Log24

… τοῦ γὰρ ἀεὶ ὄντος ἡ γεωμετρικὴ γνῶσίς ἐστιν.

… for geometry is the knowledge of the eternally existent.

See also the previous post — "Artifice of Eternity" —

and the June 23, 2010, post "Group Theory and Philosophy."

Benoît Mandelbrot died on Oct. 14.
 

— New York Lottery on Thursday, Oct. 14, 2010

Related material on 109: See 1/09, 2009.
Related material on 060: See Hexagram 60 of the I Ching  and…

Margaret Atwood on Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art—

"Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists." (159)

What is "the next world"? It might be the Underworld….

The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie– this line of thought leads Hyde to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation  and art  all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning "to join," "to fit," and "to make." (254)  If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist.  Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart.

Playing God:

The Color of
Collateral

John Lahr (Log24 on 1/26 2003):

“The play’s narrator and general master of artifice is the Stage Manager, who gives the phrase ‘deus ex machina’ a whole new meaning. He holds the script, he sets the scene, he serves as an interlocutor between the worlds of the living and the dead, calling the characters into life and out of it; he is, it turns out, the Author of Authors, the Big Guy himself. It seems, in every way, apt for Paul Newman to have taken on this role.”

“It’s not easy being green.”
— Jill O’Hara    

Center of Time

“The old man of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ imagined the city’s power as being able to ‘gather’ him into ‘the artifice of eternity’— presumably into ‘monuments of unageing intellect,’ immortal and changeless structures representative of or embodying all knowledge, linked like a perfect machine at the center of time.”

— Karl Parker, Yeats’ Two Byzantiums 

“I wrote Fermata listening to Suzanne Vega, particularly her album ‘99.9° F.’  It affected my mood in just the right way. I found a kind of maniacal intensity in her music that helped me as I typed. So if Fermata is attacked, maybe I can say i’m not responsible because I was under the spell of Suzanne Vega.”

— Nicholson Baker, interview

For some real monuments of unageing intellect, see “Geometrie” in the weblog of Andrea for February 10, 2003.

The Recruit, Part Deux

Walter L. Pforzheimer, one of the founding fathers of the Central Intelligence Agency, and its “institutional memory,” died on Monday, February 10, 2003.

From my notes of February 10, 2003:

“… gather me/ Into the artifice of eternity.”

— W. B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”

This poem has a sequel, titled simply “Byzantium” —

At midnight on the Emperor’s pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds….

Dying into a dance,  
An agony of trance,  
An agony of flame….

The Emperor’s Pavement

See also yesterday’s note “The Recruit,”
on the CIA and what Vonnegut called
“A Duty-Dance with Death.”

Rainbow’s End

For Ernst Kitzinger, professor of Byzantine art at Harvard, who died at 90 on January 22, 2003. 

In “Sailing to Byzantium,” the poet W. B. Yeats wrote of Ireland,

That is no country for old men….
….
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
….
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Don’t ever tell me the gods have no sense of humor.  After writing the phrase “rainbow’s-end gold” in yesterday’s entry, “Messe,” I came across an obituary of Professor Kitzinger, which naturally prompted me to look for a good web page on “Sailing to Byzantium.”

The poem concludes with images of “gold mosaic,” “Grecian goldsmiths,” “hammered gold,” “gold enamelling,” and “a golden bough.”  I had forgotten that Yeats’s poem begins to sound rather like the curse of King Midas.  And then the touch of divinity: the perfect deflation of Yeatsian and Byzantine pretentiousness, on the following web page:

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Atlantis/3260/sailing.html,

at “The Lonesome Surf-In Poetry Cafe.”  With lovely faux-gold borders, this page has as background music a gloriously cheesy rendition of “Moon River.”  (Rainbow’s end… Waitin’ ’round the bend….) So much for the Tiffany’s approach to poetry.

I still admire Yeats’ respect
For monuments of intellect
But even though I’m getting old
Can’t share his appetite for gold.

For a rather different “artifice of eternity,”
see my entry of February 1, 2003,

Time and Eternity.

Through a Soda-Fountain Mirror, Darkly

For Piper Laurie on Her Birthday

“He was part of my dream, of course —
but then I was part of his dream, too!”

— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, Chapter XII (“Which Dreamed It?”) quoted as epigraph to a script for the film Pleasantville, which features a soda fountain from the 1950’s.

“Scenes from yesteryear are revisited through the soda-fountain mirror, creating such a fluid pathway between the past and present that one often becomes lost along the way.”

— Caroline Palmer’s review of “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean” 

The above quotations are related to the 1952 film Has Anybody Seen My Gal?, in which James Dean makes a brief appearance at a 1920’s soda fountain. The film is chiefly notable for displaying the beauty of Piper Laurie, but a subplot is also of iterest.  Charles Coburn, a rich man visiting incognito a timeless town* rather like Pleasantville or Riverdale, takes up painting and is assisted by the young Gigi Perreau, who, as I recall, supplies him with the frame from a Circe Soap ad displayed in a shop window.

For more on a fictional rich character and Circe — indeed, enough for a soap — see my note of January 11, 2003, “The First Days of Disco,” and the sequel of January 12, 2003, “Ask Not.”  In the manner of magic realism, the adventures in the earlier entry of Scrooge McDuck and Circe are mirrored by those in the later entry of C. Douglas Dillon and Monique Wittig.

For a less pleasant trip back in time, see the later work of Gigi Perreau in Journey to the Center of Time (1967).  One viewer’s comment:

This is the worst movie ever made. I don’t want to hear about any of Ed Wood’s pictures. This is it, this is the one. Right here. The bottom of the deepest pit of cinema hell.

Happy birthday, Miss Laurie.

*Rather, in fact, like “Our Town.”  Here is John Lahr on a current production of that classic:

“The play’s narrator and general master of artifice is the Stage Manager, who gives the phrase ‘deus ex machina’ a whole new meaning. He holds the script, he sets the scene, he serves as an interlocutor between the worlds of the living and the dead, calling the characters into life and out of it; he is, it turns out, the Author of Authors, the Big Guy himself. It seems, in every way, apt for Paul Newman to have taken on this role. God should look like Newman: lean, strong-chinned, white-haired, and authoritative in a calm and unassuming way—if only we had all been made in his image!”

— The New Yorker, issue of Dec. 16, 2002

If Newman is God, then Miss Laurie played God’s girlfriend.  Nice going, Piper.