Log24

Some background for last night's post on Diego Rivera—

See "Octavio Paz" + "Solar Country" in this journal.

"Mexico is a solar country— but it is also a black country, a dark country.
This duality of Mexico has preoccupied me since I was a child."

— Octavio Paz

Tuesday, November 8, 2016, was also the publication date
at Princeton University Press for a book by one Herbert Gintis:

Gintis reportedly died yesterday, Jan. 5, 2023.

"He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania
and then attended Harvard University for post-graduate
work in mathematics. After receiving his master's degree,
he grew disillusioned with the field, and while at Harvard,
became a sandal maker with a shop in Harvard Square." 

In later years, Gintis was associated with the Santa Fe Institute.

Last two days of the conference, May 27 and 28, 2022 —

Or, "An Education Continued"

This journal on May 29, 2010, had a followup to
the previous day's post "Multispeech for Oxford"—

An Oxford workshop, "Quantum Physics and Logic," began
on the date of the above Log24 "Packed" post, May 29, 2010.
The first talk was by John Baez —

Baez's notes on his talk begin …
"Duality has many manifestations in logic and physics." —

Yes, it does.

For Octavio Paz, who died on this date in 1998

Church Emblem

Related material:

Faust in Copenhagen,
Meta Physics,
and yesterday's entry.

Affirmation of Place and Time:
East Coker and Grand Rapids

This morning’s meditation:

“Let us talk together with the courage, humor, and ardor of Socrates.

In that long conversation, we may find ourselves considering something Plato’s follower Plotinus said long ago about ‘a principle which transcends being,’ in whose domain one can ‘assert identity without the affirmation of being.’  There, ‘everything has taken its stand forever, an identity well pleased, we might say, to be as it is…. Its entire content is simultaneously present in that identity: this is pure being in eternal actuality; nowhere is there any future, for every then is a now; nor is there any past, for nothing there has ever ceased to be.’  Individuality and existence in space and time may be masks that our sensibilities impose on the far different face of quantum reality.”

— Peter Pesic, Seeing Double: Shared Identities in Physics, Philosophy, and Literature, MIT Press paperback, 2003, p. 145

A search for more on Plotinus led to sites on the Trinity, which in turn led to the excellent archives at Calvin College in Grand Rapids.

A search for the theological underpinnings of Calvin College led to the Christian Reformed church:

“Our emblem is
the cross in a triangle.”

The triangle, as a symbol of “the delta factor,” also plays an important role in the semiotic theory of Walker Percy.  A search for current material on Percy led back to one of my favorite websites, that of Percy expert Karey Perkins, and thus to the following paper:

The “East Coker” Dance
in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:
An Affirmation of Place and Time
by Karey Perkins

For a rather different, but excellent, literary affirmation of place and time — in Grand Rapids, rather than East Coker — see, for instance, Michigan Roll, a novel by Tom Kakonis.

We may, for the purposes of this trinitarian meditation, regard Percy and Kakonis as speaking for the Son and Karey Perkins as a spokesperson for the Holy Spirit.  As often in my meditations, I choose to regard the poet Wallace Stevens as speaking perceptively about (if not for, or as) the Father.  A search for related material leads to a 1948 comment by Thomas McGreevy, who

“… wrote of Stevens’ ‘Credences of Summer’ (Collected Poems 376),

On every page I find things that content me, as ‘The trumpet of the morning blows in the clouds and through / The sky.’

A devout Roman Catholic, he added, ‘And I think my delight in it is of the Holy Spirit.’ (26 May 1948).”

An ensuing search for material on “Credences of Summer” led back, surprisingly, to an essay — not very scholarly, but interesting — on Stevens, Plotinus, and neoplatonism.

Thus the circle closed.

As previous entries have indicated, I have little respect for Christianity as a religion, since Christians are, in my experience, for the most part, damned liars.  The Trinity as philosophical poetry, is, however, another matter.  I respect Pesic’s speculations on identity, but wish he had a firmer grasp of his subject’s roots in trinitarian thought.  For Stevens, Percy, and Perkins, I have more than respect.

ART WARS for

Trotsky’s Birthday

Part I:
Symbols

From my entry of July 26, 2003, in memory
of Marathon Man director John Schlesinger:

For the meaning of the above symbols, see
Kubrick’s 1x4x9 monolith in 2001,
the Halmos tombstone in Measure Theory,
and the Fritz Leiber Changewar stories.

No se puede vivir sin amar.

Part II:
Sunday in the Park with Death

  To Leon from Diego —
Details of a mural,
A Dream of a Sunday Afternoon
in Alameda Park,
Fresco, 1947-48,
Alameda Hotel, Mexico City:

Three’s a Crowd:

Symbol:

State of the Communion

Relevant readings:

• Definition of the communion of saints in the Catholic Encylopedia —
  

  “In that communion there is no loss of individuality, yet such an interdependence that the saints are ‘members one of another’ (Rom., xii, 5)….”

• Ephesians 4:16 —

“…the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth….”

• A Game Designer’s Holy Grail —
  

  “Herman Melville described the exact process beautifully in his novel, Mardi:

  ‘In me, many worthies recline, and converse. I list to St. Paul who argues the doubts of Montaigne…'”

• Invitation to the HipBone Games —
  

  “…man is seen as he is sub specie aeternitatis, an ‘immortal diamond.'”



• Your Hip Bone Connected —
  

  “Now hear the word of the Lord”