Log24

continued

"At that instant he saw,
in one blaze of light,
an image of unutterable conviction….
the core of life, the essential pattern
whence all other things proceed,
the kernel of eternity."

— Thomas Wolfe,
Of Time and the River

From "The Relations between
Poetry and Painting," by Wallace Stevens:

"The theory of poetry, that is to say, the total of the theories of poetry, often seems to become in time a mystical theology or, more simply, a mystique. The reason for this must by now be clear. The reason is the same reason why the pictures in a museum of modern art often seem to become in time a mystical aesthetic, a prodigious search of appearance, as if to find a way of saying and of establishing that all things, whether below or above appearance, are one and that it is only through reality, in which they are reflected or, it may be, joined together, that we can reach them. Under such stress, reality changes from substance to subtlety…. It was from the point of view of… [such a] subtlety that Klee could write: 'But he is one chosen that today comes near to the secret places where original law fosters all evolution. And what artist would not establish himself there where the organic center of all movement in time and space—which he calls the mind or heart of creation— determines every function.' Conceding that this sounds a bit like sacerdotal jargon, that is not too much to allow to those that have helped to create a new reality, a modern reality, since what has been created is nothing less."

As yesterday's entry "Kernel of Eternity" indicated, the word "kernel" has a definite meaning in mathematics.  The Klein four-group, beloved of structural anthropologists and art theorists, is a particularly apt example of a kernel. (See PlanetMath for details.)

Diagrams of this group may have influenced Giovanni Sambin, professor of mathematical logic at the University of Padua; the following impressive-looking diagram is from Sambin's

The Basic Picture, a Structure for Topology:
 

Sambin argues that this diagram reflects some of the basic structures of thought itself… making it perhaps one way to describe what  Klee called the "mind or heart of creation." 

But this verges on what Stevens called the sacerdotal.  It seems that a simple picture of the "kernel of eternity" as the four-group, a picture without reference to logic or philosophy, and without distracting letters and labels, is required.  The following is my attempt to supply such a picture:

This is a picture of the four-group
as a permutation group on four points.
Pairs of colored arrows indicate the three
transformations other than the identity,
which may be regarded either as
invisible or as rendered by
the four black points themselves.

Update of 7:45 PM Thursday:

Review of the above (see comments)
by a typical Xanga reader:

"Ur a FUCKIN' LOSER!!!!!  LMFAO!!!!"

For more merriment, see
The Optical Unconscious
and
The Painted Word.

A recent Xangan movie review:

"Annakin's an idiot, but he's not an idiot because that's the way the character works, he's an idiot because George Lucas was too lazy to make him anything else. He has to descend to the Daaaahk Side, but the dark side never really seems all that dark. He kills children, but offscreen. We never get to see the transformation. One minute he cares about the republic, the next he's killing his friends, and then for some reason he's duelling with Obi Wan on a lava flow. Who cares? Not me….

So a big ol' fuck you to George Lucas. Fuck you, George!"

Both Xangans seem to be fluent in what Tom Wolfe has called the "fuck patois."

A related suggestion from Google:

Give Dad a photo gift

this Father’s Day (June 19)

These remarks from Xangans and Google
 suggest the following photo gift,
based on a 2003 journal entry: