Log24

"Where whirled and well"

— Conrad Aiken, Great Circle

And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.

— T. S. Eliot, "Ash Wednesday"
 

About the Centre:

See also Dorm Room.

"The Magician’s finest trick was to
dismantle the pretensions of genius
while preserving his own lofty stature." 

— Alex Ross in The New Yorker , Jan. 17, 2022

Related material —

Meanwhile . . .

From the previous post —

For the connection between His Dark Materials  and The Four Elements ,
see Darkness at Noon (Log24, Jan. 31, 2011).

The title refers to a Log24 post of Feb. 8, 2021.

Detail from an image in that post:

 By groping toward the light we are made to realize
 how deep the darkness is around us." — Arthur Koestler

Related Hollywood remark:

"You've blown communication
…as we've known it… right out of
the water. You know that, don't you?"

— Cliff Robertson in Brainstorm  (1983)

Valentine reportedly died on December 29, 2020.

Related dialogue from “The Mirror Has Two Faces” (1996) —

– It’s interesting how coupling appears in nature and mathematics.

– You were talking about pairs …

– Oh, the twin-prime conjecture. It explores pairs of prime numbers.
Those only divisible by themselves. Three-five. Five-seven.
Not seven-nine …

– Nine can be divided by three.

– That’s right.  And … and so on.  It was discovered that pairs were
often separated by …

– One number in between.

– Exactly. Did you read my book?

– No, I’m sorry.

– That’s okay. This is marvellous.

– A first date like a game show.

– I didn’t mean to lecture.

– I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to call it a date.

Twin-Prime Dates —

December 31  and December 29, 2020.

“Though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still
which she did not know.  Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn
of time.  But if she could have looked a little further back, into the
stillness and the darkness before Time dawned…she would have known
that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed
in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start
working backwards.”

– C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe , as quoted at
https://apologyanalogy.com/death-working-backwards/ .

Related material for comedians —

See as well . . .

Damonizing Your Opponent

“Careful. Evil has a way of making friends with the good
and dragging them into the darkness.” — CSI, Feb. 24, 2011

A related meditation —

From a post this morning  by Peter J. Cameron
in memory of John Horton Conway —

“By groping toward the light we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is around us.”

— Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy ,
Random House, 1973, page 118

Flashback —

From a 2009-2016 exhibition by David Link

Related material —

Or:  An Apple for Marcela

Scene from the college class Astronomy 101 in "Transformers:
Revenge of the Fallen" (June 24, 2009) —

See also Big Apple in this journal as well as a film by the artist from
the "nubile" link above…

In memory of Jimmy Breslin, who reportedly died today at 88 —

From "Dimensions," (Log24, Feb. 15, 2015) —

"Hello  darkness,  my  old  friend.
I’ve  come  to  talk  with  you  again."

This journal on Saturday, Dec. 19 —

In memory of Madame Claude, who
reportedly died in Nice December 19:

"There were fairies and spirits."

Amen.

"The Tesseract is where it belongs: out of our reach."

 — Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury,
      quoted here on Epiphany 2013

Earlier … (See Jan. 27, 2012) …

"And the Führer digs for trinkets in the desert."

This year's Class Day speaker at Harvard
will be Natalie Portman.

Related material:

See also the link to Preoccupied  from Sunday—

"The Cardinal seemed a little preoccupied today."

"Hello  darkness,  my  old  friend.
I’ve  come  to  talk  with  you  again."

With Sarah Silverman …

… Continued from The Story of N (October 15, 2010).

“I remember how the darkness doubled….”

Happy birthday to Mira Sorvino.

Related material:

Today’s posts Hitchcockian,  Darkness and Light,
and Requiem for Abse.

Some context for the last of these:

The conclusion of last night’s episode of Intruders .

The title is a line from a preview of the new
film “The Double,” starring Jesse Eisenberg:

Related lines from T. S. Eliot:

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

“The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning
of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not
typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the
meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside,
enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a
haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes
are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.”

— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness

Photo of full moon over Oslo last night by Josefine Lyche:

A scene from my film viewing last night:

Some background (click to enlarge):

Note:

The “I, Frankenstein” scene above should not be interpreted as
a carrying of Martin Gardner through a lyche gate.  Gardner
is, rather, symbolized by the asterisk in the first image from
the above Google search.

From a Log24 search for “Boxing Day“—

(Click image for some commentary.)

From The New York Times —

Correction: Jan. 16, 2006

“An obituary on Dec. 27 about John Diebold,
a businessman and engineer who helped shape
modern industrial development in America,
misstated a business venture of John Diebold Inc.,
an investment firm he founded in 1967. It did
not finance Diebold Election Systems, a maker of
polling machines that, despite its name, has no
connection to John Diebold.”

Related material:

Synchronicity and this  journal on the date of the correction.

The title is a reference to an article on page SR4 of
The New York Times Sunday Review  on Michaelmas.  

From Wired , a Saturday evening post —

(Click to enlarge.)

From a Breaking Bad   recap by Logan Hill—

“I am not in danger, Skyler, I am  the danger,” Walt growls,
in an electric shock of a scene that likely marks the beginning
of a new phase of Breaking Bad . If this show has been the story
of Walt’s deliberate, step-by-step descent into the bottom of
some bleak moral valley, this is him charging madly downhill
into darkness. “A guy opens his door and gets shot, you think
that of me? No, I am the one who knocks .”

Talk amongst yourselves.

Click to enlarge.

Click to enlarge.

Click for story.

"By groping toward the light we are made to realize how deep the darkness is around us."

— Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy , Random House, 1973, page 118

Today's sermon is for Martha B. Helfer, author of
the treatise on Darstellung  in today's previous post
and of the following—

(Click for clearer image.)

Helfer's The Word Unheard  was published by Northwestern University Press
on St. Andrew's Day, 2011. Log24 posts on that day—

Lines, Grids, and Fatuity for St. Andrew's Day.

The last of these warned of an upcoming Jewish Book Week event
on February 22, 2012.

That date turned out to be Ash Wednesday. See a Log24 post on that topic
that quotes a poet, T.S. Eliot, with anti-Semitic proclivities—

"And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word."

— T. S. Eliot, "Ash Wednesday"

This is perhaps not entirely irrelevant to Helfer's title, The Word Unheard .

* A concept of Schopenhauer and Hitler, and the first name of
   a fictional Boston mathematician.

(Continued)

"The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity,
the whole meaning of which
lies within the shell of a cracked nut.
But Marlow was not typical
(if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted),
and to him the meaning of an episode
was not inside like a kernel but outside,
enveloping the tale which brought it out
only as a glow brings out a haze,
in the likeness of one of these misty halos
that sometimes are made visible by
the spectral illumination of moonshine."

— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness

Hexagram 44:
Coming to Meet

"This hexagram indicates a situation in which
the principle of darkness, after having been eliminated,
furtively and unexpectedly obtrudes again from within
and below. Of its own accord the female principle
comes to meet the male. It is an unfavourable and
dangerous situation, and we must understand and
promptly prevent the possible consequences.

The hexagram is linked with the fifth month
[June-July], because at the summer solstice
the principle of darkness gradually becomes
ascendant again."

— Richard Wilhelm 

To counteract the principle of darkness—

The Uploading (Friday— St. Peter's Day, 2012),

Thor's Light Bulb Joke, and …

 .

A quote from The Oxford Murders , 
a novel by Guillermo Martinez—

"Anyone can follow the path once it’s been marked out.
But there is of course an earlier moment of illumination, 
what you called the knight’s move. Only a few people, 
sometimes only one person in many centuries, 
manage to see the correct first step in the darkness.”

“A good try,” said Seldom.

Welcome.

See "How Deep the Darkness" + Koestler.

Sisteen Chapel

See Log24 two years ago on this date—

Darkness Visible and Sisteen.

"An occultation is an event that occurs
when one object is hidden by another object
that passes between it and the observer.
The word is used in astronomy…"

— Wikipedia

AP story, 10:26 PM EDT May 20, 2012—

See also Darkness Visible in this journal.

(11 PM EDT, the time of this post, is noon
the next day in Tokyo. The above eclipse was
seen in Japan on May 21, 2012, in the morning.)

An earlier verse in 1 John—

1 John 1:5 "This then is the message
which we have heard of him,
and declare unto you, that God is light,
and in him is no darkness at all."

Catechism from a different cult—

"Who are you, anyway?" 

— Question at 00:41 of 15:01,
Rainbow Bridge (Part 5 of 9) at YouTube

See also the video accompanying artist Josefine Lyche's version
of the 2×2 case of the diamond theorem.

* Title of a Robert Stone novel

Yesterday's post in memory of Octavio Paz—

An earlier post yesterday, Fashion Notes, linked to a Sting video—

"If you have to, start out 'Once upon a time.'"

Yesterday's Paz post was at 6:48 PM EDT.

For the autistic, here is some related mathematics.

Yesterday's Fashion Notes post was at 1:06 PM  EDT.

A related chronological note from Rolling Stone  yesterday—

"Levon Helm, singer and drummer for the Band,
 died on April 19th in New York of throat cancer.
 He was 71. 

"He passed away peacefully at 1:30 this afternoon…."

Helm and The Band performing "The Weight"—

"I pulled into Nazareth, I was a-feelin' 'bout half past dead…"

"And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word."

— T. S. Eliot, "Ash Wednesday"

This suggested a search for commentary on
Conrad Aiken's phrase "where whirled and well."

Of the nine (Google) search results, one is not  from
my own journal entries—

[PDF] TIME! TIME! TIME!
https://circle.ubc.ca/bitstream/id/131009/UBC_1968_A8%20C33.pdf
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat
by G Cameron – 1968 – Related articles
well where whirled and well where whirled and well—
-3. The stress on words such as "wing" is expanded for use
in Aiken's musical paragraph as follows: … 

Okay… http://m759.net/wordpress/?p=16365.

See also last night's  11:48 post and Erin Burnett in "Glad Rags."

Those impressed by George Steiner's remark on Hegel in the previous post may consult…

(Click to enlarge.)

(The Christian Examiner.  Volume LXXX. New Series, Volume I.  January, March, May, 1866.
New York: James Miller, Publisher, 522, Broadway.  Boston: Walker, Fuller, & Co.

No. CCLIV, Art. IV.– THE SECRET OF HEGEL.
By C. C. Everett, pp. 196-207.

A review of…

The Secret of Hegel, being the Hegelian System in Origin, Principle, Form, and Matter.
By James Hutchinson Sterling. In two volumes.
London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green. 1865. 8vo, 2 vols.)

On Hegel, from the review—

"He starts not from the beginning, but from the heart, of the world.
There never was a time when this pure Being— which, in its
undivided absoluteness, is indistinguishable from nothing;
as pure, unbroken light is indistinguishable from darkness—
was by itself alone; but this absolute Being is yet the foundation
and the groundwork of whatever is."

For more on Hegel's logic, see Marxists.org.

See also Steiner on chess and Lenin in The New Yorker
(September 7, 1968, page 133).

Lurching Toward Decision

"Suskind… nails, I think, Obama's intellectual blind spot. Indeed, Obama himself nails it, telling Suskind that he was too inclined to search for 'the perfect technical answer' to the myriad of complex issues coming at him."

— Frank Rich on Ron Suskind's new book about the White House, Confidence Men

Very distantly related material—

From "Confidence Game," an Oct. 12, 2008, post in this journal, a quasi-European perspective—

See also …

Gravity’s Rainbow , Penguin Classics, 1995, page 742:

"… knowing his Tarot, we would expect to look among the Humility, among the gray and preterite souls, to look for him adrift in the hostile light of the sky, the darkness of the sea….

Now there’s only a long cat’s-eye of bleak sunset left over the plain tonight, bright gray against a purple ceiling of clouds, with an iris of

   742"

Against the Day

    New York Lottery, May 28, 2011—

Page 548

General Boulanger
That the General was 'reactionary' and that the C of C bureaucracy had a 'defiant residue' of Boulangism, continues the characterization of the organization for which the Chums 'work'.

See p. 543 above, regarding a 2007 book in which Boulanger is called the 'father of fascism'.

timbres fictifs
French: fictive postage stamps. Cf "Lot 49".
Yes, stamps mean something in Pynchon's works; here, it seems important that these stamps are characterized as frauds.

Page 935

transform
A mathematical operation that "maps" a relation from one domain to another.

Here, "Belgian Congo" maps to "Balkan Penninsula". By 1912, everyone at Yz-le-Bans would be familiar with Conrad's Heart of Darkness , if not with other descriptions of the atrocities of exploitation of indigenous people in Congo. The conversation here and to follow describes the dawning realization of the imperialist exploitation of Eastern Europe by European powers. (Zora Neale Hurston famously commented that Hitler did in Europe what Europeans had been doing in Africa for a century. Cf. The Hereros sections in V .). It begins with railroads and "other straight line" constructions.

The themes of ATD might also "map" to current events in another warzone, where a contemporary Great Game is being played out.

common in dreams
Such as Frank's and Reef's. And/or, dreams require interpretation.