“Poets Are Truth’s Orphans–Critics its Bastards”
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Creation Stories for Philologists
http://johnpaulin.com/blog_Left_Side_Journal_No006.pdf
http://johnpaulin.com/blog.html
The Consolation of Philology
Genesis is in doubt. The more likely account
is that the world was assembled, logos
and all, by a convocation of abysmal philologists. These
philologists are said to have proceeded on the
assumption that there was a prior text—although
there was never any agreement upon what exactly
that text might have been. Thus, it comes as no
surprise that when the world finally emerged, it
did so as a vanishingly small fraction of its own
apparatus.
Consequently, even to the extent that the
world has proved functional—or plausible—
traces of the initial disagreement persist as
accident, disintegration, and scribal error, and
the making of the world was also the invention of
discord, ambivalence, oblivion, regress, slander,
deceit, and misreading. But from the perspective
of these demiurges, who were, after all, content
to invent the devil with the word, the antitheses
were no doubt acceptable, because the world, so
constructed, necessitated additional philology