Log24

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Gameplayers of the Academy

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:00 am

New Game

In memory of a Jesuit who died on February 22 (see yesterday's "For the Ides of March")–

“The Game in the Ship cannot be approached as a job, a vocation, a career, or a recreation. To the contrary, it is Life and Death itself at work there. In the Inner Game, we call the Game Dhum Welur, the Mind of God."

— M. A. Foster, The Gameplayers of Zan

"… for Othello, no less than his creator Shakespeare, death without speechmaking is almost unthinkable."

— "Walter Ong," by Jeet Heer (Book & Culture, July/August 2004)

"This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood…."

— Jesuit quote at David Lavery's weblog today

See also this journal on February 22, the date of the Jesuit death. A post on that date mentions Ong and his teacher McLuhan, and displays a McLuhan figure related to the "joke" quote above–

McLuhan 'tetrad' figure with four diamonds surrounding a fifth, the medium

Click figure for background.

Ong discussed "agonistic" culture.
See "Sunday's Theater" and a film
based on the novel discussed there–

Menin... First line, in Greek, of the Iliad

Classics 101 –

IMAGE- Anthony Hopkins in 'The Human Stain'

Prof. Coleman Silk introduces
freshmen to academic values

For academic gameplayers who prefer
less emotionally challenging subjects,
there is Othello Online —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100316-NewGame.jpg

"New Game. You May Pass for White to Start."

Monday, December 11, 2023

Infamy Date: December 7th, 2016

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:46 pm

This  journal on that date —

A Steiner System Forerunner —

Midrash —

Sunday October 21, 2007

10:31 AM

Halloween
Meditations
continued from
October 31, 2005

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/Gameplayers12.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

From The Gameplayers of Zan

“The Game in the Ship cannot be approached as a job, a vocation, a career, or a recreation. To the contrary, it is Life and Death itself at work there. In the Inner Game, we call the Game Dhum Welur, the Mind of God. And that Mind is a terrible mind, that one may not face directly and remain whole. Some of the forerunners guessed it long ago– first the Hebrews far back in time, others along the way, and they wisely left it alone, left the Arcana alone.”

Monday, December 28, 2020

Childermas

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:24 pm

Related material for innocents — Siobhan Roberts
on Conway’s Game of Life in today’s New York Times .

Those desiring greater literary depth may consult
this  journal’s  Gameplayers.

Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Wake

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:29 pm

Remarks on space from 1998 by sci-fi author Robert J. Sawyer quoted
here on Sunday (see the tag "Sawyer's Space") suggest a review of
rather similar remarks on space from 1977 by sci-fi author M. A. Foster
(see the tag "Foster's Space"):

Quoted here on September 26, 2012 —

"All she had to do was kick off and flow."

— The Gameplayers of Zan

"I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay."

— Finnegans Wake

Another work by Sawyer —

Tuesday, May 10, 2016

Game Theory

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:00 pm

The following passage appeared in this journal
on the night of May 23-24, 2015.

IMAGE- A fictional vision of resurrection within a tesseract

The afternoon  of May 23, 2015, was significant
for devotees of mathematics and narrative.

Saturday, May 23, 2015

Group

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:30 pm

On the artist Hilma af Klint (1862-1944):

"She belonged to a group called 'The Five'…."

Related material — Real Life (Log24, May 20, 2015).

From that post:

IMAGE- Immersion in a fictional vision of resurrection within a tesseract

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Real Life

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:12 am

From Amazon.com —

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel  Tuesday afternoon —

A 46-year-old Jesuit priest who was a Marquette University
assistant professor of theology collapsed on campus
Tuesday morning and died, President Michael Lovell
announced to the campus community in an email….

"Rev. Lúcás (Yiu Sing Luke) Chan, S.J., died after
collapsing this morning in Marquette Hall. Just last Sunday,
Father Chan offered the invocation at the Klingler College
of Arts and Sciences graduation ceremony…."

Synchronicity check…

From this journal on the above publication date of
Chan's book — Sept. 20, 2012 —

IMAGE- Immersion in a fictional vision of resurrection within a tesseract

From a Log24 post on the preceding day, Sept. 19, 2012 —

“The Game in the Ship cannot be approached as a job,
a vocation, a career, or a recreation. To the contrary,
it is Life and Death itself at work there. In the Inner Game,
we call the Game Dhum Welur , the Mind of God."

 — The Gameplayers of Zan

Friday, January 23, 2015

Complex Symplectic Fantasy

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:08 pm

"We are not isolated free chosers,
monarchs of all we survey, but
benighted creatures sunk in a reality
whose nature we are constantly and
overwhelmingly tempted to deform
by fantasy."

—Iris Murdoch, "Against Dryness"
in Encounter , p. 20 of issue 88 
(vol. 16 no. 1, January 1961, pp. 16-20)

"We need to turn our attention away from the consoling
dream necessity of Romanticism, away from the dry
symbol, the bogus individual, the false whole, towards
the real impenetrable human person."

— Iris Murdoch, 1961

"Impenetrability!  That's what I  say!"

— Humpty Dumpty, 1871

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

St. Julia’s Day

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:23 pm

For mathematician Julia Robinson, who died on this date
in 1985, and her sister Constance Reid, who died on
October 14, 2010—

A search suggested by the "cosmic dippiness" of
a 1998 science fiction novel and by the non-dippiness of
a much better novel with closely related themes from 1977—

(Click to enlarge.)

(The use of "recursive" here is of course rather poetic, not to be
construed as meaningful in the strictly mathematical sense.
See also the term's etymology, and Working Backwards.)

Sunday, June 23, 2013

Fork

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:00 am

IMAGE- NY Times- 'Saloon Priest' and Dan Brown

IMAGE- Alyssa Milano as a child, with fork

"When you come to 
a fork in the road, take it."
— Yogi Berra

See also Deconstructing Alice.

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Flow

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:00 pm
 
From French cinema—

Duelle

"a 'non-existent myth' of a battle between
goddesses of the sun and the moon
for a mysterious blue diamond
that has the power to make
mortals immortal and vice versa"

"Moon River, wider than a mile…"

The most damaging and obstructive
cluster of ideas you face as a writer
are nearly all related to the idea of “flow.”

Like “genius.”

And “sincerity.”

And “inspiration.”

Distrust these words.

They stand for cherished myths,
but myths nonetheless.

— Verlyn Klinkenborg, 
"Several Short Sentences About Writing"       

"All she had to do was kick off and flow."

— The Gameplayers of Zan

"I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay."

— Finnegans Wake

Saturday, September 22, 2012

Occupy Space

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:00 pm

(Continued)

"The word 'space' has, as you suggest, a large number of different meanings."

— Nanavira Thera in [Early Letters. 136] 10.xii.1958

From that same letter (links added to relevant Wikipedia articles)—

Space (ākāsa) is undoubtedly used in the Suttas
to mean 'what/where the four mahābhūtas are not',
or example, the cavities in the body are called ākāsa
M.62—Vol. I, p. 423). This, clearly, is the everyday
'space' we all experience—roughly, 'What I can move
bout in', the empty part of the world. 'What you can't
ouch.' It is the 'space' of what Miss Lounsberry has so
appily described as 'the visible world of our five
senses'. I think you agree with this. And, of course, if
this is the only meaning of the word that we are
going to use, my 'superposition of several spaces' is
disqualified. So let us say 'superposition of several
extendednesses'. But when all these
extendednesses have been superposed, we get
'space'—i.e. our normal space-containing visible
world 'of the five senses'. But now there is another
point. Ākāsa is the negative of the four mahābhūtas,
certainly, but of the four mahābhūtas understood
in the same everyday sense—namely, solids (the
solid parts of the body, hair, nails, teeth, etc.),
liquids (urine, blood, etc.), heat and processes
(digestion) and motion or wind (N.B. not 'air').
These four, together with space, are the normal
furniture of our visible world 'of the five senses',
and it is undoubtedly thus that they are intended
in many Suttas. But there is, for example, a Sutta
(I am not sure where) in which the Ven. Sariputta
Thera is said to be able to see a pile of logs
successively as paṭhavi, āpo, tejo, and vāyo; and
it is evident that we are not on the same level.
On the everyday level a log of wood is solid and
therefore pathavi (like a bone), and certainly not
āpo, tejo, or vāyo. I said in my last letter that I
think that, in this second sense—i.e. as present in,
or constitutive of, any object (i.e. = rupa)—they
are structural and strictly parallel to nama and can
be defined exactly in terms of the Kummer
triangle. But on this fundamental level ākāsa has
no place at all, at least in the sense of our normal
everyday space. If, however, we take it as equivalent
to extendedness then it would be a given arbitrary
content—defining one sense out of many—of which
the four mahābhūtas (in the fundamental sense) are
the structure. In this sense (but only in this sense—
and it is probably an illegitimate sense of ākāsa)
the four mahābhūtas are the structure of space
(or spatial things). Quite legitimately, however, we
can say that the four mahābhūtas are the structure
of extended things—or of coloured things, or of smells,
or of tastes, and so on. We can leave the scientists'
space (full of right angles and without reference to the
things in it) to the scientists. 'Space' (= ākāsa) is the
space or emptiness of the world we live in; and this,
when analyzed, is found to depend on a complex
superposition of different extendednesses (because
all these extendednesses define the visible world
'of the five senses'—which will include, notably,
tangible objects—and this world 'of the five
senses' is the four mahābhūtas [everyday space]
and ākāsa).

Your second letter seems to suggest that the space
of the world we live in—the set of patterns
(superimposed) in which “we” are—is scientific space.
This I quite disagree with—if you do suggest it—,
since scientific space is a pure abstraction, never
experienced by anybody, whereas the superimposed
set of patterns is exactly what I experience—the set
is different for each one of us—, but in all of these
sets 'space' is infinite and undifferentiable, since it is,
by definition, in each set, 'what the four mahābhūtas
are not'. 

A simpler metaphysical system along the same lines—

The theory, he had explained, was that the persona
was a four-dimensional figure, a tessaract in space,
the elementals Fire, Earth, Air, and Water permutating
and pervolving upon themselves, making a cruciform
(in three-space projection) figure of equal lines and
ninety degree angles.

— The Gameplayers of Zan ,
a 1977 novel by M. A. Foster

"I am glad you have discovered that the situation is comical:
 ever since studying Kummer I have been, with some difficulty,
 refraining from making that remark."

— Nanavira Thera, [Early Letters, 131] 17.vii.1958

Thursday, September 20, 2012

Immersion

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:29 am

      Part of a New York Times  banner ad last night—

IMAGE- 'Fashion Week: Immerse Yourself'

     (Fashion week dates 2012 — 
     New York Sept. 6-13, London Sept. 14-18,
     Milan Sept. 19-25, Paris Sept. 25-Oct. 3.)

     Some related prose suggested by a link in
     last night's Log24 post—

The theory, he had explained, was that the persona
was a four-dimensional figure, a tessaract in space,
the elementals Fire, Earth, Air, and Water permutating
and pervolving upon themselves, making a cruciform
(in three-space projection) figure of equal lines and
ninety degree angles.

— The Gameplayers of Zan , a novel by M. A. Foster

IMAGE- Immersion in a fictional vision of resurrection within a tesseract

      See also, if you can find a copy, Jeff Riggenbach's 
      "Science Fiction as Will and Idea," Riverside Quarterly 
       Vol. 5, No. 3 (whole number 19, August 1972, ed. by
       Leland Sapiro et al.), 168-177.

      Some background—
      Tuesday's Simple Skill and 4D Ambassador,
      as well as Now What? from May 23, 2012.

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Game

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:00 pm

“The Game in the Ship cannot be approached as a job,
a vocation, a career, or a recreation. To the contrary,
it is Life and Death itself at work there. In the Inner Game,
we call the Game Dhum Welur , the Mind of God."

 — The Gameplayers of Zan

"When Death tells a story, 
 you really have to listen."

— The Book Thief , cover

Saturday, May 7, 2011

Braids

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:48 pm

Margalit Fox in this evening's online New York Times—

Joanna Russ, Who Drew Women to Sci-Fi, Dies at 74

"Ms. Russ was best known for her novel 'The Female Man,' published in 1975 and considered a landmark. With that book, which told the intertwined stories of four women at different moments in history, she helped inaugurate the now flourishing tradition of feminist science fiction."

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110507-Gameplayers.jpg

See also Gameplayers of Zan in this journal.

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Page Mark

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:01 pm

“Multispeech is… like a kind of multidimensional speech…."

— langmaker.com on The Gameplayers of Zan

The Hunt for Blue August concludes…

As quoted today in The New York Times—

“We only have so much time to leave a mark.”
— Carl Paladino

"Now, it’s time to turn the page."
— President Obama

A search in this journal for the President's phrase yields…

For Jenny

Quality

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08A/081015-WW.jpg

Click on the mark for some context.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Preforming

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 11:00 am

Photo caption in NY Times  today— a pianist "preforming" in 1967. (See today's previous post.)

The pianist's life story seems in part to echo that of Juliette Binoche in the film "Bleu." Binoche appeared in this journal yesterday, before I had seen the pianist in today's Times  obituaries. The Binoche appearance was related to the blue diamond in the film "Duelle " (Tuesday morning's post) and the saying of Heraclitus "immortals mortal, mortals immortal" (Tuesday afternoon's post).

This somewhat uncanny echo brings to mind Nabokov—

Life Everlasting—based on a misprint!
I mused as I drove homeward: take the hint,
And stop investigating my abyss?
But all at once it dawned on me that this
Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme;
Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream
But topsy-turvical coincidence,
Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense.

Whether sense or nonsense, the following quotation seems relevant—

"Archetypes function as living dispositions, ideas in the Platonic sense, that preform and continually influence our thoughts and feelings and actions." –C.G. Jung in Four Archetypes: Mother, Rebirth, Spirit, Trickster, the section titled "On the Concept of the Archetype."

That section is notable for its likening of Jungian archetypes to Platonic ideas and to axial systems of crystals. See also "Cubist Tune," March 18 —

 

Blue tesseract cover<br /><br /> art, blue crystals in 'Bleu,' lines from 'Blue Guitar'

Saturday, March 20, 2010

Field Theory

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:29 pm

Parker’s Wake

A continuation of Wednesday’s “Field of Dreams” link —

Internet Movie Database comment —

“The Kid From Left Field” is a wonderful baseball film made in the early fifties and breathes the nostalgia of that time period. Child actor Billy Chapin becomes a batboy for the woeful Bisons (a copy of the old St. Louis Browns) and proceeds to inform the players of how they can correct their individual problems. Unbeknownst to the team, Chapin’s wisdom is from his father, a washed-up player who has become a peanut vendor and lacks confidence and courage– in spite of his obvious baseball knowledge. Pretty soon, Chapin becomes the nine year old manager of the team with dramatic results that bind father to son; you can’t help but root for the Bisons! A baseball fantasy– but filled with much innocence and charm.

“…dramatic results that bind father to son….”

Not to mention the Holy Ghost. See Fess Parker, who died Thursday, in the “Left Field” film and in an essay by Roger Cooke in the April Notices of the American Mathematical Society—

Life on the Mathematical Frontier: Legendary Figures and Their Adventures

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100320-Field.jpg

Fess Parker in
“The Kid from Left Field,” 1953

Possible associative links between recent Log24 posts and the baseball theme of the April AMS Notices—

  1. The film “Field of Dreams” mentioned above is a resurrection story.
  2. Wednesday’s link to simultaneous multiple-level associations leads to the Gameplayers of Zan cover that also appears in Thursday’s post. That cover deals with a resurrection myth in Gameplayers.
  3. The Finnegans Wake resurrection myth is mentioned in Wednesday’s post “Spring Training.”

Associative links, though entertaining, have of course their limitations in logical argument.

A notable recent example– Jon Stewart’s parody of Glenn Beck.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Cubist Tune

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:29 am

For Desconvencida

Blue tesseract cover art, blue crystals in 'Bleu,' lines from 'Blue Guitar'

See also Wallace Stevens,
"The Relations between Poetry and Painting"

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Variations on a Theme

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:29 pm

Today's previous entry was "Gameplayers of the Academy."

More on this theme–

David Corfield in the March 2010
European Mathematical Society newsletter—

    "Staying on the theme of games, the mathematician
Alexandre Borovik* once told me he thinks of mathematics
as a Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. If
so, it would show up very clearly the difference between
internal and external viewpoints. Inside the game people
are asking each other whether they were right about
something they encountered in it– 'When you entered
the dungeon did you see that dragon in the fireplace or
did I imagine it?' But someone observing them from the
outside wants to shout: 'You’re not dealing with anything
real. You’ve just got a silly virtual reality helmet on.' External
nominalists say the same thing, if more politely, to
mathematical practitioners. But in an important way the
analogy breaks down. Even if the players interact with
the game to change its functioning in unforeseen ways,
there were the original programmers who set the bounds
for what is possible by the choices they made. When they
release the next version of the game they will have made
changes to allow new things to happen. In the case of
mathematics, it’s the players themselves who make these
choices. There’s no further layer outside.
    What can we do then instead to pin down internal reality?"

*See previous references to Borovik in this journal.

Related material:

The Diamond Theory vs. the Story Theory of Truth,

Infantilizing the Audience, and

It's Still the Same Old Story…God of War III

Saturday, March 13, 2010

ART WARS continued…

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 5:01 pm

Remember the Sabbath Day

Wikipedia states that painter R.B. Kitaj (see previous references) was the model for the protagonist of the Philip Roth novel Sabbath's Theater.

A Google search shows that the article (no longer online) on Kitaj cited as a source by Wikipedia does indeed make this claim– 

In-Your-Face Outsider | Jerusalem Report | Jerusalem Post
By MATT NESVISKY … not least, Philip Roth, who modeled
the protagonist of the 1995 novel "Sabbath's Theater" largely after Kitaj. …
www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?apage=2&cid=1192380767901…

The rest of Nesvisky's article may or may not support his claim. It is available by subscribing to HighBeam.

Related material–

The New York Times on Oct. 24, 2007–

R. B. Kitaj, Painter of Moody Human Dramas, Dies at 74

By MARTHA SCHWENDENER
R. B. Kitaj was an American artist who became influential in Britain with figurative and Pop Art paintings that ran against the grain of 1960s and ’70s abstraction.

Ileana Sonnabend, Art World Figure, Dies at 92

By ROBERTA SMITH

Ileana Sonnabend’s eye, shrewdness and lasting alliance with her first husband, Leo Castelli, made her one of the most formidable contemporary art dealers of her time.

"Sonnabend" means "Saturday" in German.

Some say the Sabbath is Saturday, others say Sunday.

Here is the Log24 entry for the day that
Kitaj and Sonnabend died– a Sunday—

Sunday October 21, 2007

10:31 AM

Halloween
Meditations
continued from
October 31, 2005

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/Gameplayers12.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

From The Gameplayers of Zan

“The Game in the Ship cannot be approached as a job, a vocation, a career, or a recreation. To the contrary, it is Life and Death itself at work there. In the Inner Game, we call the Game Dhum Welur, the Mind of God. And that Mind is a terrible mind, that one may not face directly and remain whole. Some of the forerunners guessed it long ago– first the Hebrews far back in time, others along the way, and they wisely left it alone, left the Arcana alone.”

The New York Times on Sonnabend:

… Also talked about was the Sonnabend 1991 show of Jeff Koons’s “Made in Heaven” series of paintings and sculptures that showed the artist engaged in sexual acts with his wife, Ilona Staller.

Mrs. Sonnabend was variously described as “an iron marshmallow” and “a cross between Buddha and Machiavelli.” Short and plump, she was grandmotherly in appearance from a relatively early age due in part to an illness that necessitated a wig.

Her genteel, old Europe manner belied an often imperious yet bohemian and self-deprecating personality. Her soft, fluty voice often left a listener unprepared for the force of her comments, which she could deliver in at least five languages.

Happy Women's History Month.

Sunday, October 25, 2009

For Dan Brown Fans

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:12 pm

Noetic Symbology

Midrash:

"The Game in the Ship cannot be approached as a job, a vocation, a career, or a recreation. To the contrary, it is Life and Death itself at work there. In the Inner Game, we call the Game Dhum Welur, the Mind of God. And that Mind is a terrible mind, that one may not face directly and remain whole. Some of the forerunners guessed it long ago — first the Hebrews far back in time, others along the way, and they wisely left it alone, left the Arcana alone. That is why those who studied the occult arts were either fools or doomed. Fools if they were wrong, and most were; doomed if right. The forerunners know, and stay away."

— The Gameplayers of Zan

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Tuesday March 17, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 11:07 am
Deep Structures

The traditional 'Square of Opposition'

The Square of Oppositon
at Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy


The Square of Opposition diagram in its earliest known form

The Square of Opposition
in its original form

"The diagram above is from a ninth century manuscript of Apuleius' commentary on Aristotle's Perihermaneias, probably one of the oldest surviving pictures of the square."

— Edward Buckner at The Logic Museum

From the webpage "Semiotics for Beginners: Paradigmatic Analysis," by Daniel Chandler:
 

The Semiotic Square of Greimas

The Semiotic Square

"The structuralist semiotician Algirdas Greimas introduced the semiotic square (which he adapted from the 'logical square' of scholastic philosophy) as a means of analysing paired concepts more fully (Greimas 1987,* xiv, 49). The semiotic square is intended to map the logical conjunctions and disjunctions relating key semantic features in a text. Fredric Jameson notes that 'the entire mechanism… is capable of generating at least ten conceivable positions out of a rudimentary binary opposition' (in Greimas 1987,* xiv). Whilst this suggests that the possibilities for signification in a semiotic system are richer than the either/or of binary logic, but that [sic] they are nevertheless subject to 'semiotic constraints' – 'deep structures' providing basic axes of signification."

* Greimas, Algirdas (1987): On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory (trans. Paul J Perron & Frank H Collins). London: Frances Pinter

Another version of the semiotic square:

Rosalind Krauss's version of the semiotic square, which she calls the Klein group

Krauss says that her figure "is, of course, a Klein Group."

Here is a more explicit figure representing the Klein group:

The Klein Four-Group, illustration by Steven H. Cullinane

There is also the logical
    diamond of opposition —

The Diamond of Opposition (figure from Wikipedia)

A semiotic (as opposed to logical)
diamond has been used to illustrate
remarks by Fredric Jameson,
 a Marxist literary theorist:

"Introduction to Algirdas Greimas, Module on the Semiotic Square," by Dino Felluga at Purdue University–

 

The semiotic square has proven to be an influential concept not only in narrative theory but in the ideological criticism of Fredric Jameson, who uses the square as "a virtual map of conceptual closure, or better still, of the closure of ideology itself" ("Foreword"* xv). (For more on Jameson, see the [Purdue University] Jameson module on ideology.)

Greimas' schema is useful since it illustrates the full complexity of any given semantic term (seme). Greimas points out that any given seme entails its opposite or "contrary." "Life" (s1) for example is understood in relation to its contrary, "death" (s2). Rather than rest at this simple binary opposition (S), however, Greimas points out that the opposition, "life" and "death," suggests what Greimas terms a contradictory pair (-S), i.e., "not-life" (-s1) and "not-death" (-s2). We would therefore be left with the following semiotic square (Fig. 1):

A semiotic 'diamond of opposition'

 

As Jameson explains in the Foreword to Greimas' On Meaning, "-s1 and -s2"—which in this example are taken up by "not-death" and "not-life"—"are the simple negatives of the two dominant terms, but include far more than either: thus 'nonwhite' includes more than 'black,' 'nonmale' more than 'female'" (xiv); in our example, not-life would include more than merely death and not-death more than life.

 

* Jameson, Fredric. "Foreword." On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory. By Algirdas Greimas. Trans. Paul J. Perron and Frank H. Collins. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1976.

 

 

"The Game in the Ship cannot be approached as a job, a vocation, a career, or a recreation. To the contrary, it is Life and Death itself at work there. In the Inner Game, we call the Game Dhum Welur, the Mind of God."

— The Gameplayers of Zan, by M.A. Foster

"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
— Thomas Pynchon,
 Gravity's Rainbow

Crosses used by semioticians
to baffle their opponents
are illustrated above.

Some other kinds of crosses,
and another kind of opponent:

Monday, July 11, 2005

Logos
for St. Benedict's Day

Click on either of the logos below for religious meditations– on the left, a Jewish meditation from the Conference of Catholic Bishops; on the right, an Aryan meditation from Stormfront.org.

Logo of Conference of Catholic Bishops     Logo of Stormfront website

Both logos represent different embodiments of the "story theory" of truth, as opposed to the "diamond theory" of truth.  Both logos claim, in their own ways, to represent the eternal Logos of the Christian religion.  I personally prefer the "diamond theory" of truth, represented by the logo below.

Illustration of the 2x2 case of the diamond theorem

See also the previous entry
(below) and the entries
  of 7/11, 2003.
 

Sunday, July 10, 2005

Mathematics
and Narrative
 
Click on the title
for a narrative about

Nikolaos K. Artemiadis

Nikolaos K. Artemiadis,
 (co-) author of

Artemiadis's 'History of Mathematics,' published by the American Mathematical Society
 

From Artemiadis's website:
1986: Elected Regular Member
of the Academy of Athens
1999: Vice President
of the Academy of Athens
2000: President
of the Academy of Athens
Seal of the American Mathematical Society with picture of Plato's Academy

 

"First of all, I'd like to
   thank the Academy…"

— Remark attributed to Plato

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Tuesday December 16, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:00 pm
The Square Wheel
(continued)

From The n-Category Cafe today:

David Corfield at 2:33 PM UTC quoting a chapter from a projected second volume of a biography:

"Grothendieck’s spontaneous reaction to whatever appeared to be causing a difficulty… was to adopt and embrace the very phenomenon that was problematic, weaving it in as an integral feature of the structure he was studying, and thus transforming it from a difficulty into a clarifying feature of the situation."

John Baez at 7:14 PM UTC on research:

"I just don’t want to reinvent a wheel, or waste my time inventing a square one."

For the adoption and embracing of such a problematic phenomenon, see The Square Wheel (this journal, Sept. 14, 2004).

For a connection of the square wheel with yesterday's entry for Julie Taymor's birthday, see a note from 2002:

Wolfram's Theory of Everything
and the Gameplayers of Zan.

Related pictures–

From Wolfram:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08A/081216-WolframWalsh.gif

A Square

From me:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08A/081216-IChingWheel.gif

A Wheel

Monday, December 15, 2008

Monday December 15, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 3:09 pm
Happy Birthday,
Julie Taymor

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/Gameplayers12.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

"Julie Taymor… will be directing Helen Mirren in a big-screen adaptation of The Tempest. Dame Helen, in a gender-switch from the original, will be playing Prospera, the usurped Duchess possessed of a vast library and magical powers."

— John Murphy at Bardolatry.com on November 21, 2008

A vast library…

On searching for Garden of Eden patterns (GEP's):

"The grid is a staircase to the Universal…."

— Rosalind Krauss, quoted here on Weyl's birthday, 2004

"I find the whole topic of GEPs a deeply interesting one, from many viewpoints: mathematical, philosophical, physical….

… the obvious problem is, that the required computational time is growing rapidly with the size of the grid, and even for a small grid, like 4×4 (=16 cells) there are 216=65536 possible patterns…."

— cateye at RichardDawkins.net

… and magical powers

The date of cateye's post was Sunday, October 21, 2007.

For related material see Log24 on Sunday, October 21, 2007.
 

Sunday, May 11, 2008

Sunday May 11, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:31 am
May and Zan

May Swenson, left, and Zan Knudson, right

May Swenson (left)
and Zan Knudson (right)

In memory of poet May Swenson and sports novelist Rozanne Ruth “Zan” Knudson:

Maureen Dowd in today’s New York Times:

“It’s a similar syndrome to the one Katharine Hepburn’s star athlete and her supercilious fiancé have in ‘Pat and Mike.’

The fiancé is always belittling Hepburn, so whenever he’s in the stands, her tennis and golf go kerflooey. Finally, her manager, played by Spencer Tracy, asks the fiancé to stay away from big matches, explaining, ‘You are the wrong jockey for this chick.’

‘You know, except when you’re around, we got a very valuable piece of property here,’ he says, later adding, ‘When you’re around, she’s no good, she’s dead, see?'”

Girl in tesseract on cover of  'The Gameplayers of Zan'

Summary of M. A. Foster’s
The Gameplayers of Zan:

“Then she has a vision of herself,
enclosed by an unfolded hypercube,
and then an immense screen
behind it covered by complex,
     ever-shifting patterns….”

“Christ! What are
 patterns for?”
— Amy Lowell   

“Does the word ‘tesseract’
mean anything to you?“
— Robert A. Heinlein

Friday, May 9, 2008

Friday May 9, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:31 am
Cubist Language Game

"Philosophers ponder the idea
 of identity: what it is to give
 something a name on Monday
 and have it respond to 
  that name on Friday…."

— Bernard Holland 

Monday:

From Log24 on
August 19, 2003
and on
Ash Wednesday, 2004:
a reviewer on
An Instance of the Fingerpost::

"Perhaps we are meant to
 see the story as a cubist
 retelling of the crucifixion."

Related material
for today's anniversay
of the birth of philosopher
Jose Ortega y Gasset:

Cubism as Multispeech
and
Halloween Meditations
(illustrated below)

Cover of 'The Gameplayers of Zan,' by M.A. Foster

"Modern art…
will always have
the masses against it."
— Ortega y Gasset, 1925    

Sunday, March 2, 2008

Sunday March 2, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:31 pm
Practical Magic

Halloween 2005:

“They don’t understand
what it is to be awake,
To be living
on several planes at once
Though one cannot speak
with several voices at once.”

— T. S. Eliot,
The Family Reunion

Margaret Wertheim with fellow tesseract authors

Several voices:

Margaret Wertheim in today’s
Los Angeles Times and at
The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace,

Linda Dalrymple Henderson, and

Madeleine L’Engle and husband.

From Wertheim’s Pearly Gates:

Wertheim's 'Pearly Gates of Cyberspace,' page 200
“There is such a thing
as a tesseract.”

— Madeleine L’Engle   

Sunday, October 21, 2007

Sunday October 21, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:31 am
Halloween
Meditations
continued from
October 31, 2005

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/Gameplayers12.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

From The Gameplayers of Zan:

“The Game in the Ship cannot be approached as a job, a vocation, a career, or a recreation. To the contrary, it is Life and Death itself at work there. In the Inner Game, we call the Game Dhum Welur, the Mind of God. And that Mind is a terrible mind, that one may not face directly and remain whole. Some of the forerunners guessed it long ago– first the Hebrews far back in time, others along the way, and they wisely left it alone, left the Arcana alone.”

Sunday, May 13, 2007

Sunday May 13, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 am
In Memoriam
 
Dr. John K. Lattimer,
 
who died Thursday:

Dr. John K. Lattimer, who died Thursday, May 10, 2007

From The Gameplayers of Zan:

“The kind of space that the ship perceives, operates in, is to creatures such as you and I, chaotic, meaningless, and dangerous, when perceived directly, if we can at all. To confront it directly is destructive to the primate mind, indeed the whole vertebrate nervous system…. Basic to the universe: that its inmost reality cannot be perceived. A limit. So we interpose a symbolizer, and that translates the view into something we can perceive, and control….”

“…I see; the symbolizer portrays a Game….”

 
The Legend of the Green Knight

Click on pictures for details.

Friday, May 11, 2007

Friday May 11, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:30 pm
Today’s Lottery Commentary:

Lonesome No More!

In keeping with the spirit of previous Log24 entries, here is today’s Pennsylvania Lottery commentary.  This afternoon’s entry suggests an interpretation of today’s numbers as comments on the new film “Georgia Rule.”

Pennsylvania Lottery today:
Mid-day 384
Evening 952

Today’s mid-day number, 384, is the number of symmetries of the tesseract, a geometric figure illustrated on the cover of the novel The Gameplayers of Zan (see, for instance, May 10, 2007).  That novel suggests an interpretation of today’s evening number, 952, as addressing (literally) the subject of Life.

See the address mathforum.org/library/view/952.html.

From that address:

“The Game of Life is played on a field of cells, each of which has eight neighbors (adjacent cells). A cell is either occupied (by an organism) or not. The rules for deriving a generation from the previous one are these: Death – If an occupied cell has 0, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8 occupied neighbors, the organism dies (0, 1: of loneliness; 4 thru 8: of overcrowding). Survival – If an occupied cell has two or three neighbors, the organism survives to the next generation. Birth – If an unoccupied cell has three occupied neighbors, it becomes occupied.”

Relevance to the film “Georgia Rule”: lonesomeness, generations, and the Lord’s name–

Georgia is a “lonesome and decent widow in wholesome Hull, Idaho…. her framed motto is ‘Count Your Blessings’ and she’s ready to ram [a] soap bar into your mouth if you insult the Lord’s name.” –David Elliott, San Diego Union-Tribune, May 11, 2007

There is not universal agreement on just what is the Lord’s name. Perhaps it includes the number 952.

From The Gameplayers of Zan:

“The Game in the Ship cannot be approached as a job, a vocation, a career, or a recreation. To the contrary, it is Life and Death itself at work there. In the Inner Game, we call the Game Dhum Welur, the Mind of God. And that Mind is a terrible mind, that one may not face directly and remain whole. Some of the forerunners guessed it long ago– first the Hebrews far back in time, others along the way, and they wisely left it alone, left the Arcana alone.”

From Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations:

“Nothing can be produced out of nothing.”
— 10th edition, 1919, page 952

See also “Zen and Language Games“
and “Is Nothing Sacred?“

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Thursday May 10, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:31 am
Thanks to Xangan JadedFey
for the following
Commentary
on the previous entry:

Wikipedia entry - Green

Related material:

All Hallows’ Eve, 2005 —

Tesseract on the cover of The Gameplayers of Zan

— as well as
Balanchine’s Birthday
and the color worn by
Jean Butler in
Women of the Sidhe
(Wednesday’s entry).

Friday, April 20, 2007

Friday April 20, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:31 pm
Speech

In Grand Rapids today…

"… Bush spoke and answered audience questions for nearly 90 minutes inside East Grand Rapids High School in suburban Grand Rapids….

After leaving the school, Bush's motorcade stopped at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in downtown Grand Rapids, where he stood silently for a few moments after placing a bouquet of white roses at Ford's burial site on the museum grounds. The 38th president, who grew up in Grand Rapids, died Dec. 26 at age 93."

Multispeech

Mich. Lottery Apr. 20, 2007: Day 019, Night 001

 

For the meaning of the lottery icons
above, see this morning's entry and
an entry that it links to —
Time's Labyrinth continued —
of March 8, 2007.

For the meaning of multispeech,
see the entries of
All Hallows' Eve, 2005:

Tesseract on the cover of The Gameplayers of Zan
 
"There is such a thing
as a tesseract."
— A Wrinkle in Time 
 

Friday, December 8, 2006

Friday December 8, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 am
An Instance
of the Fingerpost
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061208-Date.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
 
"CRUCIAL (from Lat. crux, a cross),
that which has the form of a cross…
 From Francis Bacon's expression
instantia crucis (taken, as he says, from
the finger-post or crux at cross-roads)"
 
— Encyclopaedia Britannica,
the classic 11th edition (1911)
 
"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
— Gravity's Rainbow  
 
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060614-EvolutionBegins2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Kate Beckinsale, adapted from
poster for Underworld: Evolution
(DVD release date 6/6/6)

 
There is such a thing
as a tesseract.
— A Wrinkle in Time  
 
Related material:
 
The tesseract on the cover of
The Gameplayers of Zan
(All Hallows' Eve, 2005), and
 
A Last Stitch in Time…or
A Map of the Map
of Kierkegaard's World:

"Appropriating the Button-molder's
words to Peer Gynt, he would say,
'We'll meet at the next crossroads…
and then we'll see–
I won't say more.'"

Monday, December 4, 2006

Monday December 4, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:01 am
Descent of the God

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061204-Theo2.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Related material:

All Hallows’ Eve,
2005:

Multispeech

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/Gameplayers12.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

as well as

C. S. Lewis,
That Hideous Strength,
Chapter 15,
“The Descent of the Gods,”

and
Charles Williams,
“The Carol of Amen House“:

Beauty arose of old
And dreamed of a perfect thing,
Where none shall be angry or cold
Or armed with an evil sting;

Where the world shall be made anew,
For the gods shall breathe its air,
And Phoebus Apollo there-through
Shall move on a golden stair.

(For the musical score, see
The Masques of Amen House.)

See also
A Mass for Lucero.

Monday, October 16, 2006

Monday October 16, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:00 am

Characters

Two items from a Wikipedia watchlist today:

1. User Loyola added a list of central characters to the article on The Glass Bead Game.

2. A dialogue between the Wikipedia characters Prof02 and Charles Matthews continues.

Item 2 seems almost to echo item 1.

The Bead Game, a classic novel by Hermann Hesse, is, in part, a commentary on German cultural history, and the Prof02-Matthews dialogue concerns the Wikipedia article on Erich Heller, a noted scholar of German cultural history.

Matthews is an expert on the game of Go. The Bead Game article says that

“The Game derives its name from the fact that it was originally played with tokens, perhaps analogous to those of an abacus or the game Go….

Although invented after Hesse’s death, Conway’s Game of Life can be seen as an example of a Go-like glass bead game with surprisingly deep properties; since it can encode Turing machines, it contains in some sense everything.”

For some related thoughts on cellular automata (i.e., Conway’s game) and Go, see The Field of Reason with its links Deep Game, And So To Bed.

For some related thoughts on Turing, see the November 2006 Notices of the American Mathematical Society (special issue on Turing).

For some related religious reflections, see Wolfram’s Theory of Everything and the Gameplayers of Zan, as well as the Log24 entries of last Halloween.

Monday, October 9, 2006

Monday October 9, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 am
ART WARS:
To Apollo

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/grid3x3.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

“This is the garden of Apollo,
the field of Reason….”
John Outram, architect

To Apollo (10/09/02)
Art Wars: Apollo and Dionysus (10/09/02)
Balanchine’s Birthday (01/09/03)
Art Theory for Yom Kippur (10/05/03)
A Form (05/22/04)
Ineluctable (05/27/04)
A Form, continued (06/05/04)
Parallelisms (06/06/04)
Ado (06/25/04)
Deep Game (06/26/04)
Gameplayers of Zen (06/27/04)
And So To Bed (06/29/04)
Translation Plane for Rosh Hashanah (09/15/04)
Derrida Dead (10/09/04)
The Nine (11/09/04)
From Tate to Plato (11/19/04)
Art History (05/11/05)
A Miniature Rosetta Stone (08/06/05)
High Concept (8/23/05) 
High Concept, Continued (8/24/05)
Analogical Train of Thought (8/25/05)
Today’s Sermon: Magical Thinking (10/09/05)
Balance (10/31/05)
Matrix (11/01/05)
Seven is Heaven, Eight is a Gate (11/12/05)
Nine is a Vine (11/12/05)
Apollo and Christ (12/02/05)
Hamilton’s Whirligig (01/05/06)
Cross (01/06/06)
On Beauty (01/26/06)
Sunday Morning (01/29/06)
Centre (01/29/06)
New Haven (01/29/06) 
Washington Ballet (02/05/06)
Catholic Schools Sermon (02/05/06)
The Logic of Apollo (02/05/06)
Game Boy (08/06/06)
Art Wars Continued: The Krauss Cross (09/13/06)
Art Wars Continued: Pandora’s Box (09/16/06)
The Pope in Plato’s Cave (09/16/06)
Today’s Birthdays (09/26/06)
Symbology 101 (09/26/06)

Sunday, November 13, 2005

Sunday November 13, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:48 am
Reunion:
An Introduction
to Multispeech

From Log24, Oct. 31, 2005:

“They don’t understand
what it is to be awake,
To be living
on several planes at once
Though one cannot speak
with several voices at once.”

— T. S. Eliot,
The Family Reunion

From Finnegans Wake:

“And even if Humpty shell fall frumpty times as awkward again in the beardsboosoloom of all our grand remonstrancers there’ll be iggs for the brekkers come to mournhim, sunny side up with care….”

From Urban Legends Reference Pages:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051113-Reunion.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

See also
the previous two entries,
Ten is a Hen and Structure,
about a mother and child.

Saturday, November 12, 2005

Saturday November 12, 2005

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:28 pm
Glory Season

"…his eyes ranged the Consul's books disposed quite neatly… on high shelves around the walls: Dogme et Ritual de la Haute Magie, Serpent and Siva Worship in Central America, there were two long shelves of this, together with the rusty leather bindings and frayed edges of the numerous cabbalistic and alchemical books, though some of them looked fairly new, like the Goetia of the Lemegaton of Solomon the King, probably they were treasures, but the rest were a heterogeneous collection…."

— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, Chapter VI

"… when Saul does reach for a slim leather-bound volume Eliza cannot help but feel that something momentous is about to happen.  There is care in the way he carries the book on the short journey from its shelf, as if it were constructed not of leather and parchment but of flesh and blood….
    "Otzar Eden HaGanuz," Saul says.  "The Hidden Eden.  In this book, Abulafia describes the process of permutation…. Once you have mastered it, you will have mastered words, and once you have mastered words, you will be ready to receive shefa."

— Bee Season: A Novel

"In the Inner Game, we call the Game Dhum Welur, the Mind of God."

— The Gameplayers of Zan, a novel featuring games based on cellular automata

"Regarding cellular automata, I'm trying to think in what SF books I've seen them mentioned. Off the top of my head, only three come to mind:

The Gameplayers of Zan M.A. Foster
Permutation City Greg Egan
Glory Season David Brin"

— Jonathan L. Cunningham, Usenet

    "If all that 'matters' are fundamentally mathematical relationships, then there ceases to be any important difference between the actual and the possible. (Even if you aren't a mathematical Platonist, you can always find some collection of particles of dust to fit any required pattern. In Permutation City this is called the 'logic of the dust' theory.)….
    … Paul Durham is convinced by the 'logic of the dust' theory mentioned above, and plans to run, just for a few minutes, a complex cellular automaton (Permutation City) started in a 'Garden of Eden' configuration — one which isn't reachable from any other, and which therefore must have been the starting point of a simulation….  I didn't understand the need for this elaborate set-up, but I guess it makes for a better story than 'well, all possible worlds exist, and I'm going to tell you about one of them.'"

— Danny Yee, review of Permutation City

"Y'know, I never imagined the competition version involved so many tricky permutations."

— David Brin, Glory Season, 1994 Spectra paperback, p. 408
 

Related material:
 
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051112-EdenFigs.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Figure 2

 

 

"… matter is consciousness expressed in the intermixing of force and form, but so heavily structured and constrained by form that its behaviour becomes describable using the regular and simple laws of  physics. This is shown in Figure 2.
    The glyph in Figure 2 is the basis for a kabbalistic diagram called the Etz Chaiim, or Tree of Life. The first principle of being or consciousness is called Keter, which means Crown. The raw energy of consciousness is called Chokhmah or Wisdom, and the capacity to give form to the energy of consciousness is called Binah, which is sometimes translated as Understanding, and sometimes as Intelligence. The outcome of the interaction of force and form, the physical world, is called Malkhut or Kingdom.  This is shown… in Figure 3."

Figure 3

"This quaternary is a Kabbalistic representation of God-the-Knowable, in the sense that it the most abstract representation of God we are capable of comprehending….
    God-the-Knowable has four aspects, two male and two female: Keter and Chokhmah are both represented as male, and Binah and Malkhut are represented as female. One of the titles of Chokhmah is Abba, which means Father, and one of the titles of Binah is Imma, which means Mother, so you can think of Chokhmah as God-the-Father, and Binah as God-the-Mother. Malkhut is the daughter, the female spirit of God-as-Matter, and it would not be wildly wrong to think of her as Mother Earth. And what of God-the-Son? Is there also a God-the-Son in Kabbalah? There is…."

— A Depth of Beginning: Notes on Kabbalah by Colin Low (pdf)

See also
Cognitive Blending and the Two Cultures,
Mathematics and Narrative,
Deep Game,
and the previous entry.

Monday, October 31, 2005

Monday October 31, 2005

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:23 am

Halloween
Meditations

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/Gameplayers12.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

"They don't understand
what it is to be awake,
To be living
on several planes at once
Though one cannot speak
with several voices at once."

— T. S. Eliot,
The Family Reunion

"Multispeech is
a mode of communication…
which facilitates
direct idea transference
at high speed
and with 'multiple channels'
like a kind of
 multidimensional speech –
described in contrast to
normal language
which is, of course, strictly
linear and one-dimensional."

— langmaker.com on
The Gameplayers of Zan

"Examples are the
stained-glass windows
of knowledge."

— Vladimir Nabokov

"necess yet again from bridge of brainbow oyotecraven stare decesis
on landaway necessity timeslast the arnings ent and tided turn yet
beastfall nor mindstorms neither in their canceling sarved cut the line
that binds ecessity towarn and findaway twill open pandorapack
wishdearth amen amenusensis opend the mand of min apend the pain
of durthwursht vernichtung desiree tolight and eadly dth cessity sesame

We are the key."

— Roger Zelazny,
Eye of Cat

See also Finnegans Wake.

Tuesday, June 29, 2004

Tuesday June 29, 2004

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:22 pm
And So To Bed

Advanced Study (6/26/04), continued…

Part I: Ulysses

When?

Going to dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc's auk's egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler.

Where?

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04A/bullet.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

— Ulysses, conclusion of Ch. 17

 

Part II: Badcoc

A Visual Meditation for

the Feast of St. Peter

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04A/040629-Badcoc.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

For further details on this structure, see

Magic Squares, Finite Planes,
and Points of Inflection
on Elliptic Curves,
by Ezra Brown, and

Visualizing GL(2, p)
by Steven H. Cullinane.

For a more literary approach
to this structure, see

Balanchine's Birthday (Jan. 9, 2003),
Art Theory for Yom Kippur (Oct. 5, 2003),
A Form (May 22, 2004),
Ineluctable (May 27, 2004),
A Form, continued (June 5, 2004),
Parallelisms (June 6, 2004),
Deep Game (June 26, 2004), and
Gameplayers of Zen (June 27, 2004).

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04A/040629-Players.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

To appreciate fully this last entry
on Gameplayers,
one must understand
the concept of "suicide"
in the game of Go
and be reminded
by the fatuous phrase of the
Institute of Contemporary Art
quoted in Gameplayers —
"encompassed by 'nothing' " —
of John 1:5.

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04A/040629-Commentary.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Sunday, June 27, 2004

Sunday June 27, 2004

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:11 pm

Gameplayers of Zen

"The void, the ineffable, the sublime,
nonsense, nihilism, zero—
all are encompassed by 'nothing.' "

— Institute of Contemporary Art,
Philadelphia

"The Zen disciple sits for long hours silent and motionless, with his eyes closed. Presently he enters a state of impassivity, free from all ideas and all thoughts. He departs from the self and enters the realm of nothingness. This is not the nothingness or the emptiness of the West. It is rather the reverse, a universe of the spirit in which everything communicates freely with everything, transcending bounds, limitless."

— Yasunari Kawabata, Nobel lecture, 1968

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04A/040627-Prize.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Saturday, June 26, 2004

Saturday June 26, 2004

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:03 am
Deep Game

The entry Ado of June 25, 2004 contains a link to an earlier entry, A Form, continued, of June 5, 2004.  This in turn contains a link to a site by Wolfgang Wildgen which contains the following:

“Historically, we may say that the consequence of Bruno’s parallel work on cosmology and artificial memory is a new model of semantic fields which was so radical in its time that the first modern followers (although ignorant of this tradition) are the Von-Neumann automata and the neural net systems of the 1980s (cf. Wildgen 1998: 39, 237f).”

Wildgen, W. 1998. Das kosmische Gedächtnis. Kosmologie, Semiotik und Gedächtniskunst im Werke von Giordano Bruno. Frankfurt/Bern: Lang.

For an applet illustrating
the above remarks, see

Gedächtniskunst:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04A/040626-Neighbors.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors. 
Figure A

Neighborhood in a
Cellular Automaton
by Adam Campbell

For more of the Gedächtnis
in this Kunst, see the following
Google search on shc759:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04A/040626-Search.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Figure B

Note that the reference to “forerunners” in fig. B occurs in a journal entry of June 12, 2002. See also the reference to a journal entry of the following day, June 13, 2002, in last Tuesday’s Dirty Trick.

Those who have viewed Campbell’s applet (see  fig. A) may appreciate the following observation of poet and Dante translator Robert Pinsky:

“… a grid, and a flow–
that is the essence of terza rima….”

— Poetry, Computers, and Dante’s Inferno

For some related remarks
on the muses and epic poetry,
see a paper on Walter Benjamin:

“Here the memory (Gedächtnis) means
‘the epic faculty par excellence.’ “
(Benjamin, Der Erzähler, 1936: in
Gesammelte Schriften, 1991, II.2, 453)

— Benjamin on Experience,
Narrative, and History (pdf)

One possible connection to the muses is, as noted in a link in yesterday’s Ado, via George Balanchine.

An apt link to epic poetry (aside from the reference to Dante above) is, via the June 12, 2002, entry, to the epic The Gameplayers of Zan (the third reference in fig. B above).

The applet linked below fig. A very nicely illustrates the “structured chaos” of a space described by automata theory.  For a literary approach to such a space, see the Gameplayers entry.

For the benefit of art critic Robert Hughes, who recently made a distinction between “fast art” and “slow art,” the Campbell applet has a convenient speed control.
 

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