“That Hideous Strength” « Search Results

Combination Room
Attached to the High Table end of the largely unheated medieval college halls, this was a warm place for Fellows to gather before and after meals. Now known as the Senior Combination Room to distinguish it from the Junior and Middle combination rooms.

From Stanley Fish’s weblog
in The New York Times
(Sunday, March 1, 2009, 10 PM):

George Herbert’s “Redemption” —

“‘I resolved to be bold,/And make a suit unto him, to afford/A new small-rented lease and cancel th’old.’

But first he has to find him…. Either he’s just left or he hasn’t been seen, but then, unexpectedly and in the most unlikely circumstances, he turns up:

‘At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth/Of thieves and murderers: there I him espied.’

Before he or his reader can ask ‘what on earth are you doing here?,’ the final line provides an answer with a compact swiftness that is literally breathtaking:

‘Who straight, “Your suit is granted,” said, and died.'”

For Senior Combination Room as
a den of thieves and murderers,
see That Hideous Strength.

Related material:

“The Painted Word”

G. H. Hardy died at 70
on December 1, 1947.
That date is now observed as
“Day Without Art.”

Click on image
for further details.

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Monday, December 4, 2006

Monday December 4, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:01 am

Descent of the God

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061204-Theo2.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Related material:

All Hallows’ Eve,
2005:

Multispeech

as well as

C. S. Lewis,
That Hideous Strength,
Chapter 15,
“The Descent of the Gods,”

and
Charles Williams,
“The Carol of Amen House“:

Beauty arose of old
And dreamed of a perfect thing,
Where none shall be angry or cold
Or armed with an evil sting;

Where the world shall be made anew,
For the gods shall breathe its air,
And Phoebus Apollo there-through
Shall move on a golden stair.

(For the musical score, see
The Masques of Amen House.)

Saturday, December 2, 2006

Saturday December 2, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 1:29 am

Venus at
St. Anne's,
continued

In honor of
the film "Bobby,"
now playing.

("Venus at St. Anne's"
is the title of the final
chapter of
the C. S. Lewis classic
That Hideous Strength.)

Symbol of Venus
and
Symbol of Plato

Related symbols:

Click on pictures
for details related tp
the Feast of St. Anne
(July 26).

"The best theology today,
in its repudiation of a
rhetorical religious idealism,
finds itself in agreement
with a recurrent note
in contemporary poetry….

We keep coming back
and coming back/
To the real: to the hotel
instead of the hymns/
That fall upon it
out of the wind. We seek/
… Nothing beyond reality.
Within it/
Everything,
the spirit’s alchemicana….

(From 'An Ordinary Evening
in New Haven,'
in The Collected Poems
of Wallace Stevens….)

… Not grim/
Reality, but reality grimly seen….

(Ibid.)"

— "The Church's
New Concern with the Arts,"
by Amos N. Wilder,
Hollis Professor
of Divinity, Emeritus,
at Harvard Divinity School,
in Christianity and Crisis,
February 18, 1957.

"All the truth in the world
adds up to one big lie."

— Dylan, "Things Have Changed"

Comments (1)

Monday, November 13, 2006

Monday November 13, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:23 pm

Cognitive Blend:

Casino Royale
and
Time in the Rock

PA lottery Nov. 13, 2006: Mid-day 726, Evening 329

In today’s cognitive blend,
the role of Casino Royale
is played by the
Pennsylvania Lottery,
which points to 7/26,
Venus at St. Anne’s
(title of the closing chapter
of That Hideous Strength).

The role of
Time in the Rock
is played by a
Log24 entry of 3/29,
Diamond Theory in 1937.

“There is such a thing
as a tesseract.“

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Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Wednesday July 26, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 7:20 pm

Venus at St. Anne’s
(Title of the closing chapter
of That Hideous Strength)

Symbol of Venus
and
Symbol of Plato

“What do they
teach them
at these schools?”
— C. S. Lewis

Today is the
feast of St. Anne.

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Thursday, June 8, 2006

Thursday June 8, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 am

From the
Library of Congress:

A Reading for
the Eighth of June

Sample text for
That Hideous Strength:
A Modern Fairy-Tale
for Grown-Ups,
by C. S. Lewis

Library of Congress
subject headings
for this publication
include:

College teachers — Fiction.
Good and evil — Fiction.
Philologists — Fiction.
Linguists — Fiction.

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Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Tuesday November 29, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:25 am

The Way of the Pilgrim,
Part III:

For the Birthday
of C. S. Lewis

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051129-Tao.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051129-Tao.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The Tao, Chapter I

“The Chinese… speak of a great thing (the greatest thing) called the Tao. It is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar.”

— C. S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man

“In his preface to That Hideous Strength, Lewis says the novel has a serious point that he has tried to make in this little book, The Abolition of Man. The novel is a work of fantasy or science fiction, while Abolition is a short philosophical work about moral education, but as we shall see the two go together; we will understand either book better by having read and thought about the other.”

— Dale Nelson, Notes on The Abolition of Man

“In Epiphany Term, 1942, C.S. Lewis delivered the Riddell Memorial Lectures… in…. the University of Durham…. He delivered three lectures entitled ‘Men without Chests,’ ‘The Way,’ and ‘The Abolition of Man.’ In them he set out to attack and confute what he saw as the errors of his age. He started by quoting some fashionable lunacy from an educationalists’ textbook, from which he developed a general attack on moral subjectivism. In his second lecture he argued against various contemporary isms, which purported to replace traditional objective morality. His final lecture, ‘The Abolition of Man,’ which also provided the title of the book published the following year, was a sustained attack on hard-line scientific anti-humanism. The intervening fifty years have largely vindicated Lewis.”

— J. R. Lucas, The Restoration of Man

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Friday, November 18, 2005

Friday November 18, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:56 am

It’s still the same old story,
a fight for love and…

Glory

Wikipedia on the tesseract:

“Glory Road (1963) included the foldbox, a hyperdimensional packing case that was bigger inside than outside.”

Robert A. Heinlein in Glory Road:

    “Rufo’s baggage turned out to be a little black box about the size and shape of a portable typewriter. He opened it.
    And opened it again.
    And kept on opening it– And kept right on unfolding its sides and letting them down until the durn thing was the size of a small moving van and even more packed….
    … Anyone who has studied math knows that the inside does not have to be smaller than the outside, in theory…. Rufo’s baggage just carried the principle further.”

Johnny Cash: “And behold, a white horse.”

On The Last Battle, a book in the Narnia series by C. S. Lewis:

“… there is much glory in this wonderfully written apocalypse. Tirian, looking into the stable through the hole in the door, says, ‘The stable seen from within and the stable seen from without are two different places.’ Digory answers, ‘Its inside is bigger than its outside.’ It is the perceptive Lucy who voices the hope that is in us, ‘In our world, too, a stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.'”

Lewis said in “The Weight of Glory”—

“Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them.”

On enchantments that need to be broken:

See the description of the Eater of Souls in Glory Road and of Scientism in

Mathematics and Narrative,

The Rhetoric of Scientism,

and the C. S. Lewis classic,
That Hideous Strength.

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Thursday, November 3, 2005

Thursday November 3, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:07 am

Bond

USA Today on last night’s White House dinner:

“In his toast, Bush said the royal visit was ‘a reminder of the unique and enduring bond’ between the two countries.”

From Log24, July 18, 2003:

The use of the word “idea” in my entries’ headlines yesterday was not accidental. It is related to an occurrence of the word in Understanding: On Death and Truth, a set of journal entries from May 9-12. The relevant passage on “ideas” is quoted there, within commentary by an Oberlin professor:

“That the truth we understand must be a truth we stand under is brought out nicely in C. S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength when Mark Studdock gradually learns what an ‘Idea’ is. While Frost attempts to give Mark a ‘training in objectivity’ that will destroy in him any natural moral sense, and while Mark tries desperately to find a way out of the moral void into which he is being drawn, he discovers what it means to under-stand.

‘He had never before known what an Idea meant: he had always thought till now that they were things inside one’s own head. But now, when his head was continually attacked and often completely filled with the clinging corruption of the training, this Idea towered up above him-something which obviously existed quite independently of himself and had hard rock surfaces which would not give, surfaces he could cling to.’

This too, I fear, is seldom communicated in the classroom, where opinion reigns supreme. But it has important implications for the way we understand argument.”

— “On Bringing One’s Life to a Point,” by Gilbert Meilaender, First Things, November 1994

The old philosophical conflict between realism and nominalism can, it seems, have life-and-death consequences. I prefer Plato’s realism, with its “ideas,” such as the idea of seven-ness. A reductio ad absurdum of nominalism may be found in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy under Realism:

“A certain kind of nominalist rejects the existence claim which the platonic realist makes: there are no abstract objects, so sentences such as ‘7 is prime’ are false….”

The claim that 7 is not prime is, regardless of its motives, dangerously stupid.

The New York Lottery evening number
for All Souls’ Day, Nov. 2, 2005, was

007.

Related material:

Entries for Nov. 1, 2005 and
the song Planned Obsolescence
by the 10,000 Maniacs

(Hope Chest:
The Fredonia Recordings)

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Wednesday, September 10, 2003

Wednesday September 10, 2003

Filed under: General — Tags: Glasperlenspiel, Springer — m759 @ 4:04 pm

4:04:08

The title refers to my entry of last April 4,

The Eight,

and to the time of this entry.

From D. H. Lawrence and the Dialogical Principle:

“Plato’s Dialogues…are queer little novels….[I]t was the greatest pity in the world, when philosophy and fiction got split. They used to be one, right from the days of myth. Then they went and parted, like a nagging married couple, with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and that beastly Kant. So the novel went sloppy, and philosophy went abstract-dry. The two should come together again, in the novel.”

— pp. 154-5 in D. H. Lawrence, “The Future of the Novel,” in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays. Ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1983. 149-55.

Philosophy

Fiction

“The wild, brilliant, alert head of St. Mawr seemed to look at her out of another world… the large, brilliant eyes of that horse looked at her with demonish question…. ‘Meet him half way,’ Lewis [the groom] said. But halfway across from our human world to that terrific equine twilight was not a small step.”

— pp. 30, 35 in D. H. Lawrence, “St. Mawr.” 1925. St. Mawr and Other Stories. Ed. Brian Finney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Wednesday, August 6, 2003

Wednesday August 6, 2003

Filed under: General — Tags: Bullshit Studies, Fields, Springer — m759 @ 10:23 am

Postmodern
Postmortem

“I had a lot of fun with this audacious and exasperating book. … [which] looks more than a little like Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, a ‘secret history’ tracing punk rock through May 1968….”

— Michael Harris, Institut de Mathématiques de Jussieu, Université Paris 7, review of Mathematics and the Roots of Postmodern Thought, by Vladimir Tasic, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, August 2003

For some observations on the transgressive predecessors of punk rock, see my entry Funeral March of July 26, 2003 (the last conscious day in the life of actress Marie Trintignant — see below), which contains the following:

“Sky is high and so am I,
If you’re a viper — a vi-paah.”
— The Day of the Locust,
by Nathanael West (1939)

As I noted in another another July 26 entry, the disease of postmodernism has, it seems, now infected mathematics. For some recent outbreaks of infection in physics, see the works referred to below.

“Postmodern Fields of Physics: In his book The Dreams of Reason, H. R. Pagels focuses on the science of complexity as the most outstanding new discipline emerging in recent years….”

— “The Semiotics of ‘Postmodern’ Physics,” by Hans J. Pirner, in Symbol and Physical Knowledge: The Conceptual Structure of Physics, ed. by M. Ferrari and I.-O. Stamatescu, Springer Verlag, August 2001

For a critical look at Pagels’s work, see Midsummer Eve’s Dream. For a less critical look, see The Marriage of Science and Mysticism. Pagels’s book on the so-called “science of complexity” was published in June 1988. For more recent bullshit on complexity, see

The Critical Idiom of Postmodernity and Its Contributions to an Understanding of Complexity, by Matthew Abraham, 2000,

which describes a book on complexity theory that, besides pronouncements about physics, also provides what “could very well be called a ‘postmodern ethic.’ “

The book reviewed is Paul Cilliers’s Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems.

A search for related material on Cilliers yields the following:

Janis Joplin, Postmodernist

” …’all’ is ‘one,’ … the time is ‘now’ and … ‘tomorrow never happens,’ …. as Janis Joplin says, ‘it’s all the same fucking day.’

It appears that ‘time,’ … the linear, independent notion of ‘time’ that our culture embraces, is an artifact of our abstract thinking …

The problem is that ‘tomorrow never happens’ …. Aboriginal traditionalists are well aware of this topological paradox and so was Janis Joplin. Her use of the expletive in this context is therefore easy to understand … love is never having to say ‘tomorrow.’ “

— Web page citing Paul Cilliers

“That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.”

— Ryan O’Neal in “What’s Up, Doc?”

A more realistic look at postmodernism in action is provided by the following news story:

Brutal Death of an Actress Is France’s Summertime Drama

By JOHN TAGLIABUE

The actress, Marie Trintignant, died Friday [Aug. 1, 2003] in a Paris hospital, with severe head and face injuries. Her rock star companion, Bertrand Cantat, is confined to a prison hospital….

According to news reports, Ms. Trintignant and Mr. Cantat argued violently in their hotel room in Vilnius in the early hours of [Sunday] July 27 at the end of a night spent eating and drinking….

In coming months, two films starring Ms. Trintignant are scheduled to debut, including “Janis and John” by the director Samuel Benchetrit, her estranged husband and the father of two of her four children. In it, Ms. Trintignant plays Janis Joplin.

— New York Times of Aug. 5, 2003

” ‘…as a matter of fact, as we discover all the time, tomorrow never happens, man. It’s all the same f…n’ day, man!’ –Janis Joplin, at live performance in Calgary on 4th July 1970 – exactly four months before her death. (apologies for censoring her exact words which can be heard on the ‘Janis Joplin in Concert’ CD)”

— Janis Joplin at FamousTexans.com

All of the above fits in rather nicely with the view of science and scientists in the C. S. Lewis classic That Hideous Strength, which I strongly recommend.

For those few who both abhor postmodernism and regard the American Mathematical Society Notices

as a sort of “holy place” of Platonism, I recommend a biblical reading–

Matthew 24:15, CEV:

“Someday you will see that Horrible Thing in the holy place….”

See also Logos and Logic for more sophisticated religious remarks, by Simone Weil, whose brother, mathematician André Weil, died five years ago today.

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Friday, July 18, 2003

Friday July 18, 2003

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 4:09 pm

Hideous Strength

On a Report from London:

Assuming rather prematurely that the body found in Oxfordshire today is that of David Kelly, Ministry of Defence germ-warfare expert and alleged leaker of information to the press, the Financial Times has the following:

“Mr Kelly’s death has stunned all the players involved in this drama, resembling as it does a fictitious political thriller.”

— Financial Times, July 18,
2003, 19:06 London time

I feel it resembles rather a fictitious religious thriller… Namely, That Hideous Strength, by C. S. Lewis. The use of the word “idea” in my entries’ headlines yesterday was not accidental. It is related to an occurrence of the word in Understanding: On Death and Truth, a set of journal entries from May 9-12. The relevant passage on “ideas” is quoted there, within commentary by an Oberlin professor:

‘He had never before known what an Idea meant: he had always thought till now that they were things inside one’s own head. But now, when his head was continually attacked and often completely filled with the clinging corruption of the training, this Idea towered up above him-something which obviously existed quite independently of himself and had hard rock surfaces which would not give, surfaces he could cling to.’

This too, I fear, is seldom communicated in the classroom, where opinion reigns supreme. But it has important implications for the way we understand argument.”

— “On Bringing One’s Life to a Point,” by Gilbert Meilaender, First Things, November 1994

“A certain kind of nominalist rejects the existence claim which the platonic realist makes: there are no abstract objects, so sentences such as ‘7 is prime’ are false….”

The claim that 7 is not prime is, regardless of its motives, dangerously stupid… A quality shared, it seems, by many in power these days.

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Wednesday, January 8, 2003

Wednesday January 8, 2003

Filed under: General — Tags: Into the Woods, La Selva — m759 @ 12:00 am

Into the Woods

From the Words on Film site:

"The proximal literary antecedents for Under the Volcano are Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, especially The Inferno, on the one hand, and on the other, the Faust legend as embodied in the dramatic poem Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the play Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe."

"In the opening page of the novel, we find the words "The Hotel Casino de la Selva stands on a slightly higher hill …" (Lowry, Volcano p. 3). "Selva" is one of the Spanish words for "woods." One of the cantinas in the novel is named El Bosque, and bosque is another Spanish word for "woods." The theme of being in a darkling woods is reiterated throughout the novel."

Literary Florence

Tonight's site music is "Children Will Listen,"
by Stephen Sondheim, from "Into the Woods."

Stephen Hawking is 61 today.
An appropriate gift might be a cassette version of
The Screwtape Letters, by C. S. Lewis,
narrated by John Cleese.

See also this review of Lewis's That Hideous Strength
and my entries of Dec. 31, 2002, and Jan. 4, 2003.

Comments (1)

Saturday, January 4, 2003

Saturday January 4, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:33 am

A Darker Side of C. S. Lewis

Known for his fairy-story series “The Chronicles of Narnia,” C. S. Lewis had a more serious — some might say darker — side.

His portrayals of science and scientists in That Hideous Strength give an accurate picture of moral degeneracy in that subculture. The hero of Lewis’s “space trilogy,” of which That Hideous Strength is the conclusion, is a philologist — a student of language. In keeping with Lewis’s interest in philology and in fairy stories, and with the fact that today is Jacob Grimm‘s birthday, here are some philological observations related to the word “middle” — as in the “middle earth” of Lewis’s friend Tolkien, or in “middle kingdom,” the Chinese name for China.

From a bulletin board site, sciforums.com, that bills itself as an “intelligent science community”:

Forum: Art & Culture

Thread: Red Dragon

User: aseedrain

I’ve just watched “Red Dragon”. Not bad actually but there was a triviality in the film that somewhat spoilt my appreciation of it. In the film, the serial killer (played by Ralph Fiennes) leaves a mark behind – a Chinese character. The character is explained as a character that appear [sic] on mahjung pieces that carries the meaning ‘red dragon’.

Now I know for a fact that the Chinese character that appears in the film means ‘centre’ or ‘middle’. It is one of the two characters that make up the name “China” or its literal translation “Middle Kingdom”. I’m no expert on the mahjung game but I do know that even in the game, the piece that carry [sic] this character is also referred as “chung” meaning ‘middle’. I have never come across any instances where this particular character referred to dragons.

Therefore, in the absence of any other explanation, I assume the film made a mistake with this little detail….

From the Four Winds Mah Jong site:

The developers of the classical Mah Jong were educated and knew well the classical Chinese philosophical and mythological tradition, particularly the Book of Changes and the Book of Surprises. The elements of the game symbolize interaction of the three extremes of the universe: Heaven, Earth and Man, expressed in many ways, not only by images graved in the tiles, but also in a way the tiles form numerically significant groups and combinations.

Thus 144 is said to be the number of the plan of Earth, and the square formed by the tiles can be seen as a symbolic representation of the universe. Heaven is manifested in the Four Seasons, Earth in the Four regions (East, South, West and North), and Man in the Four Flowers (symbolizing motion or life). The Dragons (‘San Yuan’ or ‘San Chi’ in Chinese, meaning “Extremes”) symbolize Heaven (White Dragon, ‘Po’, meaning “white” or” blank”), Earth (Green Dragon, ‘Fa’, meaning “prosperous”) and Man (Red Dragon, ‘Chung’, meaning “center”, i.e. “between Heaven and Earth”).

From another mah jong site:

Red Dragon
Chinese Character: “Chung”

The true name of this tile is represented by the Chinese character “Chung” which means centre or middle. The “Chung” character represents interpretation an arrow striking the centre of a target. The meaning of this tile is therefore – success or achievement.

This tile is the counterpart of the “The Green Dragon” tile which shows the arrow about to leave the bow. It is commonly called “The Red Dragon” in western Mah Jong sets because the “Chung” character is generally drawn in red ink.

From a page on a pilot of the USAF China National Aviation Corp. (CNAC) Air Transport Command Group:

The significance of the chung on the plane is explained here. Suggested as an insignia by General Claire Chennault in 1942, it may be imagined to have signified — as on the mah jong tile — success or achievement in this area as well.

Let us hope that philologists and fairy-tale students like Grimm and Lewis — rather than followers of the religion of scientism — continue to inspire and guide those who must fight for our values.

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