b l o g o s

Aristotle on the aggravating features of recollection

Happy new year, everybody.

Since we returned from our holiday triangle trek, JM and I have been doing brainy work in the morning (well, I've been reading some and researching the local real estate market), and then manual work in the afternoon (namely, organizing shit and throwing shit out).

New Year's Day will be no different. I started 2009 by reading two Aristotelian treatises that have a lot to say about sense perception: On Sense and Sensible Objects, and On Memory and Recollection. There were lots of great tidbits in these short pieces, but my favorite comes in a long meditation on how sometimes once the faculty of recollection is set in motion it becomes unstoppable, as when we try to remember something but can't, and then it eats away at us, or, "in the case of names, tunes and sayings, when any of them has been very much on our lips; for even though we give up the habit and do not mean to yield to it, we find ourselves continually singing or saying the familiar sounds"  (453a29-32). 

That's right. Aristotle theorized earworms.  

Off to organize some tools.

"don't move gravel." --Sappho 145

A fragment of a poem attributed to the early sixth century poet Alcaeus goes like this:

This I know for certain, that if a man moves gravel . . . he will probably get a sore head.

A fragment by his slightly more famous contemporary is even more direct, if not pithy (see title). And you thought Sappho only wrote about sexy stuff! JM and I were laughing at these lines earlier today while we shoveled and wheelbarrowed three tons of gravel. That is not an exaggeration, but it is the amount a dumptruck dumped in our driveway for our patio project. Above is the area we shoveled from, after we shoveled from it.

And while it's known that the ancient greeks had wheelbarrows (though maybe not in the 6th c), perhaps they had different ways of moving gravel, because I didn't so much get a sore head. But sore hands, a sore foot, and sore shoulders, oh yeah.