In memory of author Elmore Leonard—
A graphic symbol and a search for "Nowhere"*
in this journal yield…
Pictorial version |
"Cotton Mather died
— Wallace Stevens, |
* See previous post.
In memory of author Elmore Leonard—
A graphic symbol and a search for "Nowhere"*
in this journal yield…
Pictorial version |
"Cotton Mather died
— Wallace Stevens, |
* See previous post.
Last midnight's post quoted poet John Hollander
on Cervantes—
"… the Don’s view of the world is correct at midnight,
and Sancho’s at noon."
The post concluded with a figure that might, if
rotated slightly, be regarded as a sort of Star of
David or Solomon's Seal. The figure's six vertices
may be viewed as an illustration of Pascal's
"mystic hexagram."
Pacal's hexagram is usually described
as a hexagon inscribed in a conic
(such as a circle). Clearly the hexagon
above may be so inscribed.
The figure suggests that last midnight's Don be
played by the nineteenth-century mathematician
James Joseph Sylvester. His 1854 remarks on
the nature of geometry describe a different approach
to the Pascal hexagram—
"… the celebrated theorem of Pascal known under the name of the Mystic Hexagram, which is, that if you take two straight lines in a plane, and draw at random other straight lines traversing in a zigzag fashion between them, from A in the first to B in the second, from B in the second to C in the first, from C in the first to D in the second, from D in the second to E in the first, from E in the first to F in the second and finally from F in the second back again to A the starting point in the first, so as to obtain ABCDEF a twisted hexagon, or sort of cat's-cradle figure and if you arrange the six lines so drawn symmetrically in three couples: viz. the 1st and 4th in one couple, the 2nd and 5th in a second couple, the 3rd and 6th in a third couple; then (no matter how the points ACE have been selected upon one of the given lines, and BDF upon the other) the three points through which these three couples of lines respectively pass, or to which they converge (as the case may be) will lie all in one and the same straight line." |
For a Sancho view of Sylvester's "cat's cradle," see some twentieth-century
remarks on "the most important configuration of all geometry"—
"Now look, your grace," said Sancho,
"what you see over there aren't giants,
but windmills, and what seems to be arms
are just their sails, that go around in the wind
and turn the millstone."
"Obviously," replied Don Quijote,
"you don't know much about adventures.”
From April 23, 2013, in
"Classical Geometry in Light of Galois Geometry"—
Click above image for some background from 1986.
Related material on six-set geometry from the classical literature—
Baker, H. F., "Note II: On the Hexagrammum Mysticum of Pascal,"
in Principles of Geometry , Vol. II, Camb. U. Press, 1930, pp. 219-236
Richmond, H. W., "The Figure Formed from Six Points in Space of Four Dimensions,"
Mathematische Annalen (1900), Volume 53, Issue 1-2, pp 161-176
Richmond, H. W., "On the Figure of Six Points in Space of Four Dimensions,"
Quarterly Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics , Vol. 31 (1900), pp. 125-160
Today is the 61st anniversary of the publication
of the book Mere Christianity , by C. S. Lewis.
In its honor, here is a link to "Hexagram 61"
in this journal.
See also "Moonshine and Lion."
From a weblog post on June 11, 2013, by one Pete Trbovich:
Here again, I don't think Steven Cullinane is really unhinged per se. At the very least, his geometric study is fun to play with, particularly when you find this toy. And I'm not really sure that anything he says is wrong per se. But you might find yourself asking "So what?" or more to the point, "Why is this supposed to be the central theory to explaining life, the universe, and everything?" |
It isn't supposed to be such a theory.
I do not know why Trbovich thinks it is .
— Steven H. Cullinane
Update of 11 PM June 16:
For one such central theory of everything, see
the I Ching . Diamond theory is, unlike that
Chinese classic, pure mathematics, but the larger
of the binary-coordinate structures it is based on
are clearly isomorphic, simply as structures , to
the I Ching 's 64 hexagrams.
Make of this what you will.
Structure vs. Character continued…
Structure |
|
Related vocabulary:
Nick Tosches on the German word “Quell “
* The title is from Heidegger.
… And the history of geometry —
Desargues, Pascal, Brianchon and Galois
in the light of complete n-points in space.
(Rewritten for clarity at about 10 AM ET April 29, with quote from Dowling added.
Updated with a reference to a Veblen and Young exercise (on p. 53) on April 30.)
Veblen and Young, Projective Geometry, Vol. I ,
Ginn and Company, 1910, page 39:
"The Desargues configuration. A very important configuration
is obtained by taking the plane section of a complete space five-point."
Each of figures 14 and 15 above has 15 points and 20 lines.
The Desargues configuration within each figure is denoted by
10 white points and 10 solid lines, with 3 points on each line and
3 lines on each point. Black points and dashed lines indicate the
complete space five-point and lines connecting it to the plane section
containing the Desargues configuration.
In a 1915 University of Chicago doctoral thesis, Archibald Henderson
used a complete space six -point to construct a configuration of
15 points and 20 lines in the context not of Desargues ' theorem, but
rather of Brianchon 's theorem and of the Pascal hexagram.
Henderson's 1915 configuration is, it turns out, isomorphic to that of
the 15 points and 20 lines in the configuration constructed via a
complete space five -point five years earlier by Veblen and Young.
(See, in Veblen and Young's 1910 Vol. I, exercise 11, page 53:
"A plane section of a 6-point in space can be considered as
3 triangles perspective in pairs from 3 collinear points with
corresponding sides meeting in 3 collinear points." This is the
large Desargues configuration. See Classical Geometry in Light of
Galois Geometry.)
For this large Desargues configuration see April 19.
For Henderson's complete six –point, see The Six-Set (April 23).
That post ends with figures relating the large Desargues configuration
to the Galois geometry PG(3,2) that underlies the Curtis
Miracle Octad Generator and the large Mathieu group M24 —
See also Note on the MOG Correspondence from April 25, 2013.
That correspondence was also discussed in a note 28 years ago, on this date in 1985.
“Fact and fiction weave in and out of novels like a shell game.” —R.B. Kitaj
Not just novels.
Fact:
The mark preceding A8 in the above denotes the semidirect product.
Symbol from the box-style I Ching (Cullinane, 1/6/89). This is Hexagram 55, “Abundance [Fullness].” |
The mathematical quote, from last evening’s Symmetry, is from Anne Taormina.
The I Ching remark is not.
Another version of Abbondanza —
Fiction:
Found in Translation and the giorno June 22, 2009, here.
A commenter on Saturday's "Seize the Dia" has
suggested a look at the work of one Mark Collins.
Here is such a look (click to enlarge):
I find attempts to associate pure mathematics with the words
"magic" or "mystic" rather nauseating. (H. F. Baker's work
on Pascal's mystic hexagram is no exception; Baker was
stuck with Pascal's obnoxious adjective, but had no truck
with any mystic aspects of the hexagram.)
The remarks above by Clifford Pickover on Collins, Dürer, and
binary representations may interest some non-mathematicians,
who should not be encouraged to waste their time on this topic.
For the mathematics underlying the binary representation of
Dürer's square, see, for instance, my 1984 article "Binary
Coordinate Systems."
Those without the background to understand that article
may enjoy, instead of Pickover's abortive attempts above at
mathematical vulgarization, his impressively awful 2009 novel
Jews in Hyperspace .
Pickover's 2002 book on magic squares was, unfortunately,
published by the formerly reputable Princeton University Press.
Related material from today's Daily Princetonian :
See also Nash + Princeton in this journal.
Background: Inscapes and The 2-subsets of a 6-set are the points of a PG(3,2).
Related remarks: Classical Geometry in Light of Galois Geometry.
Click image for some background.
Shown above is a rearranged version of the
Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) of R. T. Curtis
("A new combinatorial approach to M24,"
Math. Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc., 79 (1976), 25-42.)
The 8-subcell rectangles in the left part of the figure may be
viewed as illustrating (if the top left subcell is disregarded)
the thirty-five 3-subsets of a 7-set.
Such a view relates, as the remarks below show, the
MOG's underlying Galois geometry, that of PG(3,2), to
the hexagrammum mysticum of Pascal.
On Danzer's 354 Configuration:
"Combinatorially, Danzer’s configuration can be interpreted
as defined by all 3-sets and all 4-sets that can be formed
by the elements of a 7-element set; each 'point' is represented
by one of the 3-sets, and it is incident with those lines
(represented by 4-sets) that contain the 3-set."
— Branko Grünbaum, "Musings on an Example of Danzer's,"
European Journal of Combinatorics , 29 (2008),
pp. 1910–1918 (online March 11, 2008)
"Danzer's configuration is deeply rooted in
Pascal's Hexagrammum Mysticum ."
— Marko Boben, Gábor Gévay, and Tomaž Pisanski,
"Danzer's Configuration Revisited," arXiv.org, Jan. 6, 2013
For an approach to such configurations that differs from
those of Grünbaum, Boben, Gévay, and Pisanski, see
Classical Geometry in Light of Galois Geometry.
Grünbaum has written little about Galois geometry.
Pisanski has recently touched on the subject;
see Configurations in this journal (Feb. 19, 2013).
The geometry posts of Sunday and Monday have been
placed in finitegeometry.org as
Classical Geometry in Light of Galois Geometry.
Some background:
See Baker, Principles of Geometry , Vol. II, Note I
(pp. 212-218)—
On Certain Elementary Configurations, and
on the Complete Figure for Pappus's Theorem
and Vol. II, Note II (pp. 219-236)—
On the Hexagrammum Mysticum of Pascal.
Monday's elucidation of Baker's Desargues-theorem figure
treats the figure as a 154203 configuration (15 points,
4 lines on each, and 20 lines, 3 points on each).
Such a treatment is by no means new. See Baker's notes
referred to above, and
"The Complete Pascal Figure Graphically Presented,"
a webpage by J. Chris Fisher and Norma Fuller.
What is new in the Monday Desargues post is the graphic
presentation of Baker's frontispiece figure using Galois geometry :
specifically, the diamond theorem square model of PG(3,2).
See also Cremona's kernel, or nocciolo :
Baker on Cremona's approach to Pascal—
"forming, in Cremona's phrase, the nocciolo of the whole."
A related nocciolo :
Click on the nocciolo for some
geometric background.
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
by C. G. Jung
Recorded and edited By Aniela Jaffé, translated from the German
by Richard and Clara Winston, Vintage Books edition of April 1989
From pages 195-196:
"Only gradually did I discover what the mandala really is:
'Formation, Transformation, Eternal Mind's eternal recreation.'*
And that is the self, the wholeness of the personality, which if all
goes well is harmonious, but which cannot tolerate self-deceptions."
* Faust , Part Two, trans. by Philip Wayne (Harmondsworth,
England, Penguin Books Ltd., 1959), p. 79. The original:
… Gestaltung, Umgestaltung,
Des ewigen Sinnes ewige Unterhaltung….
Jung's "Formation, Transformation" quote is from the realm of
the Mothers (Faust , Part Two, Act 1, Scene 5: A Dark Gallery).
The speaker is Mephistopheles.
See also Prof. Bruce J. MacLennan on this realm
in a Web page from his Spring 2005 seminar on Faust:
"In alchemical terms, F is descending into the dark, formless
primary matter from which all things are born. Psychologically
he is descending into the deepest regions of the
collective unconscious, to the source of life and all creation.
Mater (mother), matrix (womb, generative substance), and matter
all come from the same root. This is Faust's next encounter with
the feminine, but it's obviously of a very different kind than his
relationship with Gretchen."
The phrase "Gestaltung, Umgestaltung " suggests a more mathematical
approach to the Unterhaltung . Hence…
Part I: Mothers
"The ultimate, deep symbol of motherhood raised to
the universal and the cosmic, of the birth, sending forth,
death, and return of all things in an eternal cycle,
is expressed in the Mothers, the matrices of all forms,
at the timeless, placeless originating womb or hearth
where chaos is transmuted into cosmos and whence
the forms of creation issue forth into the world of
place and time."
— Harold Stein Jantz, The Mothers in Faust:
The Myth of Time and Creativity ,
Johns Hopkins Press, 1969, page 37
Part II: Matrices
Part III: Spaces and Hypercubes
Click image for some background.
Part IV: Forms
Forms from the I Ching :
Click image for some background.
Forms from Diamond Theory :
Click image for some background.
In several posts now tagged Chessboard,
an I Ching chessboard
image in which adjacent squares
have the Karnaugh property—
— has been replaced by a picture of
the original 1989 version in which
the Karnaugh property applies only to cells
that are adjacent in a cubic, not square,
arrangement—
This morning's New York Times obituaries—
These suggest a look at Solving Nabokov's Lolita Riddle ,
by Joanne Morgan (Sydney: Cosynch Press, 2005).
That book discusses Lolita as a character like Lewis Carroll's Alice.
(The Red Queen and Alice of course correspond to figures in
the first two thumbnails above.)
From the obituary associated with the third thumbnail above:
"Front-page headlines combined concision and dark humor."
The title of this post, Bend Sinister , is not unlike such a headline.
It is the title of a novel by Nabokov (often compared with Orwell's 1984 )
that is discussed in the Lolita Riddle book.
Related material— The bend sinister found in Log24 searches
for Hexagram 14 and for the phrase Hands-On—
Related material:
Hexagram 29 and the life of
Robert Palmer Dilworth, who
died on this date in 1993.
"I'm 18."
— Spoken by a very beautiful girl
in the summer of 1991
"Work on what has been spoiled [ Decay ]."
Click image for some background.
Heidegger, "Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,"
translated by Douglas Scott, in Existence and Being ,
Regnery, 1949, pp. 291-316—
See also Hexagram 36.
Hexagram 44:
Coming to Meet
"This hexagram indicates a situation in which
the principle of darkness, after having been eliminated,
furtively and unexpectedly obtrudes again from within
and below. Of its own accord the female principle
comes to meet the male. It is an unfavourable and
dangerous situation, and we must understand and
promptly prevent the possible consequences.
The hexagram is linked with the fifth month
[June-July], because at the summer solstice
the principle of darkness gradually becomes
ascendant again."
— Richard Wilhelm
To counteract the principle of darkness—
The Uploading (Friday— St. Peter's Day, 2012),
Thor's Light Bulb Joke, and …
The New York Times today—
"Reality and our perception of it are incommensurate…."
The above New York Times Wire item from 3:35 PM ET today
mentions two topics touched on in today's earlier Log24 post
Bowling in Diagon Alley— magic (implied by the title) and
incommensurability. The connection in that post
between the two topics is the diagonal of a square.
The wire item shows one detail from a Times illustration
of the linked article— a blindfolded woman.
Another detail from the same illustration—
Hands-on Wand Work
See also remarks on Magic in this journal and on Harry Potter.
I dislike both topics.
Background— August 30, 2006—
In the 2006 post, the above seventh symbol 110000 was
interpreted as the I Ching hexagram with topmost and
next-to-top lines solid, not broken— Hexagram 20, View .
In a different interpretation, 110000 is the binary for the decimal
number 48— representing the I Ching's Hexagram 48, The Well .
“… Max Black, the Cornell philosopher, and
others have pointed out how ‘perhaps every science
must start with metaphor and end with algebra, and
perhaps without the metaphor there would never
have been any algebra’ ….”
– Max Black, Models and Metaphors,
Cornell U. Press, 1962, page 242, as quoted
in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors,
by Victor Witter Turner, Cornell U. Press,
paperback, 1975, page 25
The algebra is certainly clearer than either I Ching
metaphor, but is in some respects less interesting.
For a post that combines both the above I Ching
metaphors, View and Well , see Dec. 14, 2007.
In memory of scholar Elinor Ostrom,
who died today—
References here yesterday to Epiphany
and to Chinese logic suggest two observations—
First, a political interpretation of the number "64.89"
from Monday's Shanghai stock market index
yielded the date 6/4 in 1989—
Second, an interpretation of 64.89 as the number 64 in 1989
(on the Feast of the Epiphany, January 6)—
No connection of the number 64 with the date 6/4 is implied.
An image from 62 years ago:
Click image for details.
For the religious significance of "62," see Strong Emergence Illustrated.
See also a related search.
CBS Sunday Morning 's piece on
the number pi today suggested…
Hexagram 20, Contemplation/View,
from the website Rightreading.com
4 × 5 = ̲2̲0̲ . Related material— The link "Ten is a Hen" "She's told a detective story without violence, Judy Davis, shown above in |
A Date with Erin
Related material suggested by today's
midday New York Lottery— 032 and 7537—
Richard Wilhelm
on I Ching Hexagram 32:
Duration
“Duration is… not a state of rest, for mere standstill
is regression. Duration is rather the self-contained
and therefore self-renewing movement of
an organized, firmly integrated whole
[click on link for an example], taking place
in accordance with immutable laws
and beginning anew at every ending.”
and the date 7/5/37—
Midday NY lottery on Oct. 19, 2011— 043 and 7531.
The latter is the birth date (7/5/31) of Jerry Slocum,
Hughes Aircraft designer and puzzle enthusiast.
For the former, see Hexagram 43 in Geometry of the I Ching.
From post 4017 in this journal (do not click links)—
"Thanks to University Diaries for an entry on Clancy Martin,
a philosophy professor in the 'show me' state, and his experiences with AA."
Neither link in this quote works anymore.
See instead Martin in the London Review of Books .
Lottery hermeneutics, however, still seems usable.
Today's midday NY lottery "163" may be taken as a sequel
to both the page number "162" in today's noon post—
— Humboldt's Gift , page 163 (Penguin Classics, 1996)
— and a sequel to University Diaries ' meditation today on the Nobel literature prize,
which includes a quote from the winner:
"At last my life returns. My name appears like an angel.
Outside the walls a trumpet signal blows…. It is I! It is I!"
— Tomas Tranströmer, "The Name"
As for the evening NY numbers 014 and 5785, see Hexagram 14,
Not Even Wrong , and 5/7/85.
"Francis Bacon used the phrase instantia crucis, 'crucial instance,' to refer to something in an experiment that proves one of two hypotheses and disproves the other. Bacon's phrase was based on a sense of the Latin word crux, 'cross,' which had come to mean 'a guidepost that gives directions at a place where one road becomes two,' and hence was suitable for Bacon's metaphor."
– The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Such a cross: St. Andrew's. Some context—
X Marks the Spot scene, "The Last Crusade"
Related symbology for Dan Brown—
A portrait reproduced here on October 11, 2007—
The above was suggested by yesterday's New York Lottery and by
items dated February 8, 1958 (date of receipt of an AMS Bulletin article)
and February 1, 1953 (newspaper article on applied game theory).
(This covers three of the four relevant lottery numbers.
For the fourth, see 9/19 and recent discussions of
The End of Mr. Y (Sunday Dinner and A Link for Sunrise)).
See also Saint John Neumann.
Hexagram 55 "Be not sad. |
A year ago today—
Art Space
Pictorial version |
|
“Space: what you damn well have to see.” – James Joyce, Ulysses |
* See Vonnegut.
Recent New York Lottery numbers—
The interpretation of "056" in yesterday's
The Aleph, the Lottery, and the Eightfold Way
was not without interest, but the interpretation there
of "236" was somewhat lacking in poetic resonance.
For aspiring students of lottery hermeneutics,
here are some notes that may help. The "236" may
be reinterpreted as a page number in Stevens's
Collected Poems . It then resonates rather nicely
("answers when I ask," "visible and responsive")
with yesterday evening's "434"—
For today's midday "022," see Hexagram 22: Grace in the context of the following—
As for yesterday afternoon's 609, see a particular Stevens-related page with that number…
For "a body of thought or poetry larger than the subject's," see The Dome of the Rock.
Related material: Exhibit B Julie Taymor |
From the author of The Abacus Conundrum—
Harlan Kane's sequel to The Apollo Meme—
THE KRISTEN EFFECT
"Thus the universal mutual attraction between the sexes is represented."
— Hexagram 31
Part I — Roberta Smith in today's New York Times —
"… the argument that painting may ultimately be about
little more than the communication of some quality of
light and space, however abstract or indirect."
– Review of "Rooms With a View" at the Met
Pictorial version |
“Space: what you damn well have to see.”
– James Joyce, Ulysses
Part II — Window from A Crooked House
"Teal lifted the blind a few inches. He saw nothing, and raised it a little more—still nothing. Slowly he raised it until the window was fully exposed. They gazed out at—nothing.
Nothing, nothing at all. What color is nothing? Don't be silly! What shape is it? Shape is an attribute of something . It had neither depth nor form. It had not even blackness. It was nothing ."
Part III — Not So Crooked: The Cabinet of Dr. Montessori
An April 5 Wall Street Journal article on Montessori schools, and…
A cabinet from Dr. Montessori's own
explanation of her method
Part IV — Pilate Goes to Kindergarten and The Seven
Accidental Time and Space
New York Lottery today— midday 987, evening 522.
Time
The midday 987 may be interpreted as "…nine, eight, seven, …."—
"The countdown as we know it, 10-9-8-u.s.w.,
was invented by Fritz Lang in 1929 for
the Ufa film Die Frau im Mond . He put it into
the launch scene to heighten the suspense.
'It is another of my damned "touches,"' Fritz Lang said."
Space
The evening 522 suggests the date 5/22. From that date last year—
Art Space (2:02 AM EDT)
Pictorial version |
“Space: what you damn well have to see.”
– James Joyce, Ulysses
The sliding window in blue below
Click for the web page shown.
is an example of a more general concept.
Such a sliding window,* if one-dimensional of length n , can be applied to a sequence of 0's and 1's to yield a sequence of n-dimensional vectors. For example— an "m-sequence" (where the "m" stands for "maximum length") of length 63 can be scanned by a length-6 sliding window to yield all possible 6-dimensional binary vectors except (0,0,0,0,0,0).
For details, see A Galois Field—
The image is from Bert Jagers at his page on the Galois field GF(64) that he links to as "A Field of Honor."
For a discussion of the m-sequence shown in circular form above, see Jagers's "Pseudo-Random Sequences from GF(64)." Here is a noncircular version of the length-63 m-sequence described by Jagers (with length scale below)—
100000100001100010100111101000111001001011011101100110101011111
123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123
This m-sequence may be viewed as a condensed version of 63 of the 64 I Ching hexagrams. (See related material in this journal.)
For a more literary approach to the window concept, see The Seventh Symbol (scroll down after clicking).
* Moving windows also appear (in a different way) In image processing, as convolution kernels .
Background:
Hexagram 61
and
Still Point.
* Notably, of the film "Downfall" (Der Untergang ).
"Has time rewritten every line?" —Streisand
Benoît Mandelbrot died on Oct. 14.
— New York Lottery on Thursday, Oct. 14, 2010
Related material on 109: See 1/09, 2009.
Related material on 060: See Hexagram 60 of the I Ching and…
Margaret Atwood on Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art—
"Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists." (159)
What is "the next world"? It might be the Underworld….
The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie– this line of thought leads Hyde to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation and art all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning "to join," "to fit," and "to make." (254) If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist. Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart.
The Harvard Crimson —Magic of Numbers:
|
Saturday night's game… Harvard vs. Brown at Providence—
Related philosophy about divine providence—
See also, from 2002, a note on "light inclosed in the dark" versus the late Harvard philosopher Barbara Johnson.
For some context on Harvard and "the Magic of Numbers" see Summer Reading from 2007.
Continued from Friday the 13th—
Related material—
Cover art by Barclay Shaw reprinted from an earlier (1984) edition
A question from Ivan Illich
(founder of CIDOC, the Center for Intercultural Documentation,
in Cuernavaca, Mexico)—
"Who can be served by bridges to nowhere?"
For more about nowhere, see Utopia. See also http://outis.blogspot.com.
Lottery hermeneutics for yesterday's numbers—
PA— Midday 711, Evening 039.
NY— Midday 440, Evening 704.
Simple interpretive methods— numbers as dates and as hexagram numbers— yield 7/11, hexagram 39, and 7/04.
The reader may supply his own interpretations of 7/11 and 7/04; for hexagram 39, see Wilhelm's commentary—
"The hexagram pictures a dangerous abyss lying before us
and a steep, inaccessible mountain rising behind us."
— and the cover of Cold Mountain—
Adapted from cover of
German edition of Cold Mountain
This suggests revisiting The Edge of Eternity (July 5, 2005).
The hermeneutics of the NY midday 440 is more difficult. A Google search suggests that a Log24 post for Epiphany 2004, "720 in the Book," might yield a clue to the 440 riddle.
By all means, let us 440.
New York Lottery on Saturday, July 17, 2010—
Midday 049, Evening 613.
Related material:
Hexagram 49 and 6/13.
A quotation from this journal on 6/13—
"Christianity offers the critic a privileged ontological window…."
— Aaron Urbanczyk's 2005 review of Christ and Apollo
by William Lynch, S.J., a book first published in 1960
Picture from today's New York Times (page ST1 in New York edition)—
David Levine's portrait of Arthur Koestler (see Dec. 30, 2009) —
See also this morning's post as well as
Monday's post quoting George David Birkhoff —
"If I were a Leibnizian mystic… I would say that…
God thinks multi-dimensionally — that is,
uses multi-dimensional symbols beyond our grasp."
(Continued from April 23, 2009, and February 13, 2010.)
Paul Valéry as quoted in yesterday’s post:
“The S[elf] is invariant, origin, locus or field, it’s a functional property of consciousness” (Cahiers, 15:170 [2: 315])
The geometric example discussed here yesterday as a Self symbol may seem too small to be really impressive. Here is a larger example from the Chinese, rather than European, tradition. It may be regarded as a way of representing the Galois field GF(64). (“Field” is a rather ambiguous term; here it does not, of course, mean what it did in the Valéry quotation.)
From Geometry of the I Ching—
The above 64 hexagrams may also be regarded as
the finite affine space AG(6,2)— a larger version
of the finite affine space AG(4,2) in yesterday’s post.
That smaller space has a group of 322,560 symmetries.
The larger hexagram space has a group of
1,290,157,424,640 affine symmetries.
From a paper on GL(6,2), the symmetry group
of the corresponding projective space PG(5,2),*
which has 1/64 as many symmetries—
For some narrative in the European tradition
related to this geometry, see Solomon’s Cube.
* Update of July 29, 2011: The “PG(5,2)” above is a correction from an earlier error.
Today's New York Times—
(“Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers”
runs through Sept. 12 at the Hirshhorn.)
Related material—
Search this journal for klein + paris.
See also Art Space (May 22, 2010)—
Pictorial version |
From an interview with artist Josefine Lyche (see previous post) dated March 11, 2009—
– Can you name a writer or book, fiction or theory that has inspired your works?
– Right now I am reading David Foster Wallace, which is great and inspiring. Others would be Aleister Crowley, Terence McKenna, James Joyce, J.L Borges, J.D Ballard, Stanislaw Lem, C. S. Lewis and Plato to mention some. Books, both fiction and theory are a great part of my life and work.
This journal on the date of the interview had a post about a NY Times story, ”Paris | A Show About Nothing."
Related images—
Pictorial version |
“Space: what you damn well have to see.”
– James Joyce, Ulysses
Pictorial version
of Hexagram 20,
Contemplation (View)
Related material:
A Handful of Dust
by J. G. Ballard
(continued from April 26, 28, and 29):
Hexagram 29: |
Hexagram 30: |
Excerpt from The Fire,
by Katherine Neville —
"'Alaska's Aleutian Trench,' Key told us…. 'It's called the Ring of Fire because it boasts the largest collection of active volcanoes in the world.'….
'But you said that my father's not in Alaska…. So what does this Ring of Fire have to do with the place where we're actually going?'
'It's the Yellow Brick Road,' she told me."
A NY Times review dated Jan. 20 has the headline
Trying to Paint the Deity by Numbers
Against a Backdrop of Jewish Culture
By JANET MASLIN
"…this novel’s bracing intellectual energy never flags. Though it is finally more a work of showmanship than scholarship, it affirms Ms. Goldstein’s position as a satirist…."
The title of the book under review is
36 Arguments for the
Existence of God: A Work of Fiction.
Related "by the numbers" material–
From the I Ching, commentaries on the lines of Hexagram 36–
"Here the Lord of Light is in a subordinate place and is wounded by the Lord of Darkness…."
"The dark power at first held so high a place that it could wound all who were on the side of good and of the light. But in the end it perishes of its own darkness, for evil must itself fall at the very moment when it has wholly overcome the good, and thus consumed the energy to which it owed its duration."
The Times review of 36 Arguments notes that the book's chapters of fiction number 36, as do the 36 philosophical arguments in the book's title and appendix.
The reviewer– "So much for structure. It is not Ms. Goldstein’s strong suit…."
Some structure related to the above occurrence of 36 in the I Ching—
Another example of eightfold symmetry:
The Large Hadron Collider
See also Angels & Demons in
Hollywood and in this journal.
(Cover slightly changed.)
Background —
SAT
Part I:
Part II:
|
Part III:
From August 25th —
"Boo, boo, boo,
square root of two."
"For further details,
click on the well."
"The kind of movement Olson urges is
an inward deepening of the image,
an in-sighting of the superimposed
levels of significance within it.
This is the very mode that Jung
suggested for grasping dreams–
not as a sequence in time,
but as revolving around
a nodal complex."
And from Feb. 29, 2008:
and the following day:
— Heraclitus
A headline from 2003,
with an epiphany from
twenty years ago:
The Tables of Time
|
In related news:
The New York Times
on June 17, 2007:
Design Meets Dance,
and Rules Are Broken
Yesterday's evening entry was
on the fictional sins of a fictional
mathematician and also (via a link
to St. Augustine's Day, 2006), on
the geometry of the I Ching* —
The eternal
combined with
the temporal:
The fictional mathematician's
name, noted here (with the Augustine-
I Ching link as a gloss) in yesterday's
evening entry, was Summerfield.
From the above Times article–
"Summerspace," a work by
choreographer Merce Cunningham
and artist Robert Rauschenberg
that offers a competing
vision of summer:
From left, composer John Cage,
choreographer Merce Cunningham,
and artist Robert Rauschenberg
in the 1960's
"When shall we three meet again?"
The Grasshopper
Lies Heavy
“‘Oracle, why did you write
The Grasshopper Lies Heavy?
What are we supposed to learn?'”
— Philip K. Dick
“She began throwing the coins.“
Click on image
for further details.
(continued from April 16)
Background:
Click on the image for an
interview with the author of
Giordano Bruno and
the Geometry of Language.
Related material:
Joyce on language —
Click on images for details.
From James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
he hearth and began to stroke his chin. –When may we expect to have something from you on the esthetic question? he asked. –From me! said Stephen in astonishment. I stumble on an idea once a fortnight if I am lucky. –These questions are very profound, Mr Dedalus, said the dean. It is like looking down from the cliffs of Moher into the depths. Many go down into the depths and never come up. Only the trained diver can go down into those depths and explore them and come to the surface again. –If you mean speculation, sir, said Stephen, I also am sure that there is no such thing as free thinking inasmuch as all thinking must be bound by its own laws. –Ha! –For my purpose I can work on at present by the light of one or two ideas of Aristotle and Aquinas. –I see. I quite see your point. |
Besides being Mondrian's birthday, today is also the dies natalis (in the birth-into-heaven sense) of St. Thomas Aquinas and, for those who believe worthy pre-Christians also enter heaven, possibly of Aristotle.
Pope Benedict XVI explained the dies natalis concept on Dec. 26, 2006:
"For believers the day of death, and even more the day of martyrdom, is not the end of all; rather, it is the 'transit' towards immortal life. It is the day of definitive birth, in Latin, dies natalis."
Pictorial version
of Hexagram 20,
Contemplation (View)
In honor of
Aristotle and Aquinas,
here is a new web site,
illuminati-diamond.com,
with versions of the diamond shape
made famous by Mondrian —
Raiders of
the Lost Well
“The challenge is to keep high standards of scholarship while maintaining showmanship as well.” |
— Olga Raggio, a graduate of the Vatican library school and the University of Rome who, at one point in her almost 60 years with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, organized “The Vatican Collections,” a blockbuster show. Dr. Raggio died on January 24.
The next day, “The Last Templar,” starring Mira Sorvino, debuted on NBC.
“One highlight of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s first overseas trip will be a stop in China. Her main mission in Beijing will be to ensure that US-China relations under the new Obama administration get off to a positive start.”
— Stephanie Ho, Voice of America Beijing bureau chief, today
Symbol of The Positive,
from this journal
on Valentine’s Day:
Stephanie was born in Ohio and grew up in California. She has a bachelor’s degree in Asian studies with an emphasis on Chinese history and economics, from the University of California at Berkeley.”
“She is fluent in
Mandrin Chinese.”
—VOA
As is Mira Sorvino.
Those who, like Clinton, Raggio, and
Sorvino’s fictional archaeologist in
“The Last Templar,” prefer Judeo-
Christian myths to Asian myths,
may convert the above Chinese
“well” symbol to a cross
(or a thick “+” sign)
by filling in five of
the nine spaces outlined
by the well symbol.
In so doing, they of course
run the risk, so dramatically
portrayed by Angelina Jolie
as Lara Croft, of opening
Pandora’s Box.
(See Rosalind Krauss, Professor
of Art and Theory at Columbia,
for scholarly details.)
Krauss
Susan Sontag in
this week's New Yorker:
"The mind is a whore."
Embedded in the Sontag
article is the following:
Act One
South Pole:
Shi Ho
Act Two
North Pole:
Kun
"If baby I'm the bottom,
you're the top."
— Cole Porter
Happy birthday,
Steven Spielberg.
in memory of
G. H. Hardy,
who died on
this date in 1947
"He was living in some of the best intellectual company in the world– G.E. Moore, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, Trevelyan, the high Trinity society which was shortly to find its artistic complement in Bloomsbury."
For a rather different artistic complement, see the previous entry.
5:07:33 AM ET
33 Retreat
THE IMAGE
Mountain under heaven:
the image of RETREAT.
Thus the superior man
keeps the inferior man
at a distance,
not angrily
but with reserve.
First in War,
First in Peace…
Chairman George on February 22, 1999
|
Thus the |
Change for Washington:
For the details, see
yale.edu/lawweb:
Jack M. Balkin is Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School, and the founder and director of Yale’s Information Society Project. His books and articles range over many different fields….”
The eight trigrams
were perhaps implied in
the opening’s date,
8:28:32 AM
Anthony Hopkins, from
All Hallows' Eve
last year:
"For me time is God,
God is time. It's an equation,
like an Einstein equation."
James Joyce, from
June 26 (the day after
AntiChristmas) this year:
"… he glanced up at the clock
of the Ballast Office and smiled:
— It has not epiphanised yet,
he said."
Ezra Pound (from a page
linked to yesterday morning):
"It seems quite natural to me
that an artist should have
just as much pleasure in an
arrangement of planes
or in a pattern of figures,
as in painting portraits…."
From Epiphany 2008:
An arrangement of planes:
From May 10, 2008:
A pattern of figures:
|
See also Richard Wilhelm on
Hexagram 32 of the I Ching:
— The Middle-English
Harrowing of Hell…
by Hulme, 1907, page 64
A Cartoon Graveyard
Click to enlarge.
From Fathers' Day Meditation:
For further details,
click on the well.
CHANGE TO BELIEVE IN |
Part I:
Part II:
16
Thus the ancient kings made music
In order to honor merit, And offered it with splendor To the Supreme Deity, Inviting their ancestors to be present. When, at the beginning of summer, thunder– electrical energy– comes rushing forth from the earth again, and the first thunderstorm refreshes nature, a prolonged state of tension is resolved. Joy and relief make themselves felt. So too, music has power to ease tension within the heart and to loosen the grip of obscure emotions. The enthusiasm of the heart expresses itself involuntarily in a burst of song, in dance and rhythmic movement of the body. From immemorial times the inspiring effect of the invisible sound that moves all hearts, and draws them together, has mystified mankind. Rulers have made use of this natural taste for music; they elevated and regulated it. Music was looked upon as something serious and holy, designed to purify the feelings of men. It fell to music to glorify the virtues of heroes and thus to construct a bridge to the world of the unseen. In the temple men drew near to God with music and pantomimes (out of this later the theater developed). Religious feeling for the Creator of the world was united with the most sacred of human feelings, that of reverence for the ancestors. The ancestors were invited to these divine services as guests of the Ruler of Heaven and as representatives of humanity in the higher regions. This uniting of the human past with the Divinity in solemn moments of religious inspiration established the bond between God and man. The ruler who revered the Divinity in revering his ancestors became thereby the Son of Heaven, in whom the heavenly and the earthly world met in mystical contact. These ideas are the final summation of Chinese culture. Confucius has said of the great sacrifice at which these rites were performed: "He who could wholly comprehend this sacrifice could rule the world as though it were spinning on his hand." |
— Song lyric,
Cyndi Lauper
Alethiometer from
"The Golden Compass"
Update:
See also this morning's
later entry, illustrating
the next line of Cyndi
Lauper's classic lyric
"Time After Time" —
"… Confusion is
nothing new."
Undertakings bring misfortune.
Nothing that would further.
“Brian O’Doherty, an Irish-born artist,
before the [Tuesday, May 20] wake
of his alter ego* ‘Patrick Ireland’
on the grounds of the
Irish Museum of Modern Art.”
— New York Times, May 22, 2008
THE IMAGE
Thus the superior man
understands the transitory
in the light of
the eternity of the end.
Another version of
the image:
See 2/22/08
and 4/19/08.
Michael Kimmelman in today’s New York Times—
“An essay from the ’70s by Mr. O’Doherty, ‘Inside the White Cube,’ became famous in art circles for describing how modern art interacted with the gallery spaces in which it was shown.”
Brian O’Doherty, “Inside the White Cube,” 1976 Artforum essays on the gallery space and 20th-century art:
“The history of modernism is intimately framed by that space. Or rather the history of modern art can be correlated with changes in that space and in the way we see it. We have now reached a point where we see not the art but the space first…. An image comes to mind of a white, ideal space that, more than any single picture, may be the archetypal image of 20th-century art.”
“Nothing that would further.”
— Hexagram 54
…. Now thou art an 0 |
“…. in the last mystery of all the single figure of what is called the World goes joyously dancing in a state beyond moon and sun, and the number of the Trumps is done. Save only for that which has no number and is called the Fool, because mankind finds it folly till it is known. It is sovereign or it is nothing, and if it is nothing then man was born dead.”
— The Greater Trumps,
by Charles Williams, Ch. 14
From Play It As It Lays,
the paperback edition of 1990
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux) —
Page 170: “… In her half sleep the point was ten, the jackpot was on eighteen, the only man that could ever reach her was the son of a preacher man, someone was down sixty, someone was up, Daddy wants a popper and she rode a painted pony let the spinning wheel spin. By the end of a week she was thinking constantly 170
|
For further details
see yesterday’s entries.”In her half sleep
the point was ten….”
— Play It As It Lays
The Random House
signed first edition
of Norman Mailer’s
The Time of Our Time
(4 pounds, 1286 pages)
was published
ten years ago yesterday —
May 5, 1998:
Fireworks starburst
on the cover of
The Time of Our Time
Also from May 5, 1998:
File Photo in Mailer’s obituary —
(Photo by Bebeto Matthews
with Mailer obituary in
Toronto Globe and Mail)
with excerpt from the obituary,
by Richard Pyle
(Associated Press
Saturday, Nov. 10, 2007
at 8:20 AM EDT)
Related material:
Yesterday’s entries and
the time of this entry:
11:07:51 AM ET
51
THE JUDGMENT SHOCK brings success. Shock comes - oh, oh! Laughing words - ha, ha!
in light of…
A: Mailer’s fireworks starburst on his book cover from ten years ago yesterday B: A real starburst in a story |
For further details, see
Gift of the Third Kind
and
Kindergarten Relativity.
Related material:
Click image to enlarge.
The above tableau, from this morning's
New York Times obituary page,
suggests the following meditations:
1. "Mickey Mouse will see you dead." — Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise |
2. "Free!" |
3. "I graduated in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona…." |
These three meditations are
consistent with the fable of the
mice and the lion in The Lion,
The Witch, and the Wardrobe
and with the speech of
Aslan at the conclusion of
The Narnia Chronicles:
"The term is over: the holidays
have begun. The dream is
ended: this is the morning."
The rather depressing
"Death Notices" box
that has attracted
Charlton Heston's gaze
in the online obituaries
pictured above might
be replaced as follows:
The Heston classic pictured
above is, let us recall,
based on a book titled
Ben-Hur: A Tale of
the Christ.
"I know this man!"
— Charlton Heston
Time of this entry:
2:12:35.
I Have a
Dreamtime
Noting today that the time was 11:32 (AM ET), a portentous number in Finnegans Wake, I decided to practice a bit of chronomancy (use of time for augury). My weblog's server infomed me when I pressed "enter" that it thought the exact time was 11:32:39. Consulting (as in Symmetry and Change in the Dreamtime) the I Ching for the meaning of (hexagram) 39, I found the following:
The hexagram pictures a dangerous abyss lying before us and a steep, inaccessible mountain rising behind us…. One must join forces with friends of like mind and put himself under the leadership of a man equal to the situation: then one will succeed in removing the obstacles.
For the abyss and the mountain, see the five log24 entries ending on July 5, 2005, with "The Edge of Eternity." As for "friends of like mind," see the previous entry's references to July 2005. "The leadership of a man equal to the situation" is more difficult to interpret. Perhaps it refers, as a politician recently noted, to "a king who took us to the mountain-top and pointed the way to the promised land." Or perhaps to a different king.
Click on image for details.
Note the time: 11:32 (of 13:09).
The moment is that of the syllable
"mount" in the quotation above.
"An acute study of the links
between word and fact"
— Nina daVinci Nichols
Virginia | /391062427/item.html? | 2/22/2008 7:37 PM |
Johnny Cash:
"And behold,
a white horse."
Chess Knight
(in German, Springer)
"Liebe Frau vBayern,
mich würde interessieren wie man
mit diesem Hintergrund
(vonbayern.de/german/anna.html)
zu Springer kommt?"
Background of "Frau vBayern" from thePeerage.com:
Anna-Natascha Prinzessin zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg
F, #64640, b. 15 March 1978Last Edited=20 Oct 2005
Anna-Natascha Prinzessin zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg was born on 15 March 1978. She is the daughter of Ludwig Ferdinand Prinz zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg and Countess Yvonne Wachtmeister af Johannishus. She married Manuel Maria Alexander Leopold Jerg Prinz von Bayern, son of Leopold Prinz von Bayern and Ursula Mohlenkamp, on 6 August 2005 at Nykøping, Södermanland, Sweden.
The date of the above "Liebe Frau vBayern" inquiry, Feb. 1, 2007, suggests the following:
From Log24 on
St. Bridget's Day, 2007:
The quotation
"Science is a Faustian bargain"
and the following figure–
Change
From a short story by
the above Princess:
"'I don't even think she would have wanted to change you. But she for sure did not want to change herself. And her values were simply a part of her.' It was true, too. I would even go so far as to say that they were her basis, if you think about her as a geometrical body. That's what they couldn't understand, because in this age of the full understanding for stretches of values in favor of self-realization of any kind, it was a completely foreign concept."
To make this excellent metaphor mathematically correct,
change "geometrical body" to "space"… as in
"For Princeton's Class of 2007"—
Review of a 2004 production of a 1972 Tom Stoppard play, "Jumpers"–
Related material:
Knight Moves (Log24, Jan. 16),
Kindergarten Theology (St. Bridget's Day, 2008),
and
See also the noir entry on "Nightmare Alley" for Winter Solstice 2002, as well as a solstice-related commentary on I Ching Hexagram 41, Decrease. |
Part II:
Language Game
on Christmas Day
Pennsylvania Lottery
December 25, 2007:
Part III:
A Wonderful Life
This verse is sometimes cited as influencing the Protestant conclusion of the Lord's Prayer:
"Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever" (Mt 6.13b; compare 1 Chr 29.11-13)….
This traditional epilogue to the Lord's prayer protects the petition for the coming of the kingdom from being understood as an exorcism, which we derive from the Jewish prayer, the Kaddish, which belonged at the time to the synagogical liturgy.
The Pennsylvania Lottery on Christmas evening paired 173 with the beastly number 0666. The latter number suggests that perhaps being "understood as an exorcism" might not, in this case, be such a bad thing. What, therefore, might "173" have to do with exorcism? A search in the context of the phrase "language games" yields a reference to Wittgenstein's Zettel, section 173:
From Charles L. Creegan, Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard:
Language-
games give general guidelines of the application of language. Wittgenstein suggests that there are innumerably many language- games: innumerably many kinds of use of the components of language.24 The grammar of the language- game influences the possible relations of words, and things, within that game. But the players may modify the rules gradually. Some utterances within a given language- game are applications; others are 'grammatical remarks' or definitions of what is or should be possible. (Hence Wittgenstein's remark, 'Theology as grammar'25 – the grammar of religion.) The idea of the 'form of life' is a reminder about even more basic phenomena. It is clearly bound up with the idea of language. (Language and 'form of life' are explicitly connected in four of the five passages from the Investigations in which the term 'form of life' appears.) Just as grammar is subject to change through language-
uses, so 'form of life' is subject to change through changes in language. (The Copernican revolution is a paradigm case of this.) Nevertheless, 'form of life' expresses a deeper level of 'agreement.' It is the level of 'what has to be accepted, the given.'26 This is an agreement prior to agreement in opinions and decisions. Not everything can be doubted or judged at once. This suggests that 'form of life' does not denote static phenomena of fixed scope. Rather, it serves to remind us of the general need for context in our activity of meaning. But the context of our meaning is a constantly changing mosaic involving both broad strokes and fine-
grained distinctions. The more commonly understood point of the 'Private Language Argument' – concerning the root of meaning in something public – comes into play here. But it is important to show just what public phenomenon Wittgenstein has in mind. He remarks: 'Only in the stream of thought and life do words have meaning.'27
- 24
- Investigations, sec. 23.
- 25
- Investigations, sec. 373; compare Zettel, sec. 717.
- 26
- Investigations, p. 226e.
- 27
- Zettel, sec. 173. The thought is expressed many times in similar words.
And from an earlier chapter of Creegan:
The 'possibility of religion' manifested itself in considerable reading of religious works, and this in a person who chose his reading matter very carefully. Drury's recollections include conversations about Thomas à Kempis, Samuel Johnson's Prayers, Karl Barth, and, many times, the New Testament, which Wittgenstein had clearly read often and thought about.25 Wittgenstein had also thought about what it would mean to be a Christian. Some time during the 1930s, he remarked to Drury: 'There is a sense in which you and I are both Christians.'26 In this context it is certainly worth noting that he had for a time said the Lord's Prayer each day.27
Wittgenstein's last words were: 'Tell them I've had a wonderful life!'28
- 25
- Drury (1981) 'Conversations with Wittgenstein,' in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, pp. 112ff.
- 26
- Drury, 'Conversations,' p. 130.
- 27
- Drury, 'Some notes,' p. 109.
- 28
- Reported by Mrs. Bevan, the wife of the doctor in whose house Wittgenstein was staying. Malcolm, Memoir, p. 81.
Part IV:
For more on the Christmas evening
number of the beast, see Dec. 3:
"Santa's Polar Opposite?" —
An entry in memory of
Dr. Joseph L. Henderson,
Jungian analyst, who died
on Nov. 17 at 104
(An obituary appears in
today’s New York Times.)
Some remarks by Dr. Henderson:
The myth of the hero is the most common and the best known myth in the world… classical mythology… Greece and Rome… Middle Ages… Far East… contemporary primitive tribes. It also appears in dreams… obvious dramatic… profound… importance. P. 101
… structurally very similar… universal pattern… over and over again… a tale of… miraculous… humble birth… early proof of superhuman strength… rapid rise to prominence… triumphant struggle with the forces of evil… fallibility to the sin of pride (hybris)… and his fall through betrayal or a “heroic” sacrifice that ends in his death. P. 101
… another important characteristic… provides a clue… the early weakness… is balanced by… strong “tutelary” figures… who enable him to perform the superhuman tasks that he cannot accomplish unaided. Theseus had Poseidon… Perseus had Athena… Achilles had Cheiron… the wise centaur, as his tutor. P. 101
And Stan Carlisle had
Dr. Lilith Ritter:
Related material:
Dr. Dyane N. Sherwood and
Dr. Joseph L. Henderson, authors
of Transformation of the Psyche
(Routledge, Nov. 7, 2003)
Dr. Henderson is said to
have been, in his youth,
a student of Thornton Wilder
as well as of Dr. Jung.
"Plato's Good was a fixed and eternal and unmoving Idea, whereas for the rhetoricians it was not an Idea at all. The Good was not a form of reality. It was reality itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way." –Phaedrus in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
This apparent conflict between eternity and time, fixity and motion, permanence and change, is resolved by the philosophy of the I Ching and by the Imagism of Ezra Pound. Consider, for example, the image of The Well
as discussed here on All Saints' Day 2003 and in the previous entry.
As background, consider the following remarks of James Hillman in "Egalitarian Typologies Versus the Perception of the Unique," Part III: Persons as Images—
"To conceive images as static is to forget that they are numens that move. Charles Olson, a later poet in this tradition, said: 'One perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception… always, always one perception must must must move instanter, on another.' 80 Remember Lavater and his insistence on instantaneity for reading the facial image. This is a kind of movement that is not narrational, and the Imagists had no place for narrative. 'Indeed the great poems to come after the Imagist period– Eliot’s The Waste Land and Four Quartets; Pound’s Cantos; Williams’s Paterson– contain no defining narrative.' 81 The kind of movement Olson urges is an inward deepening of the image, an in-sighting of the superimposed levels of significance within it. 82 This is the very mode that Jung suggested for grasping dreams– not as a sequence in time, but as revolving around a nodal complex. If dreams, then why not the dreamers. We too are not only a sequence in time, a process of individuation. We are also each an image of individuality."
80 The New American Poetry (D. M. Allen, ed.) N.Y.: Evergreen, Grove, 1960, pp. 387-88. from Jones, p. 42. 81 Jones,* p. 40. 82 H. D. later turned narration itself into image by writing a novel in which the stories were "compounded like faces seen one on top of another," or as she says "superimposed on one another like a stack of photographic negatives" (Jones, p. 42). Cf. Berry,** p. 63: "An image is simultaneous. No part precedes or causes another part, although all parts are involved with each other… We might imagine the dream as a series of superimpositions, each event adding texture and thickening to the rest." * Imagist Poetry (Peter Jones, ed.) London: Penguin, 1972 ** The contrast between image simultaneity and narrative succession, and the different psychological effects of the two modes, is developed by Patricia Berry, "An Approach to the Dream," Spring 1974 (N. Y./Zürich: Spring Publ.), pp. 63, 68-71 |
Hillman also says that
"Jung’s 'complex' and Pound's definition of Image and Lavater's 'whole heap of images, thoughts, sensations, all at once' are all remarkably similar. Pound calls an Image, 'that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time'… 'the Image is more than an Idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy'… 'a Vortex, from which and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.' 79 Thus the movement, the dynamics, are within the complex and not only between complexes, as tensions of opposites told about in narrational sequences, stories that require arbitrary syntactical connectives which are unnecessary for reading an image where all is given at once."
79 These definitions of Image by Pound come from his various writings and can all be found in Jones, pp. 32-41. Further on complex and image, see J. B. Harmer, Victory in Limbo: Imagism 1908-17, London: Secker & Warburg, 1975, pp. 164-68. |
These remarks may help the reader to identify with Ada during her well-viewing in Cold Mountain (previous entry):
"She was dazzled by light and shade, by the confusing duplication of reflections and of frames. All coming from too many directions for the mind to take account of. The various images bounced against each other until she felt a desperate vertigo…."
If such complexity can be suggested by Hexagram 48, The Well, alone, consider the effect of the "cluster of fused ideas… endowed with energy" that is the entire 64-hexagram I Ching.
“Well, it changes.”
A related Log24 link from
that same date, November 27:
“Plato hadn’t tried to destroy areté. He had encapsulated it; made a permanent, fixed Idea out of it; had converted it to a rigid, immobile Immortal Truth. He made areté the Good, the highest form, the highest Idea of all. It was subordinate only to Truth itself, in a synthesis of all that had gone before.That was why the Quality that Phaedrus had arrived at in the classroom had seemed so close to Plato’s Good. Plato’s Good was taken from the rhetoricians. Phaedrus searched, but could find no previous cosmologists who had talked about the Good. That was from the Sophists. The difference was that Plato’s Good was a fixed and eternal and unmoving Idea, whereas for the rhetoricians it was not an Idea at all. The Good was not a form of reality. It was reality itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way.”
— as well as Cold Mountain —
“So in short order Ada found herself bent backward over the mossy well lip, canted in a pose with little to recommend it in the way of dignity or comfort, back arched, hips forward, legs spraddled for balance. She held a hand mirror above her face, angled to catch the surface of the water below.
Ada had agreed to the well-viewing as a variety of experiment in local custom and as a tonic for her gloom. Her thoughts had been broody and morbid and excessively retrospective for so long that she welcomed the chance to run counter to that flow, to cast forward and think about the future, even though she expected to see nothing but water at the bottom of the well.
She shifted her feet to find better grip on the packed dirt of the yard and then tried to look into the mirror. The white sky above was skimmed over with backlit haze, bright as a pearl or as a silver mirror itself. The dark foliage of oaks all around the edges framed the sky, duplicating the wooden frame of the mirror into which Ada peered, examining its picture of the well depths behind her to see what might lie ahead in her life. The bright round of well water at the end of the black shaft was another mirror. It cast back the shine of sky and was furred around the edges here and there with sprigs of fern growing between stones.
Ada tried to focus her attention on the hand mirror, but the bright sky beyond kept drawing her eye away. She was dazzled by light and shade, by the confusing duplication of reflections and of frames. All coming from too many directions for the mind to take account of. The various images bounced against each other until she felt a desperate vertigo, as if she could at any moment pitch backward and plunge head first down the well shaft and drown there, the sky far above her, her last vision but a bright circle set in the dark, no bigger than a full moon.
Her head spun and she reached with her free hand and held to the stonework of the well. And then just for a moment things steadied, and there indeed seemed to be a picture in the mirror.”
— and Log24 on December 3 —
The above logo is from
the I Ching Resources website.
Hexagram 10
Treading (Conduct)
Two Commentaries:
1.
The standard
Princeton University Press
Wilhelm/Baynes text
2.
An idiosyncratic interpretation
from one “Rhett Butler”
at I Ching Resources
Rhett describes his experience
with Hexagram 10 at the South Pole.
This pole, like the abode of Santa,
may serve to illustrate T. S. Eliot’s
remarks on “the still point of
the turning world.”
Related material:
Hitler’s Still Point,
The Still Point of
the Turning World:
Joan Didion and the
Opposite of Meaning
(Harper’s, Nov. 2005),
and
Chorus from the Rock
(Log24, Dec. 5, 2004).
Symbol from the
box-style I Ching
Related material:
The five Log24 entries
ending on August 1
Illustration by Lou Beach
in today's New York Times
article on science and magic
Related material:
A Wrinkle in Time
From the front page of this
morning's online New York Times:
Stephen B. King,
a Hallmark creative director,
with some of the new
greeting cards based
on topical themes and humor.
When you care enough
to send the very best…
From a llnk to Aug. 1
in yesterday's entry:
Epiphany
Box-style I Ching, January 6, 1989
(Click on image for background.)
Detail:
Related material:
Logos and Logic
and Diagon Alley.
Logo design by Anton Stankowski
"… at the beginning of the thirties… Stankowski began to work as a typographer and graphic designer in a Zurich advertising agency. Together with a group of friends– they were later to be known as the 'Zurich Concretists'– he explored the possibilities of symmetry and mirroring in the graphic arts. Stankowski experimented with squares and diagonals, making them the hallmarks of his art. Of his now world-famous logo for the Deutsche Bank— the soaring diagonal in the stable square– he proudly said in 1974: 'The company logo is a trade-mark that sends out a signal.'"
New York firefighters
killed at Deutsche Bank
"Two New York fire fighters were killed while trying to douse a blaze in the former Deutsche Bank building in the city.
The fire broke out on 14th and 15th floors yesterday afternoon and spread to several floors before it was brought under control about five hours later.
The building had been heavily damaged during the 11 September, 2001 terrorist attacks.
The building, which was damaged by falling debris of the twin towers that had collapsed in 2001 when terrorists flew hijacked planes into them, was being 'deconstructed' to make way for construction of a new Freedom Tower."
Related material
SPORTS OF THE TIMES
Restoring the Faith
By SELENA ROBERTS
What good is a nadir if it's denied or ignored? What's the value of reaching the lowest of the low if it can't buy a cheap epiphany? |
When you care enough
to send the very best…
"Summer Reading,"
by Joost Swarte
Cover art by Barclay Shaw reprinted
from an earlier (1984) edition
Philip K. Dick as a
window wraith (see below)
"… the kind of guy who can't drink one cup of coffee without drinking six, and then stays up all night to tell you what Schopenhauer really said and how it affects your understanding of Hitchcock and what that had to do with Christopher Marlowe."
— as well as by the illustrations of Gopnik's characterization in Kernel of Eternity, and by the following passage from Gopnik's 2005 novel The King in the Window:
"What's a window wraith?"
"It's someone who once lived in the ordinary world who lives now in a window, and makes reflections of the people who pass by and look in."
"You mean you are a ghost?!" Oliver asked, suddenly feeling a little terrified.
"Just the opposite, actually. You see, ghosts come from another world and haunt you, but window wraiths are the world. We're the memory of the world. We're here for good. You're the ones who come and go like ghosts. You haunt us."
Related material: As noted, Kernel of Eternity, and also John Tierney's piece on simulated reality in last night's online New York Times. Whether our everyday reality is merely a simulation has long been a theme (as in Dick's novel above) of speculative fiction. Interest in this theme is widespread, perhaps partly because we do exist as simulations– in the minds of other people. These simulations may be accurate or may be– as is perhaps Gopnik's characterization of Philip K. Dick– inaccurate. The accuracy of the simulations is seldom of interest to the simulator, but often of considerable interest to the simulatee.
The cover of the Aug. 20 New Yorker in which the Adam Gopnik essay appears may also be of interest, in view of the material on diagonals in the Log24 entries of Aug. 1 linked to in yesterday's entry:
"Summer Reading,"
by Joost Swarte
The Ring of Gyges
10:31:32 AM ET
Commentary by Richard Wilhelm
on I Ching Hexagram 32:
“Duration is… not a state of rest, for mere standstill is regression.
Duration is rather the self-contained and therefore self-renewing
movement of an organized, firmly integrated whole, taking place in
accordance with immutable laws and beginning anew at every ending.”
Related material
Jung and the Imago Dei
Log24 on June 10, 2007:
WHAT MAKES IAGO EVIL? some people ask. I never ask. —Joan Didion Iago states that he is not who he is. —Mark F. Frisch |
“Not Being There,”
by Christopher Caldwell,
from next Sunday’s
New York Times Magazine:
“The chance to try on fresh identities was the great boon that life online was supposed to afford us. Multiuser role-playing games and discussion groups would be venues for living out fantasies. Shielded by anonymity, everyone could now pass a ‘second life’ online as Thor the Motorcycle Sex God or the Sage of Wherever. Some warned, though, that there were other possibilities. The Stanford Internet expert Lawrence Lessig likened online anonymity to the ring of invisibility that surrounds the shepherd Gyges in one of Plato’s dialogues. Under such circumstances, Plato feared, no one is ‘of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice.’Time, along with a string of sock-puppet scandals, has proved Lessig and Plato right.” |
“The Boy Who Lived,”
by Christopher Hitchens,
from next Sunday’s
New York Times Book Review:
On the conclusion of the Harry Potter series:”The toys have been put firmly back in the box, the wand has been folded up, and the conjuror is discreetly accepting payment while the children clamor for fresh entertainments. (I recommend that they graduate to Philip Pullman, whose daemon scheme is finer than any patronus.)” |
I, on the other hand,
recommend Tolkien…
or, for those who are
already familiar with
Tolkien, Plato– to whom
“The Ring of Gyges” may
serve as an introduction.
“It’s all in Plato, all in Plato:
bless me, what do they
teach them at these schools!”
— C. S. Lewis
This symbol from the
box-style I Ching is
echoed by a French ad for
the 2006 film "Scoop"–
This film may be taken as
foreshadowing the afterlife
of the late Fleet Street
figure Richard Stott.
Stott, along with film
directors Ingmar Berman
and Michelangelo Antonioni,
died on Monday (July 30).
He is, we may suppose,
the mysterious third man
in Tuesday's remark by
the mayor of Rome:
"With Antonioni dies not only
one of the greatest directors
but also
a master of modernity."
Dogs and Lampposts,
by Richard Stott
The title of Stott's book
is from H. L. Mencken,
who is said to have felt
that the proper relationship
of a journalist to a politician
is that of a dog to a lamppost.
Cheap Epiphany
SPORTS OF THE TIMES
Restoring the Faith
By SELENA ROBERTS What good is a nadir if it's denied or ignored? What's the value of reaching the lowest of the low if it can't buy a cheap epiphany? |
Pennsylvania Lottery on the Feast of St. Ignatius Loyola: |
|
Restoring the Booze:
A Look at the 50's-
Another Epiphany:
Box-style I Ching, January 6, 1989
(Click on image for background.)
Detail:
Related material:
Logos and Logic
and Diagon Alley.
"What a swell
party this is."
— adapted from
Cole Porter
Harry Potter and the Order of The Phoenix for Xbox 360 “is based on the fifth book and is timed to coincide with the release of the movie of the same name…. The game consists of Harry walking around and talking to characters and performing spells and tasks in order to advance the plot. I jokingly considered calling this review ‘Harry Potter and the Order of the Random Tasks Needed to Advance the Plot.'” —July 9 review at Digital Joystick
Mid-day 220
Evening 034
Related material:
2/20 and
Hexagram 34 in the
box-style I Ching:
The Power
of the Great
“If Cullinane College
were Hogwarts“
(continued) and
the four entries
that preceded it
on July 5-6, 2007
In Defense of
Plato’s Realism
(vs. sophists’ nominalism–
see recent entries.)
Plato cited geometry,
notably in the Meno,
in defense of his realism.
Consideration of the
Meno’s diamond figure
leads to the following:
Click on image for details.
As noted in an entry,
Plato, Pegasus, and
the Evening Star,
linked to
at the end of today’s
previous entry,
the “universals”
of Platonic realism
are exemplified by
the hexagrams of
the I Ching,
which in turn are
based on the seven
trigrams above and
on the eighth trigram,
of all yin lines,
not shown above:
K’un
The Receptive
_____________________________________________
Update of Nov. 30, 2013:
From a little-known website in Kuala Lumpur:
(Click to enlarge.)
The remarks on Platonic realism are from Wikipedia.
The eightfold cube is apparently from this post.
Kernel
Mathematical Reviews citation:
MR2163497 (2006g:81002) 81-03 (81P05)
Gieser, Suzanne The innermost kernel. Depth psychology and quantum physics. Wolfgang Pauli's dialogue with C. G. Jung. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2005. xiv+378 pp. ISBN: 3-540-20856-9
A quote from MR at Amazon.com:
"This revised translation of a Swedish Ph. D. thesis in philosophy offers far more than a discussion of Wolfgang Pauli's encounters with the psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung…. Here the book explains very well how Pauli attempted to extend his understanding beyond superficial esotericism and spiritism…. To understand Pauli one needs books like this one, which… seems to open a path to a fuller understanding of Pauli, who was seeking to solve a quest even deeper than quantum physics." (Arne Schirrmacher, Mathematical Reviews, Issue 2006g)
The four-group is also known as the Vierergruppe or Klein group. It appears, notably, as the translation subgroup of A, the group of 24 automorphisms of the affine plane over the 2-element field, and therefore as the kernel of the homomorphism taking A to the group of 6 automorphisms of the projective line over the 2-element field. (See Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube.)
The "chessboard" of
Nov. 7, 2006
(as revised Nov. 7, 2012)–
(Faust, Part Two, as
quoted by Jung in
Memories, Dreams, Reflections)
Epiphany: A link in the Log24 entries for Epiphany 2007 leads to Damnation Morning, which in turn leads to Why Me?, a discussion of the mythology of Spiders vs. Snakes devised by Fritz Leiber. Spiders represent the conscious mind, snakes the unconscious.
On Hexagram 18: "The Chinese character ku represents a bowl in whose contents worms are breeding. This means decay." —Wilhelm's commentary
This brings us back to the previous entry with its mention of the date of Rudolf Arnheim's death: Saturday, June 9. In Log24 on that date there was a link, in honor of Aaron Sorkin's birthday, to a short story by Leonard Michaels. That link was suggested, in part, by a review in the Sunday New York Times Book Review (available online earlier, on Friday). Here is a quote from that review related to the Hexagram 18 worm bowl:
"… what grabbed attention for his early collections was Michaels's gruesome, swaggering depiction of the sexual rampage that was the swinging '60s in New York– 'the worm bucket,' as Michaels described an orgy."
Related material for meditation on this, the anniversary (according to Encyclopaedia Britannica) of the birth of author Jerzy Kosinski— his novel The Hermit of 69th Street.
Kosinski was not unfamiliar with Michaels's worm bucket. For related information, see Hermit (or at least a review).
In Leiber's stories the symbol of the Snakes is similar to the famed Yin-Yang symbol, also known as the T'ai-chi tu. For an analysis of this symbol by Arnheim, see the previous entry. See also "Sunday in the Park with Death" (Log24, Oct. 26, 2003):
and a Finite Model
Notes by Steven H. Cullinane
May 28, 2007
Part I: A Model of Space-Time
Click on picture to enlarge.
Part II: A Corresponding Finite Model
The Klein quadric also occurs in a finite model of projective 5-space. See a 1910 paper:
G. M. Conwell, The 3-space PG(3,2) and its group, Ann. of Math. 11, 60-76.
Conwell discusses the quadric, and the related Klein correspondence, in detail. This is noted in a more recent paper by Philippe Cara:
Related material:
The projective space PG(5,2), home of the Klein quadric in the finite model, may be viewed as the set of 64 points of the affine space AG(6,2), minus the origin.
The 64 points of this affine space may in turn be viewed as the 64 hexagrams of the Classic of Transformation, China’s I Ching.
There is a natural correspondence between the 64 hexagrams and the 64 subcubes of a 4x4x4 cube. This correspondence leads to a natural way to generate the affine group AGL(6,2). This may in turn be viewed as a group of over a trillion natural transformations of the 64 hexagrams.
A Baffled Reader
A reader this morning commented on my first Xanga entry (July 20, 2002):
“To set one up (which I have not done because I don’t want anyone to know what I think),” … William Safire regarding “blogs”.
I still don’t know what you think. Yet … I try, try, try.
Here’s one thing that I think– today– based on my “Hate Speech for Harvard,” on “Devil in the Details” (Log24, May 18 and 23), and, more recently, on
HSU:
WAITING
(NOURISHMENT)
See also the previous entry
and Natalie Angier’s sneer
at a politician’s call for
prayer, which, she
said, involved the
“assumption that prayer is
some sort of miracle
Vicks VapoRub.”
Detail from the
5/21/07 New Yorker:
THE IMAGE
Clouds rise up to heaven:
The image of WAITING.
Thus the superior man
eats and drinks,
Is joyous and
of good cheer.
AMEN.
“What is the spirit of the bayonet?”
— United States Army
training question, 1964
A partial answer
in two parts:
Part I —
Another question —
“Know the one about
the Demiurge and the
Abridgment of Hope?”
— Robert Stone,
A Flag for Sunrise,
Knopf, 1981,
the final page, 439,
cited by page number
here this morning
Part II —
Today’s numbers, in
this morning’s context,
strongly suggest
a look at
A Flag for Sunrise,
by Robert Stone,
Knopf, 1981,
page 431, and at Hexagram 34, |
The Power of the Great,
in the context of a
Log24 entry for
October 8, 2005.
“There is no teacher
but the enemy.“
— Orson Scott Card,
Ender’s Game
Related entertainment:
the previous entry
and the Vietnam memoir
Black Virgin Mountain.
Symbol of the Dec. 1
“Day Without Art“
This resembles the following symbol,
due to logician Charles Sanders Peirce,
of the logic of binary opposition:
(For futher details on the role
of this symbol in logic, see
Chinese Jar Revisited.)
On this, International Women’s Day,
we might also consider the
widely quoted thoughts on logic of
Harvard professor Barbara Johnson:
Detail:
“Instead of a simple ‘either/or’ structure,
deconstruction attempts to elaborate a discourse
that says neither “either/or”, nor “both/and”
nor even “neither/nor”, while at the same time
not totally abandoning these logics either.”
It may also be of interest on
International Women’s Day
that in the “box style” I Ching
(suggested by a remark of
Jungian analyst
Marie-Louise von Franz)
the symbol
denotes
Hexagram 2,
The Receptive.
“Yo es que nací un 8 de marzo,
Día de la Mujer Trabajadora,
y no he hecho más que
trabajar toda mi vida.”
For background on Aldecoa,
see a paper (pdf) by
Sara Brenneis:
“Josefina Aldecoa intertwines
history, collective memory
and individual testimony in her
historical memory trilogy…”
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York City on March 25, 1911, was the largest industrial disaster in the history of the city of New York, causing the death of 146 garment workers who either died in the fire or jumped to their deaths.
Propaganda, March 1977:
“On March 8, 1908, after the death of 128 women trapped in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City, 15,000 women workers from the garment and textile industry marched echoing the demands of their sisters 50 years earlier…”
Propaganda, March 2006:
“First of all, on March 8th, 1857, a large number of factory workers in the United States took to the streets to demand their economic and political rights. The owners called the police who arrived immediately and opened fire, engaging in blind repression… Later on, in 1908, the same date of March 8th was once again a memorable date of struggle. On this day, capitalist bosses in Chicago set fire to a textile factory where over a thousand women worked. A very large number was terribly burnt. 120 died!”
Propaganda disguised as news, March 2007:
From today’s top story in 24 HoursTM, a commuter daily in Vancouver published by Sun Media Corporation:
Fight still on for equality
By Robyn Stubbs and Carly Krug
“International Women’s Day commemorates a march by female garment workers protesting low wages, 12-hour workdays and bad working conditions in New York City on March 8, 1857.
Then in 1908, after 128 women were trapped and killed in a fire at a New York City garment and textile factory, 15,000 women workers again took their protests to the street.”
Related historical fiction:
A version of the
I Ching’s Hexagram 19:
— Katherine Neville, The Eight
“What does this have to do with why we’re here?”
“I saw it in a chess book Mordecai showed me. The most ancient chess service ever discovered was found at the palace of King Minos on Crete– the place where the famous Labyrinth was built, named after this sacred axe. The chess service dates to 2000 B.C. It was made of gold and silver and jewels…. And in the center was carved a labrys.” … “But I thought chess wasn’t even invented until six or seven hundred A.D.,” I added. “They always say it came from Persia or India. How could this Minoan chess service be so old?” “Mordecai’s written a lot himself on the history of chess,” said Lily…. “He thinks that chess set in Crete was designed by the same guy who built the Labyrinth– the sculptor Daedalus….” Now things were beginning to click into place…. “Why was this axe carved on the chessboard?” I asked Lily, knowing the answer in my heart before she spoke. “What did Mordecai say was the connection?”…. “That’s what it’s all about,” she said quietly. “To kill the King.” The sacred axe was used to kill the King. The ritual had been the same since the beginning of time. The game of chess was merely a reenactment. Why hadn’t I recognized it before? |
Perhaps at the center of
Aldecoa’s labyrinth lurk the
capitalist bosses from Chicago
who, some say, set fire
to a textile factory
on this date in 1908.
For a Freudian perspective
on the above passage,
see yesterday’s entry
In the Labyrinth of Time,
with its link to
John Irwin‘s essay
“The False Artaxerxes:
Borges and the
Dream of Chess.”
Symbols
S. H. Cullinane
March 7, 2007
Today, by the way, is the
feast of a chess saint.
“The much-borrowed Brown formula involves some very specific things. The name of a great artist, artifact or historical figure must be in the book’s story, not to mention on its cover. The narrative must start in the present day with a bizarre killing, then use that killing as a reason to investigate the past. And the past must yield a secret so big, so stunning, so saber-rattling that all of civilization may be changed by it. Probably not for the better.
This formula is neatly summarized….”
The Secret:
“Little ‘Jack’ Horner was actually Thomas Horner, steward to the Abbot of Glastonbury during the reign of King Henry VIII…. Always keen to raise fresh funds, Henry had shown a interest in Glastonbury (and other abbeys). Hoping to appease the royal appetite, the nervous Abbot, Richard Whiting, allegedly sent Thomas Horner to the King with a special gift. This was a pie containing the title deeds to twelve manor houses in the hope that these would deflect the King from acquiring Glastonbury Abbey. On his way to London, the not so loyal courier Horner apparently stuck his thumb into the pie and extracted the deeds for Mells Manor, a plum piece of real estate. The attempted bribe failed and the dissolution of the monasteries (including Glastonbury) went ahead from 1536 to 1540. Richard Whiting was subsequently executed, but the Horner family kept the house, so the moral of this one is: treachery and greed pay off, but bribery is a bad idea.” –Chris Roberts, Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: The Reason Behind the Rhyme
“The Grail Table has thirteen seats, one of which is kept vacant in memory of Judas Iscariot who betrayed Christ.” —Symbolism of King Arthur’s Round Table
and the three entries preceding it:
— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
The above is from
Feb. 15, 2006.
Commencement Address (doc)
to Computer Science Division,
College of Letters and Science,
University of California, Berkeley,
by Jim Gray,
May 25, 2003:
"I was part of Berkeley's class of 1965. Things have changed a lot since then….
So, what's that got to do with you? Well, there is going to be MORE change…. Indeed, change is accelerating– Vernor Vinge suggests we are approaching singularities when social, scientific and economic change are so rapid that we cannot imagine what will happen next. These futurists predict humanity will become post-human. Now, THAT! is change– a lot more than I have seen.
If it happens, the singularity will happen in your lifetime– and indeed, you are likely to make it happen."
More from Gray's speech:
"I am an optimist. Science is a Faustian bargain– and I am betting on mankind muddling through. I grew up under the threat of atomic war; we've avoided that so far. Information Technology is a Faustian bargain. I am optimistic that we can have the good parts and protect ourselves from the worst part– but I am counting on your help in that."
"There could not be an objective test
that distinguished a clever robot
from a really conscious person."
— Daniel Dennett in TIME magazine,
issue dated Mon., Jan. 29, 2007
Daniel Dennett, Professor of Philosophy
and Director of the
Center for Cognitive Studies
at Tufts University,
in his office on campus.
(Boston Globe, Jan. 29, 2006.
Photo © Rick Friedman.)
Obstruction. The southwest furthers.
(See Zenna Henderson.)
The northeast does not further.
(See Daniel Dennett.)
It furthers one to see the great man.
(See Alan Turing.)
Perseverance brings good fortune.
“What on earth is
a concrete universal?”
— Robert M. Pirsig
From A Shot at Redemption—
John Constantine,
cartoon character, and
Donald E. Knuth,
Lutheran mathematician
A photo opportunity —
and a recent cartoon:
From Calvin College,
today’s meditation:
Today in History
by The Associated Press:
Today is Tuesday, Dec. 26, the 360th day of 2006. There are five days left in the year. The seven-day African-American holiday Kwanzaa begins today. This is Boxing Day.
the time of this entry.
Related material:
"At the still point,
there the dance is"
and
In 1692 on July 31, at the time of the Salem witchcraft trials, Increase Mather reportedly "delivered a sermon… in Boston in which he posed the question… 'O what makes the difference between the devils in hell and the angels of heaven?'"
Increase, the father of Cotton Mather, was president of Harvard from June 27, 1692, to Sept. 6, 1701. His name is memorialized by Harvard's Mather House.
Locating Hell
"Noi siam venuti al loco ov' i' t'ho detto
"We have come to where From a Harvard student's weblog: Heard in Mather I hope you get gingivitis You want me to get oral cancer?! Goodnight fartface Turd. Turd. Turd. Turd. Turd. Make your own waffles!! Blah blah blah starcraft blah blah starcraft blah starcraft. It's da email da email. And some blue hair! Oohoohoo Izod! 10 gigs! Yeah it smells really bad. Only in the stairs though. Starcraft blah blah Starcraft fartface. Yeah it's hard. You have to get a bunch of battle cruisers. 40 kills! So good! Oh ho ho grunt grunt squeal. I'm getting sick again. You have a final tomorrow? In What?! Um I don't even know. Next year we're draggin him there and sticking the needle in ourselves. " … one more line/ unravelling from the dark design/ spun by God and Cotton Mather" — Robert Lowell |
Related material:
Log24 on 1/16,
and Hexagram 41,
Decrease
At the foot of the mountain, the lake:
The image of Decrease.
Thus the superior man controls his anger
And restrains his instincts.
This suggests thoughts of
the novel Cold Mountain
(see yesterday morning)
and the following from
Log24 on St. Luke's Day
this year:
|
Established in 1916, Montreat College is a private, Christian college located in a beautiful valley in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. |
"The valley spirit never dies…"
See also St. Luke's Day, 2004,
as well as a journal entry
prompted by both
the ignorant religion
of Harvard's past
and the ignorant scientism
of Harvard's present–
Hitler's Still Point:
A Hate Speech for Harvard.
This last may, of course, not
quite fit the description of
the superior man
controlling his anger
so wisely provided by
yesterday's lottery and
Hexagram 41.
Nobody's perfect.
Yesterday’s Pennsylvania
Mid-day 266
Evening 529
Related material:
The 266-Day Method
and
The Shining of May 29
(Wednesday, May 29, 2002) Commentary on Hexagram 29: — Richard Wilhelm, “How do we explain — Rhetorical question |
From Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday“– “Prophesy to the wind,
From The Man in the High Castle: “Juliana said, ‘Oracle, why did you write The Grasshopper Lies Heavy? What are we supposed to learn?’ ‘You have a disconcertingly superstitious way of phrasing your question,’ Hawthorne said. But he had squatted down to witness the coin throwing. ‘Go ahead,’ he said; he handed her three Chinese brass coins with holes in the center. ‘I generally use these.’
She began throwing the coins; she felt calm and very much herself. Hawthorne wrote down her lines for her. When she had thrown the coins six times, he gazed down and said: ‘Sun at the top. Tui at the bottom. Empty in the center.’ ‘Do you know what hexagram that is?’ she said. ‘Without using the chart?’ ‘Yes,’ Hawthorne said. ‘It’s Chung Fu,’ Juliana said. ‘Inner Truth. I know without using the chart, too. And I know what it means.'”
Our Lady of
Judgment Day
“One of the illusions is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly until he knows that every day is Doomsday.”
— Emerson, Ch. VII, “Works and Days,” in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. VII, Society and Solitude (1870) |
And the
"Meet Max Black"
Award goes to…
"For the Aeron and other designs,
Mr. Stumpf won this year’s
National Design Award
in Product Design,
which is to be presented
posthumously on Oct. 18
by the Cooper-Hewitt
National Design Museum
in Manhattan."
— Today's New York Times
Stumpf died on August 30,
the date of the Log24 entry
"The Seventh Symbol."
Related material:
From
Geometry of the I Ching,
a chessboard:
From the
National Design Museum:
From Log24 on the
date of Stumpf's death,
Pictorial version of
Hexagram 20,
Contemplation (View)
See also
Fearful Symmetry
and
Symmetry Framed.
A Multicultural Farewell
to a winner of the
Nobel Prize for Literature,
the Egyptian author of
The Seventh Heaven:
Supernatural Stories —
"Jackson has identified
the seventh symbol."
— Stargate
Other versions of
the seventh symbol —
"… Max Black, the Cornell philosopher, and others have pointed out how 'perhaps every science must start with metaphor and end with algebra, and perhaps without the metaphor there would never have been any algebra' …."
— Max Black, Models and Metaphors, Cornell U. Press, 1962, page 242, as quoted in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, by Victor Witter Turner, Cornell U. Press, paperback, 1975, page 25
Augustine of Hippo, who is said to
have died on this date in 430 A.D.
"He is, after all, not merely taking over a Neoplatonic ontology, but he is attempting to combine it with a scriptural tradition of a rather different sort, one wherein the divine attributes most prized in the Greek tradition (e.g. necessity, immutability, and atemporal eternity) must somehow be combined with the personal attributes (e.g. will, justice, and historical purpose) of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."
— Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Augustine
Here is a rather different attempt
to combine the eternal with the temporal:
The Eternal
Symbol of necessity,
For details, see |
The Temporal
Symbol of the
For details, see |
The eternal
combined with the temporal:
|
Related material:
Under God
Adapted from August 7:
“Saomai, the Vietnamese name
for the planet Venus, was the
eighth major storm to hit China
during an unusually violent
typhoon season.”
— AP online tonight
Lieutenant Daniel Taylor: |
Wind and thunder:
the image of Increase.
Thus the superior man:
If he sees good,
he imitates it;
If he has faults,
he rids himself of them.
For further details,
see recent entries
(August 7-11)
and also
Symmetry and Change
In the Dreamtime.
Update of 1:06 AM ET Mercy Now My father could use a little mercy now My brother could use a little mercy now My church and my country could use a little mercy now Every living thing could use a little mercy now Yeah, we all could use a little mercy now |
Night Listener
(See previous entry.)
Thanks to Natalie at
KHYI, 95.3 FM, Plano, Texas
(hard country music),
for just now playing
A Fine Line, by Radney Foster:
There’s a curve in the highway, just south of town
where a man has pulled over to figure life out
with only his concience and the lonesome sound
of diesels winding up grade
he’s got a wife and two kids, and they love him so
he’s got a woman down in georgia,
and she’s startin’ to show
he’s damned if he leaves her,
and he’s sure damned if he don’t
and he wonders how life got this way
cuase it’s a fine line in between right and wrong
yea he’s been crossing over that border
way too long
he should’ve seen it coming at him
right from the start
now there aint’ no escape from a broken heart
now the call of the highway is a powerful thing
like the pull of a lover, or a child in a swing
gave his heart to two women
only one wears his ring
they’re both gonna have his babies now
so how do you confess,
what words don’t explain
he never intended to cause this much pain
now he feels like a farmer
who went praying for the rain
got more than he bargained from the clouds
[chorus]
he’ll turn his car around tonight,
go home and try to face the truth
everyone involved’s getting hurt,
now there aint nothing he can do
[chorus]
Update of 11:08 PM ET…
and, Natalie, for playing
“Late Night Grande Hotel“
just now, thanks big time.
John Kenneth Galbraith died last evening at 9:15 PM in Cambridge, Mass., according to news reports. Related material: Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star, Time in the Rock. |
Brian Snyder/Reuters
|
“‘Lestat,’ the maiden Broadway production of Warner Brothers Theater Ventures, is the third vampire musical to open in the last few years, and it seems unlikely to break the solemn curse that has plagued the genre. Directed by Robert Jess Roth from a book by Linda Woolverton, the show admittedly has higher aspirations and (marginally) higher production values than the kitschy ‘Dance of the Vampires’ (2002) and the leaden ‘Dracula: The Musical’ (2004), both major-league flops.” — Ben Brantley
See Log24,
St. Patrick’s Day 2004:
“I faced myself that day with
the nonplused apprehension
of someone who has
come across a vampire
and has no crucifix in hand.”
— Joan Didion, “On Self-Respect,”
in Slouching Towards Bethlehem
“For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross.”
— Thomas Pynchon,
Gravity’s Rainbow
See also
In memory of Humphrey Carpenter, author of The Inklings, who attended The Dragon School. Carpenter died a year ago today.
"Lewis began with a number of haunted images…."
"The best of the books are the ones… where the allegory is at a minimum and the images just flow."
"'Everything began with images,' Lewis wrote…."
From Paul Preuss,
Broken Symmetries
(see previous entry):
From
Verbum Sat Sapienti?
The Pennsylvania lottery
on St. Stephen's Day–
Midday: 105
Evening: 064
From a new
branch of theology,
lottery hermeneutics:
See Log24, 1/05,
Death and the Spirit,
and the 64 hexagrams of
the box-style I Ching.
From the Wikipedia
article on hermeneutics:
(See also Hitler's Still Point:
A Hate Speech for Harvard.)
In the box-style I Ching
Hexagram 34,
The Power of the Great,
is represented by
.
Art is represented
by a box
(Hexagram 20,
Contemplation, View)
.
And of course
great art
is represented by
an X in a box.
(Hexagram 2,
The Receptive)
.
“… as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually
in its stillness”
“… at the still point,
there the dance is.”
— T. S. Eliot
A Jungian on this six-line figure: “They are the same six lines that exist in the I Ching…. Now observe the square more closely: four of the lines are of equal length, the other two are longer…. For this reason symmetry cannot be statically produced and a dance results.” |
For those who prefer
technology to poetry,
there is the Xbox 360.
(Today is day 360 of 2005.)
Sex and Art in
a Chinese Poem
In the box-style I Ching
Hexagram 34,
The Power of the Great,
is represented by
.
Art is represented
by a box
(Hexagram 20,
Contemplation, View)
.
And of course
great art
is represented by
an X in a box.
(Hexagram 2,
The Receptive)
.
The combination of these
three symbols may be viewed
as “Power in a Box,” or,
according to some scholars,
“The Art of Great Sex.”
From Xinhua News Agency tonight:
Xbox 360 meets
cold shoulder in Japan.
But in another time and place…
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