the timboucher experience

I also started thinking about the closeness between the word “questioning” and “questing” in relation to this whole religious search engines idea. That, of course, took me immediately to Arthurian legends, because King Arthur’s knights were ALWAYS getting mixed up in all kinds of crazy quests. In fact, that was how they defined themselves - not so much by their beliefs, but by their questions, their questing.

Arthurian legend is filled with all types of quests which frequently begin while the Court is having some kind of feast for Candlemas or some other weird now-defunct holiday. Somebody, or something, barges in, throws everybody in a tizzy, and then a variety of knights take up their swords and pursue whatever it was out into the forest and the wide world beyond.

One of my favorites was always this weird animal-thing called the “Questing Beast,” although I think they ordinarily encountered it out in the forest while they were on hunting parties.

The Questing Beast has a serpents head, leopards body and lions hindquarters. In various sources it is said to have a hare’s paws, or a deer’s hooves. When cited as having deer’s hooves, it is said to be a beast with great speed. In any case, it is continually running seeking water to slake its unquenchable thirst. As it runs, its belly omits the sound of a pack of forty hounds. It is a symbol of incest and anarchy, begotten by the Devil on a princess who accused her brother of rape after he rejected her advances. It appears several times in Mallory’s Le Mort D’Arthur.

Pantheon.org has this to say about the Questing Beast:

One day, when King Arthur stopped to rest by a spring, he was surprised by a sound like thirty baying hounds. A strange animal with a snakes head the body of a leopard the back legs of a lion and the hooves of a deer burst through the underbrush, pursued by king Pellinore. Pellinore had hunted the Questing Beast, as the creature was called, all his life but never managed to capture it. Malory describes it as “the strongeste beste that ever he [Arthur] saw or herde of.”

Anyway, I thought this whole idea of looking at search engines as a cultural metaphor might be extended too to the Questing Beast. You could substitue the more modern “Search” in for “Questing”. Similarly, “Engines” now do the work which we once relied on “Beasts” to perform for us. Also, this idea that it has an “unquenchable thirst” is wholly appropriate, as is the fact that it is made up entirely of parts of other animals. Even the notion that it relates to “incest and anarchy” makes sense on sort of an esoteric level, that search engines and networks break down traditional centralized hierarchical systems of knowledge.

• Two things I want to look up tomorrow
• Search engines statistics & info
• Religious Search Engines
• Cool Pictures
• Switching Searches To Yahoo