"… during that spell between the feasts of Christmas and Epiphany
when ghosts and specters are supposed to be abroad . . . ."
Heinrich Zimmer on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Times Literary Supplement , January 3, 2020
Sciences | Book Review
The world is not enough:
Guessing at the game God is playing
By Samuel Graydon
See as well …
See also LYNX 760 , Rubik vs. Abel, and Toying.
Rachel Dodes in The Wall Street Journal
on All Souls' Day, 2012—
"In one of the first lines uttered by Daniel Day-Lewis, playing Abraham Lincoln in the new Steven Spielberg film opening Nov. 9, he says, 'I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space— were it not that I have bad dreams.'
The line was ripped straight from 'Hamlet,' by Lincoln's favorite writer, William Shakespeare. Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright ('Angels in America') who wrote the script for the film, says that Shakespeare, much like Lincoln, 'had extraordinary mastery over the darkest parts of the human spirit.'"
The above quotation omits Shakespeare's words prefacing the nutshell part— "O God."
These same words in a different tongue— "Hey Ram"— have often been quoted as the last words of Gandhi. (See yesterday's noon post.)
"… for the Highest Essence (brahman ),
which is the core of the world, is identical
with the Highest Self (ātman ), the kernel
of man's existence."
— Heinrich Zimmer, Myths and Symbols
in Indian Art and Civilization , Pantheon
Books, 1946, page 142
Related material: A post linked to here on Friday night
that itself links to a different Shakespeare speech.
NY Lottery this evening—
Continued from Themes of Sept. 17—
"And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder."
Lottery hermeneutics for this evening—
747 — Source of the sound effect in a post of April 28, 2009:
"And Kali, ‘The Dark One,’ addressed him with the voice of a cloud of thunder…"
— The King and the Corpse , by Heinrich Zimmer
3695 — Number of a post on Steps Toward Salvation (Dec. 14, 2008)
"…the farther back we manage to wiggle
the more we need the loan of a lens…." —Finnegans Wake
For some background on the lens below, see the sermon on February 20th, 2011.
“The quad gospellers may own the targum but any of the Zingari shoolerim
may pick a peck of kindlings yet from the sack of auld hensyne.”
The above "Zingari shoolerim" passage was quoted here in Frame Tales (November 10th, 2008).
That post concerned the Heinrich Zimmer tale "The King and the Corpse." Some related material—
The weekend's posts in this journal coincided,
more or less, with the finale of the TV series "Lost."
Recalling each story brings to mind
the subtitle of Heinrich Zimmer's classic
The King and the Corpse —
Tales of the Soul's Conquest of Evil.
Here, in the spirit of "The Fifth Element," is a
brief graphic summary of such a conquest—
The Soul
Evil
(from Saturday morning)
University of California anthropologist Alan Dundes:
"One could well argue that binary opposition is a universal. Presumably all human societies, past and present, made some kind of distinction between 'Male and Female,' 'Life and Death,' 'Day and Night' (or Light and Dark), etc." –"Binary Opposition in Myth: The Propp/Levi-Strauss Debate in Retrospect," Western Folklore, Winter 1997
To Levi-Strauss, I prefer Clifford Geertz —
"…what Levi-Strauss has made for himself is an infernal culture machine." –"The Cerebral Savage"
— and Heinrich Zimmer —
"…all opposition, as well as identity, stems from Maya. Great Maya is wisdom and increase, stability and readiness to assist, compassion and serenity. Queen of the World, she is alive in every nuance of feeling and perception; feelings and perceptions are her gestures. And her nature can be sensed only by one who has comprehended that she is the unity of opposites." —The King and the Corpse
And then there are more up-to-date culture machines.
Levi-Strauss, obtuse and boring, is an opposite, of sorts, to the smart and funny Dundes. The latter, in the binary opposition posed in yesterday's Log24 title "Sinner or Saint?," is definitely on the side of the saints. (See selected Log24 entries for the date of his death– Warren Beatty's birthday.)
Today's happy birthdays — Elke Sommer —
and Sesame Street —
Google logo today, Nov. 5, 2009
Click images for historical background.
Frame Tales
From June 30 —
("Will this be on the test?")
Frame Tale One:
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Summer Reading
Subtitle: |
Frame Tale Two:
Barry Sharples
on his version of the
Kaleidoscope Puzzle —
Background:
"A possible origin of this puzzle is found in a dialogue
between Socrates and Meno written by the Greek philosopher,
Plato, where a square is drawn inside a square such that
the blue square is twice the area of the yellow square.
Colouring the triangles produces a starting pattern
which is a one-diamond figure made up of four tiles
and there are 24 different possible arrangements."
"The king asked, in compensation for his toils during this strangest
of all the nights he had ever known, that the twenty-four riddle tales
told him by the specter, together with the story of the night itself,
should be made known over the whole earth
and remain eternally famous among men."
Frame Tale Three:
"The quad gospellers may own the targum
but any of the Zingari shoolerim may pick a peck
of kindlings yet from the sack of auld hensyne."
The Transcendent
Signified, Part II –
A sequel to my recent entries
The Transcendent Signified and
Catholic Tastes
From a July 28 New York Times story on a controversy over the Latin Mass:
“Granted, most of the people don’t understand Latin,” he said, “yet they understand its evocation of the transcendent.”
— Father John A. Perricone
From the excellent site
Quotations on Sound,
the Name, and the Word:
Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
Part 2: Interviews with Bill Moyers —
Campbell: “We want to think about God. God is a thought. God is a name. God is an idea, but its reference is to something that transcends all thinking. The ultimate mystery of being is beyond all categories of thought. My friend Heinrich Zimmer of years ago used to say, ‘The best things can’t be told,’ because they transcend thought. ‘The second best are misunderstood,’ because those are the thoughts that are supposed to refer to that which can’t be thought about, and one gets stuck in the thoughts. ‘The third best are what we talk about.’ And myth is that field of reference, metaphors referring to what is absolutely transcendent.”
Moyers: “What can’t be known or can’t be named except in our own feeble attempt to clothe it in language.”
Campbell: “And the ultimate word in our language for that which is transcendent is God.”
Time and Eternity
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 Kali figure
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 Windmill
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Yesterday's meditation on St. Bridget suggests the above graphic summary of two rather important philosophical concepts. Representing Kali, or Time, is Judy Davis in "The New Age." Representing Shiva, or Eternity, is sword-saint Michioka Yoshinori-sensei. The relationship between these two concepts is summarized very neatly by Heinrich Zimmer in his section on the Kalika Purana in The King and the Corpse.
The relationship is also represented graphically by the "whirl" of Time and the "diamond" of Eternity.
On this day in 1944, Mondrian died. Echoes of the graphic whirl and diamond may be found (as shown above) in his "Red Mill" and "Victory Boogie-Woogie."
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