This post was suggested by—

1. A quotation from Under the Volcano :
   "A corpse will be transported by express!"
2. The wish in a novel by Ernesto Sábato, who died Saturday, April 30,
   for a tombstone that says "PEACE"
3. A statement by another author in this morning's post:
   "I think of myself as writing about war," said Robson….
   "I try to get away from war, but I can't.
   War forces ordinary people to behave extraordinarily."

The above Sábato novel was translated as The Angel of Darkness .
Its Spanish title was "Abaddón el Exterminador " (Abaddon the Exterminator ).

From a customer review of the novel at Amazon.com—

"Early in the book a drunken outcast will see the vision of the Great Beast of Revelation. Near the end he will tell others of what he has seen. Meanwhile Sábato, who was originally trained as a scientist, seeks out the supernatural and the mystical in order to find an antidote to Stalinism, simple-minded 'Progress' and a superficial positivism."

For a more sophisticated vision of the Beast, see The Ninth Gate.

For Abaddon in a less sophisticated antidote to positivism, see The Chronicle of Abaddon the Destroyer: The War in Heaven .

I prefer Charles Williams's approach to War in Heaven .

If there is an afterlife, perhaps Sábato's experience there will be more lively than his novel's tombstone would imply.

He may, despite his wish for heavenly peace, turn out to be (in a phrase from this morning's post) a badly needed "ghost warrior."

“Next to the bookcase stands a wooden cabinet with 24 drawers that looks like something you might have seen in a library decades ago, or perhaps in an old apothecary. The drawers are marked with the names of her novels or characters in the novels and crammed with indexed notes.

She pulls open a drawer marked ‘Lozen,’ the name of a main female character in another historical western novel, ‘The Ghost Warrior,’ and reads a few of the index tabs: ‘social relationships, puberty, death, quotes….'”

— From an article on Lucia St. Clair Robson in The Baltimore Sun  by Arthur Hirsch, dated 1:31 p.m. EDT April 30, 2011*

From this  journal later that same day —

Robson’s most recent novel is Last Train from Cuernavaca .

“A corpse will be transported by express!”

— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

* Update of 5:48 AM EDT May 3—
The same article was also published with a different  dateline— April 28.
Enthusiasts of synchronicity may lament the confusion, or they may
turn to April 28 in this journal for a different  24-part invention.
See also Art Wars, April 7, 2003 and White Horse .

Commentary on last night—

Tonight: The After-Party.

In related news…

"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 , quoted here in
   Cold Open (Saturday night, January 29, 2011)

Kernel and Moonshine

"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

Some background—

An image from yesterday's search
God, TIme, Hopkins

"We got tom-toms over here bigger than a monster
Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla"

— "Massive Attack"

"I'm just checking your math on that. Yes, I got the same thing."

— "The Social Network"

"Live… Uh, check that… From New York, it's Saturday Night! "

From a scholar quoted in this morning's post —

"Both Vico and Joyce, each in his own way, practice what Vico calls a nuov'arte critica , a 'new critical art'…"

From Hugh Grant's birthday, 2003 (found in a search for whiteness  in this morning's post) —

The cover of yesterday's Sunday New York Times Book Review
features stylized letters by artist Leonardo Sonnoli that include black
circles and triangles —

The stylized Sonnoli letters spell out "WORDS ABOUT WORDS ABOUT WORDS."
This phrase is used to introduce essays on criticism by "six accomplished critics."

A less accomplished critic might note that in the picture above, Tara is modeling
a new fashion by Sonnoli — namely, the word OOV.  A search for this word yields…

"OOV in text processing stands for 'out-of-vocabulary,' i.e., a word
 that is not known in the computer's online dictionary."

It should be.

Addendum (from a link in the same search for whiteness ) in memory of a great beauty who died on Sunday —
     

A Theory of Pure Design

by Denman Waldo Ross

Lecturer on the Theory of Design
in Harvard University

Boston and New York
Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1907

PREFACE

"My purpose in this book is to elucidate, so far as I can, the
principles which underlie the practice of drawing and painting
as a Fine Art.  Art is generally regarded as the expression of
feelings and emotions which have no explanation except per-
haps in such a word as inspiration , which is expletive rather
than explanatory.  Art is regarded as the one activity of man
which has no scientific basis, and the appreciation of Art is
said to be a matter of taste in which no two persons can be
expected to agree.  It is my purpose in this book to show how,
in the practice of Art, as in all other practices, we use certain
terms and follow certain principles.  Being defined and ex-
plained, these terms and principles may be known and under-
stood by everybody.  They are, so to speak, the form of the
language.

While an understanding of the terms and principles of Art
will not, in itself, enable any one to produce important works,
such works are not produced without it.  It must be understood,
however, that the understanding of terms and principles
is not, necessarily, an understanding in words.  It may lie in
technical processes and in visual images and may never rise,
or shall I say fall, to any formulation in words, either spoken
or written."

_________________________________________________

One of Ross's protégés, Jack Levine, died yesterday at 95. He
is said to have remarked, "I want to paint with the dead ones."

Related material: This journal on the day of Levine's death
and on the day of Martin Gardner's death.

The latter post has an image illustrating Ross's remarks on
formulations in words—
 

For further details, see Finale, Darkness Visible, and Packed.

Keanu vs. the Devil, continued

Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves in Devil's Advocate

For Keanu —

(Click for some background.)

For Keanu's mentor —

                                  …    There is a Cave
Within the Mount of God, fast by his Throne,
Where light and darkness in perpetual round
Lodge and dislodge by turns, which makes through Heav'n
Grateful vicissitude, like Day and Night….

— Paradise Lost , by John Milton

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

Judith Shulevitz at The New York Times
on Sunday, July 18, 2010 —

"What would an organic Christian Sabbath look like today?
For James Carroll, an ex-priest and dissenting Catholic
in Boston (he is the author of Practicing Catholic ,
published in 2009), it would look like the Sunday dinners
of his childhood. These were big formal meals,
held at 2 p.m. every Sunday….

'If Jesus were to visit us, it would have been
the Sunday dinner he would have insisted on
being a part of, not the worship service at the church.'"

The Usual Suspects —

For some background, see Java Jive and Today's Theology.

See also the java jive in this  journal on Sunday, July 18—

A Tale of Two Cities, Du Sucre , Sermon, and Darkness at Noon.

"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

Continued from Christmas 2009 and from last Sunday—

The serious reflection is composed
Neither of comic nor tragic but of commonplace."

– Wallace Stevens

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…."

From Sept. 30, 2004—

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).

Joshua

For darker variations on the asterisk theme,
see Darkness Visible (May 25)
and Vonnegut's Asterisk.

Two definitions–

"In Dante's Inferno  the Harrowing of Hell is mentioned in Canto IV by the pilgrim's guide Virgil." —Wikipedia

"The Easter Vigil…. is held in the hours of darkness between sunset on Holy Saturday and sunrise on Easter Day." —Wikipedia

Two more, of acronyms coined by Philip Rieff—

"Rieff is critical of the present 'pop' culture that glories in the 'primacies of possibility' and prefers 'both/and' to 'either/or.' … the 'via'— the 'vertical in authority'—… teaches us our place as we assent to and ascend on via’s ladder." —Philip Manning

Related material:

VIA CRUCIS

The infinity symbol, as sketched in a touching
attempt at scholarship by the late
"both/and" novelist David Foster Wallace—

The Cartesian cross—

The lemniscate—

Lemniscate with Cartesian cross—

Anne Applebaum in the current New York Review of Books on Arthur Koestler—

"At the moment, he still seems like yesterday's man, unfashionable and obsolete."

Rather like God. See this journal yesterday– Darkness at Noon.

See also David Levine's portrait of Koestler (Dec. 30, 2009)–

— and an objective correlative to yesterday's post —

Click to enlarge.

This journal’s Christmas Day entry, Brightness at Noon, was in response to the Orwellian headline “Arthur Koestler, Man of Darkness,” at the top of the online New York Times front page on Christmas morning.

The entry offered, as an example of brightness, some thoughts of Leibniz on his discovery of binary arithmetic.

Related material:

From Mikhail Krawtchouk: Short Biography—

Anyone knowing even a little Soviet history of the thirties can conclude that Krawtchouk could not avoid the Great Terror. During the Orwellian “hours of hatred” in 1937 he was denounced as a “Polish spy,” “bourgeois nationalist,” etc. In 1938, he was arrested and sentenced to 20 years of confinement and 5 years of exile.

Academician Krawtchouk, the author of results which became part of the world’s mathematical knowledge, outstanding lecturer, member of the French, German, and other mathematical societies, died on March 9, 1942, in Kolyma branch of the GULAG (North-Eastern Siberia) more than 6 months short of his 50th birthday.

Incidentally, happy birthday
to John von Neumann.

From the weblog of David Lavery, literature, film, and television scholar/critic, now teaching at Middle Tennessee State University–

Lavery’s quote of the day (6/27/09)-

“Art is based on second love, not first love. In it we make a return to something which we had willfully alienated. The child is occupied mostly with things, but it is because he is still unfurnished with systematic ideas, not because he is a ripe citizen by nature and comes already trailing clouds of glory. Images are clouds of glory for the man who has discovered that ideas are a sort of darkness.”

–John Crowe Ransom

Posted by Lavery on Friday, June 26, 2009, at 9:00 PM

“We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.”

— President Obama yesterday

It is not entirely clear what these “childish things” are. Perhaps the young nation’s “childish things” that the new President refers to are part of what Robert Stone memorably called “our secret culture.” Stone was referring to Puritanism, which some advocates of the new religion of Scientism might call “childish.” I do not. Lunatic, perhaps, but not childish.

Related meditations:

A year ago yesterday, on Sunday, Jan. 20, 2008, the mid-day lottery for New York State was 605.

A midrash in the Judeo-Christian tradition of paranoia a year ago today suggested that 605 might be a veiled reference to “God, the Devil, and a Bridge,” a weblog entry on mathematician André Weil.

Continuing in this vein a year later, we are confronted with the mid-day New York lottery for yesterday:

Happy birthday, Robert M. Pirsig.

Readings for the hour of the wolf:

1. The Shining of May 29 (2002) and
2. For John F. Kennedy’s Birthday (2006).

Yesterday was Arthur Koestler’s birthday.

 “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

Chapter 24

By Syd Barrett,
Dead Poet

A movement is accomplished in six stages
And the seventh brings return.
The seven is the number of the young light
It forms when darkness is increased by one.
Change returns success
Going and coming without error.
Action brings good fortune.
Sunset.

— From the 1967 album
   “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn“

Snippets:
A Reply to John Updike

See Updike on digitized snippets.

The following four snippets were pirated from the end of MathPages Quotations, compiled by Kevin Brown.

They are of synchronistic interest in view of the previous two Log24 entries, which referred (implicitly) to a Poe story and (explicitly) to Pascal.

"That is another of your odd notions,"
said the Prefect, who had the fashion
of calling everything 'odd' that was
beyond his comprehension, and thus
lived amid an absolute legion of 'oddities.'
                             Edgar Allan Poe

I knew when seven justices could not
take up a quarrel, but when the parties
were met themselves, one of them
thought but of an If,  as, 'If you said so,
then I said so'; and they shook hands
and swore brothers. Your If is the only
peacemaker; much virtue in If.
                             Shakespeare

I have made this letter longer than usual
because I lack the  time to make it shorter.
                             Blaise Pascal

S'io credessi che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma per cio che giammai di questo fondo
non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
                             Dante, 1302

For translations of the Dante (including one by Dorothy Sayers), see everything2.com.

An anonymous author there notes that Dante describes a flame in which is encased a damned soul. The flame vibrates as the soul speaks:

If I thought that I were making
Answer to one that might return to view
The world, this flame should evermore
    cease shaking.

But since from this abyss, if I hear true,
None ever came alive, I have no fear
Of infamy, but give thee answer due.

-- Dante, Inferno, Canto 27, lines 61-66,
    translated by Dorothy Sayers

Updike says,

“Yes, there is a ton of information on the web but much of it is grievously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile. The electronic marvels that abound around us serve, I have the impression, to inflame what is most informally and non-critically human about us. Our computer screens stare back at us with a kind of giant, instant aw-shucks, disarming in its modesty.”

Note Updike’s use of “inflame.”

For an aw-shucks version of “what is most informally and non-critically human about us,” as well as a theological flame, see both the previous entry and the above report from Hell.

Note that the web serves also to correct material that is inaccurate, unedited, unattributed, and juvenile. For examples, see Mathematics and Narrative. The combination of today’s entry for Pascal’s birthday with that web page serves both to light one candle and to curse the darkness.

Quarter to Three
 
(continued from
 Dec. 20, 2003,
 and from
 April 3, 2006)

… so put another nickel in the machine….

Related material:

1. The death of
   jazz percussionist Don Alias,
   
   
2. Miles Davis’s album
   Bitches Brew
   (“Miles Runs the Voodoo Down“),
3. Joni Mitchell’s album
   Shadows and Light
   (“God Must Be a Boogie Man“),
4. the Log24 entry
   from the day Alias died,
   which contains the following:
5. “By groping toward the light
    we are made to realize
    how deep the darkness
    is around us.”

   — Arthur Koestler

Mathematics and Narrative

Rebecca Goldstein, Mathematics and the Character of Tragedy:

“It was Plato who best expressed– who veritably embodied– the tension between the narrative arts and mathematics.”

Veritably.

Holy Cross Day
  
The Cross and the Wheel:

“… the quality of life as of death
and of light as of darkness is one,
one beauty, the rhythm of that Wheel,
and who can behold it is happy
and will praise it to the people.”

— Robinson Jeffers,
   “Point Pinos and Point Lobos,”
   quoted at the end of
   The Cosmic Code by Heinz Pagels,
   Simon & Schuster, 1982

Into the Dark

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant
….
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of
    darkness on darkness….

— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“I’m well past eighty now and fairly certain I won’t see ninety but I’d like more of a choice than Hell or Paradise when I leave. Now that we know the Bible was created by a vote of Emperor Constantine’s clergy, wouldn’t we all be better off if other options were offered? Or is the fear of what happens after death the glue that holds Religion together? I hope not because I believe better of God.

As a Deist, I have no fear or doubts of the way that life ends. I can bravely face the reality of ceasing to exist because the God of my heart comforts me by promising to provide a dark, starless night of nothingness when my visit is over.”

— Paul Winchell (pdf) (See previous entry.)

Paul Winchell was born at the winter solstice — the longest night — December 21, 1922.

For another view of the longest night, see the five Log24 entries ending on the day after the longest night of 2003.   Summary of those entries:

“My God, it’s full of stars!”

Darkness at Noon

I stood out in the open cold
To see the essence of the eclipse
Which was its perfect darkness.

I stood in the cold on the porch
And could not think of anything so perfect
As man’s hope of light in the face of darkness.

— Richard Eberhart,
“The Eclipse”

See also March 11.

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 them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness Isaiah 5:20

As she spoke about the Trees of Life and Death, I watched her….  The Archivist

The world has gone mad today And good’s bad today, And black’s white today, And day’s night today Cole Porter

Jennifer Connelly in “Dark City”

(from journal note of June 19, 2002) —

And, one might add for Flag Day,
“you sons of bitches.”

The Last Word

Beethoven Week on the BBC ended at midnight June 10.

“With Beethoven, music did not grow up, it regressed to adolescence. He was a hooligan who could reduce Schiller’s Ode to Joy to madness, bloodlust, and megalomania.”

— Arts and Letters Daily, lead-in to an opinion piece in The Guardian of Tuesday, June 7, 2005:

Beethoven Was a Narcissistic Hooligan “If Beethoven had dedicated his obvious talents to serving the noble Pythagorean view of music, he might well have gone on to compose music even greater than that of Mozart. You can hear this potential in his early string quartets, where the movements often have neat conclusions and there is a playfulness reminiscent of Mozart or Haydn. If only Beethoven had nourished these tender shoots instead of the darker elements that one can also hear. For the darkness is already evident in the early quartets too, in their sombre harmonies and sudden key changes. As it was, however, his darker side won out; compare, for example, the late string quartets. Here the youthful humour has completely vanished; the occasional signs of optimism quickly die out moments after they appear and the movements sometimes end in uncomfortably inconclusive cadences…. In A Clockwork Orange it is the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that echoes in the mind of Alex whenever he indulges in one of his orgies of violence. Alex’s reaction may be rather extreme, but he is responding to something that is already there in this dark and frenzied setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy; the joy it invites one to feel is the joy of madness, bloodlust and megalomania. It is glorious music, and seductive, but the passions it stirs up are dark and menacing.” — Dylan Evans, former Lacanian psychotherapist (pdf) and now head of the undergraduate robotics program at the University of the West of England.

Speak for yourself, Dylan.

“Evil did not have the last word.”

—  Richard John Neuhaus, April 4, 2005

Evil may have had the last word in Tuesday’s Guardian, but now that Beethoven Week has ended, it seems time for another word.

For another view of Beethoven, in particular the late quartets, see the Log24 Beethoven’s Birthday entry of December 16, 2002:

See also the previous entry.
 

Hope of Heaven

“Heaven is a state,
a sort of metaphysical state.”
— John O’Hara, Hope of Heaven, 1938

“The old men know
when an old man dies.”
— Ogden Nash

See also the five Log24 entries
ending with the 9 PM entry of
Tuesday, December 10, 2002.

From today’s New York Times:

“Joseph S. Frelinghuysen, whose memoir, Passages to Freedom, chronicled his escape from a prison camp in Italy during World War II, died on Saturday in Morristown, N.J. He was 92.”

A web page on the Indiantown Gap army camp quotes Frelinghuysen’s Passages to Freedom… He is describing July 1942, just before Frelinghuysen’s unit was sent overseas:

“In the last week of July, his wife Emily came to Indiantown to stay at the old Hershey Hotel so they could steal a few of the remaining hours together. He explained, ‘On my last night with Emily, she wore an evening dress with a full green and rose colored skirt, and I put on my best garrison uniform …. we had California champagne, lobster, and flaming crepes with ice cream. We danced to some old tunes; Cole Porter’s ‘Night and Day’ and Irving Berlin’s tunes from ‘Top Hat.’ Then they played a new one slowly, and a young girl sang the lyrics to ‘The White Cliffs of Dover.’ Noting that England had been at war for three years, he reminisced that it was a song that speaks of ‘love and laughter’ and ‘peace ever after.’ Nostalgically, he said, ‘We finished the dance in an embrace. She took my hand and we walked out through the lobby onto the terrace for a last look at the gardens in the pale light of a quarter moon.’ “

24

The Star
of Venus

“He looked at the fading light
in the western sky and saw Mercury,
or perhaps it was Venus,
gleaming at him as the evening star.
Darkness and light,
the old man thought.
It is what every hero legend is about.
The darkness which is more than death,
the light which is love, like our friend
Venus here, or perhaps this star is
Mercury, the messenger of Olympus,
the bringer of hope.”

— Roderick MacLeish, Prince Ombra

Related material:

The Devil and Wallace Stevens,

Journey of the Magi,

and

Hexagram 24:

“The time of darkness is past.
The winter solstice brings
the victory of light.”

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

 Example:
Mozart’s K 265,
the page number 265,
and a story by George MacDonald.

A Christmas Carol
by Dylan Thomas

Current phase of the moon,
from the U.S. Naval Observatory:

And I remember that we went singing carols once, a night or two before Christmas Eve, when there wasn’t the shaving of a moon to light the secret, white-flying streets. At the end of a long road was a drive that led to a large house, and we stumbled up the darkness of the drive that night, each one of us afraid, each one holding a stone in his hand in case, and all of us too brave to say a word. The wind made through the drive-trees noises as of old and unpleasant and maybe web-footed men wheezing in caves. We reached the black bulk of the house.

‘What shall we give them?’ Dan whispered.

‘”Hark the Herald”? ‘‘Christmas comes but Once a Year”?’

‘No,’ Jack said: ‘We’ll sing “Good King Wenceslas.” I’ll count three.’

One, two, three, and we began to sing, our voices high and seemingly distant in the snow-felted darkness round the house that was occupied by nobody we knew. We stood close together, near the dark door.

Good King Wenceslas looked out
On the Feast of Stephen.

And then a small, dry voice, like the voice of someone who has not spoken for a long time, suddenly joined our singing: a small, dry voice from the other side of the door: a small, dry voice through the keyhole. And when we stopped running we were outside our house; the front room was lovely and bright; the gramophone was playing; we saw the red and white balloons hanging from the gas-bracket; uncles and aunts sat by the fire; I thought I smelt our supper being fried in the kitchen. Everything was good again, and Christmas shone through all the familiar town.

‘Perhaps it was a ghost,’ Jim said.

‘Perhaps it was trolls,’ Dan said, who was always reading.

‘Let’s go in and see if there’s any jelly left,’ Jack said. And we did that.

Cursing the Darkness

From my entries on this date last year…

“…we shall this day light such a candle in England as I trust by God’s grace shall never be put out.”

Thought for today:

Render unto Rome that which is Rome’s.

See also my remarks of January 29, 2003,
on the opening in New Zealand of
Cullinane College.

Magic Hawaii

Today, the birthday of singer Jerry Lee Lewis, is also the feast of St. Michael and All Angels.

In honor of Lewis:

Killer Radio, an entry of July 31, 2003, that contains the following…

“When the light came she was sitting on the bed beside an open suitcase, toying with her diamond rings.  She saw the light first in the depths of the largest stone.”

— Paul Preuss, Broken Symmetries,
    scene at Diamond Head, Oahu,
    Hawaii

In honor of the angels:

Mathematics as an Adequate Language,
by Israel Gelfand, Sept. 2, 2003, which contains the following…

“Many people consider mathematics to be a boring and formal science.  However, any really good work in mathematics always has in it: beauty, simplicity, exactness, and crazy ideas.  This is a strange combination.  I understood earlier that this combination is essential on the example of classical music and poetry.  But it is also typical in mathematics.  It is not by chance that many mathematicians enjoy serious music.

This combination of beauty, simplicity, exactness, and crazy ideas is, I think, common to both mathematics and music.”

These qualities seem also to be sought by practitioners of religion and physics… for example, by the spiritually-minded physicist in Preuss’s Broken Symmetries.  Skeptics might prefer, to the word “religion,” the word (pronounced with a sneer) “magic.”

What do we find if, following in the footsteps of Gelfand and Preuss, we do a Google search on the following words…

“beauty simplicity exactness
 crazy magic Hawaii“?

The search yields two results:

1. The Pupil: Poems by W. S. Merwin.
   The above link is to a poem, “Prophecy,” that seems suitable for these, the High Holy Days at the end of one year and the beginning of another.

   

   For a follow-up to the poem, see
   The Shining of Lucero.

2. “Striking Through the Mask, or
    The Allegorical Meanings
    in Moby Dick.”

These two selections, both on the theme of light and darkness, offer a language that is perhaps more adequate than mathematics for dealing with the nature of the High Holy Days.  For a more lighthearted approach to these concerns, also with a Hawaiian theme, see

The Aloha Mass.

Time’s Breakdown

“… even if we can break down time into component Walsh functions, what would it achieve?”

— The Professor, in “Passing in Silence,”
    by Oliver Humpage

“Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillness blurring into motion on the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we find the heart of mystery in which we are never allowed to rest. The flickering of a film interrupts the intolerable continuity of apparent world; subliminally it gives us those in-between spaces of black that we crave.”

— Gösta Kraken, Perception Perceived: an Unfinished Memoir (p. 9 in Fremder, a novel by Russell Hoban)

“The Underground’s ‘flicker’ is a mechanical reconciliation of light and darkness, the two alternately exhibited very rapidly.”

— Hugh Kenner on T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” in Four Quartets

From last year’s entries:

ART WARS September 12, 2002

For some further reflections on flickering time,
see an essay by Nicholson Baker on

the Geneva mechanism
in movie projectors.

“At three o’clock in the morning
Eurydice is bound to come into it.”
—Russell Hoban,
The Medusa Frequency

For June Carter Cash as Eurydice,
see The Circle is Unbroken.

Let us pray that Jesus College
will help this production,
with Johnny Cash as Orpheus,
to have a happy ending.

For the Man in Black

Lyrics:  Arizona Star

“Shinin’ like a diamond
 she had tombstones in her eyes.”

A picture: Salma Hayek and Julie Taymor

A book:  Dark Ladies, by Fritz Leiber

This offers a gentler form of the alcoholic experience than Malcolm Lowry’s classic Under the Volcano:

“I’ve had hallucinations from alcohol, too…. But only during withdrawal oddly, the first three days.  In closets and dark corners and under tables — never in very bright light — I’d see these black and sometimes red wires, about the thickness of telephone cords, vibrating, whipping around.  Made me think of giant spiders’ legs and such.  I’d know they were hallucinations — they were manageable, thank God.  Bright light would always wipe them out.”

— Fritz Leiber, “Our Lady of Darkness,” in Dark Ladies

Related entries:

The Feast of Kali, the Dark Lady, and

Architecture of Eternity,
my own “Once Upon a Time in Mexico.”

For a more serious Dark Lady portrait, see the site of artist John de la Vega.

Story Theory

The conflict between the Euclidean, or “diamond” theory of truth, and the Trudeau, or “story” theory of truth, continues.

On this, Hugh Grant’s birthday, let us recall last year’s log24 entry for this date. On Roger Ebert’s review of the Hugh Grant film “Sirens” about the artist Norman Lindsay:

Ebert gets Pan wrong in this film; he says, “the bearded Lindsay is a Pan of sorts.” No. The “Pan of sorts” is in fact the girl who romps joyfully with the local boys and who later, with great amusement, uses her divine x-ray vision to view Tara Fitzgerald naked in church.

This year’s offering for Grant’s birthday is an illustrated prayer by a great defender of the religious, or “story,” theory of truth, Madeleine L’Engle:

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 them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness Isaiah 5:20

As she spoke about the Trees of Life and Death, I watched her….  The Archivist

The world has gone mad today And good’s bad today, And black’s white today, And day’s night today Cole Porter

“Teach us to care and not to care.”
— T. S. Eliot, “Ash Wednesday“

From The Jerusalem Post, August 6, 2001:

In the movie Godfather II there is a scene when Michael Corleone is in Batista-ruled Havana. A Marxist rebel is arrested, and rather than be taken alive he explodes a grenade he had hidden in his jacket, killing himself and the officers arresting him.

His partner says: “Those rebels, you know, they’re lunatics.”

“Maybe so,” Michael Corleone says. “But it occurred to me. The soldiers are paid to fight – the rebels aren’t.”

“What does that tell you?” asks his partner.

“They can win,” he replies.

— Analysis by Arieh O’Sullivan

The date of the above analysis, August 6, was the date of the Christian Feast of the Transfiguration and the anniversary of the first use in warfare of a nuclear weapon.

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

Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound?”

— T. S. Eliot, “Ash Wednesday,” 1930

Hiroshima, perhaps?

See also my entries for Transfiguration 2002.

* Eliot does not say what “Word” he is talking about.  Perhaps it is “Arieh,” the name of the journalist who wrote the perceptive Havana passage above.  A search for the meaning of this word reveals that it means “an adult lion, having paired, in search of his prey (Nahum 2:12; 2 Sam 17:10; Num 23:24).”  This is from The Witness of the Stars, a work that views the constellation Leo as a symbol of the Messiah.  A particularly relevant passage: “The brightest star… marks the heart of the Lion (hence sometimes called by the moderns, Cor Leonis, the heart of the Lion).”  Cor Leonis, Corleone.  Is this the “Word” you meant, T. S.?

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

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