Saturday, November 18, 2023
“Sometimes lately in dreams . . .” — Malcolm Lowry
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Wednesday, November 20, 2024
“Great Unconscious Gravity” *
"Right through hell there is a path" — Malcolm Lowry
An illustration from a post of April 13, 2009 —
That date was suggested by . . .
The "Amen Corner" tune was suggested by the life of
a Bee Gees drummer who died recently, by the title of
a book he wrote — You Should Be Dancing — and by
a scene (S1E2) in the Max miniseries "The Penguin" —
"Shit like this, the pain of it, you gotta be careful…
'cause it'll eat you alive if you let it.
It's a helluva lot more fun to dance."
* Phrase from a passage by Chesterton that led, in a
post of April 13, 2009, to the above image of Reba.
Tuesday, November 19, 2024
Skin in the Game: Real or Fake?
"Here was finality indeed, and cleavage!"
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
Update of 1:28 PM ET on November 19, 2024 —
"The decadent legacy of Berlin between the World Wars,
and that of the American speak-easy era, have left their marks
on fashion, of course. At the Golden Globes on Sunday night,
Nicole Kidman incarnated the steamy eroticism of the Weimar
years in a clingy 20's-style gold-spangled dress by Tom Ford for
YSL Rive Gauche. Ms. Kidman's illusion top, with its suggestion
of nudity, set tongues wagging well into the next day."
— By Ruth La Ferla, The New York Times, Jan. 27, 2004
Monday, November 11, 2024
Echo Chamber: “The Room Outside of Time”*
"… as Gombrich well knew, Warburg also
constantly regrets the 'loss' of this 'thought-space' …"
Echo from the Pasaje Bella Vista in Cuernavaca —
“We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns….”
— Wallace Stevens
— Postcard from eBay
|
From Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry, 1947, Chapter I:
Faustus is gone: regard his hellish fall —
Shaken, M. Laruelle replaced the book on the table… he reached to the floor for a folded sheet of paper that had fluttered out of it. He picked the paper up between two fingers and unfolded it, turning it over. Hotel Bella Vista, he read. There were really two sheets of uncommonly thin hotel notepaper…. I sit now in a little room off the bar at four-thirty in the morning drinking ochas and then mescal and writing this on some Bella Vista notepaper I filched the other night…. But this is worst of all, to feel your soul dying. I wonder if it is because to-night my soul has really died that I feel at the moment something like peace. Or is it because right through hell there is a path, as Blake well knew, and though I may not take it, sometimes lately in dreams I have been able to see it? …And this is how I sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world: but the name of this land is hell. It is not Mexico of course but in the heart. |
* "The room outside of time" is a recurring theme in "The Resort."
Saturday, August 3, 2024
Seeking the Path*
"Right through hell there is a path . . . ." — Malcolm Lowry
This quotation is from a Log24 search for "1966."
That search was suggested by the now-streaming film
"MaXXXine" and by . . .
* Title of a book by Nanavira Thera.
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Monday, December 11, 2023
Programming for Language Animals*
From this journal on December 7th, the first night of Hannukah 2023 —
|
Other "Styx"-related material posted here earlier today . . .
Note that the above Styx communications protocol should not be
"Right through hell there is a path . . . ." — Malcolm Lowry |
From zdnet.com two days earlier —
|
Linus Torvalds on the state of Linux today
" Looking ahead, Hohndel said, we must talk about
Torvalds — "We actually need autocorrects on steroids. — zdnet.com, |
Midrash —
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Thursday, December 7, 2023
Craft
Other "Styx"-related material posted here earlier today . . .
Note that the above Styx communications protocol should not be
confused with the much newer Styx operating system —
"Right through hell there is a path . . . ." — Malcolm Lowry
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Friday, August 11, 2023
Garden Party
"Pardon me. J'adoube."
— The Consul as he fastens his fly in Malcolm Lowry's classic
novel, Under the Volcano , the Garden of Eden scene.
I, on the other hand, adobe.
Musical accompaniment . . .
"Sleight of hand and twist of fate . . . ." — "With or Without U"
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Monday, October 11, 2021
Silverview
The title is that of a novel by John le Carré — apparently his last —
reviewed this morning in the online New York Times by Joseph Finder:
" The great Graham Greene didn’t quite take his own
spy novels seriously, labeling them 'entertainments,'
but le Carré revamped the genre to fit his considerable
ambitions. 'Out of the secret world I once knew,' he wrote,
'I have tried to make a theater for the larger worlds we inhabit.' "
The title suggests an image related to another novel …
Under the Volcano , by Malcolm Lowry (1947) —
The PLATA on the sign at right means "silver." The car in the foreground
is turning left onto Jardín Juárez, a street named for the plaza it adjoins
in Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico.
As for "to make a theater" . . .
My own modest efforts along those lines include a Log24 post
from le Carré's date of death:
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Wednesday, April 7, 2021
For Child Buyers
Recent posts on hotels and education suggest a review.
See “Child Buyer” in this journal.
From John Hersey’s The Child Buyer (1960):
“I was wondering about that this morning…
About forgetting. I’ve always had an idea that
each memory was a kind of picture,
an insubstantial picture. I’ve thought of it as
suddenly coming into your mind when you need it,
something you’ve seen, something you’ve heard,
then it may stay awhile, or else it flies out, then
maybe it comes back another time….
If all the pictures went out, if I forgot everything,
where would they go? Just out into the air? Into the sky?
Back home around my bed, where my dreams stay?”
“We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns….”
— Wallace Stevens
— Postcard from eBay
From Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry, 1947, Chapter I:
|
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Sunday, January 31, 2021
Space Poetics
From Malcolm Lowry’s Poetics of Space ,
edited by Richard J. Lane and Miguel Mota,
University of Ottawa Press, 2016 —
Another gesture —
See “Bella Vista” in this journal.
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Sunday, December 10, 2017
Interlacing, Interweaving
The above title should be sung to the following tune —
"Right through hell
there is a path…."
— Malcolm Lowry,
Under the Volcano
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Saturday, December 9, 2017
Lackaday Quotation
The previous post discussed an alleged description by
William H. Gass of his fellow author Malcolm Lowry as
"a black magician."
In defense of Gass, it seems that quote is inaccurate:
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Friday, December 8, 2017
Mythos and Logos
Part I: Black Magician
"Schools of criticism create their own canons, elevating certain texts,
discarding others. Yet some works – Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano
is one of them – lend themselves readily to all critical approaches."
— Joan Givner, review of
A Darkness That Murmured: Essays on Malcolm Lowry and the Twentieth Century
by Frederick Asals and Paul Tiessen, eds.
The Asals-Tiessen book (U. of Toronto Press, 2000) was cited today
by Margaret Soltan (in the link below) as the source of this quotation —
"When one thinks of the general sort of snacky
under-earnest writers whose works like wind-chimes
rattle in our heads now, it is easier to forgive Lowry
his pretentious seriousness, his old-fashioned ambitions,
his Proustian plans, [his efforts] to replace the reader’s
consciousness wholly with a black magician’s."
A possible source, Perle Epstein, for the view of Lowry as black magician —
Part II: Mythos and Logos
Part I above suggests a review of Adam Gopnik as black magician
(a figure from Mythos ) —
|
Tuesday, November 7, 2017
Polarities and Correlation
|
— and of an opposing figure from Logos ,
Paul B. Yale, in the references below:
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Tuesday, March 29, 2016
The Forest Path to the Spring*
* Title courtesy of Malcolm Lowry.
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Friday, February 26, 2016
Overarching
"The study of social memory allows scholars to
understand how different memories form within
a collective group, thus exploring the societal
and ideological elements of disparate groups
that form the over-arching memory of Melkisedeq."
— The Melkisedeq Memoirs , by Cale Staley,
2015 master's thesis at the University of Iowa
Elements of groups that I prefer —
"Right through hell
there is a path…."
— Malcolm Lowry,
Under the Volcano
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Tuesday, February 16, 2016
The Immortal Voice
From Malcolm Lowry's reply in 1947 to a hostile review
by Jacques Barzun of Lowry's novel Under the Volcano —
"The end, I suppose, is intended to crush one completely.
'Mr. Lowry has other moments, borrowed from
other styles in fashion, Henry James, Thomas Wolfe,
the thought-streamers, the surrealists. His novel can
be recommended only as an anthology held together
by earnestness.'
Whatever your larger motive–which I incidentally believe
to be extremely sound–do you not seem to have heard this
passage or something like it before? I certainly do. I seem
to recognize the voice, slightly disguised, that greeted Mr.
Wolfe himself, not to say Mr. Faulkner, Mr. Melville and Mr.
James–an immortal voice indeed that once addressed Keats
in the same terms that it informed Mr. Whitman that he knew
less about poetry than a hog about mathematics."
See as well the Log24 posts from the date of Barzun's death.
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Friday, February 12, 2016
The Game
"Right through hell
there is a path…."
— Malcolm Lowry,
Under the Volcano
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Saturday, July 25, 2015
Strange Loop
From an explanation of the Web app IFTTT —
"IF This Then That" —
"If you are a programmer you can think of it as a loop*
that checks for a certain condition… to run one or
multiple actions if the condition is met."
After Completion (from Friday night, and 1989) —
Advertisement —
"On February 19, 2015, IFTTT renamed
their original application to IF…."
From Tuesday's post on the death of E. L. Doctorow —
“…right through hell
there is a path…”
— Malcolm Lowry
* More precisely, a conditional or conditional loop .
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Tuesday, July 21, 2015
“Ragtime” Author Dies at 84
“…right through hell
there is a path…”
— Malcolm Lowry
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Sunday, November 30, 2014
Back to the Real
Continued from June 17, 2009 —
"I sit now in a little room off the bar
at four-thirty in the morning drinking
ochas and then mescal and writing this
on some Bella Vista notepaper I filched
the other night…."
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
See too a search for Snowflake in this journal.
This word may serve as Mark Strand's "Rosebud."
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Investments
From "A Piece of the Storm," by the late poet Mark Strand —
A snowflake, a blizzard of one….
From notes to Malcolm Lowry's "La Mordida" —
he had invested, in the Valley of the Shadow of Death….
See also Weyl's Symmetry in this journal.
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Sunday, November 2, 2014
Friday, April 25, 2014
Bingo
For John Milton at the Cervecería XX —
- Bingo in this journal, as well as
- Black Mass and
- “The Platonic Heritage in Under the Volcano“
(Studies in Canadian Literature, v. 3, no. 1, 1978)
Related material: Peter J. Cameron on Bertrand Russell
in A Midnight Exorcism.
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Sunday, October 6, 2013
Church with Josefine*
(Continued from last Sunday)
For some background, see Permutahedron in this journal.
See also…
- The Saturday evening post from yesterday
- The recent Arcade Fire "Reflektor" mirror ball video
- Malcolm Lowry on All Souls' Day, 2010
* Jews may prefer to retitle this post "Sunday Shul with Josefine"
and stage it as a SNL sketch, "Norwegian Disco," with
The Sunshine Girls. (For the Norwegian part, see Kristen Wiig,
of Norwegian ancestry. For the disco part, see Amy Adams,
who stars in a new disco-era movie.)
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Saturday, March 30, 2013
Bright Star
An earlier (noon) version of this post showed a photo of a
heartbreakingly beautiful young woman I encountered on
the Web today by chance. Perhaps it is best if she remains
anonymous here.
A detail taken today from her Facebook page:
Location of a nightclub in Bucharest
Related material: Shining Forth by myself and Malcolm Lowry,
and Lucifer by Mihai Eminescu.
See also this journal "about 3 weeks ago."
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Sunday, January 6, 2013
True Fury
For the Feast of Epiphany:
A trip back to December 1955—
Meditations for Three Kings Day (Feast of Epiphany)—
"Show me all the blueprints." — Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes
"The Tesseract is where it belongs: out of our reach." — Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury
"Here was finality indeed, and cleavage!" — Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano (1947)
Click images for some background.
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Wednesday, October 31, 2012
The Malfunctioning TARDIS
(Continued from previous TARDIS posts)
Summary: A review of some posts from last August is suggested by the death,
reportedly during the dark hours early on October 30, of artist Lebbeus Woods.
An (initially unauthorized) appearance of his work in the 1995 film
Twelve Monkeys …
… suggests a review of three posts from last August.
Wednesday, August 1, 2012Defining FormContinued from July 29 in memory of filmmaker Chris Marker, See Slides and Chanting†and Where Madness Lies. See also Sherrill Grace on Malcolm Lowry. * Washington Post. Other sources say Marker died on July 30. † These notably occur in Marker's masterpiece |
Wednesday, August 1, 2012Triple Feature
For related material, see this morning's post Defining Form. |
Sunday, August 12, 2012Doctor WhoOn Robert A. Heinlein's novel Glory Road— "Glory Road (1963) included the foldbox , a hyperdimensional packing case that was bigger inside than outside. It is unclear if Glory Road was influenced by the debut of the science fiction television series Doctor Who on the BBC that same year. In Doctor Who , the main character pilots a time machine called a TARDIS, which is built with technology which makes it 'dimensionally transcendental,' that is, bigger inside than out." — Todd, Tesseract article at exampleproblems.com From the same exampleproblems.com article— "The connection pattern of the tesseract's vertices is the same as that of a 4×4 square array drawn on a torus; each cell (representing a vertex of the tesseract) is adjacent to exactly four other cells. See geometry of the 4×4 square." For further details, see today's new page on vertex adjacency at finitegeometry.org. |
"It was a dark and stormy night."— A Wrinkle in Time
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Wednesday, August 1, 2012
Defining Form
Continued from July 29 in memory of filmmaker Chris Marker,
who reportedly* died on that date at 91 at his home in Paris.
See Slides and Chanting†and Where Madness Lies.
See also Sherrill Grace on Malcolm Lowry.
* Washington Post. Other sources say Marker died on July 30.
† These notably occur in Marker's masterpiece
La Jetée (review with spoilers).
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Sunday, February 5, 2012
Sermon Highlight
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Friday, January 6, 2012
Defining Form
Some related resources from Malcolm Lowry—
"…his eyes ranged the Consul's books disposed quite neatly… on high shelves around the walls: Dogme et Ritual de la Haute Magie , Serpent and Siva Worship in Central America , there were two long shelves of this, together with the rusty leather bindings and frayed edges of the numerous cabbalistic and alchemical books, though some of them looked fairly new, like the Goetia of the Lemegaton of Solomon the King , probably they were treasures, but the rest were a heterogeneous collection…."
— Under the Volcano , Chapter VI
— and from Matilde Marcolli—
Seven books on analytical psychology
See also Marcolli in this morning's previous post, The Garden Path.
For the relevance of alchemy to form, see Alchemy in this journal.
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Tuesday, May 3, 2011
24-Part Invention
“Next to the bookcase stands a wooden cabinet with 24 drawers that looks like something you might have seen in a library decades ago, or perhaps in an old apothecary. The drawers are marked with the names of her novels or characters in the novels and crammed with indexed notes.
She pulls open a drawer marked ‘Lozen,’ the name of a main female character in another historical western novel, ‘The Ghost Warrior,’ and reads a few of the index tabs: ‘social relationships, puberty, death, quotes….'”
— From an article on Lucia St. Clair Robson in The Baltimore Sun by Arthur Hirsch, dated 1:31 p.m. EDT April 30, 2011*
From this journal later that same day —
 |
Robson’s most recent novel is Last Train from Cuernavaca .
“A corpse will be transported by express!”
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
* Update of 5:48 AM EDT May 3—
The same article was also published with a different dateline— April 28.
Enthusiasts of synchronicity may lament the confusion, or they may
turn to April 28 in this journal for a different 24-part invention.
See also Art Wars, April 7, 2003 and White Horse .
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Friday, April 8, 2011
Windows
Roberta Smith in today's New York Times —
"… the argument that painting may ultimately be about
little more than the communication of some quality of
light and space, however abstract or indirect."
— Review of "Rooms With a View" at the Met
Lowry —
Malcolm Lowry, author of Under the Volcano
Hollywood —
Related material —
| Friday, October 8, 2010
Starting Out in the Evening This post was suggested by last evening's post on mathematics and narrative and by Michiko Kakutani on Vargas Llosa in this morning's New York Times .
"One must proceed cautiously, for this road— of truth and falsehood in the realm of fiction— is riddled with traps and any enticing oasis is usually a mirage." – "Is Fiction the Art of Lying?"* by Mario Vargas Llosa, * The Web version's title has a misprint— |
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Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Star Quality
A search in memory of Gerry Rafferty,
a talented singer-songwriter who died today at 63.
"Here was finality indeed, and cleavage!"
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
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Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Dia de los Muertos
Malcolm Lowry, author of
Under the Volcano
|
Mirror Ball album
Hey ho away we go |
Mirror Ball album
Yeah you're working |
Hotel Bella Vista
Gran Baile Noviembre 1938
a Beneficio de la Cruz Roja.
Los Mejores Artistas del radio en accion.
No falte Vd.
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Friday, October 8, 2010
Starting Out in the Evening
… and Finishing Up at Noon
This post was suggested by last evening’s post on mathematics and narrative
and by Michiko Kakutani on Vargas Llosa in this morning’s New York Times.
Above: Frank Langella in Right: Johnny Depp in |
 |
“One must proceed cautiously, for this road— of truth and falsehood in the realm of fiction— is riddled with traps and any enticing oasis is usually a mirage.”
— “Is Fiction the Art of Lying?”* by Mario Vargas Llosa, New York Times essay of October 7, 1984
My own adventures in that realm— as reader, not author— may illustrate Llosa’s remark.
A nearby stack of paperbacks I haven’t touched for some months (in order from bottom to top)—
- Pale Rider by Alan Dean Foster
- Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger
- The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
- Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupéry
- Literary Reflections by James A. Michener
- The Ninth Configuration by William Peter Blatty
- A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
- Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
- The Tempest by William Shakespeare
- Being There by Jerzy Kosinski
- What Dreams May Come by Richard Matheson
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
- A Gathering of Spies by John Altman
- Selected Poems by Robinson Jeffers
- Hook— Tinkerbell’s Challenge by Tristar Pictures
- Rising Sun by Michael Crichton
- Changewar by Fritz Leiber
- The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe
- The Hustler by Walter Tevis
- The Natural by Bernard Malamud
- Truly Tasteless Jokes by Blanche Knott
- The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton
- Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
What moral Vargas Llosa might draw from the above stack I do not know.
Generally, I prefer the sorts of books in a different nearby stack. See Sisteen, from May 25. That post the fanciful reader may view as related to number 16 in the above list. The reader may also relate numbers 24 and 22 above (an odd couple) to By Chance, from Thursday, July 22.
* The Web version’s title has a misprint— “living” instead of “lying.”
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Thursday, September 30, 2010
Cleft
"Here was finality indeed, and cleavage!"
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
Related— Rosetta Stone, today's Google Doodle, and Rock of Ages.
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Monday, August 2, 2010
Specific and Robust
The New York Times version of the philosophers' stone:
In the Times 's latest sermon from THE STONE, Gary Gutting, a professor of philosophy at Notre Dame, discusses
"…the specific and robust claims of Judaism, Christianity and Islam about how God is concretely and continually involved in our existence."
A search shows that Gutting's phrase "specific and robust" has many echoes in biotechnology, and a few in software development. The latter is of more interest to me than the former. (The poetically inclined might say that Professor Gutting's line of work is a sort of software development.)
"As a developer, you need a specific and robust set of development tools in the smallest and simplest package possible."
— EasyEclipse web page
Here are two notes on related material:
Specific— The Pit:
See a search for "harrowing of Hell" in this journal.
("…right through hell there is a path…." –Malcolm Lowry)
Robust— The Pendulum:
See a search for "Foucault's Pendulum" in this journal.
(“Others say it is a stone that posseses mysterious powers…. often depicted as a dazzling light. It’s a symbol representing power, a source of immense energy. It nourishes, heals, wounds, blinds, strikes down…. Some have thought of it as the philosopher’s stone of the alchemists….”
Those puzzled by why the NY Times would seek the opinions of a professor at a Catholic university may consult Gutting's home page.
He is an expert on the gay Communist Michel Foucault, a student of Althusser.
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Tuesday, July 20, 2010
The Corpse Express
See Malcolm Lowry's "A corpse will be transported by express!" in this journal.
"When Plato regards geometry as the prerequisite to
philosophical knowledge, it is because geometry alone
renders accessible the realm of things eternal;
tou gar aei ontos he geometrike gnosis estin."
— Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,
Volume V, Number 1, September, 1944.
Maybe.
June 23, Midsummer Eve, was the date of death for Colonel Michael Cobb.
Cobb, who died aged 93, was "a regular Army officer who in retirement produced
the definitive historical atlas of the railways of Great Britain." — Telegraph.co.uk, July 19
As for geometry, railways, and things eternal, see parallel lines converging
in Tequila Mockingbird and Bedlam Songs.
The Rock Island Line’s namesake depot
in Rock Island, Illinois
See also Wallace Stevens on "the giant of nothingness"
in "A Primitive Like an Orb" and in Midsummer Eve's Dream—
At the center on the horizon, concentrum, grave
And prodigious person, patron of origins.
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Wednesday, July 7, 2010
07 Book
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
A Talent for Writing, and Falling Into Things
(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/07/books/07book.html)
The above headline from this morning's New York Times is a rather strong reminder of a post linked to here last night— a post from April 10, 2004 (Holy Saturday), titled "Harrowing."
The book under review is a biography of William Golding, also quoted here in "Harrowing."
From that post—
“There is a suggestion of Christ descending into the abyss for the harrowing of Hell. But it is the Consul whom we think of here, rather than of Christ. The Consul is hurled into this abyss at the end of the novel.”
– Stephen Spender, introduction to Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano
Related material:
|
Theater of Truth rift-design— Definition by Deborah Levitt— "Rift. The stroke or rending by which a world worlds, opening both the 'old' world and the self-concealing earth to the possibility of a new world. As well as being this stroke, the rift is the site— the furrow or crack— created by the stroke. As the 'rift design' it is the particular characteristics or traits of this furrow." – "Heidegger and the Theater of Truth," in Tympanum: A Journal of Comparative Literary Studies, Vol. 1, 1998 See also "harrow up" + Hamlet in this journal. |
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Tuesday, July 6, 2010
A Serious Artist
Today's Google logo
honors a serious artist:
Related material:
That post quotes the words of another serious artist,
Malcolm Lowry, on a barranca, or deep ravine.
(See also Heidegger's "rift" concept.)
For a less serious rift, see the art of Kylie Minogue.
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Sunday, June 28, 2009
Sunday June 28, 2009
Hell Path
“…right through hell
there is a path…”
— Malcolm Lowry
Related material:
This morning’s
New York Times obituaries…
…and The Restaurant Quarré in Berlin,
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Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Wednesday June 17, 2009
Back to the Real
Colum McCann on yesterday’s history:
“Fiction gives us access to a very real history.”
The Associated Press thought for today:
“Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.”
— John Hersey, American author (born on this date in 1914, died 1993).
From John Hersey’s The Child Buyer (1960):
“I was wondering about that this morning… About forgetting. I’ve always had an idea that each memory was a kind of picture, an insubstantial picture. I’ve thought of it as suddenly coming into your mind when you need it, something you’ve seen, something you’ve heard, then it may stay awhile, or else it flies out, then maybe it comes back another time…. If all the pictures went out, if I forgot everything, where would they go? Just out into the air? Into the sky? Back home around my bed, where my dreams stay?”
“We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns….”
— Wallace Stevens
Postcard from eBay
From Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry, 1947, Chapter I:
|
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Monday, October 20, 2008
Monday October 20, 2008
Me and My Shadow
Thoughts suggested by Saturday's entry–
"… with primitives the beginnings of art, science, and religion coalesce in the undifferentiated chaos of the magical mentality…."
— Carl G. Jung, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry," Collected Works, Vol. 15, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, Princeton University Press, 1966, excerpted in Twentieth Century Theories of Art, edited by James M. Thompson.
For a video of such undifferentiated chaos, see the Four Tops' "Loco in Acapulco."
"Yes, you'll be goin' loco
down in Acapulco,
the magic down there
is so strong."
This song is from the 1988 film "Buster."
(For a related religious use of that name– "Look, Buster, do you want to live?"– see Fritz Leiber's "Damnation Morning," quoted here on Sept. 28.)
Art, science, and religion are not apparent within the undifferentiated chaos of the Four Tops' Acapulco video, which appears to incorporate time travel in its cross-cutting of scenes that seem to be from the Mexican revolution with contemporary pool-party scenes. Art, science, and religion do, however, appear within my own memories of Acapulco. While staying at a small thatched-roof hostel on a beach at Acapulco in the early 1960's, I read a paperback edition of Three Philosophical Poets, a book by George Santayana on Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe. Here we may regard art as represented by Goethe, science by Lucretius, and religion by Dante. For a more recent and personal combination of these topics, see Juneteenth through Midsummer Night, 2007, which also has references to the "primitives" and "magical mentality" discussed by Jung.
"The major structures of the psyche for Jung include the ego, which is comprised of the persona and the shadow. The persona is the 'mask' which the person presents [to] the world, while the shadow holds the parts of the self which the person feels ashamed and guilty about."
— Brent Dean Robbins, Jung page at Mythos & Logos
As for shame and guilt, see Malcolm Lowry's classic Under the Volcano, a novel dealing not with Acapulco but with a part of Mexico where in my youth I spent much more time– Cuernavaca.
Lest Lowry's reflections prove too depressing, I recommend as background music the jazz piano of the late Dave McKenna… in particular, "Me and My Shadow."
McKenna died on Saturday, the date of the entry that included "Loco in Acapulco." Saturday was also the Feast of Saint Luke.
Comments Off on Monday October 20, 2008
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Thursday June 26, 2008
Review
Yesterday, June 25, was the 100th anniversay of W.V. Quine's birth and also the day on the calendar opposite Christmas– In the parlance of Quine's son Douglas, AntiChristmas.
Having survived that ominous date, I feel it is fitting to review what Wallace Stevens called "Credences of Summer"– religious principles for those who feel that faith and doubt are best reconciled by art.
|
"Credences of Summer," VII,
by Wallace Stevens, from
"Three times the concentred |
|
Definition of Epiphany
From James Joyce's Stephen Hero, first published posthumously in 1944. The excerpt below is from a version edited by John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon (New York: New Directions Press, 1959).
Three Times: … By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. He told Cranly that the clock of the Ballast Office was capable of an epiphany. Cranly questioned the inscrutable dial of the Ballast Office with his no less inscrutable countenance: — Yes, said Stephen. I will pass it time after time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin's street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany. — What? — Imagine my glimpses at that clock as the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanised. It is just in this epiphany that I find the third, the supreme quality of beauty. — Yes? said Cranly absently. — No esthetic theory, pursued Stephen relentlessly, is of any value which investigates with the aid of the lantern of tradition. What we symbolise in black the Chinaman may symbolise in yellow: each has his own tradition. Greek beauty laughs at Coptic beauty and the American Indian derides them both. It is almost impossible to reconcile all tradition whereas it is by no means impossible to find the justification of every form of beauty which has ever been adored on the earth by an examination into the mechanism of esthetic apprehension whether it be dressed in red, white, yellow or black. We have no reason for thinking that the Chinaman has a different system of digestion from that which we have though our diets are quite dissimilar. The apprehensive faculty must be scrutinised in action. — Yes … — You know what Aquinas says: The three things requisite for beauty are, integrity, a wholeness, symmetry and radiance. Some day I will expand that sentence into a treatise. Consider the performance of your own mind when confronted with any object, hypothetically beautiful. Your mind to apprehend that object divides the entire universe into two parts, the object, and the void which is not the object. To apprehend it you must lift it away from everything else: and then you perceive that it is one integral thing, that is a thing. You recognise its integrity. Isn't that so? — And then? — That is the first quality of beauty: it is declared in a simple sudden synthesis of the faculty which apprehends. What then? Analysis then. The mind considers the object in whole and in part, in relation to itself and to other objects, examines the balance of its parts, contemplates the form of the object, traverses every cranny of the structure. So the mind receives the impression of the symmetry of the object. The mind recognises that the object is in the strict sense of the word, a thing, a definitely constituted entity. You see? — Let us turn back, said Cranly. They had reached the corner of Grafton St and as the footpath was overcrowded they turned back northwards. Cranly had an inclination to watch the antics of a drunkard who had been ejected from a bar in Suffolk St but Stephen took his arm summarily and led him away. — Now for the third quality. For a long time I couldn't make out what Aquinas meant. He uses a figurative word (a very unusual thing for him) but I have solved it. Claritas is quidditas. After the analysis which discovers the second quality the mind makes the only logically possible synthesis and discovers the third quality. This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is an organised composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany. Having finished his argument Stephen walked on in silence. He felt Cranly's hostility and he accused himself of having cheapened the eternal images of beauty. For the first time, too, he felt slightly awkward in his friend's company and to restore a mood of flippant familiarity he glanced up at the clock of the Ballast Office and smiled: — It has not epiphanised yet, he said. |
|
Under the Volcano,
by Malcolm Lowry, "What have I got out of my life? Contacts with famous men… The occasion Einstein asked me the time, for instance. That summer evening…. smiles when I say I don't know. And yet asked me. Yes: the great Jew, who has upset the whole world's notions of time and space, once leaned down… to ask me… ragged freshman… at the first approach of the evening star, the time. And smiled again when I pointed out the clock neither of us had noticed."
An approach of
This figure is from a webpage,
As noted in yesterday's early- "The appearance of the evening star brings with it long-standing notions of safety within and danger without. In a letter to Harriet Monroe, written December 23, 1926, Stevens refers to the Sapphic fragment that invokes the genius of evening: 'Evening star that bringest back all that lightsome Dawn hath scattered afar, thou bringest the sheep, thou bringest the goat, thou bringest the child home to the mother.' Christmas, writes Stevens, 'is like Sappho's evening: it brings us all home to the fold' (Letters of Wallace Stevens, 248)."
— Barbara Fisher, |
Comments Off on Thursday June 26, 2008
Friday, June 20, 2008
Friday June 20, 2008
Drunkard's Walk
In memory of Episcopal priest and Jungian analyst Brewster Yale Beach,
who died on Tuesday, June 17, 2008
"A man walks down the street…" — Paul Simon, Graceland album
who died on Tuesday, June 17, 2008
"A man walks down the street…" — Paul Simon, Graceland album
Related material:
In the above screenshot of New York Times obituaries on the date of Brewster Beach's death, Tim Russert seems to be looking at the obituary of Air Force Academy chapel architect Walter Netsch. This suggests another chapel, more closely related to my own experience, in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Some background… Walter Netsch in Oral History (pdf, 467 pp.):
"I also had a book that inspired me– this is 1947– called Communitas by Percival and Paul Goodman. Percival Goodman was the architect, and Paul Goodman was the writer and leftist. And this came out of the University of Chicago– part of the leftist bit of the University of Chicago…. I had sort of in the back of my mind, Communitas appeared from my subconscious of the new town out of town, and there were other people who knew of it…."
Log24, Feb. 24, 2008:
"God As Trauma" by Brewster Yale Beach:
"The problem of crucifixion is the beginning of individuation."
"Si me de veras quieres, deja me en paz."
— Lucero Hernandez, Cuernavaca, 1962
A more impersonal approach to my own drunkard's walk (Cuernavaca, 1962,
after reading the above words): Cognitive Blending and the Two Cultures
An approach from the culture (more precisely, the alternate religion) of Scientism–
The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives— is sketched
in Today's Sermon: The Holy Trinity vs. The New York Times (Sunday, June 8, 2008).
The Times illustrated its review of The Drunkard's Walk with facetious drawings
by Jessica Hagy, who uses Venn diagrams to make cynical jokes.
A less cynical use of a Venn diagram:
"No se puede vivir sin amar."
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
Comments Off on Friday June 20, 2008
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Wednesday May 28, 2008
Tequila
Mockingbird
Mockingbird
|
CelebritySexNews.com
on Kylie Minogue:
From a web page on
you gotta ride it like you find it. Get your ticket at the station of the Rock Island Line. in Rock Island, Illinois |
Related material:
Twenty-First Century Fox
(10/6/02)
Back to You, Kylie
(11/5/02)
Time, Eternity, and Grace
(11/22/02)
That Old Devil Moon
(1/1/03) and
The Shanghai Gesture
(1/3/03)
Whirligig
(1/5/03)
Harrowing
(4/19/03)
Temptation
(4/22/03)
Temptation
(4/9/04)
Tribute,
Train of Thought,
Drunk Bird, and
From Here to Eternity
(8/17/04-8/18/04)
Heaven and Earth
(9/2/04)
Habeas Corpus
(11/24/04)
X, continued
(12/4/04)
Birth and Death
(5/28/05)
Time Travel
(5/28/06)
Timeagain and
Two-Bar Hook
(8/9/06)
Echoes
(8/11/06)
Phantasmagoria
and Tequila!
(9/23/06)
Comments Off on Wednesday May 28, 2008
Monday, April 21, 2008
Monday April 21, 2008
A Fresh Perspective
“… if thou bring thy gift
to the altar, and
there rememberest….”
Matthew 5:23-24
The following meditations were inspired by an ad today in the online New York Times obituaries section–
“Been somewhere interesting? Tell us about it for a chance to win a trip for 2 to Paris.”
Country song, quoted here Dec. 17, 2003–
“Give faith a fighting chance.”
Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano–
“I sit now in a little room off the bar at four-thirty in the morning drinking ochas and then mescal and writing this on some Bella Vista notepaper I filched the other night…. But this is worst of all, to feel your soul dying. I wonder if it is because to-night my soul has really died that I feel at the moment something like peace. Or is it because right through hell there is a path, as Blake well knew, and though I may not take it, sometimes lately in dreams I have been able to see it? …And this is how I sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world: but the name of this land is hell. It is not Mexico of course but in the heart.”
From an obituary of mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota linked to here on April 18, the anniversary of Rota’s death:
Gian-Carlo Rota
“He always brought a very fresh
perspective on philosophical issues.”
Final Arrangements, continued–
April 21, 2008:
Odd Couples
Click image to enlarge.
From a novel, Psychoshop, quoted here in an entry on the Pope’s birthday, “The Gates of Hell” —
His manner was all charm and grace; pure cafe society….
He purred a chuckle. “My place. If you want to come, I’ll show you.”
“Love to. The Luogo Nero? The Black Place?”
“That’s what the locals call it. It’s really Buoco Nero, the Black Hole.”
“Like the Black Hole of Calcutta?”
“No. Black Hole as in astronomy. Corpse of a dead star, but also channel between this universe and its next-door neighbor.”
“Here? In Rome?”
“Sure. They drift around in space until they run out of gas and come to a stop. This number happened to park here.”
Comments Off on Monday April 21, 2008
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Thursday October 11, 2007
The Nobel Prize
in Literature
Background from 1947:
in Literature
this year goes to the author
of The Golden Notebook
and The Cleft.
Related material:
The Golden Obituary
and Cleavage —
Log24, Oct. 9, 2007 —
Background from 1947:
Further details:
Wheel
Quoted by physics writer
Heinz Pagels at the end of
The Cosmic Code:
“For the essence and the end
Of his labor is beauty… one beauty,
the rhythm of that Wheel….”
— Robinson Jeffers
|
“The Ferris wheel came into view again, just the top, silently burning high on the hill, almost directly in front of him, then the trees rose up over it. The road, which was terrible and full of potholes, went steeply downhill here; he was approaching the little bridge over the barranca, the deep ravine. Halfway across the bridge he stopped; he lit a new cigarette from the one he’d been smoking, and leaned over the parapet, looking down. It was too dark to see the bottom, but: here was finality indeed, and cleavage! Quauhnahuac was like the times in this respect, wherever you turned the abyss was waiting for you round the corner. Dormitory for vultures and city of Moloch! When Christ was being crucified, so ran the sea-borne, hieratic legend, the earth had opened all through this country…” — Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, 1947. (Harper & Row reissue, 1984, p. 15) Comment by Stephen Spender: “There is a suggestion of Christ descending into the abyss for the harrowing of Hell. But it is the Consul whom we think of here, rather than of Christ. The Consul is hurled into this abyss at the end of the novel.” — Introduction to Under the Volcano Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XXI — Gibbon, discussing the theology of the Trinity, defines perichoresis as “… the internal connection and spiritual penetration which indissolubly unites the divine persons59 ….
William Golding: “Simon’s head was tilted slightly up. His eyes could not break away and the Lord of the Flies hung in space before him. ‘What are you doing out here all alone? Aren’t you afraid of me?’ Simon shook. ‘There isn’t anyone to help you. Only me. And I’m the Beast.’ Simon’s mouth labored, brought forth audible words. ‘Pig’s head on a stick.’ ‘Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!’ said the head. For a moment or two the forest and all the other dimly appreciated places echoed with the parody of laughter. ‘You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close!’ “ “Thought of the day: — Alice Woodrome, Good Friday, 2004 Anne Francis,
“Here was finality indeed, — Under the Volcano |
For further details of
the wheel metaphor, see
Rock of Ages
Comments Off on Thursday October 11, 2007
Monday, August 6, 2007
Monday August 6, 2007
The Divine Universals
"The tigers of wrath
are wiser than
the horses of instruction."
— William Blake,
Proverbs of Hell
From Shining Forth:
|
The Place of the Lion, by Charles Williams, 1931, Chapter Eight:
Under the Volcano, Chapter Two:
A Spanish-English dictionary:
Look at the way it
How art thou fallen from heaven,
For more on Spanish |
Symmetry axes
of the square:
(See Damnation Morning.)
From the cover of the
Martin Cruz Smith novel
Stallion Gate:
"That old Jew
gave me this here."
— Dialogue from the
Robert Stone novel
A Flag for Sunrise.
Related material:
— and this morning's online
New York Times obituaries:
The above image contains summary obituaries for Cardinal Lustiger, Archbishop of Paris, 1981-2005, and for Sal Mosca, jazz pianist and teacher. In memory of the former, see all of the remarks preceding the image above. In memory of the latter, the remarks of a character in Martin Cruz Smith's Stallion Gate on jazz piano may have some relevance:
"I hate arguments. I'm a coward. Arguments are full of words, and each person is sure he's the only one who knows what the words mean. Each word is a basket of eels, as far as I'm concerned. Everybody gets to grab just one eel and that's his interpretation and he'll fight to the death for it…. Which is why I love music. You hit a C and it's a C and that's all it is. Like speaking clearly for the first time. Like being intelligent. Like understanding. A Mozart or an Art Tatum sits at the piano and picks out the undeniable truth."
Comments Off on Monday August 6, 2007
Sunday, August 5, 2007
Sunday August 5, 2007
Lucero
Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry, 1947, Chapter VI:
“What have I got out of my life? Contacts with famous men… The occasion Einstein asked me the time, for instance. That summer evening…. smiles when I say I don’t know. And yet asked me. Yes: the great Jew, who has upset the whole world’s notions of time and space, once leaned down… to ask me… ragged freshman… at the first approach of the evening star, the time. And smiled again when I pointed out the clock neither of us had noticed.”
To Ride Pegasus, by Anne McCaffrey, 1973:
“Mary-Molly luv, it’s going to be accomplished in steps, this establishment of the Talented in the scheme of things. Not society, mind you, for we’re the original nonconformists…. and Society will never permit us to integrate. That’s okay!” He consigned Society to insignificance with a flick of his fingers. “The Talented form their own society and that’s as it should be: birds of a feather. No, not birds. Winged horses! Ha! Yes, indeed. Pegasus… the poetic winged horse of flights of fancy. A bloody good symbol for us. You’d see a lot from the back of a winged horse…”
From Holt Spanish and English Dictionary, 1955:
lucero m Venus
(as morning or evening star);
bright star…
star (in forehead of animal)….
Scarlett Johansson and friend
in “The Horse Whisperer” (1998)
Comments Off on Sunday August 5, 2007
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Tuesday June 19, 2007
Let Noon Be Fair
Faustus is gone: regard his hellish fall —
"Shaken, M. Laruelle replaced the book on the table… he reached to the floor for a folded sheet of paper that had fluttered out of it. He picked the paper up between two fingers and unfolded it, turning it over. Hotel Bella Vista, he read."
— Title of a novel
by Willard Motley
A review of Helene Cixous's Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing:
"Cixous explores three distinct 'schools' that produce what she envisions as great writing– the Schools of the Dead, of Dreams, and of Roots. Cixous invests much weight in the purposefully ambiguous nature of the word 'school'; she seems to refer to a motivation, conscious or unconscious, that directs, influences, and shapes writing; at other times she seems to want to speak of actual places from whence we get instruction (again, consciously or unconsciously)."
From Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry, 1947, Chapter I:
Faustus is gone: regard his hellish fall —
"Shaken, M. Laruelle replaced the book on the table… he reached to the floor for a folded sheet of paper that had fluttered out of it. He picked the paper up between two fingers and unfolded it, turning it over. Hotel Bella Vista, he read."
From The Shining, Chapter 18:
"In 1961 four writers, two of them Pulitzer Prize winners, had leased the Overlook and reopened it as a writers' school. That had lasted one year…. Every big hotel has got a ghost. Why? Hell, people come and go…. (In the room the women come and go)" –Quoted in Shining Forth
Photo: jewishbookweek.com
Jacques Derrida and Helene Cixous
Time of this entry:
Noon.
Comments Off on Tuesday June 19, 2007
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Sunday May 20, 2007
Plato and Shakespeare:
Solid and Central
Solid and Central
"I have another far more solid and central ground for submitting to it as a faith, instead of merely picking up hints from it as a scheme. And that is this: that the Christian Church in its practical relation to my soul is a living teacher, not a dead one. It not only certainly taught me yesterday, but will almost certainly teach me to-morrow. Once I saw suddenly the meaning of the shape of the cross; some day I may see suddenly the meaning of the shape of the mitre. One free morning I saw why windows were pointed; some fine morning I may see why priests were shaven. Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living, to know that Plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before."
— G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Ch. IX
From Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star (11/11/99):
|
"Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not? This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato's beard; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Occam's razor…. I have dwelt at length on the inconvenience of putting up with it. It is time to think about taking steps." "The Consul could feel his glance at Hugh becoming a cold look of hatred. Keeping his eyes fixed gimlet-like upon him he saw him as he had appeared that morning, smiling, the razor edge keen in sunlight. But now he was advancing as if to decapitate him." |
"O God, I could be
bounded in a nutshell
and count myself
a king of infinite space,
were it not that
I have bad dreams."
— Hamlet
From today's newspaper:
Notes:
For an illustration of
the phrase "solid and central,"
see the previous entry.
For further context, see the
five Log24 entries ending
on September 6, 2006.
For background on the word
"hollow," see the etymology of
"hole in the wall" as well as
"The God-Shaped Hole" and
"Is Nothing Sacred?"
For further ado, see
Macbeth, V.v
("signifying nothing")
and The New Yorker,
issue dated tomorrow.
Comments Off on Sunday May 20, 2007
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Saturday April 14, 2007
“I sit now in a little room off the bar at four-thirty in the morning drinking ochas and then mescal and writing this on some Bella Vista notepaper I filched the other night…. But this is worst of all, to feel your soul dying. I wonder if it is because to-night my soul has really died that I feel at the moment something like peace. Or is it because right through hell there is a path, as Blake well knew, and though I may not take it, sometimes lately in dreams I have been able to see it? …And this is how I sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world: but the name of this land is hell. It is not Mexico of course but in the heart.”
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
Comments Off on Saturday April 14, 2007
Sunday, April 8, 2007
Sunday April 8, 2007
Midnight in the Garden
continued from Sept. 30, 2004
continued from Sept. 30, 2004
Tonight this journal had two Xanga footprints from Italy….
At 11:34 PM ET a visitor from Italy viewed a page containing an entry from Jan. 8, 2005, Splendor of the Light, which offers the following quotation–
From an essay on Guy Davenport—
"A disciple of Ezra Pound, he adapts to the short story the ideogrammatic method of The Cantos, where a grammar of images, emblems, and symbols replaces that of logical sequence. This grammar allows for the grafting of particulars into a congeries of implied relation without subordination. In contrast to postmodernists, Davenport does not omit causal connection and linear narrative continuity for the sake of an aleatory play of signification but in order to intimate by combinational logic kinships and correspondences among eras, ideas and forces."
— "When Novelists Become Cubists: The Prose Ideograms of Guy Davenport," by Andre Furlani
The visitor from Italy may, of course, have instead intended to view one of the four earlier entries on the page. In particular, the visitor may have seen
The Star
of Venus
"He looked at the fading light
in the western sky and saw Mercury,
or perhaps it was Venus,
gleaming at him as the evening star.
Darkness and light,
the old man thought.
It is what every hero legend is about.
The darkness which is more than death,
the light which is love, like our friend
Venus here, or perhaps this star is
Mercury, the messenger of Olympus,
the bringer of hope."
— Roderick MacLeish, Prince Ombra.
At 11:38 PM ET, a visitor from Italy (very likely the 11:34 visitor returning) viewed the five Log24 entries ending at 12:06 AM ET on Sept. 30, 2004.
These entries included Midnight in the Garden and…
A Tune for Michaelmas
The entries on this second visited page also included some remarks on Dante, on time, and on Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano that are relevant to Log24 entries earlier this week on Maundy Thursday and on Holy Saturday.
Here's wishing a happy Easter to Italy, to Francis Ford Coppola and Russell Crowe (see yesterday's entry), and to Steven Spielberg (see the Easter page of April 20, 2003).
Image courtesy of
Hollywood Jesus:
When you wish
upon a star…
Comments Off on Sunday April 8, 2007
Saturday, September 23, 2006
Saturday September 23, 2006
|
“A corpse will be — Under the Volcano,
“It has a ghastly familiarity,
like a half-forgotten dream.” — Poppy (Gene Tierney) in |
|
Temptation
|
|
“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.” From Patrick Vert, “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…. 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 |
| From a Christian fairy tale:
Aslan’s last words come at the end of The Last Battle: ‘There was a real railway accident […] Your father and mother and all of you are–as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands–dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.’…. Aslan is given the last word in these quiet but emphatic lines. He is the ultimate arbiter of reality: “‘There was a real railway accident.'” Plato, in addition to the Christian tradition, lies behind the closing chapters of The Last Battle. The references here to the Shadowlands and to the dream refer back to an earlier explanation by Digory, now the Lord Digory: “[…] that was not the real Narnia. That had a beginning and an end. It was only a shadow or a copy of the real Narnia, which has always been here and always will be here: just as our world, England and all, is only a shadow or copy of something in Aslan’s real world. [….] Of course it is different; as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream. […] It’s all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools!” |
| “I was reading Durant’s section on Plato, struggling to understand his theory of the ideal Forms that lay in inviolable perfection out beyond the phantasmagoria. (That was the first, and I think the last, time that I encountered that word.)” |
Whether any of the above will be of use in comforting the families of those killed in yesterday morning’s train wreck in Germany is not clear. Pope Benedict XVI, like C. S. Lewis, seems to think Greek philosophy may be of some use to those dealing with train wrecks:
| “Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: ‘In the beginning was the logos.‘ This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts, syn logo, with logos. Logos means both reason and word– a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist.”
— Remarks of the Pope at the University of Regensburg on Sept. 12, 2006 |
Comments Off on Saturday September 23, 2006
Sunday, August 13, 2006
Sunday August 13, 2006
David |
Via dell’Inferno
“Most modern men The Death of Satan: Song based on “The serpent’s eyes shine |
Comments Off on Sunday August 13, 2006
Monday, February 27, 2006
Monday February 27, 2006
Sudden View
From John O'Hara's Birthday:
"We stopped at the Trocadero and there was hardly anyone there. We had Lanson 1926. 'Drink up, sweet. You gotta go some. How I love music. Frère Jacques, Cuernavaca, ach du lieber August. All languages. A walking Berlitz. Berlitz sounds like you with that champagne, my sweet, or how you're gonna sound.'"
— John O'Hara, Hope of Heaven, Chapter 11, 1938
"And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance."
"Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the
PARIS,
1922-1939."
— James Joyce, conclusion of Finnegans Wake
"Using illustrative material from religion, myth, and culture, he starts with the descent of the dove on Jesus and ends with the poetic ramblings of James Joyce."
— Review of a biography of the Holy Spirit
Monica Potts in today's New York Times on Sybille Bedford:
"Though her works were not always widely popular, they inspired a deeply fervent following of committed admirers, starting with her first published work, A Sudden View, in 1953. Later retitled A Visit to Don Otavio, it was an account of her journey through Mexico."
… "I addressed him. 'Is Cuernavaca not below Mexico City?'
'It is low.'
'Then what is this?' Another summit had sprung up above a curve.
'At your orders, the Three Marias.'
'What are the Three Marias?'
'These.'
Later, I learned from Terry that they were the three peaks by the La Cima Pass which is indeed one of the highest passes in the Republic; and still later from experience, that before running down to anywhere in this country one must first run up some six or seven thousand feet. The descents are more alarming than the climbs. We hurtled towards Cuernavaca down unparapeted slopes with the speed and angle, if not the precision, of a scenic railway– cacti flashed past like telegraph poles, the sun was brilliant, the air like laughing gas, below an enchanting valley, and the lack of brakes became part of a general allegro accelerando."
— Sybille Bedford, A Sudden View, Counterpoint Press, Counterpoint edition (April 2003), page 77
"How continually, how startlingly, the landscape changed! Now the fields were full of stones: there was a row of dead trees. An abandoned plough, silhouetted against the sky, raised its arms to heaven in mute supplication; another planet, he reflected again, a strange planet where, if you looked a little further, beyond the Tres Marias, you would find every sort of landscape at once, the Cotswolds, Windermere, New Hampshire, the meadows of the Eure-et-Loire, even the grey dunes of Cheshire, even the Sahara, a planet upon which, in the twinkling of an eye, you could change climates, and, if you cared to think so, in the crossing of a highway, three civilizations; but beautiful, there was no denying its beauty, fatal or cleansing as it happened to be, the beauty of the Earthly Paradise itself."
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1st Perennial Classics edition (May 1, 2000), page 10
Comments Off on Monday February 27, 2006
Saturday, November 12, 2005
Saturday November 12, 2005
Glory Season
"…his eyes ranged the Consul's books disposed quite neatly… on high shelves around the walls: Dogme et Ritual de la Haute Magie, Serpent and Siva Worship in Central America, there were two long shelves of this, together with the rusty leather bindings and frayed edges of the numerous cabbalistic and alchemical books, though some of them looked fairly new, like the Goetia of the Lemegaton of Solomon the King, probably they were treasures, but the rest were a heterogeneous collection…."
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, Chapter VI
"… when Saul does reach for a slim leather-bound volume Eliza cannot help but feel that something momentous is about to happen. There is care in the way he carries the book on the short journey from its shelf, as if it were constructed not of leather and parchment but of flesh and blood….
"Otzar Eden HaGanuz," Saul says. "The Hidden Eden. In this book, Abulafia describes the process of permutation…. Once you have mastered it, you will have mastered words, and once you have mastered words, you will be ready to receive shefa."
"In the Inner Game, we call the Game Dhum Welur, the Mind of God."
— The Gameplayers of Zan, a novel featuring games based on cellular automata
"Regarding cellular automata, I'm trying to think in what SF books I've seen them mentioned. Off the top of my head, only three come to mind:
The Gameplayers of Zan M.A. Foster
Permutation City Greg Egan
Glory Season David Brin"
— Jonathan L. Cunningham, Usenet
"If all that 'matters' are fundamentally mathematical relationships, then there ceases to be any important difference between the actual and the possible. (Even if you aren't a mathematical Platonist, you can always find some collection of particles of dust to fit any required pattern. In Permutation City this is called the 'logic of the dust' theory.)….
… Paul Durham is convinced by the 'logic of the dust' theory mentioned above, and plans to run, just for a few minutes, a complex cellular automaton (Permutation City) started in a 'Garden of Eden' configuration — one which isn't reachable from any other, and which therefore must have been the starting point of a simulation…. I didn't understand the need for this elaborate set-up, but I guess it makes for a better story than 'well, all possible worlds exist, and I'm going to tell you about one of them.'"
— Danny Yee, review of Permutation City
"Y'know, I never imagined the competition version involved so many tricky permutations."
— David Brin, Glory Season, 1994 Spectra paperback, p. 408
Related material:
|
Figure 2
"… matter is consciousness expressed in the intermixing of force and form, but so heavily structured and constrained by form that its behaviour becomes describable using the regular and simple laws of physics. This is shown in Figure 2. |
Figure 3
"This quaternary is a Kabbalistic representation of God-the-Knowable, in the sense that it the most abstract representation of God we are capable of comprehending…. — A Depth of Beginning: Notes on Kabbalah by Colin Low (pdf) |
See also
Cognitive Blending and the Two Cultures,
Mathematics and Narrative,
Deep Game,
and the previous entry.
Comments Off on Saturday November 12, 2005
Wednesday, November 2, 2005
Wednesday November 2, 2005
Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano:
“… Let me see, he was only praelector in my time….”
“He was still praelector in mine.”
(In my time?… But what, exactly, does that mean?….)
….
“He was beginning to get the wines and the first editions slightly mixed up in my day.”….
“Bring me a bottle of the very best John Donne, will you, Smithers?… You know, some of the genuine old 1611.”
“He was still praelector in mine.”
(In my time?… But what, exactly, does that mean?….)
….
“He was beginning to get the wines and the first editions slightly mixed up in my day.”….
“Bring me a bottle of the very best John Donne, will you, Smithers?… You know, some of the genuine old 1611.”
“God how funny… Or isn’t it?….”
In memory of Malcolm Lowry, a quotation from Donne, 1611:
And, Oh, it can no more be questioned,
That beauties best, proportion, is dead,
Since euen griefe it selfe, which now alone
Is left vs, is without proportion.
Shee by whose lines proportion should bee
Examin’d measure of all Symmetree,
Whom had the Ancient seene, who thought soules made
Of Harmony, he would at next haue said
That Harmony was shee, and thence infer.
That soules were but Resultances from her,
Here is a link to a later Cambridge praelector, Robert Alexander Rankin. Rankin, a purveyor of pure mathematics, may help to counteract the pernicious influence on souls of Sir Michael Atiyah (see previous two entries and Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star).
Comments Off on Wednesday November 2, 2005
Monday, October 17, 2005
Monday October 17, 2005
Place
“Critics have compared Mr. Stone to Conrad, Faulkner, Hemingway, Graham Greene, Malcolm Lowry, Nathanael West; all apt enough, but there’s a James T. Farrell, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett strain as well – a hard-edged, lonely intelligence that sets bright promise off against stark failure and deals its mordant hand lightly. In A Flag for Sunrise (1981), an anthropologist observes: ‘There’s always a place for God. . . . There is some question as to whether He’s in it.'”
— Jean Strouse on Robert Stone
“When times are mysterious
Serious numbers will always be heard
And after all is said and done
And the numbers all come home
The four rolls into three
The three turns into two
And the two becomes a
One”
— Paul Simon,
“When Numbers Get Serious,” from
“Hearts and Bones” album, 1983
“Hickory Dickory Dock….”
Comments Off on Monday October 17, 2005
Friday, July 29, 2005
Friday July 29, 2005
Anatomy of a Death
From today's New York Times:
"Al Held, an American artist who painted large-scale abstract works… was found dead July 27, floating in a swimming pool at his villa…. The cause of death was not reported, but Italian police said he died of natural causes. He was 76."
From the Associated Press,
filed at 4:34 PM ET July 27, 2005:
"Held once described his work this way: 'Historically, the priests and wise men believed that it was the artist's job to make images of heaven and hell believable, even though nobody had experienced these places.'
'Today,' he went on, 'scientists talk about vast worlds and universes that the senses cannot experience. The purpose of the nonobjective artist is to create these images.'"
"Most modern men do not believe in hell because they have not been there."
— Review of Malcolm Lowry's novel Under the Volcano (1947)
Related material:
Hollywood images:
And from Mathematics and Narrative:
By Their Fruits
Today's (July 22) birthdays:
Don Henley and Willem Dafoe
Related material:
"And the fruit is rotten;
the serpent's eyes shine
as he wraps around the vine
in the Garden of Allah."
Comments Off on Friday July 29, 2005
Wednesday, April 6, 2005
Wednesday April 6, 2005
Final Arrangements, continued:
Confession
Confession
“A corpse will be transported by express!”
— Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry (1947)
— Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry (1947)
“Then he began to narrate in his original style…. After this came disclosure, confession. Then he accused, fulminated, stammered, blazed, cried out. He crossed the universe like light….
He had no old friends, only ex-friends. He could become terrible, going into reverse without warning. When this happened, it was like being caught in a tunnel by the Express. You could only cling to the walls, or lie between the rails, praying.”
Comments Off on Wednesday April 6, 2005
Wednesday, September 29, 2004
Wednesday September 29, 2004
Romantic Interaction,
continued
From Karl Iagnemma:
From Log24.net, March 3, 2004:
"No se puede vivir sin amar."
— Malcolm Lowry,
Under the Volcano
From Four Quartets:
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light….
Comments Off on Wednesday September 29, 2004
Sunday, September 5, 2004
Sunday September 5, 2004
Symmetry and Change
in the Dreamtime
Notes from the Journal
of Steven H. Cullinane
Summary:
| Aug 31 2004 07:31:01 PM |
Early Evening, Shining Star |
 |
| Sep 01 2004 09:00:35 AM |
Words and Images |
 |
| Sep 01 2004 12:07:28 PM |
Whale Rider |
 |
| Sep 02 2004 11:11:42 AM |
Heaven and Earth |
 |
| Sep 02 2004 07:00:23 PM |
Whale Road |
 |
| Cinderella’s Slipper |
 |
|
| Sep 03 2004 10:01:56 AM |
Another September Morn |
 |
| Noon |
 |
|
| De Nada |  |
|
| Ite, Missa Est |  |
Symmetry and Change, Part 1…
Early Evening,
Shining Star
Hexagram 01
The Creative:
The Image
Heaven
Heaven
The movement of heaven
is full of power.
Click on picture
for details.
The Clare Lawler Prize
for Literature goes to…
|
For the thoughts on time |
Symmetry and Change, Part 2…
Words and Images
Hexagram 35
Progress:
The Image
Fire
Earth
The sun rises over the earth.
|
“Oh, my Lolita. I have only words “This is the best toy train set “As the quotes above by Nabokov and Welles suggest, we need to be able to account for the specific functions available to narrative in each medium, for the specific elements that empirical creators will ‘play with’ in crafting their narratives.” |
For
James Whale
and
William French Anderson —
Words
In the Spirit of
Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs:
Stay for just a while…
Stay, and let me look at you.
It’s been so long, I hardly knew you.
Standing in the door…
Stay with me a while.
I only want to talk to you.
We’ve traveled halfway ’round the world
To find ourselves again.
September morn…
We danced until the night
became a brand new day,
Two lovers playing scenes
from some romantic play.
September morning still can
make me feel this way.
Look at what you’ve done…
Why, you’ve become a grown-up girl…
— Neil Diamond
Images
In the Spirit of
September Morn:
The Last Day of Summer:
Photographs by Jock Sturges
“In 1990, the FBI entered Sturges’s studio and seized his work, claiming violation of child pornography laws.”
Related material:
and
Log24 entries of
Aug. 15, 2004.
Those interested in the political implications of Diamond’s songs may enjoy Neil Performs at Kerry Fundraiser.
I personally enjoyed this site’s description of Billy Crystal’s remarks, which included “a joke about former President Clinton’s forthcoming children’s
“Puff, puff, woo, woo, off we go!”
Symmetry and Change, Part 3…
Hexagram 28
Preponderance of
the Great:
The Image
Lake
Wind
The lake rises
above the trees.
“Congratulations to Clare Lawler, who participated very successfully in the recently held Secondary Schools Judo Championships in Wellington.”
For an explanation of this entry’s title, see the previous two entries and
Oxford Word
(Log24, July 10, 2004)
Symmetry and Change, Part 4…
Heaven and Earth
Hexagram 42
Increase:
The Image
Wind
Thunder
Wind and thunder:
the image of Increase.
“This time resembles that of
the marriage of heaven and earth”
|
|
|
you gotta ride it like you find it.
Get your ticket at the station
of the Rock Island Line.
in Rock Island, Illinois
“What it all boiled down to really was everybody giving everybody else a hard time for no good reason whatever… You just couldn’t march to your own music. Nowadays, you couldn’t even hear it… It was lost, the music which each person had inside himself, and which put him in step with things as they should be.”
— The Grifters, Ch. 10, 1963, by
James Myers Thompson
“The Old Man’s still an artist
with a Thompson.”
— Terry in “Miller’s Crossing”
For some of “the music which
each person had inside,”
click on the picture
with the Thompson.
It may be that Kylie is,
in her own way, an artist…
with a 357:
(Hits counter at
The Quality of Diamond
as of 11:05 AM Sept. 2, 2004)
For more on
“the marriage of heaven and earth,”
see
Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star.
Symmetry and Change, Part 5…
Whale Road
Hexagram 23
Splitting Apart:
The Image
Mountain
Earth
The mountain rests
on the earth.
“… the plot is different but the monsters, names, and manner of speaking will ring a bell.”
— Frank Pinto, Jr., review of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf
Other recommended reading, found during a search for the implications of today’s previous entry, “Hexagram 42”:
This excellent meditation
on symmetry and change
comes from a site whose
home page
has the following image:
Symmetry and Change, Part 6…
Cinderella’s Slipper
Hexagram 54
The Marrying Maiden:
The Image
Thunder
Lake
See
“… a Thoreau-like retreat
by a nearby lake….
Both men have
a ‘touch of the poet’….
The symmetry is perfect.”
by a nearby lake….
Both men have
a ‘touch of the poet’….
The symmetry is perfect.”
Symmetry and Change, Part 7…
Another September Morn
Hexagram 56:
The Wanderer
The Image
Fire
Mountain
Fire on the mountain,
Run boys run…
Devil’s in the House of
The Rising Sun!
Friday, September 3, 2004
Symmetry and Change, Part 8…
Hexagram 25
Innocence:
The Image
Heaven
Thunder
Friday, September 3, 2004
Symmetry and Change, Part 9…
Hexagram 49
Revolution:
The Image
the image of Revolution.
“I sit now in a little room off the bar at four-thirty in the morning drinking ochas and then mescal and writing this on some Bella Vista notepaper I filched the other night…. But this is worst of all, to feel your soul dying. I wonder if it is because to-night my soul has really died that I feel at the moment something like peace. Or is it because right through hell there is a path, as Blake well knew, and though I may not take it, sometimes lately in dreams I have been able to see it? …And this is how I sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world: but the name of this land is hell. It is not Mexico of course but in the heart.”
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
Friday, September 3, 2004
Symmetry and Change, conclusion…
Ite, Missa Est
Hexagram 13
Fellowship With Men:
The Image
Heaven
Fire
“A pretty girl —
is like a melody —- !”
For details, see
A Mass for Lucero.
Comments Off on Sunday September 5, 2004
Friday, September 3, 2004
Friday September 3, 2004
Symmetry and Change, Part 9…
Hexagram 49
Revolution:
The Image
the image of Revolution.
"I sit now in a little room off the bar at four-thirty in the morning drinking ochas and then mescal and writing this on some Bella Vista notepaper I filched the other night…. But this is worst of all, to feel your soul dying. I wonder if it is because to-night my soul has really died that I feel at the moment something like peace. Or is it because right through hell there is a path, as Blake well knew, and though I may not take it, sometimes lately in dreams I have been able to see it? …And this is how I sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world: but the name of this land is hell. It is not Mexico of course but in the heart."
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
Comments Off on Friday September 3, 2004
Wednesday, August 18, 2004
Wednesday August 18, 2004
Drunk Bird
T. Charles Erickson
Shizuo Kakutani
in the 1980’s
“A drunk man will find his way home, but a drunk bird may get lost forever.”
— Shizuo Kakutani, quoted by J. Chang in Stochastic Processes (ps), p. 1-19. Chang says the quote is from an R. Durrett book on probability.
Meaning:
A random walk in d dimensions is recurrent if d = 1 or d = 2, but transient if d is greater than or equal to 3.
From a web page on Kylie Minogue:
Turns out she’s a party girl
who loves Tequila:
“Time disappears with Tequila.
It goes elastic, then vanishes.”
Kylie sings
“Locomotion”
From a web page on Malcolm Lowry’s classic novel Under the Volcano:
The day begins with Yvonne’s arrival at the Bella Vista bar in Quauhnahuac. From outside she hears Geoffrey’s familiar voice shouting a drunken lecture this time on the topic of the rule of the Mexican railway that requires that “A corpse will be transported by express!” (Lowry, Volcano, p. 43).
For further literary details in memory of Shizuo Kakutani, Yale mathematician and father of book reviewer Michiko Kakutani, see
Of course, Kakutani himself would probably prefer the anti-Santa, Michael Shermer. For a refutation of Santa by this high priest of Scientism, see
(Scientific American, July 26, 2004).
Saturday, May 1, 2004
Saturday May 1, 2004
Fallen from Heaven
On today's stories:
Recall, gentle readers, the reference to Lucifer in last midnight's story, "The Devil and Wallace Stevens," and the reference in yesterday's story, "Notes," to the film "2010" (1984). Here is a quote from a review of the story behind that film:
"If the coming of Lucifer in this story doesn't set your pulse racing and your mind whirring, then I don't know what will."
For some of us — students of Stephen King and Malcolm Lowry — the coming of Lucifer is not such a surprising event. See
Comments Off on Saturday May 1, 2004
Saturday, April 10, 2004
Saturday April 10, 2004
Harrowing
"The Ferris wheel came into view again, just the top, silently burning high on the hill, almost directly in front of him, then the trees rose up over it. The road, which was terrible and full of potholes, went steeply downhill here; he was approaching the little bridge over the barranca, the deep ravine. Halfway across the bridge he stopped; he lit a new cigarette from the one he'd been smoking, and leaned over the parapet, looking down. It was too dark to see the bottom, but: here was finality indeed, and cleavage! Quauhnahuac was like the times in this respect, wherever you turned the abyss was waiting for you round the corner. Dormitory for vultures and city of Moloch! When Christ was being crucified, so ran the sea-borne, hieratic legend, the earth had opened all through this country …"
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, 1947. (Harper & Row reissue, 1984, p. 15)
Comment by Stephen Spender:
"There is a suggestion of Christ descending into the abyss for the harrowing of Hell. But it is the Consul whom we think of here, rather than of Christ. The Consul is hurled into this abyss at the end of the novel."
— Introduction to Under the Volcano
Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XXI —
Gibbon, discussing the theology of the Trinity, defines perichoresis as
"… the internal connection and spiritual penetration which indissolubly unites the divine persons59 ….
59 … The
or 'circumincessio,' is perhaps the deepest and darkest corner of the whole theological abyss."
"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you."
William Golding:
"Simon's head was tilted slightly up. His eyes could not break away and the Lord of the Flies hung in space before him.
'What are you doing out here all alone? Aren't you afraid of me?'
Simon shook.
'There isn't anyone to help you. Only me. And I'm the Beast.'
Simon's mouth labored, brought forth audible words.
'Pig's head on a stick.'
'Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!' said the head. For a moment or two the forest and all the other dimly appreciated places echoed with the parody of laughter. 'You knew, didn't you? I'm part of you? Close, close, close!' "
"Thought of the day:
You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar… if you're into catchin' flies."
— Alice Woodrome, Good Friday, 2004
Anne Francis,
also known as
Honey West:
"Here was finality indeed,
and cleavage!"
— Under the Volcano
From the official
Anne Francis Web Site:
Come into my parlor….
For some background,
see the use of the word
"spider" in Under the Volcano:
WRIDER/ESPIDER:
THE CONSUL AS ARTIST IN
UNDER THE VOLCANO,
by Patrick A. McCarthy.
See, too, Why Me?
Wednesday, March 3, 2004
Wednesday March 3, 2004
An Association of Ideas
"The association is the idea." — Ian Lee
"One of my teachers told me I was a nihilist… I took it as a compliment."
— Susanna Kaysen in Girl, Interrupted
MIT biography of Carl Kaysen, Susanna Kaysen's father:
"His scholarly work has ranged widely in the areas where economics, sociology, politics and law overlap."
From Venn Diagram
by Alejandro Fuentes Penna and
Oscar de la Paz Arroyo,
ITESM Campus Cuernavaca,
Lomas de Cuernavaca,
Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico
"Ahí construyó Félix Candela la Capilla abierta (1959, junto con Guillermo Rosell y Manuel Larrosa)
que iba a ser un templo para todas las religiones, pero que no fue autorizada por las autoridades. Más adelante la Capilla habría de convertirse en restaurante, como el de Xochimilco construido en 1957, discoteca, bar y teatro. En el Casino de la Selva vivieron personajes famosos. Uno de ellos fue el escritor inglés Malcolm Lowry…."
— El Casino de la Selva,
Octavio Rodríguez Araujo
"No se puede vivir sin amar."
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
Comments Off on Wednesday March 3, 2004
Friday, January 9, 2004
Friday January 9, 2004
HURRY UP PLEASE
IT’S TIME
— T. S. Eliot,
The Waste Land, II
“A Game of Chess”
|
“Make the white Queen run so fast
|
Jan. 9 obituary of Brian Gibson —
“In 2002 he was executive producer of the film ‘Frida,’ about the artist Frida Kahlo….”
Captured for the Queen
Joan Aiken
Photo by Alex Gotfryd,
circa 1972
Jan. 9 obituary of Joan Aiken —
“Joan Aiken was born in Rye, England, a daughter of the American poet Conrad Aiken….”
“Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano must be, for anyone who loves the English language, a sheer joy.”
“He was never inclined to small talk.”
— Jan. 9 obituary of Steven Edward Dorfman, writer of questions (i.e., answers) for the game show “Jeopardy!”
“What’s the Hellfire Club?”
— Joan Aiken, beginning of the final chapter of The Shadow Guests
Note that Dorfman, Gibson, and Aiken
all died on Sunday, Jan. 4, 2004.
For some related material, see
Comments Off on Friday January 9, 2004
Sunday, December 14, 2003
Sunday December 14, 2003
Hell to Heaven
From Hotel Point:
On a novel, Dow Mossman's
The Stones of Summer —
Evidence of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. The Dow Mossman character (Dawes Williams) sitting in the Rio Grande tearing pages out of his notebooks. (We get the pages, reproduced somewhat tediously in near-agate type.) Somewhere the ex-Consul Geoffrey Firmin gets mention. Mythic drinking and death in Mexico, vaguely “Jungian.”…
“The first time he had noticed it, language, was in the fourth grade when Miss Norma Jean Thompson, his teacher, turned against the whole class and said:
‘All Americans eventually go to heaven.’
‘By sweet Jesus,’ Ronnie Crown had said that afternoon, sitting on Dunchee’s wall, waiting for Dawes Williams to come tell him about it, ‘that’s about the God Damn dumbest thing I ever heard.’
Dawes Williams had agreed immediately that the message was insipid, but he thought for years that the syntax was inspired. In fact, the first time Norma Jean Thompson had said, ALL AMERICANS EVENTUALLY GO TO HEAVEN, was also the first time Dawes Williams had ever noticed the English sentence."
From Norma Jean Thompson:
"… the Town House Restaurant on Central and Morningside [in Albuquerque]: 'It's like going backwards in time to the late 1950s; you'd think you'd meet Frank Sinatra in there. You can drown in the big red leather booths, and if you're lucky, they'll take out their private family stock of brandy. Wonderful Greek salads, steaks and potatoes for lunch or dinner. Time stops in there, right off Route 66.' "
From wcities.com:
On the Town House Lounge & Restaurant in Albuquerque:
"Try the three-inch Baklava and feel like you have died and gone to heaven…"
AMEN.
See, too, the film "Stone Reader"
and the previous Log24 entry.
Comments Off on Sunday December 14, 2003
Sunday, November 2, 2003
Sunday November 2, 2003
All Souls' Day
at the Still Point
From remarks on Denis Donoghue's Speaking of Beauty in the New York Review of Books, issue dated Nov. 20, 2003, page 48:
"The Russian theorist Bakhtin lends his august authority to what Donoghue's lively conversation has been saying, or implying, all along. 'Beauty does not know itself; it cannot found and validate itself — it simply is.' "
From The Bakhtin Circle:
"Goethe's imagination was fundamentally chronotopic, he visualised time in space:
Time and space merge … into an inseparable unity … a definite and absolutely concrete locality serves at the starting point for the creative imagination… this is a piece of human history, historical time condensed into space….
Dostoevskii… sought to present the voices of his era in a 'pure simultaneity' unrivalled since Dante. In contradistinction to that of Goethe this chronotope was one of visualising relations in terms of space not time and this leads to a philosophical bent that is distinctly messianic:
Only such things as can conceivably be linked at a single point in time are essential and are incorporated into Dostoevskii's world; such things can be carried over into eternity, for in eternity, according to Dostoevskii, all is simultaneous, everything coexists…. "
Bakhtin's notion of a "chronotope" was rather poorly defined. For a geometric structure that might well be called by this name, see Poetry's Bones and Time Fold. For a similar, but somewhat simpler, structure, see Balanchine's Birthday.
From Four Quartets:
"At the still point, there the dance is."
From an essay by William H. Gass on Malcolm Lowry's classic novel Under the Volcano:
"There is no o'clock in a cantina."
Comments Off on Sunday November 2, 2003
Monday, October 27, 2003
Monday October 27, 2003
Dream of Heaven, continued
“…I am going up the hill on the grass behind juniper trees birches the road dusty she is coming up the other side yes there she is look it is who is it not Berty no Molly no a girl with red hair comes through the oak trees beautiful loves me puts out her hand kisses me we are kissing become one face floating in air with wings one fused face with wings Turner sunset and this and this and this and this and this WINGbeat and WINGbeat where whirled and well where whirled and well where whirled and well —”
— Great Circle, by Conrad Aiken, 1933.
Pp. 297-298 in paperback published by
Arbor House, New York, 1984.
For related material, see the poems of Conrad Aiken, the 1947 novel Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry, and the 1936 poem “Altarwise by Owl-Light,” by Dylan Thomas, whose birthday is today.
Surrealist postscripts:
The above dream contains a Turner sunset; a critic once called the work of Turner “pictures of nothing.” For details, see my entry of 8/23.
The time of this entry, 8:28, is a reference to the date, 8/28, of the Feast of St. Augustine, who was puzzled, as many still are, by the nature of time. For details, see my entry of 8/28.
Comments Off on Monday October 27, 2003
Saturday, September 13, 2003
Saturday September 13, 2003
For the Man in Black
Lyrics: Arizona Star
“Shinin’ like a diamond
she had tombstones in her eyes.”
A picture: Salma Hayek and Julie Taymor
A book: Dark Ladies, by Fritz Leiber
This offers a gentler form of the alcoholic experience than Malcolm Lowry’s classic Under the Volcano:
“I’ve had hallucinations from alcohol, too…. But only during withdrawal oddly, the first three days. In closets and dark corners and under tables — never in very bright light — I’d see these black and sometimes red wires, about the thickness of telephone cords, vibrating, whipping around. Made me think of giant spiders’ legs and such. I’d know they were hallucinations — they were manageable, thank God. Bright light would always wipe them out.”
— Fritz Leiber, “Our Lady of Darkness,” in Dark Ladies
Related entries:
The Feast of Kali, the Dark Lady, and
Architecture of Eternity,
my own “Once Upon a Time in Mexico.”
For a more serious Dark Lady portrait, see the site of artist John de la Vega.
Friday, July 25, 2003
Friday July 25, 2003
Realism in Literature:
Under the Volcano
Mexican Volcano Blast
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Here are 3 webcam views of the volcano. Nothing to see at the moment.
Literary background:
Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano,
Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star,
and, as background for today’s earlier entry on Platonism and Derrida,
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For more on Plato and Christian theology, consult the highly emotional site Further Into the Depths of Satan: “…in The Last Battle on page 170 [C. S.] Lewis has Digory saying, ‘It’s all in Plato, all in Plato.’ Now, Lewis calls Plato ‘an overwhelming theological genius’ (Reflections on the Psalms, p. 80)….” The title “Further Into the Depths of Satan,” along with the volcano readings above, suggests a reading from a related site: Gollum and the Mystery of Evil: “Gollum here clearly represents Frodo’s hidden self. It is ‘as if we are witnessing the darkest night of the soul and one side attempting to master the other’ (Jane Chance 102). Then Frodo, whose finger has been bitten off, cries out, and Gollum holds the Ring aloft, shrieking: ‘Precious, precious, precious! My Precious! O my Precious!’ (RK, VI, 249). At this point, stepping too near the edge, he falls into the volcano, taking the Ring with him. With this, the mountain |
In the above two-step vignette, the part of Gollum is played by the author of “Further Into the Depths of Satan,” who called C. S. Lewis a fool† “that was and is extremely useful to his father the devil.”
† See Matthew 5:22: “…whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.”
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Friday, June 27, 2003
Friday June 27, 2003
For Fred Sandback:
Time's a Round
The following entry of Feb. 25, 2003, was written for painter Mark Rothko, and may serve as well for minimalist artist Fred Sandback, also connected to the de Menil family of art patrons, who, like Rothko, has killed himself.
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Plagued in life by depression — what Styron, quoting Milton, called "darkness visible" — Rothko took his own life on this date [Feb. 25] in 1970. As a sequel to the previous note, "Song of Not-Self," here are the more cheerful thoughts of the song "Time's a Round," the first of Shiva Dancing: The Rothko Chapel Songs, by C. K. Latham. See also my comment on the previous entry (7:59 PM).
Time’s a round, time’s a round, — C. K. Latham
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The following is from the cover of
"Finnegans Wake: a Symposium,"
a reprint of
Our Exagmination Round His Factification
for Incamination of Work in Progress,
Paris, Shakespeare and Company, 1929.
As well as being a memorial to Rothko and Sandback, the above picture may serve to mark the diamond anniversary of a dinner party at Shakespeare and Company on this date in 1928. (See previous entry.)
A quotation from aaparis.org also seems relevant on this, the date usually given for the death of author Malcolm Lowry, in some of whose footsteps I have walked:
"We are not saints."
— Chapter V, Alcoholics Anonymous
Saturday, April 19, 2003
Saturday April 19, 2003
Harrowing
In memory of the many who have died on April 19, most notably Octavio Paz.
"There is a suggestion of Christ descending into the abyss for the harrowing of Hell. But it is the Consul whom we think of here, rather than of Christ."
— Introduction to Malcolm Lowry's classic novel Under the Volcano, by Stephen Spender
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"Hey, big Spender, spend a little time
with me." — Song lyric
For a somewhat deeper meditation on time, see Architecture of Eternity.
See also Literature of the Descent into Hell.
"Mexico is a solar country — but it is also a black country, a dark country. This duality of Mexico has preoccupied me since I was a child."
— Octavio Paz, quoted by Homero Aridjis
Amen.
Concluding Unscientific Postscripts:
"Once upon a time…" — Anonymous
"It's quarter to three…" — Sinatra
Comments Off on Saturday April 19, 2003
Wednesday, February 26, 2003
Wednesday February 26, 2003
The Eight Revisited
“…search for thirty-three and three…”
— The Black Queen in The Eight, by Katherine Neville, Ballantine Books, January 1989, page 140
Samuel Beckett on Dante and Joyce:
“Another point of comparison is the preoccupation with the significance of numbers…. Thus the poem is divided into three Cantiche, each composed of 33 Canti….”
— “Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce,” in James Joyce/Finnegans Wake: A Symposium (1929), New Directions paperback, 1972
“– Nel mezzo del bloody cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai in…”
— Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry, 1947, beginning of Chapter VI
“‘The Divine Comedy’ celebrates Dante’s journey of knowledge to God through life: hell, purgatory and paradise. Dante Alighieri Academy continues Dante’s Christian philosophy of education….”
Chorus of the Damned:
I don’t know where it is we’re goin’
and God knows if I ever will,
but what a way this is to get there.
I got those archetypal, rubber-room,
astral-plane Moebius strip blues.
I got those in-and-out, round-about,
which way’s out Moebius strip blues.
© 1997 by C.K. Latham
Added March 3, 2003, 6:00 AM:
For a less confused song, click this Glasgow site.
Comments Off on Wednesday February 26, 2003
Monday, January 27, 2003
Monday January 27, 2003
Leadbelly Under the Volcano
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From a website on Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano: “This image of impending doom recurs in the movie at the local theater, ‘Los Manos De Orlac’ or ‘The Hands of Orlac’ — the classic film about a pianist….” Today’s site music, “Good Night, Irene,” by Leadbelly, is for the Diamond Project of the New York City Ballet, named for Irene Diamond, who died January 21. (See entry of that date.) |
See also the obituary of John Browning, pianist, who died January 26.
Historical postscript: Huddie Ledbetter (“Leadbelly”) was, according to some accounts, born on January 21, the date of Irene Diamond‘s death. He died on December 6, the feast day of Saint Nicholas.
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Friday, January 3, 2003
Friday January 3, 2003
The Shanghai Gesture:
An Exercise in Synchronicity
“A corpse will be transported by express!”
— Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry (1947)
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For Dietrich, see the reference below;
For Minogue, see my entry
“That Old Devil Moon”
of January 1st, 2003.
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From the Turner Classic Movies website: PLAYING ON TCM: Shanghai Express (1932) A beautiful temptress re-kindles an old romance while trying to escape her past during a tension-packed train journey. [Set in 1931] BW-82m |
From The New Yorker magazine,
received in the mail this afternoon:
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Shanghai Moon “…a new play… set in Shanghai in 1931…. Previews begin Jan. 3.” |
Given the above, a believer in synchronicity
under the volcano
will naturally search for a suitable corpse…
and voilà:
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Friday, Jan. 3, 2003. 05:50 PM Syndicated astrologist LOS ANGELES (AP) — Sydney Omarr, the astrologer to the stars who came to write horoscopes that appear in more than 200 North American newspapers, has died. He was 76. Omarr, who was blinded and paralysed from the neck down by multiple sclerosis, died Thursday [Jan. 2, 2003] in hospital in Santa Monica of complications from a heart attack, the Los Angeles Times reported. His ex-wife, assistants and several close friends were by his side. Born Sidney Kimmelman in Philadelphia, Omarr decided to change his name at age 15 after watching a movie called The Shanghai Gesture, starring Victor Mature as a character named Omar. He changed the spelling of his first name and adopted Omar as his last name, but added a second “r,” in accordance with certain numerological formulas. |
“It has a ghastly familiarity,
like a half-forgotten dream.”
— Poppy (Gene Tierney) in
“The Shanghai Gesture.”
“It’s a gesture, dear, not a recipe.”
— Peggy (Vanessa Redgrave) in
“Prick Up Your Ears“
Wednesday, January 1, 2003
Wednesday January 1, 2003
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ART WARS: That Old Devil Moon |
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From The New York Times, Wed., Jan. 1, 2003:
Richard Horner, 82,
Broadway Producer, Is DeadRichard Horner, a Broadway theater owner and producer who won a Tony Award for the 1974 revival of Eugene O'Neill's "Moon for the Misbegotten," died on Saturday [December 28, 2002] at his home in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 82.
According to one source, the O'Neill revival opened on December 28, 1973 — the same date on which the life of one of its producers was later to close.
From a CurtainUp review:
The revival at the Morosco was dubbed by its company "The Resurrection Play" since Jason Robards undertook the part just after a near fatal car accident and its legendary director José Quintero had just given up drinking.
According to the Internet Broadway Database, this revival, or resurrection, took place officially not on December 28 — the date of Horner's death — but, appropriately, a day later.
At any rate, O'Neill's title, along with my weblog entry of December 28, 2002,
"On This Date," featuring Kylie Minogue,
suggests the following mini-exhibit of artistic efforts:
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Curtain Up!
July 2000
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Under the Volcano: A painting based on Malcolm Lowry's classic novel. Having played tennis, Dr. Vigil and M. Laruelle talk about the events a year earlier. The view is of Cuernavaca from the Casino de la Selva hotel.
Painting by
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For further details on Kylie, Mexico, tequila, and
Under the Volcano,
see my entry of November 5, 2002.
For today's site music, click "Old Devil Moon" here.
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Addendum of 9:30 pm 1/1/03:
For a politically correct view
For a more perceptive analysis,
If there is a devil here,
J. D. Salinger (Nine Stories),
Frazer might appreciate the remarks in
Not amused: Charlotte Raven
Raven, take a bough.
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Comments Off on Wednesday January 1, 2003
Tuesday, November 5, 2002
Tuesday November 5, 2002
Kylie on Tequila
From a web page on Kylie Minogue:
Turns out she’s a party girl who loves Tequila:
“Time disappears with Tequila.
It goes elastic, then vanishes.”
From a web page on Malcolm Lowry’s classic novel
Under the Volcano:
The day begins with Yvonne’s arrival at the Bella Vista bar in Quauhnahuac. From outside she hears Geoffrey’s familiar voice shouting a drunken lecture this time on the topic of the rule of the Mexican railway that requires that “A corpse will be transported by express!” (Lowry, Volcano, p. 43).
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you gotta ride it like you find it.
Get your ticket at the station
of the Rock Island Line.
in Rock Island, Illinois
Comments Off on Tuesday November 5, 2002
Thursday, October 3, 2002
Thursday October 3, 2002
Literary Landmarks
From Dr. Mac's Cultural Calendar for Oct. 3:
"On this day in 1610, Ben Jonson's funniest comedy The Alchemist was entered into the Stationer's Register. It involves a servant who when the masters are away sets up a necromantic shop, tricking all and everyone."
From Literary Calendar for tomorrow, Oct. 4:
"1892 — Robert Lawson, the only author/illustrator to win both the Caldecott Award and the Newbery Award—both coveted awards in the United States for children's literature, is born."
As a child I was greatly influenced by Robert Lawson's illustrations for the Godolphin abridgement of Pilgrim's Progress. Later I was to grow up partly in Cuernavaca, Mexico, an appropriate setting for The Valley of the Shadow of Death and other Bunyan/Lawson themes. Still later, I encountered Malcolm Lowry's great novel Under the Volcano, set in Cuernavaca. Lowry's novel begins with an epigraph from Bunyan. For the connection with Ben Jonson, see Pete Hamill's article "The Alchemist of Cuernavaca" in Art News magazine, April 2001, pages 134-137. See also my journal note of April 4, 2001, The Black Queen.
Comments Off on Thursday October 3, 2002
Tuesday, August 13, 2002
Tuesday August 13, 2002
As Blake Well Knew
From The New York Times:
Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, whose contributions to the mathematical logic that underlies computer programs and operating systems make him one of the intellectual giants of the field, died on [August 6, 2002] at his home in Nuenen, the Netherlands. He was 72….
Dr. Dijkstra is best known for his shortest-path algorithm, a method for finding the most direct route on a graph or map….
The shortest-path algorithm, which is now widely used in global positioning systems and travel planning, came to him one morning in 1956 as he sat sipping coffee on the terrace of an Amsterdam cafe.
It took him three years to publish the method, which is now known simply as Dijkstra’s algorithm. At the time, he said, algorithms were hardly considered a scientific topic.
From my August 6, 2002, note below:
…right through hell there is a path, as Blake well knew…
— Malcolm Lowry, 1947, Under the Volcano
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Tuesday, August 6, 2002
Tuesday August 6, 2002
In honor of
Pope Callistus III, and
all of whom died on this date:
A lavender love butterfly vignette…
If you remember something there
That glided past you,
Followed close by heavy breathing,
Don't be concerned. It will not harm you;
It's only me, pursuing something
I'm not sure of.
and a
But seriously…
A few words in memory of a great mathematician, André Weil, who died on August 6, 1998:
"I wonder if it is because to-night my soul has really died that I feel at the moment something like peace. Or is it because right through hell there is a path, as Blake well knew, and though I may not take it, sometimes lately in dreams I have been able to see it?"
— Malcolm Lowry, 1947, Under the Volcano
There is a link on the Grand Finale site above to a site on British Columbia, which to Lowry symbolized heaven on earth. See also my website Shining Forth, the title of which is not unrelated to the August 6, 1993 encyclical of Pope John Paul II.
Comments Off on Tuesday August 6, 2002