Log24

Sunday, November 19, 2023

For the First Church of Aquaman . . .

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:10 am

From "Glamour" in this journal —

 

Meets . . .

 

Creature from the Blue Lagoon

Monday, September 16, 2024

Annals of Fantasy: H two O

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:43 am

IMAGE- Jenny O'Hara sums up the Log24 'Aqua' theme

Friday, December 29, 2023

Mystery for language animals…
Did video, in fact, kill the radio star?

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:26 pm

Prelude to a Mattress Dance

The above "Take This Waltz" review is dated July 5, 2012.

Related material from posts of July 5, 2012

     .

Saturday, June 10, 2023

Tiling Note

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:57 pm

A review by Robert Ghrist of a paper on aperiodic
Wang tilings suggests a search in this journal for Wang tiles.

A resulting image seems appropriate for today's posts,
which include a reference to a renowned Prada-wearer.

"She's like the wind." — Song lyric. See as well Hexagram 57.

Sunday, December 27, 2020

Logo Animation

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:32 pm

Related material from Log24 yesterday —

Version of the Aquarius symbol   Click the  Aquarius symbol for a puzzle.

Aquarius.jpg .

A related animation —

Animated diamond theorem

Saturday, December 26, 2020

As It Were

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:23 pm

Vide

Version of the Aquarius symbol

Aquarius.jpg .

Tuesday, April 21, 2020

Living Water

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:47 pm

The Tesseract Timeline:
Where The Cube Has Been In The …

www.cinemablend.com › news › the-tesseract-timeline-…
Mar 13, 2019 – With HYDRA. In 1942, Johann Schmidt, a.k.a.
the Red Skull, arrived in Tønsberg to procure the Tesseract
from an ancient church. While he …

Related material from posts tagged Aqua
(suggested by a name in the previous post) —

Lene from Tønsberg

 

Sunday, December 30, 2018

Also Sprach Aitchison

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:48 pm

The New Yorker  reviewing "Bumblebee"

"There is one reliable source for superhero sublimity,
and it’s all the more surprising that it’s a franchise with
no sacred inspiration whatsoever but, rather, of purely
and unabashedly mercantile origins: the 'Transformers'
series, based on a set of toys, in which Michael Bay’s
exhilarating filmmaking offers phantasmagorical textures
of an uncanny unconscious resonance."

— Richard Brody on December 29, 2018

"Before time began, there was the Cube."

— Optimus Prime

Iain Aitchison on symmetric generation of M24

Some backstory — A Riddle for Davos,  Jan. 22, 2014.

Saturday, December 29, 2018

Annals of Style: Perfecting the New Yorker Sneer

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:38 pm

See also the Verwandlungslehre  link from the previous post
and The Hassenfeld Legacy (for Harlan Kane).

Wednesday, March 7, 2018

Unite the Seven.

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , , — m759 @ 10:31 am


Related material —

The seven points of the Fano plane within 

The Eightfold Cube.
 

Weyl on symmetry, the eightfold cube, the Fano plane, and trigrams of the I Ching


"Before time began . . . ."

  — Optimus Prime

Tuesday, March 6, 2018

Fields Medal

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:30 am

For "The Shape of Fluids"

Related material — Posts tagged Aqua.

Tuesday, August 5, 2014

Verhexung

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:15 pm

"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment [Verhexung ]
of our intelligence by means of our language."

— Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations , Section 109

"The philosophy of logic speaks of sentences and words
in exactly the sense in which we speak of them in ordinary life
when we say e.g. 'Here is a Chinese sentence,' or 'No, that only
looks like writing; it is actually just an ornament' and so on."

— Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations , Section 108

Monday, June 30, 2014

High Concept

Tags:  — m759 @ 5:24 PM

For the title, see a post of Nov. 4, 2007.

Related material:

Hexagram 29, Water, and a pattern resembling
the symbol for Aquarius:

http://www.log24.com/images/IChing/hexagram29.gif          .

For some backstory about the former,
see the June 21 post Hallmark.

For some backstory about the latter,
see today’s post Toward Evening.

Tom Wolfe has supplied some scaffolding*
to support the concept.

* A reference to Grossman and Descartes.

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Ready for My Closeup

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 1:20 pm

IMAGE- Jenny O'Hara sums up the Log24 'Aqua' theme

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

New Art Now

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:45 pm

IMAGE- 'MADE IN LA,' 'NEW ART NOW,' with fountain from broken water main on Sunset Boulevard. Photo by Mike Meadows.

See also Aqua  in this journal.

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

WW Revisited

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:00 pm

See also the “Cartoon Heroes” video by Aqua, and Aqua in the three previous posts.

By Which

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:00 am

IMAGE- Fake etymology for 'aqua'

Related material:   Ayn Sof  .

Latin Word:

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:36 am

Aqua

Version 1:

(See the June 30 posts Toward Evening,
Joke, and High Concept.)

Version 2:

Version 3:

Monday, June 30, 2014

High Concept

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:24 pm

For the title, see a post of Nov. 4, 2007.

Related material:

Hexagram 29, Water, and a pattern resembling
the symbol for Aquarius:

http://www.log24.com/images/IChing/hexagram29.gif          .

For some backstory about the former,
see the June 21 post Hallmark.

For some backstory about the latter,
see today’s post Toward Evening.

Tom Wolfe has supplied some scaffolding*
to support the concept.

* A reference to Grossman and Descartes.

Toward Evening

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:29 am

(Friday’s Latin Club  posts, continued)

The poet Allen Grossman reportedly died in
the morning on Friday, June 27, 2014.

IMAGE- 'Descartes' Loneliness,' by Allen Grossman, from a book published in December, 2007

Log24 post of Aug. 31, 2010, 'Page Mark'

Monday, April 7, 2014

Jesus Talk at Harvard

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 pm

Related material:  A Harvard Crimson  story on a student who died
this morning from injuries he received in a fall from a building
near the New England Aquarium in Boston. He reportedly fell around
midnight on the night of April 5-6, Saturday-Sunday.

Here are links to two posts from The Fish Tank  blog in The
Harvard Ichthus — from 2013 March 9 and 2013 March 16
that are apparently by this same student.

See also the link to a Harvard-related psychiatrists’ paper in
The View from Lone Pine, a Log24 post from Saturday evening.

Saturday, January 19, 2013

Executioner’s Song

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:24 pm

For Terry Gilliam

IMAGE- Ace of Spades in Disney's version of 'Aquarela do Brasil,' uploaded Aug. 13, 2011

See also, from the the above uploading date, Taylor Made,
with its linked-to passage from a book by Charles Taylor.

For some more recent background, see

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Claves Regni Caelorum

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 3:33 am

Or: Night of Lunacy

From 9 PM Monday

IMAGE- Page 304 of Heidegger's 'Existence and Being' - Heidegger's essay 'Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,' tr. by Douglas Scott, publ. by Henry Regnery Company, Chicago, in 1949
Note that the last line, together with the page number, forms
a sort of key

The rest  of the story—

IMAGE- Heidegger quote continued, ending with reference to Hölderlin's 'night of lunacy'

For one reinterpretation of the page number 304, see a link— 
Sermon— from Tuesday's post Diamond Speech.

The linked-to sermon itself has a link, based on a rereading
of 304 as 3/04, to a post of March 4, 2004, with…

WW and ZZ

as rendered by figures from the Kaleidoscope Puzzle

     .

Yesterday morning the same letter-combinations occurred
in a presentation at CERN of a newly discovered particle—

IMAGE- 'High mass: WW, ZZ'

(Click for context.)

Since the particle under discussion may turn out to be the
God  particle, it seems fitting to interpret WW and ZZ as part
of an imagined requiem  High Mass.

Ron Howard, director of a film about CERN and the God particle,
may regard this imaginary Mass as performed for the late
Andy Griffith, who played Howard's father in a television series.

Others may prefer to regard the imaginary Mass as performed 
for the late John E. Brooks, S. J., who served as president of
The College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Mass., for 24 years.

Griffith died Tuesday. Brooks died Monday.

For some background on the Holy Cross, see posts of
Sept. 14 (Holy Cross Day) and Sept. 15, 2010—

  1. Language Game,
  2. Wittgenstein, 1935, and
  3. Holy Cross Day Revisited.

For more lunacy, see…

Continue a search for thirty-three and three
— Katherine Neville, The Eight

Sunday, January 8, 2012

Big Apple

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm

http://www.log24.com/log/pix12/120108-Space_Time_Penrose_Hawking.jpg

    “…the nonlinear characterization of Billy Pilgrim
    emphasizes that he is not simply an established
    identity who undergoes a series of changes but
    all the different things he is at different times.”

A 2x4 array of squares

This suggests that the above structure
be viewed as illustrating not eight  parts
but rather 8! = 40,320 parts.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix12/120108-CardinalPreoccupied.jpg

"The Cardinal seemed a little preoccupied today."

The New Yorker , May 13, 2002

See also a note of May 14 , 2002.

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Page Mark

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:01 pm

Multispeech is… like a kind of multidimensional speech…."

langmaker.com on The Gameplayers of Zan

The Hunt for Blue August concludes…

As quoted today in The New York Times

“We only have so much time to leave a mark.”
Carl Paladino

"Now, it’s time to turn the page."
President Obama

A search in this journal for the President's phrase yields…

For Jenny

Quality

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08A/081015-WW.jpg

Click on the mark for some context.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Tuesday April 28, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:15 am
For Jenny

Quality

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08A/081015-WW.jpg

Hint:
The above symbol
does not stand for
"Walter Winchell."

Oct. 15, 2008 


From the link
at the end of
yesterday's entry:

Noah: Jenny, what's troubling you?

Jenny: Sigh. I was reading this book, but the words stopped in mid-sentence at the bottom! What… what do I do, Noah?

Noah: Turn the page.

Turns page.

Falls in love amidst turmoil.

The King and the Corpse, pp. 265-266:

"… the goddess at last bodily appeared to him, dark and slender, hair hanging free, and standing on the back of her tawny lion. He gave her greeting. And Kali, 'The Dark One,' addressed him with the voice of a
 

265

THE KING AND THE CORPSE
 

cloud of thunder: 'For what reason have you called? Make known your wish. Though it were unattainable, my appearance would guarantee its fulfillment.'"
 

Turmoil and cloud of thunder

courtesy of

United States Air Force.
 

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Wednesday October 15, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:01 pm
Quality

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08A/081015-WW.jpg

Hint:
The above symbol
does not stand for
"Walter Winchell."

Related material:

Log24 entries for the
Halloween season
of 2005

"This is the turning point
 Funny
 But by the end
 Bitter and serious and deadly"

— Jill O'Hara singing
  "The Climax" in "Hair"

See also
The Quality of Diamond.

Sunday, May 25, 2008

Sunday May 25, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 9:00 am
 
Wechsler Cubes
"Confusion is nothing new."
— Song lyric, Cyndi Lauper
 
Part I:
Magister Ludi

Hermann Hesse's 1943 The Glass Bead Game (Picador paperback, Dec. 6, 2002, pp. 139-140)–

"For the present, the Master showed him a bulky memorandum, a proposal he had received from an organist– one of the innumerable proposals which the directorate of the Game regularly had to examine. Usually these were suggestions for the admission of new material to the Archives. One man, for example, had made a meticulous study of the history of the madrigal and discovered in the development of the style a curved that he had expressed both musically and mathematically, so that it could be included in the vocabulary of the Game. Another had examined the rhythmic structure of Julius Caesar's Latin and discovered the most striking congruences with the results of well-known studies of the intervals in Byzantine hymns. Or again some fanatic had once more unearthed some new cabala hidden in the musical notation of the fifteenth century. Then there were the tempestuous letters from abstruse experimenters who could arrive at the most astounding conclusions from, say, a comparison of the horoscopes of Goethe and Spinoza; such letters often included pretty and seemingly enlightening geometric drawings in several colors."

Part II:
A Bulky Memorandum

From Siri Hustvedt, author of Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005)– What I Loved: A Novel (Picador paperback, March 1, 2004, page 168)–

A description of the work of Bill Wechsler, a fictional artist:

"Bill worked long hours on a series of autonomous pieces about numbers. Like O's Journey, the works took place inside glass cubes, but these were twice as large– about two feet square. He drew his inspiration from sources as varied as the Cabbala, physics, baseball box scores, and stock market reports. He painted, cut, sculpted, distorted, and broke the numerical signs in each work until they became unrecognizable. He included figures, objects, books, windows, and always the written word for the number. It was rambunctious art, thick with allusion– to voids, blanks, holes, to monotheism and the individual, the the dialectic and yin-yang, to the Trinity, the three fates, and three wishes, to the golden rectangle, to seven heavens, the seven lower orders of the sephiroth, the nine Muses, the nine circles of Hell, the nine worlds of Norse mythology, but also to popular references like A Better Marriage in Five Easy Lessons and Thinner Thighs in Seven Days. Twelve-step programs were referred to in both cube one and cube two. A miniature copy of a book called The Six Mistakes Parents Make Most Often lay at the bottom of cube six. Puns appeared, usually well disguised– one, won; two, too, and Tuesday; four, for, forth; ate, eight. Bill was partial to rhymes as well, both in images and words. In cube nine, the geometric figure for a line had been painted on one glass wall. In cube three, a tiny man wearing the black-and-white prison garb of cartoons and dragging a leg iron has

— End of page 168 —

opened the door to his cell. The hidden rhyme is "free." Looking closely through the walls of the cube, one can see the parallel rhyme in another language: the German word drei is scratched into one glass wall. Lying at the bottom of the same box is a tiny black-and-white photograph cut from a book that shows the entrance to Auschwitz: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. With every number, the arbitrary dance of associations worked togethere to create a tiny mental landscape that ranged in tone from wish-fulfillment dream to nightmare. Although dense, the effect of the cubes wasn't visually disorienting. Each object, painting, drawing, bit of text, or sculpted figure found its rightful place under the glass according to the necessary, if mad, logic of numerical, pictorial, and verbal connection– and the colors of each were startling. Every number had been given a thematic hue. Bill had been interested in Goethe's color wheel and in Alfred Jensen's use of it in his thick, hallucinatory paintings of numbers. He had assigned each number a color. Like Goethe, he included black and white, although he didn't bother with the poet's meanings. Zero and one were white. Two was blue. Three was red, four was yellow, and he mixed colors: pale blue for five, purples in six, oranges in seven, greens in eight, and blacks and grays in nine. Although other colors and omnipresent newsprint always intruded on the basic scheme, the myriad shades of a single color dominated each cube.

The number pieces were the work of a man at the top of his form. An organic extension of everything Bill had done before, these knots of symbols had an explosive effect. The longer I looked at them, the more the miniature constructions seemed on the brink of bursting from internal pressure. They were tightly orchestrated semantic bombs through which Bill laid bare the arbitrary roots of meaning itself– that peculiar social contract generated by little squiggles, dashes, lines, and loops on a page."

Part III:
Wechsler Cubes
(named not for
Bill Wechsler, the
fictional artist above,
but for the non-fictional
David Wechsler) –

 

From 2002:

 

Above: Dr. Harrison Pope, Harvard professor of psychiatry, demonstrates the use of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale "block design" subtest.

 
Part IV:
A Magic Gallery
Log24, March 4, 2004
 

ZZ
WW

Figures from the
Kaleidoscope Puzzle
of Steven H. Cullinane:


Poem by Eugen Jost:
Zahlen und Zeichen,
Wörter und Worte

Mit Zeichen und Zahlen
vermessen wir Himmel und Erde
schwarz
auf weiss
schaffen wir neue Welten
oder gar Universen

 Numbers and Names,
Wording and Words

With numbers and names
we measure heaven and earth
black
on white
we create new worlds
and universes

English translation
by Catherine Schelbert

A related poem:

Alphabets
by Hermann Hesse

From time to time
we take our pen in hand
and scribble symbols
on a blank white sheet
Their meaning is
at everyone's command;
it is a game whose rules
are nice and neat.

But if a savage
or a moon-man came
and found a page,
a furrowed runic field,
and curiously studied
lines and frame:
How strange would be
the world that they revealed.
a magic gallery of oddities.
He would see A and B
as man and beast,
as moving tongues or
arms or legs or eyes,
now slow, now rushing,
all constraint released,
like prints of ravens'
feet upon the snow.
He'd hop about with them,
fly to and fro,
and see a thousand worlds
of might-have-been
hidden within the black
and frozen symbols,
beneath the ornate strokes,
the thick and thin.
He'd see the way love burns
and anguish trembles,
He'd wonder, laugh,
shake with fear and weep
because beyond this cipher's
cross-barred keep
he'd see the world
in all its aimless passion,
diminished, dwarfed, and
spellbound in the symbols,
and rigorously marching
prisoner-fashion.
He'd think: each sign
all others so resembles
that love of life and death,
or lust and anguish,
are simply twins whom
no one can distinguish…
until at last the savage
with a sound
of mortal terror
lights and stirs a fire,
chants and beats his brow
against the ground
and consecrates the writing
to his pyre.
Perhaps before his
consciousness is drowned
in slumber there will come
to him some sense
of how this world
of magic fraudulence,
this horror utterly
behind endurance,
has vanished as if
it had never been.
He'll sigh, and smile,
and feel all right again.

— Hermann Hesse (1943),
"Buchstaben," from
Das Glasperlenspiel,
translated by
Richard and Clara Winston

Sunday, November 13, 2005

Sunday November 13, 2005

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 6:40 am
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),

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051113-Blue.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Bee Season
(below),

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051113-Scope1.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

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

Saturday, October 29, 2005

Saturday October 29, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:07 pm
Aquarius Jazz

Adapted from Matisse
Adapted from Matisse

“The Jazz Age spirit flared
in the Age of Aquarius.”
— Maureen Dowd, essay
for Devil’s Night, 2005:
    What’s a Modern Girl to Do?

“I hope she’ll be a fool —
that’s the best thing a girl can be
in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
— Daisy Buchanan in Chapter I
of The Great Gatsby

“Thanks for the tip,
American Dream.”
Spider-Girl, in
Vol. 1, No. 30, March 2001

(Excerpts from
Random Thoughts
for St. Patrick’s Eve)

Saturday October 29, 2005

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:17 pm

Aion

From AP's "Today in History" for October 29:

On this date:
In 1967, the counter-culture musical "Hair" opened off-Broadway.

Related material:

Jung on Pisces and Aquarius in Aion

The Da Vinci Code and Symbology at Harvard

"This is the turning point
Funny
But by the end
Bitter and serious and deadly"

— Jill O'Hara singing "The Climax"
    in "Hair"
    (original cast recording)

Friday, June 17, 2005

Friday June 17, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:01 pm
The Quality of Diamond,
continued

From Log 24.net on
Thursday, February 19, 2004:

Five Easy Pieces
for Lee Marvin’s Birthday

1.

“EVERYTHING’S a story.
You are a story– I am a story.”
— Frances Hodgson Burnett,
A Little Princess

2.

“You see that sign, sir?”
[Pointing to a notice demanding
courtesy from customers]

3.

4.

“You see this sign?”

5.

“Aquarians are
extremely independent.”

Lorna Thayer, 85,
the waitress in Five Easy Pieces,
who was once someone’s little princess,
died on June 4, 2005.

Lorna Thayer, 1954
Lorna Thayer,
1954

The 2 PM June 4 Log24 entry
has a link to
The Quality of Diamond,
where more of the Lorna Thayer
story may be found.

Monday, May 23, 2005

Monday May 23, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:56 am

Final Arrangements
continued:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050523-522Obits2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Elements:

 
  PIERO DORAZIO

  (1927 – 2005) 

  The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050523-Dorazio1.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

  Aquatint, 1982
  Plate 9.5 x 9 cm | Sheet 24 x 16 cm
  99 copies signed and numbered
  from 1/99 to 99/99,
  15 from I/XV to XV/XV
  Copy 11/99
  Printed by Renzo Romero, Rome.
  This artwork accompanies the book
 
Staras by Guido Ballo,
  edition Galleria Rizzardi, Milan (1982).
 
  Edizioni l’Obliquo, Galleria di Grafica

Elegant.” — The Daily Telegraph

Tuesday, March 1, 2005

Tuesday March 1, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:16 pm

3/16 Continued

The New Yorker, issue dated March 7, 2005, on Hunter S. Thompson:

“… his true model and hero was F. Scott Fitzgerald. He used to type out pages from ‘The Great Gatsby,’ just to get the feeling, he said, of what it was like to write that way, and Fitzgerald’s novel was continually on his mind while he was working on ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,’ which was published, after a prolonged and agonizing compositional nightmare, in 1972. That book was supposed to be called ‘The Death of the American Dream,’ a portentous age-of-Aquarius cliché that won Thompson a nice advance but that he naturally came to consider, as he sat wretchedly before his typewriter night after night, a millstone around his neck.”

Louis Menand

Random Thoughts
for St. Patrick’s Eve

by Steven H. Cullinane
on March 16, 2001

“I hope she’ll be a fool — that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
— Daisy Buchanan in Chapter I of The Great Gatsby

“Thanks for the tip, American Dream.”
Spider-Girl, in Vol. 1, No. 30, March 2001

Log24.net, Feb. 21, 2005:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050221-TimeAndAgain.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Thursday, March 4, 2004

Thursday March 4, 2004

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:44 pm

ZZ

Mit Zeichen und Zahlen
vermessen wir Himmel und Erde
schwarz
auf weiss
schaffen wir neue Welten
oder gar Universen
 
With numbers and names
we measure heaven and earth
black
on white
we create new worlds
and universes
 
— from “Zahlen und Zeichen,
  Wörter und Worte”
 
 

“Numbers and Names,
Wording and Words”

by Eugen Jost

English translation by Catherine Schelbert

Alphabets

From time to time we take our pen in hand
And scribble symbols on a blank white sheet
Their meaning is at everyone’s command;
It is a game whose rules are nice and neat.

But if a savage or a moon-man came
And found a page, a furrowed runic field,
And curiously studied lines and frame:
How strange would be the world that they revealed.
A magic gallery of oddities.
He would see A and B as man and beast,
As moving tongues or arms or legs or eyes,
Now slow, now rushing, all constraint released,
Like prints of ravens’ feet upon the snow.
He’d hop about with them, fly to and fro,
And see a thousand worlds of might-have-been
Hidden within the black and frozen symbols,
Beneath the ornate strokes, the thick and thin.
He’d see the way love burns and anguish trembles,
He’d wonder, laugh, shake with fear and weep
Because beyond this cipher’s cross-barred keep
He’d see the world in all its aimless passion,
Diminished, dwarfed, and spellbound in the symbols,
And rigorously marching prisoner-fashion.
He’d think: each sign all others so resembles
That love of life and death, or lust and anguish,
Are simply twins whom no one can distinguish …
Until at last the savage with a sound
Of mortal terror lights and stirs a fire,
Chants and beats his brow against the ground
And consecrates the writing to his pyre.
Perhaps before his consciousness is drowned
In slumber there will come to him some sense
Of how this world of magic fraudulence,
This horror utterly behind endurance,
Has vanished as if it had never been.
He’ll sigh, and smile, and feel all right again.

— Hermann Hesse (1943),
Buchstaben” from Das Glasperlenspiel,
translated by Richard and Clara Winston

See also the previous entry,
on the dream
of El Pato-lógico.

Friday, February 20, 2004

Friday February 20, 2004

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 am

The Da Vinci Code
and
Symbology at Harvard

The protagonist of the recent bestseller The Da Vinci Code is Robert Langdon, "a professor of Religious Symbology at Harvard University."  A prominent part in the novel is played by the well-known Catholic organization Opus Dei.  Less well known (indeed, like Langdon, nonexistent) is the academic discipline of "symbology."  (For related disciplines that do exist, click here.) What might a course in this subject at Harvard be like?

Harvard Crimson, April 10, 2003:

While Opus Dei members said that they do not refer to their practices of recruitment as "fishing," the Work’s founder does describe the process of what he calls "winning new apostles" with an aquatic metaphor.

Point #978 of The Way invokes a passage in the New Testament in which Jesus tells Peter that he will make him a "fisher of men." The point reads:

" ‘Follow me, and I will make you into fishers of men.’ Not without reason does our Lord use these words: men—like fish—have to be caught by the head. What evangelical depth there is in the ‘intellectual apostolate!’ ”

IMAGE- Escher, 'Fishes and Scales'

IMAGE- Cullinane, 'Invariance'

Exercise for Symbology 101:

Describe the symmetry
in each of the pictures above.
Show that the second picture
retains its underlying structural
symmetry under a group of
322,560 transformations.

Having reviewed yesterday's notes
on Gombrich, Gadamer, and Panofsky,
discuss the astrological meaning of
the above symbols in light of
today's date, February 20.

Extra credit:

Relate the above astrological
symbolism to the four-diamond
symbol in Jung's Aion.

Happy metaphors!

Robert Langdon

Thursday, February 19, 2004

Thursday February 19, 2004

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:22 pm

What is Poetry, Part II —

Gombrich vs. Gadamer

Excerpts from
Tetsuhiro Kato on

Gombrich and the
Hermeneutics of Art

Kato on Gombrich

“… according to Gombrich, an image is susceptible to become a target for ‘symbol detectives’…. But the hidden authorial intention… ([for example]… astrology, recalling the famous warning of Panofsky [1955: 32]), almost always tends to become a reproduction of the interpreter’s own ideological prejudice. Not to give into the irrationalism such psychological overinterpretation might invite…. we have to look for the origin of meaning… in…  the social context…. The event of image making is not the faithful transcription of the outside world by an innocent eye, but it is the result of the artist’s act of selecting the ‘nearest equivalence’… based on social convention….”

Kato on Gadamer 

“For [Gadamer], picture reading is a process where a beholder encounters a picture as addressing him or her with a kind of personal question, and the understanding develops in the form of its answer (Gadamer 1981: 23-24; Gadamer 1985: 97,102-103).  But, it must be noted that by this Gadamer does not mean to identify the understanding of an image with some sort of ‘subsumption’ of the image into its meaning (Gadamer 1985: 100). He insists rather that we can understand an image only by actualizing what is implied in the work, and engage in a dialogue with it. This process is ideally repeated again and again, and implies different relations than the original conditions that gave birth to the work in the beginning (Gadamer 1985: 100).

What matters here for Gadamer is to let the aesthetic aspect of image take its own ‘Zeitgestalt’ (Gadamer 1985: 101).”

Example (?) — the Zeitgestalt
of today’s previous entry:

See, too,
 The Quality of Diamond.

Kato’s References:

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1981. “Philosophie und Literatur: Was ist die Literatur?,” Phänomenologische Forschungen 11 (1981): 18-45.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1985. “Über das Lesen von Bauten und Bildern.” Modernität und Tradition: Festschrift für Max Imdahl zum 60. Geburtstag. Ed. Gottfried Boehm, Karlheinz Stierle, Gundorf Winter. Munchen: Wilhelm Fink. 97-103.

Panofsky, Erwin. 1955. Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History. New York: Anchor.

Thursday February 19, 2004

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Five Easy Pieces
for Lee Marvin’s Birthday

1.

“EVERYTHING’S a story.
You are a story– I am a story.”
— Frances Hodgson Burnett,
A Little Princess

2.

“You see that sign, sir?”
[Pointing to a notice demanding
courtesy from customers]

3.

4.

“You see this sign?”


 

5.

“Aquarians are
extremely independent.”

Monday, July 28, 2003

Monday July 28, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 am

Midnight Cowboy

A Last Hurrah for Harold C. Schonberg, New York Times music critic (not to be confused with Arnold Schoenberg, composer):

“His criticism of music he disliked could be harsh, and in a valedictory essay published at the time of his retirement as senior critic, he explained himself unrepentantly.

‘I thought the serial-dominated music after the war was a hideously misbegotten creature sired by Caliban out of Hecate, and I had no hesitation in saying so,’ he wrote. ‘Nor has it been proved that I was all wrong. Certain it is that the decades of serialism did nothing but alienate the public, creating a chasm between composer and audience.'”

The serialist composer Arnold Schoenberg, on the other hand, wrote:

“I believe what I do and do only what I believe; and woe to anybody who lays hands on my faith. Such a man I regard as an enemy, and no quarter given!”


Schoenberg

To which the appropriate reply is:

“Here’s a quarter, call someone who cares.”

— Travis Tritt, CowboyLyrics.com


Harold C. Schonberg

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