See "Concordance + Center" in this journal, a search
suggested by the new URL "geometry.center."
Friday, November 17, 2023
The Center
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Thursday, December 31, 2009
All About Eve
Genesis 3:24—
So he drove out the man; and he placed
at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims,
and a flaming sword which turned every way,
to keep the way of the tree of life.
|
"The links are direct between the tautology out of the Burning Bush, that 'I am' which accords to language the privilege of phrasing the identity of God, on the one hand, and the presumptions of concordance, of equivalence, of translatability, which, though imperfect, empower our dictionaries, our syntax, our rhetoric, on the other. That 'I am' has, as it were, at an overwhelming distance, informed all predication. It has spanned the arc between noun and verb, a leap primary to creation and the exercise of creative consciousness in metaphor. Where that fire in the branches has gone out or has been exposed as an optical illusion, the textuality of the world, the agency of the Logos in logic—be it Mosaic, Heraclitean, or Johannine—becomes 'a dead letter.'" |
Carlene Hatcher Polite–
"Shall I help you?" asked a bass voice.
"If you can," answered a contralto.
"Trace down this tree. Let me show you
men in its stead. Leaf through this bush,
extinguish the burning fire…"
— The Flagellants, page 8
"How much story do you want?"
— George Balanchine
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Saturday, August 2, 2008
Saturday August 2, 2008
Geometry and Death
(continued from
June 15, 2007)
Today is the anniversary
of the 1955 death of poet
Wallace Stevens.
Related material:
an essay on the
relationships between
poets and philosophers —
“Bad Blood,” by
Leonard Michaels —
and
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Monday, July 2, 2007
Monday July 2, 2007
A figure like Ecclesiast/
Rugged and luminous,
chants in the dark/
A text that is an answer,
although obscure.
— Wallace Stevens,
"An Ordinary Evening
in New Haven"
|
Time and Chance |
From 8/02
in 2005:
| 50 Years Ago on this date, poet Wallace Stevens died. Memorial: at the Wallace Stevens Concordance, enter center. |
Result:
| The Man with the Blue Guitar | |
|---|---|
| line 150 (xiii.6): | The heraldic center of the world |
| Human Arrangement | |
| line 13: | The center of transformations that |
| This Solitude of Cataracts | |
| line 18: | Breathing his bronzen breath at the azury center of time. |
| A Primitive Like an Orb | |
| line 1 (i.1): | The essential poem at the center of things, |
| line 87 (xi.7): | At the center on the horizon, concentrum, grave |
| Reply to Papini | |
| line 33 (ii.15): | And final. This is the center. The poet is |
| Study of Images II | |
| line 7: | As if the center of images had its |
| An Ordinary Evening in New Haven | |
| line 291 (xvii.3): | It fails. The strength at the center is serious. |
| line 371 (xxi.11): | At the center, the object of the will, this place, |
| Things of August | |
| line 154 (ix.18): | At the center of the unintelligible, |
| The Hermitage at the Center | |
| Title: | The Hermitage at the Center |
| Owl's Clover, The Old Woman and the Statue (OP) | |
| line 13 (ii.9): | At the center of the mass, the haunches low, |
| The Sail of Ulysses (OP) | |
| line 50 (iv.6): | The center of the self, the self |
| Someone Puts a Pineapple Together (NA) | |
| line 6 (i.6): | The angel at the center of this rind, |
| Of Ideal Time and Choice (NA) | |
| line 29: | At last, the center of resemblance, found |
| line 32: | Stand at the center of ideal time, |
For a text on today's
mid-day number, see
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Monday, May 8, 2006
Monday May 8, 2006
Why “saint”? See his
accurate depiction of evil, the
“Eater of Souls” in Glory Road.
accurate depiction of evil, the
“Eater of Souls” in Glory Road.
Related material:
“Steven Cullinane is a Crank“
and “Certified Crank.”
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Sunday, October 2, 2005
Sunday October 2, 2005
Happy Birthday, Wallace Stevens
Readings for today:
At the Wallace Stevens online concordance, search for X and for primitive.
In the e-book edition of Bester's The Deceivers, search for X.
"We seek
Nothing beyond reality. Within it,
Everything, the spirit's alchemicana
Included, the spirit that goes roundabout
And through included, not merely the visible,
The solid, but the movable, the moment,
The coming on of feasts and the habits of saints,
The pattern of the heavens and high, night air."
— Wallace Stevens,
Oct. 2, 1879 – Aug. 2, 1955,
"An Ordinary Evening in New Haven"
IX.1-18, from The Auroras of Autumn,
Knopf, NY (1950)
Related material:
(Added Monday, Oct. 3, 8:45 AM)
"What if Shakespeare had been born in Teaneck, N.J., in 1973?
He would call himself Spear Daddy. His rap would exhibit a profound, nuanced understanding of the frailty of the human condition, exploring the personality in all its bewildering complexity: pretension, pride, vulnerability, emotional treachery, as well as the enduring triumph of love.
Spear Daddy would disappear from the charts in about six weeks."
— Gene Weingarten in the Washington Post,
Sunday, Oct. 2, 2005
Presenting…
Spear Daddy!
Continuing Bester's Maori theme,
students from Cullinane College:
(See Literature and Geography.)
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Tuesday, August 2, 2005
Tuesday August 2, 2005
50 Years Ago
on this date, poet
Wallace Stevens died.
on this date, poet
Wallace Stevens died.
Memorial: at the
Wallace Stevens
Concordance,
enter center.
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Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Wednesday May 25, 2005
The Turning
Readers who have an Amazon.com account may view book pages relevant to the previous entry. See page 77 of The Way We Think, by Fauconnier and Turner (Amazon search term = Meno). This page discusses both the Pythagorean theorem and Plato's diamond figure in the Meno, but fails to "blend" these two topics. See also page 53 of The History of Mathematics, by Roger Cooke (first edition), where these two topics are in fact blended (Amazon search term = Pythagorean). The illustration below is drawn from the Cooke book.
Cooke demonstrates how the Pythagorean theorem might have been derived by "blending" Plato's diamond (left) with the idea of moving the diamond's corners (right).
The previous entry dealt with a conference on mathematics and narrative. Above is an example I like of mathematics…. Here is an example I like of narrative:
Kate felt quite dizzy. She didn't know exactly what it was
that had just happened, but she felt pretty damn certain that
it was the sort of experience that her mother would not have
approved of on a first date.
"Is this all part of what we have to do to go to Asgard?"
she said. "Or are you just fooling around?"
"We will go to Asgard...now," he said.
At that moment he raised his hand as if to pluck an apple,
but instead of plucking he made a tiny, sharp turning movement.
The effect was as if he had twisted the entire world through a
billionth part of a billionth part of a degree. Everything
shifted, was for a moment minutely out of focus, and then
snapped back again as a suddenly different world.
— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
And here is a blend of the concepts "Asgard" and "conference":
"Asgard
During the Interuniverse Society conference,
a bridge was opened to Valhalla…."
Bifrost
In Norse myth, the rainbow bridge
that connected Earth to Asgard,
home of the gods. It was extended
to Tellus Tertius during the
Interuniverse Society conference"
— From A Heinlein Concordance
— Front page picture from a
local morning newspaper published
today, Wednesday, May 25, 2005
As George Balanchine once asked,
"How much story do you want?"
"How much story do you want?"
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Sunday, April 3, 2005
Sunday April 3, 2005
Wager
Pennsylvania Lottery Daily Number
for yesterday evening,
Saturday, April 2, 2005:
613
Pennsylvania Lottery Daily Number
for yesterday evening,
Saturday, April 2, 2005:
613
Related material:
From 6/13 2004 —
An 8-rayed star:
Another 8-rayed star:
St. Peter’s Square in Rome
From 6/13 2003 —
A link to a 2001 First Things essay,
“Here is the heart of the matter:
The underwriting of Hebraic–Hellenic literacy, of the normative analogue between divine and mortal acts of creation, was, in the fullest sense, theological. As was the wager (pronounced lost in deconstruction and postmodernism) on ultimate possibilities of accord between sign and sense, between word and meaning, between form and phenomenality. The links are direct between the tautology out of the Burning Bush, that ‘I am’ which accords to language the privilege of phrasing the identity of God, on the one hand, and the presumptions of concordance, of equivalence, of translatability, which, though imperfect, empower our dictionaries, our syntax, our rhetoric, on the other. That ‘I am’ has, as it were, at an overwhelming distance, informed all predication. It has spanned the arc between noun and verb, a leap primary to creation and the exercise of creative consciousness in metaphor. Where that fire in the branches has gone out or has been exposed as an optical illusion, the textuality of the world, the agency of the Logos in logic—be it Mosaic, Heraclitean, or Johannine—becomes ‘a dead letter.’
That passage bears rereading.”
— Richard John Neuhaus quoting
George Steiner’s Grammars of Creation
(Yale University Press, April 1, 2001)
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