Log24

Saturday, March 26, 2016

Crucible, Cauldron, Whatever

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:45 am

Readings for the morning of Holy Saturday —

Crucible,  Cauldron,  Whatever.

Sunday, August 9, 2015

The Cauldron

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:19 am

From a review of the 2013 film "The Wolverine" —

"The rituals, culture and hierarchies of Japan
have intrigued and baffled the typical Westerner
for centuries …."

Not to mention those of China 

 Hexagram 50:
         
Ding
The Cauldron

Monday, September 21, 2015

Happy Birthday, Stephen King

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:02 pm

Ding

Sunday, August 2, 2015

Comedy

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:20 pm

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Witch Fire

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 am

From the evening of Monday, July 27, 2015:

"SEATTLE (AP) — True-crime writer Ann Rule has died at age 83.
Rule died at Highline Medical Center at 10:30 p.m. Sunday [July 26],
said Scott Thompson, a spokesman for CHI Franciscan Health."

I prefer fictional  crime… for instance, crime described by the late
Patricia Highsmith.  Photos show that Highsmith had, at times, 

"… that look on a face we follow like a witch-fire."
— Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

See also Log24 posts on the evening of Sunday, July 26, tagged Cauldron.

Sunday, July 26, 2015

The Nine

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 pm

"Nine maidens kindle the Cauldron by their breathing."

Related material:  Nine Vine.

Lit

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 8:00 pm

"Passion simmers,
 Then it boils.
 To the victor
 Go the spoils."

—  The Spoils of Babylon
      (theme song, adapted)

Compare and contrast:

                                 " my song sounded
In the four-towered Caer, forever turning,
And of its Cauldron was my first song sung:
Nine maidens kindle the Cauldron by their breathing.
Of what nature is the Lord of Annwn’s Cauldron?
Enameled iridescence and pearly white its rim.
It will not boil the coward’s portion – not so its destiny."

The Spoils of Hell
     (title adapted)

Sunday, February 15, 2015

Sunday School

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am

"To Carthage then I came"

The Waste Land , by T. S. Eliot

"To Carthage I came, where
  there sang all around me in my ears
  a cauldron of unholy loves."

 — Confessions  of St. Augustine, Book III

Monday, December 30, 2002

Monday December 30, 2002

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:30 pm

Homer

“No matter how it’s done, you won’t like it.”
— Robert Redford to Robert M. Pirsig in Lila

The evening before Harriet injures Roy,
she asks him, in a restaurant car,
whether he has read Homer.”
Oxford website on the film of The Natural

“Brush Up Your Shakespeare”
— Cole Porter lyric for a show that opened
on December 30, 1948

Judy Davis as Harriet Bird

                                        

Thine eyes I love…
Shakespeare, Sonnet 132

“Roy’s Guenevere-like lover is named Memo Paris,
presumably the face that launched a thousand strikes.”
Oxford website on the film of The Natural 

Nicole Kidman
as Memo Paris

“Iris is someone to watch over Roy.”
Oxford website on the film of The Natural 

Kate Winslet as young Iris Murdoch

From the second-draft screenplay
for The Sting,
with Robert Redford as Hooker:

HOOKER
(shuffling a little)
I, ah…thought you might wanna come out for a while.  Maybe have a drink or somethin’.

LORETTA
You move right along, don’t ya.

HOOKER
(with more innocence than confidence)
I don’t mean nothin’ by it.  I just don’t know many regular girls, that’s all.

LORETTA
And you expect me to come over, just like that.

HOOKER
If I expected somethin’, I wouldn’t be still standin’ out here in the hall.

Loretta looks at him carefully.  She knows it’s not a line.

LORETTA
(with less resistance now)
I don’t even know you.

HOOKER
(slowly)
You know me.  I’m just like you…
It’s two in the morning and I don’t know nobody.

The two just stand there in silence a second.  There’s nothing more to say.  She stands back and lets him in.

Iris Murdoch on Plato’s Form of the Good,
by Joseph Malikail:

For Murdoch as for Plato, the Good belongs to Plato’s Realm of Being not the Realm of Becoming…. However, Murdoch does not read Plato as declaring his faith in a divine being when he says that the Good is

the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and the lord of light in the visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which [one who] would act rationally either in public or private life must have his eyes fixed (Republic…).

Though she acknowledges the influence of Simone Weil in her reading of Plato, her understanding of Plato on Good and God is not Weil’s (1952, ch.7)*. For Murdoch,

Plato never identified his Form of the Good with God (the use of theos in the Republic… is a façon de parler), and this separation is for him an essential one. Religion is above the level of the ‘gods.’ There are no gods and no God either. Neo-Platonic thinkers made the identification (of God with good) possible; and the Judaeo-Christian tradition has made it easy and natural for us to gather together the aesthetic and consoling impression of Good as a person (1992, 38)**.

As she understands Plato:

The Form of the Good as creative power is not a Book of Genesis creator ex nihilo … Plato does not set up the Form of the Good as God, this would be absolutely un-Platonic, nor does he anywhere give the sign of missing or needing a real God to assist his explanations. On the contrary, Good is above the level of the gods or God (ibid., 475)**.

Mary Warnock, her friend and fellow-philosopher, sums up Murdoch’s metaphysical view of the Vision of the Good:

She [Murdoch] holds that goodness has a real though abstract existence in the world. The actual existence of goodness is, in her view, the way it is now possible to understand the idea of God.

Or as Murdoch herself puts it, ‘Good represents the reality of which God is the dream.’ (1992, 496)**”

*Weil, Simone. 1952. Intimations of Christianity Among The Ancient Greeks. Ark Paperbacks, 1987/1952.

**Murdoch, Iris. 1992. Metaphysics As A Guide To Morals. London: Chatto and Windus. 

From the conclusion of Lila,
by Robert M. Pirsig:

“Good is a noun. That was it. That was what Phaedrus had been looking for. That was the homer over the fence that ended the ballgame.”

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