The above photo was taken on May 19, 2011.

See a Log24 post from that date, "Bedrock."
Those to whom this suggests a Flintstones joke
may consult Denis Dutton in this journal.

Robin Hartshorne, AMS Notices , April 2000, p. 464 —

"Whenever one approaches a subject from two different directions, there is bound to be an interesting theorem expressing their relation." 

From "When Novelists Become Cubists," by Andre Furlani—

With a nod to film-maker Stan Brakhage, Davenport calls his compositional principle "architectonic form." (2) In the essay "Narrative Tone and Form," he identifies in twentieth century literature "a movement from assuming the world to be transparent, and available to lucid thoughts and language, to assuming (having to assume, the artists involved would say) that the world is opaque" (Geography  311). Architectonic form derives from modernist experiments in disrupted perspective (as, for example, in collage and vorticism). "The architectonics of a narrative," Davenport says, "are emphasized and given a role to play in dramatic effect when novelists become Cubists; that is, when they see the possibilities of making a hieroglyph, a coherent symbol, an ideogram of the total work. A symbol comes into being when an artist sees that it is the only way to get all the meaning in. Genius always proceeds by faith" (312). The unparaphrasable architectonic text "differs from other narrative in that the meaning shapes into a web, or globe, rather than along a line" (318). The essence of such art "is that it conceals what it most wishes to show; first, because it charges word, image and sense to the fullest, fusing matter and manner; secondly, to allow meaning to be searched out" (57-58).

In architectonic form, meaning may be generated more in the interstices between images, citation, and passages of dialogue than in the content of these elements. "It is the conjunction, not the elements, that creates a new light," Davenport says in an essay on poet Ronald Johnson (194). This is the Poundian aesthetic Charles Olson attempted to translate into practical pedagogical terms as rector of Black Mountain College, a school organized, as Olson explained in a 1952 letter, on the "principle that the real existence of knowledge lies between things & is not confined to labeled areas" (quoted in Duberman 341).

Note:

(2) Brakhage has written admiringly of Davenport. In "Ice is for Coffee and for Wine" he speaks of the joy to have "at last met such a man as Pound describes Remy de Goncourt to have been…i.e. one whose intelligence was a way of feeling" (7).

References:

Brakhage, Stan. "Ice is for Coffee and for Wine." Margins  30 (Aug.-Sept. 1974): 6-7.

Davenport, Guy. The Geography of the Imagination . San Francisco, North Point Press, 1981. Reprint: New York, Pantheon, 1992.

Duberman, Martin. Black Mountain . New York, Dutton, 1972

A Sermon from Christchurch
in The New York Times

Related material:

Zen and the Art
and
For the Burning Man

For more on magic, mysticism, and the Platonic “source of all images,” see Scott McLaren on “Hermeticism and the Metaphysics of Goodness in the Novels of Charles Williams.” McLaren quotes Evelyn Underhill on magic vs. mysticism:

The fundamental difference between the two is this: magic wants to get, mysticism wants to give […] In mysticism the will is united with the emotions in an impassioned desire to transcend the sense-world in order that the self may be joined by love to the one eternal and ultimate Object of love […] In magic, the will unites with the intellect in an impassioned desire for supersensible knowledge. This is the intellectual, aggressive, and scientific temperament trying to extend its field of consciousness […] (Underhill 84; see also 178ff.)

— Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness. New York: Dutton, 1911.

For more on what Bloom calls the “Will-to-Power over nature,” see Faust in Copenhagen and the recent (20th- and 21st-century) history of Harvard University. These matters are also discussed in “Log24 – Juneteenth through Midsummer Night.”

For more on what Underhill calls “the intellectual, aggressive, and scientific temperament trying to extend its field of consciousness,” see the review, in the August 2007 Notices of the American Mathematical Society, of a book by Douglas Hofstadter– a writer on the nature of consciousness— by magician Martin Gardner.

The Oscar for best picture goes to…

“… And when at last one has arrived at San Sepolcro, what is there to be seen? A little town surrounded by walls, set in a broad flat valley between hills; some fine Renaissance palaces with pretty balconies of wrought iron; a not very interesting church, and finally, the best picture in the world.

The best picture in the world is painted in fresco on the wall of a room in the town hall….  Its clear, yet subtly sober colours shine out from the wall with scarcely impaired freshness….  We need no imagination to help us figure forth its beauty; it stands there before us in entire and actual splendour, the greatest picture in the world.

The greatest picture in the world…. You smile. The expression is ludicrous, of course.”

Yet not as ludicrous as the following

Cheesy Consolation

Doonesbury 2/26/04:

Maureen Dowd on
The Passion of the Christ:

“I went with a Jewish pal, who tried to stay sanguine. ‘The Jews may have killed Jesus,’ he said.  ‘But they also gave us ‘Easter Parade.’ “

— New York Times, Feb. 26, 2004

For a truly cheesy Easter parade at Harvard University, see

The Crimson Passion.