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Tuesday, August 16, 2022

The Pristine Edge of Darkness

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , , , , — m759 @ 6:44 am
 

Westworld Season 4 Episode 8 (Finale)

Christina: Where am I? 
Maya: You're nowhere. Unplugged from the rest of the world. (Wind swooshing)
Christina: I'm alone again. In the walled garden. 
Maya: You're scared. So you brought me back. Talk to me, Chrissie. 
Christina: Everything is destroyed. Everyone is dying. I don't know. (Wind whooshing) (Leaves rustling) But I think it may be my fault. (Melancholic music playing) 
Maya: You know, people think they know what a tree is. They have no idea. What we see, it's only part of the story. But beneath the ground… everything's connected and working together. There's violence and chaos everywhere. And you can choose to focus on all of that. And that's all you'll see. But if you sit still… (Leaves rustling) …long enough… you'll sense an ancient order. A deep peace. (Breathes deeply) And that's what I choose to see. (Inhales) I see the beauty in this world. 
Christina: Yes. (Chuckles softly) I know the feeling. 
Maya: I thought you might. (Melancholic music concludes)

Read more at
https://tvshowtranscripts.ourboard.org/
viewtopic.php?f=738&t=55566

From a college botany laboratory in the 1915
D. H. Lawrence novel The Rainbow

"Suddenly she had passed away into
an intensely-gleaming light of knowledge."

A later passage in the same novel, under
a metaphorical Tree of Life —

"She passed away as on a dark wind, far, far away,
into the pristine darkness of paradise, into the original
immortality. She entered the dark fields of immortality."

Some will prefer . . .

For further context, see posts tagged Screw Theory.

Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Scholia

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:48 pm

Heidegger- 'The world's darkening never reaches to the light of being'

Scholia —

D. H. Lawrence quote from 'Kangaroo'

South Australia goes dark

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

The Horse

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:23 am

A New York Times  piece today on author Donald Antrim:

“The next project is a novel ‘about’ (having loosely to do with)
his father, Harry, a T. S. Eliot scholar who wrote a well-regarded
monograph on the poet.”

— John Jeremiah Sullivan

From Harry T. Antrim’s 1967 thesis on Eliot:

“That words can be made to reach across the void
left by the disappearance of God (and hence of all
Absolutes) and thereby reestablish some basis of
relation with forms existing outside the subjective
and ego-centered self has been one of the chief
concerns of the first half of the twentieth century.”

An epigraph selected by Sullivan for a 2002 Harper’s Magazine
article, “Horseman, Pass By“—

Far back, far back in our dark soul
the horse prances.

— D. H. Lawrence

A related image from pure mathematics
(a source of Absolutes unrelated to theology):

See April 9, 2004, for a post on the “Horseman” article.

Sunday, May 4, 2014

Good Friday, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:00 pm

See also…

and … in this journal, the author of The Plumed Serpent.

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Howl (continued)

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:31 pm

See the Telegraph  obituary of Jim Hall
and a post on Charlie Christian (and others).

The inclusion of D. H. Lawrence in that post
suggests a review of posts tagged Howl.

"The werewolves are here to save us."
— Simon in "The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones."

Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Question

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:02 pm
 

"Lawrence seems simultaneously naïve and jaded in the face of elemental questions, and he is himself our greatest poet of the interrogative mode: his questions often begin by seeming inconsequential, even coy ('Would you like to throw a stone at me?'), but they unearth unexpected profundities of observation and thought. This process of discovery, not the profundities as such, is what makes the poems so gripping, and it takes place both within the poems and between them."

James Longenbach on D. H. Lawrence,
    The Nation , Oct. 1, 2013

"What then?" — D. H. Lawrence on the novel

"What then?" — Yeats on Plato's ghost

Sunday, September 29, 2013

Bavarian Gentians

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:01 pm

This is the title of  a poem by D. H. Lawrence.

Saturday, September 7, 2013

Structure and Character

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

(Continued from May 4, 2013)

"I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand
Walking through the streets of Soho in the rain"

Warren Zevon

"It is well
That London, lair of sudden
Male and female darknesses,
Has broken her spell."

— D. H. Lawrence in a poem on a London blackout
during a bombing raid in 1917. See also today's previous
posts, Down Under and Howl.

Backstory— Recall, from history's nightmare on this date,
the Battle of Borodino and the second  London Blitz.

Down Under

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:02 am

"If I am to have a meeting it shall be down,
down in the invisible,
and the moment I re-emerge
it shall be alone.
In the visible world I am alone, an isolate instance.
My meeting is in the underworld, the dark."

— D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo , Chapter 7,
   "The Battle of Tongues."

The web edition of this book says it was
"Last updated Tuesday,  June 18, 2013."

This was also the publication date of Max Barry's
2013 novel Lexicon . (See that date in this journal.)

Monday, January 21, 2013

Winner

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:45 pm

"Well, I got there!"

— D. H. Lawrence,
"The Rocking-Horse Winner"

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Dehors*

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:31 am

"A New York Jew imitates D. H. Lawrence at his peril."

The New York Times  today

“Our focus is on creating very high quality, highly artistically produced programs that bring together worlds that usually don’t talk to each other,” said Dr. Greene, a physics and math professor at Columbia and well-known popularizer of science. “We’ve tried to inject the drama of science into these highly produced programs, so people leave the event saying, ‘Wow, I didn’t know that’s what science is like.’ ”

As for D. H. Lawrence, see this journal on September 10, 2003.

* For the title, see last night's Turing Gate.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Winning

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:30 am

From a short story:

One day his mother and his Uncle Oscar came in when he was on one of his furious rides. He did not speak to them.

"Hallo, you young jockey! Riding a winner?" said his uncle.

"Aren't you growing too big for a rocking-horse? You're not a very little boy any longer, you know," said his mother.

But Paul only gave a blue glare from his big, rather close-set eyes. He would speak to nobody when he was in full tilt. His mother watched him with an anxious expression on her face.

At last he suddenly stopped forcing his horse into the mechanical gallop and slid down.

"Well, I got there!" he announced fiercely, his blue eyes still flaring, and his sturdy long legs straddling apart.

"Where did you get to?" asked his mother.

"Where I wanted to go," he flared back at her.

"That's right, son!" said Uncle Oscar. "Don't you stop till you get there. What's the horse's name?"

"He doesn't have a name," said the boy.

— "The Rocking-Horse Winner," by D. H. Lawrence

"In the desert you can remember your name,
'Cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain."

America

See also June 12, 2005September 11, 2007, and Something Anonymous.

"A New York Jew imitates D. H. Lawrence at his peril."

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Church of St. Frank*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:01 am

"A New York Jew imitates D. H. Lawrence at his peril."

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/11720-WallStreetAtCannesSm.jpg

Frank Langella at Cannes

See also The Ninth Gate and Spider Women.

* For the title, do a search in this journal.

Monday, May 31, 2010

Memorial for Galois

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 7:16 pm

… and for Louise Bourgeois

Image-- Louise Bourgeois, sculptor of giant spiders, dies at 98

"The épateurs  were as boring as the bourgeois,
two halves of one dreariness."

— D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent

Image-- Google 5/31/2010 search for 'eightfold geometry' yields page on mother goddess as spider figure, also pages on some actual geometry

Friday, December 17, 2004

Friday December 17, 2004

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 pm
Christmas Dance at Taos

One grows used to the weather,
The landscape and that;
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,

The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.

— Wallace Stevens,
"The American Sublime"

The Times Online on the artist Agnes Martin,
who died Dec. 16 in Taos, New Mexico:

"At a glance, or from a distance, her work looks like nothing at all. Square canvases are so palely touched with colour they might almost be blank. Considered slowly and carefully and close-up, however, the whole surface comes alive."

"The restraint and formal regularity of Martin’s work has led her often to be grouped with the Minimalists. She shares something of their self-effacing rigour and their concern with the material qualities of art, but she herself preferred to be seen in the context of the Abstract Expressionist painters who were her own contemporaries and early artistic models. Like them she may have seen abstract art as the means to a distinctively American sublime…."

"Taos had been a magnet for artists since the last years of the 19th century. D. H. Lawrence famously spent time there in the 1920s. 'Never shall I forget the Christmas dances at Taos,' he wrote, 'twilight, snow, the darkness coming over the great wintry mountains and the lonely pueblo.'"

Related material:

Pictures of Nothing,

Balanchine's Birthday.

Friday, April 9, 2004

Friday April 9, 2004

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:00 am

Triple Crown, Part II

(See previous entry.)

The winner is Mike Sullivan, far and away.

An essay, by Sullivan's son,
from Harper's magazine, Oct. 2002 —

Horseman, Pass By:
Glory, Grief, and the Race for
the Triple Crown

by John Jeremiah Sullivan

Far back, far back in our dark soul
the horse prances.

— D. H. Lawrence  

"As opposed to the typical sportswriter, who has a passion for the subject and can put together a sentence, my father's ambition had been to Write (poetry, no less), and sports were what he knew, so he sort of stumbled onto making his living that way….

Two years ago, in May, I sat with him in his hospital room at Riverside Methodist, in Columbus….

I asked him to tell me what he remembered from all those years of writing about sports, for he had seen some things in his time…. This is what he told me:

I was at Secretariat's Derby, in '73, the year before you were born — I don't guess you were even conceived yet. That was … just beauty, you know?  He started in last place, which he tended to do. I was covering the second-place horse, which wound up being Sham. It looked like Sham's race going into the last turn, I think. The thing you have to understand is that Sham was fast, a beautiful horse. He would have had the Triple Crown in another year. And it just didn't seem like there could be anything faster than that. Everybody was watching him. It was over, more or less. And all of a sudden there was this … like, just a disruption in the corner of your eye, in your peripheral vision. And then before you could make out what it was, here Secretariat came. And then Secretariat had passed him. No one had ever seen anything run like that–a lot of the old guys said the same thing. It was like he was some other animal out there …

I wrote that down when I got back to my father's apartment, where my younger sister and I were staying the night. He lived two more months, but that was the last time I saw him alive."

Thanks to the New York Times for today's review of John Jeremiah Sullivan's new book, which includes the above.

See, too,

Words Are Events.

Wednesday, September 10, 2003

Wednesday September 10, 2003

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:04 pm

4:04:08

The title refers to my entry of last April 4,

The Eight,

and to the time of this entry.

From D. H. Lawrence and the Dialogical Principle:

“Plato’s Dialogues…are queer little novels….[I]t was the greatest pity in the world, when philosophy and fiction got split.  They used to be one, right from the days of myth.  Then they went and parted, like a nagging married couple, with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and that beastly Kant.  So the novel went sloppy, and philosophy went abstract-dry.  The two should come together again, in the novel.”

— pp. 154-5 in D. H. Lawrence, “The Future of the Novel,” in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays. Ed.  Bruce Steele.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1983. 149-55.



Philosophy



Fiction

“The wild, brilliant, alert head of St. Mawr seemed to look at her out of another world… the large, brilliant eyes of that horse looked at her with demonish question…. ‘Meet him half way,’ Lewis [the groom] said.  But halfway across from our human world to that terrific equine twilight was not a small step.”    

— pp. 30, 35 in D. H. Lawrence, “St. Mawr.” 1925.  St. Mawr and Other Stories.  Ed. Brian Finney.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

See also

Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star.

Katherine Neville’s novel The Eight, referred to in my note of April 4, is an excellent example of how not to combine philosophy with fiction.  Lest this be thought too harsh, let me say that the New Testament offers a similarly ludicrous mixture.

On the other hand, there do exist successful combinations of philosophy with fiction… For example, The Glass Bead Game, Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Under the Volcano, the novels of Charles Williams, and the C. S. Lewis classic That Hideous Strength.

This entry was prompted by the appearance of the god Pan in my entry on this date last year, by Hugh Grant’s comedic encounters with Pan in “Sirens,” by Lawrence’s remarks on Pan in “St. Mawr,” and by the classic film “Picnic at Hanging Rock.”

Sunday, March 2, 2003

Sunday March 2, 2003

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:20 pm

7:20 PM CALI Time

The Bus and the Bead Game:
 
The Communion of Saints as
 the Association of Ideas

On this date in 1955, “Bus Stop,” a play by William Inge, opened at the Music Box Theatre in New York City.

“I seemed to be standing in a bus queue by the side of a long, mean street.”

— C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, opening sentence

Today’s birthdays:

Sam Houston
Dr. Seuss
Kurt Weill
Mikhail Gorbachev
Tom Wolfe
Desi Arnaz
Jennifer Jones
Karen Carpenter

and many others.

Today is the feast day of  

St. Randolph Scott
St. Sandy Dennis
St. D. H. Lawrence, and
St. Charlie Christian.

“Your guitar, it sounds so sweet and clear…”

— Karen Carpenter singing “Superstar

“And if I find me a good man,
 I won’t be back at all.”

C. C. Rider lyrics

See (and hear) also “Seven Come Eleven,” played by St. Charlie Christian.

One might (disregarding separation in time and space — never major hindrances to the saints) imagine C. S. Lewis in Heaven listening to a conversation among the four saints listed above.  For more on the communion of saints, see my entry “State of the Communion” of Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2003.  This entry, quoting an old spiritual, concluded with “Now hear the word of the Lord”  — followed by this notation: 

 7:11 PM.

See also the N.Y. Times obituary of John P. Thompson of Dallas, former 7-Eleven chairman, who died, as it happened, on that very day (Jan. 28).  See also Karen Carpenter’s “first take luck.”

The sort of association of ideas described in the “Communion” entry is not unrelated to the Glasperlenspiel, or Glass Bead Game, of Hermann Hesse.  For a somewhat different approach to the Game, see

The Glass Bead Game,”

by John S. Wilson, group theorist and head of the Pure Mathematics Group at the University of Birmingham in England. Wilson is “not convinced that Hesse’s… game is only a metaphor.” Neither am I.

For the association-of-ideas approach, see the page cited in my “Communion” entry,

A Game Designer’s Holy Grail,”

and (if you can find a copy) one of the greatest forgotten books of the twentieth century,

The Third Word War,

by Ian Lee (A&W Publishers, Inc., New York, 1978).  As Lee remarks concerning the communion of saints and the association of ideas,

“The association is the idea.”
 

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