Log24

Memorial of
St. Thomas Aquinas:

Joyce and Aquinas,
by William T. Noon, S. J.

St. Thomas Aquinas,
by G. K. Chesterton

Log24, Epiphany 2006

Mozart, 2006

Mozart, 1935

Poet, be seated at the piano.
Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo,
Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic,
Its envious cachinnation.

If they throw stones upon the roof
While you practice arpeggios,
It is because they carry down the stairs
A body in rags.
Be seated at the piano.

That lucid souvenir of the past,
The divertimento;
That airy dream of the future,
The unclouded concerto . . .
The snow is falling.
Strike the piercing chord.

Be thou the voice,
Not you. Be thou, be thou
The voice of angry fear,
The voice of this besieging pain.

Be thou that wintry sound
As of the great wind howling,
By which sorrow is released,
Dismissed, absolved
In a starry placating.

We may return to Mozart.
He was young, and we, we are old.
The snow is falling
And the streets are full of cries.
Be seated, thou.

— Wallace Stevens, Ideas of Order (1936)

From the center:

“‘Mozart, 1935’ immediately discloses a will to counter complaints of pure poetry, to refute that charge heard regularly from Stevens’s critics, to find ‘his particular celebration out of tune today’ on his own if necessary; and, in short, to meet the communist [poet and critic Willard] Maas’s ‘respect for his magnificent rhetoric’ at least halfway across from right to left.”

— Alan Filreis, Modernism from Right to Left: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, and Literary Radicalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 211

From the left:

Norman Lebrecht on this year’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth (January 27, 1756):

   “… Mozart, it is safe to say, failed to take music one step forward….
   … Mozart merely filled the space between staves with chords that he knew would gratify a pampered audience. He was a provider of easy listening, a progenitor of Muzak….
   …  He lacked the rage of justice that pushed Beethoven into isolation, or any urge to change the world. Mozart wrote a little night music for the ancien regime. He was not so much reactionary as regressive….
   … Little in such a mediocre life gives cause for celebration….
   … The bandwaggon of Mozart commemorations was invented by the Nazis in 1941….
   …  In this orgy of simple-mindedness, the concurrent centenary of Dmitri Shostakovich– a composer of true courage and historical significance– is being shunted to the sidelines, celebrated by the few.
    Mozart is a menace to musical progress, a relic of rituals that were losing relevance in his own time and are meaningless to ours. Beyond a superficial beauty and structural certainty, Mozart has nothing to give to mind or spirit in the 21st century. Let him rest. Ignore the commercial onslaught. Play the Leningrad Symphony. Listen to music that matters.”
     
The left seems little changed since 1935.

Natural Hustler (jpg, 283 KB)

Jews on Fiction

See Tony Kushner and E.L. Doctorow in today’s New York Times, Rebecca Goldstein’s talk from last summer’s Mykonos conference on mathematics and narrative, and Martin Buber on the Bible.

                     VERA JOHNSON
              I'm not sure I understand, Professor
              Franklin -- you wrote your doctoral
              thesis on my husband?
                            TOMMY
              He was a great man, Mrs. Johnson.
              He did so much for my people.
                     VERA JOHNSON
              He... did?
                            TOMMY
              Oh, yes. I'll never forget when he
              said 'Welfare is a drug -- and you  
              gotta kick it cold turkey.' It
              was... inspirational.
                     VERA JOHNSON
              Really... well, I'm sure...
                            TOMMY
              And I was actually in the audience
              when he said, 'If you people would
              just get off your dead asses and
              look for work, this country might
              be fit to live in again.' Powerful
              stuff.
                      VERA JOHNSON
              It's very kind of you to say so.
              And you're very kind to come all
              the way from... where was it?                                                      
                            TOMMY
              Wilson Pickett State Teachers College.
              But I didn't just come to pay
              respects, ma'am. I came because
              your husband deserves an archive.
              A place where scholars can study
              his legacy. A storehouse for the
              record of his remarkable career.
                       VERA JOHNSON
              I see.   So you want... his papers?
                            TOMMY
              Oh, not just his papers, Mrs.
              Johnson. Everything. Buttons,
              posters, bumper stickers. All the
              paraphernalia of his campaigns --
              proof of his political genius. Now
              I realize that you may have a
              sentimental attachment to a few
              items...
                      VERA JOHNSON
              Take 'em. 

“Wallace Stevens’s remarkable oeuvre is a quasi-spiritual quest for the supreme fiction, for a poetry that ‘must take the place / Of empty heaven and its hymns’ and thus help modern man find meaning in a godless world. The poet’s role, for Stevens, is that of high priest of the imagination: it is the poet who ‘gives to life the supreme fictions without which we are unable to conceive of it.’ ….
… Stevens’s hallmark ‘imagination-reality’ complex… is pursued almost obsessively in his poetry and prose of the 1940s. Parts of a World, published in 1942, and the poem-sequence of the same year, ‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction’ (‘Notes’ was subsequently collected in Transport to Summer in 1947), comprise a prolonged meditation in a time of war on poetry and the poet’s role, in the face of what Stevens, in his essay ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,’ terms ‘the pressure of reality.’ Parts of a World is riven by its competing vocabularies. A discourse of desire, of process, of the poet’s contemplation of the mind in the act of finding what will suffice, is elaborated in ‘the never-resting mind’ of ‘The Poems of Our Climate’ and in ‘The Well Dressed Man with a Beard,’ in which ‘It can never be satisfied, the mind, never’ [occurs]. A very different idiom, that of the ‘hero’ or ‘major man,’ the figure of capable imagination, dominates and directs such poems as ‘Mrs Alfred Uruguay,’ ‘Asides on the Oboe’ and ‘Examination of the Hero in a Time of War,’ where

    Summer, jangling
         the savagest diamonds and
    Dressed in its
         azure-doubled crimsons,
    May truly bear
         its heroic fortunes
    For the large,
         the solitary figure.”

— Lee M. Jenkins,
    University College Cork,
   “Wallace Stevens,”
    The Literary Encyclopedia,
    9 Dec., 2004.

For some related serious, but less solemn, remarks, click on the above date.

Mathematics and Narrative

Rebecca Goldstein, Mathematics and the Character of Tragedy:

“It was Plato who best expressed– who veritably embodied– the tension between the narrative arts and mathematics.”

Veritably.

Beyond the Fire

“Who Needs a White Cube These Days?”
— Headline in today’s New York Times

“That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire…“
— Poem title, Gerard Manley Hopkins
 
                                           “… Sleep realized
Was the whiteness that is the ultimate intellect,
A diamond jubilance beyond the fire,

— Wallace Stevens,
   “The Owl in the Sarcophagus” III 13-16,
    from The Auroras of Autumn, 1950

Related material:
The five entries ending on Christmas, 2005.

An anonymous commenter’s answer: “The title character announces the coming of the end, suffers mockery and condemnation, and ends up saving the world through his actions.”

(The “real” answer: “The music for each was composed by John Debney.”)

For Stephen Hawking’s Birthday

Epigraphs to the classic novel Cosmic Banditos:

God does not play dice with the universe. –Albert Einstein

Not only does God play dice with the universe, but sometimes he throws them where they cannot be seen. –Stephen Hawking

Today’s Pennsylvania Lottery numbers:

“The Transfiguration of Christ is the culminating point of His public life…. Jesus took with him Peter and James and John and led them to a high mountain apart, where He was transfigured before their ravished eyes.  St. Matthew and St. Mark express this phenomenon by the word metemorphothe, which the Vulgate renders transfiguratus est.   The Synoptics explain the true meaning of the word by adding ‘his face did shine as the sun: and his garments became white as snow,’ according to the Vulgate, or ‘as light,’  according to the Greek text.  This dazzling brightness which emanated from His whole Body was produced by an interior shining of His Divinity.”

— The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1912

From Broken Symmetries, 1983, Chapter 16:

“He’d toyed with ‘psi’ himself…. The reason he and so many other theoretical physicists were suckers for the stuff was easy to understand– for two-thirds of a century an enigma had rested at the heart of theoretical physics, a contradiction, a hard kernel of paradox….   

Peter [Slater] had never thirsted after ‘hidden variables’ to explain what could not be pictured.  Mathematical relationships were enough to satisfy him, mere formal relationships which existed at all times, everywhere, at once.  It was a thin nectar, but he was convinced it was the nectar of the gods….

Those so-called crazy psychics were too sane, that was their problem– they were too stubborn to admit that the universe was already more bizarre than anything they could imagine in their wildest dreams of wizardry.”

Then a Miracle Occurs

  The New York Times on Sunday,
  New Year’s Day, 2006,
  by John Horgan–
 “Einstein Has Left the Building“–

“Down the hall from my office, Albert Einstein’s electric-haired visage beams from a poster for the ‘World Year of Physics 2005.’ The poster celebrates the centennial of the ‘miraculous year’ when a young patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland, revolutionized physics with five papers on relativity, quantum mechanics and thermodynamics. ‘Help make 2005 another Miraculous Year!’ the poster exclaims…. As 2005 wound down with no miracles in sight, the poster took on an increasingly poignant cast, like a Kerry/Edwards bumper sticker….”

From a debate:

KERRY: “I’m going to be a president who believes in science.”

KERRY: “I’m a Catholic – raised a Catholic. I was an altar boy. Religion has been a huge part of my life, helped lead me through a war, leads me today.”

BUSH: “Trying to decipher that.”

Horgan quotes Einstein:

Click on “religion” in this quote to find out what Einstein really meant.

Here’s a bumper sticker for Horgan:

More from Horgan’s New Year’s Day sermon:

“We revere [Einstein] not only as a scientific genius but also as a moral and even spiritual sage….”

“What you mean ‘we,’ blue man?”
— The Red States