Log24

See as well Under the Volcano  and All Souls in this  journal.

Related material —

Schoolgirl Problem  

"Buy this image" . . . Or not.

Related material from the date of the above photo —

For related drama, see "Child's Play" in this journal.

See posts tagged All Souls 2015.

* Oxford webpage.

From this journal yesterday (All Saints' Day)—

"But, I asked, is there a difference
between fiction and nonfiction?
'Not much,' she said, shrugging."

— New Yorker  profile of tesseract
author Madeleine L'Engle

For a discussion of this issue in greater depth—

"Truth and fact are not the same thing."

— see a 1998 award acceptance speech by L'Engle.

See also a Log24 post of March 1st, 2008, on the soul.

"It's still the same old story…"

See Glory in this journal.

'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument",' Alice objected.

'When I  use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean— neither more nor less.'

'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can  make words mean so many different things.'

'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master— that's all.'

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything; so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. 'They've a temper, some of them — particularly verbs: they're the proudest— adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs— however, I  can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what I  say!'

'Would you tell me please,' said Alice, 'what that means?'

'Now you talk like a reasonable child,' said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. 'I meant by "impenetrability" that we've had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you'd mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don't mean to stop here all the rest of your life.'

'That's a great deal to make one word mean,' Alice said in a thoughtful tone.

'When I make a word do a lot of work like that,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'I always pay it extra.'

See also Interpenetration in this journal… and in Northrop Frye.

The Interpreter’s House

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, The Second Part, “The Interpreter’s House“–

“When the Interpreter had shown them this, He has them into the very best room in the house; a very brave room it was. So He bid them look round about, and see if they could find anything profitable there. Then they looked round and round; for there was nothing there to be seen but a very great spider on the wall: and that they overlooked.

MERCY. Then said Mercy, Sir, I see nothing; but Christiana held her peace.

INTER. But, said the Interpreter, look again, and she therefore looked again, and said, Here is not anything but an ugly spider, who hangs by her hands upon the wall. Then said He, Is there but one spider in all this spacious room? Then the water stood in Christiana’s eyes, for she was a woman quick of apprehension; and she said, Yea, Lord, there is here more than one. Yea, and spiders whose venom is far more destructive than that which is in her. The Interpreter then looked pleasantly upon her, and said, Thou hast said the truth. This made Mercy blush, and the boys to cover their faces, for they all began now to understand the riddle.‌74‌

Then said the Interpreter again, “The spider taketh hold with their hands (as you see), and is in kings’ palaces’ (Prov. 30:28). And wherefore is this recorded, but to show you, that how full of the venom of sin soever you be, yet you may, by the hand of faith, lay hold of, and dwell in the best room that belongs to the King’s house above!‌75‌

CHRIST. I thought, said Christiana, of something of this; but I could not imagine it all. I thought that we were like spiders, and that we looked like ugly creatures, in what fine room soever we were; but that by this spider, this venomous and ill-favoured creature, we were to learn how to act faith, that came not into my mind. And yet she has taken hold with her hands, as I see, and dwells in the best room in the house. God has made nothing in vain.”

Related material:

The spider metaphor in
Under the Volcano
(April 10, 2004) and
an AP obituary
from yesterday.

From Wikipedia —

"The Day of the Dead (Spanish: Día de Muertos ) is
a Mexican holiday celebrated throughout Mexico,
in particular the Central and South regions,
and by people of Mexican heritage elsewhere.
The multi-day holiday focuses on gatherings
of family and friends to pray for and remember
friends and family members who have died, and
help support their spiritual journey. . . .

The holiday is sometimes called Día de los Muertos 
in Anglophone countries, a back-translation of its
original name, Día de Muertos .

Gradually, it was associated with October 31,
November 1, and November 2 to coincide with the
Western Christianity triduum of Allhallowtide: 
All Saints' Eve, All Saints' Day, and All Souls' Day."

—————————————————————————-

The previous post concerned a poet who reportedly
died on October 23, 2018.  This journal on that date —

Or:  Netflix and Chill on All Souls' Day

Midrash from Huffington Post  (click to enlarge) —

Guy Hamilton, director of "Diamonds are Forever" 
and "Goldfinger," reportedly died at 93 on Wednesday, 
April 20, 2016. In his memory, here is a link to the
posts of All Souls' Day, 2015.

See as well All Souls' Day and November 16.

From the Harvard Graduate School of Design's introduction
to a lecture on All Souls' Day 2015 —

"Calvin Klein is an award-winning fashion icon.
He is recognized globally as a master of minimalism
and has spent his career distilling things to
their very essence. His name ranks among the
best-known brands in the world, with Calvin Klein, Inc.
reaching over seven billion dollars in global retail sales."

A Klein icon I prefer —

Click the above image for some backstory.

See All Souls in this journal.

Backstory: The two previous Log24 posts
Raiders of the Lost Aleph (May 14) and
The Crying of Bucharest (May 15).

The following sequence of images was suggested by
Peter Woit's May 16 post "One Ring to Rule Them All."

Also from Devil's Night 2008:

From the May 16 Nobel Symposium talk discussed in
Woit's "One Ring to Rule Them All":

Related material:

All Souls' Day at the Still Point (Nov. 2, 2003) and

Frodo and the Oxford Murders (Oct. 13, 2011).

(Continued)

Rachel Dodes in The Wall Street Journal
on All Souls' Day, 2012—

"In one of the first lines uttered by Daniel Day-Lewis, playing Abraham Lincoln in the new Steven Spielberg film opening Nov. 9, he says, 'I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space— were it not that I have bad dreams.'

The line was ripped straight from 'Hamlet,' by Lincoln's favorite writer, William Shakespeare. Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright ('Angels in America') who wrote the script for the film, says that Shakespeare, much like Lincoln, 'had extraordinary mastery over the darkest parts of the human spirit.'"

The above quotation omits Shakespeare's words prefacing the nutshell part— "O God."

These same words in a different tongue—  "Hey Ram"— have often been quoted as the last words of Gandhi. (See yesterday's noon post.)

"… for the Highest Essence (brahman ),
which is the core of the world, is identical
with the Highest Self (ātman ), the kernel
of man's existence."

— Heinrich Zimmer, Myths and Symbols
in Indian Art and Civilization , Pantheon
Books, 1946, page 142 

Related material: A post linked to here on Friday night
that itself links to a different Shakespeare speech.

From Saturday Night Live  last night—

Related material from the Log24 post "Now Lens"
(March 11, 2011)—

Errol Morris in The New York Times  on March 9, 2011—

"If everything is incommensurable, then everything
is seen through the lens of the present, the lens of now ."

"Borges concluded by quoting Chesterton, 'there is nothing
more frightening than a labyrinth that has no center.' [72]"

See also Borges on Shakespeare, everything, and nothing 
in a note from September 7, 2006.

Everything and nothing in Peter J. Cameron's weblog yesterday—

The existence of everything entails the existence of nothing;
indeed, the existence of anything (any set A) entails
the existence of the empty set (the set {x∈A:x≠x}).
But not the other way round.

Right, I had better put on my anorak and go out now …

Illustration added by m759—

How many miles to Babylon?*
Three score miles and ten.
Can I get there by candle-light?**
Yes, and back again.

* Suggested by the Pindar link in this journal yesterday.

** Quoted in the "Seven is Heaven" post on All Souls' Day.

For the late Helen Nicoll—

• A scene from a video starring Nicoll's characters
  Meg, Mog, and Owl. The video was uploaded on
  November 2, 2008— All Souls' Day.
• A different cartoon from All Souls' Day, 2008
• A rhyme from 1871—

Continued from All Souls Day, 2011 —

Professor Sir Michael Dummett,
born June 27 1925, died December 27 2011

See also this journal on the day of Dummett's death.

Bond

USA Today on last night’s White House dinner:

“In his toast, Bush said the royal visit was ‘a reminder of the unique and enduring bond’ between the two countries.”

The New York Lottery evening number
for All Souls’ Day, Nov. 2, 2005, was

007.

Related material:

Entries for Nov. 1, 2005 and
the song Planned Obsolescence
by the 10,000 Maniacs

(Hope Chest:
The Fredonia Recordings)

All Souls’ Day

Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano:

In memory of Malcolm Lowry, a quotation from Donne, 1611:

And, Oh, it can no more be questioned,
That beauties best, proportion, is dead,
Since euen griefe it selfe, which now alone
Is left vs, is without proportion.
Shee by whose lines proportion should bee
Examin’d measure of all Symmetree,
Whom had the Ancient seene, who thought soules made
Of Harmony, he would at next haue said
That Harmony was shee, and thence infer.
That soules were but Resultances from her,

Here is a link to a later Cambridge praelector, Robert Alexander Rankin.  Rankin, a purveyor of pure mathematics, may help to counteract the pernicious influence on souls of Sir Michael Atiyah (see previous two entries and Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star).

“Mike Nichols, who oversaw Monty Python’s Spamalot, picked up the prize for directing a musical.

A somewhat flustered Nichols told the audience he had forgotten what he intended to say, but then went on to thank his company and Eric Idle, ‘from whom all blessings flow.'”

— The Age, Monday, June 6

One of my
favorite books:

Excerpt from the chapter
“All Blessings Flow (Very Large Array)”–

“I started to cry.  My search was over.
In a home for the deranged I had found
the last of the holy Thirty-Six….

‘Beam me up, Scotty.'”

Related material:

Yesterday was the Feast of All Saints. Today is the Feast of All Souls.

Those of us who are not saints may profit from the writings of both the saintly Thomas Wolfe and the more secular Tom Wolfe.

From Log24.net on the Feast of St. Ignatius Loyola, a quotation from St. Thomas Wolfe:

See also a Wolfe quotation from the Feast of St. Gerard Manley Hopkins in 2003. 

For the Feast of St. Thomas Wolfe himself, see the Log24 entries of Sept. 15 (the date of Wolfe’s death).

Readings more suited to today, All Souls’ Day, than to yesterday, All Saints’:

Bright Young Things,
Andrew at St. Andrews,
and, of course,
Under the Volcano.

Andrew at St. Andrews recommends the remarks, in The Guardian, of Tom Wolfe on today’s election.

The fact that the protagonist of Tom Wolfe’s new novel is a virgin from the hill country of North Carolina, combined with the above entry on Nell from the Feast of St. Ignatius, brings us back to the earlier Wolfe…  For the later, secular Wolfe on the earlier, saintly Wolfe, see

Dirty Trick

Some quotations in memory of philosopher Stuart Hampshire, who died on June 13, 2004.

From the Hampshire obituary in The Guardian:

From a log24 entry on the day before Hampshire’s death:

Whether Hampshire is now in Hell, the reader may surmise.  Some evidence in Hampshire’s  favor:

His review of On Beauty and Being Just, by Elaine Scarry, in The New York Review of Books of November 18, 1999.  Note particularly his remarks on Fred Astaire, and the links to Astaire and the Four Last Things in an earlier entry of June 12, which was, as noted above, the day before Hampshire’s death.

As for the day of death itself, consider the  following  remark with which Hampshire concludes his review of Scarry’s  book:

“But one must occasionally fly the flag, and the flag, incorrigibly, is beauty.”

In this connection, see the entry of the Sunday Hampshire died, Spider Web, as well as entries on the harrowing of hell — Holy Saturday, 2004 — and on beauty —  Art Wars for Trotsky’s Birthday and A Mass for Lucero (written, as it happens, on June 13, 2002).

Resurrection

The previous entry, on Christian theology, does not imply that all religion is bad.  Consider, for instance, the following from a memorial web page: 

“Al Grierson’s song Resurrection was sung by Ray Wylie Hubbard, on his outstanding Dangerous Spirits album. The song is awesome, and fits right into Ray Wylie’s spirit ‘and an angel lay on a mattress and spoke of history and death with perfume on her lingerie and whiskey on her breath . . . he’s loading up his saddlebags on the edge of wonder, one is filled with music and the other’s filled with thunder.’ Wow.”

Amen.
Grierson died on November 2, 2000
— All Souls Day, Dia de los Muertos.

My own favorite resurrection story is “Damnation Morning,” by Fritz Leiber; see Why Me? 

For more on the Day of the Dead, see Under the Volcano.

These are, of course, just stories, but may reflect some as yet unknown truth.

By the way, thanks, Joni, for leading me to KHYI.com on the day of the Toronto Stones concert.

Día de los Muertos

Today is All Souls’ Day, the Day of the Dead in Mexico. This site’s music for today, in honor of Rufino Tamayo, is “Luna y Sol.”