silence cannot be misquoted

[arethinn]

In re: last post (which some of you will not have seen), I decided to look up Voltaire (the French guy, that is, not the goth musician) and see if "Anything too stupid to be said is sung" is in fact attributed to him. Apparently it is, and there's some other good ones on that page, such as:

"God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere." --I'd wonder if he'd been reading Crowley, if he hadn't died in 1778.

"Regimen is superior to medicine" and "The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease."

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

and
"Use, do not abuse; neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy."

I wonder if there's such a thing as "quote-o-mancy", by use of such devices as the random selection page? Maybe that's just a variation of bibliomancy.

Comments

[unseelie.livejournal.com]

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
is my favorite quote by him

[waywind.livejournal.com]

Very good quotes. I like those, particularly the second. The first is... oh, I read something really similar to that first one, just the other day, um, where is it... "Myth is a truth that can only be expressed poetically." Page nine of Taylor's "Souls in the Sea." It talks about how these are sensations/experiences/emotions that are real/universal, but which cannot be scientifically measured or proven to exist. Love, for example, or the amount and kind of beauty present in a sunset. Different from "too stupid to be said," but given the delightful corniness of those examples, there's probably a lot of overlap. ;)

"I wonder if there's such a thing as "quote-o-mancy", by use of such devices as the random selection page? Maybe that's just a variation of bibliomancy."
Sure thing.

Bibliomancy is a nice, flexible divinatory concept, one that a lot of things can be based on, wih some variations. Tarot's based on it, just without the pages bound... and by extension divination by Futhark uses the same concept. Maybe the I Ching can be considered a distant variation on bibliomancy as well, but that may be a stretch, due to the tossing of objects to ensure a random selection.

I've heard of people browsing to random pages online being used in ways similar to bibliomancy. (The book "Urban Primitive" talked about this.) I suppose you could also do divination by, hm, browsing to a random journal on Livejournal, or a random Deviation on Deviantart. Random quotes are more concise and may be more to-the-point, being short, though a random Deviation may be more pleasing to the visually-oriented.

[starlightforest.livejournal.com]

browsing to a random journal on Livejournal, or a random Deviation on Deviantart.

Random journal is hard because of the high noise-to-signal ratio - all the people who are 14 and ranting about how Ashley is such a bitch because she did this to Katie and Jennifer wants to sleep with Nathan and... well you get the idea; and then all the journals in other languages (predominantly Russian; I swear I get about 25% Russian hits when I click "random journal") which may as well be noise to me because I can't understand them and we know how machine translation is.

Random Deviantart (or other art sites with a "random" feature) hadn't occurred to me. Cool idea!

[erelin.livejournal.com]

I always had problems with his quote that "Silence cannot be misquoted." I suppose I know too much about spin. "Not able to be reached for comment," are the worst words a journalist can put by your name. There is nobility in silence, but clarity demands well-thought speech.

[starlightforest.livejournal.com]

I always had problems with his quote that "Silence cannot be misquoted."

I don't think that was Voltaire (at least, it wasn't on that page). That came from somewhere else in my head; it just seemed like a suitable post subject. Could also have said "Children seldom misquote you. In fact, they usually repeat word-for-word what you shouldn't have said."

[waywind.livejournal.com]

High noise-to-signal ratio when attempting Livejournal bibliomancy: standard bibliomancy tends to work like that, too. Therein lies the challenge of freeform bibliomancy: figuring out whether the "noise" signifies something, and what. Personally, I've either never had very good results with bibliomancy, though that may be that I'm not sharp enough at making sense of the "noise." You've got to get really creative with getting meaning out of structureless random results. A journal involving social drama of total strangers could be seen as significant, as much so as the Tarot card with a picture of some guys hitting each other with sticks. Not too different from what's going on. A journal which is inscrutable to you (because its user hasn't posted, has it friends-locked, or is writing only in a foriegn language) may be seen as equivalent as the blank Futhark rune, which represents that your answer is not to be revealed at this time, for mysterious divine reasons, sort of thing. (It is controversial whether there should even be a blank Futhark rune, historically; some guy inserted it when he was reconstructing the runes for divinatory use.)

This is, of course, silly. It's just an interesting exercise to figure out how you can divine from anything, once you've gotten used to the overall structure of how bibliomancy-based divination tends to work. Historically, people have divined the future from much weirder things than random pages of strangers' journals. Shapes of livers, cracks on tortoise shells, flight patterns of birds. Apparently there was divination by cheese, but I haven't been able to find anything that tells more details on that.

I read an article a while ago (drat, where did I read that?) where a person was mentioned who, after familiarizing herself with Tarot, used her son's Pokemon cards for fortunetelling, having assigned meanings to the different cards. Bulbasaur represents a young, energetic person who is associated with the element of water. There's some non-face cards to deal with less personalized situations.

[starlightforest.livejournal.com]

Apparently there was divination by cheese

I suppose it's Gouda enough for who it's for.

[heartssdesire.livejournal.com]

I've heard of people using Google as an oracle. Or spam email subject lines.
Think it's kind of silly myself.

I think it's more likely Crowley was reading Voltaire than the other way round. ;-}