they're in love if you even care
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@dandeli0ns0up
they're in love if you even care
There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3.
At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day.
Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.
Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.
The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.
At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.
Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain:
仁智懷德聖虞唐,
貞志篤終誓穹蒼,
欽所感想妄淫荒,
心憂增慕懷慘傷。
In pinyin, it is:
Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng,
zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng,
qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng,
xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng.
Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng
The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief."
Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain:
傷慘懷慕增憂心,
荒淫妄想感所欽,
蒼穹誓終篤志貞,
唐虞聖德懷智仁。
The pinyin:
Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn,
huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn,
cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn,
táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén.
It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén
And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence."
That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu!
At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message:
詩圖璇玑,始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping."
Or reversed:
蘇氏詩圖,璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace."
Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle.
For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (kangshiw.com/contents/461/2…), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages.
Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BB%87…).
Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:
- The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens.
- Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy.
- It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions
- Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections.
So the Star Gauge is simultaneously:
- A love letter (expressing personal longing)
- A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival)
- A cosmological model (structured like the heavens)
- A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy)
- A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision
And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me".
Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age.
The heart at the center was filled after all.
Funny how that works
I am so pleased at how many notes are some version of “I don’t fear the science, I fear the corporations who control it” because that is EXACTLY the attitude you should have. GMOs can save us. Monsanto will kill us.
what people fear about GMO- ‘theyre gonna make frankencarrots that crave human flesh and cause diarrhea ’ what GMO actually is- ‘we made rice crop that is both drought resistant and flood resistant which will prevent about 20% of major famine disasters, also it now makes vitamin A because vitamin A deficiency in poverty stricken areas is a major killer of kids as most vitamin A rich foods dont grow there’ what people SHOULD be upset about- ‘i made all crops sterile so all farmers have to buy the seed from me in perpetuity and i will sue anyone who tries to go back to crops that produce their own seed’
That’s it exactly. GMO is great ciant corporations can go straight to hell
how to escape the terrible fatigue guide
escape the terrible fatigue walkthrough no commentary
everyone loves Predynastic Egyptian Terracotta Bowl with Human Feet. shout-out to a real one
It looks like it would be so excited to run over when you needed a bowl
Got distracted. Saw a cool bug
I'm sorry how fucken old do u hafta be to be *predynastic EGYPTIAN*
i used to have no hope for the future but now i'm thinking. i want rich people food. i want rare sirloin steak. i've never had sirloin steak in my life. i think i want to try it before i die.
i want to get some tattoos. i want to learn how to play drums. i want to go back to the ocean. i want to land a heelflip. i want to benchpress with big plates.
it crept up on me but i want i want i want i want to live. i want to live
do you understand? i am living this life for the first time. nobody has seen the world through my eyes. i am alive. i want to feel the dry warmth of the sun in my bones. i want to breathe, again and again and again. maybe even forever.
do you understand? this world is a disgusting place forsaken by the one above and yet. it is beautiful. i want to live.
At the risk of sounding anti-intellectual, I think that college should be free and also not a requirement for employment outside of highly specialized career fields
At the risk of sounding like an effete intellectual, I do actually think you should be allowed to just take college courses indefinitely
technically you can, if you don't care about degrees.
Free Harvard courses. Free Courses from Stanford. Free Courses from MIT. Free courses from Yale. Free courses from Princeton.
Free courses on Coursera.
Free Courses on EDx Free Courses on Alison
For paid, there's The Great Courses+/Wonderium. 20$ a month for unlimited courses.
When searching, the phrases you're looking for are Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), or you can do a general search of say, "free online college courses." Oh, and so you don't get surprised like I did, have an avoid: Hillsdale College is a conservative Christian site and not a valid MOOC place. Sign up with them and you will get things like THIS IS WHY THE LEFT IS TURNING YOUR KIDS TRANS AND GAY in your inbox.
@yourunderwaterskies I wanted to say thank you so much for adding these links, seriously, they've been life-changingly helpful to me-
And I also wanted to mention that humanitarian organisations have free courses too, like the Red Cross on international humanitarian law.
Learn more about the Red Cross International Humanitarian Law (IHL) Program to train policy professionals, government officials, academics,
Kaya is a free humanitarian learning platform which offers hundreds of training opportunities across a range of key topics, including the hu
i need more fiction especially period fantasy and sci-fi fiction to start writing psychotic characters who aren't just stock cartoon ideas of madness, or reinforcing the idea that psychosis is an exclusively modern and middle-class phenomenon. not just sinister assassins and mad kings and lunatic sorcerers and lobotomised prophets, i want the conventionally attractive magic sword wielding knight in shining armour hero protagonist from a little village in the middle of nowhere to be delusional and dysfunctional too. i want elves and dwarves and dragons and princesses with personality disorders on my desk by tomorrow morning.
and for the love of god enough of this using psychosis as a trope to subvert audience expectations bullshit. you are not and will never be shakespeare's hamlet and the reason hamlet works as well as he does is because he's psychotic for reals. if you write a mad protagonist fucking commit to it or die.
i do accomodate people with disabilities when they collect my pages btw
i cant provide adderall for you but i can give you an extended time limit + cryptic hints for collecting my pages
thank you Slenderman! can I wear earplugs? the static is a bit overstimulating
yes you can 👍
I love you Slenderman. can you kill my boss.
i love you too and i cant leave my forest but if you send your boss over to me i can probably arrange something
Funniest tags (and I mean this with no animosity) you can get on OC art is “I don’t go here”. Like *takes long drag out of cigarette and stares into the middle distance in deep contemplation* does anyone…..
Another little comic from my rorynite AU..
Feels good to draw something stupid again
well i wanna draw something stupid too
the use of AI lately has made me feel so hopeless, i translated pages of an unfinished fanzine of mine so i can remember why i love art...i hope it can resonate with anyone feeling the same way
revealing your scaring the hoes type interests early on in a relationship is a good way to secure only hoes of bravery and fortitude that will craft horrible dreams and beautiful nightmares with you
last night was talking to my dad about career plans and he goes "i dont know if you should do a trade, you should print tshirts and sell them at the oceanfront"
👆👆👆 literally how it is
it’s psychological horror to YOU. to me it’s a romcom
it's a romcom to YOU. to me it's psychological horror