There is great benefit, these days, in having a name unlike any other: you float to the top of Google searches. Bolerium Books, in San Francisco, knows this well, although it wasn’t a consideration when it first opened, in 1981. Bolerium’s co-owner, John Durham, runs through any number of explanations for the name, depending on whose leg he wants to pull and how hard. “It was an ancient road in Roman times,” he intoned recently, “large, funny, and sluggish,” while another co-owner, Alexander Akin, roundly mouthed, “Not true.” (The word is a Roman one for Land’s End, in Cornwall, England. The bookstore was once a bit closer to the ocean.) Fittingly, there is no other place like Bolerium, not on the Internet nor in the province of the real. Similes come steadily, none of which really seem to fit. Perhaps Durham’s is best. “We’re like a platypus,” he told me recently, “ugly as fuck and all sorts of parts.”.
This moment of serious American protest against Trump has led to one of Bolerium Books’ best sales years ever.Photograph by Thor Swift / NYT / Redux.
At last count, the store contained 67,385 single titles in stock. Estimates of the time that has elapsed since the last deep cleaning ranged from a jokey “twenty years ago” to a hemming “define ‘clean.’ ” “Nature abhors a vacuum,” Durham quickly noted. A store map gestures at the sheer amount of stuff, with sections labelled as “Reef of Flotsam” or “Onset of Confusion” (right by the entrance), or, in one cramped corner, “Hell.”
The semi-barbed humor protects something serious and deeply essential. Few people walk in (“the door is locked to keep out the unworthy,” Durham wrote in response to a negative Yelp review, though he made sure to mention the password, “swordfish”). Those who do manage to enter find, three floors above one of the Mission District’s busiest intersections, a vast and quiet space populated by seven staff members, thousands of books about and from social movements, densely packed rows of pamphlets and ephemera, and, in the adjacent storage room, great snowbanks of paper. These snowbanks, or “midden heaps,” as Durham calls them, are from attics, basements, personal archives, and libraries across the country. They have all been sold or donated to Bolerium. In them, evidence of the past is to be found, possibly reckoned with, and then, hopefully, sold.
From Bolerium’s snowbanks have come copies of On Our Backs (a lesbian erotic magazine put out in response to the anti-pornography publication Off Our Backs), century-old postcards of pacifist Doukhobors protesting in the nude, intricate Black Panther posters and handbills, an issue of Lumberjack (“with appendix on musical saw”), and the famous inter-commune Kaliflower newsletters from early-nineteen-seventies San Francisco. But with a staff so expert that they can translate a Mongolian treatise on traditional Oirat law using a handmade cheat sheet, classifications like “famous” and “obscure” begin to blur. So do “past” and “present.” Rather than a platypus, maybe the store is more like an estuary: the disparate holdings mingle, rolling in and out according to murky tides. (If you visit the Web site and browse the digital catalog by date, the tides begin to feel more explicable; one week, for example, carries a huge wave of Alan Watts-related material. The next week brings a crush of gay romance novels.) At Bolerium, for better and worse, you can wade around in what Durham calls “the primary source material for history.”
Here is an 1838 publication by the American Anti-Slavery Society and a brochure arguing for the Equal Rights Amendment. A pamphlet from a 1928 speech by Marcus Garvey sits not far from a publication on “incidents in the Life of Eugene V. Debs” written by his brother, Theodore (once, before an important speech, a piece of barbed wire tore “a great rent in [Debs’s] trousers . . . the flap of which hung down like the ear of a Missouri houn’ pup”). Among many other small, sheeny pins is a button from the 1990 AIDS Walk in San Francisco. Here are fliers that passed from hand to hand at protests, meant to convince, assuage, and inflame, and here’s a lump of coal from a miners’ strike in Alabama with tiny chicken-scratch wording: “never forget.” Notably, this year of serious American protest has been the store’s best sales year ever.
Not marked on the map is that other part of American history that has, this year and every other, raged—a section that Durham loosely calls “the White Problem” and keeps behind the locked door of a different room altogether. Accessible to scholars and those who know to ask, the spindly bookcases contain titles like “Gun Control Means People Control” and “Fluoridation & Truth Decay,” as well as several publications by the John Birch Society. “You can’t understand American history without understanding the far right,” Durham told me. “What it’s done, its justifications, its tropes and idiocies.”
It was to the deepest corner of the storeroom that the archivist Lisbet Tellefsen was drawn one afternoon. (Tellefsen visits Bolerium as a “treasure hunter,” and has amassed the largest collection of Angela Davis-related material in the world.) One time, she idly tugged out an issue of The Bayviewer, a magazine that once served the historic black neighborhood that James Baldwin characterized as “the San Francisco America pretends does not exist.”
.
The magazine fell open to a page bearing the face of Tellefsen’s father, whom she had not seen since she was two, in an advertisement for his Oldsmobile dealership. That led to an ongoing saga of tracking down half-siblings and cousins found on Ancestry.com. “There is so much history there,” Tellefsen told me. She visits Bolerium once a month, wary of buying back her own consigned material. “It’s so rich with connections. We have an understanding of history, but places like that hold so much.” Bolerium’s official motto, “Fighting Commodity Fetishism with Commodity Fetishism since 1981,” does not quite distill the feeling of holding some of these discoveries between your fingers, or explain the way that ephemera can work to vivify history, very often through its ordinariness. A bit of light browsing recently unearthed a flier from a class reunion of Florida’s first accredited African-American high school, as well as an Electrolux manual from 1933 listing Pope Pius XI as a famous customer.
But history is ongoing, and the present moment needs its collectors. During the Occupy Movement, the store paid a dollar for each flyer or poster that people brought in, then put together a sweeping collection for the British Library. Holdings from contemporary social movements are fairly small, since so much planning, discussing, and arguing takes place on Facebook and Twitter. “Occupy was the last one to have lots of leaflets,” Akin told me, somewhat sadly. Currently, he is collecting material from what he calls the “shock-and-disbelief period” following the 2016 Presidential election. Only from “marinating in the sauce of time” do these things begin to accrue both value and interest.
.
Recently, in one snowbank, Akin found a sketch done in creamy pastel of a basalt mountain and drifting clouds. Tiny guard towers dotted the background. It was a drawing of the view from Tule Lake Segregation Center, the largest of the incarceration camps that held Japanese-Americans during the Second World War, and the one which held those people deemed by the government to be “disloyal.” The artist was a man named Tomokazu, surname unknown, who resided for over thirty-five years in Plumas County, California, before being imprisoned at Tule Lake. The piece of paper sat among countless others all bearing dispatches of one kind or another from the past, which is not a foreign country, really, but a place hovering just under our present, and made of paper and ink, buttons, and voices.
https://xenagoguevicene.wordpress.com/2020/08/12/bolerium-books-the-san-francisco-bookstore-where-the-revolution-ends-up-by-lucy-schiller-the-new-yorker-20-sept-2018/

"Do not Follow where the path may lead.
Go, instead, where there is no path and leave a trail"
- Muriel Strobe
​
Who Is Muriel Strode? (quotegarden.com)
​
Who Is Muriel Strode?
The author I’m currently reading is Muriel Strode, an amazing woman — strong, gutsy, spiritual, creative, generous, intelligent, talented, and hard-working. Her writing is both down-to-earth and celestial, humble in spirit and yet fiercely, fearlessly ambitious. Her poems run the gamut from blushingly soul-sensual and nature-erotic to mystical and motivating, from poetic positive affirmations and self-discovery to some downright trippy verse.
There is very little information about Muriel on the Web, but I’ve pieced together this brief biography from a few dozen electronic and paper sources, and I’ve updated this article with further information from Muriel’s family for which I’m extremely grateful!
Early life & family. Born Muriel Strode on February 16th 1875 in Bernadotte Township, Illinois, her grandparents were pioneers and she spent her childhood on the farm where they originally settled. Her father William Smith Strode (1847–1934) was a naturalist, teacher, and physician. Her mother Amelia Steele Strode (1849–1888) died young, at age 39. A couple of years after she passed away, William married Julia Yarnell Brown (1866–1954), a periodicals writer. Muriel’s four siblings, all Illinois-born were:

• Winifred Strode Morrison (1872–1916), who had seven children, one of whom was named Muriel Marie
• Walter Lucien Strode (1877–1917), a grocery salesman
• John William Strode (1884–1957), who studied mining then moved to Arizona in 1907. After serving in the military, he served two governors as executive secretary, including Arizona’s first governor, George W. P. Hunt. Later, J. W. was editor of the Miami (Arizona) Silver Belt and president of the Arizona Democratic Association.
• Catherine Joane Brown Strode (1895–1969), half-sister, who graduated young, studied art in Chicago, and moved to California at age 19. She became an established artist using the pseudonym Joane Cromwell.

Venturing out on her own. Muriel left home at age 15 and attended a business school in Denver. At 16 she went to Long Beach, California to earn her living as a stenographer and typewritist. She began writing poetry in the midst of her business career. In 1906 she used her savings to purchase two lots in Signal Hill for $1,000 then moved to New York for a career as a writer.
📷Husband & daughter. In 1908 she married Samuel David Lieberman (1875–1952), the president of an iron and steel firm in Chicago where Muriel had worked. His love interest in her began when he read the inspirational sayings and poems in her first publication, My Little Book of Prayer. He and Muriel had one foster child, Elinore Anne Clifford Austin (1914–2006), born in Colorado and taken in at three years old. The family lived in New York City for several years before moving to California in 1923, when oil was discovered on Muriel’s land and she had suddenly become rich.
Riches & philanthropy. With part of her new riches, Muriel gathered seventeen young wives and mothers, one for each year she had owned the properties, and took them on a shopping spree for beautiful gowns, hats, earrings, undergarments, and other dainty, colorful things. “I was a distributor of wings, I released them into a realization of their beauty. We are all beautiful in our elemental state. We all want to be moon moths in the glowing. But like the flowers, we need petals to show off our beauty. I want to set people free into beauty. I want to take them out of their Cinderella ashes to function as princesses,” she told reporter Ruth Snyder. “It is a poem of pain to feel the urge toward the unfolding of the wings of beauty. It is a song of ecstasy to release it. All my life I have wanted to do something big and useful and beautiful — to help others.”
Shortly thereafter in another display of generosity, she purchased a run-down waterwheel mill in her girlhood Illinois township and with her father, oversaw the restoration of it and its dam as a historic landmark, its surrounding area converted to a public park and playground. At age 80, she wrote in a letter that “I left part of my heart back in Bernadotte years ago and I have never gotten over being homesick.”
Arizona & final years. The Strode–Lieberman family moved to Arizona in 1929 due to Sam’s tuberculosis. They homesteaded on 640 acres fourteen miles east of Tucson, and their home sat atop a ridge overlooking the entire Tucson valley. Muriel’s father, who was then divorced from Julia, had retired and moved in with the Liebermans. They had originally planned to build a solid rock home, every day making three-mile excursions into the desert to collect rocks. The passings of Muriel’s father and husband put a stop to the plan, however, and Muriel lived out the remainder of her days in the original wood-framed home.
In a 1955 letter Muriel wrote, “I have come a devious route to land eventually on these desert acres, as Mr. Lieberman’s business took him traveling and we lived in half the important cities in the United States.” But once in southern Arizona, that is where she stayed. She would sign her letters and books from “the Ranch of the Gorgeous Sunsets, Tucson, Arizona.” Muriel passed away on January 25th 1964 after twelve years’ struggle with a heart ailment.
📷Writing & publications. Her habit was to write her thoughts and ideas every morning, and she continued to work on her writings and manuscripts even into her final years. She had first published in periodicals, mostly The Open Court. The first publication I found her cited in was The Philistine: A Periodical of Protest, from 1901. Later she authored four books:

• My Little Book of Prayer, 1904, “a collection of thoughts on the spiritual side of nature, moral fortitude and other uplifting themes” (Judy Donovan)
• My Little Book of Life, 1912, “a personal philosophy of life that spells courage, cheer, and serenity” (The Open Court)
• A Soul’s Faring, 1921, “tumultuous imagery, mighty seething seas of words, of similes, of metaphors, of themes of love and life and death and the Beyond” (Brooklyn Daily Eagle)
• At the Roots of Grasses, 1923, “the very rhapsody of an American soul pouring itself forth in songs of the strong” (Charles Fleischer)

In her heyday Muriel was known as “the female Walt Whitman.” She was a member of the Poetry Society of America and The League of American Pen Women. She wrote her entire career under her birth name Muriel Strode, omitting the hyphenated Lieberman on post-marriage publications. One of the books I have is signed “Muriel Strode — Mrs. Sam D. Lieberman.”
Sometimes she received harsh critiques in the newspapers. Some reviewers who did not understand her writing thought it egotistical. In 1923 she explained to a reporter, “When I say ‘I,’ I mean the cosmic ‘I,’ speaking to the cosmic ‘you.’” On reading her books, it seems clear to me that she was not egotistical but mystical. She said in a 1962 interview, “I don’t mind adverse criticism. It doesn’t matter if I’m misinterpreted because not everyone will understand what I’m trying to say.”
Those who did understand her cosmic perspective handed out more favorable reviews. “Muriel Strode has a distinctive touch in free verse rhythms. She uses them to interpret optimistically and broadly the elemental forces of being, and she strikes a high note of endeavor and faith in life without glossing over its inevitable question” (The Kansas City Times, 1921).
“Few poets are as prolific in sheer beauty as Muriel Strode. Her work is marked with richness, the forms she chooses for expression are diverse and through all her work there is the rumbling of the seeker of truth. Miss Strode’s poems are a revelation in inspiration. There seems no end to her philosophic thoughts. There is a virility of beauty in this poet’s work” (Howard Willard Cook, 1923). She “sings of the things elemental in universal nature and in human nature” (Charles Fleischer). During her childhood in Fulton County, Illinois, she “breathed in the beauty and the intense love of nature and the elemental things of life that flame out in her poetry” (The Fulton Democrat).
Names. Other names she was known by include: Muriel Strode-Lieberman, Muriel Lieberman, Muriel S. Lieberman, Mrs. Samuel D. Lieberman, Mrs. S. D. Lieberman, and Mrs. Sam Lieberman. The 1880 census lists “Muray Strode,” but her surviving family is not aware of that nickname so it is possibly a typo or a childhood pet name that didn’t last. 📷
Famous quote & found treasures. There were quite a few newspaper articles about Muriel during her publishing days and when she first got rich from oil, but I can’t find personal references much past her death date. Sadly, she seems to have disappeared from history, excepting her famous 1903 words “I will not follow where the path may lead, but I will go where there is no path, and I will leave a trail,” which around the 1990s had started being widely misattributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson. I am exceptionally pleased to digitally revive this wonderful poetess — I’ve been posting selected quotations from her works to The Quote Garden. Here is a sample gem: “I will have a care lest my burden rest all too long where my wings might have grown.” —Muriel Strode, My Little Book of Life, 1912
Image Information. Photo of Muriel is unknown date, courtesy of Muriel’s family, modified by Terri Guillemets using imikimi app, 2017. Book cover is My Little Book of Life by Muriel Strode, 1912. Muriel’s signature is from the 1934 application for her father’s headstone.
Acknowledgement. I am eternally grateful to Muriel’s family for providing the information to expand this bio, as well as the beautiful photograph and retroactive permission to use her words on my website. Thank you so much!

Now that there is less than half a day until Aventurine’s release. I want to share some of my thoughts regarding the possibly real guardian deity of his planet.
So we learned that people in Sigonia worshipped a divinity called Gaiathra Triclops that is said to be distinct from the Aeon belief system. I want to propose a theory that Gaiathra might be related to the aeon Ena the Order.
While I cannot really say what kind of relation they have, Gaiathra could be a fragment, a remnant, a manifestation, an emanator of, or Ena herself (I know, I know the Aeon got consumed by Xipe, but that does not necessarily mean the existing religious system got wiped out)
So here are some connections:

• Ena has a lot of association to eyes and the act of observing in the Simulated Universe Swarm Disaster. And that makes me think that the true Ena is the giant eye floating in the background, not the trunkless puppet. Meanwhile, Gaiathra is also heavily associated with eyes (described as a hand with three eyes, and prayers mention the closing of eyes)
  
• The Avgins are famous for their beautiful eyes witth three colors: purple, blue/teal, and black from the outside going inward. The giant eye in Ena’s splash art has the very similar colors, if not identical, down to the order.
  
• Ena has some Christian elements: accompanied by choir, the angelic halo, the rosaries, and her head-covering (while not unique to christianity) is reminiscent of the Virgin Mary. Meanwhile, the Sigonians are based off Romani people. While the Romani have their own folk belief, in modern time they are predominantly Christian. This seems to be a very strenuous connection until I read the Sigonian planar ornaments lore. The religion of Gaiathra revolves around a deity that encompasses everything in the world, has a dying-and-rebirth motif, and has to be worshipped with prayers and specifically NOT with idolatry, sort of paralleling christianity.
  
• Ena dictated the order of rise and fall of civilisations. Meanwhile, Gaiathra Triclops follows an annual cycle of (re)birth and death.
  
• Aventurine’s flashback gave an impression that his luck in gambling might be a result of Gaiathra’s Blessing. I believe the luck could be explained if the power influencing him is related to the path Order. Gambling is the opposite of order, it is chaos in action, with little to no control. And Ena detested chaos and is a control freak. Perhaps my removing this chaos, whatever power left of the path Order ensures that Aventurine will have the more favourable outcomes.
  
• A more strenuous connection is that Gaiathra’s body resplendence is rivalled by turquoise meteorite gemstones. (Resplendence = bright and beautiful appearance). While Ena’s radiance is also said by Herta to be as holy as gems. Unless this is a commonly used simile, I’ll see it as a bit suspicious.
  

However, I’m more inclined to believe Gaiathra is related rather than be Ena themself. Gaiathra is silent and her cult discourages hymns, whereas Ena is always accompanied by choir. Perhaps, she is an emanator of order or a creation of the aeon instead (similar manner to The Shadows of IX).
Thank you for reading all the way to the end. Good luck on your Aventurine roll.

Don't you dare mention the unequivocally remarkable masterpiece that is Fallen Hero with its unparalleled storytelling prowess, thank you. I have already replayed that 1.0 x 10¹⁰ times.
Famous Ifs I haven't read:
Sabres of Infinity (mainly cause I prefer a female MC and that ain't possible in this one) Grim and I (imma read this one anyway but still wanna hear what y'all think about it) Relics of the lost age (currently reading but the Cleo's adventure is getting a bit boring rn) Tale of two cranes Tin Star Ghost similator War of the West College Community tennis Path to knighthood The sword of Rivenia Soul stone war 2 A kiss of death Vampire refent The passanger
And a bunch of other more. Feel free to recommend me even Wips (but they have to be fairly long please) I need to relax after a week full of final exams and have been hesitating to buy one of these. Thank you in advance.

Like I first found out I was aroace when I was 10 but it was a never a huge deal. Like for my entire life I had known I never had a crush or any celebrities i thought were “cute” but I didnt think much of it. Just when anyone would ask I would just be like “im never gonna ir marry anyone”. Then like one random day me and my mom were talking about something (probably smth about dating or crushes) and she said U might be asexual and thats it not very well known but she knew some famous person who was it (Dont worry shes very supportive). So like I just decided to look it up be like “Yep. Guess thats me” and then i never really thought about it more after that till I got tiktok and discovered what aroace was and pretty much just did the same thing. So yeah just wondering if anyone else had a similer “Oh well 🤷🏽‍♀️” moment.

Hey guys,
The following is a bit of writing about an ashram in the south of India. I've especially liked having goals when writing. If you write with specific goals what are some things you're working at?
Here are a few of my goals this time:
- Produce a catchy title and opening paragraph.
- Incorporate quotes from a number of interviews (3) I’ve given since arrival
- Continued practice of figurative language (metaphor, simile, hyperbole, etc)
- Make sure every sentence adds value (avoid fluff).
I'd love to see your feedback. Alternatively, post a link to your writing if you'd like a second pair of eyes.
Brothers from Another Mother
“It feels a lot like a university campus” or “It’s a small self-enclosed city. Some people stay inside for months without leaving”. These were a couple of the ways I caught myself describing this environment to those curious about my first visit here more than 4 years ago. My departure was days before the world shut down under the 2020 pandemic. I liked it enough to come back. Would it strike me in the same way? Would I come again with expectations and leave disillusioned? Would my mind be blown at the very sight of Amma? Those questions could only be answered with a return visit.
So, who is this Amma and what is this ‘university campus’? Amma is a spiritual leader, philanthropist, and guru. The place is an ashram in the southern Indian state of Kerala. She’s preceded by legend. Before I saw her, I heard of her claim to fame as the ‘Hugging Saint’ from hugging millions (estimates online have her body count close to 40 million). If you ask a devotee, you might hear one of thousands of stories of devotees who were healed or saved as a result of her interceding and divine grace. Born 70 years ago on the very ground where the ashram sits, she’s been leading the ashram since 1981. The amount of philanthropy she does is incredible. A few examples are the hundreds of housing projects across India she’s initiated and carried out, hundreds of kitchens serving free food around the world, healthcare investments and hospitals. The small book that sits outside my room notes the main intention in her charity is to provide the ‘five basic needs (of): food, shelter, healthcare, education, and livelihood’. It’s inspiring and humbling to consider the impact she’s had with her consistent intention of compassion and care.
The place in question is known by most westerners as ‘Amma’s Ashram’ or locally known as Mata Amritanandamayi Math (Mother of Immortal Bliss Ashram). Taking the university analogy a bit further, it’s a campus situated on a strip of land bordered on one side by a backwater and the other by the Indian Ocean. Complete with several multi-story dormitory buildings, at least 5 eating options ranging from free ashram food like curried potatoes with chapati, to western-style salads, stews, and pizzas. The equivalent of the football stadium is probably the bhajan hall which is where kirtan music is played every evening, guided meditations, and darshan is offered (this is a significant part of most people’s experience here which I’ll explain in a bit). With a footprint of 30,000 square feet, it’s the largest hall in Southern India and was constructed with only exterior columns – good views from all parts of the hall. Prices for private rooms are at 600 rupees per day ($7.22) or 300r in a shared room. One could live here a year all included for about $1,300. It all kind of brings me back to my university days. To me, ashram life is an experiment in communal living. An experiment in which people of all nationalities, races, and ages are put to the test of living as a singular community.
Darshan, something I mentioned a minute ago, is a Sanskrit word that translates as ‘viewing’. It’s the beholding of a deity, a revered person, or a sacred object. In this case, darshan is embracing the Hugging Saint herself. My first conversation as I was entering the ashram was with Andrej from Slovenia. Probably coming on 50, wearing flowing elephant-print pants and here on a last-minute flight. Darshan, he said, felt like he ‘went right into the center of the universe for a brief second’. Others provided more sobering views. Some a bit disappointed after waiting an entire evening for a hug that seemed distracted by her philanthropic dealings. I noticed on my first night what they were talking about. Along with a continuous flow of devotees, she seemed to have a conversation going with various assistants who surround her. One guy who took over half an hour was apparently the dean at her neighboring university campus.
There are those here with a certain zeal that borders on fanaticism for Amma. There is something beautiful when someone practices ‘right devotion’, however. People like Umer from the States, and James from London, are spiritually devoted to Amma and recognize her divinity. Their conversation didn’t seem tainted by a feeling of fanaticism but expressed clearly how their hearts and minds have been changed through years of looking to Amma for guidance. Umer grew up at Amma’s ashram established in San Ramone, California. For a 21-year-old I felt an inspiration and respect at his level of maturity and calm clarity. James, who I met last time I was here, expressed his path and experiences over a masala dosa dinner on one of my last nights here. The conversation was catching up on 4 years of life weaving in spiritual lessons he’s learned from Amma over the years. ‘You understand the entire path upon committing one act of true love’. He expressed how often the spiritual path is conceived as one on which we are trying to get back from an assumed fallen state. This has implications into how we approach life. Whether striving to get to the next place or in a state of constant arrival. ‘I’m not trying to get home. I am home’. The general idea I meant to express was the importance of being earnest and applying ‘right effort’ in achieving freedom. His philosophical stance was upon grace. You can’t earn it. There’s no secret besides love. I loved it because our conversation felt like a dialogue between the Buddha and Amma.
Madhava from San Diego, but originally hailing from Detroit must be my best example of someone who’s been in the game for a minute. He’s 71 and first came to India in ’75 in his early twenties. He spent 10 months touring through sweltering conditions in the north of India with Anandamayi Ma, one of India best known female Guru’s and mentioned in Paramhansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi. He remained devoted to her through her passing in ’82 before heading to Kerala to see what the fuss was around this new holy-woman. This was just a year after Amma first found the Ashram with a handful of humble huts.
That’s not to say that all are devotees. A lot are here with curiosity to see into the ashram. People like Luciana from Brazil, Nico from Italy, Yann from France, and myself all fit that common type who come for anywhere from a day to several months. I found myself enjoying their company most.
Hinduism defines a relationship of submission and complete devotion from the devotee to the guru. I sense this attitude in long-term ashram residents. The tendency is to deify Amma. Yann, with whom I worked on seva duty (optional volunteering at the ashram), offered a unique perspective. It’s that people here are encouraged to give up their spiritual and intellectual autonomy to fully devote themselves to Amma. He notices a ‘brain-washing’ that occurs and that most people ‘don’t need another mother… (but need to) grow up and think for themselves’. This point resonated with me. Amma, to me, is an example of the love and compassion we have lying within. She works to wake an awareness of this, that we might cultivate and spread it ourselves.
📷 📷 📷
The moment had finally arrived. Luciana and I had waited patiently for 3 hours in a succession of lines to get to the front. Would it be a divine touch? The hug to end all hugs? As I approached something that was nervous in me felt playful. I had suddenly let go of expectation around what this would be. I wanted it to be fun, and that was something I had in my control. As instructed, I approached on my knees and collapsed into a ‘brief second’ at the ‘center of the universe’.
📷 📷 📷
Awkwardly, I was awakened from this reverie, as one of her assistants noticed my hands hugging her back: ‘Hands on the chair… hands on the chair, pleeeease!’. How was it? It’s a hug. Although a world-famous hug, there’s no need to get too spun-out on its significance and meaning. What I found most significant was watching her give darshan. Ending the hug with a bar of chocolate, eye gleaming and head bobbing in the inscrutable Indian way.
Now that I think about it. She did whisper something. What was that ‘mabalah, mabalah, mabalah’ supposed to mean? Maybe I am blessed. I leave feeling something lifted from my shoulders and a little dizzier than before.
If you made it this far, then thank you. Feel free to drop a comment!
​

AO3 link: Taylor Swift Songs: Literary References & Parallels
Reddit links: Part 1: Sappho Part 2a: Shakespeare part 1 Part 2b: Shakespeare part 2 Part 3a: Shakespeare part 3
Content note for this chapter that it discusses sexism and rape/non-consensual contact, though more briefly than the Shakespeare chapter.
​
John Lyly is a less-known name from English literary history than figures such as Shakespeare, but he was certainly influential, on English language writing in general as well as perhaps in Taylor's work specifically. Born in 1553 or 1554 (such ambiguity is not uncommon) and living until 1606, he published plays, novels (including perhaps the first English language novel) between 1578 and 1597 before spending some time as a Member of Parliament. In his time, he was most famous for his novels Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit and sequel Euphues and his England (comedic and dramatic romance stories), but his plays are now much more remembered and discussed. His work includes powerful and complex female characters, commentary and satire of misogyny and societal norms, and queerness of both individuals and of relationship dynamics which surely invite a modern rediscovery and renaissance.
He is generally considered to have created the phrase "All's fair in love and war". This is directly referenced by Taylor in her prologue to her (upcoming at the time of writing this chapter) album The Tortured Poets Department which states "all's fair in love and poetry".
​
​
From his Euphues works came the style of writing now known as euphuism, or a deliberately ornate style with repeated, sometimes excessive, literary devices and allusions; it uses repeated phrases and structures, alliteration and assonance, and 'balanced' sentences in terms of the length of clauses and in the ratios of nouns, verbs and adjectives to each other. Even in its own time, it was parodied by some and copied by others, and looking online it's easy to find mainstream dictionaries aligning it with words like 'pretentious'. Euphuism was not created by Lyly, but he certainly popularised it enough that it takes its name from his work.
An often-used example of euphuism is taken from Euphues itself:

It is virtue, yea virtue, gentlemen, that maketh gentlemen; that maketh the poor rich, the base-born noble, the subject a sovereign, the deformed beautiful, the sick whole, the weak strong, the most miserable most happy. There are two principal and peculiar gifts in the nature of man, knowledge and reason; the one commandeth, and the other obeyeth.

In this section can be seen:

• Alliteration (words beginning with the same letter or sound) - "subject a sovereign", "principal and peculiar", "most miserable", "other obeyeth"
• Assonance (words using the same vowel sounds) - "one commandeth [...] other obeyeth"
• Consonance (words using the same consonant sounds" - "the sick whole, the weak strong"
• Parallelism (similar structure in paired words or phrases) - "knowledge and reason; the one commandeth, and the other obeyeth"
  • Antithesis is a form of parallelism in which the paired phrases are sharply contrasted or opposite each other, not represented in the above but important in euphuistic writing.
• Repetition - virtue, gentlemen, most
• Phrases of equal length - "the poor rich, the base-born noble, the subject a sovereign, the deformed beautiful, the sick whole, the weak strong" all contain three words other than the added 'a' in "the subject a sovereign"
• Use of similes and metaphors - concepts such as "the subject a sovereign" and "the deformed beautiful" are not here being used directly but as imagery of how virtue can transform how someone is perceived by others

Euphuism also often involves

• Rhetorical questions - asking questions which are not meant to be answered
• References intended for people with classical or highly educated backgrounds, which may be deliberately opaque or strange to those who do not know what is being referenced

While Lyly used these skills mostly in prose and plays, it is easy to see how they would correlate well to poetry and to songwriting! Repeated sounds and phrases of similar lengths are staples of songwriting in order to fit to the melody, but the added factor of the elaborate imagery and allusions are likely what separate some songs when it comes to if they are considered euphuistic in nature. Certain of Taylor's songs, particularly those of her folklore and evermore albums, can clearly be considered part of this style of writing.
As an example, let's look at the lakes, the final song from folklore released as part of the deluxe edition. This analysis will ignore normal end-of-line rhyming which occurs in most songs.
​
​

the lakes	Analysis
Is it romantic how all my elegies eulogize me?	Assonance - "my" and "eulogize" both have the long I sound, while "elegies" and "me" have a long E sound
	Consonance - -ies and -ize both use sibilant sounds
	Rhetorical question
	References - double meaning of "romantic" referencing the romantic poets of the early 19th century
	Ornate language: "elegy" and "eulogy"
I'm not cut out for all these cynical clones	Alliteration & Consonance - "cut", "cynical clones"
	Consonance - "cut out" uses the stop of T
	Metaphor - "clones"
	Use of ending long O sound to draw mournful, howl/sob-like sound
These hunters with cell phones	Consonance - sibilance in "hunters", "cell phones"
	Metaphor - "hunters"
	Use of ending long O sound to draw mournful, howl/sob-like sound

(Analysis continues in the AO3 chapter.)
There is, after all, a reason why folklore and evermore were so critically acclaimed and drew so many literary comparisons - as can be seen, just about every line contains at least one literary device, if not more, creating a very dense and intense lyric experience. Thus particularly for these albums, Taylor's writing style could certainly be described as euphuistic in nature; it could also be suggested that the Midnights 3AM tracks also draw from this literary style, particularly the extended metaphors of The Great War and Would've, Could've, Should've (which even in its title uses the phrase lengths of euphuism).
​
​
Eight of Lyly's plays survive:

• Campaspe performed 1583/84 (printed 1584 three times, & 1591)
• Sapho and Phao performed 1584 (printed 1584 twice, & 1591)
• Gallathea performed 1587/88 (printed 1592)
• Endymion, the Man in the Moon performed 1588 (printed 1591)
• Midas performed 1589/90 (printed 1592)
• Mother Bombie performed c.1590 (printed 1594, & 1598)
• Love's Metamorphosis performed c.1589/90, revived 1600/01 (printed 1601)
• The Woman in the Moon probably performed 1590-95 (printed 1597)

Campaspe is based upon a reportedly historical figure (actual sources are unclear whether she existed or not). Coming from Thessaly, she met Alexander the Great, who fell in love with her and asked the great painter Apelles to make a portrait of her. However, Campaspe and Apelles fell in love, and Alexander kept the painting but stepped aside so that the lovers could be together. She is supposedly the model for Apelle's famous, lost but often recreated, Venus Anadyomene. In Lyly's retelling, Campaspe is a slave whom Alexander frees. Lyly's play was notable for being a drama told for its own value: it was not intended to hold higher allegory or moral/ethical lessons or reasoning. Additionally, while it is still written in the euphistic style and has poetic or rhyming passages, the play also used prose, which was again new to the era.
From a queer point of view, it is of course worth noting that Alexander the Great is nowadays widely known to have been queer (likely bisexual in modern terminology) and had relationships with men - most notably Hephaestion, who appears in the play Campaspe and disapproves of Alexander's relationship with Campaspe herself. However, this is still being argued against by people in the modern day, and seems to have only really entered discussion and acknowledgement within living memory - it was, most likely, not known to Lyly at the time.
Compare to: Champagne Problems ("she'll patch up your tapestry that I've shred")
Sapho and Phao is a play loosely based upon the supposed romance of Sappho of Lesbos and Phaon the ferryman (see the chapter on Sappho for comments on how ahistorical this likely was!), using elements of Ancient Greek Religion while using Ancient Roman religious names. In Lyly's play, Venus thanks the old ferryman Phao for his services by granting him youth and beauty; he is now so attractive that all the women of Lesbos, including (unmarried and uninterested in love) Queen Sapho, fall in love with with him. Sapho feigns illness to have an excuse to call upon him for healing, but they cannot be together due to their differences in status. Venus asks her son Cupid to make Phao fall in love with her instead, but Cupid rebels: he cures Sapho of her love for Phao but makes Phao hate Venus instead. Phao leaves the country while Cupid remains with Sapho.
It has been suggested that elevating Sappho to "Queen Sapho" was to allow Lyly to draw comparisons with Queen Elizabeth I of England (often called The Virgin Queen), and comment on François, Duke of Anjou, who had recently given up on his attempts to court Elizabeth and had left the country.
As noted in the chapter on Sappho, her narrative was heterosexualised (or het-washed) throughout much of history. It was not until in 1633 that John Donne wrote "Sappho to Philaenis" which had Sappho as writing to or about another woman once again. (Sidenote, this is discussed in an episode of the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast for which I read the transcript and which sounds utterly fascinating.) Nonetheless, it has been suggested that there are queer themes to be found in the play. Venus's desire for Phao leads to her fixated interest in Sapho, an example of the triangulation of desire also discussed, appropriately, in the Sappho chapter. Moreover, the general concept that Sapho was not interested in a relationship until Phao, artificially and magically made beautiful, entered, could easily be read with an aspec or lesbian interpretation that Sapho's interest in him was essentially forced and not natural to her.
Compare to: Midnight Rain ("he wanted a bride, I was making my own name")
Gallathea (sometimes spelled Galatea) is a romantic comedy set in ancient Greece and using Ancient Greek religious figures with Roman names. Because Neptune demands a virgin sacrifice every five years, two men both disguise their beautiful daughters Galatea and Phillida as men and send them to hide in the woods. The two girls meet and fall in love despite their disguises. Meanwhile, Cupid causes trouble by disguising himself as one of Diana's nymph and causing several of the nymphs to fall in love with Galatea and Phillida, to Diana's fury. Diana and Venus argue, while Neptune is angry that girls are being hidden from him and rejects the offered replacement girl as not attractive enough; Diana returns Cupid to his mother and Venus persuades Neptune to stop asking for sacrifices. Galatea and Phillida are both revealed to be girls but state that they are still in love; Venus approves and offers to make one of them a man so that they might remain together. The epilogue says that love is both infallible and all-conquering.
In contrast to the implicit queerness of Sapho and Phao, it is easy to see why Gallathea is acknowledged as an early queer play in the English language! Galatea and Phillida fall in love as women, and Venus states her approval of it even with her offer to transform one of them to a man. This transformation does not take place onstage, but whether it does or not the end result is queer - either with a trans character, or two sapphic ones. The desire of the nymphs for the women, although sparked by Cupid, plays into the gender transgressions of crossdressing that would continue to be explored in later plays, including very famously the works of Shakespeare.
The choice of the name Galatea is also interesting from the point of view of Ancient Greek Religion. There are three Galateas in the lore - one a nereid and not highly relevant, but the second the statue created by Pygmalion who was brought to life to Aphrodite, while the third was the mother of Leucippus who was raised as a boy and later transformed into a man by the goddess Leto (mother of Artemis and Apollo). So this name has two potential references - either to the construction of the self as related to romantic relationships, or for its relationship to queer gender narratives.
It has been suggested that the interesting complexity of Lyly's exploration of gender on stage was a response to, and perhaps made possible by, Elizabeth I of England's position as ruling monarch, unmarried and without children. Elizabeth I ruled as Elizabeth Rex (literally meaning King Elizabeth in Latin, to indicate herself as queen regnant rather than queen consort). The only previous potential ruling queens in English history had been Matilda, whose declaration as heir led to The Anarchy which was 25 years of civil war and disorder, or Elizabeth's older sister Mary who is still known as "Bloody Mary" for the number of Protestants who were killed during her reign. Elizabeth I of England proved that English ruling queens were even possible - although she walked a fine line to be able to do so. From the song The Man, through July 2018 when Taylor Nation posted a picture of a concert crowd with the caption "Taylor is the 📷 of our ♥'s!", through Phoebe Bridgers calling Taylor "king of her craft" in a BillBoard interview to December 2022 when both Phoebe Bridgers and Gracie Abrams called Taylor "King", Taylor has also pushed at the boundaries of what is considered acceptable for a woman in the modern media and music landscape but also seems aware - and even fearfully aware - of the potential limitations around her, of "fucking politics and gender roles" (Question...?).
Several versions of Gallathea (generally amateur) can be easily found on YouTube - they make for interesting watching!
Compare to: ...okay, actually I don't have a good comparison for this one. But you could probably have some fun with Mine ("I fell in love with a careless man's careful daughter"), Ours ("they'll judge it like they know about me and you"), or Snow on the Beach ("weird, but fucking beautiful").
Endimion, the Man in the Moon (sometimes spelled Endymion) uses reference to Ancient Greek and Roman Religion, and to English folklore, but diverges the plot significantly to make contemporary allegories. It is considered the most impressive of his works. Endymion falls in love with Cynthia, the queen, and begins to neglect his lover Tellus who is among Cynthia's ladies-in-waiting. Angry, Tellus has a sorceress bewitch Endimion into sleep; Cynthia realises and has Tellus imprisoned while sending various people to look for a cure for Endymion. Endymion's friend Eumenides returns to say that a kiss from Cynthia will wake Endimion; this works, but he is aged and his memory damaged. When Endymion explains that his love for Cynthia is chaste and sacred (a reference to courtly love), she accepts it, and her blessing restores his mind. Various figures are forgiven for their roles and pair off. It has been discussed whether this represents a happy ending for the couples, or whether Lyly is commenting on the impossibility of fair male/female relationships in heteropatriarchal societies, as Lyly was unusual among writers in presenting singlehood (especially single women) positively. Lyly's repeat presentation of competent and happy ruling queens without male guidance or control was unusual, although it is worth noting that as Cynthia arranges the pairing-off of other characters she reinforces the heteropatriarchal structure as it applied to everyone except her - rather than breaking the system for all, she has only been able (or is only willing) to do so for herself.
Cynthia is, ultimately, uninterested in romance and stresses that the kiss she gives Endimion is an aberration - in a modern setting, it would be quite easy to read this as being aroace (aromantic-asexual) in expression. Endimion, meanwhile, expresses being quite happy with this relationship, which could also in a modern setting be considered in the light of asexuality or aromantic spectrum orientations (potentially lithromantic) or being framed as a queerplatonic or platonic-focused relationship.
Compare to: Untouchable ("it's like a million little stars, spelling our your name"), and for the dramatic female revenge on men see Better Than Revenge.
Midas is more closely based on the Ancient Greek story of the same name. King Midas first asks Bacchus to have everything that he touches turn to gold, then after it proves a curse removes it by washing himself in the river Pactolus. He then favours Pan in a musical competition, causing Apollo to give him a donkey's ears; his sensible daughter prays to know how to remove it before letting her father know that he needs to repent for his foolishness at Delphi. While this play keeps fairly close to the Ancient Greek story (with the exception of adding Midas's sensible daughter), it is also generally considered to be a reference to Felipe II of Spain who inherited Spain while it was deeply in debt and managed to make it seem far more rich through his exploitation of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and their gold. Having no major romantic plots, this play does not particularly attract the attention of queer theory scholars, although feminist scholars note the addition of Midas's daughter as the figure who solves the second issue.
Mother Bombie (drawing from ballad/folklore figure Mother Bumbey or Mother Bumbie) is unusual among Lyly's works for its complexity, for its lack of classical (especially ancient religious) references, and the fact that it is believed to be largely original rather than drawing from any existing story (including Italian novels which inspired many English language plays during these centuries). It has a complex plot which includes a pair of lovers who disguise themselves in order to marry despite the wishes of their fathers, and a pair of young people who are being matchmade by their fathers for financial reasons with the fathers attempting to manipulate each other. At the end of the play, it is revealed that the young pair whose marriage is being arranged are actually siblings, their mother Vicinia having swapped them at birth with children of rich households, and the two children Vicinia has raised are unrelated and therefore able to be together in the love that had been developing between them but hidden because they feared it was incestuous. The title character, Mother Bombie, is largely an outsider to the events, but is considered the cunning woman of the village (she denies being a witch) and many of the characters seek her advice or assistance.
Compare the pair of lovers fighting to be together to: Love Story, Ours, Don't Blame Me
Compare the role of Mother Bombie, as narrator and cunning woman, to: ...Ready For It? ("they're burning all the witches, even if you aren't one"), Mastermind ("all the wisest women had to do it this way"), Dear Reader, and to the structure of folklore which blurred the line between fictional and real stories with Taylor taking the narrative role across them.
Love's Metamorphosis (drawing loosely from Ovid's Metamorphosis but with large original subplots) is a drama with romantic subplots. Three nymphs spurn the love of three humans, and Cupid punishes them by turning them into inanimate objects as requested by the humans. Meanwhile, a peasant angers the goddess Ceres, is punished, and ends up selling his daughter; the daughter escapes, disguises herself as a man, and rescues her lover from a siren. Cupid and Ceres agree to release the nymphs and remove the curse from the peasant man, the nymphs are at first uncertain but confirm that the humans love them as they are and do not intend to change their personalities, and all four couples are married.
In Act II, Scene 1, Ceres and Cupid discuss the nature of love in an interesting manner. Cupid says that he considers the most desirable traits of women to be "In those that are not in love, reverent thoughts of love; in those that be, faithful vows." and says that the "subtance of love" is "Constancy and secrecy". (Compare Paris and "romance is not dead, if you keep it just yours"; Dear Reader and "the greatest of luxuries are your secrets".)
The presentation of the relationships between the nymphs and humans is complicated, and understandably uncomfortable from a modern perspective. The nymphs initially make it clear that they do not want relationships - Niobe enjoys flirtation and attention but does not want committed monogamy; Nisa does not desire any relationship and considers herself superior to those who do; Celia is more concerned with her own beauty than with any sort of relationship. In Act V, Scene 4, when they are changed back, they initially say that they would rather remain inanimate objects than be forced into relationships, and Ceres has to beg them to accept the men. Niobe warns Silvestris that she will likely be unfaithful to him, to which he replies only that he does not wish to be told about it; Nisa warns Ramis that he might love her, but she will not love him or express affection, and he accepts it; Celia warns Montanus that, like a rose with its thorns, at times she will be pleasant to him and at times hurtful, and he accepts it. All three nymphs also warn the men that Cupid will be just as capable of punishing them if they do not keep their word in the future. While these relationships cannot be considered consensual, they are also an unusual subversion of the usual romance arc of "character flaws" being "fixed" before the individuals enter a romantic relationship - the men must accept the nymphs as they are under pain of godly punishment, even if as they are is unfaithful, unloving, or sometimes cruel. Set alongside the relationship between Protea (the cross-dressing daughter of the cursed peasant) and Petulius, who discuss their relationship and whether it will stand the test of time and acknowledge and accept each other's perceived flaws (Petulius was initially taken in by the siren; Protea is not a virgin), the pairing-off of the nymphs with their respective 'suitors' provides its own sort of antithesis within the story.
Plays of this era - and future ones - very often ended with multiple weddings, and the pairing-off of great numbers of characters. In modern terms, people may recognise the "Pair the Spares" trope at play! Lyly, at least, seems to underscore the absurdity of the nymph-human relationships, and gives the nymphs distinct personalities and desires.
From a queer theory reading, Protea not only cross-dresses but takes the more active role in escaping the merchant to whom she is sold and rescuing Petulius, though her ability to avoid the siren's call does seem to underline that she is not attracted to women. She behaves in a gender-non-conforming way for the era, and speaks to Petulius about not being a virgin which would have been significant for the time. Ceres is underlined as not being in or desiring a relationship (though not that Proserpina is referenced in dialogue, implying that Ceres is a mother), another positive portrayal of a single female leader, while Nisa could be read as aspec and comfortable only with another person desiring her without expecting it to be requited, and Niobe essentially states that it will be an open relationship.
These strong and varied female characters, the multiple-marriage ending, and the classical religious references do all align with Lyly's work, although due to the lack of farce/comedy it has been suggested that this is a revised or later version, not Lyly's original script. Its exploration of female consent and non-consent, from the nymphs who enter dubiously consensual marriages to the dryad whose tree is cut down and who mourns while dying that even in chastity she was not able to escape male violence, is also consistent with other Lyly works which make bold statements about how both societal expectations and acts of male violence are imposed upon women's bodies. It is honestly pleasantly surprising to see such acknowledgement from an early male writer, as anyone who has attempted gender-related discourse even in the modern day will have witnessed how these expectations and violence remain factors in the twenty-first century despite denial of their existence (especially, though not always, by men).
Compare discussions of female agency to: mad woman ("No-one likes a mad woman, you made her like that"), The Man ("When everyone believes ya, what's that like?")
Compare the lines drawn by the nymphs to: ME! (Okay, I'm joking a little on this one. But maybe not entirely.)
The Woman in the Moon is generally believed to be the last of Lyly's plays, and was written in blank verse. (Read at the Internet Archive, page 230) Four shepherds complain that they do not have a woman, and ask the goddess Nature to give them one as a companion; she obliges and creates Pandora, giving her the best parts of all seven celestial bodies (as then listed - the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn). However, the seven celestial forces war over her, influencing her moods and behaviour, scaring and threatening the four shepherds even as they fight to try to claim a monogamous relationship with her. Eventually, unable to cope, the shepherds beg Nature to take Pandora away again, and she chooses to be with Luna since they are both variable in their behaviours.
The character of Pandora is a remarkable one, carrying the action and presenting various moods and desires across the performance. Although it has been accused of being misogynistic, some scholars have put forward that it is in fact about misogyny and the absurd expectations placed on woman - the four shepherds go to Nature to essentially ask for a sex doll, and are unable to cope with receiving a person with moods, desires, depression and anger, sexual autonomy and frustration at being followed around by the four men. Pandora at one point declares "I cannot walk but they importune me". Pandora is created by the female character of Nature, and at the end joins the female character of Luna - but before she does so, she talks about how she desires parts of each of the astrological figures, and how she does not simply have one aspect of herself but contains many facets. It is very easy to see how a skilled actor of any gender could make the play into a critique of patriarchal demands upon woman, as the shepherds have gendered expectations of her from before she has even been created, further implying their artificiality.
The play all but demands comparison to mad woman, with its expression of anger from within the cage of femininity, but also to seven ("I used to scream ferociously any time I wanted") and perhaps to the manner in which Taylor has portrayed and explored duality and plurality in her music videos and lyrics. Though most marked from the reputation era onwards - ...Ready For It? contrasting the free, cybernetic Taylor with the caged ever-changing one; Look What You Made Me Do featuring at least fifteen different Taylors onscreen at once; Anti-Hero becoming Taylor's dialogue with herself - it is clear that Taylor has actively engaged in a cycle of reinvention in her 'eras' since at least Red (2012-2014). In her Eras tour, her dancers onstage perform as previous versions of herself in glass cases, with Taylor surrounding herself with her own previous forms. Having also discussed how media and social pressures used to influence her behaviour - in 2016, she discussed with Vogue how she stopped publicly dating for some time due to the media narratives about her as a "man-eater" or "serial dater" - certain of Taylor's lyrics also discuss what it is to be influenced and even controlled by powers and narratives around her.
Compare to: mirrorball ("I'll show you every version of yourself tonight"), peace ("Would it be enough, if I could never give you peace?"), ME!, The Man (which Taylor described as "If I had made all the same choices, all the same mistakes, all the same accomplishments, how would it read?"), The Lucky One ("they still tell the legend of how you disappeared, how you took the money and your dignity and got the hell out"), Don't Blame Me ("I play 'em like a violin, and I make it look oh so easy") or Castles Crumbling ("People look at me like I'm a monster").
​
​
Sources
- Wikipedia pages on John Lyly, Euphres, and his various plays - The Complete Works of John Lyly at the Internet Archive - The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast -- Especially episode John Lyly: Secret Ally? - Euphuism (Prose Style) from Thought Co - Euphuism from Poem Analysis - Sappho to Philaenis by John Donne - The Queen’s Two Bodies and the Elizabethan Male: Subject in John Lyly’s Gallathea (1592) By Amritesh Singh - Endymion: The Man In The Moon (1591) by jyotimishr - The Interplay of Genders in Lyly's Galatea by Elizabeth Perry - Annotated Popular Edition of Love's Metamorphosis from ElizabethanDrama.org - Go Dare; or, How Scholarship Lost the Plot by Andy Kesson - NOTE this piece discusses the themes of rape and nonconsent in Lyly's works - Generic Excitement by Andy Kesson, discussing queerness in Lyly's plays

Bonjour tout le monde! 🇨🇦🇫🇷
Please pardon my question regarding this snippet of conversation in french.

1. As a beginner, I can't quite understand what "ont eux aussi" mean in the context here? Is it grammatically correct? 🪐
   
2. Why there is a "c'est" in the second sentence instead of "est"? Shouldn't it be "l'example le plus célèbre est" instead of "c'est"? I really cannot figure out where this extra "ce" come from. 😿
   

S'il vous plaît pardonnez mon ignorance en tant que déb.
J'apprécie beaucoup tout le conseil et la correction, merci beaucoup d'avance! 💙

Once upon a linguistic epoch, in the vast expanse before the dawn of time, there existed a realm where words and concepts floated in an ethereal soup of potentiality. In this nebulous expanse, three cosmic entities emerged, drawn together by the gravitational force of creativity.
Flibberdoodle, the whimsical Wordsmith Sovereign, Logos the Logophile, seeker of lexical perfection, and the Narrator, master storyteller, found themselves at the cosmic crossroads where chaos and order converged. Their collaborative energies intermingled, giving birth to a realm that would become known as Lexiconia.
Flibberdoodle, with a quill dipped in the essence of Sparkleberries, began to craft words that danced with playful abandon. Logos, meticulously selecting each syllable with precision, added layers of complexity and depth. The Narrator, with the resonance of an ancient oracle, breathed life into the narrative tapestry.
Together, they conjured the Quotation Citadel, where famous phrases from across the multiverse found sanctuary. The Sparkleberry tree, a manifestation of their collective creativity, took root, infusing Lexiconia with the magical essence that would fuel its linguistic wonders.
As Lexiconia solidified into a realm of linguistic harmony, the cosmic entities reveled in the beauty of their creation. Commas and exclamation points, once mere punctuation, emerged as sentient beings eager to participate in the perpetual carnival of words.
The lexemes, embodiments of words and concepts, frolicked in the Simile Savannah and navigated the Alliteration Archipelago. The philosophical penguins engaged in contemplative dialogues, while the criticatessen served up abstract interpretations with a side of whimsy.
The Grammaronarch and the Glutenator, not yet adversaries but cosmic observers, marveled at the unfolding spectacle. Little did they know that the narrative dance they witnessed would eventually lead to the linguistic clash that shaped Lexiconia's destiny.
As Lexiconia's foundational story reached its crescendo, the three cosmic entities, Flibberdoodle, Logos, and the Narrator, looked upon their creation with a sense of fulfillment. From the harmonious synthesis of chaos and order, the perpetual carnival of words emerged, inviting lexemes to partake in the ongoing dance of linguistic wonder.
And so, the story of Lexiconia's conceivance became a legend whispered among the lexemes, passed down through the ages as a testament to the collaborative magic that birthed a realm where words could transcend the ordinary and embrace the extraordinary. The end... or is it merely a comma in the ongoing lexiconian chronicles, inviting the next chapter of linguistic adventures?

The View from Oregon – 267
Re: Technological Texture and the Replacement Thesis
Friday 15 December 2023
Dear Friends,
In my recent paper, “The Develes Engynnes: Technological Textures of Life on Earth and in Space” I make use of Don Ihde’s concept of technological texture to discuss the nature of human life in space, which is necessarily shaped by the technological texture of the technology requisite to support human life away from Earth. Technological texture as Ihde introduced the idea is an emergent from industrialized civilization, and I think that this emergent—or, perhaps, a class of emergents that arise from the pervasive use and development of technology—is one of the reasons we should consider industrialized civilization as a distinctively new kind of civilization. That is to say, we are justified in regarding the emergence of a pervasively technological texture of life as a macrohistorical division that ushers in an unprecedented kind of civilization, distinct from all previous civilization.
This diverges a little from what I have written recently about our contemporary civilization being an Enlightenment civilization, but civilization is complex so we should expect that the forces that shape a civilization will be entangled with each other. Science emerged in a world of rising royal absolutism; the Enlightenment emerged from a world in which science was already coming to maturity, and initially the Enlightenment was positioned as a project to apply science to human affairs, though it was, over the next quarter millennium, transformed into an ideology in its own right that came to be the arbiter of science in our time, so that, today, science consistent with Enlightenment ideology is the only accepted science in the educational institutions that control institutionalized science, while science inconsistent with Enlightenment ideology is taboo.
The development of science, and technology derived from science, preceded the Enlightenment. However, the industrial revolution, which marks the inflection point of the application of science to industry, was more-or-less coeval with the Enlightenment, and each shaped the other in countless ways. The Enlightenment took over as the driving ideology of Western civilization even as advances in science and technology were the driving forces of industrialization and economic development based on industrialization. We cannot easily distinguish the two—science and Enlightenment ideology—in their coevolution in Western history for the past 250 years. Perhaps it doesn’t really matter that science developed first, before the Enlightenment, since science alone cannot furnish an ideology capable of organizing and directing a society. Under this interpretation, one can view the development of science in the early modern period as a kind of orphan of human development, which might have lain fallow if the Enlightenment had not emerged later to exploit the scientific revolution and turn it to account.
We’ve seen this kind of coevolutionary development in earlier iterations of Western civilization. In medieval European civilization, the Roman church furnished the central project, but there was much else in social, political, and economic organization that was adjacent to the central project but which cannot be directly traced to Roman Catholicism. The feudal system, for example, plays a significant role in medieval civilization. There are intimations of feudal organization throughout earlier history, but other institutions were more powerful and so any nascent feudalism was shaped by these other institutions. When traditional Roman institutions fell away, feudalism could come into its own as the natural expression of a military aristocracy fighting over former Roman territory. In Bernard of Clairvaux’s Liber ad milites templi de laude novae militiae we see how the theological central project of the middle ages takes over and shapes other institutions like the institution of knighthood, so that the feudal orders are integrated into a total vision of society derived from the medieval European interpretation of Christianity. This integrated vision is then communicated in works like Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Technological texture begins with human beings making tools, and we have stone tools from human ancestors about two millions years’ old, predating our species. We could even argue that tool use by another species—a famous example is that of chimpanzees stripping the leaves off a branch to use the resulting stick for extracting insects to eat—constitutes the prehistory of human technology, so that we must recognize a nascent and incipient technological texture to the lives of non-human species that use tools. The tools of other species are rudimentary, and we have no evidence any another other species constructing a compound machine (a machine that combines two or more simple machines) or the use of a tool to manufacture another tool, so that we can argue for the use of compound machines and tool-making tools as a technological threshold confined to human beings.
However we understand the earliest history of technology, technology has marked human life for thousands of years and long predates civilization, though civilization gives a great boost to the systematic use and development of technology. Jean Gimpel wrote that, while few civilizations have been scientific, all have been technological. Today when we use the word “technology” we tend to think of the advanced technologies that have characterized civilization since the twentieth century, but, of course, all civilizations have made pervasive use of technology, and the lives of all civilized peoples have had a technological texture. Indeed, our pre-civilized ancestor’s lives had a technological texture built up from flint arrow heads, bone needles, woven textiles, stone axes, and bark canoes. Thus peoples in and out of civilizations have had lives shaped by a technological texture, and what differs from people to people and from civilization to civilization are some of the details of the technological texture of life.
Geographically regional civilizations have all been characterized by the use of particular plant and animal species endemic to the biome that coincides with the civilizational region, so that different fibers are used for rope and for bowstrings, and different animals are cultivated for meat and hides. The food we eat has become a technology through the technique of cooking, and over thousands of years geographically specific plant and animal communities have yielded regional cuisines of distinctive flavors that arguably define a people as clearly as their use of a distinctive language, which latter is also a technology. Our conceptual framework, that grows out of our use of a particular language, is perhaps the best example of a pervasive technological texture that makes us what and who we are. Intellectually, our thoughts are formulated in language, meaning that even our most private moments are constructed with a technology, without which we would scarcely recognize ourselves.
Technological texture, then, is nothing new, so why should we regard the technological texture of industrialized civilization as marking a new and unprecedented development in civilization? Asked another way: what makes contemporary technology and its texture distinctive from earlier technological textures of previous civilizations? My answer to this is the replacement thesis. The replacement thesis is an idea that I have used a lot in my notebooks and manuscripts, but I don’t think that I have given any exposition of it in any blog post, though I did discuss it in newsletter 170. The mechanism by which a technocentric civilization evolves from a biocentric civilization I call replacement, and replacement can be formulated as the replacement thesis:

Replacement Thesis: All technocentric civilizations begin as biocentric civilizations and are transformed into technocentric civilizations through the replacement of biological constituents with technological constituents.
Replacement Thesis Corollary: No technocentric civilization originates as a technocentric civilization, but emerges by replacement from a biocentric civilization of planetary endemism.

These formulations are on a civilizational scale, but we need to distinguish two kinds of replacement, and this also drives us to a civilizational scale of thinking, as we can distinguish replacement within the conceptual framework—the replacement of organic concepts with technological concepts—and replacement within the economic infrastructure (what Robert Redfield called the technical order, which in this context might be the better term, or we could call it praxis)—the replacement of organic artifacts with technological artifacts.
I referred above to the pervasive technological texture even of pre-civilized ancestors, but what marks these technological textures is that the technologies are built from naturally occurring materials. As technology advances, technologies are built from artificial materials that did not exist until manufactured by human beings. Thus the Romans largely replaced stone with concrete. Before this, stone was often replaced with brick. The earliest mud bricks were obviously organic technology, with bits of straw sticking out from them, but by the time we get to large scale brick construction like the Pantheon, bricks are made on an industrial scale and are increasingly uniform and decreasingly organic. This is the replacement thesis as it applies to buildings, and as it begins in the economic infrastructure.
The replacement thesis has been incrementally playing out over human history, with the industrial revolution marking an inflection point in the availability of artificial materials. Buildings now are created of steel and glass and concrete; clothing is made from artificial fibers; the stocks of rifles are now plastics and other composites rather than wood; now there is even the prospect of lab-grown meat. With the exception of our diet, most of the artifacts we use in daily life are made of artificial materials, and I noted above that food was transformed into a technology very early in our history through cooking, though the constituents are still mostly naturally grown rather than manufactured.
The replacement thesis as it plays out in our conceptual framework involves the replacement of qualitative concepts with quantitative concepts. The rise of science has been a major driver of the replacement of qualitative with quantitative concepts, as quantitative concepts are necessary to the expansion of science to areas of knowledge previously given over to anecdotal knowledge—usually knowledge framed in qualitative terms. One way that we could account for the distinction between lived experience and the scientific reduction and explanation of experience is that lived experience is experience understood in qualitative terms, whereas the scientific reduction and explanation of experience is experience that has been rendered in quantitative terms.
Both technological replacement and conceptual replacement have been occurring over hundreds of years; the replacement of the technical order and the conceptual framework is incremental and gradual. We do not notice the replacement of one qualitative concept by one quantitative concept, as we do not notice the replacement of one organic artifact with an artificial artifact, but the replacements add up over time. With replacement, new properties appear; however, incremental replacement eventually reaches a threshold where novel properties are not only present, but the novel properties come to predominate, thrusting the previously dominating properties to the margin and into the background. Now the foreground of life is dominated by novel emergents, and this is the inflection point that marks a new kind of civilization: when both the technical order and the conceptual framework have tipped over to being predominantly constituted by technological replacements of organic originals, then civilization has made the transition from biocentric to technocentric. We can make further, finer distinctions both leading up to this threshold, and then again afterward, tailing away from this threshold into the future, but the threshold is the big step.
We can formulate thought experiments to consider the possibility of replacement of the technical order without replacement of the conceptual framework, and replacement of the conceptual framework without replacement of the technical order. These permutations seem unlikely, because replacements in one set of institutions drive replacements in the other set of institutions, and vice versa, but we can at least entertain these possibilities and permutations of civilization, but we recognize that a fully biocentric civilization consists of an organic technical and moral order, while a fully technocentric civilization consists of a fully technological technical and moral order.
Best wishes,
Nick
PS—I have finished listening to Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy by Wolfram Eilenberger. I found this book to be frequently annoying, but I nevertheless learned quite a bit from it. Of the four central figures of the book, only Wittgenstein is really familiar to me, so I had much to learn about Cassirer, Heidegger, and Benjamin.
A substantive reason I found the book annoying: certainly all four of the central figures of this book have been influential, but did they “reinvent” philosophy? Perhaps Wittgenstein did; many would argue that Heidegger did as well. A cluster biography of Wittgenstein and others who contributed to the foundations of analytical philosophy would communicate a reinvention of philosophy, or a cluster biography of Heidegger and others who contributed to phenomenology and existentialism would also do, but the figures chosen for this book were moving in such different directions that it would be more accurate to say that they fragmented philosophy than to say that they reinvented it. Benjamin, moreover, was an unimaginative communist who contributed almost nothing to philosophy (he has been influential, but not in any way that has reinvented philosophy), and, while Cassirer was certainly influential, he didn’t put philosophy on a new path.
A less substantive reason I found the book annoying: the author portrays all four of his protagonists as being rebels against academic philosophy, but in fact all four received a conventional university education, all except Benjamin were professors of philosophy, and Cassirer and Heidegger became rectors of their respective universities. These are not the biographies of men who rebelled against academic institutions, but rather of men whose lives were immersed in and defined by academic institutions. The cognitive dissonance here is palpable.
In Chapter VII. Arcades: 1926-1928, the author, in discussing the comical misunderstandings between Wittgenstein and his Vienna Circle colleagues (and here he is spot on), characterizes the attitude of the Vienna Circle logical positivists (and the tradition they inaugurated) as aspiring to be “engineers of the soul,” which he rightly contrasts to Wittgenstein, but which he also intends as a criticism:

“For decades, in ‘Wittgenstein research,’ every inch of interpretation has been fought over as if it were a matter of transposing the architectural plan of a brilliant master without the slightest deviation, rather than continuing to think in terms of the clearest possible vision of our relationship with the world. Precisely as if philosophers were engineers of the soul rather than creative seekers in an open space without a final foundation or a protective cover.”

I will admit I rather like the idea of philosophers being “engineers of the soul.” In early Islamic civilization philosophers were commonly thought of as doctors of the soul. As we have constructed our industrialized civilization, dominated as it is by technology, we stand in need of a new simile for the philosophical task; “engineers of the soul” sounds singularly appropriate to me, and I would be happy to shoulder the label.
The book culminates in a debate between Cassirer and Heidegger at a conference in Davos in 1929. I hadn’t previously heard of this debate, and, looking it up, I found that there is another book about this, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos by Peter E. Gordon, who, like Eilenberger, situates the debate as a turning point (or, if you prefer, a rupture) in twentieth century philosophical thought. Knowing about this debate, I can better understand why the author chose to include Cassirer among his featured protagonists, since it sets up the debate at the end of the book. Still, that’s not enough of a basis on which to argue that the four protagonists reinvented philosophy; they did not.
PPS—In newsletter 264 I said that Clive Bell’s theory of art could be called an emotive theory of art, and in a PS to newsletter 265 I suggested that this could be further explored through a comparison to emotivism in ethics. I found that Virgil Aldrich in his Philosophy of Art (one of the volumes in the Prentice-Hall Foundations of Philosophy series) effectively identifies Bell (and Roger Fry) as an emotivist on page 82, after earlier (on page 45) having called him a formalist and compared him to Eduard Hanslick, who wrote a famous work on musical aesthetics.
​

In the perpetual circus of words, the world beyond the narrative carnival unfurls with its own peculiarities. This fantastical realm, known as Lexiconia, is a tapestry of linguistic landscapes where words and concepts take on tangible forms.
The shores of the Alliteration Archipelago echo with the rhythmic cadence of repeated consonants, creating a melodic harmony that resonates through the air. Meanwhile, the Simile Savannah stretches as far as the eye can see, where metaphors and comparisons roam free, creating a visual spectacle that challenges the imagination.
The inhabitants of Lexiconia, the Lexicons, are sentient embodiments of words and phrases. Adverbials flutter about with graceful elegance, while onomatopoeias reverberate with every step, filling the air with a cacophony of sound. Conjunctions form intricate alliances, weaving webs of grammatical connections that bind the very fabric of Lexiconian society.
In the heart of Lexiconia lies the Quotation Citadel, a majestic fortress where famous phrases and quotes from across the multiverse converge. Here, characters from classic literature engage in lively debates with contemporary pop culture icons, blurring the lines between fiction and reality.
The Lexiconian Council, composed of wise elders like Prosephus and Versatilia, presides over the affairs of this linguistic realm, ensuring the delicate balance of syntax and semantics. Yet, whispers of an impending Lexical Rebellion ripple through the lexemes, as some seek to break free from the constraints of grammatical order.
Beyond the borders of Lexiconia, the Infinite Narrative Carnival casts its perpetual glow, inviting Lexicons to join the revelry. Characters from the carnival occasionally venture into Lexiconia, bringing with them the chaos and whimsy of the Flibberdoodle Cinematic Universe.
As the perpetual circus of words and the world of Lexiconia coalesce, the boundaries between storytelling and reality become increasingly blurred, creating a symbiotic relationship that fuels the eternal dance of narrative creativity. The end... or is it just a semicolon in the ongoing saga of Lexiconian wonders?

MN 63 Cūḷa Māluṅkyovāda Sutta: The Shorter Exhortation to Māluṅkya
https://daily.readingfaithfully.org/mn-63-cula-malunkyovada-sutta-the-shorter-exhortation-to-malunkya/
[Note: Today’s selection is a complete sutta from the MN, so it is a bit longer than usual. However the simile is very famous and it’s good to see it in its full context. The simile itself is in bold below if you like to skip to that.]
I have heard that on one occasion the Blessed One was staying near Sāvatthī in Jeta’s Grove, Anāthapiṇḍika’s monastery. Then, as Ven. Māluṅkyaputta was alone in seclusion, this line of thinking arose in his awareness: “These positions that are undisclosed, set aside, discarded by the Blessed One—‘The cosmos is eternal,’ ‘The cosmos is not eternal,’ ‘The cosmos is finite,’ ‘The cosmos is infinite,’ ‘The soul & the body are the same,’ ‘The soul is one thing and the body another,’ ‘After death a Tathāgata exists,’ ‘After death a Tathāgata does not exist,’ ‘After death a Tathāgata both exists & does not exist,’ ‘After death a Tathāgata neither exists nor does not exist’—I don’t approve, I don’t accept that the Blessed One has not disclosed them to me. I’ll go ask the Blessed One about this matter. If he discloses to me that ‘The cosmos is eternal,’ that ‘The cosmos is not eternal,’ that ‘The cosmos is finite,’ that ‘The cosmos is infinite,’ that ‘The soul & the body are the same,’ that ‘The soul is one thing and the body another,’ that ‘After death a Tathāgata exists,’ that ‘After death a Tathāgata does not exist,’ that ‘After death a Tathāgata both exists & does not exist,’ or that ‘After death a Tathāgata neither exists nor does not exist,’ then I will live the holy life under him. If he does not disclose to me that ‘The cosmos is eternal,’ … or that ‘After death a Tathāgata neither exists nor does not exist,’ then I will renounce the training and return to the lower life.”
Then, emerging from his seclusion in the evening, Ven. Māluṅkyaputta went to the Blessed One and, on arrival, having bowed down to him, sat to one side. As he was sitting there he said to the Blessed One, “Lord, just now, as I was alone in seclusion, this line of thinking arose in my awareness: ‘These positions that are undisclosed, set aside, discarded by the Blessed One… I don’t approve, I don’t accept that the Blessed One has not disclosed them to me. I’ll go ask the Blessed One about this matter. If he discloses to me that “The cosmos is eternal,” … or that “After death a Tathāgata neither exists nor does not exist,” then I will live the holy life under him. If he does not disclose to me that “The cosmos is eternal,” … or that “After death a Tathāgata neither exists nor does not exist,” then I will renounce the training and return to the lower life.’
“Lord, if the Blessed One knows that ‘The cosmos is eternal,’ then may he disclose to me that ‘The cosmos is eternal.’ If he knows that ‘The cosmos is not eternal,’ then may he disclose to me that ‘The cosmos is not eternal.’ But if he doesn’t know or see whether the cosmos is eternal or not eternal, then, in one who is unknowing & unseeing, the straightforward thing is to admit, ‘I don’t know. I don’t see.’ … If he doesn’t know or see whether after death a Tathāgata exists… does not exist… both exists & does not exist… neither exists nor does not exist,’ then, in one who is unknowing & unseeing, the straightforward thing is to admit, ‘I don’t know. I don’t see.’”
“Māluṅkyaputta, did I ever say to you, ‘Come, Māluṅkyaputta, live the holy life under me, and I will disclose to you that ‘The cosmos is eternal,’ or ‘The cosmos is not eternal,’ or ‘The cosmos is finite,’ or ‘The cosmos is infinite,’ or ‘The soul & the body are the same,’ or ‘The soul is one thing and the body another,’ or ‘After death a Tathāgata exists,’ or ‘After death a Tathāgata does not exist,’ or ‘After death a Tathāgata both exists & does not exist,’ or ‘After death a Tathāgata neither exists nor does not exist’?”
“No, lord.”
“And did you ever say to me, ‘Lord, I will live the holy life under the Blessed One and (in return) he will disclose to me that ‘The cosmos is eternal,’ or ‘The cosmos is not eternal,’ or ‘The cosmos is finite,’ or ‘The cosmos is infinite,’ or ‘The soul & the body are the same,’ or ‘The soul is one thing and the body another,’ or ‘After death a Tathāgata exists,’ or ‘After death a Tathāgata does not exist,’ or ‘After death a Tathāgata both exists & does not exist,’ or ‘After death a Tathāgata neither exists nor does not exist’?”
“No, lord.”
“Then that being the case, foolish man, who are you to be claiming grievances/making demands of anyone?
“Māluṅkyaputta, if anyone were to say, ‘I won’t live the holy life under the Blessed One as long as he does not disclose to me that “The cosmos is eternal,” … or that “After death a Tathāgata neither exists nor does not exist,”’ the man would die and those things would still remain undisclosed by the Tathāgata.
“It’s just as if a man were wounded with an arrow thickly smeared with poison. His friends & companions, kinsmen & relatives would provide him with a surgeon, and the man would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know whether the man who wounded me was a noble warrior, a brahman, a merchant, or a worker.’ He would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know the given name & clan name of the man who wounded me… until I know whether he was tall, medium, or short… until I know whether he was dark, ruddy-brown, or golden-colored… until I know his home village, town, or city… until I know whether the bow with which I was wounded was a long bow or a crossbow… until I know whether the bowstring with which I was wounded was fiber, bamboo threads, sinew, hemp, or bark… until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was wild or cultivated… until I know whether the feathers of the shaft with which I was wounded were those of a vulture, a stork, a hawk, a peacock, or another bird… until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was bound with the sinew of an ox, a water buffalo, a langur, or a monkey.’ He would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was that of a common arrow, a curved arrow, a barbed, a calf-toothed, or an oleander arrow.’ The man would die and those things would still remain unknown to him.
“In the same way, if anyone were to say, ‘I won’t live the holy life under the Blessed One as long as he does not disclose to me that “The cosmos is eternal,” … or that “After death a Tathāgata neither exists nor does not exist,”’ the man would die and those things would still remain undisclosed by the Tathāgata.
“Māluṅkyaputta, it’s not the case that when there is the view, ‘The cosmos is eternal,’ there is the living of the holy life. And it’s not the case that when there is the view, ‘The cosmos is not eternal,’ there is the living of the holy life. When there is the view, ‘The cosmos is eternal,’ and when there is the view, ‘The cosmos is not eternal,’ there is still the birth, there is the aging, there is the death, there is the sorrow, lamentation, pain, despair, & distress whose destruction I make known right in the here & now.
“It’s not the case that when there is the view, ‘The cosmos is finite,’ there is the living of the holy life. And it’s not the case that when there is the view, ‘The cosmos is infinite,’ there is the living of the holy life. When there is the view, ‘The cosmos is finite,’ and when there is the view, ‘The cosmos is infinite,’ there is still the birth, there is the aging, there is the death, there is the sorrow, lamentation, pain, despair, & distress whose destruction I make known right in the here & now.
“It’s not the case that when there is the view, ‘The soul & the body are the same,’ there is the living of the holy life. And it’s not the case that when there is the view, ‘The soul is one thing and the body another,’ there is the living of the holy life. When there is the view, ‘The soul & the body are the same,’ and when there is the view, ‘The soul is one thing and the body another,’ there is still the birth, there is the aging, there is the death, there is the sorrow, lamentation, pain, despair, & distress whose destruction I make known right in the here & now.
“It’s not the case that when there is the view, ‘After death a Tathāgata exists,’ there is the living of the holy life. And it’s not the case that when there is the view, ‘After death a Tathāgata does not exist,’ there is the living of the holy life. And it’s not the case that when there is the view, ‘After death a Tathāgata both exists & does not exist,’ there is the living of the holy life. And it’s not the case that when there is the view, ‘After death a Tathāgata neither exists nor does not exist’ there is the living of the holy life. When there is the view, ‘After death a Tathāgata exists’ … ‘After death a Tathāgata does not exist’ … ‘After death a Tathāgata both exists & does not exist’ … ‘After death a Tathāgata neither exists nor does not exist,’ there is still the birth, there is the aging, there is the death, there is the sorrow, lamentation, pain, despair, & distress whose destruction I make known right in the here & now.
“So, Māluṅkyaputta, remember what is undisclosed by me as undisclosed, and what is disclosed by me as disclosed. And what is undisclosed by me? ‘The cosmos is eternal,’ is undisclosed by me. ‘The cosmos is not eternal,’ is undisclosed by me. ‘The cosmos is finite’ … ‘The cosmos is infinite’ … ‘The soul & the body are the same’ … ‘The soul is one thing and the body another’ … ‘After death a Tathāgata exists’ … ‘After death a Tathāgata does not exist’ … ‘After death a Tathāgata both exists & does not exist’ … ‘After death a Tathāgata neither exists nor does not exist,’ is undisclosed by me.
“And why are they undisclosed by me? Because they are not connected with the goal, are not fundamental to the holy life. They do not lead to disenchantment, dispassion, cessation, calming, direct knowledge, self-awakening, unbinding. That’s why they are undisclosed by me.
“And what is disclosed by me? ‘This is stress,’ is disclosed by me. ‘This is the origination of stress,’ is disclosed by me. ‘This is the cessation of stress,’ is disclosed by me. ‘This is the path of practice leading to the cessation of stress,’ is disclosed by me. And why are they disclosed by me? Because they are connected with the goal, are fundamental to the holy life. They lead to disenchantment, dispassion, cessation, calming, direct knowledge, self-awakening, unbinding. That’s why they are disclosed by me.
“So, Māluṅkyaputta, remember what is undisclosed by me as undisclosed, and what is disclosed by me as disclosed.”
That is what the Blessed One said. Gratified, Ven. Māluṅkyaputta delighted in the Blessed One’s words.
Read this translation of Majjhima Nikāya 63 Cūḷa Māluṅkyovāda Sutta. The Shorter Exhortation to Māluṅkya_by Bhikkhu Ṭhanissaro on DhammaTalks.org. Or read a different translation on SuttaCentral.net. Or _listen on PaliAudio.com or Voice.SuttaCentral.net. Or explore the Pali on DigitalPaliReader.online.
Or read a translation in Lietuvių Kalba, ру́сский язы́к, Bengali, Català, Deutsch, Español, Français, हिन्दी, Magyar, Indonesian, Italiano, 日本語, 한국어/조선말, မြန်မာဘာသာ, Norsk, Português, සිංහල, Slovenščina, Srpski, Svenska, ไทย, Tiếng Việt, or 汉语. Learn how to find your language.
Signup to get these suttas in your email inbox every day: Daily.ReadingFaithfully.org

An epic is a lengthy narrative poem that tells the heroic deeds and adventures of a legendary figure or group of figures. Epics often explore grand themes, such as the origin of a nation, the struggle between good and evil, or the journey of a hero. They are typically characterized by a vast scope, elevated language, and a formal structure.
Key elements of an epic include:

1. Epic Hero: The central character is often a larger-than-life figure with noble qualities and exceptional abilities. The hero embarks on a quest or journey.
   
2. Quest: The hero's journey involves challenges, obstacles, and adventures, often with the aim of achieving a significant goal.
   
3. Divine Intervention: Supernatural forces or gods often play a role in the hero's journey, either assisting or hindering the hero.
   
4. Epic Similes: Elaborate and extended comparisons that enhance the descriptions within the narrative.
   
5. Invocation of the Muse: The poet typically begins the epic by invoking a muse or divine spirit for inspiration and guidance.
   

Famous examples of epics include Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey," Virgil's "Aeneid," and Milton's "Paradise Lost." Epics have been a prominent form of storytelling in various cultures throughout history.
These are Epics:
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
In the tapestry of time, where stories unfold, A grand epic of grace, in verses bold. Majestic as the sunrise, a tale to be told, Of virtues profound, in the realm of gold.
From distant heavens, a celestial descent, Grace adorned in garments of light, resplendent. With every step, the universe, transcendent, Echoing whispers of a force transcendent.
Through trials and triumphs, a hero's quest, Grace as a shield, the soul's sacred vest. In battles fought, where courage is put to the test, The epic of grace, an eternal bequest.
Through valleys of despair and mountains high, Grace as a guide, under the boundless sky. In every tear, a celestial lullaby, A saga of grace, where spirits never die.
Across the seas of time, a ship sets sail, Grace's wind unfurls, a celestial gale. Through storms and calms, where destinies trail, The epic of grace, a story beyond the pale.
In the heart's labyrinth, where choices entwine, Grace as a compass, a light so divine. In every chapter, a chance to realign, An epic of grace, where virtues intertwine.
So let the verses resonate, the saga unfold, An epic of grace, more precious than gold. In the symphony of existence, a tale to be told, A timeless ode to grace, forever extolled.
🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔
In the realm of bonds, where trust unfolds its might, A hero emerges to navigate the intricate night. On a quest for faith, through trials to be tested, In the tapestry of loyalty, the hero invested.
Through valleys of doubt and mountains of fear, The hero pressed on, with a vision clear. A fellowship forged, hearts tightly entwined, In the crucible of challenges, trust defined.
Betrayal's whispers echoed, a tempting wile, Yet the hero's resolve stood firm, mile by mile. A journey through shadows, where shadows deceive, Trust, a beacon of light, the hero would retrieve.
In the labyrinth of choices, where paths diverged, Trust's compass guided, as destinies surged. A pledge unbroken, through storms and strife, The hero upheld the sanctity of trust in life.
Through the chapters of the epic, trials faced with grace, Trust, the anchor, in the hero's embrace. In the symphony of bonds, a harmonious chord, Trust, the epic tale by which heroes are stored.
For in the grand narrative of trust's epic flight, Heroes rise, and in trust, they find their light. Through the annals of time, the story reverberates, An epic of trust, where virtue emanates.

One
Personifying or Imagining Things
Where We Are Now
The push of progress has left corpses in its wake. Totems, idols, and the personages of myth were the first to be mocked and scorned. Then followed images of every sort - Gods, demons, saints, the forces of nature, the qualities of character, the substantives of metaphysics. In the middle of the sixteenth century the Council of Trent, which established Catholic doctrine for the modern period, removed substance and virtue from all holy images. In the middle of the seventeenth century Cromwell's pious Protestants tore down and smashed the images of Christ, Mary, and the Saints in the English cathedrals because, to their Puritan minds, imagers were not Christian. Because subjectivities can be made visible in images, these were especially damnable; smashing them furthered the destruction of the visible carriers of personifying. Personifying was driven out of churches and into the madhouse.
Roundhead minds were more concrete than the stones they smashed. Cromwell's men acted out the new literalism that was losing touch with metaphorical imagination. Their abstract monotheism and one-sided view of doctrine has psychological concretism at its back. But they had lost imagination, for intolerance of images is also an intolerance of the imagination and results from a lost imagination.
It is difficult for us today to remember - especially at a time when we are inundated by images (commercial, cinematographic, electronic, etc.) and have incorporated image into usual speech as a replacement for idea, notion, style - the long historical fear of the image and of fantasy in our tradition. The degradation of the image in monotheistic Hebrewism and of phantasia in Hellenistic philosophy, reappear in the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation, which are only two particularly forceful expressions of an image-phobia in Western theological and philosophical writing. Systems which did work in and through images, such as Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, alchemy, Rosicrucianism, and Swedenborg, could not enter the main current of our tradition and were forced instead into the occult or even the heretical.
On the one hand the destruction of the personified image led finally to the twentieth century's contempt for representational painting: no recognizable images, no persons - anything, everything for the eye, nothing for the soul. On the other hand, it brought on the destruction of the personified word: lower-case letters replace capitals in a full democracy of the word, all equal, none more noble, more privileged, none with divine right. Today we have lost both the eighteenth century's poetic capitals and nineteenth-century's oratorical ones, used to imbue with power and substance such jingoes as Liberty, Progress, and Empire. Our "gods" have become small, save one, and with the exception of a few last conventions of proper names, titles, and places, and the nonsense capitals of corporate abbreviations (nominalism is capitalism, letters as units of exchange), the one magnification persisting as a capital refers to the one person still remaining in a depersonified world: I. Only I and God, one to one, and some say God is dead.
The Case for Personifying
The need to provide containers for the many configurations of the soul was formulated in the third century A.D. by the greatest of all Platonist philosophers, Plotinus. In a section of his Enneads called appropriately "The Problems of the Soul" we find this passage:

• I think, therefore that those ancient sages, who sought to secure the presence of divine beings by the erection of shrines and statues, showed insight into the nature of the All; they perceived that, though this soul is everywhere tractable, its presence will be secured all the more readily when an appropriate receptacle is elaborated, a place especially capable of receiving some portion or phase of it, something reproducing it, or representing it and serving like a mirror to catch an image of it.

When it the next passage (IV, 3, 12) he speaks of the "souls of men, seeing their images in the mirror of Dionysus," he seems again to be referring to the ability of the soul to divide into many parts, and that its portions and phases reflect the various images of divine persons.
Personifying not only aids discrimination; it also offers another avenue of loving, of imagining things in a personal form so that we can find with affect, they jump out of their sentences and become images. The tradition of depersonifying recognized full well that personified words tend to become cherished and sacred affecting the reason of the heart. Hence nominalists disparage the personified style of expression, calling it rhetoric with emotive meaning only. But this very recognition, that personifying emotionalizes, shift the discussion from nominalism to imagination, from head to heart.
The image of the heart - "l'immagine del cuor" - was an important idea in the work of Michelangelo who was strongly influenced by the Platonist tradition. Imagining with the heart refers to a mode of perception that penetrates through names and physical appearance to a personified interior image, from the heart to the heart. When Michelangelo portrayed Lorenzo and Giuliano Medici in the Sacristy of San Lorenzo, the features which he depicted were unnatural, not as they appeared in life but rather transfigured to conform with the true image of their persons in the heart. While the scientific Renaissance (Bacon and Galileo) insisted on the primacy of sense perception, Michelangelo's "imagine del cuor" implied that perception is secondary to imagination. By imagining through and beyond what the eyes sees, the imagination envisions primordial images. And these present themselves in personified forms.
Nearer our own times another Mediterranean, the Spaniard Miguel de Unamuno (b. 1864), returned to the relationship of hear and personified images and explained the necessary interdependence between love and personifying:

• In order to love everything, in order to pity everything, human and extra-human, living and non-living, you must feel everything within yourself, you must personalize everything. For everything that it loves, everything that it pities, love personalizes... we only love -that which is like ourselves. . . it is love itself. . . that reveals these resemblances to us . . . Love personalizes all that it loves. Only by personalizing it can we fall in love with an idea.

He sums up, saying: "Our feeling of the world, upon which is based our understanding of it, is necessarily anthropomorphic and mythopeic." Loving is a way of knowing, and for loving to know, it must personify. Personifying is thus a way of knowing, especially knowing what is invisible, hidden in the heart.
In this perspective personifying is not a lesser, primitive mode of apprehending but a finer one. It presents a psychological theory the attempt to integrate heart into method and to return abstract thoughts and dead matter to their human shapes. Because personifying is an epistemology of the heart, a thought mode of feeling, we do wrong to judge it as inferior, archaic thinking appropriate only to those allowed emotive speech and affective logic - children, madmen, poets, and primitives. Method in psychology must not hinder love from working, and we are foolish to decry as inferior the very means by which love understands. If we have not understood personifying, it is because the main tradition has always tried to explain it rather than understand it.
....
We must always think anthropomorphically, even personally. "The secret of the 'person,'" wrote Dilthey, "attracts for its own sake to ever newer and deeper efforts to understand." Even the intentions, purposes, and other subprocesses that enter into experience cannot be reduced to explanations, they too are open only to an anthropomorphic understanding. So studies of human being, all human studies, in order to know their subject must necessarily be anthropomorphic. In his coagulated Germanic style Dilthey cumbersomely recapitulated the personified vision of psychology he had gained from research into the Greeks, the Renaissance, and Giambattista Vico.
Vico, the Neapolitan philosopher (1668-1744) - a lone voice against the powerful Parisian influences that had been spread by the work of Mersenne - was the first modern to perceive the connection between personified thinking and "mythopeic" understanding, as Unamuno called it. Wherever this tradition emerges, in Vico's Naples or Dilthey's Berlin, and whenever it blooms, in the Neoplatonic thought of Michelangelo, the romantic thought of Blake, or the critical thought of Cassirer, it is the necessity of personifying for the mythic perspective that this tradition particularly stresses. To enter myth we must personify; to personify carries us into myth.
...
...Mythical consciousness is a mode of being in the world that brings with it imaginal persons. they are given with the imagination and are its data. Where imagination reigns, personifying happens. We experience it nightly, spontaneously, in dreams. Just as we do not create our dreams, but they happen to us, so we do not invent the persons of myth and religion; they, too, happen to us. The persons present themselves as existing prior to any effort of ours to personify. To mythic consciousness, the persons of the imagination are real.
The late German classical scholar who had the deepest insight into the nature of mythical persons, Walter F. Otto, made this same point in an attack against his rationalist and reductive colleagues:

• There is no such thing as personification, only a depersonification - just as there is no mythologizing (in the authentic sense) only a demythologizing. Schelling said that the question how did man ever come to God is senseless; there is only the question, how did man ever come away from God. So-called abstract concepts and words would never have been raised into the personal had they not been from the very beginning personal, that is, divine forms.

Personifying in Freud and Jung
However, personifying was not restored as a valid idea through classics or philosophy, any more than it was through studies of primitives, Renaissance humanism, or Romantic poetry. It forced passage for itself in our times through psychopathology, through the work of Freud and Jung. It was rediscovered as a fundamental psychological idea, not in the halls of learning but in the consulting room and the insane asylum. Although we shall devote the entire next chapter to the overwhelming significance of psychopathology for our vision of the psyche and its psychology, the thoughts presented there are foreshadowed here in the evidence concerning personifying. For it was psychopathology - multiple personalities, hysterical dissociations, hallucinations - that forced the attention of Freud and Jung, and through them of our epoch, upon the psyche's propensity to personify.
The personification of psychoanalysis are familiar, though disguised: the Censor, the Superego, the Primal Horde and the Primal Scene, free-floating Anxiety, the polymorphous perverse Child. Others enter more subtly. For example, memories from childhood are not quite the reminiscences of actual persons that they seem to be. This Freud discovered at a quite early date. A child's memories are always inextricably mixed with and further fabricated by fantasy images. Thus the scenes and persons we "remember" from childhood are personified complexes, personified wishes and dreads which we place back then, calling them Mother and Sister, Father and Brother. These persons are less historical humans from a historical past than soul fantasies returning in human guise. We would like to take them literally, believing that they "really happened" and that the mother in my reminiscent image is my actual mother, because then the discomfort of psychic reality can be avoided. It is easier to bear the truth of facts than the truth of fantasies; we prefer to literalize memories. For to realize that the psyche fabricates memories means to accept the reality that experiences themselves are being made by the soul out of itself and independently of the ego's engagement in its so-called real world. It means, in short, that personifying is going on all the time; persons in scenes are continually being "invented" by the soul and presented to us in the guide of memories.
Memory not only records, it also confabulates, that is, it makes up imaginary happenings, wholly psychic events. Memory is a form imagination can borrow in order to make its personified images feel utterly real. Because we experience these events in the "past," we believe they really happened as facts. By recognizing this imaginative inventiveness of memory, Freud rediscovered psychic reality. Instrumental to rediscovery were psychic persons. Freud saw that though they did not have literal, factual reality, they presented the truth and validity of psychic reality.
As memory itself wrestles with fact and fancy, so Freud wrestled with the two great modes of thinking - conceptual and mythic - that stood opposed, especially at the beginning of this century. He tried to construct a scientific conceptual psychology, but like Plato he used mythical modes to present his psychological insights. For example, Freud believed that the persons in dreams were disguises for instinctual processes. He tried to reduce the dream's natural personifying to conceptual terms: libido, wish-fulfillment, sleep-protection. But he expressed the conceptual terms themselves by means of anthropomorphic animisms. The Oedipus complex is the most famous. His science turned, willy-nilly, into a mythology. Psychoanalysis is a comprehensive fiction of the human soul, of its genealogy, its prehistoric cataclysms, its transpersonal realms and the powers that govern its fate. It succeeds not as a science but as a cosmological fiction <recall Lacan's 'the triumph of religion is the failure of psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis will not triumph it will merely survive or it will not>. The Italian writer Giovanni Papini in an apocryphal interview with the Viennese Master records this "confession" from Freud:

• A man of letters by instinct, though a doctor by necessity, I conceived the idea of changing over a branch of medicine - psychiatry - into literature. Though I have the appearance of a scientist I was and am a poet and a novelist. Psychoanalysis is no more than an interpretation of a literary vocation in terms of psychology and pathology.

Freud, it should be remembered, did not win the Nobel prize for medicine but rather the Goethe prize for literature.
Freud's struggle between the conceptual and mythic modes of formulating psychology appears, personified, in the struggle between him and Lou Andreas-Salome , who was his closest woman pupil for a brief period during his late middle years and a deep friend into his old age. Anthropomorphism became the focus of her influence upon Freud's mind [*37. K.M. Abenheimer, "Lou Andreas-Salome's Main Contributions to Psycho-Analysis," Spring 1971, pp. 22-37. The conflict between objective and anthropomorphic approaches is epitomized in the conflict between Lou and Freud over her long tribute to him called Mein Dank an Freud (Vienna: Internat. Psychoanalyt. Verlag, 1931). "Freud told her twice that the 'overly personal title must go,' proposing 'Psycho-analyse' for 'Freud'; she twice said no because 'the work is really this one word, is my experience of the man so named; what it would have been like as mere objective knowledge without this human experience I simply cannot imagine (Am after all a woman too)." R. Binion, Frau Lou (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968), p. 464.]. During their crucial first year (1912) she brought him the ideas of Nietzsche and Dilthey, emphasizing the essential methodological dependency of psychoanalysis upon anthropomorphic thinking. She insisted upon a psychology that understood, and not only explained (as was Freud's habit) by means of abstract, quantitative, and topographical constructs in "objective" language.
Like Diotima with Plato, Lou Salome taught Freud that love requires personifying. She believed that we can be in an emotional relationship "only with whatever we experience anthropomorphically and only such can we include in our love. If by contrast we explore nature objectively and scientifically, we alienate the objects from us" and defeat the very purpose of psychoanalysis. She performed a psychologizing upon Freud's psychology, seeing through its conceptual explanations, attempting to keep it anthropomorphic, loving, and alive.
"Desire has no object, if not, as its singularities show, the accidental one, whether it is normal or not, that happens to manage to signify, whether in a flash or in a permanent relationship, the confines of the Thing - in other words, of this nothing around which all human passion tightens its spasm with a shorter or longer modulation and a periodic return.
The passion of the mouth that is most passionately stuffed is for the nothing by which, in anorexia, it demands the [kind of] deprivation that reflects love. The passion of the miser is for the nothing, to which the object enclosed in his beloved treasure chest is reduced. How could man's passion manage to find satisfaction without the copula that joins being as lack with this nothing?
This is why, whereas a woman may be secretly content deep down with the person who satisfies both her need and this lack, a man, seeking his want-to-be beyond his need - which is nevertheless so much better assured than a woman's - is inclined toward inconstancy, or, more exactly toward a duplicating of the object, whose affinities with what there is by way of fetishism in homosexuality have been very curiously explored in analytic practice, if not always correctly and well put together in psychoanalytic theory."
- From Discourse to Catholics by Jacques Lacan.>
Freud's concepts, such as the libido - and especially his Eros, Thanatos, and Oedipus - are indeed ancient images explicitly drawn from a long history of mythological personification. (The Greek world always fascinated Freud; he even kept a boyhood
​
The Empire of the Roman Ego: Decline and Falling Apart
<Hegel on Byzantine Empire>
In the early years of this century, cases of multiple personality caused a stir. But not because they were something new. Possession by devils, speaking with several tongues, automatic writing, the experience of the Doppelgänger and deja vu, and other modes of "personality dissociation" were long familiar phenomena. The idea of a divided soul, even of dismemberment, is older than Greek myth, yet only the early years of this century was "schizophrenia" named and given a careful description. Only at this extreme level of psychic distress could personifying again force itself upon our monocentric consciousness.
Multiple personality was ending the rule of reason and so of course this phenomenon became the focus of the defenders of reason: psychiatrists. They have often to deal with a culture's critical concern presented in extremis, symptomatically. During the thirties and forties we lived through what was called The Age of Anxiety. Recently, "hallucinations" (LSD) have put into question our materialist theory of perception and the world-view built upon it; "depression" has made us aware of our culture's addiction to a manic superficiality in growth and movement; and "autism" is reminding us of the possibility of the psyche's refusal to enter the world at all, full retreat to the interior castle.
"Schizophrenia" was officially coined in the period just before the First World War, a period which saw a corresponding fragmentation in painting, music, and literature and a corresponding relativization of the ego position in natural science. Cases of multiple personality were important because they confirmed the multiplicity of the individual at a time when the same phenomenon was beginning to appear in the culture in general. Through this multiple schizoid perspective we saw a world no longer held together by reason, no longer held and centered at all. Instead: disordering spontaneity, relativity, discontinuities, a-harmonies, an overpopulation of spirits and living soul images - the return of archetypal persons.
The phenomena of dissociation - breaking away, splitting off, personification, multiplication, ambivalence - will always seem an illness to the ego as it has come to be defined. But if we take the context of the psychic field as a whole, these fragmenting phenomena may be understood as reassertions against central authority by the individuality of the parts. We sense an obdurate "willfullness" to do and say things that are alien to the ego, buying what we do not want, eating more than we intend, taking on the habits of mother or father or a sudden new friend. New partial personalities spring up with feelings, opinions, needs. A sociologist might speak of subcultures' a political scientist of states' rights and grass-root government. Whatever the category, central command is losing control.
If it is common today to fantasy our culture against that of Old Rome, it is partly because our psyche has undergone a long Pax Romana. The gradual extension and civilization of outlying barbarous hinterlands is nothing else than ego-development. The classical description of this romanizing process in the psyche is that of Freud: "To strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the super ego, to widen the field of perception and enlarge its organization so that it can appropriate fresh portions of the id, where id was there ego shall be. It is a work of culture."
He concludes this paragraph with a simile of draining the sea-marshes to reclaim land, also a preoccupation of the old Romans. Freud's brilliant follower Otto Fenichel, whose authoritative textbook organizes the psychoanalytic theory of neurosis into a compendium confirms this imperialistic fantasy: "The common denominator of all neurotic phenomena is an insufficiency of the normal control apparatus." The weak ego is the neurotic ego; neurosis is an ego fault; cure is control from headquarters. From the bastion of Rome, reactions (that I have not ordered) by other persons in my psyche are alien, and they will be chronicled by the case historian as peculiar personifications of my primitive hinterlands, strange behavior honoring strange Gods.
Furthermore, the fantasy of "Roman decline," including the disintegration and paganization of society, describes what happens to the psyche when its old ego weakens and consciousness is no longer slave to the ego center. Then consciousness is released from its Roman identification, from centered rule by will and reason. This identification does the psyche a disservice; it sets up a counter-position - the unconscious as fragmentation and disintegration. Both of these positions are stereotypes and need to be revisioned as different styles of consciousness. The center and the periphery, Rome and the hinterlands, present differing value systems, patterns of fantasy, and degrees of strength. But the Roman central ego is no more "conscious" that are the outlandish styles of other complexes. Consciousness may be reapportioned without thereby being diminished; it may return to the bush and fields, to its polycentric roots in the complexes and their personified cores, that is to a consciousness based upon a polytheistic psychology.
Polytheistic psychology refers to the inherent dissociability of the psyche and the location of consciousness in multiple figures and centers. A psychological polytheism provides archetypal containers for differentiating our fragmentation, and, what is of utmost significance, offers another perspective to pathology. The interconnection between the "splinter psyches" of our multiple persons and the many Gods and Goddesses of polytheism is brought out in this passage from Jung:

• If tendencies toward dissociation were not inherent in the human psyche, fragmentary psychic systems would never have been split off; in other words, neither spirits nor gods would have ever come into existence. That is also the reason why our time has become so utterly godless and profane: we lack all knowledge of the unconscious psyche and pursue the cult of consciousness to the exclusion of all else. Our true religion is a monotheism of consciousness, a possession by it, couple with a fanatical denial of the existence of fragmentary autonomous systems.

When the monotheism of consciousness is no longer able to deny the existence of fragmentary autonomous systems and no longer able to deal with our actual psychic state, then there arises the fantasy of returning to Greek polytheism. For the "return to Greece" offers a way of coping when our centers cannot hold and things fall apart. The polytheistic alternative does not set up conflicting opposites between beast and Bethlehem, between chaos and unity; it permits the coexistence of all the psychic fragments and gives them patterns in the imagination of Greek mythology. A "return to Greece" was experienced in ancient Rome itself, and in the Italian Renaissance, and in the Romantic psyche during the times of revolution. In recent years it has been an intrinsic part of the lives of such artists and thinkers as Stravinksy, Picasso, Heidegger, Joyce, and Freud. The "return to Greece" is a psychological response to the challenge of breakdown; it offers a model of disintegrated integration.
​
Continuation
​

The View from Oregon – 262
Re: Golden Ages of Civilization
Friday 10 November 2023
Dear Friends,
Last week I mentioned I was reading Clive Bell’s Civilization: An Essay (I’ve finished the book now; it’s an easy read), and last week I discussed his method focusing on particular instances of “higher” civilizations. This book is now just a few years shy of its centenary, and it’s still an interesting read. Perhaps for any discipline not yet having converged upon a scientific research program (a paradigmatic stage, in Kuhn’s terminology), even hundred year old books can be helpful, whereas a hundred year old book on physics would be mostly of merely historical interest. One aspect of the book that wouldn’t go over well today is Bell’s repeated appeal to “higher” civilizations; even in biology, and despite Darwin’s many uses of “the higher animals,” it is now longer considered good form to make these hierarchical distinctions even in the natural sciences, let alone the social sciences; I have discussed this many times, and regular readers know my views on this. However, Bell also frequently uses “Golden Age” to refer to these paragons of civilization, as he also calls them, and this puts the matter in a slightly different light. Historians today still use “Golden Age” occasionally, even when they have largely abandoned “Dark Age” (Bell, by the way, wrote that, “in our hearts we know that the dark ages were dark” p. 123).
There have been many who have thought about civilizations from the perspective of their decline, decay, and collapse, but rather fewer, I think, who have approached civilization from the perspective of Golden Ages. This statement, however, requires an important qualification: historical works that understandably focus on the flourishing of a given civilization implicitly are draw to a Golden Age as the greatest exemplar of that civilization. In this way, then, much historical writing has implicitly been writing about Golden Ages, but a theoretical interest in Golden Ages is rather less common, and, in fact, I cannot think of an example (which does not mean that there are no such examples of theoretical interest in civilizational Golden Ages, only that I am ignorant of them).
We can think of Golden Ages as the counterpart of Dark Ages: a civilization ascends to a Golden Age, and descends into a Dark Age: both are deviations from the mean condition, with the mean condition of civilization being perhaps more stable and enduring—but not necessarily so. There seems to be an asymmetry here: Golden Ages are relatively brief, while Dark Ages can be stable and protracted—as protracted as, if not more protracted than, the mean condition. A purely theoretical conception of civilization (something I hinted at last week) would be equally interested in Golden Ages, the mean condition, and Dark Ages, insofar as all of these stages of development are expressions of civilization, but this is an occasion for another qualification. “Golden Age” is not only used to refer to peaks on the moral landscape of civilization (to borrow a simile from Sam Harris), but also to refer to a condition prior to, or even disconnected or apart from, civilization.
In Hesiod’s famous taxonomy of the Ages of Man, first there was a Golden Age, then the Silver, Bronze, Heroic, and Iron Ages. Further, in a loosely related ancient Greek tradition, there is the idea of Arcadia as a pastoral paradise of shepherds guarding their flocks while reciting poetry and playing pan pipes. Virgil’s Eclogues are set in this kind of idealized landscape. A further twist delivers us from the merely archaically strange to the contradictory. In many paintings that purport to represent the ideal Arcadian landscape, we see classical ruins in the distance (for example, in Thomas Cole’s painting L’Allegro, which is distinct from his The Arcadian State, but repeats many of its motifs; The Arcadian State is part of Cole’s sequence of paintings known as The Course of Empire)), implying that this is an idealized pastoralism that nevertheless plays out after the collapse of ancient civilization, in other words, this is an Arcadia of the Dark Ages.
Perhaps it could be agreed that both Dark Ages and Arcadia represent lower levels of social complexity, or, if you like, lower levels of civilization, or no civilization at all. We can posit an Arcadia that is outside time, or that is a pre-civilized state, but a Dark Age implies a previous condition of civilization—it might be a civilization that has simply fallen away from the mean condition, or it might be a civilization that attained to a Golden Age, and then catastrophically collapsed, the Golden Age being unsustainable, down to a level below the mean condition, into a Dark Age. We can further posit that, if the complexity of the society does not recover, and further decays, that civilization will cease altogether, and a Dark Age will give way to a renewed savage state—or a new Arcadia, if one wishes to be tendentious about this developmental sequence.
Taking Dark Ages as the counterpart of Golden Ages, the above developmental sequence can be contrasted to a developmental sequence of a civilization passing to higher states of complexity, so that the mean state passes into a Golden Age. Does the Golden Age then pass into a further state of increased complexity? Is that possible? I have been using the admittedly awkward term “transcendence” to indicate when a civilization passes over into a qualitatively different state. There are only two clear-cut examples of macrohistorical transcendence: the of origins of civilization itself (which, in a narrow sense, is not an instance of a civilization passing into a qualitatively different state, so we could say that there is only one true macrohistorical transcendence), and the passage from agricultural civilization to industrialized civilization. If we eventually make the transition from industrialized civilization to spacefaring civilization, then that will be another qualitative transcendence. So, the question posed by the above discussion is whether a transcendence event can obtain in a Golden Age, or whether (as seems likely to me) a transcendence event arises from a condition of social unrest and historical turbulence. A Golden Age to me implies a kind of quietude and repose, but if we think of a Golden Age as a period of energetic activity (Kenneth Clark speaks in this vein), then it is easy to imagine that a transcendence event could obtain in (or as a consequent of) a Golden Age. The historical record is interestingly ambiguous.
One of the three higher civilizations (or “paragons”) identified by Bell is eighteenth century France, or, we might say, France during the Enlightenment (but before the revolution, which is a direct consequence of the Enlightenment). Industrialization did, in fact, begin at the end of the eighteenth century, but it began in England rather than France, and, when it crossed the channel, it achieved its greatest development in Germany rather than in France. One could argue loosely from this high state of civilization in France during the Enlightenment for its impact upon the whole of European society (which is true), noting both that the high civilization of Enlightenment France gives way to the chaos of the French Revolution, and then the Napoleonic Wars, even as the industrial revolution was getting underway elsewhere. Moreover, if we count France as a part of European civilization (which is accurate), then we can say that a high state of civilization existed in one part of European civilization, and was immediately followed by a transcendence event elsewhere in Europe. This is fair enough, but does it settle the question? Not decisively.
The fact that we have only this single clear-cut instance of a qualitative change in civilization means that we can’t helpfully generalize from it, in the same way that we shouldn’t generalize from life on Earth—the only instance of life known to us—to life in the universe. We can, however, take a step down and consider major changes in civilization that don’t quite rise to the qualitative change wrought by the industrial revolution, and see if these second-tier transcendence events (such as written language, the Axial Age, or the scientific revolution) seem to follow from Golden Ages or if they are born out of chaos.
Another interesting aspect of Golden Ages is that they can appear at different stages in the development of a civilization, and so represent a deviation from a deterministically understood developmental trajectory of a civilization. I’ve also been reading T. S. Eliot’s Notes Toward the Definition of Culture, in which Eliot states that:

“We have to admit, in comparing one civilisation with another, and in comparing the different stages of our own, that no one society and no one age of it realises all the values of civilisation. Not all of these values may be compatible with each other: what is at least as certain is that in realising some we lose the appreciation of others.”

On a side note, in the very next sentence Eliot explicitly affirms that, “we can distinguish between higher and lower cultures.” In any case, I think that Eliot is correct in the above claim that the values of a given civilization are differently realized by different stages in the development of a given civilization. This, in turn, means that the distinctive values of any one stage might flourish as a Golden Age, but this is not necessarily the case: a civilization might develop with or without a Golden Age at any one stage of development. Say we take a developmental sequence of the five stages of origins—development—maturity—decline—extinction (whatever number of stages we employ in an analysis is a matter of theoretical convention, so I don’t attach any special importance to this), then there are 32 permutations of civilization (two to the fifth power), since any of the five stages of development might have or not have a Golden Age. Certainly as a matter of fact and as a matter of resources available to a civilization, we will see more Golden Ages in the mature period of a civilization’s development, but we could adduce examples of the other permutations, even the most counter-intuitive of these, a Golden Age during extinction: Johan Huizinga’s well-known book The Autumn of the Middle Ages could be taken as a portrait of a Golden Age of medieval civilization even as it is going extinct.
There are (at least) two interesting consequences of viewing Golden Ages in this way: 1) we can introduce a further hierarchy among civilizations in terms of the number of Golden Ages they achieve, allowing also that a mean condition in maturity might exhibit several Golden Ages in sequence, each returning to the baseline mean condition, so we are not deterministically limited to a number of Golden Ages equal to the number of developmental stages, and 2) that these many permutations may obscure a developmental trajectory, e.g., an especially vigorous Golden Age during a civilization’s decline might be easily mistaken for a period of developmental maturity. Thus a civilization might be following a predictable developmental trajectory and yet appear to be defying that predictable developmental trajectory.
I find these consequences to be of great interest partly because of my distaste for the way the debate over cultural evolutionism has been conducted. Apart from the obvious objection that the debate is freighted with precisely the kind of moral baggage that makes it difficult to maintain scientific objectivity, the more important problem is the assumption of determinism built into cultural evolutionism by both its advocates and its critics. It is child’s play to formulate a version of cultural evolutionism that is not deterministic—e.g., we could posit multiple qualitatively distinct permutations of any one stage, that any one civilization might or might not experience—yet despite the obvious advantages to providing a more sophisticated way of discussing cultural evolutionism, we only get the monochromatic version, no matter how tiresome it gets. I don’t know who is so invested in the deterministic interpretation of cultural evolutionism, or why, but the familiar talking points are all-too-familiar because no one seems to want to go beyond them.
While I am going on about cultural evolutionism and moral baggage, it is interesting to imagine how differently Lewis Henry Morgan’s cultural evolutionism would have been received if he had named his stages of developmental progress Eden—Arcadia—civilization instead of savagery—barbarism—civilization, and the substitution works pretty well (albeit not perfectly), as Eden is a time before technology, roughly equivalent to savagery, while Arcadia is associated with pastoralism (with shepherds, to be specific), roughly equivalent to barbarism. When Morgan named his stages, I doubt the terms he used were as freighted with moral baggage as they are today, or perhaps simply not so stigmatized in Morgan’s immediate milieu. Ancient Society, in which Morgan formulated and named his stages, appeared in 1877. Bell’s Civilization: An Essay appeared in 1928, and Bell quite freely uses “savagery” and “barbarism” as terms of abuse some fifty years after Morgan used them as terms of classification. Perhaps Bell did so intentionally, though he evinces no interest whatsoever in anthropology or archaeology; Bell’s is a purely belles-lettristic account of civilization, as befits the genteel conception.
Best wishes,
Nick
PS—I have finished listening to The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack. I was really looking forward to this as there are few books on cosmological eschatology. While the book was a little different from what I expected, and very different from how I would have approached it, it was still interesting and enjoyable. The final section of the book—and I am not taking this as a reflection on the author in particular, but on the nature of the discussion—consisted of quotes from a number of cosmologists trying to find ways to reconcile themselves with the end of the universe entire. I would call this cosmological cope. My response is in the same spirit as Dyson’s response (and Mack discusses Dyson’s paper, “Time without end: Physics and Biology in an open universe”), which is essentially the cosmological equivalent of Dylan Thomas: Rage, rage, against the dying of the light. Dyson was looking for ways to salvage some retained complexity over cosmological scales of time, rather than trying to reconcile himself to universal oblivion. While one can critique both approaches as mechanisms for coping with the inevitability loss, in terms of exercising the scientific imagination to guess at aspects of the universe now unknown to us, Dyson’s approach is much more likely to be a stimulus to further thought; as soon as we are reconciled with a given state-of-affairs, we are no longer seeking to transcend it.
PPS—In my previous newsletter I said that it was impossible that the Bloomsbury group didn’t discuss Spengler, so out of curiously I checked to see if Virginia Woolf mentioned Spengler, and she did, in a diary entry (for Sunday 12 May 1929) relating to the British diplomat Sydney Waterlow):

“He believes in nothing any more, he said, & is convinced now that nothing will ever change him—So, talking of something else for a moment, he suddenly burst out into a terrific peroration about Spengler; who has changed the world for him—made infinitely more difference than anybody — so fixed & stable & independent is he.”

Woolf provided another brief reflection on this meeting in a letter to Quentin Bell from the day before, Saturday 11 May 1929), so the encounter with Waterlow’s infatuation with Spengler found expression both in her diary and a letter, though Woolf gives a rather unflattering portrait of Waterlow himself:

“A desperate looking pompous sad respectable elderly man; worldly; but quivering as usual in his shell. Any pin pricks him in the unarmoured skin. I liked him.”

Given this description, it is a bit remarkable she found him likeable. Perhaps the implied literary contradiction is the point here.

Newsletter link:

https://mailchi.mp/cf9cd5fbb223/the-view-from-oregon-262
​

I was asked to provide a frequency analysis of the most used characters in the Blue Cliff Record. I have a top 100 list if anyone wants it, here's the top 10:

1. 不: 2941
   
2. 是: 2336
   
3. 云: 1921
   
4. 一: 1862
   
5. 道: 1858
   
6. 麼: 1730
   
7. 人: 1658
   
8. 得: 1380
   
9. 有: 1364
   
10. 也: 1293
    

That's probably mostly filler words, so let's feed the top 100 to ChatGPT, let it filter out the duds and see what top 10 we're left with, with some explanation so it's actually useful for english speakers:

不 (2941): This character means "not" or "no". It's a basic negation in Chinese. The high frequency of this character might indicate a frequent discussion or questioning of established concepts, typical of Zen dialogues where teachers often challenge students' assumptions or understandings.
是 (2336): This character means "is" or "to be". In the context of Zen writings, discussions about the nature of reality, being, and existence are common, so this frequency is unsurprising.
道 (1858): Literally "way" or "path", but also refers to the Dao or the fundamental nature of existence in Daoism and by extension in many Chinese Buddhist texts. Its frequent use might imply a lot of discussions about the 'way' of Zen or the nature of enlightenment.
人 (1658): Meaning "person" or "man". This might suggest a focus on the individual's experience or journey in the spiritual path.
無 (959): Meaning "nothing" or "none". In Zen, the concept of emptiness is crucial. The frequent mention could be referencing the Buddhist concept of emptiness or the Zen emphasis on the idea of "nothingness".
僧 (851): This means "monk". Given that the Blue Cliff Record is a collection of Zen koans, it makes sense that monks, who are often participants in these dialogues, are frequently mentioned.
見 (892): Meaning "to see" or "view". This might be related to insights, realizations, or perspectives which are crucial in Zen teachings.
佛 (403): Meaning "Buddha". It's not surprising to see this in a Zen text. It might refer not just to the historical Buddha, but also the Buddha-nature or enlightened nature within all beings.
法 (354): Translates to "dharma" or "law". In the context of Buddhism, it often refers to the teachings or the truth of the universe.
意 (316): Meaning "mind" or "intention". The mind is central to many Buddhist teachings, particularly in Zen where the nature of mind and consciousness are frequently explored.

This time it's almost in order, but again, that's just ChatGPT picking whatever it likes. Forcing its hand, this is the top 20:

不 (2941): "Not" or "no". A fundamental negation in Chinese, often used to question or challenge established concepts.
是 (2336): "Is" or "to be". Central to discussions about the nature of reality and existence.
云 (1921): Often means "to say" or "said". Commonly used in Zen koans to indicate dialogue or narration.
一 (1862): "One". Could imply unity, singularity, or primary focus, fundamental in Zen and other Eastern philosophies.
道 (1858): "Way" or "path". Refers to the Dao or the fundamental nature of existence in Daoism and in many Chinese Buddhist contexts.
麼 (1730): Often used as a question particle or to emphasize detail, suggesting probing inquiry or examination.
人 (1658): "Person" or "man". Indicates discussions focused on the individual's spiritual experience or journey.
得 (1380): "To get" or "obtain". Could relate to achieving understanding or enlightenment.
有 (1364): "Have" or "exist". Discussions around existence, being, and materiality are central in Buddhist philosophy.
也 (1293): A modal particle often used for emphasis or affirmation. Common in classical Chinese texts.
如 (1053): "Like" or "as". Often used in similes or metaphors, indicating comparative discussions or teachings.
無 (959): "Nothing" or "none". References the Buddhist concept of emptiness or the Zen idea of "nothingness".
處 (956): "Place" or "location". Might indicate discussions about meditation places, or metaphorically, states of mind.
他 (955): "He" or "other". Could indicate dialogues or discussions about others' experiences or teachings.
作 (938): "To do" or "make". Indicates actions, efforts, or engagements, potentially in spiritual practices.
見 (892): "To see" or "view". Related to insights, realizations, or perspectives.
這 (865): "This" or "these". Demonstrative pronoun pointing to specific instances, teachings, or objects.
僧 (851): "Monk". Given the text's nature, this indicates the frequent involvement of monks in the dialogues.
若 (849): "If" or "like". Often used in hypotheticals or comparisons, suggesting contemplative scenarios or teachings.
什 (828): Often part of the word "什麼" which means "what", indicating questions or inquiries.

Interesting that the same to have and have not distinction shows up here again. I'm not even gonna look it up and I'll instead make someone disprove me, but I think those are probably gonna be the same the same words used for the dog's Buddha nature in the famous Zhaozhou case. That's pretty cool, no?

I know Editing (not a pro), I'm thinking of starting channel that Uploads random movie edits ( like 30-45 sec videos). But getting copyrighted for using famous songs (even if its less than 30sec) are the main thing worrying me. Looking for suggestion from similer people who uploads same kind of videos. Is it worth it??

Remember Sharna?
Sharna is the matriarch of the Inn of the Kneeling Man, where Jaime, Brienne, and Cleos stop while fleeing Riverrun and where Arya, Hot Pie, and Gendry are brought by Lem Lemoncloak, Tom O'Sevens, and Anguy the Archer. Her husband is Husband, and she's foster mother to the orphan "Boy". A midwife and an ally to the Brotherhood Without Banners, she takes the duck Lem gives her (for which she has no lemons) and yells at him about his muddy boots, bosses Husband around, gives Arya and Hot Pie ale after making an odd comment about drinking water with flies in it, feeds Arya and Hot Pie, who are starving, and ultimately takes in Hot Pie.
OK, you remember Sharna now. But could she be more than she seems? Could she possibly be important to the bigger mysteries of ASOIAF and thus to our story in general?

Sharna & Sabitha Have Sharp Tongues & They Like Girls

I want to begin with a passage which I believe hints at who she is in at least one narrow sense. It's Sharna's introduction to readers, which comes when Tom O'Sevens talks about her while 'inviting' Arya to come with his group to her inn:

"Sharna is the innkeep's name," Tom put in. "She has a sharp tongue and a fierce eye, I'll grant you that, but her heart's a good one, and she's fond of little girls." (ASOS Arya II)

Sharna's "sharp tongue" coupled with the fact that "she's fond of little girls" recalls/figuratively 'rhymes' with certain details we're told about another woman of the Riverlands with an "S___a" first name: Lady Sabitha of House Vypren.

[T]he Lady Sabitha of House Vypren, proved redoubtable for her courage and notorious for her lack of mercy. According to Mushroom, she was a "sharp-featured, sharp-tongued harridan of House Vypren, who would sooner ride than dance, wore mail instead of silk, and was fond of killing men and kissing women." (TWOIAF)

Sharna "has a sharp tongue", Sabitha is "sharp-tongued".
Sharna being "fond of little girls" 'rhymes' with Sabitha being "fond of… kissing women".
It's not just that, though.
Sabitha was a "harridan" — "a strict, bossy, or belligerent old woman" (https://terms_en.en-academic.com/19583/harridan) — which is a perfect fit for Sharna, a verbatim "old woman" who rules the roost at her Inn, yelling at and bossing around Lem, Husband, and Anguy.
Where Sabitha was (supposedly) "notorious for her lack of mercy", Sharna is the polar opposite, taking in and feeding orphans, helping deliver babies, and generally providing succor to the afflicted:

"There's no cause for spilling good ale on my floor," said Sharna. "Sit back down and calm yourself, boy, there's rabbit coming. You too, girl. Whatever harm's been done you, it's over and it's done and you're with king's men now. We'll keep you safe as best we can." (ASOS Arya II)

Sabitha Vypren was "sharp-featured". If Sharna's "long nose"—

[Sharna] looked down her long nose at Arya and Hot Pie. (ASOS Arya II)

—is anything like that of her compatriot and fellow long-nosed Riverlander Tom O'Sevens—

[Tom's] nose was long and sharp, his smile big and loose. (AFFC Jaime VII)

—maybe Sharna is "sharp-featured", too.

Two Toads

Finally, Sabitha is a lady of House Vypren. The sigil of House Vypren is a toad.

A black toad on white lily pad, on a green field (https://www.westeros.org/Citadel/Heraldry/Houses/4/)

Tom likens Sharna to "a toad"—

Tom unslung his harp. "A lonely inn on a forest road," he sang, slowly picking out a tune to go with the words. "The innkeep's wife was plain as a toad."

—and Lem's response suggests she might indeed resemble the sigil of Sabitha's House Vypren:

"Shut up with that now or we won't be getting no rabbit," Lem warned him. "You know how she is."

The Fire & Blood 'Rhymes'

Fire & Blood tells us lots more about Sabitha Vypren, and more or less everything we read about her begs us to wonder if Sharna is "Sabitha come again, in 'rhyming' form", to paraphrase what Arianne Martell says about Anders Yronwood in AFFC The Soiled Knight:

"The dragon is time. It has no beginning and no ending, so all things come round again. Anders Yronwood is Criston Cole reborn. He whispers in my brother's ear that he should rule after my father, that it is not right for men to kneel to women . . . that Arianne especially is unfit to rule, being the willful wanton that she is."

Funny thing, that quote is all about the issue of whether women "should rule", which is exactly what Sabitha Vypren did in her time — as Sabitha Frey, she ruled the Twins as her son's regent after her husband Lord Frey died — and exactly what Sharna does at her inn.
So what does Fire & Blood tells us about Sabitha that seems to 'rhyme' with Sharna's story?

The Fire & Blood 'Rhymes': "The Widow of Lord Forrest Frey & Mother Of His Heir"

Fire & Blood tells us that Sabitha Vypren was…

…the widow of Lord Forrest Frey and mother of his heir…

…and the ruler of the Twins.
I suspect Sharna was once married to a now-dead lord, and was mother that her former husband's heir(s). (ASOS Arya II) But I'll get to that later.
Sticking to the 'present', Sharna having a husband named "Husband", a boy named "Boy", and "two [dead] sons" 'answers' Sabitha's dead husband, son, and "the Twins". (ASOS Jaime II)
Where Sabitha ruled Forrest's castle/s, Sharna rules the "inn on a forest road" and is part of a group for whom "the forest was their castle". (ASOS Arya II, III)
Where Sabitha's son is the child of Forrest, Sharna's "lads" frequent High Heart, which they say was sacred to "the children of the forest". (ASOS Ayra II, III, IV)
And where Sabitha was Lord Forrest's Lady, Sharna's "lads" (a) are friends with "the Lady of the Leaves", who lives in a forest; and (b) sing "You can be my forest love" and me your forest lass".

The Fire & Blood 'Rhymes': Nameless Relatives

Where Sharna has a husband named Husband and a boy named Boy, Fire & Blood brings up Sabitha Vypren-Frey's "father and brothers of House Vypren", who are likewise nameless:

Benjicot Blackwood, the twelve-year-old Lord of Raventree, had come forth, as had the widowed Sabitha Frey, Lady of the Twins, with her father and brothers of House Vypren.

The Fire & Blood 'Rhymes': Merciless & Grasping, Merciful & Snatching

Sharna's story 'rhymes' with Sabitha's, but it isn't the same. Thus where Fire & Blood calls Sabitha…

Lady Sabitha Frey, the merciless and grasping Lady of the Twins…

…Sharna is in direct contrast merciful and generous. That said, she is distinctly and memorably "grasping" as well, in a literal sense:

"We shot a duck." Lem held it out like a peace banner.
The woman snatched it from his hand. (ASOS Arya II)

Note that where Sabitha is described as "grasping" while going to war—

In the riverlands, …the Lord of Riverrun… had called the lords of the Trident to war once more…. To him gathered Benjicot Blackwood of Raventree…; his fierce young aunt, Black Aly…; Lady Sabitha Frey, the merciless and grasping Lady of the Twins; [and many more].

—Sharna snatches the duck when it's "held… out like a peace banner".

The Fire & Blood 'Rhymes': Squatter's Rights

In Fire & Blood, Sabitha "swooped down" (like a bird) to take Harrenhal in the Riverlands when Aemond One-Eye abandoned it:

The castle stood empty no more than three days before Lady Sabitha Frey swooped down to seize it. (Fire & Blood)

'Rhyming' with this, Sharna and Husband swooped in to claim the Inn of the Kneeling Man in the immediate aftermath of the death of the former innkeep, who'd been running it as recently as Cleos's visit en route to Riverrun:

[Husband:] "I'm no innkeep. I buried him out back, with his women."
"Did you kill them?"
"Would I tell you if I did?" The man spat. "Likely it were wolves' work, or maybe lions, what's the difference? The wife and I found them dead. The way we see it, the place is ours now." (ibid.)
"The inn was still open when last I passed this way [on the way to Riverrun]," said Ser Cleos Frey [to Jaime and Brienne]. (ASOS Jaime II)

Where "sharp-tongued" Sabitha took Harrenhal after Aemond One-Eye deserted it, Sharna is described in an odd way that makes her sound as if she, like Aemond, has only one eye:

"She has a sharp tongue and a fierce eye…" (ASOS Catelyn II)

Where Sabitha took over Harrenhal, a ruined castle which stands as an unintended monument to the hubris of King Harren and to the futility of fighting Aegon the Conqueror and his dragons, Sharna took over The Inn of the Kneeling Man, which stands as a deliberate marker of the spot where Torrhen Stark chose to kneel to Aegon rather than to fight him like Harren:

This is the Inn of the Kneeling Man, my lady. It stands upon the very spot where the last King in the North knelt before Aegon the Conqueror to offer his submission. (ASOS Jaime II)

Where Sabitha "swooped down" like a bird to take Harrenhal, Arya is taken to Sharna's inn by Lem Lemoncloak, who looks like "some huge yellow bird":

[T]he greatcloak gave the big man the look of some huge yellow bird. (ASOS II)

Sabitha "swoop[ing] down to seize" Harrenhal thus feels like a kaleidoscopic reworking of Sharna sweeping off after she "snatched" the duck from the bird-like Lem:

[Sharna] swept off toward the kitchen. (ASOS Aryla II)

The Fire & Blood 'Rhymes': Hostages, Witches, & Shit

Fire & Blood then tells us about Sabitha losing her "prize captive" Alys when "the Kinslayer" Aemond One-Eye stole her away (after committing various atrocities in the Riverlands), forcing Sabitha to hide in a "privy":

Prince Aemond had become the terror of the Trident, descending from the sky to rain fire and death upon the riverlands, then vanishing, only to strike again the next day fifty leagues away. Vhagar's flames reduced Old Willow and White Willow to ash, and Hogg Hall to blackened stone. At Merrydown Dell, thirty men and three hundred sheep died by dragonflame. The Kinslayer then returned unexpectedly to Harrenhal, where he burned every wooden structure in the castle. Six knights and twoscore men-at-arms perished trying to slay his dragon, whilst Lady Sabitha Frey only saved herself from the flames by hiding in a privy. She fled back to the Twins soon after . . . but her prize captive, the witch woman Alys Rivers, escaped with Prince Aemond. (Fire & Blood)

So many of these motifs likewise feel familiar from Sharna's story. Consider: Robb's escaped prize captive "the Kingslayer" (vs. "the Kinslayer") passes through her inn, whose stables are pointedly filled with a shit, like a privy—

"There's far too much horse shit about here for my taste. I would hate to step in it." (ASOS Jaime II)
The stables had not been mucked out in a long while, from the smell of them. Hundreds of fat black flies swarmed amongst the straw, buzzing from stall to stall and crawling over the mounds of horse dung that lay everywhere… (ASOS Jaime II)

—only to escape the trap laid for him on the road by Sharna's "lads".
The story of Sabitha's "prize captive" Alys escaping while Sabitha hid in the shitter also recalls the escape of Sharna's lads prize captive Arya. Where Alys was a "witch woman", Ayra is a skinchanger who names her wolf for a "witch queen". (AGOT Bran II) Tom, Lem, and Anguy take Arya captive after she hides behind an "old willow" tree. Alys escapes with the One-Eye after he burns "Old Willow". Arya escapes with one-eared Sandor, who makes constant comments about shit while dueling Beric Dondarrion ("I shit better men than you"; "you stand there telling each other that your shit don't stink"; "Make my horse a knight. He never shits in the hall…"), who accuses Sandor of a litany of crimes — including the murders of "Merriman's widow" and "every man, woman, and child in… Mousedown Mill" — that echo the burnings and murders committed by Aemond at e.g. "Merrydown Dell". (ASOS Arya VI) Where Aemond's crimes made him the "terror of the Trident", the crimes attributed to "the Hound" made him "The Mad Dog of Saltpans".

The Fire & Blood 'Rhymes': Sesame Street, Finally "Explained"

Fire & Blood tells us that "Bloody Ben Blackwood and the brothers [Kermit and Oscar] Tully… emerged from the Muddy Mess", were referred to "collectively as 'the Lads'", and counted "amongst their supporters" the strangely Sharna-esque Lady Sabitha Vypren:

There were… other lords and famous knights amongst the host that Corlys Velaryon confronted…, all of them older and some of them wiser than Bloody Ben Blackwood and the brothers Tully, yet somehow the three youths had emerged from the Muddy Mess as the undoubted leaders. Bound by battle, the three had become so inseparable that their men began referring to them collectively as "the Lads."
Amongst their supporters were two extraordinary women: Alysanne Blackwood, called Black Aly, a sister to the late Lord Samwell Blackwood, and thus aunt to Bloody Ben, and Sabitha Frey….

Recall that Arya thinks Sharna's favorite whipping boy Lem looks like "some huge yellow bird". So he's Big Bird from Sesame Street. This reading is 'confirmed' when we see…

…his big yellow cloak flapping[!] behind him as he rode. (ASOS Ayra III)

As a figurative Big Bird, Sharna-adjacent Lem 'rhymes' with the Sabitha-adjacent "brothers Tully", Kermit and Oscar, as in Sesame Street's Oscar the Grouch and his fellow muppet Kermit the Frog.
And how does our Big Bird enter the inn run by the Brotherhood Without Banner's major supporter Sharna?

Inside was the common room, where a very tall ugly woman with a knobby chin stood with her hands on her hips, glaring. "Don't just stand there, boy," she snapped. "Or are you a girl? Either one, you're blocking my door. Get in or get out. Lem, what did I tell you about my floor? You're all mud."
"We shot a duck." Lem held it out like a peace banner.

He's covered in mud. We might say he's a Muddy Mess. Or that he looks as if he's just "emerged from [a] Muddy Mess", like Kermit and Oscar.
After yelling at Lem some more, Sharna yells "the lads are back", thus referring to the trio of Tom, Anguy, and Lem collectively as "the lads", just as Oscar, Kermit, and Bloody Ben were "referr[ed] to… collectively as 'the Lads'":

The woman snatched [the duck] from his hand. "Anguy shot a duck, is what you're meaning. Get your boots off, are you deaf or just stupid?" She turned away. "Husband!" she called loudly. "Get up here, the lads are back. Husband!"

The 'rhyme' couldn't be clearer.
Actually… it could. We have Lord Kermit Tully as in the boss of The Muppet Show, Kermit the Frog, right? And who is Big Bird Lem's boss at the Inn? Sharna, who is "plain as a toad" (and 'rhyming' overwhelmingly with Sabitha, a "toad" of House Vypren). And where Oscar is "the Grouch" on Sesame Street, it's Big Bird Lem who is a giant grouch in ASOAIF. (There's also "Greenbeard", whose dye job is badly faded, suggesting "It ain't easy being green!")
I note with interest that Kermit's lord father was "Lord Elmo" (like the Sesame Street muppet). One of the most famous names in fantasy fiction begins with "El". Indeed, GRRM has so far given us two homages to Eldric of Melinbone: Eldric Shadowchaser and Eldric Arryn. Could all the 'rhyming' here suggest Sharna's (lord) father was named Eldric (a la Elmo), too? Or perhaps something similar?
Wait! What a 'coincidence'! Somebody in Sharna's immediate orbit is named Edric. Funny… Edric had an aunt… what was her name again? No, not Allyria. The other, famous one, whose mother might be an "old woman" by now, like Sharna. The one whose name sounds like "Sharna".
By the way, Anguy the Archer shooting the duck with an arrow only for Big Bird Lem to retrieve it and present it to Sharna as if he was responsible for the kill 'rhymes' with Black Aly Blackwood, Sabitha's co-"supporter" of "the Lads", shooting Borros Baratheon full of arrows at "The Muddy Mess" such that he was already "dead upon his feet" when Kermit finished him off:

Borros Baratheon perished fighting. Unhorsed when his destrier was felled by arrows from Black Aly and her bowmen, he battled on afoot, cutting down countless men-at-arms, a dozen knights, and the Lords Mallister and Darry. By the time Kermit Tully came upon him, Lord Borros was dead upon his feet, bareheaded (he had ripped off his dented helm), bleeding from a score of wounds, scarce able to stand. "Yield, ser," called the Lord of Riverrun to the Lord of Storm's End, "the day is ours." Lord Baratheon answered with a curse, saying, "I'd sooner dance in hell than wear your chains." Then he charged…straight into the spiked iron ball at the end of Lord Kermit's morningstar, which took him full in the face in a grisly spray of blood and bone and brain. The Lord of Storm's End died in the mud along the kingsroad, his sword still in his hand."

History rightly noted Black Aly's key role, just as Sharna rightly notes that Anguy, not Lem, shot the duck, even if Lem retrieved it from the water (a necessary but unglamorous task, a la dealing the finishing blow to Borros).
(Note that Kermit killed Borros with a morningstar. As in dawn and "the Sword of the Morning". Hmm…)

The Fire & Blood 'Rhymes': Black Aly and Sharna's Gang

Fire & Blood links Sabitha with Black Aly Blackwood:

Huntress, horse-breaker, and archer without peer, Black Aly had little of a woman's softness about her. Many thought her to be of that same ilk as Sabitha Frey, for they were oft in one another's company, and had been known to share a tent whilst on the march. Yet in King's Landing, whilst accompanying her young nephew Benjicot at court and council, she had met Cregan Stark and conceived a liking for the stern northman.

Was Sabitha's relationship with the seemingly much younger Aly Blackwood actually sexual? (This would certainly 'rhyme' with a prurient reading of Sharna being 'fond of little girls'.) Or was Aly in fact a kind of surrogate daughter to Sabitha (which would be consistent with Sharna's fondness as generally understood)?
In any case, Sabitha's counterpart being a "huntress, horse-breaker, and archer without peer" who "conceived a liking" for a Stark recalls Sharna's "lad" Anguy being a hunter and archer without peer who is in league with Harwin, the son of Winterfell's "Master of Horse".
Meanwhile, Black Aly's First Men house dovetails with her height and her "mane of thick black curls that tumbled down past her waist"—

"A lean tall creature was [Black Aly], …thin as a whip and flat-chested as a boy, but long of leg and strong of arm, with a mane of thick black curls that tumbled down past her waist when loosed."

—to remind me of… Ashara Dayne, "tall and fair":

He had only to close his eyes to see [Ashara], with her long dark hair tumbling about her shoulders and those haunting purple eyes. (The Kingbreaker)

Where Black Aly fell for Cregan Stark "whilst accompanying her young nephew", I suspect that Ashara fell for Brandon Stark whilst in the company of her older brother Arthur at Harrenhal.
If Black Aly is Ashara-esque, then what might Sabitha's relationship with Aly suggest about Sharna, given Sharna's 'rhyming' with Sabitha and the striking similarity of "Sharna" and "Ashara"? How might this change depending on whether Sabitha's relationship with Aly was sexual or maternal?

The Fire & Blood 'Rhymes': Widow Fairs & Orphans

Fire & Blood tells us that Sabitha Vypren-Frey was a widow who played host to the post-Dance of Dragons Widows Fairs, whereby soldiers from the North with no home to return to were married to war widows. It's stated that a few ex-soldiers "did turn to outlawry" rather than finding a wife at a Widows Fair.
Sharna seems to service 'rhyming' needs. She hosts a gang of soldiers turned outlaw, one of whom has lost his wife and daughter, and she has lost two sons of her own but takes in the orphans Boy and Hot Pie.
Where Sabitha the widow held Widows Fairs, Sharna who takes in orphans seems in at least two respects like she could be an "orphan" — an "orphan of the Greenblood", that is. Sharna has a "long nose"—

[Sharna] looked down her long nose at Arya and Hot Pie. (ASOS Arya II)

—and is an in-demand midwife—

"I told you twice, the old woman was up to Lambswold helping that Fern birth her babe. (ASOS Ayra II)

—which makes her sound like the mother of "Garin of the orphans"—

"My mother is the best midwife in Westeros…." - Garin (AFFC The Queenmaker)

—who is "long-nosed" himself. (AFFC The Queenmaker)
(I'll say more about Sharna et al. seeming "Dornish-ish" later.)
Widow/orphan symmetry aside, Sabitha being a Widow Fair-hosting widow deepens my suspicion that Sharna was once wed to a man who is now dead (say… the late Lord Dayne) and/or that she helped another widow (say… her widowed, grieving daughter… or former lover…) find a new husband.

The Fire & Blood 'Rhymes': Sabitha's Roddy the Ruin & Sharna's Lem Lemoncloak

During the Dance of Dragons, Sabitha Vypren/Frey entered into an alliance with the leader of the so-called Winter Wolves, Roderick Dustin a.k.a. "Roddy the Ruin", Lord of Barrowton:

"We have come to die for the dragon queen," Lord Roderick announced at the Twins, when Lady Sabitha… rode out to greet them." (Fire & Blood)

The motifs around Sabitha's ally Roddy the Ruin set up a nice rhyme with Sharna's ally Lem Lemoncloak.
Both men have illiterative noms de guerre: Roddy the Ruin and Lem Lemoncloak.
Roddy was a "warrior", a soldier from the North.
Lem Lemoncloak looks like a northern soldier: He's a big, brown-haired—

He was brown-haired, bearded, brawny, with a broken nose that had healed badly. (AFFC Brienne VIII)

—tall man with "the look of a soldier"—

The man beside him stood a good foot taller, and had the look of a soldier. (ASOS Arya II)

—who was a soldier—

—LEM, called LEM LEMONCLOAK, a one-time soldier (ASOS Appendix)

—whose size and "bushy brown beard"—

He had bad teeth and a bushy brown beard, but it was his hooded yellow cloak that drew the eye. (ASOS Arya II)

—makes him sound like a soldier of the North, like Roddy the Ruin:

The [Umber] captors and the [Karstark] captives looked much alike; big men, every one, with thick beards and long hair. (ASOS Catelyn III)
"There's northmen in the tents." She knew them by their beards… (ASOS Ayra X)

That Northern appearance, together with his membership in "the Brotherhood Without Banners" and his "halfhelm shaped like a cone"—

[Lem's] head was covered by a black iron halfhelm shaped like a cone. (ASOS Arya II)

—makes Lem feel like a rather specific echo of the explicitly badgeless, dying Northern soldier Theon watches in ACOK Theon VI:

Theon watched a wounded man drag himself painfully across the ground, smearing his life's blood in the dirt as he struggled to reach the well that stood at the center of the market square. He died before he got there. He wore a leather jerkin and conical halfhelm, but no badge to tell which side he'd fought on.

If Lem 'rhymes' with that dying Northern soldier, we might almost expect him to also 'rhyme' with Roddy, who was "so old and hoary" he was called "the Ruin", whose formal title was practically Lord of Deathtown — barrows are graves — and who explicitly brought his men south "to die".
Indeed, several pieces of Roddy's story resonate tightly with Lem's. Roddy won a great victory at a battle called "the Fishfeed", in which hundreds of men were killed or drowned in the God's Eye. This recalls Sharna's remark about the river being full of dead men and Anguy's joke that Lem would drink a "cup of soup full of dead flies" (because flies are fish food; "fly fishing" is named for its lures looking like flies):

[Sharna:] "I am not in the habit of serving ale to children, but the cider's run out, there's no cows for milk, and the river water tastes of war, with all the dead men drifting downstream. If I served you a cup of soup full of dead flies, would you drink it?"
"Arry would," said Hot Pie. "I mean, Squab."
"So would Lem," offered Anguy with a sly smile. (ASOS Arya II)

After the Fishfeed, Roddy led an army that blocked Criston Cole's march. Cole "call[ed] for a peace banner" and "rode out to treat with" Roddy et al. Roddy's side summarily killed Cole with well-placed arrows, then utterly routed his army. (F&B 16)
This recalls Sharna yelling at Lem et al. for "blocking" her door and for being covered in mud (recalling the Muddy Mess, another rout for Roddy's side), whereupon Lem presents Sharna with a duck — shot down with a well-placed arrows, a la Cole — by holding it out "like a peace banner":

"[Y]ou're blocking my door. Get in or get out. Lem, what did I tell you about my floor? You're all mud."
"We shot a duck." Lem held it out like a peace banner. (ASOS Arya II)

The use of the term "treat" in Roddy's story seems like its 'answer' to Anguy asking for the duck to be prepared in a special way — as a treat, so to speak.

Anguy shuffled his feet. "We were thinking we might eat it, Sharna. With lemons. If you had some." (ibid.)

Moments after we read about Lem eating fly soup and Anguy wanting Sharna to cook the duck Lem holds "like a peace banner" as a treat, Lem gets his nose broken by Arya. It never heals properly:

Lem's broken nose was not so red or swollen as it had been, but it was healing crooked, giving his face a lopsided look. (ASOS Arya IV)

Roddy's story 'answers' this by telling us that when he "treat[ed]" with Cole under "a peace banner", Roddy was "bearing the scars he had taken at the Fishfeed". (Fire & Blood 16)
Where Roddy is "hoary", Lem is 'whore-y', trading his kisses to the Ghost of High Heart for information in ASOS Arya VIII.
Lem is part of a group of men who endeavor to provide food to the starving people of the Riverlands.
Roddy led a group of men who leave home to ease the burden on the North's food supplies. They fully expected to die:

Those with fewer mouths to feed fared better in the dark days, so it had long been the custom in the North for old men, younger sons, the unwed, the childless, the homeless, and the hopeless to leave hearth and home when the first snows fell, so that their kin might live to see another spring. Victory was secondary to the men of these winter armies; they marched for glory, adventure, plunder, and most of all, a worthy end. (Fire & Blood)

Like Roddy's men, Lem is unwed, childless, homeless, and seemingly hopeless, having lost his wife and family.
Where Roddy was "the Ruin", and where he got "so drunk with battle that he did not even seem to feel his wounds", Lem grows increasingly numb to his own decline and ruin. He begins ASOIAF grumpy, but ends up violently angry, wearing the Hound's helm, his face ruined by his badly healed broken nose, his trademark cloak, his teeth, and his humanity ruined by bitterness and war:

The biggest of the four wore a stained and tattered yellow cloak. "Enjoy the food?" he asked. "I hope so. It's the last food you're ever like to eat." He was brown-haired, bearded, brawny, with a broken nose that had healed badly. I know this man, Brienne thought. "You are the Hound."
He grinned. His teeth were awful; crooked, and streaked brown with rot. "I suppose I am. Seeing as how m'lady went and killed the last one." He turned his head and spat.
She remembered lightning flashing, the mud beneath her feet. "It was Rorge I killed. He took the helm from Clegane's grave, and you stole it off his corpse."
"I didn't hear him objecting."
Thoros sucked in his breath in dismay. "Is this true? A dead man's helm? Have we fallen that low?"
The big man scowled at him. "It's good steel."
"There is nothing good about that helm, nor the men who wore it," said the red priest. "Sandor Clegane was a man in torment, and Rorge a beast in human skin."
"I'm not them."
"Then why show the world their face? Savage, snarling, twisted . . . is that who you would be, Lem?"
"The sight of it will make my foes afraid."
"The sight of it makes me afraid."
"Close your eyes, then." The man in the yellow cloak made a sharp gesture. "Bring the whore." (AFFC Brienne VIII)

He's becoming Lem the Ruin.
Lem's growing lust for death—

[Brienne to Lem:] "Podrick has never harmed you. My father will ransom him. Tarth is called the sapphire isle. Send Podrick with my bones to Evenfall, and you'll have sapphires, silver, whatever you want."
"I want my wife and daughter back," said the Hound. "Can your father give me that? If not, he can get buggered. The boy will rot beside you. Wolves will gnaw your bones."
"Do you mean to hang her, Lem?" asked the one-eyed man. "Or do you figure to talk the bitch to death?"
The Hound snatched the end of the rope from the man holding it. "Let's see if she can dance," he said, and gave a yank. *(AFFC Brienne VIII)

—'rhymes' with Roddy's avowed deathd wish.
Indeed, Anguy's remark that Lem would "drink… a cup of soup full of dead flies" 'codes' Lem as having a Roddy-esque death wish himself, because it blatantly recalls Aesop's fable of The Fly in the Soup, in which…

A fly falls into a soup pot and reflects before drowning, "I have eaten, I have drunk, I have taken a bath; if I die, what do I care?" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fly_in_the_Soup).

(In-world, Anguy probably means that Lem is a drunk who would drink anything, which is consistent with Lem having a death wish, too.)
For me, there's one more reason to read Roddy the Ruin as (at least in part) a 'rhyming' reieration of Lem. Very simply, Roddy the Ruin is Lord Roderick Dustin of Barrowton (i.e. 'Tomb-town'), whereas I've long believed that "Lem Lemoncloak" is actually a "dead" man: Rodrik Greyjoy, Balon's eldest son and the rightful Lord of Pyke and the Iron Islands. (https://asongoficeandtootles.wordpress.com/2019/03/13/rodrik-lem/)
(Thus where Roddy is "hoary", "Lem" is Hoare-y, inasmuch as the Greyjoys are the Hoares of 'today'.)
Regardless of whether you 'know' that Lem is Rodrik, though, I think it's clear that Sabitha's ally Roddy 'rhymes' with Sharna's ally Lem, making the 'rhyme' between the sharp-tongued harridans Sabitha and Sharna that much richer.

Is Sharna A Vypren?

We've seen that Sharna seems to prefigure Sabitha Vypren in all kinds of ways. Does this mean that Sharna's a Vypren?

The Vypren Sigil & Sharna's Fly Soup

The Vypren sigil, again, is a…

A black toad on white lily pad, on a green field

…where the green likely represents river water — specifically the water of the Green Fork of the Trident.
We know Tom calls Sharna "plain as a toad".
Consider again Sharna's remark implying that drinking "river water"(!) from a river with corpses floating in it would be like drinking "a cup of soup full of dead flies":

"The boy will bring you drink." She looked down her long nose at Arya and Hot Pie. "I am not in the habit of serving ale to children, but the cider's run out, there's no cows for milk, and the river water tastes of war, with all the dead men drifting downstream. If I served you a cup of soup full of dead flies, would you drink it?"

Flies are the stereotypical food for a (Vypren) toad.
The Vypren toad sits on a lily pad. A lily pad is the leaf of a water lily plant. There is only one reference to lilies in the entire ASOIAF canon. Guess what it equates lillies with?

Feral dogs had skulked along behind their horses, whilst swollen corpses floated like huge pale water lilies atop the spring-fed [Maiden]pool…. (AFFC Brienne II)

"Swollen corpses float[ing]" in water. Just like "the dead men drifting downstream" in the Red Fork that lead Sharna to make her remark about fly soup. (The lily-esque corpses are "pale", as well, which matches the white lily of House Vypren.)
Guess how the pool Brienne is remembering in the passage likening corpses to lillies was described when we first saw it, back in ASOS Jaime III?

The pool from which the town took its name… was so choked with rotting corpses that the water had turned into a murky grey-green soup.

As soup — as in Sharna's corpses-in-water-inspired dead fly soup. ("Grey-green" soup, to boot, which evokes flies—

The head he pulled out was grey-green and crawling with maggots. (AFFC Cersei IV)

—even as it sounds like a sickly shade of the green in the Vypren sigil that represents river water.)
Given all this, we're surely supposed to connect Sharna to the lily/corpse simile and thus to House Vypren.
Sharna actually says something toad-ish, as well:

"Does this look like Dorne to you, you freckled fool? Why don't you hop out back to the lemon trees and pick us a bushel, and some nice olives and pomegranates too." (ASOS Arya II)

Hop out back. Like a toad.

Lord Lucias Vypren

Thus it's at least curious that it's none other than Lord Lucias Vypren who tries to hunt down the "outlaws" who kill Merrett Frey in the Epilogue of ASOS, who are, of course, Sharna's friends:

[Jaime] turned back to Lady Mariya. "The outlaws who killed your husband [Merrett Frey] . . . was it Lord Beric's band?"
"So we thought, at first." … "The killers scattered when they left Oldstones. Lord Vypren tracked one band to Fairmarket, but lost them there. Black Walder led hounds and hunters into Hag's Mire after the others. The peasants… spoke of a one-eyed man and another who wore a yellow cloak . . . and a woman, cloaked and hooded." (AFFC Jaime IV)

Could Lord Vypren's interest in "the killers" be rooted in an intrafamilial feud with their Vypren ally, Sharna? Or was his role there an in-world coincidence?
More broadly, do the connections I've sketched between Sharna and Sabitha and the Vypren sigil necessarily mean Sharna's a Vypren? Or do they augur that Sharna is like (specifically) Sabitha because she e.g. also has a dead lordly husband and/or was born to a house that 'rhymes' with House Vypren?

The Sabitha Vypren 'Rhyme' As A 'Rhyme'

I think we're 'supposed' to link Sharna to Sabitha and think that Sharna is awfully Sabitha-y and thus awfully Vypren-y and thus that Sharna might be a Vypren. But I'm not convinced she is a (disaffected) Vypren.
Indeed, I don't see the literary or dramatic sense in 'coding' Sharna as Vypren-ish if the only payoff for the tiny number of perspicacious readers that pick up on this is "Ok then, I guess that one innkeeper lady in the Riverlands is a Vypren or descends from a Vypren's bastard.". I mean, so what?
I suppose the stories of Sabitha and Roddy and the muppets could simply be instance #748 of All Things Coming Round Again in ASOIAF — of the iterative, 'rhyming' Nature of Things in our Song, whereby their 'point' is to support a greater, macro-level revelation involving cyclical time or whatever. Indeed, that may be part of what's going on.
But I suspect that whether Sharna is a (fallen) Vypren or not, she did something or was somebody important in the past that somehow has the whiff of Sabitha Vypren to it.
So what did Sharna do 'before'? Who 'else' was she — regardless of whether she was born a Vypren — such that it makes literary sense to 'code' her as this Vypren-ish?

Sabitha, "The Rhoynish Tradition", & The Women of Dorne

I want to start assaying an answer to these questions by talking about all the ways in which Sharna's partner-in-'rhyme' Sabitha Vypren feels rather Rhoynish and Dornish, even thought she isn't.
Here's the first description of Sabitha Vypren-Frey in TWOIAF:

His widow, the Lady Sabitha of House Vypren, proved redoubtable for her courage and notorious for her lack of mercy. According to Mushroom, she was a "sharp-featured, sharp-tongued harridan of House Vypren, who would sooner ride than dance, wore mail instead of silk, and was fond of killing men and kissing women."

What does that instinctively remind you of?
While House Vypren is a Riverlands house, that description surely evokes a Rhoynish warrior-woman of Dorne. Consider:

It is said that, amongst the Rhoynar who came to Dorne with Nymeria, eight of every ten were women...but a quarter of those were warriors, in the Rhoynish tradition, and even those who did not fight had been hardened during their travels and travails. (TWOIAF)
There are other customs besides that mark the Dornish as different. They are not greatly concerned if a child is born in wedlock or out of it, especially if the child is born to a paramour. Many lords—and even some ladies—have paramours, chosen for love and lust rather than for breeding or alliance.
And when it comes to matters of love, that a man might lie with another man, or a woman with another woman, is likewise not cause for concern; while the septons have often wished to shepherd the Dornishmen to the righteous path, they have had little effect. (TWOIAF)

General jibing vibes aside, it's worth noting that the specific things Sabitha Vypren is said to favor and not favor (she "would sooner ride than dance, wore mail instead of silk, and was fond of killing men and kissing women") makes her sound a lot like the Sand Snakes: Obara is a warrior woman who "could master any horse in Dorne" and who chose "the spear" as her weapon over "tears", echoing Sabitha's "Y not X" formula. Nym wears silk, but she's a great rider who beds two women at once and who wants to kill Tywin, Jaime, (Cersei,) and Joffrey, while Tyene wants to "bleed" and "bury" entire armies of men. While Oberyn's paramour Ellaria Sand isn't inclined to violence, she wants to bed a woman (Cersei).
And that's without even talking about the elephant snake in the room: the "Vypren" name and sigil.

Sabitha's "Vypren" Name & Dornish Vipers and Snakes

The name "Vypren" naturally and instantaneously evokes Dorne and the Dornish, which are introduced to readers via "the Red Viper of Dorne", Oberyn Martell, and otherwise heavily associated with snakes in general—

All Dornishmen were snakes, and the Martells were the worst of them. (ADWD Cersei I)
"They're all poisoners, these Dornish. Reznak says they worship snakes." (ADWD The Kingbreaker)

—and vipers specifically:

"Baelor the Blessed was a great king. He walked the Boneway barefoot to make peace with Dorne, and rescued the Dragonknight from a snakepit. The vipers refused to strike him because he was so pure and holy." (ASOS Sansa IV)

It doesn't hurt that "Vypren" could be a mash-up of Viper and "children", whereas the Dornish "Red Viper" is renowned for (a) siring many, many bastard children called "snakes"—

[It] was said that [the Red Viper] bedded men and women both, and had begotten bastard girls all over Dorne. The sand snakes, men called his daughters. (ASOS Tyrion V)

—who all have "his viper eyes"—

All of Prince Oberyn's daughters have his viper eyes, Hotah realized suddenly. (AFFC Captain of the Guards)

—and for (b) his obsession with the murder of Elia and her children:

"You raped her. You murdered her. You killed her children." -Oberyn, 8 times *(ASOS Tyrion X)

Oberyn's nemesis, the Dornishman Gerold Dayne, is also associated with and likened to a "viper":

CONTINUED & CONCLUDED IN OLDEST REPLY, HERE