Log24

See also Icon and a fresh New York Times  obituary.

Happy birthday to Jill Abramson.

(Continued from yesterday's "earlier references" link.)

Yesterday at the Simons Foundation's Quanta Magazine :

See also earlier Log24 references to Mathieu moonshine .
I do not know the origin of this succinct phrase, taken from
an undated web page of Anne Taormina.

In memory of a dead poet —

"Relax," said the night man.
"We are programmed to receive."

* A phrase from a new book by mathematician
  Michael Harris, Mathematics without Apologies .

“Zero is a group of artists founded by Heinz Mack and
Otto Piene….” — Wikipedia

“The title ZERO was the result of months of search
and was finally found more or less by chance.
From the beginning we looked upon the term
not as an expression of nihilism – or a dada-like gag,
but as a word indicating a zone of silence and of
pure possibilities for a new beginning as at the
count-down when rockets take off-  zero is the
incommensurable zone in which the old state turns
into the new.”

— Otto Piene, 1964

(Where Entertainment Is God , continued)

In memory of artist Otto Piene — a news item from last May
at the ZERO Foundation website on an exhibition that closes tomorrow —

2014-05-15
Today is the opening of the exhibition ZERO — Zwischen Himmel und Erde
in Friedrichshafen. The Zeppelin Museum is showing wonderful artworks
all related to heaven and earth by various ZERO artists
such as Piene, Mack, Uecker, Klein, Luther, and Manzoni.
ZERO – Zwischen Himmel und Erde
Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen
15.05. – 20.07.2014
www.zeppelin-museum.de

“Oh, show me the way to the next whiskey bar”
— Song lyric from previous post

“In a technologically advanced 1939, the zeppelin Hindenburg III
arrives in New York City, mooring atop the Empire State Building.”

— Wikipedia on the first scene of the 2004 film
“Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow“

The Los Alamos Vision

“Gates said his foundation is an advocate for the Common Core State Standards
that are part of the national curriculum and focus on mathematics and language
arts. He said learning ‘needs to be on the edge’ where it is challenging but not
too challenging, and that students receive the basics through Common Core.

‘It’s great to teach other things, but you need that foundation,’ he said.”

— T. S. Last in the Albuquerque Journal , 12:05 AM Tuesday, July 1, 2014

See also the previous post (Core Mathematics: Arrays) and, elsewhere
in this journal,

“Eight is a Gate.” — Mnemonic rhyme:

(Continued from Tuesday morning)

“… Or what’s a heaven for?“

In memory of Lucia Eames, who reportedly died
on April 1, 2014:

“… Walter Gropius was her professor ….”

See also in this journal Gropius and the April 1 posts.

Related material: “As a little child.”

Yakov G. Sinai today won the 2014 Abel Prize.
Earlier, he won the Wolf Prize.

Wolf Foundation press release quoted in the March 1997
Notices of the American Mathematical Society —

On Sinai —

“He is generally recognized as the world leader
in the mathematics of statistical physics.”

This afternoon’s New York Lottery:  813 and 1857.

Unrelated remarks:  813 and  1857.

A recent addition to Barry Mazur's home page—

"December 1, 2013: Here are rough notes for
a short talk entitled The Faces of Evidence
(in Mathematics) ([PDF]) to be given at the
Cambridge Scientific Club, Dec. 5 2013."

The PDF link does not work, but some earlier remarks by
Mazur on this topic have been published elsewhere:

Related material:

The Proof and the Lie (St. Andrew's Day, 2003), and
a recent repetition of the lie in Wikipedia:

"Around 1955, Japanese mathematicians Goro Shimura 
and Yutaka Taniyama observed a possible link between
two apparently completely distinct, branches of mathematics, 
elliptic curves and modular forms."

This statement, from the article on Algebraic number theory,
was added on Oct. 22, 2013 by one "Brirush," apparently a
Temple University postdoctoral researcher, in what he rightly
called a "terrible history summary."

"These are odd facts…." — G. H. Hardy,
quoted in the previous post, "Centered"

Other odd facts:

If n  is odd, then the object at the center  
of the n×n  square is a square.
Similarly for the n×n×n  cube.

Related meditation:

“In a sense, we would see that change
arises from the structure of the object,” he said.
“But it’s not from the object changing.
The object is basically timeless.”

— Theoretical physicist quoted in a
Simons Foundation article of Sept. 17, 2013,
"A Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics"

See also "My God, it's full of… everything."

Ben Brantley reviewing a show by the X-Men patriarchs
that opened on Sunday:

"This isn’t just a matter of theatergoers chuckling
to show that they’re smart and cultured and had
damn well better be having a good time after
forking out all that money…."

I prefer reality (which includes the life of Fred Kavli) :

See also Saturday's posts Chess and Frame Tale.

Whether the patriarch Kavli, pictured above, is now having
a good time, I do not know. I hope so.

Continues.

A Brainstorm  for Jo Lyxe :

Swastika logo of the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind 
at the University of California, San Diego.

Soundtrack:  Under the Iron Sky .

(Continued from yesterday's posts, "Object of Beauty"
and "Amy's Shadow")

A winner of a Nobel Prize for X-ray crystallography stands
at the head of the New York Times  obituary list today.

In memoriam —

Some further background:

The Times  follows yesterday's egregious religious error
with an egregious scientific error:

"The technique developed by Dr. Karle and Herbert A. Hauptman,
called X-ray crystallography, is now routinely used by scientists…."

Karle was reportedly born in 1918, Hauptman in 1917.

Wikipedia on the history of X-ray crystallography:

"The idea that crystals could be used as a 
diffraction grating for X-rays arose in 1912…."

The Nobel Foundation:

"The Nobel Prize in Physics 1914 was awarded to
Max von Laue 'for his discovery of the diffraction of
X-rays by crystals.'"

"The Nobel Prize in Physics 1915 was awarded jointly to
Sir William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg 
'for their services in the analysis of crystal structure
by means of X-rays.'"

Randy Kennedy in tomorrow's print edition
of The New York Times—

Art collector Albert C. Barnes "viewed his foundation
less as a museum than as a school."

Roberta Smith in the New York Times 
print edition of May 18, 2012, on
art arrangements by Albert C. Barnes—

"Barnes’s arrangements are as eye-opening,
intoxicating and, at times, maddening as ever, maybe more so.
They mix major and minor in relentlessly symmetrical patchworks
that argue at once for the idea of artistic genius and the
pervasiveness of talent. Nearly every room is an exhibition
unto itself— a kind of art wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities…."

This journal at noon on the same day, May 18, 2012—

Balakrishnan's Banners

See also Brightness at Noon from March 25.

It Must Be Abstract
It Must Change
It Must Give Pleasure

— Parts of a poem by Wallace Stevens

“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being–the reward he seeks–the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”

– Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River

      Of Time and the River and the Frogs —

* This post's title refers to the above uploading date—  Jan. 26, 2008.

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).

On Halloween…

"Remember that for Ockham there is nothing in the universe that is
in any way universal except a concept or word: there are no real
natures shared by many things. However, things do resemble one
another, some things more closely  than others. So the various
degrees of resemblance give a foundation in reality for our conceptual
structures, such as Porphyry's tree.
Now resemblance (or similitude or likeness) is a relation.
If such relations are realities, then we can say that there are realities
out there that correspond to our conceptual structures."

— R.J. Kilcullen at Macquarie University, course labeled Phil360

"The kernel of a homomorphism is always a congruence.
 Indeed, every congruence arises as a kernel."

— Congruence Relation, section on Universal Algebra, in Wikipedia

"Beauty then is a relation."

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

"An Attempt to Understand the Problem of Universals"
is the title of a talk by Fabian Geier, University of Bamberg—

"The talk was held at Gdańsk University on May 26th 2008."

Related material— Stevie Nicks turns 60.

(A sequel to The Lost Word)

NY Lottery, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2011

The number "38" might refer, notably, to

• The old postal code  of Harvard University,
• the caliber  of one type of handgun…

… and, less notably, to a page number
     that appears in most books.

T.S. Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
was first published in 1919.*

For some background on that year, see the Harvard Class  of 1919.

For a notable instance of the page number  38, see
Poetry and Belief in the Work of T.S. Eliot ,
by Kristian Smidt (first published in 1949 by
the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters).

* "Tradition and the Individual Talent" in The Egoist
   at the Modernist Journals Project:
   Part I in Vol. 6, No. 4 (Sept. 1919),
   Parts II-III in Vol. 6, No. 5 (Dec. 1919)

"Even before Thales fell into the well, and the ancient Greeks laid the foundation
for Western philosophy, humans were engaged in the search for wisdom…."

— Introducing "The Stone," NY Times, May 16, 2010, quoted here this morning

Some have Wisdom thrust upon them.
Context— Happy Birthday Reba, 2009, and "I'll Follow a Star."

A link in the previous post to the Harvard Foundation led to a screenshot
of a long-neglected Harvard web page. That page stated yesterday that
"the Harvard Foundation 2008 Artist of the Year has not yet been announced."

It turns out to be jazz artist Herbie Hancock, who was honored at
Harvard's Sanders Theatre on Saturday, March 1, 2008.

Related material from this journal—

Call and Response

For a response from the next day,
March 1, click on the professor.

From the 7/20 Harvard Crimson—

"The scholarly expeditions undertaken by modern-day explorer and Harvard Foundation Director S. Allen Counter will be featured in a biopic produced by actor Will Smith.

…. Debbie Allen is also producing the film, and Farhad Safinia will be penning the script, Variety  magazine reported.

…. Counter said that Debbie Allen described his character as 'a mixture of Indiana Jones and Robert Langdon,' the fictional Harvard professor of symbology in Dan Brown’s novels."

Farhad Safinia is co-writer and co-producer, with Mel Gibson, of "Apocalypto."

From "The Envelope: The Awards Insider" at the LA Times, a review of the film based on Dan Brown's "Angels & Demons"—

"The script tips its hand too early, and can't quite turn Langdon into Indiana Langdon on his Last Crusade."

—  Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel  movie critic, May 15, 2009

Related material:

The Robert Jones Code—

(Click for video.)

(Pace  James Redfield)

"…after all, the word 'bolshoi' means big, great or grand."

— Celestine Bohlen, 1999

"How much for a dream?" — This journal, January 1, 2010

Star of Bolshoi Ballet Dies at 102

                                                                  I was eight—
I saw the different weights of things,
saw the vivid performance of the present,
saw the light rippling almost shuddering where her body finally
                                                                                     touched
the image, the silver film between them like something that would have
                                                                           shed itself in nature now
but wouldn’t, couldn’t, here, on tight,
between, not thinning, not slipping off to let some
                                                                       seed-down
through, no signal in it, no information …

— Jorie Graham, "The Dream of the Unified Field"

Update of 10:25 AM June 10— Click to enlarge—

“Orthodox Jews are disappearing from Jerusalem. One moment they are praying at the Western Wall, and in the blink of an eye, they seem to evaporate…. In order to build the Third Temple while being respectful of the Islamic structures on the Temple Mount, the Jews have discovered a way to access a fourth spatial dimension. They will build the Third Temple invisibly ‘above’ the Temple Mount and ‘above’ the Mosque in the direction of the fourth dimension.”

— Clifford Pickover, description of his novel Jews in Hyperspace

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

— Henry David Thoreau, conclusion of Walden

Related material: Log24 entries, morning and evening of June 11, 2009,  “Text” (June 22, 2009), and Salomon Bochner‘s remarks on space in “Eight is a Gate” (Feb. 26, 2008).

McGee Thanks the Academy:

“The ulterior motive behind this essay [“Reading Authority,” above], the purpose for which I seize this occasion, concerns the question or problem of authority. I stress at the outset my understanding of authority as the constructed repository of value or foundation of a system of values, the final effect of fetishism– in this case, literary fetishism. [Cf. Marx, Das Kapital] Reading– as in the phrase ‘reading authority’– should be grasped as the institutionally determined act of constructing authority….”

Wikipedia:

“[In Peter Pan] Smee is Captain Hook’s right-hand man… Barrie describes him as ‘Irish’ and ‘a man who stabbed without offence‘….”

Background: In yesterday’s morning entry, James Joyce as Jesuit, with “Dagger Definitions.”

A different Smee appears as an art critic in yesterday’s afternoon entry “Design Theory.”–

Smee Stabs Without Offence:

“Brock, who has a brisk mind, is a man on a mission. He read mathematical economics and political philosophy at Princeton (he has five degrees in all) and is the founder and president of Strategic Economic Decisions Inc., a think tank specializing in applying the economics of uncertainty to forecasting and risk assessment.

But phooey to all that; Brock has deeper things to think about. He believes he has cracked the secret of beautiful design. He even has equations and graphs to prove it.”

A Jesuit in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

“When may we expect to have something from you on the esthetic question?”

Beckett Bethicketted:

“Our entanglement in the wilderness of Finnegans Wake is exemplified by the neologism ‘Bethicket.’ This word condenses a range of possible meanings and reinforces a diversity of possible syntactic interpretations. Joyce seems to allude to Beckett, creating a portmanteau word that melds ‘Beckett’ with ‘thicket’ (continuing the undergrowth metaphor), ‘thick’ (adding mental density to floral density)…. As a single word ‘Bethicket’ contains the confusion that its context suggests. On the one hand, ‘Bethicket me for a stump of a beech’ has the sound of a proverbial expletive that might mean something like ‘I’ll be damned’ or ‘Well, I’ll be a son of a gun.’….”

— Stephen Dilks

At the Oscars, 2009

Related material:

Frame Tales and Dickung

 
Two reviews from the February 2008 Notices of the American Mathematical Society:

From a review of

A Certain Ambiguity
(A Mathematical Novel)
by Gaurav Suri and Hartosh Singh Bal
Princeton University Press
Hardcover, US$27.95, 281 pages —

“From the Habermas-Lyotard debate (see [1] for an introduction) to the Sokal hoax ([4]), to recent atheist manifestos on the bestseller lists (e.g., [2]) the question of foundations for intellectual thought and especially for intellectual debate has never been more critical or urgent.”

[1] M. Bérubé, What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and “Bias” in Higher Education, W. W. Norton, 2006.
[2] S. Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation, Knopf, 2006.
[4] A. Sokal and P. Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science, Picador, 1999.

— Danny Calegari of Caltech

Also in the February Notices– a review of a book, Superior Beings: If They Exist, How Would We Know?, in which the author

“.. uses elementary ideas from game theory to create situations between a Person (P) and God (Supreme Being, SB) and discusses how each reacts to the other in these model scenarios….

In the ‘Revelation Game,’ for example,
the Person (P) has two options:
1) P can believe in SB’s existence
2) P can not believe in SB’s existence
The Supreme Being also has two options:
1) SB can reveal Himself
2) SB can not reveal Himself….

… [and] goals allow us to rank all the outcomes for each player from best… to worst…. The question we must answer is: what is the Nash equilibrium in this case?”

The answer is what one might expect from the American Mathematical Society:

“… the dominant strategy for both is when SB does not reveal Himself and P does not believe in His existence.”

Other strategies are, of course, possible. See last year’s entries.

See also
the life of John Nash,

for whom the above
equilibrium is named.

Related material:

Faust in Copenhagen

and

Kernel of Eternity

Comments today on Peter Woit’s weblog entry “Deep Beauty“–

1. chris says:
   October 11th, 2007 at 1:38 am

   once we reach the point at which the templeton foundation – or any other private sponsor for that matter – is the main source of funding in a certain area of science it would be time for society to react. react by outdoing the private source and thus claiming the research topic in question firmly back into the public domain.

   if society chooses to be oblivious – well – then so be it. research in that area will then not be driven by public interest but by private interest. ultimately it is just a reflection of the value commonly assigned to a specific field.

   what i hope this will ultimately achieve is to ring the alarm bell in society that no private organization should take over research funding and direction.

   if this will not happen – well – then we are kind of lost anyways. and funding no matter what agenda behind is still better than no funding, since i firmly believe that ultimately the truth (i.e. true statements about reproducible empirical relations) will ultimately prevail and nothing else.

2. Steven H. Cullinane says:
   October 11th, 2007 at 3:53 pm

   Chris says the truth consists of “true statements about reproducible empirical relations.” He should read William Golding’s Nobel lecture: “When I consider a universe which the scientist constructs by a set of rules which stipulate that this construct must be repeatable and identical, then I am a pessimist and bow down before the great god Entropy. I am optimistic when I consider the spiritual dimension which the scientist’s discipline forces him to ignore.”

was the title of a symposium on quantum theory at Princeton last week dedicated to the late John von Neumann. The title was left undefined. In honor of von Neumann, here is some material that may help those searching for the title’s meaning:

“In chapters 19 and 20 of LILA there is a discussion about the possibility of making Zen and the Art into a movie. It opens with a scene where Robert Redford, who ‘really would like to have the film rights,’ comes to meet and negotiate with Phaedrus in his New York City hotel room. Phaedrus tells the famous actor that he can have the rights to the book, but maybe that’s just because he’s star-struck and doesn’t like to haggle. Under his excitement, Phaedrus has a bad feeling about it. He tells us that he’s been warned by several different people not to allow such a film to be made. Even Redford warned him not to do it. So what’s the problem? As it’s put at the end of that discussion, ‘Films are social media; his book was largely intellectual. That was the center of the problem.'”

— David Buchanan at robertpirsig.org

“The insight is constituted precisely by ‘seeing’ the idea in the image, the intelligible in the sensible, the universal in the particular, the abstract in the concrete.”

— Fr. Brian Cronin‘s Foundations of Philosophy, Ch. 2, “Identifying Direct Insights,” quoted in Ideas and Art

See also Smiles of a Summer Evening, the current issue of TIME, the time of this entry (7:20:11 PM ET), and Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star.

The August 2007 issue of Notices of the American Mathematical Society contains tributes to the admirable personal qualities and mathematical work of the late Harvard professor George Mackey.  For my own tributes, see Log24 on March 17, 2006,  April 29, 2006, and March 10, 2007.  For an entry critical of Mackey’s reductionism– a philosophical, not mathematical, error– see Log24 on May 23, 2007 (“Devil in the Details”).

Here is another attack on reductionism, from a discussion of the work of another first-rate mathematician, the late Gian-Carlo Rota of MIT:

“Another theme developed by Rota is that of ‘Fundierung.’ He shows that throughout our experience we encounter things that exist only as founded upon other things: a checkmate is founded upon moving certain pieces of chess, which in turn are founded upon certain pieces of wood or plastic. An insult is founded upon certain words being spoken, an act of generosity is founded upon something’s being handed over. In perception, for example, the evidence that occurs to us goes beyond the physical impact on our sensory organs even though it is founded upon it; what we see is far more than meets the eye. Rota gives striking examples to bring out this relationship of founding, which he takes as a logical relationship, containing all the force of logical necessity. His point is strongly antireductionist. Reductionism is the inclination to see as ‘real’ only the foundation, the substrate of things (the piece of wood in chess, the physical exchange in a social phenomenon, and especially the brain as founding the mind) and to deny the true existence of that which is founded. Rota’s arguments against reductionism, along with his colorful examples, are a marvelous philosophical therapy for the debilitating illness of reductionism that so pervades our culture and our educational systems, leading us to deny things we all know to be true, such as the reality of choice, of intelligence, of emotive insight, and spiritual understanding. He shows that ontological reductionism and the prejudice for axiomatic systems are both escapes from reality, attempts to substitute something automatic, manageable, and packaged, something coercive, in place of the human situation, which we all acknowledge by the way we live, even as we deny it in our theories.”

— Robert Sokolowski, foreword to Rota’s Indiscrete Thoughts

Father Robert Sokolowski Fr. Robert Sokolowski, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1962, he is internationally recognized and honored for his work in philosophy, particularly phenomenology. In 1994, Catholic University sponsored a conference on his work and published several papers and other essays under the title, The Truthful and the Good, Essays In Honor of Robert Sokolowski. — Thomas Aquinas College newsletter

The tributes to Mackey are contained in the first of two feature articles in the August 2007 AMS Notices.  The second feature article is a review of a new book by Douglas Hofstadter.  For some remarks related to that article, see Thursday’s Log24 entry “Not Mathematics but Theology.”

Mathematics and Narrative
continued…

“Now, at the urging of the UC Berkeley cognitive linguist George Lakoff, liberal America’s guru of the moment, progressive Democrats are practicing to get their own reluctant mouths around some magical new vocabulary, in the hope of surviving and eventually overcoming the age of Bush.”

“… the right’s language is now the default language for everyone.
     On the way to proposing a counterstrategy (it never really arrives), Nunberg pauses to engage in a polite disagreement with his fellow linguist George Lakoff, who has provided a rival account of the conservative ascendancy. Lakoff argues that Republicans have articulated– first for themselves and then for others– a conceptual framework that allows them to unite apparently disparate issues in a single coherent worldview …  woven together not in a philosophically consistent framework but in a narrative ‘that creates an illusion of coherence.’
     Once again, the Republicans have such a narrative– ‘declining patriotism and moral standards, the out-of-touch media and the self-righteous liberal elite … minorities demanding special privileges … disrespect for religious faith, a swollen government’– but ‘Democrats and liberals have not offered compelling narratives that could compete’ with it. Eighty pages later he is still saying the same thing. ‘The Democrats need a compelling narrative of their own.'”

Lakoff is the co-author of a book on the philosophy of mathematics, Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being.  From Wikipedia’s article on Lakoff:

“According to Lakoff, even mathematics itself is subjective to the human species and its cultures: thus ‘any question of math’s being inherent in physical reality is moot, since there is no way to know whether or not it is.’ Lakoff and Rafael E. Nunez (2000) argue at length that mathematical and philosophical ideas are best understood in light of the embodied mind. The philosophy of mathematics ought therefore to look to the current scientific understanding of the human body as a foundation ontology, and abandon self-referential attempts to ground the operational components of mathematics in anything other than ‘meat.'”

For a long list of related leftist philosophy, see The Thinking Meat Project.

Democrats seeking narratives may also consult The Carlin Code and The Prime Cut Gospel.
 

The Lincoln Brigade



Marches On.

As yesterday’s Lincoln’s Birthday entry indicated, my own sympathies are not with the “created equal” crowd.  Still, the Catholic Fascism of Franco admirer Andrew Cusack seems somewhat over-the-top.  A more thoughtful approach to these matters may be found in a recommendation by Ross Douthat at The American Scene:

Read Eve Tushnet on the virtues of The Man in the High Castle.

Related material: Log24 on Nov. 14, Nov. 15, and Nov. 16, 2003.

Another item of interest from Eve:

“Transubstantiation [is equivalent but not equal to] art (deceptive accident hides truthful substance), as vs. Plato’s condemnation of the physical & the fictive? (Geo. Steiner)”

Related material:

“In Grammars of Creation, more than in his 1989 book Real Presences, Steiner acknowledges that his argument rests on inescapably Christian foundations. In fact, he has in the past sometimes written in a strongly anti–Christian vein, while the present book reflects the influence of, among others, Miri Rubin, whose Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture is credited in a footnote. Steiner asserts that, after the Platonisms and Gnosticisms of late antiquity, it is the doctrines of incarnation and transubstantiation that mark ‘the disciplining of Western syntax and conceptualization’ in philosophy and art. ‘Every heading met with in a study of “creation,” every nuance of analytic and figural discourse,’ he says, derives from incarnation and transubstantiation, ‘concepts utterly alien to either Judaic or Hellenic perspectives– though they did, in a sense, arise from the collisions and commerce between both.’….

The incarnation of God in the Son, the transubstantiation of bread and wine into his body and blood, are ‘a mysterium, an articulated, subtly innervated attempt to reason the irrational at the very highest levels of intellectual pressure.’ ‘Uniquely, perhaps, the hammering out of the teaching of the eucharist compels Western thought to relate the depth of the unconscious and of pre-history with speculative abstractions at the boundaries of logic and of linguistic philosophy.’ Later, the ‘perhaps’ in that claim seems to have disappeared:

At every significant point, Western philosophies of art and Western poetics draw their secular idiom from the substratum of Christological debate. Like no other event in our mental history, the postulate of God’s kenosis through Jesus and of the never-ending availability of the Savior in the wafer and wine of the eucharist, conditions not only the development of Western art and rhetoric itself, but at a much deeper level, that of our understanding and reception of the truth of art– a truth antithetical to the condemnation of the fictive in Plato.

This truth reaches its unrepeated perfection in Dante, says Steiner. In Dante, ‘It rounds in glory the investigation of creativity and creation, of divine authorship and human poesis, of the concentric spheres of the aesthetic, the philosophical, and the theological. Now truth and fiction are made one, now imagination is prayer, and Plato’s exile of the poets refuted.’ In the fashionable critical theories of our day, we witness ‘endeavors of the aesthetic to flee from incarnation.’ ‘It is the old heresies which revive in the models of absence, of negation or erasure, of the deferral of meaning in late–twentieth–century deconstruction. The counter-semantics of the deconstructionist, his refusal to ascribe a stable significance to the sign, are moves familiar to [an earlier] negative theology.’ Heidegger’s poetics of ‘pure immanence’ are but one more attempt ‘to liberate our experience of sense and of form from the grip of the theophanic.’ But, Steiner suggests, attempted flights from the reality of Corpus Christi will not carry the day. ‘Two millennia are only a brief moment.’

Prequel on
Saint Cecilia’s Day

“Death itself would start
working backward.”

— Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia

Celebrity Obits, Nov. 22, 2005 —

Intelligence and
Counterintelligence
(continued):

See also the previous entry, and this follow-up:

“Shattuck’s death on Thursday… was reported by his nephew, John Shattuck, head of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, The Boston Globe reported Saturday.” – Boston.com

Related material:

“The White Witch rules Narnia,
and has brought to it
the Hundred Years of Winter.”
— The Narnia Academy

and the foundation of the
David Morrell Counterintelligence Library:

Shemp

Campion’s Day

Today is the feast of the Catholic saint Edmund Campion.  Campion, a Jesuit with a graceful prose style, would perhaps not be too deeply offended by the fact that his surname is now best known in some circles as that of a fictional character– the “Albert Campion” of Margery Allingham‘s detective stories. 

The following is from a web page devoted to Allingham’s fiction, Roger Johnson’s “Thoughts on Mr. Campion and His Family.”

The non-fictional St. Edmund Campion is of course remembered also, for instance in the names of Campion College in suburban Sydney, of Campion College at the University of Regina and of Campion Hall at the University of Oxford.

Religion at Harvard

The Children’s Hour

Harvard Magazine,
Sept.-Oct. 2004:

“With the legalization of gay marriage in Massachusetts, Harvard couples were among those who took vows…. Lowell House master Diana Eck (left) and co-master Dorothy Austin tied the knot in Memorial Church on July 4, with Rev. Peter Gomes, Plummer professor of Christian morals, officiating.”

Once in Love with Amy

Harvard’s Lowell House: “In the Dining Hall are portraits of President Lowell and his wife; his sister Amy Lowell (Pulitzer prize winning poet, and a lover of scandal…)….”

Today’s Harvard Crimson: “Stone joined members of the Foundation for lunch yesterday in Lowell House before delivering her remarks at Memorial Church last night…”

Site on Shakespeare’s Sonnets:

nothing – the word had sexual connotations, as a slang word referring to female sexual parts. Compare Hamlet:

HAMLET   Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
[Lying down at OPHELIA’s feet]
OPHELIA  No, my lord.
HAMLET   I mean, my head upon your lap?
OPHELIA  Ay, my lord.
HAMLET   Do you think I meant country matters?
OPHELIA  I think nothing, my lord.
HAMLET   That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs.
OPHELIA  What is, my lord?
HAMLET   Nothing.

— Hamlet, III.2

The First Idea

From aldaily.com,
a service of
The Chronicle of
Higher Education:

Peekaboo:

Wallace Stevens on “The First Idea”

Patty-cake:

Language, Poetry, Philology

“A specialist in Homer’s Odyssey and early Greek lyric poetry, Joseph Russo is the only American classicist among six international scholars to provide commentary for Oxford University Press’ three-volume edition of the epic poem.”

— Introduction to an inaugural lecture, “Language, Poetry, Philology, and ‘The Stateliest Measure,'” at Haverford College given by Joseph Russo on Feb. 26, 1999

Olympic Arc

Thomas Becker, president of Chautauqua Institution, on Friday, Aug. 27, 2004:

“I’m really proud of this lecture platform this year.  We started with Phil Wilcox on the first day of the season and finished with Sandra Day O’Connor.  The arc of participation between them was really amazing.”

Phil Wilcox: See 

Israel and Palestine:
Let’s Separate Myth from Reality,
by Philip C. Wilcox, Jr., President,
Foundation for Middle East Peace,
Chautauquan Daily, June 28, 2004

Sandra Day O’Connor: See

The Majesty of the Law:
Reflections of a
Supreme Court Justice,
by Sandra Day O’Connor

The O’Connor link above is to a page at the Chautauqua Bookstore.

For Justice O’Connor:

Reflections on Themis
(Log24, Aug. 17, 2004) 

For Wilcox:

The Zen of Abraham
(Same entry, different title.)

I personally was at Chautauqua only one day this season — Friday, the 13th of August.  My stops of course included the Chautauqua Bookstore, where I purchased the following:

Human cultural activity is mostly what Walker Percy astutely called “symbol-mongering.”  Of the three books above, the central one offers the best symbols.

My own version of a
Chautauqua “Versus” symbol:

The Line,
by S. H. Cullinane

For further details, see the

entries of Aug. 15, 2004.

For an “arc” symbol, see

Loretta’s Rainbow.

Ideas and Art, Part II

"We do not, of course, see  ideas."

— Roger Kimball, Minimalist Fantasies, 2003

"Idea (Lat. idea , forma , species ; Gk. idea , eidos , from idein , to see; Fr. idée ; Ger. Bild ; Begriff )

Probably to no other philosophical term have there been attached so many different shades of meaning as to the word idea. Yet what this word signifies is of much importance. Its sense in the minds of some philosophers is the key to their entire system. But from Descartes onwards usage has become confused and inconstant. Locke, in particular, ruined the term altogether in English philosophical literature…."

— The Catholic Encylopedia, 1910  

James Hillman, A Blue Fire , p. 53:

"For us ideas are ways of regarding things (modi res considerandi ), perspectives.  Ideas give us eyes, let us see …. Ideas are ways of seeing and knowing….

Our word idea  comes from the Greek eidos , which meant originally in early Greek thought, and as Plato used it, both that which one sees — an appearance or shape in a concrete sense — and that by means of which one sees.  We see them, and by means of them.  Ideas are both the shape of events, their constellation in this or that archetypal pattern, and the modes that make possible our ability to see through events into their pattern.  By means of an idea we can see the idea cloaked in the passing parade.  The implicit connection between having ideas to see with  and seeing ideas themselves suggests that the more ideas we have, the more we see, and the deeper the ideas we have, the deeper we see.  It also suggests that ideas engender other ideas, breeding new perspectives for viewing ourselves and world.

Moreover, without them we cannot 'see' even what we sense with the eyes in our heads, for our perceptions are shaped according to particular ideas …. And our ideas change as changes take place in the soul, for as Plato said, soul and idea refer to each other, in that an idea is the 'eye of the soul,' opening us through its insight and vision."

Hillman does not say where in Plato this extraordinary saying, that an idea is the eye of the soul, occurs.  He is probably wrong.

Both Kimball and Hillman seem confused.

A more sensible approach to these matters is available in Brian Cronin's Foundations of Philosophy:

"3.4 An Insight Pivots between the Abstract and the Concrete

On the one hand, an insight is dealing with data and images which are concrete and particular: Archimedes had one chalice, one King, and one particular problem to solve. On the other hand, what the insight grasps is an idea, a relation, a universal, a law; and that is abstract. The laws that Archimedes eventually formulated were universal, referring not only to this chalice but also to any other material body immersed in any other liquid at any time or any place. The insight is constituted precisely by 'seeing' the idea in the image, the intelligible in the sensible, the universal in the particular, the abstract in the concrete. We pivot back and forth between images and ideas as we search for the correct insight. First let us now clarify the difference between images, ideas and concepts…."

— From Ch. 2, Identifying Direct Insights

Cross-Referenced

†

Shortly after midnight on the night of April 22-23, I updated my entry for Shakespeare's birthday with the following quotation: 

"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

About 24 hours later, I came across the following obituary in The New York Times: 

"Edgar F. Codd, a mathematician and computer scientist who laid the theoretical foundation for relational databases, the standard method by which information is organized in and retrieved from computers, died on Friday…. He was 79."

The Times does not mention that the Friday it refers to is Good  Friday.  God will  have his little jokes.

From Computerworld.com:
1969: Edgar F. "Ted" Codd invents the relational database.	1969: Edgar F. “Ted” Codd invents the relational database. 1973: Cullinane, led by John J. Cullinane, ships IDMS, a network-model database for IBM mainframes. 1976: Honeywell ships Multics Relational Data Store, the first commercial relational database.

For a better (and earlier) obituary than the Times's, see The San Jose Mercury News of Easter Sunday.  For some thoughts on death and the afterlife appropriate to last weekend, see The Matthias Defense.

† The Exorcist, 1973
 

William Golding
and the Lost Boys

Author William Golding was born on this date in 1911.

Theater review,
‘The Terrible Tragedy of Peter Pan’
at House Theatre in Chicago

By Chris Jones

“J. M. Barrie’s famous 1904 tale of Peter Pan and the Lost Boys is fertile ground for post-modern exploration.”

See also the Stephen King novel

Hearts in Atlantis.

(Forget the movie, which does not even mention William Golding.)

For a somewhat more cheerful variation on the Lost Boys theme, see the new

Kingdom Hearts game.

Of course, mature audiences might react to this Disney production by recalling the classic question, “Why did Mickey Mouse divorce Minnie Mouse?”

See also the

Lord of the Flies game

at the Nobel Prize Foundation site.

A Time to Gather Stones Together
(Ecclesiastes 3:5)

Readings for Yom Kippur:

• “Stones,” from Jewish Heritage Online Magazine
• “The Foundation Stone: The Center of Creation,” from Jewish Heritage Online Magazine
• Many Dimensions, a novel by Charles Williams

Double Day… August 2, 2002

“Time cannot exist without a soul (to count it).” — Aristotle

The above quotation appears in my journal note of August 2, 1995, as an  epigraph on the reproduced title page of The Sense of an Ending, by Frank Kermode (Oxford University Press, 1967).

August 2, 1995, was the fortieth anniversary of Wallace Stevens’s death. On the same date in 1932 — seventy years ago today — actor Peter O’Toole was born.  O’Toole’s name appears, in a suitably regal fashion, in my journal note of August 2, 1995, next to the heraldic crest of Oxford University, which states that “Dominus illuminatio mea.”  Both the crest and the name appear below the reproduced title page of Kermode’s book — forming, as it were, a foundation for what  Harvard professor Marjorie Garber scornfully called “the Church of St. Frank” (letters to the editor, New York Times Book Review, July 30, 1995).

Meditations for today, August 2, 2002:

From page 60 of Why I Am a Catholic, by Gary Wills (Houghton Mifflin, 2002):

“Was Jesus teasing Peter when he called him ‘Rocky,’ naming him ab opposito, as when one calls a not-so-bright person Einstein?”

From page 87 of The Third Word War, by Ian Lee (A&W Publishers, Inc., New York, 1978):

“Two birds… One stone (EIN STEIN).”

From “Seventy Years Later,” Section I of “The Rock,” a poem by Wallace Stevens:

A theorem proposed between the two —

Two figures in a nature of the sun….

From page 117 of The Sense of an Ending:

“A great many different kinds of writing are called avant-garde…. The work of William Burroughs, for instance, is avant-garde.  His is the literature of withdrawal, and his interpreters speak of his hatred for life, his junk nihilism, his treatment of the body as a corpse full of cravings.  The language of his books is the language of an ending world, its aim… ‘self-abolition.'”

From “Today in History,” by The Associated Press:

“Five years ago:  ‘Naked Lunch’ author William S. Burroughs, the godfather of the ‘Beat generation,’ died in Kansas City, Mo., at age 83.”

Part of the above statement is the usual sort of AP disinformation, due not to any sinister intent but to stupidity and carelessness.  Burroughs actually died in Lawrence, Kansas. For the location of Lawrence, click on the link below.  Location matters.

http://www.mapquest.com/

From page 118 of The Sense of an Ending:

“Somewhere, then, the avant-garde language must always rejoin the vernacular.”

From the Billie Holiday songbook:

“Good mornin’, heartache.”

From page 63 of The New Yorker issue dated August 5, 2002:

“Birthday, death-day — what day is not both?” — John Updike