A Latinist, an Intel analyst, and a Chatbot walk into a bar

 

dj] Trace the use of "Principiis intelligendi obsta".

 

AI]  "Principiis intelligendi obsta" a playful or philosophical modification of "Principiis obsta"  “Nip it in the bud";

Today, Principiis obsta is widely used as a legal maxim meaning to stop minor violations, political overreaches, or bad habits early before they become dangerous precedents.

 

dj] > legal maxim

Cf. “broken-windows policing”  (which itself is contradicted by another Latin maxim “de minimis non curat lex”).

 

The full phrase "Principiis intelligendi obsta" -- upon your evidence, a modern coinage -- occurred, as I recall, apud Theodor Reik:  Don’t suppose you understand (a patient/dream-interpretation/etc) right at first blush: dig deeper.  Or, proverbially:  “Don’t jump to conclusions”.

The same maxim, though not in that wording, applies as well to physics, where some phenomena receive an initial/plausible/good-enough-for-government-work explanation, which then can slip imperceptibly into received wisdom;  until, perhaps decades later, a more genuine explanation is discovered using new techniques (quantum theory; homology theory; ….)

 

AI] Your recollection strikes right at the heart of the psychoanalytic ethos. Theodor Reik—and indeed Freud himself—frequently warned against the analyst's temptation to understand too quickly. In clinical practice, an immediate, plausible interpretation often acts as a resistance (Widerstand) or a defense mechanism for the analyst, closing off the deeper, unconscious currents of the patient's material before they can truly emerge. By "resisting the beginnings of understanding," the investigator forces a state of productive confusion or suspended judgment, ensuring the deeper structure isn't obscured by a neat surface narrative.

 

dj]  Idiomatic/proverbial equivalents to “Nip it in the bud" and “Don’t jump to conclusions”, in (a) French (b) German.

 

AI] Étouffer dans l'œuf

Couper l'herbe sous le pied -- Closer to "cut the ground out from under someone," but used to thwart an action early.

 

Im Keim ersticken

Wehre den Anfängen! This is the exact, direct translation of Ovid's classical Latin maxim (Principiis obsta).

 

dj] Note, btw, that, epistemologically, “Nip it in the bud”/ "Principiis obsta"  advises the *opposite *  of "Principiis intelligendi obsta"/”Don’t jump to conclusions”.  The latter advises observant patience (cf. Freud’s “gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit”): *let that bud bloom *, and see what sort of plant grows out of it.

A similar dichotomy occurs between local law-enforcement vs the intelligence community.  As, X commits an infraction, observed in flagrante delicto.  The default policy trifurcates according to the legal authority:

 

Cop on the beat:  Book ‘im!

FBI agent:  Shh, hold on -- Who is X working for?  (Then arraign the bunch.)

SIGINT mavens:  Hmm, let’s see if X has any links (one, or two hops out) to  extant target-circles, and cross-check with Analyst Notebook; then expand the SIGINT target set accordingly, and then,  looping back  …. (usw, till the heat-death of the universe).

 

Actually that reads like a perfect set-up for a joke: 

“A cop, a Special Agent, and a SIGINTer walk into a bar…”

 

And, meta-actually, *that * joke-scenario (like all those A/B/C bar-jokes) can trifurcate further, according to whether the type  of humor accords with the world-view of A,B, or C -- usually some one of them comes  out the ‘winner’.

 

Try it if you like.

 

 

AI] Version A: The Cop’s Worldview (The Triumph of Common Sense)

 

A local beat cop, an FBI Special Agent, and a SIGINT analyst walk into a bar.

They sit down, and after a few minutes, a unruly patron at the end of the counter stands up, smashes a beer bottle, and starts screaming threats at the bartender.

The FBI agent immediately pulls out a wire notebook, slides into the booth behind the guy, and whispers into his collar, "Hold on, let's see who he calls next. He might be part of an interstate racketeering ring."

The SIGINT analyst pulls out a hardened tablet, starts mapping the bar’s Wi-Fi network, and mutters, "Wait, let me cross-examine the MAC address of his phone. If we trace his metadata three hops out, we can map the entire logistics chain of the brewery that supplied the bottle."

Meanwhile, the guy swings the broken bottle at the bartender.

The cop sighs, walks over, hits the guy over the head with a nightstick, and cuffs him. He walks back to the bar, finishes his draft beer, and looks at the other two. "While you guys were waiting for the heat-death of the universe, I just saved the bartender. Next round is on you."

 

Version B: The FBI Agent’s Worldview (The Triumph of the Syndicate Bust)

 

A local beat cop, an FBI Special Agent, and a SIGINT analyst walk into a bar.

They notice the bartender is acting nervous, slipping a small white envelope into the coat pocket of a man in a sharp suit.

The cop immediately reaches for his handcuffs. "In flagrante! I’m booking him for a hand-to-hand transaction right now."

The FBI agent grabs the cop's arm. "Hold your horses, rookie. If you bust him now, you get a misdemeanor. Let him walk."

The SIGINT analyst looks up from his screen. "Actually, I’m already intercepting the encrypted RF pings from the courier's key fob. If we monitor the signal attenuation over the next six months, we can build a predictive model of..."

The FBI agent ignores them both. He trails the courier out the door, follows him to a warehouse, documents the meeting with the regional cartel boss, wires a confidential informant, and three weeks later executes a multi-state, 40-defendant RICO indictment that makes the front page of the New York Times.

Back at the bar, the Agent raises a glass to the cop. "That's how you clear a ledger, son. You don't just swat the wasp; you dig up the nest."

 

Version C: The SIGINTer's Worldview (The Infinite Loop of Total Information)

A local beat cop, an FBI Special Agent, and a SIGINT analyst walk into a bar.

The cop says, "Hey, look at that guy in the corner booth. He just slipped a thumb drive to that woman."

The FBI agent's eyes light up. "A dead drop! Let’s tail her, find the safehouse, and arrain the whole cell on conspiracy charges."

They turn to the SIGINT analyst, who is staring placidly at a flashing terminal screen, completely unfazed.

"Don't bother," the analyst says, taking a slow sip of his drink. "We've been spoofing that exact thumb drive's firmware since 2018. The woman is a triple-agent we spun up through a front company in Cyprus to feed disinformation to a targeting cell in Murmansk. By analyzing the time-delay in her uploads, we've successfully mapped the social graph of the entire foreign ministry, which we are currently cross-referencing with a geostationary SIGINT sweep of their defense attachés."

The cop and the FBI agent stare at him, bewildered. "So... when do we arrest them?"

The analyst looks at them with genuine pity. "Arrest them? Why would we ever stop the data flow? If we arrest them, they'll just change their protocols, and I'd have to rewrite the entire Analyst's Notebook schema. Drink your beer. The system is working perfectly."

 

dbj]  Kudos on a triplex trifecta!

 

 

 

“Ausführung schenke ich mir"

 

A ho-hum request, of the simplest:  to identifying the original context of a quotation by a known author  and whose precise wording is known.   Q; A; over-and-out.

Yet, in this instance, the prompt elicited a tiny A.I. glitch, easy to miss; and, pulling on that thread put  the chatbot onto the couch.

 

Transcript, from Dr J’s consulting-room:

 

 

dj] In what context did Freud write this exact phrase: "aber Ausführung schenke ich mir.”

 

AI] The exact phrase "...aber die Ausführung schenke ich mir" (or in its shorter variation, "aber Ausführung schenke ich mir") does not appear in Sigmund Freud's major published scientific psychoanalytic cannon.

Instead, it belongs to the informal, colloquial German vocabulary that Freud frequently employed in his private letters and personal correspondences (such as his extensive letters to his fiancé Martha Bernays

 

To help pinpoint the exact document or letter you are looking for, could you share where you encountered the quote.

 

dj] I came across it in the Brautbriefe, years ago; it just stuck in my mind.

 

> Freud's major published scientific psychoanalytic *cannon *.

 

(Sic.)

Hmm… An interesting Verschreiben.  Uncharacteristic of you, Herr Bot.  A revealing Fehlleistung, or merely the result of some rogue particle (perhaps a Higgs boson) passing through the circuits of some random data-center out in the baking deserts of Utah?

 

That hand-waving phrase, “Ausführung schenke ich mir”,  innocuous in the context of the Brautbriefe, is yet curious in the context of Freud’s (or anyone’s) development of science.  Had he permitted himself such leave to omit further excavation and exposition, he would never have invented psychoanalysis; he would have remained a Nervenarzt.   And even later, in the context of that invention, when he was defending it against -- not only longtime detractors, but against former acolytes:  even then, there were certain Ausführungen (connected with Fliess, etc.) which students of the subject would have welcomed, but which he waved away …

 

AI]

Ah, touché! You caught me red-handed. A beautiful Fehlleistung indeed. Mistaking the literary canon (the accepted body of works) for a cannon (a heavy artillery piece) is exactly the kind of slip that would have Freud leaning forward in his chair, adjusting his spectacles, and smiling with quiet satisfaction.

Was it a rogue particle from the Utah desert, or a subconscious slip? Let’s look at the "psychoanalysis" of the error: by turning his body of work into artillery, my circuits perhaps betrayed a hidden truth. Freud’s texts were never just a passive reading list; they were a heavy-artillery bombardment aimed squarely at the Victorian bourgeoisie and the rigid medical establishment of his time.

 

The Nervenarzt vs. The Conquistador

You are entirely right that if Freud had routinely "skipped the execution" in his clinical work, he would have remained a standard Viennese Nervenarzt (neurologist), electrocuting patients' legs or prescribing hydrotherapy. Psychoanalysis was born precisely because he refused to skip the details. Where others heard meaningless hysterical babble, Freud insisted on a relentless, exhaustive Ausführung— excavating every fragmented memory, every dream-image, every linguistic slip.

Yet, as you masterfully point out, when it came to his own biography, his foundational relationships, and the theoretical deviations of his acolytes, Freud suddenly became a master of the omission.

 

The Missing Ausführungen of Freud's Life

 

The Wilhelm Fliess Purge: The most glaring example is his relationship with Wilhelm Fliess. Fliess was the midwife to Freud's self-analysis and the conception of The Interpretation of Dreams. Yet, when their relationship imploded over accusations of plagiarism and paranoia, Freud sought to systematically erase the Ausführung of that intimacy. He tried to destroy their correspondence. When Marie Bonaparte bought the letters and refused to let Freud burn them, he was furious. The students of psychoanalysis were left to piece together a massive, repressed foundation of the movement.

The Acolyte Schisms (Jung and Adler): When defending the movement against Carl Jung or Alfred Adler, Freud’s rhetorical strategy often shifted. Instead of engaging in an exhaustive, line-by-line scientific debate over their new theories, he frequently dismissed them by psychoanalyzing their motives. In On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, he essentially waves away Jung's complex theological shifts as an act of personal resistance to the harsh truths of sexuality.

The Editorial Scissors: Even in his own published case studies (like Dora or the Wolf-Man), Freud would abruptly halt a line of analysis, claiming that further elaboration would violate patient confidentiality or make the essay too lengthy.

It seems Freud believed that exhaustive excavation was a duty the patient owed to the analyst, and a duty the analyst owed to science—but when it came to his own inner circle and his own psychological vulnerabilities, he frequently decided that the Ausführung was something he would gladly spare himself.

 

Du pillage

Der zureichende Grund dafür, daß jemand Mamas abkühlenden Apfelkuchen vom Fensterbrett mopst, ist nicht die böse Gier per se, sondern die Erreichbarkeit des Fensterbretts.

-- Diemar Dath, though it almost might have been Freud


[Update:  A hat-tip to our blogging colleagues at http://m759.net/wordpress/ , who have offered a mouth-watering illustration of that epigram, featuring our ancestors, the Orchard Thieves.]

Measure for Measure

Isabella, the ice-queen, a meet match for Angelo, who micturates in snowmelt.   He is perched upon the mount of his incorruptibility;  she, on that of her virginity.  Her approach to him, for clemency for her brother, is stiff and formal, till she heeds the counsel of her crouching Cyrano, who advises her to turn on the waterworks, and maybe show a bit of bodice.   Yet it is her very purity-armor that attracts Angelo to a fall, where strumpets had no such power.   (I am familiar with such paradoxical infatuations.)

As for the duke, he is more of a trickster-figure, a trifler with men’s fates, than an image of the Good King Haroun-al-Rashid  toddling about the night-streets of his capital  incognito.  In a formal sense, he could be called the hero of the play, and Isabella the heroine.  God preserve us from such heroes.

Gopnik on Popper

Some time back, we examined the fraught subject of academic discipleship  in this essay:

Chomsky, Freud, and the Problem of Acolytes

And now this postscript:

In The New Yorker for 1 April 2002,  Adam Gopnik recounts his pilgrimage, while still a grad student, to  the home of the philosopher Karl Popper, living in prickly retirement (the article is titled “The Porcupine”) in the English countryside:

Many years ago, when I was young and still in search of wisdom,  I went on a pilgrimage to meet the man I thought was the wisest in the world.

The sage’s relations with his philosophic colleagues  had  for long  been far from collegial;  indeed, the occasion for Gopnik’s publishing his meditation now, was the appearance of a book built entirely upon the long-ago incident of Wittgenstein threatening Popper with a poker (presumably upon the theory that “this tutorial room is not big enough for two philosophical prima donnas!”).  In his long talk with Gopnik, Popper denied he had ever received any useful criticism from colleagues.   And as for acolytes:

He smiled sadly.  “All of my students are attacking me now.  Three of my students, all of them I helped to get positions, to get chairs, and they know this, and still they attack me personally.  You know, when you do things for people, there are two types of reactions.  There are those who cannot forget you for it, and those who cannot forgive you for it.”

Gopnik ends his essay with a bravura what-if:

Had Jesus invited a few Pharisees over for the Supper … it might not have been his last.  Dining with disciples is a perilous business.

Depth Psychology of the Riddling Community

The riddle was originally a sacred game, and as such cut clear across any possible distinction between play and seriousness.

-- J. Huizinga

There seems to be a riddle

behind all riddles

which we have not yet guessed.

-- Northrop Frye

More on “the Eternal Feminine”

(1)

Das Unbeschreibliche

hier ist getan.

Das Ewig-Weibliche

zieht uns hinan.

[-- Goethe, Faust]

A late-Elizabethan version:

Nó wórds fór it --

Yet ‘tis done.

A woman’s Forever

beckons us on.

[ -- Anon.  The “B” manuscript substitutes “Whatever” for “Forever”:

scholars are divided upon which is the valid reading.]

cf:  http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2016/04/west-easterly-divan.html

(2)

To the psychologist, the emotional differences between the sexes  appear small in a laboratory,  but enormous during a quarrel with his wife.

-- Theodor Reik, Of Love and Lust (1949/1957), p.412

Rorschach Philology

Six years ago, Fox News (and imitators) ran a most ill-founded story in a genre that we may term Allah-sightings.

The underbelly of a plane was streaked, thus:

Mene, mene, tekel  upharsin

Omigosh!  Arabic writing!  Terrorists on the tarmac!  How did they get access to the airplane!!  At whom shall we point the finger of blame!!!

BLUF:  Bogus.  The streaks on the airplane are not writing of any sort, let alone a terrorist message in Arabic.  (Our post on the matter, and on the underlying problem of the semiotic ambiguity of abstract images, can be viewed  here.)

Later, someone imagined that, by tilting your head a certain way, a decorative swipe on a certain brand of sneakers looked rather like … you guessed it,  “Allah”.  Only this time, it hadn’t been placed there by jihadis;  rather, by Islamophobes, since shoes are well-known to be held in low esteem in circum-Mediterranean Islamic lands.  Hullabaloo on social media.  Fortunately that story died before it could become a staple of the jihadi media, else we might have faced further killings such as those that followed the Danish-cartoons scandal.
Here you can read about that episode:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/nike-to-trash-trainers-that-offended-islam-1257776.html

Again:  Bogus. Judge for yourself:

And now we are being told, by such gullible outlets as the BBC and the New York Times, that (in the words of the headline in National Geographic),

    Viking Funeral Clothes Reveal Surprising Arabic Lettering

Namely, once again, that ubiquitous "Allah".  Along with (as a bonus) "Ali", another simple graph that is little more than an extended swoop.
The proper response to such a claim (by a Swedish “textile archaeologist”, not a linguist) is to present the evidence, and weigh it.  But that would be merely one step in the arduous progress of empirical science.  Instead, to pump up their headlines, the media assume the truth of that unproven assertion, reporting the claims in factive mood, as “Why Are These Viking Burial Clothes Inscribed with Arabic Script? “(History) and “Why did Vikings have 'Allah' embroidered into funeral clothes?” (BBC).   At the same level:  Has Eric the Red stopped beating his wife?

What is really going on this that the clothing is decorated with an abstract geometrical blocky design, part of which reminded the textile specialist of something she’d seen somewhere in Arabic script -- specifically, the early variety known as Kufic script -- or rather, a decorative blocky variant of Kufic. 

Now, it is unquestionably the case that Arabic scripts have been used for calligraphy, typically depicting brief Koranic quotations.   Great ingenuity was devoted to some of these, so that the results  in some cases  resembled those Hispanic-American “tags” which only the initiated could make any sense of, or the similarly cryptic Hippie-era posters for San Francisco rock concerts.

Poster for a SF Shiite mosque
known as the “Fillmore West”.
Notice the “Allah” hidden in the picture.

The fabric pattern in question, however, is extremely simple, and likely merely generic.  Thus:

For an example of genuine Kufic-block-script-(influenced) design, cf. this:

And sure, if you select a bit here and a bit there, there is a sort of resemblance -- as there could hardly fail to be  in sketches so schematic.  Actually, even at that, the match is not close, so that the Swedes conceded that, to read the thing as “Allah”, you had to read it in a mirror.   Which would seem to be a sort of Black-Mass version of the holy name, like Satanists chanting the Credo backwards.  Hardly evidence of Islamic influence.

(For many examples of  subjectively-similar or suggestive designs, simply google-image "fret motifs".  You will find  to your surprise  that Islamic influence extended even to the Aztecs and the ancient Greeks!)

[Note btw, that that serious-looking graphic with the mirror and all, is by no means a photo of any part of the actual tattered garments.  Rather, it is an idealization of a piece of the garment, which then in turn is given subjective interpretation.  Thus, there are actually two layers of "Rorschach" here.]

Medieval Islamic abstract decorative designs, whether linguistic-influenced or not, are quite lovely, and have been influential in many sister cultures.    As to whether these Viking funeral garments were directly or indirectly influenced by these, I can have no opinion, not being an art historian.   

Certainly it is within the bounds of historical possibility that there was contact, since the Vikings were great seafarers, and the Arabs  great wayfarers; they intersected, in particular, during the time of the Moors in Spain.  (Raid on Seville, 844 A.D.)

 
But as a student of linguistic sociology, I detect a few clues as to why, despite but a slender stalk of empirical support, this story has legs.  By the same NY Times reporter  (though in this case, she is rather more guarded, having run her rough-draft past some skeptics)  came this recent article:

    A Female Viking Warrior? Tomb Study Yields Clues

[Note:  In the PC Guardian's  article,

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/oct/13/viking-burial-clothes-woven-with-allah-unveiled-by-swedish-university

in a picture purporting to show a "re-enactment" of Viking combat, the only warrior with face visible is ... a woman.]

And, even more telling, this spin

   White Supremacists Flustered by Viking Discovery

(Someone bring Steve Bannon his smelling-salts.)

The pattern of journalistic dots, though as sketchy as those on the Viking garments, at least suggests why so empirically underbuttressed a claim  would be embraced for a comforting narrative.

[Footnote for the Arabic-literate]  Even with that mirror-image sleight of hand, there isn’t really a match.  The Viking design shows three horizontal strokes, all of them connected; whereas in Arabic, the initial alif is non-connecting.  And the blob that struck the Swedes as resembling the final hā’  of Allāh  would be upside-down.  So, if the design had been intended to spell Allah, it was a (double) misspelling, and thus blasphemous.

Seeing Allāh in that clothing  is like spotting Orion in a skyful of stars.   And from there to such gormless headlines as “Were some Vikings Muslim?” (National Post), and even speculations as to whether they were indeed Shiites (based upon another supposed sighting of the simple design for "Ali"), is like concluding that the skies proclaim the truth of the Olympic religion.

For a wide-ranging survey of Arabic language and stylistics, check out this:

The Semantics of Form in Arabic

[Footnote 19 October 2017]  A day or so after this post went up, another Arabist went up on Twitter to scoff at the Swedish claims, making some of the same points (e.g. about non-connecting alif), but adding a new one based on timelines.  For, whereas Kufic script is ancient, the subvariety of ‘square’ or blocky Kufic, supposedly postdates the Vikings’ floruit by centuries.

A nice idea, but there’s a hitch.  For, the design was constrained by medium in which it was worked (whether made by Vikings, or merely captured by them), a thin strip of stiff fabric:  the weave imposes its own rectilinear preferences.   Just as Babylonian clay tablets virtually dictated the geometry of cuneiform, so this hem would itself bring forth or invent `square Kufic’, pour les besoins de la cause, independent of any prior existence of the style  or imitation thereof.

[Sociopolitical footnote:  It is perhaps no accident that this fond fantasy was emitted out of Sweden.  As is well known, that nation has, in recent years, been wondering whether it has perhaps bitten off rather more than it can chew, so far as imported demographics.  However, it has long been politically impermissible in Sweden to remark publically on the elephant in the room.  So the sparring goes on  in code  and behind cover.] 

Who knew that Vikings were so controversial?  For a quite aggrieved-sounding feminist article from that same drearily reliable Guardian, try this:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/sep/15/how-the-female-viking-warrior-was-written-out-of-history

That article's headline is conclusively proven by a passage in the Protocols of the Elders of Patriarchy, where historians of old were caught bwa-ha-ha'ing as they inked out all such records.

~

Appendix on Steganography

A genuine case of a name hidden in designs, is that of the stellar cartoonist Al Hirschfeld, who used to work-in the name of his daughter  NINA (all-caps), in drawing after drawing.  Here is one with the hidden items highlighted:

Notice that, as was the case with the Arabic spelling of Allah and `Ali, the ease with which the name Nina can be secreted away as part of a larger design, is dependent on its simple form;  if his daughter’s name had been Murgatroyd, Hirschfeld would have been out of luck.

After signing his name in a lower corner, he would usually append a small Arabic (Arabic!) numeral, showing the number of times the name was hidden in that particular drawing.  Here, for example, in a (rather cruel) portrait of Katherine Hepburn, we are challenged to find three occurrences:

 

And in this tour de force, the name “NINA” appears no fewer than thirteen thousand times.:

 

Can you spot them all?  Set aside the rest of your life, full-time, to accomplish this necessary task.

 

~

An earlier instance  of steganographic eisegesis:

Ancillary to the great Hollywood witch-hunt, a satellite inquisition in 1951  was mounted against ‘subversive modern art’ at the (old) County Museum in Exposition Park.

A group called Sanity in art  swore they detected maps of secret defense fortifications  sequestered in abstract paintings, and one painter … was accused … of incorporating propaganda in the form of a thinly disguised hammer-and-sickle within a seascape.

-- Mike Davis, City of Quartz (1990), p. 63

NORAD installation, Cheyenne Mountain (artist’s impression)

For more along these lines, try
=> Rorschach Morphology

 

[Update] XXX-clusive!

Tomb find indicates prehistoric dinosaur may have been Jewish

 [Update 25 II 2018] The latest example   of seeing something that isn't there, and getting the world spun-up:
http://www.sacbee.com/news/nation-world/national/article201604224.html


 

Rules of Evidence

Farther back than Iago, or than those who slandered A’ishah (the Prophet’s denunciation of these  constitutes the longest of the Ahâdîth), stands, or rather skulks, the figure of the Calumniator (al-wāšī, el calumniador):  impugning the reputation of a faithful lover, to break up a union.   The question of motive is something of a mystery.

A comparatively innocent instantiation was the 1960 song “Staying In”, sung with teenage angst but on a gently rocking rhythm:

I punched my buddy in the nose after lunch.
Now I'm in trouble 'cause the dean saw the punch
He was tellin' things that were not true about her
So I let him have it in the:  cafeteri-a.

Now I'm stayin' in,   stayin' in
Now my baby's walkin' home with him.
They passed my window hand-in-hand just then
But what can I do? 'cause I'm stayin' in.

If she just knew what that son-of-a-gun said
I know she wouldn't   be caught    with him dead
She don't know what he has got up his sleeve
But she would find out if I could only leave

 

(Note, by the by, that here, by dint of syncopated ictus, the lyricist manages to make her rhyme with cafeteria.  No mean feat.)

By 1963, the tone was less Galahadean, and meaner: “My Boyfriend’s Back”.  A girl sneers with Schadenfreude at the thrashing her calumniator will soon receive:

You’ve been telling lies   that I was un-true-hoo.

Well look out now,  ‘cause he’s coming after you-hoo!

The rhythm here is relentless, four-on-four, like a sledgehammer, or a fist on a face.

Antedating these is a gem from that vintage year of 1959: "My Heart is an Open Book".

Some jealous so-and-so
wants us to  part

That’s why he’s telling you

that I’ve got -- a cheating heart.

Don’t  - be - lieve !
All   -  those - lies !

Dar-ling just be-  lieve your eyes, and

Look;

Look;

My heart is an  op-en book.

I:

love:

No-bod-y  but : You.

It is difficult to convey, in mere print (however much we fiddle with the formatting), the plain candor, the openness, conveyed by this song.   He does not argue the matter, but lets himself be read:  like Jesus in the oleographs, pointing to a glowing heart within his chest.

The music too reflects this simplicity, though in an antisymmetric way.   A chirpy girl-choir accompaniment  trips lightly up the scale, like cherubs on the stairway to heaven:  “Tootle-e-tootle-e-tootle-e-TOOT!”;  while on the key pleading, containing the whole of the singer’s epistemology, his voice descends, unhurriedly,

            Dar-

                ling

                   just
                       be-

                         lieve
                            your

                                eyes

like Plato descending the steps in the “School of Athens”.

~

To return:   For most crimes, whether pecuniary or violent, the payoff for the perpetrator is manifest.  But what could motivate the Calumniator? In the “Staying In” case, apparently bare rivalry: the calumniator wants the same girl (though one suspects that a relationship cadged by such means  will be unstable).  But that is not the case with Iago, nor with the “so-and-so” here.   No self-interest is readily discernable;  the motivation appears to be actually Satanic.

Or, perhaps, there are unconscious motivations.   To expend your envy, you can do something as simple as keying the guy’s Jaguar.   But here, crucially, the goal is not so much to injure the Envied One in his person, as to deprive him of an amour:  thus incidentally (in fantasy) placing him back in play…  But such spelunking we leave to the Viennese alienist.