"Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:"
— Two lines from a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem
as quoted by Caleb Murdock at . . .
https://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showthread.php?t=5356 .
From that same URL —
"And, Caleb, yes, 'sprung rhythm' has made it into dictionaries,
though even there, the association is with Hopkins."
For guess-ghosts —
"Spring is sprung, the grass is riz,
I wonder where the flowers is."
And for an able muse —
“Suck any sense from that who can” — Gerard Manley Hopkins
Related architecture:
From posts tagged Marfa Day —
"Den Kopf benutzen ist besser als ihn verlieren."
The title, which suggests a combination of musings by James Joyce
and Gerard Manley Hopkins, is actually a person’s name. See below.
“Mr. Lowery’s view that news organizations’ ‘core value
needs to be the truth, not the perception of objectivity,’
as he told me, has been winning in a series of battles,
many around how to cover race.”
— Ben Smith in the print New York Times this morning
“Christ is truth.” — St. Gerard Manley Hopkins
See also The Diamond Chariot in posts tagged September Samurai.
This post was suggested by a May 28 death —
The terms glitch and cross-carrier in the previous post
suggest a review —
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For some backstory, see Glitch, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Inscape —
particularly the post A Balliol Star.
According to McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan writing to Ezra Pound on Dec. 21, 1948—
"The American mind is not even close to being amenable
to the ideogram principle as yet. The reason is simply this.
America is 100% 18th Century. The 18th century had
chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy—
the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD.
It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still
verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all
human thought for the U.S.A.
I am trying to devise a way of stating this difficulty as it exists.
Until stated and publicly recognized for what it is, poetry and
the arts can’t exist in America."
For context, see Cameron McEwen,
"Marshall McLuhan, John Pick, and Gerard Manley Hopkins."
(Renascence , Fall 2011, Vol. 64 Issue 1, 55-76)
A relation in four terms —
A : B :: C : D as Model : Crutch :: Metaphor : Ornament —
See also Dueling Formulas and Symmetry.
(A sequel to today's earlier posts Cube for Berlin and Midnight for Paris.)
See London in this journal.
That search yields …
“The more intellectual, less physical,
the spell of contemplation
the more complex must be the object,
the more close and elaborate
must be the comparison
the mind has to keep making
between the whole and the parts,
the parts and the whole.”
— The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins ,
ed. by Humphry House (London: Oxford University Press, 1959),
as quoted by Philip A. Ballinger in The Poem as Sacrament
(From the post The Inscape of 24, April 24, 2014. The 14 blocks in
the design S(3, 4, 8) of today's previous post are analogous to the 759
blocks in the design S(5, 8, 24).)
Two items from this morning’s news:
“Sasaki Roshi trained for years in a distinctively strict style of Zen
that he transplanted to the U.S. His students rose at 3 a.m.
for chanting, exhausting hours of meditation and one-on-one
meetings with their teacher, who would pose impenetrable
koans, riddles like: ‘When you see the flower, where is God?'”
For a mathematician’s example of an alleged Zen ideal, see the feast day
this year of St. Gerard Manley Hopkins.
“The more intellectual, less physical, the spell of contemplation
the more complex must be the object, the more close and elaborate
must be the comparison the mind has to keep making between
the whole and the parts, the parts and the whole.”
— The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins ,
edited by Humphry House, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford
University Press, 1959), p. 126, as quoted by Philip A.
Ballinger in The Poem as Sacrament
Related material from All Saints’ Day in 2012:
For the first word of the title, see The Harrowing of Hell.
For the second, see Pater and Hopkins.
This post was suggested by yesterday’s Symmetry and by…
The title is taken from Isak Dinesen— See the previous post,
which posed the question, "Stylist or fraud?"
Stylist and fraud—
The stylist: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Society of Jesus
The fraud (i.e., the fiction):
Click on the cover art for further details.
The cover artist, by the way, died on the date*
mentioned prominently in the previous post.
* September 7, 2009.
See also that date in this journal, with its post
"Magic Boxes." Happy birthday, J. K. Rowling.
For this, the dies natalis of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins,
it seems apt to cite a 1973 master's thesis on what the author
calls multiguity in Hopkins.
See also multispeech in this journal.
Related material:
See, too, the online front page of The New York Times
from 1:54 PM ET today, and, as an example of multispeech,
yesterday morning's post Rubric's Cuber.
Yesterday's noon post concerned a forthcoming novel
about poetry and intelligence services. Some related backstory:
New York Lottery today—
Without imagination, these digits are a meaningless jumble.
With imagination…
608 might refer to June 8, the Saint's Day of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
(See the date July 29, 2002, that appeared in an earlier post today
as the publication date of Geometrical Landscapes . In this
journal, a post on that date, "At Random," referred to Hopkins.)
8516 might refer to 8/5/1916. A check of a hometown newspaper
on that date yields…
"St. Joseph's Garden Party and Bazaar 22, 23, 24.
Pictures. Everybody Welcome. Admission to Garden Ten Cents"
And in the evening…
937 might refer to a post on the nihilistic philosophy of Joan Didion, and
7609 might refer to an occurrence of these digits in a link
to "7/11" in a post from the feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola last year.
For a more cynical view of lottery hermeneutics, see
"High on RAM (overload)," by Jo Lyxe.
Happy birthday to Stevie Nicks.
Occultation according to McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan writing to Ezra Pound on Dec. 21, 1948—
"The American mind is not even close to being amenable to the ideogram principle as yet. The reason is simply this. America is 100% 18th Century. The 18th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy— the basic fact that
I am trying to devise a way of stating this difficulty as it exists. Until stated and publicly recognized for what it is, poetry and the arts can’t exist in America."
For context, see Cameron McEwen, "Marshall McLuhan, John Pick, and Gerard Manley Hopkins." (Renascence , Fall 2011, Vol. 64 Issue 1, 55-76)
An adaptation for the late Barbara Lea—
Man's spirit will be flesh-bound, when found at best,
But úncúmberèd: meadow-dówn is nót distréssed
For a ráinbow fóoting it nor shé for her bónes rísen.
— After Gerard Manley Hopkins, Society of Jesus
* "And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it."
On Halloween…
"Remember that for Ockham there is nothing in the universe that is
in any way universal except a concept or word: there are no real
natures shared by many things. However, things do resemble one
another, some things more closely than others. So the various
degrees of resemblance give a foundation in reality for our conceptual
structures, such as Porphyry's tree.
Now resemblance (or similitude or likeness) is a relation.
If such relations are realities, then we can say that there are realities
out there that correspond to our conceptual structures."
— R.J. Kilcullen at Macquarie University, course labeled Phil360
"The kernel of a homomorphism is always a congruence.
Indeed, every congruence arises as a kernel."
— Congruence Relation, section on Universal Algebra, in Wikipedia
"Beauty then is a relation."
"An Attempt to Understand the Problem of Universals"
is the title of a talk by Fabian Geier, University of Bamberg—
"The talk was held at Gdańsk University on May 26th 2008."
Related material— Stevie Nicks turns 60.
Video: Pope to youths in Cuatro Vientos: "Thank you for your joy and resistance" 
Tony Long at Wired.com, Aug. 30, 2007— "Scattered to the four winds"—
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"This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ' patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond." —Gerard Manley Hopkins, Society of Jesus
An RSS item today—
 Diamond squares Fri Aug 19, 2011 05:36 [EDT] from Peter Cameron
If you like Latin squares and such things, take a look at Diamond Geezer’s post for today: a pair of orthogonal Latin squares with two disjoint common transversals, and some entries given (if you do the harder puzzle).
|
The post referred to—
"This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ' patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond." —Gerard Manley Hopkins, Society of Jesus
Those now celebrating the Catholic Church's "World Youth" week in Madrid
may prefer a related puzzle for younger and nimbler minds:
Yesterday's "Succor" cited the New York Lottery of Tuesday— Midday 489, Evening 886.
One interpretation of these numbers—
Some background from Tuesday—
Background —
From a 1990 novel —
Notes on Mathematics and Narrative, continued
"the Citizen Kane of horror films"
— Sarah Lawless quoting other reviews
in Saga of the Wicker Man,
cited here on September 7
"Frivolous as a willow on a tombstone"
— Robert Stone on "our secret culture" in A Flag for Sunrise
"world's wildfire, leave but ash"
— Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J.,
quoted here on October 4
Happy birthday, Britt.
… twó flocks, twó folds—black, white; ' right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind
But thése two; wáre of a wórld where bút these ' twó tell, each off the óther….
— "Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves," by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Related material:
Max Black — "Beginners are taught that a set having three members is a single thing, wholly constituted by its members but distinct from them. After this, the theological doctrine of the Trinity as 'three in one' should be child's play." ("The Elusiveness of Sets," Review of Metaphysics, June 1971, p. 615– as quoted by Bill Vallicella)
Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XXI —
Gibbon, discussing the theology of the Trinity, defines perichoresis as
“… the internal connection and spiritual penetration which indissolubly unites the divine persons59 ….
59 … The
or ‘circumincessio,’ is perhaps the deepest and darkest corner of the whole theological abyss.”
”Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, section 146, translated by Walter Kaufmann
"Human perception is a saga of created reality. But we were devising entities beyond the agreed-upon limits of recognition or interpretation…."
– Don DeLillo, Point Omega
Capitalized, the letter omega figures in the theology of two Jesuits, Teilhard de Chardin and Gerard Manley Hopkins. For the former, see a review of DeLillo. For the latter, see James Finn Cotter's Inscape and "Hopkins and Augustine."
The lower-case omega is found in the standard symbolic representation of the Galois field GF(4)—
A representation of GF(4) that goes beyond the standard representation—
Here the four diagonally-divided two-color squares represent the four elements of GF(4).
The graphic properties of these design elements are closely related to the algebraic properties of GF(4).
This is demonstrated by a decomposition theorem used in the proof of the diamond theorem.
To what extent these theorems are part of "a saga of created reality" may be debated.
I prefer the Platonist's "discovered, not created" side of the debate.
The title is a reference to yesterday's noon post.
For the late Vladimir Igorevich Arnold—
"All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order and mystical Mathematicks of the City of Heaven."
— Sir Thomas Browne, The Garden of Cyrus, Chapter V
Arnold's own mystical mathematics may be found in his paper
"Polymathematics: Is Mathematics a Single Science or a Set of Arts?"
Page 13–
"In mathematics we always encounter mysterious analogies, and our trinities [page 8] represent only a small part of these miracles."
Also from that paper—
Page 5, footnote 2–
"The Russian way to formulate problems is to mention the first nontrivial case (in a way that no one would be able to simplify it). The French way is to formulate it in the most general form making impossible any further generalization."
Arnold died in Paris on June 3. A farewell gathering was held there on June 8—
"Celles et ceux qui le souhaitent pourront donner un dernier adieu à Vladimir Igorevitch
mardi 8 juin, de 14h a 16h, chambre mortuaire de l'hopital Saint Antoine…."
An International Blue Diamond
In Arnold's memory— Here, in the Russian style, is a link to a "first nontrivial case" of a blue diamond— from this journal on June 8 (feast of St. Gerard Manley Hopkins). For those who prefer French style, here is a link to a blue diamond from May 18—
From French cinema—
"a 'non-existent myth' of a battle between
goddesses of the sun and the moon
for a mysterious blue diamond
that has the power to make
mortals immortal and vice versa"
“Nuvoletta in her lightdress, spunn of sisteen shimmers,
was looking down on them, leaning over the bannistars….
Fuvver, that Skand, he was up in Norwood’s sokaparlour….”
— Finnegans Wake
To counteract the darkness of today’s 2:01 AM entry—
Part I— Artist Josefine Lyche describes her methods—
A— “Internet and hard work”
B— “Books, both fiction and theory”
Part II— I, too, now rely mostly on the Internet for material. However, like Lyche, I have Plan B— books.
Where I happen to be now, there are piles of them. Here is the pile nearest to hand, from top to bottom.
(The books are in no particular order, and put in the same pile for no particular reason.)
Lyche probably could easily make her own list of what Joyce might call “sisteen shimmers.”
NY Times obituary of Knox Burger,
book editor and agent, who died at 87 on January 4—
"As a magazine editor in the 1950s, Knox Burger published Kurt Vonnegut’s first short story….
During Mr. Burger’s tenure at Collier’s, a short story by Vonnegut, whom he had known slightly when both were at Cornell and who was then working in public relations for General Electric, crossed his desk. He asked for changes, which Vonnegut made, and the story, 'Report on the Barnhouse Effect,' appeared in the magazine in February 1950. It was the first published work of fiction for Vonnegut, who recounted the episode decades later….
At least half a dozen authors… honored Mr. Burger by dedicating books to him. Vonnegut, who died in 2007, did, too. His dedication of Welcome to the Monkey House, a 1968 collection of short stories that included 'Report on the Barnhouse Effect,' read:
'To Knox Burger. Ten days older than I am. He has been a very good father to me.'"
A Jesuit at the
Gerard Manley Hopkins Archive—
"Bisociation": The Act of Creation
"Koestler’s concept of ‘bisociation’… enters into the very ‘act of creation.’ In every such act, writes Koestler, the creator ‘bisociates,’ that is, combines, two ‘matrices’– two diverse patterns of knowing or perceiving– in a new way. As each matrix carries its own images, concepts, values, and ‘codes,’ the creative person brings together– ‘bisociates’– two diverse matrices not normally connected."
– Joseph J. Feeney, S.J.
Robert Stone in A Flag for Sunrise
(Knopf hardcover, 1981)–
"The eye you see him with is the same eye with which he sees you."
– Father Egan on page 333
Pablo on page 425–
"'…You know, he told me– that old man told me– the eye you look at it with, well, that's the eye it sees you with. That's what he told me.'
Holliwell was moved to recall an experiment he had once read about; he had clipped the report of it for his class. An experimenter endeavoring to observe chimpanzee behavior had fashioned a spy hole in the door of the animals' chamber through which he might watch them unobserved. Putting his eye to it, he had seen nothing more than what he finally identified as the eye of a chimpanzee on the other side of the door. Ape stuff."
More ape stuff from a Jesuit–
"This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond."
— Gerard Manley Hopkins,
"That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire
and of the comfort of the Resurrection"
More ape stuff from myself–
Problem: Perform this transformation
by combining the sorts of permutations allowed
in the diamond puzzle. A solution: click here.
Arthur Koestler by David Levine,
New York Review of Books,
December 17, 1964
| A Jesuit at the Gerard Manley Hopkins Archive: ‘Bisociation’: The Act of Creation Koestler’s concept of ‘bisociation’… enters into the very ‘act of creation.’ In every such act, writes Koestler, the creator ‘bisociates,’ that is, combines, two ‘matrices’– two diverse patterns of knowing or perceiving– in a new way. As each matrix carries its own images, concepts, values, and ‘codes,’ the creative person brings together– ‘bisociates’– two diverse matrices not normally connected. — Joseph J. Feeney, S.J. |
See also December 9, 2009:
The theme of the January 2010 issue of the
Notices of the American Mathematical Society
is “Mathematics and the Arts.”
Related material:
A PBS broadcast of Cyrano de Bergerac was shown yesterday nationally and this evening, a day late, by WNED TV, Buffalo.
From the translation by Anthony Burgess:
Cyrano speaks of falling leaves–
They fall well. With a sort of panache.
They plume down in their last
Loveliness, disguising their fear
Of being dried and pounded to ash
To mix with the common dust.
They go in grace, making their fall appear
Like flying.
ROXANE You’re melancholy today.
CYRANO Never. I’m not the melancholy sort.
ROXANE Very well, then. We’ll let
The leaves of the fall fall while you
Turn the leaves of my gazette.
What’s new at court?
CYRANO … There have been some scandals
To do with witches. A bishop went to heaven,
Or so it’s believed: there’s been as yet no report
Of his arrival….”
Later….
CYRANO … See it there, a white plume
Over the battle– A diamond in the ash
Of the ultimate combustion–
My panache.”
Related material:
Today’s previous entry
and the Epiphany
link to the
four-diamond symbol
in Jung’s Aion
with an epigraph by
Gerard Manley Hopkins:
Cheap* Epiphanies
for the Church of
the Forbidden Planet
Mid-day lotteries Dec. 19:
* NY 198 PA 918
O the mind, mind has mountains,
cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man fathomed.
Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there.
Evening lotteries Dec. 19:
* NY 198 PA 414
"minds blazing, to the barricades"
— The New York Times
on the Wheeler effectSee also
Bloomsday for Nash:
The Revelation Game —
For details,
click on the
black hole.
jour·nal·ist
— The American Heritage Dictionary
of the English Language, Fourth Edition, according to Dictionary.com |
Related material:
— Fr. Morton Kelsey,
The Other Side of Silence
See also Tuesday’s Church of the Forbidden Planet and the journal entry of October 9, 2005, which contains both the thoughts of Joan Didion on Hoover Dam and the following meditation:
|
A quotation that somehow
seems relevant: O the mind, mind has mountains, |
The Revelation Game
Revisited
| Lotteries on Jung’s birthday, July 26, 2008 |
Pennsylvania (No revelation) |
New York (Revelation) |
| Mid-day (No belief) |
No belief, no revelation 625 6/25 — Quine’s birthday |
Revelation without belief 003 |
| Evening (Belief) |
Belief without revelation 087 1987 — Quine publishes Quiddities |
Belief and revelation 829 |
From Josephine Klein, Jacob’s Ladder: Essays on Experiences of the Ineffable in the Context of Contemporary Psychotherapy, London, Karnac Books, 2003–
Page 14 —
Gerard Manley Hopkins
“Quiddity and haeccity were contentious topics in medieval discussions about the nature of reality, and the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins would have encountered these concepts during his Jesuit training. W. H. Gardner, who edited much of Hopkins’s work, writes that
in 1872, while studying medieval philosophy… Hopkins came across the writing of Duns Scotus, and in that subtle thinker’s Principles of Individuation and Theory of Knowledge he discovered what seemed to be a philosophical corroboration of his own private theory of inscape and instress. [Gardner, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose, Penguin, 1953, p. xxiii]
In this useful introduction to his selection of Hopkins’s work, Gardner writes that Hopkins was always looking for the law or principle that gave an object ‘its delicate and surprising uniqueness.’ This was for Hopkins ‘a fundamental beauty which is the active principle of all true being, the source of all true knowledge and delight.’ Clive Bell called it ‘significant form’; Hopkins called it ‘inscape’– ‘the rich and revealing oneness of the natural object’ (pp. xx-xxiv). In this chapter, I call it quiddity.”
A Balliol Star
In memory of
mathematician
Graham Higman of
Balliol College and
Magdalen College,
Oxford,
Jan. 19, 1917 –
April 8, 2008
From a biography of an earlier Balliol student,
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889):
"In 1867 he won First-Class degrees in Classics
and 'Greats' (a rare 'double-first') and was
considered by Jowett to be the star of Balliol."
Hopkins, a poet who coined the term "inscape," was a member of the Society of Jesus.
According to a biography, Higman was the founder of Oxford's Invariant Society.
From a publication of that society, The Invariant, Issue 15– undated but (according to Issue 16, of 2005) from 1996 (pdf):
|
Taking the square root
of a function by Ian Collier "David Singmaster once gave a talk at the Invariants and afterwards asked this question: What is the square root of the exponential function? In other words, can you define a function f such that for all x, |
Another approach to the expression f(f(x)), by myself in 1982:
For further details,
see Inscapes.
For more about Higman, see an interview in the September 2001 newsletter of the European Mathematical Society (pdf).
Pennsylvania Lottery today: Mid-day 504, Evening 628. Related material: Today’s previous entry and entries of Happy birthday, Thomas Jefferson: “… God to a nation — “To what serves Mortal Beauty?,” (Quoted here on Aug. 29, 2006) |
"Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men,
but rather of their folly"
— Four Quartets
"Dear friends, would those of you who know what this is all about please raise your hands? I think if God is dead he laughed himself to death. Because, you see, we live in Eden. Genesis has got it all wrong– we never left the Garden. Look about you. This is paradise. It's hard to find, I'll grant you, but it is here. Under our feet, beneath the surface, all around us is everything we want. The earth is shining under the soot. We are all fools. Ha ha! Moriarty has made fools of all of us. But together– you and I, tonight– we'll bring him down."
— George C. Scott as Justin Playfair
[John Travolta runs on stage
and rushes for the door.]
For a religious interpretation
of the number 707, see
To Announce a Faith
(All Hallows' Eve, 2006)
and the following link
to a Tom Stoppard line
from the previous entry:
"Heaven, how can I
believe in Heaven?"
she sings at the finale.
"Just a lying
rhyme for seven!"
(continued from Dec. 11, 2006):
J. G. Ballard on "the architecture of death":
"… a huge system of German fortifications that included the Siegfried line, submarine pens and huge flak towers that threatened the surrounding land like lines of Teutonic knights. Almost all had survived the war and seemed to be waiting for the next one, left behind by a race of warrior scientists obsessed with geometry and death."
— The Guardian, March 20, 2006
From the previous entry, which provided a lesson in geometry related, if only by synchronicity, to the death of Jewish art theorist Rudolf Arnheim:
"We are going to keep doing this until we get it right."
Here is a lesson related, again by synchronicity, to the death of a Christian art scholar of "uncommon erudition, wit, and grace"– Robert R. Wark of the Huntington Library. Wark died on June 8, a date I think of as the feast day of St. Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest-poet of the nineteenth century.
From a Log24 entry on the date of Wark's death–
Samuel Pepys on a musical performance (Diary, Feb. 27, 1668):
"When the Angel comes down"
"When the Angel Comes Down, and the Soul Departs," a webpage on dance in Bali:
"Dance is also a devotion to the Supreme Being."
"I went to Bali to a remote village by a volcanic mountain…."
The above three quotations were intended to supply some background for a link to an entry on Taymor, on what Taymor has called "skewed mirrors," and on a related mathematical concept named, using a term Hopkins coined, "inscapes."
They might form part of an introductory class in mathematics and art given, like the class of the previous entry, in Purgatory.
Wark, who is now, one imagines, in Paradise, needs no such class. He nevertheless might enjoy listening in.
A guest teacher in
the purgatorial class
on mathematics
and art:
"Is it safe?"
The Joy of Six
Yom Kippur begins on the East Coast
at about 6:38 PM today.
Recommended holiday reading list
from Robert Langdon, Harvard author
of “the renowned collegiate texbook
Religious Iconology“ —
Gerard Manley Hopkins on parallelism
Hamlet’s Transformation and the four
Log24 entries that preceded it
Finite Geometry of the Hexahedron
(Alternate title for the Christmas, 2005, entry)
The Hand of Grace
"Only the hand of grace
can end the race"
"Have you tried 22 tonight?"
— Rick in Casablanca
Today's lottery in Pennsylvania
(state of Grace):
Mid-day 229, evening 119.
"… God to a nation
dealt that day's dear chance.
To man, that needs would worship
block or barren stone…."
— "To what serves Mortal Beauty?,"
by Gerard Manley Hopkins, S. J.
"Cash it in, and don't come back."
in today’s Hagar the Horrible:
Those who prefer higher culture
may consult
The Dragon in the Gate:
Studies in the Poetry
of G. M. Hopkins,
by
Elisabeth Wintersteen Schneider.
Schneider’s title comes from a
description of Hopkins’s poem
“The Wreck of the Deutschland.”
— “Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins: Priest and Poet,”
by Bro. Anthony Joseph
Go with the Flow
The previous entry links to a document that discusses the mathematical concept of “Ricci flow (pdf).”
Though the concept was not named for him, this seems as good a time as any to recall the virtues of St. Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit who died in Beijing on May 11, 1610. (The Church does not yet recognize him as a saint; so much the worse for the Church.)
There was no Log24 entry on Ricci’s saint’s day, May 11, this year, but an entry for 4:29 PM May 10, 2006, seems relevant, since Beijing is 12 hours ahead of my local (Eastern US) time.
The relevance of this structure
to memory and to Chinese culture
is given in Dragon School and in
Geometry of the 4x4x4 Cube.
For some related remarks on
the colloquial, rather than the
mathematical, concept of flow,
see
Philosophy, Religion, and Science
as well as Crystal and Dragon.
Yesterday’s entry on the 1865
remarks on aesthetics of
Gerard Manley Hopkins,
who later became a Jesuit,
may also have some relevance.
Hopkins on Parallelism
“The structure of poetry is that of continuous parallelism, ranging from the technical so-called Parallelism of Hebrew Poetry and the antiphons of Church music up to the intricacy of Greek or Italian or English verse. But parallelism is of two kinds necessarily – where the opposition is clearly marked, and where it is transitional rather or chromatic. Only the first kind, that of marked parallelism is concerned with the structure of verse — in rhythm, the recurrence of a certain sequence of rhythm, in alliteration, in assonance and in rhyme. Now the force of this recurrence is to beget a recurrence or parallelism answering to it in the words or thought and, speaking roughly and rather for the tendency than the invariable result, the more marked parallelism in structure whether of elaboration or of emphasis begets more marked parallelism in the words and sense. And moreover parallelism in expression tends to beget or passes into parallelism in thought. This point reached we shall be able to see and account for the peculiarities of poetic diction. To the marked or abrupt kind of parallelism belong metaphor, simile, parable, and so on, where the effect is sought in likeness of things, and antithesis, contrast, and so on, where it is sought in unlikeness. To the chromatic parallelism belong gradation, intensity, climax, tone, expression (as the word is used in music), chiaroscuro, perhaps emphasis: while the faculties of Fancy and Imagination might range widely over both kinds, Fancy belonging more especially to the abrupt than to the transitional class.”
— From Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Poetic Diction,” 1865
For an application to Hopkins’s poetry, see an excerpt from Stephen Prickett, Words and the Word: Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
See also the publisher’s description of Maria R. Lichtmann’s The Contemplative Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Princeton University Press, 1989.
| Galatians 4:4
But when the fulness |
Luke 2:13
And suddenly |
|
Inscape: The Christology and
Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, by James Finn Cotter, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972. See esp. the references to pleroma 40-48, 51, 65, 70, 81, 85, 92, 93, |
Beyond the Fire
“Who Needs a White Cube These Days?”
— Headline in today’s New York Times
“That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire…“
— Poem title, Gerard Manley Hopkins
“… Sleep realized
Was the whiteness that is the ultimate intellect,
A diamond jubilance beyond the fire,
That gives its power to the wild-ringed eye.”
— Wallace Stevens,
“The Owl in the Sarcophagus” III 13-16,
from The Auroras of Autumn, 1950
Related material:
The five entries ending on Christmas, 2005.
From Jung’s Map of the Soul, by Murray Stein:
“… Jung thinks of the self as undergoing continual transformation during the course of a lifetime…. At the end of his late work Aion, Jung presents a diagram to illustrate the dynamic movements of the self….”
“The formula presents a symbol of the self, for the self is not just a stable quantity or constant form, but is also a dynamic process. In the same way, the ancients saw the imago Dei in man not as a mere imprint, as a sort of lifeless, stereotyped impression, but as an active force…. The four transformations represent a process of restoration or rejuvenation taking place, as it were, inside the self….”
“The formula reproduces exactly the essential features of the symbolic process of transformation. It shows the rotation of the mandala, the antithetical play of complementary (or compensatory) processes, then the apocatastasis, i.e., the restoration of an original state of wholeness, which the alchemists expressed through the symbol of the uroboros, and finally the formula repeats the ancient alchemical tetrameria, which is implicit in the fourfold structure of unity.
What the formula can only hint at, however, is the higher plane that is reached through the process of transformation and integration. The ‘sublimation’ or progress or qualitative change consists in an unfolding of totality into four parts four times, which means nothing less than its becoming conscious. When psychic contents are split up into four aspects, it means that they have been subjected to discrimination by the four orienting functions of consciousness. Only the production of these four aspects makes a total description possible. The process depicted by our formula changes the originally unconscious totality into a conscious one.”
— Jung, Collected Works,
Vol. 9, Part 2, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (1951)
Related material:
“Although ‘wholeness’ seems at first sight to be nothing but an abstract idea (like anima and animus), it is nevertheless empirical in so far as it is anticipated by the psyche in the form of spontaneous or autonomous symbols. These are the quaternity or mandala symbols, which occur not only in the dreams of modern people who have never heard of them, but are widely disseminated in the historical recods of many peoples and many epochs. Their significance as symbols of unity and totality is amply confirmed by history as well as by empirical psychology. What at first looks like an abstract idea stands in reality for something that exists and can be experienced, that demonstrates its a priori presence spontaneously. Wholeness is thus an objective factor that confronts the subject independently of him… Unity and totality stand at the highest point on the scale of objective values because their symbols can no longer be distinguished from the imago Dei. Hence all statements about the God-image apply also to the empirical symbols of totality.”
— Jung, Aion, as quoted in
Carl Jung and Thomas Merton
#
“Beauty therefore is a relation.”
— Gerard Manley Hopkins
Leo Bogart,
dead on Oct. 15.
 |
“Leo Bogart is surely the Grand Master of social research in the world of the newspaper and the mass media in general.” — Sociologist
Robert K. Merton, “father of the focus group,” born in Philadelphia as Meyer R. Schkolnick, dead on Feb. 23, 2003- Grammy night. |
More on media:
"I know what nothing means."
— Maria Wyeth in Play It As It Lays
"Nothing is random."
— Mark Helprin in Winter's Tale
"… She thought about nothing. Her mind was a blank tape, imprinted daily with snatches of things overheard, fragments of dealers' patter, the beginnings of jokes and odd lines of song lyrics. When she finally lay down nights in the purple room she would play back the day's tape, a girl singing into a microphone and a fat man dropping a glass, cards fanned on a table and a dealer's rake in closeup and a woman in slacks crying and the opaque blue eyes of the guard at some baccarat table. A child in the harsh light of a crosswalk on the Strip. A sign on Fremont Street. A light blinking. In her half sleep the point was ten, the jackpot was on eighteen, the only man that could ever reach her was the son of a preacher man, someone was down sixty, someone was up, Daddy wants a popper and she rode a painted pony let the spinning wheel spin.
By the end of a week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began, about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and other. She had the sense that if she could get that in her mind and hold it for even one micro-second she would have what she had come to get. As if she had fever, her skin burned and crackled with a pinpoint sensitivity. She could feel smoke against her skin. She could feel voice waves. She was beginning to feel color, light intensities, and she imagined that she could be put blindfolded in front of the signs at the Thunderbird and the Flamingo and know which was which. 'Maria,' she felt someone whisper one night, but when she turned there was nobody.
She began to feel the pressure of Hoover Dam, there on the desert, began to feel the pressure and pull of the water. When the pressure got great enough she drove out there. All that day she felt the power surging through her own body. All day she was faint with vertigo, sunk in a world where great power grids converged, throbbing lines plunged finally into the shallow canyon below the dam's face, elevators like coffins dropped into the bowels of the earth itself. With a guide and a handful of children Maria walked through the chambers, stared at the turbines in the vast glittering gallery, at the deep still water with the hidden intakes sucking all the while, even as she watched, clung to the railings, leaned out, stood finally on a platform over the pipe that carried the river beneath the dam. The platform quivered. Her ears roared. She wanted to stay in the dam, lie on the great pipe itself, but reticence saved her from asking.
'Just how long have you been here now,' Freddy Chaikin asked when she ran into him in Caesar's. 'You planning on making a year of it? Or what?'"
Related material
The front page of today's
New York Times Book Review
and Log24, July 15, 2004:
|
A quotation that somehow
seems relevant:
O the mind, mind has mountains, |
Kernel of Eternity
Today is the feast day of Saint Gerard Manley Hopkins, “immortal diamond.”
“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being–the reward he seeks–the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”
— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River
“… the stabiliser of an octad preserves the affine space structure on its complement, and (from the construction) induces AGL(4,2) on it. (It induces A8 on the octad, the kernel of this action being the translation group of the affine space.)”
— Peter J. Cameron,
The Geometry of the Mathieu Groups (pdf)
“… donc Dieu existe, réponse!”
— attributed, some say falsely, to Leonhard Euler
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:
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“Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?” |
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
Frances Hansen,
cruciverbalist extraordinaire:
The first crossword puzzle —
For related commentary on
telepathic interplay, see an
entry for Aug. 29, 2002.
For related material on
intersecting word patterns
and telepathic interplay,
see The Demolished Man,
by Alfred Bester, and
We Are The Key,
a Log24 entry for
St. Lucia’s Day, 2003.
Here is an illustration of what might
be called, as in the above puzzle, a
“ten miles pit,” from Forbidden Planet,
a classic film, based on
Shakespeare’s The Tempest,
discussed in the 8/29/02 entry.
A quotation that somehow
seems relevant:
|
O the mind, mind has mountains, |
Frances Hansen died on Friday, July 9. For more on words and The Roots of Coincidence (the subject of the previous entry), see the entries of July 8-10.
Triple Crown
“The tug of an art that unapologetically sees itself as on a par with science and religion is not to be underestimated…. Philosophical ambition and formal modesty still constitute Minimalism’s bottom line.”
________________
From Hans Reichenbach‘s
Ch. 18 – The Old and the New Philosophy
“The speculative philosophers allotted to art a dignified position by putting art on a par with science and morality: truth, beauty and the good were for them the triple crown of human searching and longing.”
Ch. 15 – Interlude: Hamlet’s Soliloquy
“I have good evidence. The ghost was very conclusive in his arguments. But he is only a ghost. Does he exist? I could not very well ask him. Maybe I dreamed him. But there is other evidence….
It is really a good idea: that show I shall put on. It will be a crucial experiment. If they murdered him they will be unable to hide their emotions. That is good psychology. If the test is positive I shall know the whole story for certain. See what I mean? There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, my dear logician.
I shall know it for certain? I see your ironical smile. There is no certainty….
There I am, the eternal Hamlet. What does it help me to ask the logician….? His advice confirms my doubt rather than giving me the courage I need for my action. One has to have more courage than Hamlet to be always guided by logic.”
________________
On this Holy Thursday, the day of Christ’s Last Supper, let us reflect on Quine’s very pertinent question in Quiddities (under “Communication”):
“What transubstantiation?”
“It is easiest to tell what transubstantiation is by saying this: little children should be taught about it as early as possible. Not of course using the word…because it is not a little child’s word. But the thing can be taught… by whispering…”Look! Look what the priest is doing…He’s saying Jesus’ words that change the bread into Jesus’ body. Now he’s lifting it up. Look!”
From “On Transubstantiation” by Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, Collected Philosophical Papers, V.III: Ethics, Religion, and Politics, 1981, Univ. of Minnesota Press, as quoted in the weblog of William Luse, Sept, 28, 2003
A perhaps more credible instance of transubstantiation may be found in this account of Anscombe on the Feast of Corpus Christi:
“In her first year at Oxford, she converted to Catholicism. In 1938, after mass at Blackfriars on the Feast of Corpus Christi, she met Peter Geach, a young man three years her senior who was also a recent convert to Catholicism. Like her, Geach was destined to achieve eminence in philosophy, but philosophy played no role in bringing about the romance that blossomed. Smitten by Miss Anscombe’s beauty and voice, Geach immediately inquired of mutual friends whether she was ‘reliably Catholic.’ Upon learning that she was, he pursued her and, swiftly, their hearts were entangled.”
— John M. Dolan, Living the Truth
Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and
lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through
the features of men’s faces.— Gerard Manley Hopkins
Concluding reflections for Holy Thursday:
Truth, Beauty, and The Good
Art is magic delivered from
the lie of being truth.
— Theodor Adorno, Minima moralia,
London, New Left Books, 1974, p. 222
(First published in German in 1951.)
The director, Carol Reed, makes…
impeccable use of the beauty of black….
— V. B. Daniel on The Third Man
I see your ironical smile.
— Hans Reichenbach (see above)
Adorno, The Third Man, and Reichenbach
are illustrated below (l. to r.) above the names of cities with which they are associated.
In keeping with our transubstantiation theme, these three cities may be regarded as illustrating the remarks of Jimmy Buffett
Language Game
More on "selving," a word coined by the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. (See Saturday's Taking Lucifer Seriously.)
"… through the calibrated truths of temporal discipline such as timetabling, serialization, and the imposition of clock-time, the subject is accorded a moment to speak in."
Framing
Intelligibility, Identity, and Selfhood:
A Reconsideration of
Spatio-Temporal Models.
The "moment to speak in" of today's previous entry, 11:29 AM, is a reference to the date 11/29 of last year's entry
That entry contains, in turn, a reference to the journal Subaltern Studies. According to a review of Reading Subaltern Studies,
"… the Subaltern Studies collective drew upon the Althusser who questioned the primacy of the subject…."
Munt also has something to say on "the primacy of the subject" —
"Poststructuralism, following particularly Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, has ensured that 'the subject' is a cardinal category of contemporary thought; in any number of disciplines, it is one of the first concepts we teach to our undergraduates. But are we best served by continuing to insist on the intellectual primacy of the 'subject,' formulated as it has been within the negative paradigm of subjectivity as subjection?"
How about objectivity as objection?
I, for one, object strongly to "the Althusser who questioned the primacy of the subject."
This Althusser, a French Marxist philosopher by whom the late Michael Sprinker (Taking Lucifer Seriously) was strongly influenced, murdered his wife in 1980 and died ten years later in a lunatic asylum.
For details, see
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For details of Althusser's philosophy, see the oeuvre of Michael Sprinker. For another notable French tribute to Marxism, click on the picture at left. |
Taking Lucifer Seriously:
Michael Sprinker
versus
The Society of Jesus
As the previous entry indicates, I do not take Christian poetry too seriously. The Prince of Darkness is another matter. I encountered him this morning in a book on the Christian poet Hopkins by the late Michael Sprinker.
“You were never on the debating team when you were in high school, were you, ace? When you’re in a debate, you don’t try to convince the other side; they’re never going to agree with you. You try to convince the judges and the audience.”
— Michael Sprinker, quoted in The Minnesota Review, 2003
“For Hopkins, poetry was the act of producing the self, one version of that selving which he associated not only with Christ but with Lucifer.”
— Michael Sprinker, “A Counterpoint of Dissonance” — The Aesthetics and Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, p. 95
A counterbalance to Sprinker on Hopkins and Lucifer is Hopkins, the Self, and God, by Walter J. Ong, S. J. (University of Toronto Press, 1986). From p. 119:
“The interior dynamism of the Three Persons in One God was not for Hopkins some sort of formula for theological juggling acts but was rather the centre of his personal devotional life and thus of his own ‘selving.’ …. He writes to Bridges 24 October 1883…
‘For if the Trinity… is to be explained by grammar and by tropes… where wd. be the mystery? the true mystery, the incomprehensible
one.’ “
For the dynamics of the Trinity, see the Jan. 22 entry, Perichoresis, or Coinherence. Another word for coinherence is “indwelling,” as expressed in what might be called the
Song of Lucifer:
Me into you,
You into me,
Me into you…
For a Christian version of this “indwelling,” see
Coinherence,
Interpenetration,
Mutual Indwelling
See also last year’s entries of 9/09.
Diamonds
This is the first anniversary of the death of Irene Diamond, patron of the arts, for whom the New York City Ballet’s Diamond Project is named. (See last year’s entries for January 20-23.)
Since tomorrow is the 100th anniversary of the birth of George Balanchine (according to the Gregorian, or “new style,” calendar), it seems appropriate to recall his ballet Diamonds, though it has no apparent connection with Irene.
Diamonds is the conclusion of a three-part work titled Jewels. (The first two parts are Emeralds, with music by Fauré, and Rubies, with music by Stravinsky.)
” ‘And then for the finale, Diamonds, I move to Tchaikovsky-always Tchaikovsky for dancing.’
Balanchine chose to use Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 3 in D major, gracefully cutting the first movement of the piece (by some accounts because it was too long, and by others because he felt it just wasn’t suitable for dancing).”
In other words, Balanchine “cut” Diamonds. For another use of this metaphor, see The Diamond Project. The following remark on the first movement seems appropriate on this, the anniversary of Irene Diamond’s death.
“The introduction to the first movement of the symphony is marked Moderato assai, Tempo di marcia funebre, the funeral march proceeding with increased pace….”
The following link to a part of Irene’s year-long funeral march seems appropriate:
Longtime Juilliard Benefactor Dies.
Whether her good deeds made her, like Christ and Gerard Manley Hopkins, an immortal Diamond, I do not know. Let us hope so.
The Tables of Time
Implied by previous two entries:
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“This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, |
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Is immortal diamond.” |
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— Gerard Manley Hopkins, |
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Killer Radio
"See the girl with the diamond ring?
She knows how to shake that thing."
— Jerry Lee "Killer" Lewis on
KHYI 95.3 FM, Plano, Texas,
at about 5:12 PM EDT 7/31/03,
introduced by DJ Allen Peck Sr.
"And on this point I pass the same judgment as those who say that geometricians give them nothing new by these rules, because they possessed them in reality, but confounded with a multitude of others, either useless or false, from which they could not discriminate them, as those who, seeking a diamond of great price amidst a number of false ones, but from which they know not how to distinguish it, should boast, in holding them all together, of possessing the true one equally with him who without pausing at this mass of rubbish lays his hand upon the costly stone which they are seeking and for which they do not throw away the rest."
— Blaise Pascal, De l'Esprit Géométrique
"When the light came she was sitting on the bed beside an open suitcase, toying with her diamond rings. She saw the light first in the depths of the largest stone."
— Paul Preuss, Broken Symmetries,
scene at Diamond Head, Oahu, Hawaii
Now playing (6:41 PM EDT) on Killer Radio:
"Jack of Diamonds, that's
a hard card to find."
"This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond…."
— Gerard Manley Hopkins, Society of Jesus
Perhaps Sam Phillips was twanged by a Hawaiian guitar. (See previous two entries.)
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The Big Time
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See also "Top Ten Most Overheard Comments by new KHYI listeners" at Miss Lana's Anything Page, entry for
Of Time and the River
Today is the feast day of Saint Gerard Manley Hopkins, “immortal diamond.”
“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being–the reward he seeks–the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”
“entered the university at Chapel Hill at fifteen ‘an awkward, unhappy misfit.’ By the time he graduated, he was editor of the college newspaper….”
Jeff MacNelly, who died on this date in the Year of Our Lord 2000,
“in 1977 started drawing the comic strip ‘Shoe‘…. The strip was named in honor of the legendary Jim Shumaker, for whom MacNelly worked at the Chapel Hill Weekly.”
From my Monday, June 2, 2003 entry:
Two quotations from “The Diamond Project“:
“We all know that something is eternal,” the Stage Manager says. “And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even stars—everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings.”
— John Lahr, review of “Our Town““Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame.”
— Song of Solomon
Here are some other thoughts from the same date, but a different time, fictional time, Faulkner time:
Where the shadow of the bridge fell I could see down for a long way, but not as far as the bottom. When you leave a leaf in water a long time after a while the tissue will be gone and the delicate fibers waving slow as the motion of sleep. They dont touch one another, no matter how knotted up they once were, no matter how close they lay once to the bones. And maybe when He says Rise the eyes will come floating up too, out of the deep quiet and the sleep, to look on glory.
— William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
The concluding link from my June 2, 2003, entry furnishes a clue to the timelessness of Quentin Compson‘s thoughts above:
Glory… Song of Songs 8. 7-8
From the King James Bible‘s rendition of the Song of Songs:
8:7 Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.
8:8 We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts: what shall we do for our sister in the day when she shall be spoken for?
For Quentin Compson’s thoughts on his little sister Caddy, consult the online hypertext edition of
Operation Playmate:
On this date in 1938, Louis Armstrong and his orchestra recorded “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
On this date in 1961, Saint Gary Cooper died.
From my Jan. 2, 2003, entry:
Faces of the Twentieth Century:
The Harvest Continues
“I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens
to glean our Saviour;
And, éyes, héart, what looks, what lips
yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer,
of rounder replies?”
— Gerard Manley Hopkins,
“Hurrahing in Harvest”
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“Cowboy, take me away.
Fly this girl as high as you can
into the wild blue.”
From my March 31, 2003, entry:
“During the Gulf War, Playboy magazine’s celebrated Centerfolds reached out to U.S. military men and women… with their ‘Operation Playmate’ project….
Now, in light of the war in Iraq, ‘Operation Playmate’ has returned.”
Entertainment Weekly, May 2, 2003:
Perhaps, in heaven, Dixie Chick Natalie “Mattress Dancing” Maines will provide terpsichorean instruction.
Etymology: Latin Terpsichor
,
from Greek Terpsikhor
from feminine of terpsikhoros,
dance-loving : terpein, to delight
+ khoros, dance.
See, too, my entry for Beltane (May 1), the day that death claimed the 13th Episcopal bishop of New York City.
All of these events are not without interest, but it is not easy to fit them into one coherent story, as Robert Penn Warren once requested:
“The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.”
It is perhaps relevant that, as T. S. Eliot well knew, there can be no dance except in time, and that the time of my May 1 entry is 5:13, today’s date in another guise. To paraphrase an Eliot line,
“Hurry up please, it’s 5/13.”
ART WARS:
From The New Yorker, issue of March 17, 2003, Clive James on Aldous Huxley:
“The Perennial Philosophy, his 1945 book compounding all the positive thoughts of West and East into a tutti-frutti of moral uplift, was the equivalent, in its day, of It Takes a Village: there was nothing in it to object to, and that, of course, was the objection.”
For a cultural artifact that is less questionably perennial, see Huxley’s story “Young Archimedes.”
Plato, Pythagoras, and
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From the New Yorker Contributors page for St. Patrick’s Day, 2003:
“Clive James (Books, p. 143) has a new collection, As of This Writing: The Essential Essays, 1968-2002, which will be published in June.”
See also my entry “The Boys from Uruguay” and the later entry “Lichtung!” on the Deutsche Schule Montevideo in Uruguay.
Daimon Theory
Today is allegedly the anniversary of the canonization, in 1622, of two rather important members of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits):
Ignatius Loyola…
Click here for Loyola’s legacy of strategic intelligence.
Francis Xavier…
Click here for Xavier’s legacy of strategic stupidity.
We can thank (or blame) a Jesuit (Gerard Manley Hopkins) for the poetic phrase “immortal diamond.” He may have been influenced by Plato, who has Socrates using a diamond figure in an argument for the immortality of the soul. Confusingly, Socrates also talked about his “daimon” (pronounced dye-moan). Combining these similar-sounding concepts, we have Doctor Stephen A. Diamond writing about daimons — a choice of author and topic that neatly combines the strategic intelligence of Loyola with the strategic stupidity of Xavier.
The cover illustration is perhaps not of Dr. Diamond himself.
A link between diamond theory and daimon theory is furnished by the charitable legacy of the non-practicing Jew Walter Annenberg.
For Annenberg and diamond theory, see this site on the elementary geometry of quilt blocks, which credits the Annenberg Foundation for support.
For Annenberg and daimon theory, see this site on Socrates, which has a similar Annenberg support credit.
Advanced disciples of Annenberg can learn much from the Perseus site about daimon theory. Let us pray that Abrahamic religious bigotry does not stand in their way. Less advanced disciples of Annenberg may find fulfillment in teaching children the beauty of elementary 4×4 quilt-block symmetry. Let us pray that academic bigotry does not prevent these same children, when they have grown older, from learning the deeper, and more difficult, beauties of diamond theory.
Release Date
From Dr. Mac’s Cultural Calendar
—
“It all adds up.” — Saul Bellow, book title
“I see my light come shining
From the west unto the east.
Any day now, any day now,
I shall be released.”
— Bob Dylan
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“The theme of the film is heavily influenced by its release date….” — Jonathan L. Bowen, review of “Modern Times” At left:
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5:10 AM Feb. 1
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9:00 AM Feb. 1
TIME |
From Robert Morris’s page on Hopkins (see note of Sunday, February 2 (Candlemas)):
“Inscape” was Gerard Manley Hopkins’s term for a special connection between the world of natural events and processes and one’s internal landscape–a frame of mind conveyed in his radical and singular poetry….
This is false, but suggestive.
Checked, corrected, and annotated
Shine On, Robinson Jeffers
"…be in nothing so moderate as in love of man,
a clever servant, insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits,
that caught — they say — God, when he walked on earth."
— Shine, Perishing Republic, by Robinson Jeffers
Robinson Jeffers died at Big Sur, California, on January 20, 1962 — a year to the day after Robert Frost spoke at the Kennedy inauguration.
"The poetry of Robinson Jeffers shines with a diamond's brilliance when he depicts Nature's beauty and magnificence. His verse also flashes with a diamond's hardness when he portrays human pain and folly."
— Gary Suttle
"Praise Him, He hath conferred aesthetic distance
Upon our appetites, and on the bloody
Mess of our birthright, our unseemly need,
Imposed significant form. Through Him the brutes
Enter the pure Euclidean kingdom of number…."
— Howard Nemerov,
Grace To Be Said at the Supermarket
"Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. | Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fáll to the resíduary worm; | world's wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is |, since he was what I am, and
Thís Jack, jóke, poor pótsherd, | patch, matchwood,
immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond."
— Gerard Manley Hopkins,
That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection
"In the last two weeks, I've been returning to Hopkins. Even in the 'world's wildfire,' he asserts that 'this Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,/Is immortal diamond.' A comfort."
— Michael Gerson, head White House speechwriter,
in Vanity Fair, May 2002, page 162
"There's none but truth can stead you. Christ is truth."
— Gerard Manley Hopkins
"The rock cannot be broken. It is the truth."
— Wallace Stevens
"My ghost you needn't look for; it is probably
Here, but a dark one, deep in the granite…."
— Robinson Jeffers, Tor House
On this date in 1993, the inauguration day of William Jefferson Clinton, Audrey Hepburn died.
"…today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully…."
— Maya Angelou, January 20, 1993
"So, purposing each moment to retire,
She linger'd still. Meantime, across the moors,
Had come young Porphyro, with heart on fire"
— John Keats, The Eve of St. Agnes (January 20), IX
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Top view of |
Top view of |
What you see with a Hearts On Fire diamond is an unequalled marriage of math and physics, resulting in the world's most perfectly cut diamond. |
"Eightpointed symmetrical signs are ancient symbols for the Venus goddess or the planet Venus as either the Morning star or the Evening star."
— Symbols.com
"Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame."
— Song of Solomon
"The last words from the people in the towers and on the planes, over and over again, were 'I love you.' Over and over again, the message was the same, 'I love you.' …. Perhaps this is the loudest chorus from The Rock: we are learning just how powerful love really is, even in the face of death."
— The Rev. Kenneth E. Kovacs
"Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again."
— The Who
See also my note, "Bright Star," of October 23, 2002.
Faces of the Twentieth Century:
The Harvest Continues
“I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And, éyes, héart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?”
— Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Hurrahing in Harvest”
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“Cowboy, take me away.
Fly this girl as high as you can
into the wild blue.”
See
“Culture Clash at Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil“
in my notes of December 11, 2002.
Dead Poets Society
Man’s spirit will be flesh-bound, when found at best,
But úncúmberèd: meadow-dówn is nót distréssed
For a ráinbow fóoting it nor hé for his bónes rísen.
Gerard Manley Hopkins,
Society of Jesus
In accordance with this sentiment,
this midnight in the garden of good and evil
is the occasion for a change of site music
to “Skylark,” by Hoagy Carmichael
(lyrics by Johnny Mercer).
Cruciatus in Crucem
From Battlefield Vacations, Edinburgh:
On the film “Braveheart” —
If you’ve ever wondered about what exactly “drawn and quartered” means, there’s a good demonstration at the end.
NIGHT TABLE READING —
MICHAEL GERSON
Head White House speechwriter —
God’s Grandeur and Other Poems, by Gerard Manley Hopkins (Dover)
“In the last two weeks, I’ve been returning to Hopkins. Even in the ‘world’s wildfire,” he asserts that
‘this Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.’A comfort.”
Miss Sauvé
for the Sunday following Corpus Christi Day, 2002:
The part of her fiction that most fascinates me, then and now, is what many critics referred to as “the grotesque,” but what she herself called “the reasonable use of the unreasonable.” [Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, eds. (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1969)]
A modest example comes to mind. In a short story …. the setting sun appears like a great red ball, but she sees it as “an elevated Host drenched in blood” leaving a “line like a red clay road in the sky.” [Flannery O’Connor, “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” from A Good Man is Hard to Find (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1971)]
In a letter to a friend of hers, O’Connor would later write, “…like the child, I believe the Host is actually the body and blood of Christ, not just a symbol. If the story grows for you it is because of the mystery of the Eucharist in it.” In that same correspondence, O’Connor relates this awkward experience:
I was once, five or six years ago, taken by [Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick] to have dinner with Mary McCarthy…. She departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual. We went and eight and at one, I hadn’t opened my mouth once, there being nothing for me in such company to say…. Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them. Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. [McCarthy] said that when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the “most portable” person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable. [Sally Fitzgerald, ed., The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor (Vintage: New York, 1979) 124-125]
….There is, of course, something entirely preposterous and, well, unreasonable, almost grotesque, about the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence. We claim, with a perfectly straight face, to eat the body and drink the blood of the Eternal Word of God, the second person of the Most Holy Trinity who, according to some, shouldn’t even have a body to begin with. But therein lies precisely the most outlandish feature of the Eucharist: namely, that it embodies the essential scandal of the Incarnation itself.
— Friar Francisco Nahoe, OFM Conv.
From James Joyce
A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man
Why was the sacrament of the eucharist instituted under the two species of bread and wine if Jesus Christ be present body and blood, soul and divinity, in the bread alone and in the wine alone? Does a tiny particle of the consecrated bread contain all the body and blood of Jesus Christ or a part only of the body and blood? If the wine change into vinegar and the host crumble into corruption after they have been consecrated, is Jesus Christ still present under their species as God and as man?
— Here he is! Here he is!
From The Gazette, Montreal,
of Sunday, August 20, 1995, page C4:
“Summer of ’69,” a memoir by Judy Lapalme on the death by accidental drowning of her 15-year-old younger brother:
“I had never tasted pizza until Jeff died. Our family, of staunch Irish Catholic stock with more offspring than money, couldn’t cope with the luxury or the spice.
The Hallidays, neighbors from across the street, sent it over to us the day after the funeral, from Miss Sauvé’s Pizzeria, on Sauvé St., just east of Lajeunesse St. in Ahuntsic. An all-dressed pizza with the hard hat in the centre….
I was 17 that summer and had just completed Grade 12 at Holy Names High School in Rosemont….
…. Jeff was almost 16, a handsome football star, a rebellious, headstrong, sturdy young man who was forever locking horns with my father…. On Friday, Aug. 1, Jeff went out on the boat… and never came back….
The day after the funeral, a white Volkswagen from Miss Sauvé’s Pizzeria delivered a jumbo, all-dressed pizza to us. The Hallidays’ daughter, Diane, had been smitten with Jeff and wanted to do something special.
My father assured us that we wouldn’t like it, too spicy and probably too garlicky. There could not be a worse indictment of a person to my father than to declare them reeking of garlic.
The rest of us tore into the cardboard and began tasting this exotic offering — melted strands of creamy, rubbery, burn-your-palate mozzarrella that wasn’t Velveeta, crisp, dry, and earthy mushrooms, spicy and salty pepperoni sliding off the crust with each bite, green peppers…. Bread crust both crisp and soggy with tomato sauce laden with garlic and oregano.
It was an all-dressed pizza, tasted for the first time, the day after we buried Jeff….
The fall of 1969, I went to McGill…. I never had another pizza from Miss Sauvé’s. It’s gone now — like so many things.”
Ten thousand places
AS kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came. Í say móre: the just man justices; Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is— Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men’s faces. — Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844-1889
She died on August 3, 1964 at the age of 39.
In almost all of her works the characters were led to a place where they had to deal with God’s presence in the world.
She once said “in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or statistics, but by the stories it tells. Fiction is the most impure and the most modest and the most human of the arts.”
Flannery OConnor – Southern Prophet:
… When a woman wrote to Flannery O’Connor saying that one of her stories “left a bad taste in my mouth,” Flannery wrote back: “You weren’t supposed to eat it.”
At Random
Today’s birthday: poet Stanley Kunitz —
“I’m Stanley Kunitz. I live in New York City. I published my first book of poems some 70 years ago. Back in 1926, I was roaming through the stacks of the Widener Library at Harvard. While I was walking through the section on English poetry of the 19th century, I just at random lifted my arm and picked a book off the shelf. It was… an author I was not familiar with, Gerard Manley Hopkins. The page that I turned to and began to read was a page devoted to a poem called “God’s Grandeur.” I couldn’t believe what I was reading when I opened this book and started reading that poem. It really shook me, because it was unlike anything else I had ever read before. When I started reading it, suddenly that whole book became alive to me. It was filled with such a lyric passion. It was so fierce and eloquent, wounded and yet radiant, that I knew that it was speaking directly to me and giving me a hint of the kind of poetry that I would be dedicated to for the rest of my life.”
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