Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper proposes an analysis of Yeats's poem Long-legged Fly based on the idea that the self is a space wherein imagination's drives inscribe ideographic realities of desire. I will argue that the re-presentation of such inscriptions in the presence of signs and symbols masks the absence of objective reality. Given that the sign is a landmark of memory, I will explore how remembering gives a pleasure that is anchored both in the reality effect of signs' presence and in the imaginary. In the first stanza we read: That civilisation may not sink, / Its great battle lost, / Quiet the dog, tether the pony / To a distant post. (1) The poet requires the reader to lower the pressure of immediate, objective reality so that the mind's eye can inspect the inner imaginative reality. On a metapoetic level the reader may now focus on the metonymic relation between objective and imagined reality, that is, on the way inner processes are structured so that their expression becomes part for whole. Imaginations are accounts of the past filtering into presence through the experience of the here and now. This is not to say that through imagination we can relive the past. We may live a contextualized past that resonates with present experience. Through imagination we nestle the past in the The reality we experience becomes sanctioned by memory, it becomes a site of memory. And we may speak of a memory of humanity if we trust it exists as Yeats does: Our master Caesar is in the tent / Where the maps are spread, / His eyes upon nothing, / A hand under his head (287). This passage from the first stanza functions as a metaphor: Caesar's mastery of unknown territories evokes the artist's mastery of the unknown spaces of the mind. Caesar's quest, the writer's work is to map these spaces out. But in the presence of the formed and civilized unknown (be that through conquering it in writing) the eye is fixed upon nothing. The passage evinces a paradox: mapping should stabilize (fix) the unknown, should offer a mantra for concentrating reality in the mind's eye. For bringing knowledge in sight, for offering insight into reality. Why, then, are Caesar's eyes upon nothing? Where has his quest brought him? How does the quest of writing reach into the unknown territory of the mind? In metaphorical perspective the first stanza conceptualizes the artist's work (his working) as a quest by resorting to accounts of historical events perceived to be similar in purpose. The purpose of the writer's work--of mapping out the spaces of the mind--shares in its essence with the civilizing purpose of a conqueror like Caesar. The metaphor's terms are structured around the dichotomy unknown/spelled out. While the metaphor is not striking, the way in which Yeats manages it is. Yeats conceptualizes the importance of artistic creation by referring to a historical situation that he feels is similar in process. But that situation (in our case, Caesar's) is itself an imagination of the past. The present (reality of writing, reading) is impregnated with actualized perceptions of the past, that is, it becomes a play of memories. In other words, describing the present is particularizing the past. The play is real and it is the reader's pleasure to decipher it. What he deciphers is imaginary, and that is also pleasurable: Like a long-legged fly upon the stream / His mind moves upon silence (287). Time is a stream. The mind forms the present out of memories by adjusting them idiosyncratically. What is really present is but the mind's movement, its construction of the present through mapping out the past; its making something out of nothing: a simile of presence out of projections of the past whose bringing up characterizes and defines present. This process itself is the present: the Yeatsean measured quietude. While the first stanza deals with imaginations of the past sited (sighted) in the present, the second stanza deals with the embedding of the past into present: That the topless towers be burnt / And men recall that face, / Move most gently if move you must / In this lonely place (287). …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".