Log24

The Lincoln Brigade



Marches On.

As yesterday’s Lincoln’s Birthday entry indicated, my own sympathies are not with the “created equal” crowd.  Still, the Catholic Fascism of Franco admirer Andrew Cusack seems somewhat over-the-top.  A more thoughtful approach to these matters may be found in a recommendation by Ross Douthat at The American Scene:

Read Eve Tushnet on the virtues of The Man in the High Castle.

Related material: Log24 on Nov. 14, Nov. 15, and Nov. 16, 2003.

Another item of interest from Eve:

“Transubstantiation [is equivalent but not equal to] art (deceptive accident hides truthful substance), as vs. Plato’s condemnation of the physical & the fictive? (Geo. Steiner)”

Related material:

“In Grammars of Creation, more than in his 1989 book Real Presences, Steiner acknowledges that his argument rests on inescapably Christian foundations. In fact, he has in the past sometimes written in a strongly anti–Christian vein, while the present book reflects the influence of, among others, Miri Rubin, whose Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture is credited in a footnote. Steiner asserts that, after the Platonisms and Gnosticisms of late antiquity, it is the doctrines of incarnation and transubstantiation that mark ‘the disciplining of Western syntax and conceptualization’ in philosophy and art. ‘Every heading met with in a study of “creation,” every nuance of analytic and figural discourse,’ he says, derives from incarnation and transubstantiation, ‘concepts utterly alien to either Judaic or Hellenic perspectives– though they did, in a sense, arise from the collisions and commerce between both.’….

The incarnation of God in the Son, the transubstantiation of bread and wine into his body and blood, are ‘a mysterium, an articulated, subtly innervated attempt to reason the irrational at the very highest levels of intellectual pressure.’ ‘Uniquely, perhaps, the hammering out of the teaching of the eucharist compels Western thought to relate the depth of the unconscious and of pre-history with speculative abstractions at the boundaries of logic and of linguistic philosophy.’ Later, the ‘perhaps’ in that claim seems to have disappeared:

At every significant point, Western philosophies of art and Western poetics draw their secular idiom from the substratum of Christological debate. Like no other event in our mental history, the postulate of God’s kenosis through Jesus and of the never-ending availability of the Savior in the wafer and wine of the eucharist, conditions not only the development of Western art and rhetoric itself, but at a much deeper level, that of our understanding and reception of the truth of art– a truth antithetical to the condemnation of the fictive in Plato.

This truth reaches its unrepeated perfection in Dante, says Steiner. In Dante, ‘It rounds in glory the investigation of creativity and creation, of divine authorship and human poesis, of the concentric spheres of the aesthetic, the philosophical, and the theological. Now truth and fiction are made one, now imagination is prayer, and Plato’s exile of the poets refuted.’ In the fashionable critical theories of our day, we witness ‘endeavors of the aesthetic to flee from incarnation.’ ‘It is the old heresies which revive in the models of absence, of negation or erasure, of the deferral of meaning in late–twentieth–century deconstruction. The counter-semantics of the deconstructionist, his refusal to ascribe a stable significance to the sign, are moves familiar to [an earlier] negative theology.’ Heidegger’s poetics of ‘pure immanence’ are but one more attempt ‘to liberate our experience of sense and of form from the grip of the theophanic.’ But, Steiner suggests, attempted flights from the reality of Corpus Christi will not carry the day. ‘Two millennia are only a brief moment.’

3:17:20 PM

Spin the Numbers

IN NOMINE PATRIS…

ET FILII…

ET SPIRITUS SANCTI…

“Heraclitus…. says:
‘The ruler whose prophecy
occurs at Delphi
oute legei oute kryptei,
neither gathers nor hides,
alla semainei, but gives hints.'”
— An Introduction to Metaphysics,
by Martin Heidegger,
Yale University Press paperback,
1959, p. 170

“The lord whose oracle is in Delphi
neither indicates clearly nor conceals,
but gives a sign.”
— Adolf Holl, The Left Hand of God,
Doubleday, 1998, p. 50

AMEN.

Happy Rohatsu

“The Buddha was enlightened on the eighth of December when he looked up at the morning star, the planet we call Venus.”

— Shodo Harada Roshi, Dharma Talk

A poem for Rohatsu:

On the one-ton temple bell
a moon-moth, folded into sleep,
sits still.

~by Taniguchi Buson
(translated by X.J. Kennedy)

Commentary on poetry of Buson:

Poetry as an open space
 for lightening of Being

“… a cleft of existence from where the time is to extend to eternity. It is a place where ‘nothing’ crosses with ‘being’ or the ‘clearing’ in Heidegger’s term, the only light place in the dark forest.”

— Hiroo Saga

In other words,
From Here to Eternity.

For more on Zen, see the
entry of May 2, 2003.

For more on a Temple Bell, see the
entry of May 1, 2003.

For more on Venus, see the
entry of March 28, 2003.

For more on the morning star, see the
entry of December 8, 2002.

ART WARS:
Invitation to the Dance

While checking the claim of art historian Anna Chave that “the veil is an age-old metaphor used from Plato through Hegel and Heidegger for the concept of truth as aletheia or unveiling,”  I came across the following essay:

“Taking the Veil,” by Jessica Kardon.

Kardon writes very well.  A related essay I particularly like is

“Invitation to the Dance.”

Today’s entry on Kardon is part of my “ART WARS” series of journal notes.  This title began partly as a joke, but it seems rather appropriate in light of Anna Chave’s claim that minimalism in the 1960’s was part of the “rhetoric of power.”  See my later entry today on Tony Smith at the National Gallery.

If we are in a war of art,

the essays of Jessica Kardon

are a powerful weapon.

Being and Time

Heidegger’s birthday: September 26.

Einstein’s birthday: March 14.

Fred Zinnemann, who won an Oscar
for directing “From Here to Eternity“:

Zinnemann’s birthday: today, April 29.

In honor of Zinnemann, a cheerful man, who died on Einstein’s birthday in 1997, our site music today is the cheerful Gershwin tune “Our Love Is Here To Stay.” In honor of Olivia Newton-John (granddaughter of physicist Max Born), who notably portrayed the Muse Terpsichore in “Xanadu”^◊ and who shares a September 26 birthday with Gershwin, T. S. Eliot, and Heidegger, today’s midi of “Our Love” has a special arrangement. Ms. Newton-John might wish to commemorate the romance (“Passionate!” — Yale University Press) of Hannah Arendt, a Jewish political theorist, and Heidegger, a Catholic Nazi, by listening to “Our Love” on the acoustic bass and glockenspiel.†

Terpsichore is the Muse of Dance.
See also Einstein’s first paper on relativity:
“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,”
Annalen der Physik,

September 26, 1905.

^◊ Not to be confused with an Orson Welles
film based on the life of
William Randolph Hearst,
whose birthday is also today.

† Glockenspiel means “bell-play.”
See Metaphysics for Tina.

Birthday of T. S. Eliot, 
George Gershwin,
and Olivia Newton-John

Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

In time the Rockies may crumble
Gibraltar may tumble
They’re only made of clay….
— Ira Gershwin

In honor of Tom and George (not to mention Olivia) the muse of dance, Terpsichore, suggests that today we recall Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron as they dance by the Seine in “An American in Paris.”

Today is also the birthday of Martin Heidegger, author of Being and Time.  In honor of Heidegger and his girlfriend Hannah Arendt, I looked for a rendition of “Our Love is Here to Stay” on the glockenspiel,  but could not find one.  The birthday song “Las Mañanitas” will therefore have to do for Tom, George, Olivia, and Martin, as well as Michael and Catherine (see Sept. 25 note below).

Tierra y Cielo:
Meditations on the initials TC

Heaven and Earth in Heidegger

Cuando imaginamos algo en la tierra, este algo también se encuentra bajo el cielo, ante los divinos y junto a los mortales. Esta unidad de ellos designamos la Cuaternidad….

…Heiddeger nos presenta un ejemplo para aplicar la reflexión: un puente….

El puente coliga según su manera cabe sí tierra y cielo, los divinos y los mortales; es una cosa y lo es en tanto que la coligación de la Cuaternidad que hemos caracterizado antes. El puente coliga la Cuaternidad de tal modo que hace sitio a una plaza. Pero sólo aquello que en sí mismo es un lugar puede abrir espacio a una plaza. Antes del puente, hay muchos sitios que pueden ser ocupados por algo. De entre ellos uno se da como un lugar, y esto ocurre por la propia presencia del puente. Luego, el lugar se da por el puente. El puente es una cosa, coliga la Cuaternidad, pero coliga en el modo de otorgar (hacer sitio a) a la Cuaternidad una plaza.

See also

HEIDEGGER AND HÖLDERLIN
ON TIERRA Y CIELO

and my note of September 5,

“ARROW IN THE BLUE.”