Log24

Monday, April 27, 2020

The Cracked Nut

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 1:25 pm

“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

“… the stabiliser of an octad preserves the affine space structure on its
complement, and (from the construction) induces AGL(4,2) on it.
(It induces A8 on the octad, the kernel of this action being the translation
group of the affine space.)”

— Peter J. Cameron,
The Geometry of the Mathieu Groups (pdf)

“The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning
of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not
typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the
meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside…."

— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness

Friday, March 29, 2019

The Blazon World*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:59 pm

“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

* Title suggested by that of a Siri Hustvedt novel.
   See also Blazon in this journal.

Friday, June 29, 2012

The Uploading (continued)*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:29 pm

It Must Be Abstract
It Must Change
It Must Give Pleasure

— Parts of a poem by Wallace Stevens

“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

      Of Time and the River and the Frogs —

Video uploaded on Jan. 26, 2008, of talk, 'The Lively Kernel,' on object-oriented software

* This post's title refers to the above uploading date—  Jan. 26, 2008.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

The Race

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:14 am
 
IMAGE- From Esther Dyson- Boats on the Charles- 'Race you to the bridge!'

An image related to
the Flesh obituary below—

See "As It Lays" in this journal.

Vegas background for 'Play It As It Lays'

(Not as it lies .)

New York Times 
obituaries today—

 

Click to enlarge.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110721-NYT-Gayler-240w.jpg

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110721-NYT-Flesh-240w.jpg

     "That's GUY-ler, not GAY-ler."

      See also Time and the River, Number of the Beast, and Story Theory.

Monday, February 28, 2011

Original Facebook

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

"What is your original face before you were born?" — Zen riddle

See also yesterday's sermon, the birth date of William Faulkner, and Of Time and the River.

Monday, May 5, 2008

Monday May 5, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:07 pm
Time and the River

“At the edge of the meadow
flowed the river.

Nick was glad
to get to the river.

He walked upstream
through the meadow.”

— Ernest Hemingway

Pennsylvania Lottery
May 5, 2008:

PA Lottery May 5, 2008: mid-day 216, evening 725

Related material:

2/16,  7/25

“In the swamp the banks were bare, the big cedars came together overhead, the sun did not come through, except in patches; in the fast deep water, in the half light, the fishing would be tragic. In the swamp fishing was a tragic adventure. Nick did not want it. He did not want to go down the stream any further today.”

— Ernest Hemingway,
Big Two-Hearted River

Friday, January 25, 2008

Friday January 25, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 5:01 pm

Time and the River

Harvard Class of 1964
Twenty-fifth Anniversary Report:

"At this writing (November, '88), President-elect Bush has just announced his intention to name me to his Cabinet and to nominate me as Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Given the state of play in Washington, I suppose I may find myself in premature retirement by the time this report is published.

That is not an entirely unattractive prospect. Kath (Kathleen Emmet, '64) and I live in an idyllic setting, overlooking the Little Falls of the Potomac, just twelve minutes upstream from the Capitol. She writes– she's now completing a book on American writers in Paris after World War II. Our children (Willy and Jonathan) do what healthy growing twelve- and seven-year-olds do. The river works its way peacefully over the falls and riffles around a woodsy island through the Chain Bridge narrows, and then on into the familar wide mud-basin of Washington– a wholly different world.

When I was an undergraduate, I asked all the adolescent questions. I still do: Why does the river flow the way it does? Why does one move downstream and back? The allure of such simple questions is as great for me today as when we talked of them so seriously and so long at the University Restaurant or the Casablanca, or on the steps of Widener. The only difference seems to be that I'm now a bit more willing to settle for answers that seem simpler, less profound, sometimes even trite. But only a bit."

— Richard Darman, who died today at 64

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Thursday June 21, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 12:07 pm

Let No Man
Write My Epigraph

(See entries of June 19th.)

"His graceful accounts of the Bach Suites for Unaccompanied Cello illuminated the works’ structural logic as well as their inner spirituality."

—Allan Kozinn on Mstislav Rostropovich in The New York Times, quoted in Log24 on April 29, 2007

"At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction…. the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity."

— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River, quoted in Log24 on June 9, 2005

"… the stabiliser of an octad preserves the affine space structure on its complement, and (from the construction) induces AGL(4,2) on it. (It induces A8 on the octad, the kernel of this action being the translation group of the affine space.)"

— Peter J. Cameron, "The Geometry of the Mathieu Groups" (pdf)

"… donc Dieu existe, réponse!"

— Attributed, some say falsely,
to Leonhard Euler
 
"Only gradually did I discover
what the mandala really is:
'Formation, Transformation,
Eternal Mind's eternal recreation'"

(Faust, Part Two, as
quoted by Jung in
Memories, Dreams, Reflections)

 

Wolfgang Pauli as Mephistopheles

"Pauli as Mephistopheles
in a 1932 parody of
Goethe's Faust at Niels Bohr's
institute in Copenhagen.
The drawing is one of
many by George Gamow
illustrating the script."
— Physics Today
 

"Borja dropped the mutilated book on the floor with the others. He was looking at the nine engravings and at the circle, checking strange correspondences between them.

'To meet someone' was his enigmatic answer. 'To search for the stone that the Great Architect rejected, the philosopher's stone, the basis of the philosophical work. The stone of power. The devil likes metamorphoses, Corso.'"

— The Club Dumas, basis for the Roman Polanski film "The Ninth Gate" (See 12/24/05.)


"Pauli linked this symbolism
with the concept of automorphism."

— The Innermost Kernel
 (previous entry)

And from
"Symmetry in Mathematics
and Mathematics of Symmetry"
(pdf), by Peter J. Cameron,
a paper presented at the
International Symmetry Conference,
Edinburgh, Jan. 14-17, 2007,
we have

The Epigraph–

Weyl on automorphisms
(Here "whatever" should
of course be "whenever.")

Also from the
Cameron paper:

Local or global?

Among other (mostly more vague) definitions of symmetry, the dictionary will typically list two, something like this:

• exact correspondence of parts;
• remaining unchanged by transformation.

Mathematicians typically consider the second, global, notion, but what about the first, local, notion, and what is the relationship between them?  A structure M is homogeneous if every isomorphism between finite substructures of M can be extended to an automorphism of M; in other words, "any local symmetry is global."

Some Log24 entries
related to the above politically
(women in mathematics)–

Global and Local:
One Small Step

and mathematically–

Structural Logic continued:
Structure and Logic (4/30/07):

This entry cites
Alice Devillers of Brussels–

Alice Devillers

"The aim of this thesis
is to classify certain structures
which are, from a certain
point of view, as homogeneous
as possible, that is which have
  as many symmetries as possible."

"There is such a thing
as a tesseract."

— Madeleine L'Engle 

Friday, January 5, 2007

Friday January 5, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:26 am
Time and the River

Front page of The New York Times Book Review, issue dated January 7, 2007:

“Time passes, and what it passes through is people– though people believe that they are passing through time, and even, at certain euphoric moments, directing time.  It’s a delusion, but it’s where memoirs come from, or at least the very best ones.  They tell how destiny presses on desire and how desire pushes back, sometimes heroically, always poignantly, but never quite victoriously.  Life is an upstream, not an uphill, battle, and it results in just one story: how, and alongside whom, one used his paddle.”

— Walter Kirn, “Stone’s Diaries”

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Thursday, June 9, 2005

Thursday June 9, 2005

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:45 pm
Kernel of Eternity

continued

"At that instant he saw,
in one blaze of light,
an image of unutterable conviction….
the core of life, the essential pattern
whence all other things proceed,
the kernel of eternity."

— Thomas Wolfe,
Of Time and the River

From "The Relations between
Poetry and Painting," by Wallace Stevens:

"The theory of poetry, that is to say, the total of the theories of poetry, often seems to become in time a mystical theology or, more simply, a mystique. The reason for this must by now be clear. The reason is the same reason why the pictures in a museum of modern art often seem to become in time a mystical aesthetic, a prodigious search of appearance, as if to find a way of saying and of establishing that all things, whether below or above appearance, are one and that it is only through reality, in which they are reflected or, it may be, joined together, that we can reach them. Under such stress, reality changes from substance to subtlety…. It was from the point of view of… [such a] subtlety that Klee could write: 'But he is one chosen that today comes near to the secret places where original law fosters all evolution. And what artist would not establish himself there where the organic center of all movement in time and space—which he calls the mind or heart of creation— determines every function.' Conceding that this sounds a bit like sacerdotal jargon, that is not too much to allow to those that have helped to create a new reality, a modern reality, since what has been created is nothing less."

As yesterday's entry "Kernel of Eternity" indicated, the word "kernel" has a definite meaning in mathematics.  The Klein four-group, beloved of structural anthropologists and art theorists, is a particularly apt example of a kernel. (See PlanetMath for details.)

Diagrams of this group may have influenced Giovanni Sambin, professor of mathematical logic at the University of Padua; the following impressive-looking diagram is from Sambin's

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/SambinBP1Pic2A.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Sambin argues that this diagram reflects some of the basic structures of thought itself… making it perhaps one way to describe what  Klee called the "mind or heart of creation." 

But this verges on what Stevens called the sacerdotal.  It seems that a simple picture of the "kernel of eternity" as the four-group, a picture without reference to logic or philosophy, and without distracting letters and labels, is required.  The following is my attempt to supply such a picture:

Klein four-group

This is a picture of the four-group
as a permutation group on four points.
Pairs of colored arrows indicate the three
transformations other than the identity,
which may be regarded either as
invisible or as rendered by
the four black points themselves.

Update of 7:45 PM Thursday:

Review of the above (see comments)
by a typical Xanga reader:

"Ur a FUCKIN' LOSER!!!!!  LMFAO!!!!"

For more merriment, see
The Optical Unconscious
and
The Painted Word.

A recent Xangan movie review:

"Annakin's an idiot, but he's not an idiot because that's the way the character works, he's an idiot because George Lucas was too lazy to make him anything else. He has to descend to the Daaaahk Side, but the dark side never really seems all that dark. He kills children, but offscreen. We never get to see the transformation. One minute he cares about the republic, the next he's killing his friends, and then for some reason he's duelling with Obi Wan on a lava flow. Who cares? Not me….

So a big ol' fuck you to George Lucas. Fuck you, George!"

Both Xangans seem to be fluent in what Tom Wolfe has called the "fuck patois."

A related suggestion from Google:

Give Dad a photo gift

These remarks from Xangans and Google
 suggest the following photo gift,
based on a 2003 journal entry:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05A/050609-Fahne.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Wednesday, June 8, 2005

Wednesday June 8, 2005

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 4:00 pm

Kernel of Eternity

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

“… the stabiliser of an octad preserves the affine space structure on its complement, and (from the construction) induces AGL(4,2) on it. (It induces A8 on the octad, the kernel of this action being the translation group of the affine space.)”

— Peter J. Cameron,
The Geometry of the Mathieu Groups (pdf)

“… donc Dieu existe, réponse!”

— attributed, some say falsely, to Leonhard Euler

Sunday, June 8, 2003

Sunday June 8, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:04 am

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

Powered by WordPress