-- Personally, I think the guy's something of a pedant. He probably hasn't
a clue, he keeps treading the same ground all over again, and he follows a
thread to death. E.g., for Virgil's labryinth as a kind of floor plan or
choreographic design he wonders about the relevance of -- wouldn't you
guess? -- Pliny! Pliny suggests that Daedalus adapted the labyrinth's
design from the famous Egyptian one, and shrunk it: "It contains passages
that wind, advance and retreat in a bewilderingly intricate manner. It is
not just a narrow strip of ground comprising many miles of 'walks' such as
we seen in our tesselllated floors, or in the ceremonial games played by our
boys on the Campus Martius, but doors are let into the walls at frequent
intervals to suggest deceptively the way ahead and to force the visitor to
go back upon the very same tracks he has already followed in his
wanderings." (Nat. Hist., Book XXXVI.)
Remains of Roman floors with Theseus' labyrinth on them are found in
Strasbourg and Pompeii ("The House of the Labyrinth"). (Churches include
Chartres, San Michele in Pavia, San Vitale in Ravenna, Aix-en-Provence,
Amiens and Verdes in France, Harpham in England, Caerleon in Wales, and
Lucca (he remembers this last--it's in a wall now, but we're told it was
probably originally on the floor.) The Roman one in Strasbourg may show, he
thinks, why Pliny writes in terms of both a labyrinthine border-strip, and
centralized design. (But Pliny's description is not apparently of the
unicursive kind of design, which leads you in a circuitious but single path
((tho' regularly self-reversing)) into the center of the labyrinth with no
choices or chances of avoiding that center, if you keep moving forward.
((--In which case the complete path is more or less identical with -- or
reproduces -- the plan of the labyrinth itself, occupying the same space,
making the same number of turns, and using the same amount of thread, or
ink, like traveling around all the whorls of a whirlpool, or tracing all the
length of a spiral. )) )
This posting has his fingerprints all over it.
On Wed, 23 May 2007 18:38:59 -0400
"David L. Miller" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I think I will stop writing--or reading--criticism, and just spend my
> days reading Nohrnberg's posts. It's like downloading the Mind of
> Tradition.
[log in to unmask]
James Nohrnberg
Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
Univ. of Virginia
P.O Box 400121
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121
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