Some will prefer other archivists.
Monday, October 28, 2024
Sunday, December 20, 2020
Looking Firmly
“… and the song of love’s recision is the music of the spheres.”
— E. L. Doctorow, City of God
Doctorow’s remark was quoted here earlier, on February 5, 2009 —
The central aim of Western religion–
"Each of us has something to offer the Creator... the bridging of masculine and feminine, life and death. It's redemption.... nothing else matters." -- Martha Cooley in The Archivist (1998) The central aim of Western philosophy– Dualities of Pythagoras as reconstructed by Aristotle: Limited Unlimited Odd Even Male Female Light Dark Straight Curved ... and so on .... “Of these dualities, the first is the most important; all the others may be seen as different aspects of this fundamental dichotomy. To establish a rational and consistent relationship between the limited [man, etc.] and the unlimited [the cosmos, etc.] is… the central aim of all Western philosophy.” — Jamie James in The Music of the Spheres (1993) “In the garden of Adding — The Midrash Jazz Quartet in City of God, by E. L. Doctorow (2000) A quotation today at art critic Carol Kino’s website, slightly expanded: “Art inherited from the old religion — Octavio Paz,”Seeing and Using: Art and Craftsmanship,” in Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1987), 52 From Brian O’Doherty’s 1976 Artforum essays– not on museums, but rather on gallery space: “We have now reached
“Space: what you — James Joyce, Ulysses |
Comments Off on Looking Firmly
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Imago Creationis
In the above view, four of the tesseract's 16
vertices are overlaid by other vertices.
For views that are more complete and
moveable, see Smith's tesseract page.
Four-Part Tesseract Divisions—
The above figure shows how four-part partitions
of the 16 vertices of a tesseract in an infinite
Euclidean space are related to four-part partitions
of the 16 points in a finite Galois space
|
Euclidean spaces versus Galois spaces in a larger context— Infinite versus Finite The central aim of Western religion —
"Each of us has something to offer the Creator...
the bridging of
masculine and feminine,
life and death.
It's redemption.... nothing else matters."
-- Martha Cooley in The Archivist (1998)
The central aim of Western philosophy —
Dualities of Pythagoras
as reconstructed by Aristotle:
Limited Unlimited
Odd Even
Male Female
Light Dark
Straight Curved
... and so on ....
"Of these dualities, the first is the most important; all the others may be seen as different aspects of this fundamental dichotomy. To establish a rational and consistent relationship between the limited [man, etc.] and the unlimited [the cosmos, etc.] is… the central aim of all Western philosophy." |
Another picture related to philosophy and religion—
Jung's Four-Diamond Figure from Aion—
This figure was devised by Jung
to represent the Self. Compare the
remarks of Paul Valéry on the Self—
|
Flight from Eden: The Origins of Modern Literary Criticism and Theory, by Steven Cassedy, U. of California Press, 1990, pages 156-157—
Valéry saw the mind as essentially a relational system whose operation he attempted to describe in the language of group mathematics. "Every act of understanding is based on a group," he says (C, 1:331). "My specialty— reducing everything to the study of a system closed on itself and finite" (C, 19: 645). The transformation model came into play, too. At each moment of mental life the mind is like a group, or relational system, but since mental life is continuous over time, one "group" undergoes a "transformation" and becomes a different group in the next moment. If the mind is constantly being transformed, how do we account for the continuity of the self? Simple; by invoking the notion of the invariant. And so we find passages like this one: "The S[elf] is invariant, origin, locus or field, it's a functional property of consciousness" (C, 15:170 [2:315]). Just as in transformational geometry, something remains fixed in all the projective transformations of the mind's momentary systems, and that something is the Self (le Moi, or just M, as Valéry notates it so that it will look like an algebraic variable). Transformation theory is all over the place. "Mathematical science… reduced to algebra, that is, to the analysis of the transformations of a purely differential being made up of homogeneous elements, is the most faithful document of the properties of grouping, disjunction, and variation in the mind" (O, 1:36). "Psychology is a theory of transformations, we just need to isolate the invariants and the groups" (C, 1:915). "Man is a system that transforms itself" (C, 2:896). O Paul Valéry, Oeuvres (Paris: Pléiade, 1957-60) C Valéry, Cahiers, 29 vols. (Paris: Centre National de le Recherche Scientifique, 1957-61) |
Note also the remarks of George David Birkhoff at Rice University
in 1940 (pdf) on Galois's theory of groups and the related
"theory of ambiguity" in Galois's testamentary letter—
|
… metaphysical reasoning always relies on the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and… the true meaning of this Principle is to be found in the “Theory of Ambiguity” and in the associated mathematical “Theory of Groups.” If I were a Leibnizian mystic, believing in his “preestablished harmony,” and the “best possible world” so satirized by Voltaire in “Candide,” I would say that the metaphysical importance of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and the cognate Theory of Groups arises from the fact that God thinks multi-dimensionally* whereas men can only think in linear syllogistic series, and the Theory of Groups is the appropriate instrument of thought to remedy our deficiency in this respect. * That is, uses multi-dimensional symbols beyond our grasp. |
Related material:
A medal designed by Leibniz to show how
binary arithmetic mirrors the creation by God
of something (1) from nothing (0).
Another array of 16 strings of 0's and 1's, this time
regarded as coordinates rather than binary numbers—
Some context by a British mathematician —
|
Imago by Wallace Stevens Who can pick up the weight of Britain, Who can move the German load Or say to the French here is France again? Imago. Imago. Imago. It is nothing, no great thing, nor man Of ten brilliancies of battered gold And fortunate stone. It moves its parade Of motions in the mind and heart, A gorgeous fortitude. Medium man In February hears the imagination's hymns And sees its images, its motions And multitudes of motions And feels the imagination's mercies, In a season more than sun and south wind, Something returning from a deeper quarter, A glacier running through delirium, Making this heavy rock a place, Which is not of our lives composed . . . Lightly and lightly, O my land, Move lightly through the air again. |
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Saturday, May 29, 2010
Packed
Significant Passage:
On the Writing Style of Visual Thinkers
"The words are filled with unstated meaning.
They are (the term is Ricoeur's) 'packed'
and need unpacking." —Gerald Grow
From the date of Ricoeur's death,
May 20, 2005—
“Plato’s most significant passage
may be found in Phaedrus 265b…."
|
With a little effort, cross-referenced." — Opening sentence
|
Mozart's K 265 is variations on the theme
now known as "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star."
For darker variations on the Twinkle theme,
see the film "Joshua" and Martin Gardner's
Annotated Alice (Norton, 2000, pp. 73-75).
For darker variations on the asterisk theme,
see Darkness Visible (May 25)
and Vonnegut's Asterisk.
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Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Tuesday July 28, 2009
Monumental
Anniversary
Anniversary
The Associated Press this morning —
“Today’s Highlight in History:
On July 28, 1609, the English ship Sea Venture, commanded by Admiral Sir George Somers, ran ashore on Bermuda after nearly foundering at sea during a storm.”
“… the Sea Venture story is two tales in one. There’s the hurricane at sea, and then there is the Bermuda wreck becoming an inspiration for ‘The Tempest.’ The first is one of the most dramatic adventures of the era, and the second is a fascinating detective story.”
“It has been a commonplace in English literary criticism that Shakespeare’s play, ‘The Tempest,’ was modeled on these accounts…. However, this common wisdom is almost certainly a falsity. A monumental error.”
Related material:
Plot summary by “Anonymous” at imdb.com of a feminist film version of “The Tempest” (now in post-production):
“In Julie Taymor’s version of ‘The Tempest,’ the gender of Prospero has been switched to Prospera. Going back to the 16th or 17th century, women practicing the magical arts of alchemy were often convicted of witchcraft.”
Taymor’s “Tempest” stars, as Prospera, the famed portrayer of monarchs Helen Mirren. Another work dealing with alchemy suitable for Mirren (who is also known as Detective Inspector Jane Tennison):
The Eight, by Katherine Neville, is perhaps the greatest bad novel of the twentieth century. If it were made into a movie, who should be cast as the Black Queen? (“…the dignified silver-haired woman danced sinuously…” — p. 241)
Comments Off on Tuesday July 28, 2009
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Tuesday July 7, 2009
Review
On June 25
in this journal–
A Word for AntiChristmas:“… T. S. Eliot tried to recompose,
in Four Quartets, the fragments he had grieved over in The Waste Land.” — “Beauty and Desecration,” |
Today’s word
(thanks to Michael Jackson)–
| From Log24 on Nov. 12, 2005:
“‘Tikkun Olam, the fixing of the world,’ she whispers. ‘I’ve been gathering up the broken vessels to make things whole again.'” — Miriam in Bee Season
“Tikkun Olam, the gathering of the divine fragments, is a religious activity…. How do we work for the repair of the world? If we live in a humpty dumpty world, how do we get it all put back together again?”
— A Sunday Sermon “… the
— Martha Cooley, The Archivist |
Comments Off on Tuesday July 7, 2009
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Thursday February 5, 2009
Through the
Looking Glass:
A Sort of Eternity
From the new president’s inaugural address:
“… in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.”
The words of Scripture:
“through a glass”—
[di’ esoptrou].
By means of
a mirror [esoptron].
Childish things:
© 2005 The Institute for Figuring
Photo by Norman Brosterman
fom the Inventing Kindergarten
exhibit at The Institute for Figuring
(co-founded by Margaret Wertheim)
fom the Inventing Kindergarten
exhibit at The Institute for Figuring
(co-founded by Margaret Wertheim)
Not-so-childish:
Three planes through
the center of a cube
that split it into
eight subcubes:
Through a glass, darkly:
A group of 8 transformations is
generated by affine reflections
in the above three planes.
Shown below is a pattern on
the faces of the 2x2x2 cube
that is symmetric under one of
these 8 transformations–
a 180-degree rotation:
(Click on image
for further details.)
But then face to face:
A larger group of 1344,
rather than 8, transformations
of the 2x2x2 cube
is generated by a different
sort of affine reflections– not
in the infinite Euclidean 3-space
over the field of real numbers,
but rather in the finite Galois
3-space over the 2-element field.
Galois age fifteen,
drawn by a classmate.
These transformations
in the Galois space with
finitely many points
produce a set of 168 patterns
like the one above.
For each such pattern,
at least one nontrivial
transformation in the group of 8
described above is a symmetry
in the Euclidean space with
infinitely many points.
For some generalizations,
see Galois Geometry.
Related material:
The central aim of Western religion–
"Each of us has something to offer the Creator... the bridging of masculine and feminine, life and death. It's redemption.... nothing else matters." -- Martha Cooley in The Archivist (1998) The central aim of Western philosophy– Dualities of Pythagoras as reconstructed by Aristotle: Limited Unlimited Odd Even Male Female Light Dark Straight Curved ... and so on .... “Of these dualities, the first is the most important; all the others may be seen as different aspects of this fundamental dichotomy. To establish a rational and consistent relationship between the limited [man, etc.] and the unlimited [the cosmos, etc.] is… the central aim of all Western philosophy.” — Jamie James in The Music of the Spheres (1993) “In the garden of Adding — The Midrash Jazz Quartet in City of God, by E. L. Doctorow (2000) A quotation today at art critic Carol Kino’s website, slightly expanded: “Art inherited from the old religion — Octavio Paz,”Seeing and Using: Art and Craftsmanship,” in Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1987), 52 From Brian O’Doherty’s 1976 Artforum essays– not on museums, but rather on gallery space: “We have now reached
“Space: what you — James Joyce, Ulysses |
Comments Off on Thursday February 5, 2009
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Sunday June 1, 2008
Yet Another
Cartoon Graveyard
Cartoon Graveyard
The conclusion of yesterday’s commentary on the May 30-31 Pennsylvania Lottery numbers:
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow:
“The fear balloons again inside his brain. It will not be kept down with a simple Fuck You…. A smell, a forbidden room, at the bottom edge of his memory. He can’t see it, can’t make it out. Doesn’t want to. It is allied with the Worst Thing.
He knows what the smell has to be: though according to these papers it would have been too early for it, though he has never come across any of the stuff among the daytime coordinates of his life, still, down here, back here in the warm dark, among early shapes where the clocks and calendars don’t mean too much, he knows that’s what haunting him now will prove to be the smell of Imipolex G.
Then there’s this recent dream he is afraid of having again. He was in his old room, back home. A summer afternoon of lilacs and bees and
286”
What are we to make of this enigmatic 286? (No fair peeking at page 287.)
One possible meaning, given The Archivist‘s claim that “existence is infinitely cross-referenced”–
Page 286 of Ernest G. Schachtel, Metamorphosis: On the Conflict of Human Development and the Psychology of Creativity (first published in 1959), Hillsdale NJ and London, The Analytic Press, 2001 (chapter– “On Memory and Childhood Amnesia”):
“Both Freud and Proust speak of the autobiographical [my italics] memory, and it is only with regard to this memory that the striking phenomenon of childhood amnesia and the less obvious difficulty of recovering any past experience may be observed.”
The concluding “summer afternoon of lilacs and bees” suggests that 286 may also be a chance allusion to the golden afternoon of Disney’s Alice in Wonderland. (Cf. St. Sarah’s Day, 2008)
Some may find the Disney afternoon charming; others may see it as yet another of Paul Simon’s dreaded cartoon graveyards.
More tastefully, there is poem 286 in the 1919 Oxford Book of English Verse– “Love.”
For a midrash on this poem, see Simone Weil, who became acquainted with the poem by chance:
“I always prefer saying chance rather than Providence.”
— Simone Weil, letter of about May 15, 1942
Weil’s brother André might prefer Providence (source of the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society.)
(Photo from Providence)
Related material:
Log24, December 20, 2003–
White, Geometric, and Eternal—
White, Geometric, and Eternal—
A description in Gravity’s Rainbow of prewar Berlin as “white and geometric” suggested, in combination with a reference elsewhere to “the eternal,” a citation of the following illustration of the concept “white, geometric, and eternal”–
For more on the mathematical significance of this figure, see (for instance) Happy Birthday, Hassler Whitney, and Combinatorics of Coxeter Groups, by Anders Björner and Francesco Brenti, Graduate Texts in Mathematics, vol. 231, Springer, New York, 2005.
This book is reviewed in the current issue (July 2008) of the above-mentioned Providence Bulletin.
The review in the Bulletin discusses reflection groups in continuous spaces.
For a more elementary approach, see Reflection Groups in Finite Geometry and Knight Moves: The Relativity Theory of Kindergarten Blocks.
See also a commentary on
the phrase “as a little child.”
the phrase “as a little child.”
Comments Off on Sunday June 1, 2008
Wednesday, August 2, 2006
Wednesday August 2, 2006
the process of determining
correspondences between concepts.”
Online New York Times today
“With a little effort,
“With a little effort,
anything can be shown to
connect with anything else:
existence is infinitely
connect with anything else:
existence is infinitely
cross-referenced.”
— Opening sentence of
Martha Cooley’s The Archivist
“Frere Jacques, Cuernavaca,
ach du lieber August.”
— John O’Hara, Hope of Heaven, 1938
Comments Off on Wednesday August 2, 2006
Friday, February 24, 2006
Friday February 24, 2006
Final Club
For the feast of St. Matthias
(traditional calendar)–
from Amazon.com, a quoted Library Journal review of Geoffrey Wolff‘s novel The Final Club:
“‘What other colleges call fraternities, Princeton calls Eating Clubs. The Final Club is a group of 12 Princeton seniors in 1958 who make their own, distinctive club….
Young adults may find this interesting, but older readers need not join The Final Club.’
— Previewed in Prepub Alert, Library Journal 5/1/90. Paul E. Hutchison, Fisherman’s Paradise, Bellefonte, Pa. Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.”
From The Archivist, by Martha Cooley:
“Although I’ve always been called Matt, my first name isn’t Matthew but Matthias: after the disciple who replaced Judas Iscariot. By the time I was four, I knew a great deal about my namesake. More than once my mother read to me, from the New Testament, the story of how Matthias had been chosen by lot to take the place of dreadful Judas. Listening, I felt a large and frightened sympathy for my predecessor. No doubt a dark aura hung over Judas’s chair– something like the pervasive, bitter odor of Pall Malls in my father’s corner of the sofa.
As far as my mother was concerned, the lot of Matthias was the unquestionable outcome of an activity that seemed capricious to me: a stone-toss by the disciples. I tried with difficulty to picture a dozen men dressed in dust-colored robes and sandals, playing a child’s game. One of the Twelve had to carry on, my mother explained, after Judas had perpetrated his evil. The seat couldn’t be left empty. Hence Matthias: the Lord’s servants had pitched their stones, and his had traveled the farthest.”
Comments Off on Friday February 24, 2006
Saturday, November 12, 2005
Saturday November 12, 2005
Ten is a Hen
“Follow the spiritual journey
that is BEE SEASON.“
“‘Tikkun Olam,
the fixing of the world,’
she whispers. ‘I’ve been
gathering up the broken vessels
to make things whole again.'”
— Miriam in Bee Season
“Tikkun Olam, the gathering
of the divine fragments,
is a religious activity….
How do we work for
the repair of the world?
If we live in a
humpty dumpty world,
how do we get it all
put back together again?”
of the divine fragments,
is a religious activity….
How do we work for
the repair of the world?
If we live in a
humpty dumpty world,
how do we get it all
put back together again?”
“… the tikkun can’t start until
everyone asks what happened–
not just the Jews but everybody.
The strange thing is that
Christ evidently saw this.”
— Martha Cooley, The Archivist
“She understands that Bloom asked for breakfast in bed. Since we were present when Bloom fell asleep and he had not asked for breakfast in bed before he fell asleep, Molly may have misunderstood his sleepy murmurs about the Roc’s egg.”
Jorn Barger on Finnegans Wake:
“Acknowledging the dream as sexually harrowing, we’re offered relief in a view of ALP as a hen scratching up battle-relics from a midden heap after the fall/Flood.
And even if Humpty shell fall frumpty times as awkward again in the beardsboosoloom of all our grand remonstrancers there’ll be iggs for the brekkers come to mournhim, sunny side up with care….”
Comments Off on Saturday November 12, 2005
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
Wednesday June 15, 2005
Cross-Referenced
From today’s New York Times,
a review of a Werner Herzog film,
“Wheel of Time,” that opens
today in Manhattan:
From the June 13-14
midnight Log24 entry:
midnight Log24 entry:
“With a little effort, anything can be
shown to connect with anything else:
existence is infinitely cross-referenced.”
— Opening sentence of
Martha Cooley’s The Archivist
These images suggest
a Google search on the phrase
“crucified on the wheel of time,”
which yields the following.
 DARK CITY (1998)Crucified on the Wheel Of Time. A visual feast. |
From Dark City: A Hollywood Jesus Movie Review —
“There is something mesmerizing about this important film. It flows in the same vein as The Truman Show, The Game, and Pleasantville. Something isn’t real with the world around John Murdoch. Some group is trying to control things and it isn’t God.”
Amen.
Related material:
Skewed Mirrors and
The Graces of Paranoia
Comments Off on Wednesday June 15, 2005
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
Tuesday June 14, 2005
ART WARS:
Dark City
Jennifer Connelly at
premiere of “Cinderella Man” —
In memory of Martin Buber,
author of Good and Evil,
who died on June 13, 1965:
“With a little effort, anything can be
shown to connect with anything else:
existence is infinitely cross-referenced.”
— Opening sentence of
Martha Cooley’s The Archivist
|
Woe unto Isaiah 5:20
|
As she spoke |
The world
|
Jennifer Connelly in “Dark City”
(from journal note of June 19, 2002) —
And, one might add for Flag Day,
“you sons of bitches.”
Comments Off on Tuesday June 14, 2005
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
Wednesday May 11, 2005
Art History
Reuters – "Joe Grant, a legendary Disney artist who designed the Queen/Witch in 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,' died of a heart attack while doing what he loved most, drawing, the Walt Disney Co. said Monday.
Grant, 96, died at his home in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale last Friday while sitting at his drawing board."
"With a little effort, anything can be
shown to connect with anything else:
existence is infinitely cross-referenced."
shown to connect with anything else:
existence is infinitely cross-referenced."
— Opening sentence of
Martha Cooley's The Archivist
From Log24 last Friday,
a Greek cross:
Click on picture for details.
And from Sunday, May 1
(Orthodox Easter):
Columbia University's
Meyer Schapiro Professor
of Modern Art and Theory:
"There is no painter in the West
who can be unaware of
the symbolic power of
the cruciform shape1
and the Pandora's box
of spiritual reference2
that is opened
once one uses it."
Click on pictures for details.
Related material:
Nine is a Vine3.
Related material:
Nine is a Vine3.
1, 2, 3 Today's birthdays:
1 Natasha Richardson, born 11 May 1963,
Jedi wife and costar of Nell
2 Martha Quinn, born 11 May 1959,
MTV wit
3 Frances Fisher, born 11 May 1952,
dazzling redhead
Comments Off on Wednesday May 11, 2005
Friday, April 29, 2005
Friday April 29, 2005
Midrash Jazz Quartet
Harvard's Barry Mazur likes to quote Aristotle's Metaphysics. See 1, 2, 3.
Here, with an introductory remark by Martha Cooley, is more from the Metaphysics:
The central aim of Western religion —
"Each of us has something to offer the Creator...
the bridging of
masculine and feminine,
life and death.
It's redemption.... nothing else matters."
-- Martha Cooley in The Archivist (1998)
The central aim of Western philosophy —
Dualities of Pythagoras
as reconstructed by Aristotle:
Limited Unlimited
Odd Even
Male Female
Light Dark
Straight Curved
... and so on ....
"Of these dualities, the first is the most important; all the others may be seen as different aspects of this fundamental dichotomy. To establish a rational and consistent relationship between the limited [man, etc.] and the unlimited [the cosmos, etc.] is… the central aim of all Western philosophy."
— Jamie James in The Music of the Spheres (1993)
"In the garden of Adding,
Live Even and Odd….
And the song of love's recision
is the music of the spheres."
— The Midrash Jazz Quartet in City of God, by E. L. Doctorow (2000)
Harvard University, Department of English:
|
• |
Today's birthday: Jerry Seinfeld.
Related material:
Is Nothing Sacred? and Symmetries.
Comments Off on Friday April 29, 2005
Thursday, September 30, 2004
Thursday September 30, 2004
Midnight in the Garden
“With a little effort,
anything can be shown
to connect with anything else:
existence is infinitely
cross-referenced.”
— Opening sentence
of Martha Cooley’s
The Archivist
|
Woe unto Isaiah 5:20 |
As she spoke |
The world Cole Porter |
Example:
Mozart’s K 265,
the page number 265,
and a story by George MacDonald.
Thursday, September 23, 2004
Thursday September 23, 2004
Church Architecture
In memory of Harvard-trained
architect Edward Larrabee Barnes
From Martha Cooley’s The Archivist,
April 1999 paperback, page 301:
For related design issues
at Harvard, click here.
Comments Off on Thursday September 23, 2004
Sunday, February 8, 2004
Sunday February 8, 2004
The Quality of Diamond
On February 3, 2004, archivist and abstract painter Ward Jackson died at 75. From today’s New York Times:
“Inspired by painters like Piet Mondrian and Josef Albers, Mr. Jackson made austere, hard-edged geometric compositions, typically on diamond-shaped canvases.”
|
On a 2003 exhibit by Pablo Helguera that included Mr. Jackson: Parallel Lives recounts and recontextualizes real episodes from the lives of five disparate individuals including Florence Foster Jenkins, arguably the world’s worst opera singer; Giulio Camillo, a Renaissance mystic who aimed to build a memory container for all things; Friedrich Froebel, the inventor of the kindergarten education system, the members of the last existing Shaker community, and Ward Jackson, the lifelong archivist of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Parallel Lives pays homage to Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) and his system of philosophical hermeneutics built through an exploration of historicity, language, and art. This exhibition, which draws its title from the classic work by Plutarch, is a project that explores biography as a medium, drawing from the earlier innovation of the biographical practice in works like Marcel Schwob’s “Imaginary Lives” (1896) and John Aubrey’s “Brief Lives” (1681). Through display means, the project blends the lives of these individuals into one basic story, visually stating the relationship between individualism and society as best summarized by Gadamer’s famous phrase: “we all are others, and we all are a self.” |
On February 3, the day that Jackson died, there were five different log24.net entries:
Parallels with the Helguera exhibit:
Florence Foster Jenkins: Janet Jackson in (2) above.
Giulio Camillo: Myself as compiler of the synchronistic excerpts in (5).
Friedrich Froebel: David Wade in (4).
The last Shakers: Christopher Alexander and his acolytes in (1).
Ward Jackson: On Feb. 3, Jackson became a permanent part of
Some thoughts of Hans-Georg Gadamer
relevant to Jackson’s death:
|
by G.T. Karnezis The pleasure it [art] elicits “is the joy of knowledge.” It does not operate as an enchantment but “a transformation into the true.” Art, then, would seem to be an essentializing agent insofar as it reveals what is essential. Gadamer asks us to see reality as a horizon of “still undecided possibilities,” of unfulfilled expectations, of contingency. If, in a particular case, however, “a meaningful whole completes and fulfills itself in reality,” it is like a drama. If someone sees the whole of reality as a closed circle of meaning” he will be able to speak “of the comedy and tragedy of life” (genres becoming ways of conceiving reality). In such cases where reality “is understood as a play, there emerges the reality of what play is, which we call the play of art.” As such, art is a realization: “By means of it everyone recognizes that that is how things are.” Reality, in this viewpoint, is what has not been transformed. Art is defined as “the raising up of this reality to its truth.” |
As noted in entry (3) above
on the day that Jackson died,
“All the world’s a stage.”
Comments Off on Sunday February 8, 2004
Monday, July 28, 2003
Monday July 28, 2003
City of God
Today's site music is
The central aim of Western religion —
"Each of us has something to offer the Creator... the bridging of masculine and feminine, life and death. It's redemption.... nothing else matters." -- Martha Cooley in The Archivist (1998)
The central aim of Western philosophy —
Dualities of Pythagoras
as reconstructed by Aristotle:
Limited Unlimited
Odd Even
Male Female
Light Dark
Straight Curved
... and so on ....
"Of these dualities, the first is the most important; all the others may be seen as different aspects of this fundamental dichotomy. To establish a rational and consistent relationship between the limited [man, etc.] and the unlimited [the cosmos, etc.] is… the central aim of all Western philosophy."
— Jamie James in
The Music of the Spheres (1993)
"In the garden of Adding,
Live Even and Odd….
And the song of love's recision
is the music of the spheres."
— The Midrash Jazz Quartet in
City of God, by E. L. Doctorow (2000)
Today is the feast of St. Johann Sebastian Bach.
Comments Off on Monday July 28, 2003
Thursday, April 24, 2003
Thursday April 24, 2003
Cross-Referenced
†
Shortly after midnight on the night of April 22-23, I updated my entry for Shakespeare's birthday with the following quotation:
"With a little effort, anything can be shown to connect with anything else: existence is infinitely cross-referenced."
— Opening sentence of Martha Cooley's The Archivist
About 24 hours later, I came across the following obituary in The New York Times:
"Edgar F. Codd, a mathematician and computer scientist who laid the theoretical foundation for relational databases, the standard method by which information is organized in and retrieved from computers, died on Friday…. He was 79."
The Times does not mention that the Friday it refers to is Good Friday. God will have his little jokes.
|
From Computerworld.com: |
|||
|---|---|---|---|
|
1969: Edgar F. “Ted” Codd invents the relational database. 1973: Cullinane, led by John J. Cullinane, ships IDMS, a network-model database for IBM mainframes. 1976: Honeywell ships Multics Relational Data Store, the first commercial relational database. |
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For a better (and earlier) obituary than the Times's, see The San Jose Mercury News of Easter Sunday. For some thoughts on death and the afterlife appropriate to last weekend, see The Matthias Defense.
† The Exorcist, 1973
Comments Off on Thursday April 24, 2003
Wednesday, April 23, 2003
Wednesday April 23, 2003
Midnight in the Garden
of Good and Evil
on Shakespeare’s Birthday
Tony Scherman on an April 7, 1968, recording by Nina Simone:
“…nobody could telescope more emotion into a single, idiosyncratically turned syllable (listen to the way she says the word “Savannah” in her spoken intro to “Sunday in Savannah.” It breaks your heart — and she ain’t even singin’ yet!).”
See also the following entries on midnight in the garden:
Trinity, Oct. 25, 2002
Midnight in the Garden, Oct. 26, 2002
Point of No Return, Dec. 10, 2002
Culture Clash at Midnight, Dec. 11, 2002
Dead Poets Society, Dec. 13, 2002
For the Dark Lady, Dec. 18, 2002
Nightmare Alley, Dec. 21, 2002
For the Green Lady, Dec. 21, 2002
“With a little effort, anything can be shown to connect with anything else: existence is infinitely cross-referenced.”
— Opening sentence of Martha Cooley’s The Archivist
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Woe unto Isaiah 5:20
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As she spoke about the Trees of Life and Death, I watched her…. |
The world Cole Porter
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Tuesday, October 15, 2002
Tuesday October 15, 2002
From the Archives:
On this date in 1971, “Rick Nelson was booed off the stage when he didn’t stick to all oldies at the seventh Annual Rock ’n’ Roll Revival show at Madison Square Garden, New York. He tried to slip in some of his new material and the crowd did not approve. The negative reaction to his performance inspired Nelson to write his last top-40 hit, ‘Garden Party,’ which hit the top-ten about a year after the Madison Square Garden debacle. ‘Garden Party,’ ironically, was Nelson’s biggest hit in years.”
“With a little effort, anything can be shown to connect with anything else: existence is infinitely cross-referenced.”
— Opening sentence of Martha Cooley’s The Archivist
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Woe unto Isaiah 5:20 |
As she spoke |
The world Cole Porter |
Actor Pat O’Brien died on this date in 1983.
“A man in Ireland, who came in contact with a Bible colporteur, at first repulsed him. Finally he was persuaded to take a Bible and later he said: ‘I read a wee bit out of the New Testament every day, and I pray to God every night and morning.’ When asked if it helped him to read God’s Word and to pray, he answered: ‘Indade it does. When I go to do anything wrong, I just say to myself, “Pat, you’ll be talking to God tonight.” That keeps me from doing it!'”
— worldmissions.org
colporteur
… noun…
Etymology: French, alteration of Middle French comporteur, from comporter to bear, peddle….
a peddler of religious books
Comments Off on Tuesday October 15, 2002
Saturday, September 7, 2002
Saturday September 7, 2002
The Boys from Uruguay
If one were to write a “secret history” of the twentieth century, one possible organizing theme might be the religious struggle between worshippers of the Semitic deity (variously known as Yahweh, God, and Allah) and worshippers of the Aryan deities… notably, the Aryan god of music, light, and reason, Apollo.
(See my jounal notes of Monday, Sept. 2, 2002, below.)
In perhaps the best academic website I have ever seen, Karey L. Perkins quotes Walker Percy:
“The truth is that man’s capacity for symbol-mongering in general and language in particular is…intimately part and parcel of his being human, of his perceiving and knowing, of his very consciousness…”
The greatest symbol-monger of the twentieth century was, of course, Adolf Hitler. His use of the Aryan sun-wheel symbol rose to the level of genius. Of course, it ultimately failed to win the approval of the sun god himself, Apollo, who is also the god of reason.
Since symbol-mongering cannot be avoided, let us hope that it can be done in a somewhat more reasonable way than that of the National Socialist movement. Two examples suggest themselves.
- From Peggy Noonan’s column of Friday, Sept. 6:
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From Karey Perkins’s website:
On this Rosh Hashanah, the cross as a symbol of intelligence may be offensive to some worshippers of Yahweh. Let them read The Archivist, a novel by Martha Cooley, and then my journal note The Matthias Defense.
They might also contemplate the biblical quotation in the musical “Contact” broadcast from Lincoln Center on September 1, 2002: “Let there be light!”
Three Jews named Paul have been associated with light…
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Saul of Tarsus, who later assumed an alias.
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Paul Newman, whose performance in “The Verdict” continues, indirectly, to trouble Cardinal Law of Boston.
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Paul R. Halmos, a personal hero of mine ever since I saw his Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces and Measure Theory as an ignorant young undergraduate browsing the bookstores of Harvard Square.
In accordance with the “secret history” theme mentioned above, the struggle between Aryan and Semitic religions may also be viewed in the light of the struggle between Christianity and Communism. Hitler exploited this viewpoint very successfully, pretending to be the champion of the Christians against the godless Reds. Peggy Noonan also successfully uses this strategy. Both Hitler and Noonan manage to ignore the fact that Christianity is itself one of the Semitic religions, and that at least two of its three deities are Jewish.
As for me, I rather identify with the young Hitler clone at the end of the film “The Boys from Brazil.” Forced to decide between Gregory Peck and Sir Laurence Olivier, he sides with Olivier. His reason? Peck lied.
In a similar situation, forced to decide between Peggy Noonan and the Jew Halmos, I would probably side with Halmos. Halmos, who should, if not a saint, be at least dubbed a knight, does not, unlike the great majority of the damned human race, lie.
See Halmos’s memoir, I Want to Be a Mathematician. In particular, see the single index entry “communist by allegation” and the 29 entries under “Uruguay.”
Happy birthday to Elia Kazan and Peggy Noonan, and a happy and prosperous New Year to should-be-Sir Paul R. Halmos.
Comments Off on Saturday September 7, 2002