My name is Paul, spelled with a "p" like in "ptolemy"

I love William Faulkner. I do not love William Faulkner with the urgency, thrust, capacious lust, and thrall that attends my love for my wife Amanda; but I love William Faulkner. Yesterday morning, driving home from work, I began to think of a passage from Faulkner’s seminal novel Absalom!Absalom! and its application to the our novel under consideration in class as well as in consideration to Boone’s monologue on constellations that I keep regenerating in class like an anathema does the pneuma of his/her Lord who has indicted their supposed venial peccadillo as blatant heresy: I hope to make myself see the clarity that I know is there, but that I know hides like eyeshine in twilight. So in cogitation on the poetics of constructing constellations under the auspice of animals, gods, and goddesses as template, I considered the origin of such a practice while leafing through a folio of Harry Partch recordings on my Walkman; Partch himself was deeply influenced by the Babylonian and later Grecian harmonic as well as the Oriental tradition of composing scales and pieces of music.

Here is evidence of Partch’s musical splendour and genius:

So, the art of astronomy ostensibly begins with the Babylonians around 3200-3800 years ago, according to relicts discovered that were ascribed as the “Babylonian Star Catalogs” I really don’t know much about these documents, eg, who discovered them and when, but a star catalog is simply a charting of the skies. A wonderful academic article appears from Dr. Robert Powell charts the provenance of Babylonian astrology and naming: http://www.astrogeographia.org/articles/BabylonianZodiac (Powell). Babylonian divination-priests were de were the agents who excoriated the sky with lines to connect star to star in such a way that reflected the proclivities of each season and ascribed to each star a corporeal sensibility and a name which corresponded. So the Greeks came later and charted further adumbrations of what were to become the modern zodiac and cosmological blueprint of the sky’s constellations.

Understood, but what is missing here, as far as I can see from my vantage point, is the POSITION of peoples in viewing these stars and corresponding celestial bodies. Babylonians had a perception of the sky and so too did the Greeks from both a geographical positioning as well as a subtle, mental zeitgeist that positioned them, creatively, in their analytical thinking on all things theological, empirical, and theoretical. The graphic embedded in this blog post is from the University of Tennessee’s website detailing the folio of constellations as if one were looking at a boon that is flattened and spread out at its sagittal plane:




(http://www.physics.unlv.edu/~jeffery/astro/constellation/constellation.html)
(c) University of Tennesse, Mount Wilson Observatory

But each individual has a differing geographic station on the earth from which they view this tome. The following links are examples of the same sky of those people located in Kent http://ftp.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/Yoursky (Walker)and those people located in Johannesburg, South Africa http://ftp.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/Yoursky(Walker)on January 25th, 2010. Now, librations make volatile these fluid skeletons of fire and gas, but the gist is that to each person, their axis and rays.

Thus, it seems that Christopher’s postulation on constellations being delineated “arbitrarily” as he is concerned (Haddon 125) as well The Monty Hall Problem (Haddon 64-5) both are correct unto themselves as evinced by Boone and, as well, as to a theory expounded on by William Faulkner in his novel Absalom! Absalom! that is used to describe Miss Rosa Coldfield as seen by Quentin Compson who sits in consideration of a story she is giving on Thomas Sutpen. Miss Coldfield, as inferred by Quention, is“[…]a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward from the fever which cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward into the fever and into the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence” (Faulkner 7).

Rather than meditating on and thinking through the system of a “thing;” what comprises it and how the individual parts of the system works; and the logic of how all these relations interact and correlate to each other, so many of us are apt to leap toward a logical reason based on extraneous inference on similar systems(an old truck of yours once misfired and the battery idled at a low level so when a similar problem arises in your current vehicle, you replace the battery because that is what the diagnosis became in the truck; in actuality, the flaw in the system of your current car is a ground wire leading to the coils and the battery was actually salubrious)or infer cursorily because we feel well-versed enough in the theoretic of how a system(s) should work so we “logically” give the sum as an exponent that is apocryphal to the actual problem.

But, a bad battery is a bad battery and a bad ground wire is a bad ground wire; you just have to dig deeper in logic—get into its bowels and furnaces, its pipes and cinderblocks and not merely stop eternally in its foyer and admire the symmetry of joins and cornices—to discover which agent is corrupt and which is well unto the system.

It is so much the want of man, in its mean, to answer and codify what is perceived from their own azimuth and presume that grid is how the world operates. Boone builds a resistance to this theorem by utilizing the theorem to the degree that he does not seek the world abed in his hypothesis. To say that Orion—if dismantled and recalibrated to an angle of stars as seen in other parts of the world—could not be an elephant(Ganesha or the simple, general pachyderm)is narrow and desultory; it does not correlate to logic. That is Boone’s sight-line: a latitude of logic. There are a million minds and a million eyes in this world if one; there are a million adumbrations of how and why of the mind and the eye if one. It is not that Boone—ostensibly, dealing with autism—is oblique of society, it is simply that society’s tenets are oblique to the order that life and organics have constructed. That order is a variable defined by each human animate upon this earth

WORK CITED
Donahe, Bob. “Constellations, Clusters of Stars, and Star Names.” Mount Wilson Observatory, University of Tennessee. Version Two. University of Tennessee. 2003. Internet. 27 January 2011
Faulkner, William. Absalom!Absalom!. New York: Vintage International, 1986. Print.
Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in The Night-Time. 1. London: Doubleday, 2002. Print.
Powell, PhD., Robert. Astrogeographia. Version One. The Sophia Foundation. 2007. Internet. 27 Jan 2011.
Walker, John. “YourSky Sky Charts.” YourSky. Version Iterate. John Walker. 2003. Internet. 27 January 2011.


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