Sentential Puzzle: Failed Attempt #2.

I here deal with my second attempt at a solution to "the previous sentence" puzzle I posed two blog posts ago. For the first formulation of the puzzle, go here; for a reformulation and first crack at the puzzle, go here.

I call this, my second, attempted solution...

The Mr. Previous Sentence Solution
This one's cinchy.

Most texts which are published, marketed, sold and discussed at the Lady's Book Club are made up of lots of words. Novels tend to be more words in length than can be conveniently uttered in regular conversation. So, for quick dispatch in referring to these collections of words, we, sophisticated speakers we be, came up with titles. "Out of Africa", as a title, is just a small ordered collection of words we use to indicate a larger ordered collection of words, beautifully collected and ordered by Isak Dinesen. It is a title's job to help us refer to some much bigger collection of words without unduly chapping our lips. That "Out of Africa" refers to anything at all is the case because somebody applied it as an appellative and it was respected by a group of speakers as such. Nothing about the meanings of "Out", "of", or "Africa", nor their conjunction, create some linguistically entailed referential tie.

So, to continue in this vein, you and I together could agree to refer to the previous blog post as, say, "Sentential Puzzle: Failed Attempt #1." So, when you tell me that you really enjoyed Sentential Puzzle: Failed Attempt #1., I will know you mean to say you enjoyed a certain decently lengthy combination of words I posted on my blog. I will not think that you simply enjoyed the words, symbols, and numerals, "Sentential", "Puzzle", "Failed", "Attempt" and "#1". I'm not an idiot.

We could also agree to name certain particular sentences if we really wanted to. Lets agree to call the first sentence in Charles Williams' War in Heaven ("The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse.") by the title: "The Best First Sentence Ever". By agreeing to call it this, rather than repeat the whole thing every time we want to bring it up, we can save ourselves a little breath, just in case there are any oxygen-demanding make-out sessions in our near future. You never know.

Presumably, then, we can even legitimately give a title to the following sentence: "I dare you to come up with a way to modify the text of this blog in such a way that this sentence can be legitimately referenced by the definite description, 'the previous sentence', without compromising this sentence's status as 'the last sentence' of this text." We could call this sentence by the name "Mortimer" or by "Blog Challenge #1" or "Mr. Previous Sentence" or "Mr. Mortimer Previous Sentence, Esq. VI" or, for economy's sake, simply, "the previous sentence". Whichever moniker we decide upon, we can use that smaller conjunction of sounds or symbols to refer to the larger, and do so legitimately. I move that you and I deign to use "the previous sentence" as our nickname of choice.

Now, I think once our chosen name for the sentence in question has garnered sufficient clout and notoriety, it seems perfectly legitimate for me to modify the blog post in question by adding a sentence anywhere within the text of the following sort:

S2. "Incidentally, the challenge issued in "the previous sentence" is hereby met."

So, to recap: my second attempt at a solution to this puzzle, in two steps, is as follows:
(1) agree to call the last sentence of the given text by the name "the previous sentence", and
(2) insert a new sentence relevantly akin to S2.

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Now, does the Mr. Previous Sentence Solution fly? Here's a simple distinction, which, if employed, will persuade one that the solution at hand does not fly:

We refer to things in at least two different ways: by means of descriptions and by means of designations. Let me give a half-hearted attempt at making the distinction between these nouns: descriptions refer to things by describing them; designations refer to things by designating them. Okay. Now, let me give a half-hearted attempt at making the distinction between these modes of reference: to refer by means of describing some thing X is to employ words together in such a way that they represent some thing X by virtue of their semantic content; to refer by means of designating some thing X is to employ words which have been previously assigned the function of naming some thing X by virtue of some mutual agreement between speakers, regardless of any natural semantic referential character the words may have.

It might help to think of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (not to be confused with the abominable Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). Remember when poor Ms. Beauregarde eats the full-course-meal candy, and then turns into a human blueberry?
Remember that great bit when Mr. Beauregarde yelps: "You're turning violet, Violet!"?
Right, well, lets imagine Charlie and Mr. Wonka standing off to the side of the room, not noticing this scene, being rapt and transported in some secret conversation about gobstoppers. Now, imagine too that Charlie, in accordance with good etiquette, had made effort to remember Violet's name; Wonka, however, has not---he can't be wasting precious mental energy on anything as trivial as names when there are multifarious chocolate goods to be excogitated and eructated.
Okay, now imagine that an Oompa Loompa waddles in and asks Charlie and Wonka, "Who's that girl?" They both turn to look, and then reply in unison: "She's violet."
Charlie, again, knows her name; Wonka, however, does not. Wonka is simply making a characteristically insensitive quip. Here we have the peculiar situation of both individuals referring to her by the same string of phonemes, yet one is doing so by means of designation, the other by description!

Thus it is that one may refer to some thing by a given sequence of words, and yet do so either by means of description or designation.

Great. It should be plain that in the Mr. Previous Sentence Solution we refer by means of coining "the previous sentence" as a designation (though, we could, in other instances, refer to things by these words by means of description). But, recall, the original statement of my challenge!...
"I dare you to come up with a way to modify the text of this blog in such a way that this sentence can be legitimately referenced by the definite description, "the previous sentence", without compromising this sentence's status as "the last sentence" of this text."
Given this stipulation of the challenge, then, the Mr. Previous Sentence Solution fails. A necessary condition of the challenge is that "the previous sentence" be employed as a definite description, not a designation.

Sentential Puzzle: Failed Attempt #1.

Okay. In my previous post, I issue a dare in the last sentence. The basic thrust of the challenge is to try to make it that the last sentence of a given text can be legitimately referenced by the definite description, "the previous sentence". The trick is that a given sentence must be both the last sentence of the text and be a sentence such that "the previous sentence", as a definite description, picks it out.
I have three attempts at the solution. My first attempt I call...

The Ouroboros Solution

First, some background.
The Ouroboros is a mythological creature--some serpent who eats its own tail, presumably for quite a long time, and not without some discomfort. The image of this beast was picked up and harped on at length in multifarious works by medieval alchemists and modern psychoanalysts alike, which makes sense, since it can so easily be taken as symbolic of any number of perennial, archetypal concepts, such as hoolahoops.

Borges has this to say about him:

"This creature's most famous appearance is in Norse cosmogony. In the Younger, or Prose, Edda, Loki is said to have engendered a Wolf and a Serpent. An oracle warned the gods that these creatures would be the earth's doom. The Wolf, Fenrir, was bound by a "fetter called Gleipnir, made from six things: the noise a cat makes when it moves, the beard of a woman, the roots of a mounatin, the sinews of a bear, the breath of a fish, and the spittle of a bird." The Serpent, Jörmungandr, the "Mithgarth-Serpent," "was flung into the deep sea which surrounds the whole world, and it grew so large that it now lies in the middle of the ocean round the earth, biting its own tail."
In Jotunheim, or "Giant-Land," Utgarda-Loki once challenged the god Thor to lift a cat; Thor, using all his strength, could barely lift one of the cat's paws off the ground; this cat was Jörmungandr, and Thor was tricked by magic.
When the Twilight of the Gods shall come, the serpent shall devour the earth and the wolf shall devour the sun."

I take it that you get the idea. Okay, now, to answer the challenge presented to us. To do this, lets stipulate a peculiar condition for some given text: it is structurally Ouroboric (where a structurally Ouroboric text is a text in which the last sentence is to directly precede the first.) The ordination of sentences within such a textually Ouroboric work, accordingly, will be infinitely cycling, always repeating themselves in an endless loop. An example, then, of an Ouroboric song would be Lamp Chops' famous "The Song that Never Ends". Also, I've heard that Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce is also like this, ending half-way through the sentence with which it begins, but, since I don't read bad books, I can't verify whether this is actually the case.

Assuming that a text (that of my previous blog post, for instance,) can be stipulated as structurally Ouroboric, it follows that we can meet the challenge at hand by simply editing the blog post in question by adding a new first sentence immediately before "I have yet to mention my favorite kind of nymph: one coined by my favorite romantic poet, maybe my favorite poet .." The sentence just has to be something like the following:

S1. "Incidentally, the challenge issued in the previous sentence is hereby met."

So, to recap: my first attempt at a solution to this puzzle, in two steps, is as follows:
(1) stipulate by whatever means necessary that the given text is to be read as being structurally Ouroboric, and
(2) insert a new first sentence relevantly akin to S1.

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Now, does The Ouroboros Solution fly? Here's a dilemma that argues that it doesn't fly:

P1. Either a text is infinitely long or finitely long.
P2. If a text is infinitely long, then it has no last sentence & If a text is finitely long, then it has a sentence such that no other sentence occurs ordinally after it.
C. Therefore, either a text has no last sentence or it has a sentence such that no other sentence occurs ordinally after it.

The Ouroboros Solution secretly wants to have its cake and eat it too (and eat it forever and ever and ever at that). For the solution to get off the ground it must be both that there is a last sentence in the text (which entails a finite understanding of the text) and that there are no sentences in the text such that no other sentence occurs ordinally after them (which entails an infinite reading of the text). So, if it is to accomplish the work it sets out to do, my first solution must assume that there are texts that are simultaneously finitely and infinitely long. But this is a duplicity more befitting Janus than the Ouroboros.

Furthermore, I wonder if it's even possible for there to be an Ouroboric text. I said above, with Loki-like guile, that one must simply "stipulate that the given text is to be read as being structurally Ouroboric". But to read a given text as per a set of stipulated instructions does not affect the text as an object. Nat Tabris once advised me that when reading Victorian novels I should read every other sentence to save time, ensuring me that nothing of value in my experience as a reader would be lost. Now, I could certainly read The Egoist according to this procedure, and maybe without vitiating my enjoyment (I doubt it. Something like Middlemarch might be more appropriate for the Tabris-leapfrog method) but Meredith's text, qua text, remains unaltered. Such stipulation does not generate an infinite text.
I could maybe argue that there exists some abstract, yet non-instantiated, infinite texts. Say, an Ouroborized War in Heaven by Charles Williams, such that every time the last sentence of the original text finishes with "No doubt the knock on the head affected it rather much.", the original first sentence comes nipping at its heels with "The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse." (I used this novel as an example for no other reason than that its first sentence is my absolute favorite first sentence ..)
I have no reason to think that such abstract, infinite texts couldn't exist. I mean, I believe that π, in some sense, exists. Is an extant, infinite "War in Heaven" such a far theoretical jump? Or, to be theologically cavalier, what about an infinite War in Heaven? Such speculation, however, while perhaps highlighting the existence of some of the more exhausting reads within the Library of Babel, does not answer the above dilemma. So, lets move on...

A nymph, heterodox. (With typical typographical tripe.)

I have yet to mention my favorite kind of nymph: one coined by my favorite romantic poet, maybe my favorite poet ..

The previous sentence should be read aloud as follows: "I have yet to mention my favorite kind of nymph: one coined by my favorite romantic poet, maybe my favorite poet PERIOD." and NOT as follows: "I have yet to mention my favorite kind of nymph, COLON, one coined by my favorite romantic poet, COMMA, maybe my favorite poet PERIOD, PERIOD", because that's just silly sounding..., ..

The previous sentence, incidentally, should be read aloud as "The previous sentence should be read aloud as follows: QUOTE, I have yet to mention my favorite kind of nymph: one coined by my favorite romantic poet, maybe my favorite poet PERIOD., ENDQUOTE, and NOT as follows: QUOTE, I have yet to mention my favorite kind of nymph, COLON, one coined by my favorite romantic poet, COMMA, maybe my favorite poet PERIOD, PERIOD, ENDQUOTE, because that's just silly sounding [PAUSE], PERIOD", not as "The previous sentence should be read aloud as follows, COLON, QUOTE, I have yet to mention my favorite kind of nymph, COLON, one coined by my favorite romantic poet, COMMA, maybe my favorite poet PERIOD, PERIOD, ENQUOTE, and NOT as follows, COLON, QUOTE, I have yet to mention my favorite kind of nymph, COMMA, COLON, COMMA, one coined by my favorite romantic poet, COMMA, COMMA, COMMA, maybe my favorite poet PERIOD, COMMA, PERIOD, ENQUOTE, COMMA, because that's just silly sounding, PERIOD, PERIOD, PERIOD, COMMA, PERIOD, PERIOD", because that's just obnoxious..., .!... ~".,."!.

The previous sentence...I leave as homework.

(Notice how the descriptor "the previous sentence" does not have a fixed referent, but can be used at different points within a text (as I have used it in the last three sentences) to refer to any sentence within the document [except, interestingly, the last sentence of the document! Ha! The referential hegemony of "the previous sentence" (Not to be confused with the relatively weak referential hegemony of, simply, the previous sentence) is not universal! The last sentence, that elusive renegade, escapes its haunting gaze! Here's a puzzle: try to figure out a way for me to legitimately, within this text, refer to the last sentence of this document by using the definite description, "the previous sentence". I'm going to think about it.].).

Ahem. To continue:

The nymph of which I speak is the
Poliad: a nymph of the city.
Think POLIS + OREAD.

Isn't it great? Apparently Shelley first employed this neologism within a letter to a friend (or so indicates OED), writing to the recipient as follows: "Pray, are you yet cured of your Nympholepsy? 'Tis a sweet disease: but one as obstinate and dangerous as any--even when the Nymph is a Poliad."

Firstly, imagine a word being introduced into the English lexicon simply because you dropped it in a personal letter, giving friendly, innocuous advice to some horndog penpal of yours. Incredible. Shelley is the freaking man.

Secondly, I just love the notion of a city being animate in some spiritual way. I can't stop thinking about Poliads as a larger classification, like Naiads, with there then being, within the class of "poliads", various specific species of nymphs: nymphs of streets, nymphs of chain link fences, nymphs of telephone wires, of parking structures, of bus stops, of subways, cathedrals, post offices, bars---I could easily go on.

Some further thoughts on this: Lets say there were a manmade park within a city. Okay. Lets say that it's quite a sizely park. Now, we could conceivably orchestrate some interesting interaction between traditional nymphs and poliads. There could be complicated social hierarchy, involved alliances, enmities, ploys, tricks, and stories between these two foreign kinds. Are parks, even large ones with plenty of traditional geographical features, (glens, rivers, etc.), to be considered a part of a city's territory or instead a strange lacuna within the city's map? The nymphs debate. Are parks simply another feature of cities, comparable to public libraries or freeways, or are parks the only places within a city's perimeter where City is not? This is an underlying tension to be had within my Great, Burlesque Epic on the conflict between the traditional and the city nymphs.
We could even have it that the park was not technically built by anyone within the city--so, not manmade--but rather have the city built around some pre-ordaned section of natural wilderness. Thus, the original nymphs who inhabit their respective earthly phenomena within this area end up surrounded by mankind's brick and mortar. We (who is "We"?) could even have some such encircled Dryad separated from her satyr lover, who yet lives on the outside the city walls. He then must engage on a daring mission through the wilderness, the civilized squalor of the city, to reach his fair nymph on the inside! What a sub-plot!
This Epic could also be a kind theogony for a new hybrid nymph-kind!: The Nymphs of City Parks!
The Nymphs of City Park-Lakes: Pollimnades!
The Nymphs of City Park-Trees: Polhamadryads!
The Nymphs of City Park-Meadows: Polleimakids!
The Nymphs of City Park-Breezes: Polaurai!
I could easily go on.

My other thought:
Lets say there is a Poliad for city-statues. Lets call 'em Polagalmaiad. Then, lets say there is a city statue of a nymph somewhere in the city!...You do the math. There would be a nymph for that nymph statue! Then, if we want, we can imagine a statue of that nymph! Then the polagalmaiad for that statue could exist! And so on! And so on! I heart nymph-ridden self-referential confusion.

Thirdly,
Any priviledged person who has yet read this far into my post, who happens to have access to Oxford Journals should download and send me this article.

Lastly,
I dare you to come up with a way to modify the text of this blog in such a way that this sentence can be legitimately referenced by the definite description, "the previous sentence", without compromising this sentence's status as "the last sentence" of this text.

An Introduction, A Brief Excursus Down Memory Lane, and The Quotation in Question.

Introduction to a Quotation.
Hi. The story behind this post is strikingly similar to the previous. Something great reminded me of a particular protracted quotation, and I thought, due to a flurry of variables the number of which defy dactylonomy, that it would be best to blog the quotation, and then link to it.

Thus-Hence!:

A Brief Excursus Down Memory Lane.
My old friend Luke Messimer and I used to always integrate "Thus-Hence!" as a logico-linguistic connective into our everyday speech as a great and glorious joke. (Not unlike the boarders in Balzac's Old Goriot adding "O-RAMA" to everything [which, incidentally, is downright hilarious.].). (Within the previous sentence [and in this one], I couldn't decide which was the appropriate place, according to the anonymous gurus of formatting, to place the period...so I wedged one period in each available inter-parenthetical location, just to cover my bases [I always vacillate concerning period-parenthesis rules, as if the location of the period is somehow related to the psychological posture I take toward the parenthetical comment in question. If the comment is a kind of sidelong sub-clause to the sentence of which it is a part, the period tends to drift outside the parenthesis, since the sentence that comprises the parenthetical comment is of more literary or communicative significance, thereby earning the punctuation for itself. If, however, the parenthetical comment is not subservient but subversive to the sentence of which it is a part, then the period clings to it, staying within the parenthesis, as if the parenthetical comment generated greater linguistic gravity than the sentence it impregnates.].). There was no inappropriate time for Luke and myself to show our learned, logical prowess by adding this gem, "Thus-Hence!" to conversation. To any and every conclusion it became a prelude; we would even, amid screams and howls and laughter and flailing kicks, "Thus-Hence!" our very "Thus-Hence!"ing. The nature of the humor may at first have been the simple joy of lampooning self-important speakers/thinkers, but then I think through time we became enamored of the expression entirely on its own semantic and phonetic merits. It had a kind of snare-drum rhythm to it, it had the ever-flexible linguistic versatility of the F-word, it was so easy and pleasant to the lungs to sharply snap out. I don't know whether we even knew if we considered it to be one hyphenated word or two (not two hyphenated words; not even two hyphenated-words, but just two, separate and distinct, words.) Good memories.

So.

Thus-Hence!:

The Quotation in Question.

On the Tram
by Franz Kafka

I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family. Not even casually could I indicate any claims that I might rightly advance in any direction. I have not even any defense to offer for standing on this platform, holding on to this strap, letting myself be carried along by this tram, nor for the people who give way to the tram or walk quietly along or stand gazing into shopwindows. Nobody asks me to put up a defense, indeed, but that is irrelevant.

The tram approaches a stopping place and a girl takes up her position near the step, ready to alight. She is as distinct to me as if I had run my hands over her. She is dressed in black, the pleats of her skirt hang almost still, her blouse is tight and has a collar of white fine-meshed lace, her left hand is braced flat against the side of the tram, the umbrella in her right hand rests on the second top step. Her face is brown, her nose, slightly pinched at the sides, has a broad round tip. She has a lot of brown hair and stray little tendrils on the right temple. Her small ear is close-set, but since I am near her I can see the whole ridge of the whorl of her right ear and the shadow at the root of it.

At that point I ask myself: How is it that she is not amazed at herself, that she keeps her lips closed and makes no such remark?