In memory of a producer — Black Trinity.
See also a phrase from an image* in today's earlier post
For Non -Charlatans:
"Let us make a small example. . . ."
* Page 149 of "Groups and Symmetries," by F. Oggier
& A. M. Bruckstein. "These notes were designed to fit
the syllabus of the course 'Groups and Symmetries',
taught at Nanyang Technological University in autumn
2012, and 2013."
"Taken together, vibe, mood, and energy formed
something like a loose philosophical system.
They presented the world as a swirl of forces
that eluded capture in rational thought, but that
could nevertheless be acutely sensed and even
influenced with the right kind of effort."
— Mitch Therieau in The Drift , Jan. 19, 2022 —
https://www.thedriftmag.com/vibe-mood-energy/ .
See as well Pacific Rimming and Black Sparrow.
Related cinematic lore:
Cailee Spaeny and The Drift in "Pacific Rim: Uprising," as well as . . .
Related tune: "Gimme the Beat Boys."
________________________________________________________
Update of 4:16 PM ET Friday, Jan. 21, 2021 —
From https://dash.harvard.edu/
bitstream/handle/1/39988028/
GRIETZER-DISSERTATION-2017.pdf —
Ambient Meaning: Mood, Vibe, System
A dissertation presented by Peli Grietzer
to The Department of Comparative Literature
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for
the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in
the subject of Comparative Literature,
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
November 2017 —
[Edited to emphasize key notions]
"On the picture that I am suggesting, there exists a reciprocity between
the structure of our sensibility or sensible cognition (system),
the structure of our affective life or social experience (mood),
and the structure of our social-material performance or production (style/vibe)
— a reciprocity whose approximate equilibrium or ‘metastable state’ binds
the cognitive, affective, and material aspects of life into a coherent lifeworld
or ‘totality.’ One way to tell the story of this reciprocity is as follows. The system
of our sensibility—our faculty of sensuous cognition that discloses objects, properties,
and patterns—recapitulates the structure of the social-material world. We continuously
calibrate our sensibility by attuning it to our social-material world’s dominant patterns
and forms, adapting our powers of apperception to the task of navigating our
social-material world." (Pp. 145-146.)
Compare and contrast the following trinities:
Related tune — Meat Loaf at the Ryman, "Two out of three ain't bad."
“‘In the dictionary next to [the] word “bright,” you should see Paula’s picture,’ he said. ‘She was super smart, with a sparkling wit. … She had a beautiful sense of style and color.'”
— Elinor J. Brecher in The Miami Herald on June 8, quoting Palm Beach Post writer John Lantigua on the late art historian Paula Hays Harper
This journal on the date of her death—
For some simpleminded commentary, see László Lovász on the cube space.
Some less simpleminded commentary—
“Was ist Raum, wie können wir ihn
erfassen und gestalten?”
"And, as with all retold tales that are in people's hearts,
there are only good and bad things and black and white
things and good and evil things and no in-between anywhere."
— John Steinbeck, author's epigraph to The Pearl
From the Season 4 finale of Westworld :
uploading Dolores's pearl at Hoover Dam —
For those who prefer greater theological simplicity . . .
Optimus Prime on a different Hoover Dam figure, that of
the AllSpark: "Before time began, there was the Cube."
Simplifying even more . . .
“A set having three members is a single thing
wholly constituted by its members but distinct from them.
After this, the theological doctrine of the Trinity as
‘three in one’ should be child’s play.”
– Max Black, Caveats and Critiques: Philosophical Essays
in Language, Logic, and Art , Cornell U. Press, 1975
As above, Black's theology forms a cube.
“A set having three members is a single thing
wholly constituted by its members but distinct from them.
After this, the theological doctrine of the Trinity as
‘three in one’ should be child’s play.”
— Max Black, Caveats and Critiques: Philosophical Essays
in Language, Logic, and Art , Cornell U. Press, 1975
“There is such a thing as a three-set.”
— Saying adapted from a novel by Madeleine L’Engle
Last night's post on The Trinity of Max Black and the use of
the term "eightfold" by the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute
at Berkeley suggest a review of an image from Sept. 22, 2011—
The triskele detail above echoes a Buddhist symbol found,
for instance, on the Internet in an ad for meditation supplies—
Related remarks—
http://www.spencerart.ku.edu/about/dialogue/fdpt.shtml—
Mary Dusenbury (Radcliffe '64)—
"… I think a textile, like any work of art, holds a tremendous amount of information— technical, material, historical, social, philosophical— but beyond that, many works of art are very beautiful and they speak to us on many layers— our intellect, our heart, our emotions. I've been going to museums since I was a very small child, thinking about what I saw, and going back to discover new things, to see pieces that spoke very deeply to me, to look at them again, and to find more and more meaning relevant to me in different ways and at different times of my life. …
… I think I would suggest to people that first of all they just look. Linger by pieces they find intriguing and beautiful, and look deeply. Then, if something interests them, we have tried to put a little information around the galleries to give a bit of history, a bit of context, for each piece. But the most important is just to look very deeply."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikaya_Buddhism—
According to Robert Thurman, the term "Nikāya Buddhism" was coined by Professor Masatoshi Nagatomi of Harvard University, as a way to avoid the usage of the term Hinayana.[12] "Nikaya Buddhism" is thus an attempt to find a more neutral way of referring to Buddhists who follow one of the early Buddhist schools, and their practice.
12. The Emptiness That is Compassion:
An Essay on Buddhist Ethics, Robert A. F. Thurman, 1980
[Religious Traditions , Vol. 4 No. 2, Oct.-Nov. 1981, pp. 11-34]
http://dsal.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.2:1:6.pali—
Nikāya [Sk. nikāya, ni+kāya]
collection ("body") assemblage, class, group
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/नि—
Sanskrit etymology for नि (ni)
नि (ni)
http://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=Kaya—
Kaya (Skt. kāya ; སྐུ་, Tib. ku ; Wyl. sku ) —
the Sanskrit word kaya literally means ‘body’
but can also signify dimension, field or basis.
• structure, existentiality, founding stratum ▷HVG KBEU
Note that The Trinity of Max Black is a picture of a set—
i.e., of an "assemblage, class, group."
Note also the reference above to the word "gestalt."
"Was ist Raum, wie können wir ihn
erfassen und gestalten?"
“A set having three members is a single thing
wholly constituted by its members but distinct from them.
After this, the theological doctrine of the Trinity as
‘three in one’ should be child’s play.”
– Max Black, Caveats and Critiques: Philosophical Essays
in Language, Logic, and Art , Cornell U. Press, 1975
Related material—
In memory of Sir Andrew Huxley, OM, who died on May 30, 2012
C. P. Snow on G. H. Hardy at Trinity College, Cambridge—
He played his games and indulged his eccentricities.
He was living in some of the best intellectual company
in the world— G. E. Moore, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell,
Trevelyan, the high Trinity society which was shortly to
find its artistic complement in Bloomsbury. (Hardy himself
had links with Bloomsbury, both of personal friendship
and of sympathy.)
See also "Max Black" + Trinity in this journal.
(Continued. See previous post and Red and Gray in this journal.)
“Give faith a fighting chance.” —Country song
From a post of June 3, 2007—
Related illustration relevant to theology—
For some background, see Cube Trinity in this journal.
For greater depth, see Levering’s Scripture and Metaphysics:
Aquinas and the Renewal of Trinitarian Theology ,
Blackwell, 2004, page 150.
… twó flocks, twó folds—black, white; ' right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind
But thése two; wáre of a wórld where bút these ' twó tell, each off the óther….
— "Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves," by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Related material:
Max Black — "Beginners are taught that a set having three members is a single thing, wholly constituted by its members but distinct from them. After this, the theological doctrine of the Trinity as 'three in one' should be child's play." ("The Elusiveness of Sets," Review of Metaphysics, June 1971, p. 615– as quoted by Bill Vallicella)
Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XXI —
Gibbon, discussing the theology of the Trinity, defines perichoresis as
“… the internal connection and spiritual penetration which indissolubly unites the divine persons59 ….
59 … The
or ‘circumincessio,’ is perhaps the deepest and darkest corner of the whole theological abyss.”
”Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, section 146, translated by Walter Kaufmann
(The phrase “sacred geometry”
is of course anathema to most
mathematicians, to whom
nothing is sacred.)
From “The Geometric
Art of John Michell“:
From this morning’s
New York Times:
| John Michell, Counterculture Author Who Cherished Idiosyncrasy, Dies at 76
By DOUGLAS MARTIN Mr. Michell, a self-styled Merlin of the 1960s English counterculture, inspired disciples like the Rolling Stones with a deluge of writings…. |
He is not to be
confused with an earlier
Trinity figure, mathematician
John Henry Michell,
who died at 76 on the third
day of February in 1940.
Related material:
See the Log24 entry
from the date of death
of the later Michell —
April 24 —
and, in light of the later
Michell’s interest in
geometry and King Arthur,
the Log24 remarks for
Easter Sunday this year
(April 12).
These remarks include the
following figure by
Sebastian Egner related,
if only through myth,
to Arthur’s round table —
— and the classic Delmore Schwartz
poem “Starlight Like Intuition
Pierced the Twelve.”
Which of the two John Michells
(each a Merlin figure of sorts)
would be more welcome in
Camelot is open to debate.
A footprint from Germany:
|
Germany Python-urllib |
/504856559/item.html |
12/6/2008 1:21 PM |
The link in the above footprint leads
to an entry of July 5, 2006.
The access method:
The urllib Module
|
For a larger and more sophisticated
relative of that object,
see Solomon's Cube and
the related three presents
from the German link's target:
|
1. Many Dimensions 2. Boggle 3. My Space |
The Revelation Game
Revisited
| Lotteries on Jung’s birthday, July 26, 2008 |
Pennsylvania (No revelation) |
New York (Revelation) |
| Mid-day (No belief) |
No belief, no revelation 625 6/25 — Quine’s birthday |
Revelation without belief 003 |
| Evening (Belief) |
Belief without revelation 087 1987 — Quine publishes Quiddities |
Belief and revelation 829 |
From Josephine Klein, Jacob’s Ladder: Essays on Experiences of the Ineffable in the Context of Contemporary Psychotherapy, London, Karnac Books, 2003–
Page 14 —
Gerard Manley Hopkins
“Quiddity and haeccity were contentious topics in medieval discussions about the nature of reality, and the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins would have encountered these concepts during his Jesuit training. W. H. Gardner, who edited much of Hopkins’s work, writes that
in 1872, while studying medieval philosophy… Hopkins came across the writing of Duns Scotus, and in that subtle thinker’s Principles of Individuation and Theory of Knowledge he discovered what seemed to be a philosophical corroboration of his own private theory of inscape and instress. [Gardner, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose, Penguin, 1953, p. xxiii]
In this useful introduction to his selection of Hopkins’s work, Gardner writes that Hopkins was always looking for the law or principle that gave an object ‘its delicate and surprising uniqueness.’ This was for Hopkins ‘a fundamental beauty which is the active principle of all true being, the source of all true knowledge and delight.’ Clive Bell called it ‘significant form’; Hopkins called it ‘inscape’– ‘the rich and revealing oneness of the natural object’ (pp. xx-xxiv). In this chapter, I call it quiddity.”
From the illustrator of
today's NY Times review of
The Drunkard's Walk —
|
http://indexed.blogspot.com/
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Posted by Jessica Hagy at 10:31 PM |
The book under review–
The Drunkard's Walk:
How Randomness Rules Our Lives,
by the author of Euclid's Window—
is, appropriately, published by
Random House:
Click image for
related material.
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."
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."
|
From 2002:
Above: Dr. Harrison Pope, Harvard professor of psychiatry, demonstrates the use of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale "block design" subtest. |
|
ZZ
Figures from the
Poem by Eugen Jost:
Mit Zeichen und Zahlen
Numbers and Names,
With numbers and names English translation A related poem:
Alphabets
From time to time
But if a savage
— Hermann Hesse (1943), |
From
“On the Holy Trinity,”
the entry in the 3:20 PM
French footprint:
“…while the scientist sees
everything that happens
in one point of space,
the poet feels
everything that happens
in one point of time…
all forming an
instantaneous and transparent
organism of events….”
From
“Angel in the Details,”
the entry in the 3:59 PM
French footprint:
“I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose”
These, along with this afternoon’s
earlier entry, suggest a review
of a third Log24 item, Windmills,
with an actress from France as…
|
Changing Woman: “Kaleidoscope turning…
Shifting pattern |
“When life itself seems lunatic,
who knows where madness lies?”
— For the source, see
Joyce’s Nightmare Continues.
“It is said that the students of medieval Paris came to blows in the streets over the question of universals. The stakes are high, for at issue is our whole conception of our ability to describe the world truly or falsely, and the objectivity of any opinions we frame to ourselves. It is arguable that this is always the deepest, most profound problem of philosophy.”
— Simon Blackburn, Think (Oxford, 1999)
Michael Harris, mathematician at the University of Paris:
“… three ‘parts’ of tragedy identified by Aristotle that transpose to fiction of all types– plot (mythos), character (ethos), and ‘thought’ (dianoia)….”
— paper (pdf) to appear in Mathematics and Narrative, A. Doxiadis and B. Mazur, eds.
Mythos —
A visitor from France this morning viewed the entry of Jan. 23, 2006: “In Defense of Hilbert (On His Birthday).” That entry concerns a remark of Michael Harris.
A check of Harris’s website reveals a new article:
“Do Androids Prove Theorems in Their Sleep?” (slighly longer version of article to appear in Mathematics and Narrative, A. Doxiadis and B. Mazur, eds.) (pdf).
From that article:
“The word ‘key’ functions here to structure the reading of the article, to draw the reader’s attention initially to the element of the proof the author considers most important. Compare E.M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel:
[plot is] something which is measured not be minutes or hours, but by intensity, so that when we look at our past it does not stretch back evenly but piles up into a few notable pinnacles.”
Ethos —
“Forster took pains to widen and deepen the enigmatic character of his novel, to make it a puzzle insoluble within its own terms, or without. Early drafts of A Passage to India reveal a number of false starts. Forster repeatedly revised drafts of chapters thirteen through sixteen, which comprise the crux of the novel, the visit to the Marabar Caves. When he began writing the novel, his intention was to make the cave scene central and significant, but he did not yet know how:
When I began a A Passage to India, I knew something important happened in the Malabar (sic) Caves, and that it would have a central place in the novel– but I didn’t know what it would be… The Malabar Caves represented an area in which concentration can take place. They were to engender an event like an egg.”
— E. M. Forster: A Passage to India, by Betty Jay
Dianoia —
“Despite the flagrant triviality of the proof… this result is the key point in the paper.”
— Michael Harris, op. cit., quoting a mathematical paper
Online Etymology Dictionary:
flagrant c.1500, “resplendent,” from L. flagrantem (nom. flagrans) “burning,” prp. of flagrare “to burn,” from L. root *flag-, corresponding to PIE *bhleg– (cf. Gk. phlegein “to burn, scorch,” O.E. blæc “black”). Sense of “glaringly offensive” first recorded 1706, probably from common legalese phrase in flagrante delicto “red-handed,” lit. “with the crime still blazing.”
A related use of “resplendent”– applied to a Trinity, not a triviality– appears in the Liturgy of Malabar:
— The Liturgies of SS. Mark, James, Clement, Chrysostom, and Basil, and the Church of Malabar, by the Rev. J.M. Neale and the Rev. R.F. Littledale, reprinted by Gorgias Press, 2002
Judy Davis in the Marabar Caves
In mathematics
(as opposed to narrative),
somewhere between
a flagrant triviality and
a resplendent Trinity we
have what might be called
“a resplendent triviality.”
For further details, see
“A Four-Color Theorem.”
this year goes to the author
of The Golden Notebook
and The Cleft.
Related material:
The Golden Obituary
and Cleavage —
Log24, Oct. 9, 2007 —
Wheel
Quoted by physics writer
Heinz Pagels at the end of
The Cosmic Code:
“For the essence and the end
Of his labor is beauty… one beauty,
the rhythm of that Wheel….”
— Robinson Jeffers
|
“The Ferris wheel came into view again, just the top, silently burning high on the hill, almost directly in front of him, then the trees rose up over it. The road, which was terrible and full of potholes, went steeply downhill here; he was approaching the little bridge over the barranca, the deep ravine. Halfway across the bridge he stopped; he lit a new cigarette from the one he’d been smoking, and leaned over the parapet, looking down. It was too dark to see the bottom, but: here was finality indeed, and cleavage! Quauhnahuac was like the times in this respect, wherever you turned the abyss was waiting for you round the corner. Dormitory for vultures and city of Moloch! When Christ was being crucified, so ran the sea-borne, hieratic legend, the earth had opened all through this country…” — Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, 1947. (Harper & Row reissue, 1984, p. 15) Comment by Stephen Spender: “There is a suggestion of Christ descending into the abyss for the harrowing of Hell. But it is the Consul whom we think of here, rather than of Christ. The Consul is hurled into this abyss at the end of the novel.” — Introduction to Under the Volcano Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XXI — Gibbon, discussing the theology of the Trinity, defines perichoresis as “… the internal connection and spiritual penetration which indissolubly unites the divine persons59 ….
William Golding: “Simon’s head was tilted slightly up. His eyes could not break away and the Lord of the Flies hung in space before him. ‘What are you doing out here all alone? Aren’t you afraid of me?’ Simon shook. ‘There isn’t anyone to help you. Only me. And I’m the Beast.’ Simon’s mouth labored, brought forth audible words. ‘Pig’s head on a stick.’ ‘Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!’ said the head. For a moment or two the forest and all the other dimly appreciated places echoed with the parody of laughter. ‘You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close!’ “ “Thought of the day: — Alice Woodrome, Good Friday, 2004 Anne Francis,
“Here was finality indeed, — Under the Volcano |
For further details of
the wheel metaphor, see
Rock of Ages
Will Hunting may be
interested in the following
vacant editorships at
The Open Directory:
Graph Theory
and
Combinatorics.
Related material:
The Long Hello and
On the Holy Trinity —
"Hey, Carrie-Anne, what's
your game now….?"
Picture sources:
azstarnet.com,
vibrationdata.com.
Personally, I prefer
Carol Ann:
From Criticism, Fall, 2001,
by Carol Ann Johnston—
|
"Drawing upon Platonic thought, Augustine argues that ideas are actually God's objective pattern and as such exist in God's mind. These ideas appear in the mirror of the soul. (35)." (35.) In Augustine, De Trinitate, trans., Stephen McKenna (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1970). See A. B. Acton, "Idealism," in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed., Paul Edwards. Vol. 4 (New York: Macmillan, 1967): 110-118; Robert McRae, "`Idea' as a Philosophical Term in the Seventeenth Century," JHI 26 (1965): 175-190, and Erwin Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in Art History, trans., Joseph J. S. Peake (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1968) for explications of this term. |
For more on Augustine and geometry,
see Today's Sinner (Aug. 28, 2006).
and in memory of
George Sadek —
From Log24 in July 2005:
|
Intersections A Trinity Sunday sermon “… to apprehend See also The Diamond Project. |
” … an alphabet
By which to spell out holy doom and end,
A bee for the remembering of happiness.”
— Wallace Stevens,
“The Owl in the Sarcophagus”
Some context for these figures:
The Diamond Theory of Truth
Bernard Holland in The New York Times on Monday, May 20, 1996:
“Philosophers ponder the idea of identity: what it is to give something a name on Monday and have it respond to that name on Friday….”
|
Log24 on Monday,
Dec. 18, 2006: “I did a column in — Martin Gardner (pdf) “… the entire profession — Joan S. Birman (pdf)
Lottery on Friday,
Dec. 22, 2006:
 |
“Art history was very personal
through the eyes of Ad Reinhardt.”
— Robert Morris,
Smithsonian Archives
of American Art
“A set having three members is a
single thing wholly constituted by
its members but distinct from them.
After this, the theological doctrine
of the Trinity as ‘three in one’
should be child’s play.”
— Max Black,
Caveats and Critiques:
Philosophical Essays in
Language, Logic, and Art
| From the diary of John Baez: September 22, 2006… Meanwhile, the mystics beckon:
September 23, 2006I’m going up to San Rafael (near the Bay in Northern California) to visit my college pal Bruce Smith and his family. I’ll be back on Wednesday the 27th, just in time to start teaching the next day. |
A check on the Rumi quote yields
this, on a culinary organization:
|
“Out beyond rightdoing and wrongdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”
This is the starting place of good spirit for relationship healing and building prescribed centuries ago in the Middle East by Muslim Sufi teacher and mystic, Jelaluddin Rumi (1207-1273). Even earlier, the Psalmists knew such a meeting place of adversaries was needed, sacred and blessed: |
A Field and a Table:
From “Communications Toolbox”
at MathWorks.com
For more on this field
in a different context, see
Generating the Octad Generator
and
“Putting Descartes Before Dehors”
in my own diary for December 2003.
Descartes
Après l’Office à l’Église
de la Sainte-Trinité, Noël 1890
(After the Service at Holy Trinity Church,
Christmas 1890), Jean Béraud
Let us pray to the Holy Trinity that
San Rafael guides the teaching of John Baez
this year. For related material on theology
and the presence of enemies, see Log24 on
the (former) Feast of San Rafael, 2003.
| Cleavage Term
“… a point of common understanding between the classic and romantic worlds. Quality, the cleavage term between hip and square, seemed to be it. Both worlds used the term. Both knew what it was. It was just that the romantic left it alone and appreciated it for what it was and the classic tried to turn it into a set of intellectual building blocks for other purposes.”
For such building blocks, see
A Trinity for Rebecca (4/25/06) and yesterday’s lottery |
|
| In memory of Kermit Hall, college president, who died Sunday, August 13, 2006: Square
|
In memory of Duke Jordan, jazz pianist, who died Tuesday, August 8, 2006:
|
Square and hip may each have a place
in heaven; for a less pleasant destination,
see the previous entry.
__________________________________
* Update of 3 PM 8/14/06:
See Forrest Gump on God
in an Aug. 11 entry and
the related paper
| Renegotiating Chinese Identity: Between Local Group and National Ideology, by Kristen Parris:
The paper is found in Related material |
High Concept, continued:
“In the beginning there was nothing.
And God said, ‘Let there be light!’
And there was still nothing,
but now you could see it.“
— Jim Holt, Big-Bang Theology,
Slate‘s “High Concept” department
Related material:
| Page 110:
“In chapter I I explained that devils first and foremost exist as semioticians of the world’s signs. Devils solely live in their interpretations, in their destructive syllogisms. As Visconti puts it, devils speak the idiom of the mind.37 …. The exorcist’s healing voice states that Satan has always been absent from the world, that his disturbing and unclear manifestations in the possessed person’s physicality are really nonexistent occurrences, nothing but disturbances of the mind, since evil itself is a lack of being.” Footnote 37, page 110: “It is necessary to distinguish the devils’ ‘language of the mind’ and Augustine’s verbum mentis (word of the mind), as he theorizes it first of all in On the Trinity (book 15). The devils’ language of the mind disturbs the subject’s internal and preverbal discourse.” |
Intersections
1. Blue Ridge meets Black Mountain,
2. Vertical meets horizontal in music,
3. The timeless meets time in religion.
Details:
1. Blue Ridge, Black Mountain
“Montreat College is located in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina…. The Black Mountain Campus is… three miles from the main campus in the historic town of Black Mountain.”
Black Mountain College was “established on the Blue Ridge Assembly grounds outside the town of Black Mountain in North Carolina in the fall of 1933.”
USA Today, May 15, 2005, on Billy Graham:
“MONTREAT, N.C. — … It’s here at his… homestead, where the Blue Ridge meets the Black Mountain range east of Asheville, that Graham gave a rare personal interview.”
See also the following from June 24:
“No bridge reaches God, except one…
— Billy Graham Evangelistic Association,
according to messiahpage.com
For some remarks more in the spirit of Black Mountain than of the Blue Ridge, see today’s earlier entry on pianist Grete Sultan and composer Tui St. George Tucker.
2. Vertical, Horizontal in Music
Richard Neuhaus on George Steiner’s
Grammars of Creation:
“… the facts of the world are not and will never be ‘the end of the matter.’ Music joins grammar in pointing to the possibility, the reality, of more. He thinks Schopenhauer was on to something when he said music will continue after the world ends.
‘The capacity of music to operate simultaneously along horizontal and vertical axes, to proceed simultaneously in opposite directions (as in inverse canons), may well constitute the nearest that men and women can come to absolute freedom. Music does “keep time” for itself and for us.'”
3. Timeless, Time
A Trinity Sunday sermon quotes T. S. Eliot:
“… to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint.”
See also The Diamond Project.
A Bridge for Private Ryan
In memory of actor
Harrison Richard Young, 75,
who died on Sunday, July 3, 2005
“Philosophers ponder the idea of identity:
what it is to give something a name
on Monday and have it respond
to that name on Friday….”
— Bernard Holland
in the New York Times
of Monday, May 20, 1996
Log24.net on Monday:
|
Zen and the Trinity (See entries of Zen: The Trinity: |
New York Times on Friday:
 |
Goin' to Carolina
in My Mind
From today's New York Times:
"Bobby Frank Cherry, the former Klansman whose conviction two years ago for the church bombing that killed four black girls in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963 resolved one of the most shocking cases of the civil rights era, died yesterday at the Kilby Correctional Facility near Montgomery, Ala., a prison spokesman said. He was 74."
|
"If Trinity is everything you say it is," she said, "then why in God's name would it be based in North Carolina?" This I hadn't expected. "Aren't you the top Jungian analyst in the world?" "Well… one of them." "Why are you based in North Carolina?" |
"The western portions of Virginia and the Carolinas, the northern portions of Georgia and Alabama, and most of Tennessee, were settled by the hardy race of Scotch-Irish, in whose veins the Scotch blood was warm."
"Born in Charlotte, N.C., Graham grew up in a family of Scottish Presbyterians…. Since 1950, [he has] lived in an Appalachian log home… near Asheville, N.C."
|
|
|
Graham in 1972 |
Methodist Flag |
"The Cross and Flame is a registered trademark and the use is supervised by the General Council on Finance and Administration of The United Methodist Church. Permission to use the Cross and Flame must be obtained from the General Council on Finance and Administration of The United Methodist Church – Legal Department, 1200 Davis Street, Evanston, IL 60201." — www.bobmay.info
"In the riven troughs the splayed leaves
Pile up, of nature the casual sacrament
To the seasonal eternity of death."
For the Feast of St. Ignatius Loyola:
In God’s Name
|
“If Trinity is everything you say it is,” she said, “then why in God’s name would it be based in North Carolina?” This I hadn’t expected. “Aren’t you the top Jungian analyst in the world?” “Well… one of them.” “Why are you based in North Carolina?” |
|
“Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?” |
Trinity Test
Some background on the previous entry, Honorable Bird….
A note on the Michael Douglas film in that previous entry:
“This film is not to be confused with Japanese director Shohei Imamura’s BLACK RAIN, which was produced around the same time. Imamura’s film deals with the lives of a Japanese family who survived the nuclear-bombing of Hiroshima. The phrase ‘black rain,’ used in both films, refers to the deadly fallout caused by the detonation of an atomic weapon.”
For related material on the religion of Trinity, see Hiroshima Mayor Says US Worships Nukes, a news story quoted in Death of a Holy Man (8/10/03). The phrase “holy man” there is from John Steinbeck, who once wrote a sentence saying that sons of bitches, viewed from another perspective, are holy men.
Here is the death of another holy man, Clayton S. White, a medical researcher who developed the field of blast biology — the study of how nuclear explosions affect people immediately and over time. This holy man died on April 26, 2004. A log24 entry of that date supplies an appropriate epitaph for the holy man, dead at 91, who has now joined his younger brother, the late Supreme Court Justice Byron R. White, in some region of the afterworld.
Anschaulichkeit
In memory of John W. Seybold, who died at 88 on Sunday, March 14, 2004….
Seybold is said to have originated the application of the phrase “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) to computerized typesetting.
The date of Seybold’s death was also the date of Einstein’s birth.
The entry “Clarity and Certainty” for that day contains a discussion by Einstein of the fact that the altitudes of a triangle have a point in common.
A March 14 search for a clear diagram of that fact yielded the above illustration, to which I returned today after reading of Seybold’s WYSIWYG philosophy. The illustration is taken from an article by a British teacher of geometry that contains the following:
“Dick Tahta wrote… of geometry as involving the direct apprehension of imagery, gazing as into the eyes of a beloved and a certain intuition-seeing (Anschauung)…..
His sentences have tremendous power, and yet the terms he uses are slippery and seem unexplainable. What is, or what might be, ‘direct apprehension of imagery’? What is evoked by the powerfully metaphorical ‘gazing as into the eyes of a beloved’? ‘Intuition’ is a tremendously difficult term…. The combination ‘intuition-seeing’ seems to represent an attempt to convey a meaning for the German ‘Anschauung,’ and echoes the original title of the text Anschauliche Geometrie by Hilbert and Cohn-Vossen which was published in English as Geometry and the Imagination.”
From the same article:
“… for Lacan ‘mathematics … is constantly in touch with the unconscious’….
Commentators on Lacan frequently write that… he argued that the human being is captivated by an image….
The object, in a sense, gazes back.”
|
“Anschaulichkeit” is in my Cassell’s German-English dictionary, with the meanings “visual or graphic quality, clearness, vividness, perspicuity.” For “anschaulich,” this dictionary gives “visual, clear, vivid, graphic, concrete; (Phil.) intuitive, perceptual.” For “Anschauung” it has
|
The final meaning above, theological contemplation, suggests that the altitude-intersection diagram above may be used for a meditation on the Trinity. This is, of course, silly†, but no sillier than the third-rate lucubrations of the damned charlatan Lacan.
And so let us pray that Einstein on his birthday was joined by Seybold in rapturous contemplation of the Trinity as revealed‡ in the physicist’s “holy geometry book.”
† For a less silly geometrico-theological metaphor, see “Scalene Trinities” from The Mind of the Maker, by Dorothy Sayers.
‡ For a related revelation, see A Contrapuntal Theme.
Entries since Xanga’s
August 10 Failure:
Sunday, August 17, 2003 2:00 PM
A Thorny Crown of…
From the first episode of
the television series
“The West Wing“:
|
Original airdate: Sept. 22, 1999 MARY MARSH CALDWELL MARY MARSH JOSH TOBY [A stunned silence. Everyone stares at Toby.] TOBY (CONT.) JOSH |
Going There, Part I
|
Crown of Ideas Kirk Varnedoe, 57, art historian and former curator of the Museum of Modern Art, died Thursday, August 14, 2003. From his New York Times obituary: ” ‘He loved life in its most tangible forms, and so for him art was as physical and pleasurable as being knocked down by a wave,’ said Adam Gopnik, the writer and a former student of his who collaborated on Mr. Varnedoe’s first big show at the Modern, ‘High & Low.’ ‘Art was always material first — it was never, ever bound by a thorny crown of ideas.’ ” For a mini-exhibit of ideas in honor of Varnedoe, see Verlyn Klinkenborg on Varnedoe: “I was always struck by the tangibility of the words he used…. It was as if he were laying words down on the table one by one as he used them, like brushes in an artist’s studio. That was why students crowded into his classes and why the National Gallery of Art had overflow audiences for his Mellon Lectures earlier this year. Something synaptic happened when you listened to Kirk Varnedoe, and, remarkably, something synaptic happened when he listened to you. You never knew what you might discover together.” Perhaps even a “thorny crown of ideas“?
“Crown of Thorns” Varnedoe’s death coincided with “To what extent does this idea of a civic life produced by sense of adversity correspond to actual life in Brasília? I wonder if it is something which the city actually cultivates. Consider, for example the cathedral, on the monumental axis, a circular, concrete framed building whose sixteen ribs are both structural and symbolic, making a structure that reads unambiguously as a crown of thorns; other symbolic elements include the subterranean entrance, the visitor passing through a subterranean passage before emerging in the light of the body of the cathedral. And it is light, shockingly so….” — Modernist Civic Space: The Case of Brasilia, by Richard J. Williams, Department of History of Art, University of Edinburgh, Scotland |
Going There, Part II
|
Simple, Bold, Clear Art historian Kirk Varnedoe was, of course, not the only one to die on the day of the Great Blackout. Claude Martel, 34, a senior art director of The New York Times Magazine, also died on Thursday, August 14, 2003. Janet Froelich, the magazine’s art director, describes below a sample of work that she and Martel did together: “A new world of ideas”
Froelich notes that “the elements are simple, bold, and clear.” For another example of elements with these qualities, see my journal entry The flag design in that entry
Note that the elements of the flag design have the qualities described so aptly by Froelich– simplicity, boldness, clarity:
They share these qualities with the Elements of Euclid, a treatise on geometrical ideas. For the manner in which such concepts might serve as, in Gopnik’s memorable phrase, a “thorny crown of ideas,” see “Geometry for Jews” in ART WARS: Geometry as Conceptual Art. See also the discussion of ideas in my journal entry on theology and art titled Understanding: On Death and Truth and the discussion of the word “idea” (as well as the word, and the concept, “Aryan”) in the following classic (introduced by poet W. H. Auden):
|
Saturday, August 16, 2003 6:00 AM
Varnedoe’s Crown
Kirk Varnedoe, 57, art historian and former curator of the Museum of Modern Art, died Thursday, August 14, 2003.
From his New York Times obituary:
” ‘He loved life in its most tangible forms, and so for him art was as physical and pleasurable as being knocked down by a wave,’ said Adam Gopnik, the writer and a former student of his who collaborated on Mr. Varnedoe’s first big show at the Modern, ‘High & Low.’ ‘Art was always material first — it was never, ever bound by a thorny crown of ideas.’ “
For a mini-exhibit of ideas in honor of Varnedoe, see
Verlyn Klinkenborg on Varnedoe:
“I was always struck by the tangibility of the words he used…. It was as if he were laying words down on the table one by one as he used them, like brushes in an artist’s studio. That was why students crowded into his classes and why the National Gallery of Art had overflow audiences for his Mellon Lectures earlier this year. Something synaptic happened when you listened to Kirk Varnedoe, and, remarkably, something synaptic happened when he listened to you. You never knew what you might discover together.”
Perhaps even a “thorny crown of ideas”?
“Crown of Thorns”
Cathedral, Brasilia
Varnedoe’s death coincided with
the Great Blackout of 2003.
“To what extent does this idea of a civic life produced by sense of adversity correspond to actual life in Brasília? I wonder if it is something which the city actually cultivates. Consider, for example the cathedral, on the monumental axis, a circular, concrete framed building whose sixteen ribs are both structural and symbolic, making a structure that reads unambiguously as a crown of thorns; other symbolic elements include the subterranean entrance, the visitor passing through a subterranean passage before emerging in the light of the body of the cathedral. And it is light, shockingly so….”
— Modernist Civic Space: The Case of Brasilia, by Richard J. Williams, Department of History of Art, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Friday, August 15, 2003 3:30 PM
ART WARS:
The Boys from Brazil
It turns out that the elementary half-square designs used in Diamond Theory
also appear in the work of artist Nicole Sigaud.
Sigaud’s website The ANACOM Project has a page that leads to the artist Athos Bulcão, famous for his work in Brasilia.
From the document
Conceptual Art in an
Authoritarian Political Context:
Brasilia, Brazil,
by Angélica Madeira:
“Athos created unique visual plans, tiles of high poetic significance, icons inseparable from the city.”
As Sigaud notes, two-color diagonally-divided squares play a large part in the art of Bulcão.
The title of Madeira’s article, and the remarks of Anna Chave on the relationship of conceptual/minimalist art to fascist rhetoric (see my May 9, 2003, entries), suggest possible illustrations for a more politicized version of Diamond Theory:
|
Fahne, |
Dr. Mengele, |
Is it safe?
These illustrations were suggested in part by the fact that today is the anniversary of the death of Macbeth, King of Scotland, and in part by the following illustrations from my journal entries of July 13, 2003 comparing a MOMA curator to Lady Macbeth:
|
Die Fahne Hoch, |
|
Thursday, August 14, 2003 3:45 AM
Famous Last Words
The ending of an Aug. 14 Salon.com article on Mel Gibson’s new film, “The Passion”:
” ‘The Passion’ will most likely offer up the familiar puerile, stereotypical view of the evil Jew calling for Jesus’ blood and the clueless Pilate begging him to reconsider. It is a view guaranteed to stir anew the passions of the rabid Christian, and one that will send the Jews scurrying back to the dark corners of history.”
— Christopher Orlet
“Scurrying”?! The ghost of Joseph Goebbels, who famously portrayed Jews as sewer rats doing just that, must be laughing — perhaps along with the ghost of Lady Diana Mosley (née Mitford), who died Monday.
This goes well with a story that Orlet tells at his website:
“… to me, the most genuine last words are those that arise naturally from the moment, such as
Joseph Goebbels |
Voltaire’s response to a request that he foreswear Satan: ‘This is no time to make new enemies.’ ”
For a view of Satan as an old, familiar, acquaintance, see the link to Prince Ombra in my entry last October 29 for Goebbels’s birthday.
Wednesday, August 13, 2003 3:00 PM
Best Picture
For some reflections inspired in part by
Tuesday, August 12, 2003 4:44 PM
Atonement:
A sequel to my entry “Catholic Tastes” of July 27, 2003.
Some remarks of Wallace Stevens that seem appropriate on this date:
“It may be that one life is a punishment
For another, as the son’s life for the father’s.”
— Esthétique du Mal, Wallace Stevens
“Unless we believe in the hero, what is there
To believe? ….
Devise, devise, and make him of winter’s
Iciest core, a north star, central
In our oblivion, of summer’s
Imagination, the golden rescue:
The bread and wine of the mind….”
— Examination of the Hero in a Time of War, Wallace Stevens
Etymology of “Atonement”:
“Middle English atonen, to be reconciled, from at one, in agreement“
At One
“… We found,
If we found the central evil, the central good….
… we and the diamond globe at last were one.”
— Asides on the Oboe, Wallace Stevens
Tuesday, August 12, 2003 1:52 PM
Franken & ‘Stein,
Attorneys at Law
“Tue August 12, 2003 04:10 AM ET
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Fox News Network is suing humor writer Al Franken for trademark infringement over the phrase ‘fair and balanced’ on the cover of his upcoming book, saying it has been ‘a signature slogan’ of the network since 1996.”
|
Franken: |
‘Stein: |
For answers, click on the pictures
of Franken and ‘Stein.
Death of a Holy Man
Part I: An American Religion
Hiroshima Mayor Says
US Worships Nukes
“HIROSHIMA — Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba warned that the world is moving toward war and accused Washington of ‘worshipping’ nuclear weapons during Wednesday’s ceremony marking the 58th anniversary of the atomic bombing of the city….
… the Hiroshima mayor blamed the United States for making the world a more uncertain place through its policy of undermining the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
‘A world without nuclear weapons and war that the victims of the atomic bomb have long sought for is slipping into the shadows of growing black clouds that could turn into mushroom clouds at any moment,’ Akiba said. ‘The chief cause of this is the United States’ nuclear policy which, by openly declaring the possibility of a pre-emptive nuclear strike and by starting research into small ‘useable’ nuclear weapons, appears to worship nuclear weapons as God.’ “
— Mainichi Shimbun, Aug. 6, 2003
Part II: Holy Men and
Sons of Bitches
“I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.”
— Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer,
Director of Los Alamos
John Steinbeck describing Cannery Row in Monterey:
“Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing.”
“Now we are all sons of bitches.”
— Dr. Kenneth Bainbridge,
Director of Trinity Test
Part III: Death of a Holy Man
|
The New York Times, Aug. 10, 2003: Atom-Bomb Physicist Dies at 98 “Henry A. Boorse, a physicist who was one of the original scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project in the development of the atomic bomb, died on July 28 in Houston, where he lived…. Dr. Boorse was a consultant to the United States Atomic Energy Commission from 1946 to 1958 and to the Brookhaven National Laboratory from 1951 to 1955. He and Lloyd Motz wrote a two-volume work, The World of the Atom (1966), and — with Jefferson Hane Weaver — a one-volume book, The Atomic Scientists (1989).” |
From a review of The Atomic Scientists:
“… the authors try to add a personal element that can excite the reader about science.”
For more excitement, see Timequake, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Beware of…
Jews Peddling Stories:
An episode in the ongoing saga of the conflict between the "story theory of truth" and the "diamond theory of truth."
The following set of pictures summarizes some reflections on truth and reality suggested by the August 9, 2003, New York Times obituary of writer William Woolfolk, who died on July 20, 2003.
Woolfolk was the author of The Sex Goddess and was involved in the production of the comic book series The Spirit (see below).
The central strategy of the three Semitic religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — is to pretend that we are all characters in a story whose author is God. This strategy suggests the following Trinity, based on the work of William Woolfolk (The Sex Goddess and The Spirit) and Steven Spielberg ("Catch Me If You Can"). Like other Semitic tales, the story of this Trinity should not be taken too seriously.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
A Confession of Faith:
Theology Based On the Film
"Catch Me If You Can":
The Son to God the Lutheran Father:
"I'm nothing really, just a kid in love with your daughter."
This is taken from a review of "Catch Me If You Can" by Thomas S. Hibbs.
For some philosophical background to this confession, see Hibbs's book
Shows About Nothing:
Nihilism in Popular Culture
from The Exorcist to Seinfeld.
By the way, today is the anniversary of the dropping on Nagasaki
of a made-in-USA Weapon of Mass Destruction, a plutonium bomb
affectionately named Fat Man.
Fat Man was a sequel to an earlier Jewish story,
A Queer Religion
August 4 headline:
This suggests the following theological meditation by a gay Christian:
|
“I can’t resist but end by pointing out the irony of the doctrine of the Trinity as seen by gay eyes. Please don’t take what I say next too seriously. I don’t believe that gender is very important or that it is any more present in God than is ‘green-ness,’ however, I simply can’t resist. The Trinity seems to be founded on the ecstatic love union of two male persons; the Father and the Son. If one takes this seriously it is incestuous pedophilia. There is no doubt that this union is generative (and so in the origin of the meaning ‘sexual’) in character, because from it bursts forth a third person: Holy Spirit; neuter in Greek, feminine in Hebrew! Whereas Islam detests the Catholic idea that the Blessed Virgin was ‘impregnated’ by God, as demeaning to the transcendence of God, the internal incestuous homosexuality that the doctrine of the Trinity amounts to should really offend more! Any orthodox account of the inner life of God is at best highly uncongenial to the paradigm of the heterosexual nuclear family. Amusingly, the contemporary Magisterium fails to notice this and even attempts to use the doctrine of the procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son to bolster its conventional championing of ‘male-female complementarity’ and the centrality of procreation to all authentically ‘self-giving’ relationships. Absurdities will never cease!” |
Amen to the conclusion, at least.
The author of this meditation, “Pharsea,” is a “traditional Catholic” and advocate of the Latin Mass — just like Mel Gibson. One wonders how Gibson might react to Pharsea’s theology.
As for me… I always thought there was something queer about that religion.
Mental Health Month, Day 23:
The Prime Cut Gospel
On Christmas Day, 1949,
Mary Elizabeth Spacek was born in Texas.
Lee Marvin, Sissy Spacek in “Prime Cut”
Exercises for Mental Health Month:
Read this discussion of the phrase, suggested by Spacek’s date of birth, “God’s gift to men.”
Read this discussion of the phrase “the same yesterday, today, and forever,” suggested by the previous reading.
Read the more interesting of these discussions of the phrase “the eternal in the temporal.”
Read this discussion of eternal, or “necessary,” truths versus other sorts of alleged “truths.”
Read this discussion of unimportant mathematical properties of the prime number 23.
Read these discussions of important properties of 23:
Introduction to the Theory of Groups of Finite Order, Ginn, Boston, 1937 (reprinted by Dover in 1956), final chapter, “Tactical Configurations,” and
J. H. Conway, “Three Lectures on Exceptional Groups,” pp. 215-247 in Finite Simple Groups (Oxford, 1969), edited by M. B. Powell and G. Higman, Academic Press, London, 1971….. Reprinted as Ch. 10 in Sphere Packings, Lattices, and Groups
Read this discussion of what might be called “contingent,” or “literary,” properties of the number 23.
Read also the more interesting of these discussions of the phrase “the 23 enigma.”
Having thus acquired some familiarity with both contingent and necessary properties of 23…
Read this discussion of Aquinas’s third proof of the existence of God.
Note that the classic Spacek film “Prime Cut” was released in 1972, the year that Spacek turned 23:
|
1949
+ 23 1972 |
Day of the Mother Ship:
A Close Encounter of the Third Level
Today is also the feast day of Saint Zenna Henderson, who was born on All Saints’ Day, 1917. The Adherents.com website says she was a Mormon, but the printed reference work Contemporary Authors (written when she was still alive and could defend herself against any accusation of Mormonism) says she was a Methodist. Maybe she was just one of The People — i.e., a Person.
“The concept of a person, which we find so familiar in its application to human beings, cannot be clearly and sharply expressed by any word in the vocabulary of Plato and Aristotle; it was wrought with the hammer and anvil* of theological disputes about the Trinity and the Person of Christ.”
— Peter Geach, The Virtues, Cambridge U. Press, 1977, p. 75
See also Terpsichore and the Trinity.
* For a use of this phrase suited to Mental Health Month, see The Prisoner, Episode Ten. See, too, Inaugural Address.
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
|
Woe unto Isaiah 5:20
|
As she spoke about the Trees of Life and Death, I watched her…. |
The world Cole Porter
|
Powered by WordPress
