Log24

Mary McCarthy's philosophical remark in the previous post
suggests further investigation of the number 281 . . .

Another way to secure 281 –

See also "Diamond Pivot" in this journal.

"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore…."

— Edgar Allan Poe, 1845 (link added)

"The infamous pseudohistorian Eric Temple Bell
begins his book 'The Magic of Numbers' as follows:

The hero of our story is Pythagoras…."

— John Baez, June 20, 2006

Related material —

See also "Temple Bell" in this  journal.

This post was suggested by previous posts of 
February 29, 2008, and of March 1, 2008.

The writer quoted in the latter, Ava Chitwood,
reportedly died on November 1, 2012 —
All Saints' Day. See a post from that  date.

See also Legespiel  in this journal.

Here is a link to a copy of  the home page of a Turkish
author quoted here on May 4, 2012… in honor of
archaeologist Crawford Greenewalt Jr., who reportedly
died on that date. Greenewalt was an expert on the
ancient city of Sardis, in what is now western Turkey.

The May 4 quote was about 
"Heraclitus’s Aion and His Transformations."

“… Which makes it a gilt-edged priority that one  of us
 gets into that Krell lab and takes that brain boost.”

— American adaptation of Shakespeare's Tempest , 1956

From "The Onto-theological Origin of Play:
Heraclitus and Plato," by Yücel Dursun, in
Lingua ac Communitas  Vol 17 (October 2007)—

"Heraclitus’s Aion and His Transformations

 The saying is as follows:

αἰὼν παῖς ἐστι παίζων, πεττεύων·
παιδὸς ἡ βασιληίη

(Aion is a child playing draughts;
the kingship is the child’s)

(Krell 1972: 64).*

 * KRELL, David Farrell.
   “Towards an Ontology of Play:
   Eugen Fink’s Notion of Spiel,”
   Research in Phenomemology ,
   2, 1972: 63-93.

This is the translation of the fragment in Greek by Krell.
There are many versions of the translation of the fragment….."

See also Child's Play and Froebel's Magic Box.

Update of May 5— For some background
from the date May 4 seven years ago, see
The Fano Plane Revisualized.

For some background on the word "aion,"
see that word in this journal.

Heisenberg on Heraclitus

From Physics and Philosophy , by Werner Heisenberg, 1958, reprinted by Penguin Classics, 2003—

Page 28—

… In the philosophy of Heraclitus of Ephesus the concept of Becoming occupies the foremost
place. He regarded that which moves, the fire, as the basic element. The difficulty, to reconcile
the idea of one fundamental principle with the infinite variety of phenomena, is solved for him by
recognizing that the strife of the opposites is really a kind of harmony. For Heraclitus the world is
at once one and many, it is just 'the opposite tension' of the opposites that constitutes the unity
of the One. He says: 'We must know that war is common to all and strife is justice, and that all
things come into being and pass away through strife.'

Looking back to the development of Greek philosophy up to this point one realizes that it has
been borne from the beginning to this

Page 29—

stage by the tension between the One and the Many. For our senses the world consists of an
infinite variety of things and events, colors and sounds. But in order to understand it we have to
introduce some kind of order, and order means to recognize what is equal, it means some sort
of unity. From this springs the belief that there is one fundamental principle, and at the same
time the difficulty to derive from it the infinite variety of things. That there should be a material
cause for all things was a natural starting point since the world consists of matter. But when one
carried the idea of fundamental unity to the extreme one came to that infinite and eternal
undifferentiated Being which, whether material or not, cannot in itself explain the infinite variety
of things. This leads to the antithesis of Being and Becoming and finally to the solution of
Heraclitus, that the change itself is the fundamental principle; the 'imperishable change, that
renovates the world,' as the poets have called it. But the change in itself is not a material cause
and therefore is represented in the philosophy of Heraclitus by the fire as the basic element,
which is both matter and a moving force.

We may remark at this point that modern physics is in some way extremely near to the
doctrines of Heraclitus. If we replace the word 'fire' by the word 'energy' we can almost repeat
his statements word for word from our modern point of view. Energy is in fact the substance
from which all elementary particles, all atoms and therefore all things are made, and energy is
that which moves. Energy is a substance, since its total amount does not change, and the
elementary particles can actually be made from this substance as is seen in many experiments on
the creation of elementary particles. Energy can be changed into motion, into heat, into light
and into tension. Energy may be called the fundamental cause for all change in the world. But this
comparison of Greek philosophy with the ideas of modern science will be discussed later.

* See earlier uses of the phrase in this journal. Further background— Hopkins and Heraclitus.

  "This is in point of form Heraclitus' masterpiece,
   the most perfectly symmetrical of all the fragments."

    — Charles H. Kahn

Sybil on the Beach

"I was waiting for you," said the young man. "What's new?"

"What?" said Sybil.

"What's new? What's on the program?"

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

— Heraclitus in
   Death by Philosophy,
   by Ava Chitwood

Related material:

International Journal of the Classical Tradition—

“Ava Chitwood, ‘The Anonymous Philosopher of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain: A Heraclitean Hero in a Homeric World,’ IJCT 11 (2004-2005), pp. 232-243.

1997’s surprise best-seller, Cold Mountain, is the first novel of North Carolina native and travel writer, Charles Frazier. Two ancient Greek authors shape and drive the novel, set in the post-war Southern Appalachians of 1865. Homer’s Odyssey frames the novel: the hero Inman undergoes epic adventures after the war, has his own Penelope waiting, and travels back to a land as remote as any island, Cold Mountain, North Carolina. But fragments of an anonymous philosopher who can be identified as Heraclitus alienate Inman from the Homeric world around him and determine his fate. Ada, his Penelope, also casts off her shroud of tradition: impatient with the ‘glorious war,’ no longer content to wait, Ada plunges into the new business of living. And just as the archaic, post-Homeric Greek world produced new ways of living and thought, as exemplified by Heraclitus, so too does the post-bellum world of Cold Mountain, as exemplified by Inman and Ada; their struggle, and the novel’s tension, speak to and about all those caught between two worlds, epic and philosophic, whether driven by love or strife.”

From Log24 on the date of Fowles’ death:  Coincidence and Design Related material: The Collector and Speak, Memory	From Log24 on the date of Fowles’ death: Contrapuntal Themes in a Shadowland Related material: The Aristos

“Two years after The Collector had brought him international recognition and a year before he published The Magus, John Fowles set out his ideas on life in The Aristos.  The chief inspiration behind them was the fifth century BC philosopher Heraclitus.  In the world he posited of constant and chaotic flux the supreme good was the Aristos, ‘of a person or thing, the best or most excellent of its kind.'”

— Random House Australia

Cliffs of Moher

My father’s father,
    his father’s father, his —
Shadows like winds

Go back to a parent before thought,
    before speech,
At the head of the past.

They go to the cliffs of Moher
    rising out of the mist….

— Wallace Stevens,
   “The Irish Cliffs of Moher”

See also Kahn’s The Art and Thought of Heraclitus and the references to a “Delian diver” in Chitwood’s Death by Philosophy.

From
Death by Philosophy:

“Although fragments examined earlier may enable Heraclitus’ reader to believe that the stylistic devices arose directly from his dislike of humanity, I think rather that Heraclitus deliberately perfected the mysterious, gnomic style he praises in the following  fragment.

31. The lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor hides, but  indicates. (fr. 93)

Heraclitus not only admires the oracular style of delivery, but recommends it; this studied ambiguity is, I think, celebrated and alluded to in the Delian diver comment. For just as the prophecies of the Delian or Delphic god are at once obscure and darkly clear, so too are the workings of the Logos and Heraclitus’ remarks on it.”

3:17:20 PM

Spin the Numbers

IN NOMINE PATRIS…

ET FILII…

ET SPIRITUS SANCTI…

“Heraclitus…. says:
‘The ruler whose prophecy
occurs at Delphi
oute legei oute kryptei,
neither gathers nor hides,
alla semainei, but gives hints.'”
— An Introduction to Metaphysics,
by Martin Heidegger,
Yale University Press paperback,
1959, p. 170

“The lord whose oracle is in Delphi
neither indicates clearly nor conceals,
but gives a sign.”
— Adolf Holl, The Left Hand of God,
Doubleday, 1998, p. 50

AMEN.

Change and Permanence:
A Philosophical Quartet