Ereignis: 0, (Max.: 500+)

[...]ogical 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- Descarteswonder: (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

wonder story assemblage composition affect tale report whirlpool animal media techne waterbody fish [source: NOAA] 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]
[...]