I’ve lately developed an aversion to generalizations, but otoh, I’m wary of the “great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people” effect of focusing on situational, contingent, matters... without ideas, you drown in small-minded noise...
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Epic is in many ways the wrong term. It has connotations of priceless value. It seems to be about greatness in people and events, but it’s the best we have. What I am pointing at is the gestalt of all the details that fall through the cracks of all the theories.
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Take the raw phenomenology of people/events, the “news”. Throw away everything “explained” by theories of history the way you would in multiple regression till you get to the residuals. The weight of significance and meaning in that residue, how do you tease that out?
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I think that’s what epic narratives do to history. Distill some sort of signature essence out of it. That but for anything/anyone/any time. Post-theory liminal perception or something. It’s a way of seeing and speaking that’s pure 200 proof historicity.
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“See the world in a grain of sand...eternity in an hour” I think refers to this kind of epic eye.
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I suspect this is why I’m obsessed with mediocrity. It seems like the right thing to study.
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Do you really want to know how? I do this connecting all the time. It has the feeling of "tuning" my mind's eye to different levels of defocus. Sort of like those 3D posters where you have to gaze past the poster.
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But it first starts with being able to see everything in 4D, as a series of overlapping spatial+temporal waves, instead of the "normal" perception of static 3D objects extruding linearly through time. Metaphysical Fourier decomposition. In this view, everything rhymes, connects.
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