DFS Key Instructions
1
Audio:
From the Phaedrus:
Socrates: I heard, then, that at Naucratis, in Egypt, was one of the ancient gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is called the ibis, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. He it was who [274d] invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of all, letters. Now the king of all Egypt at that time was the god Thamus, who lived in the great city of the upper region, which the Greeks call the Egyptian Thebes, and they call the god himself Ammon. To him came Theuth to show his inventions, saying that they ought to be imparted to the other Egyptians. But Thamus asked what use there was in each, and as Theuth enumerated their uses, expressed praise or blame, according as he approved [274e] or disapproved.
The story goes that Thamus said many things to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts, which it would take too long to repeat; but when they came to the letters, “This invention, O king,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.”
But Thamus replied, “Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem [275b] to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.
§ Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 9 translated by Harold N. Fowler. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1925.
At 17m in the audio: Regarding poetic craft: I meant scanning, not parsing. Scanning, scansion: tracking and annotating the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables (phonemic units) in poetry or any written text:
The interplay of the stressed and unstressed units determines the meter or metrical count, or cadence, of the poetry. Cadence denotes the falling of the accents, like footsteps — from Latin cadere, to fall, cut off, or cut short. When the metrical count is regular and repetitive, you have straight or regular meter, when it does not recur in a predictable way, you have irregular meter. One of the much-observed lines in poetic instruction coming from Ezra Pound was: to compose in the cadence of the spoken voice, not in the cadence of the metronome. This single line alone liberated modern poetry from the strict conventions of classical poetry.
Pound advised his contemporaries to write by the musical cadence: “As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome
Example of composing in the cadence of the musical phrase which carries the natural force of emotion:
Tantrika. I see desire that sidles like a river
from bank to bank, but its dissolving rush
undoes the very borders of its flow,
and gleaming like an omen pearl above,
the moon reflected in the coursing current
shows me the life unborn, in hunger that awaits
the beauty to consume it, and be consumed in turn.
How wonderful and great, how endlessly immense
is this discovery, this treasure-bound romance,
the lover’s dance encircled by the reflected moon.From The Tantrika and the Terton, Yeats Conversions, II
How the Dragonfly Flies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUfYiQSWJAg
As usual, it can do without the music on the second video. However, that close tracking in ultra slow motion footage reveals “the slight delay / in the interplay of the matching wings /”: specifically, the opposite pairs (left and right), compared to the apposite pairs (front and rear), do not either or always stroke in unison, in mirroring motions, like the wings of a bird flapping, or a swimmer doing the breaststroke, both arms pulling equilaterally and simultaneously. The matching wings sometimes beat off cadence with each other. The complex action of the flight of the dragonfly is endlessly fascinating and mysterious. Notice also how they can fly backwards. Behold and wonder!