Thursday, August 26, 2010

Snarkness at Noon



Max Muller once called mythology the disease of language, in which case this wordless picture of the HMS Snark making way off Snark Island is safely myth free … for now …

Of course, myth is the mother of religion and we all know that a pure heart (and not a Socratic smarty-pants-unexamined-life-blah-blah-blah) is the sole requirement for the proper enjoyment of religion and so we can safely assume that a pure heart and a certain mangling of language go hand in hand.

The natives of Snark Island seen here are busy at their mute pastime of creating immense pictures which almost, but not entirely, fail to resemble reality. They eschew the noisy double-talk of the pure-hearted for they are a rascally band of epistemological purists whom this heathen artist has mythologized with this inky pictogram of lines, dots and squiggles, all of it a sound and fury signifying nothing.

Manhattan Repertory Theatre's Snark Update …
Here’s more information concerning this September’s performance of the Snark in NYC. It appears that Kate Dickinson, the founder of Snark Productions, likes to celebrate her birthday by reading Nonsense verse, which seems an honest way of marking the inevitable passage of one’s time into entropy and oblivion.

2 comments:

  1. As for entropy, you perhaps will like this: "Gain in entropy always means loss of information, and nothing more." This is the best explanation of entropy which I know of. Gilbert Newton Lewis came up with that brief explanation already in 1930 (before Claude Shannon introduced entropy to information theory) besides discovering those photons which today help to enjoy Snark illustrations.

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  2. Too much information! The Snark is beyond entropy, beyond good and evil … the Snark is an infinite boojum whose circumference is infinite and whose center is everywhere. Right now the Snark is centered on an Assamese woman eating a chocolate truffle … tomorrow? Who knows.

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