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Saturday Morning Little Light Appreciation Blogging

piny

Little Light put up a post about antecedents and record-keeping:

History is full of these things, no matter where you go, things we can circle around, draw rough outlines of, even make very good educated guesses about. But we don’t have them any more, and we’re different people now, and nobody thought to leave us careful instructions because they just assumed that what they had would always be there. There’s an entire genre of Song Dynasty Chinese poetry that’s really song lyrics, but we don’t have the tunes any more in part because they were so popular they didn’t need to be written down. There are buried cities that periodically turn up all over Arabia that we don’t even know the names of, any more–huge capitals of trade and art just vanished, when once everyone knew where to go to find them.

Her essay touches on a lot of aspects of remembering and defending continuity in the face of erasure; like she says, it isn’t only time that creates this kind of loss. I wish I had something brilliant to contribute myself, but it’s just that good.

So, go read the whole thing.

3 thoughts on Saturday Morning Little Light Appreciation Blogging

  1. I met a traveller from an antique land
    Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
    Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
    Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
    And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
    Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
    Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
    The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
    And on the pedestal these words appear:
    `My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
    Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
    Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
    Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
    The lone and level sands stretch far away.
     Percy Shelley

  3. I would buy a copy of the Little Light book of essays and poetry. A bunch of copies, really.

    The most fascinating thing about silphium is what might be its most enduring legacy — at least that’s what some people suspect. Silphium is thought to have been an herbal form of birth control or morning-after medication, and was associated in some ancient works with love and eros, as was the narrow strip of coastline on the south side of the Mediterranean that apparently was one of the only places it grew. Some people think that the seed of the silphium turned into a symbol representing love, like this coin from ancient Syrene, the area where silphium grew, that has a silphium seedpod inscribed on it:

    Ironic, no? The symbol that adorns valentines and saccharine romance memorabilia everywhere might also be the one remaining legacy of a plant that was driven extinct because it was so popular for birth control. First it became incredibly expensive (according to Pliny) and then it was gone forever… except as a symbol of love. Or maybe we’ve got this all wrong? Unless some new pieces of a lost age are unearthed, we’ll never know.

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