Hexagram 39:
Obstruction

The Judgment

Obstruction. The southwest furthers.
(See Zenna Henderson.) 
The northeast does not further.
 (See Daniel Dennett.)
It furthers one to see the great man.
 (See Alan Turing.)
Perseverance brings good fortune.

Tim Weiner in today's New York Times:

"Mr. Hunt was intelligent, erudite, suave and loyal to his friends....

Everette Howard Hunt Jr. was born in Hamburg, N.Y., on Oct. 9, 1918, the son of a lawyer and a classically trained pianist who played church organ. He graduated from Brown University in June 1940 and entered the United States Naval Academy as a midshipman in February 1941.

He worked as a wartime intelligence officer in China, a postwar spokesman for the Marshall Plan in Paris and a screenwriter in Hollywood. Warner Brothers had just bought his fourth novel, 'Bimini Run,' a thriller set in the Caribbean, when he joined the fledgling C.I.A. in April 1949.

Mr. Hunt was immediately assigned to train C.I.A. recruits.... He moved to Mexico City, where he became chief of station in 1950. He brought along another rookie C.I.A. officer, William F. Buckley Jr., later a prominent conservative author and publisher, who became godfather and guardian to the four children of Mr. Hunt and his wife, the former Dorothy L. Wetzel.

In 1954, Mr. Hunt helped plan the covert operation that overthrew the elected president of Guatemala....

By the time of the coup, Mr. Hunt had been removed from responsibility. He moved on to uneventful stints in Japan and Uruguay. Not until 1960 was Mr. Hunt involved in an operation that changed history.

The C.I.A. had received orders from both President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his successor, President John F. Kennedy, to alter or abolish the revolutionary government of Fidel in Cuba. Mr. Hunt's assignment was to create a provisional Cuban government that would be ready to take power once the C.I.A.'s cadre of Cuban shock troops invaded the island.... 

He retired from the C.I.A. in 1970 and secured a job with an agency-connected public relations firm in Washington. Then, a year later, came a call from the White House....

Mr. Hunt’s last book, 'American Spy: My Secret History in the C.I.A., Watergate and Beyond,' written with Greg Aunapu, is to be published on March 16 with a foreword by his old friend William F. Buckley Jr.

Late in life, he said he had no regrets, beyond the Bay of Pigs."

Related Material:

Game Boy,
Philosophy Wars,
and the following:

Andre Furlani, quoted in
Log24 on January 19:

"In his study of The Cantos,
Davenport defines the Poundian
ideogram as 'a grammar of images,
emblems, and symbols, rather than
a grammar of logical sequence....
An idea unifies, dominates, and
controls the particulars that make
the ideogram'."

For such an ideogram,
see Bright Star and the
(clickable) symbol from
Philosophy Wars:

Thursday, April 7, 2005  7:26 PM

In the Details

Wallace Stevens,
An Ordinary Evening in New Haven:

...the movement of
a self in the rock...

-- Wallace Stevens:
The Poems of Our Climate,
by Harold Bloom,
Cornell U. Press, 1977

The more industrious scholars
will derive considerable pleasure
from describing how the art-history
professors and journalists of the period
1945-75, along with so many students,
intellectuals, and art tourists of every
sort, actually struggled to see the
paintings directly, in the old
pre-World War II way,
like Plato's cave dwellers
watching the shadows, without
knowing what had projected them,
which was the Word."

-- Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word

"...Mondrian and Malevich
are not discussing canvas
or pigment or graphite or
any other form of matter.
They are talking about
Being or Mind or Spirit.
From their point of view,
the grid is a staircase
to the Universal...."

Related material:

The intellectual concepts
mentioned by Richard Powers
at the end of tomorrow's
New York Times Book Review.
(See the links on these concepts
in yesterday's "Goldberg Variation.")

See also Old School Tie.

Evariste Galois

Birth or Death?
There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt.
I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different;
this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us,
like Death, our death.

"If you don't play
some people's game, they say
that you have 'lost your marbles,'
not recognizing that,

while Chinese checkers
is indeed a fine pastime,
a person may also play dominoes,
chess, strip poker, tiddlywinks,
drop-the-soap or Russian roulette
with his brain.

One brain game that is widely,
if poorly, played is a gimmick
called 'rational thought.'"