Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: More Laudz

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 7 Jun 2002 14:32:53 EDT

I tend to think of these kinds of things as always carrying the same message, 
which I (pretty definitely not the originators) put into three points:
1. Opposites are not real since they are mutually defined -- nothing is good 
unless something is bad (or at least we wouldn't know it as good unless we 
knew something as bad).
2. In the big picture, what we take as vast differences are totally 
insignificant: on the scale of the diameter of the earth, the difference in 
height between Mt. Everest and The Dead Sea doesn't show before the fourth 
decimal place and on the scale of an Astronomical Unit, say, not before the 
ninth. And compared to the universe....
3. Historically, the one will become the other eventually and naturally -- 
mountains wear down and valleys are upthrust ("Every valley shall be exalted, 
and every mountain and hill made low")
But particular cases may be onto something else or doing these in different 
ways from usual. In particular, the verbs (so to speak) here seem to be all 
over the place: sharing at most notions like sequence, creation, dependence 
(all of which tie in with the above general theory). The whole set seems to 
be parallel, could we but figure out how to render it.
The problem is the last two lines (9 and 10 of the original, chunk 2 of DDJ). 
I would like to think that there once was a Chinese theory of music that 
used the two words here given as "tone" and "voice" meant something like 
"tonic" and whatever is the maximally dissonant tone (minor third? -- music 
theory is just not in my line at all. Happily, on this group any such 
defects quickly get corrected). Unfortunately, so far as I can tell, not 
(other?) evidence of such a theory or usage exists. And Chineses music is 
said to be pentatonic, in which it is said to be difficult to get a 
dissonance (see wind chimes and ignore Westerners' first perceptions of 
Chinese music). Even then, "harmonize" is not quite parallel to the other 
verbs

<{si'u})? 
> Surely the intention is that the future pursues the past as well

Don't think so: Future is eaten up by the past not viceversa! >

Well, that depends on your point of view, doesn't it. If pursuit is the 
metaphor, then one can see the future catching up with the past about as 
easily as the other way round (though the eating metaphor is harder). And, 
of course, the line might also be the "there is nothing new under the sun" 
line, too. 
<> What is the point of the 
> {caku}, which breaks the pattern? All of these are presumably
eternal facts 
> (indeed, one variant reading has just that claim about the list).

{caku} is the narrow (virtual) line where {purci} reaches {balvi} -
devouring/incorporating it live ;-( Excuse, this being my own idea!
Maybe the whole is circular in kind of a helix, but not mutual in
direction.>

You are suggesting that what is going on here is the old (Hui again) "I left 
tomorrow and arrive yesterday" about making a move right at midnight (well, 
maybe that was the point, anyhow). Could be, but the parallelism and the 
words themselves -- the structure of each line seems the same -- don't 
suggest it as much as even the German translation does. Indeed, about half 
the English traslations doen't even take this one as temporal but as spatial: 
"in front of" and "behind" (I gather the Chinese is inspecific, getting on ly 
the ordering, not the dimension).