Log24

Robin Hartshorne, AMS Notices , April 2000, p. 464 —

"Whenever one approaches a subject from two different directions, there is bound to be an interesting theorem expressing their relation." 

From "When Novelists Become Cubists," by Andre Furlani—

With a nod to film-maker Stan Brakhage, Davenport calls his compositional principle "architectonic form." (2) In the essay "Narrative Tone and Form," he identifies in twentieth century literature "a movement from assuming the world to be transparent, and available to lucid thoughts and language, to assuming (having to assume, the artists involved would say) that the world is opaque" (Geography  311). Architectonic form derives from modernist experiments in disrupted perspective (as, for example, in collage and vorticism). "The architectonics of a narrative," Davenport says, "are emphasized and given a role to play in dramatic effect when novelists become Cubists; that is, when they see the possibilities of making a hieroglyph, a coherent symbol, an ideogram of the total work. A symbol comes into being when an artist sees that it is the only way to get all the meaning in. Genius always proceeds by faith" (312). The unparaphrasable architectonic text "differs from other narrative in that the meaning shapes into a web, or globe, rather than along a line" (318). The essence of such art "is that it conceals what it most wishes to show; first, because it charges word, image and sense to the fullest, fusing matter and manner; secondly, to allow meaning to be searched out" (57-58).

In architectonic form, meaning may be generated more in the interstices between images, citation, and passages of dialogue than in the content of these elements. "It is the conjunction, not the elements, that creates a new light," Davenport says in an essay on poet Ronald Johnson (194). This is the Poundian aesthetic Charles Olson attempted to translate into practical pedagogical terms as rector of Black Mountain College, a school organized, as Olson explained in a 1952 letter, on the "principle that the real existence of knowledge lies between things & is not confined to labeled areas" (quoted in Duberman 341).

Note:

(2) Brakhage has written admiringly of Davenport. In "Ice is for Coffee and for Wine" he speaks of the joy to have "at last met such a man as Pound describes Remy de Goncourt to have been…i.e. one whose intelligence was a way of feeling" (7).

References:

Brakhage, Stan. "Ice is for Coffee and for Wine." Margins  30 (Aug.-Sept. 1974): 6-7.

Davenport, Guy. The Geography of the Imagination . San Francisco, North Point Press, 1981. Reprint: New York, Pantheon, 1992.

Duberman, Martin. Black Mountain . New York, Dutton, 1972

See as well "Red Mountain," "Green Mountain," "Black Mountain,"
and of course "Cold Mountain."

Katherine Neville, author of perhaps the greatest bad novel of the twentieth century, The Eight, has now graced a new century with her sequel, titled The Fire. An excerpt:

“Our family lodge had been built at about this same period in the prior century, by neighboring tribes, for my great-great-grandmother, a pioneering mountain lass. Constructed of hand-hewn rock and massive tree trunks chinked together, it was a huge log cabin that was shaped like an octagon– patterned after a hogan or sweat lodge– with many-paned windows facing in each cardinal direction, like a vast, architectural compass rose.
……..
From here on the mountaintop, fourteen thousand feet atop the Colorado Plateau, I could see the vast, billowing sea of three-mile-high mountain peaks, licked by the rosy morning light. On a clear day like this, I could see all the way to Mount Hesperus– which the Diné call Dibé Nitsaa: Black Mountain. One of the four sacred mountains created by First Man and First Woman.

Together with Sisnaajinii, white mountain (Mt. Blanca) in the east; Tsoodzil, blue mountain (Mt. Taylor) in the south, and Dook’o’osliid, yellow mountain (San Francisco Peaks) in the west, these four marked out the four corners of Dinétah– ‘Home of the Diné,’ as the Navajo call themselves.

And they pointed as well to the high plateau I was standing on: Four Corners, the only place in the U.S. where four states– Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona– come together at right angles to form a cross.”

Intersections

1. Blue Ridge meets Black Mountain,

2. Vertical meets horizontal in music,

3. The timeless meets time in religion.

Details:

1. Blue Ridge, Black Mountain

“Montreat College is located in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina…. The Black Mountain Campus is… three miles from the main campus in the historic town of Black Mountain.”

Black Mountain College was “established on the Blue Ridge Assembly grounds outside the town of Black Mountain in North Carolina in the fall of 1933.”

USA Today, May 15, 2005, on Billy Graham:

“MONTREAT, N.C. — … It’s here at his… homestead, where the Blue Ridge meets the Black Mountain range east of Asheville, that Graham gave a rare personal interview.”

See also the following from June 24:

“No bridge reaches God, except one…
God’s Bridge: The Cross.”

— Billy Graham Evangelistic Association,
according to messiahpage.com

For some remarks more in the spirit of Black Mountain than of the Blue Ridge, see today’s earlier entry on pianist Grete Sultan and composer Tui St. George Tucker.

2. Vertical, Horizontal in Music

Richard Neuhaus on George Steiner’s
Grammars of Creation:

 “… the facts of the world are not and will never be ‘the end of the matter.’ Music joins grammar in pointing to the possibility, the reality, of more. He thinks Schopenhauer was on to something when he said music will continue after the world ends.

‘The capacity of music to operate simultaneously along horizontal and vertical axes, to proceed simultaneously in opposite directions (as in inverse canons), may well constitute the nearest that men and women can come to absolute freedom.  Music does “keep time” for itself and for us.'”

3. Timeless, Time

A Trinity Sunday sermon quotes T. S. Eliot:

“… to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint.”

See also The Diamond Project.