Log24

Meditation for St. Peter’s Day

“Religious activists fool themselves if they believe public displays of the Ten Commandments reflect a more moral and less corrupt nation. One needs only to watch television to discern the level of our depravity.”

— Cal Thomas, June 28, 2005

For further details, see

Into the Dark

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant
….
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of
    darkness on darkness….

— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“I’m well past eighty now and fairly certain I won’t see ninety but I’d like more of a choice than Hell or Paradise when I leave. Now that we know the Bible was created by a vote of Emperor Constantine’s clergy, wouldn’t we all be better off if other options were offered? Or is the fear of what happens after death the glue that holds Religion together? I hope not because I believe better of God.

As a Deist, I have no fear or doubts of the way that life ends. I can bravely face the reality of ceasing to exist because the God of my heart comforts me by promising to provide a dark, starless night of nothingness when my visit is over.”

— Paul Winchell (pdf) (See previous entry.)

Paul Winchell was born at the winter solstice — the longest night — December 21, 1922.

For another view of the longest night, see the five Log24 entries ending on the day after the longest night of 2003.   Summary of those entries:

“My God, it’s full of stars!”

Cross-Referenced

From today’s New York Times,
a review of a Werner Herzog film,
“Wheel of Time,” that opens
today in Manhattan:

These images suggest
a Google search on the phrase
“crucified on the wheel of time,”

DARK CITY (1998) Crucified on the Wheel Of Time. A visual feast.

From Dark City: A Hollywood Jesus Movie Review —

“There is something mesmerizing about this important film. It flows in the same vein as The Truman Show, The Game, and Pleasantville.  Something isn’t real with the world around John Murdoch. Some group is trying to control things and it isn’t God.”

Amen.

Related material:
Skewed Mirrors and
The Graces of Paranoia

Darkness at Noon

I stood out in the open cold
To see the essence of the eclipse
Which was its perfect darkness.

I stood in the cold on the porch
And could not think of anything so perfect
As man’s hope of light in the face of darkness.

— Richard Eberhart,
“The Eclipse”

See also March 11.

ART WARS:
Dark City

Jennifer Connelly at
premiere of “Cinderella Man” —

In memory of Martin Buber,
author of Good and Evil,
who died on June 13, 1965:

“With a little effort, anything can be
shown to connect with anything else:
existence is infinitely cross-referenced.”

— Opening sentence of
Martha Cooley’s The Archivist

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness Isaiah 5:20

As she spoke about the Trees of Life and Death, I watched her….  The Archivist

The world has gone mad today And good’s bad today, And black’s white today, And day’s night today Cole Porter

Jennifer Connelly in “Dark City”

(from journal note of June 19, 2002) —

And, one might add for Flag Day,
“you sons of bitches.”

STAR WARS
continued 

Picture from Feb. 8
(Martin Buber’s birthday)

For John Nash on his birthday:

I know more than Apollo,
For oft when he lies sleeping
I see the stars at mortal wars
In the wounded welkin weeping.

— Tom O’Bedlam’s Song

Birthday Links

Today’s birthdays:
Gene Wilder and Adrienne Barbeau.

For Gene:
A discussion of Frankenstein as
The Modern Prometheus at
Mathematics and Narrative.

For Adrienne:
Chinese Arithmetic.

The Last Word

Beethoven Week on the BBC ended at midnight June 10.

“With Beethoven, music did not grow up, it regressed to adolescence. He was a hooligan who could reduce Schiller’s Ode to Joy to madness, bloodlust, and megalomania.”

— Arts and Letters Daily, lead-in to an opinion piece in The Guardian of Tuesday, June 7, 2005:

Beethoven Was a Narcissistic Hooligan “If Beethoven had dedicated his obvious talents to serving the noble Pythagorean view of music, he might well have gone on to compose music even greater than that of Mozart. You can hear this potential in his early string quartets, where the movements often have neat conclusions and there is a playfulness reminiscent of Mozart or Haydn. If only Beethoven had nourished these tender shoots instead of the darker elements that one can also hear. For the darkness is already evident in the early quartets too, in their sombre harmonies and sudden key changes. As it was, however, his darker side won out; compare, for example, the late string quartets. Here the youthful humour has completely vanished; the occasional signs of optimism quickly die out moments after they appear and the movements sometimes end in uncomfortably inconclusive cadences…. In A Clockwork Orange it is the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that echoes in the mind of Alex whenever he indulges in one of his orgies of violence. Alex’s reaction may be rather extreme, but he is responding to something that is already there in this dark and frenzied setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy; the joy it invites one to feel is the joy of madness, bloodlust and megalomania. It is glorious music, and seductive, but the passions it stirs up are dark and menacing.” — Dylan Evans, former Lacanian psychotherapist (pdf) and now head of the undergraduate robotics program at the University of the West of England.

Speak for yourself, Dylan.

“Evil did not have the last word.”

—  Richard John Neuhaus, April 4, 2005

Evil may have had the last word in Tuesday’s Guardian, but now that Beethoven Week has ended, it seems time for another word.

For another view of Beethoven, in particular the late quartets, see the Log24 Beethoven’s Birthday entry of December 16, 2002:

See also the previous entry.
 

Test

This entry is in memory of Howard Eavenson Boyer, Jr., who, today’s New York Times informs us, was born in Philadelphia on Oct. 26, 1943, and in his youth studied the 17th-century metaphysical poets.

Later in life, Boyer worked for Harvard University Press, where he edited science books, including Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (1988), by Hans Moravec.

Boyer died at 61 on May 4, 2005.

From Log24.net on Sept. 9, 2003,

Reply to Lucifer:

January 9, 1989, is the date of The New Yorker’s review of Hans Moravec’s Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Harvard University Press).

Brad Leithauser, reviewing Mind Children, says that if Moravec “is correct in supposing that human minds will be transferred into or otherwise fused with machines, it seems likely that traditional religious questions — and traditional religions themselves — will either melt away or suffer wholesale metamorphosis. Debates about Heaven or Hell — to take but one example — would hold little relevance for an immortal creature.”

Au contraire.  Immortal creatures– such as, according to Christianity, human beings– are the only creatures for whom such debates hold relevance.

For an example of such a debate, see

The Contrasting Worldviews of
Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis,

by Harvard psychiatrist Armand Nicholi.

For more on Nicholi, see my entry
of August 19, 2003,

Intelligence Test.

From Andrew Cusack’s weblog:

April 21, 2005

‘For Christ and Liberty’

Though [it is] a purely Protestant institution (literally), I am rather fond of Patrick Henry College. Indeed, it takes some courage in this day and age to only admit students willing to sign a ten-point profession of Protestant Reformed faith. They also happen to have an old-fashioned ball featuring ‘English country dancing, delicacies such as cream puffs and truffles and leisurely strolls about the scenic grounds of the historic Selma Plantation’.

Anyhow, the college, whose motto is ‘For Christ and Liberty’, was visited [by] Anthony Esolen, a contributing editor to Touchstone magazine, who makes these comments:

Many of the points Esolen commends are things I hope will be found in the colleges of my university when I get around to starting it. I particularly admire that Patrick Henry College’s young men and women are just that, according to Esolen. This is all too often hard to achieve in modern American higher education, where students are quite often just elderly adolescents. (Though I suspect this has more to do with parents and family than education).

The absurdist drinking age that the Federal government underhandedly coerced each state into passing hinders maturity as well. Indeed, when I start the first college or colleges of the university I’m planning, each will have a private college bar which will serve anyone over the age of 16 or so. (Probably at the barman or barmaid’s discretion). Civil disobedience is the only solution.

Though the graduates Patrick Henry College provides will be Protestant (at least at the time of their graduation), I have no doubt that they will act as leaven to raise up the social and political life of our United States. I’m not particularly fond that they proudly advertise their commendation as “One of America’s Top Ten Conservative Colleges”. I’m not of the view that colleges ought to be ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal’ per se. They ought to be seen more as communities of inquisitive, curious, intelligent people united in the quest for truth. Labels like ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ are far too narrow and allow the simple-minded to pidgeon-hole things which are too complex for such monikers.

But anyhow, cheers for Patrick Henry College.

“Myths have no life of their own. They wait for us to give them flesh.”

— Albert Camus, Prometheus in the Underworld

“Prometheus — One of the Titans of Greek myth, famous as a benefactor of man”

— Log24 yesterday, 9:39 PM

The New York Times on today’s maiden speech of the new prime minister of France:

“PARIS, June 8 —  … In replying to his critics, Mr. De Villepin quoted from Albert Camus’s description of Prometheus, saying, ‘He is harder than his rock and more patient than his vulture.'”

“In Praise of Those Who Stole the Fire, M. de Villepin’s grandest literary effort to date…. will enhance his reputation within a small Paris set, but not in Washington, where he is already regarded as too clever by half.”

— Philip Delves Broughton,
    “De Villepin bares soul
     as France’s politician poet,”
    The Telegraph, May 23, 2003

The Titan Prometheus was “‘… chained to Mount Caucasus where an eagle preyed on his liver’ (Bullfinch [sic] 939).”  The study guide does not say whether 939 is a page number or paragraph number, nor does it name which edition of Bulfinch’s Mythology is meant.

“Prometheus —  One of the Titans of Greek myth, famous as a benefactor of man. Zeus had him make men out of mud and water; however, pitying mankind, he stole fire from heaven and gave it to them. As punishment, Zeus chained him to Mount Caucasus where an eagle preyed on his liver all day, the liver being renewed at night. Hercules eventually released him and killed the eagle. Zeus sent Pandora to Earth with her box of evils to balance the gift of fire.”

It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times.

One Bound “With one bound, the Prime Minister is free.” — Times of London,     June 7, 2005

Inaugural

Order and Disorder

From “Connoisseur of Chaos,”
by Wallace Stevens, in
Parts of a World, 1942:

I

A.  A violent order is a disorder; and
B.  A great disorder is an order.
    These Two things are one. (Pages of illustrations.)               

IV  

A.  Well, an old order is a violent one. This proves nothing.
    Just one more truth, one more
    Element in the immense disorder of truths.

B.  It is April as I write. The wind
    Is blowing after days of constant rain.
    All this, of course, will come to summer soon.
    But suppose the disorder of truths should ever come
    To an order, most Plantagenet, most fixed. . . .
    A great disorder is an order.
    Now, A And B are not like statuary, posed
    For a vista in the Louvre. They are things chalked
    On the sidewalk so that the pensive man may see.

V

    The pensive man . . . He sees that eagle float
    For which the intricate Alps are a single nest.

Related material:

Skewed Mirrors,
Sept. 14, 2003

“Evil did not  have the last word.”
— Richard John Neuhaus, April 4, 2005

Mot Juste?

From today’s New York Times, on the effort of Paris to be chosen as the host of the 2012 Olympics:

“‘To have the games would bring a little fun, as you say, a breath of fresh air,’ said Benoît Génuini, president of the French operation of Accenture, a global consulting company, on a balcony of the Louvre last week during an event to highlight the city’s cultural attractions as an Olympic host. He remarked that the country was morose and that the city itself had become a sort of museum. ‘The games would put Paris back in the saddle and lead it into the 21st century,’ he said, ‘get it out of its stupor.'”

Attributed to Dominique de Villepin, the new Prime Minister of France: words about his book on poetry–

“It tries to penetrate the heart of the poetic ferment, this secret place where words are made and unmade, where language is fashioned.”

Villepin (l.) with President Chirac