A Unified Field —
Click the above image for further details.
See also a search in this journal for Jorie Graham.
Related dramatic dialogue for Emma Stone and
Joaquin Phoenix, actors in "Irrational Man" —
"Are you aware of what's going on at that table?"
Philosophical backstory by Hans Christian Andersen —
"He was quite frightened, and he tried to repeat the Lord's Prayer;
but all he could do, he was only able to remember the multiplication table."
“His daughter, the poet Jorie Graham, confirmed the death.”
From an artist on Oct. 3, 2013:
“‘This is St. Francis country,’ she says of Umbria.”
"… At the hour of vespers
in a sudden blinding snow,
they entered the harbor…."
— Jorie Graham,
"The Dream of the Unified Field"
Other snow dreams—
Master Class and
Today is commencement day at College of the Desert.
Without Graduation
(from a poem by Jorie Graham)
With Graduation
Click either passage above for some commentary.
"Why is a raven like a writing-desk?" — Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Arthur Koestler, The Roots of Coincidence —
"In his The Nature of the Physical World (1928) Sir Arthur Eddington introduced his famous 'parable of the two writing desks.' One is the antique piece of furniture on which his elbows solidly rest while writing; the other is the desk as the physicist conceives it, consisting almost entirely of empty space, sheer nothingness…. Eddington concluded:
In the world of physics we watch a shadowgraph performance of familiar life. The shadow of my elbow rests on the shadow-table as the shadow-ink flows over the shadow-paper….
Though the constituents of matter could be described with great mathematical accuracy as patterns of vibrations, the question remained— what was it that vibrated? On the one hand, these matter-waves produced physically real phenomena, such as interference patterns on a screen, or the currents in a transistor radio. On the other hand, the whole conception of matter-waves excludes by definition any medium with physical attributes as a carrier of the waves. A wave is movement; but what is that something that moves, producing the shadows on Eddington's shadow-desk? Short of calling it the grin of the Cheshire Cat, it was named the 'psi field' or 'psi function.'"
What is it that moves? Perhaps not the Cheshire Cat, but rather The Raven—
Closeup, he’s blue—streaked iris blue, india-ink blue—and
black—an oily, fiery set of blacks—none of them
true—as where hate and order touch—something that cannot
become known. Stages of black but without
graduation. So there is no direction.
All of this happened, yes.
— Jorie Graham, "The Dream of the Unified Field"
See also notes on darkness in this journal.
"…after all, the word 'bolshoi' means big, great or grand."
"How much for a dream?" — This journal, January 1, 2010
Star of Bolshoi Ballet Dies at 102
I was eight—
I saw the different weights of things,
saw the vivid performance of the present,
saw the light rippling almost shuddering where her body finally
touched
the image, the silver film between them like something that would have
shed itself in nature now
but wouldn’t, couldn’t, here, on tight,
between, not thinning, not slipping off to let some
seed-down
through, no signal in it, no information …
— Jorie Graham, "The Dream of the Unified Field"
Update of 10:25 AM June 10— Click to enlarge—
Dream of the Unified Field
Quartet:
Shanavasa, Ananda,
Jorie Graham, Robert Louis Stevenson
“Shanavasa asked Ananda,
‘What is the fundamental uncreated essence of all things?’ “
— Jorie Graham,
“Relativity: A Quartet”
in The Dream of the Unified Field:
Selected Poems 1974-1994,
Ecco Press, 1995
“Ananda to Shanavasa:
‘Buddha is Alive! Buddha is Alive!’
Shanavasa to Upagupta:
‘Space is Consumed by Flaming Space.’ “
— Table of Contents, Living Buddha Zen
Cover illustration
by Stephen Savage,
NY Times Book Review,
Feb. 2 (Candlemas), 2003
“We live the time that a match flickers.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson, Aes Triplex
Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh on this date in 1850.
Powered by WordPress
