Meaning of Life

[kFoyauextlH]

Two things to consider implicit to the question:

What is meaning?

1) It could be "the teleological" end "purpose of life". I agree that this is commonly based on values, and this is what people call "the meaning of life"

2) or meaning is "The Definition of Life". This could be purely biological but on the other end it could mean the sanctity of life based on values

I can't seem to compute either really, I see life as having nothing worthwhile or necessary about it, and no stakes, just a completely arbitrary, irrelevant, replaceable "A.I." style "blurgh" of sh*t. Like how people say that life is a "test" but never think of how that word is also used for just trying to do something, anything at all, just an experiment in manifesting.

I also don't think life is definable really, and each definition fails to do justice to what it may be, which we can't know and should never say with any confidence lest we become dishonest (oh no!).

I think that nothing has any value, making everything as valuable or non-valuable as anything else unless there is some agenda involved which then people can say that this or that is useful seeming to get this or that done, none of which even matters. If a person just dropped dead in an instant or spent zillions of years learning everything, each is equally as worthless seeming to me.

I take "life" to be referring to experiencing anything, and that anything could've been anything else, and it would still not katter, as there is nothing apparently at risk or crucial or involved, like a terribly written story, the story before and behind any story is "whatever" and could go away or be brought back.

We're trapped into experiencing for as long as we do and only when we do, so all we can ever know is life and experiencing, and giving things "meaning" also, in order to "understand" and navigate gibberish out of the blue or black or neither.

Nothing is even "really" anything at all, or what we ever say, or "good", it is just what happens to be there and given and what we are directed to consider good or bad for whatever reason traceable back to no reason.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism

https://iep.utm.edu/nihilism/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_nihilism

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absence_of_good

See, look, garbage:

https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/c ... es_moving/

https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comm ... favourite/

https://www.artsthread.com/portfolios/p ... -algorithm

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/artic ... ne.0184604

https://allthingsinsights.com/content/w ... -sciences/

https://medium.com/street-science/6174- ... 2de21bd064

https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/ ... -extremism

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomness

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creatio_ex_nihilo

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism

"
The etymological origin of anarchism is from the Ancient Greek anarkhia (ἀναρχία), meaning "without a ruler", composed of the prefix an- ("without") and the word arkhos ("leader" or "ruler"). The suffix -ism denotes the ideological current that favours anarchy.[5] Anarchism appears in English from 1642 as anarchisme and anarchy from 1539; early English usages emphasised a sense of disorder.[6] Various factions within the French Revolution labelled their opponents as anarchists, although few such accused shared many views with later anarchists. Many revolutionaries of the 19th century such as William Godwin (1756–1836) and Wilhelm Weitling (1808–1871) would contribute to the anarchist doctrines of the next generation but did not use anarchist or anarchism in describing themselves or their beliefs.[7][8]

The first political philosopher to call himself an anarchist (French: anarchiste) was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865),[2][3][4] marking the formal birth of anarchism in the mid-19th century. Since the 1890s and beginning in France,[9] libertarianism has often been used as a synonym for anarchism;[10] its use as a synonym is still common outside the United States.[11] Some usages of libertarianism refer to individualistic free-market philosophy only, and free-market anarchism in particular is termed libertarian anarchism.[12]

While the term libertarian has been largely synonymous with anarchism,[13] its meaning has more recently been diluted by wider adoption from ideologically disparate groups,[14] including both the New Left and libertarian Marxists, who do not associate themselves with authoritarian socialists or a vanguard party, and extreme cultural liberals, who are primarily concerned with civil liberties.[14] Additionally, some anarchists use libertarian socialist[15] to avoid anarchism's negative connotations and emphasise its connections with socialism.[14] Anarchism is broadly used to describe the anti-authoritarian wing of the socialist movement.[16][nb 1] Anarchism is contrasted to socialist forms which are state-oriented or from above.[20] Scholars of anarchism generally highlight anarchism's socialist credentials[21] and criticise attempts at creating dichotomies between the two.[22] Some scholars describe anarchism as having many influences from liberalism,[14] and being both liberal and socialist but more so.[23] Many scholars reject anarcho-capitalism as a misunderstanding of anarchist principles.[24][nb 2]

While opposition to the state is central to anarchist thought, defining anarchism is not an easy task for scholars, as there is a lot of discussion among scholars and anarchists on the matter, and various currents perceive anarchism slightly differently.[26][nb 3] Major definitional elements include the will for a non-coercive society, the rejection of the state apparatus, the belief that human nature allows humans to exist in or progress toward such a non-coercive society, and a suggestion on how to act to pursue the ideal of anarchy.[29]
"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_nature

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meaning_(psychology)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noli_me_tangere

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Tread_on_Me

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsden_flag

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomy

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-actualization

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coercion

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satiety

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_satiation

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predator_satiation

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation

"
Semantic satiation is a psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener,[1] who then perceives the speech as repeated meaningless sounds. Extended inspection or analysis (staring at the word or phrase for a long time) in place of repetition also produces the same effect.
"

"
Bands
edit
Happy (band), a Japanese band formed in 2012
Albums
edit
Happy (Alexia album), or the title song (see below), 1999
Happy (Matthew West album), or the title song, 2003
Happy (Real Life album), or the title song, 1997
Happy? (Jann Arden album), 1997
Happy? (Public Image Ltd album), 1987
Happy, by Sakurako Ohara, 2015
Happy (Jin album), 2024
Songs
edit
"Happy" (Alexia song), 1999
"Happy" (Ashanti song), 2002
"Happy" (Ayiesha Woods song), 2006
"Happy" (Bump of Chicken song), 2010
"Happy" (Danny Elfman song), 2020
"Happy" (Hog Heaven song), 1971
"Happy" (Koharu Kusumi song), 2007
"Happy" (Legacy of Sound song), 1993
"Happy" (Leona Lewis song), 2009
"Happy" (Lighthouse Family song), 2002
"Happy" (Marina and the Diamonds song), 2014
"Happy" (Michael Jackson song), 1973; first recorded by Bobby Darin, 1972
"Happy" (NF song), 2023
"Happy" (Pharrell Williams song), 2013
"Happy" (Rolling Stones song), 1972
"Happy" (Surface song), 1987
"Happy" (Taeyeon song), 2020
"Happy" (Travis song), 1997
"Happy?" (Mudvayne song), 2005
"Happy", by Alexandra Stan from Unlocked, 2014
"Happy", by Best Coast from Crazy for You, 2010
"Happy", by Brooke Candy, 2019
"Happy", by Bruce Springsteen from Tracks, 1992
"Happy", by The Carpenters from Horizon, 1975
"Happy", by Five for Fighting from Message for Albert, 1997
"Happy", by Fool's Garden from For Sale, 2000
"Happy", by The Frames from Burn the Maps, 2004
"Happy", by Gabbie Hanna from Bad Karma, 2020
"Happy", by Hardy from The Mockingbird & the Crow, 2023
"Happy", by Hilary Duff from Dignity, 2007
"Happy", by Jenny Lewis from Rabbit Fur Coat, 2006
"Happy", by Julia Michaels from Inner Monologue Part 1, 2019
"Happy", by Kesha from Gag Order, 2023
"Happy", by Last Dinosaurs from Yumeno Garden, 2018
"Happy", by Lit from A Place in the Sun, 1999
"Happy", by Lolly from My First Album, 1999
"Happy", by Mary Mary from Incredible, 2002
"Happy", by Mazzy Star from Among My Swan, 1996
"Happy", by Mitski from Puberty 2, 2016
"Happy", by Natasha Bedingfield from Pocketful of Sunshine, 2007
"Happy", by Ned's Atomic Dustbin from God Fodder, 1991
"Happy", by Oh Wonder from No One Else Can Wear Your Crown, 2020
"Happy", by Pink from Hurts 2B Human, 2019
"Happy", by Public Image Ltd from 9, 1989
"Happy", by Rick James from Throwin' Down, 1982
"Happy", by Saving Jane from Girl Next Door, 2005
"Happy", by Sister Hazel from ...Somewhere More Familiar, 1997
"Happy", by Slowthai from Ugly, 2023
"Happy", by Soul Asylum from Say What You Will, Clarence... Karl Sold the Truck, 1984
"Happy", by Stabbing Westward from Stabbing Westward, 2001
"Happy", by Steps from Tears on the Dancefloor, 2017
"Happy", by Tracy Chapman from Let It Rain, 2002
"(Don't It Make You) Happy", by Liz McClarnon in competition to represent United Kingdom in the Eurovision Song Contest 2007
"

https://youtube.com/shorts/PCgA3a7az88?feature=shared

"
@anshaggarwal-hz1jh
1 year ago
Lol this word "Stupid" is so close to my heart cause I used to call my crush "Stupid". And now I got a whole song on this word. Thanks JMH
"

Jeez, abusive.

https://youtu.be/tA_8lWrmkSU?feature=shared

"
@FelipeAndresPerezRodriguez
1 year ago
A just read in my bible about how David played music to calm Saul’s heart, and then accidentally clicked your instagram live telling us to go watch the premiere of this video. God used it, Jesus used you, to cheer me up and calm me down. Thank you and God bless you.

557
9



@FelipeAndresPerezRodriguez
1 year ago
Bro, keep your heart grounded and focused on Him
"

He looks like the guy making the music:

https://yt3.googleusercontent.com/cWYv5 ... ffff-no-rj

[Whisper]

atreestumpf made a good point that function does not equal value. So I add a third implicit question to my response, the meaning of life can be


3) the sanctity of life

Added in 4 minutes 29 seconds:
Eros, Philia, Agape

[kFoyauextlH]

Haha, came off as pretentious to me, also didn't care, my thought was about how I had to go urinate.

[kFoyauextlH]

https://westerngazette.ca/culture/the-p ... 7e656.html

[kFoyauextlH]

Oh my gosh, what the heck is this?



Added in 1 day 11 hours 40 minutes 28 seconds:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of ... _Middleton

A lot of weirdness as to the reality of this due to difficulties retrieving early and contemporary information. A YouTube video also showed weird images where it looked like the supposed child had tattoos on his hands? People in the comments were saying how they were surprised they had never heard of the case. Also it has the highest winnings number supposedly, adding to the weirdness.

[kFoyauextlH]

Added in 1 day 18 hours 3 minutes 21 seconds:
"
In this Carolingian manuscript, Eridanus is embodied text, a humanized text, a
natural object, or its idea, transformed into a man (name, icon, figure) who is shaped out of words on the page. Even his spilling jug and quill like sheaf might incarnate
the process of embodying text—the transmission of idea, or image, through writing on a surface.

I take this figure to symbolize mythography—text as image, the margins of a manuscript made into text borrowed from other texts, that is, intertextualized. The way the
figure is constructed reverses the iconographic process in which text describes the image or idea (substance) of a thing. For the figure can do what no icon can do—
exist, simultaneously, on several levels of meaning, just as Eridanus is:
An Image
1. a literal, inscribed image on the page
2. an image of a man recumbent with jug and sheaf
3. an image of a man pouring, nude or clothed
4. an image, later on, of a woman pouring, and
A Man
5. a being known as Oceanus, husband of Thetis and grandfather of Saturn
6. a man or woman personifying a river
7. a force, personified
8. the writer or scribe or poet priest, and
A River
9. a literal, natural river
10. the idea of a river, that is, a generative force
11. Eridanus (Fluvius, Currus)—a proper name
12. a specific river—the Nile River, Ocean (N. Africa = Egypt) or an alternate specific river—the Po River (Italy)
13. a heavenly river located in the Elysian fields or an underground/underworld river, and
A Constellation
14. a constellation depicting a river and therefore representing all of the above, and
A Text
15. a literary text, specifically Virgil's Aeneid 6.659, or Hyginus's Astronomica 2.32.
The complex vox, the voces, associated with this one figure sum up the

philosophical problem of literary exegesis in antiquity and (given the influence of Virgil and Hyginus on the Middle Ages) the medieval period. In some medieval
manuscripts of astrological treatises, chiefly Cicero's Aratea, the constellations stellify stories through their mostly star connected animal figures, which are described
both by illustrations and by the accompanying didactic text (see fig. 2).
In its embodiment of text, or text as image, mythography was associated even in the medieval Church primarily with Stoic philosophy. Stoic philosophy functioned to
humanize, or feminize, the dissemination of mythography in the Middle Ages, not so much in terms of a corpus of Stoic writings translated into Latin (as was the case
with Aristotle in the thirteenth century) as in a passive presence, especially in the realm of ethics. Even in the Hellenistic period covering five centuries, it was more
important than the other great philosophies—Epicurean, Peripatetic, Platonic, Pythagorean. The humanism of this philosophy—and its permission for female equality,
its "feminism"—depends upon its tenet that, in the words of Gerard Verbeke,

,
all human beings—free citizens and slaves, men and women, Greeks and barbarians—are fundamentally equal. . . . Even Aristotle admits that some individuals are slaves by nature, and that women and barbarians represent a lower level of humanity. . . . Quite in agreement with their own physical system, the Stoics
reject such discrimination. The soul of each individual, whatever his rank in society, is a particle of the divine Spirit.
Even though Neoplatonism as a philosophical approach dominated the schools beginning in the third century, it was itself full of some Stoic ideas—whereas
Neoplatonism is spiritual, Stoicism is "a kind of materialistic pantheism," so that "even the immanent divine Spirit is corporeal," as Gerard Verbeke writes. 12 Further,
Stoicism influenced the construction of early Christian ideas, in the Greek Christian writers Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Nemesius of
Emesa, and the Latin Christians Tertullian, Lactantius, St. Jerome, St. Ambrose, and St. Augustine.13
In its feminizing impulse Stoic mythography simultaneously acts as a vehicle not for Jupiter, understood as God, the World Soul, aether, and father of Apollo,
Hercules, and others, but for his sister consort, Juno. Within what might be perceived as phallogocentric narrative allegory—the journeys of Aeneas, the genealogy of
the gods, the descent of the hero, the adulteries, rapes, castrations of Jupiter (an image, in Derridean terms, for critical action)—also appear the invaginated
boundaries, or frames, for each of these. Material spaces were associated with women, whether Dido or Lavinia, the invisible mother linking one father to son, or with
the monstrous (female, pagan, infernal) underworld itself, that is, symbolic invagination, identified variously as Proserpina, Ceres, Cybele, Berecynthia, Circe. Together
these women introduce the mortal victims of Jupiter's desire and also the immortal consort and sister whom he insults and ignores, Juno herself. Whereas most of the
philosophical explanations of the gods begin with Jupiter as the One God, Progenitor, World Soul, most of the narrative allegories actually create a montage of females
and are other, different, from what has been located as patriarchal discourse in both classical myth and medieval mythography.
According to Stoic philosophy, Jupiter (aether) and Juno (air) produce all creation. In addition, Juno acts as a conflation, or montage, of all the female deities,
beginning with Saturn's consort Ops; she is the central female principle, matter to his time, associated with the lower element (air, that sublunary region between earth
and moon) and negatively constructed according to the Neoplatonic cosmos in which earth was the dense center.
"

- Jane Chance, Medieval Mythography Volume I
From Roman North Africa to the School of Chartres, A.D. 433–1177

Added in 16 minutes 15 seconds:
It continues:

"
Specific agents of the one deity include Diana the moon, Duana, Trivia, Lucina goddess of childbirth, Ceres, Proserpina, Ops, Rhea, Cybele, and Berecynthia.
Because of the late antique North African and Eastern Magna Mater cult (associated with Isis and others), readings of the female crept into the already Stoicized
mythographies by the North African Roman Macrobius, Martianus Capella, Fulgentius, and then in the late Roman provincial writings of the Iberian Isidore. In the
ninth century commentaries on Martianus, glosses on such deities carefully proceed to introduce into Western culture many more female figures and new gods; this
was largely the work of Irish scholars still full of Celtic native beliefs who came to Charlemagne's court to help him in his platform of educational reform.
Given this Stoic concept, there is another mythographic means of interpreting classical female deities, especially Juno. Juno is everywhere apparent beneath the
mythological text; understanding her role is necessary to unravel the complex textuality of mythography. The story of mythography is her story, and the story of her
subversive presence in the authoritative discourse of the Church. As virgin mother she represents a pagan Virgin Mary. The virginity of Juno would be matched by that
of Jupiter's female progeny Diana and also Minerva, but opposed to the full blown cosmic sexuality of Venus and Ops Rea Ceres Cybele. And why Jupiter raped
mortal females (and why Juno was so hostile to those women and the heroes they bore) is in pagan terms the story of human history—in Christian terms, of Original
Sin. For example, Jupiter slept with a daughter of Atlas and produced Mercury; he raped Europa, whose brother Cadmus in following her founded Thebes. Juno was
as hostile to her stepson Hercules, child of Alcmene and Jupiter, as to Paris of Troy, who chose Venus over Juno and Minerva. Her only true son was Vulcan, who as
an embryo was carried in her thigh and who in Stoic terms represents the fire of creativity. In another sense, other "sons" might be identified as the centaurs who were
produced by the lust of Ixion for Juno, and whose line eventually produced Chiron, the Christlike centaur who sacrificed his immortality to save the first man,
Prometheus—thief of fire from the gods—from hell's torments.
From life on earth as an underworld it is not far to fiction as an "underworld," and female—the former concept articulated by the twelfth century Neoplatonists William
of Conches and Bernard Silvestris. The philosopher's task is to emulate Aeneas and descend into the underworld to reveal truth; the poet's job is to create that
successful underworld. Thus the Neoplatonism of the twelfth century is not so much the beginning of a new approach to poetry and fiction as it is the outgrowth and culmination of a process that had begun around the year 400 with Macrobius and continued with Fulgentius
up into the sixth century.
Reading a pagan text, a seductive and entertaining fiction, was imagined by late medieval mythographers as a duplication of the heroic descent into an underworld. An
archetype for the underworld, the name of "Demogorgon," the mythical progenitor from whom descend the other gods and heroes in Boccaccio's Genealogia
deorum, implies that the reader of this mythographic encyclopedia, like Dante in the Commedia, will explore hell. Derived from Bernard of Utrecht's late eleventh
century commentary on the Ecloga Theoduli, "Demogorgon," or Demorigon, the Demiurge, who shares rule of the subdivided underworld with Pluto, combines
daemon, suggesting the infernal, with Gorgon, the terrible and fierce quality associated with Medusa and her sisters. Coluccio Salutati's fifteenth century encyclopedia
De laboribus Herculis in its first two books defends poetry as itself a kind of descent into the underworld of artifice or fable, with its third book detailing the labors of
Salutati's ideal epic hero, Hercules, and its fourth and last book discussing various kinds of descents into hell.
Finally, there remains another way in which mythography occupied a feminized and feminizing role in the cultures of the Middle Ages. To us mythography might appear
largely mimetic, unoriginal, and, like the manuscripts with which commentaries grew up, a matter of copying and recopying. A gloss on a Virgil myth in the fourth
century (say, by Servius) might be used in a ninth century scholium on another classical author, whose glossator might add to it other glosses on the same myth from
different authors. One danger in recuperating the mythographic tradition is to assume that such commentators and scholars reworking the meanings of the classics were
marginal in the modern sense of trivial or unimportant. True, a commentator such as Fulgentius might subscribe to the rhetorical modesty topos in terming himself a
"homunculus," a humble interpreter of the greatest ancient poets, Homer and Virgil. And often an anonymous glossator would write in the physical margins of the great
manuscripts of those works, or above the lines of the poem or text being studied.
"Marginality," of course, can refer to that which is marginal, not central, or part of authority. "Margin" as a noun is an economic term for the difference between cost
and selling price; "marginal," in recent theories of social science, expresses the ontology of the situation of women, blacks, and other disempowered groups. In
paleography it refers to the text outside the text—in the Middle Ages that which exists as commentary: contemporary prose, explanations of terms and ideas written frequently in the vernacular in the margin next
to an important (meaning classical, poetic, ancient) text. Marginal and writing marginally in all of the above senses, Christine de Pizan, a woman poet and philosopher
who lived from 1360 to about 1430, wrote what might be termed a commentary on Ovid's Metamorphoses. The question we might then ask, given the above, is in
what sense a marginal writer—a scholarly commentator, or a woman like Christine writing a marginal text like the Epistre Othea—is "original" in the modern sense,
and therefore important, worthy of study.
The greatest marginality, the largest hem between the authority of the classical period and its renewal in the sixteenth century, has been identified as the "mimetic" and
"unoriginal" Middle Ages itself, which has been perceived as borrowing its culture from the Graeco Romans. The lofty regard for antiquity and its giants in the twelfth
century led the scholar Bernard of Chartres to envisage himself as a dwarf, a little man, sitting on the shoulders of giants. The ancients were read from the perspectives
of the medieval commentators who sought to elucidate them in an age when "originality" was not spiritually authorized—an age of the dwarf, the margin, the unoriginal,
the unauthoritative. For such reasons Petrarch, in a bold but mistaken attempt to bolster his and his nation's confidence, first described the Christian Middle Ages as
the "Dark Ages," anterior to the light of the "new time'' and its study of antiquity and the classics—the rinascimento of his own day. Such marginality could itself
empower a new perspective, however, enabling the dwarf to "see more and further" than the Roman giants whose writings taught the dwarf so much.
Medievalists have begun to question, rightly, just how naively classicism was accepted in the Middle Ages and just how naively we continue today to construe
classicism's medieval reception. The outlines of the reception of classicism in the Middle Ages were well documented earlier in this century, with the classical privileged
over what might be essentialized as the "medieval." 14 Jean Seznec's tracing of the three traditions of mythological interpretation (natural or physical, moral,
grammatical or philosophical) from medieval models to Renaissance art was intended to show "the debt of the Renaissance to the Middle Ages" and thereby
demonstrate the continuity of the classical tradition of mythology. But he denigrated the textual tradition of medieval mythography from which Renaissance artists drew
for their subjects as a "complex and often very corrupt tradition." Because the medieval period was "unable and unwilling to realize that classical motifs and classical themes structurally belonged together," the period "avoided preserving the union of these two. Once the Middle Ages had
established their own standards of civilization and found their own methods of artistic expression, it became impossible to enjoy or even to understand any
phenomenon which had no common denominator with the phenomena of the contemporary world." 15
Like Seznec, Erwin Panofsky regarded the Middle Ages as flawed, ignorant, and most of all monolithic, a single cultural entity—the "mediaeval mind,"
anthropomorphized as a misguided individual whose own "phenomenona of the contemporary world" were perceived by Panofsky, from the Renaissance vantage
point, as empty and unimportant.16 For these scholars what was important was the recurrence of classical themes and motifs—as if the historical preservation of
classical culture should have been uppermost in the medieval "mind."
Very recently, Lawrence Nees's revisionist critique of Panofsky reassesses the normally pejorative term medieval to identify patristic as well as classical sources
crucial to its culture in an accurate reflection of the specific historical period in which the art or writing actually occurred.17 No longer can we examine, say,
Carolingian "classicism" (no matter how closely allied to antique representations) without understanding its polemical and political character, its alterity, its singularity—
its medieval historicity. For that matter, naive acceptance of what has been termed "classical" (presumably Graeco Roman) has been questioned by modern scholars:
the way in which nineteenth century classical scholars have constructed what they imagined to be the history of ancient culture in reality reflects their own prejudices
for the Aryan over the Levantine, as Martin Bernal has shown with such stunning postmodern effect in Black Athena.18 History itself has been conceived as textual, a
fabric whose "competing discourses" result in "patterns of interference" termed by Laurie A. Finke ''noise." Historical noise, within the constructed subject of Western
history as consciously male, is information not in itself meaningful whose examination involves " 'a putting into discourse woman.' "19 In the forthcoming book Reading
Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval Aeneid, Marilynn Desmond argues that (male) Virgil readers throughout history have read the epic, and its fourth
book, as an "epitome of patriarchal poetry" that marginalizes the role and power of the African queen Dido.20 Understanding the politics of reading classical texts in
the Middle Ages will also place sanctioned interpretations against an appropriate background of cultural alterity, or noise.

In relation to mythography, then, "marginality" and "originality" accrue new, varied, and specific hues of meaning. Because medieval Christian students of Latin
grammar far removed from the Roman Empire increasingly needed assistance in deciphering references to pagan gods and goddesses, help was provided by masters
and lecturers who had studied glosses (interlinear or marginal annotations of the text) or commentaries (longer expositions that could stand alone and that introduce
lines from the text for elaborate explanation) on those school texts. The difference between the two forms of annotation was clarified by the twelfth century Huguccio
of Pisa: the commentary is an exposition which does not consider the particular conjunction of words but only their sense or meaning, for it is in itself a study of the
various doctrines or thoughts collected together about one work. In contrast the gloss focuses on individual phrases or words: "It is an exposition on words or lines
and their meanings, as the sense does not exist except through words, so that the gloss is an exposition of the sense the word or line contains." 21 Of course the two
forms were not mutually exclusive. Huguccio's contemporary William of Conches distinguished between the gloss and commentary, but in his own work wished to
combine the best from both types of analysis.
William of Conches also perceived the role of the commentator as more than marginal, trivial, or imitative in its shaping, clarifying, and unifying function, compelling us
in this study of mythography to consider such "marginality" and "originality" from a more firmly medieval and historicized perspective. William declares,
Although we do not doubt many have commented on Plato, many glossed, nevertheless because commentators, neither connecting nor expounding the letter of the text, alone
serve the ideas, and glossators are found in truth superfluous on light trifles, in truth most obscure on the weighty matters, we, aroused by the entreaty of friends to whom we owe
all noble things, propose to say something on the abovesaid, cutting off the superfluous of others, adding the overlooked, clarifying the obscure, removing abusive things, and
imitating the things said well. (My emphasis)22
And in the twelfth century handbook or commentaries, such glosses might be compiled with still other related glosses, and perhaps slightly changed to reflect some
current scholastic or literary interest, until, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the collection of myths will have been organized into a unified entity with its own
authority. Nevertheless, Page 16
"marginality" and "originality" as issues germane to the study of the medieval mythographic tradition can help to elucidate the importance of mythographic "texts" and
the (mainly) men who compiled and wrote them in innovative ways that reinterpreted the original myths and the classical texts in which they appeared.
To document the way in which mythography changed in the Middle Ages, I would like to demonstrate by means of examples drawn primarily from the most
"innovative" mythographers the confluence of historical necessity, the power of literary convention, and the creation of new paradigms, to use Thomas Kuhn's term. By
"innovation" I mean those changes in the conventions of literary interpretation instituted by grammarians and scholars who applied what they knew to new mythological
texts or situations for which there were no paradigms, working, as has been demonstrated, at least by the philologists tracing the history of Old and Middle English, by
analogy. Such changes occurred through multicultural shifts and affected the genres of mythography, the pagan hero and god, the underworld with which the demigod
or deity was associated, to result in an assimiliation and transmogrification of pagan into Christian culture.
"

I put this in here because I think that it has to do with meaning and forming a narrative which translates and organized and filters information in a certain way, creating a myth about our world and our life in relation to everything else which is given a place on a map in proximity to the parts of our story and interaction with the world we focus on and emphasize in our thinking and telling.

Added in 5 days 5 hours 11 minutes 31 seconds: