Legacy Codes:
The Most Violent Poem
Lore of the Manhattan Project:
From The Trinity Site —
“I imagined Oppenheimer saying aloud,
‘Batter my heart, three person’d God,”
unexpectedly recalling John Donne’s ‘Holy Sonnet [14],’
and then he knew, ‘ “Trinity” will do.’
Memory has its reasons.
‘Batter my heart’ — I remember these words.
I first heard them on a fall day at Duke University in 1963.
Inside a classroom twelve of us were
seated around a long seminar table
listening to Reynolds Price recite this holy sonnet….
I remember Reynolds saying, slowly, carefully,
‘This is the most violent poem in the English language.’ ”
Related Entertainment
Today’s birthday:
director Mike Nichols
From a dead Righteous Brother:
“If you believe in forever
Then life is just a one-night stand.”
— Bobby Hatfield, found dead
in his hotel room at
7 PM EST Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2003,
before a concert scheduled at
Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo.
From a review of The Matrix Revolutions:
“You’d have to be totally blind at the end
to miss the Christian symbolism….
Trinity gets a glimpse of heaven…. And in the end…
God Put A Rainbow In The Clouds.”
Moral of the
Entertainment:
According to Chu Hsi [Zhu Xi],
“Li” is
“the principle or coherence
or order or pattern
underlying the cosmos.”
— Smith, Bol, Adler, and Wyatt,
Sung Dynasty Uses of the I Ching,
Princeton University Press, 1990
Related Non-Entertainment
Symmetry and a Trinity
(for the dotting-the-eye symbol above)
Introduction to Harmonic Analysis
(for musical and historical background)
Mathematical Proofs
(for the spirit of Western Michigan
University, Kalamazoo)
Moral of the
Non-Entertainment:
“Many kinds of entity
become easier to handle
by decomposing them into
components belonging to spaces
invariant under specified symmetries.”
— The importance of
mathematical conceptualisation
by David Corfield,
Department of History and
Philosophy of Science,
University of Cambridge
See, too,
Symmetry of Walsh Functions and
Geometry of the I Ching.