The reference in the previous post to the Hollywood blacklist suggests
a review of a more interesting kind of list.
See "I Ching" + Ideas posts and . . .
Thursday, January 11, 2024
December 17 Flashback: The List
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Saturday, October 28, 2017
Just the Facts
The New Yorker on the recent film "The Square" —
"It’s an aesthetic that presents,
so to speak, just the facts,
as if the facts themselves weren’t
deeply layered with living history
and crisscrossed with vectors
of divergent ideas and ideals."
— Richard Brody, Thursday, Oct. 26, 2017
For other images deeply layered and crisscrossed ,
see Geometry of the I Ching.
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Wednesday, March 29, 2017
Design Abyss
Hexagram 29,
The Abyss (Water)
This post was suggested by an August 6, 2010, post by the designer
(in summer or fall, 2010) of the Stack Exchange math logo (see
the previous Log24 post, Art Space Illustrated) —
In that post, the designer quotes the Wilhelm/Baynes I Ching to explain
his choice of Hexagram 63, Water Over Fire, as a personal icon —
"When water in a kettle hangs over fire, the two elements
stand in relation and thus generate energy (cf. the
production of steam). But the resulting tension demands
caution. If the water boils over, the fire is extinguished
and its energy is lost. If the heat is too great, the water
evaporates into the air. These elements here brought in
to relation and thus generating energy are by nature
hostile to each other. Only the most extreme caution
can prevent damage."
See also this journal on Walpurgisnacht (April 30), 2010 —
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Hexagram 29:
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Hexagram 30:
"Hates California,
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A thought from another German-speaking philosopher —
"Die Philosophie ist ein Kampf gegen die Verhexung
unsres Verstandes durch die Mittel unserer Sprache."
See also The Crimson 's abyss in today's 4:35 AM post Art Space, Continued.
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Sunday, November 9, 2014
Sermon
The Ideas
| “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.” — Joan Didion |
See Didion and the I Ching and posts tagged Plato in China .
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Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Boundary
A comment yesterday on the New York Times philosophy column “The Stone” quoted Karl Barth—
“Man is the creature of the boundary between heaven and earth.”
See also Plato’s theory of ideas (or “forms”) and the I Ching—
The eight trigrams are images not so much of objects as of states of change. This view is associated with the concept expressed in the teachings of Lao-tse, as also in those of Confucius, that every event in the visible world is the effect of an “image,” that is, of an idea in the unseen world. Accordingly, everything that happens on earth is only a reproduction, as it were, of an event in a world beyond our sense perception; as regards its occurrence in time, it is later than the suprasensible event. The holy men and sages, who are in contact with those higher spheres, have access to these ideas through direct intuition and are therefore able to intervene decisively in events in the world. Thus man is linked with heaven, the suprasensible world of ideas, and with earth, the material world of visible things, to form with these a trinity of the primal powers.
— Richard Wilhelm, Introduction to the I Ching
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Monday, September 7, 2009
Monday September 7, 2009
Magic Boxes
"Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas– only I don't exactly know what they are!…. Let's have a look at the garden first!"
— A passage from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass. The "garden" part– but not the "ideas" part– was quoted by Jacques Derrida in Dissemination in the epigraph to Chapter 7, "The Time before First."
Commentary
on the passage:
Part I "The Magic Box," shown on Turner Classic Movies earlier tonight
Part II: "Mimsy Were the Borogoves," a classic science fiction story:
"… he lifted a square, transparent crystal block, small enough to cup in his palm– much too small to contain the maze of apparatus within it. In a moment Scott had solved that problem. The crystal was a sort of magnifying glass, vastly enlarging the things inside the block. Strange things they were, too. Miniature people, for example– They moved. Like clockwork automatons, though much more smoothly. It was rather like watching a play."
Part III: A Crystal Block —
Image of pencils is by
Diane Robertson Design.
Related material:
"A Four-Color Theorem."
Part IV:
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Monday, June 16, 2008
Monday June 16, 2008
Bloomsday for Nash:
The Revelation Game
(American Mathematical Society Feb. 2008
review of Steven Brams’s Superior Beings:
If They Exist, How Would We Know?)
(pdf, 15 megabytes)
"Brams does not attempt to prove or disprove God. He uses elementary ideas from game theory to create situations between a Person (P) and God (Supreme Being, SB) and discusses how each reacts to the other in these model scenarios….
In the 'Revelation Game,' for example, the Person (P) has two options:
1) P can believe in SB's existence
2) P can not believe in SB's existence
The Supreme Being also has two options:
1) SB can reveal Himself
2) SB can not reveal Himself
1) P can believe in SB's existence
2) P can not believe in SB's existence
The Supreme Being also has two options:
1) SB can reveal Himself
2) SB can not reveal Himself
Each player also has a primary and secondary goal. For the Person, the primary goal is to have his belief (or non-belief) confirmed by evidence (or lack thereof). The secondary goal is to 'prefer to believe in SB’s existence.' For the Supreme Being, the primary goal is to have P believe in His existence, while the secondary goal is to not reveal Himself. These goals allow us to rank all the outcomes for each player from best (4) to worst (1). We end up with a matrix as follows (the first number in the parentheses represents the SB's ranking for that box; the second number represents P's ranking):
The question we must answer is: what is the Nash equilibrium in this case?"
Analogously:
|
Lotteries on Bloomsday, June 16, 2008 |
Pennsylvania (No revelation) |
New York (Revelation) |
|
Mid-day (No belief) |
418
No belief, |
064
Revelation |
|
Evening (Belief) |
709
Belief without |
198
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The holy image
denoting belief and revelation
may be interpreted as
a black hole or as a
symbol by James Joyce:
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When? Going to dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc's auk's egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler. Where?
— Ulysses, conclusion of Chapter 17 |
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Sunday, June 8, 2008
Sunday June 8, 2008
| CHANGE TO BELIEVE IN |
Part I:
Part II:
16
|
Thus the ancient kings made music
In order to honor merit, And offered it with splendor To the Supreme Deity, Inviting their ancestors to be present. When, at the beginning of summer, thunder– electrical energy– comes rushing forth from the earth again, and the first thunderstorm refreshes nature, a prolonged state of tension is resolved. Joy and relief make themselves felt. So too, music has power to ease tension within the heart and to loosen the grip of obscure emotions. The enthusiasm of the heart expresses itself involuntarily in a burst of song, in dance and rhythmic movement of the body. From immemorial times the inspiring effect of the invisible sound that moves all hearts, and draws them together, has mystified mankind. Rulers have made use of this natural taste for music; they elevated and regulated it. Music was looked upon as something serious and holy, designed to purify the feelings of men. It fell to music to glorify the virtues of heroes and thus to construct a bridge to the world of the unseen. In the temple men drew near to God with music and pantomimes (out of this later the theater developed). Religious feeling for the Creator of the world was united with the most sacred of human feelings, that of reverence for the ancestors. The ancestors were invited to these divine services as guests of the Ruler of Heaven and as representatives of humanity in the higher regions. This uniting of the human past with the Divinity in solemn moments of religious inspiration established the bond between God and man. The ruler who revered the Divinity in revering his ancestors became thereby the Son of Heaven, in whom the heavenly and the earthly world met in mystical contact. These ideas are the final summation of Chinese culture. Confucius has said of the great sacrifice at which these rites were performed: "He who could wholly comprehend this sacrifice could rule the world as though it were spinning on his hand." |
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Sunday, December 16, 2007
Sunday December 16, 2007
Mad Phaedrus
Meets Mad Ezra
Meets Mad Ezra
"Plato's Good was a fixed and eternal and unmoving Idea, whereas for the rhetoricians it was not an Idea at all. The Good was not a form of reality. It was reality itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way." –Phaedrus in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
This apparent conflict between eternity and time, fixity and motion, permanence and change, is resolved by the philosophy of the I Ching and by the Imagism of Ezra Pound. Consider, for example, the image of The Well
as discussed here on All Saints' Day 2003 and in the previous entry.
As background, consider the following remarks of James Hillman in "Egalitarian Typologies Versus the Perception of the Unique," Part III: Persons as Images—
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"To conceive images as static is to forget that they are numens that move. Charles Olson, a later poet in this tradition, said: 'One perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception… always, always one perception must must must move instanter, on another.' 80 Remember Lavater and his insistence on instantaneity for reading the facial image. This is a kind of movement that is not narrational, and the Imagists had no place for narrative. 'Indeed the great poems to come after the Imagist period– Eliot’s The Waste Land and Four Quartets; Pound’s Cantos; Williams’s Paterson– contain no defining narrative.' 81 The kind of movement Olson urges is an inward deepening of the image, an in-sighting of the superimposed levels of significance within it. 82 This is the very mode that Jung suggested for grasping dreams– not as a sequence in time, but as revolving around a nodal complex. If dreams, then why not the dreamers. We too are not only a sequence in time, a process of individuation. We are also each an image of individuality."
80 The New American Poetry (D. M. Allen, ed.) N.Y.: Evergreen, Grove, 1960, pp. 387-88. from Jones, p. 42. 81 Jones,* p. 40. 82 H. D. later turned narration itself into image by writing a novel in which the stories were "compounded like faces seen one on top of another," or as she says "superimposed on one another like a stack of photographic negatives" (Jones, p. 42). Cf. Berry,** p. 63: "An image is simultaneous. No part precedes or causes another part, although all parts are involved with each other… We might imagine the dream as a series of superimpositions, each event adding texture and thickening to the rest." * Imagist Poetry (Peter Jones, ed.) London: Penguin, 1972 ** The contrast between image simultaneity and narrative succession, and the different psychological effects of the two modes, is developed by Patricia Berry, "An Approach to the Dream," Spring 1974 (N. Y./Zürich: Spring Publ.), pp. 63, 68-71 |
Hillman also says that
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"Jung’s 'complex' and Pound's definition of Image and Lavater's 'whole heap of images, thoughts, sensations, all at once' are all remarkably similar. Pound calls an Image, 'that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time'… 'the Image is more than an Idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy'… 'a Vortex, from which and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.' 79 Thus the movement, the dynamics, are within the complex and not only between complexes, as tensions of opposites told about in narrational sequences, stories that require arbitrary syntactical connectives which are unnecessary for reading an image where all is given at once."
79 These definitions of Image by Pound come from his various writings and can all be found in Jones, pp. 32-41. Further on complex and image, see J. B. Harmer, Victory in Limbo: Imagism 1908-17, London: Secker & Warburg, 1975, pp. 164-68. |
These remarks may help the reader to identify with Ada during her well-viewing in Cold Mountain (previous entry):
"She was dazzled by light and shade, by the confusing duplication of reflections and of frames. All coming from too many directions for the mind to take account of. The various images bounced against each other until she felt a desperate vertigo…."
If such complexity can be suggested by Hexagram 48, The Well, alone, consider the effect of the "cluster of fused ideas… endowed with energy" that is the entire 64-hexagram I Ching.
Related material: St. Augustine's Day 2006
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Tuesday, April 6, 2004
Tuesday April 6, 2004
Ideas and Art, Part III
The first idea was not our own. Adam
In Eden was the father of Descartes…
— Wallace Stevens, from
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction
"Quaedam ex his tanquam rerum imagines sunt, quibus solis proprie convenit ideae nomen: ut cùm hominem, vel Chimaeram, vel Coelum, vel Angelum, vel Deum cogito."
— Descartes, Meditationes III, 5
"Of my thoughts some are, as it were, images of things, and to these alone properly belongs the name idea; as when I think [represent to my mind] a man, a chimera, the sky, an angel or God."
— Descartes, Meditations III, 5
Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea
Of this invention, this invented world,
The inconceivable idea of the sun.
You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it.
— Wallace Stevens, from
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction
"… Quinimo in multis saepe magnum discrimen videor deprehendisse: ut, exempli causâ, duas diversas solis ideas apud me invenio, unam tanquam a sensibus haustam, & quae maxime inter illas quas adventitias existimo est recensenda, per quam mihi valde parvus apparet, aliam verò ex rationibus Astronomiae desumptam, hoc est ex notionibus quibusdam mihi innatis elicitam, vel quocumque alio modo a me factam, per quam aliquoties major quàm terra exhibetur; utraque profecto similis eidem soli extra me existenti esse non potest, & ratio persuadet illam ei maxime esse dissimilem, quae quàm proxime ab ipso videtur emanasse."
— Descartes, Meditationes III, 11
"… I have observed, in a number of instances, that there was a great difference between the object and its idea. Thus, for example, I find in my mind two wholly diverse ideas of the sun; the one, by which it appears to me extremely small draws its origin from the senses, and should be placed in the class of adventitious ideas; the other, by which it seems to be many times larger than the whole earth, is taken up on astronomical grounds, that is, elicited from certain notions born with me, or is framed by myself in some other manner. These two ideas cannot certainly both resemble the same sun; and reason teaches me that the one which seems to have immediately emanated from it is the most unlike."
— Descartes, Meditations III, 11
"Et quamvis forte una idea ex aliâ nasci possit, non tamen hîc datur progressus in infinitum, sed tandem ad aliquam primam debet deveniri, cujus causa sit in star archetypi, in quo omnis realitas formaliter contineatur, quae est in ideâ tantùm objective."
— Descartes, Meditationes III, 15
"And although an idea may give rise to another idea, this regress cannot, nevertheless, be infinite; we must in the end reach a first idea, the cause of which is, as it were, the archetype in which all the reality [or perfection] that is found objectively [or by representation] in these ideas is contained formally [and in act]."
— Descartes, Meditations III, 15
Michael Bryson in an essay on Stevens's "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,"
The Quest for the Fiction of the Absolute:
"Canto nine considers the movement of the poem between the particular and the general, the immanent and the transcendent: "The poem goes from the poet's gibberish to / The gibberish of the vulgate and back again. / Does it move to and fro or is it of both / At once?" The poet, the creator-figure, the shadowy god-figure, is elided, evading us, "as in a senseless element." The poet seeks to find the transcendent in the immanent, the general in the particular, trying "by a peculiar speech to speak / The peculiar potency of the general." In playing on the senses of "peculiar" as particular and strange or uncanny, these lines play on the mystical relation of one and many, of concrete and abstract."
Brian Cronin in Foundations of Philosophy:
"The insight is constituted precisely by 'seeing' the idea in the image, the intelligible in the sensible, the universal in the particular, the abstract in the concrete. We pivot back and forth between images and ideas as we search for the correct insight."
— From Ch. 2, Identifying Direct Insights
Michael Bryson in an essay on Stevens's "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction":
"The fourth canto returns to the theme of opposites. 'Two things of opposite natures seem to depend / On one another . . . . / This is the origin of change.' Change resulting from a meeting of opposities is at the root of Taoism: 'Tao produced the One. / The One produced the two. / The two produced the three. / And the three produced the ten thousand things' (Tao Te Ching 42) …."
|
From an entry of March 7, 2004:
From the web page
Introduction to the I Ching– "He who has perceived the meaning of change fixes his attention no longer on transitory individual things but on the immutable, eternal law at work in all change. This law is the tao of Lao-tse, the course of things, the principle of the one in the many. That it may become manifest, a decision, a postulate, is necessary. This fundamental postulate is the 'great primal beginning' of all that exists, t'ai chi — in its original meaning, the 'ridgepole.' Later Chinese philosophers devoted much thought to this idea of a primal beginning. A still earlier beginning, wu chi, was represented by the symbol of a circle. Under this conception, t'ai chi was represented by the circle divided into the light and the dark, yang and yin,
This symbol has also played a significant part in India and Europe. However, speculations of a gnostic-dualistic character are foreign to the original thought of the I Ching; what it posits is simply the ridgepole, the line. With this line, which in itself represents oneness, duality comes into the world, for the line at the same time posits an above and a below, a right and left, front and back-in a word, the world of the opposites." The t'ai chi symbol is also illustrated on the web page Cognitive Iconology, which says that
"W.J.T. Mitchell calls 'iconology' A variation on the t'ai chi symbol appears in a log24.net entry for March 5:
The Line, See too my web page Logos and Logic, which has the following:
Logos Alogos, In the conclusion of Section 3, Canto X, of "Notes," Stevens says
This is the logoi alogoi of Simone Weil. |
In "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,"
Wallace Stevens lists three criteria
for a work of the imagination:
It Must Be Abstract
The Line,
by S.H. Cullinane
It Must Change
It Must Give Pleasure
Related material:
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Sunday, March 7, 2004
Sunday March 7, 2004
Ridgepole
CBS News Sunday Morning today had a ridgepole ceremony for a house that was moved from China to Salem, Massachusetts.
From the web page
Introduction to the I Ching–
By Richard Wilhelm:
"He who has perceived the meaning of change fixes his attention no longer on transitory individual things but on the immutable, eternal law at work in all change. This law is the tao of Lao-tse, the course of things, the principle of the one in the many. That it may become manifest, a decision, a postulate, is necessary. This fundamental postulate is the 'great primal beginning' of all that exists, t'ai chi — in its original meaning, the 'ridgepole.' Later Chinese philosophers devoted much thought to this idea of a primal beginning. A still earlier beginning, wu chi, was represented by the symbol of a circle. Under this conception, t'ai chi was represented by the circle divided into the light and the dark, yang and yin, 
.
This symbol has also played a significant part in India and Europe. However, speculations of a gnostic-dualistic character are foreign to the original thought of the I Ching; what it posits is simply the ridgepole, the line. With this line, which in itself represents oneness, duality comes into the world, for the line at the same time posits an above and a below, a right and left, front and back-in a word, the world of the opposites."
The t'ai chi symbol is also illustrated on the web page Cognitive Iconology, which says that
"W.J.T. Mitchell calls 'iconology' a study of the 'logos' (the words, ideas, discourse, or 'science') of 'icons' (images, pictures, or likenesses). It is thus a 'rhetoric of images' (Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, p. 1)."
A variation on the t'ai chi symbol appears in a log24.net entry for March 5:
The Line,
by S. H. Cullinane
See too my web page Logos and Logic, which has the following:
"The beautiful in mathematics resides in contradiction. Incommensurability, logoi alogoi, was the first splendor in mathematics."
— Simone Weil, Oeuvres Choisies, éd. Quarto, Gallimard, 1999, p. 100
Logos Alogos,
by S. H. Cullinane
In the conclusion of Section 3, Canto X, of "Notes," Stevens says
"They will get it straight one day
at the Sorbonne.
We shall return at twilight
from the lecture
Pleased that
the irrational is rational…."
This is the logoi alogoi of Simone Weil.
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Sunday, January 11, 2004
Sunday January 11, 2004
The Lottery
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New York Midday: 720 Evening: 510 |
Pennsylvania Midday: 616 Evening: 201 |
What these numbers mean to me:
720: See the recent entries
720 in the Book, and
Report to the Joint Mathematics Meetings.
616 and 201:
The dates, 6/16 and 2/01,
of Bloomsday and St. Bridget's Day.
510: A more difficult association…
Perhaps "Love at the Five and Dime"
(8/3/03 and 1/4/04).
Perhaps Fred Astaire's birthday, 5/10.
More interesting…
A search for relevant material in my own archives, using the phrase "may 10" cullinane journal, leads to the very interesting weblog Heckler & Coch, which contains the following brief entries (from May 19, 2003):
"May you live in interesting times
While widely reported as being an ancient Chinese curse, this phrase is likely to be of recent and western origin.Geometry of the I Ching
The Cullinane sequence of the 64 hexagrams"
"… there are many associations of ideas which do not correspond to any actual connection of cause and effect in the world of phenomena…."
— John Fiske, "The Primeval Ghost-World," quoted in the Heckler & Coch weblog
"The association is the idea"
— Ian Lee on the communion of saints and the association of ideas (in The Third Word War, 1978)