http://www.wittgen-cam.ac.uk/biogre9.html —

1935

With the expiry of his five-year Research Fellowship at Trinity College Wittgenstein was faced once more with the problem of loss of career. Accordingly he planned a journey to the Soviet Union, to find out whether he could find a suitable post there. Wittgenstein’s constant quest for the right career was not, as it is often misunderstood, a flight from himself. Rather, it was a search for the right place, a being at one with himself: Return him [Man] to his rightful element and everything will unfold and appear as healthy. (MS 125)

Since 1933/34 he had been taking lessons in Russian from the philosopher Fanja Pascal, initially with Francis Skinner. In June he asked Keynes for an introduction to the Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan M. Maiski. He sought contacts in two places above all, at the Northern Institute in Leningrad and the Institute for National Minorities in Moscow, writing to Keynes on 6 July: These Institutes, as I am told, deal with people who want to go to the ‘colonies’ the newly colonized parts at the periphery of the U. S. S. R. (Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore)

On 12 September Wittgenstein arrived in Leningrad. There he met the author and educator Guryevich at the Northern Institute, then an autonomous faculty of Leningrad University. On the evening of the following day he travelled on to Moscow, arriving there on the morning of the 14th. Here he had contacts with various western Europeans and Americans, including the correspondent of the Daily Worker, Pat Sloane. Most of his discussions, however, were with scientists, for example the young mathematician Yanovskaya and the philosopher Yushevich from Moscow University, who were both close to so-called Mach Marxism and the Vienna Circle. He was invited by the philosopher Tatiana Nikolayeva Gornstein, a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, to teach philosophy at Leningrad University. He traveled to Kazakhstan, where he was offered a chair at the famous university where Tolstoy once studied. On 1 October he was back in Cambridge. The trip was shorter than planned, and it appears that he had given up the idea of settling in Russia.

His friend Gilbert Pattison, who picked him up from the ship on his return, recalled that Wittgenstein’s view was that he could not live there himself: One could live there, but only if one kept in mind the whole time that one could never speak one’s mind. … It is as though one were to spend the rest of one’s life in an army, any army, and that is a rather difficult thing for people who are educated. (Interview with Pattison)

Enigma Variations

The intercept control room in Hut 6 at Bletchley Park, 1943—

Photo: GETTY

The above photo is from today's London Telegraph  obituary of Keith Batey, a Bletchley Park codebreaker who died at 91 on St. Augustine's Day, 2010. Also from that obituary—

Batey himself was responsible for some important breakthroughs in decrypting the Abwehr Enigma system, helping MI5 to control the entire German espionage network in Britain. The intelligence was crucial to the Double Cross system – under which MI5 turned German agents sent to Britain and used them to feed the Abwehr false information – as it showed that the information was being accepted as genuine; it further revealed what the Germans did and did not know about the D-Day invasion plans.

From the current index to obituaries at Telegraph.co.uk—

Teufel is also featured in today's New York Times—

"Mr. Teufel became a semicelebrity, helped in no small part by his last name, which means 'devil' in German."

From Group Analysis ,  June 1993, vol. 26 no. 2, 203-212—

The Problem of Good and Evil

by Ronald Sandison, Ledbury, Herefordshire HR8 2EY, UK

In my contribution to the Group Analysis Special Section: "Aspects of Religion in Group Analysis" (Sandison, 1993) I hinted that any consideration of a spiritual dimension to the group involves us in a discussion on whether we are dealing with good or evil spirits. But if we say that God is in the group, why is not the Devil there also? Can good and evil coexist in the same group matrix? Is the recognition of evil "nothing but" the ability to distinguish between good and bad? If not, then what is evil? Is it no more than the absence of good?

These and other questions were worked on at a joint Institute of Group Analysis and Group-Analytic Society (London) Workshop entitled "The Problem of Good and Evil." We considered the likelihood that good and evil coexist in all of us, as well as in the whole of the natural world, not only on earth, but in the cosmos and in God himself What we actually do with good and evil is to split them apart, thereby shelving the problem but at the same time creating irreconcilable opposites. This article examines this splitting and how we can work with it psychoanalytically.

This suggests a biblical remark—

"Now there was a day… when the sons of God
came to present themselves before the Lord,
and Satan came also among them."

— Job 1:6, quoted by Chesterton in The Man Who Was Thursday

Sandison died on June 18. See the Thursday, August 5, Log24 post "The Matrix."

Teufel died on July 6. See the Log24 posts for that day.

The title of this  post, "rift designs," refers to a recurring theme in the July 6 posts. It is taken from Heidegger.

From a recent New Yorker  review of Absence of Mind  by Marilynne Robinson—

"Robinson is eloquent in her defense of the mind’s prerogatives, but her call for a renewed metaphysics might be better served by rereading Heidegger than by dusting off the Psalms."

Following this advice, we find—

"Propriation gathers the rift-design of the saying and unfolds it  in such a way that it becomes the well-joined structure of a manifold showing."

— p. 415 of Heidegger's Basic Writings , edited by David Farrell Krell, HarperCollins paperback, 1993

"Das Ereignis versammelt den Aufriß der Sage und entfaltet ihn zum Gefüge des vielfältigen Zeigens." 

— Heidegger, Weg zur Sprache

Happy Birthday,
Carey Mulligan

Star of "An Education"

In "An Education," Mulligan's character
applies for admission to Oxford.

Today's New York Times:

A sermon for the father of Kal-El.
See also related material in this journal
on Vegas and on Maniacs.

Slouching
Towards Kristen

My Prayer:

Private Gomorrah lessons
with Kristen.

Background:

“Heaven Can Wait”
at Haaretz.com

Happy Rosh Hashanah
(and Gemara).

Update, 5:01 AM Sept. 19

Before becoming a writer,
Krauthammer was, his
Washington Post biography says,
a resident and then chief resident
in psychiatry at
Massachusetts General Hospital.

Related Metaphors

This morning’s New York Times:

MicheleBachmann.com this morning:

See also:

James Hillman’s “acorn theory“
of personality development
(yesterday’s entry).

From Josephine Klein, Jacob’s Ladder: Essays on Experiences of the Ineffable in the Context of Contemporary Psychotherapy, London, Karnac Books, 2003–

Page 14 —
Gerard Manley Hopkins

“Quiddity and haeccity were contentious topics in medieval discussions about the nature of reality, and the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins would have encountered these concepts during his Jesuit training. W. H. Gardner, who edited much of Hopkins’s work, writes that

in 1872, while studying medieval philosophy… Hopkins came across the writing of Duns Scotus, and in that subtle thinker’s Principles of Individuation and Theory of Knowledge he discovered what seemed to be a philosophical corroboration of his own private theory of inscape and instress. [Gardner, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose, Penguin, 1953, p. xxiii]

In this useful introduction to his selection of Hopkins’s work, Gardner writes that Hopkins was always looking for the law or principle that gave an object ‘its delicate and surprising uniqueness.’ This was for Hopkins ‘a fundamental beauty which is the active principle of all true being, the source of all true knowledge and delight.’ Clive Bell called it ‘significant form’; Hopkins called it ‘inscape’– ‘the rich and revealing oneness of the natural object’ (pp. xx-xxiv). In this chapter, I call it quiddity.”

Click image to enlarge.

The “Boy’s Life” illustration is of an Arthur C. Clarke story, “Against the Fall of Night.” This, according to the review quoted below, was Clarke’s first story, begun in 1936 and first published in 1948. The title is from a poem by A. E. Housman, “Smooth Between Sea and Land.” See Log24 on the Feast of St. Mark, 2003.

From a book review by Christopher B. Jones:

“Against the Fall of Night describes well how it often takes youth to bring forth change. The older mind becomes locked in a routine, or blocks out things because it has been told that it shouldn’t think or talk about them. But the young mind is ever the explorer, seeking out knowledge without the taboos placed on it by a rigid society. Alvin is a breath of fresh air in the don’t-look-over-the-wall society of Diaspar.

Myths play a big role, and an interesting religious overtone pervades the story with a long since departed being whose origins are unknown and who played an important part in Earth’s past. Parallels to Jesus can easily be drawn, and the forecast shown for the longevity of religions in general seems to me to be rather accurate….

Finally, when Alvin uncovers part of the truth he has been looking for, he learns of the dangers and stagnation that can befall a xenophobic society. There are still a few such societies in the world today, and this characteristic almost always comes with negative effects– even if it has been cultivated with the intention to protect.”

An example of such a xenophobic society is furnished by the Hadassah ad currently running in the New York Times obituaries section: “Who will say Kaddish in Israel?”

Another example:

Tom Stoppard, in the London Times of Sunday, March 16, 2008, on the social unrest of forty years ago in 1968–

“Altering the psyche was supposed to change the social structure but, as a Marxist, Max knows it really works the other way: changing the social structure is the only way to change the psyche. The idea that ‘make love, not war’ is a more practical slogan than ‘workers of the world unite’ is as airy-fairy as the I Ching.”

Airy-fairy, Jewey-phooey.

Clarke’s 1948 story was the basis of his 1956 novel, The City and the Stars. In memory of the star Richard Widmark, here are two illustrations from St. Mark’s Day, 2003:

Housman asks the reader
to tell him of runes to grave
or bastions to design
“against the fall of night.”

Here, as examples, are
one rune and one bastion.

Neither part of this memorial suits the xenophobic outlook of Israel. Both parts, together, along with his classic film “The Long Ships,” seem somehow suited to the non-xenophobic outlook of Richard Widmark. As for the I Ching… perhaps Widmark has further voyages to make.

Also in today’s online Times:

“Mstislav Rostropovich, a cellist and conductor who was renowned not only as one of the great instrumentalists of the 20th century, but also as an outspoken champion of artistic freedom in Russia during the final decades of the Cold War, died in Moscow today. He was 80 and lived in Paris, with homes in Moscow, St. Petersburg, London and Lausanne, Switzerland….

Mr. Rostropovich… was widely known by his diminutive, Slava (which means glory in Russian)….”

Related material:

I. “Established on 8 November 1943, the Order of Glory (Orden Slavy – Орден Славы) was an Order (decoration) of the Soviet Union…. The Order of Glory… was modelled closely upon the Tsarist Cross of St. George….” —Wikipedia

II. Also on the 8th of November, in 2006 and 2002: Grave Matters and Religious Symbolism at Princeton.

III. “Mr. Rostropovich will be buried in Moscow at the Novodevichy Cemetery, where on Wednesday his friend, Boris Yeltsin, post-Soviet Russia’s first president, was laid to rest.” —New York Times

IV. “A graveyard smash.” –Bobby (Boris) Pickett, who died Wednesday.

Wittgenstein’s
Passion
 
From today’s
London Daily Mail:

Related
Philosophy:

Related
Art in Our Schools:

April 8 two years ago:

Art is magic delivered from
the lie of being truth.
 — Theodor Adorno, Minima moralia,
London, New Left Books, 1974, p. 222
(First published in German in 1951.)

The director, Carol Reed, makes…
 impeccable use of the beauty of black….
— V. B. Daniel on The Third Man

Catholic Schools Sermon

For those who might be tempted today, following yesterday’s conclusion of Catholic Schools Week, to sing (for whatever reason) “Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead”–

Here, from his classic Witchcraft (first published by Faber and Faber, London, 1941, reprinted by Apocryphile Press, Berkeley, CA, Oct. 1, 2005) is Charles Williams on the strong resemblance between witchcraft and the rituals of the Church:

From Witchcraft, 2005 Apocryphile edition, pages 77-80–

[77] … The predisposition towards the idea of magic might be said to begin with a moment which seems to be of fairly common experience– the moment when it seems that anything might turn into anything else.  We have grown used– and properly used– to regarding this sensation invalid because, on the whole, things do not turn into other things except by processes which we realize, or else at least so frequently that we appreciate the probability.  But the occasional sensation remains.  A room, a street, a field becomes unsure.  The edge of a possibility of utter alteration intrudes.  A door, untouched, might close; a picture might walk; a tree might speak; an animal might not be an animal; a man might not be a man.  One may be with a friend, and a terror will take one even while his admirable voice is speaking; one will be with a lover and the hand will become a different and terrifying thing, moving in one’s own like a malicious intruder, too real for anything but fear.  All this may be due to racial memories or to any other cause; the point is that it exists.  It exists and can be communicated; it can even be shared.  There is, in our human centre, a heart-gripping fear of irrational change, of perilous and malevolent change.
    Secondly, there is the human body, and the movements of the human body.  Even now, when, as a general rule, the human body is not supposed to mean [78] anything, there are moments when it seems, in spite of ourselves, packed with significance.  This sensation is almost exactly the opposite of the last.  There, one was aware that any phenomenon might alter into another and truer self.  Here, one is aware that a phenomenon, being wholly itself, is laden with universal meaning.  A hand lighting a cigarette is the explanation of everything; a foot stepping from a train is the rock of all existence.  If the first group of sensations are due to racial fear, I do not know to what the second group are due– unless indeed to the Mercy of God, who has not left us without a cloud of witnesses.  But intellectually they are both as valid or invalid as each other; any distinction must be a matter of choice.  And they justify each other, at least to this extent, that (although the first suggests irrationality and the second rationality) they both at first overthrow a simple trust that phenomena are what phenomena seem.
    But if the human body is capable of seeming so, so are the controlled movements of the human body– ritual movements, or rather movements that seem like ritual.  A finger pointing is quite capable of seeming not only a significant finger, but a ritual finger; an evocative finger; not only a finger of meaning, but a finger of magic.  Two light dancing steps by a girl may (if one is in that state) appear to be what all the Schoolmen were trying to express; they are (only one cannot quite catch it) an intellectual statement of beatitude.  But two quiet steps by an old man may seem like the very speech of hell.  Or the other way round.  Youth and age have nothing to do with it, nor did the ages that defined and [79] denounced witchcraft think so.  The youngest witch, it is said, that was ever burned was a girl of eleven years old.
    Ordered movement, ritual, is natural to men.  But some ages are better at it, are more used to it, and more sensitive to it, than others.  The Middle Ages liked great spectacle, and therefore (if for no other reasons– but there were many) they liked ritual.  They were nourished by ritual– the Eucharist exhibited it.  They made love by ritual– the convention of courtly love preserved it.  Certainly also they did all these things without ritual– but ritual (outside the inner experience) was the norm.  And ritual maintains and increases that natural sense of the significance of movement.  And, of course, of formulae, of words.
    The value of formulae was asserted to be very high.  The whole religious life ‘as generally necessary to salvation’ depended on formulae.  The High God had submitted himself to formulae.  He sent his graces.  He came Himself, according to ritual movements and ritual formulae.  Words controlled the God.  All generations who have believed in God have believed that He will come on interior prayer; not all that He will come, if not visibly yet in visible sacraments, on exterior incantation.  But so it was.  Water and a Triune formula concentrated grace; so did oil and other formulae; so– supremely– did bread and wine and yet other formulae.   Invocations of saints were assumed, if less explicitly guaranteed, to be effective.  The corollaries of the Incarnation had spread, in word and gesture, very far.
    The sense of alteration, the sense of meaning, the [80] evocation of power, the expectation of the God, lay all about the world.  The whole movement of the Church had, in its rituals, a remarkable similarity to the other rites it denounced.  But the other rites had been there first, both in the Empire and outside the Empire.  In many cases the Church turned them to its own purposes.  But also in many cases it entirely failed to turn them to its own purposes.  In many cases it adopted statues and shrines.  But in others it was adopted by, at least, the less serious spells and incantations.  Wells and trees were dedicated to saints.  But the offerings at many wells and trees were to something other than the saint; had it not been so they would not have been, as we find they often were, forbidden.  Within this double and intertwined life existed those other capacities, of which we know more now, but of which we still know little– clairvoyance, clairaudience, foresight, telepathy.

Red and Blue

On the June 28 mock naval battle between “red” and “blue” fleets to mark the bicentenary year of the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar:

Battle of Trafalgar (Detail)

A spokeswoman for the Royal Navy said —

“Nelson is featured, but we are not billing it as Britain versus France… This will not be a French-bashing opportunity.”

It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times.

One Bound “With one bound, the Prime Minister is free.” — Times of London,     June 7, 2005

Inaugural

Crimson
on St. Cecilia’s Day

“… from the Age that is past,
To the Age that is waiting before.”
— Samuel Gilman, “Fair Harvard“

Published by The Harvard Crimson
on Monday, November 22, 2004:

From an entry of October 29, 2004:

From The New York Times today:

“It’s official, I guess. Forty years after he recorded it, Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ was just named the greatest rock ‘n’ roll song of all time….”

Song

"Each epoch has its singer."
— Jack London, Oakland, California, 1901

"Anything but the void. And so we keep hoping to luck into a winning combination, to tap into a subtle harmony, trying like lock pickers to negotiate a compromise with the 'mystery tramp,' as Bob Dylan put it…."
— Dennis Overbye, Quantum Baseball,
    New York Times, Oct.  26, 2004

"You said you'd never compromise
With the mystery tramp,
    but now you realize
He's not selling any alibis
As you stare into
    the vacuum of his eyes
And ask him do you want to
    make a deal?"
— Bob Dylan, Like a Rolling Stone

"About a century ago scientists began to realize that beneath the too, too solid veneer of what had passed for reality for 2,000 years there was some pretty funny and fuzzy business going on….

Most of us, I suspect, would rather believe that the devil is running things than that no one is in charge, that our lives, our loves, World Series victories, hang on the whims of fate and chains of coincidences, on God throwing dice, as Einstein once referred to quantum randomness….

[But] we are people, with desires and memories and a sense of humor – not Ping Pong balls."
— Dennis Overbye, Quantum Baseball,
    New York Times, Oct.  26, 2004

"You can be replaced by some Ping Pong balls and a dictionary."
— Anonymous source, March 29, 2001

Introduction to Aesthetics

“Chess problems are the
hymn-tunes of mathematics.”
— G. H. Hardy,
A Mathematician’s Apology

“We do not want many ‘variations’ in the proof of a mathematical theorem: ‘enumeration of cases,’ indeed, is one of the duller forms of mathematical argument.  A mathematical proof should resemble a simple and clear-cut constellation, not a scattered cluster in the Milky Way.

A chess problem also has unexpectedness, and a certain economy; it is essential that the moves should be surprising, and that every piece on the board should play its part.  But the aesthetic effect is cumulative.  It is essential also (unless the problem is too simple to be really amusing) that the key-move should be followed by a good many variations, each requiring its own individual answer.  ‘If P-B5 then Kt-R6; if …. then …. ; if …. then ….’ — the effect would be spoilt if there were not a good many different replies.  All this is quite genuine mathematics, and has its merits; but it just that ‘proof by enumeration of cases’ (and of cases which do not, at bottom, differ at all profoundly*) which a real mathematician tends to despise.

* I believe that is now regarded as a merit in a problem that there should be many variations of the same type.”

(Cambridge at the University Press.  First edition, 1940.)

Brian Harley in
Mate in Two Moves:

“It is quite true that variation play is, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the soul of a problem, or (to put it more materially) the main course of the solver’s banquet, but the Key is the cocktail that begins the proceedings, and if it fails in piquancy the following dinner is not so satisfactory as it should be.”

(London, Bell & Sons.  First edition, 1931.)

Aluminum, Your Shiny Friend

(Continued)

Citicorp Center Vital Statistics: Location: New York, NY Completion Date: 1977 Cost: $175 million Height: 915 feet Stories: 59 Materials: Steel Facing Materials: Aluminum, reflective glass

Click photo for larger image.

“From the very beginning, the Citicorp Center (today, the Citigroup Center) in New York City was an engineering challenge. When planning for the skyscraper began in the early 1970s, the northwest corner of the proposed building site was occupied by

The church allowed Citicorp to build the skyscraper under one condition: a new church would have to be built on the same corner, with no connection to the Citicorp building and no columns passing through it.

How did the engineers do it? They set the 59-story tower on four massive columns, positioned at the center of each side, rather than at the corners. This design allowed the northwest corner of the building to cantilever 72 feet over the new church.”

Source: PBS, Building BIG.

Citigroup (NYSE:C) is said to be the largest financial services conglomerate in the world. 

For more on the close relationship between churches and banks, see the works of T. S. Eliot and a description of the City of London,

The Square Mile.

For more on Eliot, architecture,  and another Harvard man, use links in the previous entry.

Philosophy

For Samira Bellil,

who died in Paris on
Friday, Sept. 3, 2004… 

From the link at
Symmetry and Change
in the Dreamtime,
Part 8, Friday,
Sept. 3, 2004,
Noon…

Under heaven 
thunder rolls…

Log24 on Sept. 10, 2002—

Three songs from Sept. 10
in various preceding years–

“Good morning little schoolgirl
Good morning little schoolgirl
Can I come home with
Can I come home with you“

— Rod Stewart, Sept. 10, 1964

“Tell your mamma, girl, I can’t stay long
We got things we gotta catch up on
Mmmm, you know
You know what I’m sayin’ “

— Neil Diamond, Sept. 10, 1966

“A time of war, a time of peace
A time of love, a time of hate
A time you may embrace
A time to refrain from embracing“

— The Byrds, Sept. 10, 1965

Further verses from the Byrds
seem appropriate on this, the day
of Samira Bellil’s funeral:

To everything, turn, turn, turn,
there is a season, turn, turn, turn…

Tournante

“It’s not even called rape. They call it
a tournante, or pass-round.
The banality is deliberate:
a joint, a girl – same difference.”

… and a time to every purpose
under heaven.

“… The kind of school where teacher
Fabrice Genestal kept hearing
the word “tournante” and didn’t click
what it meant, till he and Sillam
sat the kids down in after-school
workshops, and got talking.”

— Metropolitan Police Service, London

Iconography

For student
Anthony Fonseca,
Harvard ’04-’05:

Michael (Studio della Robbia, ca. 1475)

For teacher
Margaret Casey:

The Green and
Burning Tree, by
Chesca Potter

For the Voice of Gollum,
Peter Woodthorpe:

For further details, click on
any of the pictures above.

… y eres tú y soy yo 
y es un caminarte en círculo 
dar a tus hechos dimensión de arco 
y a solas con tu impulso decirte la palabra.

— Homero Aridjis

For Lucero:

dimensión de arco

(This last picture, taken by
Andrew from London,
was added at
11:30 AM ET Aug. 31, 2004.
For the excellent story that
accompanies the picture, see
“Early Evening, the Light
Beginning to Fade.”)

We Call This Friday Good

— T. S. Eliot

Triple Crown

“The tug of an art that unapologetically sees itself as on a par with science and religion is not to be underestimated…. Philosophical ambition and formal modesty still constitute Minimalism’s bottom line.”

— Michael Kimmelman, April 2, 2004 

________________

From Hans Reichenbach‘s

The Rise of Scientific Philosophy:

Ch. 18 – The Old and the New Philosophy

“The speculative philosophers allotted to art a dignified position by putting art on a par with science and morality: truth, beauty and the good were for them the triple crown of human searching and longing.”

Ch. 15 – Interlude: Hamlet’s Soliloquy

“I have good evidence.  The ghost was very conclusive in his arguments.  But he is only a ghost.  Does he exist?  I could not very well ask him.  Maybe I dreamed him.  But there is other evidence….

It is really a good idea: that show I shall put on.  It will be a crucial experiment.  If they murdered him they will be unable to hide their emotions.  That is good psychology.  If the test is positive I shall know the whole story for certain.  See what I mean?  There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, my dear logician.
    I shall know it for certain?  I see your ironical smile.  There is no certainty….
   There I am, the eternal Hamlet.  What does it help me to ask the logician….?  His advice confirms my doubt rather than giving me the courage I need for my action.  One has to have more courage than Hamlet to be always guided by logic.”

________________

On this Holy Thursday, the day of Christ’s Last Supper, let us reflect on Quine’s very pertinent question in Quiddities (under “Communication”):

“What transubstantiation?”

“It is easiest to tell what transubstantiation is by saying this: little children should be taught about it as early as possible. Not of course using the word…because it is not a little child’s word. But the thing can be taught… by whispering…”Look! Look what the priest is doing…He’s saying Jesus’ words that change the bread into Jesus’ body. Now he’s lifting it up. Look!”

From “On Transubstantiation” by Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, Collected Philosophical Papers, V.III: Ethics, Religion, and Politics, 1981, Univ. of Minnesota Press, as quoted in the weblog of William Luse, Sept, 28, 2003

A perhaps more credible instance of transubstantiation may be found in this account of Anscombe on the Feast of Corpus Christi:

“In her first year at Oxford, she converted to Catholicism. In 1938, after mass at Blackfriars on the Feast of Corpus Christi, she met Peter Geach, a young man three years her senior who was also a recent convert to Catholicism. Like her, Geach was destined to achieve eminence in philosophy, but philosophy played no role in bringing about the romance that blossomed. Smitten by Miss Anscombe’s beauty and voice, Geach immediately inquired of mutual friends whether she was ‘reliably Catholic.’ Upon learning that she was, he pursued her and, swiftly, their hearts were entangled.”

— John M. Dolan, Living the Truth

Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and
    lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through
    the features of men’s faces.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

Concluding reflections for Holy Thursday:

Truth, Beauty, and The Good

Art is magic delivered from
the lie of being truth.
 — Theodor Adorno, Minima moralia,
London, New Left Books, 1974, p. 222
(First published in German in 1951.)

The director, Carol Reed, makes…
 impeccable use of the beauty of black….
— V. B. Daniel on The Third Man 

I see your ironical smile.
— Hans Reichenbach (see above)

Adorno, The Third Man, and Reichenbach
are illustrated below (l. to r.) above the names of cities with which they are associated. 

In keeping with our transubstantiation theme, these three cities may be regarded as illustrating the remarks of Jimmy Buffett

on culinary theology.

Hard Core, Part II:
Star of Africa

In memory of St. Katharine Hepburn,
who died on St. Peter’s Day, 2003:
“Although the greater saints
are more acceptable to God
than the lesser,
it is sometimes profitable
to pray to the lesser.”
— St. Thomas Aquinas  

From The Times, UK, Feb. 18, 2004:

Straw denies
a big-three takeover
at EU summit 

Britain’s Foreign Secretary “said that there were no plans to set up a small body within the EU to take control of its affairs.

However, he told a news conference at the Foreign Office that it made sense for the three biggest economies to work ‘collaboratively’ on matters of common interest….

At tonight’s summit Mr Blair, Gerhard Schröder, the German Chancellor, and President Chirac of France will discuss initiatives to co-ordinate and strengthen the EU’s industrial policy….

German commentators regard the summit as a sea-change in British policy towards Europe — a signal that London’s main aim is no longer to split Paris and Berlin.”

Hermes and Folded Time

Yesterday’s entry on painter Ward Jackson and the philosopher Gadamer involved what is called hermeneutics, or the art of interpretation.  Gadamer was a leader in this field.  The following passage perhaps belabors the obvious, but it puts hermeneutics clearly in context.

From Daniel Chandler’s Semiotics for Beginners:

“The ‘tightness’ of semiotic codes themselves varies from the rule-bound closure of logical codes (such as computer codes) to the interpretative looseness of poetic codes. Pierre Guiraud notes that ‘signification is more or less codified,‘ and that some systems are so ‘open’ that they ‘scarcely merit the designation ‘code’ but are merely systems of “hermeneutic” interpretation’ (*Guiraud 1975, 24). Guiraud makes the distinction that a code is ‘a system of explicit social conventions’ whilst ‘a hermeneutics’ is ‘a system of implicit, latent and purely contingent signs,’ adding that ‘it is not that the latter are neither conventional nor social, but they are so in a looser, more obscure and often unconscious way’ (*ibid., 41). His claim that (formal) codes are ‘explicit’ seems untenable since few codes would be likely to be widely regarded as wholly explicit. He refers to two ‘levels of signification,’ but it may be more productive to refer to a descriptive spectrum based on relative explicitness, with technical codes veering towards one pole and interpretative practices veering towards the other. At one end of the spectrum are what Guiraud refers to as ‘explicit, socialized codes in which the meaning is a datum of the message as a result of a formal convention between participants’ (*ibid., 43-4). In such cases, he argues, ‘the code of a message is explicitly given by the sender’ (*ibid., 65). At the other end of the spectrum are ‘the individual and more or less implicit hermeneutics in which meaning is the result of an interpretation on the part of the receiver’ (*ibid., 43-4). Guiraud refers to interpretative practices as more ‘poetic,’ being ‘engendered by the receiver using a system or systems of implicit interpretation which, by virtue of usage, are more or less socialized and conventionalized’ (*ibid., 41). Later he adds that ‘a hermeneutics is a grid supplied by the receiver; a philosophical, aesthetic, or cultural grid which he applies to the text’ (*ibid., 65).”

* Pierre Guiraud, Semiology (trans. George Gross), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975

Related material:

From Michalinos Zembylas on Michel Serres:

“Serres’ use of Hermes is reminiscent of hermeneutics. The word derives from Hermes and implies that the idea of hermeneutics as a theory of interpretation (and consequently of communication) is necessary when there is a possibility for misunderstanding. Hermes translated the ‘word of Gods’; an interpreter translates the written text, and a teacher ‘translates’ the literature….  Understanding then is aided by the mediation of a hermeneut…. According to Gadamer (1975), the pleasure such understanding elicits is the joy of knowledge (which does not operate as an enchantment but as a kind of transformation). It is worth exploring this idea a bit more since there are interesting connections with Serres’ work.”

There is also an interesting connection with Guiraud’s work.  As quoted above, Guiraud wrote that

“…a hermeneutics is a grid supplied by the receiver; a philosophical, aesthetic, or cultural grid which he applies to the text.”

Serres describes Hermes as passing through “folded time.”  Precisely how time can be folded into a grid is the subject of my note The Grid of Time, which gives the context for the Serres phrase “folded time.”

For more on hermeneutics and Gadamer’s “joy of knowledge,” see Ian Lee in The Third Word War on “understanding the J.O.K.E.” (the Joy of Knowledge Encyclopedia).

War of Ideas

US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently declared a “war of ideas.”

Here is some background– notes made to help clarify my own thoughts.

Today, the 22nd “Socialist International Conference,” held every 4 years, concludes.  This is a non-communist gathering of various countries’ Social Democratic parties.  It has been called a gathering of “dinosaurs” (rather like the Democratic Party in the United States, or Tony Blair).

More relevant is the following history:

The First International
1864-1876
Founded in London, led by Karl Marx.

The Second International
1889-1914
Founded at a Paris congress, collapsed with the outbreak of World War I.

The Third International
1919-1939
Founded by the Russian revolution, also known as the Comintern.  Said to have ended with the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact, officially dissolved in 1943.  Succeeded by a Stalinist, hence non-international, organization.

The Fourth International
Founded by Trotsky in 1938.  Ended in various splinter groups after World War II.

The Fifth International
In process of formation.
See Movement for a Socialist Future and
The Fifth International?.

Intelligence Test

Today’s British Intelligence Award
goes to Reuters news agency:

Today’s British Stupidity Award goes,
of course, to Jonathan Powell.

Intelligence Test

On July 17, my entry “British Intelligence” linked to a Guardian story about a bumbling amateur spy organization set up by the Bush administration.  The headline of that entry, together with Tony Blair’s remark quoted there, implied that The Guardian was a much better example of real British intelligence than Blair’s minions.

On July 21, my entry “Meet D. B. Norton” attacked Blair as a puppet of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch.

Now The Guardian has come through with a story confirming the picture of puppetmaster Murdoch.  See

For background on Rupert Murdoch, see

Murdoch’s Mean Machine
How Rupert uses his vast media power
to help himself and hammer his foes

in the Columbia Journalism Review

Edward Arnold portrays Rupert Murdoch
as he hears of
Wednesday’s 400-21 House vote
against media tycoons.

For more details, see

Congress Vote May Stymie Murdoch and

Scramble to Overturn House Media Bill.

Before and After

From Understanding the (Net) Wake:

G. H. Hardy in A Mathematician’s Apology:

“We do not want many ‘variations’ in the proof of a mathematical theorem: ‘enumeration of cases,’ indeed, is one of the duller forms of mathematical argument.  A mathematical proof should resemble a simple and clear-cut constellation, not a scattered cluster in the Milky Way.

A chess problem also has unexpectedness, and a certain economy; it is essential that the moves should be surprising, and that every piece on the board should play its part.  But the aesthetic effect is cumulative.  It is essential also (unless the problem is too simple to be really amusing) that the key-move should be followed by a good many variations, each requiring its own individual answer.  ‘If P-B5 then Kt-R6; if …. then …. ; if …. then ….’ — the effect would be spoilt if there were not a good many different replies.  All this is quite genuine mathematics, and has its merits; but it just that ‘proof by enumeration of cases’ (and of cases which do not, at bottom, differ at all profoundly*) which a real mathematician tends to despise.

* I believe that is now regarded as a merit in a problem that there should be many variations of the same type.”

(Cambridge at the University Press.  First edition, 1940.)

Brian Harley in Mate in Two Moves:

“It is quite true that variation play is, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the soul of a problem, or (to put it more materially) the main course of the solver’s banquet, but the Key is the cocktail that begins the proceedings, and if it fails in piquancy the following dinner is not so satisfactory as it should be.”

(London, Bell & Sons.  First edition, 1931.)

Mental Health Month, Day 23:

The Prime Cut Gospel

On Christmas Day, 1949,
Mary Elizabeth Spacek was born in Texas.

Lee Marvin, Sissy Spacek in “Prime Cut”

Exercises for Mental Health Month:

Read this discussion of the phrase, suggested by Spacek’s date of birth, “God’s gift to men.”

Read this discussion of the phrase “the same yesterday, today, and forever,” suggested by the previous reading.

Read the more interesting of these discussions of the phrase “the eternal in the temporal.”

Read this discussion of eternal, or “necessary,” truths versus other sorts of alleged “truths.”

Read this discussion of unimportant mathematical properties of the prime number 23.

Read these discussions of important properties of 23:

• R. D. Carmichael’s 1937 discussion of the linear fractional group modulo 23 in 

Introduction to the Theory of Groups of Finite Order, Ginn, Boston, 1937 (reprinted by Dover in 1956), final chapter, “Tactical Configurations,” and

• Conway’s 1969 discussion of the same group in    

J. H. Conway, “Three Lectures on Exceptional Groups,” pp. 215-247 in Finite Simple Groups (Oxford, 1969), edited by M. B. Powell and G. Higman, Academic Press, London, 1971….. Reprinted as Ch. 10 in Sphere Packings, Lattices, and Groups 

Read this discussion of what might be called “contingent,” or “literary,” properties of the number 23. 

Read also the more interesting of  these discussions of the phrase “the 23 enigma.”

Having thus acquired some familiarity with both contingent and necessary properties of 23…

Read this discussion of Aquinas’s third proof of the existence of God.

Note that the classic Spacek film “Prime Cut” was released in 1972, the year that Spacek turned 23:

Messe

Yesterday's entry, "Requiem for a Queen," suggested a certain resemblance between the Jedburgh death mask of Mary Queen of Scots and the face of actress Vivien Leigh.  The following links are related to this resemblance.

1. The first great stage success of Miss Leigh was in a play called "The Mask of Virtue," which opened on May 15, 1935.
2. Leigh was educated for eight years at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Roehampton.
3. A requiem mass for Miss Leigh was held at the Roman Catholic Church of St. Mary's, Cadogan Street, London, on 12th July 1967, at 10 o'clock. On the coffin were her favorite white roses, picked from her garden at Tickerage Mill in Sussex.

Yesterday's site music, "The Water is Wide," was suggested by T. S. Eliot's language in Four Quartets.  Whether Eliot's use of the motto of the Catholic queen Mary Stuart, "In my end is my beginning," was meant as a tribute to that monarch is debatable.  As one web forum entry points out, the motto "Ma fin est ma [sic] commencement" is the title of a rondeau by Guillaume de Machaut written some two centuries earlier, and Eliot may have taken his motto from Machaut rather than Mary.  Some evidence for this is provided by the lyrics for Machaut's rondeau, which include Eliot's phrase "in my beginning is my end" as well as the reversed version.  At any rate, Machaut and Eliot share an interest in four-part compositions — as do I and as did, apparently, the compilers of the Gospels.

A search on the phrase Machaut Eliot "four part"  yields an essay that to me seems like rainbow's-end gold:

ON TIME, ORIGINALITY, AND THE ART OF
MUSICAL COMPOSITION

by Joseph Dillon Ford

In honor of Ford, Eliot, Machaut, Leigh, and Stuart, today's site music is the "Kyrie" from Machaut's "Messe de Notre Dame."
 

Song of Bernadette

JEAN KERR STARS IN…

               BROADWAY BABY!

In memory of Broadway’s Jean Kerr —

Recall the ending of the classic film “Michael.”

See also this review of  a Bernadette Peters concert:

“Then comes the moment that you have been secretly waiting for all of your life and whisks you away to the other universe, where everyone is singing happy show-tunes and appreciating the good life. Has some religious leader taken over my life or what? No, nothing like that… I just attended the first ever London concert performance of Bernadette Peters at the Royal Festival Hall….

… Broadway Baby simply brought the house down for the first time.” 

I’m just a Broad-way Ba-by,
     walk-ing off my ti-red feet,
Pound-ing For-ty Sec-ond Street, 
     to be in a show.

Broad-way Ba-by,
Learn-ing how to sing and dance,
Wait-ing for that one big chance 
     to be in a show.

Gee, I’d like to be
On some mar-quee,
All twink-ling lights,
A spark to pierce the dark
    from Bat-t’ry Park 
    to Wash – ing-ton Heights.
Some day may-be,
All my dreams will be re-paid.

ART WARS:

The Reader
Over Your Shoulder

See also last night’s entry on “Red Dragon” and
this news story on a Chinese cannibal-artist
from today’s Toronto Globe and Mail.

Homer

“No matter how it’s done, you won’t like it.”
— Robert Redford to Robert M. Pirsig in Lila

“The evening before Harriet injures Roy,
she asks him, in a restaurant car,
whether he has read Homer.”
— Oxford website on the film of The Natural

“Brush Up Your Shakespeare”
— Cole Porter lyric for a show that opened
on December 30, 1948

Judy Davis as Harriet Bird

                                        

Thine eyes I love…
Shakespeare, Sonnet 132

“Roy’s Guenevere-like lover is named Memo Paris,
presumably the face that launched a thousand strikes.”
— Oxford website on the film of The Natural 

Nicole Kidman
as Memo Paris

“Iris is someone to watch over Roy.”
— Oxford website on the film of The Natural 

Kate Winslet as young Iris Murdoch

From the second-draft screenplay
for The Sting,
with Robert Redford as Hooker:

HOOKER
(shuffling a little)
I, ah…thought you might wanna come out for a while.  Maybe have a drink or somethin’.

LORETTA
You move right along, don’t ya.

HOOKER
(with more innocence than confidence)
I don’t mean nothin’ by it.  I just don’t know many regular girls, that’s all.

LORETTA
And you expect me to come over, just like that.

HOOKER
If I expected somethin’, I wouldn’t be still standin’ out here in the hall.

Loretta looks at him carefully.  She knows it’s not a line.

LORETTA
(with less resistance now)
I don’t even know you.

HOOKER
(slowly)
You know me.  I’m just like you…
It’s two in the morning and I don’t know nobody.

The two just stand there in silence a second.  There’s nothing more to say.  She stands back and lets him in.

Iris Murdoch on Plato’s Form of the Good,
by Joseph Malikail:

“For Murdoch as for Plato, the Good belongs to Plato’s Realm of Being not the Realm of Becoming…. However, Murdoch does not read Plato as declaring his faith in a divine being when he says that the Good is

the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and the lord of light in the visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which [one who] would act rationally either in public or private life must have his eyes fixed (Republic…).

Though she acknowledges the influence of Simone Weil in her reading of Plato, her understanding of Plato on Good and God is not Weil’s (1952, ch.7)*. For Murdoch,

Plato never identified his Form of the Good with God (the use of theos in the Republic… is a façon de parler), and this separation is for him an essential one. Religion is above the level of the ‘gods.’ There are no gods and no God either. Neo-Platonic thinkers made the identification (of God with good) possible; and the Judaeo-Christian tradition has made it easy and natural for us to gather together the aesthetic and consoling impression of Good as a person (1992, 38)**.

As she understands Plato:

The Form of the Good as creative power is not a Book of Genesis creator ex nihilo … Plato does not set up the Form of the Good as God, this would be absolutely un-Platonic, nor does he anywhere give the sign of missing or needing a real God to assist his explanations. On the contrary, Good is above the level of the gods or God (ibid., 475)**.

Mary Warnock, her friend and fellow-philosopher, sums up Murdoch’s metaphysical view of the Vision of the Good:

She [Murdoch] holds that goodness has a real though abstract existence in the world. The actual existence of goodness is, in her view, the way it is now possible to understand the idea of God.

Or as Murdoch herself puts it, ‘Good represents the reality of which God is the dream.’ (1992, 496)**”

*Weil, Simone. 1952. Intimations of Christianity Among The Ancient Greeks. Ark Paperbacks, 1987/1952.

**Murdoch, Iris. 1992. Metaphysics As A Guide To Morals. London: Chatto and Windus. 

From the conclusion of Lila,
by Robert M. Pirsig:

“Good is a noun. That was it. That was what Phaedrus had been looking for. That was the homer over the fence that ended the ballgame.”

Great Simplicity

Today

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.

MAYA

Jack London died on this date.  On the other hand, Hoagy Carmichael, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Mariel Hemingway were born.

Readings for the Oct. 18
Feast of St. Luke

A fellow Xangan is undergoing a spiritual crisis. Well-meaning friends are urging upon her all sorts of advice. The following is my best effort at religious counsel, meant more for the friends than for the woman in crisis.

Part I… Wallace Stevens 

From Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable:

Ox Emblematic of St. Luke. It is one of the four figures which made up Ezekiel’s cherub (i. 10). The ox is the emblem of the priesthood….

   The dumb ox. St. Thomas Aquinas; so named by his fellow students at Cologne, on account of his dulness and taciturnity. (1224-1274.)
   Albertus said, “We call him the dumb ox, but he will give one day such a bellow as shall be heard from one end of the world to the other.” (Alban Butler.)

From Wallace Stevens, “The Latest Freed Man“:

It was how the sun came shining into his room:
To be without a description of to be,
For a moment on rising, at the edge of the bed, to be,
To have the ant of the self changed to an ox
With its organic boomings, to be changed
From a doctor into an ox, before standing up,
To know that the change and that the ox-like struggle
Come from the strength that is the strength of the sun,
Whether it comes directly or from the sun.
It was how he was free. It was how his freedom came.
It was being without description, being an ox.

Part II… The Rosy Cross

Readings:

• Brautigan, Richard, The Hawkline Monster, Simon and Schuster, 1974…
  Just for the pleasure of reading it… A compelling work of fiction on spiritual matters that includes a conversion to Rosicrucianism in its concluding chapter.
• Browning, Vivienne (Betty Coley, ed).
  My Browning Family Album. With a Foreword by Ben Travers, and a Poem by Jack Lindsay Springwood, London, 1979…
  The Rosicrucian tradition in Australia (highly relevant background reading for the 1994 film “Sirens”). Includes a mention of Aleister Crowley, dark mage, who also figures (prominently) in….
• Wilson, Robert Anton, Masks of the Illuminati, Pocket Books, April 1981…
  James Joyce and Albert Einstein join in a metaphysical investigation.

  “He recited from the anonymous Muses Threnody of 1648:

  For we be brethren of the Rosy Cross
  We have the Mason Word and second sight
  Things for to come we can see aright.”

Part III… Stevens Again

A major critical work on Wallace Stevens that is not unrelated to the above three works on the Rosicrucian tradition:

Leonora Woodman, Stanza My Stone: Wallace Stevens and the Hermetic Tradition, West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1983

From the Department of English, Purdue University:

Leonora Woodman came to Purdue in 1976. In 1979, she became Director of Composition, a position she held until 1986…. At the time of her death in 1991, she was in the midst of an important work on modernist poetry, Literary Modernism and the Fourth Dimension: The Visionary Poetics of D.H. Lawrence, H.D., and Hart Crane.

For more on Gnostic Christianity, see

• Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (Random House, 1979), and
• Harold Bloom, Omens of Millenium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (Riverhead Books, 1996).

Meditation for Friday the 13th

The 1946 British film below (released as “Stairway to Heaven” in the U.S.) is one of my favorites.  I saw it as a child. Since costar Kim Hunter died this week (on 9/11), and since today is Friday the 13th, the following material seems relevant.

The doctor in “A Matter of Life and Death” addresses a heavenly court on behalf of his patient, R.A.F pilot David Niven:

In the film, David Niven is saved by mistake from a fated death and his doctor must argue to a heavenly court that he be allowed to live.

In a similar situation, I would want Dr. Alan McGlashan, a real-life psychiatrist, on my side.  For an excerpt from one of my favorite books, McGlashan’s The Savage and Beautiful Country,

click here.

As Walker Percy has observed (see my Sept. 7 note, “The Boys from Uruguay”), a characteristic activity of human beings is what Percy called “symbol-mongering.”  In honor of today’s anniversary of the births of two R.A.F. fighter pilots,

Sir Peter Guy Wykeham-Barnes (b. 1915) and author

Roald Dahl (b. 1916),

here is one of the better symbols of the past century:

The circle is of course a universal symbol, and can be made to mean just about whatever one wants it to mean.  In keeping with Clint Eastwood’s advice, in the soundtrack album for “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” to “accentuate the positive,” here are some positive observations on a circle from the poet (and perhaps saint) Dante, who died on the night of September 13-14:

In the sun, Dante and Beatrice find themselves surrounded by a circle of souls famous for their wisdom on earth. They appear as splendid lights and precious jewels who dance and sing as they lovingly welcome two more into their company. Their love for God is kindled even more and grows as they find more individuals to love. Among the blessed souls are St. Thomas Aquinas and one of his intellectual “enemies”, Siger of Brabant, a brilliant philosopher at the University of Paris, some of whose teachings were condemned as heretical. Conflicts and divisions on earth are now forgotten and absorbed into a communal love song and dance “whose sweetness and harmony are unknown on earth and whose joy becomes one with eternity.”

Dante compares their dance and song to God’s bride on earth, the Church, when she answers the morning bells to rise from bed and “woo with matins song her Bridegroom’s love.” Some critics consider this passage the most “spiritually erotic” of all the one hundred cantos of the Comedy. It is the ending of Canto 10, verses 139-148.

— Fr. James J. Collins, “The Spiritual Journey with Dante V,” Priestly People October 1997

The above material on Dante is from the Servants of the Paraclete website.

For more on the Paraclete, see

The Left Hand of God.

See also the illustration in the note below.