See Ballet Blanc and Black Art in this journal.
From the former:
"A blank underlies the trials of device."
— Wallace Stevens
From the latter:
Monday, August 22, 2022
Tuesday, January 2, 2018
Debs and Redhead
The above images were suggested in part by the birthdays
on Sept. 21, 2011, of Bill Murray and Stephen King.
More seriously, also in this journal on that date, from a post
titled Symmetric Generation —
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Friday, July 14, 2017
Black Art
A search for posts in this journal on the actress Ellen Page
in the film "Inception" was suggested by Bastille Day (today),
by her character's name, Ariadne, and by the concluding image
of the previous post —
.
That search yielded the following image …
… which in turn suggests a "loop" back to this date last year —
.
The New York Times seems to prefer another sort of black art.
A 9 AM illustration from the Times Wire this morning is a misleading
attempt at humor that links to a very dark poem —
.
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Thursday, March 16, 2017
Iacta Est
"Though realism is excellent rhetoric, maybe the best,
in a purely technical or instrumental sense,
that cannot be an adequate reason to accept it
as a serious intellectual position. In its tropes of
Death and Furniture we see a rhetoric that refuses
to acknowledge its own existence; a politics that
can claim a critical-radical credibility only by
the selective use of its opponents' analytic tools;
and a theology which is deeply conservative and
seeks nothing less than the death of disruptive,
disturbing inquiry. While tedium, good taste, political
and moral sensibility will properly determine what
sorts of given realities are thought worthy of inquiry,
those considerations are no grounds for promoting
a realist ontology for social science, nor any other
science, nor for rejecting relativism. On the contrary,
relativism is social science par excellence . . . ."
Loughborough University
— Edwards, D., Ashmore, M., and Potter, J. (1995),
"Death and furniture: The rhetoric, politics and theology
of bottom line arguments against relativism,"
History of the Human Sciences , 8, 25-49.
Related material:
Platonic realism in this journal, yesterday's post Ripples, and …
Gravity's Shadow , 2004 —
Gravity's Ghost , 2010 —
See also an "Inception"-related object —
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Sunday, February 19, 2017
Cast
"La morte è avvenuta alle 22.30 di ieri sera nella sua abitazione."
— http://www.repubblica.it/cultura/2016/02/20/news/
morto_lo_scrittore_umberto_eco-133816061/
See also the previous post, "Radical."
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Thursday, July 2, 2015
Tuesday, December 16, 2014
Say Hello to My Little Friend
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Monday, February 3, 2014
Designs
This journal a year ago yesterday—
“Some designs work subtly.
Others are successful through sheer force.”
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Monday, January 6, 2014
Triumph of the Will
"… the human will cannot be simultaneously
triumphant and imaginary."
— Ross Douthat, Defender of the Faith,
in this afternoon's New York Times at 3:25* PM ET
Some— even some Catholics— might say the will
cannot be triumphant unless imaginary.
Related material: The Galois Quaternion: A Story.
See also C. S. Lewis on enchantment.
* Cf., in this journal, the most recent 3/25 ,
and a bareword —
Click image for some context.
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Sunday, September 15, 2013
Sermon
Suggested by a poem in the current New Yorker.
Today's text —
"We have no more beginnings.
Incipit : that proud Latin word
which signals the start
survives in our dusty 'inception'."
— George Steiner, beginning of
Grammars of Creation
Reply in the Latin tradition—
.
Cast
(From the Log24 posts
of August 23-24, 2013)
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Saturday, August 24, 2013
Cast (continued)
The death yesterday of British cinematographer
Gilbert Taylor suggests an image from last evening's
Log24 search Point Omega —
.
The die in the above image (shown here Dec. 28, 2012)
displays the numbers 3-6-5 in counterclockwise order.
A similar die in an earlier post served as a metaphor for
a time-jump to 365 days in the past.
For some religious remarks by Umberto Eco that may
serve as a small memorial to Taylor, see this journal
a year before the day he died— August 23, 2012.
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Friday, December 28, 2012
Cube Koan
|
From Don DeLillo's novel Point Omega — I knew what he was, or what he was supposed to be, a defense intellectual, without the usual credentials, and when I used the term it made him tense his jaw with a proud longing for the early weeks and months, before he began to understand that he was occupying an empty seat. "There were times when no map existed to match the reality we were trying to create." "What reality?" "This is something we do with every eyeblink. Human perception is a saga of created reality. But we were devising entities beyond the agreed-upon limits of recognition or interpretation. Lying is necessary. The state has to lie. There is no lie in war or in preparation for war that can't be defended. We went beyond this. We tried to create new realities overnight, careful sets of words that resemble advertising slogans in memorability and repeatability. These were words that would yield pictures eventually and then become three-dimensional. The reality stands, it walks, it squats. Except when it doesn't." He didn't smoke but his voice had a sandlike texture, maybe just raspy with age, sometimes slipping inward, becoming nearly inaudible. We sat for some time. He was slouched in the middle of the sofa, looking off toward some point in a high corner of the room. He had scotch and water in a coffee mug secured to his midsection. Finally he said, "Haiku." I nodded thoughtfully, idiotically, a slow series of gestures meant to indicate that I understood completely. "Haiku means nothing beyond what it is. A pond in summer, a leaf in the wind. It's human consciousness located in nature. It's the answer to everything in a set number of lines, a prescribed syllable count. I wanted a haiku war," he said. "I wanted a war in three lines. This was not a matter of force levels or logistics. What I wanted was a set of ideas linked to transient things. This is the soul of haiku. Bare everything to plain sight. See what's there. Things in war are transient. See what's there and then be prepared to watch it disappear." |
What's there—
This view of a die's faces 3, 6, and 5, in counter-
clockwise order (see previous post) suggests a way
of labeling the eight corners of a die (or cube):
123, 135, 142, 154, 246, 263, 365, 456.
Here opposite faces of the die sum to 7, and the
three faces meeting at each corner are listed
in counter-clockwise order. (This corresponds
to a labeling of one of MacMahon's* 30 colored cubes.)
A similar vertex-labeling may be used in describing
the automorphisms of the order-8 quaternion group.
For a more literary approach to quaternions, see
Pynchon's novel Against the Day .
* From Peter J. Cameron's weblog:
"The big name associated with this is Major MacMahon,
an associate of Hardy, Littlewood and Ramanujan,
of whom Robert Kanigel said,
His expertise lay in combinatorics, a sort of
glorified dice-throwing, and in it he had made
contributions original enough to be named
a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Glorified dice-throwing, indeed…"
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Thursday, December 27, 2012
Cast
Note that the visible faces of the die, in counter -clockwise
order, are 3 6 5. See also this journal 365 days ago and,
since 2012 is a leap year, also today's date last year.
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Object Lesson
Yesterday's post on the current Museum of Modern Art exhibition
"Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925" suggests a renewed look at
abstraction and a fundamental building block: the cube.
From a recent Harvard University Press philosophical treatise on symmetry—
The treatise corrects Nozick's error of not crediting Weyl's 1952 remarks
on objectivity and symmetry, but repeats Weyl's error of not crediting
Cassirer's extensive 1910 (and later) remarks on this subject.
For greater depth see Cassirer's 1910 passage on Vorstellung :
This of course echoes Schopenhauer, as do discussions of "Will and Idea" in this journal.
For the relationship of all this to MoMA and abstraction, see Cube Space and Inside the White Cube.
"The sacramental nature of the space becomes clear…." — Brian O'Doherty
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