A well in the opening scenes of the 2020 film version of Joan Didion's
1996 novel The Last Thing He Wanted —
From a link in the previous post —
Sorvino in “The Last Templar”
at the Church of the Lost Well:
Consider the source.
From a post of July 24, 2011 —
A review —
“The story, involving the Knights Templar, the Vatican, sunken treasure,
the fate of Christianity and a decoding device that looks as if it came out of
a really big box of medieval Cracker Jack, is the latest attempt to combine
Indiana Jones derring-do with ‘Da Vinci Code’ mysticism.”
A feeble attempt at a purely mathematical "decoding device"
from this journal earlier this month —
For some background, see a question by John Baez at Math Overflow
on Aug. 20, 2015.
The nonexistence of a 24-cycle in the large Mathieu group
might discourage anyone hoping for deep new insights from
the above figure.
See Marston Conder's "Symmetric Genus of the Mathieu Groups" —
Venus and Mars Realigned (continued from July 20) …
A review —
“The story, involving the Knights Templar, the Vatican, sunken treasure,
the fate of Christianity and a decoding device that looks as if it came out of
a really big box of medieval Cracker Jack, is the latest attempt to combine
Indiana Jones derring-do with ‘Da Vinci Code’ mysticism.”
A related Google image search yields more Cracker Jack prizes.
|
The following meditation was inspired by the recent fictional recovery, by Mira Sorvino in "The Last Templar," of a Greek Cross — "the Cross of Constantine"– and by the discovery, by art historian Rosalind Krauss, of a Greek Cross in the art of Ad Reinhardt. |
|
Note that in applications, the vertical axis of the Cross of Descartes often symbolizes the timeless (money, temperature, etc.) while the horizontal axis often symbolizes time. T.S. Eliot:
"Men’s curiosity searches past and future |
|
"In suggesting that the success [1] of the grid
[1] Success here refers to
three things at once: a sheerly quantitative success, involving the number of artists in this century who have used grids; a qualitative success through which the grid has become the medium for some of the greatest works of modernism; and an ideological success, in that the grid is able– in a work of whatever quality– to emblematize the Modern." — Rosalind Krauss, "Grids" (1979) |
Related material:
Time Fold and Weyl on
objectivity and frames of reference.
See also Stambaugh on
The Formless Self
as well as
A Study in Art Education
and
Jung and the Imago Dei.
Raiders of
the Lost Well
| “The challenge is to keep high standards of scholarship while maintaining showmanship as well.” |
— Olga Raggio, a graduate of the Vatican library school and the University of Rome who, at one point in her almost 60 years with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, organized “The Vatican Collections,” a blockbuster show. Dr. Raggio died on January 24.
The next day, “The Last Templar,” starring Mira Sorvino, debuted on NBC.
“One highlight of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s first overseas trip will be a stop in China. Her main mission in Beijing will be to ensure that US-China relations under the new Obama administration get off to a positive start.”
— Stephanie Ho, Voice of America Beijing bureau chief, today
Symbol of The Positive,
from this journal
on Valentine’s Day:
Stephanie was born in Ohio and grew up in California. She has a bachelor’s degree in Asian studies with an emphasis on Chinese history and economics, from the University of California at Berkeley.”
“She is fluent in
Mandrin Chinese.”
—VOA
As is Mira Sorvino.
Those who, like Clinton, Raggio, and
Sorvino’s fictional archaeologist in
“The Last Templar,” prefer Judeo-
Christian myths to Asian myths,
may convert the above Chinese
“well” symbol to a cross
(or a thick “+” sign)
by filling in five of
the nine spaces outlined
by the well symbol.
In so doing, they of course
run the risk, so dramatically
portrayed by Angelina Jolie
as Lara Croft, of opening
Pandora’s Box.
(See Rosalind Krauss, Professor
of Art and Theory at Columbia,
for scholarly details.)
Krauss
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