The above Livingstone obituary is dated January 29, 2024.
See as well that date in this journal, and some remarks
by Bernd Witte on Walter Benjamin, science, language, and religion.
Sunday, March 17, 2024
The Livingstone Dies Natalis
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Saturday, March 16, 2024
Immanentizing the Eschaton: The Source
See also "Circle in the Square" and Fulcrum.
The above is from a post, "Immanentizing the Eschaton," in this
journal on March 6, 2024. For the significance of that date to
San Juan Capistrano , see a New York Times obituary online today.
See as well the source of the above remarks by Walter Benjamin.
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Wednesday, September 4, 2019
Wednesday, August 28, 2019
Tiger’s Leap to 1905
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Tuesday, August 27, 2019
Tiger Leaps
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Saturday, July 9, 2011
Blessings from the Apollo
Part I, Midday —
Yesterday's midday NY Lottery "689" suggests (from April 3, 2005)—
| 689 |  |
[fú] blessing, good fortune |
Diagram taken from R. Sing,
“Chinese New Year’s Dragon Teacher’s Guide”
— and the 4-digit midday number suggests a NASA Picture of the Day
that was published (not taken) on 7795 (7/7/95)—
Part II, Evening —
Suggested by yesterday's evening NY Lottery "068"
and by Weltschmerz and the Ursprache —
— Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and On the Language of Man” (1916),
Edmund Jephcott, tr., Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume I: 1913-1926 ,
Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, eds., Cambridge, MA,
Harvard University Press, 1996, pp. 62-74. The above is page 68.
A more entertaining meditation is suggested by yesterday's 4-digit evening NY number—
a video tribute to a song said to have been released as a single on 7383 (7/3/83)—
Related material— "Dark Side of the Moon" in this journal.
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Thursday, May 19, 2011
Bedrock
Today's previous post suggests the following—
Bester on bedrock and "the bottom line of all existence" suggests
a review of Wallace Stevens's "The Rock." Some background:
See Succor, May 11, and But Seriously, May 12.
See also Waiting for Benjamin, May 15.
Larry McMurtry famously wrote of reading Walter Benjamin
at the Dairy Queen. I never read Benjamin there, but I did
read at least some of the Bester book quoted above.
The bottom lines of this peculiar meditation—
It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves.
We must be cured of it by a cure of the ground
Or a cure of ourselves, that is equal to a cure
Of the ground, a cure beyond forgetfulness.
And yet the leaves, if they broke into bud,
If they broke into bloom, if they bore fruit,
And if we ate the incipient colorings
Of their fresh culls might be a cure of the ground.
— "The Rock," a poem by Wallace Stevens from
a section with the same title in the Collected Poems .
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Sunday, May 15, 2011
Waiting for Benjamin
… Walter Benjamin, that is… At the Dairy Queen.
(With apologies to Parker Posey.)
"One of Benjamin's many unrealised projects was a book
that would consist only of culls from already existing material;
he would do no more than arrange and edit."
— Screenwriter Frederic Raphael, May 2011 Literary Review
Raphael is clever, but I prefer Wallace Stevens on culls—
It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves.
We must be cured of it by a cure of the ground
Or a cure of ourselves, that is equal to a cure
Of the ground, a cure beyond forgetfulness.
And yet the leaves, if they broke into bud,
If they broke into bloom, if they bore fruit,
And if we ate the incipient colorings
Of their fresh culls might be a cure of the ground.
Dairy Queen — Click to enlarge—
See also Stevens and "The Rock" in this journal and today's "Shoe."
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Sunday, May 1, 2011
Quarantine Story
A link in the previous post to Delos in this journal mentions physicist John Cramer.
His daughter Kathryn's weblog mentions the following story—
Graffiti in the Library of Babel • David Langford
—from her forthcoming anthology Year's Best SF 16 .
From the Langford story—
"'I suppose we have a sort of duty…' Out of the corner of her eye Ceri saw her notes window change. She hadn't touched the keyboard or mouse. Just before the flatscreen went black and flickered into a reboot sequence, she saw the coloured tags where no tags had been before. In her own notes. Surrounding the copied words 'quarantine regulations.'"
Related material from this journal last Jan. 9 —
"Show me all the blueprints."
– Leonardo DiCaprio in "The Aviator" (2004)
DiCaprio in "Inception"
In the "blueprints" link above, DiCaprio's spelling of "Q-U-A-R-A-N-T-I-N-E" is of particular interest.
See also a search for Inception in this journal.
A post on a spelling bee at the end of that search quotes an essay on Walter Benjamin—
This blissful state between the world and its creator as expressed in Adamic language has its end, of course, in the Fall. The “ignorance” introduced into the world that ultimately drives our melancholic state of acedia has its inception with the Fall away from the edenic union that joins God’s plan to the immediacy of the material world. What ensues, says Benjamin, is an overabundance of conventional languages, a prattle of meanings now localized hence arbitrary. A former connection to a defining origin has been lost; and an overdetermined, plethoric state of melancholia forms. Over-determination stems from over-naming. “Things have no proper names except in God. . . . In the language of men, however, they are overnamed.” Overnaming becomes “the linguistic being of melancholy.”7
7 Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and On the Languages of Man,” Edmund Jephcott, tr., Walter Benjamin , Selected Writings , Volume I: 1913-1926 , Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, eds., Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 73.
Compare and contrast with a remark by a translator mentioned here previously —
I fancy, myself, that this self-consciousness about translation dates approximately from the same time as man's self-consciousness about language itself. Genesis tells us that Adam named all the animals (just as in Indian tradition the monkey-god Hanuman invented grammar by naming all the plants in the Garden of Illo Tempore). No doubts, no self-consciousness: "Whatever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof." (Genesis II, 19). But after the expulsion from Paradise I see Adam doubting the moment the possibility occurs that another name might be possible. And isn't that what all translators are? Proposers, in another language, of another name ?
— Helen Lane in Translation Review , Vol. 5, 1980
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Tuesday, April 3, 2007
Tuesday April 3, 2007
Our Judeo-Christian
Heritage –
Lottery
Hermeneutics
Part I: Judeo
| The Lottery 12/9/06 | Mid-day | Evening |
| New York | 036
See |
331
See 3/31— “square crystal” and “the symbolism could not have been more perfect.” |
| Pennsylvania | 602
See 6/02— Walter Benjamin |
111
See 1/11— “Related material:
|
Part II: Christian
| The Lottery 4/3/07 | Mid-day | Evening |
| New York | 115
See 1/15— |
017
See
|
| Pennsylvania | 604
See |
714
See |
Related material:
It is perhaps relevant to
this Holy Week that the
date 6/04 (2006) above
refers to both the Christian
holy day of Pentecost and
to the day of the
facetious baccalaureate
of the Class of 2006 in
the University Chapel
at Princeton.
For further context for the
Log24 remarks of that same
date, see June 1-15, 2006.
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Sunday, December 10, 2006
Sunday December 10, 2006
The Matrix:
Time and Chance
on the 90th Birthday
of Kirk Douglas,
star of
“The Garden of Allah“
| The Lottery 12/9/06 | Mid-day | Evening |
| New York | 036
See |
331
See 3/31— “square crystal” and “the symbolism could not have been more perfect.” |
| Pennsylvania | 602
See 6/02— Walter Benjamin |
111
See 1/11— “Related material: |
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Friday, June 2, 2006
Friday June 2, 2006
'Ursprache' beats 'weltschmerz'
to win American spelling bee
Weltschmerz
and the
Ursprache
to win American spelling bee
Weltschmerz
and the
Ursprache
From eudaemonist.com,
a quotation from
Paul Zanker's
The Mask of Socrates:
"Zanker describes the photograph [above] as 'Walter Benjamin looking out at the viewer, his head propped on his hand, his face filled with loneliness and weltschmerz.'"
Benjamin was a Jewish Marxist. For a Jewish perspective on spelling, see Log24, Nov. 11, 2005. For a leftist perspective on Benjamin and last night's crucial spelling word "Ursprache," see "Ground Zero, an American Origin," by Mary Caputi (Poroi, 2, 1, August 2003):
The Baroque sensibility of ruin emphasizes a meaninglessness that too many possibilities deliver. Aimlessness and malaise make life into exhausting toil in the absence of coherence. In overdetermined realities, meaning appears arbitrary and erratic, as the world's connection to God seems lost or withheld. At the extreme, everyday life is as full of noise and commotion as it is devoid of intrinsic meaning. Connections among people wither with the onset of overabundance and despair. Recognition of this condition induces acedia, a weariness of life. Here the malaise of modernity and ruins ties to Benjamin's interest in Trauerspiel, German tragic drama, and the tragedies of Shakespeare. All respond to a plague of lost spiritual connections and a meaningless earthly existence where incessant toil and trouble — "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" — contribute to a chronic, wearing sense of pain.
Benjamin's interest in this form of melancholia, from suffering a sort of spiritual exile, is evident in his 1916 essay "On Language as Such and On the Language of Man." In this text, he explains that the Ursprache, our "original" language, is "blissful" precisely because it lacks the arbitrariness that results from overdetermination. Ur-speech is Adamic language, the linguistic power that God gives to Adam to confer identity on the material world. It contains no arbitrary component, but reveals the unity between God's divine plan and the world as it exists. Before ruins and fragments, there is no overdetermination to induce the melancholy of acedia. Instead the originary language implies a unity of transcendent and immanent realms. "With the creative omnipotence of language it begins, and at the end of language, as it were, assimilates the created, names it. Language is therefore both the creative and the finished creation; it is word and nature."6
This blissful state between the world and its creator as expressed in Adamic language has its end, of course, in the Fall. The "ignorance" introduced into the world that ultimately drives our melancholic state of acedia has its inception with the Fall away from the edenic union that joins God's plan to the immediacy of the material world. What ensues, says Benjamin, is an overabundance of conventional languages, a prattle of meanings now localized hence arbitrary. A former connection to a defining origin has been lost; and an overdetermined, plethoric state of melancholia forms. Over-determination stems from over-naming. "Things have no proper names except in God. . . . In the language of men, however, they are overnamed." Overnaming becomes "the linguistic being of melancholy."7
6 Walter Benjamin, "On Language as Such and On the Languages of Man," Edmund Jephcott, tr., Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume I: 1913-1926, Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, eds., Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 68. 7 Ibid., p. 73.
For a Christian perspective on Adamic language, see Charles Williams's The Place of the Lion.
Float like a butterfly,
sting like a
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Sunday, December 12, 2004
Sunday December 12, 2004
Ideas, Stories, Values:
Literati in Deep Confusion
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live….
We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas‘ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.”
Interview with Joseph Epstein:
“You can do in stories things that are above those in essays,” says Epstein. “In essays and piecework, you are trying to make a point, whereas in stories you are not quite sure what the point is. T.S. Eliot once said of Henry James, ‘He had a mind so fine no idea could violate it,’ which, I think, is the ultimate compliment for an author. Stories are above ideas.”
Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers, Sept. 12, 2004:
“You are entering a remarkable community, the Harvard community. It is a community built on the idea of searching for truth… on the idea of respect for others….
… we practice the values we venerate. The values of seeking truth, the values of respecting others….”
“… Hegel discusses ‘culture’ as the ‘world of self-alienated spirit.’ The idea seems to be that humans in society not only interact, but that they collectively create relatively enduring cultural products (stories, dramas, and so forth) within which they can recognise their own patterns of life reflected.”
The “phantasmagoria” of Didion seems related to the “phenomenology” of Hegel…
From Michael N. Forster, Hegel’s Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit:
“This whole system is conceived, on one level at least, as a defense or rational reworking of the Christian conception of God. In particular, its three parts are an attempt to make sense of the Christian idea of a God who is three in one — the Logic depicting God as he is in himself, the Philosophy of Nature God the Son, and the Philosophy of Spirit God the Holy Spirit.”
and, indeed, to the phenomenology of narrative itself….
From Patrick Vert,
The Narrative of Acceleration:
“There are plenty of anecdotes to highlight the personal, phenomenological experience of railway passage…
… a unique study on phantasmagoria and the history of imagination. The word originates [in] light-projection, the so-called ghost-shows of the early 19th century….
… thought becomes a phantasmagorical process, a spectral, representative location for the personal imagination that had been marginalized by scientific rationalism….
Truly, ‘immediate experience is [or becomes] the phantasmagoria of the idler’ [Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Page 801.]….
Thought as phantasm is a consequence of the Cartesian split, and… a further consequence to this is the broad take-over of perceptual faculty…. What better example than that of the American railway? As a case-study it offers explanation to the ‘phantasmagoria of the idler’….
This phantasmagoria became more mediated over time…. Perception became increasingly visually oriented…. As this occurred, a narrative formed to encapsulate the phenomenology of it all….”
For such a narrative, see
the Log24.net entries of
November 5, 2002, 2:56 AM,
November 5, 2002, 6:29 AM,
January 3, 2003, 11:59 PM,
August 17, 2004, 7:29 PM,
August 18, 2004, 2:18 AM,
August 18, 2004, 3:00 AM, and
November 24, 2004, 10:00 AM.
Thursday, September 16, 2004
Thursday September 16, 2004
The Fullness of Time
“In the fullness of time,
educated people will believe
there is no soul
independent of the body,
and hence no life after death.”
— Francis Crick
|
PARAPHRASE OF THE PROSE after Walter Benjamin You live alone in — Gershom Scholem, |
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Wednesday, September 15, 2004
Wednesday September 15, 2004
Shakespeare
for Rosh Hashanah
From “Walter Benjamin,
1892-1940,”
by Hannah Arendt
(Introduction to
Benjamin’s Illuminations.):
THE PEARL DIVER
Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
— THE TEMPEST, I, 2
“… we are dealing here with something which may not be unique but is certainly extremely rare: the gift of thinking poetically.
And this thinking, fed by the present, works with the ‘thought fragments’ it can wrest from the past and gather about itself. Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths, and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the past– but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things ‘suffer a sea-change’ and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living– as ‘thought fragments,’ as something ‘rich and strange,’ and perhaps even as everlasting Urphänomene.”
For examples of everlasting Urphänomene, see Translation Plane for Rosh Hashanah and The Square Wheel; recall that on this date
“In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws deprived German Jews of their citizenship and made the swastika the official symbol of Nazi Germany.”
— Today in History, the Miami Herald
(For some further reflections on square wheels, see Triumph of the Cross.)
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Wednesday September 15, 2004
On Translation
From Illuminations, by Walter Benjamin, translated by Harry Zohn:
“If there is such a thing as a language of truth, the tensionless and even silent depository of the ultimate truth which all thought strives for, then this language of truth is– the true language. And this very language, whose divination and description is the only perfection a philosopher can hope for, is concealed in concentrated fashion in translations. There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation. But despite the claims of sentimental artists, these two are not banausic. For there is a philosophical genius that is characterized by a yearning for that language which manifests itself in translations: ‘Les langues imparfaites en cela que plusieurs, manque la suprême: penser étant écrire sans accessoires, ni chuchotement mais tacite encore l’immortelle parole, la diversité, sur terre, des idiomes empêche personne de proférer les mots qui, sinon se trouveraient, par une frappe unique, elle-même matériellement la vérité.’* If what Mallarmé evokes here is fully fathomable to a philosopher, translation, with its rudiments of such a language, is midway between poetry and doctrine. Its products are less sharply defined, but it leaves no less of a mark on history.”
* “The imperfection of languages consists in their plurality, the supreme one is lacking: thinking is writing without accessories or even whispering, the immortal word still remains silent; the diversity of idioms on earth prevents everybody from uttering the words which otherwise, at one single stroke, would materialize as truth.’
— Stéphane Mallarmé / Crise de vers
(The Benjamin is from a copy of Illuminations I purchased exactly 12 years ago, on Sept. 15, 1992.)
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Saturday, June 26, 2004
Saturday June 26, 2004
Deep Game
The entry Ado of June 25, 2004 contains a link to an earlier entry, A Form, continued, of June 5, 2004. This in turn contains a link to a site by Wolfgang Wildgen which contains the following:
“Historically, we may say that the consequence of Bruno’s parallel work on cosmology and artificial memory is a new model of semantic fields which was so radical in its time that the first modern followers (although ignorant of this tradition) are the Von-Neumann automata and the neural net systems of the 1980s (cf. Wildgen 1998
: 39, 237f).”
Wildgen, W. 1998. Das kosmische Gedächtnis. Kosmologie, Semiotik und Gedächtniskunst im Werke von Giordano Bruno. Frankfurt/Bern: Lang.
For an applet illustrating
the above remarks, see
the above remarks, see
Gedächtniskunst:
Figure A
Neighborhood in a
Cellular Automaton
by Adam Campbell
For more of the Gedächtnis
in this Kunst, see the following
Google search on shc759:
Figure B
Note that the reference to “forerunners” in fig. B occurs in a journal entry of June 12, 2002. See also the reference to a journal entry of the following day, June 13, 2002, in last Tuesday’s Dirty Trick.
Those who have viewed Campbell’s applet (see fig. A) may appreciate the following observation of poet and Dante translator Robert Pinsky:
“… a grid, and a flow–
that is the essence of terza rima….”
that is the essence of terza rima….”
— Poetry, Computers, and Dante’s Inferno
For some related remarks
on the muses and epic poetry,
see a paper on Walter Benjamin:
“Here the memory (Gedächtnis) means
‘the epic faculty par excellence.’ “
(Benjamin, Der Erzähler, 1936: in
Gesammelte Schriften, 1991, II.2, 453)
One possible connection to the muses is, as noted in a link in yesterday’s Ado, via George Balanchine.
An apt link to epic poetry (aside from the reference to Dante above) is, via the June 12, 2002, entry, to the epic The Gameplayers of Zan (the third reference in fig. B above).
The applet linked below fig. A very nicely illustrates the “structured chaos” of a space described by automata theory. For a literary approach to such a space, see the Gameplayers entry.
For the benefit of art critic Robert Hughes, who recently made a distinction between “fast art” and “slow art,” the Campbell applet has a convenient speed control.
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