Log24

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From A Cure of the Mind: The Poetics of Wallace Stevens, by Theodore Sampson, published by Black Rose Books Ltd., 2000–

Page x:

“… if what he calls ‘the spirit’s alchemicana’ (CP [Collected Poems] 471) addresses itself to the irrational element in poetry, to what extent is such an element dominant in his theory and practice of poetry, and therefore in what way is Stevens’ intricate verbal music dependent on his irrational use of language– a ‘pure rhetoric of a language without words?’ (CP 374)?”

“… when novelists become Cubists; that is, when they see the possibilities of making a hieroglyph, a coherent symbol, an ideogram of the total work. A symbol comes into being when an artist sees that it is the only way to get all the meaning in.”

– Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination

Today's previous entry discussed the hermeneutics of the midday NY and PA lottery numbers.

The rest of the story:
 

Interpretations of the evening numbers–

The PA evening number, 006, may be viewed as a followup to the PA midday 726 (or 7/26, the birthday of Kate Beckinsale and Carl Jung). Here 006 is the prestigious "00" number assigned to Beckinsale.
 

The NY evening number, 091, may be viewed as a followup to the NY midday 378 (the number of pages in The Innermost Kernel by Suzanne Gieser, published by Springer, 2005)–

Page 91: The entire page is devoted to the title of the book's Part 3– "The Copenhagen School and Psychology"–
 

The next page begins: "With the crisis of physics, interest in epistemological and psychological questions grew among many theoretical physicists. This interest was particularly marked in the circle around Niels Bohr."
 

The circle above is
marked with a version of
the classic Chinese symbol
adopted as a personal emblem
by Danish physicist Niels Bohr,
leader of the Copenhagen School.

"Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined

On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come."

-- Wallace Stevens,
  "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,"
   Canto IV of "It Must Change"

The square above is marked
with a graphic design
related to the four-diamond
figure of Jung's Aion.

The Child Trap

See E! Online, March 18 — Lindsay Lohan Remembers Parent Trap Mum

See also
 

For those who like such things, an excellent Marxist analysis of Watchmen from another fan:

Whitson, Roger. “Panelling Parallax: The Fearful Symmetry of Alan Moore and William Blake.” ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies Vol. 3 No. 2 (2007). Dept. of English, University of Florida.

Whitson’s subject, Alan Moore, is the author of the Watchmen graphic novel. Moore’s style seems less suited to the Forth family pictured above than to Lindsay Lohan fans– who may also enjoy another graphic novel by Moore, Lost Girls.

More Lohan material related to her role in “Georgia Rule“–

Further background:

“The film realizes that if people actually fought crime, they’d most likely be crazy. Take The Comedian for an example. He fights crime, sure. He’s also a raging alcoholic.” –”‘Watchmen’ a flawed masterpiece,” by Ryan Michaels

See also the following expanded version of a link from Sunday morning, March 22:

“I argue that Sophocles did not intend to present either Antigone or Creon as the hero/heroine for his tragic play, as Hegel, Kierkegaard, and others stipulate. Rather, Sophocles presents the Chorus and the Watchman as the true heroic figures.”

–”A Burkean Reading of the Antigone: Comical and Choral Transcendence,” by Rebecca McCarthy, Kaplan University

Counters in Rows

“Music, mathematics, and chess are in vital respects dynamic acts of location. Symbolic counters are arranged in significant rows. Solutions, be they of a discord, of an algebraic equation, or of a positional impasse, are achieved by a regrouping, by a sequential reordering of individual units and unit-clusters (notes, integers, rooks or pawns).”

– George Steiner
   (See March 10, “Language Game.”)

Yesterday’s entry Deep Structures discussed the “semiotic square,” a device that exemplifies the saying “If you can’t dazzle ‘em with brilliance, then baffle ‘em with bullshit.”

A search today for what the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson might have meant by saying that the square “is capable of generating at least ten conceivable positions out of a rudimentary binary opposition” leads to two documents of interest.

1. “Theory Pictures as Trails: Diagrams and the Navigation of Theoretical Narratives” (pdf), by J.R. Osborn, Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego (Cognitive Science Online, Vol.3.2, pp.15-44, 2005)

2. “The Semiotic Square” (html), by Louis Hébert (2006), professor, Université du Québec à Rimouski, in Signo (http://www.signosemio.com).

Shown below is Osborn’s picture of the semiotic square:

Osborn’s discussion of the square, though more clear than, say, that of Rosalind Krauss (who reverses the bottom two parts of the square– see Deep Structures), fails. His Appendix A is miserably obscure.

On the brighter side, we have, as a sign that Gallic clarity still exists, the work of Hébert.

Here is how he approaches Jameson’s oft-quoted, but seemingly confused, remark about “ten conceivable positions”–

“The Semiotic Square,”   by Louis Hébert 1. ABSTRACT The semiotic square, developed by Greimas and Rastier, is a means of refining oppositional analyses by increasing the number of analytical classes stemming from a given opposition from two (life/death, for instance) to four (for example, life, death, life and death (the living dead), and neither life nor death (angels)) to eight or even ten. 2. THEORY The actantial model, isotopy and the semiotic square are undoubtedly the best-known theoretical propositions that have emerged from the Paris School of semiotics, with Greimas as its central figure. Like the actantial model and the veridictory square, the semiotic square is designed to be both a conceptual network and a visual representation of this network, usually depicted in the form of a “square” (which actually looks like a rectangle!). Courtés defines it as the visual representation of the logical structure of an opposition (cf. Courtés, 1991, 152). The semiotic square is a means of refining oppositional analyses by increasing the number of analytical classes stemming from a given opposition from two (for instance, life/death) to four (for example, life, death, life and death (the living dead), and neither life nor death (angels)) to eight or even ten. Here is an empty semiotic square. Structure of the semiotic square     5. (=1+2) COMPLEX TERM       1. TERM A   2. TERM B   9. (=1+4) 10. (=2+3)   3. TERM NOT-B   4. TERM NOT-A   7. (=1+3) POSITIVE DEIXIS 8. (=2+4) NEGATIVE DEIXIS         6. (=3+4) NEUTRAL TERM     LEGEND: The + sign links the terms that are combined to make up a metaterm (a compound term); for example, 5 is the result of combining 1 and 2. 2.1 CONSTITUENT ELEMENTS The semiotic square entails primarily the following elements (we are steering clear of the constituent relationships of the square: contrariety, contradiction, and complementarity or implication): 1. terms 2. metaterms (compound terms) 3. object(s) (classified on the square) 4. observing subject(s) (who do the classifying) 5. time (of the observation) 2.1.1 TERMS The semiotic square is composed of four terms: Position 1 (term A) Position 2 (term B) Position 3 (term not-B) Position 4 (term not-A) The first two terms form the opposition (the contrary relationship) that is the basis of the square, and the other two are obtained by negating each term of the opposition. 2.1.2 METATERMS The semiotic square includes six metaterms. The metaterms are terms created from the four simple terms. Some of the metaterms have been named. (The complex term and the neutral term, despite their names, are indeed metaterms). Position 5 (term 1 + term 2): complex term Position 6 (term 3 + term 4): neutral term Position 7 (term 1 + term 3): positive deixis Position 8 (term 2 + term 4): negative deixis Position 9 = term 1 + term 4: unnamed Position 10 = term 2 + term 3: unnamed

These ten “positions” are apparently meant to explain Jameson’s remark.

Hébert’s treatment has considerably greater entertainment value than Osborn’s. Besides “the living dead” and angels, Hébert’s examples and exercises include vampires, transvestites, the Passion of Christ, and the following very relevant quotation:

“Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.” (Matthew 5:37)

“The diagram above is from a ninth century manuscript of Apuleius’ commentary on Aristotle’s Perihermaneias, probably one of the oldest surviving pictures of the square.”

– Edward Buckner at The Logic Museum

From the webpage “Semiotics for Beginners: Paradigmatic Analysis,” by Daniel Chandler:

The Semiotic Square

“The structuralist semiotician Algirdas Greimas introduced the semiotic square (which he adapted from the ‘logical square’ of scholastic philosophy) as a means of analysing paired concepts more fully (Greimas 1987,* xiv, 49). The semiotic square is intended to map the logical conjunctions and disjunctions relating key semantic features in a text. Fredric Jameson notes that ‘the entire mechanism… is capable of generating at least ten conceivable positions out of a rudimentary binary opposition’ (in Greimas 1987,* xiv). Whilst this suggests that the possibilities for signification in a semiotic system are richer than the either/or of binary logic, but that [sic] they are nevertheless subject to ‘semiotic constraints’ – ‘deep structures’ providing basic axes of signification.”

* Greimas, Algirdas (1987): On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory (trans. Paul J Perron & Frank H Collins). London: Frances Pinter

Another version of the semiotic square:

Krauss says that her figure “is, of course, a Klein Group.”

Here is a more explicit figure representing the Klein group:

There is also the logical
    diamond of opposition –

A semiotic (as opposed to logical)
diamond has been used to illustrate
remarks by Fredric Jameson,
 a Marxist literary theorist:

“Introduction to Algirdas Greimas, Module on the Semiotic Square,” by Dino Felluga at Purdue University– The semiotic square has proven to be an influential concept not only in narrative theory but in the ideological criticism of Fredric Jameson, who uses the square as “a virtual map of conceptual closure, or better still, of the closure of ideology itself” (“Foreword”* xv). (For more on Jameson, see the [Purdue University] Jameson module on ideology.) Greimas’ schema is useful since it illustrates the full complexity of any given semantic term (seme). Greimas points out that any given seme entails its opposite or “contrary.” “Life” (s1) for example is understood in relation to its contrary, “death” (s2). Rather than rest at this simple binary opposition (S), however, Greimas points out that the opposition, “life” and “death,” suggests what Greimas terms a contradictory pair (-S), i.e., “not-life” (-s1) and “not-death” (-s2). We would therefore be left with the following semiotic square (Fig. 1): As Jameson explains in the Foreword to Greimas’ On Meaning, “-s1 and -s2“—which in this example are taken up by “not-death” and “not-life”—”are the simple negatives of the two dominant terms, but include far more than either: thus ‘nonwhite’ includes more than ‘black,’ ‘nonmale’ more than ‘female’” (xiv); in our example, not-life would include more than merely death and not-death more than life. * Jameson, Fredric. “Foreword.” On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory. By Algirdas Greimas. Trans. Paul J. Perron and Frank H. Collins. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1976.

“The Game in the Ship cannot be approached as a job, a vocation, a career, or a recreation. To the contrary, it is Life and Death itself at work there. In the Inner Game, we call the Game Dhum Welur, the Mind of God.”

– The Gameplayers of Zan, by M.A. Foster

“For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross.”
– Thomas Pynchon,
 Gravity’s Rainbow

Crosses used by semioticians
to baffle their opponents
are illustrated above.

Some other kinds of crosses,
and another kind of opponent:

Monday, July 11, 2005 Logos for St. Benedict’s Day Click on either of the logos below for religious meditations– on the left, a Jewish meditation from the Conference of Catholic Bishops; on the right, an Aryan meditation from Stormfront.org.       Both logos represent different embodiments of the “story theory” of truth, as opposed to the “diamond theory” of truth.  Both logos claim, in their own ways, to represent the eternal Logos of the Christian religion.  I personally prefer the “diamond theory” of truth, represented by the logo below. See also the previous entry (below) and the entries   of 7/11, 2003. Sunday, July 10, 2005 Mathematics and Narrative   Click on the title for a narrative about Nikolaos K. Artemiadis,  (co-) author of From Artemiadis’s website: 1986: Elected Regular Member of the Academy of Athens 1999: Vice President of the Academy of Athens 2000: President of the Academy of Athens “First of all, I’d like to    thank the Academy…” — Remark attributed to Plato

“Preserving a strict unity of time and place, this stark tale of a young woman’s decline into insanity is set in a summer home on a holiday island. It is the first part of the trilogy

that comprises Winter Light and The Silence, films which are generally seen as addressing Bergman’s increasing disillusionment with the emotional coldness of his inherited Lutheran religion. In particular here, Bergman focuses on the absence of familial love which might perhaps have pulled Karin (Andersson) back from the brink; while Karin’s mental disintegration manifests itself in the belief that God is a spider. As she slips inexorably into madness, she is observed with terrifying objectivity by her emotionally paralyzed father (Björnstrand) and seemingly helpless husband (von Sydow).”

– Nigel Floyd, Time Out, quoted at Bergmanorama

Related material:

1. The “spider” symbol of Fritz Leiber’s short story “Damnation Morning“–

2. The Illuminati Diamond of Hollywood’s “Angels & Demons” (to open May 15), and

3. The following diagram by one “John Opsopaus“–

“Preserving a strict unity of time and place, this stark tale of a young woman’s decline into insanity is set in a summer home on a holiday island. It is the first part of the trilogy that comprises Winter Light and The Silence, films which are generally seen as addressing Bergman’s increasing disillusionment with the emotional coldness of his inherited Lutheran religion. In particular here, Bergman focuses on the absence of familial love which might perhaps have pulled Karin (Andersson) back from the brink; while Karin’s mental disintegration manifests itself in the belief that God is a spider. As she slips inexorably into madness, she is observed with terrifying objectivity by her emotionally paralyzed father (Björnstrand) and seemingly helpless husband (von Sydow).”

— Nigel Floyd, Time Out, quoted at Bergmanorama

Related material:

1. The “spider” symbol of Fritz Leiber’s short story “Damnation Morning”–

2. Hollywood’s “Angels & Demons” (to open May 15), and

3. The following diagram by one “John Opsopaus”–

(Cf. Sinatra’s birthday, 2004)

One for his baby:

Ron Silver as
Alan Dershowitz in
“Reversal of Fortune”
suggests the epigraph of
The Particulars of Rapture:
Reflections on Exodus –
two stanzas from attorney
Wallace Stevens
quoted here yesterday afternoon.

One more for the road:

A link that appeared in a
different form in Saturday’s
“Flowers for Barry“–

Speed the Plow.

This leads to
A Hanukkah Tale
containing the following:

This is, in turn, related to
Harvard’s Barry Mazur‘s recent
essay on time in mathematics
and literature (pdf).

L’Chaim.

The Origin of Change

A note on the figure
from this morning’s sermon:

"Two things of opposite natures seem to dependOn one another, as a man dependsOn a woman, day on night, the imagined

On the real. This is the origin of change.Winter and spring, cold copulars, embraceAnd forth the particulars of rapture come."

-- Wallace Stevens,  "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,"   Canto IV of "It Must Change"

Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard, home of the rat psychology of Skinner and Quine, today offered a lesson in behavioral economics.

From a transcript of Summers’s remarks (for a video, see the previous entry)–

“An abundance of greed and an absence of fear on Wall Street led some to make purchases – not based on the real value of assets, but on the faith that there would be another who would pay more for those assets. At the same time, the government turned a blind eye to these practices and their potential consequences for the economy as a whole. This is how a bubble is born. And in these moments, greed begets greed. The bubble grows.

Eventually, however, this process stops – and reverses. Prices fall. People sell. Instead of an expectation of new buyers, there is an expectation of new sellers. Greed gives way to fear. And this fear begets fear.

This is the paradox at the heart of the financial crisis. In the past few years, we’ve seen too much greed and too little fear; too much spending and not enough saving; too much borrowing and not enough worrying. Today, however, our problem is exactly the opposite.

It is this transition from an excess of greed to an excess of fear that President Roosevelt had in mind when he famously observed that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself. It is this transition that has happened in the United States today.”

Related material

Spatial Practice,
Paris-Style:

“Voids, a Retrospective,”
an exhibit of empty rooms
that runs through March 23
at the Centre Pompidou

See also “Art Humor“
 and “Conceptual Art.”

Tom Conoboy on James Purdy’s novel Malcolm:

“Life, Purdy is telling us, is meaningless. Existence is absurd. It consists of events and happenings, all unavoidable, all simultaneously significant and meaningless. They touch you, wound even, ultimately kill, yet somehow existence appears to obtain in a bubble outside of the self. As Thomas M. Lorch describes it, ‘the novel portays humanity revolving about an abyss.’[1] What is real is not real, and what is not real becomes real. Malcolm describes himself as a ‘cypher’ and, in the end, his death affects no-one, least of all him.

Yet, through this, Purdy presents us with the final, and greatest, paradox. In presenting us with nothingness, and in deliberately describing the action in such bland and emotionless language, Purdy actually creates a sense of loss: there is nothing to lose, he is telling us, and yet we feel the loss greatly. What he does is to create a world of genuine nihilism, where nobody communicates, nobody connects, so that we can, in negative, imagine what a world in harmony might be like.”

[1] Thomas M. Lorch, “Purdy’s Malcolm: A Unique Vision of Radical Emptiness.” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Summer, 1965), p. 212.

The Associated Press, “Today in History” March 11– On this date…

“In 1959, the Lorraine Hansberry drama ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ opened at New York’s Ethel Barrymore Theater.”

The Times describes one of the empty rooms on exhibit as…

“… Yves Klein’s ‘La spécialisation de la sensibilité à l’état matière première en sensibilité picturale stabilisée, Le Vide‘ (‘The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State Into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, the Void’)”

This is a mistranslation. See “An Aesthetics of Matter” (pdf), by Kiyohiko Kitamura and Tomoyuki Kitamura, pp. 85-101 in International Yearbook of Aesthetics, Volume 6, 2002–

“The exhibition «La spécialisation de la sensibilité à l’état matière-première en sensibilité picturale stabilisée», better known as «Le Vide» (The Void) was held at the Gallery Iris Clert in Paris from April 28th till May 5th, 1955.” –p. 94

“… «Sensibility in the state of prime matter»… filled the emptiness.” –p. 95

Kitamura and Kitamura translate matière première correctly as “prime matter” (the prima materia of the scholastic philosophers) rather than “raw material.” (The phrase in French can mean either.)

Immortal Diamond
continued:

“That flower unseen, that gem of purest ray,
Bright thoughts uncut by men:
Strange that you need but speak them, Thomas Gray,
And the mind skips and dives beyond its ken,

Finding at once the wild supposed bloom,
Or in the imagined cave
Some pulse of crystal staving off the gloom
As covertly as phosphorus in a grave.”

– From “In a Churchyard,” by Richard Wilbur

“A metaphysical assertion of this kind is the idea of the ‘diamond body,’ the indestructible breath-body which develops in the Golden Flower, or in the square inch space.”

– The Secret of the Golden Flower, by Richard Wilhelm, Carl Gustav Jung, and Hua-Yang Liu, second rev. ed., publ. by Routledge, 1999, pp. 130-131

For more about these concepts, see the work cited.

“Music, mathematics, and chess are in vital respects dynamic acts of location. Symbolic counters are arranged in significant rows. Solutions, be they of a discord, of an algebraic equation, or of a positional impasse, are achieved by a regrouping, by a sequential reordering of individual units and unit-clusters (notes, integers, rooks or pawns). The child-master, like his adult counterpart, is able to visualize in an instantaneous yet preternaturally confident way how the thing should look several moves hence. He sees the logical, the necessary harmonic and melodic argument as it arises out of an initial key relation or the preliminary fragments of a theme. He knows the order, the appropriate dimension, of the sum or geometric figure before he has performed the intervening steps. He announces mate in six because the victorious end position, the maximally efficient configuration of his pieces on the board, lies somehow ‘out there’ in graphic, inexplicably clear sight of his mind….”

“… in some autistic enchantment, pure as one of Bach’s inverted canons or Euler’s formula for polyhedra.”

– George Steiner, “A Death of Kings,” in The New Yorker, issue dated Sept. 7, 1968

“Classrooms are filled with discussions not of the Bible and Jesus but of 10 ‘core values’– perseverance and curiosity, for instance– that are woven into the curriculum.”

– “Secular Education, Catholic Values,” by Javier C. Hernandez, The New York Times, Sunday, March 8, 2009

— Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

The Chandler quotation appears in “Language Game,” an entry in this journal on April 7, 2008.

Some say the “Language Game” date, April 7, is the true date (fixed, permanent) of the Crucifixion– by analogy, Eliot’s “still point” and Jung’s “centre.” (See yesterday, noon.)

Next Sunday’s New York Times Book Review arrived in today’s mail. On the inside of the first page is a full-page ad for a course of 24 lectures on DVD’s called “Games People Play: Game Theory in Life, Business, and Beyond.” On the inside of the last page is “Our Steiner Problem– and Mine,” a full-page essay by Lee Siegel on polymath George Steiner.

Related material:

• The five Log24 entries ending Jan. 19, 2008
• “The End of Endings,” by Richard John Neuhaus

Happy birthday to the late Bobby Fischer.

Russell Crowe as game theorist
John Nash in “A Beautiful Mind”

Besides being Mondrian’s birthday, today is also the dies natalis (in the birth-into-heaven sense) of St. Thomas Aquinas and, for those who believe worthy pre-Christians also enter heaven, possibly of Aristotle.

Pope Benedict XVI explained the dies natalis concept on Dec. 26, 2006:

“For believers the day of death, and even more the day of martyrdom, is not the end of all; rather, it is the ‘transit’ towards immortal life. It is the day of definitive birth, in Latin, dies natalis.“

Pictorial version
of Hexagram 20,
Contemplation (View)

Here’s hoping this president knows how to read the newspaper.

“Treatment of Autistic Schizophrenic Children with LSD-25 and UML-491“–

“Autistic schizophrenic children present challenging and baffling problems in treatment…. Many of the children have been followed subsequently into later childhood, adolescence, and adulthood…. Meanwhile, a new group of young autistic children are always available for new treatment endeavors as the new modes become available.”*

“The Solomon Key is the working title of an unreleased novel in progress by American author Dan Brown. The Solomon Key will be the third book involving the character of the Harvard professor Robert Langdon, of which the first two were Angels & Demons (2000) and The Da Vinci Code (2003).” –Wikipedia

“One has O⁺(6) ≅ S₈, the symmetric group of order 8! ….”

 – “Siegel Modular Forms and Finite Symplectic Groups,” by Francesco Dalla Piazza and Bert van Geemen, May 5, 2008, preprint.

“The complete projective group of collineations and dualities of the [projective] 3-space is shown to be of order [in modern notation] 8! …. To every transformation of the 3-space there corresponds a transformation of the [projective] 5-space. In the 5-space, there are determined 8 sets of 7 points each, ‘heptads’ ….”

— George M. Conwell, “The 3-space PG(3, 2) and Its Group,” The Annals of Mathematics, Second Series, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Jan., 1910), pp. 60-76

“It must be remarked that these 8 heptads are the key to an elegant proof….”

— Philippe Cara, “RWPRI Geometries for the Alternating Group A₈,” in Finite Geometries: Proceedings of the Fourth Isle of Thorns Conference (July 16-21, 2000), Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001, ed. Aart Blokhuis, James W. P. Hirschfeld, Dieter Jungnickel, and Joseph A. Thas, pp. 61-97