Log24

From Harvest Moon Day, 2019 —

From yesterday —

From St. Bridget's Day, 2012 —

See also Hermann Weyl and T. S. Eliot on time. 

Season 2 Teaser of "The Peripheral" —

Non-fiction —

I did not attempt a solution of the above red-dot problem, but others
have done some related work —

Vide  https://www.quora.com/Is-it-possible-to-construct-a-straight-line-
through-a-point-on-a-circle-that-is-perpendicular-to-that-circles-diameter-
with-the-Euclidean-straightedge-alone/log .

Some related Log24 remarks: "The Dotted Line," Sept. 21, 2021.

See also the Thurston link in the previous post.

The phrase "binary opposition" in the previous post suggests
a review of some binary-related concepts —

Boole at Cork —

From a post on St. Finbarr's Day 2015 —

From http://www.chosentwo.com/buffy/quotes/harvest.php —

Introduction to a review of two books in
The American Interest , June 17, 2014:

“A believer and an atheist seek out their antitheses.
Do they meet somewhere in the middle,
or pass in the murk of half-baked pseudo-syntheses?”

Soundtrack:

“Waiting for the harvest, and the time of reaping,
We shall come rejoicing, passing in the murk.”

Related material:

This morning’s passage by Friedrich Gundolf.
For some backstory, see Gundolf in
Secret Germany: Stefan George and His Circle ,
by Robert E. Norton, Cornell University Press, 2002.

For the late Carolyn Cassady, once a wife of Neal Cassady
(Dean Moriarty of Jack Kerouac's classic novel On the Road ).
She reportedly died at 90 in England on Friday, September 20,
2013.

From a post in this journal on the night of September 20-21,
with waning Harvest Moon:

Click on "Aooo" for some related posts, tagged "Howl."

Benedict XVI, before he became Pope:

“… a purely harmonious concept of beauty is not enough…. Apollo, who for Plato’s Socrates was ‘the God’ and the guarantor of unruffled beauty as ‘the truly divine’ is absolutely no longer sufficient.”

Tom O’Bedlam:

“I know more than Apollo….“

Wikipedia:

“The lapis manalis (Latin: ‘stone of the Manes‘) was a name given to two sacred stones used in the Roman religion. One covered a gate to Hades, abode of the dead….

One such stone covered the mundus Cereris, a pit thought to contain an entrance to the underworld….

The… mundus was located in the Comitium, on the Palatine Hill. This stone was ceremonially opened three times a year, during which spirits of the blessed dead (the Manes) were able to commune with the living. The three days upon which the mundus was opened were August 24, October 5, and November 8. Fruits of the harvest were offered to the dead at this time.”

Yesterday’s entry, Absurdities, quoted Erich Heller:

“All relevant objective truths are born and die as absurdities. They come into being as the monstrous claim of an inspired rebel and pass away with the eccentricity of a superstitious crank.”

The context for this remarkable saying is Heller’s essay “The Hazard of Modern Poetry.” (See p. 270 in the links below.)

Discussing “the century of Pascal and Hobbes,” he says (see the link to p. 269 below) that

“… as for spiritual cunning, it was in the conceits of metaphysical poetry, in the self-conscious ambiguities of poetical language (there are, we are told, as many types of it as deadly sins), and in the paradoxes of Pascal’s religious thought. For ambiguity and paradox are the manner of speaking when reality and symbol, man’s mind and his soul, are at cross-purposes.”

Heller’s description of “relevant objective truths” as “absurdities” seems to be an instance of such ambiguity and paradox. For further details, see

The Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modern German Literature and Thought (Harvest paperback, 1975)–

“The Hazard of Modern Poetry” (pp. 263-300), Section 1, pages

263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272.

For material related to Pascal, see the five Log24 entries ending on D-Day, 2008.

For material related to Hobbes, see the five Log24 entries ending on St. Patrick’s Day, 2007.

Summer of ’36

Another Opening
of Another Show

“When I cast my mind back to that summer of 1936 different kinds of memories offer themselves to me. We got our first wireless set that summer– well, a sort of a set; and it obsessed us. And because it arrived as August was about to begin, my Aunt Maggie– she was the joker of the family– she suggested we give it a name. She wanted to call it Lugh after the old Celtic God of the Harvest. Because in the old days August the First was La Lughnasa, the feast day of the pagan god, Lugh; and the days and weeks of harvesting that followed were called the Festival of Lughnasa.”

From the film “Contact”–

Jodie Foster and the
opening of the 1936 Olympics

Lughnasa — An Irish harvest festival.

"It was usually celebrated on the nearest Sunday to August 1st." —Chalice Centre

Related material:

1. Dancing at Lughnasa, a play by Brian Friel
2. Natasha's Dance, an entry in this journal
3. Dancing at Lughnasa, an entry in this journal from August 3, 2003

The “greatest generation” theme from Art Wars– April 7, 2003 continues in two obituaries from this morning’s New York Times:

The first obituary says that Goldberg

“saw abstract painting… as ‘still the primary visual challenge of our time. It might get harder and harder to make an abstract image that’s believable, but I think that just makes the challenge greater.'”  The Times says that Goldberg was a veteran of Merrill’s Marauders in World War II (as well as of the last century’s art wars).

The second obituary notes that Astor’s books include A Blood-Dimmed Tide (a phrase from Yeats)– an account of the Battle of the Bulge– and a biography of Dr. Josef Mengele.

Both men died on Sunday, December 30, 2007. From Log24 on that date, an abstract image and a cinematic portrait of Dr. Mengele:

From Andrew Cusack’s weblog:

April 21, 2005

‘For Christ and Liberty’

Though [it is] a purely Protestant institution (literally), I am rather fond of Patrick Henry College. Indeed, it takes some courage in this day and age to only admit students willing to sign a ten-point profession of Protestant Reformed faith. They also happen to have an old-fashioned ball featuring ‘English country dancing, delicacies such as cream puffs and truffles and leisurely strolls about the scenic grounds of the historic Selma Plantation’.

Anyhow, the college, whose motto is ‘For Christ and Liberty’, was visited [by] Anthony Esolen, a contributing editor to Touchstone magazine, who makes these comments:

Many of the points Esolen commends are things I hope will be found in the colleges of my university when I get around to starting it. I particularly admire that Patrick Henry College’s young men and women are just that, according to Esolen. This is all too often hard to achieve in modern American higher education, where students are quite often just elderly adolescents. (Though I suspect this has more to do with parents and family than education).

The absurdist drinking age that the Federal government underhandedly coerced each state into passing hinders maturity as well. Indeed, when I start the first college or colleges of the university I’m planning, each will have a private college bar which will serve anyone over the age of 16 or so. (Probably at the barman or barmaid’s discretion). Civil disobedience is the only solution.

Though the graduates Patrick Henry College provides will be Protestant (at least at the time of their graduation), I have no doubt that they will act as leaven to raise up the social and political life of our United States. I’m not particularly fond that they proudly advertise their commendation as “One of America’s Top Ten Conservative Colleges”. I’m not of the view that colleges ought to be ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal’ per se. They ought to be seen more as communities of inquisitive, curious, intelligent people united in the quest for truth. Labels like ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ are far too narrow and allow the simple-minded to pidgeon-hole things which are too complex for such monikers.

But anyhow, cheers for Patrick Henry College.

Operation Playmate:

11:01 AM

On this date in 1938, Louis Armstrong and his orchestra recorded “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

On this date in 1961, Saint Gary Cooper died.

From my Jan. 2, 2003, entry:

Faces of the Twentieth Century:
The Harvest Continues

“I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens
    to glean our Saviour;
And, éyes, héart, what looks, what lips
    yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer,
    of rounder replies?”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins,
   “Hurrahing in Harvest”

“Cowboy, take me away.
Fly this girl as high as you can
into the wild blue.”

— The Dixie Chicks

From my March 31, 2003, entry:

“During the Gulf War, Playboy magazine’s celebrated Centerfolds reached out to U.S. military men and women… with their ‘Operation Playmate’ project….

Now, in light of the war in Iraq, ‘Operation Playmate’ has returned.”

Entertainment Weekly, May 2, 2003:

Perhaps, in heaven, Dixie Chick Natalie “Mattress Dancing” Maines will provide terpsichorean instruction. 

Etymology: Latin Terpsichor,
from Greek Terpsikhor,
from feminine of terpsikhoros,
dance-loving : terpein, to delight
+ khoros, dance.

See, too, my entry for Beltane (May 1), the day that death claimed the 13th Episcopal bishop of New York City.

All of these events are not without interest, but it is not easy to fit them into one coherent story, as Robert Penn Warren once requested:

“The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.”

It is perhaps relevant that, as T. S. Eliot well knew, there can be no dance except in time, and that the time of my May 1 entry is 5:13, today’s date in another guise.  To paraphrase an Eliot line, 

“Hurry up please, it’s 5/13.”

Faces of the Twentieth Century:
The Harvest Continues

“I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And, éyes, héart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Hurrahing in Harvest”

“Cowboy, take me away.
Fly this girl as high as you can
into the wild blue.”

— The Dixie Chicks

See
“Culture Clash at Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil“
in my notes of December 11, 2002.