Log24

Sir Anthony Hopkins in "Slipstream." See "Home from Home."

Fritz Leiber ?

Today is said to be the 25th anniversary of the
opening to the public of the World Wide Web.
Related material:  Click on the above icon for
posts mentioning "Spider Woman."

* See references in this journal to the classic Fritz Leiber story.

"Have you ever thought about
 the properties of numbers?"

 — "The Maiden" in Shaw's
 Back to Methuselah , quoted in
 the Fritz Leiber Changewar  story
“No Great Magic” (1963), Part V

Johnny Cash*  Meets  Fritz Leiber**

*  "You can run on for a long time…"

** See Spider + Snake in this journal.

For the Janus-Faced Human Race

Related material —

Strange Myths and The Starflight Problem.

Synchronicity check —

"On the afternoon of October 10, 2013,
an unusually cold day, the streets of downtown
Dublin were filled …." — "How Stories Deceive"

See also this  journal on October 10, 2013.

Peter Schjeldahl in the current (Dec. 14) New Yorker :

The phrase “outsider art” was coined in 1972 by a
British art historian, Roger Cardinal, to translate
the sense of “art brut ,” which Dubuffet had
considered rendering as art “raw,” “uncouth,” “crude,”
or “in the rough.” But the term misses the full thrust
of Dubuffet’s elevation of “people uncontaminated
by artistic culture,” as he called them. He aspired not
to make outsiders respectable but to destroy the
complacency of insiders. He disqualified even tribal
and folk artists, and spirited amateurs like Henri
Rousseau, for being captive to one tradition or another.
Art brut  must be sui generis, from the hands and minds
of “unique, hypersensitive men, maniacs, visionaries,
builders of strange myths.”

The literary  art of Fritz Leiber and Stephen King seems to
fit this definition.

Somewhat less brut — the literary art of Plato.

A non-literary illustration:

  Time as "a moving
   image of eternity.”
       — Plato   

* Title of a story by Fritz Leiber.

A passage suggested by the previous post, Box Office:

A book first published by Doubleday in 1979:

From Fritz Leiber's 1959 sci-fi classic "Damnation Morning" —

She drew from her handbag a pale grey
gleaming implement that looked by quick turns
to me like a knife, a gun, a slim sceptre, and a
delicate branding iron— especially when its tip
sprouted an eight-limbed star of silver wire.

“The test?” I faltered, staring at the thing.

“Yes, to determine whether you can live in the
fourth dimension or only die in it.”

See also Philanthropic Numerology (St. Luke's Day, 2012).

• “Jung’s archetypes transgress the barriers of time and space.”
  — From a passage quoted by Fritz Leiber in “The Oldest Soldier,”
  Fantastic,  May 1960
• “… as if they had opened a door and stepped into another dimension
  full of the potentialities of any dimension not immediately calculable.”
  — Wallace Stevens, Bard College speech,  1951
• “Break on through to the other side.”
  — The Doors, 1967

Serge Lang, Collected Papers, Vol. 4 , p. 179—

"I find it appropriate to quote here a historical
comment made by Halberstam…."

This is Heini Halberstam, who reportedly died
on January 25, 2014.

I find it appropriate to quote here an unhistorical
comment made by a fictional character —

“The test?” I faltered, staring at the thing.

“Yes, to determine whether you can live
in the fourth dimension or only die in it.”

— From Fritz Leiber's classic story
    "Damnation Morning"

The Leiber quote was suggested by the posts
in this journal on the day of Halberstam's death.

A Story That Works “There is the dark, eternally silent, unknown universe; there are the friend-enemy minds shouting and whispering their tales and always seeking the three miracles — that minds should really touch, or that the silent universe should speak, tell minds a story, or (perhaps the same thing) that there should be a story that works, that is all hard facts, all reality, with no illusions and no fantasy; and lastly, there is lonely, story-telling, wonder-questing, mortal me.” – Fritz Leiber in “The Button Molder“

Dichtung ist Stiftung.

"The Double-Cross System, or XX System, was a World War II
anti-espionage and deception operation of the British military
intelligence arm, MI5. Nazi agents in Britain… were captured,
turned themselves in or simply announced themselves and were
then used by the British to broadcast mainly disinformation to
their Nazi controllers." —Wikipedia

The XX —

The Double Cross of Fritz Leiber—

Source: Rudolf Koch, The Book of Signs

(Continued from yesterday evening)

On Max Bialystock's Spider-Man Godspell Seminar—

"… for surrealism to be entertaining
onstage, it must be shaped into
some kind of satisfying form."

— Charles Isherwood
    in today's New York Times

(RSS:  Wed, 16  May  2012  00:37:17 GMT)

From Fritz Leiber's 1959 story "Damnation Morning" —

She drew from her handbag a pale grey gleaming
implement that looked by quick turns to me
like a knife, a gun, a slim sceptre, and a delicate
branding iron— especially when its tip sprouted
an eight-limbed star of silver wire.

“The test?” I faltered, staring at the thing.

“Yes, to determine whether you can live
in the fourth dimension or only die in it.”

Suggested by a piece in the
Melbourne Herald Sun  dated August 1, 2007—

A link from Log24 on that date—

Show Business
according to Fritz Leiber:
“Sid thinks you’re ready for
 some of the smaller parts.”

Microsoft plans Windows 8 compatibility with mobile devices

"This won't be just another upgrade. Windows 8 is nothing less than the linchpin to Microsoft's strategy for keeping Windows relevant— if not resurgent— as the shift to the post-PC computing era unfolds.

'The stakes are huge,' says Charles King, principal analyst at research firm Pund-IT. 'The company must play outside its comfort zone, but if Microsoft succeeds, the potential opportunities could be significant.'"

— Byron Acohido in USA TODAY this evening

Yesterday's 7:20 AM Google News—

From Cliff Robertson's 1958 TV classic "Days of Wine and Roses"—

From Fritz Leiber's 1959 sci-fi classic "Damnation Morning" —

She drew from her handbag a pale grey gleaming implement
that looked by quick turns to me like a knife, a gun,
a slim sceptre, and a delicate branding iron— especially when
its tip sprouted an eight-limbed star of silver wire.

“The test?” I faltered, staring at the thing.

“Yes, to determine whether you can live in the fourth dimension or only die in it.”

For Ms. Julie and the Pope

For Ms. Julie:

Nuevas Banderas in this journal…

Click on image
for details.

See also Balakrishnan's Last Problem—

For the Pope:

Now playing; click poster for details.

See also "Damnation Morning" in this journal—

She drew from her handbag a pale grey gleaming implement
that looked by quick turns to me like a knife, a gun, a slim
sceptre, and a delicate branding iron—especially when its
tip sprouted an eight-limbed star of silver wire.

“The test?” I faltered, staring at the thing.

“Yes, to determine whether you can live in the fourth
dimension or only die in it.”

— Fritz Leiber, short story, 1959

* For a time-leap from Leiber's 1959 to Hollywood's 2011, see yesterday's
  Marginal Remarks,  "The God particle ?" and a different Banderas.

Kernel and Moonshine

"The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine."

— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness

Some background—

An image from yesterday's search
God, TIme, Hopkins

"We got tom-toms over here bigger than a monster
Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla"

— "Massive Attack"

"I'm just checking your math on that. Yes, I got the same thing."

— "The Social Network"

"Live… Uh, check that… From New York, it's Saturday Night! "

Yesterday's New York Lottery— Midday 042, Evening 919.

Here 042 may be seen as referring to New York's 42nd Street…

Below, West 42nd St., facing north, from yesterday's New York Times—

Related material —

• Yesterday's Star of Venus in the post Black Swan
   
• Damnation Morning in this journal (with a version of the above symbol)
   
• "Damnation Morning" (the original story)

That story is part of the Change War  saga by Fritz Leiber, notably represented by Leiber's 1957 novel The Big Time.

See also Comic Book Resources on the new comic-book  series Spider-Man: Big Time—

CBR: “Big Time” is this title of this new era of “Amazing Spider-Man.” Why choose that title? What exactly is it referring to?

DAN SLOTT: “Big Time” refers to more than “Amazing Spider-Man,” it also refers to other Spider-Projects: “Astonishing Spider-Man/Iron Man,” the new Norman Osborn mini, and the all-new “Spider-Girl!” With “Amazing,” “Big Time” takes on a lot of meanings. In this book, everything is bigger: bigger stakes for Peter Parker, bigger threats for Spider-Man, and a much bigger comic. We are expanding to 30 pages of material, twice a month!

As for yesterday's evening NY lottery number 919, see 9/19.

New York Times, January 12, 2010, 12:26 PM–

"Spider-Man" Musical Will Refund Tickets

"With… direction by Julie Taymor ['Frida'], 'Spider-Man' has been marred by delays….

The musical’s troubles have unfolded at the same time that the next “Spider-Man” movie has been descending into disarray…."

Related material:

"No Great Magic," by Fritz Leiber–

"The white cosmetic came away, showing sallow skin and on it a faint tattoo in the form of an 'S' styled like a yin-yang symbol left a little open.

'Snake!' he hissed. 'Destroyer! The arch-enemy, the eternal opponent!'"

“Ay que bonito es volar  
    A las dos de la mañana….”
— “La Bruja“

“Preserving a strict unity of time and place, this stark tale of a young woman’s decline into insanity is set in a summer home on a holiday island. It is the first part of the trilogy that comprises Winter Light and The Silence, films which are generally seen as addressing Bergman’s increasing disillusionment with the emotional coldness of his inherited Lutheran religion. In particular here, Bergman focuses on the absence of familial love which might perhaps have pulled Karin (Andersson) back from the brink; while Karin’s mental disintegration manifests itself in the belief that God is a spider. As she slips inexorably into madness, she is observed with terrifying objectivity by her emotionally paralyzed father (Björnstrand) and seemingly helpless husband (von Sydow).”

— Nigel Floyd, Time Out, quoted at Bergmanorama

Related material:

1. The “spider” symbol of Fritz Leiber’s short story “Damnation Morning”–

2. Hollywood’s “Angels & Demons” (to open May 15), and

3. The following diagram by one “John Opsopaus”–

“Preserving a strict unity of time and place, this stark tale of a young woman’s decline into insanity is set in a summer home on a holiday island. It is the first part of the trilogy

that comprises Winter Light and The Silence, films which are generally seen as addressing Bergman’s increasing disillusionment with the emotional coldness of his inherited Lutheran religion. In particular here, Bergman focuses on the absence of familial love which might perhaps have pulled Karin (Andersson) back from the brink; while Karin’s mental disintegration manifests itself in the belief that God is a spider. As she slips inexorably into madness, she is observed with terrifying objectivity by her emotionally paralyzed father (Björnstrand) and seemingly helpless husband (von Sydow).”

— Nigel Floyd, Time Out, quoted at Bergmanorama

Related material:

1. The “spider” symbol of Fritz Leiber’s short story “Damnation Morning“–

2. The Illuminati Diamond of Hollywood’s “Angels & Demons” (to open May 15), and

3. The following diagram by one “John Opsopaus“–

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.”

Retired pastor William W. McDermet III on the editorial page of Saturday’s Buffalo News (Warren E. Buffett, chairman):

“In the 1940s, there was no Internet or television, so after school I amused myself with a snack of graham crackers and milk, maybe a comic book or a Tinkertoy project. Yet what was really exciting was a frequent ring of the doorbell, which mother answered, followed by the request: ‘Can Billy come out and play?'”

Excerpt from Fritz Leiber’s
“Damnation Morning,” 1959:

“Time traveling, which is not quite the good clean boyish fun it’s cracked up to be, started for me when this woman with the sigil on her forehead looked in on me from the open doorway of the hotel bedroom where I’d hidden myself and the bottles and asked me,

Our Lady of
Judgment Day

 ‘Look, Buster,
 do you want to live?'”

Today in History
(via The Associated Press)

Joan Didion, The White Album:

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live….

We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.”

An Alternate History

(based on entries of
the past three days):

“A FAMOUS HISTORIAN:

England, 932 A.D. —
A kingdom divided….”

— Introduction to “Spamalot”

In memory of Akira Ifukube (pdf), composer of music for “Godzilla,” who died on Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2006… birthday of John “Star Wars” Williams–

Strange Attractor

Epiphany Star

(See also the star as a
“spider” symbol in the
stories of Fritz Leiber.)

For Heinrich Harrer,
who died today…

Wikipedia on the north face of the Eiger:

“A portion of the upper face is called ‘The White Spider,’ as snow-filled cracks radiating from an ice-field resemble the legs of a spider. Harrer used the name for the title of his book about his successful climb, Die Weisse Spinne (translated… as The White Spider).”

“Connoisseur of Chaos,”
by Wallace Stevens,
from Parts of a World (1942):

III

After all the pretty contrast of life and death
Proves that these opposite things partake of one,
At least that was the theory, when bishops’ books
Resolved the world. We cannot go back to that.
The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,
If one may say so . And yet relation appears,
A small relation expanding like the shade
Of a cloud on sand, a shape on the side of a hill.

V

The pensive man . . . He sees that eagle float
For which the intricate Alps are a single nest.

Related material:

• Trevanian on “the meadow” in Shibumi,
• Trevanian on “the meadow that tilts up toward the north face” in The Eiger Sanction,
• Johnny Mercer on the meadow (Dec. 18 and 20, 2005), and
• Nine is a Vine, Christmas Eve, 2005.

“Mahlburg likens his approach to an analogous one for deciding whether a dance party has an even or odd number of attendees. Instead of counting all the participants, a quicker method is to see whether everyone has a partner—in effect making groups that are divisible by 2.

In Mahlburg’s work, the partition numbers play the role of the dance participants, and the crank splits them not into couples but into groups of a size divisible by the prime number in question. The total number of partitions is, therefore, also divisible by that prime.

Mahlburg’s work ‘has effectively written the final chapter on Ramanujan congruences,’ Ono says.

‘Each step in the story is a work of art,’ Dyson says, ‘and the story as a whole is a sequence of episodes of rare beauty, a drama built out of nothing but numbers and imagination.'”

— Erica Klarreich in Science News Online, week of June 18, 2005

This would seem to meet the criteria set by Fritz Leiber for “a story that works.” (See previous entry.)  Whether the muse of dance (played in “Xanadu” by a granddaughter of physicist Max Born– see recent entries) has a role in the Dyson story is debatable.

Born Dec. 11, 1882, Breslau, Germany. Died Jan. 5, 1970, Göttingen, West Germany.

Max Born

Those who prefer less abstract stories may enjoy a mythic tale by Robert Graves, Watch the North Wind Rise, or a Christian tale by George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind.

Related material:

“The valley spirit never dies. It’s named the mystic woman.”

— Tao Te Ching

For an image of a particular
incarnation of the mystic woman
(whether as muse, as goddess,
or as the White Witch of Narnia,
I do not know) see Julie Taymor.

“Down in the valley,
 valley so low,
 hang your head over,
 hear the wind blow.”

— Folk song

“Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in
    the same bare place

For the listener,
    who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there
    and the nothing that is.”

— Wallace Stevens

8:00:00

For related iconology, see Star Wars and
Show Business according to Fritz Leiber.

Star Wars,
continued

The Eight

Lest the reader of the previous entry mistakenly take Katherine Neville’s book The Eight more seriously than Fritz Leiber’s greatly superior writings on eightness, here are two classic interpretations of Leiber’s “spider” or “double cross” symbol:

This symbol consists of
two triangles

representing
male and female,
fire and water,
up and down,
etc., etc., etc.

For some deeper properties
of the number eight, see a
Log24.net entry of 4/4/03.

Show Business
according to Fritz Leiber

(Leiber's "Changewar" is my
favorite mythology.)

From the Changewar story
"No Great Magic" (1963) Part V:

Even little things are
turning out to be great things
and becoming intensely interesting.
Have you ever thought about
the properties of numbers?
— The Maiden

"I've had this idea– it's just a sort of fancy, remember– that if you wanted to time-travel and, well, do things, you could hardly pick a more practical machine than a dressing-room and a sort of stage and half-theater attached, with actors to man it…."

For the remainder of this section
of Leiber's story, see

Show Business.

Related material:
The previous entry,
The Eight, and
Now We See Wherein
Lies the Pleasure.

Angel of the
First Degree

June 24, 2002, at 8:22:21 PM:

Honey Blonde She’s as sweet as   tupelo honey She’s an angel   of the first degree. She’s as sweet as   tupelo honey Just like honey, baby,   from the bee. — Van Morrison, 1971

Elmer Bernstein, Film Composer, Dies at 82

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:22 a.m. ET
Thursday, Aug. 19, 2004

LOS ANGELES (AP)– Elmer Bernstein, the versatile, Oscar-winning composer who scored such movie classics as “The Ten Commandments,” “The Magnificent Seven,”‘ “To Kill a Mockingbird,”‘ “The Great Escape” and “True Grit,” died Wednesday. He was 82.

Bernstein died in his sleep at his Ojai home.

That, M.C.C., is what
Fritz Leiber means by

The Big Time.

Star Wars

In memory of Melvin J. Lasky, editor, 1958-1990, of the CIA-funded journal Encounter:

“Once called as lively, and as bitchy, as a literary cocktail party, Encounter published articles of unrivalled authority on politics, history and literature.”

— Obituary in the Telegraph 

Lasky died on Wednesday, May 19, 2004.  From a journal entry of my own on that date:

This newly-digitized diagram is from a
paper journal note of October 21, 1999.

Note that the diagram’s overall form is that of an eight-point star.  Here is an excerpt from a Fritz Leiber story dealing with such a star, the symbol of a fictional organization:

From last year’s entry,
Indiana Jones and the Hidden Coffer,
of 6/14:

Finally, from an excellent site
on the Knights Templar,
a quotation from Umberto Eco:

ART WARS for

Trotsky’s Birthday

Part I:
Symbols

From my entry of July 26, 2003, in memory
of Marathon Man director John Schlesinger:

For the meaning of the above symbols, see
Kubrick’s 1x4x9 monolith in 2001,
the Halmos tombstone in Measure Theory,
and the Fritz Leiber Changewar stories.

No se puede vivir sin amar.

Part II:
Sunday in the Park with Death

  To Leon from Diego —
Details of a mural,
A Dream of a Sunday Afternoon
in Alameda Park,
Fresco, 1947-48,
Alameda Hotel, Mexico City:

Three’s a Crowd:

Symbol:

For the Man in Black

Lyrics:  Arizona Star

“Shinin’ like a diamond
 she had tombstones in her eyes.”

A picture: Salma Hayek and Julie Taymor

A book:  Dark Ladies, by Fritz Leiber

This offers a gentler form of the alcoholic experience than Malcolm Lowry’s classic Under the Volcano:

“I’ve had hallucinations from alcohol, too…. But only during withdrawal oddly, the first three days.  In closets and dark corners and under tables — never in very bright light — I’d see these black and sometimes red wires, about the thickness of telephone cords, vibrating, whipping around.  Made me think of giant spiders’ legs and such.  I’d know they were hallucinations — they were manageable, thank God.  Bright light would always wipe them out.”

— Fritz Leiber, “Our Lady of Darkness,” in Dark Ladies

Related entries:

The Feast of Kali, the Dark Lady, and

Architecture of Eternity,
my own “Once Upon a Time in Mexico.”

For a more serious Dark Lady portrait, see the site of artist John de la Vega.

Morning Flight

“I’m working on a morning flight to anywhere but here….

It’s not the way you say you hear my heart
when the music ends
I am just learning how to fly away again”

— Nanci Griffith on KHYI.com, 6:45 AM

Click on the above yantra for deeper meditations from May 24 and 25, 2003.

See entries of June 10-14, 2003, for more on the symbolism of the above figure’s central two triangles, which represent Shiva and Kali united.  For the symbolism of the eight petals, see the eight-ray star of Venus in my Oct. 23, 2002, entry.  This is one interpretation of the eightfold “Spider” symbol

which plays a major role in the Changewar stories of Fritz Leiber (my favorite mythology).  This symbol, like the two-triangles symbol at the center of the eight-petal lotus above, represents “Shiva and Kali united in love,” according to Leiber. (See my journal note “Biblical Proportions,” written on this date in 1997.)

For a Christian perspective on the Spider symbol, see Quine in Purgatory.

For a different religious perspective on the two-triangles symbol in the lotus, see

You Don’t Look Buddhist,

Suzanne Takes You Down, and

Satori at Pearl Harbor.

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.

Dancing at Lughnasa

“The place outside the cosmos where I and my pals do our nursing job I simply call the Place. A lot of my nursing consists of amusing and humanizing Soldiers fresh back from raids into time. In fact, my formal title is Entertainer….”

— Fritz Leiber, The Big Time

“And he sang:
‘Dance a little closer to me,
Dance a little closer now,
Dance a little closer tonight.
Dance a little closer to me,
    hey it’s closing time,
And love’s on sale tonight
    at this five and dime.’ “

— “Love at the Five and Dime,”
written and sung by Nanci Griffith 

“Going up.” — Nanci Griffith

Late Night Grande Hotel

“I feel like Garbo in this late night Grande Hotel
 ‘Cause living alone is all I’ve ever done well”

— Nanci Griffith, Song lyric

“…the thought of those dark three
Is dark, thought of the forms of dark desire.”

— Wallace Stevens,
    “The Owl in the Sarcophagus” 

“I am not as romantically entrancing as the immortal film star… but I have a rough-and-ready charm of my own.”

— Fritz Leiber, The Big Time

Thank you, KHYI.com, for playing Nanci Griffith on this, the feast day of Presbyterian saint Wallace Stevens.  She is not Garbo or Marie Trintignant (see previous entry), but she will do.

 “Beauty is momentary in the mind —
     The fitful tracing of a portal;
     But in the flesh it is immortal.”
     — Wallace Stevens,
     Peter Quince at the Clavier

Transcendental Meditation

The bicentennial of Ralph Waldo Emerson was on May 25, 2003.  For a commemoration of Emerson on that date, click on the picture below of Harvard University’s Room 305, Emerson Hall.

This will lead you to a discussion of the properties of a 5×5 array, or matrix, with a symbol of mystical unity at its center.  Although this symbol of mystical unity, the number “1,” is not, pace the Shema, a transcendental number, the matrix is, as perhaps a sort of Emersonian compensation, what postmodernists would call phallologocentric.  It is possible that Emerson is a saint; if so, his feast day (i.e., date of death), April 27, might reveal to us the sort of miraculous fact hoped for by Fritz Leiber in my previous entry.  A check of my April 27 notes shows us, lo and behold, another phallologocentric 5×5 array, this one starring Warren Beatty.  This rather peculiar coincidence is, perhaps, the sort of miracle appropriate to a saint who is, as this week’s politically correct New Yorker calls him, a Big Dead White Male.

 Leiber’s fiction furnishes “a behind-the-scenes view of the time change wars.”

“It’s quarter to three…” — St. Frank Sinatra

The Big Time

A Story That Works

• “There is the dark, eternally silent, unknown universe;
• there are the friend-enemy minds shouting and whispering their tales and always seeking the three miracles —
  • that minds should really touch, or
  • that the silent universe should speak, tell minds a story, or (perhaps the same thing)
  • that there should be a story that works, that is all hard facts, all reality, with no illusions and no fantasy;
• and lastly, there is lonely, story-telling, wonder-questing, mortal me.”

  — Fritz Leiber in “The Button Molder“

Mental Health Month, Day 24:

The Sacred Day of
Kali, the Dark Lady

On this day, Gypsies from all over Europe gather in Provence for the sacred day of St. Sarah, also known as Kali.

Various representations of Kali exist; there is a novel about the ways men have pictured her:

The above is one of the best descriptions of Kali I know of in literature; another is in a short story by Fritz Leiber, “Damnation Morning.”   It is not coincidental that one collection of Leiber’s writings is called “Dark Ladies.”

My journal note “Biblical Proportions” was in part inspired by Leiber.

Frank Sinatra may have pictured her as Ava Gardner.  I think I saw her the night Sinatra died… hence my entries of March 31 and April 2, 2003. 

It is perhaps not irrelevant that Kali is, among other things, a mother goddess, and that my entry “Raiders of the Lost Matrix” of May 20 deals with this concept and with the number 24.

The above religious symbol (see “Damnation Morning“) pictures both the axes of symmetry of the square¹ and a pattern with intriguing combinatorial properties².  It also is the basis of a puzzle³ I purchased on August 29, 1997 — Judgment Day in Terminator 2.  Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor in that film is an excellent representation of the Dark Lady, both as mother figure and as Death Goddess.

 
Sarah Connor

Background music: “Bit by bit…” — Stephen Sondheim… See Sondheim and the Judgment Day puzzle in my entry of May 20. The Lottery Covenant.

¹ A. W. Joshi, Elements of Group Theory for Physicists, Third Edition, Wiley, 1982, p. 5

² V. K. Balakrishnan, Combinatorics, McGraw-Hill, 1995, p. 180

³ The Izzi Puzzle