symbolism 1654, “practice of representing things with symbols,” from symbol. Attested from 1892 as a movement in Fr. literature that aimed at representing ideas and emotions by indirect suggestion rather than direct expression; rejecting realism and naturalism, it attached symbolic meaning to certain objects, words, etc. Fr. symboliste was coined by poet Paul Verlaine (1844-96) in 1885.
symbol Look up symbol at Dictionary.com->

symbol c.1434, “creed, summary, religious belief,” from L.L. symbolum “creed, token, mark,” from Gk. symbolon “token, watchword” (applied c.250 by Cyprian of Carthage to the Apostles’ Creed, on the notion of the “mark” that distinguishes Christians from pagans) from syn- “together” stem of ballein “to throw.” …

… The sense evolution is from “throwing things together” to “contrasting” to “comparing” to “token used in comparisons to determine if something is genuine.” …

… Hence, “outward sign” of something. The meaning “something which stands for something else” first recorded 1590 (in “Faerie Queene”). Symbolic is attested from 1680.

First: I’m struck by this notion of symbolism meaning “throwing things together” – I suppose for something to stand for something else, it must put its back up to it and project [blank], that is, project its case for standing for something else.

Second: What is sense evolution? An interesting phrase, because what of the sense remains the same and what changes?

Third: In a curious and potentially unconscious/ conscientious move, “Saudi authorities” in 2004 replaced the three jamarats, obelisk shaped targets in the Stoning of the Devil ceremony that is part of Hajj, with three walls accessible by a great multi-levelled bridge.

The expressed reason for the reconstruction is safety, and that makes perfect sense, but what I see in the wall is an enlargement of the pillars to unrepresentable proportions. To remain a jamarat (a pillar), the community of participants must fill in that which lies beyond the crop marks to its imaginable size.

Thanks to imagination, the wall can secure the well being of the masses as they reject the devil.

Yet this is not the only activity taking place. There is a projection involved in securing a safe site of projection. The act on the day is a “throwing something together”, but so too is the jamarat bridge – this passageway over and upon which the projection is made – a throwing of concrete, a throwing of people. This is the Jamarat Bridge and one can see the three pillars.

The site is being reconstructed again. 362 died in 2006 at the event, something to do with luggage getting in the way of the flow of the crowd. Apparently not everyone makes it over the bridge. According to Alexander Trevi at Pruned:

Dirk Helbing, a professor in crowd dynamics at the Dresden University of Technology, et al., will be complemented by a reorganization of the streets leading up to the bridge, and a time schedule and route assignments as determined in real time through video monitoring and on-site surveillance.

As stones are throne at these pillars/half-done, people are throne across the bridge. And this is how a community of self projection evolves, through conscientious and imaginative commitment to throwing something together. This is how the obelisk is built.

Trevi’s piece on the Bridge pointed me to something analogue to this – the 10 Mile Spiral, a great big coiled rattlesnake of a roadway near Las Vegas that conceptually give you all the pleasure of Vegas while maintaining efficient throughput.

Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch, authors of this concept in their book Tool, have, like the developers of the Bridge, decongestion and cultural facilitation as their aim.

First, it acts as a massive traffic decongestion device… by adding significant mileage to the highway in the form of a spiral. The second purpose is less infrastructural and more cultural: along the spiral you can play slots, roulette, get married, see a show, have your car washed, and ride through a tunnel of love, all without ever leaving your car. It is a compact Vegas, enjoyed at 55 miles per hour and topped off by a towering observation ramp offering views of the entire valley floor below.

The obelisk of the 10 Mile Spiral appears to be negative-space obelisk, but I don’t know if I buy that. The folks at BLDGBLOG, who introduced me to the 10 Mile Spiral, point out some scene in J.G. Ballard’s Concrete Island, where a character driving around in the madness of London’s motorways loathes the other drivers. The stick shifts of other drivers could quite possibly be our obelisks, but so what if I loathe everyone today and care little tomorrow? There’s nothing very together about it – I still go out driving. I like a spectacle. A mass gathering – congregating to maintaine the etymological integrity of symbol-the-verb. Motorways spin around a city, perhaps that is our obelisk (or obelisk park, since all respectable cities are filled with them.) Washington D.C. spins around the Washington Monument – there’s an obelisk that took a couple of decades to build!

But on the stones we throw in Vegas, I know something:

It is dice we throw together.

“It is only out of a community forged by the recognition of a shared danger that a common readiness for responsible action can come into being.” – Moltmann, C of G, 211)

Which is the most legitimate enemy and why? Despots, Democrats, Death, Deities or Global Warming? Any other suggestions? Is ethics dependent on the recognition of a shared danger?

That’s it. That’s my question. For a backgrounder to the question read: The lie of the land – Economist.com.

For those who use “European” as a term of approbation, surely faraway Canada and New Zealand are much more “European” than, say, Albania. But the map doesn’t lie. Albania is between Greece and Italy, the historic hearts of everything the Europhiles count their own.

“So what are you doing with yourself these days – leading a life of pleasure?” – that is what the man [who sees me now] would say, smiling genially. What could I say in return? That we cannot always be working, that life is short, we must taste its pleasures while we can? What a joke, and what a scandal too! For the stubborn, mean lives that my ancestors lived, sweating in their dark clothes in the heat and dust of the Free State, to eventuate in this: a young man sauntering around a foreign city, eating up his savings, drinking lattes, pretending to be a writer! How can I so casually betray them and then hope to escape their avenging ghosts? It was no in the nature of those men and women to be gay and have pleasure, and it is not in mine. I am their cihld, foredoomed from birth to be gloomy and suffer. How else does poetry come anyway, except out of suffering, like blood squeezed from stone?

South Africa is a wound within me. How much longer before the wound stops bleeding? How much longer will I have to grit my teeth and endure before I am able to say, ‘Once upon a time I used to live in south Africa but now I live in the United States’? (pg 116, from youth – scenes from provincial life II)

I’ve put this passage in the first person and replaced actions and nouns to show what I see in this when I read it.

Part answer: The Global Brain.