I was unable to develop a blog post during the past month of December, but during that time I thought quite a bit about continuing or extending what I'm calling the Eupalinos thread, which I now conceive as a vehicle for capturing and conveying some part of my experience doing ethnographic fieldwork over the past several decades. I have little more to offer on this theme just now, except to repeat that the thread borrows its title from an imagined Socratic dialog by Paul Valéry. I was struck in reading the dialog by a scene in which Socrates is walking along a beach and finds an unidentifiable object, which he contemplates briefly then returns to the sea. I had a similar experience some years ago, while walking the beach at Barnegat Light on the New Jersey coast. In my case, however, I was able to identify my found object as an anthropomorphically carved stone figure, though its origins and meanings were and remain mysterious. I too recommitted my find to the tide, but the stone figure has goaded my imagination since that time.
Apropos Paul Valéry, there's a new translation of his collected writings on the persona he called 'Monsieur Teste'. Reading the piece titled "The Evening with Monsieur Teste" I saw the following, which I'm setting down here as a place marker for the next installment of the Eupalinos thread:
After much reflection, I came to believe that Monsieur Teste had managed to discover laws of the mind of which we are ignorant. Surely, he must have devoted years to this research: even more surely, more years, many more, had been set aside in order to mature his inventions and make them instinctual. Finding is nothing. The difficulty is incorporating what one finds. (translation by Charlotte Mandell, New York Review Books, 2025).
The cover of this edition of Monsieur Teste reproduces Odilon Redon's "Orpheus', which I've in turn chosen to illustrate this post with a nod to Rilke's 'Sonnets to Orpheus' -- thickening the matrix of allusions portended here.
More soon…