Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
— T. S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"
A passage quoted here on this date in 2005—
Douglas Hofstadter on his magnum opus:
“… I realized that to me,
Gödel and Escher and Bach
were only shadows
cast in different directions
by some central solid essence."
This refers to Hofstadter's cover image:
Also from this date in 2005:
In memory of "Mr. Piano" Roger Williams, who died today—
Related material— A quote from The Oxford Murders ,
a novel by Guillermo Martinez—
"Anyone can follow the path once it’s been marked out.
But there is of course an earlier moment of illumination,
what you called the knight’s move. Only a few people,
sometimes only one person in many centuries,
manage to see the correct first step in the darkness.”
“A good try,” said Seldom.
Lurching Toward Decision
"Suskind… nails, I think, Obama's intellectual blind spot. Indeed, Obama himself nails it, telling Suskind that he was too inclined to search for 'the perfect technical answer' to the myriad of complex issues coming at him."
— Frank Rich on Ron Suskind's new book about the White House, Confidence Men
Very distantly related material—
From "Confidence Game," an Oct. 12, 2008, post in this journal, a quasi-European perspective—
|
Kaleidoscope turning… – Roger Zelazny, Eye of Cat |
See also …
Gravity’s Rainbow , Penguin Classics, 1995, page 742:
"… knowing his Tarot, we would expect to look among the Humility, among the gray and preterite souls, to look for him adrift in the hostile light of the sky, the darkness of the sea….
Now there’s only a long cat’s-eye of bleak sunset left over the plain tonight, bright gray against a purple ceiling of clouds, with an iris of
742"
Continued from March 10, 2011 — A post that says
"If Galois geometry is thought of as a paradigm shift
from Euclidean geometry, both… the Kuhn cover
and the nine-point affine plane may be viewed…
as illustrating the shift."
Yesterday's posts The Fano Entity and Theology for Antichristmas,
together with this morning's New York Times obituaries (below)—
—suggest a Sunday School review from last year's
Devil's Night (October 30-31, 2010)—
|
Sunday, October 31, 2010 ART WARS – m759 @ 2:00 AM … There is a Cave – Paradise Lost , by John Milton
|
See also Ash Wednesday Surprise and Geometry for Jews.
The New Yorker 's review of The Great Escape (Simon & Schuster, $27), by Kati Marton—
"Marton, who fled Hungary as a child in 1957, illuminates Budapest's vertiginous Golden Age and the darkness that followed (a darkness that some of her subjects, notably Arthur Koestler, never shook)."
— Issue dated November 6, 2006
See also The Ninth Gate in this journal and the life of Marton's second husband, Peter Jennings.
New York Lottery, May 28, 2011—
General Boulanger
That the General was 'reactionary' and that the C of C bureaucracy had a 'defiant residue' of Boulangism, continues the characterization of the organization for which the Chums 'work'.
See p. 543 above, regarding a 2007 book in which Boulanger is called the 'father of fascism'.
timbres fictifs
French: fictive postage stamps. Cf "Lot 49".
Yes, stamps mean something in Pynchon's works; here, it seems important that these stamps are characterized as frauds.
transform
A mathematical operation that "maps" a relation from one domain to another.
Here, "Belgian Congo" maps to "Balkan Penninsula". By 1912, everyone at Yz-le-Bans would be familiar with Conrad's Heart of Darkness , if not with other descriptions of the atrocities of exploitation of indigenous people in Congo. The conversation here and to follow describes the dawning realization of the imperialist exploitation of Eastern Europe by European powers. (Zora Neale Hurston famously commented that Hitler did in Europe what Europeans had been doing in Africa for a century. Cf. The Hereros sections in V .). It begins with railroads and "other straight line" constructions.
The themes of ATD might also "map" to current events in another warzone, where a contemporary Great Game is being played out.
common in dreams
Such as Frank's and Reef's. And/or, dreams require interpretation.
This post was suggested by—
The above Sábato novel was translated as The Angel of Darkness .
Its Spanish title was "Abaddón el Exterminador " (Abaddon the Exterminator ).
From a customer review of the novel at Amazon.com—
"Early in the book a drunken outcast will see the vision of the Great Beast of Revelation. Near the end he will tell others of what he has seen. Meanwhile Sábato, who was originally trained as a scientist, seeks out the supernatural and the mystical in order to find an antidote to Stalinism, simple-minded 'Progress' and a superficial positivism."
For a more sophisticated vision of the Beast, see The Ninth Gate.
For Abaddon in a less sophisticated antidote to positivism, see The Chronicle of Abaddon the Destroyer: The War in Heaven .
I prefer Charles Williams's approach to War in Heaven .
If there is an afterlife, perhaps Sábato's experience there will be more lively than his novel's tombstone would imply.
He may, despite his wish for heavenly peace, turn out to be (in a phrase from this morning's post) a badly needed "ghost warrior."
“Next to the bookcase stands a wooden cabinet with 24 drawers that looks like something you might have seen in a library decades ago, or perhaps in an old apothecary. The drawers are marked with the names of her novels or characters in the novels and crammed with indexed notes.
She pulls open a drawer marked ‘Lozen,’ the name of a main female character in another historical western novel, ‘The Ghost Warrior,’ and reads a few of the index tabs: ‘social relationships, puberty, death, quotes….'”
— From an article on Lucia St. Clair Robson in The Baltimore Sun by Arthur Hirsch, dated 1:31 p.m. EDT April 30, 2011*
From this journal later that same day —
 |
Robson’s most recent novel is Last Train from Cuernavaca .
“A corpse will be transported by express!”
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
* Update of 5:48 AM EDT May 3—
The same article was also published with a different dateline— April 28.
Enthusiasts of synchronicity may lament the confusion, or they may
turn to April 28 in this journal for a different 24-part invention.
See also Art Wars, April 7, 2003 and White Horse .
|
Related material:
Exhibit B Julie Taymor |
Commentary on last night—
Tonight: The After-Party.
In related news…
"The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which
lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical
(if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning
of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale
which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of
one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by
the spectral illumination of moonshine."
– Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness , quoted here in
Cold Open (Saturday night, January 29, 2011)
Conclusion of “The Place of Pure Mathematics” —
“Dogmas and philosophies, it would seem, rise and fall. But gradually accumulating throughout the ages, from the earliest dawn of history, there is a body of doctrine, a reasoned insight into the relations of exact ideas, painfully won and often tested. And this remains the main heritage of man; his little beacon of light amidst the solitudes and darknesses of infinite space; or, if you prefer, like the shout of children at play together in the cultivated valleys, which continues from generation to generation.
Yes, and continues for ever! A universe which has the potentiality of becoming thus conscious of itself is not without something of which that which we call memory is but an image. Somewhere, somehow, in ways we dream not of, when you and I have merged again into the illimitable whole, when all that is material has ceased, the faculty in which we now have some share, shall surely endure; the conceptions we now dimly struggle to grasp, the joy we have in the effort, these are but part of a greater whole. Some may fear, and some may hope, that they and theirs shall not endure for ever. But he must have studied Nature in vain who does not see that our spiritual activities are inherent in the mighty process of which we are part; who can doubt of their persistence.
And, on the intellectual side, of all that is best ascertained, and surest, and most definite, of these; of all that is oldest and most universal; of all that is most fundamental and far-reaching, of these activities, Pure Mathematics is the symbol and the sum.”
— From a 1913 address by geometry saint Henry Frederick Baker, who died on this date in 1956
The feast of another saint, Patrick, also falls on 3/17. The date itself is related, if only by chance, to the following remark—
“317 is a prime, not because we think so,
or because our minds are shaped in one way
rather than another, but because it is so,
because mathematical reality is built that way.”
— From a 1940 book by the somewhat less saintly number theorist G. H. Hardy
"The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine."
— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness
Some background—
An image from yesterday's search
God, TIme, Hopkins
"We got tom-toms over here bigger than a monster
Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla"
— "Massive Attack"
"I'm just checking your math on that. Yes, I got the same thing."
"Live… Uh, check that… From New York, it's Saturday Night! "
From a scholar quoted in this morning's post —
"Both Vico and Joyce, each in his own way, practice what Vico calls a nuov'arte critica , a 'new critical art'…"
From Hugh Grant's birthday, 2003 (found in a search for whiteness in this morning's post) —
|
Tara Fitzgerald and Hugh Grant |
PATRICK’S RUNE At Tara, in this fateful hour, From A Swiftly Tilting Planet |
The cover of yesterday's Sunday New York Times Book Review
features stylized letters by artist Leonardo Sonnoli that include black
circles and triangles —
The stylized Sonnoli letters spell out "WORDS ABOUT WORDS ABOUT WORDS."
This phrase is used to introduce essays on criticism by "six accomplished critics."
A less accomplished critic might note that in the picture above, Tara is modeling
a new fashion by Sonnoli — namely, the word OOV. A search for this word yields…
"OOV in text processing stands for 'out-of-vocabulary,' i.e., a word
that is not known in the computer's online dictionary."
Addendum (from a link in the same search for whiteness ) in memory of a great beauty who died on Sunday —
Symmetry, Duality, and Cinema
— Title of a Paris conference held June 17, 2010
From that conference, Edward Frenkel on symmetry and duality—
"Symmetry plays an important role in geometry, number theory, and quantum physics. I will discuss the links between these areas from the vantage point of the Langlands Program. In this context 'duality' means that the same theory, or category, may be described in two radically different ways. This leads to many surprising consequences."
Related material —
See also "Black Swan" in this journal, Ingmar Bergman's production of Yukio Mishima's "Madame de Sade," and Duality and Symmetry, 2001.
This journal on the date of the Paris conference
had a post, "Nighttown," with some remarks about
the duality of darkness and light. Its conclusion—
"By groping toward the light we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is around us."
— Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy,
Random House, 1973, page 118
A Theory of Pure Design
by Denman Waldo Ross
Lecturer on the Theory of Design
in Harvard University
Boston and New York
Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1907
PREFACE
"My purpose in this book is to elucidate, so far as I can, the
principles which underlie the practice of drawing and painting
as a Fine Art. Art is generally regarded as the expression of
feelings and emotions which have no explanation except per-
haps in such a word as inspiration , which is expletive rather
than explanatory. Art is regarded as the one activity of man
which has no scientific basis, and the appreciation of Art is
said to be a matter of taste in which no two persons can be
expected to agree. It is my purpose in this book to show how,
in the practice of Art, as in all other practices, we use certain
terms and follow certain principles. Being defined and ex-
plained, these terms and principles may be known and under-
stood by everybody. They are, so to speak, the form of the
language.
While an understanding of the terms and principles of Art
will not, in itself, enable any one to produce important works,
such works are not produced without it. It must be understood,
however, that the understanding of terms and principles
is not, necessarily, an understanding in words. It may lie in
technical processes and in visual images and may never rise,
or shall I say fall, to any formulation in words, either spoken
or written."
_________________________________________________
One of Ross's protégés, Jack Levine, died yesterday at 95. He
is said to have remarked, "I want to paint with the dead ones."
Related material: This journal on the day of Levine's death
and on the day of Martin Gardner's death.
The latter post has an image illustrating Ross's remarks on
formulations in words—
For further details, see Finale, Darkness Visible, and Packed.
Hollywood Reporter Exclusive
Martin Sheen Caught in
Spider-Man's Web
Sally Field is in early talks
to play Aunt May.
Related material:
Birthdays in this journal,
Galois Field of Dreams,
and Class of 64.
Keanu vs. the Devil, continued
Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves in Devil's Advocate
For Keanu —
For Keanu's mentor —
… There is a Cave
Within the Mount of God, fast by his Throne,
Where light and darkness in perpetual round
Lodge and dislodge by turns, which makes through Heav'n
Grateful vicissitude, like Day and Night….
— Paradise Lost , by John Milton
|
Click on figure for details. |
Al Pacino in Devil's Advocate |
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?
Judith Shulevitz at The New York Times
on Sunday, July 18, 2010 —
"What would an organic Christian Sabbath look like today?
For James Carroll, an ex-priest and dissenting Catholic
in Boston (he is the author of Practicing Catholic ,
published in 2009), it would look like the Sunday dinners
of his childhood. These were big formal meals,
held at 2 p.m. every Sunday….
'If Jesus were to visit us, it would have been
the Sunday dinner he would have insisted on
being a part of, not the worship service at the church.'"
The Usual Suspects —
For some background, see Java Jive and Today's Theology.
See also the java jive in this journal on Sunday, July 18—
A Tale of Two Cities, Du Sucre , Sermon, and Darkness at Noon.
"What exactly was Point Omega?"
This is Robert Wright in Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.
Wright is discussing not the novel Point Omega by Don DeLillo,
but rather a (related) concept of the Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
My own idiosyncratic version of a personal "point omega"—
The circular sculpture in the foreground
is called by the artist "The Omega Point."
This has been described as
"a portal that leads in or out of time and space."
For some other sorts of points, see the drawings
on the wall and Geometry Simplified—
The two points of the trivial affine space are represented by squares,
and the one point of the trivial projective space is represented by
a line segment separating the affine-space squares.
For related darkness at noon, see Derrida on différance
as a version of Plato's khôra—
The above excerpts are from a work on and by Derrida
published in 1997 by Fordham University,
a Jesuit institution— Deconstruction in a Nutshell—
For an alternative to the Villanova view of Derrida,
see Angels in the Architecture.
or, Darkness and Brightness at Noon
"Human perception is a saga of created reality. But we were devising entities beyond the agreed-upon limits of recognition or interpretation…. We tried to create new realities overnight, careful sets of words that resemble advertising slogans in memorability and repeatability. These were words that would yield pictures eventually and then become three-dimensional."
— Don DeLillo, Point Omega
GF(4) = {0, 1, ω, ω2}
— Symbolic representation of a Galois field
"One two three four,
who are we for?"
— Cheerleaders' chant
"By groping toward the light we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is around us."
— Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy,
Random House, 1973, page 118
A 1973 review of Koestler's book—
"Koestler's 'call girls,' summoned here and there
by this university and that foundation
to perform their expert tricks, are the butts
of some chilling satire."
Examples of Light—
Felix Christian Klein (1849- June 22, 1925) and Évariste Galois (1811-1832)
Klein on Galois—
"… in France just about 1830 a new star of undreamt-of brilliance— or rather a meteor, soon to be extinguished— lighted the sky of pure mathematics: Évariste Galois."
— Felix Klein, Development of Mathematics in the 19th Century, translated by Michael Ackerman. Brookline, Mass., Math Sci Press, 1979. Page 80.
"… um 1830 herum in Frankreich als ein neuer Stern von ungeahntem Glanze am Himmel der reinen Mathematik aufleuchtet, um freilich, einem Meteor gleich, sehr bald zu verlöschen: Évariste Galois."
— Felix Klein, Vorlesungen Über Die Entwicklung Der Mathematick Im 19. Jahrhundert. New York, Chelsea Publishing Co., 1967. (Vol. I, originally published in Berlin in 1926.) Page 88.
Examples of Darkness—
Martin Gardner on Galois—
"Galois was a thoroughly obnoxious nerd,
suffering from what today would be called
a 'personality disorder.' His anger was
paranoid and unremitting."
Gardner was reviewing a recent book about Galois by one Amir Alexander.
Alexander himself has written some reviews relevant to the Koestler book above.
See Alexander on—
The 2005 Mykonos conference on Mathematics and Narrative
A series of workshops at Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation between 2003 and 2006. "The meetings brought together professional mathematicians (and other mathematical scientists) with authors, poets, artists, playwrights, and film-makers to work together on mathematically-inspired literary works."
Continued from yesterday evening's "Long Day's Journey into Nighttown"—
A detail from that post—
Related material from Nighttown—
The Sebastian Horsley Guide to Whoring—
Horsley, the author of Dandy in the Underworld, was
found dead this morning of a suspected heroin overdose.
"By groping toward the light we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is around us."
— Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy,
Random House, 1973, page 118
The late mathematician V.I. Arnold was born on this date in 1937.
"By groping toward the light we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is around us."
— Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy
Light
Choosing light rather than darkness, we observe Arnold's birthday with a quotation from his 1997 Paris talk 'On Teaching Mathematics.'
"The Jacobi identity (which forces the heights of a triangle to cross at one point) is an experimental fact…."
The "experimental fact" part, perhaps offered with tongue in cheek, is of less interest than the assertion that the Jacobi identity forces the altitude-intersection theorem.
Albert Einstein on that theorem in the "holy geometry book" he read at the age of 12—
"Here were assertions, as for example the intersection of the three altitudes of a triangle in one point, which– though by no means evident– could nevertheless be proved with such certainty that any doubt appeared to be out of the question. This lucidity and certainty made an indescribable impression upon me.”
Arnold's much less evident assertion about altitudes and the Jacobi identity is discussed in "Arnol'd, Jacobi identity, and orthocenters" (pdf) by Nikolai V. Ivanov.
Ivanov says, without giving a source, that the altitudes theorem "was known to Euclid." Alexander Bogomolny, on the other hand, says it is "a matter of real wonderment that the fact of the concurrency of altitudes is not mentioned in either Euclid's Elements or subsequent writings of the Greek scholars. The timing of the first proof is still an open question."
For other remarks on geometry, search this journal for the year of Arnold's birth.
"Why is a raven like a writing-desk?" — Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Arthur Koestler, The Roots of Coincidence —
"In his The Nature of the Physical World (1928) Sir Arthur Eddington introduced his famous 'parable of the two writing desks.' One is the antique piece of furniture on which his elbows solidly rest while writing; the other is the desk as the physicist conceives it, consisting almost entirely of empty space, sheer nothingness…. Eddington concluded:
In the world of physics we watch a shadowgraph performance of familiar life. The shadow of my elbow rests on the shadow-table as the shadow-ink flows over the shadow-paper….
Though the constituents of matter could be described with great mathematical accuracy as patterns of vibrations, the question remained— what was it that vibrated? On the one hand, these matter-waves produced physically real phenomena, such as interference patterns on a screen, or the currents in a transistor radio. On the other hand, the whole conception of matter-waves excludes by definition any medium with physical attributes as a carrier of the waves. A wave is movement; but what is that something that moves, producing the shadows on Eddington's shadow-desk? Short of calling it the grin of the Cheshire Cat, it was named the 'psi field' or 'psi function.'"
What is it that moves? Perhaps not the Cheshire Cat, but rather The Raven—
Closeup, he’s blue—streaked iris blue, india-ink blue—and
black—an oily, fiery set of blacks—none of them
true—as where hate and order touch—something that cannot
become known. Stages of black but without
graduation. So there is no direction.
All of this happened, yes.
— Jorie Graham, "The Dream of the Unified Field"
See also notes on darkness in this journal.
"By groping toward the light we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is around us."
— Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy,
Random House, 1973, page 118
Continued from Christmas 2009 and from last Sunday—
The serious reflection is composed
Neither of comic nor tragic but of commonplace."
Continued from May 8
(Feast of Saint Robert Heinlein)
“Wells and trees were dedicated to saints. But the offerings at many wells and trees were to something other than the saint; had it not been so they would not have been, as we find they often were, forbidden. Within this double and intertwined life existed those other capacities, of which we know more now, but of which we still know little– clairvoyance, clairaudience, foresight, telepathy.”
— Charles Williams, Witchcraft, Faber and Faber, London, 1941
Why "Saint" Robert? See his accurate depiction of evil– the Eater of Souls in Glory Road.
For more on Williams's "other capacities," see Heinlein's story "Lost Legacy."
A related story– Fritz Leiber's "The Mind Spider." An excerpt:
The conference—it was much more a hyper-intimate
gabfest—proceeded.
"My static box bugged out for a few ticks this morning,"
Evelyn remarked in the course of talking over the
trivia of the past twenty-four hours.
The static boxes were an invention of Grandfather
Horn. They generated a tiny cloud of meaningless brain
waves. Without such individual thought-screens, there was
too much danger of complete loss of individual personality
—once Grandfather Horn had "become" his infant daughter
as well as himself for several hours and the unfledged
mind had come close to being permanently lost in its own
subconscious. The static boxes provided a mental wall be-
– hind which a mind could safely grow and function, similar
to the wall by which ordinary minds are apparently
always enclosed.
In spite of the boxes, the Horns shared thoughts and
emotions to an amazing degree. Their mental togetherness
was as real and as mysterious—and as incredible—as
thought itself . . . and thought is the original angel-cloud
dancing on the head of a pin. Their present conference
was as warm and intimate and tart as any actual family
gathering in one actual room around one actual table.
Five minds, joined together in the vast mental darkness
that shrouds all minds. Five minds hugged together for
comfort and safety in the infinite mental loneliness that
pervades the cosmos.
Evelyn continued, "Your boxes were all working, of
course, so I couldn't get your thoughts—just the blurs of
your boxes like little old dark grey stars. But this time
if gave me a funny uncomfortable feeling, like a spider
Crawling down my—Grayl! Don't feel so wildly! What
Is it?”
Then… just as Grayl started to think her answer…
something crept from the vast mental darkness and infinite
cosmic loneliness surrounding the five minds of the
Horns.
Grayl was the first to notice. Her panicky thought had
ttie curling too-keen edge of hysteria. "There are six of
us now! There should only be five, but there are six.
Count! Count, I tell you! Six!"
To Mort it seemed that a gigantic spider was racing
across the web of their thoughts….
See also this journal on May 30– "720 in the Book"– and on May 31– "Memorial for Galois."
("Obnoxious nerds"— a phrase Martin Gardner recently applied to Galois— will note that 720
Significant Passage:
On the Writing Style of Visual Thinkers
"The words are filled with unstated meaning.
They are (the term is Ricoeur's) 'packed'
and need unpacking." —Gerald Grow
From the date of Ricoeur's death,
May 20, 2005—
“Plato’s most significant passage
may be found in Phaedrus 265b…."
|
With a little effort, cross-referenced." — Opening sentence
|
Mozart's K 265 is variations on the theme
now known as "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star."
For darker variations on the Twinkle theme,
see the film "Joshua" and Martin Gardner's
Annotated Alice (Norton, 2000, pp. 73-75).
For darker variations on the asterisk theme,
see Darkness Visible (May 25)
and Vonnegut's Asterisk.
"Nuvoletta in her lightdress, spunn of sisteen shimmers,
was looking down on them, leaning over the bannistars….
Fuvver, that Skand, he was up in Norwood's sokaparlour…."
— Finnegans Wake
To counteract the darkness of today's 2:01 AM entry—
Part I— Artist Josefine Lyche describes her methods—
A— "Internet and hard work"
B— "Books, both fiction and theory"
Part II— I, too, now rely mostly on the Internet for material. However, like Lyche, I have Plan B— books.
Where I happen to be now, there are piles of them. Here is the pile nearest to hand, from top to bottom.
(The books are in no particular order, and put in the same pile for no particular reason.)
Lyche probably could easily make her own list of what Joyce might call "sisteen shimmers."
Darkness Visible
The inevitable tribute to Martin Gardner
has now appeared at the AMS website—
Related Imagery—
The following is an image from Saturday morning—
See also Art Wars and
Mathematics and Narrative.
Two definitions–
"In Dante's Inferno the Harrowing of Hell is mentioned in Canto IV by the pilgrim's guide Virgil." —Wikipedia
"The Easter Vigil…. is held in the hours of darkness between sunset on Holy Saturday and sunrise on Easter Day." —Wikipedia
Two more, of acronyms coined by Philip Rieff—
"Rieff is critical of the present 'pop' culture that glories in the 'primacies of possibility' and prefers 'both/and' to 'either/or.' … the 'via'— the 'vertical in authority'—… teaches us our place as we assent to and ascend on via’s ladder." —Philip Manning
Related material:
The infinity symbol, as sketched in a touching
attempt at scholarship by the late
"both/and" novelist David Foster Wallace—
Lemniscate with Cartesian cross—
Anne Applebaum in the current New York Review of Books on Arthur Koestler—
"At the moment, he still seems like yesterday's man, unfashionable and obsolete."
Rather like God. See this journal yesterday– Darkness at Noon.
See also David Levine's portrait of Koestler (Dec. 30, 2009)–
— and an objective correlative to yesterday's post —
A Medal
In memory of Byzantine scholar Ihor Sevcenko,
who died at 87 on St. Stephen's Day, 2009–
| William Grimes on Sevcenko in this morning's New York Times:
"Perhaps his most fascinating, if uncharacteristic, literary contribution came shortly after World War II, when he worked with Ukrainians stranded in camps in Germany for displaced persons. In April 1946 he sent a letter to Orwell, asking his permission to translate 'Animal Farm' into Ukrainian for distribution in the camps. The idea instantly appealed to Orwell, who not only refused to accept any royalties but later agreed to write a preface for the edition. It remains his most detailed, searching discussion of the book." |
See also a rather different medal discussed
here in the context of an Orwellian headline from
The New York Times on Christmas morning,
the day before Sevcenko died.
That headline, at the top of the online front page,
was "Arthur Koestler, Man of Darkness."
The medal, offered as an example of brightness
to counteract the darkness of the Times, was designed
by Leibniz in honor of his discovery of binary arithmetic.
See Brightness at Noon and Brightness continued.
"By groping toward the light we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is around us."
— Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy,
Random House, 1973, page 118
This journal’s Christmas Day entry, Brightness at Noon, was in response to the Orwellian headline “Arthur Koestler, Man of Darkness,” at the top of the online New York Times front page on Christmas morning.
The entry offered, as an example of brightness, some thoughts of Leibniz on his discovery of binary arithmetic.
Related material:
“To make all things from nothing, unity suffices.” So it is written on a medal entitled Imago Creationis and designed by Leibniz to “exhibit to posterity in silver” his discovery of the binary system. Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (also Leibnitz) 1646-1716. Philosopher and mathematician. Invented calculus independently of Newton. Proposed the metaphysical theory that we live in “the best of all possible worlds.” He also discovered binary number system and believed in its profound metaphysical significance. He noticed similarity with the ancient Chinese divination system “I Ching.” We chose him for our patron, for Krawtchuk polynomials can be understood as a sophistication of the simple counting of 0 and 1… — Philip Feinsilver and Jerzy Kocik, 17 July 2001 |
From Mikhail Krawtchouk: Short Biography—
Anyone knowing even a little Soviet history of the thirties can conclude that Krawtchouk could not avoid the Great Terror. During the Orwellian “hours of hatred” in 1937 he was denounced as a “Polish spy,” “bourgeois nationalist,” etc. In 1938, he was arrested and sentenced to 20 years of confinement and 5 years of exile.
Academician Krawtchouk, the author of results which became part of the world’s mathematical knowledge, outstanding lecturer, member of the French, German, and other mathematical societies, died on March 9, 1942, in Kolyma branch of the GULAG (North-Eastern Siberia) more than 6 months short of his 50th birthday.
Incidentally, happy birthday
to John von Neumann.
New York Times online front page
Christmas morning:
"Arthur Koestler, Man of Darkness"–
The photo is of Koestler in 1931 on a zeppelin expedition to the North Pole.
"The Act of Creation is, I believe, a more truly creative work than any of Koestler’s novels…. According to him, the creative faculty in whatever form is owing to a circumstance which he calls ‘bisociation.’ And we recognize this intuitively whenever we laugh at a joke, are dazzled by a fine metaphor, are astonished and excited by a unification of styles, or ’see,’ for the first time, the possibility of a significant theoretical breakthrough in a scientific inquiry. In short, one touch of genius—or bisociation—makes the whole world kin. Or so Koestler believes.”
– Henry David Aiken, The Metaphysics of Arthur Koestler, New York Review of Books, Dec. 17, 1964
From Opus Postumum by Immanuel Kant, Eckart Förster, Cambridge U. Press, 1995, p. 260:
"In January 1697, Leibniz accompanied his New Year Congratulations to Rudolf August with the design of a medal with the duke's likeness on one side, and the 'image of Creation' in terms of the binary number system on the other. Concerning the inscription on this side, Leibniz writes: 'I have thought for a while about the Motto dell'impresa and finally have found it good to write this line: omnibus ex nihilo ducendis SUFFICIT UNUM [To make all things from nothing, UNITY SUFFICES], because it clearly indicates what is meant by the symbol, and why it is imago creationis' (G. F. Leibniz, Zwei Briefe über das binäre Zahlensystem und die chinesische Philosophie, ed. Renate Loosen and Franz Vonessen, Chr. Belser Verlag: Stuttgart 1968, p. 21)."
Figure from Rudolf Nolte’s
Gottfried Wilhelms Baron von Leibniz
Mathematischer Beweis der Erschaffung und
Ordnung der Welt in einem Medallion…
(Leipzig: J. C. Langenheim, 1734).
"And so that I won’t come entirely empty-handed this time, I enclose a design of that which I had the pleasure of discussing with you recently. It is in the form of a memorial coin or medallion; and though the design is mediocre and can be improved in accordance with your judgment, the thing is such, that it would be worth showing in silver now and unto future generations, if it were struck at your Highness’s command. Because one of the main points of the Christian Faith, and among those points that have penetrated least into the minds of the worldly-wise and that are difficult to make with the heathen is the creation of all things out of nothing through God’s omnipotence, it might be said that nothing is a better analogy to, or even demonstration of such creation than the origin of numbers as here represented, using only unity and zero or nothing. And it would be difficult to find a better illustration of this secret in nature or philosophy; hence I have set on the medallion design IMAGO CREATIONIS [in the image of creation]. It is no less remarkable that there appears therefrom, not only that God made everything from nothing, but also that everything that He made was good; as we can see here, with our own eyes, in this image of creation. Because instead of there appearing no particular order or pattern, as in the common representation of numbers, there appears here in contrast a wonderful order and harmony which cannot be improved upon….
Such harmonious order and beauty can be seen in the small table on the medallion up to 16 or 17; since for a larger table, say to 32, there is not enough room. One can further see that the disorder, which one imagines in the work of God, is but apparent; that if one looks at the matter with the proper perspective, there appears symmetry, which encourages one more and more to love and praise the wisdom, goodness, and beauty of the highest good, from which all goodness and beauty has flowed."
See also Parable.
Union colonel Joshua Chamberlain, on the way to the battle at Gettysburg, remembers his boyhood.
"Maine… is silent and cold.
Maine in the winter: air is darker, the sky is a deeper dark. A darkness comes with winter that these Southern people don't know. Snow falls so much earlier and in the winter you can walk in a snowfield among bushes, and visitors don't know that the bushes are the tops of tall pines, and you're standing in thirty feet of snow. Visitors. Once long ago visitors in the dead of winter: a preacher preaching hell-fire. Scared the fool out of me. And I resented it and Pa said I was right.
Pa.
When he thought of the old man he could see him suddenly in a field in the spring, trying to move a gray boulder. He always knew instinctively the ones you could move, even though the greater part was buried in the earth, and he expected you to move the rock and not discuss it. A hard and silent man, an honest man, a noble man. Little humor but sometimes the door opened and you saw the warmth within a long way off, a certain sadness, a slow, remote, unfathomable quality as if the man wanted to be closer to the world but did not know how. Once Chamberlain had a speech memorized from Shakespeare and gave it proudly, the old man listening but not looking, and Chamberlain remembered it still: 'What a piece of work is man… in action how like an angel!' And the old man, grinning, had scratched his head and then said stiffly, 'Well, boy, if he's an angel, he's sure a murderin' angel.' And Chamberlain had gone on to school to make an oration on the subject: Man, the Killer Angel. And when the old man heard about it he was very proud, and Chamberlain felt very good remembering it."
— Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels: A Novel of the Civil War
From the weblog of David Lavery, literature, film, and television scholar/critic, now teaching at Middle Tennessee State University–
Lavery’s quote of the day (6/27/09)-
“Art is based on second love, not first love. In it we make a return to something which we had willfully alienated. The child is occupied mostly with things, but it is because he is still unfurnished with systematic ideas, not because he is a ripe citizen by nature and comes already trailing clouds of glory. Images are clouds of glory for the man who has discovered that ideas are a sort of darkness.”
–John Crowe Ransom
Posted by Lavery on Friday, June 26, 2009, at 9:00 PM
Apocatastasis Now
I give you the end of a golden string,
Only wind it into a ball:
It will lead you in at Heavens gate,
Built in Jerusalems wall.
— WILLIAM BLAKE
"In 'Apocatastasis Now: A Very Condensed Reading of William Blake's Jerusalem' (
— The Year's Work in English Studies, 2003: Vol. 82, No. 1, pp. 493-547
| Thriller |
|
From the website of Philip Pullman, president of The Blake Society:
"I must create a System…"
|
Click to enlarge.
"There is a body
on the cross
in my church."
Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman
in "The Interpreter."
Click to enlarge.
"My card."
|
"Is Heart of Darkness the story of Kurtz or the story of Marlow’s experience of Kurtz? Was Marlow invented as a rhetorical device for heightening the meaning of Kurtz’s moral collapse, or was Kurtz invented in order to provide Marlow with the centre of his experience in the Congo? Again a seamless web, and we tell ourselves that the old-fashioned question 'Who is the protagonist?' is a meaningless one."
|
“… while some are elected,
others not elect are
passed by….”
— A commentary on the
Calvinist doctrine of preterition
| Gravity’s Rainbow, Penguin Classics, 1995, page 742:
“… knowing his Tarot, we would expect to look among the Humility, among the gray and preterite souls, to look for him adrift in the hostile light of the sky, the darkness of the sea…. Now there’s only a long cat’s-eye of bleak sunset left over the plain tonight, bright gray against a purple ceiling of clouds, with an iris of 742″ |
“God is the original
conspiracy theory.”
“We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.”
— President Obama yesterday
It is not entirely clear what these “childish things” are. Perhaps the young nation’s “childish things” that the new President refers to are part of what Robert Stone memorably called “our secret culture.” Stone was referring to Puritanism, which some advocates of the new religion of Scientism might call “childish.” I do not. Lunatic, perhaps, but not childish.
Related meditations:
A year ago yesterday, on Sunday, Jan. 20, 2008, the mid-day lottery for New York State was 605.
A midrash in the Judeo-Christian tradition of paranoia a year ago today suggested that 605 might be a veiled reference to “God, the Devil, and a Bridge,” a weblog entry on mathematician André Weil.
Continuing in this vein a year later, we are confronted with the mid-day New York lottery for yesterday:
Taking a hint from another
entry on Weil, this may be
regarded as a reference to
The Oxford Book of
English Verse (1919 edition):
Selection 742 in that book
comports well with this
jounal’s recent meditations
on death and Brooklyn:
| “Let me glide noiselessly forth; | |
| With the key of softness unlock the locks….” — Walt Whitman |
Applying this method of
exegesis to last year’s
lottery, we have
| “And all that did then attend and follow, |
|
| Were silent with love, as you now, Apollo, |
|
| With envy of my sweet pipings.” |
— Pan: God of Shepherds, Flocks, and Fornication
Hymn 605 thus supplies a reference to the devil mentioned by Weil in the entry of 6/05.
“… thus far, I have not heard any priests of Apollo, nor of any other God, issuing any auguries.”
Neither have I, but hearing is only one of the senses.
“Heard melodies are sweet,
but those unheard
Are sweeter.”— John Keats
Part I: The Pagan View
From The Fire, Katherine Neville's sequel to her novel The Eight:
"'Cat…. realized that we all need some kind of a chariot driver to pull our forces together, like those horses of Socrates, one pulling toward heaven, one toward the earth….'
… I asked, 'Is that why you said my mother's and my birthdays are important? Because April 4 and October 4 are opposite in the calendar?'
Rodo beamed a smile…. He said, 'That's how the process takes place….'"
Part II: The Christian View
"The Calendar of saints is a traditional Christian method of organizing a liturgical year by associating each day with one or more saints and referring to the day as that saint's feast day. The system arose from the very early Christian custom of annual commemoration of martyrs on the dates of their deaths, or birth into heaven, and is thus referred to in Latin as dies natalis ('day of birth')." –Wikipedia
The October 4 date above, the birthday of Cat's daughter, Xie, in The Fire, is also the liturgical Feast of St. Francis of Assisi (said by some to be also the date of his death).
The April 4 date above is Neville's birthday and that of her alter ego Cat in The Eight and The Fire. Neville states that this is also the birth date of Charlemagne. It is, as well, the dies natalis (in the "birth into heaven" sense), of Dr. Martin Luther King.
For more about April 4, see Art Wars and 4/4/07.
For more about October 4, see "Revelation Game Continued: Short Story."
"et lux in tenebris lucet
et tenebrae eam
non comprehenderunt"
From the previous entry:
“If it’s a seamless whole you want,
pray to Apollo, who sets the limits
within which such a work can exist.”
— Margaret Atwood,
author of Cat’s Eye
“The power of the dark is ascending.
The light retreats to security, so that
the dark cannot encroach upon it.”
Related material:
Darkness Visible
From Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, a fictional Communist on propaganda:
“It is necessary to hammer every sentence into the masses by repetition and simplification. What is presented as right must shine like gold; what is presented as wrong must be black as pitch.”
Thanks for this quotation to Kati Marton, author of The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World (Simon & Schuster, paperback edition Nov. 6, 2007). One of Marton’s nine was Koestler.
From another book related to this exodus:
“Riesz was one of the most elegant mathematical writers in the world, known for his precise, concise, and clear expositions. He was one of the originators of the theory of function spaces– an analysis which is geometrical in nature.”
— Stanislaw Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician
And from Gian-Carlo Rota, a friend of Ulam:
“Riesz’s example is well worth following today.”
Related material: Misunderstanding in the Theory of Design and Geometry for Jews.
For a different approach to ethnicity and the number nine that is also “geometrical in nature,” see The Pope in Plato’s Cave and the four entries preceding it, as well as A Study in Art Education.
Great Directors
“After his return to acting in ‘Tootsie,’ Pollack took movie roles under directors Robert Altman in ‘The Player’ (1992), Woody Allen in ‘Husbands and Wives’ (1992) and Stanley Kubrick in ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ (1999). He said he chose roles in part to study other great directors.”
April 19, 2008–
“On this date….
Ten years ago….
Mexican poet-philosopher
Octavio Paz died at age 84.”
“Mexico is a solar country–
but it is also a black country,
a dark country. This duality
of Mexico has preoccupied
me since I was a child.”
— Octavio Paz, as quoted
by Homero Aridjis
(at Google News):
In other words:
|
Revelation for
April 16, 2008 —
day of the Pennsylvania
Clinton-Obama debate and
of the Pope’s birthday —
The Pennsylvania Lottery:
Make of this revelation
what you will.
My own interpretations:
the Lichtung of 4/13 and
the Dickung of page 441
of Heidegger’s
Basic Writings, where
the terms Lichtung and
Dickung are described.
See also “The Shining of
May 29” (JFK’s birthday).
“By groping toward the light
we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is
around us.”
— Arthur Koestler,
The Call Girls:
A Tragi-Comedy
Those who have followed the links here recently may appreciate a short story told by yesterday’s lottery numbers in Pennsylvania: mid-day 096, evening 513.
The “96” may be regarded as a reference to the age at death of geometer H.S.M. Coxeter (see yesterday morning’s links). The “513” may be regarded as a reference to the time of yesterday afternoon’s entry, 5:01, plus the twelve minutes discussed in that entry by presidential aide Richard Darman, who died yesterday.
These references may seem less fanciful in the light of other recent Log24 material: a verse quoted here on Jan. 18—
— and a link on Jan. 19 to the following:
|
“But what does it all mean?” asked Susan when they were somewhat calmer. “It means,” said Aslan, “that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward.” |
Tonight this journal had two Xanga footprints from Italy….
At 11:34 PM ET a visitor from Italy viewed a page containing an entry from Jan. 8, 2005, Splendor of the Light, which offers the following quotation–
From an essay on Guy Davenport—
"A disciple of Ezra Pound, he adapts to the short story the ideogrammatic method of The Cantos, where a grammar of images, emblems, and symbols replaces that of logical sequence. This grammar allows for the grafting of particulars into a congeries of implied relation without subordination. In contrast to postmodernists, Davenport does not omit causal connection and linear narrative continuity for the sake of an aleatory play of signification but in order to intimate by combinational logic kinships and correspondences among eras, ideas and forces."
— "When Novelists Become Cubists: The Prose Ideograms of Guy Davenport," by Andre Furlani
The visitor from Italy may, of course, have instead intended to view one of the four earlier entries on the page. In particular, the visitor may have seen
The Star
of Venus
"He looked at the fading light
in the western sky and saw Mercury,
or perhaps it was Venus,
gleaming at him as the evening star.
Darkness and light,
the old man thought.
It is what every hero legend is about.
The darkness which is more than death,
the light which is love, like our friend
Venus here, or perhaps this star is
Mercury, the messenger of Olympus,
the bringer of hope."
— Roderick MacLeish, Prince Ombra.
At 11:38 PM ET, a visitor from Italy (very likely the 11:34 visitor returning) viewed the five Log24 entries ending at 12:06 AM ET on Sept. 30, 2004.
These entries included Midnight in the Garden and…
A Tune for Michaelmas
The entries on this second visited page also included some remarks on Dante, on time, and on Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano that are relevant to Log24 entries earlier this week on Maundy Thursday and on Holy Saturday.
Here's wishing a happy Easter to Italy, to Francis Ford Coppola and Russell Crowe (see yesterday's entry), and to Steven Spielberg (see the Easter page of April 20, 2003).
Image courtesy of
Hollywood Jesus:
When you wish
upon a star…
Related material:
“But what is it?”
Calvin demanded.
“We know that it’s evil,
but what is it?”
“Yyouu hhave ssaidd itt!”
Mrs. Which’s voice rang out.
“Itt iss Eevill. Itt iss thee
Ppowers of Ddarrkknesss!”
“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.”
— Freeman Dyson,
New York Review of Books,
issue dated May 28, 1998
Excerpt:
"We are left to conclude that there was something significant in Hobbes's philosophy that motivated Wallis to engage in the lengthy and vitriolic denunciation of all things Hobbesian.
In point of fact, Wallis made no great secret of his motivations for attacking Hobbes's geometry, and the presence of theological and political motives is well attested in a 1659 letter to Huygens. He wrote:
But regarding the very harsh diatribe against Hobbes, the necessity of the case, and not my manners, led to it. For you see, as I believe, from other of my writings how peacefully I can differ with others and bear those with whom I differ. But this was provoked by our Leviathan (as can be easily gathered fro his other writings, principally those in English), when he attacks with all his might and destroys our universities (and not only ours, but all, both old and new), and especially the clergy and all institutions and all religion. As if the Christian world knew nothing sound or nothing that was not ridiculous in philosophy or religion; and as if it has not understood religion because it does not understand philosophy, nor philosophy because it does not understand mathematics. And so it seemed necessary that now some mathematician, proceeding in the opposite direction, should show how little he understand this mathematics (from which he takes his courage). Nor should we be deterred from this by his arrogance, which we know will vomit poison and filth against us. (Wallis to Huygens, 11 January, 1659; Huygens 1888-1950,* 2: 296-7)
The threats that Hobbes supposedly posed to the universities, the clergy, and all religion are a consequence of his political and theological doctrines. Hobbes's political theory requires that the power of the civil sovereign be absolute and undivided. As a consequence, such institutions as universities and the clergy must submit to the dictates of the sovereign in all matters. This extends, ironically enough, to geometry, since Hobbes notoriously claimed that the sovereign could ban the teaching of the subject and order 'the burning of all books of Geometry' if he should judge geometric principles 'a thing contrary to [his] right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion' (Leviathan (1651) 1.11, 50; English Works** 3: 91). In the area of church government, Hobbes's doctrines are a decisive rejection of the claims of Presbyterianism, which holds that questions of theological doctrine is [sic] to be decided by the elders of the church– the presbytery– without reference to the claims of the sovereign. As a Presbyterian minister, a doctor of divinity, and professor of geometry at Oxford, Wallis found abundant reason to reject this political theory."
* Huygens, Christiaan. 1888-1950. Les oeuvres complètes de Chrisiaan Huygens. Ed. La Société Hollandaise des Sciences. 22 vols. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
** Hobbes, Thomas. [1839-45] 1966. The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, now First Collected and Edited by Sir William Molesworth. Edited by William Molesworth. 11 vols. Reprint. Aalen, Germany: Scientia Verlag.
"But what is it?"
Calvin demanded.
"We know that it's evil,
but what is it?"
"Yyouu hhave ssaidd itt!"
Mrs. Which's voice rang out.
"Itt iss Eevill. Itt iss thee
Ppowers of Ddarrkknesss!"
"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."
(in memory of George Latshaw,
who died on Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2006)
|
Brightness Doubled Seven is Heaven “Love is the shadow Witness the man who — Roger Waters, quoted in |
Garrett comments on Wordsworth’s approach to landscape, citing Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, translated by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (page numbers below refer to the 1998 Routledge edition):
“… ‘the present becomes the breach through which what was previously inward, bursts out suddenly, takes hold of the outer world and transforms it’ [p. 193]. This breaking through into ecstasy can only be brought about through ‘Kairos‘ or ‘fulfilled time'”….
See translators’ note, p. 198: “In Greek mythology Kairos is the God of Opportunity– the genius of the decisive moment. The Christianized notion of this is given thus in Paul Tillich‘s The Religious Situation [1925, translation by H. Richard Niebuhr, New York, Holt, 1932, pp. 138-139]: ‘Kairos is fulfilled time, the moment of time which is invaded by eternity. But Kairos is not perfection or completion in time.'”
Garrett quotes Wordsworth’s 1850 Prelude:
There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue … (12.208-210)
“And in book 14 Wordsworth…. symbolizes how man can find transcendent unity with the universe through the image of himself leading his group to the peak of Mt. Snowdon. Climbing at night in thick fog, he almost steps off a cliff, but at the last instant, he steps out of the mist, the moon appears, and his location on the brink is revealed. Walking in the darkness of reason, his imagination illumed the night, revealed the invisible world, and spared him his life.”
See also Charles Frazier on the edge of eternity:
“They climbed to a bend and from there they walked on great slabs of rock. It seemed to Inman that they were at the lip of a cliff, for the smell of the thin air spoke of considerable height, though the fog closed off all visual check of loftiness…. Then he looked back down and felt a rush of vertigo as the lower world was suddenly revealed between his boot toes. He was indeed at the lip of a cliff, and he took one step back….”
Christopher Fry’s obituary
in The New York Times—
“His plays radiated
"Every great magic trick consists of three acts. The first act is called 'The Pledge.' The magician shows you something ordinary, but of course… it probably isn't. The second act is called 'The Turn.' The magician makes his ordinary 'some thing' do something extraordinary. Now if you're looking for the secret… you won't find it. That's why there's a third act, called 'The Prestige.' This is the part with the twists and turns, where lives hang in the balance, and you see something shocking you've never seen before."
"You can fool
too many of the people
too much of the time."
— James Thurber,
American humorist
(1894-1961)
For more detail,
Pandora's Box
Part I:
The Pandora Cross
— Rosalind Krauss in "Grids"
Part II:
The Opening
Remarks by the Pope on Sept. 12,
as reported by the Vatican:
Faith, Reason, and the University:
Memories and Reflections
For the result of
the Pope's remarks, see
a transcript of
yesterday's Google News
and the following
from BBC today:
Click to enlarge the screenshot.
Part III:
Hope
"In September [2005], she had a private audience with Pope Benedict XVI at Castel Gandolfo, his summer residence outside Rome. She had criticized John Paul II for making overtures to Muslims, and for not condemning terrorism heartily enough, but she has hopes for Joseph Ratzinger."
For further details, see yesterday's Log24.
Part IV:
The Sibyl's Song
— From The Magic Circle,
a spiritual narrative
by Katherine Neville
For more on "the long-mute voice
of the past," on "darkness beneath
the volcano," and on uncorking,
see Glory Season and Harrowing.
Related material from
Log24 on Dec. 2, 2005:
Benedict XVI, before he became Pope:
and a related
Christian symbol,
the Greek Cross
(adapted from
Ad Reinhardt).
Moral of the Pandora Cross:
"Nine is a very powerful Nordic number."
— Katherine Neville in The Magic Circle…
quoted in The Nine, a Log24 entry
for Hermann Weyl's birthday,
November 9, 2004.
Happy birthday, Robert M. Pirsig.
Readings for the hour of the wolf:
Yesterday was Arthur Koestler’s birthday.
“By groping toward the light
we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is
around us.”
— Arthur Koestler,
The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy,
Random House, 1973, page 118
Tom Stoppard and an ad for a concert
in Pribor, Czech Republic,
birthplace of Sigmund Freud
Related material:
and the five Log24 entries
ending on this date last year.
By Syd Barrett,
Dead Poet:
— From the 1967 album
“The Piper at the Gates of Dawn“
By Syd Barrett,
Dead Poet
— From the 1967 album
“The Piper at the Gates of Dawn“
Snippets:
A Reply to John Updike
See Updike on digitized snippets.
The following four snippets were pirated from the end of MathPages Quotations, compiled by Kevin Brown.
They are of synchronistic interest in view of the previous two Log24 entries, which referred (implicitly) to a Poe story and (explicitly) to Pascal.
"That is another of your odd notions,"
said the Prefect, who had the fashion
of calling everything 'odd' that was
beyond his comprehension, and thus
lived amid an absolute legion of 'oddities.'
Edgar Allan Poe
I knew when seven justices could not
take up a quarrel, but when the parties
were met themselves, one of them
thought but of an If, as, 'If you said so,
then I said so'; and they shook hands
and swore brothers. Your If is the only
peacemaker; much virtue in If.
Shakespeare
I have made this letter longer than usual
because I lack the time to make it shorter.
Blaise Pascal
S'io credessi che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma per cio che giammai di questo fondo
non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
Dante, 1302
For translations of the Dante (including one by Dorothy Sayers), see everything2.com.
An anonymous author there notes that Dante describes a flame in which is encased a damned soul. The flame vibrates as the soul speaks:
If I thought that I were making
Answer to one that might return to view
The world, this flame should evermore
cease shaking.
But since from this abyss, if I hear true,
None ever came alive, I have no fear
Of infamy, but give thee answer due.
-- Dante, Inferno, Canto 27, lines 61-66,
translated by Dorothy Sayers
“Yes, there is a ton of information on the web but much of it is grievously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile. The electronic marvels that abound around us serve, I have the impression, to inflame what is most informally and non-critically human about us. Our computer screens stare back at us with a kind of giant, instant aw-shucks, disarming in its modesty.”
Note Updike’s use of “inflame.”
For an aw-shucks version of “what is most informally and non-critically human about us,” as well as a theological flame, see both the previous entry and the above report from Hell.
Note that the web serves also to correct material that is inaccurate, unedited, unattributed, and juvenile. For examples, see Mathematics and Narrative. The combination of today’s entry for Pascal’s birthday with that web page serves both to light one candle and to curse the darkness.
For John F. Kennedy's birthday:
See The Shining of May 29
from 2002
and the references to
the marriage theorem
in Dharwadker's Alleged Proof
from 2005.
"By groping toward the light
we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is
around us."
— Arthur Koestler,
The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy,
Random House, 1973, page 118
For related material on
academic darkness, see
Mathematics and Narrative.
Quarter to Three
(continued from
Dec. 20, 2003,
and from
April 3, 2006)
… so put another nickel in the machine….
Related material:
— Arthur Koestler
| Galatians 4:4
But when the fulness |
Luke 2:13
And suddenly |
|
Inscape: The Christology and
Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, by James Finn Cotter, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972. See esp. the references to pleroma 40-48, 51, 65, 70, 81, 85, 92, 93, |
It turns out that Medawar (see previous entry) also wrote a deeply hostile review of Koestler’s The Act of Creation. (See Pluto’s Republic.)
There are plenty more like Medawar, so it may be that a further effort at documentation of Diamond Theory is needed. See this evening’s entry, to follow.
“What did he fear? It was not a fear or dread, It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was a nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.”
| “By groping toward the light we are made to realize how deep the darkness is around us.” — Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy, Random House, 1973, page 118 |
|
“It would have been |
“He’s good.”
“Good? He’s the fucking
Prince of Darkness!”
— Paul Newman
and Jack Warden
in “The Verdict“
| Sanskrit (transliterated) —
nada: “So Nada Brahma means not only: — Joachim-Ernst Berendt, |
“This book is the outcome of
a course given at Harvard
first by G. W. Mackey….”
— Lynn H. Loomis, 1953, preface to
An Introduction to
Abstract Harmonic Analysis
For more on Mackey and Harvard, see
the Log24 entries of March 14-17.
A Living Church
A skeptic’s remark:
“…the mind is an amazing thing and it can create patterns and interconnections among things all day if you let it, regardless of whether they are real connections.”
— Xanga blogger “sejanus”
A reply from G. K. Chesterton
(Log24, Jan. 18, 2004):
“Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living. To know that Plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before.”
A meditation on
Sunday’s numbers —
24
The Star
of Venus
“He looked at the fading light
in the western sky and saw Mercury,
or perhaps it was Venus,
gleaming at him as the evening star.
Darkness and light,
the old man thought.
It is what every hero legend is about.
The darkness which is more than death,
the light which is love, like our friend
Venus here….”
— Roderick MacLeish, Prince Ombra
From Log24, Oct. 23, 2002:
An excerpt from
Robert A. Heinlein‘s
classic novel Glory Road —
|
“I have many names. What would you like to call me?” “Is one of them ‘Helen’?” She smiled like sunshine and I learned that she had dimples. She looked sixteen and in her first party dress. “You are very gracious. No, she’s not even a relative. That was many, many years ago.” Her face turned thoughtful. “Would you like to call me ‘Ettarre’?” “Is that one of your names?” “It is much like one of them, allowing for different spelling and accent. Or it could be ‘Esther’ just as closely. Or ‘Aster.’ Or even ‘Estrellita.’ ” ” ‘Aster,’ ” I repeated. “Star. Lucky Star!” |
Related material:
672 Astarte and
The Venerable Bede
(born in 672).
672 illustrated:
The Venerable Bede
and the Star of Venus
The 672 connection is, of course,
not a real connection
(in the sense of “sejanus” above)
but it is nevertheless
not without interest.
Postscript of 6 PM
A further note on the above
illustration of the 672 connection:
The late Buck Owens
(see previous entry for
Owens, Reba, and the
star of Venus)
once described
his TV series as
“a show of fat old men
and pretty young girls”
(today’s Washington Post).
A further note on
lottery hermeneutics:
Those who prefer to interpret
random numbers with the aid
of a dictionary
(as in Is Nothing Sacred?)
may be pleased to note that
“heehaw” occurs in Webster’s
New World Dictionary,
College Edition, 1960,
on page 672.
In today’s Washington Post,
Richard Harrington informs us that
“As a child, Owens worked cotton and
maize fields, taking the name Buck
from a well-liked mule….”
“In The Painted Word, a rumination on the state of American painting in the 1970s, Tom Wolfe described an epiphany….”
— Peter Berkowitz, “Literature in Theory”
“I had an epiphany.”
— Apostolos Doxiadis, organizer of last summer’s conference on mathematics and narrative. See the Log24 entry of 1:06 PM last August 23 and the four entries that preceded it.
“… das Durchleuchten des ewigen Glanzes des ‘Einen’ durch die materielle Erscheinung“
— A definition of beauty from Plotinus, via Werner Heisenberg
“By groping toward the light we are made to realize how deep the darkness is around us.”
— Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy, Random House, 1973, page 118, quoted in The Shining of May 29
“Perhaps we are meant to see the story as a cubist retelling of the crucifixion….”
— Adam White Scoville, quoted in Cubist Crucifixion, on Iain Pears’s novel, An Instance of the Fingerpost
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.”
I stood in the cold on the porch
And could not think of anything so perfect
As man’s hope of light in the face of darkness.
— Richard Eberhart,
“The Eclipse”
1:00:19 EST
The Lion, the Witch
and the Wardrobe
premieres tonight at
the Royal Albert Hall.
Hexagram 19 in the
Cullinane series:
— Katherine Neville, The Eight
|
“What does this have to do with why we’re here?”
“I saw it in a chess book Mordecai showed me. The most ancient chess service ever discovered was found at the palace of King Minos on Crete– the place where the famous Labyrinth was built, named after this sacred axe. The chess service dates to 2000 B.C. It was made of gold and silver and jewels…. And in the center was carved a labrys.” … “But I thought chess wasn’t even invented until six or seven hundred A.D.,” I added. “They always say it came from Persia or India. How could this Minoan chess service be so old?” “Mordecai’s written a lot himself on the history of chess,” said Lily…. “He thinks that chess set in Crete was designed by the same guy who built the Labyrinth– the sculptor Daedalus….” Now things were beginning to click into place…. “Why was this axe carved on the chessboard?” I asked Lily, knowing the answer in my heart before she spoke. “What did Mordecai say was the connection?”…. “That’s what it’s all about,” she said quietly. “To kill the King.” The sacred axe was used to kill the King. The ritual had been the same since the beginning of time. The game of chess was merely a reenactment. Why hadn’t I recognized it before? |
|
“But what does it all mean?” asked Susan when they were somewhat calmer. “It means,” said Aslan, “that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward.” |
"I remember how the darkness doubled
I recall lightning struck itself
I was listening, listening to the rain
I was hearing, hearing something else
Life in the hive puckered up my night
The kiss of death, the embrace of life
There I stand neath the Marquee Moon
Just waiting"
— Tom Verlaine, "Marquee Moon"
In memory of Michael Gill,
producer and director of the
1969 TV series "Civilisation,"
who died on October 20:
Two descriptions of "Aeon Flux,"
a story featured in the Log24 entry
on the day that Gill died —
"After Aeon is done, Trevor decides that she knows too much, so he has a underling propose a plan to kill her. The plan, quite strangely, is to implant a bunch of nanites (microscopic robots) in Trevors seminal duct so he has sex with Aeon and the nanites tear her apart from the inside. But Aeon was prepared because she had some weird, mean, spiky, device in her uterus(!?!!) that eats the nanites (that part is kinda weak), she blows up a wall then and escapes leaving Trevor standing there naked and confused."
The Incredible Shrinking Man
(Wired Magazine, October 2004)
See also yesterday's entry on Scientism.
In memory of
Thomas Wootton Masland,
brother of
Richard Harry Masland, Harvard '64,
the Log24 entries of October 25.
And for the Halloween season…
"The mixolydian mode is one of the authentic 'church modes' of the Middle Ages…. On the white notes of a piano, the mixolydian scale runs from G to G."
Friday, Oct. 21–Saturday, Oct. 29…. Tickets available at the Harvard Box Office and Loeb Drama Center Box Office, 64 Brattle St.
Related material:
|
“Is Heart of Darkness the story of Kurtz or the story of Marlow’s experience of Kurtz? Was Marlow invented as a rhetorical device for heightening the meaning of Kurtz’s moral collapse, or was Kurtz invented in order to provide Marlow with the centre of his experience in the Congo? Again a seamless web, and we tell ourselves that the old-fashioned question ‘Who is the protagonist?’ is a meaningless one.”
|
Log24 entries for those dates contain allusions
to games of chance and games of skill.
See also yesterday’s entry.
Multimedia
“… the quality of life as of death
and of light as of darkness is one…”
— Robinson Jeffers
(See previous two entries
and Dante, Paradiso, 25.054.)
Holy Cross Day
The Cross and the Wheel:
“… the quality of life as of death
and of light as of darkness is one,
one beauty, the rhythm of that Wheel,
and who can behold it is happy
and will praise it to the people.”
— Robinson Jeffers,
“Point Pinos and Point Lobos,”
quoted at the end of
The Cosmic Code by Heinz Pagels,
Simon & Schuster, 1982
Part I: The Light
The Shining of May 29
and
Diamond Theory
Part II: The Darkness
From Darkness Visible:
"Ed Rinehart [sic] made a fortune painting canvases that were just one solid color. He had his black period in which the canvas was totally black. And then he had a blue period in which he was painting the canvas blue."
— Martin Gardner interview in AMS Notices, June/July 2005
From Art History:
"Art history was very personal through the eyes of Ad Reinhardt."
— Robert Morris,
Smithsonian Archives of American Art
From The Edge of Eternity:
Christopher Fry's obituary
in The New York Times—
"His plays radiated an optimistic faith in God and humanity, evoking, in his words, 'a world in which we are poised on the edge of eternity, a world which has deeps and shadows of mystery, and God is anything but a sleeping partner.' He said he wrote his plays in poetry because that was 'the language in which man expresses his own amazement' at the complexity both of himself and of a reality which, beneath the surface, was 'wildly, perilously, inexplicably fantastic.'"
Adapted from cover of
German edition of Cold Mountain
Into the Dark
O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant
….
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of
darkness on darkness….
— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
“I’m well past eighty now and fairly certain I won’t see ninety but I’d like more of a choice than Hell or Paradise when I leave. Now that we know the Bible was created by a vote of Emperor Constantine’s clergy, wouldn’t we all be better off if other options were offered? Or is the fear of what happens after death the glue that holds Religion together? I hope not because I believe better of God.
As a Deist, I have no fear or doubts of the way that life ends. I can bravely face the reality of ceasing to exist because the God of my heart comforts me by promising to provide a dark, starless night of nothingness when my visit is over.”
— Paul Winchell (pdf) (See previous entry.)
Paul Winchell was born at the winter solstice — the longest night — December 21, 1922.
For another view of the longest night, see the five Log24 entries ending on the day after the longest night of 2003. Summary of those entries:
After the Long Night
Mathematics and Metaphor
The current (June/July) issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society has two feature articles. The first, on the vulgarizer Martin Gardner, was dealt with here in a June 19 entry, Darkness Visible. The second is related to a letter of André Weil (pdf) that is in turn related to mathematician Barry Mazur’s attempt to rewrite mathematical history and to vulgarize other people’s research by using metaphors drawn, it would seem, from the Weil letter.
A Mathematical Lie conjectures that Mazur’s revising of history was motivated by a desire to dramatize some arcane mathematics, the Taniyama conjecture, that deals with elliptic curves and modular forms, two areas of mathematics that have been known since the nineteenth century to be closely related.
Mazur led author Simon Singh to believe that these two areas of mathematics were, before Taniyama’s conjecture of 1955, completely unrelated —
“Modular forms and elliptic equations live in completely different regions of the mathematical cosmos, and nobody would ever have believed that there was the remotest link between the two subjects.” — Simon Singh, Fermat’s Enigma, 1998 paperback, p. 182
This is false. See Robert P. Langlands, review of Elliptic Curves, by Anthony W. Knapp, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, January 1994.
It now appears that Mazur’s claim was in part motivated by a desire to emulate the great mathematician André Weil’s manner of speaking; Mazur parrots Weil’s “bridge” and “Rosetta stone” metaphors —
From Peter Woit’s weblog, Feb. 10, 2005:
“The focus of Weil’s letter is the analogy between number fields and the field of algebraic functions of a complex variable. He describes his ideas about studying this analogy using a third, intermediate subject, that of function fields over a finite field, which he thinks of as a ‘bridge‘ or ‘Rosetta stone.'”
In “A 1940 Letter of André Weil on Analogy in Mathematics,” (pdf), translated by Martin H. Krieger, Notices of the A.M.S., March 2005, Weil writes that
“The purely algebraic theory of algebraic functions in any arbitrary field of constants is not rich enough so that one might draw useful lessons from it. The ‘classical’ theory (that is, Riemannian) of algebraic functions over the field of constants of the complex numbers is infinitely richer; but on the one hand it is too much so, and in the mass of facts some real analogies become lost; and above all, it is too far from the theory of numbers. One would be totally obstructed if there were not a bridge between the two. And just as God defeats the devil: this bridge exists; it is the theory of the field of algebraic functions over a finite field of constants….
On the other hand, between the function fields and the ‘Riemannian’ fields, the distance is not so large that a patient study would not teach us the art of passing from one to the other, and to profit in the study of the first from knowledge acquired about the second, and of the extremely powerful means offered to us, in the study of the latter, from the integral calculus and the theory of analytic functions. That is not to say that at best all will be easy; but one ends up by learning to see something there, although it is still somewhat confused. Intuition makes much of it; I mean by this the faculty of seeing a connection between things that in appearance are completely different; it does not fail to lead us astray quite often. Be that as it may, my work consists in deciphering a trilingual text {[cf. the Rosetta Stone]}; of each of the three columns I have only disparate fragments; I have some ideas about each of the three languages: but I know as well there are great differences in meaning from one column to another, for which nothing has prepared me in advance. In the several years I have worked at it, I have found little pieces of the dictionary. Sometimes I worked on one column, sometimes under another.”
Here is another statement of the Rosetta-stone metaphor, from Weil’s translator, Martin H. Krieger, in the A.M.S. Notices of November 2004, “Some of What Mathematicians Do” (pdf):
“Weil refers to three columns, in analogy with the Rosetta Stone’s three languages and their arrangement, and the task is to ‘learn to read Riemannian.’ Given an ability to read one column, can you find its translation in the other columns? In the first column are Riemann’s transcendental results and, more generally, work in analysis and geometry. In the second column is algebra, say polynomials with coefficients in the complex numbers or in a finite field. And in the third column is arithmetic or number theory and combinatorial properties.”
For greater clarity, see Armand Borel (pdf) on Weil’s Rosetta stone, where the three columns are referred to as Riemannian (transcendental), Italian (“algebraico-geometric,” over finite fields), and arithmetic (i.e., number-theoretic).
From Fermat’s Enigma, by Simon Singh, Anchor paperback, Sept. 1998, pp. 190-191:
Barry Mazur: “On the one hand you have the elliptic world, and on the other you have the modular world. Both these branches of mathematics had been studied intensively but separately…. Than along comes the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture, which is the grand surmise that there’s a bridge between these two completely different worlds. Mathematicians love to build bridges.”
Simon Singh: “The value of mathematical bridges is enormous. They enable communities of mathematicians who have been living on separate islands to exchange ideas and explore each other’s creations…. The great potential of the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture was that it would connect two islands and allow them to speak to each other for the first time. Barry Mazur thinks of the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture as a translating device similar to the Rosetta stone…. ‘It’s as if you know one language and this Rosetta stone is going to give you an intense understanding of the other language,’ says Mazur. ‘But the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture is a Rosetta stone with a certain magical power.'”
If Mazur, who is scheduled to speak at a conference on Mathematics and Narrative this July, wants more material on stones with magical powers, he might consult The Blue Matrix and The Diamond Archetype.
|
Fade to Black "…that ineffable constellation of talents that makes the player of rank: a gift for conceiving abstract schematic possibilities; a sense of mathematical poetry in the light of which the infinite chaos of probability and permutation is crystallized under the pressure of intense concentration into geometric blossoms; the ruthless focus of force on the subtlest weakness of an opponent." — Trevanian, Shibumi "'Haven't there been splendidly elegant colors in Japan since ancient times?' 'Even black has various subtle shades,' Sosuke nodded." — Yasunari Kawabata, The Old Capital
An Ad Reinhardt painting
Ad Reinhardt,
The viewer may need to tilt "The grid is a staircase to the Universal…. We could think about Ad Reinhardt, who, despite his repeated insistence that 'Art is art,' ended up by painting a series of… nine-square grids in which the motif that inescapably emerges is a Greek cross. 
Greek Cross There is no painter in the West who can be unaware of the symbolic power of the cruciform shape and the Pandora's box of spiritual reference that is opened once one uses it."
— Rosalind Krauss,
|
In memory of
St. William Golding
(Sept. 19, 1911 – June 19, 1993)
I stood out in the open cold
To see the essence of the eclipse
Which was its perfect darkness.
I stood in the cold on the porch
And could not think of anything so perfect
As man’s hope of light in the face of darkness.
— Richard Eberhart,
“The Eclipse”
See also March 11.
ART WARS:
Dark City
Jennifer Connelly at
premiere of “Cinderella Man” —
In memory of Martin Buber,
author of Good and Evil,
who died on June 13, 1965:
“With a little effort, anything can be
shown to connect with anything else:
existence is infinitely cross-referenced.”
— Opening sentence of
Martha Cooley’s The Archivist
|
Woe unto Isaiah 5:20
|
As she spoke |
The world
|
Jennifer Connelly in “Dark City”
(from journal note of June 19, 2002) —
And, one might add for Flag Day,
“you sons of bitches.”
Evil
Some academics may feel that a denunciation of an essay by one of their fellow academics as "evil" (see this morning's entry The Last Word) goes too far.
Here is a followup to that entry.
From the Riviera Presbyterian Church, a sermon quoting Madeleine L’Engle's classic A Wrinkle in Time:
|
For a moment there was the darkness of space, then another planet. The outlines of this planet were not clean and clear. It seemed to be covered with a smoky haze. Through the haze Meg thought she could make out the familiar outlines of continents like pictures in her Social Studies books. "Is it because of our atmosphere that we can't see properly?" she asked anxiously. "No, Meg, yyou know thattt itt iss nnott tthee attmosspheeere," Mrs. Which said. "Yyou mmusstt bee brrave." "It's the Thing!" Charles Wallace cried. "It's the Dark Thing we saw… when we were riding on Mrs. Whatsit's back!" "Did it just come?" Meg asked in agony, unable to take her eyes from the sickness of the shadow which darkened the beauty of the earth. Mrs. Whatsit sighed. "No, Meg. It hasn't just come. It has been there for a great many years. That is why your planet is such a troubled one." "I hate it!" Charles Wallace cried passionately. "I hate the Dark Thing!" Mrs. Whatsit nodded. "Yes, Charles dear. We all do." "But what is it?" Calvin demanded. "We know that it's evil, but what is it?" "Yyouu hhave ssaidd itt!" Mrs. Which's voice rang out. "Itt iss Eevill. Itt iss thee Ppowers of Ddarrkknessss!" "But what's going to happen?" Meg's voice trembled. "Oh, please, Mrs. Which, tell us what's going to happen!" "We will continue tto ffight!" Something in Mrs. Which's voice made all three of the children stand straighter, throwing back their shoulders with determination, looking at the glimmer that was Mrs. Which with pride and confidence. "And we're not alone, you know, children," came Mrs. Whatsit, the comforter. "All through the universe it's being fought, all through the cosmos… and some of our very best fighters have come right from your own planet, and it's a little planet, dears, out on the edge of a little galaxy." "Who have some of our fighters been?" Calvin asked. "Oh, you must know them dear," Mrs. Whatsit said. Mrs. Who's spectacles shone out at them triumphantly, "And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not." "Jesus!" Charles Wallace said. "Why, of course, Jesus!" "Go on, Charles, love. There were others. All your great artists. They've been lights for us to see by." "Leonardo da Vinci?" Calvin suggested tentatively. "And Michelangelo?" "And Shakespeare," Charles Wallace called out, "and Bach! And Pasteur and Madame Curie and Einstein!" Now Calvin's voice rang with confidence. "And Schweitzer and Gandhi and Buddha and Beethoven and Rembrandt and St. Francis!" "Watch!" the Medium told them. The earth with its fearful covering of dark shadow swam out of view and they moved rapidly through the Milky Way. And there was the Thing again. Suddenly there was a great burst of light through the Darkness. The light spread out and where it touched the Darkness the Darkness disappeared. The light spread until the patch of Dark Thing had vanished, and there was only a gentle shining, and through the shining came the stars, clear and pure. No shadows. No fear. Only the stars and the clear darkness of space, quite different from the fearful darkness of the Thing. "You see!" the Medium cried, smiling happily. "It can be overcome! It is being overcome all the time!" And it is. Lift up your hearts, lift up your heads, catch the ball, practice Advent, see in the dark. You are a city set on a hill, whose light cannot be hid. said Jesus, and he believed it. |
The Last Word
Beethoven Week on the BBC ended at midnight June 10.
“With Beethoven, music did not grow up, it regressed to adolescence. He was a hooligan who could reduce Schiller’s Ode to Joy to madness, bloodlust, and megalomania.”
— Arts and Letters Daily, lead-in to an opinion piece in The Guardian of Tuesday, June 7, 2005:
| Beethoven Was a Narcissistic Hooligan
“If Beethoven had dedicated his obvious talents to serving the noble Pythagorean view of music, he might well have gone on to compose music even greater than that of Mozart. You can hear this potential in his early string quartets, where the movements often have neat conclusions and there is a playfulness reminiscent of Mozart or Haydn. If only Beethoven had nourished these tender shoots instead of the darker elements that one can also hear. For the darkness is already evident in the early quartets too, in their sombre harmonies and sudden key changes. As it was, however, his darker side won out; compare, for example, the late string quartets. Here the youthful humour has completely vanished; the occasional signs of optimism quickly die out moments after they appear and the movements sometimes end in uncomfortably inconclusive cadences…. In A Clockwork Orange it is the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that echoes in the mind of Alex whenever he indulges in one of his orgies of violence. Alex’s reaction may be rather extreme, but he is responding to something that is already there in this dark and frenzied setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy; the joy it invites one to feel is the joy of madness, bloodlust and megalomania. It is glorious music, and seductive, but the passions it stirs up are dark and menacing.”  — Dylan Evans, former Lacanian psychotherapist (pdf) and now head of the undergraduate robotics program at the University of the West of England. |
Speak for yourself, Dylan.
“Evil did not have the last word.”
— Richard John Neuhaus, April 4, 2005
Evil may have had the last word in Tuesday’s Guardian, but now that Beethoven Week has ended, it seems time for another word.
For another view of Beethoven, in particular the late quartets, see the Log24 Beethoven’s Birthday entry of December 16, 2002:
|
Beethoven’s Birthday “Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Quartet in A Minor, Opus 132, is one of the transcendent masterworks of the Western classical tradition. It is built around its luminous third movement, titled ‘Holy song of thanksgiving by one recovering from an illness.’ In this third movement, the aging Beethoven speaks, clearly and distinctly, in a voice seemingly meant both for all the world and for each individual who listens to it. The music, written in the ancient Lydian mode, is slow and grave and somehow both a struggle and a celebration at the same time. This is music written by a supreme master at the height of his art, saying that through all illness, tribulation and sorrow there is a strength, there is a light, there is a hope.” “Eliot’s final poetic achievement—and, for many, his greatest—is the set of four poems published together in 1943 as Four Quartets…. Structurally—though the analogy is a loose one—Eliot modeled the Quartets on the late string quartets of Beethoven, especially… the A Minor Quartet; as early as 1931 he had written the poet Stephen Spender, ‘I have the A Minor Quartet on the gramophone, and I find it quite inexhaustible to study. There is a sort of heavenly or at least more than human gaiety about some of his later things which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruit of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering; I should like to get something of that into verse before I die.'” — Anonymous author at a “Each of the late quartets has a unique structure, and the structure of the Quartet in A Minor is one of the most striking of all. Its five movements form an arch. At the center is a stunning slow movement that lasts nearly half the length of the entire quartet… The third movement (Molto adagio) has a remarkable heading: in the score Beethoven titles it ‘Hymn of Thanksgiving to the Godhead from an Invalid,’ a clear reflection of the illness he had just come through. This is a variation movement, and Beethoven lays out the slow opening section, full of heartfelt music. But suddenly the music switches to D major and leaps ahead brightly; Beethoven marks this section ‘Feeling New Strength.’ These two sections alternate through this movement (the form is A-B-A-B-A), and the opening section is so varied on each reappearance that it seems to take on an entirely different character each time: each section is distinct, and each is moving in its own way (Beethoven marks the third ‘With the greatest feeling’). This movement has seemed to many listeners the greatest music Beethoven ever wrote. and perhaps the problem of all who try to write about this music is precisely that it cannot be described in words and should be experienced simply as music.” — Eric Bromberger, In accordance with these passages, here is a web page with excellent transcriptions for piano by Steven Edwards of Beethoven’s late quartets: Our site music for today, Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15 in A Minor, Opus 132, Movement 3 (1825), is taken from this web page. |
See also the previous entry.
See also the iconology —
what Dan Brown in
The Da Vinci Code
calls "symbology" —
of Pandora's Box
at Log24.net,
March 10, 2005:
"Karol Wojtyla had looked into
the heart of darkness–
and at the heart of darkness
discovered reason
for an indomitable hope.
He lived on the far side of
the greatest catastrophe
in human history,
the death of the Son of God,
and knew that evil
did not have the last word.
This is the key…."
— Richard John Neuhaus,
April 4, 2005
Finnegans Wake, p. 293,
"the lazily eye of his lapis"
Skewed Mirrors,
Sept. 14, 2003
"Evil did not have the last word."
— Richard John Neuhaus, April 4, 2005
| Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the PARIS, |
"There is never any ending to Paris."
— Ernest Hemingway
For the first word, see Louis Armand on
Lethe, erinnerung, and riverrun.
See also the following passage,
linked to on the Easter Vigil, 2005:
Readings for
St. Patrick's Day
Time of this entry: 12:00:36 PM.
Hence,
"Here the climax of the darkening is reached. The dark power at first held so high a place that it could wound all who were on the side of good and of the light. But in the end it perishes of its own darkness, for evil must itself fall at the very moment when it has wholly overcome the good, and thus consumed the energy to which it owed its duration."
Narrativity: Theory and Practice, by Philip John Moore Sturgess
Sturgess's book deals with the narrative logic of the above novels by Koestler and Conrad, as well as some Irish material:
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These readings are in opposition to the works of Barbara Johnson published by Harvard University Press.
For some background, see The Shining of May 29 (JFK's birthday).
Discussion question:
In the previous entry, who represents the
Hexagram 36 "dark power"
Hope of Heaven
“Heaven is a state,
a sort of metaphysical state.”
— John O’Hara, Hope of Heaven, 1938
“The old men know
when an old man dies.”
— Ogden Nash
See also the five Log24 entries
ending with the 9 PM entry of
Tuesday, December 10, 2002.
From today’s New York Times:
“Joseph S. Frelinghuysen, whose memoir, Passages to Freedom, chronicled his escape from a prison camp in Italy during World War II, died on Saturday in Morristown, N.J. He was 92.”
A web page on the Indiantown Gap army camp quotes Frelinghuysen’s Passages to Freedom… He is describing July 1942, just before Frelinghuysen’s unit was sent overseas:
“In the last week of July, his wife Emily came to Indiantown to stay at the old Hershey Hotel so they could steal a few of the remaining hours together. He explained, ‘On my last night with Emily, she wore an evening dress with a full green and rose colored skirt, and I put on my best garrison uniform …. we had California champagne, lobster, and flaming crepes with ice cream. We danced to some old tunes; Cole Porter’s ‘Night and Day’ and Irving Berlin’s tunes from ‘Top Hat.’ Then they played a new one slowly, and a young girl sang the lyrics to ‘The White Cliffs of Dover.’ Noting that England had been at war for three years, he reminisced that it was a song that speaks of ‘love and laughter’ and ‘peace ever after.’ Nostalgically, he said, ‘We finished the dance in an embrace. She took my hand and we walked out through the lobby onto the terrace for a last look at the gardens in the pale light of a quarter moon.’ “
— Foucault’s Pendulum
by Umberto Eco,
Professor of Semiotics at
Europe’s oldest university,
the University of Bologna.
The Club Dumasby Arturo Perez-Reverte
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“In 1603, at Monte Paderno, outside Bologna, an alchemist (by day a cobbler) named Vicenzo Cascariolo discovered the Philosopher’s Stone, catalyst in the transformation of base metals into gold, focus of the imagination, talisman for abstruse thought. Silver in some lights, white in others, it glowed blue in darkness, awesome to behold.”
“For the University of Bologna hosting an International Conference on Bioluminescence and Chemiluminescence has a very special significance. Indeed, it is in our fair City that modern scientific research on these phenomena has its earliest roots….
‘After submitting the stone
to much preparation, it was not
the Pluto of Aristophanes
that resulted; instead, it was
the Luciferous Stone’ ”
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From one of the best books
of the 20th century: The Hawkline Monsterby Richard Brautigan
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24
The Star
of Venus
“He looked at the fading light
in the western sky and saw Mercury,
or perhaps it was Venus,
gleaming at him as the evening star.
Darkness and light,
the old man thought.
It is what every hero legend is about.
The darkness which is more than death,
the light which is love, like our friend
Venus here, or perhaps this star is
Mercury, the messenger of Olympus,
the bringer of hope.”
— Roderick MacLeish, Prince Ombra
Related material:
The Devil and Wallace Stevens,
Journey of the Magi,
and
“The time of darkness is past.
The winter solstice brings
the victory of light.”
The Dark Door
From Log24.net, Dec. 22, 2003:
“One, two, three, and we began to sing, our voices high and seemingly distant in the snow-felted darkness round the house that was occupied by nobody we knew. We stood close together, near the dark door.
Good King Wenceslas looked out
On the Feast of Stephen.”
— Dylan Thomas,
A Child’s Christmas in Wales
“The day after Christmas
turned out to be a living nightmare.”
— Arthur C. Clarke, Dec. 27, 2004
Adapted from the logo of the
Arthur C. Clarke Foundation:
Dabo claves regni caelorum. By silent shore
Ripples spread from castle rock. The metaphor
For metamorphosis no keys unlock.
— “Endgame,” Steven H. Cullinane,
November 7, 1986
One grows used to the weather,
The landscape and that;
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,
The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.
— Wallace Stevens,
"The American Sublime"
The Times Online on the artist Agnes Martin,
who died Dec. 16 in Taos, New Mexico:
"At a glance, or from a distance, her work looks like nothing at all. Square canvases are so palely touched with colour they might almost be blank. Considered slowly and carefully and close-up, however, the whole surface comes alive."
"The restraint and formal regularity of Martin’s work has led her often to be grouped with the Minimalists. She shares something of their self-effacing rigour and their concern with the material qualities of art, but she herself preferred to be seen in the context of the Abstract Expressionist painters who were her own contemporaries and early artistic models. Like them she may have seen abstract art as the means to a distinctively American sublime…."
"Taos had been a magnet for artists since the last years of the 19th century. D. H. Lawrence famously spent time there in the 1920s. 'Never shall I forget the Christmas dances at Taos,' he wrote, 'twilight, snow, the darkness coming over the great wintry mountains and the lonely pueblo.'"
The careful reader will note that the previous entry has two parts.
Part I, “Spain,” links to the home page of a Spaniard named Jesús.
Part II, “Take This Cup,” links to a page about a poet named César.
I found Jesús in a search for images of “Apocalypse Now” prompted in turn by earlier entries.
I knew of César from library browsing.
This afternoon, I looked at the home page of the site where I found the essay on César; this in turn led to another essay:
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by Frederick Zackel While it’s a story that’s never been written, a suggested title– Indiana Jones Sails Up The River Of Death–
shows how readily we as individuals or we as a culture can automatically visualize a basic story motif. We may each see the particular elements of the story differently, but almost instantaneously we catch its drift. The hero sails up the river of death to discover what lies within his own heart: i.e., how much moral and physical strength he has. Indiana Jones sails up the River of Death. We are following Indiana Jones up the River of Death. We’re going to visit with Colonel Kurtz. (You may not want to get off the boat.) No, I am not mixing up metaphors. These are the Story. |
For what it’s worth, the birthday of Jesús is April 9… See the entry of April 9, 2003, “Hearts of Darkness.”
The birthday of César is March 16. See the entry of March 16, 2003, on the letter A… Here is the logo of the site where I found both César and “The Necessity For Story”–
Midnight in the Garden
“With a little effort,
anything can be shown
to connect with anything else:
existence is infinitely
cross-referenced.”
— Opening sentence
of Martha Cooley’s
The Archivist
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Woe unto Isaiah 5:20 |
As she spoke |
The world Cole Porter |
Example:
Mozart’s K 265,
the page number 265,
and a story by George MacDonald.
Literary Archaeology
“Mrs. Who’s spectacles shone out
at them triumphantly,
‘And the light shineth in darkness;
and the darkness
comprehended it not.’ ”
— A Wrinkle in Time
See, too,
Shining Forth and
Taking Lucifer Seriously:
Michael Sprinker
versus
The Society of Jesus
As the previous entry indicates, I do not take Christian poetry too seriously. The Prince of Darkness is another matter. I encountered him this morning in a book on the Christian poet Hopkins by the late Michael Sprinker.
“You were never on the debating team when you were in high school, were you, ace? When you’re in a debate, you don’t try to convince the other side; they’re never going to agree with you. You try to convince the judges and the audience.”
— Michael Sprinker, quoted in The Minnesota Review, 2003
“For Hopkins, poetry was the act of producing the self, one version of that selving which he associated not only with Christ but with Lucifer.”
— Michael Sprinker, “A Counterpoint of Dissonance” — The Aesthetics and Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, p. 95
A counterbalance to Sprinker on Hopkins and Lucifer is Hopkins, the Self, and God, by Walter J. Ong, S. J. (University of Toronto Press, 1986). From p. 119:
“The interior dynamism of the Three Persons in One God was not for Hopkins some sort of formula for theological juggling acts but was rather the centre of his personal devotional life and thus of his own ‘selving.’ …. He writes to Bridges 24 October 1883…
‘For if the Trinity… is to be explained by grammar and by tropes… where wd. be the mystery? the true mystery, the incomprehensible
one.’ “
For the dynamics of the Trinity, see the Jan. 22 entry, Perichoresis, or Coinherence. Another word for coinherence is “indwelling,” as expressed in what might be called the
Song of Lucifer:
Me into you,
You into me,
Me into you…
For a Christian version of this “indwelling,” see
Coinherence,
Interpenetration,
Mutual Indwelling
See also last year’s entries of 9/09.
Sequel to previous 4 entries:
A Christmas Carol
by Dylan Thomas
Current phase of the moon,
from the U.S. Naval Observatory:
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And I remember that we went singing carols once, a night or two before Christmas Eve, when there wasn’t the shaving of a moon to light the secret, white-flying streets. At the end of a long road was a drive that led to a large house, and we stumbled up the darkness of the drive that night, each one of us afraid, each one holding a stone in his hand in case, and all of us too brave to say a word. The wind made through the drive-trees noises as of old and unpleasant and maybe web-footed men wheezing in caves. We reached the black bulk of the house.
‘What shall we give them?’ Dan whispered.
‘”Hark the Herald”? ‘‘Christmas comes but Once a Year”?’
‘No,’ Jack said: ‘We’ll sing “Good King Wenceslas.” I’ll count three.’
One, two, three, and we began to sing, our voices high and seemingly distant in the snow-felted darkness round the house that was occupied by nobody we knew. We stood close together, near the dark door.
Good King Wenceslas looked out
On the Feast of Stephen.
And then a small, dry voice, like the voice of someone who has not spoken for a long time, suddenly joined our singing: a small, dry voice from the other side of the door: a small, dry voice through the keyhole. And when we stopped running we were outside our house; the front room was lovely and bright; the gramophone was playing; we saw the red and white balloons hanging from the gas-bracket; uncles and aunts sat by the fire; I thought I smelt our supper being fried in the kitchen. Everything was good again, and Christmas shone through all the familiar town.
‘Perhaps it was a ghost,’ Jim said.
‘Perhaps it was trolls,’ Dan said, who was always reading.
‘Let’s go in and see if there’s any jelly left,’ Jack said. And we did that.
Cursing the Darkness
From my entries on this date last year…
“…we shall this day light such a candle in England as I trust by God’s grace shall never be put out.”
Thought for today:
Render unto Rome that which is Rome’s.
See also my remarks of January 29, 2003,
on the opening in New Zealand of
Cullinane College.
Magic Hawaii
Today, the birthday of singer Jerry Lee Lewis, is also the feast of St. Michael and All Angels.
In honor of Lewis:
Killer Radio, an entry of July 31, 2003, that contains the following…
“When the light came she was sitting on the bed beside an open suitcase, toying with her diamond rings. She saw the light first in the depths of the largest stone.”
— Paul Preuss, Broken Symmetries,
scene at Diamond Head, Oahu,
Hawaii
In honor of the angels:
Mathematics as an Adequate Language,
by Israel Gelfand, Sept. 2, 2003, which contains the following…
“Many people consider mathematics to be a boring and formal science. However, any really good work in mathematics always has in it: beauty, simplicity, exactness, and crazy ideas. This is a strange combination. I understood earlier that this combination is essential on the example of classical music and poetry. But it is also typical in mathematics. It is not by chance that many mathematicians enjoy serious music.
This combination of beauty, simplicity, exactness, and crazy ideas is, I think, common to both mathematics and music.”
These qualities seem also to be sought by practitioners of religion and physics… for example, by the spiritually-minded physicist in Preuss’s Broken Symmetries. Skeptics might prefer, to the word “religion,” the word (pronounced with a sneer) “magic.”
What do we find if, following in the footsteps of Gelfand and Preuss, we do a Google search on the following words…
The search yields two results:
For a follow-up to the poem, see
The Shining of Lucero.
These two selections, both on the theme of light and darkness, offer a language that is perhaps more adequate than mathematics for dealing with the nature of the High Holy Days. For a more lighthearted approach to these concerns, also with a Hawaiian theme, see
Time’s Breakdown
“… even if we can break down time into component Walsh functions, what would it achieve?”
— The Professor, in “Passing in Silence,”
by Oliver Humpage
“Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillness blurring into motion on the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we find the heart of mystery in which we are never allowed to rest. The flickering of a film interrupts the intolerable continuity of apparent world; subliminally it gives us those in-between spaces of black that we crave.”
— Gösta Kraken, Perception Perceived: an Unfinished Memoir (p. 9 in Fremder, a novel by Russell Hoban)
“The Underground’s ‘flicker’ is a mechanical reconciliation of light and darkness, the two alternately exhibited very rapidly.”
— Hugh Kenner on T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” in Four Quartets
From last year’s entries:
ART WARS September 12, 2002
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Artist Ben Shahn was born on this date in 1898. |
For some further reflections on flickering time,
see an essay by Nicholson Baker on
the Geneva mechanism
in movie projectors.
“At three o’clock in the morning
Eurydice is bound to come into it.”
—Russell Hoban,
The Medusa Frequency
For June Carter Cash as Eurydice,
see The Circle is Unbroken.
Let us pray that Jesus College
will help this production,
with Johnny Cash as Orpheus,
to have a happy ending.
Skewed Mirrors
Readings on Aesthetics for the
Feast of the Triumph of the Cross
Part I —
Bill Moyers and Julie Taymor
Director Taymor on her own passion play (see previous entry), "Frida":
"We always write stories of tragedies because that's how we reach our human depth. How we get to the other side of it. We look at the cruelty, the darkness and horrific events that happened in our life whether it be a miscarriage or a husband who is not faithful. Then you find this ability to transcend. And that is called the passion, like the passion of Christ. You could call this the passion of Frida Kahlo, in a way."
— 10/25/02 interview with Bill Moyers
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From transcript MOYERS: What happened to you in Indonesia. TAYMOR: This is probably it for me. This is the story that moves me the most…. I went to Bali to a remote village by a volcanic mountain on the lake. They were having a ceremony that only happens only every 10 years for the young men. I wanted to be alone. I was listening to this music and all of a sudden out of the darkness I could see glints of mirrors and 30 or 40 old men in full warrior costume– there was nobody in this village square. I was alone. They couldn't see me in the shadows. They came out with these spears and they started to dance. They did, I don't know, it felt like an eternity but probably a half hour dance. With these voices coming out of them. And they danced to nobody. Right after that, they and I went oh, my God. The first man came out and they were performing for God. Now God can mean whatever you want it to mean. But for me, I understood it so totally. The detail on the costumes. They didn't care if someone was paying tickets, writing reviews. They didn't care if an audience was watching. They did it from the inside to the outside. And from the outside to the in. And that profoundly moved me then. MOYERS: How did you see the world differently after you were in Indonesia? |
From transcript ….They did it from the inside to the outside. And from the outside to the in. And that profoundly moved me then. It was…it was the most important thing that I ever experienced. … ………………….. MOYERS: Now that you are so popular, now that your work is… TAYMOR: [INAUDIBLE]. MOYERS: No, I'm serious. Now that you're popular, now that your work is celebrated and people are seeking you, do you feel your creativity is threatened by that popularity or liberated by it? TAYMOR: No, I think it's neither one. I don't do things any differently now than I would before. And you think that sometimes perhaps if I get a bigger budget for a movie, then it will just be the same thing… MOYERS: Ruination. Ruination. TAYMOR: No, because LION KING is a combination of high tech and low tech. There are things up on that stage that cost 30 cents, like a little shadow puppet and a lamp, and it couldn't be any better than that. It just couldn't. Sometimes you are forced to become more creative because you have limitations. …. |
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TAYMOR: Well I understood really the power of art to transform. I think transformation become the main word in my life. Transformation because you don't want to just put a mirror in front of people and say, here, look at yourself. What do you see? You want to have a skewed mirror. You want a mirror that says you didn't know you could see the back of your head. You didn't know that you could amount cubistic see almost all the same aspects at the same time. It allows human beings to step out of their lives and to revisit it and maybe find something different about it. |
It's not about the technology. It's about the power of art to transform. I think transformation becomes the main word in my life, transformation. Because you don't want to just put a mirror in front of people and say, here, look at yourself. What do you see? You want to have a skewed mirror. You want a mirror that says, you didn't know you could see the back of your head. You didn't know that you could…almost cubistic, see all aspects at the same time. And what that does for human beings is it allows them to step out of their lives and to revisit it and maybe find something different about it. |
Part II —
Inside and Outside: Transformation
(Research note, July 11, 1986)
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Click on the above typewritten note to enlarge.
Summary of
Parts I and II:
See also
Geometry for Jews.
"We're not here to stick a mirror on you. Anybody can do that, We're here to give you a more cubist or skewed mirror, where you get to see yourself with fresh eyes. That's what an artist does. When you paint the Crucifixion, you're not painting an exact reproduction."
— Julie Taymor on "Frida" (AP, 10/22/02)
"She made 'real' an oxymoron,
she made mirrors, she made smoke.
She had a curve ball
that wouldn't quit,
a girlfriend for a joke."
— "Arizona Star," Guy Clark / Rich Alves
For the Man in Black
Lyrics: Arizona Star
“Shinin’ like a diamond
she had tombstones in her eyes.”
A picture: Salma Hayek and Julie Taymor
A book: Dark Ladies, by Fritz Leiber
This offers a gentler form of the alcoholic experience than Malcolm Lowry’s classic Under the Volcano:
“I’ve had hallucinations from alcohol, too…. But only during withdrawal oddly, the first three days. In closets and dark corners and under tables — never in very bright light — I’d see these black and sometimes red wires, about the thickness of telephone cords, vibrating, whipping around. Made me think of giant spiders’ legs and such. I’d know they were hallucinations — they were manageable, thank God. Bright light would always wipe them out.”
— Fritz Leiber, “Our Lady of Darkness,” in Dark Ladies
Related entries:
The Feast of Kali, the Dark Lady, and
Architecture of Eternity,
my own “Once Upon a Time in Mexico.”
For a more serious Dark Lady portrait, see the site of artist John de la Vega.
Story Theory
The conflict between the Euclidean, or “diamond” theory of truth, and the Trudeau, or “story” theory of truth, continues.
On this, Hugh Grant’s birthday, let us recall last year’s log24 entry for this date. On Roger Ebert’s review of the Hugh Grant film “Sirens” about the artist Norman Lindsay:
Ebert gets Pan wrong in this film; he says, “the bearded Lindsay is a Pan of sorts.” No. The “Pan of sorts” is in fact the girl who romps joyfully with the local boys and who later, with great amusement, uses her divine x-ray vision to view Tara Fitzgerald naked in church.
This year’s offering for Grant’s birthday is an illustrated prayer by a great defender of the religious, or “story,” theory of truth, Madeleine L’Engle:
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PATRICK’S RUNE At Tara, in this fateful hour, From A Swiftly Tilting Planet |
For an uncensored view, see my Harvard weblog. |
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For Fred Sandback:
Time's a Round
The following entry of Feb. 25, 2003, was written for painter Mark Rothko, and may serve as well for minimalist artist Fred Sandback, also connected to the de Menil family of art patrons, who, like Rothko, has killed himself.
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Plagued in life by depression — what Styron, quoting Milton, called "darkness visible" — Rothko took his own life on this date [Feb. 25] in 1970. As a sequel to the previous note, "Song of Not-Self," here are the more cheerful thoughts of the song "Time's a Round," the first of Shiva Dancing: The Rothko Chapel Songs, by C. K. Latham. See also my comment on the previous entry (7:59 PM).
Time’s a round, time’s a round, — C. K. Latham
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The following is from the cover of
"Finnegans Wake: a Symposium,"
a reprint of
Our Exagmination Round His Factification
for Incamination of Work in Progress,
Paris, Shakespeare and Company, 1929.
As well as being a memorial to Rothko and Sandback, the above picture may serve to mark the diamond anniversary of a dinner party at Shakespeare and Company on this date in 1928. (See previous entry.)
A quotation from aaparis.org also seems relevant on this, the date usually given for the death of author Malcolm Lowry, in some of whose footsteps I have walked:
"We are not saints."
— Chapter V, Alcoholics Anonymous
Midnight in the Garden
of Good and Evil
on Shakespeare’s Birthday
Tony Scherman on an April 7, 1968, recording by Nina Simone:
“…nobody could telescope more emotion into a single, idiosyncratically turned syllable (listen to the way she says the word “Savannah” in her spoken intro to “Sunday in Savannah.” It breaks your heart — and she ain’t even singin’ yet!).”
See also the following entries on midnight in the garden:
Trinity, Oct. 25, 2002
Midnight in the Garden, Oct. 26, 2002
Point of No Return, Dec. 10, 2002
Culture Clash at Midnight, Dec. 11, 2002
Dead Poets Society, Dec. 13, 2002
For the Dark Lady, Dec. 18, 2002
Nightmare Alley, Dec. 21, 2002
For the Green Lady, Dec. 21, 2002
“With a little effort, anything can be shown to connect with anything else: existence is infinitely cross-referenced.”
— Opening sentence of Martha Cooley’s The Archivist
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Woe unto Isaiah 5:20
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As she spoke about the Trees of Life and Death, I watched her…. |
The world Cole Porter
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Hearts of Darkness
Today's birthdays:
Charles Baudelaire, poet, b. 1821
Leopold II, King of Belgium, b. 1835
Tom Lehrer, mathematician, b. 1928
In view of these birthdays and of yesterday's entry quoting Eliot on "the Shadow," the following trilogy of links seems appropriate:
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The Lamont Cranston: |
Nota bene:
Today is also the birthday of
Paul Robeson and J. William Fulbright,
shadows to respect.
Symbols —
Broadway:
The Sound of Silence
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Hello darkness, my old friend. I’ve come to talk with you again. (See previous entry, Mar. 7, “Lovely, Dark and Deep.) |
And the people bowed and prayed to the neon god they made. (See CNN.com Broadway City Arcade club story of Mar. 9) |
The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls. (See picture in NY Times Book Review, Mar. 9, page 31.) |
See also the footnote on the Halmos “tombstone” symbol in the previous entry, the entry “Dustin in Wonderland” of Feb. 24, the film “Marathon Man,” and the entry “Geometry for Jews” of March 6.
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Ash |
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“Teach us to care and not to care.”
— T. S. Eliot, “Ash Wednesday“
From The Jerusalem Post, August 6, 2001:
In the movie Godfather II there is a scene when Michael Corleone is in Batista-ruled Havana. A Marxist rebel is arrested, and rather than be taken alive he explodes a grenade he had hidden in his jacket, killing himself and the officers arresting him.
His partner says: “Those rebels, you know, they’re lunatics.”
“Maybe so,” Michael Corleone says. “But it occurred to me. The soldiers are paid to fight – the rebels aren’t.”
“What does that tell you?” asks his partner.
“They can win,” he replies.
— Analysis by Arieh O’Sullivan
The date of the above analysis, August 6, was the date of the Christian Feast of the Transfiguration and the anniversary of the first use in warfare of a nuclear weapon.
“And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word* the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word….
Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound?”
— T. S. Eliot, “Ash Wednesday,” 1930
Hiroshima, perhaps?
See also my entries for Transfiguration 2002.
* Eliot does not say what “Word” he is talking about. Perhaps it is “Arieh,” the name of the journalist who wrote the perceptive Havana passage above. A search for the meaning of this word reveals that it means “an adult lion, having paired, in search of his prey (Nahum 2:12; 2 Sam 17:10; Num 23:24).” This is from The Witness of the Stars, a work that views the constellation Leo as a symbol of the Messiah. A particularly relevant passage: “The brightest star… marks the heart of the Lion (hence sometimes called by the moderns, Cor Leonis, the heart of the Lion).” Cor Leonis, Corleone. Is this the “Word” you meant, T. S.?
For Mark Rothko
Plagued in life by depression — what Styron, quoting Milton, called "darkness visible" — Rothko took his own life on this date in 1970. As a sequel to the previous note, "Song of Not-Self," here are the more cheerful thoughts of the song "Time's a Round," the first of Shiva Dancing: The Rothko Chapel Songs, by C. K. Latham. See also my comment on the previous entry (7:59 PM).
Time’s a round, time’s a round,
A circle, you see, a circle to be.
— C. K. Latham
Irish Fourplay
"…something I once heard Charles M. Schulz say, 'Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia.'"
"Forewarned is four-armed."
— Folk saying
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The painting at left is by Mary B. Kelly, a 1958 graduate of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College. Kelly is an expert on portrayals of Goddess figures in art. |
Today in Australia is February First, the feast of St. Bridget. As several websites note, St. Bridget is a combination of Christian saint and Goddess figure… rather like St. Sara (patron saint of Gypsies, also known as Kali) or like Sara Pezzini in the classic TV series "Witchblade."
"Aww… Irish foreplay."
— Sara Pezzini in Witchblade, Episode 6
"Mighty in the gift of purity
She was pleasing unto the Bridegroom on high."
"Brace yourself, Bridget."
— Definition of Irish foreplay
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Four people can form this cross by joining hands as shown. Of course, a Goddess like Kali (shown above) or Sara Pezzini could do it all by herself. |
For futher details, see The Swastika Goddess, the history of Jews and the Roman Catholic Church, and the history of Irish neutrality in World War II.
Postscript of 11 PM —
The Goddess Bridget in Literature
The Goddess Bridget (or Brigid) is incarnated in two classic works of American literature —
"In Jungian terms, Brigid becomes a projection of Spade's anima, a contrasexual replica of his own face as expressed in someone of the opposite sex.
Spade wears a variety of masks in his work. Masking allows him to get underneath the scam most clients lay on him. He is closer to the darker side of his unconscious than any of the other characters in the book, and he is so, because of his role as shamus. His function in his society is to expose all of the underlying darkness of the human psyche."
One way of looking at animus and anima is through the following archetypes:
A diamond and its dual "whirl" figure —
or a "jewel-box and its mate"
"D'ye mane to soy that Bridget O'Shaughnessy bought the mate to that joo-ul box to ship that dhrunken divil to Purgatory in?"
"Yes, madam."
"Then Pat shall go to heaven in the twin to it, if it takes the last rap the O'Flaherties can raise!"
From the Archives:
On this date in 1971, “Rick Nelson was booed off the stage when he didn’t stick to all oldies at the seventh Annual Rock ’n’ Roll Revival show at Madison Square Garden, New York. He tried to slip in some of his new material and the crowd did not approve. The negative reaction to his performance inspired Nelson to write his last top-40 hit, ‘Garden Party,’ which hit the top-ten about a year after the Madison Square Garden debacle. ‘Garden Party,’ ironically, was Nelson’s biggest hit in years.”
“With a little effort, anything can be shown to connect with anything else: existence is infinitely cross-referenced.”
— Opening sentence of Martha Cooley’s The Archivist
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Woe unto Isaiah 5:20 |
As she spoke |
The world Cole Porter |
Actor Pat O’Brien died on this date in 1983.
“A man in Ireland, who came in contact with a Bible colporteur, at first repulsed him. Finally he was persuaded to take a Bible and later he said: ‘I read a wee bit out of the New Testament every day, and I pray to God every night and morning.’ When asked if it helped him to read God’s Word and to pray, he answered: ‘Indade it does. When I go to do anything wrong, I just say to myself, “Pat, you’ll be talking to God tonight.” That keeps me from doing it!'”
— worldmissions.org
colporteur
… noun…
Etymology: French, alteration of Middle French comporteur, from comporter to bear, peddle….
a peddler of religious books
Two Literary Classics
(and a visit from a saint)
On this date in 1962, Edward Albee's classic play, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" opened on Broadway.
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As I was preparing this entry, based on the October 13 date of the Albee play's opening, after I looked for a picture of Marshall's book I thought I'd better check dates related to Marshall, too. This is what I was surprised to find: Marshall (b. Oct. 10, 1942) died in 1992 on today's date, October 13. This may be verified at
The James Edward Marshall memorial page,
A James Edward Marshall biography, and
Author Anniversaries for October 13.
The titles of the three acts of Albee's play suffice to indicate its dark spiritual undercurrents:
"Fun and Games" (Act One),
"Walpurgisnacht" (Act Two) and
"The Exorcism" (Act Three).
A theological writer pondered Albee in 1963:
"If, as Tillich has said of Picasso's Guernica, a 'Protestant' picture means not covering up anything but looking at 'the human situation in its depths of estrangement and despair,' then we could call Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? a 'Protestant' play. On any other definition it might be difficult to justify its religious significance except as sheer nihilism."
— Hugh T. Kerr, Theological Table-Talk, July 1963
It is a great relief to have another George and Martha (who first appeared in 1972) to turn to on this dark anniversary, and a doubly great relief to know that Albee's darkness is balanced by the light of Saint James Edward Marshall, whose feast day is today.
For more on the carousel theme of the Marshall book's cover, click the link for "Spinning Wheel" in the entry below.
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