled your great cupidity, the great world itself would not suffice to contain you ... Your right hand would hold the East, the left the West. Not content with this, in all your prayers you would be consumed with desire to investigate and find out where that amazing light hid itself, and would dare to climb into the sun’s chariot and ... control its wandering beams. So, too, you desire much that you cannot possess. Having subdued the world and conquered the human race, delighting in blood, you will wage war against trees, wild beasts, rocks and mountain snows. *You will not allow the strange creatures that lurk in the caves to be untouched. Even senseless elements will be compelled to experience your rages.*
--> ***Chatillon's powerful prose understands that marveling at diversity can be the prelude to appropriation***
*marveling at diversity ~=> appropriation*


*impulse to collect/chronicle/list --(critique[sublimated?])-->~?=>(<--)(~/=!!) impulse to posses*


beautiful + horrible + skillfully made ==induce==> wonder
bizzar + rare (~= that which challenges or suddenly illuminates our expectations) + *range of differences* found in the world ==> wonder

admirabiles mixturae: events or phenomena in which ontological and moral boundaries are crossed, confused, erased

[*]singularity: absence of cause [--> is enough to induce wonder]


human body appearing as meat to be masticated is an aweful condescension (in worldly terms: an assuming of an inappropriate nature) for God


Peter the Venerable (12th century collection of miracle stories)
reverents (those who returned from the dead)
...a monk who has been poisoned appears in a dream while the murder is under investigation: “When I saw him [the murdered monk], I got up full of joy and began to embrace and kiss him with much affection. Although a deep stupor [sopor] took the place of my outward senses,... I was not unaware that I was sleeping ... And what is more wonderful [mirum], it occurred to me immediately ... that the dead could not remain long with the living ... So I decided to question him quickly, for the vision seemed not a phantasm but true [non fantastica sed verax] ... [The monk attests his faith and affirms that he has been murdered; then he disappears.] I wondered greatly ... then rested my head again ... and immediately he reappeared ... I rushed toward him and ... began to kiss him as before ... I heard the same answers as above concerning his state, his vision of God, the certitude of the Christian faith, and his death ... [Then] I woke up and found my eyes wet and my cheeks warmed by fresh tears.
=/= Hamlet's experience with his father's ghost (--> has no epistemological wonder)

Peter of Tarentaise
confronted with a deformed man, questioned him closely and sent him away unhealed but with a new sense of self-worth

**moral reaction described in heightened emotion-language**
(we see) *the response enacted inside the story*

Julian of Norwich
her most wonder-filled language
because of the incarnation we are a marvelous mixture (medle se mervelous) of sin and grace

the unheards-of... عجایبِ (ajayeb-e)
describing unheard-of prodigy (of green children born from the earth)


👉
William of Newburgh
what he cannot grasp (attingere or rimari) [there must be a “reason"] ==> forced to marvel at (mirari) --means--> a significance or moral use (utilitas)
•mysterious dog discovered in a stone
•a crucifix in the sky
•
}--> rarity + (they have a) secret reason
}--Bynum--> *wonder-reaction = significance-reaction* ~= ****things are signs or portents (not because of their natures or their causes but [from their ontology]) because they indicate or point [from their utility]****
#telegram bestiary
#index finger

monster <-- monstrare: to know

(for theologians, chroniclers, preachers) wonderful = strange + rare + inexplicable (never merely strange or simply inexplicable)
--> it was ***a strange that mattered, that pointed beyond itself to meaning*** (--> #wonders of pits)


(my work for WIELS, Wonders of the Moon – A Thousand Years of Sleepwal[...]