The title is taken from Isak Dinesen— See the previous post,
which posed the question, "Stylist or fraud?"
Stylist and fraud—
The stylist: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Society of Jesus
The fraud (i.e., the fiction):
Click on the cover art for further details.
The cover artist, by the way, died on the date*
mentioned prominently in the previous post.
* September 7, 2009.
See also that date in this journal, with its post
"Magic Boxes." Happy birthday, J. K. Rowling.
Maya Alexandri on September 7, 2009—
|
… Blixen herself may have cut closer to the truth In it, a character explains,
What exactly [the imposter to the Prince] has told
Later, the imposter utters the following enigma: "Life and Death Stylist or fraud, that's the question. |
For mathematician Julia Robinson, who died on this date
in 1985, and her sister Constance Reid, who died on
October 14, 2010—
A search suggested by the "cosmic dippiness" of
a 1998 science fiction novel and by the non-dippiness of
a much better novel with closely related themes from 1977—
(The use of "recursive" here is of course rather poetic, not to be
construed as meaningful in the strictly mathematical sense.
See also the term's etymology, and Working Backwards.)
Today is the dies natalis of group theorist Walter Feit.
"The Steiner systems S (5,6,12) and S (5,8,24) are remarkable combinatorial
configurations unlike any others. Their automorphism groups are the Mathieu
groups M12 and M24. These are the only 5-transitive permutation groups other
than symmetric and alternating groups: (a fact long conjectured but only
proved as a consequence of the classification). The Leech lattice is a blown up
version of S (5,8,24). It is the unique even unimodular lattice in 24 dimensions
with no vectors of weight 2. This uniqueness is an essential reason why it is a
geometric object of fundamental importance. The automorphism group Co.O
of the Leech lattice involves about half of the sporadic groups and generally it
is felt that these are well understood."
— Walter Feit, book review, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society ,
Vol. 8 (1983), 120-124, page 123
For a memorable eccentric who reportedly died
on Wednesday, July 24, 2013—
(Simplicity continued)
"Understanding a metaphor is like understanding a geometrical
truth. Features of various geometrical figures or of various contexts
are pulled into revealing alignment with one another by the
demonstration or the metaphor.
What is 'revealed' is not that the alignment is possible; rather,
that the alignment is possible reveals the presence of already-
existing shapes or correspondences that lay unnoticed. To 'see' a
proof or 'get' a metaphor is to experience the significance of the
correspondence for what the thing, concept, or figure is ."
— Jan Zwicky, Wisdom & Metaphor , page 36 (left)
Zwicky illustrates this with Plato's diamond figure
from the Meno on the facing page— her page 36 (right).
A more sophisticated geometrical figure—
Galois-geometry key to
Desargues' theorem:
| D | E | F | |
| S' | P | Q | R |
| S | P' | Q' | R' |
| O | P1 | Q1 | R1 |
For an explanation, see
Classical Geometry in Light of Galois Geometry.
(Continued from July 16)
From the schedule of an April 2013 philosophical conference:
Why should anyone care what Zwicky thinks?
1. Her writings. In particular, Plato as Artist .
2. Her husband. See Robert Bringhurst in this journal.
3. A reading by Zwicky and Bringhurst on March 20, 2013.
Related material: Weiner news
Update of 3:30 AM:
A meditation on the above
headline phrase "widely published."
"Und was für ein Bild des Christentums
ist dabei herausgekommen?"
Arts and Letters Daily today links to a July 17
Washington Post review of two books on the
occult and the enlightenment. The review, by
Michael Dirda, ends on a cheerful note:
"Happy synchronicity."
In related news, a Walpurgisnacht obituary also
ends cheerfully:
"He was still trying to get out a joke
with his final breath."
That obituary describes a life that reportedly ended
on April 21, 2013. Synchronicity involving that date—
The posts of April 21, 2013 (and related material in
this morning's previous post).
This post was suggested by a search for the
Derridean phrase "necessary possibility"* that
led to web pages on a conference at Harvard
on Friday and Saturday, March 26**-27, 2010,
on Derrida and Religion .
The conference featured a talk titled
"The Poetics of the Broken Tablet."
I prefer the poetics of projective geometry.
An illustration— The restoration of the full
15-point "large" Desargues configuration in
place of the diminished 10-point Desargues
configuration that is usually discussed.
Click on the image for further details.
* See a discussion of this phrase in
the context of Brazilian religion.
** See also my own philosophical reflections
on Friday, March 26, 2010:
"You Can't Make This Stuff Up."
A related scene, in memory of a jingle singer who died Sunday at 97:
Click for the Heavenly Coffee song.
"The Germans, the document reads,
were looking for 'guidance and advice.'
Their wish was fulfilled."
by René Pfister, Laura Poitras, Marcel Rosenbach,
Jörg Schindler and Holger Stark
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
This is the weekend for Comic-Con International in San Diego.
The convention includes an art show. (Click above image to enlarge.)
Related material from Norway…
Suggested nominations for a Kavli Prize:
1. Josefine Lyche's highly imaginative catalog page for
the current Norwegian art exhibition I de lange nætter,
which mentions her interest in sacred geometry
2. Sacred Geometry: Drawing a Metatron Cube
… and from San Diego—
The Kavli Institutes logo:
For a modeling visionary— "All the Time."
Related material: Coco Rocha and Gatsby .
Update of 12:31 AM July 21— See also "For Doin' Evil."
A Brainstorm for Jo Lyxe :
Swastika logo of the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind
at the University of California, San Diego.
Soundtrack: Under the Iron Sky .
For a former defender of the Fulda Gap
who reportedly died on July 1, 2013—
and two quotations:
For Brad Leithauser, some of whose remarks
on "Reading Poems Backward" were quoted
here on July 13—
A brief review of the life of artist Marc Simont,
who died on that day.
(Click for a larger and clearer image.)
Marc Simont, Classic Children’s Book Illustrator, Dies at 97
Simont reportedly died on Saturday, July 13, 2013.
See this journal on that date and Simont's cover illustration
for The Wonderful O .
The title refers to a classic 1960 novel by John Hersey.
“How do you get young people excited about space?”
— Megan Garber in The Atlantic , Aug. 16, 2012
(Italics added.) (See previous four posts.)
Allyn Jackson on “Simplicity, in Mathematics and in Art,”
in the new August 2013 issue of Notices of the American
Mathematical Society—
“As conventions evolve, so do notions of simplicity.
Franks mentioned Gauss’s 1831 paper that
established the respectability of complex numbers.”
This suggests a related image by Gauss, with a
remark on simplicity—
Here Gauss’s diagram is not, as may appear at first glance,
a 3×3 array of squares, but is rather a 4×4 array of discrete
points (part of an infinite plane array).
Related material that does feature the somewhat simpler 3×3 array
of squares, not seen as part of an infinite array—
Marketing the Holy Field
Click image for the original post.
For a purely mathematical view of the holy field, see Visualizing GL(2,p).
"How do you get young people excited
about space? How do you get them interested
not just in watching movies about space,
or in playing video games set in space …
but in space itself?"
— Megan Garber in The Atlantic , Aug. 16, 2012
One approach:
"There is such a thing as a tesseract" and
Diamond Theory in 1937.
See, too, Baez in this journal.
(Continued from yesterday evening)
Madeleine L'Engle in The Irrational Season
(1977), Chapter 9:
"After A Wrinkle in Time was finally published,
it was pointed out to me that the villain, a naked
disembodied brain, was called 'It' because It
stands for Intellectual truth as opposed to a truth
which involves the whole of us, heart as well as
mind. That acronym had never occurred to me.
I chose the name It intuitively, because an IT
does not have a heart or soul. And I did not
understand consciously at the time of writing
that the intellect, when it is not informed by
the heart, is evil."
Related material: Mathematics as a Post-Communist Activity.
From Iris Murdoch's novel The Bell —
" 'With an engineer to help me,' said Dora,
'I can do anything.' And indeed as she
stood there in the moonlight, looking at
the quiet water, she felt as if by the sheer
force of her will she could make the great
bell rise. After all, and after her own fashion,
she would fight. In this holy community
she would play the witch."
Some recent posts have been added to the Root Circle saga.
Update of 12:13 AM July 16, 2013:
Click the above image for further details. This "every other term"
strategy may be illustrated as in the July 12, 2013, post "Ein Bild "—
This image was originally posted on June 5, 2006 at 12:06 AM ET.
"Warming to the question of what it means to read a poem backward…."
— Essayist in a New Yorker weblog on July 11, 2013
“Death itself would start working backwards.”
— Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia , 1950
|
"I twisted my mind like a bright ribbon, folded it,
"All manner of thing shall be well |
See also some context for these quotations.
Last night's 9:29 PM (ET) post featured the phrase
"This way to the egress."
Last night's 10 PM post featured two deaths:
The author of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
reportedly died at 85 on Tuesday, July 9.
A former director of the Museum of Modern Art
who was famously shown the exit door there
in his younger years reportedly died at 80 on
Saturday, July 6.
For a sort of pageant combining Christmas,
the Museum of Modern Art, and an egress,
see St. Stephen's Day, 2008.
The title refers to Brad Leithauser's remarks
in the previous post.
A sort of poem
by Gauss and Weyl —
Click the circle for the context in Weyl's Symmetry .
For related remarks, see the previous post.
A literary excursus—
|
Brad Leithauser in a New Yorker post of July 11, 2013: If a poet determines that a poem should begin at point A and conclude at point D, say, the mystery of how to get there—how to pass felicitously through points B and C—strikes me as an artistic task both genuine and enlivening. There are fertile mysteries of transition, no less than of termination. And I’d like to suppose that Frost himself would recognize that any ingress into a poem is better than being locked out entirely. His little two-liner, “The Secret,” suggests as much: “We dance round in a ring and suppose / But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.” Most truly good poems might be said to contain a secret: the little sacramental miracle by which you connect, intimately, with the words of a total stranger. And whether you come at the poem frontward, or backward, or inside out—whether you approach it deliberately, word by word and line by line, or you parachute into it borne on a sudden breeze from the island of Serendip—surely isn’t the important thing. What matters is whether you achieve entrance into its inner ring, and there repose companionably beside the Secret. |
One should try, of course, to avoid repose in an inner circle of Hell .
A rhetorical question from this journal—
"Und was für ein Bild des Christentums
ist dabei herausgekommen?"
A rhetorical answer from this journal (June 5, 2006)—
Material closely related to the above rhetorical answer—
(Click for clearer image.)
"In Princeton every Sunday he would walk
one and a half miles from his home to buy
the Sunday New York Times , and so,
according to his daughters, his church
denomination was pedestrian."
— "André Weil As I Knew Him," by Goro Shimura,
Notices of the American Mathematical Society ,
Vol. 46, No. 4, April 1999, page 430
The above passage was suggested by
a reported death from July 9, 2013, and by
a photo taken by Trish Mayo on July 6,
2013. See also Log24 on that date.
See also 11 February 2012 in this journal, as well as the link in
last evening's post to 2 March 2012, in the context of synchronicity.
You say goodbye, I say …
A YouTube video uploaded on March 2, 2012—
This journal on the date of the above video's uploading— March 2, 2012:
"…des carreaux mi-partis de deux couleurs par une ligne diagonale…."
See also Josefine Lyche in Vril Chick and Bowling in Diagon Alley.
From a Telegraph obituary about a death on July 8, 2013:
"The pilots’ tactic was to fly to within a certain distance of the target, and cut their engines. They would then glide in silently, release their bombs, then restart their engines and fly home. The Germans called them the 'Nachthexen' (the Night Witches) due to the whooshing sound they made— 'like a witch’s broomstick in the night'— as they flew past. There was, supposedly, a promise to award an Iron Cross to any Luftwaffe pilot who actually managed to bring down a Night Witch."
In memoriam:
"At some point in Greek history, it was noticed that the capital upsilon—Y—
looked like a path branching left and right. The comparison, like so much
traditional material, was ascribed to the Pythagoreans, in accordance with
the dualism just mentioned; our earliest source for it, however, is as late as
the Roman poet Persius (Satires, 3.56)."
— "The Garden of Forking Paths" in the weblog
Varieties of Unreligious Experience, Nov. 21, 2006
Amy Adams at the Lancia Café in Taormina, Sicily, on June 15, 2013.
Adams was in Taormina for the Italian premiere of her Superman film.
See also this journal on that date— June 15, 2013.
Posts related to the Garden of Forking Paths: Witch Ball (Jan. 24, 2013),
Sermon for Harvard (Sept. 19, 2010), and Amy Adams + Craft.
Related material from June 3, 2008 …
On Faith:
“God is the original conspiracy theory….
Among the varieties of Christian monotheism,
none is more totalitarian, none lodges more radical
claims for God’s omnipotence, than Calvinism—
and within America, the chief analogue of Calvinist
theology, Puritanism. According to Calvin every
particle of dust, every act, every thought, every
creature is governed by the will of God, and yields
clues to the divine plan.”
– Scott Sanders, “Pynchon’s Paranoid History“
Profile picture of "Jo Lyxe" (Josefine Lyche) at Vimeo—
Compare to an image of Vril muse Maria Orsitsch.
From the catalog of a current art exhibition
(25 May – 31 August, 2013) in Norway,
I DE LANGE NÆTTER —
|
Josefine Lyche
Keywords (to help place my artwork in the (See also the original catalog page.) |
Clearly most of this (the non-highlighted parts) was taken
from my webpage Diamond Theory. I suppose I should be
flattered, but I am not thrilled to be associated with the
(apparently fictional) Vril Society.
For some background, see (for instance)
Conspiracy Theories and Secret Societies for Dummies .
" 'So this is heaven!' A line that strikes dread into
a theater reviewer's heart."
— Dan Sullivan in the Los Angeles Times
“The most terrifying verse I know:
merrily merrily merrily life is but a dream.”
—Joan Didion, The Last Thing He Wanted
"Audiences never had any difficulty with his work,
which was instantly recognisable as the stuff of dreams…."
— Apology for the life of a British playwright
who died on July 3, 2013.
"I saw 'More Light' twice, for my sins, and wasn't surprised
that half of the second audience left at intermission."
— Dan Sullivan in the Los Angeles Times (continued)
Some light from this journal on the day of the above
playwright's death, the day before, and the day after—
For a more plausible heaven, see the posts of July first
and an LA Times obituary for a man who died on that date.
In memory of Douglas J. Dayton, who reportedly died last Friday—
The Studio of Gratifying Discourse.
See also Barry's Lexicon and (for The Blake School)…
Today is the 61st anniversary of the publication
of the book Mere Christianity , by C. S. Lewis.
In its honor, here is a link to "Hexagram 61"
in this journal.
See also "Moonshine and Lion."
From Andries Brouwer —
* Related material: Yesterday's evening post and The People's Cube.
(By the way, any 4×4 array is a tesseract .)
"Classical Geometry in Light of Galois Geometry"
is now available at independent.academia.edu.
Related commentary: Yesterday's post Vision
and a post of February 21, 2013: Galois Space.
"Then it came to him.
In a single stroke he had what might be called
a complete vision of the information age."
— "Douglas C. Engelbart, Inventor of the
Computer Mouse, Dies at 88," by John Markoff
in this afternoon's online New York Times
Related material:
The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace
in the Dec. 4, 2008, post OCODE.
My diamond theorem articles at PlanetMath and at
Encyclopedia of Mathematics have been updated
to clarify the relationship between the graphic square
patterns of the diamond theorem and the schematic
square patterns of the Curtis Miracle Octad Generator.
Continued from Sunday's post Book Award and last
midnight's post Holding the Frame—
The nineteenth-century German writer Rudolf Haym on
German romantic Hellenism—
"In the enjoyment of this fair picture-world, our nation must
needs delude itself a moment with the dream of Greek felicity
and Greek repose to awaken directly poorer and more restless
than before. To Poetry such a delusion was indeed natural, and
who would dispute it with her after she had offered to our
enjoyment what was sweetest and most perfect! But we see
now all at once Metaphysic seized with the same illusion.
Turning aside from the strait path of sober inquiry and from the
labour of deliverance through the most conscientious criticism,
Hegel begins to expand over our spiritual world his ideal that
was found in Hellas, that was strengthened by exhaustive
penetration into the ultimate grounds of all religion. A dreamed-of
and yearned-for future is treated as present. A system tricked
out with the entire dignity of the science of truth raises itself
beside our poetry, and with diamond net spins us into an idea
with which the want, the incompleteness, and the unbeauty of
our political and historical actuality is at every point in contradiction."
— Rudolf Haym, Hegel und seine Zeit (1857), 91-92, translated
and quoted in The Secret of Hegel , by James Hutchison Stirling
(1898 edition, p. 626)
Major Barbara (Gabriel Pascal, 1941) — "There are some performances
that bypass your critical faculties altogether, connecting not with your brain
but with your soul. They are desperately few, those characterisations of
such heightened sensitivity, such emotional resonance that the effect is
both exalting and suffocating. You might chance upon one every three or
four years, if you're lucky. I don't know why, or how, but every time Wendy
Hiller utters a line or holds the frame in Major Barbara , I am on the verge
of tears." — Rick Burin
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