(Continued from September 12, 2005)
The previous post contrasted the number-triple 11-7-8 below
with number triples 12-9-5 and 12-5-9.
A perhaps more logical counterpart of the triple 11-7-8, based
on opposite locations of star-points or cube-edges, is
the triple 9-12-5. For a theological interpretation, see 9/12/05.
Yesterday's post Devil's Gate provided a dark view of life and culture.
A more cheerful view is provided by the late Gail Levin,
a maker of PBS "American Masters" documentaries
that included, notably, Jeff Bridges and Marilyn Monroe.
Levin reportedly died at 67 on July 31, 2013.*
An image from an interview with Levin —
The date in the image, July 19th, 2006, is the broadcast
date of the PBS "American Masters" program on Monroe.
A check for synchronicity shows there was no Log24 post
on that date.
See, however, posts for the day before— "Sacred Order"—
and the day after— "Bead Game."
A related quote from an article linked to in the latter—
"First world culture, which is 'pagan and in the majority
everywhere,' has as its defining characteristic
a 'primacy of possibility,' or pop— a broadly inclusive
concept that covers everything from the Aboriginal
dreamtime to Plato’s Forms."
— Review by Jess Castle of Philip Rieff’s
Sacred Order/Social Order, Vol. 1: My Life among the
Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority,
University of Virginia Press, 2006. 256 pages, $34.95.
This quote may serve as the missing July 19, 2006, post.
Related material: Dreamtime, Possibility, and Plato's Forms.
* See that date in this journal for two less famous American
masters, artist Edward Valigursky and writer Robert Silverberg.
A meditation on the performance of the late Charles Durning
in the film The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas .
In memory of Dutch author Harry Mulisch…
Mulisch died at his home in Amsterdam on the evening of October 30.
The Discovery of Heaven was made into a film in 2001 by Jeroen Krabbé,
brother of Tim Krabbé. The latter is the author of the novel The Cave
(1997, first published in English in 2000 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
The Cave is notable for a phrase, "a hole in time."
See also "starflight" in this journal.
RHYMES for Bergen Feb. 13-14, 2024
one fun
two crew
three see
four core
five live
six tricks
seven heaven
eight gate
nine line
core line crew
see live heaven
gate fun tricks
This post was suggested by the
"Night of Lunacy" post of May 5, 2013.
In memory of Joan Rivers
This post was suggested by the previous post‘s quote
“the subject’s desires are scripted and orchestrated
by an unconscious fundamental fantasy,”
and by one of my favorite musical fantasies:
Melanie – Brand New Key (’71) .
Academics may prefer the following —
… Continues.
A post by Margaret Soltan this morning:
Links (in blue) from the above post:
Cane and Mondo Cane.
Bagger Vance — “Time for you to see the field.”
From Pictures for Kurosawa (Sept. 6, 2003) —
“As these flowing rivers that go towards the ocean,
when they have reached the ocean, sink into it,
their name and form are broken, and people speak of
the ocean only, exactly thus these sixteen parts
of the spectator that go towards the person (purusha),
when they have reached the person, sink into him,
their name and form are broken, and people speak of
the person only, and he becomes without parts and
immortal. On this there is this verse:
‘That person who is to be known, he in whom these parts
rest, like spokes in the nave of a wheel, you know him,
lest death should hurt you.’ “
— Prasna Upanishad
Related material — Heaven’s Gate images from Xmas 2012:
“This could be heaven or this could be hell.” — Hotel California
Those who prefer mathematics to narrative may consult Root Circle.
An Aleph for Pynchon
Part I:
A California Sixties version
of Heaven’s Gate:
Aleph Sanctuary, by Mati Klarwein
Part II:
Log24 entries of April 29, 2009
(esp. the link to Anastasia Ashley)
Part III:
Inherent Vice,
a novel by Thomas Pynchon
to be published in August 2009
“And what is it
you’re going to do?”
— Eddie Murphy as Pharaoh 
See also
Reba at Heaven’s Gate
and
The Seventh Symbol:
“Jackson’s identified
the seventh symbol.”
— Stargate
Text
Online Etymology Dictionary
|
“Discuss the geometry
underlying the above picture.”
— Log24, June 11, 2009
“Time: the moving
image of eternity.”
— Plato
Happy birthday,
Reba McEntire
A Version of
Heaven’s Gate
in memory of
Alexy II, the Russian Orthodox
patriarch who died today in Moscow:
The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace:
From Geoffrey Broadbent,
“Why a Black Square?” in Malevich
(London, Art and Design/
Academy Group, 1989, p. 49):
“Malevich’s Black Square seems to be
nothing more, nor less, than his
‘Non-Objective’ representation
of Bragdon’s (human-being-as) Cube
passing through the ‘Plane of Reality.’!”
This morning’s entry quoted Ezra Pound:
“The first credential we should demand of a critic is his ideograph of the good.”
Dance critic Clive Barnes died Wednesday. Pound may have whispered his advice in St. Peter’s ear when Barnes stood before the Janitor Coeli at heaven’s gate. If so, another angel may have whispered in the other ear,
“Vide Forever Fonteyn.”
Earlier this month, told he would
receive this year’s Mark Twain
award for comedy, Carlin said,
“Thank you, Mr. Twain.
Have your people
call my people.”
|
Heaven’s Gate
continues: |
… and Of —
George Carlin
in the Air Force:
Photo from
georgecarlin.com
New York Times video
April 30, 2006
Arthur Harttman, Air Force veteran
and resident of the Bowery’s recently
refurbished Andrews House
Step:
“Many dreams have been
brought to your doorstep.
They just lie there
and they die there.”
— Lyricist Ray Evans,
who died at 92
one year ago today
Associated Press –
Today in History –
Thought for Today:
The Return of the Author, by Eugen Simion:
On Sartre’s Les Mots —
The craft of writing appeared to me as an adult activity, so ponderously serious, so trifling, and, at bottom, so lacking in interest that I didn’t doubt for a moment that it was in store for me. I said to myself both ‘that’s all it is’ and ‘I am gifted.’ Like all dreamers, I confused disenchantment with truth.”
This is given in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (1999) as
Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.
Also from the AP’s
Today in History —
Today’s Birthdays:
Actor Kevin McCarthy is 94.
Hopkins at Heaven’s Gate
(In context: October 2007)–
“Dolly’s Little Diner–
Home from Home”
Gala Premiere:
FOUR FOR
HEAVEN’S GATE
“This movie is….
the most scandalous
cinematic waste I have
ever seen, and remember,
I’ve seen Paint Your Wagon.”
Part I:
Overview of Unix
at pangea.stanford.edu
Last revision August 2, 2004
“The Unix operating environment is organized into three layers. The innermost level of Unix is the kernel. This is the actual operating system, a single large program that always resides in memory. Sections of the code in this program are executed on behalf of users to do needed tasks, like access files or terminals. Strictly speaking, the kernel is Unix.
The next level of the Unix environment is composed of programs, commands, and utilities. In Unix, the basic commands like copying or removing files are implemented not as part of the kernel, but as individual programs, no different really from any program you could write. What we think of as the commands and utilities of Unix are simply a set of programs that have become standardized and distributed. There are hundreds of these, plus many additional utilities in the public domain that can be installed.
The final level of the Unix environment, which stands like an umbrella over the others, is the shell. The shell processes your terminal input and starts up the programs that you request. It also allows you to manipulate the environment in which those programs will execute in a way that is transparent to the program. The program can be written to handle standard cases, and then made to handle unusual cases simply by manipulating its environment, without having to have a special version of the program.” (My italics.)
Part II:
Programs
From my paper journal
on the date
“Good Will Hunting”
was released:
|
Friday, December 5, 1997 To: The executive editor, The New York Times Re: The Front Page/His Girl Friday Match the speaker with the speech–
|
||||
| The Speaker | Frame of Reference | |||
| 1. | rosebud | A. | J. Paul Getty | The front page, N.Y. Times, Monday, 12/1/97 |
| 2. | clock | B. | Joel Silver | Page 126, The New Yorker, 3/21/94 |
| 3. | act | C. | Blanche DuBois | The Elysian Fields |
| 4. | waltz | D. | Bob Geldof | People Weekly 12/8/97 |
| 5. | temple | E. | St. Michael | Heaven’s Gate |
| 6. | watch | F. | Susanna Moore | In the Cut (pbk., Dec. ’96) p. 261 |
| 7. | line | G. | Joseph Lelyveld | Page A21, The New York Times, 12/1/97 |
| 8. | chair | H. | Kylie Minogue | Page 69, People Weekly, 12/8/97 |
| 9. | religion | I. | Carol Gilligan | The Garden of Good and Evil |
| 10. | wife | J. | John Travolta | “Michael,” the movie |
| 11. | harp | K. | Shylock | Page 40, N.Y. Review of Books, 12/4/97 |
| 12. | Oscar | L. | Stephen King | The Shining (pbk., 1997), pp. 316, 317 |
“…while the scientist sees
everything that happens
in one point of space,
the poet feels
everything that happens
in one point of time…
all forming an
instantaneous and transparent
organism of events….”
Part III:
The Bourne Shell
“The binary program of the Bourne shell or a compatible program is located at /bin/sh on most Unix systems, and is still the default shell for the root superuser on many current Unix implementations.” –Wikipedia
See also
the recent comments
of root@matrix.net in
Peter Woit’s weblog.
“Hey, Carrie-Anne,
what’s your game now….”
— The Hollies, 1967
Final arrangements, continued:
Justice at Heaven’s Gate
“Gate — Early term for a Jazz musician.
Armstrong is the original Swing Jazz player that’s why they call used to call him ‘Gate.’“
— All About Jazz
“Armstrong is also frequently cited as the main source or popularizer of words like scat, gate (a greeting among jazz musicians that became a popular WWII term for a buddy or pal)²
² The term apparently goes back to Louis’s own adolescent nickname, ‘Gatemouth.'”
— Jazz Institute of Chicago
The sequel to
“Every Boy Has a Daddy“:
Hepburn’s Mass
at Heaven’s Gate
Katharine Hepburn died at 2:50 PM EDT
on the Feast of St. Peter.
“The Consecration and Sacrifice effected by the priest (standing in the place of Christ) is, then, the visible manifestation of an eternal and timeless act. After the Consecration, as Gueranger says in The Liturgical Year, ‘the divine Lamb is lying on our altar!’ Thus we see that the Mass is the visible reality, here and now, of the timeless eternal Mass of Heaven, described in the Apocalypse. Through it we participate in the Celestial Liturgy; through it the gates of Heaven are opened to us and the possibility of eternal life is made available to us.”
The Source:
The Church Militant recommends
Defense of the Inquisitions.
For a different viewpoint,
see my May 12 entries.
Rhetoric Happens
“Rhetoric is concerned with the state of Babel after the Fall.”
— Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, quoted by Douglas Robinson at the site Linguistics and Language
CNN.com headline, Saturday, April 12, 2003, Posted at 12:24 AM EDT:
Rumsfeld on looting in Iraq:
‘Stuff happens’
For further rhetoric, see
A Short Comparative Guide to Religion and Philosophy.
This site has the added attraction of a midi of Lennon’s classic, “Instant Karma,” mentioned in yesterday’s entry “Heaven’s Gate.”
Heaven’s Gate
“Rhetoric is concerned with the state of Babel after the Fall.”
— Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, quoted by Douglas Robinson at the site Linguistics and Language
“Location: present-day Iraq, between the Tigris and Euphrates
Cities: Babylon, founded 2300 BC, 70 miles south of present Baghdad, on the Euphrates….
Babylon = Bab-ilu, “gate of God,” Hebrew: Babel or Bavel.”
|
Modern rendition |
Kenneth |
Perhaps the real heaven’s gate is at
Instant karma update:
At 5:09 PM I read the following in the New York Review of Books, dated May 1, 2003, which arrived today.
From a review of Terror and Liberalism, by Paul Berman:
“As a general analysis of the various enemies of liberalism, and what ties them together, it is superb. All — Nazis, Islamists, Bolsheviks, Fascists, and so on — are linked by Berman to the ‘ur-myth’ of the fall of Babylon.”
Speaking of Ur, Berman likes to quote a non-Biblical Abraham, named Lincoln. The first, Biblical, Abraham was a damned homicidal lunatic, and the later American Abraham also delighted in blood sacrifice. But that’s just my opinion. For a different view, see the Chautauqua Abrahamic Program.
ART WARS
At the Still Point
“At the still point, there the dance is.”
— T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets
Humphrey Carpenter in The Inklings, his book on the Christian writers J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams, says that
“Eliot by his own admission took the ‘still point of the turning world’ in Burnt Norton from the Fool in Williams’s The Greater Trumps.”
— The Inklings, Ballantine Books, 1981, p. 106
Carpenter says Williams maintained that
It is the Christian’s duty to perceive “the declared pattern of the universe” — the “eternal dance” of Williams’s story The Greater Trumps — and to act according to it.
— Paraphrase of Carpenter, pp. 111-112
“The sun is not yet risen, and if the Fool moves there he comes invisibly, or perhaps in widespread union with the light of the moon which is the reflection of the sun. But if the Tarots hold, as has been dreamed, the message which all things in all places and times have also been dreamed to hold, then perhaps there was meaning in the order as in the paintings; the tale of the cards being completed when the mystery of the sun has opened in the place of the moon, and after that the trumpets cry in the design which is called the Judgement, and the tombs are broken, and then in the last mystery of all the single figure of what is called the World goes joyously dancing in a state beyond moon and sun, and the number of the Trumps is done. Save only for that which has no number and is called the Fool, because mankind finds it folly till it is known. It is sovereign or it is nothing, and if it is nothing then man was born dead.”
— The Greater Trumps, by Charles Williams, Ch. 14
If we must have Christians telling stories, let them write like Charles Williams.
Note that although Williams says the Fool Tarot card has no number, it is in fact often numbered 0. See
See also Sequel — about the work, life, and afterlife of Stan Rice, husband of Anne Rice (author of The Vampire Chronicles) — and the following story from today’s N.Y. Times:
The New York Times, Jan. 16, 2003:‘Dance of the Vampires,’
|
The death and arrival at heaven’s gate
of The Producers‘ producer, Sidney Glazier,
on Dec. 14, 2002, is described in the web page
Eight is a Gate.
ART WARS:
Bach at Heaven’s Gate
From a weblog entry of Friday, December 13, 2002:
|
Divine Comedy Joan Didion and her husband If the incomparable Max Bialystock |
From The Hollywood Reporter:
|
Producer Sidney Glazier dies Academy Award-winning producer In addition to “The Producers,” His nephew is “Scrooged” screenwriter
(Josh Spector) |
Recommended reading —
Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of
“Heaven’s Gate,”
the Film that Sank United Artists,
Second Edition,
by Steven Bach
From Newmarket Press:
“Steven Bach was the senior vice-president and head of worldwide production for United Artists at the time of the filming of Heaven’s Gate…. Apart from the director and the producer, Bach was the only person to witness the evolution of Heaven’s Gate from beginning to end.”
Rebecca Goldstein
at Heaven’s Gate
This entry is in gratitude for Rebecca Goldstein’s
excellent essay
in The New York Times of December 16, 2002.
She talks about the perennial conflict between two theories of truth that Richard Trudeau called the “story theory” and the “diamond theory.” My entry of December 13, 2002, “Rhyme Scheme,” links the word “real” to an article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy that contains the following:
“According to a platonist about arithmetic, the truth of the sentence ‘7 is prime’ entails the existence of an abstract object, the number 7. This object is abstract because it has no spatial or temporal location, and is causally inert. A platonic realist about arithmetic will say that the number 7 exists and instantiates the property of being prime independently of anyone’s beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, and so on. A certain kind of nominalist rejects the existence claim which the platonic realist makes: there are no abstract objects, so sentences such as ‘7 is prime’ are false…”
This discussion of “sevenness,” along with the discussion of “eightness” in my December 14, 2002, note on Bach, suggest that I supply a transcription of a note in my paper journal from 2001 that deals with these matters.
From a paper journal note of October 5, 2001:
|
The 2001 Silver Cup Award Glynis Johns is 78 today. “Seven is heaven, “There is no highway in the sky.” “Don’t give up until you See also page |
Added 12/17/02: See also
the portrait of Rebecca Goldstein in
Hadassah Magazine
Volume
78
Number 10
(June/July 1997).
For more on the Jewish propensity to
assign mystical significance to numbers, see
Rabbi Zwerin’s Kol Nidre Sermon.
For the significance of “seven” in Judaism, see
Zayin: The Woman of Valor.
For the significance of “eight” in Judaism, see
Chet: The Life Dynamic.
For the cabalistic significance of
“Seven is heaven, Eight is a gate,”
note that Zayin, Seven, signifies
“seven chambers of Paradise”
and that Chet, Eight, signifies
the “gateway to infinity.”
For the significance of the date 12.17, see
Tet: The Concealed Good.
What is Truth?
My state of mind |
My state of mind |
In light of the entry below (“Mass Confusion,” Oct. 19, 2002), some further literary reflections seem called for. Since this is, after all, a personal journal, allow me some personal details…
Yesterday I picked up some packages, delivered earlier, that included four books I had ordered. I opened these packages this morning before writing the entry below; their contents may indicate my frame of mind when I later read this morning’s New York Times story that prompted my remarks. The books are, in the order I encountered them as I opened packages,
Taken as a whole, this quartet of books supplies a rather powerful answer to the catechism question of Pontius Pilate, “What is truth?”…
The answer, which I pray will some day be delivered at heaven’s gate to all who have lied in the name of religion, is, in Jack Nicholson’s classic words,
You can’t handle the truth!
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