Men in the Off Hours

“Dirt” may be defined as “matter out of place.” The poached egg on your plate at breakfast is not dirt; the poached egg on the floor of the Reading Room of the British Museum is. Dirt is matter that has crossed a boundary it ought not to have crossed. Dirt confounds categories and mixes up form

Physiologically and psychologically women are wet. Hippokrates differentiates male from female as follows:

The female flourishes more in an environment of water, from things cold and wet and soft, whether food or drink or activities. The male flourishes more in an environment of fire, from dry, hot foods and mode of life.4

As Sappho says:

To stop breathing is bad.

So the gods judge.

For they do not stop breathing

Metaphors teach the mind

to enjoy error

and to learn

from the juxtaposition of what is and what is not the case.

There is a Chinese proverb that says,

Brush cannot write two characters with the same stroke.

And yet

that is exactly what a good mistake does

Psychiatry was invented as a defense against visionaries.

Metaphors teach the mind

to enjoy error

and to learn

from the juxtaposition of what is and what is not the case.

There is a Chinese proverb that says,

Brush cannot write two characters with the same stroke.

And yet

that is exactly what a good mistake does.

In his discussion of metaphor in the Rhetoric

Aristotle says there are 3 kinds of words.

Strange, ordinary and metaphorical.

“Strange words simply puzzle us;

ordinary words convey what we know already;

it is from metaphor that we can get hold of something new & fresh”

(Rhetoric, 1410b10–13).

In what does the freshness of metaphor consist?

Aristotle say

Akhmatova never finished Macbeth although

she liked to quote the hero saying people

in my homeland die faster than

the flowers on their hats.

7 Aristotle accords to the male in the act of procreation the role of active agent, contributing “motion” and “formation” while the female provides the “raw material,” as when a bed (the child) is made by a carpenter (the father) out of wood (the mother). Man determines the form, woman contributes the matter. We might note also that the so-called P