Log24

Narration by the fictional schoolgirl Pagan Moore in a novel
apparently first published on March 4, 2004 —

Update at 1:37 PM ET the same day —

A check for the source of the above speech yields …

"Apollo is a symbol for the male, the rational, the young, and the civilized.
The Furies represent the female, the violent, the old, and the primal."

This passage is from
https://www.gradesaver.com/the-eumenides/study-guide/themes.
From the citation data there —
"By Borey, Eddie. 'The Eumenides Themes.'
GradeSaver, 24 October 2000 Web."

Ben Lerner on Judd's art at Marfa —

"as if the installation were waiting to be visited
 by an alien or god" — 10:04: A Novel

Oslo artist Josefine Lyche's public Instagram today —

See also Space (May 13, 2015).

Part I, Midday —

Yesterday's midday NY Lottery "689" suggests (from April 3, 2005)—

689

[fú] blessing, good fortune

STAR WARS
continued 

Picture from Feb. 8
(Martin Buber’s birthday)

For John Nash on his birthday:

I know more than Apollo,
For oft when he lies sleeping
I see the stars at mortal wars
In the wounded welkin weeping.

— Tom O’Bedlam’s Song

Palm Sunday, Part II:

Cold Mountain

From the notes to the CD of Songs From the Mountain (John Herrmann, Dirk Powell, Tim O’Brien):

“John [Herrmann, banjo player] would like to dedicate his work on this recording to Philip Kapleau Roshi, Kalu Rimpoche, and Harada Tangen Roshi, who all know the way to Cold Mountain….”

 See Buddha’s Birthday (April 8) and The Diamond Project.

“What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? 
  I never know what you are thinking. Think.”

— Tom Eliot, The Waste Land 

“I am thinking…
… of the midnight picnic
Once upon a time….”

— Suzanne Vega, “Tom’s Diner“

“How much story do you want?”

— George Balanchine

"It seems fitting that a handsome, professional and future-minded
space drama in fine color, like 'Marooned,' should open a new
jewel box of a theater, the Ziegfeld."

— Howard Thompson in The New York Times , Dec. 19, 1969

A related film tells of a real-life April 1970 sequel 
to the 1969 film "Marooned."

Then there is my own "jewel box" picture with three horses . . .

From the posts of October 9 four years ago —

The previous post dealt with one of the 64 symbols
(in a redesigned format) of the ancient Chinese classic 
The I Ching .

For those who prefer to be guided by programmed
responses to alphabetical  symbols …

A lyric by Ira Gershwin —

A cinematic "T" —

See also "T for Texas" in this journal and
George Clooney's recent attempt to commercialize
both the space program and the letter Omega: 

From a post of May 13, 2015 —

Do you know where your watch is?

From a post of May 13, 2015 —

From the recent film "Interstellar" —

Or perhaps the Richman.

Roger Richman, agent who represented image rights for the
estates of celebrities, reportedly died on October 9, 2013.

This journal on that date —

* For the title, see Apollo + Outram in this journal.

"Got to keep the loonies on the path."

— Lyrics to Dark Side of the Moon

For those who, like Tom Stoppard, prefer the dark side—

Not quite so dark—

"And then one day you find ten years have got behind you."

— Lyrics to Dark Side of the Moon

This journal ten years ago, on August 25, 2003—

"A view of New Haven, say…." —

"This is the garden of Apollo,
the field of Reason…."
John Outram, architect 

A similar version of this Apollonian image —

  Detail:

Related material for the loonies:

"the spirit's alchemicana."

From "The Talented," a post of April 26, 2011—

And for Josefine Lyche—

Unity in Multiplicity —

Pink  in Wikipedia

Tracking Shot

Related material—

See also this journal's September 2009 posts.

This  post was suggested by today's previous post and by today's NY Lottery.
For some background to the ioncinema.com post numbered 4210 above,
see, in conjunction with the page headed "Azazel" linked to here earlier today,
the ioncinema.com post numbered 5601.

From the post numbered 460 in this  journal—

At the still point… from the film "Absolute Power" :

Photo credit – Graham Kuhn

I’ve heard of affairs that are strictly plutonic,
But diamonds are a girl’s best friend!

— Marilyn Monroe, modeling a Freudian slip

Today is Commencement Day at MIT.

Well, perhaps not quite nothing.

The above pictures were posted here on the day the following book was published—

The lives of the nine Jews in the above book amount to more than Yau's "nothing."

Note, however, that claims by Jews (see Jill Abramson yesterday) 
that their secular publications constitute a substitute for religion
and contain only "absolute truth" should be viewed with at least one
raised eyebrow.

Abramson's remark yesterday that her promotion to New York Times  executive editor
was like "ascending to Valhalla" had a religious flavor worthy of yesterday's
Feast of the Ascension.

In related news from yesterday's Times—

See also a symbol related to Apollo, to nine, and to "nothing"—

A minimalist 3×3 matrix favicon—

This may, if one likes, be viewed as the "nothing"
present at the Creation.  See Jim Holt on physics.

"It's going to be accomplished in steps, this establishment of the Talented in the scheme of things."
— Anne McCaffrey, Radcliffe ’47, To Ride Pegasus

"Character, as we have stated, is revealed through action.
We are not yet telepathic; we must embody even the most intellectual traits
and express them physically."
— The Craftsmen of Dionysus: An Approach to Acting  by Jerome Rockwood

Dionysus Meets Apollo
in "Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould"—

Step I — Tiny Dancer in My Hand (0.48.46)

Step II — The Bridge (0.52.46)

Step III — Liftoff (1.27.37)

New York Lottery on Saturday, July 17, 2010—

Midday 049, Evening 613.

Related material:

Hexagram 49 and 6/13.

A quotation from this journal on 6/13—

"Christianity offers the critic a privileged ontological window…."

— Aaron Urbanczyk's 2005 review of Christ and Apollo 
    by William Lynch, S.J., a book first published in 1960

Picture from today's New York Times  (page ST1 in New York edition)—

“What on earth is a 'concrete universal'?"
— Said to be an annotation (undated)
by Robert M. Pirsig of A History of Philosophy,
by Frederick Copleston, Society of Jesus.

From Aaron Urbanczyk's 2005 review of Christ and Apollo  by William Lynch, S.J., a book first published in 1960—

"Lynch's use of analogy vis-a-vis literature provides, in a sense, a philosophical basis to the theoretical paradox popularized by W. K. Wimsatt (1907-1975), which contends that literature is a sort of 'concrete universal.'"

The following figure has often been
offered in this journal as a symbol of Apollo—

Arguments that it is, rather, a symbol of Christ
may be left to the Society of Jesus.

One possible approach—
Urbanczyk's review says that
"Christianity offers the critic
   a privileged ontological window…."

"The world was warm and white when I was born:
Beyond the windowpane the world was white,
A glaring whiteness in a leaded frame,
Yet warm as in the hearth and heart of light."

— Delmore Schwartz

“We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.”

— President Obama yesterday

It is not entirely clear what these “childish things” are. Perhaps the young nation’s “childish things” that the new President refers to are part of what Robert Stone memorably called “our secret culture.” Stone was referring to Puritanism, which some advocates of the new religion of Scientism might call “childish.” I do not. Lunatic, perhaps, but not childish.

Related meditations:

A year ago yesterday, on Sunday, Jan. 20, 2008, the mid-day lottery for New York State was 605.

A midrash in the Judeo-Christian tradition of paranoia a year ago today suggested that 605 might be a veiled reference to “God, the Devil, and a Bridge,” a weblog entry on mathematician André Weil.

Continuing in this vein a year later, we are confronted with the mid-day New York lottery for yesterday:

Benedict XVI, before he became Pope:

“… a purely harmonious concept of beauty is not enough…. Apollo, who for Plato’s Socrates was ‘the God’ and the guarantor of unruffled beauty as ‘the truly divine’ is absolutely no longer sufficient.”

Tom O’Bedlam:

“I know more than Apollo….“

Wikipedia:

“The lapis manalis (Latin: ‘stone of the Manes‘) was a name given to two sacred stones used in the Roman religion. One covered a gate to Hades, abode of the dead….

One such stone covered the mundus Cereris, a pit thought to contain an entrance to the underworld….

The… mundus was located in the Comitium, on the Palatine Hill. This stone was ceremonially opened three times a year, during which spirits of the blessed dead (the Manes) were able to commune with the living. The three days upon which the mundus was opened were August 24, October 5, and November 8. Fruits of the harvest were offered to the dead at this time.”

From A Mass for Lucero:

“To the two gods of art, Apollo and Dionysus, we owe our recognition that… there is a tremendous opposition, as regards both origins and aims, between the Apolline art of the sculptor and the non-visual, Dionysiac art of music.”
— The Birth of Tragedy, by Friedrich Nietzsche, Penguin, 1993, page 14

“Melody, then, is both primary and universal.” (Author’s italics)
— Nietzsche, op. cit., page 33

“…in so far as he interprets music in images, he himself lies amidst the peaceful waves of Apolline contemplation….”
— Nietzsche, op. cit., page 35

Apolline Contemplation

From The Miracle of the Bells, by Russell Janney, Prentice-Hall, 1946, page 333–

“He was singing softly:
‘A pretty girl–
 is like a melody—- !‘
 But that was always
 Bill Dunnigan’s
 Song of Victory….
 Thus thought the…
 press agent for
‘The Garden of the Soul.'”

“… a purely harmonious concept of beauty is not enough…. Apollo, who for Plato’s Socrates was ‘the God’ and the guarantor of unruffled beauty as ‘the truly divine’ is absolutely no longer sufficient.”

The Shining of Lucero

From my journal note, “Shining Forth“:

The Spanish for “Bright Star” is “Lucero.”

The Eye of the Beholder:

When you stand in the dark and look at a star a hundred light years away, not only have the retarded light waves from the star been travelling for a hundred years toward your eyes, but also advanced waves from your eyes have reached a hundred years into the past to encourage the star to shine in your direction.

— John Cramer, “The Quantum Handshake“

From Broken Symmetries, by Paul Preuss, 1983:

He’d toyed with “psi” himself…. The reason he and so many other theoretical physicists were suckers for the stuff was easy to understand — for two-thirds of a century an enigma had rested at the heart of theoretical physics, a contradiction, a hard kernel of paradox….   

Peter [Slater] had never thirsted after “hidden variables” to explain what could not be pictured.  Mathematical relationships were enough to satisfy him, mere formal relationships which existed at all times, everywhere, at once.  It was a thin nectar, but he was convinced it was the nectar of the gods.

………………

Those so-called crazy psychics were too sane, that was their problem — they were too stubborn to admit that the universe was already more bizarre than anything they could imagine in their wildest dreams of wizardry. (Ch. 16)

From Secret Passages, by Paul Preuss, 1997:

Minakis caught up and walked beside him in silence, moving with easy strides over the bare ground, listening as Peter [Slater] spoke. “Delos One was ten years ago — quantum theory seemed as natural as water to me then; I could play in it without a care. If I’d had any sense of history, I would have recognized that I’d swallowed the Copenhagen interpretation whole.”

“Back then, you insisted that the quantum world is not a world at all,” Minakis prompted him. “No microworld, only mathematical descriptions.”

“Yes, I was adamant. Those who protested were naive — one has to be willing to tolerate ambiguity, even to be crazy.”

“Bohr’s words?”

“The party line. Of course Bohr did say, ‘It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.’ Meaning that when we start to talk what sounds like philosophy, our colleagues should rip us to pieces.” Peter smiled. “They smell my blood already.”

………………  Peter glanced at Minakis. “Let’s say there are indications — I have personal indications — not convincing, perhaps, but suggestive, that the quantum world penetrates the classical world deeply.” He was silent for a moment, then waved his hand at the ruins. “The world of classical physics, I mean. I suppose I’ve come to realize that the world is more than a laboratory.”

“We are standing where Apollo was born,” Minakis said. “Leto squatted just there, holding fast to a palm tree, and after nine days of labor gave birth to the god of light and music….”

To Lucero, in memory of
1962 in Cuernavaca

From On Beauty, by Elaine Scarry,
Princeton University Press, 1999 —

“Homer sings of the beauty of particular things. Odysseus, washed up on shore, covered with brine, having nearly drowned, comes upon a human community and one person in particular, Nausicaa, whose beauty simply astonishes him. He has never anywhere seen a face so lovely; he has never anywhere seen any thing so lovely….

I have never laid eyes on anyone like you,
neither man nor woman…
I look at you and a sense of wonder takes me.

Wait, once I saw the like —
in Delos, beside Apollo’s altar —
the young slip of a palm-tree
springing into the light.”

From Secret Passages, by Paul Preuss, 1997:

“When we try to look inside atoms,” Peter said, “not only can we not see what’s going on, we cannot even construct a coherent picture of what’s going on.”

“If you will forgive me, Peter,” Minakis said, turning to the others. “He means that we can construct several pictures — that light and matter are waves, for example, or that light and matter are particles — but that all these pictures are inadequate. What’s left to us is the bare mathematics of quantum theory.”

…. “Whatever the really real world is like, my friend, it is not what you might imagine.”

………………

 

Talking physics, Peter tended to bluntness. “Tell me more about this real world you imagine but can’t describe.”

Minakis turned away from the view of the sunset. “Are you familiar with John Cramer’s transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics?”

“No I’m not.”

………………

“Read Cramer. I’ll give you his papers. Then we can talk.” 

 From John Cramer, “The Quantum Handshake“:

Advanced waves could perhaps, under the right circumstances, lead to “ansible-type” FTL communication favored by Le Guin and Card…. 

For more on Le Guin and Card, see my journal notes below.

For more on the meaning of “lucero,” see the Wallace Stevens poem “Martial Cadenza.”

On this, his birthday, actor Hugh Grant
is hereby named an

Honorary Waco Wacko.

By the authority vested in me by the possession of

1. Knowledge of Vivienne Browning’s My Browning Family Album, a work dedicated to Dr. Joseph Armstrong, “founder of the Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University, Waco, Texas,”
2. Knowledge that today is the date of the Battle of Marathon, and of the claim that
   

   “The spread of Pan’s worship beyond his home pastures of Arcadia was said to have arisen around the 5th Century BCE. Pan asked why the Athenians neglected him, and promised them victory over the Persians if they would worship him. At Marathon, the Persians were routed and fled in Panic; so, the Athenians built a temple for him on the Acropolis, and his worship soon extended to all Greece.”

   2a. (including subsidiary knowledge of the ridiculous falseness of all political statements, including the following contemptible lie by Michael Dukakis in his 1988 Democratic National Convention acceptance speech:

   “And as I accept your nomination tonight, I can’t help recalling that the first marathon was run in ancient Greece, and that on important occasions like this one, the citizens of Athens would complete their ceremonies by taking a pledge. That pledge, that covenant, is as eloquent and timely today as it was 2000 years ago.  

   ‘We will never bring disgrace to this, our country, by any act of dishonesty or cowardice. We will fight for the ideals of this, our country. We will revere and obey the laws. We will strive to quicken our sense of civic duty. Thus, in all these ways, we will transmit this country greater, better, stronger, prouder and more beautiful than it was transmitted to us.’ “)

   (None of the Harvard intellects associated with Dukakis saw fit to point out that there never was any such pledge. As a consequence, both Harvard University and the Democratic Party remain cursed to this day.),

3. Knowledge (both intellectual and carnal) of the female form of the god Pan, as seen in the classic and great movie “Sirens” (starring, among others, Hugh Grant) and on the cover of the 1977 Olivia Newton-John album “Making a Good Thing Better,”

   

4. Knowledge that even the best critics can be wrong, as exemplified by Roger Ebert’s remarks in his review of “Sirens”…
   
   

   “Although they are often charged with being emotionally distant, the British have produced more than their share of sexual outlaws, from Oscar Wilde to Aleister Crowley to D.H. Lawrence to Francis Bacon, to balance the ledger. The central figure in ‘Sirens’ is perhaps vaguely inspired by another legendary British bohemian, Augustus John, an artist whose models and mistresses were interchangeable, and who delighted in scandal.

   Named Norman Lindsay, the film’s hero is played by Sam Neill as a notorious painter who lives on an estate in Australia where his art coexists side-by-side with an experiment in living.”

   (Actually, the central figure is not “vaguely inspired” by anyone. He is precisely inspired by an artist named exactly Norman Lindsay, as Roger will learn if he searches the Web. Roger also gets Pan wrong in this film; he says, “the bearded Lindsay is a Pan of sorts.” No. The “Pan of sorts” is in fact the girl who romps joyfully with the local boys and who later, with great amusement, uses her divine x-ray vision to view Tara Fitzgerald naked in church.),

   and, finally,

5. Knowledge that, as the Greeks well knew,  there is a dark side to all this Pan business (Vivienne Browning’s book reveals that her father was a friend, not only of the bohemian artist Norman Lindsay, but also of the black mage Aleister Crowley. Let us pray that Hugh Grant’s performance as a clergyman in “Sirens” and as a defender of the faith in “The Lair of the White Worm” have prepared him to cope with the dark (or, sometimes, “Brown”) side of the divine.),

I hereby declare Hugh Grant an honorary Waco (home of the Dr. Pepper Museum, the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame, and the Armstrong Browning Library) Wacko.

Elevation of the Host

Some religious fanatics may be offended by my account, in the note below, of a theatrical bartender-priest at Lincoln Center who last night held a CD aloft in what may seem a parody or satire of the elevation of the host in the Mass. They should consider the following account of how a medieval nun viewed the host:

…she saw a great brightness between the priest’s hands, so vivid and so bright and of such wonderful beauty that in her opinion it could not be compared to anything the human spirit could imagine. And it seemed to her that this brightness had a circular shape….

For another appearance of a priest associated, if only by synchronicity, with Lincoln Center, see the photographs below, both from the New York Times obituaries section of Friday, August 30, 2002.

	Richard Lippold, a sculptor known for radiant, expansive abstractions in metal, died on Aug. 22…. Richard Lippold’s ‘‘Orpheus and Apollo’’ at Avery Fisher Hall in 1996. Jack Manning/The New York Times
	Bill Wassmuth, a former Roman Catholic priest who opposed the Aryan Nations group in northern Idaho, died on Tuesday, Aug. 27.

In this little drama of August 30, played out in the obituary section of the New York Times, it is not clear from the Lippold sculpture who is to play the role of Orpheus and who the role of Apollo. One might interpret the note below, written two days later, as implying that Orpheus is to be played by Lionel Hampton and Apollo by Christ himself.  Such a drama is neither parody nor satire.  It is, on the contrary, deadly serious. 

“A great brightness,” as seen by the medieval nun described above, is traditionally associated with the Aryan sun god Apollo.  For more on this theme in Roman Catholic art, see

Sun-Worship and Catholicism,

The Monstrance and the Wafer God, and

A Catholic rebuttal.

For a less dogmatic approach to these matters, see my journal note of June 13, 2002,

 A Mass for Lucero.