Second Billing, Part III:
Philosophy of
Communication
Pictures are more accessible
than words. See Logos
(May 17) and Torbellino
(June 10), as well as
the entries for June 8,
the date of Rorty's death.
On the ABC-conjecture in number theory:
“We hope to elucidate the beautiful connections between elliptic curves, modular forms and the ABC–conjecture.” —Dorian Goldfeld (pdf)
An Edinburgh postgraduate student on the conjecture:
“… abc brings us full circle to Fermat’s Last Theorem….” —Graeme Taylor at Everything2.com
I regret I can add nothing to Taylor’s admirable exposition and to Goldfeld’s “beautiful connections” except the following observation of a rather ugly connection.
The previous Log24 entry, from yesterday afternoon, related the May 18 “details” entry to Friday’s PA evening lottery number, 005. A followup seems (if only to honor the madcap tradition of John Nash) to be called for. The PA evening number yesterday evening, Saturday, was 443. Nash, in his younger days, might have been pleased to note that this number is associated (if only by coincidence) with a topic Woit mentioned earlier yesterday– Fermat’s famed conjecture:
in The Annals of Mathematics,
2nd Ser., Vol. 141, No. 3 (May, 1995)
This is the first page of a rather
famous paper by Andrew Wiles.
Logos
for
Yolanda King,
who died May 15,
the birthday of
L. Frank Baum:
Tin Man, Lion, Scarecrow
Symbols of, left to right,
Philip K. Dick (see 3/2/06),
Robert Anton Wilson (see 6/11/03),
and Kurt Vonnegut (see Palm Sunday,
an Autobiographical Collage).
See also An Unholy Trinity (5/6/07).
The "sunrise" logo at top,
along with the three-part motto
"Educate, Empower, Entertain,"
is Yolanda King's own.
| The diamond is used in modal logic to symbolize possibility. |
The 3×3 grid may also be used
to illustrate “possibility.” It leads,
as noted at finitegeometry.org, to
the famed “24-cell,” which may be
pictured either as the diamond
figure from Plato’s Meno —
Click for details.
— or as a figure
with 24 vertices:
Click for details.
The “diamond” version of the
24-cell seems unrelated to the
second version that shows all
vertices and edges, yet the
second version is implicit,
or hidden, in the first.
Hence “possibility.”
Neither version of the 24-cell
seems related in any obvious
way to the 3×3 grid, yet both
versions are implicit,
or hidden, in the grid.
Hence “possibility.”
— Bernard Holland in
The New York Times
Monday, May 20, 1996
From Log24
on Monday, Oct. 2, 2006:
“Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis,
Incipit and a form to speak the word
And every latent double in the word….”
— Wallace Stevens,
“Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction“
Pennsylvania lottery,
mid-day on Friday, Oct. 6, 2006:
“331”
Related material: Log24, 3/31, 2006.
From Wallace Stevens
On His Birthday
“Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis,
Incipit and a form to speak the word
And every latent double in the word….”
|
“A corpse will be — Under the Volcano,
“It has a ghastly familiarity,
like a half-forgotten dream.” — Poppy (Gene Tierney) in |
|
Temptation
|
|
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live…. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas‘ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.” From Patrick Vert, “There are plenty of anecdotes to highlight the personal, phenomenological experience of railway passage… … a unique study on phantasmagoria and the history of imagination. The word originates [in] light-projection, the so-called ghost-shows of the early 19th century…. … thought becomes a phantasmagorical process, a spectral, representative location for the personal imagination that had been marginalized by scientific rationalism…. This phantasmagoria became more mediated over time…. Perception became increasingly visually oriented…. As this occurred, a narrative formed to encapsulate the phenomenology of it all….” For such a narrative, see |
| From a Christian fairy tale:
Aslan’s last words come at the end of The Last Battle: ‘There was a real railway accident […] Your father and mother and all of you are–as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands–dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.’…. Aslan is given the last word in these quiet but emphatic lines. He is the ultimate arbiter of reality: “‘There was a real railway accident.'” Plato, in addition to the Christian tradition, lies behind the closing chapters of The Last Battle. The references here to the Shadowlands and to the dream refer back to an earlier explanation by Digory, now the Lord Digory: “[…] that was not the real Narnia. That had a beginning and an end. It was only a shadow or a copy of the real Narnia, which has always been here and always will be here: just as our world, England and all, is only a shadow or copy of something in Aslan’s real world. [….] Of course it is different; as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream. […] It’s all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools!” |
| “I was reading Durant’s section on Plato, struggling to understand his theory of the ideal Forms that lay in inviolable perfection out beyond the phantasmagoria. (That was the first, and I think the last, time that I encountered that word.)” |
Whether any of the above will be of use in comforting the families of those killed in yesterday morning’s train wreck in Germany is not clear. Pope Benedict XVI, like C. S. Lewis, seems to think Greek philosophy may be of some use to those dealing with train wrecks:
| “Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: ‘In the beginning was the logos.‘ This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts, syn logo, with logos. Logos means both reason and word– a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist.”
— Remarks of the Pope at the University of Regensburg on Sept. 12, 2006 |
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.
(Rhyme attributed to
Monsignor Ronald
Arbuthnott Knox)
Related material:
the previous entry,
an article subtitled
“Beckett’s Private Purgatories“
in this week’s New Yorker,
Quine in Purgatory,
and Logos and Logic.
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.
The figures are:
A symbol of Apollo from
Balanchine's Birthday and
A Minature Rosetta Stone,
a symbol of pure reason from
Visible Mathematics and
Analogical Train of Thought,
a symbol of Venus from
Why Me? and
To Graves at the Winter Solstice,
and, finally, a more
down-to-earth symbol,
adapted from a snowflake in
Those who prefer their
theological art on the scary side
may enjoy the
Christian Snowflake
link in the comments on
the "Logos" entry of
Orthodox Easter (May 1), 2005.
"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…."
"We go to the writing of the marvellous, and to children’s books, for stories, certainly, and for the epic possibilities of good and evil in confrontation, not yet so mixed as they are in life. But we go, above all, for imagery: it is the force of imagery that carries us forward. We have a longing for inexplicable sublime imagery…."
"The religious believer finds consolation, and relief, too, in the world of magic exactly because it is at odds with the necessarily straitened and punitive morality of organized worship, even if the believer is, like Lewis, reluctant to admit it. The irrational images– the street lamp in the snow and the silver chair and the speaking horse– are as much an escape for the Christian imagination as for the rationalist, and we sense a deeper joy in Lewis’s prose as it escapes from the demands of Christian belief into the darker realm of magic. As for faith, well, a handful of images is as good as an armful of arguments, as the old apostles always knew."
Click on pictures for details.
See also Windmills and
Verbum sat sapienti?
as well as
at Calvin College
on Simone Weil,
Charles Williams,
Dante, and
"the way of images."
Click on either of the logos below for religious meditations — on the left, a Jewish meditation from the Conference of Catholic Bishops; on the right, an Aryan meditation from Stormfront.org.
Both logos represent different embodiments of the “story theory” of truth, as opposed to the “diamond theory” of truth. Both logos claim, in their own ways, to represent the eternal Logos of the Christian religion. I personally prefer the “diamond theory” of truth, represented by the logo below.
See also the previous entry
and the entries of 7/11, 2003.
Cliffs of Moher
My father’s father,
his father’s father, his —
Shadows like winds
Go back to a parent before thought,
before speech,
At the head of the past.
They go to the cliffs of Moher
rising out of the mist….
— Wallace Stevens,
“The Irish Cliffs of Moher”
|
As he came back to the hearth, limping slightly but with a brisk step, Stephen saw the silent soul of a jesuit look out at him from the pale loveless eyes. Like Ignatius he was lame but in his eyes burned no spark of Ignatius’s enthusiasm. Even the legendary craft of the company, a craft subtler and more secret than its fabled books of secret subtle wisdom, had not fired his soul with the energy of apostleship. It seemed as if he used the shifts and lore and cunning of the world, as bidden to do, for the greater glory of God, without joy in their handling or hatred of that in them which was evil but turning them, with a firm gesture of obedience back upon themselves and for all this silent service it seemed as if he loved not at all the master and little, if at all, the ends he served. SIMILITER ATQUE SENIS BACULUS, he was, as the founder would have had him, like a staff in an old man’s hand, to be leaned on in the road at nightfall or in stress of weather, to lie with a lady’s nosegay on a garden seat, to be raised in menace. The dean returned to the 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. |
See also Kahn’s The Art and Thought of Heraclitus and the references to a “Delian diver” in Chitwood’s Death by Philosophy.
From
Death by Philosophy:
“Although fragments examined earlier may enable Heraclitus’ reader to believe that the stylistic devices arose directly from his dislike of humanity, I think rather that Heraclitus deliberately perfected the mysterious, gnomic style he praises in the following fragment.
31. The lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor hides, but indicates. (fr. 93)
Heraclitus not only admires the oracular style of delivery, but recommends it; this studied ambiguity is, I think, celebrated and alluded to in the Delian diver comment. For just as the prophecies of the Delian or Delphic god are at once obscure and darkly clear, so too are the workings of the Logos and Heraclitus’ remarks on it.”
|
Related material: That web page concludes with a reference to esthetics and a Delian palm, and was written three years ago on this date. Today is also the date of death for Martin Buber, philosophical Jew. Here is a Delphic saying in memory of Buber: “It is the female date that is considered holy, and that bears fruit.” — Steven Erlanger, |
Drama of the Diagonal,
continued
"I could name other writers
who share this sense of a world
larger than ourselves; their writing provides
a field in which something like
a sacramental imagination is clearly at play."
It is a giant, always, that is evolved, To be in scale, unless virtue cuts him, snips Both size and solitude or thinks it does, As in a signed photograph on a mantelpiece. But the virtuoso never leaves his shape, Still on the horizon elongates his cuts, And still angelic and still plenteous, Imposes power by the power of his form.
Here, then, is an abstraction given head, A giant on the horizon, given arms, A massive body and long legs, stretched out, A definition with an illustration, not Too exactly labeled, a large among the smalls Of it, a close, parental magnitude, At the center of the horizon, concentrum, grave And prodigious person, patron of origins.
That's it. The lover writes, the believer hears, The poet mumbles and the painter sees, Each one, his fated eccentricity, As a part, but part, but tenacious particle, Of the skeleton of the ether, the total Of letters, prophecies, perceptions, clods Of color, the giant of nothingness, each one And the giant ever changing, living in change.
Related material
(Click on pictures
for details.)
Logos Alogos
by S. H. Cullinane
Logos Alogos II:
Horizon
See also
Subject and Predicates and
The Quality of Diamond.
Wednesday’s entry The Turning discussed a work by Roger Cooke. Cooke presents a
“fanciful story (based on Plato’s dialogue Meno).”
The History of Mathematics is the title of the Cooke book.
Associated Press thought for today:
“History is not, of course, a cookbook offering pretested recipes. It teaches by analogy, not by maxims. It can illuminate the consequences of actions in comparable situations, yet each generation must discover for itself what situations are in fact comparable.”
— Henry Kissinger (whose birthday is today)
This link suggests a search for material
on the art of Sol LeWitt, which leads to
an article by Barry Cipra,
The “Sol LeWitt” Puzzle:
A Problem in 16 Squares (ps),
a discussion of a 4×4 array
of square linear designs.
Cipra says that
* Jean-Paul Sartre,
Being and Nothingness,
Philosophical Library, 1956
[reference by Cipra]
For another famous group lurking near, if not within, a 4×4 array, click on Kissinger’s birthday link above.
Kissinger’s remark (above) on analogy suggests the following analogy to the previous entry’s (Drama of the Diagonal) figure:
Logos Alogos II:
Horizon
This figure in turn, together with Cipra’s reference to Sartre, suggests the following excerpts (via Amazon.com)–
From Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, translated by Hazel E. Barnes, 1993 Washington Square Press reprint edition:
| 1. | on Page 51: |
| “He makes himself known to himself from the other side of the world and he looks from the horizon toward himself to recover his inner being. Man is ‘a being of distances.'” | |
| 2. | on Page 154: |
| “… impossible, for the for-itself attained by the realization of the Possible will make itself be as for-itself–that is, with another horizon of possibilities. Hence the constant disappointment which accompanies repletion, the famous: ‘Is it only this?’….” | |
| 3. | on Page 155: |
| “… end of the desires. But the possible repletion appears as a non-positional correlate of the non-thetic self-consciousness on the horizon of the glass-in-the-midst-of-the-world.” | |
| 4. | on Page 158: |
| “… it is in time that my possibilities appear on the horizon of the world which they make mine. If, then, human reality is itself apprehended as temporal….” | |
| 5. | on Page 180: |
| “… else time is an illusion and chronology disguises a strictly logical order of deducibility. If the future is pre-outlined on the horizon of the world, this can be only by a being which is its own future; that is, which is to come….” | |
| 6. | on Page 186: |
| “… It appears on the horizon to announce to me what I am from the standpoint of what I shall be.” | |
| 7. | on Page 332: |
| “… the boat or the yacht to be overtaken, and the entire world (spectators, performance, etc.) which is profiled on the horizon. It is on the common ground of this co-existence that the abrupt revelation of my ‘being-unto-death’….” | |
| 8. | on Page 359: |
| “… eyes as objects which manifest the look. The Other can not even be the object aimed at emptily at the horizon of my being for the Other.” | |
| 9. | on Page 392: |
| “… defending and against which he was leaning as against a wail, suddenly opens fan-wise and becomes the foreground, the welcoming horizon toward which he is fleeing for refuge.” | |
| 10. | on Page 502: |
| “… desires her in so far as this sleep appears on the ground of consciousness. Consciousness therefore remains always at the horizon of the desired body; it makes the meaning and the unity of the body.” |
| 11. | on Page 506: |
| “… itself body in order to appropriate the Other’s body apprehended as an organic totality in situation with consciousness on the horizon— what then is the meaning of desire?” | |
| 12. | on Page 661: |
| “I was already outlining an interpretation of his reply; I transported myself already to the four corners of the horizon, ready to return from there to Pierre in order to understand him.” | |
| 13. | on Page 754: |
| “Thus to the extent that I appear to myself as creating objects by the sole relation of appropriation, these objects are myself. The pen and the pipe, the clothing, the desk, the house– are myself. The totality of my possessions reflects the totality of my being. I am what I have. It is I myself which I touch in this cup, in this trinket. This mountain which I climb is myself to the extent that I conquer it; and when I am at its summit, which I have ‘achieved’ at the cost of this same effort, when I attain this magnificent view of the valley and the surrounding peaks, then I am the view; the panorama is myself dilated to the horizon, for it exists only through me, only for me.” |
|
Illustration of the
last horizon remark: |
For more on the horizon, being, and nothingness, see
Logos Alogos
by S. H. Cullinane
"To a mathematician, mathematical entities have their own existence, they habitate spaces created by their intention. They do things, things happen to them, they relate to one another. We can imagine on their behalf all sorts of stories, providing they don't contradict what we know of them. The drama of the diagonal, of the square…"
— Dennis Guedj, abstract of "The Drama of Mathematics," a talk to be given this July at the Mykonos conference on mathematics and narrative.
For the drama of the diagonal of the square, see
Harvard's Barry Mazur on
one mathematical style:
"It’s the barest, most Beckett-like vocabulary
that incorporates the theory and nothing else."
Samuel Beckett, Quad (1981):
A Jungian on this six-line logo:
"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."
— Marie-Louise von Franz,
Number and Time (1970),
Northwestern U. Press
paperback, 1979, p. 108
A related logo from
Columbia University's
Department of Art History
and Archaeology:
Also from that department:
Meyer Schapiro Professor
of Modern Art and Theory:
"There is no painter in the West
who can be unaware of
the symbolic power
of the cruciform shape
and the Pandora's box
of spiritual reference
that is opened
once one uses it."
"In the garden of Adding
live Even and Odd…"
— The Midrash Jazz Quartet in
City of God, by E. L. Doctorow
THE GREEK CROSS
Here, for reference, is a Greek cross
within a nine-square grid:
Related religious meditation for
Doctorow's "Garden of Adding"…
Types of Greek cross
illustrated in Wikipedia
under "cross":
THE BAPTISMAL CROSS
Related material:
Fritz Leiber's "spider"
or "double cross" logo.
See Why Me? and
A Shot at Redemption.
Happy Orthodox Easter.
Related material:
From 6/13 2004 —
An 8-rayed star:
Another 8-rayed star:
St. Peter’s Square in Rome
From 6/13 2003 —
A link to a 2001 First Things essay,
The underwriting of Hebraic–Hellenic literacy, of the normative analogue between divine and mortal acts of creation, was, in the fullest sense, theological. As was the wager (pronounced lost in deconstruction and postmodernism) on ultimate possibilities of accord between sign and sense, between word and meaning, between form and phenomenality. The links are direct between the tautology out of the Burning Bush, that ‘I am’ which accords to language the privilege of phrasing the identity of God, on the one hand, and the presumptions of concordance, of equivalence, of translatability, which, though imperfect, empower our dictionaries, our syntax, our rhetoric, on the other. That ‘I am’ has, as it were, at an overwhelming distance, informed all predication. It has spanned the arc between noun and verb, a leap primary to creation and the exercise of creative consciousness in metaphor. Where that fire in the branches has gone out or has been exposed as an optical illusion, the textuality of the world, the agency of the Logos in logic—be it Mosaic, Heraclitean, or Johannine—becomes ‘a dead letter.’
That passage bears rereading.”
— Richard John Neuhaus quoting
George Steiner’s Grammars of Creation
(Yale University Press, April 1, 2001)
Related material:
Click on the “spider“
symbol below.
Questions or comments on the sermon:
webweaver@genetics.med.harvard.edu
For the religious significance of the
logo on the left, see Why Me?
For the religious significance of the
logo on the right, see Palgrave.com.
Related material:
previous entry and Style.
God is in…
The Details
From an entry for Aug. 19, 2003 on
conciseness, simplicity, and objectivity:
Above: Dr. Harrison Pope, Harvard professor of psychiatry, demonstrates the use of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale "block design" subtest. Another Harvard psychiatrist, Armand Nicholi, is in the news lately with his book The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life.
For the meaning of the Old-Testament logos above, see the remarks of Plato on the immortality of the soul at For the meaning of the New-Testament logos above, see the remarks of R. P. Langlands at |
On Harvard and psychiatry: see
The Crimson Passion:
A Drama at Mardi Gras
(February 24, 2004)
This is a reductio ad absurdum of the Harvard philosophy so eloquently described by Alston Chase in his study of Harvard and the making of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. Kaczynski's time at Harvard overlapped slightly with mine, so I may have seen him in Cambridge at some point. Chase writes that at Harvard, the Unabomber "absorbed the message of positivism, which demanded value-neutral reasoning and preached that (as Kaczynski would later express it in his journal) 'there is no logical justification for morality.'" I was less impressed by Harvard positivism, although I did benefit from a course in symbolic logic from Quine. At that time– the early 60's– little remained at Harvard of what Robert Stone has called "our secret culture," that of the founding Puritans– exemplified by Cotton and Increase Mather.
From Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise:
"Our secret culture is as frivolous as a willow on a tombstone. It's a wonderful thing– or it was. It was strong and dreadful, it was majestic and ruthless. It was a stranger to pity. And it's not for sale, ladies and gentlemen."
Some traces of that culture:
|
A web page
|
A contemporary
Click on pictures for details. |
A more appealing view of faith was offered by PBS on Wednesday night, the beginning of this year's High Holy Days:
|
Armand Nicholi: But how can you believe something that you don't think is true, I mean, certainly, an intelligent person can't embrace something that they don't think is true — that there's something about us that would object to that.
Jeremy Fraiberg: Well, the answer is, they probably do believe it's true. Armand Nicholi: But how do they get there? See, that's why both Freud and Lewis was very interested in that one basic question. Is there an intelligence beyond the universe? And how do we answer that question? And how do we arrive at the answer of that question? Michael Shermer: Well, in a way this is an empirical question, right? Either there is or there isn't. Armand Nicholi: Exactly. Michael Shermer: And either we can figure it out or we can't, and therefore, you just take the leap of faith or you don't. Armand Nicholi: Yeah, now how can we figure it out? Winifred Gallagher: I think something that was perhaps not as common in their day as is common now — this idea that we're acting as if belief and unbelief were two really radically black and white different things, and I think for most people, there's a very — it's a very fuzzy line, so that — Margaret Klenck: It's always a struggle. Winifred Gallagher: Rather than — I think there's some days I believe, and some days I don't believe so much, or maybe some days I don't believe at all. Doug Holladay: Some hours. Winifred Gallagher: It's a, it's a process. And I think for me the big developmental step in my spiritual life was that — in some way that I can't understand or explain that God is right here right now all the time, everywhere. Armand Nicholi: How do you experience that? Winifred Gallagher: I experience it through a glass darkly, I experience it in little bursts. I think my understanding of it is that it's, it's always true, and sometimes I can see it and sometimes I can't. Or sometimes I remember that it's true, and then everything is in Technicolor. And then most of the time it's not, and I have to go on faith until the next time I can perhaps see it again. I think of a divine reality, an ultimate reality, uh, would be my definition of God. |
|
|
|
Gallagher seemed to be the only participant in the PBS discussion that came close to the Montessori ideals of conciseness, simplicity, and objectivity. Dr. Montessori intended these as ideals for teachers, but they seem also to be excellent religious values. Just as the willow-tombstone seems suited to Geoffrey Hill's style, the Pythagorean sangaku pictured above seems appropriate to the admirable Gallagher.
Minimalism
"It's become our form of modern classicism."
— Nancy Spector in
the New York Times of April 23, 2004
Part I: Aesthetics
In honor of the current Guggenheim exhibition, "Singular Forms" — A quotation from the Guggenheim's own website:
"Minimalism refers to painting or sculpture
Discuss these seven points
in relation to the following:
Form,
by S. H. Cullinane
Mark Rothko's reference
to geometry as a "swamp"
and his talk of "the idea" in art
Michael Kimmelman's
remarks on ideas in art
ART WARS:
Judgment Day
(2003, 10/07)
Part II: Theology
Today's previous entry, "Skylark," concluded with an invocation of the Lord. Of course, the Lord one expects may not be the Lord that appears.
"… the idea that, in art at least, less is more.
It is an idea surely as old, as enduringly attractive and as ubiquitous as its opposite. In the beginning was the Word: only later came the Bible, not to mention the three-decker Victorian novel. The oracle at Delphi did not say, 'Exhaustive analysis and comprehension of one's own psyche may be prerequisite to an understanding of one's behavior and of the world at large'; it said, 'Know thyself.' Such inherently minimalist genres as oracles (from the Delphic shrine of Apollo to the modern fortune cookie), proverbs, maxims, aphorisms, epigrams, pensees, mottoes, slogans and quips are popular in every human century and culture–especially in oral cultures and subcultures, where mnemonic staying power has high priority–and many specimens of them are self-reflexive or self-demonstrative: minimalism about minimalism. 'Brevity is the soul of wit.' "
Another form of the oracle at Delphi, in minimalist prose that might make Hemingway proud:
"He would think about Bert. Bert was an interesting man. Bert had said something about the way a gambler wants to lose. That did not make sense. Anyway, he did not want to think about it. It was dark now, but the air was still hot. He realized that he was sweating, forced himself to slow down the walking. Some children were playing a game with a ball, in the street, hitting it against the side of a building. He wanted to see Sarah.
When he came in, she was reading a book, a tumbler of dark whiskey beside her on the end table. She did not seem to see him and he sat down before he spoke, looking at her and, at first, hardly seeing her. The room was hot; she had opened the windows, but the air was still. The street noises from outside seemed almost to be in the room with them, as if the shifting of gears were being done in the closet, the children playing in the bathroom. The only light in the room was from the lamp over the couch where she was reading.
He looked at her face. She was very drunk. Her eyes were swollen, pink at the corners. 'What's the book,' he said, trying to make his voice conversational. But it sounded loud in the room, and hard.
She blinked up at him, smiled sleepily, and said nothing.
'What's the book?' His voice had an edge now.
'Oh,' she said. 'It's Kierkegaard. Soren Kierkegaard.' She pushed her legs out straight on the couch, stretching her feet. Her skirt fell back a few inches from her knees. He looked away.
'What's that?' he said.
'Well, I don't exactly know, myself." Her voice was soft and thick.
He turned his face away from her again, not knowing what he was angry with. 'What does that mean, you don't know, yourself?'
She blinked at him. 'It means, Eddie, that I don't exactly know what the book is about. Somebody told me to read it once, and that's what I'm doing. Reading it.'
He looked at her, tried to grin at her — the old, meaningless, automatic grin, the grin that made everbody like him — but he could not. 'That's great,' he said, and it came out with more irritation than he had intended.
She closed the book, tucked it beside her on the couch. She folded her arms around her, hugging herself, smiling at him. 'I guess this isn't your night, Eddie. Why don't we have a drink?'
'No.' He did not like that, did not want her being nice to him, forgiving. Nor did he want a drink.
Her smile, her drunk, amused smile, did not change. 'Then let's talk about something else,' she said. 'What about that case you have? What's in it?' Her voice was not prying, only friendly, 'Pencils?'
'That's it,' he said. 'Pencils.'
She raised her eyebrows slightly. Her voice seemed thick. 'What's in it, Eddie?'
'Figure it out yourself.' He tossed the case on the couch."
— Walter Tevis, The Hustler, 1959,
Chapter 11
See, too, the invocation of Apollo in
A Mass for Lucero, as well as
GENERAL AUDIENCE OF JOHN PAUL II
Wednesday 15 January 2003:
"The invocation of the Lord is relentless…."
and
JOURNAL ENTRY OF S. H. CULLINANE
Wednesday 15 January 2003:
Karl Cullinane —
"I will fear no evil, for I am the
meanest son of a bitch in the valley."
Ideas and Art, Part III
The first idea was not our own. Adam
In Eden was the father of Descartes…
— Wallace Stevens, from
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction
"Quaedam ex his tanquam rerum imagines sunt, quibus solis proprie convenit ideae nomen: ut cùm hominem, vel Chimaeram, vel Coelum, vel Angelum, vel Deum cogito."
— Descartes, Meditationes III, 5
"Of my thoughts some are, as it were, images of things, and to these alone properly belongs the name idea; as when I think [represent to my mind] a man, a chimera, the sky, an angel or God."
— Descartes, Meditations III, 5
Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea
Of this invention, this invented world,
The inconceivable idea of the sun.
You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it.
— Wallace Stevens, from
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction
"… Quinimo in multis saepe magnum discrimen videor deprehendisse: ut, exempli causâ, duas diversas solis ideas apud me invenio, unam tanquam a sensibus haustam, & quae maxime inter illas quas adventitias existimo est recensenda, per quam mihi valde parvus apparet, aliam verò ex rationibus Astronomiae desumptam, hoc est ex notionibus quibusdam mihi innatis elicitam, vel quocumque alio modo a me factam, per quam aliquoties major quàm terra exhibetur; utraque profecto similis eidem soli extra me existenti esse non potest, & ratio persuadet illam ei maxime esse dissimilem, quae quàm proxime ab ipso videtur emanasse."
— Descartes, Meditationes III, 11
"… I have observed, in a number of instances, that there was a great difference between the object and its idea. Thus, for example, I find in my mind two wholly diverse ideas of the sun; the one, by which it appears to me extremely small draws its origin from the senses, and should be placed in the class of adventitious ideas; the other, by which it seems to be many times larger than the whole earth, is taken up on astronomical grounds, that is, elicited from certain notions born with me, or is framed by myself in some other manner. These two ideas cannot certainly both resemble the same sun; and reason teaches me that the one which seems to have immediately emanated from it is the most unlike."
— Descartes, Meditations III, 11
"Et quamvis forte una idea ex aliâ nasci possit, non tamen hîc datur progressus in infinitum, sed tandem ad aliquam primam debet deveniri, cujus causa sit in star archetypi, in quo omnis realitas formaliter contineatur, quae est in ideâ tantùm objective."
— Descartes, Meditationes III, 15
"And although an idea may give rise to another idea, this regress cannot, nevertheless, be infinite; we must in the end reach a first idea, the cause of which is, as it were, the archetype in which all the reality [or perfection] that is found objectively [or by representation] in these ideas is contained formally [and in act]."
— Descartes, Meditations III, 15
Michael Bryson in an essay on Stevens's "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,"
The Quest for the Fiction of the Absolute:
"Canto nine considers the movement of the poem between the particular and the general, the immanent and the transcendent: "The poem goes from the poet's gibberish to / The gibberish of the vulgate and back again. / Does it move to and fro or is it of both / At once?" The poet, the creator-figure, the shadowy god-figure, is elided, evading us, "as in a senseless element." The poet seeks to find the transcendent in the immanent, the general in the particular, trying "by a peculiar speech to speak / The peculiar potency of the general." In playing on the senses of "peculiar" as particular and strange or uncanny, these lines play on the mystical relation of one and many, of concrete and abstract."
Brian Cronin in Foundations of Philosophy:
"The insight is constituted precisely by 'seeing' the idea in the image, the intelligible in the sensible, the universal in the particular, the abstract in the concrete. We pivot back and forth between images and ideas as we search for the correct insight."
— From Ch. 2, Identifying Direct Insights
Michael Bryson in an essay on Stevens's "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction":
"The fourth canto returns to the theme of opposites. 'Two things of opposite natures seem to depend / On one another . . . . / This is the origin of change.' Change resulting from a meeting of opposities is at the root of Taoism: 'Tao produced the One. / The One produced the two. / The two produced the three. / And the three produced the ten thousand things' (Tao Te Ching 42) …."
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From an entry of March 7, 2004:
From the web page
Introduction to the I Ching– "He who has perceived the meaning of change fixes his attention no longer on transitory individual things but on the immutable, eternal law at work in all change. This law is the tao of Lao-tse, the course of things, the principle of the one in the many. That it may become manifest, a decision, a postulate, is necessary. This fundamental postulate is the 'great primal beginning' of all that exists, t'ai chi — in its original meaning, the 'ridgepole.' Later Chinese philosophers devoted much thought to this idea of a primal beginning. A still earlier beginning, wu chi, was represented by the symbol of a circle. Under this conception, t'ai chi was represented by the circle divided into the light and the dark, yang and yin,
This symbol has also played a significant part in India and Europe. However, speculations of a gnostic-dualistic character are foreign to the original thought of the I Ching; what it posits is simply the ridgepole, the line. With this line, which in itself represents oneness, duality comes into the world, for the line at the same time posits an above and a below, a right and left, front and back-in a word, the world of the opposites." The t'ai chi symbol is also illustrated on the web page Cognitive Iconology, which says that
"W.J.T. Mitchell calls 'iconology' A variation on the t'ai chi symbol appears in a log24.net entry for March 5:
The Line, See too my web page Logos and Logic, which has the following:
Logos Alogos, In the conclusion of Section 3, Canto X, of "Notes," Stevens says
This is the logoi alogoi of Simone Weil. |
In "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,"
Wallace Stevens lists three criteria
for a work of the imagination:
It Must Be Abstract
The Line,
by S.H. Cullinane
It Must Change
It Must Give Pleasure
Related material:
Apartments
From Wallace Stevens,
"Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction":
It is the celestial ennui of apartments
That sends us back to the first idea, the quick
Of this invention; and yet so poisonous
Are the ravishments of truth, so fatal to
The truth itself, the first idea becomes
The hermit in a poet’s metaphors,
Who comes and goes and comes and goes all day.
May there be an ennui of the first idea?
What else, prodigious scholar, should there be?….
From Guyan Robertson,
Groups Acting on Affine Buildings
and their Boundaries:
From Plato's Meno:
They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.
We shall return at twilight from the lecture
Pleased that the irrational is rational….
See Logos and Logic
and the previous entry.
Ridgepole
CBS News Sunday Morning today had a ridgepole ceremony for a house that was moved from China to Salem, Massachusetts.
From the web page
Introduction to the I Ching–
By Richard Wilhelm:
"He who has perceived the meaning of change fixes his attention no longer on transitory individual things but on the immutable, eternal law at work in all change. This law is the tao of Lao-tse, the course of things, the principle of the one in the many. That it may become manifest, a decision, a postulate, is necessary. This fundamental postulate is the 'great primal beginning' of all that exists, t'ai chi — in its original meaning, the 'ridgepole.' Later Chinese philosophers devoted much thought to this idea of a primal beginning. A still earlier beginning, wu chi, was represented by the symbol of a circle. Under this conception, t'ai chi was represented by the circle divided into the light and the dark, yang and yin, 
.
This symbol has also played a significant part in India and Europe. However, speculations of a gnostic-dualistic character are foreign to the original thought of the I Ching; what it posits is simply the ridgepole, the line. With this line, which in itself represents oneness, duality comes into the world, for the line at the same time posits an above and a below, a right and left, front and back-in a word, the world of the opposites."
The t'ai chi symbol is also illustrated on the web page Cognitive Iconology, which says that
"W.J.T. Mitchell calls 'iconology' a study of the 'logos' (the words, ideas, discourse, or 'science') of 'icons' (images, pictures, or likenesses). It is thus a 'rhetoric of images' (Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, p. 1)."
A variation on the t'ai chi symbol appears in a log24.net entry for March 5:
The Line,
by S. H. Cullinane
See too my web page Logos and Logic, which has the following:
"The beautiful in mathematics resides in contradiction. Incommensurability, logoi alogoi, was the first splendor in mathematics."
— Simone Weil, Oeuvres Choisies, éd. Quarto, Gallimard, 1999, p. 100
Logos Alogos,
by S. H. Cullinane
In the conclusion of Section 3, Canto X, of "Notes," Stevens says
"They will get it straight one day
at the Sorbonne.
We shall return at twilight
from the lecture
Pleased that
the irrational is rational…."
This is the logoi alogoi of Simone Weil.
Intelligence Test
From my August 31, 2002, entry quoting Dr. Maria Montessori on conciseness, simplicity, and objectivity:
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Above: Dr. Harrison Pope, Harvard professor of psychiatry, demonstrates the use of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale "block design" subtest.
Another Harvard psychiatrist, Armand Nicholi, is in the news lately with his book The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life.
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Pope |
Nicholi |
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Old |
New |
For the meaning of the Old-Testament logos above, see the remarks of Plato on the immortality of the soul at
For the meaning of the New-Testament logos above, see the remarks of R. P. Langlands at
The Institute for Advanced Study.
For the meaning of life, see
The Gospel According to Jill St. John,
whose birthday is today.
Postmodern
Postmortem
“I had a lot of fun with this audacious and exasperating book. … [which] looks more than a little like Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, a ‘secret history’ tracing punk rock through May 1968….”
— Michael Harris, Institut de Mathématiques de Jussieu, Université Paris 7, review of Mathematics and the Roots of Postmodern Thought, by Vladimir Tasic, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, August 2003
For some observations on the transgressive predecessors of punk rock, see my entry Funeral March of July 26, 2003 (the last conscious day in the life of actress Marie Trintignant — see below), which contains the following:
“Sky is high and so am I,
If you’re a viper — a vi-paah.”
— The Day of the Locust,
by Nathanael West (1939)
As I noted in another another July 26 entry, the disease of postmodernism has, it seems, now infected mathematics. For some recent outbreaks of infection in physics, see the works referred to below.
“Postmodern Fields of Physics: In his book The Dreams of Reason, H. R. Pagels focuses on the science of complexity as the most outstanding new discipline emerging in recent years….”
— “The Semiotics of ‘Postmodern’ Physics,” by Hans J. Pirner, in Symbol and Physical Knowledge: The Conceptual Structure of Physics, ed. by M. Ferrari and I.-O. Stamatescu, Springer Verlag, August 2001
For a critical look at Pagels’s work, see Midsummer Eve’s Dream. For a less critical look, see The Marriage of Science and Mysticism. Pagels’s book on the so-called “science of complexity” was published in June 1988. For more recent bullshit on complexity, see
The Critical Idiom of Postmodernity and Its Contributions to an Understanding of Complexity, by Matthew Abraham, 2000,
which describes a book on complexity theory that, besides pronouncements about physics, also provides what “could very well be called a ‘postmodern ethic.’ “
The book reviewed is Paul Cilliers’s Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems.
A search for related material on Cilliers yields the following:
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Janis Joplin, Postmodernist ” …’all’ is ‘one,’ … the time is ‘now’ and … ‘tomorrow never happens,’ …. as Janis Joplin says, ‘it’s all the same fucking day.’ It appears that ‘time,’ … the linear, independent notion of ‘time’ that our culture embraces, is an artifact of our abstract thinking … The problem is that ‘tomorrow never happens’ …. Aboriginal traditionalists are well aware of this topological paradox and so was Janis Joplin. Her use of the expletive in this context is therefore easy to understand … love is never having to say ‘tomorrow.’ “ |
“That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.”
— Ryan O’Neal in “What’s Up, Doc?”
A more realistic look at postmodernism in action is provided by the following news story:
| Brutal Death of an Actress Is France’s Summertime Drama
By JOHN TAGLIABUE The actress, Marie Trintignant, died Friday [Aug. 1, 2003] in a Paris hospital, with severe head and face injuries. Her rock star companion, Bertrand Cantat, is confined to a prison hospital…. According to news reports, Ms. Trintignant and Mr. Cantat argued violently in their hotel room in Vilnius in the early hours of [Sunday] July 27 at the end of a night spent eating and drinking…. In coming months, two films starring Ms. Trintignant are scheduled to debut, including “Janis and John” by the director Samuel Benchetrit, her estranged husband and the father of two of her four children. In it, Ms. Trintignant plays Janis Joplin. |
” ‘…as a matter of fact, as we discover all the time, tomorrow never happens, man. It’s all the same f…n’ day, man!’ –Janis Joplin, at live performance in Calgary on 4th July 1970 – exactly four months before her death. (apologies for censoring her exact words which can be heard on the ‘Janis Joplin in Concert’ CD)”
— Janis Joplin at FamousTexans.com
All of the above fits in rather nicely with the view of science and scientists in the C. S. Lewis classic That Hideous Strength, which I strongly recommend.
For those few who both abhor postmodernism and regard the American Mathematical Society Notices
as a sort of “holy place” of Platonism, I recommend a biblical reading–
Matthew 24:15, CEV:
“Someday you will see that Horrible Thing in the holy place….”
See also Logos and Logic for more sophisticated religious remarks, by Simone Weil, whose brother, mathematician André Weil, died five years ago today.
The Transcendent
Signified
“God is both the transcendent signifier
and transcendent signified.”
— Caryn Broitman,
Deconstruction and the Bible
“Central to deconstructive theory is the notion that there is no ‘transcendent signified,’ or ‘logos,’ that ultimately grounds ‘meaning’ in language….”
— Henry P. Mills,
The Significance of Language,
Footnote 2
“It is said that the students of medieval Paris came to blows in the streets over the question of universals. The stakes are high, for at issue is our whole conception of our ability to describe the world truly or falsely, and the objectivity of any opinions we frame to ourselves. It is arguable that this is always the deepest, most profound problem of philosophy. It structures Plato’s (realist) reaction to the sophists (nominalists). What is often called ‘postmodernism’ is really just nominalism, colourfully presented as the doctrine that there is nothing except texts. It is the variety of nominalism represented in many modern humanities, paralysing appeals to reason and truth.”
— Simon Blackburn, Think,
Oxford University Press, 1999, page 268
The question of universals is still being debated in Paris. See my July 25 entry,
That entry discusses an essay on
mathematics and postmodern thought
by Michael Harris,
professor of mathematics
at l’Université Paris 7 – Denis Diderot.
A different essay by Harris has a discussion that gets to the heart of this matter: whether pi exists as a platonic idea apart from any human definitions. Harris notes that “one might recall that the theorem that pi is transcendental can be stated as follows: the homomorphism
Harris illustrates this with
an X in a rectangle:
For the complete passage, click here.
If we rotate the Harris X by 90 degrees, we get a representation of the Christian Logos that seems closely related to the God-symbol of Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey. On the left below, we have a (1x)4×9 black monolith, representing God, and on the right below, we have the Harris slab, with X representing (as in “Xmas,” or the Chi-rho page of the Book of Kells) Christ… who is, in theological terms, also “the variable par excellence.”
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Kubrick’s |
Harris’s |
For a more serious discussion of deconstruction and Christian theology, see
For Jung’s 7/26 Birthday:
A Logocentric Meditation
Leftist academics are trying to pull a fast one again. An essay in the most prominent American mathematical publication tries to disguise a leftist attack on Christian theology as harmless philosophical woolgathering.
In a review of Vladimir Tasic’s Mathematics and the Roots of Postmodern Thought, the reviewer, Michael Harris, is being less than candid when he discusses Derrida’s use of “logocentrism”:
“Derrida uses the term ‘logocentrism’… as ‘the metaphysics of phonetic writing’….”
— Notices of the American Mathematical Society, August 2003, page 792
We find a rather different version of logocentrism in Tasic’s own Sept. 24, 2001, lecture “Poststructuralism and Deconstruction: A Mathematical History,” which is “an abridged version of some arguments” in Tasic’s book on mathematics and postmodernism:
“Derrida apparently also employs certain ideas of formalist mathematics in his critique of idealist metaphysics: for example, he is on record saying that ‘the effective progress of mathematical notation goes along with the deconstruction of metaphysics.’
Derrida’s position is rather subtle. I think it can be interpreted as a valiant sublation of two completely opposed schools in mathematical philosophy. For this reason it is not possible to reduce it to a readily available philosophy of mathematics. One could perhaps say that Derrida continues and critically reworks Heidegger’s attempt to ‘deconstruct’ traditional metaphysics, and that his method is more ‘mathematical’ than Heidegger’s because he has at his disposal the entire pseudo-mathematical tradition of structuralist thought. He has himself implied in an interview given to Julia Kristeva that mathematics could be used to challenge ‘logocentric theology,’ and hence it does not seem unreasonable to try looking for the mathematical roots of his philosophy.”
The unsuspecting reader would not know from Harris’s review that Derrida’s main concern is not mathematics, but theology. His ‘deconstruction of metaphysics’ is actually an attack on Christian theology.
From “Derrida and Deconstruction,” by David Arneson, a University of Manitoba professor and writer on literary theory:
“Logocentrism: ‘In the beginning was the word.’ Logocentrism is the belief that knowledge is rooted in a primeval language (now lost) given by God to humans. God (or some other transcendental signifier: the Idea, the Great Spirit, the Self, etc.) acts a foundation for all our thought, language and action. He is the truth whose manifestation is the world.”
Some further background, putting my July 23 entry on Lévi-Strauss and structuralism in the proper context:
Part I. The Roots of Structuralism
“Literary science had to have a firm theoretical basis…”
Part II. Structuralism/Poststructuralism
“Most [structuralists] insist, as Levi-Strauss does, that structures are universal, therefore timeless.”
Part III. Structuralism and
Jung’s Archetypes
Jung’s “theories, like those of Cassirer and Lévi-Strauss, command for myth a central cultural position, unassailable by reductive intellectual methods or procedures.”
And so we are back to logocentrism, with the Logos — God in the form of story, myth, or archetype — in the “central cultural position.”
What does all this have to do with mathematics? See
“the Klein group (much beloved of Structuralists)”
Another Michael Harris Essay, Note 47 –
“From Krauss’s article I learned that the Klein group is also called the Piaget group.”
and Jung on Quaternity:
Beyond the Fringe –
“…there is no denying the fact that [analytical] psychology, like an illegitimate child of the spirit,
leads an esoteric, special existence beyond the fringe of what is generally acknowledged to be the academic world.”
What attitude should mathematicians have towards all this?
Towards postmodern French
atheist literary/art theorists –
Mathematicians should adopt the attitude toward “the demimonde of chic academic theorizing” expressed in Roger Kimball’s essay, Feeling Sorry for Rosalind Krauss.
Towards logocentric German
Christian literary/art theorists –
Mathematicians should, of course, adopt a posture of humble respect, tugging their forelocks and admitting their ignorance of Christian theology. They should then, if sincere in their desire to honestly learn something about logocentric philosophy, begin by consulting the website
The Quest for the Fiction of an Absolute.
For a better known, if similarly disrespected, “illegitimate child of the spirit,” see my July 22 entry.
ART WARS, 5:09
The Word in the Desert
For Harrison Ford in the desert.
(See previous entry.)
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break,
under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them.
The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of
the disconsolate chimera.— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
The link to the word "devilish" in the last entry leads to one of my previous journal entries, "A Mass for Lucero," that deals with the devilishness of postmodern philosophy. To hammer this point home, here is an attack on college English departments that begins as follows:
"William Faulkner's Snopes trilogy, which recounts the generation-long rise of the drily loathsome Flem Snopes from clerk in a country store to bank president in Jefferson, Mississippi, teems with analogies to what has happened to English departments over the past thirty years."
For more, see
The Word in the Desert,
by Glenn C. Arbery.
See also the link on the word "contemptible," applied to Jacques Derrida, in my Logos and Logic page.
This leads to an National Review essay on Derrida,
The Philosopher as King,
by Mark Goldblatt.
A reader's comment on my previous entry suggests the film "Scotland, PA" as viewing related to the Derrida/Macbeth link there.
I prefer the following notice of a 7-11 death, that of a powerful art museum curator who would have been well cast as Lady Macbeth:
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Die Fahne Hoch, |
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From the Whitney Museum site:
"Max Anderson: When artist Frank Stella first showed this painting at The Museum of Modern Art in 1959, people were baffled by its austerity. Stella responded, 'What you see is what you see. Painting to me is a brush in a bucket and you put it on a surface. There is no other reality for me than that.' He wanted to create work that was methodical, intellectual, and passionless. To some, it seemed to be nothing more than a repudiation of everything that had come before—a rational system devoid of pleasure and personality. But other viewers saw that the black paintings generated an aura of mystery and solemnity.
The title of this work, Die Fahne Hoch, literally means 'The banner raised.' It comes from the marching anthem of the Nazi youth organization. Stella pointed out that the proportions of this canvas are much the same as the large flags displayed by the Nazis.
But the content of the work makes no reference to anything outside of the painting itself. The pattern was deduced from the shape of the canvas—the width of the black bands is determined by the width of the stretcher bars. The white lines that separate the broad bands of black are created by the narrow areas of unpainted canvas. Stella's black paintings greatly influenced the development of Minimalism in the 1960s."
From Play It As It Lays:
She took his hand and held it. "Why are you here."
"Because you and I, we know something. Because we've been out there where nothing is. Because I wanted—you know why."
"Lie down here," she said after a while. "Just go to sleep."
When he lay down beside her the Seconal capsules rolled on the sheet. In the bar across the road somebody punched King of the Road on the jukebox again, and there was an argument outside, and the sound of a bottle breaking. Maria held onto BZ's hand.
"Listen to that," he said. "Try to think about having enough left to break a bottle over it."
"It would be very pretty," Maria said. "Go to sleep."
I smoke old stogies I have found…
Cigar Aficionado on artist Frank Stella:
" 'Frank actually makes the moment. He captures it and helps to define it.'
This was certainly true of Stella's 1958 New York debut. Fresh out of Princeton, he came to New York and rented a former jeweler's shop on Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side. He began using ordinary house paint to paint symmetrical black stripes on canvas. Called the Black Paintings, they are credited with paving the way for the minimal art movement of the 1960s. By the fall of 1959, Dorothy Miller of The Museum of Modern Art had chosen four of the austere pictures for inclusion in a show called Sixteen Americans."
For an even more austere picture, see
For more on art, Derrida, and devilishness, see Deborah Solomon's essay in the New York Times Magazine of Sunday, June 27, 1999:
"Blame Derrida and
his fellow French theorists…."
See, too, my site
Art Wars: Geometry as Conceptual Art.
For those who prefer a more traditional meditation, I recommend
("Behold the Wood of the Cross")
For more on the word "road" in the desert, see my "Dead Poet" entry of Epiphany 2003 (Tao means road) as well as the following scholarly bibliography of road-related cultural artifacts (a surprising number of which involve Harrison Ford):
Links for St. Benedict
Today is the feast of St. Benedict.
Here is a link from the left:
The Trial of Depleted Uranium,
by Saint Philip Berrigan
Here is a link from the right:
On a Preview of “The Passion,”
a film by Saint Mel Gibson
Both Berrigan and Gibson are devout Catholics. (I use the present tense for Berrigan, though he is dead, since, as a saint, he is not very dead.) Both are worthy of respect, and should be listened to carefully, even though the religion they espouse is that of Hitler and Torquemada.
For more details, see sites related to the above links…. Click on either of the logos below — on the left, a Jewish meditation from the Conference of Catholic Bishops; on the right, an Aryan meditation from Stormfront.org.
Both logos represent different embodiments of the “story theory” of truth, as opposed to the “diamond theory” of truth. Both logos claim, in their own ways, to represent the eternal Logos of the Christian religion. I personally prefer the “diamond theory” of truth, represented by the logo below.
The Order of the Phoenix
Some links of interest
on this day of Potter-mania:
The Royal Order of the Phoenix
Knight’s Gold Cross
With Swords
awarded to
Arthur Edmonds,
Royal New Zealand Engineers,
attached to Special Operations Executive and parachuted into occupied Greece
1 October 1941,
serving with Greek guerrillas.
St. James Church Cemetery,
Kerikeri, New Zealand
In Loving Memory of
Arthur Edmonds
who died June 20th,
1914, aged 88 years:
Logo,
Anglican Diocese
of Auckland
Logo,
Catholic Diocese
of Phoenix
See also Cullinane College.
“The dark lord re-emerges, but thinking he can now kill Harry, discovers that Harry is still protected, since both his wand and Harry’s wand have as their essence two feathers from the same phoenix, a phoenix that has only given two feathers, and they cannot be used against one another.”
— Harry Potter:
Social Activist for the 21st Century
“The question is — why does the same story keep getting told? The answer is that we’re still trying to figure it out.”
ART WARS:
The Religion of Cubism
In the dome of the Capitol at Washington, DC, a painting depicts The Apotheosis of Washington . Personally, I prefer the following pair of pictures, which might be titled Apotheosis of the Cube.
A New York Times article says Tony Smith's instructions for fabricating Die were as follows:
"a six-foot cube of quarter-inch hot-rolled steel with diagonal internal bracing."
The transparent cube in the upper picture above shows the internal diagonals. The fact that there are four of these may be used to demonstrate the isomorphism of the group of rotations of the cube with the group of permutations on an arbitrary set of four elements. For deeper results, see Diamond Theory.
For an explanation of why our current president might feel that the cube deserves an apotheosis, see the previous entry, "The Rhetoric of Power."
See, too, Nabokov's Transparent Things :
"Its ultimate vision was the incandescence of a book or a box grown completely transparent and hollow. This is, I believe, it: not the crude anguish of physical death but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another. Easy, you know, does it, son."
Symmetries…. May 15, 1998
The following journal note, from the day after Sinatra died, was written before I heard of his death. Note particularly the quote from Rilke. Other material was suggested, in part, by Alasdair Gray's Glasgow novel 1982 Janine. The "Sein Feld" heading is a reference to the Seinfeld final episode, which aired May 14, 1998. The first column contains a reference to angels — apparently Hell's Angels — and the second column provides a somewhat more serious look at this theological topic.
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Sein Feld
1984 Janine
"But Angels love their own
"Logos means above all relation."
"Gesang ist Dasein…. |
Geometry and Theology
PA lottery May 14, 1998: |
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Tape purchased 12/23/97:
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"In the middle of 1982 Janine there are pages in which Jock McLeish is fighting with drugs and alcohol, attempting to either die or come through and get free of his fantasies. In his delirium, he hears the voice of God, which enters in small print, pushing against the larger type of his ravings. Something God says is repeated on the first and last pages of Unlikely Stories, Mostly, complete with illustration and the words 'Scotland 1984' beside it. God's statement is 'Work as if you were in the early days of a better nation.' It is the inherent optimism in that statement that perhaps best captures the strength of Aladair Gray's fiction, its straightforwardness and exuberance." |
For another look at angels, see "Winging It," by Christopher R. Miller, The New York Times Book Review Bookend page for Sunday, May 24, 1998. May 24 is the feast day of Sara (also known by the Hindu name Kali), patron saint of Gypsies.
For another, later (July 16, 1998) reply to Dyson, from a source better known than myself, see Why Religion Matters, by Huston Smith, Harper Collins, 2001, page 66.
Great Simplicity
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is the day that Daisetsu Suzuki attained satori,
according to the Zen Calendar. “Daisetsu” is
said to mean “Great Simplicity.”
For those who prefer Harry Potter and
Diagon Alley, here is another calendar:
To Have and Have Not
Those who prefer traditional Western religions may like a site on the Trinity that contains this:
“Zen metaphysics is perhaps most succinctly set forth in the words ‘not-two.” But even when he uses this expression, Suzuki is quick to assert that it implies no monism. Not-two, it is claimed, is not the same as one.* But when Suzuki discusses the relationship of Zen with Western mysticism, it is more difficult to escape the obvious monistic implications of his thinking. Consider the following:
We are possessed of the habit of looking at Reality by dividing it into two… It is all due to the human habit of splitting one solid Reality into two, and the result is that my ‘have’ is no ‘have’ and my ‘have not’ is no ‘have not.’ While we are actually passing, we insist that the gap is impassable.**”
*See: Daisetz T. Suzuki, ‘Basic Thoughts Underlying Eastern Ethical and Social Practice’ in Philosophy and Culture — East and West: East-West Philosophy in Practical Perspective, ed. Charles A. Moore (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1968), p. 429
** Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki, Mysticism Christian and Buddhist (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1957, Unwin paperback, 1979), p. 57.
Personally, I am reminded by Suzuki’s satori on this date that today is the eve of the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. I am also reminded by the rather intolerant tract on the Trinity quoted above that the first atomic bomb was exploded in the New Mexico desert at a test site named Trinity. Of course, sometimes intolerance is justified.
Concluding unscientific postscript:
On the same day in 1896 that D. T. Suzuki attained satori,
lyricist Ira Gershwin was born.
Dies irae, dies illa.
Art isn't Easy
In honor of Georges Seurat, whose birthday is today, this site's music is now "Putting It Together," by Stephen Sondheim.
For a relevant quote by Sondheim and some related material, see
A Logocentric Archetype
Today we examine the relativist, nominalist, leftist, nihilist, despairing, depressing, absurd, and abominable work of Samuel Beckett, darling of the postmodernists.
One lens through which to view Beckett is an essay by Jennifer Martin, "Beckettian Drama as Protest: A Postmodern Examination of the 'Delogocentering' of Language." Martin begins her essay with two quotations: one from the contemptible French twerp Jacques Derrida, and one from Beckett's masterpiece of stupidity, Molloy. For a logocentric deconstruction of Derrida, see my note, "The Shining of May 29," which demonstrates how Derrida attempts to convert a rather important mathematical result to his brand of nauseating and pretentious nonsense, and of course gets it wrong. For a logocentric deconstruction of Molloy, consider the following passage:
"I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in a store of sucking-stones. They were pebbles but I call them stones…. I distributed them equally among my four pockets, and sucked them turn and turn about. This raised a problem which I first solved in the following way. I had say sixteen stones, four in each of my four pockets these being the two pockets of my trousers and the two pockets of my greatcoat. Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced by the stone which was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stones….But this solution did not satisfy me fully. For it did not escape me that, by an extraordinary hazard, the four stones circulating thus might always be the same four."
Beckett is describing, in great detail, how a damned moron might approach the extraordinarily beautiful mathematical discipline known as group theory, founded by the French anticleric and leftist Evariste Galois. Disciples of Derrida may play at mimicking the politics of Galois, but will never come close to imitating his genius. For a worthwhile discussion of permutation groups acting on a set of 16 elements, see R. D. Carmichael's masterly work, Introduction to the Theory of Groups of Finite Order, Ginn, Boston, 1937, reprinted by Dover, New York, 1956.
There are at least two ways of approaching permutations on 16 elements in what Pascal calls "l'esprit géométrique." My website Diamond Theory discusses the action of the affine group in a four-dimensional finite geometry of 16 points. For a four-dimensional euclidean hypercube, or tesseract, with 16 vertices, see the highly logocentric movable illustration by Harry J. Smith. The concept of a tesseract was made famous, though seen through a glass darkly, by the Christian writer Madeleine L'Engle in her novel for children and young adults, A Wrinkle in Tme.
This tesseract may serve as an archetype for what Pascal, Simone Weil (see my earlier notes), Harry J. Smith, and Madeleine L'Engle might, borrowing their enemies' language, call their "logocentric" philosophy.
For a more literary antidote to postmodernist nihilism, see Archetypal Theory and Criticism, by Glen R. Gill.
For a discussion of the full range of meaning of the word "logos," which has rational as well as religious connotations, click here.
Waiting for Logos
Searching for background on the phrase "logos and logic" in yesterday's "Notes toward a Supreme Fact," I found this passage:
"…a theory of psychology based on the idea of the soul as the dialectical, self-contradictory syzygy of a) soul as anima and b) soul as animus. Jungian and archetypal psychology appear to have taken heed more or less of only one half of the whole syzygy, predominantly serving an anima cut loose from her own Other, the animus as logos and logic (whose first and most extreme phenomenological image is the killer of the anima, Bluebeard). Thus psychology tends to defend the virginal innocence of the anima and her imagination…"
— Wolfgang Giegerich, "Once More the Reality/Irreality Issue: A Reply to Hillman's Reply," website
The anima and other Jungian concepts are used to analyze Wallace Stevens in an excellent essay by Michael Bryson, "The Quest for the Fiction of an Absolute." Part of Bryson's motivation in this essay is the conflict between the trendy leftist nominalism of postmodern critics and the conservative realism of more traditional critics:
"David Jarraway, in his Stevens and the Question of Belief, writes about a Stevens figured as a proto-deconstructionist, insisting on 'Steven's insistence on dismantling the logocentric models of belief' (311) in 'An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.' In opposition to these readings comes a work like Janet McCann's Wallace Stevens Revisited: 'The Celestial Possible', in which the claim is made (speaking of the post-1940 period of Stevens' life) that 'God preoccupied him for the rest of his career.'"
Here "logocentric" is a buzz word for "Christian." Stevens, unlike the postmodernists, was not anti-Christian. He did, however, see that the old structures of belief could not be maintained indefinitely, and pondered what could be found to replace them. "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction" deals with this problem. In his essay on Stevens' "Notes," Bryson emphasizes the "negative capability" of Keats as a contemplative technique:
"The willingness to exist in a state of negative capability, to accept that sometimes what we are seeking is not that which reason can impose…."
For some related material, see Simone Weil's remarks on Electra waiting for her brother Orestes. Simone Weil's brother was one of the greatest mathematicians of the past century, André Weil.
"Electra did not seek Orestes, she waited for him…"
— Simone Weil
"…at the end, she pulls it all together brilliantly in the story of Electra and Orestes, where the importance of waiting on God rather than seeking is brought home forcefully."
— Tom Hinkle, review of Waiting for God
Compare her remarks on waiting for Orestes with the following passage from Waiting for God:
"We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them. Man cannot discover them by his own powers, and if he sets out to seek for them he will find in their place counterfeits of which he will be unable to discern falsity.
The solution of a geometry problem does not in itself constitute a precious gift, but the same law applies to it because it is the image of something precious. Being a little fragment of particular truth, it is a pure image of the unique, eternal, and living Truth, the very Truth that once in a human voice declared: "I am the Truth."
Every school exercise, thought of in this way, is like a sacrament.
In every school exercise there is a special way of waiting upon truth, setting our hearts upon it, yet not allowing ourselves to go out in search of it. There is a way of giving our attention to the data of a problem in geometry without trying to find the solution…."
— Simone Weil, "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God"
Weil concludes the preceding essay with the following passage:
"Academic work is one of those fields containing a pearl so precious that it is worth while to sell all of our possessions, keeping nothing for ourselves, in order to be able to acquire it."
This biblical metaphor is also echoed in the work of Pascal, who combined in one person the theological talent of Simone Weil and the mathematical talent of her brother. After discussing how proofs should be written, Pascal says
"The method of not erring is sought by all the world. The logicians profess to guide to it, the geometricians alone attain it, and apart from their science, and the imitations of it, there are no true demonstrations. The whole art is included in the simple precepts that we have given; they alone are sufficient, they alone afford proofs; all other rules are useless or injurious. This I know by long experience of all kinds of books and persons.
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, The Art of Persuasion
Notes toward a Supreme Fact
In "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction," Wallace Stevens lists criteria for a work of the imagination:
For a work that seems to satisfy these criteria, see the movable images at my diamond theory website. Central to these images is the interplay of rational sides and irrational diagonals in square subimages.
"Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis,
Incipit and a form to speak the word
And every latent double in the word…."— "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction," Section 1, Canto VIII
Recall that "logos" in Greek means "ratio," as well as (human or divine) "word." Thus when I read the following words of Simone Weil today, I thought of Stevens.
"The beautiful in mathematics resides in contradiction. Incommensurability, logoi alogoi , was the first splendor in mathematics."
— Simone Weil, Oeuvres Choisies , éd. Quarto, Gallimard, 1999, p. 100
In the conclusion of Section 3, Canto X, of "Notes," Stevens says
"They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.
We shall return at twilight from the lecture
Pleased that the irrational is rational…."
This is the logoi alogoi of Simone Weil.
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The group of all projectivities and correlations of 
