Some say it is best to let things collapse in all realms of society severely,
starting in 2024 and continuing for the next few decades, before trying to
salvage or rebuild them. This applies to any number of areas, like democracy,
the climate, culture, and world peace, because after all you can’t push the
string.
Others will see and hear those people talking and will prepare for the worst,
that is, invest in it, perhaps with sums that are too large not to succeed.
This is often how unnecessary wars and misery happen, too much tit for tat, not
enough comedy of the commons. Too much tragedy, more than is needed, more than
is good for the health.
Many leaders, so-called, fall into these two groups. When they reach a
critical mass they prevail; all things fall and are built again, and those who
build them again are gay, their ancient glittering eyes are gay.
In today’s terms, this dynamic of best-middle-worst possible outcomes centers
on, as usual, war or peace, what some call the Peloponnesian dilemma: a rising
power China and whether it will war with extant power the United States, and if
so, how badly for how long. Whatever is spent on this war, by both sides,
perforce won’t be spent on the climate, eco-preservation, art, human health,
and so forth.
Much human waste historically occurs when one group decides they have to topple
a stronger group on principle. We call it waste when the toppling isn’t
necessary, doesn’t succeed, costs a ton, makes a big mess, and would have been
better avoided, like the US-Soviet Cold War and many similar wars. How long
must the “weaker half” of the planet pool its resources to overturn the
“stronger half,” endlessly pursuing a reversal of fortune which even if
attained would help nothing? Forever?
+++
Persuading China to take a different path than this automatonic classical one,
should it by some fortunate chance be accomplished, will require words, ideas,
images, and who knows maybe even (as with the Soviets) music. It won’t just be
accomplished by money and guns, and if only money and guns are brought to bear
they are likely to just throw gas on the fires of combat, injury, and hate.
The consciences and better angels of each side must also be brought to parley,
to parlement even, and try their best too just as the collapsians and
rebuilderbergers must try theirs. This is all as it should be and as it always
has been.
Don Quixote, the Man of La Mancha, was such a one as these, by which I mean,
one of those who try with words, images, songs, and ideas. He lived, albeit
only in people’s imagination, at the start of modern times (1605) when two
other large groups, Europe and the Ottomans, stood locked in combat. In many
ways that fierce battle formed the modern world in which we still live;
conflict between Europe and Asia (or thereabouts) was then as present as now.
What did Don Quixote say about war? Well, he spoke often about the word
“experience” for one, an open secret code word (I’d aver) for secular art and
science in those early modern days, and in fact the true allegorical name of La
Gioconda, La Joconde, the Mona Lisa: Esperienza, which Leonardo called circa
1503 “the common mother of all the sciences and arts,” “the interpreter between
humans and nature,” and “the one true maestra,” pledging himself her “disciple”
and vowing “as maestra, to acknowledge her, and in every case call her as
evidence.”
Cervantes uses “experiencia,” Spanish for experience and experiment, a full 38
times in Don Quixote, and mostly (but not always) in the most bold, modern,
humorous, and philosophic passages of his epic. This word is, I must continue
to assert, the exhortation, by mirror if you will, of humans to learn by means
other than war and might-makes-right. (Learning also means geometry, the
measuring of land, and the shaping of society, among other things.) It started
in Latin as “experientia” but revived in later medieval times to join modern
language when modernity started to think about being born.
For example, “the Countenance” said to the quizzical and somewhat ambivalent
poet Don Lorenzo:
“Many a time,” replied Don Quixote, “have I said what I now say once
more,
that the majority of the world are of opinion that there never were
any knights-errant
in it; and as it is my opinion that, unless heaven by some miracle
brings home to
them the truth that there were and are, all the pains one takes will
be in vain
(as experience has often proved to me), I will not now stop to
disabuse you of
the error you share with the multitude. All I shall do is to pray to
heaven to deliver
you from it, and show you how beneficial and necessary knights-errant
were in
days of yore, and how useful they would be in these days were they
but in vogue;
but now, for the sins of the people, sloth and indolence, gluttony
and luxury are
triumphant.”
“Our guest has broken out on our hands,” said Don Lorenzo to himself
at this point;
“but, for all that, he is a glorious madman, and I should be a dull
blockhead to doubt it.”
+++
And what is it that such knights-errant do?
“So far,” said Don Lorenzo to himself, “I should not take you to be a
madman; but
let us go on.” So he said to him, “Your worship has apparently
attended the schools;
what sciences have you studied?”
“That of knight-errantry,” said Don Quixote, “which is as good as
that of poetry,
and even a finger or two above it.”
“I do not know what science that is,” said Don Lorenzo, “and until
now I have
never heard of it.”
“It is a science,” said Don Quixote, “that comprehends in itself all
or most
of the sciences in the world, for he who professes it must be a
jurist, and
must know the rules of justice, distributive and equitable, so as to
give to
each one what belongs to him and is due to him. He must be a
theologian,
so as to be able to give a clear and distinctive reason for the
Christian faith
he professes, wherever it may be asked of him. He must be a
physician, and
above all a herbalist, so as in wastes and solitudes to know the
herbs that
have the property of healing wounds, for a knight-errant must not go
looking
for someone to cure him at every step. He must be an astronomer, so
as to
know by the stars how many hours of the night have passed, and what
clime
and quarter of the world he is in. He must know mathematics, for at
every
turn some occasion for them will present itself to him; and, putting
it aside
that he must be adorned with all the virtues, cardinal and
theological, to
come down to minor particulars, he must, I say, be able to swim as
well as
Nicholas or Nicolao the Fish could, as the story goes; he must know
how to
shoe a horse, and repair his saddle and bridle; and, to return to
higher matters,
he must be faithful to God and to his lady; he must be pure in
thought,
decorous in words, generous in works, valiant in deeds, patient in
suffering,
compassionate towards the needy, and, lastly, an upholder of the
truth
though its defence should cost him his life. Of all these qualities,
great
and small, is a true knight-errant made up; judge then, Señor Don
Lorenzo,
whether it be a contemptible science which the knight who studies and
professes
it has to learn, and whether it may not compare with the very
loftiest that
are taught in the schools.”
“If that be so,” replied Don Lorenzo, “this science, I protest,
surpasses all.”
“How, if that be so?” said Don Quixote.
“What I mean to say,” said Don Lorenzo, “is, that I doubt whether
there
are now, or ever were, any knights-errant, and adorned with such
virtues.”
It was to this Don Quixote replied per above.
+++
Poet and scholar Mary Baine Campbell has a fascinating recent essay from 2010
about the early modern quest for a “homunculus” and how it relates to both
science and metaphor. It is titled, “Artificial Men: Alchemy,
Transubstantiation, and the Homunculus.”
She writes:
“My recent research into the issues of parthenogenesis, homunculi,
and
the Jewish golem is focused on the seventeenth and even eighteenth
centuries,
where the mythical and alchemical combine with the biological in ways
that
establish the ground of current commercial and ethical debates about
cloning….
My hope is that this article can not only consider a new avenue to
the dominant
place of metaphor in this transitional period, but also open further
the question
of what is differentially at stake in xenophobia and homophilia and
their related
but separate monstrosities. Can we learn something about the fatal
instinct to
project a monstrous other, from hypertrophic signs of the instinct to
propagate
a monstrous same? A look at the history of European aspirations to
the artificial
production of a man may tie the art of alchemy, at least in its
popular and
allegorical forms (but perhaps even in its more pragmatic metallurgic
form),
to the history of the fate of metaphor—the supreme figure of early
modern
European poetry.”
Early modern poems and metaphor “establish the ground” of “current commercial
and ethical debates”? Curiouser and curiouser! This would however agree with
our itinerant Cervantes, former prisoner of the enemy for five long years, and
his encyclopedic sense of mission not to mention his ability to see the legion
adversary of all human conscience in wind-driven grinders of grain.
Campbell very likely knows historian of science Pamela Smith’s exploration of
“artisanal epistemology” as in her books The Body of the Artisan (2004) and
From Lived Experience to the Written Word (2022), both about early modern
alchymistry; and Campbell continues into the even more topical “little human”
of AI/GPT:
“Of course, software programs, artificial intelligence and now even
so-called
artificial life have been a major interest of philosophers as well,
and the issue
of autonomy an ethical problem that can only increase in interest and
urgency
under the pressure of work like Jordan Pollack’s (see note 22).”
Was there ever a metaphor to counter, oppose, or defy the mechanical logistics,
network and otherwise, of such homunculi, Machiavelli’s means to every end, the
machine-learning of evil capable of conquering a planet, which is to say, the
all? Who is there to break a lance, scribble a pen, or daub a brush, and in
defense of what Dulcinea? On what possible grounds can we even hope or begin
to hope that amor non malum vincit omnia?
+++
Cervantes, or I should say, the actual author of the history -- Cide Hamete
Benengeli, “Arabian and Manchegan,” somewhat of a hybrid himself -- is not so
stingy as to deny us an answer. He tells us flat out: “Experiencia itself, the
mother of all the Sciences.” In this he sides with his jolly band of other
early modern innovators, improvisers, authors, and adapters, such as John
Redford’s 1530 “Play of Wyt and Science,” Montaigne’s final essay “Of
Experience,” Dante’s Paradiso I & II, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale (whose
first word is "Experience"), Roger Bacon’s “Of Conjecture,” and Francis Bacon’s
1620 Novum Organum (which uses “experience” thirty-odd times, declaring it “our
sole resource” and the only stable foundation of the sciences). There are
dozens if not hundreds more. Today, amid quite modern authors, one may find
meaningful mentions as in Benjamin’s echo of Kant’s echo of Bacon and the
first’s “new system of philosophy” based on experience, or in Benjamin’s
German, Erfahrung und Erlebnis; John Dewey’s many book titles include
“Experience and Nature,” “Art as Experience,” and “Experience and Education."
But let us read the more Quixotic, that is to say, vernacular expression of our
hero’s ethos:
The goatherd took it with thanks, and drank and calmed himself, and
then said,
“I should be sorry if your worships were to take me for a simpleton
for having
spoken so seriously as I did to this animal; but the truth is there
is a certain
mystery in the words I used. I am a clown, but not so much of one but
that I
know how to behave to men and to beasts.”
“That I can well believe,” said the curate, “for I know already by
experience that
the woods breed men of learning, and shepherds’ huts harbour
philosophers.”
“At all events, señor,” returned the goatherd, “they shelter men of
experience;
and that you may see the truth of this and grasp it, though I may
seem to put
myself forward without being asked, I will, if it will not tire you,
gentlemen, and
you will give me your attention for a little, tell you a true story
which will confirm
this gentleman’s word (and he pointed to the curate) as well as my
own.”
To this Don Quixote replied, “Seeing that this affair has a certain
colour of
chivalry about it, I for my part, brother, will hear you most gladly,
and so will
all these gentlemen, from the high intelligence they possess and
their love
of curious novelties that interest, charm, and entertain the mind, as
I feel
quite sure your story will do. So begin, friend, for we are all
prepared to listen.”
One mystery yet to be solved, for those of the lock-picking profession, is what
“Hamete” and “Benengeli” mean for the name of the author. I offer this: “hook
or messenger of good angels.” After all, the Quixote is all about the “bad
angels,” enchanters and shape-shifters, who seek to divert and confuse the
knight with their devilish illusions, and the “good angels” among whom one
might say Don Quixote counts himself: those who try their level best for good.
And what is a pen (supreme, suspended, or otherwise) but a line, and what a
line but a hook to engage, the Latin vocative “hamate,” and who is Leonardo’s
“ermete filosofo” but the alchemistry of Campbell? Who can help us choose from
among the good angels and the bad bad baddies, which to praise and which to
resist, which to heed and which to armor ourselves against? Only Esperienza,
Dulcinea, Experiencia, the mirror; that is, the metaphor of learning which is
itself learning, philosophy moral or natural, which is to say the love of
wisdom, its honor and its defense.
+++
Yet further, Experience carries onward to our very day, time, and political
scene or stage. Blake got it from Dante, and saith in All Religions Are One
(1788) “the true faculty of knowledge must be the faculty which experiences; Of
this faculty I treat.” He wrote from time to time about the mystical chymistry
he used to etch his metal plates for printing words and pictures; he understood
metaphors, let’s concede. Hamilton started his Federalist Papers, advocating
constitutional democracy in 1787, with the four words “After an unequivocal
experience...” and ended them in 1788, quoting Hume in their final paragraph,
using EXPERIENCE in ALL CAPS:
“These judicious reflections contain a lesson of moderation to all
sincere
lovers of the union, and ought to put them on their guard against
hazarding
anarchy, civil war, a perpetual alienation of the states from each
other, and
perhaps the military despotism of a victorious demagogue, in the
pursuit
of what they are not likely to obtain, but from TIME and EXPERIENCE.”
Can all this early modernism about homunculi and errant poets move China to
learn? One might counter that they, like every autocracy which has ever been,
are “all in” on Machiavelli – it is better to be feared than loved – and the
digital homunculus of facial recognition, social credit, cognitive
conformation, and goodness knows what else. Party thought which blends Marx
and Confucius can often seem immune to conversation. Yet we must not despair,
because as el globo de plomo sang in their by far most alchemical song about
Jacob’s ladder, “yes there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run….”
And remember too the rural Chinese agricultural reforms of 1979-1989, when the
miraculous central control by computer of the largely biological process of
growing grains from soil nearly starved the nation until they reverted to human
intelligence, the knowledge of the huts and woodlands: Kelliher’s 1992 book
“Peasant Power in China” tells the tale. We might see such a flowering of
knowledge, and of the knowledge of knowledge, yet again. Indeed it is
guaranteed that we will, just not when we will.
And China, like even Russia, has poets of its own; one might well say they are
everywhere and that they have nothing but poets. Would they only become
knights-errant! Yet again, as sage Don Quixote said:
“…[As] it is my opinion that, unless heaven by some miracle brings
home
to them the truth that there were and are [such things], all the
pains one
takes will be in vain (as experience has often proved to me), I will
not now
stop to disabuse you of the error you share with the multitude. All I
shall
do is to pray to heaven to deliver you from it, and show you how
beneficial
and necessary knights-errant were in days of yore, and how useful
they
would be in these days were they but in vogue.”
There is also, perhaps, the alchymistry of ancient China to lend its voice, the
philosophers’ stone (both plural) or Cintamani of Buddhism, the Elixir of Life
of Lao Tzu, the mighty I Ching of changes and chances, the knights and
knights-errant of ancient Eastern emperors, epic journeys to the west, and
poems, and paintings, and music. There is horsemanship, farming, and
meditation as medicine. Nothing in principle requires that moving in the
direction of rights and laws, which some few portions of Europe have painfully
and grudgingly attempted in the past despite their stubborn nature, is not
possible, nor that it cannot be honorable and even glorious.
One might think or suppose that China is too far gone, too chained at a
molecular level to the foul homunculus currently inhabiting its neighbor, a
monk-like demon of despair to the northwest whose ignorant abjuration of decent
goodness is its professional qualification – to lie and assassinate, the chief
arts of every spy and secret service, the opposite of to tell the truth and
negotiate – and being thus chained must perforce sink like a millstone to the
very bottom of control’s abyss. Nothing could be further from the truth! Sir
Leo of Tolstoy remains in the field to battle by words regarding both peace and
war, with sword and shield unmatched by the monk’s Machiavellian factories and
software; and the path of decent responsibility and honorable trust in peace is
never beyond reach. “Prepare as thou must for the worst, but take care thou
kill’st not the best in fear or haste.”
This too is the story told us by arch-alchemist Faust, the Marlovian one, whose
magic makes for him a wish list of today’s global tech goods and services:
FAUSTUS. How am I glutted with conceit of this!
Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please,
Resolve me of all ambiguities,
Perform what desperate enterprise I will?
I’ll have them fly to India for gold,
Ransack the ocean for orient pearl,
And search all corners of the new-found world
For pleasant fruits and princely delicates;
I’ll have them read me strange philosophy,
And tell the secrets of all foreign kings;
I’ll have them wall all Germany with brass,
And make swift Rhine circle fair Wertenberg;
I’ll have them fill the public schools with silk,
Wherewith the students shall be bravely clad;
I’ll levy soldiers with the coin they bring,
And chase the Prince of Parma from our land,
And reign sole king of all the provinces;
Yea, stranger engines for the brunt of war,
Than was the fiery keel at Antwerp’s bridge,
I’ll make my servile spirits to invent.
+++
Written that same year, or thereabout, 1604-1605, we might thank history for,
is our friend and comic hero the Knight of the Rueful Countenance. He tells us
quite plainly to observe, and learn, and understand:
They now came in sight of some large water mills that stood in the
middle
of the river, and the instant Don Quixote saw them he cried out,
“Seest thou
there, my friend? there stands the castle or fortress, where there
is, no doubt,
some knight in durance, or ill-used queen, or infanta, or princess,
in whose
aid I am brought hither.”
“What the devil city, fortress, or castle is your worship talking
about, señor?”
said Sancho; “don’t you see that those are mills that stand in the
river to grind corn?”
“Hold thy peace, Sancho,” said Don Quixote; “though they look like
mills they
are not so; I have already told thee that enchantments transform
things and
change their proper shapes; I do not mean to say they really change
them
from one form into another, but that it seems as though they did, as
experience
proved in the transformation of Dulcinea, sole refuge of my hopes.”
Therefore we can try to persuade, and must, lest the willing be not persuaded.
As with the vernacular metaphor of early modern improvised evasion of
bureaucratic party monopoly in Europe, we might pay heed to the power of
ordinary individuals and groups within the autocratic bloc to make changes and
might also encourage them at least verbally, when possible, in doing so. As
Kelliher writes:
“Here, then, is the puzzle. Peasants using the same methods to
manipulate
policy won in the case of family farming but were stalled (after
great gains)
in the case of marketing. And in containing this peasant effort to
loosen the
marketing system, the state reversed policies that had brought it
spectacular
success in its basic domestic program. Why did peasant power falter?
And
what drove the state to this Pyrrhic victory?
“The reasons for the backlash of 1985 derived from the anxieties
lurking in
the heart of the state’s relationship to the peasantry. The
conservative reformers
who forced the backlash were driven less by reasons of state than
obsessions
of state: obsession with finance and control. In finance,
conservatives believed
that rising farm-good prices jeopardized both industry and the
central state
budget. This turned them against the peasantry, for the
administrative structure
of the economy locked the state into a financial alliance with
industry against
agriculture. And in the question of control, the conservative
reformers were
obsessed with central suzerainty over peasant labor and
decision-making.”
(Kelliher, p. 141)
This historical narrative can be contrasted with the current revival of a
Mao-era practice sometimes called “the Fengqiao Experience,” in which local
communities enforce party doctrine from within on a somewhat decentralized
basis. This practice has recently been used increasingly to replace local
elections, which had been encouraged to some degree by Deng Xiaoping and others
around the time of the above-mentioned agricultural reforms. This revival is
sometimes called “New-Era Fengqiao Experience [Jingyan]” incorporating digital
and network aspects such as computerized learning, and its greater promotion
has accompanied the increased central power recently observed to have made
conscientious verbal expression by individuals more needful.
+++
Olivia Cheung of the University of London writes in her 2023 book titled
“Factional-Ideological Conflicts in Chinese Politics: To the Left or to the
Right?” in Chapter 7, in the section titled “Spiritual prosperity: Promote the
Fengqiao experience”:
“Besides material prosperity, the other pillar of Xi’s common
prosperity
programme is spiritual prosperity. To promote spiritual prosperity, Xi
reinvigorated the ‘Fengqiao experience’ of social control, which
originated in
Zhejiang historically. Mao commended Fengqiao as a party model for
class
struggle in 1963. It was recorded that Fengqiao’s party leaders
worked very
hard to indoctrinate the residents with Mao Zedong Thought. This
resulted
in strong socialist consciousness among the masses, who would
willingly
report to the Party other residents who they suspected to be ‘class
enemies’
(Bandurski, 2013; Wang and Mou, 2021). Xi was not after reviving
Maoist
class struggle. He interpreted the Fengqiao model as a strategy of
conflict
de-escalation: grievances against the party-state should be detected
early
and pre-empted if at all possible. To this end, he advocates using
digital
technology to achieve precision social control. As the home province
of
Fengqiao, Zhejiang is a powerful symbol of the Fengqiao experience.
It was
also an early adopter of the social credit system, an automated
system that
uses artificial intelligence to monitor, reward and punish residents.”
Clearly any successful attempt to persuade China of the value of peaceful
economic and political development will require some kind of rapprochement or
interface with this program of spiritual prosperity.
Or in other words, as Cheung writes in her Conclusion:
“As the ideological and factional spectrums evolved over time, so did
the types of factional models on display. Political theatre models
were the
dominant type of factional models in the Mao era. They featured the
use
of theatrical techniques to carry out ideological indoctrination.
Residents
of the models were mobilized to carry out infrastructure construction
in a
campaign style (see Chapter 2). The opposite of the political theatre
models
were rightful resistance models, which were cultivated by the Party’s
Right
in the transitional period from the Mao to post-Mao era. They
appealed to
common sense and pragmatism instead (see Chapter 3).”
All becomes clear when we peruse Chapter 3, as I just now have, finding an
auspicious note to end on:
“Regardless of how we might see it, Wan defended his vision to be
socialist
on the ground that collective land ownership was maintained.
Market-oriented
socialism underlined Wan’s campaign for the HRS [Household
Responsibility System]
– a major challenge against the rural party line. Throughout the
process of
promoting Anhui, Wan eschewed attaching any ideological labels to his
actions.
In fact, he couched his campaign in an a-ideological discourse.
Specifically, it was
the discourse that was purveyed by the conservatives since late 1977,
namely that
‘practice is the sole criterion for testing truth’. It asserts that
no policy is right or
wrong a priori, even if a particular ideological perspective says so;
moreover, it is
only through trial-and-error that the best policy can be discovered
(Baum, 1994: 58–65).
The slogan originated in Mao’s writings but the conservatives and Wan
used it to
attack Mao’s socialist vision for rural China (see Chapter 1).”
That writing is, not completely without coincidence, as follows, from Mao’s
1937 “On Practice”:
“All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.”
Mao then wrote in 1948, as if to square the circle, in “On the Policy
concerning Industry and Commerce”:
“Only through the practice of the people, that is, through
experience, can we
verify whether a policy is correct or wrong and determine to what
extent it is
correct or wrong.”
In any case, to my novice understanding of Wiktionary, the four component
characters of the Chinese word Jingyan (experience) are, right to left,
roughly: all + horse/knight (meaning to examine, test, check) then flow + silk
(meaning classics, sacred book, pass through); and do not these four elements
taken together mean, if you think about it, a cognitive network in temporal
motion?
April, 2024
+++
Max Herman
The Mindful Mona Lisa at Leonardo.info/blog
ExperienceDemocracy2024.org/experience-democracy-is/
Commedia Leonardi Vici – free PDF of MS available on request
+++
Links:
https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/779/pg779-images.html -- Marlowe’s Faustus
Don Quixote -- https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/996/pg996-images.html
Campbell article --
https://arcade.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/article_pdfs/roflv01i02_02campbell_comp3_083010_JM_0.pdf
Blake -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Religions_are_One
Federalist 1 – first sentence --
https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbc0001.2014jeff21562v1/?sp=17
Federalist 85 – last paragraph --
https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbc0001.2019amimp21561v2/?sp=380
Kelliher --
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300105650/peasant-power-in-china/
Kelliher
--https://books.google.com/books?id=orTPbQ8neCAC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ViewAPI&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false
Novum Organum -- https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/45988/pg45988-images.html
Janeway --
https://www.oecd.org/naec/events/doing-capitalism-in-the-innovation-economy.htm
Jung on alchemy -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology_and_Alchemy
Newton’s chymistry site -- https://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/newton/
Chinese alchemy -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_alchemy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cide_Hamete_Benengeli
review of Peasant Power: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2949842
another review: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2058879
CSIS report translation of CCP doc -- https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep28757
Olivia Cheung chapter on “Fengqiao experience”:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.5053561.13
Chapter on HRS -- https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.5053561.9
Entry for Jingyan (experience) --
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%B6%93%E9%A9%97
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/16475/pdf -- article on Cide Hamete Benengeli
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci
+++
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