Log24

Friday, September 8, 2023

Life Coaches

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:33 am

Lilydale and Rain , by Like No. 90 (Rain is the one on the left) —

A perhaps more useful coach . . .

Some prose by Harrington —

By 1956, Fromm was dining at Suzuki’s part-time home in New York City, and talking with him about ways in which Zen could contribute to a wholesale reimagining of psychoanalytic therapeutics and theory (see Friedman and Schreiber 2013). By this time, also, Fromm was himself spending considerable periods of time at a new home in Cuernavaca, Mexico. At one point he suggested that Suzuki consider moving in with him permanently. When Suzuki politely declined, Fromm conceived instead a major conference based in Mexico that would try to take stock of the entire current state of the conversation between Zen and psychotherapy (see Friedman and Schreiber 2013). In 1957, some fifty psychotherapists—double the original expected number—participated in a week of presentations and discussions. Fromm later recalled the event as a magical time: what began as a traditional conference with the usual ‘over-emphasis on thoughts and words' changed over a few days, as people 'became more concentrated and more quiet.'

See as well a web page on what is now called "shadow work" —
an activity completely different  from the "shadow work" described 
some years ago by Ivan Illich, the so-called "Prophet of Cuernavaca."

Sunday, July 16, 2023

D-Day Science Death

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:44 am

A New York Times  obituary yesterday reported the 
June 6 death, at 91, of a Harvard professor who dealt with
the relations between science and society —

“ 'Everett was one of a new generation of social historians
of science who insisted that it was not enough to pay attention
to the internal intellectual story of science,' Anne Harrington,
the Franklin L. Ford professor of the history of science at Harvard,
said by email. 'The field needed to attend also to how science was
shaped by and also helped shape the conditions of the social world.' ”

Consider as well Scarlett Johansson on Alan Watts in "Her" (2013)
and Harrington on intellectual history in Cuernavaca . . .

By 1956, Fromm was dining at Suzuki’s part-time home in New York City, and talking with him about ways in which Zen could contribute to a wholesale reimagining of psychoanalytic therapeutics and theory (see Friedman and Schreiber 2013). By this time, also, Fromm was himself spending considerable periods of time at a new home in Cuernavaca, Mexico. At one point he suggested that Suzuki consider moving in with him permanently. When Suzuki politely declined, Fromm conceived instead a major conference based in Mexico that would try to take stock of the entire current state of the conversation between Zen and psychotherapy (see Friedman and Schreiber 2013). In 1957, some fifty psychotherapists—double the original expected number—participated in a week of presentations and discussions. Fromm later recalled the event as a magical time: what began as a traditional conference with the usual ‘over-emphasis on thoughts and words' changed over a few days, as people 'became more concentrated and more quiet.'

A search in this  journal for D-Day related material yields
posts tagged "Shadow Hacking."

"Please wait as your operating system is initiated."

Monday, June 22, 2020

The Long Hello…

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 1:51 am

Continues.

"In July, 1960, having just received a doctorate from Harvard
and a research and training fellowship from the National Institute
of Mental Health, I drove, together with my wife, Sandylee,
from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Cuernavaca, Mexico."

— Michael Maccoby, June 26, 2014,
"Building on Erich Fromm's Scientific Contributions"

This is the Michael Maccoby of . . .

First published, with a less lurid cover,  in 1958 by Arlington Books
of Cambridge, Mass.

What appears to be that 1958 edition, with the Maccoby introduction,
is available as a PDF —

http://paragoninspects.com/articles/pdfs/temp/operators_and_things.pdf .

Some Harvard-related material — See Leary and 6 Prescott .

Sunday, January 19, 2020

For 6 Prescott Street*

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:01 pm

"Freshman Seminar Program Department Administrator Corinna S. Rohse
described the program’s courses, which allow students to study subjects
that vary from Sanskrit to the mathematical basis for chess, as
'jewel-like:  small and incredibly well-cut.' "

— The Harvard Crimson , Dec. 10, 2008

For remarks related to Sanskrit, chessboard structure, and "jewel-like" 
mathematics, see A Prince of Darkness (Log24, March 28, 2006).

See also Walsh Functions in this journal and …

Lecture notes on dyadic harmonic analysis
(Cuernavaca, 2000)

— Dr. Maria Cristina Pereyra

Compare and contrast these remarks of Pereyra with the following
remarks, apparently by the same Corinna S. Rohse quoted above.

* Location of the Harvard Freshman Seminar program in the 2008
article above. The building at 6 Prescott was moved there from 
5 Divinity Avenue in 1978. When the seminar program was started
in the fall of 1959, it was located in a house at 8 Prescott St. (In 
1958-1959 this was a freshman dorm, the home of Ted Kaczynski.)

Saturday, September 10, 2016

Annals of Psychopharmacology

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:45 pm

The New Yorker , issue dated Feb. 9, 2015 —

"After trying magic mushrooms in Cuernavaca, in 1960,
Leary conceived the Harvard Psilocybin Project, to study
the therapeutic potential of hallucinogens. His involvement
with LSD came a few years later."

Related viewing —

Thursday, March 3, 2016

Metaphors

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:19 pm

A rose on a Harvard University Press book cover (2014) —

A Log24 post's "lotus" (2004) —

A business mandorla (2016) —

Saturday, August 10, 2013

Amor

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:29 pm

Ya la ronda llega aqui.

Friday, January 8, 2010

The Nexus

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:00 pm
From Google today, some excerpts from the result of the search “define:nexus”–

  • link: the means of connection between things linked in series
  • a connected series or group
    wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
  • In computing, Nexus is the security kernel in Microsoft’s delayed NGSCB initiative. It provides a secure environment for trusted code to run in. Code running in Nexus mode is out of reach of untrusted applications.
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_(computing)
  • A Nexus is a place equidistant from the five elements as explained in the TV series Charmed. Using this as a point of reference, it is quite possible that there could be several Nexus points of power scattered throughout the world, though rare. …
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_(Charmed)
  • A line-mode browser is a form of web browser that is operated from a single command line.
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_(web_browser)
This search was suggested by a book review in today’s New York Times that mentions both the Harvard classic The Varieties of Religious Experience and some religious experiences affecting my own Harvard class– that of 1964.

Cuernavaca, Mexico, in August 1960 was the site of what Harvard’s Timothy Leary later called the deepest religious experience of his life.

For some other experiences related to Harvard and Cuernavaca, see a search on those two terms in this journal.

The book under review is titled “The Harvard Psychedelic Club.” My own experiences with the Harvard-Cuernavaca nexus might more appropriately be titled “The Harvard Alcoholic Club.”

Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Tuesday May 8, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:56 pm
The Public Square

Center of Town, Cuernavaca, from Paul Goodman's Communitas

On the words “symbology” and “communitas” (the former used, notably, as the name of a fictional field at Harvard in the novel The Da Vinci Code)–

Symbology:

“Also known as ‘processual symbolic analysis,’ this concept was developed by Victor Turner in the mid-1970s to refer to the use of symbols within cultural contexts, in particular ritual. In anthropology, symbology originated as part of Victor Turner’s concept of ‘comparative symbology.’ Turner (1920-1983) was professor of Anthropology at Cornell University, the University of Chicago, and finally he was Professor of Anthropology and Religion at the University of Virginia.” —Wikipedia

Symbology and Communitas:

 From Beth Barrie’s
  “Victor Turner“—
“‘The positional meaning of a symbol derives from its relationship to other symbols in a totality, a Gestalt, whose elements acquire their significance from the system as a whole’ (Turner, 1967:51). Turner considered himself a comparative symbologist, which suggests he valued his contributions to the study of ritual symbols. It is in the closely related study of ritual processes that he had the most impact.

The most important contribution Turner made to the field of anthropology is his work on liminality and communitas. Believing the liminal stage to be of ‘crucial importance’ in the ritual process, Turner explored the idea of liminality more seriously than other anthropologists of his day.

As noted earlier Turner elaborated on van Gennep’s concept of liminality in rites of passage. Liminality is a state of being in between phases. In a rite of passage the individual in the liminal phase is neither a member of the group she previously belonged to nor is she a member of the group she will belong to upon the completion of the rite. The most obvious example is the teenager who is neither an adult nor a child. ‘Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial’ (Turner, 1969:95). Turner extended the liminal concept to modern societies in his study of liminoid phenomena in western society. He pointed out the similarities between the ‘leisure genres of art and entertainment in complex industrial societies and the rituals and myths of archaic, tribal and early agrarian cultures’ (1977:43).

Closely associated to liminality is communitas which describes a society during a liminal period that is ‘unstructured or rudimentarily structured [with] a relatively undifferentiated comitatus, community, or even communion of equal individuals who submit together to the general authority of the ritual elders’ (Turner, 1969:96).

The notion of communitas is enhanced by Turner’s concept of anti-structure. In the following passage Turner clarifies the ideas of liminal, communitas and anti-structure:

I have used the term ‘anti-structure,’… to describe both liminality and what I have called ‘communitas.’ I meant by it not a structural reversal… but the liberation of human capacities of cognition, affect, volition, creativity, etc., from the normative constraints incumbent upon occupying a sequence of social statuses (1982:44).

It is the potential of an anti-structured liminal person or liminal society (i.e., communitas) that makes Turner’s ideas so engaging. People or societies in a liminal phase are a ‘kind of institutional capsule or pocket which contains the germ of future social developments, of societal change’ (Turner, 1982:45).

Turner’s ideas on liminality and communitas have provided scholars with language to describe the state in which societal change takes place.”

Turner, V. (1967). The forest of symbols: Aspects of Ndembu ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process: structure and anti-structure. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co.

Turner, V. (1977). Variations of the theme of liminality. In Secular ritual. Ed. S. Moore & B. Myerhoff. Assen: Van Gorcum, 36-52.

Turner, V. (1982). From ritual to theater: The human seriousness of play. New York: PAJ Publications.

Related material on Turner in Log24:

Aug. 27, 2006 and Aug. 30, 2006.  For further context, see archive of Aug. 19-31, 2006.

Related material on Cuernavaca:

Google search on Cuernavaca + Log24.

Friday, May 19, 2006

Friday May 19, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:07 pm
Women-Only
Meeting at Princeton

From May 15 through May 26, there is a women-only meeting on zeta functions at the  Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.  Today’s activities:

8:00- 9:45 a.m. Breakfast (Dining Hall)
9:00- 9:30 a.m. T-shirt Sale, Harry’s Bar – Dining Hall
9:30-10:00 a.m. Depart for Princeton University (talks, lunch, campus and art museum tour, and dinner)

No movie?

From Log24, July 27, 2003:

“…my despair with words as instruments of communion is often near total.”

— Charles Small, Harvard ’64 25th Anniversary Report, 1989 (See 11/21/02).

Perhaps dinner and a movie?
The dinner — 
at Formaggio in Cuernavaca.
The movie — Michael.

Lucero
(Bright Star),
portrayed by
Megan Follows

 

Hoc est enim
corpus meum…

See also
A Mass for Lucero.


Related material:

Women’s History Month–
Global and Local: One Small Step

Tuesday, December 6, 2005

Tuesday December 6, 2005

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:33 am
Lasso
 
  In memory of…

CUERNAVACA, Mexico – Spanish singer Gloria Lasso, who made her name recording romantic ballads in Latin America and Paris, died in her sleep on Sunday at her home in Cuernavaca. She was 83.
 

Today's Harvard Crimson–

"Pudding Show Features
Wild West Theme"

From yesterday's entry,
a tribute to Olivia Newton-John:

"At the still point,
there the dance is."
— T. S. Eliot

Xanadu (1980)

For related material, see

Balanchine's Birthday (1/9/03)
and Deep Game (6/26/04).

 

 

 

 


For more on Balanchine,
Olivia Newton-John, Sunday,
 and Eliot's "still point,"
see the previous entry.

For more Harvard humor,
see The Crimson Passion.

Thursday, March 11, 2004

Thursday March 11, 2004

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:28 pm

Sequel

From an entry of July 27, 2003…

Catholic Tastes, Part I:

“…my despair with words as instruments of communion is often near total.”

— Charles Small, Harvard ’64 25th Anniversary Report, 1989 (See 11/21/02).

Perhaps dinner and a movie?
The dinner — 
at Formaggio in Cuernavaca.
The movie — Michael.

Lucero
(Bright Star),
portrayed by
Megan Follows

Hoc est enim
corpus meum…

See also
A Mass for Lucero.

Catholic Tastes, Part II:

A Catholic priest on “The Passion of the Christ”:

“By the time it’s over, the make-up artists give his skin the texture of spaghetti marinara.”

— The Rev. Richard A. Blake, S.J., professor of fine arts and co-director of the film studies program at Boston College, in America magazine, issue dated March 15, 2004.

Related material:

“I’m waiting for Mel’s sequel:

‘He’s back. Christ Almighty!
The Resurrection.
This time, it’s personal.’ “

— Bruce Feirstein in The New York Observer

Sunday, July 27, 2003

Sunday July 27, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:59 pm

Catholic Tastes

In memory of New York Times music critic Harold C. Schonberg, who died Saturday, July 26, 2003:

Nous Voici Dans La Ville – A Christmas song from 15th century France (midi by John Philip Dimick).

In memory of my own youth:

Formaggio
Address Paseo del Conquistador # 144 Food Type Italian Dress Casual Tel 777-313-0584
Comment Chef Lorenzo Villagra is formally trained in Italian Cuisine. Great food and views of the valley of Cuernavaca.

In memory of love:

Volverán del amor en tus oídos

Las palabras ardientes a sonor;

Tu corazón de su profundo sueño

Tal vez despertará;

Pero mudo y absorto y de rodillas,

Como se adora a Dios ante su altar,

Como yo te he querido…desengáñate,

¡Así no te querrán!

— from “Rima LIII“
    by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
   (1836-1870)

Translation by Young Allison, 1924:

Burning words of love will come
Again full oft within thine ears to sound;
Perchance thy heart will even be aroused
From its sleep profound;

But mute and prostrate and absorbed,
As God is worshipped in His holy fane,
As I have loved thee…undeceive thyself:
Thou wilt not be thus loved again!

The Robert Lowell version of
the complete poem by Bécquer:

Will Not Come Back
(Volverán)

Dark swallows will doubtless come back killing
the injudicious nightflies with a clack of the beak:
but these that stopped full flight to see your beauty
and my good fortune… as if they knew our names–
they’ll not come back. The thick lemony honeysuckle,
climbing from the earthroot to your window,
will open more beautiful blossoms to the evening;
but these… like dewdrops, trembling, shining, falling,
the tears of day–they’ll not come back…
Some other love will sound his fireword for you
and wake your heart, perhaps, from its cool sleep;
but silent, absorbed, and on his knees,
as men adore God at the altar, as I love you–
don’t blind yourself, you’ll not be loved like that.

“…my despair with words as instruments of communion is often near total.”

— Charles Small, Harvard ’64 25th Anniversary Report, 1989 (See 11/21/02).

Perhaps dinner and a movie?
The dinner — 
at Formaggio in Cuernavaca.
The movie — Michael.

Lucero
(Bright Star),
portrayed by
Megan Follows

 

Hoc est enim
corpus meum…

See also
A Mass for Lucero.

See, too, my entry for the feast day of
Saint Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer,
which happens to be December 22.

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