Dear Diary: Metascenes
Today was gloriously “meta.” Astonishingly!
Don’t you hate that word? “Meta” always sounds to me like one of those awful Midwestern women’s names from the last century. And did you know that all it means — “meta” — is “after” or “between”? All right, it’s more complicated than that; as a preposition, μετά means different things depending upon the case of the associated noun. But the one thing that μετά does not mean is “meta.” Here’s why:
They were arranging Aristotle’s books on a shelf one day. So to speak. Aristotle’s “books” were in most cases passels of notes taken by students and recensed after the philosopher’s demise. The book that begins, “All men by nature desire to know” somehow wound up shelved after the book that begins,
When the objects of an inquiry, in any department, have principles, causes, or elements, it is through acquaintance with these that knowledge and understanding is attained. Are we dead yet?
This second/first book was called, for very clear reasons — it’s about the world that we perceive — Physics. The next book on the shelf, which is about some other world, some world that we can’t see, and that, therefore, in the eyes of many ancient Greeks and even more modern Americans, is better than the world described in Physics, came to be called Metaphysics — the book after Physics.
However: here’s why the day was “meta”: I was busy all day reading and writing stuff for The Daily Blague and Portico. That was it. The things that did not pertain to Internet sites belonged under the category of breathing: I made the bed. I ate lunch. I collected the mail and went to Food Emporium. I made shrimp risotto for one (Kathleen is still on her prisoner-of-war diet). I still have to wash half of the dishes. Fascinating stuff.
When I wasn’t being domestically fascinating, I was thinking thoughts that have already been copyrighted by other pages. If I were to write about them here, it would be the world’s most ludicrous episode of “Behind the Scenes!” Which, come to think of it, isn’t so far from “Between the Scenes!”