Haerenga Tuarima - Part 6 - Superintelligence, the Spirit, and Subverting Empire

This feels to me very much like one of those little weird bits of the Bible where it like says the same thing a couple of times.

And that used to really annoy me.

I was like, come on, be better writers.

Like you've already said that.

Surely you can see like two lines ahead that you literally said that.

But I have been introduced to the idea by an author called Robert Alter of biblical design patterns.

And he refers to these things.

I think they're called chiasms, maybe.

That's not a word I think I've actually said out loud before.

Andrew's nodding.

And it's got like a, is it an inclusio? Maybe that's the term.

So there's a starting line and then it heads towards a middle and And then it works back out to an end line and the end line and the starting line are the same.

So a good example would be like Psalm 8, which is, Oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth.

And then it works into a middle and then works back out to it.

Oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth.

Hmm.

And what that has led me to do as a reader, as a student of the Bible, is rather than seeing this and being like, man, someone's terrible at writing.

I'm like, oh, that thing appeared twice.

So I wonder what's in the middle and if that's important or I wonder if this is a poem or Or I wonder if this was a tool for memorization.

Or I wonder if this is like almost the song that was sung.

And that thing was kind of the mental hook to retell the whole story.

You

know, you think about a few things in Te Reo Māori.

You know, I could say, He tangata, he tangata, he tangata.

And you would know that that's one statement, but it actually points to the rest of the statement.