Voilà!
Wednesday, July 31, 2024
Saturday, March 2, 2024
Wonder Box
"Wundermärchen – the original German word for fairytale –
literally translates to ‘wonder tale’."
— Abigail Tulenko. a PhD student in philosophy at Harvard University,
at Aeon on Feb. 26, 2024.
Another example of abstract art . . .
"The discovery of the Cullinane Diamond Theorem is a testament
to the power of mathematical abstraction and its ability to reveal
deep connections and symmetries in seemingly simple structures."
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Saturday, September 10, 2022
Solomon’s Mental Health Month
May 2003 was "Solomon's Mental Health Month" in this journal.
An essay linked to on the 9th of May in that month —
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"Taking the Veil," by Jessica Kardon
https://web.archive.org/web/20021102182519/ James Hillman, writing in The Soul's Code, argues for his "acorn theory" of human individual identity, and suggests that "each person bears a uniqueness that asks to be lived and that is already present before it can be lived." He insists we are born with a given character, a daimon, the carrier of destiny. This theory is closely linked to the beautiful myth described by Plato in his Republic, when the soul stands before Lachesis and receives his specific soul guardian. Hillman maintains that the daimon will always emerge somehow, even if thwarted or unrecognized. I never had ambitions that reached fruition in the adult world. I have had only two career interests in my life – both formed precognitively. I wanted to be a mermaid or a nun. By the time I learned – shockingly late – that I could not be a mermaid, I had realized I would not be a nun. I concur with Hillman's emphasis on the persistence of early disposition, and I like to imagine that my dreamy, watery, Victorian and self-righteous psyche has held aspects of both of these early interests, throughout my life. I was adopted one month after my birth. I was tended by nuns during the first four weeks of my life. Thereafter, I spent my whole educational life in convent schools. It was the sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul that gave me my favorite musical and my early distortions about romantic love and the gender plans of Our Lord. My misconceptions about love and marriage were culled from the Lerner Loewe musical Gigi, a wonderful film based loosely on a Colette novel. I was summoned along with my whole class to the gymnasium to view the movie under the edgy eye of Sister Bernadette. Sister Bernadette was a large, mesomorphic nun famed for the beatings she gave to boys and girls alike, and feared for the mean zest with which she bestowed her favors upon many of us. I was not beaten – but once, believing I was wearing lipstick, she held my head in a sink and scrubbed my lips until they bled, then slapped me. I recall this with a mild, rueful whimsy. We were all manhandled. In memory, Bernadette seems more like an angry and troubled older sibling than a true figure of authority. Anyway, I loved Gigi. It fed directly into my Francophilia. I was convinced that at some future date, I, like Gigi, would be trained as a courtesan. I, too, would cause some hard case, experienced roué to abandon his chill and irony. I saw myself strolling down the Champs Elysee with Louis Jordan in rapt attendance, pushing a baby carriage, wearing a hat the size of a manhole cover, hoisting a parasol above that to assure the longevity of my adorable pallor. The gender plans of Our Lord had recently been revealed to me too. Sister B. had drawn a ladder on the blackboard, a ladder with three rungs. At the top, she explained, were the priests, the nuns, and the monks. These souls had surrendered their lives to God. All would be taken directly to heaven upon their passing from this vale of tears, as we all referred to the world in those lean emotional times. On the middle rung stood the married. If you married and kept the law – which meant leaving every act of marital congress open to the reception of a child, you would be eligible for heaven. If you were foul in marriage, seeking your pleasure, you were going to be damned. On the bottom rung were those selfish souls who had remained single and had imagined their lives their own. This group had never given themselves to Our Lord. They were headed to hell in a sort of preternatural laundry chute. So we little ladies had two viable options: marry and breed without ceasing – or take the veil. Despite my hat and perambulator fantasies, once given the sorry news of the ladder, the veil became the clear romantic favorite. Therefore I began my research. I obtained a catalogue of nunnery. It offered photographs of each order, describing the duties of the specific order, and displaying the garb of that order. I was looking for two things – a great looking veil and gown, and a contemplative order. I had no desire to sully my glorious vision of myself with a life in the outer world. It was apparent to me that the teaching of children was going to involve a whole range of miseries – making them cry, telling them the bad news about the ladder, and so forth. This was not for me. I saw myself kneeling on the floor of my pristine little cell, serene and untouched by human hands. Teaching would be certain to interfere with the proper lighting. Yoked to a bunch of messy children, I could not possibly have the opalescent illumination of heaven falling reliably on my upturned visage. What divided me from my dream of rebirth as a mermaid was the force of what was real: I could not morph. What divided me from my dream of life as a nun was the force of the erotic: I would not abstain. Now, long years later, I am still underwater, and I am still bending the knee. I live in the blue shadows of hidden grottoes, and I am swimming, too, in the gold of my drifting prayers. September 7th, this dream. I am standing in a dimly lit room, gazing at a group of heavy, antique silk burqas that look weirdly like Fortuny gowns. A holy woman approaches me, and tells me that my soul will leave my body, and enter these garments. She turns and points at a young girl standing nearby, a child with close-cropped hair and a solemn look. My heart knows her, but my eyes don't. For a moment I am thinking, exactly as I did in the seventies when holding a joint: "This isn't working." Suddenly, these things: I feel the shape of flame, then I am the shape. I am released into the air, and as pure essence I enter other forms, dissolving in them, gathering my energy back into myself, and flying out again. This was a sensation so exquisite that my dreaming brain woke up and announced to me: "This is a dream about death." I saw that child again as I flew. This time my eyes knew her. I flew to her, but the flame of my soul would not cohere with hers, this child who was, of course, my own self. In the shadows alone, I heard myself whisper: "I'm in the wind. I'm in the water." This lovely dream, which gave me the sublime gift of a little visceral preview of the soul in the death process, also showed me my guardian spirit; divided, but viable. I pass through my life swimming in one self, kneeling in the other. I thought of Rilke's 29th Sonnet to Orpheus and realized this was what I had been dreaming about all my life, moving between them.
by jessica kardon |
See as well yesterday's post "At a Still Point."
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Monday, May 24, 2021
Review
From the cover of a 1971 book of stories by Zenna Henderson —
From Frame Tale (Oct. 1, 2013) —
From Log24 posts tagged Aitchison —
"Has time rewritten every line?" — Streisand
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Thursday, March 31, 2016
Devil’s Gate Revisited
The revisiting, below, of an image shown here in part
on Spy Wednesday, 2016, was suggested in part by
a New York Times obituary today for a Nobel-prize
winning Hungarian novelist.
Note the references on the map to
"Devil's Gate" and "Pathfinder."
See also the following from a review of The Pathseeker , a novel
by the Nobel laureate (Imre Kertész), who reportedly died today —
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… The commissioner is in fact not in search of a path, but rather of traces of the past (more literally the Hungarian title means ‘trace seeker’). His first shock comes at his realization that the site of his sufferings has been converted into a museum, complete with tourists “diligently carrying off the significance of things, crumb by crumb, wearing away a bit of the unspoken importance” (59). He meets not only tourists, however. He also comes across paradoxically “unknown acquaintances who were just as much haunted by a compulsion to revisit,” including a veiled woman who slowly repeats to him the inventory of those she lost: “my father, my younger brother, my fiancé” (79). The commissioner informs her that he has come “to try to redress that injustice” (80). When she asks how, he suddenly finds the words he had sought, “as if he could see them written down: ‘So that I should bear witness to everything I have seen’” (80). The act of bearing witness, however, proves elusive. In the museum he is compelled to wonder, “What could this collection of junk, so cleverly, indeed all too cleverly disguised as dusty museum material, prove to him, or to anyone else for that matter,” and adds the chilling observation, “Its objects could be brought to life only by being utilized” (71). As he touches the rust-eaten barbed wire fence he thinks, “A person might almost feel in the mood to stop and dutifully muse on this image of decay – were he not aware, of course, that this was precisely the goal; that the play of ephemerality was merely a bait for things” (66). It is this play of ephemerality, the possibility that the past will be consigned to the past, against which the commissioner struggles, yet his struggle is frustrated precisely by the lack of resistance, the indifference of the objects he has come to confront. “What should he cling on to for proof?” he wonders. “What was he to fight with, if they were depriving him of every object of the struggle? Against what was he to try and resist, if nothing was resisting?” (68) He had come with the purpose of “advertis[ing] his superiority, celebrat[ing] the triumph of his existence in front of these mute and powerless things. His groundless disappointment was fed merely by the fact that this festive invitation had received no response. The objects were holding their peace” (109). In point of fact The Pathseeker makes no specific mention either of the Holocaust or of the concentration camps, yet the admittedly cryptic references to places leave no doubt that this is its subject. Above the gate at the camp the commissioner’s wife reads the phrase, “Jedem das Seine,” to each his due, and one recalls the sign above the entrance to the camp at Buchenwald. Further references to Goethe as well as the Brabag factory, where Kertész himself worked as a prisoner, confirm this. Why this subterfuge on the part of the author? Why a third-person narrative with an unnamed protagonist when so many biographical links tie the author to the story? One cannot help but wonder if Kertész sought specifically to avoid binding his story to particulars in order to maintain the ultimately metaphysical nature of the quest. Like many of Kertész’s works,The Pathseeker is not about the trauma of the Holocaust itself so much as the trauma of survival. The self may survive but the triumph of that survival is chimerical. Translator Tim Wilkinson made the bold decision, in translating the title of the work, not to resort to the obvious. Rather than simply translate Nyomkereső , an allusion to the Hungarian translation of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pathfinder , back into English, he preserves an element of the unfamiliar in his title. This tendency marks many of the passages of the English translation, in which Wilkinson has opted to preserve the winding and often frustratingly serpentine nature of many of the sentences of the original instead of rewriting them in sleek, familiar English. . . . — Thomas Cooper |
"Sleek, familiar English" —
"Those were the good old days!" — Applegate in "Damn Yankees"
(See previous post.)
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Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Tuesday November 6, 2007
The Third Person
Of Modern Art
The New York Times
November 6, 2007
More on the Career of
the Genius Who Boldly
Compared Himself to God
“Picasso… once said…
‘… No wonder his [Picasso’s] style is so ambiguous. It’s like God’s. God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style. He just keeps on trying other things. The same with this sculptor….’
The comparison to God, like the use of the third person, was deliberate, of course.”
Of Modern Poetry
The poem of the mind
in the act of finding
What will suffice ….
… It has
To construct a new stage.
It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor,
slowly and
With meditation, speak words
that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear
of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it
wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible
audience listens,
Not to the play, but to
itself, expressed
In an emotion as of
two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one.
The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark….
— Wallace Stevens in
Parts of a World, 1942
Of Modern Metaphysics
“For every work [or act] of creation is threefold, an earthly trinity to match the heavenly.
First, [not in time, but merely in order of enumeration] there is the Creative Idea, passionless, timeless, beholding the whole work complete at once, the end in the beginning: and this is the image of the Father.
Second, there is the Creative Energy [or Activity] begotten of that idea, working in time from the beginning to the end, with sweat and passion, being incarnate in the bonds of matter: and this is the image of the Word.
Third, there is the Creative Power, the meaning of the work and its response in the lively soul: and this is the image of the indwelling Spirit.
And these three are one, each equally in itself the whole work, whereof none can exist without other: and this is the image of the Trinity.”
— Concluding speech of St. Michael the Archangel in a 1937 play, “The Zeal of Thy House,” by Dorothy Sayers, as quoted in her 1941 book The Mind of the Maker. That entire book was, she wrote, an expansion of St. Michael’s speech.
Related material:
- Dana Wilde, “An Introduction to Reading Wallace Stevens as a Poet of the Human Spirit” (from The Antigonish Review, published by St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia; Issue 109, online version undated– perhaps Spring 1997)
- Trinities for Hollywood (Oct. 24) and Something Anonymous (Oct. 25– Picasso’s birthday)
- A 1990 note, The Maker’s Gift.
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Friday, January 5, 2007
Friday January 5, 2007
In Twelfth Night, the character Feste
".. seems to be the wisest person within all the characters in the comedy. Viola remarks this by saying 'This fellow's wise enough to play the fool'…. Since Feste is a licensed fool, his main role in Twelfth Night is to speak the truth. This is where the humor lies…."
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Monday, March 27, 2006
Monday March 27, 2006
A Living Church
A skeptic’s remark:
“…the mind is an amazing thing and it can create patterns and interconnections among things all day if you let it, regardless of whether they are real connections.”
— Xanga blogger “sejanus”
A reply from G. K. Chesterton
(Log24, Jan. 18, 2004):
“Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living. To know that Plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before.”
Mid-day: 024
Evening: 672
Evening: 672
A meditation on
Sunday’s numbers —
24
The Star
of Venus
“He looked at the fading light
in the western sky and saw Mercury,
or perhaps it was Venus,
gleaming at him as the evening star.
Darkness and light,
the old man thought.
It is what every hero legend is about.
The darkness which is more than death,
the light which is love, like our friend
Venus here….”
— Roderick MacLeish, Prince Ombra
From Log24, Oct. 23, 2002:
An excerpt from
Robert A. Heinlein‘s
classic novel Glory Road —
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“I have many names. What would you like to call me?” “Is one of them ‘Helen’?” She smiled like sunshine and I learned that she had dimples. She looked sixteen and in her first party dress. “You are very gracious. No, she’s not even a relative. That was many, many years ago.” Her face turned thoughtful. “Would you like to call me ‘Ettarre’?” “Is that one of your names?” “It is much like one of them, allowing for different spelling and accent. Or it could be ‘Esther’ just as closely. Or ‘Aster.’ Or even ‘Estrellita.’ ” ” ‘Aster,’ ” I repeated. “Star. Lucky Star!” |
Related material:
672 Astarte and
The Venerable Bede
(born in 672).
672 illustrated:
The Venerable Bede
and the Star of Venus
The 672 connection is, of course,
not a real connection
(in the sense of “sejanus” above)
but it is nevertheless
not without interest.
Postscript of 6 PM
A further note on the above
illustration of the 672 connection:
The late Buck Owens
(see previous entry for
Owens, Reba, and the
star of Venus)
once described
his TV series as
“a show of fat old men
and pretty young girls”
(today’s Washington Post).
A further note on
lottery hermeneutics:
Those who prefer to interpret
random numbers with the aid
of a dictionary
(as in Is Nothing Sacred?)
may be pleased to note that
“heehaw” occurs in Webster’s
New World Dictionary,
College Edition, 1960,
on page 672.
In today’s Washington Post,
Richard Harrington informs us that
“As a child, Owens worked cotton and
maize fields, taking the name Buck
from a well-liked mule….”
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Thursday, July 31, 2003
Thursday July 31, 2003
Killer Radio
"See the girl with the diamond ring?
She knows how to shake that thing."
— Jerry Lee "Killer" Lewis on
KHYI 95.3 FM, Plano, Texas,
at about 5:12 PM EDT 7/31/03,
introduced by DJ Allen Peck Sr.
"And on this point I pass the same judgment as those who say that geometricians give them nothing new by these rules, because they possessed them in reality, but confounded with a multitude of others, either useless or false, from which they could not discriminate them, as those who, seeking a diamond of great price amidst a number of false ones, but from which they know not how to distinguish it, should boast, in holding them all together, of possessing the true one equally with him who without pausing at this mass of rubbish lays his hand upon the costly stone which they are seeking and for which they do not throw away the rest."
— Blaise Pascal, De l'Esprit Géométrique
"When the light came she was sitting on the bed beside an open suitcase, toying with her diamond rings. She saw the light first in the depths of the largest stone."
— Paul Preuss, Broken Symmetries,
scene at Diamond Head, Oahu, Hawaii
Now playing (6:41 PM EDT) on Killer Radio:
"Jack of Diamonds, that's
a hard card to find."
"This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond…."
— Gerard Manley Hopkins, Society of Jesus
Perhaps Sam Phillips was twanged by a Hawaiian guitar. (See previous two entries.)
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The Big Time
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See also "Top Ten Most Overheard Comments by new KHYI listeners" at Miss Lana's Anything Page, entry for
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Tuesday, September 24, 2002
Tuesday September 24, 2002
The Shining of Lucero
From my journal note, “Shining Forth“:
The Spanish for “Bright Star” is “Lucero.”
The Eye of the Beholder:
When you stand in the dark and look at a star a hundred light years away, not only have the retarded light waves from the star been travelling for a hundred years toward your eyes, but also advanced waves from your eyes have reached a hundred years into the past to encourage the star to shine in your direction.
— John Cramer, “The Quantum Handshake“
From Broken Symmetries, by Paul Preuss, 1983:
He’d toyed with “psi” himself…. The reason he and so many other theoretical physicists were suckers for the stuff was easy to understand — for two-thirds of a century an enigma had rested at the heart of theoretical physics, a contradiction, a hard kernel of paradox….
Peter [Slater] had never thirsted after “hidden variables” to explain what could not be pictured. Mathematical relationships were enough to satisfy him, mere formal relationships which existed at all times, everywhere, at once. It was a thin nectar, but he was convinced it was the nectar of the gods.
……………… Those so-called crazy psychics were too sane, that was their problem — they were too stubborn to admit that the universe was already more bizarre than anything they could imagine in their wildest dreams of wizardry. (Ch. 16)
From Secret Passages, by Paul Preuss, 1997:
Minakis caught up and walked beside him in silence, moving with easy strides over the bare ground, listening as Peter [Slater] spoke. “Delos One was ten years ago — quantum theory seemed as natural as water to me then; I could play in it without a care. If I’d had any sense of history, I would have recognized that I’d swallowed the Copenhagen interpretation whole.”
“Back then, you insisted that the quantum world is not a world at all,” Minakis prompted him. “No microworld, only mathematical descriptions.”
“Yes, I was adamant. Those who protested were naive — one has to be willing to tolerate ambiguity, even to be crazy.”
“Bohr’s words?”
“The party line. Of course Bohr did say, ‘It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.’ Meaning that when we start to talk what sounds like philosophy, our colleagues should rip us to pieces.” Peter smiled. “They smell my blood already.”
……………… Peter glanced at Minakis. “Let’s say there are indications — I have personal indications — not convincing, perhaps, but suggestive, that the quantum world penetrates the classical world deeply.” He was silent for a moment, then waved his hand at the ruins. “The world of classical physics, I mean. I suppose I’ve come to realize that the world is more than a laboratory.” “We are standing where Apollo was born,” Minakis said. “Leto squatted just there, holding fast to a palm tree, and after nine days of labor gave birth to the god of light and music….”
From my journal note, “A Mass for Lucero“:
To Lucero, in memory of
1962 in CuernavacaFrom On Beauty, by Elaine Scarry,
Princeton University Press, 1999 —“Homer sings of the beauty of particular things. Odysseus, washed up on shore, covered with brine, having nearly drowned, comes upon a human community and one person in particular, Nausicaa, whose beauty simply astonishes him. He has never anywhere seen a face so lovely; he has never anywhere seen any thing so lovely….
I have never laid eyes on anyone like you,
neither man nor woman…
I look at you and a sense of wonder takes me.Wait, once I saw the like —
in Delos, beside Apollo’s altar —
the young slip of a palm-tree
springing into the light.”
From Secret Passages, by Paul Preuss, 1997:
“When we try to look inside atoms,” Peter said, “not only can we not see what’s going on, we cannot even construct a coherent picture of what’s going on.”
“If you will forgive me, Peter,” Minakis said, turning to the others. “He means that we can construct several pictures — that light and matter are waves, for example, or that light and matter are particles — but that all these pictures are inadequate. What’s left to us is the bare mathematics of quantum theory.”
…. “Whatever the really real world is like, my friend, it is not what you might imagine.”
……………… Talking physics, Peter tended to bluntness. “Tell me more about this real world you imagine but can’t describe.”Minakis turned away from the view of the sunset. “Are you familiar with John Cramer’s transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics?”
“No I’m not.”
……………… “Read Cramer. I’ll give you his papers. Then we can talk.”
From John Cramer, “The Quantum Handshake“:
Advanced waves could perhaps, under the right circumstances, lead to “ansible-type” FTL communication favored by Le Guin and Card….
For more on Le Guin and Card, see my journal notes below.
For more on the meaning of “lucero,” see the Wallace Stevens poem “Martial Cadenza.”
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