HW: News from the Hawkwind camp!

[Jonathan Jarrett]

On Tue, Apr 10, 2007 at 01:20:36PM +0100, Carl Edlund Anderson typed out:
> On 06/04/2007 17:58, Jonathan Jarrett wrote:
> >	We never argued about whether there *could* be or not! I merely 
> >maintained that since man has never seen an Archaeopteryx move, no-one 
> >knows what it would have looked like 
> 
> And I will heroically (but yet, pointlessly :) maintain that since no 
> one has seen an Archaeopteryx move, we couldn't necessarily be sure that 
> a given movement (perhaps especially in clouds) was not an Archaeopteryx 
> movement, so I'll give Alan (and Ron) the benefit of the doubt. 

	But what we know of Archaeopteryces (I confess that I may only 
be writing this post so as to use that plural) implies that they 
couldn't really fly, only glide. So an Archaeoopteryx being at cloiud 
height is pretty much impossible. Therefore, whatever the singer is 
seeing can only be moving *like* an Archaeopteryx, not actually be one.

> >so it's a metaphor that conveys 
> >nothing. 
> Ah!  Perhaps that itself is the message!  The cloud of unknowing .....

	If the message were that a thing is like something that could be 
absolutely anything, I have to ask whether that's a message worth an 
elaborate metaphor :-)

	I mean, this is like deconstructing Eliot. You say, "that's only 
there because it sounds sort of cool" and the critics go, "no, no, every 
word is significant, man!" Only this is not T. S. Eliot, but Ron Tree. 
Now I ask you, given Ron's penchant for buzzwords, which of these 
interpretations is more likely? 

> >It is possible that I had been drinking at that time yer honner. 
> 
> And may the goods bless you for it! :)

	Now I'm just being stubborn, of course :-) Yours,
							  Jon

-- 
"When fortune wanes, of what assistance are quantities of elephants?"
	    (Juvaini, Afghan Muslim chronicler, c. 1206)
 Jon Jarrett, Fitzwilliam Museum, jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk