Log24

Mathematics and Narrative
(continued from April 26 and 28):

The Web

See also

Leiber's Big Time, Spider Woman, and The Eight.

Windmills
 

Upper part of above picture–

From today’s New York Times,
Seeing Mountains in
Starry Clouds of Creation.

Lower part of above picture–
Pilgrimage to Spider Rock:

“This magical place, according to Navajo Legend, was the home of Spider Woman, who gave the gift of weaving to the Dineh’ People.  Today’s Navajos trace the excellence of their finest textiles to this time of legends, when their patron, Changing Woman, met Spider Woman, the first Weaver.”

Vine Deloria Jr.,
 
Evolution, Creationism,
and Other Modern Myths:

“The continuing struggle between evolutionists and creationists, a hot political topic for the past four decades, took a new turn in the summer of 1999 when the Kansas Board of Education voted to omit the mention of evolution in its newly approved curriculum, setting off outraged cries of foul by the scientific establishment.  Don Quixotes on both sides mounted their chargers and went searching for windmills.”

    “Time traveling, which is not quite the good clean boyish fun it’s cracked up to be, started for me when this woman with the sigil on her forehead looked in on me from the open doorway of the hotel bedroom where I’d hidden myself and the bottles and asked me, ‘Look, Buster, do you want to live?’….
    Her right arm was raised and bent, the elbow touching the door frame, the hand brushing back the very dark bangs from her forehead to show me the sigil, as if that had a bearing on her question.

Bordered version
of the sigil

The sigil was an eight-limbed asterisk made of fine dark lines and about as big as a silver dollar.  An X superimposed on a plus sign.  It looked permanent.”

— Fritz Leiber, “Damnation Morning“

For Vine Deloria Jr., who died at 72 on Sunday, Nov. 13, 2005:

        Things forgotten are shadows.
        The shadows will be as real
        as wind and rain and song and light,
        there in the old place.
        Spider Woman atop your rock,
        I would greet you,
        but I am going the other way.
        Only a fool would pursue a Navajo
        into the Canyon of Death.