Log24

Mental Health Month, Day 26:

Many Dimensions

John Baez on why bosonic string theory is said to require 26 dimensions —

“By now, if you’re a rigorous sort of pure mathematician, you must be suffering from grave doubts about the sanity of this whole procedure.”

Doubts?  Let us just say I prefer

G-string theory:

“The G-string is unique in that it combines the properties of all known string theories. It has 26-dimensional modes propagating to the left, 10-dimensional modes propagating to the right, and 2-dimensional modes just sitting around wondering what the hell is going on.”

Mental Health Month, Day 24:

The Sacred Day of
Kali, the Dark Lady

On this day, Gypsies from all over Europe gather in Provence for the sacred day of St. Sarah, also known as Kali.

Various representations of Kali exist; there is a novel about the ways men have pictured her:

The above is one of the best descriptions of Kali I know of in literature; another is in a short story by Fritz Leiber, “Damnation Morning.”   It is not coincidental that one collection of Leiber’s writings is called “Dark Ladies.”

My journal note “Biblical Proportions” was in part inspired by Leiber.

Frank Sinatra may have pictured her as Ava Gardner.  I think I saw her the night Sinatra died… hence my entries of March 31 and April 2, 2003. 

It is perhaps not irrelevant that Kali is, among other things, a mother goddess, and that my entry “Raiders of the Lost Matrix” of May 20 deals with this concept and with the number 24.

The above religious symbol (see “Damnation Morning“) pictures both the axes of symmetry of the square¹ and a pattern with intriguing combinatorial properties².  It also is the basis of a puzzle³ I purchased on August 29, 1997 — Judgment Day in Terminator 2.  Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor in that film is an excellent representation of the Dark Lady, both as mother figure and as Death Goddess.

 
Sarah Connor

Background music: “Bit by bit…” — Stephen Sondheim… See Sondheim and the Judgment Day puzzle in my entry of May 20. The Lottery Covenant.

¹ A. W. Joshi, Elements of Group Theory for Physicists, Third Edition, Wiley, 1982, p. 5

² V. K. Balakrishnan, Combinatorics, McGraw-Hill, 1995, p. 180

³ The Izzi Puzzle

Mental Health Month, Day 23:

The Prime Cut Gospel

On Christmas Day, 1949,
Mary Elizabeth Spacek was born in Texas.

Lee Marvin, Sissy Spacek in “Prime Cut”

Exercises for Mental Health Month:

Read this discussion of the phrase, suggested by Spacek’s date of birth, “God’s gift to men.”

Read this discussion of the phrase “the same yesterday, today, and forever,” suggested by the previous reading.

Read the more interesting of these discussions of the phrase “the eternal in the temporal.”

Read this discussion of eternal, or “necessary,” truths versus other sorts of alleged “truths.”

Read this discussion of unimportant mathematical properties of the prime number 23.

Read these discussions of important properties of 23:

• R. D. Carmichael’s 1937 discussion of the linear fractional group modulo 23 in 

Introduction to the Theory of Groups of Finite Order, Ginn, Boston, 1937 (reprinted by Dover in 1956), final chapter, “Tactical Configurations,” and

• Conway’s 1969 discussion of the same group in    

J. H. Conway, “Three Lectures on Exceptional Groups,” pp. 215-247 in Finite Simple Groups (Oxford, 1969), edited by M. B. Powell and G. Higman, Academic Press, London, 1971….. Reprinted as Ch. 10 in Sphere Packings, Lattices, and Groups 

Read this discussion of what might be called “contingent,” or “literary,” properties of the number 23. 

Read also the more interesting of  these discussions of the phrase “the 23 enigma.”

Having thus acquired some familiarity with both contingent and necessary properties of 23…

Read this discussion of Aquinas’s third proof of the existence of God.

Note that the classic Spacek film “Prime Cut” was released in 1972, the year that Spacek turned 23:

Götterdämmerung

As our celebration of Wagner’s May 22 birthday draws to a close, let us recall that on this date in 1966 the Beatles released “Paperback Writer” in the US.   Perhaps our most notable paperback writer is now Stephen King; in honor of a recurring theme in his Hearts in Atlantis, our site music today is “Twilight Time.”

Seek and Ye Shall Find:

On the Mystical Properties
of the Number 162

On this date in history:

May 22, 1942:  Unabomber Theodore John Kaczynski is born in the Chicago suburb of Evergreen Park, Ill., to Wanda Kaczynski and her husband Theodore R. Kaczynski, a sausage maker. His mother brings him up reading Scientific American.

From the June 2003 Scientific American:

“Seek and ye shall find.” – Michael Shermer

Here is a connection to runes:

Mayer, R.M., “Runenstudien,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 21 (1896): pp. 162 – 184.

Here is a connection to Athenian bastions from a UN article on Communist educational theorist Dimitri Glinos:

“Educational problems cannot be scientifically solved by theory and reason alone….” (D. Glinos (1882-1943), Dead but not Buried, Athens, Athina, 1925, p. 162)

“Schools are…. not the first but the last bastion to be taken by… reform….”

“…the University of Athens, a bastion of conservatism and counter-reform….”

I offer the above with tongue in cheek as a demonstration that mystical numerology may have a certain heuristic value overlooked by fanatics of the religion of Scientism such as Shermer.

For a more serious discussion of runes at the Acropolis, see the photo on page 16 of the May 15, 2003, New York Review of Books, illustrating the article “Athens in Wartime,” by Brady Kiesling.

The 401 Club: Commentary on
yesterday’s “The Lottery Covenant”
and Monday’s “A Mighty Wind”

 “There are dark comedies. There are screwball comedies. But there aren’t many dark screwball comedies. And if Nora Ephron’s Lucky Numbers is any indication, there’s a good reason for that.”
— Todd Anthony, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

See also the dark screwball comedy starring Pat Robertson and Michael Eisner,

Bizarre Marriage.
  

Mental Health Month:
The Lottery Covenant

Here are the evening lottery numbers for Pennsylvania, the Keystone state, drawn on Monday, May 19, 2003:

401 and 1993.

This, by the sort of logic beloved of theologians, suggests we find out the significance of the divine date 4/01/1993.

It turns out that April 1, 1993, was the date of the New York opening of the Stephen Sondheim retrospective “Putting It Together.”

For material related to puzzles, games, Sondheim, and Mental Health Month, see

Notes on
Literary and Philosophical Puzzles. 

The figures below illustrate some recurrent themes in these notes.

“Not games. Puzzles. Big difference. That’s a whole other matter. All art — symphonies, architecture, novels — it’s all puzzles. The fitting together of notes, the fitting together of words have by their very nature a puzzle aspect. It’s the creation of form out of chaos. And I believe in form.”

— Stephen Sondheim, in Stephen Schiff,
    “Deconstructing Sondheim,” 
    The New Yorker, March 8, 1993, p. 76
 

Raiders of the Lost Matrix

“In general, a matrix… is something that provides support or structure, especially in the sense of surrounding and/or shaping. It comes from the Latin word for ‘womb,’ itself derived from the Latin word for ‘mother,’ which is mater [as in alma mater].” — Wikipedia

For a mystical interpretation of the above matrix as it relates to the Hebrew words at the center of the official Yale seal, see Talmud. 

DAY OF THE MOTHER SHIP
Part II: A Mighty Wind

I just saw the John Travolta film “Phenomenon” for the first time.  (It was on the ABC Family Channel from 8 to 11.)

Why is it that tellers of uplifting stories (like Zenna Henderson, in “Day of the Mother Ship, Part I,” or the authors of “Phenomenon” or the Bible) always feel they have to throw in some cockamamie and obviously false miracles to hold people’s attention?

On May 11 (Mother’s Day), Mother Nature got my attention with a mighty wind waving the branches of nearby trees, just before a tornado watch was issued for the area I was in.  This made me recall a Biblical reference I had come across in researching references to “Our Lady of the Woods” for my Beltane (May 1) entry. 

Isaiah 7:2

…And his heart was moved, and the heart of his people, as the trees of the wood are moved with the wind.

This is what I thought of on May 11 watching branches swaying in the wind on Mother’s Day — which some might regard as a festival of Our Lady of the Woods.  John Travolta in “Phenomenon” sees a very similar scene partway through the picture; then, at the end, explains to his girlfriend how the swaying branches made him feel — without mentioning the branches — by asking her to describe how she would cradle and rock a child in her arms.  At the very end of the film, she herself is reminded of his question by the swaying branches of another tree.

Events like these are miracle enough for me.

Phaedrus Lives!

Fans of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance may recall that it is a sort of elegy for an earlier self named Phaedrus who vanished with the recovery of mental health.  Since this is Mental Health Month, the following observations seem relevant.

Reading another weblog’s comments today, I found the following remark:

“…the mind is an amazing thing and it can create patterns and interconnections among things all day it you let it, regardless of whether they are real connections.”
 – sejanus

This, of course, prompted me to look for patterns and interconnections.   The first thing I thought of was the fictional mathematician in “A Beautiful Mind” establishing an amazing — and, within the fiction, real — connection between the pattern on a colleague’s tie and the reflections from a glass.  A web search led to a really real connection…. i.e., to a lengthy listserver letter from an author named Christopher Locke, whose work is new to me but also strangely familiar…. I recognize in his writing both some of my own less-than-mentally-healthy preoccupations and also what might be called the spirit of Phaedrus, from Zen and the Art.

Here is a link to a cache I made of the Locke letter and a follow-up he wrote detailing his sources:

Christopher Locke as Phaedrus

One part of Locke’s letter seems particularly relevant in light of yesterday’s entries related to the death of June Carter Cash:

“Will the circle be unbroken?
  As if some southern congregation
  is praying we will come to understand.”

                            Amen.

Concluding Unscientific Postscript

from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (“Q”), quoting Socrates’s remarks to the original Phaedrus:

‘By Hera,’ says Socrates, ‘a fair resting-place, full of summer sounds and scents! This clearing, with the agnus castus in high bloom and fragrant, and the stream beneath the tree so gratefully cool to our feet! Judging from the ornaments and statues, I think this spot must be sacred to Acheloüs and the Nymphs. 

This quotation illustrates a connection between Jesus (College) — from my entry of 3:33 PM Thursday — and a Nymph — from my entry of 11:44 PM Friday.  See, too, Q’s quoting of Socrates’s prayer to Pan, as well as the cover of the May 19, 2003, New Yorker:

For a discussion of the music
that Pan is playing (today’s site music),
see my entry of Sept. 10, 2002,
“The Sound of Hanging Rock.”

Highballs

“If you can bounce high,
bounce for her too….”
 – F. Scott Fitzgerald, epigraph to
The Great Gatsby

Magazine purchased at
newsstand May 14, 2003:

A Whiff of Camelot
as ‘West Wing’
Ends an Era

– New York Times,
 May 14, 2003

Song title from the
June Carter Cash album “Press On“:

“Gatsby’s Restaurant”

From The Great Gatsby, Chapter Four:

“Highballs?” asked the head waiter.
“This is a nice restaurant here,”
said Mr. Wolfsheim, looking at the
Presbyterian nymphs on the ceiling.

Presbyterian Nymph:

Mimi Beardsley, JFK playmate,
in the news on May 15, 2003 

On JFK’s plane trips:
“Whenever the President traveled,
members of the press staff traveled as well.
You always have a press secretary
and a couple of girls traveling….
 Mimi, who obviously couldn’t perform
 any function at all, made all the trips!”

Apparently there was some function….

“Don’t forget the coffee!”
– Punchline from the film
  “Good Will Hunting.”

Enough

Commentary on the May 15 death of
June Carter Cash, which I learned of
at the New York Times site
at about 2:10 AM today:

Jesus College

In light of yesterday's Jesus College entry
("The Only Pretty Ring Time," May 15),
the following song lyrics seem relevant.

While walking out one evening
                 not knowing where to go
Just to pass the time away      
                 before we held our show
 I heard a little mission band     
             playing with all their might
I gave my soul to Jesus           
             and left the show that night.

The day will soon be over         
                  and evening will begun;
No more gems to be gathered  
                     so let us all press on.
When Jesus comes to claim us  
                    and says it is enough
 The diamonds will be shining,    
                   no longer in the rough.

Birthday Present

Today is the birthday of Emile Mathieu.
Here is a present.

Well Done

“So tell me about the matrix reloaded… and what it’s like to finish a job well done.”

— Weblog entry by Harvard student, May 15, 2003

The matrix reloaded: 

See chapter VII, “Composition,” in Chinese Calligraphy: An Introduction to Its Aesthetic and Technique, by Chiang Yee, Harvard University Press, first published April 21st, 1938.

A job well done:

“The Best is Yet to Come”
— Epitaph of Francis Albert Sinatra

Cubist Catechism

For the birthday of Georges Braque

From A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle:

“Now we will tesser, we will wrinkle again. Do you understand?”

“No,” Meg said flatly….

“Oh, dear,” Meg sighed. “I guess I am a moron. I just don’t get it.”

“That is because you think of space only in three dimensions,” Mrs. Whatsit told her….

Meg sighed. “Just explain it to me.”

“Okay,” Charles said. “What is the first dimension?”

“Well — a line.”

“Okay. And the second dimension?”

“Well, you’d square the line. A flat square would be in the second dimension.”

“And the third?”

“Well, you’d square the second dimension. Then the square wouldn’t be flat any more. It would have a bottom, and sides, and a top.”

“And the fourth?”

“Well, I guess if you want to put it into mathematical terms you’d square the square. But you can’t take a pencil and draw it the way you can the first three.”

Braque

Operation Playmate:

11:01 AM

On this date in 1938, Louis Armstrong and his orchestra recorded “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

On this date in 1961, Saint Gary Cooper died.

From my Jan. 2, 2003, entry:

Faces of the Twentieth Century:
The Harvest Continues

“I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens
    to glean our Saviour;
And, éyes, héart, what looks, what lips
    yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer,
    of rounder replies?”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins,
   “Hurrahing in Harvest”

“Cowboy, take me away.
Fly this girl as high as you can
into the wild blue.”

— The Dixie Chicks

From my March 31, 2003, entry:

“During the Gulf War, Playboy magazine’s celebrated Centerfolds reached out to U.S. military men and women… with their ‘Operation Playmate’ project….

Now, in light of the war in Iraq, ‘Operation Playmate’ has returned.”

Entertainment Weekly, May 2, 2003:

Perhaps, in heaven, Dixie Chick Natalie “Mattress Dancing” Maines will provide terpsichorean instruction. 

Etymology: Latin Terpsichor,
from Greek Terpsikhor,
from feminine of terpsikhoros,
dance-loving : terpein, to delight
+ khoros, dance.

See, too, my entry for Beltane (May 1), the day that death claimed the 13th Episcopal bishop of New York City.

All of these events are not without interest, but it is not easy to fit them into one coherent story, as Robert Penn Warren once requested:

“The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.”

It is perhaps relevant that, as T. S. Eliot well knew, there can be no dance except in time, and that the time of my May 1 entry is 5:13, today’s date in another guise.  To paraphrase an Eliot line, 

“Hurry up please, it’s 5/13.”

The Tony Nominations

Dannie Abse quoting Robert Penn Warren:

“The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.”

 Dannie Abse

Abse deserves a Tony Smith award¹ for his play Pythagoras.

Frank Rich on Bush’s Top Gun speech:

“Only hours before President Bush’s prime-time speech came news of what Variety headlined on Page 1 as ‘Regime Change’ in Hollywood — the departure of the [West Wing] creator, the writer Aaron Sorkin.”

 George W. Bush

President Bush deserves a Tony Smith award² for his performance aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln.

 Madeleine L’Engle on the religion of Cubism:

“There is such a thing as a tesseract.”

 Madeleine L’Engle

L’Engle, former librarian at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, deserves a Tony Smith award³ for insisting on the existence of the tesseract, or 4-dimensional cube, as an object of conceptual art.

L’Engle is perhaps the best defender of the religious, or “story,” theory of truth, as opposed to the “diamond” theory of truth. (See my earlier May 12 entry, “Death and Truth,” which deals with the bishop of L’Engle’s cathedral.)

¹ See Tony Smith on mathematics.

² See Tony Smith on foreign policy.

³ See Tony Smith on conceptual art.

Epiphany 1941:
Why We Fought

Hepburn is 96 today.

Death and Truth

Material related to my May 9, 2003, notes:

1. Pilate, Truth, and Friday the Thirteenth
2. The Diamond Theory of Truth
3. Understanding

Day of the Mother Ship:

A Close Encounter of the Third Level

• Level 1:  Religions in General —
  adherents.com
  • Level 2: Religions in Literature —
    adherents.com/lit/
    • Level 3: Zenna and Her People —
      adherents.com/lit/bk_Zenna.html
      Scroll down about 3/4 of this page to find… Moi!

Today is also the feast day of Saint Zenna Henderson, who was born on All Saints’ Day, 1917.   The Adherents.com website says she was a Mormon, but the printed reference work Contemporary Authors (written when she was still alive and could defend herself against any accusation of Mormonism) says she was a Methodist.  Maybe she was just one of The People — i.e., a Person.

“The concept of a person, which we find so familiar in its application to human beings, cannot be clearly and sharply expressed by any word in the vocabulary of Plato and Aristotle; it was wrought with the hammer and anvil* of theological disputes about the Trinity and the Person of Christ.”

— Peter Geach, The Virtues, Cambridge U. Press, 1977, p. 75

See also Terpsichore and the Trinity.

* For a use of this phrase suited to Mental Health Month, see The Prisoner, Episode Ten.  See, too, Inaugural Address.

ART WARS:
Invitation to the Dance

While checking the claim of art historian Anna Chave that “the veil is an age-old metaphor used from Plato through Hegel and Heidegger for the concept of truth as aletheia or unveiling,”  I came across the following essay:

“Taking the Veil,” by Jessica Kardon.

Kardon writes very well.  A related essay I particularly like is

“Invitation to the Dance.”

Today’s entry on Kardon is part of my “ART WARS” series of journal notes.  This title began partly as a joke, but it seems rather appropriate in light of Anna Chave’s claim that minimalism in the 1960’s was part of the “rhetoric of power.”  See my later entry today on Tony Smith at the National Gallery.

If we are in a war of art,

the essays of Jessica Kardon

are a powerful weapon.

ART WARS:

The following flashback to March 2002 seems a suitable entry for May, which is Mental Health Month.

From On Certainty, by Ludwig Wittgenstein (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1969):

#508: What can I rely on?
#509: I really want to say that a language game is only possible if one trusts something. (I did not say “can trust something”).
— Quoted by Hilary Putnam in Renewing Philosophy, Chapter 8 (Harvard University Press, 1992)

An Arab on Deconstruction

From “Deconstructing Postmodernism,” by Ziauddin Sardar, at the website “The Free Arab Voice”:

Doubt, the perpetual and perennial condition of postmodernism, is best described by the motto of the cult television series The X-files: ‘Trust no One’….

Deconstruction – the methodology of discursive analysis – is the norm of postmodernism. Everything has to be deconstructed. But once deconstruction has reached its natural conclusion, we are left with a grand void: there is nothing, but nothing, that can remotely provide us with meaning, with a sense of direction, with a scale to distinguish good from evil.

Those who, having reviewed a thousand years of lies by Jews, Arabs, and Christians, are sick of language games, and who are also offended by the recent skillful deconstruction of the World Trade Center, may find some religious solace in the philosophy of Zen.

Though truth may be very hard to find in the pages of most books, the page numbers are generally reliable. This leads to the following Zen meditations.

From a review of the film “The Terminator”:

Some like to see Sarah as a sort of Mother of God, and her son as the saviour in a holy context. John Connor, J.C. , but these initials are also those of the director, so make up your own mind.
— http://www.geocities.com/
   hackettweb2/terminator.html

From a journal note on religion, science, and the meaning of life written in 1998 on the day after Sinatra died and the Pennsylvania lottery number came up “256”:

“What is 256 about?”
— S. H. Cullinane

From Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun (Ballantine paperback, 1993) —
John Connor (aka J. C.) offers the following metaphysical comment on the page number that appears above his words (256):

“It seems to be.”
“Is your investigation finished?”
“For all practical purposes, yes,” Connor said.

Connor is correct. The number 256 does indeed seem to be, and indeed it seemed to be again only yesterday evening, when the Pennsylvania lottery again made a metaphysical statement.

Our Zen meditation on the trustworthiness of page numbers concludes with another passage from Rising Sun, this time on page 373:

Connor sighed.
“The clock isn’t moving.”

Here J. C. offers another trenchant comment on his current page number.

The metaphysical significance of 373, “the eternal in the temporal,” is also discussed in the Buddhist classic A Flag for Sunrise, by Robert Stone (Knopf hardcover, 1981)… on, of course, page 373.

Rhymes with Puck

Readings for May Day, also known as Beltane.

  I. The Playboy of the Western World

• Operation Playmate
• Puck Fair
• Playboy Magazine, June 2003:
  See cover headline at top left.

 II.  Beltane

• St. Mary-of-the-Woods
• Our Lady of the Woods, Los Alamos
• Our Lady of the Woods, Bellarmine U.

III.  A is for Art

• Wrestling Pablo Picasso
• Terpsichore’s Birthday
• Bell/Taine (see below)

Bell/Taine

In 1993, The Mathematical Association of America published Constance Reid’s

THE SEARCH FOR E. T. BELL
also known as John Taine.

This is a biography of Eric Temple Bell, a mathematician and writer on mathematics, who also wrote fiction under the name John Taine.

On page 194, Reid records a question Bell’s son asked as a child.  Passing a church and seeing a cross on the steeple, he inquired, “Why is the plus up there?”

For an answer that makes some sort of sense

• in the context of Part II above, and
• in the context of last month’s “Math Awareness Month” theme, mathematics and art,

consider the phrase “A is for Art,” so aptly illustrated by Olivia Newton-John in “Wrestling Pablo Picasso,”  then examine the photograph of ballerina Margaret “Puck” Petit on page 195 of Reid’s book.  Puck, as the mother of Leslie Caron (see Terpsichore’s Birthday), clearly deserves an A⁺.