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Google search result: Saint Anselm College https://www.anselm.edu › Documents › Brown by M Brown · 2014 · Cited by 14 — Thomas insists that the image of God exists most perfectly in the acts of the soul, for the soul is that which is most perfect in us and so best images God, and … 11 pages |
For a Douglas Hofstadter version of the Imago Dei , see the
"Gödel, Escher, Bach" illustration in the Jan. 15 screenshot below —
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
|
Jung’s four-diamond figure from
Aion — a symbol of the self –
For those who prefer the Ed Wood approach —
Related art—
Midnight's Icons,
and…
(Wikipedia figure)
"Visually, a tetrad can be depicted as
four diamonds forming an X…."
In the above view, four of the tesseract's 16
vertices are overlaid by other vertices.
For views that are more complete and
moveable, see Smith's tesseract page.
Four-Part Tesseract Divisions—
The above figure shows how four-part partitions
of the 16 vertices of a tesseract in an infinite
Euclidean space are related to four-part partitions
of the 16 points in a finite Galois space
|
Euclidean spaces versus Galois spaces in a larger context— Infinite versus Finite The central aim of Western religion — "Each of us has something to offer the Creator...
the bridging of
masculine and feminine,
life and death.
It's redemption.... nothing else matters."
-- Martha Cooley in The Archivist (1998)
The central aim of Western philosophy — Dualities of Pythagoras
as reconstructed by Aristotle:
Limited Unlimited
Odd Even
Male Female
Light Dark
Straight Curved
... and so on ....
"Of these dualities, the first is the most important; all the others may be seen as different aspects of this fundamental dichotomy. To establish a rational and consistent relationship between the limited [man, etc.] and the unlimited [the cosmos, etc.] is… the central aim of all Western philosophy." |
Another picture related to philosophy and religion—
Jung's Four-Diamond Figure from Aion—
This figure was devised by Jung
to represent the Self. Compare the
remarks of Paul Valéry on the Self—
|
Flight from Eden: The Origins of Modern Literary Criticism and Theory, by Steven Cassedy, U. of California Press, 1990, pages 156-157—
Valéry saw the mind as essentially a relational system whose operation he attempted to describe in the language of group mathematics. "Every act of understanding is based on a group," he says (C, 1:331). "My specialty— reducing everything to the study of a system closed on itself and finite" (C, 19: 645). The transformation model came into play, too. At each moment of mental life the mind is like a group, or relational system, but since mental life is continuous over time, one "group" undergoes a "transformation" and becomes a different group in the next moment. If the mind is constantly being transformed, how do we account for the continuity of the self? Simple; by invoking the notion of the invariant. And so we find passages like this one: "The S[elf] is invariant, origin, locus or field, it's a functional property of consciousness" (C, 15:170 [2:315]). Just as in transformational geometry, something remains fixed in all the projective transformations of the mind's momentary systems, and that something is the Self (le Moi, or just M, as Valéry notates it so that it will look like an algebraic variable). Transformation theory is all over the place. "Mathematical science… reduced to algebra, that is, to the analysis of the transformations of a purely differential being made up of homogeneous elements, is the most faithful document of the properties of grouping, disjunction, and variation in the mind" (O, 1:36). "Psychology is a theory of transformations, we just need to isolate the invariants and the groups" (C, 1:915). "Man is a system that transforms itself" (C, 2:896). O Paul Valéry, Oeuvres (Paris: Pléiade, 1957-60) C Valéry, Cahiers, 29 vols. (Paris: Centre National de le Recherche Scientifique, 1957-61) |
Note also the remarks of George David Birkhoff at Rice University
in 1940 (pdf) on Galois's theory of groups and the related
"theory of ambiguity" in Galois's testamentary letter—
|
… metaphysical reasoning always relies on the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and… the true meaning of this Principle is to be found in the “Theory of Ambiguity” and in the associated mathematical “Theory of Groups.” If I were a Leibnizian mystic, believing in his “preestablished harmony,” and the “best possible world” so satirized by Voltaire in “Candide,” I would say that the metaphysical importance of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and the cognate Theory of Groups arises from the fact that God thinks multi-dimensionally* whereas men can only think in linear syllogistic series, and the Theory of Groups is the appropriate instrument of thought to remedy our deficiency in this respect. * That is, uses multi-dimensional symbols beyond our grasp. |
Related material:
A medal designed by Leibniz to show how
binary arithmetic mirrors the creation by God
of something (1) from nothing (0).
Another array of 16 strings of 0's and 1's, this time
regarded as coordinates rather than binary numbers—
Some context by a British mathematician —
|
Imago by Wallace Stevens Who can pick up the weight of Britain, Who can move the German load Or say to the French here is France again? Imago. Imago. Imago. It is nothing, no great thing, nor man Of ten brilliancies of battered gold And fortunate stone. It moves its parade Of motions in the mind and heart, A gorgeous fortitude. Medium man In February hears the imagination's hymns And sees its images, its motions And multitudes of motions And feels the imagination's mercies, In a season more than sun and south wind, Something returning from a deeper quarter, A glacier running through delirium, Making this heavy rock a place, Which is not of our lives composed . . . Lightly and lightly, O my land, Move lightly through the air again. |
Recommended— an online book—
Flight from Eden: The Origins of Modern Literary Criticism and Theory,
by Steven Cassedy, U. of California Press, 1990.
See in particular
Pages 156-157—
Valéry saw the mind as essentially a relational system whose operation he attempted to describe in the language of group mathematics. "Every act of understanding is based on a group," he says (C, 1:331). "My specialty—reducing everything to the study of a system closed on itself and finite" (C, 19: 645). The transformation model came into play, too. At each moment of mental life the mind is like a group, or relational system, but since mental life is continuous over time, one "group" undergoes a "transformation" and becomes a different group in the next moment. If the mind is constantly being transformed, how do we account for the continuity of the self? Simple; by invoking the notion of the invariant. And so we find passages like this one: "The S[elf] is invariant, origin, locus or field, it's a functional property of consciousness" (C, 15:170 [2: 315]). Just as in transformational geometry, something remains fixed in all the projective transformations of the mind's momentary systems, and that something is the Self (le Moi, or just M, as Valéry notates it so that it will look like an algebraic variable). Transformation theory is all over the place. "Mathematical science . . . reduced to algebra, that is, to the analysis of the transformations of a purely differential being made up of homogeneous elements, is the most faithful document of the properties of grouping, disjunction, and variation in the mind" (O, 1:36). "Psychology is a theory of transformations, we just need to isolate the invariants and the groups" (C, 1:915). "Man is a system that transforms itself" (C, 2:896).
O Paul Valéry, Oeuvres (Paris: Pléiade, 1957-60)
C Valéry, Cahiers, 29 vols. (Paris: Centre National de le Recherche Scientifique, 1957-61)
Compare Jung's image in Aion of the Self as a four-diamond figure:
and Cullinane's purely geometric four-diamond figure:
For a natural group of 322,560 transformations acting on the latter figure, see the diamond theorem.
What remains fixed (globally, not pointwise) under these transformations is the system of points and hyperplanes from the diamond theorem. This system was depicted by artist Josefine Lyche in her installation "Theme and Variations" in Oslo in 2009. Lyche titled this part of her installation "The Smallest Perfect Universe," a phrase used earlier by Burkard Polster to describe the projective 3-space PG(3,2) that contains these points (at right below) and hyperplanes (at left below).
Although the system of points (at right above) and hyperplanes (at left above) exemplifies Valéry's notion of invariant, it seems unlikely to be the sort of thing he had in mind as an image of the Self.
Remarks by Rosalind Krauss in the previous post suggest a look at …
Then there is the universal beauty of oneself :
Jung's Four-Diamond Figure from Aion—
This figure was devised by Jung
to represent the Self.
Metaphysical conceit | literature | Britannica.com
|
This post's title refers to a metaphysical conceit
in the previous post, Desperately Seeking Clarity.
Related material —
The source of the above mystical octahedron —
See also Jung's Imago Dei in this journal.
The title was suggested by the "Crystal Cult" installations
of Oslo artist Josefine Lyche and by a post of May 30 —
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Thursday, May 30, 2019 Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:02 PM Edit This Jeff Nichols, director of Midnight Special (2016) —
"When asked about the film's similarities to See also Jung's four-diamond figure and the previous post. |
Writers of fiction are, of course, also dabblers in the collective unconscious.
For instance . . .
A 1971 British paperback edition of The Dreaming Jewels,
a story by Theodore Sturgeon (first version published in 1950):
The above book cover, together with the Death Valley location
Zabriskie Point, suggests . . .
Those less enchanted by the collective unconscious may prefer a
different weblog's remarks on the same date as the above Borax post . . .
Jeff Nichols, director of Midnight Special (2016) —
"When asked about the film's similarities to the 2015 Disney
movie Tomorrowland , which also posits a futuristic world
that exists in an alternative dimension, Nichols sighed.
'I was a little bummed, I guess,' he said of when he first
learned about the project. . . . 'Our die was cast.
Sometimes this kind of collective unconscious that
we're all dabbling in, sometimes you're not the first one
out of the gate.' "
See also Jung's four-diamond figure and the previous post.
Continued from the previous post and from posts
now tagged Dueling Formulas —
The four-diamond formula of Jung and
the four-dot "as" of Claude Lévi-Strauss:
Simplified versions of the diamonds and the dots —
::
I prefer Jung. For those who prefer Lévi-Strauss —
First edition, Cornell University Press, 1970.
A related tale — "A Meaning, Like."
The above cycle may have influenced the design
of Carl Jung's symbol of the self —
Related art by
Steven H. Cullinane
See also Levi-Strauss Formula in this journal.
From a check tonight of The New York Review of Books —
These NYRB stories from May 15 and May 13 suggest a
review of images on Ratner's Star and on the Eye of God.
Above image reposted from Jan. 10, 2014
|
I. The structures in the Diamond Puzzle…
Click on image for Jungian background. II: The structure on a recent cover of Semiotica…
|
Above images reposted from May 5, 2016
Related material: The previous post, Dueling Formulas.
Excerpt from a post of November 4, 2009 —
|
I. The structures in the Diamond Puzzle…
Click on image for Jungian background. II: The structure on a recent cover of Semiotica…
|
For some related material, see a search
for Solomon Marcus in this journal.
"Remember, Genesis IS Skynet."
Bloomberg News today:
Why 2015 Was a Breakthrough Year in Artificial Intelligence
"Computers are 'starting to open their eyes,' said a senior fellow at Google."
"William Tell’s weapon of choice has become
the symbol of Switzerland, a sign of sovereignty
and a guarantee of Swiss quality. On the eve of
the Second World War, these values seemed
especially important and necessary to the Swiss.
This five-centime green stamp was issued for
the 1939 national exhibition."
Related material in this journal: Basel.
See also Jung + Imago.
Background: Jung's Aion in this journal discusses this
figure from finite geometry's diamond theorem—
Fig. A
This resembles a figure that served Jung
as a schema of the Self—
Fig. B
Fig. A, with color variations, serves as the core
of many automatically generated Identicons —
a different sort of self-symbol.
Examples from Sept. 6 at MathOverflow—
A user wanting to custom-tailor his self-symbol should consider
the following from the identicon service Gravatar—
1. User Submissions. "… you hereby do and shall grant to Automattic a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free and fully-paid, transferable (including rights to sublicense) right to perform the Services (e.g., to use, modify, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, perform, and otherwise fully exercise and exploit all intellectual property, publicity, and moral rights with respect to any User Submissions, and to allow others to do so)."
Sounds rather Faustian.
… and Arthur Koestler
|
The theme of the January 2010 issue of the
Notices of the American Mathematical Society was “Mathematics and the Arts.”
Related material:
|
See also two posts from the day Peter Jennings died—
The Medium is the Message
Marshall McLuhan
From the Wikipedia article
on Marshall McLuhan–
(Click images for some background.)
Related material:
a web page on McLuhan's
student Walter J. Ong, S. J.,
Yesterday's post may, if one likes, be regarded
as a nod to Dionysus, god of tragedy.
Here is a complementary passage:
Related material:
Jung and the Imago Dei
Arthur Koestler by David Levine,
New York Review of Books,
December 17, 1964
| A Jesuit at the Gerard Manley Hopkins Archive: ‘Bisociation’: The Act of Creation Koestler’s concept of ‘bisociation’… enters into the very ‘act of creation.’ In every such act, writes Koestler, the creator ‘bisociates,’ that is, combines, two ‘matrices’– two diverse patterns of knowing or perceiving– in a new way. As each matrix carries its own images, concepts, values, and ‘codes,’ the creative person brings together– ‘bisociates’– two diverse matrices not normally connected. — Joseph J. Feeney, S.J. |
See also December 9, 2009:
The theme of the January 2010 issue of the
Notices of the American Mathematical Society
is “Mathematics and the Arts.”
Related material:
The theme of the January 2010 issue of the
Notices of the American Mathematical Society
is "Mathematics and the Arts."
Related material:
The Diamond Puzzle
may be downloaded by
viewing it in Internet Explorer
and saving it in the
"web archive" (*.mht) format.
Time and Chance, continued…
NY Lottery numbers today–
Midday 401, Evening 717
_________________________________________________
From this journal on 4/01, 2009:
The Cruelest Month
"Langdon sensed she was
toying with him…."
___________________________________________
From this journal on 7/17, 2008:
Jung’s four-diamond figure from
Aion — a symbol of the self –
Jung’s Map of the Soul,
by Murray Stein:
“… Jung thinks of the self as undergoing continual transformation during the course of a lifetime…. At the end of his late work Aion, Jung presents a diagram to illustrate the dynamic movements of the self….”
For related dynamic movements,
see the Diamond 16 Puzzle
and the diamond theorem.
As noted here yesterday, Claude Levi-Strauss may have died on Devil's Night, on Halloween, or on All Saints' Day. He was apparently a myth-transformer to the end.
The Independent says today he died on Sunday, All Saints' Day. Its eulogy, by Adam Kuper, is well-written, noting that linguist Roman Jakobson was a source of Levi-Strauss's theory of oppositions in myth, and observing that
"… binary oppositions tend to accumulate to form structures…."
Yes, they do. Examples:
I. The structures in the Diamond Puzzle…
Click on image for Jungian background.
II: The structure on a recent cover of Semiotica…
The Semiotica article by mathematical linguist Solomon Marcus is a defense of the Levi-Strauss canonic formula mentioned here yesterday.
It is available online for $40.
A less expensive, and possibly more informative, look at oppositions in linguistics is available for free online in a 1984 master's thesis (pdf, 8+ mb)–
"Language, Linguistics, and Philosophy: A Comparison of the Work of Roman Jakobson and the Later Wittgenstein, with Some Attention to the Philosophy of Charles Saunders Peirce," by Miles Spencer Kimball.
— “Beauty and Desecration,”
Roger Scruton
(link at aldaily.com today)
| “The formula reproduces exactly the essential features of the symbolic process of transformation. It shows the rotation of the mandala, the antithetical play of complementary (or compensatory) processes, then the apocatastasis, i.e., the restoration of an original state of wholeness….”
— Carl G. Jung in Aion
|
The Rest
of the Story
Today's previous entry discussed the hermeneutics of the midday NY and PA lottery numbers.
| Lotteries on Reba's birthday, 2009 |
Pennsylvania (No revelation) |
New York (Revelation) |
| Mid-day (No belief) |
No belief, no revelation 726 |
Revelation without belief 378 |
| Evening (Belief) |
Belief without revelation 006 |
Belief and revelation 091 |
Interpretations of the evening numbers–
The PA evening number, 006, may be viewed as a followup to the PA midday 726 (or 7/26, the birthday of Kate Beckinsale and Carl Jung). Here 006 is the prestigious "00" number assigned to Beckinsale.
The NY evening number, 091, may be viewed as a followup to the NY midday 378 (the number of pages in The Innermost Kernel by Suzanne Gieser, published by Springer, 2005)–
Page 91: The entire page is devoted to the title of the book's Part 3– "The Copenhagen School and Psychology"–
The next page begins: "With the crisis of physics, interest in epistemological and psychological questions grew among many theoretical physicists. This interest was particularly marked in the circle around Niels Bohr."
The circle above is
marked with a version of
the classic Chinese symbol
adopted as a personal emblem
by Danish physicist Niels Bohr,
leader of the Copenhagen School.
"Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined
On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come."
-- Wallace Stevens,
"Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,"
Canto IV of "It Must Change"
The square above is marked
with a graphic design
related to the four-diamond
figure of Jung's Aion.
|
The following meditation was inspired by the recent fictional recovery, by Mira Sorvino in "The Last Templar," of a Greek Cross — "the Cross of Constantine"– and by the discovery, by art historian Rosalind Krauss, of a Greek Cross in the art of Ad Reinhardt. |
|
Note that in applications, the vertical axis of the Cross of Descartes often symbolizes the timeless (money, temperature, etc.) while the horizontal axis often symbolizes time. T.S. Eliot:
"Men’s curiosity searches past and future |
|
"In suggesting that the success [1] of the grid
[1] Success here refers to
three things at once: a sheerly quantitative success, involving the number of artists in this century who have used grids; a qualitative success through which the grid has become the medium for some of the greatest works of modernism; and an ideological success, in that the grid is able– in a work of whatever quality– to emblematize the Modern." — Rosalind Krauss, "Grids" (1979) |
Related material:
Time Fold and Weyl on
objectivity and frames of reference.
See also Stambaugh on
The Formless Self
as well as
A Study in Art Education
and
Jung and the Imago Dei.
The British Academy Awards last night showed two Paul Newman clips:
"Sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand."
"Boy, I got vision and the rest of the world wears bifocals."
Related material: This journal, September 2008.
 Pennsylvania Lottery 
|
|
A PBS broadcast of Cyrano de Bergerac was shown yesterday nationally and this evening, a day late, by WNED TV, Buffalo.
From the translation by Anthony Burgess:
Cyrano speaks of falling leaves–
They fall well. With a sort of panache.
They plume down in their last
Loveliness, disguising their fear
Of being dried and pounded to ash
To mix with the common dust.
They go in grace, making their fall appear
Like flying.
ROXANE You’re melancholy today.
CYRANO Never. I’m not the melancholy sort.
ROXANE Very well, then. We’ll let
The leaves of the fall fall while you
Turn the leaves of my gazette.
What’s new at court?
CYRANO … There have been some scandals
To do with witches. A bishop went to heaven,
Or so it’s believed: there’s been as yet no report
Of his arrival….”
Later….
CYRANO … See it there, a white plume
Over the battle– A diamond in the ash
Of the ultimate combustion–
My panache.”
Related material:
Today’s previous entry
and the Epiphany
link to the
four-diamond symbol
in Jung’s Aion
with an epigraph by
Gerard Manley Hopkins:
The current (Feb. 2009) Notices of the American Mathematical Society has a written version of Freeman Dyson's 2008 Einstein Lecture, which was to have been given in October but had to be canceled. Dyson paraphrases a mathematician on Carl Jung's theory of archetypes:
"… we do not need to accept Jung’s theory as true in order to find it illuminating."
The same is true of Jung's remarks on synchronicity.
For example —
Yesterday's entry, "A Wealth of Algebraic Structure," lists two articles– each, as it happens, related to Jung's four-diamond figure from Aion as well as to my own Notes on Finite Geometry. The articles were placed online recently by Cambridge University Press on the following dates:
R. T. Curtis's 1974 article defining his Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) was published online on Oct. 24, 2008.
Curtis's 1987 article on geometry and algebraic structure in the MOG was published online on Dec. 19, 2008.
On these dates, the entries in this journal discussed…
Oct. 24:
Cube Space, 1984-2003
Material related to that entry:
Dec. 19:
Art and Religion: Inside the White Cube
That entry discusses a book by Mark C. Taylor:
The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey and the Ends of Representation (U. of Chicago Press, 1999).
"What, then, is a frame, and what is frame work?"
One possible answer —
Hermann Weyl on the relativity problem in the context of the 4×4 "frame of reference" found in the above Cambridge University Press articles.
|
CHANGE FEW CAN BELIEVE IN |
Continued from June 18.
Jungian Symbols
of the Self —
Compare and contrast:
Jung's four-diamond figure from
Aion — a symbol of the self —
Jung's Map of the Soul,
by Murray Stein:
John Baez, Week 266
(June 20, 2008):
"The Renaissance thinkers liked to
organize the four elements using
a chain of analogies running
from light to heavy:
fire : air :: air : water :: water : earth
They also organized them
in a diamond, like this:"
This figure of Baez
is related to a saying
attributed to Heraclitus:
For related thoughts by Jung,
see Aion, which contains the
following diagram:
"The formula reproduces exactly the essential features of the symbolic process of transformation. It shows the rotation of the mandala, the antithetical play of complementary (or compensatory) processes, then the apocatastasis, i.e., the restoration of an original state of wholeness, which the alchemists expressed through the symbol of the uroboros, and finally the formula repeats the ancient alchemical tetrameria, which is implicit in the fourfold structure of unity."
— Carl Gustav Jung
That the words Maximus of Tyre (second century A.D.) attributed to Heraclitus imply a cycle of the elements (analogous to the rotation in Jung's diagram) is not a new concept. For further details, see "The Rotation of the Elements," a 1995 webpage by one "John Opsopaus."
Related material:
Log24 entries of June 9, 2008, and
"Quintessence: A Glass Bead Game,"
by Charles Cameron.
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
"Ich aber, hier auf dem objektiven Wege, bin jetzt bemüht, das Positive der Sache nachzuweisen, daß nämlich das Ding an sich von der Zeit und Dem, was nur durch sie möglich ist, dem Entstehen und Vergehen, unberührt bleibt, und daß die Erscheinungen in der Zeit sogar jenes rastlos flüchtige, dem Nichts zunächst stehende Dasein nicht haben könnten, wenn nicht in ihnen ein Kern aus der Ewigkeit* wäre. Die Ewigkeit ist freilich ein Begriff, dem keine Anschauung zum Grunde liegt: er ist auch deshalb bloß negativen Inhalts, besagt nämlich ein zeitloses Dasein. Die Zeit ist demnach ein bloßes Bild der Ewigkeit, ho chronos eikôn tou aiônos,** wie es Plotinus*** hat: und ebenso ist unser zeitliches Dasein das bloße Bild unsers Wesens an sich. Dieses muß in der Ewigkeit liegen, eben weil die Zeit nur die Form unsers Erkennens ist: vermöge dieser allein aber erkennen wir unser und aller Dinge Wesen als vergänglich, endlich und der Vernichtung anheimgefallen."
* "a kernel of eternity"
** "Time is the image of eternity."
*** "wie es Plotinus hat"–
Actually, not Plotinus, but Plato,
according to Diogenes Laertius.
Related material:
J. N. Darby,
"On the Greek Words for
Eternity and Eternal
(aion and aionios),"
Carl Gustav Jung, Aion,
which contains the following
four-diamond figure,
Our Judeo-Christian
Heritage –
Lottery
Hermeneutics
Part I: Judeo
| The Lottery 12/9/06 | Mid-day | Evening |
| New York | 036
See |
331
See 3/31— “square crystal” and “the symbolism could not have been more perfect.” |
| Pennsylvania | 602
See 6/02— Walter Benjamin |
111
See 1/11— “Related material:
|
Part II: Christian
| The Lottery 4/3/07 | Mid-day | Evening |
| New York | 115
See 1/15— |
017
See
|
| Pennsylvania | 604
See |
714
See |
Related material:
It is perhaps relevant to
this Holy Week that the
date 6/04 (2006) above
refers to both the Christian
holy day of Pentecost and
to the day of the
facetious baccalaureate
of the Class of 2006 in
the University Chapel
at Princeton.
For further context for the
Log24 remarks of that same
date, see June 1-15, 2006.
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism—
Various forms of “the modern movement” that include “… the modernist school of poetry (as institutionalised and canonised in the works of Wallace Stevens) all are now seen as the final, extraordinary flowering of a high-modernist impulse which is spent and exhausted…” —marxists.org:
“One of the primary critiques of modernism that Learning from Las Vegas was engaged in, as Frederic [sic] Jameson clearly noted, was the dialectic between inside and outside and the assumption that the outside expressed the interior.* Let’s call this the modernist drive for ‘expressive transparency.'”
— Aron Vinegar of Ohio State U., “Skepticism and the Ordinary: From Burnt Norton to Las Vegas“
* Jameson, Frederic [sic]. 1988. “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology.” The Ideologies of Theory: Essays, 1971-1986. Volume 2. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 59.
Steven Helmling, The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson, SUNY Press, 2001, p. 54–
Jameson “figures the inside/outside problem in the metaphor of the ‘prison-house of language’….”
“… Jung presents a diagram
to illustrate the dynamic
movements of the self….”
…the movement of
a self in the rock…
— Wallace Stevens:
The Poems of Our Climate,
by Harold Bloom,
Cornell U. Press, 1977
“… just as God defeats the devil:
this bridge exists….”
— Andre Weil
The bridge illustration
is thanks to Magneto.
Time and Chance
on the 90th Birthday
of Kirk Douglas,
star of
“The Garden of Allah“
| The Lottery 12/9/06 | Mid-day | Evening |
| New York | 036
See |
331
See 3/31— “square crystal” and “the symbolism could not have been more perfect.” |
| Pennsylvania | 602
See 6/02— Walter Benjamin |
111
See 1/11— “Related material: |
Public Space
"… the Danish cartoons crisis last March showed 'two world views colliding in public space with no common point of reference.'"
— George Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1991 to 2002, quoted in today's London Times.
Related material:
Geometry and Christianity
(Google search yielding
"about 1,540,000" results)
Geometry and Islam
(Google search yielding
"about 1,580,000" results)
A Public Space
— Motto of
Plato's Academy
|
If we replace the Chinese word "I" (change, transformation) with the word "permutation," the relevance of Western mathematics (which some might call "the Logos") to the I Ching ("Changes Classic") beomes apparent.
Related material:
Hitler's Still Point, Jung's Imago, Solomon's Cube, Geometry of the I Ching, and Globe Award. |
For the relevance of Plato to
Islam, see David Wade's
Pattern in Islamic Art
and a Google search on
Plato and Islam
("about 1,680,000" results).
— Heraclitus of Ephesus, about 500 B.C.
"Alcatraz, Spanish for pelican, was named Isla de los Alcatraces after the birds that were the island's only inhabitants." —Bay City Guide
Related material
Thomas Kuhn's "Pelican Brief":
"… the Philosopher’s Stone was a psychic rather than a physical product. It symbolized one’s Self…."
"The formula presents a symbol of the self…."
"… Jung presents a diagram to illustrate the dynamic movements of the self…."
…the movement of
a self in the rock…
— Wallace Stevens:
The Poems of Our Climate,
by Harold Bloom,
Cornell U. Press, 1977
See the essay
by Ana Marie Cox
on the final page
of this week's
TIME magazine.
Related material:
Jung and the Imago Dei,
Log24 entries of Feb. 20, 2004,
Space, Time, and Scarlett, and
Crystal's Sweet Sixteen
(Saturday Night Live sketch
starring Scarlett Johansson–
also featured as the clerk in
"Once in a Lifetime Jewelers"–
broadcast on Jan. 14, 2006.)
"Her wall is filled with pictures,
She gets 'em one by one."
These topics may be illuminated
by a study of the Chinese classics.
If we replace the Chinese word "I"
(change, transformation) with the
word "permutation," the relevance
of Western mathematics (which
some might call "the Logos") to
the I Ching ("Changes Classic")
beomes apparent.
Related material:
Hitler's Still Point,
Jung's Imago,
Solomon's Cube,
Geometry of the I Ching,
and Globe Award.
Yesterday's Valentine
may also have some relevance.
"Wherefore let it hardly… be… thought that the prisoner… was at his best a onestone parable…
for… pathetically few… cared… to doubt… the canonicity of his existence as a tesseract."
— Finnegans Wake, page 100, abridged
"… we have forgotten that we were angels and painted ourselves into a corner
of resource extraction and commodification of ourselves."
— A discussion, in a draft of a paper (rtf) attributed to Josh Schultz,
of the poem "Diamond" by Attila Jozsef
Commodification of
the name Cullinane:
See the logos at
cullinane.com,
a design firm with
the motto
To adapt a phrase from
Finnegans Wake, the
"fourstone parable" below
is an attempt to
decommodify my name.
Fourstone Parable:
(See also yesterday's "Logos."
The "communicate" logo is taken from
an online library at Calvin College;
the "connect" logo is a commonly
available picture of a tesseract
(Coxeter, Regular Polytopes, p. 123),
and the other two logos
are more or less original.)
For a more elegant
four-diamond figure, see
Jung and the Imago Dei.
Time in the Rock
"a world of selves trying to remember the self
before the idea of self is lost–
Walk with me world, upon my right hand walk,
speak to me Babel, that I may strive to assemble
of all these syllables a single word
before the purpose of speech is gone."
— Conrad Aiken, "Prelude" (1932),
later part of "Time in the Rock,
or Preludes to Definition, XIX" (1936),
in Selected Poems, Oxford U. Press
paperback, 2003, page 156
"The rock is the habitation of the whole,
Its strength and measure, that which is near, point A
In a perspective that begins again
At B: the origin of the mango's rind.
It is the rock where tranquil must adduce
Its tranquil self, the main of things, the mind,
The starting point of the human and the end,
That in which space itself is contained, the gate
To the enclosure, day, the things illumined
By day, night and that which night illumines,
Night and its midnight-minting fragrances,
Night's hymn of the rock, as in a vivid sleep."
— Wallace Stevens in The Rock (1954)
"Poetry is an illumination of a surface,
the movement of a self in the rock."
— Wallace Stevens, introduction to
The Necessary Angel, 1951
The following may help illuminate the previous entry:
"I want, as a man of the imagination, to write poetry with all the power of a monster equal in strength to that of the monster about whom I write. I want man's imagination to be completely adequate in the face of reality."
— Wallace Stevens, 1953 (Letters 790)
The "monster" of the previous entry is of course not Reese Witherspoon, but rather Vox Populi itself.
From Jung's Map of the Soul, by Murray Stein:
"… Jung thinks of the self as undergoing continual transformation during the course of a lifetime…. At the end of his late work Aion, Jung presents a diagram to illustrate the dynamic movements of the self…."
"The formula presents a symbol of the self, for the self is not just a stable quantity or constant form, but is also a dynamic process. In the same way, the ancients saw the imago Dei in man not as a mere imprint, as a sort of lifeless, stereotyped impression, but as an active force…. The four transformations represent a process of restoration or rejuvenation taking place, as it were, inside the self…."
"The formula reproduces exactly the essential features of the symbolic process of transformation. It shows the rotation of the mandala, the antithetical play of complementary (or compensatory) processes, then the apocatastasis, i.e., the restoration of an original state of wholeness, which the alchemists expressed through the symbol of the uroboros, and finally the formula repeats the ancient alchemical tetrameria, which is implicit in the fourfold structure of unity.
What the formula can only hint at, however, is the higher plane that is reached through the process of transformation and integration. The 'sublimation' or progress or qualitative change consists in an unfolding of totality into four parts four times, which means nothing less than its becoming conscious. When psychic contents are split up into four aspects, it means that they have been subjected to discrimination by the four orienting functions of consciousness. Only the production of these four aspects makes a total description possible. The process depicted by our formula changes the originally unconscious totality into a conscious one."
— Jung, Collected Works,
Vol. 9, Part 2, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (1951)
Related material:
"Although 'wholeness' seems at first sight to be nothing but an abstract idea (like anima and animus), it is nevertheless empirical in so far as it is anticipated by the psyche in the form of spontaneous or autonomous symbols. These are the quaternity or mandala symbols, which occur not only in the dreams of modern people who have never heard of them, but are widely disseminated in the historical recods of many peoples and many epochs. Their significance as symbols of unity and totality is amply confirmed by history as well as by empirical psychology. What at first looks like an abstract idea stands in reality for something that exists and can be experienced, that demonstrates its a priori presence spontaneously. Wholeness is thus an objective factor that confronts the subject independently of him… Unity and totality stand at the highest point on the scale of objective values because their symbols can no longer be distinguished from the imago Dei. Hence all statements about the God-image apply also to the empirical symbols of totality."
— Jung, Aion, as quoted in
Carl Jung and Thomas Merton
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Initial Xanga entry. Updated Nov. 18, 2006.
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