time for sins and false alarms

The more I learn, the more I need to learn.

I've marked off the most immediately necessary Greek revision from my to-do list. Now I need to start roughing out an outline for my paper, "Sensory dimensions to healing cult in the Graeco-Roman East: the Asklepieia at Pergamon and at Kos."

Of course, the contemplate sensory experience is impossible to begin to discuss in a short paper. I'll be looking at the sense-experience of entering the two sanctuaries, along the monumental road and through the propylon at Pergamon, and through the monumental entryway at Kos (concerning which the internet has not been helpful in the way of plans). I will be relying on the phenomenology of Christopher Tilley, whose quote from 1994's A Phenomenology of Landscape has proven very useful to my thinking:

"Perceptual space is the egocentric space perceived and encountered by individuals in their daily practices. The centre of such a space is grounded in individual perception of distances and directions, natural objects and cultural creations. This space is always relative and qualitative. Distance and direction are perceived as near or far, this way or that way, moving along one track or another. A perceptual space is one that links patterns of individual intentionality to bodily movement and perception. It is a space of personality, of encounter and emotional attachment. It is the constructed life-space of the individual, involving feelings and memories giving rise to a sense of awe, emotion, wonder or anguish in spatial encounters. Such a space may as often as not be felt rather than verbalised. It creates personal significances for an individual in his or her bodily routines - places remembered and places of affective importance." [p16]

Space affects. It creates in the one who experiences it both attitudes and emotions, even receptiveness to different states of being. The act of approaching a healing sanctuary becomes more affecting when the built or natural landscape induces a sense of awe. Perhaps a receptiveness to being-healed, or to thinking oneself healed.

I'm hoping to find some material in Aelius Aristides to add to my considerations. I have twenty-five minutes for the paper, so I can't really write more than 2,500 words, I don't think. (Maybe 3,000, if I talk quickly. But I'll have a powerpoint, too.) So that gives me about a thousand words of "Describe What You See," a few hundred words for AA (who should at least have some sort of perspective), and a thousand words for the use of phenomenological analysis - the why and the how and the wherefore, as opposed to the what.

This sounds like a plan for going on with. So. Starting tomorrow afternoon, I will be reading AA, and on Wednesday I should be about ready to move on to "Describe What You See." (My photocopy bill is about to go through the roof. I can tell...)

But right now, I think I'll put on some vol-au-vents for supper and watch last week's Nikita.

time for sins and false alarms

The more I learn, the more I need to learn.

I've marked off the most immediately necessary Greek revision from my to-do list. Now I need to start roughing out an outline for my paper, "Sensory dimensions to healing cult in the Graeco-Roman East: the Asklepieia at Pergamon and at Kos."

Of course, the contemplate sensory experience is impossible to begin to discuss in a short paper. I'll be looking at the sense-experience of entering the two sanctuaries, along the monumental road and through the propylon at Pergamon, and through the monumental entryway at Kos (concerning which the internet has not been helpful in the way of plans). I will be relying on the phenomenology of Christopher Tilley, whose quote from 1994's A Phenomenology of Landscape has proven very useful to my thinking:

"Perceptual space is the egocentric space perceived and encountered by individuals in their daily practices. The centre of such a space is grounded in individual perception of distances and directions, natural objects and cultural creations. This space is always relative and qualitative. Distance and direction are perceived as near or far, this way or that way, moving along one track or another. A perceptual space is one that links patterns of individual intentionality to bodily movement and perception. It is a space of personality, of encounter and emotional attachment. It is the constructed life-space of the individual, involving feelings and memories giving rise to a sense of awe, emotion, wonder or anguish in spatial encounters. Such a space may as often as not be felt rather than verbalised. It creates personal significances for an individual in his or her bodily routines - places remembered and places of affective importance." [p16]

Space affects. It creates in the one who experiences it both attitudes and emotions, even receptiveness to different states of being. The act of approaching a healing sanctuary becomes more affecting when the built or natural landscape induces a sense of awe. Perhaps a receptiveness to being-healed, or to thinking oneself healed.

I'm hoping to find some material in Aelius Aristides to add to my considerations. I have twenty-five minutes for the paper, so I can't really write more than 2,500 words, I don't think. (Maybe 3,000, if I talk quickly. But I'll have a powerpoint, too.) So that gives me about a thousand words of "Describe What You See," a few hundred words for AA (who should at least have some sort of perspective), and a thousand words for the use of phenomenological analysis - the why and the how and the wherefore, as opposed to the what.

This sounds like a plan for going on with. So. Starting tomorrow afternoon, I will be reading AA, and on Wednesday I should be about ready to move on to "Describe What You See." (My photocopy bill is about to go through the roof. I can tell...)

But right now, I think I'll put on some vol-au-vents for supper and watch last week's Nikita.

television

Oh, Americans.

I am watching episode four of Undercovers, a mildly entertaining spy show. This episode happens to be set in Dublin. And aside from the accents - which, as usual, for Americans doing Dublin seem to be mostly stuck with country (not that anyone not used to it can interpret some types of Dub) - the guns. Oh, my. Armed gardaí, armed prison service officers... (I have been inside Mountjoy. It was a thing my secondary school did, to intimidate sixteen-year-olds into a respect for Law Und Ordnung. It still looks very much like a nineteenth-century prison - ie, not like that - but, you know. Television.) Guns, guns, guns.

And we are only five minutes in. What is it with the American obsession with lethal force?

(And. Er. Easiest prison break ever? Strikes one as excessively implausible. Research, people! Versimilitude!)

ETA: Oh, the accents. This is actively painful. If they're working for the Dept. of Justice, they may as well have kept their American accents. God knows it's not as though they're implausibly rare hereabouts.

(I do not like seeing what I know well misrepresented. Especially since television is the closest many USians will ever get to foreign travel. But, well. Television, god help us. And television pubs seem to be so much more accepting than the ones I visit, alas.)

(And at last, in the pub, an authentic accent. The owner. I may not survive the shock.)

television

Oh, Americans.

I am watching episode four of Undercovers, a mildly entertaining spy show. This episode happens to be set in Dublin. And aside from the accents - which, as usual, for Americans doing Dublin seem to be mostly stuck with country (not that anyone not used to it can interpret some types of Dub) - the guns. Oh, my. Armed gardaí, armed prison service officers... (I have been inside Mountjoy. It was a thing my secondary school did, to intimidate sixteen-year-olds into a respect for Law Und Ordnung. It still looks very much like a nineteenth-century prison - ie, not like that - but, you know. Television.) Guns, guns, guns.

And we are only five minutes in. What is it with the American obsession with lethal force?

(And. Er. Easiest prison break ever? Strikes one as excessively implausible. Research, people! Versimilitude!)

ETA: Oh, the accents. This is actively painful. If they're working for the Dept. of Justice, they may as well have kept their American accents. God knows it's not as though they're implausibly rare hereabouts.

(I do not like seeing what I know well misrepresented. Especially since television is the closest many USians will ever get to foreign travel. But, well. Television, god help us. And television pubs seem to be so much more accepting than the ones I visit, alas.)

(And at last, in the pub, an authentic accent. The owner. I may not survive the shock.)