Ten Years Ago Today

Divine aporia

By Moristotle

[Originally published on June 12, 2007, not one word different.]

I have long regretted that I didn’t study much classical rhetoric in college. My knowledge of technical terms in poetics and prosody has barely kept me afloat as I’ve tried to tread water reading literary essays and criticism. So my interest was piqued last October when a young Hollywood screenwriter [JD Payne] suggested I look at M. H. Abrams’s Glossary of Literary Terms. And I’ve since discovered Chapel Hill’s own English Professor William Harmon’s Handbook to Literature. Not bedside reading for everyone, but I delight in both books.

Thor's Day: Verbicide

Aristotle (384–322 BC). Roman copy after
Greek bronze original by Lysippos from 330 BC
(alabaster mantle a modern addition)

A crime of rhetorical proportions

By Kyle Garza

The best defense against the whimsical rhetorical strategies of any good prosecuting attorney is a solid understanding of Aristotle’s three appeals of persuasion: ethos, pathos, and logos. To Aristotle’s mind, these three are ultimately what lead to a listener’s persuasion in favor of a speaker’s position. While the ethos of a speaker rests entirely in his personal character, his pathos and logos are established through the words he employs in his rhetorical attempts to persuade his audience. In matters of persuasion, all winsome speakers must sway the hearts of their audience by using diction that will appeal to their emotions (pathos) and their logical thinking (logos).

Today's Islamist oxymoron

Al Qaeda, according to The New York Times today (in "Bin Laden’s No. 2, Zawahri, Takes Control of Al Qaeda," by David Jolly and J. David Goodman), has announced that it will “seek with the aid of God to call for the religion of truth and incite the ummah to prepare and fight.” (Ummah is an Arabic word, in this context meaning the global community of Muslims.)
    If you're waiting for me to reveal the oxymoron, you weren't paying attention. Go back three sentences: "...aid of God...religion of truth," as though God and religion had anything to do with truth.
    It isn't clear whether the statement is cheap rhetoric to hoodwink (i.e., incite) gullible people or its author himself actually believes the pairing.

Sayyid Qutb, Bin Laden’s favorite philosopher, who spent most of 1949 in Greeley, Colorado, apparently terrified of women and fantasizing about American girls, made a similarly flawed pairing. He saw the sexuality of western teenage women as evidence of a spiritual banality that demanded the destruction of western civilization.
    In his 1951 book, The America I Have Seen: In the Scale of Human Values, Qutb wrote that

The American girl is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs—and she shows all this and does not hide it.

    As Sam Harris noted Tuesday in his blog, in the entry "On Spiritual Truths, "What a relief it must have been [to Qutb] to know [from studying his holy book] that the Creator of the universe intended these terrifying creatures to live as slaves to men."
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See sequel: "A 'good' Muslim."

Truism...or wisdom...or...?

While visiting a friend in the hospital this afternoon who will very soon undergo multiple heart bypass surgery, I worked today's cryptoquote^©1 in the local newspaper². The answer that I got³ was:

Things work out best for people who make the best out of the way things work out. – John Wooden [the legendary UCLA basketball coach]

The Wooden statement is a gem of one of the classic figures of speech (I'm sure it is although I don't know which one), and we can enjoy it just for the cleverness of its wording. It can of course also be read as a maxim or a "key to happiness," which is probably the way Wooden intended it, since he was a teacher by all accounts ever seeking ways to impart helpful advice to the members of his teams and who knows whom else.

Or is it, aside from the figurative wording and the good intention, a truism—a statement of an obvious truth? In a word, a cliché? Everyone knows that it's useful to make the best of whatever happens, or to take whatever happens as an opportunity to gain some advantage or other, for yourself or somebody else.

If a statement's being a truism implies that "everyone" knows and acts on it³, then "Things work out best for people who make the best out of the way things work out" is hardly a truism, but more like a secret that many ineffective people have never suspected. Wooden's advice points beyond the given happening to what might happen next it if it is regarded constructively. For many people, that's a very big "if."

But is Wooden's statement even true? Some things happen in life that are very hard to "regard constructively." Maybe impossible. Things like discovering you have a couple of arteries blocked up in your heart. Being (or having a friend) in the hospital awaiting major surgery reminds you that sometimes you don't have a lot of control over what's going to happen next, except perhaps over your attitude.

But Wooden seems to be claiming more. Was he wrong, or wiser than I comprehend?
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1. I was unable to discover who owns the copyright.
2. From today's cryptoquote (as published somewhere in Arkansas):
   

   

3. I wonder whether someone has devised a cryptoquote of more than, say, sixty or seventy characters that has multiple sensible answers.
4. By this criterion there may be no such thing as a truism.

Divine Aporia

I have long regretted that I didn't study much classical rhetoric in college. My knowledge of technical terms in poetics and prosody has barely kept me afloat as I've tried to tread water reading literary essays and criticism. So my interest was piqued last October when a young Hollywood screenwriter suggested I look at M. H. Abrams's Glossary of Literary Terms. And I've since discovered Chapel Hill's own English Professor William Harmon's Handbook to Literature. Not bedside reading for everyone, but I delight in both books.

This morning I had occasion to look up a technical term in Harmon, for last night I came across a passage in David Lodge's Nice Work that seemed to bear on my recent infatuation with seminal contradictions and their seeming to provide a ground for the concepts of "believing all things" and "all things are possible"—which, for me, are admirably expressed by Howard Nemerov's short poem that I am fond of citing¹.

Robyn Penrose's term of shadowing Vic Wilcox under the Industrial Year Shadow Scheme has come to an end, but an inspired Vic has wangled an extension of the program by which he will now shadow Robyn. In the first of Robyn's tutorials that he will observe, the discussion has turned to a line from Tennyson's "Locksley Hall" whose use of the word "grooves" seems to defy interpretation: "Let the great world spin for ever, the ringing grooves of change."

"It's an aporia," said Robyn. "A kind of accidental aporia, a figure of undecidable ambiguity, irresolvable contradiction. We know Tennyson intended an allusion to railways, and, as Helen said, we can't erase that knowledge...But we also know that railway trains don't run in grooves, and nothing that does run in grooves seems metaphorically adequate to the theme. As Simon says, trams aren't very poetic. So the reader's mind is continually baffled in its efforts to make sense of the line." [p. 243]

I turned to Harmon for more²:

Aporia: A difficulty, impasse, or point of doubt and indecision. Used to describe a species of irony in which a speaker expresses uncertainty but intends none, as in this sentence: "I don't know what scares me more—your stupidity or your dishonesty." Aporia has also been used by recent critics to indicate a point of "undecidability" in a text, which indicates the site at which the text most obviously dismantles or deconstructs itself.

I muse whether "God" intended the irony implicit in the seminal contradictions of the Cosmos (freedom, for example). The overarching "divine aporia" seems to be that in dismantling and deconstructing itself, Being creates and constructs all, including in the food chain and the inexorable opposition of Good and Evil, not to mention another that affects us all: the fact that because we were born we will also die.
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1. "Creation Myth on a Moebius Band":

   The world's just mad enough to have been made
   By the Being his beings into Being prayed.

2. Fifth edition of A Handbook to Literature. New York: Macmillan, 1986.