Aloft, incumbent on the dusky air

Forthwith up to the clouds

With him I flew, and underneath beheld
The earth outstretched immense, a prospect wide
And various: wond'ring at my flight and change
To this high exaltation.

- PL 5.86-90

I'm posting this entry in the middle of a transcontinental flight, thanks to a free trial run of on-board WiFi. Looking out the window gives me access to a sight that Milton could only have imagined, that Eve could only experience as a sinful dream of prophetic wish-fulfillment.

This--the idea that technology enables what previous generations could only imagine--is banal stuff, but it reminds me of an idea that's been implanted in my head for a while. Implanted in my head since I heard two talks: the first about science fiction and globalization, the second about mapping in the early modern world. For me, what united these two talks was a question of tropes and metaphors in their relation to technology. Science fiction, according to the first talk, does something new with poetic language by providing a new way to literalize tropes. I asked this speaker what, precisely, the difference is between an Elizabethan poet describing his lover's cheek as roses and a science fiction writer describing a beautiful cyborg constructed with actual rose petals in its face. I realized later that the answer has something to do with belief and time: the Elizabethan poet never expects the reader to believe roses can actually be in cheeks; the reader of science fiction can believe that in the future it might be possible to construct a rosy-cheeked cyborg. As I listened to the second talk, weeks later, I realized that this kind of shift helps us to account for the Renaissance trope of mapping--a trope that oscillates rapidly between fiction, present fact, and future possibility.

I wonder if technology is the missing component of, say, de Man's famous discussion of allegory versus symbol.

Know to know no more

In recent weeks, Miltonista has submitted a rather zany abstract for a conference, and has drafted his talk for the 2009 Conference on John Milton in Murfreesboro, TN (hereafter called MuRFBRo2k9). When I first started this blog, I thought it'd be a fun place to share random ideas; I'd especially like to get feedback on the abstract since I haven't actually written the paper yet (and am not sure what I'm going to say). But the pressure to preserve my anonymity compels silence. In the future, I'll have to figure out more ways to say substantive things without blowing my cover.