Vorkosigan

Well, if this is "substantive" criticism, I'm sure I have nothing to fear.

Get well soon!

Happy Wonderer

This might be painfully obvious, but I see striking similarities to music theory in this sort of analysis. If we didn't know anything about formal theory and were onlly acquainted with unstructured modern music, I can imagine that we might have the same conversation about Mozart. Mozart didn't bang out melodies randomly, he follows (and sometimes contravenes) the classic forms of his day. You can even find boxes within boxes in his music (and that of other great composers.) This structure is obscure to someone who isn't trained how to listen for it.

I wonder if some of the chasimatic (?) form is related to the tones of the original language -- information that may be lost forever. What we see as 'puns' may be a way of making the rythem and tonalities work; a crude example that survives today is the limerick. If "stone" and "son" sound similar, they may be used like they were the same 'notes'.

I think that the musical aspect of language is a difficult concept for English speakers such as myself, because English is a very poor language tonally. I do not speak middle eastern languages (and have no idea how related modern arabic is to language 2000 years ago) but when I hear a sermon or a formal Arabic speaker what I hear is a chant that is pleasing to the ear -- more so than when I hear German (which I don't speak either.)

Just a thought. If it is new, rather than banal, it might be interesting for you to round up a musician who was fluent in greek and run your ideas past them.

hw

[lurk on]

Rick Sumner

You seem to be missing the point. If you look hard enough, you'll find it. I could find seventeen syllable sayings in early Christian literature too. That doesn't mean they wrote Haikus. I don't need to be taking them out of a narrative to make that point.

And it's interesting, though entirely subjective, that you choose "similar thematic patterns" for Vorkosigan, and "superficially similar pattern" for mine. As a quantative analysis, it's a worthless assessment, because, as noted, it's utterly subjective. And Vork's "chiasms" look every bit as superficial to me, which is of course the pont of the excercise.

I'm not interested in whether or not a "chiasm" makes it historical. It's ultimately irrelevant to the point of my post (see above).

My problem isn't that I wonder whether or not Chiasms whether or not an author is recording history. My problem is that I wonder whether or not the chiasms are actual rather than imagined. It's a rather loose standard being used to identify them. A standard that can pull one out of pretty well anything you want it too. Monday, presuming I find time, I'll do Robin Hood.

Thanks.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

Rick Sumner

If this is a "substantive" response, I'm sure you have nothing to defend either. Spare me the rhetoric.

Don't flame, Vork. It's beneath you.

Thanks.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

Vorkosigan

Not at all. It's always a pleasure to interact with a mind that accuses others of playing "word games" and then whines about getting flamed when responded to in a like manner. There's an old adage about heat and kitchens that I commend you to study.

But if you like, it's easy to see why my proposed chiasms are far better than yours.

First, they have identifiable patterns that are found across all of them. Yours apparently does not. The complex interior sequences are found in every single one, without exceptions. Many integrate chreia or other important sequences into the center. That is how a chiasm should work -- it focuses attention on the most important action. In Mark 15 I propose three chiasms, and they rest on:

1
Now at the feast he used to release for them one prisoner for whom they asked.
And among the rebels in prison, who had committed murder in the insurrection, there was a man called Barab'bas.
And the crowd came up and began to ask Pilate to do as he was wont to do for them.
And he answered them, "Do you want me to release for you the King of the Jews?"

2
and plaiting a crown of thorns they put it on him.
And they began to salute him, "Hail, King of the Jews!"
And they struck his head with a reed, and spat upon him,
and they knelt down in homage to him.

3.
And with him they crucified two robbers, one on his right and one on his left.
And those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads, and saying, "Aha! You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself, and come down from the cross!"
So also the chief priests mocked him to one another with the scribes, saying, "He saved others; he cannot save himself. Let the Christ, the King of Israel, come down now from the cross, that we may see and believe."
Those who were crucified with him also reviled him.

Can you see the relationship there? Each chiasm has, as its center, an ironically correct identification of Jesus as the king of the Jews. Not only that, but if you go back to the Sanhedrin Trial, the centers of each of the chiasms I have proposed go

Sanhedrin/Peter ABAB
Pilate Trial ABBA
Mocking ABAB
Crucifixion ABBA

I had no idea what they were prior to my constructing them.

Second, the keyword sequences also form patterns of their own. Yours do not. Consider your D sequence here:

D:---Bus configurations can be 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit and so on. The more bits of information that can be processed simultaneously, the faster the throughput at a given clock speed.

D:---This allowed the AT motherboards to move far more complex information across the system.

Now consider similar brackets in my Pilate Trial Chiasm:

• B: and they called together the whole battalion.17: And they clothed him in a purple cloak,
  
  B' And when they had mocked him, they stripped him of the purple cloak, and put his own clothes on him.

Not only do we see the keyword sequences, we also have a pattern of movement:

B they come to mock, they put cloak on him
B' they cease to mock, they take cloak off him

But also a neat little chiastic structure:

B: clothed... purple cloak
B' purple cloak...clothes

Your D/D' has no similar structure. The movement in the two parts is unrelated. It exhibits a superficial understanding of chiasm construction. My keyword relationships are underpinned by thematic relationships. Your "keywords" do not relate thematically. Of course, your chiasm contains a no-no: two sentences in the D bracket, but only one in the D' bracket. It's pretty clear that you hadn't worked out any rules about how to construct the chiasm, winged it, and ended up having to shoehorn that baby in there.

Third, the A brackets in Mark are always movement and appear as natural breaks in the story. Your second A bracket does not appear to conclude any sequence of events, but rather ends in the middle of an explanation. In other words, your "chiasm" shows that you do not even know how to go about constructing a chiasm. But I already knew that from looking at the lack of insight your D brackets showed.

This "natural break" is important because chiastic structures were, in the arguments of Stock, an important signal of text structures in a culture that did not have paragraphing and other signals of divisions.

Fourth, I did not invent the relationships here. I have simply broken out the text in a new way. The underlying relationships between sequences of keywords have been noted by many other commentators. The chiasm I have proposed in Mark 2 is simply an elaborated of the intercalation well-known to New Testament scholars. That the Sanhedrin Trial is a doublet of the Pilate Trial was proposed years ago, and that Pilate's three offerings double Peter's three denials was noticed years ago. I have simply worked out the relationships in a very detailed and way.

That is why, Rick, I wrote that your criticism was not substantive and was no threat to my perceptions. What your "critique" showed was that you had not interacted with my ideas in a thoughtful manner that would allow us to move toward a valid reconstruction of the text (read Ted Hoffman's critiques, which are excellent) which in the end may not include any of my proposed chiasms.

Vorkosigan

Amaleq13

My thoughts exactly after reading your post. You presented a "chiasm" that is far too simplistic to be considered analogous.

Take a look at the example Celsus contributed (and Ted's critique as Vork suggests) in order to understand the substantive difference between your efforts.

I think Vorkosigan did an excellent job explaining why yours is only superficially similar.

Now that sounds like it has potential.

Rick Sumner

Huh. The focus of the passage I cited is the fundamental change between AT and ATX boards in regards to system buses. That would be E. I can construct another on the next page with exactly the same main focus. Another on the page previous. Not terribly surprising, given that the focus of the pages in question is the advance to the ATX mainboard.

I see a relationship at least equally as strong in mine. Which is, to say, I don't find yours terribly compelling. Mine's supposed to be ludicrous--it's a reductio ad absurdum, the point of which being that I find yours absurd.

Neither did I. And yet here we are.

We shouldn't expect to find anything analogous. In fact, I'd be rather shocked if we did, given that I took it from an explanatory reference work with the sole intent of caricaturing what seems, to me, to be a specious method.

Which works out great, because that's what it was supposed to do. Once again, it was--I should think rather flagrantly--a caricature. I am certainly not contending that Exam Cram writes in intentional chiasm, I'm contending that your chiasm is the product of an active imagination.

My chiasm was actually defined by exclusive use of words. Which is quite a reasonable way to go about it. Take a look at the chiasm in Eccl. 11.3-12.2. The vast majority of the brackets are linked only by word usage, rather than thematic similarity. Your efforts at defining chiasm exclusively by one means exhibit that "superficial understanding of chiasm" you discussed above.

My chiasm ends with the punctuation, a rather arbitrary way to go about it, to be sure.

See above. Your understanding of chiasm is so rudimentary as to preclude any appearance of one other than the one you use as your typeset. Tsk.

I'm working from English. We do have signals of division. What stock has to say about ancient chiasm is quite irrelevant to what I do with a contemporary text. Watch this:

A: Dear Vork,
B: I'm sorry, but you have failed utterly to convince me.
C: Your chiasms are weak.
B: I apologize if that offends you.
A: Rick

See how neatly that falls, right along the lines of punctuation?

A: Your perceptions may persuade you, but
B: Unless a chiasm is explicit
C: Or very overtly identifiable (such as the one from Eccl.)
D: We are left little way of identifying them with any certainty
C: Yours are not overtly identifiable
B: And explicit chiasms do not appear in Biblical texts
A: Thus I am not persuaded.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

Rick Sumner

The problem isn't that it's simplistic, it follows a perfectly legitimate way of coming about a chiasm. The problem is that it's obviously forced.

Take a look at the two I wrote above. I'm aware of a what a chiasm is, and perfectly aware that the one from Exam Cram isn't a chiasm. That's the point. Because I don't think Vork's is a chiasm either.

I had to run to the Doc this AM, and am about ready for bed now, but I'll do my best to get the Robin Hood up as soon as possible.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

Vorkosigan

This is why it is so hard to respond seriously to your "critiques." Nowhere have I ever defined brackets "exclusively by one."

Vorkosigan

Amaleq13

I agree (though I would say it was another problem with it) but presenting an obviously forced chiasm does nothing to show that any of Vorkosigan's are as well.