Log24

"I just found me a brand new box of matches …"

— Soundtrack of the  trailer for "Ocean's 8"

"… matchwood, immortal diamond …." —

Click the above definitions for further information.

See as well Blue Diamond in this journal.

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"—

"This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ' patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
                Is immortal diamond." —Gerard Manley Hopkins, Society of Jesus

Continued from May 18, 2010.

Previous logo for the New York Times  feature "The Stone"—

Today's new logo, appearing retroactively—

Comparison—

From the October 3 "The Stone," Hegel on Wall Street—

The “Phenomenology” is a philosophical portrait gallery that presents depictions, one after another, of different, fundamental ways in which individuals and societies have understood themselves.  Each self-understanding has two parts: an account of how a particular kind of self understands itself and, then, an account of the world that the self considers its natural counterpart.  Hegel narrates how each formation of self and world collapses because of a mismatch between self-conception and how that self conceives of the larger world.  Hegel thinks we can see how history has been driven by misshapen forms of life in which the self-understanding of agents and the worldly practices they participate in fail to correspond.  With great drama, he claims that his narrative is a “highway of despair.”

— J.M. Bernstein of the New School for Social Research

A two-part self-understanding that is not  from Hegel—

1. An account of how a particular kind of self understands itself:

2. An account of the world that the self considers its natural counterpart:

Immortal Diamond
continued:

"That flower unseen, that gem of purest ray,
Bright thoughts uncut by men:
Strange that you need but speak them, Thomas Gray,
And the mind skips and dives beyond its ken,

Finding at once the wild supposed bloom,
Or in the imagined cave
Some pulse of crystal staving off the gloom
As covertly as phosphorus in a grave."

— From "In a Churchyard," by Richard Wilbur

"A metaphysical assertion of this kind is the idea of the 'diamond body,' the indestructible breath-body which develops in the Golden Flower, or in the square inch space."

— The Secret of the Golden Flower, by Richard Wilhelm, Carl Gustav Jung, and Hua-Yang Liu, second rev. ed., publ. by Routledge, 1999, pp. 130-131

For more about these concepts, see the work cited.

Music for Dunne’s Wake

“Heaven was kind of a hat on the universe,
a lid that kept everything underneath it
where it belonged.”

 — Carrie Fisher,
Postcards from the Edge

Dunne's Wake:

What, and Give Up Show Biz?

"Dying is easy. Comedy is hard."

— Saying attributed to Edmund Gwenn, star of "Miracle on 34th Street," and also attributed to "Noel Coward, David Garrick, William Holden, Edmund Kean, Marcel Marceau, Groucho Marx, and Oscar Wilde."

See also yesterday's entry on the Dark Lady.  For more on Santa and the Dark Lady, see my archive for Aug.-Sept. 2002.

"Drink up, sweet.  You gotta go some.  How I love music.  Frère Jacques, Cuernavaca, ach du lieber August.  All languages.  A walking Berlitz.  Berlitz sounds like you with that champagne, my sweet, or how you're gonna sound."

— Hope of Heaven, by John O'Hara,
"another acidic writer to whom he
[John Gregory Dunne]
was often compared"
(Adam Bernstein, Washington Post)

For some context for the Hope of Heaven quotation, see Immortal Diamond: O'Hara, Hopkins, and Joyce, or click on the adding machine in yesterday's entry.

For more on miracles and the afterlife, see my archive for September 2002.

The Tables of Time

Implied by previous two entries:

See, too, Art Wars and Time Fold.

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.”

— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River

Thomas Wolfe

“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:

June Second, 1910

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

Saint Faggot’s Day

“During the European Inquisitions, faggot referred to the sticks used to set fires for burning heretics, or people who opposed the teachings of the Catholic Church. Heretics were required to gather bundles of sticks (‘faggots’) and carry them to the fire that was being built for them. Heretics who changed their beliefs to avoid being killed were forced to wear a faggot design embroidered on their sleeve, to show everyone that they had opposed the Church.”

— Handout

Head White House speechwriter Michael Gerson:

“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.”
— Vanity Fair, May 2002, page 162

“At midnight on the Emperor’s pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds….”

— William Butler Yeats, “Byzantium”

On this date in 1600, Saint Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for heresy by the Roman Catholic Church.

He was resurrected by Saint Frances Yates, who went to her reward on the feast day of Saint Michael and All Angels, 1981.

Steering a Space-Plane

Head White House speechwriter Michael Gerson:

“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.”
— Vanity Fair, May 2002, page 162

Yesterday’s note, “Time and Eternity,” supplies the “immortal diamond” part of this meditation.  For the “matchwood” part, see the cover of The New York Times Book Review of February 2 (Candlemas), 2003:

See also the Times’s excerpt from Baker‘s first chapter,
about “steering a space-plane.”

For the relationship of Hopkins to Eastern religions,
see “Out of Inscape,” by Robert Morris.

State of the Communion

Relevant readings:

• Definition of the communion of saints in the Catholic Encylopedia —
  

  “In that communion there is no loss of individuality, yet such an interdependence that the saints are ‘members one of another’ (Rom., xii, 5)….”

• Ephesians 4:16 —

“…the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth….”

• A Game Designer’s Holy Grail —
  

  “Herman Melville described the exact process beautifully in his novel, Mardi:

  ‘In me, many worthies recline, and converse. I list to St. Paul who argues the doubts of Montaigne…'”

• Invitation to the HipBone Games —
  

  “…man is seen as he is sub specie aeternitatis, an ‘immortal diamond.'”



• Your Hip Bone Connected —
  

  “Now hear the word of the Lord” 

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.