MDDM18: Cryptick Intestinal Commentary

[Dave Monroe]

"Cities begin upon the day the Walls of the Shambles
go up, to screen away Blood and Blood-letting,
Animals' Cries, Smells and Soil, from Residents
already grown fragile before Country Realities.  The
Bettter-Off live as they may, from the concentration
of Slaughter.  Soon, country Melancholicks are
flocking to Town like Crows, dark'ning the Sun. 
Dress'd Meats appear in the Market,-- Sausages hang
against the Sky, forming Lines of Text, cryptick
Intestinal Commentary."  (M&D, Ch. 29, p. 289)

Cf. ...

"It was indeed a majestic idea, that the destiny of
nations should be revealed in these awful hieroglyphs,
on the cope of the heavens.  A scroll so wide might
not be deemed too expansive for Providence to write a
people's doom upon ... the minister, looking upward to
the zenith, beheld there the appearance of an immense
letter--the letter A--marked out in lines of dull red
light."

http://www.bartleby.com/83/12.html

--Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, Ch. 12,
"The
Minister's Vigil" ...

As well as, e.g. ...

"San Narciso lay further south, near L.A. Like many
name places in California it was less an identifiable
city than a grouping of concepts--census tracts,
special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei,
all over laid with access roads to its own freeway....
 She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the
sunlight, on to a vast sprawl of houses which had
grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from
the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time
she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery
and see her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl
of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at
her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity
as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less
about radios than about Southern Californians, there
were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of
concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate."

http://www.art.man.ac.uk/ENGLISH/staff/pk/teaching/cultlog.html

"... like walking among matrices of a great digital
computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging
like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick,
maybe endless.  Behind the hieroglyphic streets there
would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the
earth."

http://sophie7.culture.hu-berlin.de/aesthetic/lot49.htm

--Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 ...

Now, of course, there's haruspicy, "inspecting the
entrails of slaughtered animals" and/or splanchomancy,
"reading cut sections of a goat liver," "divination by
examining the entrails of sacrificial victims" ...

http://skepdic.com/divinati.html

http://www.occultopedia.com/a/anthropomancy.htm

http://www.sepulchritude.com/suffer/poefest/entrails.html

But from Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History
of Ventriloquism (New York: Oxford UP, 2000), Ch. 2,
"Earth, Breath, Frenzy: The Delphic Oracle," pp.47-74
...

   "Even where they do not literally identify the
influx of demons through and utterance from the
genitals, other descriptions of the oracle from the
early centuries of the Christian era onwards seem to
insist more generally upon the importance of the ideas
either of a vaginal opening or invaginated hollowness.
 Accounts speak generally of the pythia's 'descent' to
give her oracles, which has encouraged in some the
belief that the physical space of the oracle was
didvided between the place where the consulter's
enquiry was voiced and the inner space, either below
the ground, in an inner space, or behind a veil, from
which the pythia gave her response.  Thus, diffeent
accounts speak of the pythia delivering her oracles
from the adyton, the secret inner space of th temple,
or from the stomion.  Stomion signifies a mouth or
opening, and supplies the English word stomach because
of this reference ....   The English word stomach is
apt tosuggest belly-speaking [ventriloquism] beacuse
the word signifies at once a kind of burial in the
depths of the body and an opening outwards.  The
stomion of the oracle seems to have suggested to many
that the space of consultation was a vocal space.  But
it was also an interior, or visceral space.  Enetring
the oracle, the enquirers thus appeared to enter a
resonant or speaking body." (p. 54)

Hopefully, at least one more for now ...

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