Log24

Thursday, October 31, 2024

Gold Search

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:20 am

Scholia —

http://m759.net/wordpress/?s=" Tree"+"Stone" .

"We should definitely touch base moving forward."
— "Sweethearts" (2024)

Monday, August 30, 2021

Down, or: A Black Box for Didion

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:28 pm

From "Why I Write," by Joan Didion —

"I am not a scholar. I am not in the least an intellectual, which is not to say that when I hear the word 'intellectual' I reach for my gun, but only to say that I do not think in abstracts. During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley I tried, with a kind of hopeless late-adolescent energy, to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind that could deal with the abstract.

All I knew then was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.

In short I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral. I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor. I would try to read linguistic theory and would find myself wondering instead if the lights were on in the Bevatron up the hill. When I say that I was wondering if the lights were on in the Bevatron you might immediately suspect, if you deal in ideas at all, that I was registering the Bevatron as a political symbol, thinking in shorthand about the military-industrial complex and its role in the university community, but you would be wrong. I was only wondering if the lights were on in the Bevatron, and how they looked. A physical fact.

I had trouble graduating from Berkeley, not because of this inability to deal with ideas—I was majoring in English, and I could locate the house-and-garden imagery in The Portrait of a Lady  as well as the next person, 'imagery' being by definition the kind of specific that got my attention—but simply because I had neglected to take a course in Milton. For reasons which now sound baroque I needed a degree by the end of that summer, and the English department finally agreed, if I would come down from Sacramento every Friday and talk about the cosmology of Paradise Lost , to certify me proficient in Milton. I did this. Some Fridays I took the Greyhound bus, other Fridays I caught the Southern Pacific’s City of San Francisco on the last leg of its transcontinental trip. I can no longer tell you whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center of his universe in Paradise Lost , the central question of at least one century and a topic about which I wrote ten thousand words that summer, but I can still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in the City of San Francisco’s dining car, and the way the tinted windows on the Greyhound bus cast the oil refineries around Carquinez Strait into a grayed and obscurely sinister light. In short my attention was always on the periphery, on what I could see and taste and touch, on the butter, and the Greyhound bus. During those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. I knew I couldn’t think. All I knew then was what I couldn’t do. All I knew then was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was."

"I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas."
— Joan Didion, December 5, 1976

"In the 1988 interview with Scripps Howard, Mr. Poynter mused
about the device he wanted to invent for his own tombstone.

'When you walked up to it,' he said, 'you’d activate
an electronic voice. And it would say, "Come on down."’”

New York Times  obituary yesterday

And add, "We all float down here"?

For other, better, remarks about ideas by Didion
see "Freeze the shifting phantasmagoria," a phrase
from her 1979 book The White Album.

Monday, March 10, 2014

God’s Architecture

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:19 pm

Part I:

The sermon, “God’s Architecture,” at Nassau Presbyterian
Church in Princeton on Sunday, Feb. 23, 2014.  (This is the
“sermon” link in last Sunday’s 11 AM ET Log24 post.)

An excerpt:

“I wonder what God sees when God looks at our church.
Bear with me here because I’d like to do a little architectural
redesign. I look up at our sanctuary ceiling and I see buttons.
In those large round lights, I see buttons. I wonder what would
happen if we unbutton the ceiling, Then I wonder if we were to
unzip the ceiling, pull back the rooftop, and God were to look in
from above – What does God see? What pattern, what design,
what shape takes place?” — Rev. Lauren J. McFeaters

Related material —  All About Eve: 

A. The Adam and Eve sketch from the March 8 “Saturday Night Live”

B. “Katniss, get away from that tree!” —

C. Deconstructing God in last evening’s online New York Times .

Part II:

Heavensbee!” in the above video, as well as Cartier’s Groundhog Day
and Say It With Flowers.

Part III:

Humans’  architecture, as described (for instance) by architecture
theorist Anne Tyng, who reportedly died at 91 on Dec. 27, 2011.
See as well Past Tense and a post from the date of Tyng’s death.

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

A Riddle for Davos

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 9:00 pm

Hexagonale Unwesen

Einstein and Thomas Mann, Princeton, 1938


IMAGE- Redefining the cube's symmetry planes: 13 planes, not 9.


See also the life of Diogenes Allen, a professor at Princeton
Theological Seminary, a life that reportedly ended on the date—
January 13, 2013— of the above Log24 post.

January 13 was also the dies natalis  of St. James Joyce.

Some related reflections —

"Praeterit figura huius mundi  " — I Corinthians 7:31 —

Conclusion of of "The Dead," by James Joyce—

The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.

Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Friday, June 15, 2012

Elements

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:00 am

In memory of Paul Sussman, author of archaeological 
mystery novels about Egypt—

IMAGE- Harvard Divinity School bookplate dated 1910

"… the sacred symbols of the cosmic elements
were hid away hard by the secrets of Osiris."  

Thrice-Great Hermes: Excerpts and Fragments ,
      by George Robert Stowe Mead,
     Theosophical Publishing Society, 1906   

Sussman's last novel, not yet published, was

The Labyrinth of Osiris .

Sussman, 45, reportedly died suddenly on May 31, 2012.

A perhaps relevant thought—

"A world of made
is not a world of born— pity poor flesh
and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical 
ultraomnipotence."

– e. e. cummings, 1944

Monday, May 21, 2012

Child’s Play (continued*)

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:59 pm

You and I …

we are just like a couple of tots…

Sinatra

JOSEFINE LYCHE

Born 1973 in Bergen. Lives and works in Oslo.

Education

2000 – 2004 National Academy of Fine Arts, Oslo
1998 – 2000 Strykejernet Art School, Oslo, NO
1995 – 1998 Philosophy, University of Bergen

University of Bergen—

 It might therefore seem that the idea of digital and analogical systems as rival fundaments to human experience is a new suggestion and, like digital technology, very modern. In fact, however, the idea is as old as philosophy itself (and may be much older). In his Sophist, Plato sets out the following ‘battle’ over the question of ‘true reality’:

What we shall see is something like a battle of gods and giants going on between them over their quarrel about reality [γιγαντομαχία περì της ουσίας] ….One party is trying to drag everything down to earth out of heaven and the unseen, literally grasping rocks and trees in their hands, for they lay hold upon every stock and stone and strenuously affirm that real existence belongs only to that which can be handled and offers resistance to the touch. They define reality as the same thing as body, and as soon as one of the opposite party asserts that anything without a body is real, they are utterly contemptuous and will not listen to another word. (…) Their adversaries are very wary in defending their position somewhere in the heights of the unseen, maintaining with all their force that true reality [την αληθινήν ουσίαν] consists in certain intelligible and bodiless forms. In the clash of argument they shatter and pulverize those bodies which their opponents wield, and what those others allege to be true reality they call, not real being, but a sort of moving process of becoming. On this issue an interminable battle is always going on between the two camps [εν μέσω δε περι ταυτα απλετος αμφοτέρων μάχη τις (…) αει συνέστηκεν]. (…) It seems that only one course is open to the philosopher who values knowledge and truth above all else. He must refuse to accept from the champions of the forms the doctrine that all reality is changeless [and exclusively immaterial], and he must turn a deaf ear to the other party who represent reality as everywhere changing [and as only material]. Like a child begging for 'both', he must declare that reality or the sum of things is both at once [το όν τε και το παν συναμφότερα] (Sophist 246a-249d).

The gods and the giants in Plato’s battle present two varieties of the analog position. Each believes that ‘true reality’ is singular, that "real existence belongs only to" one side or other of competing possibilities. For them, difference and complexity are secondary and, as secondary, deficient in respect to truth, reality and being (την αληθινήν ουσίαν, το όν τε και το παν). Difference and complexity are therefore matters of "interminable battle" whose intended end for each is, and must be (given their shared analogical logic), only to eradicate the other. The philosophical child, by contrast, holds to ‘both’ and therefore represents the digital position where the differentiated two yet belong originally together. Here difference, complexity and systematicity are primary and exemplary.

It is an unfailing mark of the greatest thinkers of the tradition, like Plato, that they recognize the digital possibility and therefore recognize the principal difference of it from analog possibilities.

— Cameron McEwen, "The Digital Wittgenstein,"
    The Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen

* See that phrase in this journal.

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Code Wars

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:00 pm

Steve Buscemi last night on Saturday Night Live
describing Christmas tree ornaments with his mate Sheila—

"This one's a little computer."

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111203-SnakeApple.jpg

"Beep Boop Beep"

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111204-ElectricDreams.jpg

"This one's a little pinecone. … Beep Boop Beep"

Meanwhile…

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111204-NewWorldDisorder.jpg

In related news…

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111204-RosettaStone-Sheila.jpg

"Her name drives me insane."

— Rosetta Stone, 1978 cover of "Sheila," Tommy Roe's 1962 classic

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111204-SNLcard.jpg

Click image for sketch.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Diamond Theory and Magic Squares

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 6:19 pm

"A world of made
is not a world of born— pity poor flesh
and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical
ultraomnipotence."

— e. e. cummings, 1944

For one such specimen, see The Matrix of Abraham
a 5×5 square that is hypermagical… indeed, diabolical.

Related material on the algebra and geometry underlying some smaller structures
that have also, unfortunately, become associated with the word "magic"—

  1. Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube
  2. Clifford Pickover on a 4×4 square
  3. Christopher J. Henrich on the geometry of 4×4 magic squares
    (without any mention of  [1] above or related work dating back to 1976)

" … listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go"

— e. e. cummings

Happy birthday, e. e.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

The Lotus Gate*

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Image-- The Jewel in Venn's Lotus (Zen in Cuernavaca)
The Jewel
in Venn’s Lotus

See also a prequel to
Ramanujan’s Flowering Tree

Flowering Judas.

* “Every city has its gates, which need not be of stone. Nor need soldiers be upon them or watchers before them. At first, when cities were jewels in a dark and mysterious world, they tended to be round and they had protective walls. To enter, one had to pass through gates, the reward for which was shelter from the overwhelming forests and seas, the merciless and taxing expanse of greens, whites, and blues–wild and free–that stopped at the city walls.

In time the ramparts became higher and the gates more massive, until they simply disappeared and were replaced by barriers, subtler than stone, that girded every city like a crown and held in its spirit.”

Mark Helprin, Winter’s Tale

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Thursday February 14, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:20 am
The Fab Four
Meet Ken Kesey

“Hanging from the highest limb of the apple tree are the three God’s Eyes Quiston and Caleb made out of yarn at Camp Nebo. The eyes aren’t moving a wink in the thick hot air, but they likely see the world spinning around as well as any Fool‘s.”

Ken Kesey,
  “Last Time the Angels Came Up,”
   in Demon Box

Saturday, February 2, 2008

Saturday February 2, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:19 am
Trevanian,
Incident at Twenty-Mile:

Matthew had a couple of hours on his hands before dinner with the Kanes, so he drifted up to the only grassy spot in Twenty-Mile, the triangular, up-tilted little meadow crossed by a rivulet running off from the cold spring that provided the town's water. This meadow belonged to the livery stable, and half a dozen of its donkeys lazily nosed in the grass while, at the far end, a scrawny cow stood in the shade of the only tree in Twenty-Mile, a stunted skeleton whose leafless, wind-raked branches stretched imploringly to leeward, like bony fingers clawing the clouds. The meadow couldn't be seen from any part of the town except the Livery, so Matthew felt comfortably secluded as he sauntered along, intending to investigate the burial ground that abutted the donkey meadow, but B. J. Stone called to him from the Livery, so he turned back and began the chore they had found for him to do: oiling tools.

LATER….

After they did the dishes, Matthew and Ruth Lillian walked down the Sunday-silent street, then turned up into the donkey meadow. He was careful to guide her away from the soggy patch beneath the tree, where the Bjorkvists had slaughtered that week's beef. Lost in their own thoughts, they strolled across the meadow, the uneven ground causing their shoulders to brush occasionally, until they reached the fenced-in burying ground.

STILL LATER….

"Matthew?" she asked in an offhand tone.

"Hm-m-m?"

"What's 'the Other Place'?"

He turned and stared at her. "How do you know about that?"

"You told me."

"I never!"

"Yes, you did. You were telling about your fight with the Benson boys, and you said you couldn't feel their punches because you were in this 'Other Place.' I didn't ask you about it then, 'cause you were all worked up.  But I've been curious about it ever since."

"Oh, it's just…" In a gesture that had something of embarrassment in it and something of imitation, he threw his stick as hard as he could, and it whop-whop-whop'd through the air, landing against the sagging fence that separated the burying ground from the donkey meadow.

"If you don't want to tell me, forget it.  I just thought… Never mind." She walked on.

"It's not that I don't want to tell you. But it's… it's hard to explain."

She stopped and waited patiently.

"It's just… well, when I was a little kid and I was scared– scared because Pa was shouting at Ma, or because I was going to have to fight some kid during recess– I'd fix my eyes on a crack in the floor or a ripple in a pane of glass– on anything, it didn't matter what– and pretty soon I'd slip into this– this Other Place where everything was kind of hazy and echoey, and I was far away and safe. At first, I had to concentrate real hard to get to this safe place. But then, this one day a kid was picking on me, and just like that– without even trying– I was suddenly there, and I felt just as calm as calm, and not afraid of anything. I knew they were punching me, and I could hear the kids yelling names, but it didn't hurt and I didn't care, 'cause I was off in the Other Place.  And after that, any time I was scared, or if I was facing something that was just too bad, I'd suddenly find myself there. Safe and peaceful." He searched here eyes. "Does that make any sense to you, Ruth Lillian?"

"Hm-m… sort of. It sounds kind of eerie." And she added quickly, "But really interesting!"

"I've never told anybody about it. Not even my ma. I was afraid to because… This'll sound funny, but I was afraid that if other people knew about the Other Place, it might heal up and go away, and I wouldn't be able to get there when I really needed to. Crazy, huh?"

Related material:

The Meadow,

Logical Songs,

Plato, Pegasus, and
the Evening Star

Friday, December 29, 2006

Friday December 29, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:01 am
Tools
of Christ Church

"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
— Thomas Pynchon

Cover of Thomas, by Shelley Mydans: Sword and its shadow, a cross

Click on picture for details.

Today is the feast
of St. Thomas Becket.

In his honor, a meditation
on tools and causation:

"Lewis Wolpert, an eminent developmental biologist at University College London, has just published Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, a pleasant, though rambling, look at the biological basis of belief. While the book focuses on our ability to form causal beliefs about everyday matters (the wind moved the trees, for example), it spends considerable time on the origins of religious and moral beliefs. Wolpert defends the unusual idea that causal thinking is an adaptation required for tool-making. Religious beliefs can thus be seen as an odd extension of causal thinking about technology to more mysterious matters. Only a species that can reason causally could assert that 'this storm was sent by God because we sinned.' While Wolpert's attitude toward religion is tolerant, he's an atheist who seems to find religion more puzzling than absorbing."

Review by H. Allen Orr in
The New York Review of Books,
Vol. 54, No. 1, January 11, 2007    


"An odd extension"–

Wolpert's title is, of course,
from Lewis Carroll.

Related material:

"It's a poor sort of memory
that only works backwards."
Through the Looking-Glass

An event at the Kennedy Center
broadcast on
December 26, 2006
(St. Steven's Day):

"Conductor John Williams, a 2004 Honoree, says, 'Steven, sharing our 34-year collaboration has been a great privilege for me. It's been an inspiration to watch you dream your dreams, nurture them and make them grow. And, in the process, entertain and edify billions of people around the world. Tonight we'd like to salute you, musically, with a piece that expresses that spirit beautifully … It was written by Leonard Bernstein, a 1980 Kennedy Center Honoree who was, incidentally, the first composer to be performed in this hall.' Backed by The United States Army Chorus and The Choral Arts Society, soprano Harolyn Blackwell and tenor Gregory Turay sing the closing number for Spielberg's tribute and the gala itself. It's the finale to the opera 'Candide,' 'Make Our Garden Grow,' and Williams conducts."

CBS press release

See also the following,
from the conclusion to

"Mathematics and Narrative"

(Log24, Aug. 22, 2005):

Diamond on cover of Narrative Form, by Suzanne Keen

"At times, bullshit can
only be countered
   with superior bullshit."
Norman Mailer

Many Worlds and Possible Worlds in Literature and Art, in Wikipedia:

    "The concept of possible worlds dates back to at least Leibniz who in his Théodicée tries to justify the apparent imperfections of the world by claiming that it is optimal among all possible worlds.  Voltaire satirized this view in his picaresque novel Candide….
    Borges' seminal short story El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan ("The Garden of Forking Paths") is an early example of many worlds in fiction."

"Il faut cultiver notre jardin."
— Voltaire

"We symbolize
logical necessity
with the box (box.gif (75 bytes))
and logical possibility
with the diamond (diamond.gif (82 bytes))."

Keith Allen Korcz 

Diamond in a square

"The possibilia that exist,
and out of which
the Universe arose,
are located in
     a necessary being…."

Michael Sudduth,
Notes on
God, Chance, and Necessity
by Keith Ward,
 Regius Professor of Divinity,
  Christ Church College, Oxford
(the home of Lewis Carroll)

For further details,
click on the
Christ Church diamond.

Friday, May 19, 2006

Friday May 19, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 am
Star and Diamond
 
continued

” ‘I know what it is you last saw,’ she said; ‘for that is also in my mind. Do not be afraid! But do not think that only by singing amid the trees, nor even by the slender arrows of elvenbows, is this land of Lothlórien maintained and defended against the Enemy. I say to you, Frodo, that even as I speak to you, I perceive the Dark Lord and know his mind, or all his mind that concerns the Elves. And he gropes ever to see me and my thought. But still the door is closed!’
      She lifted up her white arms, and spread out her hands towards the East in a gesture of rejection and denial. Eärendil, the Evening Star, most beloved of the Elves, shone clear above. So bright was it that the figure of the Elven-lady cast a dim shadow on the ground. Its ray glanced upon a ring about her finger; it glittered like polished gold overlaid with silver light, and a white stone in it twinkled as if the Even-star had come to rest upon her hand. Frodo gazed at the ring with awe; for suddenly it seemed to him that he understood.
      ‘Yes,’ she said, divining his thought, ‘it is not permitted to speak of it, and Elrond could not do so. But it cannot be hidden from the Ring-Bearer, and one who has seen the Eye. Verily it is in the land of Lórien upon the finger of Galadriel that one of the Three remains. This is Nenya, the Ring of Adamant, and I am its keeper.’ ”

— J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Related material:

The last 3 entries,
as well as
Mathematics and Narrative

“How much story
do you want?”
— George Balanchine  

Saturday, March 11, 2006

Saturday March 11, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm
Holy the Firm
by Annie Dillard

    Esoteric Christianity, I read, posits a substance.  It is a created substance, lower than metals and minerals on a “spiritual scale” and lower than salts and earths, occurring beneath salts and earths in the waxy deepness of planets, but never on the surface of planets where men could discern it; and it is in touch with the Absolute, at base.  In touch with the Absolute!  At base.  The name of this substance is Holy the Firm.
    Holy the Firm: and is Holy the Firm in touch with metals and minerals?  With salts and earths?  Of course, and straight on up, till “up” ends by curving back.  Does something that touched something that touched Holy the Firm in touch with the Absolute at base seep into ground water, into grain; are islands rooted in it, and trees?  Of course.
    Scholarship has long distinguished between two strains of thought which proceed in the West from human knowledge of God.  In one, the ascetic’s metaphysic, the world is far from God.  Emanating from God, and linked to him by Christ, the world is yet infinitely other than God, furled away from him like the end of a long banner falling.  This notion makes, to my mind, a vertical line of the world, a great chain of burning.  The more accessible and universal view, held by Eckhart and by many peoples in various forms, is scarcely different from pantheism: that the world is immanation, that God is in the thing, and eternally present here, if nowhere else.  By these lights the world is flattened on a horizontal plane, singular, all here, crammed with heaven, and alone.  But I know that it is not alone, nor singular, nor all.  The notion of immanence needs a handle, and the two ideas themselves need a link, so that life can mean aught to the one, and Christ to the other.
    For to immanence, to the heart, Christ is redundant and all things are one.  To emanance, to the mind, Christ touches only the top, skims off only the top, as it were, the souls of men, the wheat grains whole, and lets the chaff fall where?  To the world flat and patently unredeemed; to the entire rest of the universe, which is irrelevant and nonparticipant; to time and matter unreal, and so unknowable, an illusory, absurd, accidental, and overelaborate stage.
    But if Holy the Firm is “underneath salts,” if Holy the Firm is matter at its dullest, Aristotle’s materia prima, absolute zero, and since Holy the Firm is in touch with the Absolute at base, then the circle is unbroken.  And it is.  Thought advances, and the world creates itself, by the gradual positing of, and belief in, a series of bright ideas.  Time and space are in touch with the Absolute at base.  Eternity sockets twice into time and space curves, bound and bound by idea.  Matter and spirit are of a piece but distinguishable; God has a stake guaranteed in all the world.  And the universe is real and not a dream, not a manufacture of the senses; subject may know object, knowedge may proceed, and Holy the Firm is in short the philosopher’s stone.

    These are only ideas, by the single handful.  Lines, lines, and their infinite points!  Hold hands and crack the whip, and yank the Absolute out of there and into the light, God pale and astounded, spraying a spiral of salts and earths, God footloose and flung.  And cry down the line to his passing white ear, “Old Sir!  Do you hold space from buckling by a finger in its hole?  O Old!  Where is your other hand?”  His right hand is clenching, calm, round the exploding left hand of Holy the Firm.

— Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm, Harper & Row 1977, reissued by Harper Perennial Library in 1988 as a paperback, pp. 68-71.

Monday, February 27, 2006

Monday February 27, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 9:26 am

Sudden View

From John O'Hara's Birthday:

"We stopped at the Trocadero and there was hardly anyone there.  We had Lanson 1926.  'Drink up, sweet.  You gotta go some.  How I love music.  Frère Jacques, Cuernavaca, ach du lieber August.  All languages.  A walking Berlitz.  Berlitz sounds like you with that champagne, my sweet, or how you're gonna sound.'"

— John O'Hara, Hope of Heaven, Chapter 11, 1938

"And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance."

Acts, Chapter 2, Verse 4

"Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the

PARIS,
1922-1939."

— James Joyce, conclusion of Finnegans Wake

"Using illustrative material from religion, myth, and culture, he starts with the descent of the dove on Jesus and ends with the poetic ramblings of James Joyce."

Review of a biography of the Holy Spirit

Monica Potts in today's New York Times on Sybille Bedford:

"Though her works were not always widely popular, they inspired a deeply fervent following of committed admirers, starting with her first published work, A Sudden View, in 1953. Later retitled A Visit to Don Otavio, it was an account of her journey through Mexico."

… "I addressed him.  'Is Cuernavaca not below Mexico City?'
    'It is low.'
    'Then what is this?'  Another summit had sprung up above a curve.
    'At your orders, the Three Marias.'
    'What are the Three Marias?'
    'These.'
    Later, I learned from Terry that they were the three peaks by the La Cima Pass which is indeed one of the highest passes in the Republic; and still later from experience, that before running down to anywhere in this country one must first run up some six or seven thousand feet.  The descents are more alarming than the climbs.  We hurtled towards Cuernavaca down unparapeted slopes with the speed and angle, if not the precision, of a scenic railway– cacti flashed past like telegraph poles, the sun was brilliant, the air like laughing gas, below an enchanting valley, and the lack of brakes became part of a general allegro accelerando."

— Sybille Bedford, A Sudden View, Counterpoint Press, Counterpoint edition (April 2003), page 77

"How continually, how startlingly, the landscape changed!  Now the fields were full of stones: there was a row of dead trees.  An abandoned plough, silhouetted against the sky, raised its arms to heaven in mute supplication; another planet, he reflected again, a strange planet where, if you looked a little further, beyond the Tres Marias, you would find every sort of landscape at once, the Cotswolds, Windermere, New Hampshire, the meadows of the Eure-et-Loire, even the grey dunes of Cheshire, even the Sahara, a planet upon which, in the twinkling of an eye, you could change climates, and, if you cared to think so, in the crossing of a highway, three civilizations; but beautiful, there was no denying its beauty, fatal or cleansing as it happened to be, the beauty of the Earthly Paradise itself."

— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1st Perennial Classics edition (May 1, 2000), page 10

Friday, March 28, 2003

Friday March 28, 2003

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:16 am

Bright Star

From a Spanish-English dictionary:


lucero m. morning or evening star: any bright star….

 Today is Reba McEntire's birthday.

" 'I know what it is you last saw,' she said; 'for that is also in my mind. Do not be afraid! But do not think that only by singing amid the trees, nor even by the slender arrows of elven-bows, is this land of Lothlórien maintained and defended against the Enemy. I say to you, Frodo, that even as I speak to you, I perceive the Dark Lord and know his mind, or all his mind that concerns the Elves. And he gropes ever to see me and my thought. But still the door is closed!'

      She lifted up her white arms, and spread out her hands towards the East in a gesture of rejection and denial. Eärendil, the Evening Star, most beloved of the Elves, shone clear above. So bright was it that the figure of the Elven-lady cast a dim shadow on the ground. Its ray glanced upon a ring about her finger; it glittered like polished gold overlaid with silver light, and a white stone in it twinkled as if the Even-star had come to rest upon her hand. Frodo gazed at the ring with awe; for suddenly it seemed to him that he understood. 

      'Yes', she said, divining his thought, 'it is not permitted to speak of it, and Elrond could not do so. But it cannot be hidden from the Ring-Bearer, and one who has seen the Eye. Verily it is in the land of Lórien upon the finger of Galadriel that one of the Three remains. This is Nenya, the Ring of Adamant, and I am its keeper.' "

— J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Related material on telepathy:

Shining Forth and Naturalized Epistemology

Related material on rings, and another musical Reba:

Leonard Gillman interview, Part I and Part II

Gillman, a pianist, is co-author of Rings of Continuous Functions.

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