Saturday, December 1, 2012
Astutuli!
“Astutuli” are the cheeky super-bright people who get taken all too easily by a clever con-man. Nobody wants to be the dumb one; thus, the audience first lose a healthy sense of truth, then they lose their clothes and their purses and eventually all their dignity. “Everything is make-believe!” shouts the entertainer before disappearing with his accomplice and the loot. It’s a rascal’s tale, a story of deception, which is both fascinating and amusing. But behind all that – and unnoticeable until the very end – we find deceit, spoon-feeding and theft. All this is presented in Carl Orff’s “rootsy” and powerful Bavarian style – both linguistically and musically.
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5 comments:
Perhaps you would like to see this in the same context.
...and celebrate it. ;)
Vive la differance!
I don't know what's wrong with blogger, it's away texts. By context i meant this: But Hrmodius! I will be like your myrtle, your myrtle in which the sword was hidden.
Why, what you tell changes the entire meaning of it. This is what i like about 'texts', they are eager to 'explode', as it were. ;) The sword hidden inside the myrtle! lol! :(
Plato, "Cratylus"
SOCRATES: And can we rightly speak of a beauty which is always passing away, and is first this and then that; must not the same thing be born and retire and vanish while the word is in our mouths?
CRATYLUS: Undoubtedly.
SOCRATES: Then how can that be a real thing which is never in the same state? for obviously things which are the same cannot change while they remain the same; and if they are always the same and in the same state, and never depart from their original form, they can never change or be moved.
CRATYLUS: Certainly they cannot.
SOCRATES: Nor yet can they be known by any one; for at the moment that the observer approaches, then they become other and of another nature, so that you cannot get any further in knowing their nature or state, for you cannot know that which has no state.
CRATYLUS: True.
SOCRATES: Nor can we reasonably say, Cratylus, that there is knowledge at all, if everything is in a state of transition and there is nothing abiding; for knowledge too cannot continue to be knowledge unless continuing always to abide and exist. But if the very nature of knowledge changes, at the time when the change occurs there will be no knowledge; and if the transition is always going on, there will always be no knowledge, and, according to this view, there will be no one to know and nothing to be known: but if that which knows and that which is known exists ever, and the beautiful and the good and every other thing also exist, then I do not think that they can resemble a process or flux, as we were just now supposing. Whether there is this eternal nature in things, or whether the truth is what Heracleitus and his followers and many others say, is a question hard to determine; and no man of sense will like to put himself or the education of his mind in the power of names: neither will he so far trust names or the givers of names as to be confident in any knowledge which condemns himself and other existences to an unhealthy state of unreality; he will not believe that all things leak like a pot, or imagine that the world is a man who has a running at the nose. This may be true, Cratylus, but is also very likely to be untrue; and therefore I would not have you be too easily persuaded of it. Reflect well and like a man, and do not easily accept such a doctrine; for you are young and of an age to learn. And when you have found the truth, come and tell me.
CRATYLUS: I will do as you say, though I can assure you, Socrates, that I have been considering the matter already, and the result of a great deal of trouble and consideration is that I incline to Heracleitus.
SOCRATES: Then, another day, my friend, when you come back, you shall give me a lesson; but at present, go into the country, as you are intending, and Hermogenes shall set you on your way.
CRATYLUS: Very good, Socrates; I hope, however, that you will continue to think about these things yourself.
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