Log24

For the title, see Illuminations in this journal.

Another approach —

These images were suggested by Creamy and Sweaty.

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 …

 .

 Putting the
X
in Xmas

— C. S. Lewis

Apparently they teach them nihilism, empty rhetoric, and despair, as reflected in Borges, Baudrillard, and Benjamin, according to the art review below from today’s New York Times.  Let us hope that the late Peter Boyle, who died on Tuesday, Dec. 12, has moved beyond these now– singing “Heaven, I’m in Heaven,” rather than “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”

Black, White, and Read All Over by Randy Kennedy in The New York Times Friday, Dec. 15, 2006 “In one of Jorge Luis Borges’s best-known short stories, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,’ a 20th-century French writer sets out to compose a verbatim copy of Cervantes’s 17th-century masterpiece simply because he thinks he can, originality perhaps not being all it’s cracked up to be. He manages two chapters word for word, a spontaneous duplicate that Borges’s narrator finds to be ‘infinitely richer’ than the original because it contains all manner of new meanings and inflections, wrenched as it is from its proper time and context….” [An artist’s version of a newspaper is]…. “a drawing of a copy of a version of what happened, holding a mirror up to nature with a refraction or two in between.  In a way that mixes Borges with a dollop of Jean Baudrillard and a heavy helping of Walter Benjamin, the work also upends ideas….”

The Work:

Pennsylvania Lottery
December 2006
Daily Number (Day):

Click on numbers
for commentary.

“There is nothing new under the sun. With the death of the real, or rather with its (re)surrection, hyperreality both emerges and is already always reproducing itself.”  –Jean Baudrillard

On Translation

From Illuminations, by Walter Benjamin, translated by Harry Zohn:

“If there is such a thing as a language of truth, the tensionless and even silent depository of the ultimate truth which all thought strives for, then this language of truth is– the true language.  And this very language, whose divination and description is the only perfection a philosopher can hope for, is concealed in concentrated fashion in translations.  There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.  But despite the claims of sentimental artists, these two are not banausic.  For there is a philosophical genius that is characterized by a yearning for that language which manifests itself in translations: ‘Les langues imparfaites en cela que plusieurs, manque la suprême: penser étant écrire sans accessoires, ni chuchotement mais tacite encore l’immortelle parole, la diversité, sur terre, des idiomes empêche personne de proférer les mots qui, sinon se trouveraient, par une frappe unique, elle-même matériellement la vérité.’*  If what Mallarmé evokes here is fully fathomable to a philosopher, translation, with its rudiments of such a language, is midway between poetry and doctrine.  Its products are less sharply defined, but it leaves no less of a mark on history.”

* “The imperfection of languages consists in their plurality, the supreme one is lacking: thinking is writing without accessories or even whispering, the immortal word still remains silent; the diversity of idioms on earth prevents everybody from uttering the words which otherwise, at one single stroke, would materialize as truth.’

— Stéphane Mallarmé / Crise de vers

(The Benjamin is from a copy of Illuminations I purchased exactly 12 years ago, on Sept. 15, 1992.)