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Changing Woman: “Kaleidoscope turning…
Shifting pattern — Roger Zelazny, Eye of Cat |
Friday, March 19, 2021
Eye of Cat
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Saturday, April 7, 2018
Word and Image: Backstory for James Spader
Actor James Spader in a 2014 interview —
". . . my father taught English. My mother taught art . . . ."
Detail of part of a text by Magritte (1929) that appeared
without attribution in the online New York Times today —
See also, from a search for the phrase "Word and Image"
in this journal —
The Philosophers' Stone as originally
illustrated in The New York Times —
.
Related images —
See as well a Log24 search for "Philosophers' Stone"
and remarks related to the Magritte pictures above
in the post Story of March 13, 2014.
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Thursday, May 21, 2015
Gaze
The gaze of Juliette Binoche, star of the film Bleu ,
in a post of December 16, 2003, suggests the following…
From The Philosopher's Gaze, by David Michael Levin,
University of California Press, 1999 —
Now, the gathering of re-collection,
as a return to the opening ground,
a Rücknahme in den zu eröffnenden Grund ,
would be crucial to the transfiguration of the
figure-ground Gestalt: its release from the
disfigurements of enframing (Gestell ) and
its emergence and becoming as a gathering
of the fourfold. The opening, gathering, and
laying-down that would take place in and as
the ring of the Geviert is therefore to be
understood as entering into a figure-ground
formation, a Gestalt , that our looking and
seeing would have opened up, gathered,
and laid down by virtue of their being (or say
by virtue of their character as) a hermeneutical
re-collection of being, gathering the presencing
of the lighting, the boundless giving-to-be-hold
of the field, into the pain and the thankfulness
of memory.
A hermeneutical re-collection —
Log24 posts tagged May 19 Gestalt.
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Sunday, May 25, 2014
Bleu
For instance:
See Log24 instances of the above Binoche image,
as well as other posts on Binoche + Bleu .
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Sunday, September 18, 2011
What Rough Beast
Lurching Toward Decision
"Suskind… nails, I think, Obama's intellectual blind spot. Indeed, Obama himself nails it, telling Suskind that he was too inclined to search for 'the perfect technical answer' to the myriad of complex issues coming at him."
— Frank Rich on Ron Suskind's new book about the White House, Confidence Men
Very distantly related material—
From "Confidence Game," an Oct. 12, 2008, post in this journal, a quasi-European perspective—
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Kaleidoscope turning… – Roger Zelazny, Eye of Cat |
See also …
Gravity’s Rainbow , Penguin Classics, 1995, page 742:
"… knowing his Tarot, we would expect to look among the Humility, among the gray and preterite souls, to look for him adrift in the hostile light of the sky, the darkness of the sea….
Now there’s only a long cat’s-eye of bleak sunset left over the plain tonight, bright gray against a purple ceiling of clouds, with an iris of
742"
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Thursday, October 21, 2010
St. Ursula’s Day
Mathematics and Narrative continued
A search for Ursula in this journal yields a story…
“The main character is a slave woman who discovers new patterns in the mosaics.”
Other such stories: Plato’s Meno and Changing Woman —
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“Kaleidoscope turning…
Shifting pattern within — Roger Zelazny, Eye of Cat |
Philosophical postscript—
“That Lévi-Strauss should have been able to transmute the romantic passion of Tristes Tropiques into the hypermodern intellectualism of La Pensée Sauvage is surely a startling achievement. But there remain the questions one cannot help but ask. Is this transmutation science or alchemy? Is the ‘very simple transformation’ which produced a general theory out of a personal disappointment real or a sleight of hand? Is it a genuine demolition of the walls which seem to separate mind from mind by showing that the walls are surface structures only, or is it an elaborately disguised evasion necessitated by a failure to breach them when they were directly encountered? Is Lévi-Strauss writing, as he seems to be claiming in the confident pages of La Pensée Sauvage, a prolegomenon to all future anthropology? Or is he, like some uprooted neolithic intelligence cast away on a reservation, shuffling the debris of old traditions in a vain attempt to revivify a primitive faith whose moral beauty is still apparent but from which both relevance and credibility have long since departed?”
— Clifford Geertz, conclusion of “The Cerebral Savage: On the Work of Claude Lévi-Strauss“
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Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Stone Junction*
The Philosophers' Stone
according to
The New York Times—
Related material
from French cinema—
"a 'non-existent myth' of a battle between
goddesses of the sun and the moon
for a mysterious blue diamond
that has the power to make
mortals immortal and vice versa."
See also
* The title is a reference to Jim Dodge's 1989 novel Stone Junction: An Alchemical Potboiler.
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Friday, September 11, 2009
Friday September 11, 2009
Theology
in memory of
physicist Aage Bohr,
who died at 87 on
Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2009
From the perspective of one inside the jewel, one might ask 'Why is this section blue while this section is black?,' and from within the jewel, one could not formulate an answer since one could not see the entire picture projected on the jewel; however, from outside the jewel, an observer (some analogue of Newton's God, perhaps, looking down on his 'sensorium' from the 5th dimension) could easily see the pattern and understand that all of the 'genuinely fortuitous' events inside the space-time jewel are, in fact, completely determined by the pattern in the projector."
in memory of
physicist Aage Bohr,
who died at 87 on
Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2009
Swarthmore physics honors thesis, 136 pp., 2007–
Abstract:
"Quantum mechanics, which has no completely accepted interpretation but many seemingly strange physical results, has been interpreted in a number of bizarre and fascinating ways over the years. The two interpretations examined in this paper, [Aage] Bohr and [Ole] Ulfbeck's 'Genuine Fortuitousness' and Stuckey, Silberstein, and Cifone's 'Relational Blockworld,' seem to be two such strange interpretations; Genuine Fortuitousness posits that causality is not fundamental to the universe, and Relational Blockworld suggests that time does not act as we perceive it to act. In this paper, I analyze these two interpretations…."
Footnote 55, page 114:
"Thus far, I have been speaking in fairly abstract terms, which can sometimes be unhelpful on the issue of explaining anything about the structure of space-time. I want to pause for a moment to suggest a new potential view of the blockworld within a 'genuinely fortuitous' universe in more visual terms. Instead of the 'static spacetime jewel' of blockworld that is often invoked by eternalists to help their readers conceptualize of what a blockworld would 'look like' from the outside, now imagine that a picture on a slide is being projected onto the surface of this space-time jewel."
From the perspective of one inside the jewel, one might ask 'Why is this section blue while this section is black?,' and from within the jewel, one could not formulate an answer since one could not see the entire picture projected on the jewel; however, from outside the jewel, an observer (some analogue of Newton's God, perhaps, looking down on his 'sensorium' from the 5th dimension) could easily see the pattern and understand that all of the 'genuinely fortuitous' events inside the space-time jewel are, in fact, completely determined by the pattern in the projector."
— "Genuine Fortuitousness, Relational Blockworld, Realism, and Time" (pdf), by Daniel J. Peterson, Honors Thesis, Swarthmore College, December 13, 2007
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Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Wednesday August 5, 2009
Word and Image
"Edward T. Hall, a cultural anthropologist
who pioneered the study of nonverbal
communication and interactions between
members of different ethnic groups,
died July 20 at his home in
Santa Fe, N.M. He was 95."
NY Times piece quoted here on
the date of Hall's death:
|
"July 20, 1969, was the moment NASA needed, more than anything else in this world, the Word. But that was something NASA's engineers had no specifications for. At this moment, that remains the only solution to recovering NASA's true destiny, which is, of course, to build that bridge to the stars." Commentary —
The Word according to St. John:
|
From Hall's obituary:
"Mr. Hall first became interested in
space and time as forms of cultural
expression while working on
Navajo and Hopi reservations
in the 1930s."
Log24, July 29:
|
"Kaleidoscope turning…
Shifting pattern within |
"We are the key."
— Eye of Cat
Update of about 4:45 PM 8/5:
Paul Newall, "Kieślowski's Three Colours Trilogy"—
"Julie recognises the music of the busker outside playing a recorder as that of her husband's. When she asks him where he heard it, he replies that he makes up all sorts of things. This is an instance of a theory of Kieślowski's that 'different people, in different places, are thinking the same thing but for different reasons.' With regard to music in particular, he held what might be characterised as a Platonic view according to which notes pre-exist and are picked out and assembled by people. That these can accord with one another is a sign of what connects people, or so he believed."
The above photo of Juliette Binoche in Blue accompanying the quotations from Zelazny illustrates Kieślowski's concept, with graphic designs instead of musical notes. Some of the same designs are discussed in Abstraction and the Holocaust (Mark Godfrey, Yale University Press, 2007). (See the Log24 entries of June 11, 2009.)
Related material:
"Jeffrey Overstreet, in his book Through a Screen Darkly, comments extensively on Blue. He says these stones 'are like strands of suspended crystalline tears, pieces of sharp-edged grief that Julie has not been able to express.'….
Throughout the film the color blue crops up, highlighting the mood of Julie's grief. A blue light occurs frequently, when Julie is caught by some fleeting memory. Accompanied by strains of an orchestral composition, possibly her husband's, these blue screen shots hold for several seconds while Julie is clearly processing something. The meaning of this blue light is unexplained. For Overstreet, it is the spirit of reunification of broken things."
— Martin Baggs at Mosaic Movie Connect Group on Sunday, March 15, 2009. (Cf. Log24 on that date.)
For such a spirit, compare Binoche's blue mobile in Blue with Binoche's gathered shards in Bee Season.
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Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Wednesday July 29, 2009
Kaleideion
Related material:
“A great deal has been made of the fact that Forbidden Planet is essentially William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) in an science-fiction setting. It is this that transforms Forbidden Planet into far more than a mere pulp science-fiction story” — Richard Scheib
Dialogue from Forbidden Planet —
“… Which makes it a gilt-edged priority that one of us gets into that Krell lab and takes that brain boost.”
Dialogue from another story —
“They thought they were doing a linear magnification, sort of putting me through a magnifying glass.”
“Sizewise?”
“Brainwise, but what they did was multiply me by myself into a quadratic.”
— Psychoshop, by Bester and Zelazny, 1998 paperback, p. 7
“… which would produce a special being– by means of that ‘cloned quadratic crap.’ [P. 75] The proper term sounds something like ‘Kaleideion‘….”
“So Adam is a Kaleideion?”
She shook her head.
“Not a Kaleideion. The Kaleideion….”
— Psychoshop, 1998 paperback, p. 85
See also
|
“Kaleidoscope turning…
Shifting pattern within
|
“When life itself seems lunatic,
who knows where madness lies?”
— For the source, see
Joyce’s Nightmare Continues.
Comments Off on Wednesday July 29, 2009
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Sunday January 11, 2009
| A Minor Metaphor
… we know that we use — Delmore Schwartz, |
stories to truth,
I recommend the
blue matrices of
Marion Zimmer Bradley’s
Darkover stories.
Bradley also wrote
The Mists of Avalon.
Happy birthday to
David Wolper,
who produced the
TV version of Mists.
Related material:
Diamonds Are Forever
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Sunday, October 12, 2008
Sunday October 12, 2008
Confidence Game
The Winners:
The Winners:
Related material:
Dec. 16, 2003—
|
Kaleidoscope turning… |
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Thursday, May 8, 2008
Thursday May 8, 2008
Synchronicity,
Part Deux
Part Deux
From
“On the Holy Trinity,”
the entry in the 3:20 PM
French footprint:
“…while the scientist sees
everything that happens
in one point of space,
the poet feels
everything that happens
in one point of time…
all forming an
instantaneous and transparent
organism of events….”
From
“Angel in the Details,”
the entry in the 3:59 PM
French footprint:
“I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose”
These, along with this afternoon’s
earlier entry, suggest a review
of a third Log24 item, Windmills,
with an actress from France as…
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Changing Woman: “Kaleidoscope turning…
Shifting pattern |
“When life itself seems lunatic,
who knows where madness lies?”
— For the source, see
Joyce’s Nightmare Continues.
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Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Tuesday November 15, 2005
Windmills
Upper part of above picture–
From today’s New York Times,
Seeing Mountains in
Starry Clouds of Creation.
Lower part of above picture–
Pilgrimage to Spider Rock:
“This magical place, according to Navajo Legend, was the home of Spider Woman, who gave the gift of weaving to the Dineh’ People. Today’s Navajos trace the excellence of their finest textiles to this time of legends, when their patron, Changing Woman, met Spider Woman, the first Weaver.”
Vine Deloria Jr.,
Evolution, Creationism,
and Other Modern Myths:
“The continuing struggle between evolutionists and creationists, a hot political topic for the past four decades, took a new turn in the summer of 1999 when the Kansas Board of Education voted to omit the mention of evolution in its newly approved curriculum, setting off outraged cries of foul by the scientific establishment. Don Quixotes on both sides mounted their chargers and went searching for windmills.”
Related material–
A figure from
last night’s entry,
Spider Woman:
From Sunday, the day
of Vine Deloria’s death,
a picture that might be
called Changing Woman:
Kaleidoscope turning…
Shifting pattern
within unalterable structure…
— Roger Zelazny, Eye of Cat
See also the windmill figure
in Time and Eternity
(Log 24, Feb. 1, 2003)
and
a review
of Fritz Leiber’s
The Big Time,
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Sunday, November 13, 2005
Sunday November 13, 2005
Structure
“Sunrise–
Hast thou a Flag for me?”
— Emily Dickinson
From a
Beethoven’s Birthday entry:
Kaleidoscope turning…
Shifting pattern
within unalterable structure…
— Roger Zelazny, Eye of Cat
Related material:
Blue
(below),
Bee Season
(below),
Halloween Meditations,
Aquarius Jazz,
We Are the Key,
and
Jazz on St. Lucia’s Day.
“Y’know, I never imagined
the competition version involved
so many tricky permutations.”
— David Brin, Glory Season
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Friday, April 30, 2004
Friday April 30, 2004
Notes
On “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” by Wallace Stevens:
“This third section continues its play of opposing forces, introducing in the second canto a ‘blue woman,’ arguably a goddess- or muse-figure, who stands apart from images of fecundity and sexuality….”
From a Beethoven’s Birthday entry:
Kaleidoscope turning…
Shifting pattern
within unalterable structure…
— Roger Zelazny, Eye of Cat
See, too, Blue Matrices, and
a link for Beethoven’s birthday:
Song for the
Unification of Europe
(Blue 1)
From today’s news:
PRAGUE, Czech Republic (AP) – Ushering in a bold new era, hundreds of thousands of people packed streets and city squares across Europe on Friday for festivals and fireworks marking the European Union’s historic enlargement to 25 countries from 15.
The expanded EU, which takes in a broad swath of the former Soviet bloc – a region separated for decades from the West by barbed wire and Cold War ideology – was widening to 450 million citizens at midnight (6 p.m.EDT) to create a collective superpower rivalling the United States.
“All these worlds are yours
except Europa.
Attempt no landing there.”
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Tuesday, December 16, 2003
Tuesday December 16, 2003
Kaleidoscope turning…
Shifting pattern
within unalterable structure…
— Roger Zelazny, Eye of Cat
See, too, Blue Matrices, and
a link for Beethoven's birthday:
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