Seán Stickle

My online journal for comparative source code now has a domain. It took a bit to come up with a good name, as all of my initial and naïve ideas were already taken (eg, Software Poetry). Casting the net a bit wider, I turned to William Blake. He has some things to say about machinery and poetry (not always nice, true). Perhaps he could suggest a title?

Some Google searching, and I didn’t come up with much. Until I ran across a Google book result for William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols:

“Some persons of a scientific turn were once discoursing pompously and, to him, distastefully, about the incredible distance of the planets, the length of time light takes to travel to the earth, &c., when he burst out, ‘Tis false! I was walking down a lane the other day, and at the end of it I touched the sky with my stick.’” In this he was bolder than Sappho, if we may credit her choriambic quoted by Herodian: “I do not think to touch the sky with my two arms.” Possibly Blake had been reading Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana (II.5): “A man who has his station upon this vast and mysterious engine ought to express clearer views about heaven and the sun and the moon, which I dare say you fancy you could touch with a stick, from our vantage of proximity to yonder heaven.”

I quite like that whole excerpt, but the term “this vast and mysterious engine” really captures my imagination. That seems to put the right spin on software, as the source code is hidden from most people.

So I registered The Mysterious Engine, and will start setting up the journal there soon.