Via the always interesting and never boring The Browser, comes an announcement of an Indiana Jones-style hunt for the tomb and (looted treasure) of Alaric I under the waters of the river Busento flowing through the town of Cosenza (an army of mourners apparently dammed and diverted the river in order to give Alaric a proper burial) in southern Italy, where the victorious Alaric suddenly and unexpectedly died.
In 1990 after the space probe Voyager 1 had accomplished her primary mission of exploration of the outer planets, famed astronomer and project architect Carl Sagan requested that the emissary turn its lens back once more and capture an image of the Earth in all its humbleness from such a great distance.
It did not matter much that the photograph with two weeks’ delay was not quite as dramatic as Sagan had envisioned as his poetic reflections on this invisible parting-shot managed to inspire multitudes. Seizing on a similar opportunity twenty-three years later, Sagan’s students sought to make his pale blue dot as envisioned a reality by directing the Cassini to take a break from exploring Saturn and focusing back on its place of origin. Still not awash among a field of stars, the Earth’s latest selfie was produced, with the planet’s inhabitants being urged in advance—perhaps without sufficient publicity—to take a moment to appreciate the uniqueness of the world outside as they smiled for the camera. Maybe such a moment was not as well promoted as it could have been, as I hope I wasn’t on the wrong side of the globe or doing something tedious and inside as all of this transpired—paradoxically, I think we were at that moment experimenting with our own aerial photography.
Of course, we were all present for 19. July 2013 when robot
photographed its makers from the orbit of Saturn, awash in the erupting
jets of the Moon Enceladus whose mysterious geysers might be spouting
off the most accessible hints of life elsewhere in the solar system.
It’s an inspiring, sacred look back and more in the spirit of Sagan’s
vision than the original.
genealogy room: via Boing Boing, a service that maps the prevalence and distribution of one’s family name
the plot thickens: a 1919 screenwriters’ resource of ten million photoplay expositional combinations
die roboter: elementary school class in Mainz perform Kraftwerk
your brain on drugs: testing the web-spinning capabilities of spiders under the influence was an abortive forensics ploy for drug-testing
lowered-expectations: due to a profound lack of same-species mates, the coywolf is emerging
The splendiferous Nag on the Lake directs our attention to a lovingly curated gallery of mesmerizing phenakistoscope animations, whose looping effect (and themes, perhaps) are not much different than what’s produced by GIFs (which I have been kind of obsessed with lately).
Debuting in the early 1830s, the invention of Belgian Joseph Plateau but with several other independent animateurs promoting their own spectacles, the phenakistoscope spread quickly across Europe, the engaged audiences viewing a spinning disk through a series of tiny slits to achieve the illusion of motion. Until opticians devised techniques of projection—which saw an explosion in phantasmagoria with similarly prefixed motion picture devices—spectators had the Greek root ฯฮตฮฝฮฑฮบฮนฮถฮตฮนฮฝ, which meant deceptive. I hadn’t thought about it beforehand but the German term for an animated feature is “Trickfilm.”
By its nature, mythology does not admit to definitive versions, although the fables and folklore of the Greeks, once committed to paper by Homer and Hesiod and countless others took on an air authority that was not a uniting theme in the tradition of story-telling. Although different accounts circulated long afterwards and inheritor traditions continue to build on that unstaid corpus still, lore, variation and invention is sourced to the Heroic Age—those who fought in the Trojan War, and abruptly ended with that diasporic, lost generation afterwards.
Maybe it was because those stories were written down and the winningest narratives became the prevailing ones—competition continued among poets, championing their own character-analyses, morals and retribution and it’s now hard to imagine as the readership that there were opposing legends presented to audiences, amok-time scenarios where Electra and ลdipus had normal families and lost their place in the popular imagination to the racier, received versions. One of the very last myths constructed, a lost epic that seems groundless morose but somewhat reconstituted, by the Greeks is called the Telegony and dealt again with re-deploying veterans and the homecoming of Odysseus, but told from the perspective of the seductress and enchantress Circe. During Odysseus’ captivity on the exile-island of Aeaea—Loลกinj, Croatia—(Circe was banished to this remote location to keep her out of trouble), Circe became pregnant and bore Odysseus a son after his departure, the eponymous Telegonus, whose name meant born far away due to his father’s distant home. Athena urges Circe to reveal to her young adult son—juxtaposed with the massacre and funeral service for opportunist suitors of his wife, Penelope, whose advances she solemnly rebuffed for the two decades’ absence of her husband that open the story—who his father is. Telegonus resolves journey to Ithaca to find Odyssey.
Why Athena, as Odysseus’ constant champion and protector, encouraged this reunion seems impenetrable and without the entire story—that’s just been teased out of a few lines and other myths referencing the Telegony—the goddess’ motivation will remain a mystery, I suppose. Before going on this long and dangerous voyage, Circe asks the blacksmith of the gods to craft her son a supernatural spear with the poison tip of a string-ray to defend himself. Just as Telegonus arrives in the Ionian Sea, he is visited by a terrible storm and disoriented, does not realise that he has already arrived at his destination. Though the trope seems rather predictable to us thanks to the tragedies of Sophocles, Telegonus poached one of his father’s cows and was ambushed by Odysseus and his men. As he deftly defends himself, Telegonus strikes down Odysseus, fulfilling a prophesy that the wily hero who satisfied his charge with burying an oar in a land where they never had heard of the ocean that stated he would meet his demise from the sea, and recognizes, too late, that he is his father. Beside himself with remorse, Telegonus takes Odysseus’ body, widow and half-brother, Telemachus (meaning “far from the battle-field” also unborn when Odysseus went off to war) back to Aeaea in the Adriatic. Circe’s magic was unable to restore Odysseus to life but is able to make the landing party immortal. Telegonus marries his step-mother, Penelope, and Circe, Odysseus’ lover, marries Telemachus. I wish we had the whole story in order to make this outcome seem plausible—the classic myths were hinged together in such a way where one could always suspend ones disbelief and accept that a character was fated to be transformed into a tree or flower or would be forced to experiment with the lesser-evils and impossible choices. I wonder if this outline could be expanded.
memory-hole: the estate of George Orwell, ironically, attempts to suppress unsanctioned mention of “1984”
