[APPLAUSE]
Hello, can you hear me OK?
I'm very, very happy to be here, and I hope that soon enough you
will be too.
[LAUGHTER]
Because I'm an academic, I arranged
for you to have a handout given to you out of door.
[LAUGHTER]
It's a little poem of a Spartan poet named Alcman,
and it figures in the first piece that I'm going to read.
So I thought you might like to look at it
or take it home as a memento.
"Essay on what I think about most--
error and its emotions.
On the brink of error is a condition of fear.
In the midst of error, is a state of folly and defeat.
Realizing you've made an error brings shame and remorse,
or does it?
Let's look into this.
Lots of people, including Aristotle,
think error an interesting and valuable mental event.
In his discussion of metaphor in the rhetoric,
Aristotle says there are three kinds of words--
strange, ordinary, and metaphorical.
Strange words simply puzzle us, Aristotle says.
Ordinary words convey what we know already.
It is from metaphor that we can get hold
of something new and fresh.
In what does the freshness of metaphor consist.
Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind
to experience itself in the act of making a mistake.
He pictures the mind moving along
a plane, the surface of ordinary language when suddenly
that surface breaks or complicates,
unexpectedness emerges.
At first, it looks odd, contradictory, or wrong.
Then it makes sense.
And at this moment, according to Aristotle,
the mind turns to itself and says,
how true and yet I mistook it?
From the true mistakes of metaphor,
a lesson can be learned, not only that things are other
than they seem and so we mistake them,
but that such mistakeness valuable.
Hold on to it, Aristotle says, there
is much to be seen and felt here.
Metaphors teach the mind to enjoy error
and to learn from the juxtaposition of what is
and what is not the case.
There's a Chinese proverb that says,
rush cannot write two characters with the same stroke.
And yet that is exactly what a good mistake does.
Here is an example.
It's a fragment of ancient Greek lyric
that contains an error of arithmetic.
The poet does not seem to know that 2 plus 2 equals 4.
I have to find my handout now.
In Greek, it says, ὥρας δ' ἔσηκε τρεῑς, θέρος καὶ χεῑμα χὠπάραν τρίταν, καὶ τέτρατον τὸ Ϝηρ, ὅκα σάλλει μὲν ἐσθίεν δ' ἄδαν οὐκ ἔστι...
which means question mark made three seasons, summer,
and winter, and autumn, third, and fourth spring when
there is blooming, but to eat enough is not.
Alcman lived in Sparta in the 7th century BC.
Now Sparta was a poor country, and it is unlikely
that Alcman led a wealthy or well-fed life there.
This fact forms the background of his remarks
which end in hunger.
Hunger always feels like a mistake when it happens to you.
Alcman makes us experience this mistake with him
by an effective use of computational error,
for a poor Spartan poet with nothing left in his cupboard
at the end of winter, along comes spring
like an afterthought of the natural economy, fourth
in a series of three, unbalancing his arithmetic
and end jamming his verse.
Alcman's poem breaks off midway through in iambic metron
with no explanation of where spring came from
or why numbers don't help us control reality better.
There are three things I like about Alcman's poem.
First that it is small, light, and more
than perfectly economical.
Second, that it seems to suggest colors,
like pale green without ever naming them.
Third, that it manages to put into place
some major metaphysical questions
like who made the world without overt analysis.
You notice that the verb made in the first verse has no subject.
I put a question mark in brackets.
It is unusual in Greek for a verb to have no subject.
In fact, you could call it a grammatical mistake.
Strict philologists will tell you
that this mistake is just an accident of transmission,
that the poem as we have it is surely a fragment
broken off some longer text, and that Alcman almost certainly
did name the agent of creation in the verses preceding
what we have here.
Well, that may be so.
But as you know, the chief aim of philology
is to reduce all textual delight to an accident of history,
and I am uneasy with any claim to know exactly
what a poet means to say.
So let's leave the question mark there
at the beginning of the poem and admire Alcman's courage
in confronting what it brackets.
The fourth thing I like about Alcman's poem
is the impression it gives of blurting out
the truth in spite of itself.
Many a poet aspires to this tone of inadvertent lucidity,
but few realize it so simply as Alcman.
Of course, his simplicity is a fake.
Alcman is not simple at all.
He is a master contriver, or what Aristotle would call,
an imitator of reality.
Imitation, mimesis in Greek, is Aristotle's collective term
for the true mistakes of poetry.
What I like about this term is the ease
with which it accepts that what we are engaged
in when we do poetry is error.
The willful creation of error.
The deliberate break and complication
of mistakes out of which may arise unexpectedness.
So a poet like Alcman sidesteps fear, anxiety, shame, remorse,
and all the other silly emotions associated
with making mistakes in order to engage the fact of the matter.
The fact of the matter for humans is imperfection.
Alcman breaks the rules of arithmetic,
and jeopardizes grammar, and messes up
the metrical form of his verse in order
to draw us into this fact.
At the end of the poem, the fact remains
and Alcman is likely no less hungry,
yet something has changed in the quotient of our expectations.
For in mistaking them, Alcman has perfected something.
Indeed he has more than perfected something,
using a single brushstroke.
[APPLAUSE]