(A sequel to yesterday's reappearing number)
25 —
See "Quine, Newton, logic" in this journal.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Another Reappearing Number
Comments Off on Another Reappearing Number
Monday, January 24, 2011
A Reappearing Number, continued
"In the work of Ramanujan, the number 24 appears repeatedly.
This is an example of what mathematicians call magic numbers,
which continually appear, where we least expect them,
for reasons that no one understands."
— Michio Kaku, Hyperspace, Oxford U. Press, 1994, p. 173
See also "A Reappearing Number," this journal, July 4, 2010.
Comments Off on A Reappearing Number, continued
Saturday, January 8, 2011
True Grid (continued)
"Rosetta Stone" as a Metaphor
in Mathematical Narratives
For some backgound, see Mathematics and Narrative from 2005.
Yesterday's posts on mathematics and narrative discussed some properties
of the 3×3 grid (also known as the ninefold square ).
For some other properties, see (at the college-undergraduate, or MAA, level)–
Ezra Brown, 2001, "Magic Squares, Finite Planes, and Points of Inflection on Elliptic Curves."
His conclusion:
When you are done, you will be able to arrange the points into [a] 3×3 magic square,
which resembles the one in the book [5] I was reading on elliptic curves….
This result ties together threads from finite geometry, recreational mathematics,
combinatorics, calculus, algebra, and number theory. Quite a feat!
5. Viktor Prasolov and Yuri Solvyev, Elliptic Functions and Elliptic Integrals ,
American Mathematical Society, 1997.
Brown fails to give an important clue to the historical background of this topic —
the word Hessian . (See, however, this word in the book on elliptic functions that he cites.)
Investigation of this word yields a related essay at the graduate-student, or AMS, level–
Igor Dolgachev and Michela Artebani, 2009, "The Hesse Pencil of Plane Cubic Curves ."
From the Dolgachev-Artebani introduction–
In this paper we discuss some old and new results about the widely known Hesse
configuration of 9 points and 12 lines in the projective plane P2(k ): each point lies
on 4 lines and each line contains 3 points, giving an abstract configuration (123, 94).
PlanetMath.org on the Hesse configuration—
A picture of the Hesse configuration–
(See Visualizing GL(2,p), a note from 1985).
Related notes from this journal —
From last November —
|
From the December 2010 American Mathematical Society Notices—
Related material from this journal— Consolation Prize (August 19, 2010) |
From 2006 —
|
Sunday December 10, 2006
“Function defined form, expressed in a pure geometry
– J. G. Ballard on Modernism
“The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance –
— Daniel J. Boorstin, |
Also from 2006 —
|
Sunday November 26, 2006
Rosalind Krauss "If we open any tract– Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art or The Non-Objective World , for instance– we will find that Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter. They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit. From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal, and they are not interested in what happens below in the Concrete. Or, to take a more up-to-date example…."
"He was looking at the nine engravings and at the circle,
"And it's whispered that soon if we all call the tune
The nine engravings of The Club Dumas
An example of the universal*– or, according to Krauss,
"This is the garden of Apollo, the field of Reason…."
For more on the field of reason, see
A reasonable set of "strange correspondences" Unreason is, of course, more popular. * The ninefold square is perhaps a "concrete universal" in the sense of Hegel: "Two determinations found in all philosophy are the concretion of the Idea and the presence of the spirit in the same; my content must at the same time be something concrete, present. This concrete was termed Reason, and for it the more noble of those men contended with the greatest enthusiasm and warmth. Thought was raised like a standard among the nations, liberty of conviction and of conscience in me. They said to mankind, 'In this sign thou shalt conquer,' for they had before their eyes what had been done in the name of the cross alone, what had been made a matter of faith and law and religion– they saw how the sign of the cross had been degraded."
– Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy ,
"For every kind of vampire, |
And from last October —
|
Friday, October 8, 2010
Starting Out in the Evening This post was suggested by last evening's post on mathematics and narrative and by Michiko Kakutani on Vargas Llosa in this morning's New York Times .
"One must proceed cautiously, for this road— of truth and falsehood in the realm of fiction— is riddled with traps and any enticing oasis is usually a mirage."
– "Is Fiction the Art of Lying?"* by Mario Vargas Llosa,
* The Web version's title has a misprint— |
Comments Off on True Grid (continued)
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Savage Solstice
In memory of kaleidoscope enthusiast Cozy Baker, who died at 86, according to Saturday's Washington Post , on October 19th.
This journal on that date — Savage Logic and Savage Logic continued.
See this journal on All Saints' Day 2006 for some background to those posts—
“Savage logic works like a kaleidoscope whose chips can fall into a variety of patterns while remaining unchanged in quantity, form, or color. The number of patterns producible in this way may be large if the chips are numerous and varied enough, but it is not infinite. The patterns consist in the disposition of the chips vis-a-vis one another (that is, they are a function of the relationships among the chips rather than their individual properties considered separately). And their range of possible transformations is strictly determined by the construction of the kaleidoscope, the inner law which governs its operation. And so it is too with savage thought. Both anecdotal and geometric, it builds coherent structures out of ‘the odds and ends left over from psychological or historical process.’
These odds and ends, the chips of the kaleidoscope, are images drawn from myth, ritual, magic, and empirical lore. (How, precisely, they have come into being in the first place is one of the points on which Levi-Strauss is not too explicit, referring to them vaguely as the ‘residue of events… fossil remains of the history of an individual or a society.’) Such images are inevitably embodied in larger structures– in myths, ceremonies, folk taxonomies, and so on– for, as in a kaleidoscope, one always sees the chips distributed in some pattern, however ill-formed or irregular. But, as in a kaleidoscope, they are detachable from these structures and arrangeable into different ones of a similar sort. Quoting Franz Boas that ‘it would seem that mythological worlds have been built up, only to be shattered again, and that new worlds were built from the fragments,’ Levi-Strauss generalizes this permutational view of thinking to savage thought in general.”
– Clifford Geertz, “The Cerebral Savage: the Structural Anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss,” in Encounter, Vol. 28 No. 4 (April 1967), pp. 25-32.
Related material —
See also "Levi-Strauss" in this journal and "At Play in the Field."
Comments Off on Savage Solstice
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Curtain Call
Julie Taymor in an interview published Dec. 12 —
“I’ve got two Broadway shows, a feature film, and Mozart,’’ she said.
“It’s a very interesting place to be and to be able to move back and forth,
but at a certain point you have to be able to step outside and see,’’
and here she dropped her voice to a tranquil whisper, “it’s just theater.
It’s all theater. It’s all theater. The whole thing is theater.’’
Google News this afternoon (Blake Edwards obituary) —
Comments Off on Curtain Call
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Play and Interplay
Julie Taymor in an interview published Dec. 12 —
“I’ve got two Broadway shows, a feature film, and Mozart,’’ she said. “It’s a very interesting place to be and to be able to move back and forth, but at a certain point you have to be able to step outside and see,’’ and here she dropped her voice to a tranquil whisper, “it’s just theater. It’s all theater. It’s all theater. The whole thing is theater.’’
Non-theater —
"The interplay between Euclidean and Galois geometry" and
related remarks on interplay — Keats's Laws of Aesthetics.
Part theater, part non-theater —
Comments Off on Play and Interplay
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Hanukkah Continues —
Dan Brown Meets
The Exorcist
in…
The 973 Code
Baphomet with Ouroboros Pendant
$140 Code: 973
____________________________________
Meanwhile, our hero…
In this production, Jeff Goldblum is played by
David Ben-Zvi of the University of Texas at Austin
Geometry Research Group —
Comments Off on Hanukkah Continues —
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Monday, November 1, 2010
Seasons of…
A Year of Magical Thinking
In memory of Theodore Chaikin Sorensen, who died at noon in New York on Halloween —
Two posts from All Saints' Day, 2009 —
October Endgame and Indignation and Laughter in Toronto.
Related material: New York Lottery on All Hallows' Eve this year —
Midday 896, Evening 384.
"Man is a system that transforms itself." (Paul Valéry, Cahiers , Vol. 2, page 896)
"There is such a thing as a tesseract." (Madeleine L'Engle. See 384 on Halloween 2006.)
Comments Off on Seasons of…
Sunday, October 17, 2010
An Intricate Reflection
"Humanity's fascination with numbers is ancient and complex. Our present relationship with numbers reveals both a highly developed tool and a highly developed user, working together to measure, create, and predict both ourselves and the world around us. But like every symbiotic couple, the tool we would like to believe is separate from us (and thus objective) is actually an intricate reflection of our thoughts, interests, and capabilities."
— The Secret Lives of Numbers, by New Radio and Performing Arts
(recommended on the Frivolous Linkages page at Daniel Gilbert's Harvard website)
Other linkages:
New York Lottery on October 16: Midday 706, Evening 684.
Related material — 7/06, 2007, and post no. 684 in this journal.
The above "Secret Lives of Numbers" quotation was suggested by Gilbert's "Magic by Numbers" op-ed piece in today's New York Times—
Comments Off on An Intricate Reflection
Friday, October 15, 2010
Mathematics and Narrative, continued
The Story of N
Roberta Smith in the New York Times of July 7, 2006—
Art Review
Endgame Art? It's Borrow, Sample and Multiply in an Exhibition at Bard College
"… The show has an endgame, end-time mood, as if we are looking at the end of the end of the end of Pop, hyperrealism and appropriation art. The techniques of replication and copying have become so meticulous that they are beside the point. This is truly magic realism: the kind you can't see, that has to be explained. It is also a time when artists cultivate hybridism and multiplicity and disdain stylistic coherence, in keeping with the fashionable interest in collectivity, lack of ego, the fluidity of individual identity. But too often these avoidance tactics eliminate the thread of a personal sensibility or focus.
I would call all these strategies fear of form, which can be parsed as fear of materials, of working with the hands in an overt way and of originality. Most of all originality. Can we just say it? This far from Andy Warhol and Duchamp, the dismissal of originality is perhaps the oldest ploy in the postmodern playbook. To call yourself an artist at all is by definition to announce a faith, however unacknowledged, in some form of originality, first for yourself, second, perhaps, for the rest of us.
Fear of form above all means fear of compression— of an artistic focus that condenses experiences, ideas and feelings into something whole, committed and visually comprehensible. With a few exceptions, forms of collage and assemblage dominate this show: the putting together (or simply putting side by side) of existing images and objects prevails. The consistency of this technique in two and three dimensions should have been a red flag for the curators. Collage has driven much art since the late 1970's. Lately, and especially in this exhibition, it often seems to have become so distended and pulled apart that its components have become virtually autonomous and unrelated, which brings us back to square one. This is most obvious in the large installations of graphic works whose individual parts gain impact and meaning from juxtaposition but are in fact considered distinct artworks."
Margaret Atwood on art and the trickster—
"The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie— this line of thought leads Hyde* to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation and art all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning 'to join,' 'to fit,' and 'to make.' If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist. Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart."
* Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art, Farrar Straus & Giroux, January 1998
Smith mentions "an artistic focus that condenses experiences, ideas and feelings into something whole, committed and visually comprehensible."
Atwood mentions "a seamless whole."
For some related remarks, see "A Study in Art Education" and the central figure pictured above. (There "N" can stand for "number," "nine," or "narrative.")
Comments Off on Mathematics and Narrative, continued
Monday, October 11, 2010
Venue
… Don't you know that when you play
at this level there's no ordinary venue?
— Lyrics from Chess
Why don't you come with me little girl
On a magic carpet ride?
— Steppenwolf lyrics in Star Trek: First Contact
I like to fold my magic carpet, after use,
in such a way as to superimpose
one part of the pattern upon another.
— Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory
See also recent Log24 posts.
Comments Off on Venue
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Where Credit Is Due…
The Dick Medal
Review of the film "Knowing" from 2009—
Nicolas Cage's character, an astrophysicist, looks at a chart (written 50 years earlier by a child) with a colleague and points out a chronologically correct prediction of the date and number of dead in world wide tragedies over the last fifty years, and his colleague's response is "Systems that find meaning in numbers are a dime a dozen. Why? Because people see what they want to see." Well that would be a pretty neat trick. You could build a career on that in a Vegas showroom.
Film Title: Next
Based on the 1954 short story
"The Golden Man" by Philip K. Dick
Release Date:
April 27, 2007
About the Film:
Nicolas Cage stars as Cris Johnson, a Las Vegas magician with a secret gift that is both a blessing and a curse: He has the uncanny ability to tell you what happens next.
Related material from this journal on the release date of "Next"— April 27, 2007—
|
Production Credits: Thanks to the
– and to
|
"It’s almost enough to make you think that time present and time past might both be present in time future. As someone may have said."
— David Orr, "The Age of Citation"
Comments Off on Where Credit Is Due…
After the Fall
The Harvard Crimson —Magic of Numbers:
|
Saturday night's game… Harvard vs. Brown at Providence—
Related philosophy about divine providence—
See also, from 2002, a note on "light inclosed in the dark" versus the late Harvard philosopher Barbara Johnson.
For some context on Harvard and "the Magic of Numbers" see Summer Reading from 2007.
Comments Off on After the Fall
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Evocation*
"Epistulae ad familiares" (adfamiliares for short) at livejournal.com—
"Prefatory notes evoke a Republic of Letters— or at least an academic support group— in which the writer claims membership. In fact, they often describe something much more tenuous, the group of those who the author wishes had read his work, offered him references, or at least given him the time of day. Hence they retain something of the literary— not to say fictional— quality of traditional poets' prayers." (Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History)
P.S. This book rules. Why did I wait so long to read it?
* See a definition. See also this journal's previous post, Patterns in the Carpets. As for "those who the author wishes had read his work," see a quotation from an author mentioned in that post, Greg Egan, that seems relevant to the suicide outside Harvard's Memorial Church last Saturday during the morning Yom Kippur service—
… The word "transhumanism" (or, even worse, "posthumanism") sounds like a suicide note for the species, which effectively renders it a political suicide note for any movement by that name. No doubt there are people prepared to spend 90% of their time and energy explaining that they didn't intend any negative connotations, but this is not one of those cases where other people will be to blame if "transhumanists" are reviled as the enemies of humanity on purely linguistic grounds. It's no use people proclaiming "Please, read my 1,000-page manifesto, don't just look at one word!"….
— Greg Egan on April 23, 2008,** at Metamagician and the Hellfire Club
Related material— A livejournal note on the Memorial Church suicide, nihilism, and a "final crux."
** Footnote to a footnote— See also Log24 on April 23, 2008— Shakespeare's birthday.
Comments Off on Evocation*
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Film Dream
New York Lottery on Tuesday, August 3, 2010—
Midday 726, Evening 215. Interpretations— 7/26, 2/15, and yesterday's post.
The late Robert F. Boyle, film production designer, quoted in today's New York Times—
A movie “starts with the locale, with the environment that people live in, how they move within that environment.” Sometimes that environment has to be built.
“I’m all for construction, because we’re dealing with the magic of movies,” he told Variety in 2008. “And I always feel that if you build it, you build it for the dream rather than the actuality."
Comments Off on Film Dream
Saturday, May 1, 2010
An Education
天鈞
Made famous by Ursula K. Le Guin
as the book title "Lathe of Heaven,"
this Chinese phrase, tianjun, apparently
means something more like "Scales of Heaven"–
an appropriate image for Law Day 2010.
An anonymous forum user says that
"…if you switch the two characters around,
you get: 鈞天, which is one of
the nine heavens, more specifically,
the middle heaven."
This is supported by a
non-anonymous source:
"I follow A.C. Graham’s translation of
Juntian as 'Level Heaven (the innermost
of the nine divisions of heaven)';
he renders Juntian guangyue as
'the mighty music of the innermost heaven.'"
— "Music in the World of Su Shi (1037-1101):
Terminology," by Stuart H. Sargent,
Colorado State University,
Journal of Sung-Yuan Studies 32 (2002), 39-81
The Nine Divisions of Heaven–
Some context–
"This pattern is a square divided into nine equal parts.
It has been called the 'Holy Field' division and
was used throughout Chinese history for many
different purposes, most of which were connected
with things religious, political, or philosophical."
– The Magic Square: Cities in Ancient China,
by Alfred Schinz, Edition Axel Menges, 1996, p. 71
Comments Off on An Education
Friday, March 19, 2010
Garden of Forking Paths
Comments Off on Garden of Forking Paths
Monday, March 8, 2010
Mathematics and Narrative continued
The Magic Lyre
(Click image for context.)
See also Saturday's post—
as well as Solemn Dance
and Mazur at Delphi.
(This last is apparently based on
a talk given by Barry Mazur at Delphi
in 2007 and may or may not appear in
a book, Mathematics and Narrative,
to be published in 2010.)
Suggested tune for the lyre–
"Send me the pillow
that you dream on,"
in memory of Hank Locklin,
who died on this date last year.
Comments Off on Mathematics and Narrative continued
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Symbology continued
The Magic Lyre
The front page of tomorrow's New York Times Book Review is devoted to a new novel titled Angelology.
Detail of the front page, top right corner–
"…this will be popular for fans of such historical thrillers as… Katherine Neville's The Eight." —Library Journal
The New York Times review is more flattering– "a terrifically clever thriller– more Eco than Brown…."
Related historical remarks–
the symbology novels of Dan Brown and…
TIME magazine cover, issue
dated March 15, 2010–
"History Maker: How Tom Hanks is
redefining America's past"
For some theological background to
this post and today's noon post,
see the use of the word "harrowing"
in this journal — particularly on
April 19, 2003– Holy Saturday.
Comments Off on Symbology continued
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
That’s Showbiz
New York Times, January 12, 2010, 12:26 PM–
"Spider-Man" Musical Will Refund Tickets
"With… direction by Julie Taymor ['Frida'], 'Spider-Man' has been marred by delays….
The musical’s troubles have unfolded at the same time that the next “Spider-Man” movie has been descending into disarray…."
Related material:
"No Great Magic," by Fritz Leiber–
"The white cosmetic came away, showing sallow skin and on it a faint tattoo in the form of an 'S' styled like a yin-yang symbol left a little open.
'Snake!' he hissed. 'Destroyer! The arch-enemy, the eternal opponent!'"
“Ay que bonito es volar
A las dos de la mañana….”
— “La Bruja“
Comments Off on That’s Showbiz
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Merry Xmas from Arthur C. Clarke
Well-Recognized
Some personal reminiscences from 1982
suggested the following notes on
yesterday’s thought from Arthur C. Clarke–
“Any sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic.”
“‘Abracadabra’ is a well-recognized song recorded by the Steve Miller Band.
Released as the main single from Abracadabra in June 1982, it became a number-one hit on the United States Billboard Hot 100 chart, and also hit number two on the UK charts. It followed Survivor‘s ‘Eye of the Tiger‘ (from Rocky III ) on the Hot 100….” –Wikipedia
Advanced Technology:
MST 682 Advanced Topics in
Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM)
An overview of the components of CIM Enterprise, System Design, Material Handling, Materials Requirement Planning (MRP), Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRPII), Manufacturing Database and Management, Expert Systems for Manufacturing. Two hours of lecture and two hours of laboratory per week. Prerequisites: An undergraduate course in CAD or CAM or CIM, or consent of instructor. —SUNY Institute of Technology
Magic:
“Christian Surrealism,” an entry in this journal on Dec. 15, 2009, at 5:26 PM.
The time 5:26 may of course be interpreted as a reference to the date 5/26.
Technology and Magic:
NY Lottery yesterday, Dec. 16: mid-day 682, evening 526.
Comments Off on Merry Xmas from Arthur C. Clarke
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
The Passion of the Beast
A thought from yesterday by David Brooks:
“Life is a struggle to push back against the evils of the world without succumbing to the passions of the beast lurking inside.”
Associated Press Thought for Today:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
— British science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke (born this date in 1917, died in 2008).
Photo by Amy Marash
Arthur C. Clarke at his home office
in Sri Lanka, 28 March 2005
A search for that date
in this journal yields…
Bright Star and Happy Six.
Comments Off on The Passion of the Beast
Sunday, November 8, 2009
H is for Hogwarts, continued
A Sequel to Koestler's
The Call Girls
Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 1972-1990,
Columbia University Press paperback, 1997, p. 137–
"Academics' lives are seldom interesting."
But then there is Matt Lee of the University of Greenwich.
See his weblog subtitled "notes and thoughts on philosophy"… particularly his post "Diamond time, daimon time," of August 20, 2009.
See also my own post of August 20, 2009– "Sophists"– and my earlier post "Daimon Theory" of March 12, 2003:
More about Lee:
"Chaos majik is a form of modern witchcraft."
More about magick:
Noetic Symbology
(Log24 on October 25, 2009)
Comments Off on H is for Hogwarts, continued
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Tuesday September 8, 2009
Froebel's
Magic Box
Continued from Dec. 7, 2008,
and from yesterday.
|
Non-Euclidean
Blocks
Passages from a classic story:
… he took from his pocket a gadget he had found in the box, and began to unfold it. The result resembled a tesseract, strung with beads….  Tesseract
"Your mind has been conditioned to Euclid," Holloway said. "So this– thing– bores us, and seems pointless. But a child knows nothing of Euclid. A different sort of geometry from ours wouldn't impress him as being illogical. He believes what he sees."
"Are you trying to tell me that this gadget's got a fourth dimensional extension?" Paradine demanded. "Hardening of the thought-arteries," Jane interjected. Paradine was not convinced. "Then a baby could work calculus better than Einstein? No, I don't mean that. I can see your point, more or less clearly. Only–" "Well, look. Let's suppose there are two kinds of geometry– we'll limit it, for the sake of the example. Our kind, Euclidean, and another, which we'll call x. X hasn't much relationship to Euclid. It's based on different theorems. Two and two needn't equal four in it; they could equal y, or they might not even equal. A baby's mind is not yet conditioned, except by certain questionable factors of heredity and environment. Start the infant on Euclid–" "Poor kid," Jane said. Holloway shot her a quick glance. "The basis of Euclid. Alphabet blocks. Math, geometry, algebra– they come much later. We're familiar with that development. On the other hand, start the baby with the basic principles of our x logic–" "Blocks? What kind?" Holloway looked at the abacus. "It wouldn't make much sense to us. But we've been conditioned to Euclid." — "Mimsy Were the Borogoves," Lewis Padgett, 1943 |
Padgett (pseudonym of a husband-and-wife writing team) says that alphabet blocks are the intuitive "basis of Euclid." Au contraire; they are the basis of Gutenberg.
For the intuitive basis of one type of non-Euclidean* geometry– finite geometry over the two-element Galois field– see the work of…
Friedrich Froebel
(1782-1852), who
invented kindergarten.
His "third gift" —
© 2005 The Institute for Figuring
Photo by Norman Brosterman
fom the Inventing Kindergarten
exhibit at The Institute for Figuring
fom the Inventing Kindergarten
exhibit at The Institute for Figuring
* i.e., other than Euclidean
Comments Off on Tuesday September 8, 2009
Monday, September 7, 2009
Monday September 7, 2009
Magic Boxes
"Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas– only I don't exactly know what they are!…. Let's have a look at the garden first!"
— A passage from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass. The "garden" part– but not the "ideas" part– was quoted by Jacques Derrida in Dissemination in the epigraph to Chapter 7, "The Time before First."
Commentary
on the passage:
Part I "The Magic Box," shown on Turner Classic Movies earlier tonight
Part II: "Mimsy Were the Borogoves," a classic science fiction story:
"… he lifted a square, transparent crystal block, small enough to cup in his palm– much too small to contain the maze of apparatus within it. In a moment Scott had solved that problem. The crystal was a sort of magnifying glass, vastly enlarging the things inside the block. Strange things they were, too. Miniature people, for example– They moved. Like clockwork automatons, though much more smoothly. It was rather like watching a play."
Part III: A Crystal Block —
Image of pencils is by
Diane Robertson Design.
Related material:
"A Four-Color Theorem."
Part IV:
Comments Off on Monday September 7, 2009
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Sunday September 6, 2009
Magic Boxes
Part I: “The Magic Box,” shown on Turner Classic Movies tonight
Part II: “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” a classic science fiction story:
“… he lifted a square, transparent crystal block, small enough to cup in his palm– much too small to contain the maze of apparatus within it. In a moment Scott had solved that problem. The crystal was a sort of magnifying glass, vastly enlarging the things inside the block. Strange things they were, too. Miniature people, for example–
They moved. Like clockwork automatons, though much more smoothly. It was rather like watching a play.”
Comments Off on Sunday September 6, 2009
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Thursday September 3, 2009
Autistic Enchantment
“Music and mathematics are among the pre-eminent wonders of the race. Levi-Strauss sees in the invention of melody ‘a key to the supreme mystery’ of man– a clue, could we but follow it, to the singular structure and genius of the species. The power of mathematics to devise actions for reasons as subtle, witty, manifold as any offered by sensory experience and to move forward in an endless unfolding of self-creating life is one of the strange, deep marks man leaves on the world. Chess, on the other hand, is a game in which thirty-two bits of ivory, horn, wood, metal, or (in stalags) sawdust stuck together with shoe polish, are pushed around on sixty-four alternately coloured squares. To the addict, such a description is blasphemy. The origins of chess are shrouded in mists of controversy, but unquestionably this very ancient, trivial pastime has seemed to many exceptionally intelligent human beings of many races and centuries to constitute a reality, a focus for the emotions, as substantial as, often more substantial than, reality itself. Cards can come to mean the same absolute. But their magnetism is impure. A mania for whist or poker hooks into the obvious, universal magic of money. The financial element in chess, where it exists at all, has always been small or accidental.
To a true chess player, the pushing about of thirty-two counters on 8×8 squares is an end in itself, a whole world next to which that of a mere biological or political or social life seems messy, stale, and contingent. Even the patzer, the wretched amateur who charges out with his knight pawn when the opponent’s bishop decamps to R4, feels this daemonic spell. There are siren moments when quite normal creatures otherwise engaged, men such as Lenin and myself, feel like giving up everything– marriage, mortgages, careers, the Russian Revolution– in order to spend their days and nights moving little carved objects up and down a quadrate board. At the sight of a set, even the tawdriest of plastic pocket sets, one’s fingers arch and a coldness as in a light sleep steals over one’s spine. Not for gain, not for knowledge or reknown, but in some autistic enchantment, pure as one of Bach’s inverted canons or Euler’s formula for polyhedra.”
— George Steiner in “A Death of Kings,” The New Yorker, issue dated September 7, 1968, page 133
“Examples are the stained-glass windows of knowledge.” —Nabokov
Click above images for some context.
See also:
Log24 entries of May 30, 2006, as well as “For John Cramer’s daughter Kathryn”– August 27, 2009— and related material at Wikipedia (where Kathryn is known as “Pleasantville”).
Log24 entries of May 30, 2006, as well as “For John Cramer’s daughter Kathryn”– August 27, 2009— and related material at Wikipedia (where Kathryn is known as “Pleasantville”).
Comments Off on Thursday September 3, 2009
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Sunday August 2, 2009
Spider Girl
"The 'magico-religious' tarantella
is a solo dance performed
supposedly to cure…
the delirium and contortions
attributed to the bite of a spider
at harvest (summer) time."
Moral:
Life's a dance
(and Jersey girls
are tough).
who was raised in Tenafly, New Jersey–Bull on Sacred Cows:
"Poor late nineteenth-century, poor early twentieth-century! Oh, brave new world that had such people in it: people like Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Gödel. Seven people who did more than all the machine-guns and canons of the Somme Valley or the Panzer divisions of Hitler to end the old world and to create– if not the answers– at least the questions that started off the new, each one of them killing one of the sacred cows on which Western consciousness had fed for so long…."— Apostolos Doxiadis, "Writing Incompleteness-– the Play" (pdf).
See also Mathematics and Narrative.
Comments Off on Sunday August 2, 2009
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Tuesday July 28, 2009
Monumental
Anniversary
Anniversary
The Associated Press this morning —
“Today’s Highlight in History:
On July 28, 1609, the English ship Sea Venture, commanded by Admiral Sir George Somers, ran ashore on Bermuda after nearly foundering at sea during a storm.”
“… the Sea Venture story is two tales in one. There’s the hurricane at sea, and then there is the Bermuda wreck becoming an inspiration for ‘The Tempest.’ The first is one of the most dramatic adventures of the era, and the second is a fascinating detective story.”
“It has been a commonplace in English literary criticism that Shakespeare’s play, ‘The Tempest,’ was modeled on these accounts…. However, this common wisdom is almost certainly a falsity. A monumental error.”
Related material:
Plot summary by “Anonymous” at imdb.com of a feminist film version of “The Tempest” (now in post-production):
“In Julie Taymor’s version of ‘The Tempest,’ the gender of Prospero has been switched to Prospera. Going back to the 16th or 17th century, women practicing the magical arts of alchemy were often convicted of witchcraft.”
Taymor’s “Tempest” stars, as Prospera, the famed portrayer of monarchs Helen Mirren. Another work dealing with alchemy suitable for Mirren (who is also known as Detective Inspector Jane Tennison):
The Eight, by Katherine Neville, is perhaps the greatest bad novel of the twentieth century. If it were made into a movie, who should be cast as the Black Queen? (“…the dignified silver-haired woman danced sinuously…” — p. 241)
Comments Off on Tuesday July 28, 2009
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Wednesday July 15, 2009
The Plot Thickens
Thanks to David Lavery—
see previous entry— the
word for today is…
"As the story develops, an
element of magical realism
enters the picture."
— Amazon review
Related material:
For background on magical
realism, see the update to
today's previous entry.
See also
A Year of Magical Thinking
(June 6, 2009) and
the entries of May 19-22,
featuring Judy Davis in…
(Cf. St. Bridget's Day, 2003)
Comments Off on Wednesday July 15, 2009
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Tuesday June 9, 2009
Recessional
"I know what
nothing means."
— Joan Didion,
Play It As It Lays
Faust
President Faust of Harvard on Joan Didion:
"She was referring to life as a kind of improvisation: that magical crossroads of rigor and ease, structure and freedom, reason and intuition. What she calls being prepared to 'go with the change.'"
"I think about swimming with him into the cave at Portuguese Bend, about the swell of clear water, the way it changed, the swiftness and power it gained as it narrowed through the rocks at the base of the point. The tide had to be just right. We had to be in the water at the very moment the tide was right. We could only have done this a half dozen times at most during the two years we lived there but it is what I remember. Each time we did it I was afraid of missing the swell, hanging back, timing it wrong. John never was. You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that."
From the same book:
"The craziness is receding but no clarity is taking its place."
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
For a magical crossroads at another university, see the five Log24 entries ending on November 25, 2005:
This holy icon
appeared at
N37°25.638'
W122°09.574'
on August 22, 2003,
at the Stanford campus.
Also from that date,
an example of clarity
in another holy icon —
|
|
— in honor of better days
at Harvard and of a member
of the Radcliffe Class of 1964.
Comments Off on Tuesday June 9, 2009
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Saturday June 6, 2009
Excerpts from Log24,
with commentary by
Wilhelm and Mather
Comments Off on Saturday June 6, 2009
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Monday, January 26, 2009
Monday January 26, 2009
Harvard, Magic,
and The New York Times,
continued from Jan. 15:
The New York Times Jan. 15:
and The New York Times,
continued from Jan. 15:
The New York Times Jan. 15:
Magic and Realism,
by Roger Cohen —
by Roger Cohen —
“… what I want from the
Obama administration is
something more than
Harvard-to-the-Beltway
smarts. I want
magical realism.”
Google News, 4:19 PM ET today:
“My shavin’ razor’s cold
and it stings.”
— Song quoted here on
Mardi Gras, 2008
Comments Off on Monday January 26, 2009
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Thursday January 15, 2009
Harvard, Magic,
and The New York Times
The New York Times Magazine for next Sunday:
The Edge of the Mystery, by Matt Bai–
“Weeks before the election of 1960, Norman Mailer, already an accomplished novelist, sat down to write his first major work of political journalism, an essay for Esquire in which he argued that only John F. Kennedy could save America… the only kind of leader who could rescue it, who could sweep in an era of what Mailer called ‘existential’ politics, was a ‘hipster’ hero– someone who welcomed risk and adventure, someone who sought out new experience, both for himself and for the country….
… Mailer essentially created a new genre for a generation of would-be literary philosophers covering politics…. By 1963, Mailer and other idealists were crushed to discover that Kennedy was in fact a fairly conventional and pragmatic politician, more Harvard Yard than Fortress of Solitude.”
Magic and Realism, by Roger Cohen–
“… what I want from the Obama administration is something more than Harvard-to-the-Beltway smarts. I want magical realism.”
Mailer and Cohen, taken together, suggest I should review two authors– Picard and Hesse– I encountered as a Harvard freshman in 1960.
“In the ‘Prologue in Heaven’ in Goethe’s Faust a powerful silence is produced by the powerful word after each verse. There is an active, audible silence after every verse. The things that were moved into position by the word stand motionless in the silence, as if they were waiting to be called back into the silence and to disappear therein. The word not only brings the things out of silence; it also produces the silence in which they can disappear again.”
DER HERR:
Kennst du den Faust?
Kennst du den Faust?
MEPHISTOPHELES:
Den Doktor?
DER HERR:
Meinen Knecht!
knight
O.E. cniht “boy, youth, servant,” common W.Gmc. (cf. O.Fris. kniucht, Du. knecht, kneht “boy, youth, lad,” Ger. Knecht “servant, bondsman, vassal”), of unknown origin. Meaning “military follower of a king or other superior” is from c.1100. Began to be used in a specific military sense in Hundred Years War, and gradually rose in importance through M.E. period until it became a rank in the nobility 16c. The verb meaning “to make a knight of (someone)” is from c.1300. Knighthood is O.E. cnihthad M.H.G. “the period between childhood and manhood;” sense of “rank or dignity of a knight” is from c.1300. The chess piece so called from c.1440.
O.E. cniht “boy, youth, servant,” common W.Gmc. (cf. O.Fris. kniucht, Du. knecht, kneht “boy, youth, lad,” Ger. Knecht “servant, bondsman, vassal”), of unknown origin. Meaning “military follower of a king or other superior” is from c.1100. Began to be used in a specific military sense in Hundred Years War, and gradually rose in importance through M.E. period until it became a rank in the nobility 16c. The verb meaning “to make a knight of (someone)” is from c.1300. Knighthood is O.E. cnihthad M.H.G. “the period between childhood and manhood;” sense of “rank or dignity of a knight” is from c.1300. The chess piece so called from c.1440.
Further background on the word “Knecht”–
Epigraph to Magister Ludi
(Joseph Knecht’s translation):
(Joseph Knecht’s translation):
“… For although in a certain sense and for light-minded persons non-existent things can be more easily and irresponsibly represented in words than existing things, for the serious and conscientious historian it is just the reverse. Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.”
Comments Off on Thursday January 15, 2009
Monday, December 15, 2008
Monday December 15, 2008
Happy Birthday,
Julie Taymor
Julie Taymor
"Julie Taymor… will be directing Helen Mirren in a big-screen adaptation of The Tempest. Dame Helen, in a gender-switch from the original, will be playing Prospera, the usurped Duchess possessed of a vast library and magical powers."
— John Murphy at Bardolatry.com on November 21, 2008
A vast library…
On searching for Garden of Eden patterns (GEP's):
"The grid is a staircase to the Universal…."
— Rosalind Krauss, quoted here on Weyl's birthday, 2004
"I find the whole topic of GEPs a deeply interesting one, from many viewpoints: mathematical, philosophical, physical….
… the obvious problem is, that the required computational time is growing rapidly with the size of the grid, and even for a small grid, like 4×4 (=16 cells) there are 216=65536 possible patterns…."
— cateye at RichardDawkins.net
… and magical powers
The date of cateye's post was Sunday, October 21, 2007.
For related material see Log24 on Sunday, October 21, 2007.
Comments Off on Monday December 15, 2008
Monday, October 20, 2008
Monday October 20, 2008
Me and My Shadow
Thoughts suggested by Saturday's entry–
"… with primitives the beginnings of art, science, and religion coalesce in the undifferentiated chaos of the magical mentality…."
— Carl G. Jung, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry," Collected Works, Vol. 15, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, Princeton University Press, 1966, excerpted in Twentieth Century Theories of Art, edited by James M. Thompson.
For a video of such undifferentiated chaos, see the Four Tops' "Loco in Acapulco."
"Yes, you'll be goin' loco
down in Acapulco,
the magic down there
is so strong."
This song is from the 1988 film "Buster."
(For a related religious use of that name– "Look, Buster, do you want to live?"– see Fritz Leiber's "Damnation Morning," quoted here on Sept. 28.)
Art, science, and religion are not apparent within the undifferentiated chaos of the Four Tops' Acapulco video, which appears to incorporate time travel in its cross-cutting of scenes that seem to be from the Mexican revolution with contemporary pool-party scenes. Art, science, and religion do, however, appear within my own memories of Acapulco. While staying at a small thatched-roof hostel on a beach at Acapulco in the early 1960's, I read a paperback edition of Three Philosophical Poets, a book by George Santayana on Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe. Here we may regard art as represented by Goethe, science by Lucretius, and religion by Dante. For a more recent and personal combination of these topics, see Juneteenth through Midsummer Night, 2007, which also has references to the "primitives" and "magical mentality" discussed by Jung.
"The major structures of the psyche for Jung include the ego, which is comprised of the persona and the shadow. The persona is the 'mask' which the person presents [to] the world, while the shadow holds the parts of the self which the person feels ashamed and guilty about."
— Brent Dean Robbins, Jung page at Mythos & Logos
As for shame and guilt, see Malcolm Lowry's classic Under the Volcano, a novel dealing not with Acapulco but with a part of Mexico where in my youth I spent much more time– Cuernavaca.
Lest Lowry's reflections prove too depressing, I recommend as background music the jazz piano of the late Dave McKenna… in particular, "Me and My Shadow."
McKenna died on Saturday, the date of the entry that included "Loco in Acapulco." Saturday was also the Feast of Saint Luke.
Comments Off on Monday October 20, 2008
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Saturday October 18, 2008
Allure
(continued from
July 3, 2006)
(continued from
July 3, 2006)
This morning’s New York Times
has an obituary for the father
of the paper’s executive editor,
Bill Keller:
For more on George Keller and on
the more colorful Levi Stubbs,
who also died on Friday,
see the Times‘s AP obituaries.
Keller’s son Bill has emphasized
what he calls the “allure” of the
Times‘s lifestyles coverage.
An example of such coverage–
a 2006 story on visual art in Mexico
that included a reference to…
For descriptions of such life,
I prefer the literary art of
Robert Stone– in particular,
Stone’s novel
A Flag for Sunrise.
Credit must be given to
the Times for an excellent
1981 review of that novel.
(This was well before
the younger Keller
joined the Times in 1984.)
My own views on life are
less like those of either Keller
than like those of Stone and
perhaps of Levi Stubbs, the
other father figure who
died on Friday.
Related material:
“Yes, you’ll be goin’ loco
down in Acapulco,
the magic down there
is so strong.”
— Levi Stubbs
Comments Off on Saturday October 18, 2008
Monday, August 18, 2008
Monday August 18, 2008
| Lotteries on August 17, 2008 |
Pennsylvania (No revelation) |
New York (Revelation) |
| Mid-day (No belief) |
No belief, no revelation 492 Chinese 4 9 2 (See below.) |
Revelation without belief 423 4/23: |
| Evening (Belief) |
Belief without revelation 272 (See below.) |
Belief and revelation 406 4/06: |
No belief, no revelation:
An encounter with “492”–
An encounter with “492”–
| “What is combinatorial mathematics? Combinatorial mathematics, also referred to as combinatorial analysis or combinatorics, is a mathematical discipline that began in ancient times. According to legend the Chinese Emperor Yu (c. 2200 B.C.) observed the magic square 4 9 2
3 5 7 8 1 6 on the shell of a divine turtle….” — H.J. Ryser, Combinatorial Mathematics, Mathematical Association of America, Carus Mathematical Monographs 14 (1963) |
Belief without revelation:
Theology and human experience,
and the experience of “272”–
Theology and human experience,
and the experience of “272”–
| From Christian Tradition Today, by Jeffrey C. K. Goh (Peeters Publishers, 2004), p. 438: “Insisting that theological statements are not simply deduced from human experience, Rahner nevertheless stresses the experience of grace as the ‘real, fundamental reality of Christianity 272 ‘Grace’ is a key category in Rahner’s theology. He has expended a great deal of energy on this topic, earning himself the title, amongst others, of a ‘theologian of the graced search for meaning.’ See G. B. Kelly (ed.), Karl Rahner, in The Making of Modern Theology series (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1992).” |
Comments Off on Monday August 18, 2008
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Thursday August 14, 2008
Magister Ludi
(The Glass Bead Game)
is now available for
download in pdf or
text format at Scribd.
(The Glass Bead Game)
is now available for
download in pdf or
text format at Scribd.
“How far back the historian wishes to place the origins and antecedents of the Glass Bead Game is, ultimately, a matter of his personal choice. For like every great idea it has no real beginning; rather, it has always been, at least the idea of it. We find it foreshadowed, as a dim anticipation and hope, in a good many earlier ages. There are hints of it in Pythagoras, for example, and then among Hellenistic Gnostic circles in the late period of classical civilization. We find it equally among the ancient Chinese, then again at the several pinnacles of Arabic-Moorish culture; and the path of its prehistory leads on through Scholasticism and Humanism to the academies of mathematicians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and on to the Romantic philosophies and the runes of Novalis’s hallucinatory visions. This same eternal idea, which for us has been embodied in the Glass Bead Game, has underlain every movement of Mind toward the ideal goal of a universitas litterarum, every Platonic academy, every league of an intellectual elite, every rapprochement between the exact and the more liberal disciplines, every effort toward reconciliation between science and art or science and religion. Men like Abelard, Leibniz, and Hegel unquestionably were familiar with the dream of capturing the universe of the intellect in concentric systems, and pairing the living beauty of thought and art with the magical expressiveness of the exact sciences. In that age in which music and mathematics almost simultaneously attained classical heights, approaches and cross-fertilizations between the two disciplines occurred frequently.”
Comments Off on Thursday August 14, 2008
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Tuesday June 24, 2008
Random Walk with
X's and O's
X's and O's
Part I: Random Walk
Part II: X's
3/22:
"Shakespeare, Rilke, Joyce,
Beckett and Levi-Strauss are
instances of authors for whom
chiasmus and chiastic thinking
Beckett and Levi-Strauss are
instances of authors for whom
chiasmus and chiastic thinking
are of central importance,
for whom chiasmus is a
generator of meaning,
tool of discovery and
philosophical template."
for whom chiasmus is a
generator of meaning,
tool of discovery and
philosophical template."
— Chiasmus in the
Drama of Life
Drama of Life
Part III: O's —
A Cartoon Graveyard
in honor of the late
Gene Persson †
Today's Garfield —
See also
Midsummer Eve's Dream:
"The meeting is closed
with the lord's‡ prayer
and refreshments are served."
† Producer of plays and musicals
including Album and
The Ruling Class
‡ Lower case in honor of
Peter O'Toole, star of
the film version of
The Ruling Class.
(This film, together with
O'Toole's My Favorite Year,
may be regarded as epitomizing
Hollywood's Jesus for Jews.)
Those who prefer
less randomness
in their religion
may consult O'Toole's
more famous film work
involving Islam,
as well as
the following structure
discussed here on
the date of Persson's death:
"The Moslems thought of the
central 1 as being symbolic
of the unity of Allah."
Comments Off on Tuesday June 24, 2008
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Wednesday June 11, 2008
Indiana Jones and the
Amazon Delivery
Amazon Delivery
Click on images for details.
Related material:
Comments Off on Wednesday June 11, 2008
Friday, June 6, 2008
Friday June 6, 2008
The Dance of Chance
"Harvard seniors have
every right to demand a
Harvard-calibre speaker."
— Adam Goldenberg in
The Harvard Crimson
"Look down now, Cotton Mather"
— Wallace Stevens,
Harvard College
Class of 1901
For Thursday, June 5, 2008,
commencement day for Harvard's
Class of 2008, here are the
Pennsylvania Lottery numbers:
Mid-day 025
Evening 761
Thanks to the late
Harvard professor
Willard Van Orman Quine,
the mid-day number 025
suggests the name
"Isaac Newton."
(For the logic of this suggestion,
see On Linguistic Creation
and Raiders of the Lost Matrix.)
Thanks to Google search, the
name of Newton, combined with
Thursday's evening number 761,
suggests the following essay:
PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE:
|
What can a non-scientist add?
Perhaps the Log24 entries for
the date of Koshland's death:
The Philosopher's Stone
and The Rock.
Or perhaps the following
observations:
On the figure of 25 parts
discussed in
"On Linguistic Creation"–
"The Moslems thought of the
central 1 as being symbolic
of the unity of Allah. "
— Clifford Pickover
"At the still point,
there the dance is."
— T. S. Eliot,
Harvard College
Class of 1910
Comments Off on Friday June 6, 2008
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Thursday May 29, 2008
| The Diadem of Death Washington Post Death Notices: Dead on |
||
| Sophie B. Altman | ||
Mother-in-law of In Memoriam: LOS TRES REYES MAGOS —Yo soy Gaspar. Aquí traigo el incienso. —Yo soy Melchor. Mi mirra aroma todo. —Soy Baltasar. Traigo el oro. Aseguro —Gaspar, Melchor y Baltasar, callaos. THE THREE KINGS I am Caspar. I bring with me the myrrh, I am Melchior. My frankincense perfumes the air. I am Balthasar. I bring the gold. And I Caspar, Melchior, Balthasar — say no more.
|
||
Comments Off on Thursday May 29, 2008
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Sunday May 25, 2008
Wechsler Cubes
"Confusion is nothing new."
— Song lyric, Cyndi Lauper
— Song lyric, Cyndi Lauper
Part I:
Magister Ludi
Magister Ludi
Hermann Hesse's 1943 The Glass Bead Game (Picador paperback, Dec. 6, 2002, pp. 139-140)–
"For the present, the Master showed him a bulky memorandum, a proposal he had received from an organist– one of the innumerable proposals which the directorate of the Game regularly had to examine. Usually these were suggestions for the admission of new material to the Archives. One man, for example, had made a meticulous study of the history of the madrigal and discovered in the development of the style a curved that he had expressed both musically and mathematically, so that it could be included in the vocabulary of the Game. Another had examined the rhythmic structure of Julius Caesar's Latin and discovered the most striking congruences with the results of well-known studies of the intervals in Byzantine hymns. Or again some fanatic had once more unearthed some new cabala hidden in the musical notation of the fifteenth century. Then there were the tempestuous letters from abstruse experimenters who could arrive at the most astounding conclusions from, say, a comparison of the horoscopes of Goethe and Spinoza; such letters often included pretty and seemingly enlightening geometric drawings in several colors."
Part II:
A Bulky Memorandum
A Bulky Memorandum
From Siri Hustvedt, author of Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005)– What I Loved: A Novel (Picador paperback, March 1, 2004, page 168)–
A description of the work of Bill Wechsler, a fictional artist:
"Bill worked long hours on a series of autonomous pieces about numbers. Like O's Journey, the works took place inside glass cubes, but these were twice as large– about two feet square. He drew his inspiration from sources as varied as the Cabbala, physics, baseball box scores, and stock market reports. He painted, cut, sculpted, distorted, and broke the numerical signs in each work until they became unrecognizable. He included figures, objects, books, windows, and always the written word for the number. It was rambunctious art, thick with allusion– to voids, blanks, holes, to monotheism and the individual, the the dialectic and yin-yang, to the Trinity, the three fates, and three wishes, to the golden rectangle, to seven heavens, the seven lower orders of the sephiroth, the nine Muses, the nine circles of Hell, the nine worlds of Norse mythology, but also to popular references like A Better Marriage in Five Easy Lessons and Thinner Thighs in Seven Days. Twelve-step programs were referred to in both cube one and cube two. A miniature copy of a book called The Six Mistakes Parents Make Most Often lay at the bottom of cube six. Puns appeared, usually well disguised– one, won; two, too, and Tuesday; four, for, forth; ate, eight. Bill was partial to rhymes as well, both in images and words. In cube nine, the geometric figure for a line had been painted on one glass wall. In cube three, a tiny man wearing the black-and-white prison garb of cartoons and dragging a leg iron has
— End of page 168 —
opened the door to his cell. The hidden rhyme is "free." Looking closely through the walls of the cube, one can see the parallel rhyme in another language: the German word drei is scratched into one glass wall. Lying at the bottom of the same box is a tiny black-and-white photograph cut from a book that shows the entrance to Auschwitz: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. With every number, the arbitrary dance of associations worked togethere to create a tiny mental landscape that ranged in tone from wish-fulfillment dream to nightmare. Although dense, the effect of the cubes wasn't visually disorienting. Each object, painting, drawing, bit of text, or sculpted figure found its rightful place under the glass according to the necessary, if mad, logic of numerical, pictorial, and verbal connection– and the colors of each were startling. Every number had been given a thematic hue. Bill had been interested in Goethe's color wheel and in Alfred Jensen's use of it in his thick, hallucinatory paintings of numbers. He had assigned each number a color. Like Goethe, he included black and white, although he didn't bother with the poet's meanings. Zero and one were white. Two was blue. Three was red, four was yellow, and he mixed colors: pale blue for five, purples in six, oranges in seven, greens in eight, and blacks and grays in nine. Although other colors and omnipresent newsprint always intruded on the basic scheme, the myriad shades of a single color dominated each cube.
The number pieces were the work of a man at the top of his form. An organic extension of everything Bill had done before, these knots of symbols had an explosive effect. The longer I looked at them, the more the miniature constructions seemed on the brink of bursting from internal pressure. They were tightly orchestrated semantic bombs through which Bill laid bare the arbitrary roots of meaning itself– that peculiar social contract generated by little squiggles, dashes, lines, and loops on a page."
Part III:
Wechsler Cubes
(named not for
Bill Wechsler, the
fictional artist above,
but for the non-fictional
David Wechsler) –
(named not for
Bill Wechsler, the
fictional artist above,
but for the non-fictional
David Wechsler) –
|
From 2002:
Above: Dr. Harrison Pope, Harvard professor of psychiatry, demonstrates the use of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale "block design" subtest. |
Part IV:
A Magic Gallery
A Magic Gallery
|
ZZ
Figures from the
Poem by Eugen Jost:
Mit Zeichen und Zahlen
Numbers and Names,
With numbers and names English translation A related poem:
Alphabets
From time to time
But if a savage
— Hermann Hesse (1943), |
Comments Off on Sunday May 25, 2008
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Thursday March 27, 2008
Back to the Garden
Film star Richard Widmark
died on Monday, March 24.
From Log24 on that date:
"Hanging from the highest limb
of the apple tree are
the three God's Eyes…"
— Ken Kesey
Related material:
The Beauty Test, 5/23/07–
H.S.M. Coxeter's classic
Introduction to Geometry (2nd ed.):
Note the resemblance of
the central part to
a magical counterpart–
the Ojo de Dios
of Mexico's Sierra Madre.
From a Richard Widmark film festival:
GARDEN OF EVIL
Henry Hathaway, 1954
"A severely underrated Scope western, shot in breathtaking mountain locations near Cuernavaca. Widmark, Gary Cooper and Cameron Mitchell are a trio of fortune hunters stranded in Mexico, when they are approached by Susan Hayward to rescue her husband (Hugh Marlowe) from a caved-in gold mine in Indian country. When they arrive at the 'Garden of Evil,' they must first battle with one another before they have to stave off their bloodthirsty Indian attackers. Widmark gives a tough, moving performance as Fiske, the one who sacrifices himself to save his friends. 'Every day it goes, and somebody goes with it,' he says as he watches the setting sun. 'Today it's me.' This was one of the best of Hollywood veteran Henry Hathaway's later films. With a brilliant score by Bernard Herrmann."
See also
the apple-tree
entries from Monday
(the date of Widmark's death)
and Tuesday, as well as
today's previous entry and
previous Log24
entries on Cuernavaca.
Comments Off on Thursday March 27, 2008
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Sunday March 2, 2008
Practical Magic
“They don’t understand
what it is to be awake,
To be living
on several planes at once
Though one cannot speak
with several voices at once.”
what it is to be awake,
To be living
on several planes at once
Though one cannot speak
with several voices at once.”
— T. S. Eliot,
The Family Reunion
Several voices:
Margaret Wertheim in today’s
Los Angeles Times and at
The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace,
Linda Dalrymple Henderson, and
Madeleine L’Engle and husband.
From Wertheim’s Pearly Gates:
“There is such a thing
as a tesseract.”
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Saturday January 26, 2008
Working Backward
Those who have followed the links here recently may appreciate a short story told by yesterday’s lottery numbers in Pennsylvania: mid-day 096, evening 513.
The “96” may be regarded as a reference to the age at death of geometer H.S.M. Coxeter (see yesterday morning’s links). The “513” may be regarded as a reference to the time of yesterday afternoon’s entry, 5:01, plus the twelve minutes discussed in that entry by presidential aide Richard Darman, who died yesterday.
These references may seem less fanciful in the light of other recent Log24 material: a verse quoted here on Jan. 18—
… Todo lo sé por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte.
— Rubén Darío,
born January 18, 1867
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte.
— Rubén Darío,
born January 18, 1867
— and a link on Jan. 19 to the following:
The Lion, the Witch
and the Wardrobe:
and the Wardrobe:
|
“But what does it all mean?” asked Susan when they were somewhat calmer. “It means,” said Aslan, “that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward.” |
Comments Off on Saturday January 26, 2008
Friday, January 25, 2008
Friday January 25, 2008
Requiem for a Curator
"There is a pleasantly discursive treatment
of Pontius Pilate's unanswered question
'What is truth?'"
— H. S. M. Coxeter, 1987,
book introduction quoted
as epigraph to
Art Wars
book introduction quoted
as epigraph to
Art Wars
"I confess I do not believe in time.
I like to fold my magic carpet,
after use, in such a way
as to superimpose
one part of the pattern
upon another."
Figure by Coxeter
reminiscent of the
Ojo de Dios of
Mexico's Sierra Madre
In memory of
National Gallery
of Art curator
Philip Conisbee,
who died on
January 16:
|
"the God's-eye of the author"
— Dorothy Sayers, |
"one complete and free eye, which can simultaneously see in all directions"
— Vladimir Nabokov, |
Comments Off on Friday January 25, 2008
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Saturday January 19, 2008
In Memory of
Bobby Fischer
Bobby Fischer
Edward Rothstein has a piece on Bobby Fischer in today’s New York Times. The Rothstein opening:
“There may be only three human activities in which miraculous accomplishment is possible before adulthood: mathematics, music and chess.”
This echoes the opening of a classic George Steiner essay (The New Yorker, Sept. 7, 1968):
“There are three intellectual pursuits, and, so far as I am aware, only three, in which human beings have performed major feats before the age of puberty. They are music, mathematics, and chess.”
— “A Death of Kings,” reprinted in George Steiner: A Reader, Oxford University Press, 1984, pp. 171-178.
Despite its promising (if unoriginal) opening, the New York Times piece is mainly an attack on Fischer’s anti-Jewish stance. Rothstein actually has little of interest to say about what he calls the “glass-bead games” of music, mathematics, and chess. For a better-written piece on chess and madness, see Charles Krauthammer’s 2005 essay in TIME. The feuilletons of Rothstein and Krauthammer do not, of course, come close to the genuinely bead-game-like writing of Steiner.
Related material on
chess and religion:
Magical Thinking
(December 7th, 2005)
Comments Off on Saturday January 19, 2008
Monday, December 24, 2007
Monday December 24, 2007
From Saturday's entry
(Log24, Dec. 22, 2007)
a link goes to–
The five entries of June 14, 2007.
From there, the link
"One Two Three Four,
Who Are We For?"
goes to–
Princeton: A Whirligig Tour
(Log24, June 5, 2007).
From there, the link
"Taking Christ to Studio 60"
goes to–
The five Log 24 entries
prior to midnight Sept. 18, 2006.
From there, the link
"Log24, January 18, 2004"
goes to–
A Living Church.
From there, the link
"click here"
goes to–
In the Bleak Midwinter
(Internet Movie Database)…
Tagline:
The drama. The passion. The intrigue… And the rehearsals haven't even started.
Plot Summary:
Out of work actor Joe volunteers to help try and save his sister's local church
for the community by putting on a Christmas production of Hamlet…
"… were it not that
I have bad dreams."
— Hamlet
Related material:
The New York Times online
obituaries of December 22,
Ike Turner's
"Bad Dreams" album
(see Log24, July 12, 2004),
"Devil Music," a composition
by H. S. M. Coxeter,
and
Those desiring more literary depth
may consult the G. K. Chesterton
play "Magic" for which Coxeter
wrote his "Devil Music" and
the Ingmar Bergman film
"The Magician" said to have
been inspired by Chesterton.
Comments Off on Monday December 24, 2007
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Tuesday November 20, 2007
Death on a Friday
and the
Magic of Numbers
Magic of Numbers
Above: PA Lottery on
Friday, November 16th,
the date of death
for noted leftist attorney
Victor Rabinowitz
“Mr. Rabinowitz was a member
of the Communist Party
from 1942 until the early 1960s,
he wrote in his memoir,
Unrepentant Leftist (1996).
He said the party
seemed the best vehicle
to fight for social justice.”
— The New York Times,
Nov. 20, 2007
Related material:
From the Harvard Crimson on Friday:
“Robert Scanlan, a professor of theater
who knew Beckett personally,
directed the plays….
He said that performing Beckett as part of
the New College Theatre’s inaugural series
represents an auspicious beginning.”
From Log24 on 4/19–
“Drama Workshop“–
a note of gratitude
from the Virginia Tech killer:
“Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ,
to inspire generations of the weak
and the defenseless people.”
“It’s not for me. For my children,
for my brothers and sisters…
I did it for them.”
Party on, Victor.
For further drama, see
Comments Off on Tuesday November 20, 2007
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Wednesday October 31, 2007
On Time
Anthony Hopkins on time:
"For me time is God, God is time…. I'm fascinated by the fact that we can't grasp anything about time. The magical, supernatural force that is with us every second is time." —Cinema Blend
"For me time is God, God is time. It's an equation, like an Einstein equation." —Washington Square News
A Marxist on time:
"God demands scrutiny beyond his menacingly comic aspects. Primarily, the [Saramago] Gospel 's God is time, and not truth, the other attribute he asserts. Saramago, a Marxist (an eccentric one), and not a Christian, subverts St. Augustine on the theodicy of time. If time is God, then God can be forgiven nothing, and who would desire to forgive him anyway?"
—Harold Bloom on José Saramago's The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991). Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998.
Related material:
Augustine's Theodicy
and Joyce's Aesthetics,
Comments Off on Wednesday October 31, 2007
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Saturday September 22, 2007
The Magic of Numbers
"Emphasis will be placed on discovery through conjecture and experimentation."
— Elena Mantovan, pre-2007 undated Harvard syllabus for Quantitative Reasoning 28, "The Magic of Numbers"
"The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, said Shakespeare, are of imagination all compact. He forgot the mathematician…. Those who win through to the end of The Magic of Numbers will be for the rest of their lives in touch with the accessible mystery of things."
— Review, Harvard Magazine, Jan/Feb 2004
"Lear becomes almost lyrical. 'When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down/ And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh/ At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues/ Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too/ Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out– And take upon's the mystery of things/ As if we were God's spies.' That is a remarkable, haunting passage."
— Father James V. Schall, Society of Jesus, Georgetown Hoya, undated column (perhaps, the URL indicates, from All Hallows' Eve, 2006)
Comments Off on Saturday September 22, 2007
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Tuesday August 21, 2007
In the Details
Symbol from the
box-style I Ching
Related material:
The five Log24 entries
ending on August 1
Illustration by Lou Beach
in today's New York Times
article on science and magic
Related material:
A Wrinkle in Time
Comments Off on Tuesday August 21, 2007
Monday, July 30, 2007
Monday July 30, 2007
The Deathly Hallows Symbol
Some fear that the Harry Potter books introduce children to the occult; they are not entirely mistaken.
According to Wikipedia, the “Deathly Hallows” of the final Harry Potter novel are “three fictional magical objects that appear in the book.”
The vertical line, circle, and triangle in the symbol pictured above are said to refer to these three magical objects.
One fan relates the “Deathly Hallows” symbol above, taken from the spine of a British children’s edition of the book, to a symbol for “the divine (or sacred, or secret) fire” of alchemy. She relates this fire in turn to “serpent power” and the number seven:
Kristin Devoe at a Potter fan site:
“We know that seven is a powerful number in the novels. Tom Riddle calls it ‘the most powerfully magic number.‘ The ability to balance the seven chakras within oneself allows the person to harness the secret fire. This secret fire in alchemy is the same as the kundalini or coiled snake in yogic philosophy. It is also known as ‘serpent power’ or the ‘dragon’ depending on the tradition. The kundalini is polar in nature and this energy, this internal fire, is very powerful for those who are able to harness it and it purifies the aspirant allowing them the knowledge of the universe. This secret fire is the Serpent Power which transmutes the base metals into the Perfect Gold of the Sun.
It is interesting that the symbol of the caduceus in alchemy is thought to have been taken from the symbol of the kundalini. Perched on the top of the caduceus, or the staff of Hermes, the messenger of the gods and revealer of alchemy, is the golden snitch itself! Many fans have compared this to the scene in The Order of the Phoenix where Harry tells Dumbledore about the attack on Mr. Weasley and says, ‘I was the snake, I saw it from the snake’s point of view.‘
The chapter continues with Dumbledore consulting ‘one of the fragile silver instruments whose function Harry had never known,’ tapping it with his wand:
The instrument tinkled into life at once with rhythmic clinking noises. Tiny puffs of pale green smoke issued from the minuscule silver tube at the top. Dumbledore watched the smoke closely, his brow furrowed, and after a few seconds, the tiny puffs became a steady stream of smoke that thickened and coiled into he air… A serpent’s head grew out of the end of it, opening its mouth wide. Harry wondered whether the instrument was confirming his story; He looked eagerly at Dumbledore for a sign that he was right, but Dumbledore did not look up.
“Naturally, Naturally,” muttered Dumbledore apparently to himself, still observing the stream of smoke without the slightest sign of surprise. “But in essence divided?”
Harry could make neither head not tail of this question. The smoke serpent, however split instantly into two snakes, both coiling and undulating in the dark air. With a look of grim satisfaction Dumbledore gave the instrument another gentle tap with his wand; The clinking noise slowed and died, and the smoke serpents grew faint, became a formless haze, and vanished.
Could these coiling serpents of smoke be foreshadowing events to come in Deathly Hallows where Harry learns to ‘awaken the serpent’ within himself? Could the snake’s splitting in two symbolize the dual nature of the kundalini?”
Related material
and the following
famous illustration of
the double-helix
structure of DNA:
This is taken from
a figure accompanying
an obituary, in today’s
New York Times, of the
artist who drew the figure.
The double helix
is not a structure
from magic; it may,
however, as the Rowling
quote above shows, have
certain occult uses,
better suited to
Don Henley’s
Garden of Allah
than to the
Garden of Apollo.
Similarly, the three objects
above (Log24 on April 9)
are from pure mathematics–
the realm of Apollo, not
of those in Henley’s song.
The similarity of the
top object of the three —
the “Fano plane” — to
the “Deathly Hallows”
symbol is probably
entirely coincidental.
Comments Off on Monday July 30, 2007
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Tuesday July 24, 2007
The Church of St. Frank
See yesterday’s entries for
some relevant quotations
from Wallace Stevens.
Further quotations for what
Marjorie Garber, replying to
a book review by
Frank Kermode, has called
“the Church of St. Frank“–
Frank Kermode on
Harold Bloom:
“He has… a great, almost
selfish passion for poetry,
and he interprets difficult
texts as if there were no
more important activity
in the world, which may
be right.”
Page 348 of Wallace Stevens:
The Poems of Our Climate,
by Harold Bloom
(1977, Cornell U. Press):
“The fiction of the leaves is now Stevens’ fiction…. Spring, summer, and autumn adorn the rock of reality even as a woman is adorned, the principle being the Platonic one of copying the sun as source of all images….
… They are more than leaves
that cover the barren rock….
They bear their fruit
so that the year is known….
If they are more than leaves, then they are no longer language, and the leaves have ceased to be tropes or poems and have become magic or mysticism, a Will-to-Power over nature rather than over the anteriority of poetic imagery.”
For more on magic, mysticism, and the Platonic “source of all images,” see Scott McLaren on “Hermeticism and the Metaphysics of Goodness in the Novels of Charles Williams.” McLaren quotes Evelyn Underhill on magic vs. mysticism:
The fundamental difference between the two is this: magic wants to get, mysticism wants to give […] In mysticism the will is united with the emotions in an impassioned desire to transcend the sense-world in order that the self may be joined by love to the one eternal and ultimate Object of love […] In magic, the will unites with the intellect in an impassioned desire for supersensible knowledge. This is the intellectual, aggressive, and scientific temperament trying to extend its field of consciousness […] (Underhill 84; see also 178ff.)
— Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness. New York: Dutton, 1911.
For more on what Bloom calls the “Will-to-Power over nature,” see Faust in Copenhagen and the recent (20th- and 21st-century) history of Harvard University. These matters are also discussed in “Log24 – Juneteenth through Midsummer Night.”
For more on what Underhill calls “the intellectual, aggressive, and scientific temperament trying to extend its field of consciousness,” see the review, in the August 2007 Notices of the American Mathematical Society, of a book by Douglas Hofstadter– a writer on the nature of consciousness— by magician Martin Gardner.
Comments Off on Tuesday July 24, 2007
Monday, July 16, 2007
Monday July 16, 2007
Confirmation
“They took all the trees,
put ’em in a tree museum
and they charged the people
a dollar and a half just to see ’em”
From an article (full version contains spoiler) on Bridge to Terabithia:
“In the book, a girl named Leslie Burke moves in next door to a chore-ridden farm boy, Jess Aarons, and imagines for him a kingdom she names Terabithia. Over a fall and winter, they ride the bus home from school together (sharing a seat in spite of catcalls from schoolmates), dump their backpacks at the edge of the road, and run across an empty field to the edge of a creek bed, where ‘someone long forgotten had hung a rope.’ They use the rope to swing across the gully into Terabithia, a wooded glade that Leslie makes magic….”
Art by Wendell Minor from the cover
of Magic Time, by Doug Marlette
From Bridge to Terabithia:
“I know”– she was getting excited– “it could be a magic country like Narnia, and the only way you can get in is by swinging across on this enchanted rope.” Her eyes were bright. She grabbed the rope. “Come on,” she said.
LOS ANGELES – Roger Cardinal Mahony, leader of the Los Angeles Catholic Archdiocese, the nation’s largest, apologized yesterday for what he called a “terrible sin and crime” as the church confirmed it would pay a record $660 million to people sexually abused by priests.
“Magic Time”—Mary Karr,
“Facing Altars:
Poetry and Prayer“–“There is a body
on the cross
in my church.”
Comments Off on Monday July 16, 2007
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Wednesday July 11, 2007
… And One More
for the Road
cartoonist and author
of Magic Time.
for the Road
In memory of Doug Marlette,
cartoonist and author
of Magic Time.
Marlette died in a highway
accident yesterday at about
10 AM CT. He was
"on his way to Oxford
[Mississippi]… to help a
troupe of high school students
put on a play based on
his nationally syndicated
comic strip, Kudzu."
— Chris Joyner,
Clarion-Ledger,
Jackson, Mississippi
Log24 yesterday,
7:59 AM ET:
Mary Karr,
"Facing Altars:
Poetry and Prayer"–
"There is a body
on the cross
in my church."
"I started kneeling to pray morning and night– spitefully at first, in a bitter pout. The truth is, I still fancied the idea that glugging down Jack Daniels would stay my turmoil, but doing so had resulted in my car hurtling into stuff." —Mary Karr
Comments Off on Wednesday July 11, 2007
Friday, May 25, 2007
Friday May 25, 2007
Dance and the Soul
From Log24 on
this date last year:
"May there be an ennui
of the first idea?
What else,
prodigious scholar,
should there be?"
— Wallace Stevens,
"Notes Toward a
Supreme Fiction"
The Associated Press,
May 25, 2007–
Thought for Today:
"I hate quotations.
Tell me what you know."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
This "telling of what
I know" will of course
mean little to those
who, like Emerson,
have refused to learn
through quotations.
For those less obdurate
than Emerson —Harold Bloom
on Wallace Stevens
and Paul Valery's
"Dance and the Soul"–
"Stevens may be playful, yet seriously so, in describing desire, at winter's end, observing not only the emergence of the blue woman of early spring, but seeing also the myosotis, whose other name is 'forget-me-not.' Desire, hearing the calendar hymn, repudiates the negativity of the mind of winter, unable to bear what Valery's Eryximachus had called 'this cold, exact, reasonable, and moderate consideration of human life as it is.' The final form of this realization in Stevens comes in 1950, in The Course of a Particular, in the great monosyllabic line 'One feels the life of that which gives life as it is.' But even Stevens cannot bear that feeling for long. As Eryximachus goes on to say in Dance and the Soul:
A cold and perfect clarity is a poison impossible to combat. The real, in its pure state, stops the heart instantaneously….[…] To a handful of ashes is the past reduced, and the future to a tiny icicle. The soul appears to itself as an empty and measurable form. –Here, then, things as they are come together, limit one another, and are thus chained together in the most rigorous and mortal* fashion….
O Socrates, the universe cannot for one instant endure to be only what it is.
Valery's formula for reimagining the First Idea is, 'The idea introduces into what is, the leaven of what is not.' This 'murderous lucidity' can be cured only by what Valery's Socrates calls 'the intoxication due to act,' particularly Nietzschean or Dionysiac dance, for this will rescue us from the state of the Snow Man, 'the motionless and lucid observer.'" —Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate
* "la sorte… la plus mortelle":
mortal in the sense
"deadly, lethal"
Other quotations
(from March 28,
the birthday of
Reba McEntire):
Logical Songs
Logical Song I
(Supertramp)
"When I was young, it seemed that
Life was so wonderful, a miracle,
Oh it was beautiful, magical
And all the birds in the trees,
Well they'd be singing so happily,
Joyfully, playfully watching me"
Logical Song II
(Sinatra)
"You make me feel so young,
You make me feel like
Spring has sprung
And every time I see you grin
I'm such a happy in-
dividual….
You and I are
Just like a couple of tots
Running across the meadow
Picking up lots
Of forget-me-nots"
Comments Off on Friday May 25, 2007
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Wednesday May 23, 2007
Strong Emergence Illustrated:
The Beauty Test
"There is no royal road
to geometry"
to geometry"
— Attributed to Euclid
There are, however, various non-royal roads. One of these is indicated by yesterday's Pennsylvania lottery numbers:
The mid-day number 515 may be taken as a reference to 5/15. (See the previous entry, "Angel in the Details," and 5/15.)
The evening number 062, in the context of Monday's entry "No Royal Roads" and yesterday's "Jewel in the Crown," may be regarded as naming a non-royal road to geometry: either U. S. 62, a major route from Mexico to Canada (home of the late geometer H.S.M. Coxeter), or a road less traveled– namely, page 62 in Coxeter's classic Introduction to Geometry (2nd ed.):
The illustration (and definition) is
of regular tessellations of the plane.
of regular tessellations of the plane.
This topic Coxeter offers as an
illustration of remarks by G. H. Hardy
that he quotes on the preceding page:
One might argue that such beauty is strongly emergent because of the "harmonious way" the parts fit together: the regularity (or fitting together) of the whole is not reducible to the regularity of the parts. (Regular triangles, squares, and hexagons fit together, but regular pentagons do not.)
The symmetries of these regular tessellations of the plane are less well suited as illustrations of emergence, since they are tied rather closely to symmetries of the component parts.
But the symmetries of regular tessellations of the sphere— i.e., of the five Platonic solids– do emerge strongly, being apparently independent of symmetries of the component parts.
Another example of strong emergence: a group of 322,560 transformations acting naturally on the 4×4 square grid— a much larger group than the group of 8 symmetries of each component (square) part.
The lottery numbers above also supply an example of strong emergence– one that nicely illustrates how it can be, in the words of Mark Bedau, "uncomfortably like magic."
(Those more comfortable with magic may note the resemblance of the central part of Coxeter's illustration to a magical counterpart– the Ojo de Dios of Mexico's Sierra Madre.)
Comments Off on Wednesday May 23, 2007
Wednesday May 23, 2007
From the May 18 Harvard Crimson:
“Paul B. Davis ’07-’08, who contributed to a collection of student essays written in 2005 on the purpose and structure of a Harvard education, said that ‘the devil is in the details’….”
Related material:
“In philosophy, reductionism is a theory that asserts that the nature of complex things is reduced to the nature of sums of simpler or more fundamental things.” —Wikipedia
“In the 1920’s… the discovery of quantum mechanics went a very long way toward reducing chemistry to the solution of well-defined mathematical problems. Indeed, only the extreme difficulty of many of these problems prevents the present day theoretical chemist from being able to predict the outcome of every laboratory experiment by making suitable calculations. More recently the molecular biologists have made startling progress in reducing the study of life back to the study of chemistry. The living cell is a miniature but extremely active and elaborate chemical factory and many, if not most, biologists today are confident that there is no mysterious ‘vital principle,’ but that life is just very complicated chemistry. With biology reduced to chemistry and chemistry to mathematics, the measurable aspects of the world become quite pervasive.” –Harvard mathematician George Mackey, “What Do Mathematicians Do?“
Opposed to reductionism are “emergence” and “strong emergence“–
“Although strong emergence is logically possible, it is uncomfortably like magic.” —Mark A. Bedau
Or comfortably.
Comments Off on Wednesday May 23, 2007
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Wednesday May 16, 2007
Star Wars
From this morning's New York Times:
"In April, Wiccans won an important victory when the Department of Veterans Affairs settled a lawsuit and agreed to add the Wiccan pentacle to a list of approved religious symbols that it will engrave on veterans' headstones….
Many Wiccans practice some form of magic or witchcraft, which they say is a way of affecting one's destiny, but which many outsiders see as evil. The Wiccan pentacle, a five-pointed star inside a circle, is often confused with symbols of Satanism."
Comments Off on Wednesday May 16, 2007
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Tuesday May 15, 2007
The Rev. Jerry Falwell speaks at a rally
on the steps of the Alabama Capitol
in Montgomery in this Saturday,
Aug. 16, 2003, file photo.
(AP Photo/Dave Martin)
The New York Times, Nov. 22, 2004:
"The Rev. Jerry Falwell's Liberty University [at Lynchburg, Virginia] is part of a movement around the nation that brings a religious perspective to the law."
Religious perspective:
See the five Log24 entries ending with "Dinner Theater?" (Nov. 26, 2004). Note Charles Williams's discussion of the Salem witchcraft trials.
See also yesterday's "Seven Bridges." In light of that entry's picture of Nicole Kidman in "To Die For," and of Charles Williams's remarks, a discussion of Kidman's "Practical Magic" may also interest some.
Comments Off on Tuesday May 15, 2007
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
Tuesday May 1, 2007
May 1, 2007
2:45 AM
I could tell you a lot,
but you gotta be
true to your code.
— Sinatra
2:45 AM
I could tell you a lot,
but you gotta be
true to your code.
— Sinatra
At the still point…
— Eliot
…da ist der Tanz;
Doch weder Stillstand noch Bewegung.
Und nenne es nicht Beständigkeit,
Wo Vergangenheit und Zukunft sich sammeln.
|
|
|
| to put one's back into something |
bei etwas Einsatz zeigen |
| to up the ante |
den Einsatz erhöhen |
| to debrief | den Einsatz nachher besprechen |
| to be on duty |
im Einsatz sein |
| mil.to be in action | im Einsatz sein |
| to play for high stakes |
mit hohem Einsatz spielen |
"Nine is a very
powerful Nordic number."
— Katherine Neville,
The Magic Circle
Comments Off on Tuesday May 1, 2007
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Saturday April 14, 2007
A Year of Magical…
Related material:
The Log24 entry for
this date last year
(Good Friday and
the opening date of
HARD CANDY),
and
Comments Off on Saturday April 14, 2007
Friday, March 30, 2007
Friday March 30, 2007
A Year of
Magical Thinking
Magical Thinking
12:07:57 AM ET
March 30, 2007
See also this date
last year.
last year.
Comments Off on Friday March 30, 2007
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Wednesday March 28, 2007
Logical Songs
Logical Song I
(Supertramp)
“When I was young, it seemed that
Life was so wonderful, a miracle,
Oh it was beautiful, magical
And all the birds in the trees,
Well they’d be singing so happily,
Joyfully, playfully watching me”
Logical Song II
(Sinatra)
“You make me feel so young,
You make me feel like
Spring has sprung
And every time I see you grin
I’m such a happy in-
dividual….
You and I are
Just like a couple of tots
Running across the meadow
Picking up lots
Of forget-me-nots“
Comments Off on Wednesday March 28, 2007
Friday, February 16, 2007
Friday February 16, 2007
“The much-borrowed Brown formula involves some very specific things. The name of a great artist, artifact or historical figure must be in the book’s story, not to mention on its cover. The narrative must start in the present day with a bizarre killing, then use that killing as a reason to investigate the past. And the past must yield a secret so big, so stunning, so saber-rattling that all of civilization may be changed by it. Probably not for the better.
This formula is neatly summarized….”
Cover illustration
for
The Judas Seat:
for
The Judas Seat:
The Narrative:
The Secret:
Part I
“Little ‘Jack’ Horner was actually Thomas Horner, steward to the Abbot of Glastonbury during the reign of King Henry VIII…. Always keen to raise fresh funds, Henry had shown a interest in Glastonbury (and other abbeys). Hoping to appease the royal appetite, the nervous Abbot, Richard Whiting, allegedly sent Thomas Horner to the King with a special gift. This was a pie containing the title deeds to twelve manor houses in the hope that these would deflect the King from acquiring Glastonbury Abbey. On his way to London, the not so loyal courier Horner apparently stuck his thumb into the pie and extracted the deeds for Mells Manor, a plum piece of real estate. The attempted bribe failed and the dissolution of the monasteries (including Glastonbury) went ahead from 1536 to 1540. Richard Whiting was subsequently executed, but the Horner family kept the house, so the moral of this one is: treachery and greed pay off, but bribery is a bad idea.” –Chris Roberts, Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: The Reason Behind the Rhyme
Part II
“The Grail Table has thirteen seats, one of which is kept vacant in memory of Judas Iscariot who betrayed Christ.” —Symbolism of King Arthur’s Round Table
“In medieval romance, the grail was said to have been brought to Glastonbury in Britain by Joseph of Arimathea and his followers. In the time of Arthur, the quest for the Grail was the highest spiritual pursuit.” —The Camelot Project
and the three entries preceding it:
“And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
they can tell you, being dead:
the communication of the dead is tongued with fire
beyond the language of the living.”
they can tell you, being dead:
the communication of the dead is tongued with fire
beyond the language of the living.”
— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Comments Off on Friday February 16, 2007
Sunday, November 26, 2006
Sunday November 26, 2006
Rosalind Krauss
in "Grids," 1979:
"If we open any tract– Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art or The Non-Objective World, for instance– we will find that Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter. They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit. From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal, and they are not interested in what happens below in the Concrete.
Or, to take a more up-to-date example…."
"He was looking at
the nine engravings
and at the circle,
checking strange
correspondences
between them."
— The Club Dumas,1993
"And it's whispered that soon
if we all call the tune
Then the piper will lead us
to reason."
— Robert Plant,1971
The nine engravings of
The Club Dumas
(filmed as "The Ninth Gate")
are perhaps more an example
of the concrete than of the
universal.
An example of the universal*–
or, according to Krauss, a
"staircase" to the universal–
is the ninefold square:
"This is the garden of Apollo,
the field of Reason…."
— John Outram, architect
For more on the field
of reason, see
Log24, Oct. 9, 2006.
A reasonable set of
"strange correspondences"
in the garden of Apollo
has been provided by Ezra Brown
in a mathematical essay (pdf).
Unreason is, of course,
more popular.
* The ninefold square is perhaps a "concrete universal" in the sense of Hegel:
"Two determinations found in all philosophy are the concretion of the Idea and the presence of the spirit in the same; my content must at the same time be something concrete, present. This concrete was termed Reason, and for it the more noble of those men contended with the greatest enthusiasm and warmth. Thought was raised like a standard among the nations, liberty of conviction and of conscience in me. They said to mankind, 'In this sign thou shalt conquer,' for they had before their eyes what had been done in the name of the cross alone, what had been made a matter of faith and law and religion– they saw how the sign of the cross had been degraded."
— Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, "Idea of a Concrete Universal Unity"
"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
— Thomas Pynchon
Comments Off on Sunday November 26, 2006
Wednesday, November 1, 2006
Wednesday November 1, 2006
Professor Emeritus,
Institute for Advanced Study
Savage Logic
"Savage logic works like a kaleidoscope whose chips can fall into a variety of patterns while remaining unchanged in quantity, form, or color. The number of patterns producible in this way may be large if the chips are numerous and varied enough, but it is not infinite. The patterns consist in the disposition of the chips vis-a-vis one another (that is, they are a function of the relationships among the chips rather than their individual properties considered separately). And their range of possible transformations is strictly determined by the construction of the kaleidoscope, the inner law which governs its operation. And so it is too with savage thought. Both anecdotal and geometric, it builds coherent structures out of 'the odds and ends left over from psychological or historical process.'
These odds and ends, the chips of the kaleidoscope, are images drawn from myth, ritual, magic, and empirical lore. (How, precisely, they have come into being in the first place is one of the points on which Levi-Strauss is not too explicit, referring to them vaguely as the 'residue of events… fossil remains of the history of an individual or a society.') Such images are inevitably embodied in larger structures– in myths, ceremonies, folk taxonomies, and so on– for, as in a kaleidoscope, one always sees the chips distributed in some pattern, however ill-formed or irregular. But, as in a kaleidoscope, they are detachable from these structures and arrangeable into different ones of a similar sort. Quoting Franz Boas that 'it would seem that mythological worlds have been built up, only to be shattered again, and that new worlds were built from the fragments,' Levi-Strauss generalizes this permutational view of thinking to savage thought in general."
— Clifford Geertz, "The Cerebral Savage: the Structural Anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss," in Encounter, Vol. 28 No. 4 (April 1967), pp. 25-32.
Today's New York Times
reports that
Geertz died on Monday,
October 30, 2006.
Related material:
and Up the River:
|
While it's a story that's never been written, a suggested title– Indiana Jones Sails Up The River Of Death–
shows how readily we as individuals or we as a culture can automatically visualize a basic story motif. We may each see the particular elements of the story differently, but almost instantaneously we catch its drift. The hero sails up the river of death to discover what lies within his own heart: i.e., how much moral and physical strength he has. Indiana Jones sails up the River of Death. We are following Indiana Jones up the River of Death. We're going to visit with Colonel Kurtz. (You may not want to get off the boat.) No, I am not mixing up metaphors. These are the Story. |
Amen.
Comments Off on Wednesday November 1, 2006
Friday, October 27, 2006
Friday October 27, 2006
Excerpt from Harvard Magazine:
“The people who intermediate between lunatics and the world used to be called alienists; the go-betweens for mathematicians are called teachers. Many a student may rightly have wondered if the terms shouldn’t be reversed.”
— Review of The Magic of Numbers, a book by Benedict H. Gross, Leverett Professor of Mathematics and Dean of Harvard College
For the full review, see
On Mathematical Imagination–
Harvard Magazine
(January-February 2004):
… part of a New Instauration
that will bring mathematics, at last, …
Wednesday,
http://www.harvardmagazine.com/
on-line/010442.html
Related material:
the previous entry,
Hall of Shem,
and the link, in the
Ash Wednesday, 2006,
entry, Deaconess,
to The House of God,
a novel by
Samuel Shem.
Shem is the pen-name
of Stephen J. Bergman,
Clinical Instructor in Psychiatry
at Harvard Medical School.
Comments Off on Friday October 27, 2006
Sunday, October 22, 2006
Sunday October 22, 2006
Ad for "The Prestige":
"Every great magic trick consists of three acts. The first act is called 'The Pledge.' The magician shows you something ordinary, but of course… it probably isn't. The second act is called 'The Turn.' The magician makes his ordinary 'some thing' do something extraordinary. Now if you're looking for the secret… you won't find it. That's why there's a third act, called 'The Prestige.' This is the part with the twists and turns, where lives hang in the balance, and you see something shocking you've never seen before."
The Associated Press
Thought for Today,
Oct. 22, 2006:
Thought for Today,
Oct. 22, 2006:
"You can fool
too many of the people
too much of the time."
— James Thurber,
American humorist
(1894-1961)
For more detail,
click on the above
Comments Off on Sunday October 22, 2006
Monday, October 9, 2006
Monday October 9, 2006
ART WARS:
To Apollo
To Apollo
“This is the garden of Apollo,
the field of Reason….”
John Outram, architect
To Apollo (10/09/02)
Art Wars: Apollo and Dionysus (10/09/02)
Balanchine’s Birthday (01/09/03)
Art Theory for Yom Kippur (10/05/03)
A Form (05/22/04)
Ineluctable (05/27/04)
A Form, continued (06/05/04)
Parallelisms (06/06/04)
Ado (06/25/04)
Deep Game (06/26/04)
Gameplayers of Zen (06/27/04)
And So To Bed (06/29/04)
Translation Plane for Rosh Hashanah (09/15/04)
Derrida Dead (10/09/04)
The Nine (11/09/04)
From Tate to Plato (11/19/04)
Art History (05/11/05)
A Miniature Rosetta Stone (08/06/05)
High Concept (8/23/05)
High Concept, Continued (8/24/05)
Analogical Train of Thought (8/25/05)
Today’s Sermon: Magical Thinking (10/09/05)
Balance (10/31/05)
Matrix (11/01/05)
Seven is Heaven, Eight is a Gate (11/12/05)
Nine is a Vine (11/12/05)
Apollo and Christ (12/02/05)
Hamilton’s Whirligig (01/05/06)
Cross (01/06/06)
On Beauty (01/26/06)
Sunday Morning (01/29/06)
Centre (01/29/06)
New Haven (01/29/06)
Washington Ballet (02/05/06)
Catholic Schools Sermon (02/05/06)
The Logic of Apollo (02/05/06)
Game Boy (08/06/06)
Art Wars Continued: The Krauss Cross (09/13/06)
Art Wars Continued: Pandora’s Box (09/16/06)
The Pope in Plato’s Cave (09/16/06)
Today’s Birthdays (09/26/06)
Symbology 101 (09/26/06)
Comments Off on Monday October 9, 2006
Saturday, September 16, 2006
Saturday September 16, 2006
Pandora's Box
Part I:
The Pandora Cross
"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."
— Rosalind Krauss in "Grids"
Part II:
The Opening
Remarks by the Pope on Sept. 12,
as reported by the Vatican:
Faith, Reason, and the University:
Memories and Reflections
For the result of
the Pope's remarks, see
a transcript of
yesterday's Google News
and the following
from BBC today:
Click to enlarge the screenshot.
Part III:
Hope
The New Yorker (issue of June 5, 2006) on the late Oriana Fallaci:
"In September [2005], she had a private audience with Pope Benedict XVI at Castel Gandolfo, his summer residence outside Rome. She had criticized John Paul II for making overtures to Muslims, and for not condemning terrorism heartily enough, but she has hopes for Joseph Ratzinger."
For further details, see yesterday's Log24.
Part IV:
The Sibyl's Song
— From The Magic Circle,
a spiritual narrative
by Katherine Neville
For more on "the long-mute voice
of the past," on "darkness beneath
the volcano," and on uncorking,
see Glory Season and Harrowing.
Related material from
Log24 on Dec. 2, 2005:
Benedict XVI, before he became Pope:
"… a purely harmonious concept of beauty is not enough…. Apollo, who for Plato's Socrates was 'the God' and the guarantor of unruffled beauty as 'the truly divine' is absolutely no longer sufficient."
and a related
Christian symbol,
the Greek Cross
(adapted from
Ad Reinhardt).
Moral of the Pandora Cross:
"Nine is a very powerful Nordic number."
— Katherine Neville in The Magic Circle…
quoted in The Nine, a Log24 entry
for Hermann Weyl's birthday,
November 9, 2004.
Comments Off on Saturday September 16, 2006
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Thursday August 31, 2006
Wag the Dogma
(continued from 2001)
(continued from 2001)
Ingrid Thulin and
Glenn Ford in
“The 4 Horsemen
of the Apocalypse”:
Glenn Ford in
“The 4 Horsemen
of the Apocalypse”:
A sneering review from TIME Magazine, March 23, 1962:
“Hero Ford, a playboy from Argentina, falls pampassionately in love with Heroine Thulin, a Parisienne married to a patriotic editor. When the editor joins the Resistance, the hero realizes his duty and secretly does the same. Unaware of his decision, the heroine decides that he is merely a lightweight, and goes back to her husband. At the fade, while the violins soar among the bomb bursts, the poor misunderstood playboy dies heroically in an attempt to weaken the Wehrmacht’s defenses in Normandy.
The tale is trite, the script clumsy, and the camera work grossly faked. Though the lovers wander all over Paris, the Cathedral of Notre Dame turns up in the background practically everywhere they go, almost as if it were following them around like a little dog.”
TIME Magazine is still wearing the Ivy League sneer it displayed so impressively in 1962.
A less dismissive summary from Answers.com:
“The World War I setting of the original Blasco-Ibanez novel has been updated to World War II, but the basic plot remains the same. A well-to-do Argentinian family, rent asunder by the death of patriarch Lee J. Cobb, scatters to different European countries in the late 1930s. Before expiring, Cobb had warned his nephew Carl Boehm that the latter’s allegiance to the Nazis would bring down the wrath of the titular Four Horsemen: War, Conquest, Famine and Death. Ford, Cobb’s grandson, has promised to honor his grandfather’s memory by thwarting the plans of Boehm. At the cost of his own life, Ford leads allied bombers to Boehm’s Normandy headquarters.”
In memory of Glenn Ford, a talented character actor who died at 90 yesterday, the opening paragraphs of an obituary in The Scotsman:
Screen icon Glenn Ford
dies at 90RHIANNON EDWARDGLENN Ford, one of the most enduring stars of the silver screen, has died at the age of 90.
Ford, who appeared in more than 200 films in a career spanning five decades, died at his home in Beverly Hills.
The actor’s health had been in decline for a number of years after he suffered a series of strokes.
Although he never achieved the superstardom he craved, Ford was widely acclaimed as one of the best character actors in the business.
The business of narrative:
From a narrative suggested by the name of The Scotsman‘s reporter and related, if only by association with Normandy, to Ford’s “Four Horsemen” film:
“The Vandaleurs are a family of Norman nobles with a heritable version of the mages’ Gift. They have been using magic covertly for what appears to have been a very long time…. Another branch of the family is known to hold a fief in Normandy, but it is not yet known if they are covert magicians as well.”
The Vandaleur narrative may be of interest to fans of The Da Vinci Code. (Ford is said to have been a Freemason, a charter member of Riviera Lodge No. 780, Pacific Palisades, California.)
For Catholics and others who prefer more traditional narratives:
Illuminated parchment,
1047 A.D.,
The Four Horsemen
of the Apocalypse
Related material:
Yesterday’s entries, and
an entry from April 7. 2003,
that they link to:
Comments Off on Thursday August 31, 2006
Sunday, July 16, 2006
Sunday July 16, 2006
Mathematics and Narrative
continued…
“Now, at the urging of the UC Berkeley cognitive linguist George Lakoff, liberal America’s guru of the moment, progressive Democrats are practicing to get their own reluctant mouths around some magical new vocabulary, in the hope of surviving and eventually overcoming the age of Bush.”
— Marc Cooper in The Atlantic Monthly, April 2005, “Thinking of Jackasses: The Grand Delusions of the Democratic Party”
Cooper’s “now” is apparently still valid. In today’s New York Times, the leftist Stanley Fish reviews Talking Right, by leftist Geoffrey Nunberg:
“… the right’s language is now the default language for everyone.
On the way to proposing a counterstrategy (it never really arrives), Nunberg pauses to engage in a polite disagreement with his fellow linguist George Lakoff, who has provided a rival account of the conservative ascendancy. Lakoff argues that Republicans have articulated– first for themselves and then for others– a conceptual framework that allows them to unite apparently disparate issues in a single coherent worldview … woven together not in a philosophically consistent framework but in a narrative ‘that creates an illusion of coherence.’
Once again, the Republicans have such a narrative– ‘declining patriotism and moral standards, the out-of-touch media and the self-righteous liberal elite … minorities demanding special privileges … disrespect for religious faith, a swollen government’– but ‘Democrats and liberals have not offered compelling narratives that could compete’ with it. Eighty pages later he is still saying the same thing. ‘The Democrats need a compelling narrative of their own.'”
Lakoff is the co-author of a book on the philosophy of mathematics, Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being. From Wikipedia’s article on Lakoff:
“According to Lakoff, even mathematics itself is subjective to the human species and its cultures: thus ‘any question of math’s being inherent in physical reality is moot, since there is no way to know whether or not it is.’ Lakoff and Rafael E. Nunez (2000) argue at length that mathematical and philosophical ideas are best understood in light of the embodied mind. The philosophy of mathematics ought therefore to look to the current scientific understanding of the human body as a foundation ontology, and abandon self-referential attempts to ground the operational components of mathematics in anything other than ‘meat.'”
For a long list of related leftist philosophy, see The Thinking Meat Project.
Democrats seeking narratives may also consult The Carlin Code and The Prime Cut Gospel.
Comments Off on Sunday July 16, 2006
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Tuesday July 11, 2006
It's like tryin' to
tell a stranger 'bout
Rock 'n' Roll
"In Tom Stoppard's new play 'Rock 'n' Roll,' showing in the West End, he [Syd Barrett] is portrayed in the opening scene, and his life and music are a recurring theme."
— Terry Kirby, Syd Barrett: The Crazy Diamond, in The Independent of July 12
Keynote
"Each scene is punctuated with a rock track from such acts as the Velvet Underground, the Doors, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd. Songs by Floyd's lost founder, Syd Barrett, are the keynote for Stoppard's theme that rock music sounded the death knell for repression but also heralded a freedom filled with its own perils."
— Ray Bennett, today's review of a new play, "Rock 'n' Roll," by Tom Stoppard
Related material:
Dance of the Numbers,
for Tom Stoppard
on his birthday,
July 3, 2006,
and
Knock, Knock, Knockin',
from yesterday.
Comments Off on Tuesday July 11, 2006
Friday, July 7, 2006
Friday July 7, 2006
ART WARS continued
| Now
In memory of “Now, we are seven.“ Related material: Log24 for 6/6/6 |
Comments Off on Friday July 7, 2006
Tuesday, June 6, 2006
Tuesday June 6, 2006
Pentecost
and
Queer Theory
and
Queer Theory
“Stuff comes up,
weird doors open,
people fall into things.”
— David Sedaris,
baccalaureate address
at Princeton on Sunday,
June 4, 2006,
the Feast of Pentecost
“The truth is that man’s capacity for symbol-mongering in general and language in particular is so intimately part and parcel of his being human, of his perceiving and knowing, of his very consciousness itself, that it is all but impossible for him to focus on the magic prism through which he sees everything else.”
— Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Girox, 1975, page 29.
Comments Off on Tuesday June 6, 2006
Monday, June 5, 2006
Monday June 5, 2006
Sermon
Baccalaureate:
A farewell address
in the form of a sermon
delivered to a graduating class.
"Stuff comes up,
weird doors open,
people fall into things."
— David Sedaris,
baccalaureate address
at Princeton yesterday
"The truth is that man's capacity for symbol-mongering in general and language in particular is so intimately part and parcel of his being human, of his perceiving and knowing, of his very consciousness itself, that it is all but impossible for him to focus on the magic prism through which he sees everything else."
— Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1975, page 29.
Review: ART WARS
on Sept. 12, 2002:
Und was für ein Bild des Christentums
ist dabei herausgekommen?
Voilà:
Related material:
Bright Star.
Comments Off on Monday June 5, 2006
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Wednesday May 31, 2006
Clint Eastwood
is 76.
is 76.
In honor of his birthday,
a three-part meditation
on quality:
Part I —
From The Quality of Diamond,
Log24 entries from Feb. 2004:
The Quality
with No Name
|
|
|
And what is good, Phaedrus,
and what is not good…
Need we ask anyone
to tell us these things?
— Epigraph to
Zen and the Art of
Motorcyle Maintenance
Part II —
From Log24 on
Dec. 7, 2003:
|
Eyes on the Prize Dialogue from “Good Will Hunting” — Will: He used to just put a belt,
Location, Location, Location
|
Part III —
From the website of
Noam D. Elkies,
Harvard mathematician:
| SLUMMERVILLE |
| Somerville, |
| Where the livin’ is sleazy: |
| Folk are humpin’ |
| And the chillun is high. |
| Oh yo’ daddy’s rich, |
| ‘Cos yo’ ma is good lookin’ |
| So hush, ugly baby, |
| Or I’ll make you cry. |
[“Parody by Noam D. Elkies;
not the original lyrics,
of course.”]
Related material
from Log24 on
April 10, 2006:
Noam D. Elkies
Friday, May 19, 2006
Friday May 19, 2006
The Great Bartender
by Peter Viereck (1948)
Being absurd as well as beautiful,
Magic– like art– is hoax redeemed by awe.
(Not priest but clown,
the shuddering sorcerer
Is more astounded than
his rapt applauders:
“Then all those props and Easters
of my stage
Came true? But I was joking all the time!”)
Art, being bartender, is never drunk;
And magic that believes itself, must die.
My star was rocket of my unbelief,
Launched heavenward as
all doubt’s longings are;
It burst when, drunk with self-belief,
I tried to be its priest and shouted upward:
“Answers at last! If you’ll but hint
the answers
For which earth aches, that famous
Whence and Whither;
Assuage our howling Why? with final fact.”
— As quoted in The Practical Cogitator,
or The Thinker’s Anthology,
Selected and Edited by
Charles P. Curtis, Jr., and
Ferris Greenslet,
Third Edition, Revised and Enlarged,
With a new Introduction by
John H. Finley, Jr.,
Houghton Mifflin Company,
Boston, 1962
The dates of Viereck’s birth and death are according to this morning’s New York Times.
Related material:
Five Log24 entries
ending May 13,
the date of Viereck’s death.
Comments Off on Friday May 19, 2006
Friday, April 28, 2006
Friday April 28, 2006
Poetry Month, continued
Was Heaven
Where You Thought?
Where You Thought?
A partial answer:
Yesterday's Pennsylvania Lottery evening number was 432.
Poets and others who seek meaning in random numbers may, if they wish, consult page 432 of The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. They may also, having studied the Log24 entries of Holy Saturday (April 15, 2006), consult page 432 of A Flag For Sunrise.
Those who prefer the dictionary method of interpreting random numbers may consult page 432 of Webster's New World Dictionary, College Edition of 1960. This page has a special meaning for those aware that Aslan's How is "home to the deepest magic Narnia has ever known." (Everything2.com)
Comments Off on Friday April 28, 2006
Monday, April 10, 2006
Monday April 10, 2006
Club
continued
continued
"What other colleges call fraternities,
Princeton calls Eating Clubs."
Princeton calls Eating Clubs."
Illustrated below:
The Restaurant
Related etymology:
OF.
from L.
— Webster's Revised
Unabridged Dictionary, 1913
Related material:
(1) A symbol of symmetry
that might have pleased
Hermann Weyl:
Source —
Timothy A. Smith on
Bach's Fugue No. 21,
the Well-Tempered
Clavier, Book II
(pdf or Shockwave)
(2) The remarks of Noam D. Elkies
on his
"Brandenburg Concerto No. 7":
"It is of course an act of chutzpah,
some would say almost heresy,
to challenge Bach so explicitly
on his own turf."
(3) The five Log24 entries
culminating on Pi Day,
March 14, 2006
(4) The following event at the
Harvard University
mathematics department
on March 14, 2006, also
featuring Noam D. Elkies:
"At 3:14 p.m., six contestants began
a pie-eating contest…. Contestants had
exactly three minutes and 14 seconds
to eat as much pie as they could.
'Five, four, pi, three, two, one,'
Elkies counted down as the
contestants shoved the last
mouthful of pie
into their mouths…."
Noam D. Elkies
Comments Off on Monday April 10, 2006
Saturday, April 8, 2006
Saturday April 8, 2006
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
Comments Off on Saturday April 8, 2006
Sunday, February 5, 2006
Sunday February 5, 2006
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:
Charles Williams on
Witchcraft and the Church
Witchcraft and 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.
Comments Off on Sunday February 5, 2006
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
Tuesday January 10, 2006
Ten is a Hen
(continued)
From Nov. 12, 2005:
“Follow the spiritual journey
that is BEE SEASON.“
(continued)
From Nov. 12, 2005:
“Follow the spiritual journey
that is BEE SEASON.“
“‘Tikkun Olam,
the fixing of the world,’
she whispers. ‘I’ve been
gathering up the broken vessels
to make things whole again.'”
From Nov. 14, 2005:
|
Culture Wars
‘Chicken Little’ Lays Golden Egg (Dean Goodman, Reuters) ‘Bee Season’ Anxiety
The mixed bag of limited release preems was highlighted by an excellent response to the concert film Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic. The film recorded a $19,000 plus per engagement average from seven outings for a $130,000 gross. The family drama Bee Season had a comparable gross but on three times as many screens that translated into anxiety about the Richard Gere film’s expansion prospects.
|
Today’s vocabulary lesson:
Click on the word for the definition.
A search on the related adjective “hendiadic”
leads to an insightful discussion of
religion and law
in contemporary Latin America
by Antônio Flávio Pierucci.
For other material on
Latin America and religion
from Robert Stone and
Nythamar Fernandes de Oliveira,
see the Jan. 25, 2005, entry
Diamonds Are Forever.
Related material:
Yesterday’s link for Nixon’s birthday
led to an obituary of a Marxist
writer that concluded as follows:
“In 2004, Mr. Magdoff wrote about his friendship with Che Guevara, one of his revolutionary heroes. At what proved to be their final meeting before Mr. Guevara’s death in 1967, Mr. Magdoff asked what he could do to help Cuba. ‘Keep on educating me,’ was the response.”
For the education of Latin America
I recommend the writings of
Pierucci, Stone, and Oliveira,
but not those of Magdoff.
I recommend the writings of
Pierucci, Stone, and Oliveira,
but not those of Magdoff.
Comments Off on Tuesday January 10, 2006
Thursday, December 15, 2005
Thursday December 15, 2005
The Cinematic
Imagination,
or
“Frida” meets
“Under the Volcano”
A scene from “Frida”
and a scene from the
Day of the Dead festival,
Cuernavaca, 10/30/04
Related material:
For the Man in Black
(Log 24, 9/13/03)
and
For a Man in Black
(Log 24, 11/17/05).
See also the utopia in Robert Graves’s novel, Watch the North Wind Rise— “New Crete, where the ritual murder of the Victim-King makes murder for less sacred ends seem unthinkable”– and the Log24 entry “Magical Thinking” of Pearl Harbor Day, 2005.
Friday, December 9, 2005
Friday December 9, 2005
Fairy Tales
“It’s all in Plato.”
— C. S. Lewis
“It’s all in Plato.”
— C. S. Lewis
Talking Narnia to Your Neighbors
ChristianityToday.com
by Keri Wyatt Kent
“The summer Lindy Lowry was 20,
she rejected the Christian faith
she’d had since childhood–
dismissing it as a fairy tale
that made no sense
in a world full of evil.”
Tales from
The New Yorker:
“Brokeback Mountain” and
“The Chronicles of Narnia.”
by ANTHONY LANE
“This slow and stoic movie, hailed as a gay Western, feels neither gay nor especially Western….”
The Chronicles of Narnia:
The Chronicles of Narnia:
“If the movie has to forgo Lewis’s narrative tone, with its grimly Oxonian blend of the bluff and the twee (‘And now we come to one of the nastiest things in this story’), that is fine by me. And, if there is Deep Magic, as Lewis called it, in his tale, it resides not in the springlike coming of Aslan but in the dreamlike, compacted poetry of Lewis’s initial inspiration—the sight of a faun….”
Concluding Unscientific Postscript
From The Circle is Unbroken,
a web page in memory of
June Carter Cash:
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (“Q”), quoting Socrates–
“By Hera,” says Socrates, “a fair resting-place, full of summer sounds and scents! This clearing, with the agnus castus in high bloom and fragrant, and the stream beneath the tree so gratefully cool to our feet! Judging from the ornaments and statues, I think this spot must be sacred to Acheloüs and the Nymphs.”
See, too, Q’s quoting of Socrates’s prayer to Pan, as well as the cover of the May 19, 2003, New Yorker:
For a discussion of the music that
Pan is playing (today’s site music),
see my entry of Sept. 10, 2002,
“The Sound of Hanging Rock.”
Comments Off on Friday December 9, 2005
Wednesday, December 7, 2005
Wednesday December 7, 2005
Magical Thinking
(continued)
(continued)
1:00:19 EST
The Lion, the Witch
and the Wardrobe
premieres tonight at
the Royal Albert Hall.
Hexagram 19 in the
Cullinane series:
— Katherine Neville, The Eight
|
“What does this have to do with why we’re here?”
“I saw it in a chess book Mordecai showed me. The most ancient chess service ever discovered was found at the palace of King Minos on Crete– the place where the famous Labyrinth was built, named after this sacred axe. The chess service dates to 2000 B.C. It was made of gold and silver and jewels…. And in the center was carved a labrys.” … “But I thought chess wasn’t even invented until six or seven hundred A.D.,” I added. “They always say it came from Persia or India. How could this Minoan chess service be so old?” “Mordecai’s written a lot himself on the history of chess,” said Lily…. “He thinks that chess set in Crete was designed by the same guy who built the Labyrinth– the sculptor Daedalus….” Now things were beginning to click into place…. “Why was this axe carved on the chessboard?” I asked Lily, knowing the answer in my heart before she spoke. “What did Mordecai say was the connection?”…. “That’s what it’s all about,” she said quietly. “To kill the King.” The sacred axe was used to kill the King. The ritual had been the same since the beginning of time. The game of chess was merely a reenactment. Why hadn’t I recognized it before? |
|
“But what does it all mean?” asked Susan when they were somewhat calmer. “It means,” said Aslan, “that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward.” |
Comments Off on Wednesday December 7, 2005
Tuesday, December 6, 2005
Tuesday December 6, 2005
Headline in today's New York Times:
'Year of Magical Thinking'
Headed for Broadway
which suggests…
Heaven, Hell,
and Hollywood
(continued)
"This could be Heaven
or this could be Hell."
— The Eagles, Hotel California
"There are no facts,
there is no truth–
just data to be manipulated."
— Don Henley, The Garden of Allah
Data:
The New York Lottery numbers
on Joan Didion's birthday,
Monday, Dec. 5, 2005, were
Since that day's Log24 entry,
Magical Thinking, interpreted
the previous day's (Sunday's)
NY lottery numbers as a date
and a page number, it seems
appropriate to do a follow-up.
Date 7/29:
See Log24, 7/29/05,
Anatomy of a Death:
Page 439:
See Bartlett's Familiar
Quotations, 1919, p. 439:
A man’s ingress into the world
is naked and bare,
His progress through the world
is trouble and care;
And lastly,
his egress out of the world,
is nobody knows where.
— John Edwin (1749-1790)
Related material:
The Log24 version of
"This Way to the Egress,"
Directions Out,
linked to in yesterday's
Magical Thinking.
Comments Off on Tuesday December 6, 2005
Monday, December 5, 2005
Monday December 5, 2005
The Associated Press on the Kennedy Center honors yesterday:
"Dancer Suzanne Farrell was feted by her former colleague at the New York City Ballet, Jacques d'Amboise. The company, led by George Balanchine, 'was the center of American ballet and she was the diamond in its crown,' d'Amboise said."
As Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, paraphrasing Horace, remarks in his Whitsun, 1939, preface to the new edition of the Oxford Book of English Verse, "tamen usque recurret Apollo."
The New York Lottery yesterday:
The mid-day number was 926;
the evening number was 373.
For the significance of 926,
see 9/26 2002 and
Balanchine's Birthday.
For the significance of 373, see
Art Wars,
May 2, 2003,
White, Geometric, and Eternal,
Dec. 20, 2003,
Directions Out,
April 26, 2004,
Outside the World,
April 26, 2004,
The Last Minute,
Sept. 15, 2004,
and
Diamonds Are Forever,
Jan. 25, 2005.
See also the link
at the end of
yesterday's entry.
For related material that is
more personally linked to
Joan Didion, see
Log24, June 1-16, 2004.
Comments Off on Monday December 5, 2005
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Wednesday November 16, 2005
Images
"Lewis began with a number of haunted images…."
"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."
Related material:
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."
Comments Off on Wednesday November 16, 2005
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Tuesday November 15, 2005
Windmills
Upper part of above picture–
From today’s New York Times,
Seeing Mountains in
Starry Clouds of Creation.
Lower part of above picture–
Pilgrimage to Spider Rock:
“This magical place, according to Navajo Legend, was the home of Spider Woman, who gave the gift of weaving to the Dineh’ People. Today’s Navajos trace the excellence of their finest textiles to this time of legends, when their patron, Changing Woman, met Spider Woman, the first Weaver.”
Vine Deloria Jr.,
Evolution, Creationism,
and Other Modern Myths:
“The continuing struggle between evolutionists and creationists, a hot political topic for the past four decades, took a new turn in the summer of 1999 when the Kansas Board of Education voted to omit the mention of evolution in its newly approved curriculum, setting off outraged cries of foul by the scientific establishment. Don Quixotes on both sides mounted their chargers and went searching for windmills.”
Related material–
A figure from
last night’s entry,
Spider Woman:
From Sunday, the day
of Vine Deloria’s death,
a picture that might be
called Changing Woman:
Kaleidoscope turning…
Shifting pattern
within unalterable structure…
— Roger Zelazny, Eye of Cat
See also the windmill figure
in Time and Eternity
(Log 24, Feb. 1, 2003)
and
a review
of Fritz Leiber’s
The Big Time,
Comments Off on Tuesday November 15, 2005
Monday, November 14, 2005
Monday November 14, 2005
Culture Wars
‘Chicken Little’ Lays Golden Egg
(Dean Goodman, Reuters)
‘Bee Season’ Anxiety
(Leonard Klady, Movie City News):
The mixed bag of limited release preems was highlighted by an excellent response to the concert film Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic. The film recorded a $19,000 plus per engagement average from seven outings for a $130,000 gross. The family drama Bee Season had a comparable gross but on three times as many screens that translated into anxiety about the Richard Gere film’s expansion prospects.
Weekend Estimates
Nov. 11-13, 2005
Nov. 11-13, 2005
| Title |
Gross (average)
|
Theaters
|
Cume
|
| Chicken Little |
32.7 ( 8,950)
|
3658
|
81.5
|
| Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic |
0.13 (19,210)
|
7
|
0.13
|
| Bee Season |
0.13 ( 6,280)
|
21
|
0.13
|
Comments Off on Monday November 14, 2005
Friday, November 11, 2005
Friday November 11, 2005
720 in the Book
(continued)
(continued)
Phil Bray
Transcendence through spelling:
Richard Gere and Flora Cross
as father and daughter
in "Bee Season."
Words Made Flesh: Code, Culture, Imagination—
The earliest known foundation of the Kabbalah is the Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Creation) whose origin and history is unknown….
… letters create things by the virtue of an algorithm…
"From two letters or forms He composed two dwellings; from three, six; from four, twenty-four; from five, one hundred and twenty; from six, seven hundred and twenty…."
— Sefer Yetzirah
— Sefer Yetzirah
Mystic logic, letters whirling in infinite change, is the world of bliss, it is the music of thought, but see that you proceed slowly, and with caution, because your machine may bring you delirium instead of ecstasy. Many of Abulafia's disciples were unable to walk the fine line between contemplation of the names of God and the practice of magic.
"The exercises we've been doing are Abulafia's. His methods are primarily a kind of Jewish yoga, a way to relax. For most, what Abulafia describes as shefa, the influx of the Divine, is a historical curiosity to be discussed and interpreted. Because, while anyone can follow Abulafia's instructions for permutation and chanting, very few can use them to achieve transcendence….
Spelling is a sign, Elly. When you win the national bee, we'll know that you are ready to follow in Abulafia's footsteps. Once you're able to let the letters guide you through any word you are given, you will be ready to receive shefa."
In the quiet of the room, the sound of Eliza and her father breathing is everything.
"Do you mean," Eliza whispers, "that I'll be able to talk to God?"
Related material:
Log24, Sept. 3, 2002,
Diamond Theory notes
of Feb. 4, 1986,
of April 26, 1986, and
of May 26, 1986,
Sacerdotal Jargon
(Log24, Dec. 5, 2002),
and 720 in the Book
(Log24, Epiphany 2004).
Comments Off on Friday November 11, 2005
Sunday, October 9, 2005
Sunday October 9, 2005
Today's Sermon:
Magical Thinking
Magical Thinking
On this date– "In 1936,
the first generator at Boulder
(later Hoover) Dam began
transmitting electricity to Los Angeles."
— Today in History, Associated Press
the first generator at Boulder
(later Hoover) Dam began
transmitting electricity to Los Angeles."
— Today in History, Associated Press
"Brightness doubled
generates radiance."
— Hexagram 30
generates radiance."
— Hexagram 30
"I know what nothing means."
— Maria Wyeth in Play It As It Lays
"Nothing is random."
— Mark Helprin in Winter's Tale
"… She thought about nothing. Her mind was a blank tape, imprinted daily with snatches of things overheard, fragments of dealers' patter, the beginnings of jokes and odd lines of song lyrics. When she finally lay down nights in the purple room she would play back the day's tape, a girl singing into a microphone and a fat man dropping a glass, cards fanned on a table and a dealer's rake in closeup and a woman in slacks crying and the opaque blue eyes of the guard at some baccarat table. A child in the harsh light of a crosswalk on the Strip. A sign on Fremont Street. A light blinking. In her half sleep the point was ten, the jackpot was on eighteen, the only man that could ever reach her was the son of a preacher man, someone was down sixty, someone was up, Daddy wants a popper and she rode a painted pony let the spinning wheel spin.
By the end of a week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began, about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and other. She had the sense that if she could get that in her mind and hold it for even one micro-second she would have what she had come to get. As if she had fever, her skin burned and crackled with a pinpoint sensitivity. She could feel smoke against her skin. She could feel voice waves. She was beginning to feel color, light intensities, and she imagined that she could be put blindfolded in front of the signs at the Thunderbird and the Flamingo and know which was which. 'Maria,' she felt someone whisper one night, but when she turned there was nobody.
She began to feel the pressure of Hoover Dam, there on the desert, began to feel the pressure and pull of the water. When the pressure got great enough she drove out there. All that day she felt the power surging through her own body. All day she was faint with vertigo, sunk in a world where great power grids converged, throbbing lines plunged finally into the shallow canyon below the dam's face, elevators like coffins dropped into the bowels of the earth itself. With a guide and a handful of children Maria walked through the chambers, stared at the turbines in the vast glittering gallery, at the deep still water with the hidden intakes sucking all the while, even as she watched, clung to the railings, leaned out, stood finally on a platform over the pipe that carried the river beneath the dam. The platform quivered. Her ears roared. She wanted to stay in the dam, lie on the great pipe itself, but reticence saved her from asking.
'Just how long have you been here now,' Freddy Chaikin asked when she ran into him in Caesar's. 'You planning on making a year of it? Or what?'"
Related material
The front page of today's
New York Times Book Review
and Log24, July 15, 2004:
|
A quotation that somehow
seems relevant:
O the mind, mind has mountains, |
Comments Off on Sunday October 9, 2005
Thursday, August 11, 2005
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Wednesday June 29, 2005
Meditation for St. Peter’s Day
“Religious activists fool themselves if they believe public displays of the Ten Commandments reflect a more moral and less corrupt nation. One needs only to watch television to discern the level of our depravity.”
Reality TV and The Magic Christian,
by Peter Carlson.
by Peter Carlson.
Comments Off on Wednesday June 29, 2005
Thursday, June 23, 2005
Thursday June 23, 2005
Mathematics and Metaphor
The current (June/July) issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society has two feature articles. The first, on the vulgarizer Martin Gardner, was dealt with here in a June 19 entry, Darkness Visible. The second is related to a letter of André Weil (pdf) that is in turn related to mathematician Barry Mazur’s attempt to rewrite mathematical history and to vulgarize other people’s research by using metaphors drawn, it would seem, from the Weil letter.
A Mathematical Lie conjectures that Mazur’s revising of history was motivated by a desire to dramatize some arcane mathematics, the Taniyama conjecture, that deals with elliptic curves and modular forms, two areas of mathematics that have been known since the nineteenth century to be closely related.
Mazur led author Simon Singh to believe that these two areas of mathematics were, before Taniyama’s conjecture of 1955, completely unrelated —
“Modular forms and elliptic equations live in completely different regions of the mathematical cosmos, and nobody would ever have believed that there was the remotest link between the two subjects.” — Simon Singh, Fermat’s Enigma, 1998 paperback, p. 182
This is false. See Robert P. Langlands, review of Elliptic Curves, by Anthony W. Knapp, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, January 1994.
It now appears that Mazur’s claim was in part motivated by a desire to emulate the great mathematician André Weil’s manner of speaking; Mazur parrots Weil’s “bridge” and “Rosetta stone” metaphors —
From Peter Woit’s weblog, Feb. 10, 2005:
“The focus of Weil’s letter is the analogy between number fields and the field of algebraic functions of a complex variable. He describes his ideas about studying this analogy using a third, intermediate subject, that of function fields over a finite field, which he thinks of as a ‘bridge‘ or ‘Rosetta stone.'”
In “A 1940 Letter of André Weil on Analogy in Mathematics,” (pdf), translated by Martin H. Krieger, Notices of the A.M.S., March 2005, Weil writes that
“The purely algebraic theory of algebraic functions in any arbitrary field of constants is not rich enough so that one might draw useful lessons from it. The ‘classical’ theory (that is, Riemannian) of algebraic functions over the field of constants of the complex numbers is infinitely richer; but on the one hand it is too much so, and in the mass of facts some real analogies become lost; and above all, it is too far from the theory of numbers. One would be totally obstructed if there were not a bridge between the two. And just as God defeats the devil: this bridge exists; it is the theory of the field of algebraic functions over a finite field of constants….
On the other hand, between the function fields and the ‘Riemannian’ fields, the distance is not so large that a patient study would not teach us the art of passing from one to the other, and to profit in the study of the first from knowledge acquired about the second, and of the extremely powerful means offered to us, in the study of the latter, from the integral calculus and the theory of analytic functions. That is not to say that at best all will be easy; but one ends up by learning to see something there, although it is still somewhat confused. Intuition makes much of it; I mean by this the faculty of seeing a connection between things that in appearance are completely different; it does not fail to lead us astray quite often. Be that as it may, my work consists in deciphering a trilingual text {[cf. the Rosetta Stone]}; of each of the three columns I have only disparate fragments; I have some ideas about each of the three languages: but I know as well there are great differences in meaning from one column to another, for which nothing has prepared me in advance. In the several years I have worked at it, I have found little pieces of the dictionary. Sometimes I worked on one column, sometimes under another.”
Here is another statement of the Rosetta-stone metaphor, from Weil’s translator, Martin H. Krieger, in the A.M.S. Notices of November 2004, “Some of What Mathematicians Do” (pdf):
“Weil refers to three columns, in analogy with the Rosetta Stone’s three languages and their arrangement, and the task is to ‘learn to read Riemannian.’ Given an ability to read one column, can you find its translation in the other columns? In the first column are Riemann’s transcendental results and, more generally, work in analysis and geometry. In the second column is algebra, say polynomials with coefficients in the complex numbers or in a finite field. And in the third column is arithmetic or number theory and combinatorial properties.”
For greater clarity, see Armand Borel (pdf) on Weil’s Rosetta stone, where the three columns are referred to as Riemannian (transcendental), Italian (“algebraico-geometric,” over finite fields), and arithmetic (i.e., number-theoretic).
From Fermat’s Enigma, by Simon Singh, Anchor paperback, Sept. 1998, pp. 190-191:
Barry Mazur: “On the one hand you have the elliptic world, and on the other you have the modular world. Both these branches of mathematics had been studied intensively but separately…. Than along comes the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture, which is the grand surmise that there’s a bridge between these two completely different worlds. Mathematicians love to build bridges.”
Simon Singh: “The value of mathematical bridges is enormous. They enable communities of mathematicians who have been living on separate islands to exchange ideas and explore each other’s creations…. The great potential of the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture was that it would connect two islands and allow them to speak to each other for the first time. Barry Mazur thinks of the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture as a translating device similar to the Rosetta stone…. ‘It’s as if you know one language and this Rosetta stone is going to give you an intense understanding of the other language,’ says Mazur. ‘But the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture is a Rosetta stone with a certain magical power.'”
If Mazur, who is scheduled to speak at a conference on Mathematics and Narrative this July, wants more material on stones with magical powers, he might consult The Blue Matrix and The Diamond Archetype.
Comments Off on Thursday June 23, 2005
Wednesday, June 8, 2005
Wednesday June 8, 2005
Kernel of Eternity
Today is the feast day of Saint Gerard Manley Hopkins, “immortal diamond.”
“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being–the reward he seeks–the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”
— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River
“… the stabiliser of an octad preserves the affine space structure on its complement, and (from the construction) induces AGL(4,2) on it. (It induces A8 on the octad, the kernel of this action being the translation group of the affine space.)”
— Peter J. Cameron,
The Geometry of the Mathieu Groups (pdf)
“… donc Dieu existe, réponse!”
— attributed, some say falsely, to Leonhard Euler
Comments Off on Wednesday June 8, 2005
Saturday, May 14, 2005
Saturday May 14, 2005
The Nine
"Nine is a very powerful Nordic number."
— Katherine Neville, author of The Eight,
in The Magic Circle
"To live is to defend a form."
("Leben, das heisst eine Form verteidigen")
— attributed to Hölderlin
In defense of the nine-square grid:
For details on the above picture, see
Translation Plane.
Sunday, March 27, 2005
Sunday March 27, 2005
From
The Mother Ship
The Mother Ship
Camille Paglia, The Magic of Images:
“Young people today are flooded with disconnected images but lack a sympathetic instrument to analyze them as well as a historical frame of reference in which to situate them…. The new generation, raised on TV and the personal computer but deprived of a solid primary education, has become unmoored from the mother ship of culture.”
Sunday, February 6, 2005
Sunday February 6, 2005
The Equation
David Thomson on The Last Tycoon in The Guardian on 1/29/05:
“There’s a passage in the book, early on, where Cecilia’s narration says: ‘You can take Hollywood for granted like I did, or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what we don’t understand. It can be understood, too, but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.’….
That phrase stuck in my head: The Whole Equation was a title, waiting to have its book written. And the book might be all the more intriguing (and difficult to do) because Fitzgerald had never been able to give us the equation itself, a tidy little e=mc2. That equation was as elusive as magic: it was a vision, a power, a passion, a kind of perfection that could change the world.”
David Thomson’s book The Whole Equation was published recently.
Comments Off on Sunday February 6, 2005
Monday, November 22, 2004
Monday November 22, 2004
Flores, Flores Para Los Muertos
See entry of
All Hallows' Eve:
"A memorial Mass will be held on Monday,
November 22, 2004, at the Church of
St. Ignatius Loyola, 980 Park Avenue…."
From Four Quartets:
And the pool was filled
with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light…
Related reading:
From a review at Amazon.com
of All Hallows' Eve, by Charles Williams:
"How many other books do you know in which one of the two main characters is dead, in which the dead and living can communicate almost as easily as we do every day, in which magic is serious and scary? Mainstream books, that is, not Goosebumps, with an introduction by T.S. Eliot, with the whole thing to be understood as at least feasible if not truth. This is unusual. And yet, and yet, the whole thing works."
Comments Off on Monday November 22, 2004
Tuesday, November 9, 2004
Tuesday November 9, 2004
The Nine
(Readings for
Weyl’s birthday)
“The grid is a staircase to the Universal….
We could think about Ad Reinhardt, who,
despite his repeated insistence that
‘Art is art,’
ended up by painting a series of…
nine-square grids in which the motif
that inescapably emerges is
a Greek cross.
Greek Cross
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.”
— Rosalind Krauss,
Meyer Schapiro Professor
of Modern Art and Theory
at Columbia University
(Ph.D., Harvard U., 1969),
in “Grids”
“Nine is a very powerful Nordic number.”
— Katherine Neville, author of The Eight,
in The Magic Circle,
Ballantine paperback,
1999, p. 339
“To live is to defend a form.”
(“Leben, das heisst eine Form verteidigen“)
— attributed to Hölderlin
For details on the above picture,
which deals with properties of the
nine-square grid, see
For more on the defense
of this form,
see the Log24.net entry of
June 5, 2004, A Form,
and the Art Wars entries
for St. Peter’s Day, 2004.
Comments Off on Tuesday November 9, 2004
Friday, November 5, 2004
Friday November 5, 2004
New Journalism 101:
The Rhetorical Question
The Rhetorical Question
Art critic Holland Cotter in today’s New York Times on the work of a contemporary artist:
“Although much of this art is intuitive in origin, an on-the-spot response to materials, little of it can be described as whimsical. Some of it is uninnocently weird: several of the dozens of small, labor-intensive pieces seem to be invaded by a creeping mold, or stained with organic substances, including blood.
Indeed, like Mozart’s opera, the work as a whole eludes conventional categories. Is ‘The Magic Flute’ a musical comedy, a redemptive pageant or a moral tract? Is it darling or dark? Is Mr. Tuttle doing drawing, collage, painting or sculpture? Process Art or Conceptual Art? Or something else? Are the results art about art, or art about everything, including art?”
Who gives a rat’s ass?
Comments Off on Friday November 5, 2004
Wednesday, October 13, 2004
Wednesday October 13, 2004
Show Business
according to Fritz Leiber
(Leiber's "Changewar" is my
favorite mythology.)
From the Changewar story
"No Great Magic" (1963) Part V:
Even little things are
turning out to be great things
and becoming intensely interesting.
Have you ever thought about
the properties of numbers?
— The Maiden
"I've had this idea– it's just a sort of fancy, remember– that if you wanted to time-travel and, well, do things, you could hardly pick a more practical machine than a dressing-room and a sort of stage and half-theater attached, with actors to man it…."
For the remainder of this section
of Leiber's story, see
Related material:
The previous entry,
The Eight, and
Now We See Wherein
Lies the Pleasure.
Comments Off on Wednesday October 13, 2004
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
Wednesday September 22, 2004
Tribute
In memory of Russ Meyer, who "made industrial films for Standard Oil and lumber companies before making his own films," a picture that might aptly (see Pi continued) be titled
.
By the same designer:
Click on picture for details.
Object of game:
Connect the devils
with their tail ends.
Manufacturer:
Click on logo for details.
Related material:
The Crimson Passion
Comments Off on Wednesday September 22, 2004
Monday, September 20, 2004
Monday September 20, 2004
Pi continued:
(see 9/15/04)
Renegade mathematician Max Cohen (Sean Gullette, left) and the leader of the Kabbalah sect, Lenny Meyer (Ben Shenkman) have a chance encounter on a Chinatown street corner.
The Magic Schmuck
"Confucius is said to have received only one inappropriate answer, i.e., hexagram 22, GRACE — a thoroughly aesthetic hexagram. This is reminiscent of the advice given to Socrates by his daemon — 'You ought to make more music' — whereupon Socrates took to playing the flute. Confucius and Socrates compete for first place as far as reasonableness and a pedagogic attitude to life are concerned; but it is unlikely that either of them occupied himself with 'lending grace to the beard on his chin,' as the second line of this hexagram advises. Unfortunately, reason and pedagogy often lack charm and grace, and so the oracle may not have been wrong after all."
— Carl Jung, Foreword to the I Ching
Yesterday, class, in keeping with our morning German lesson, our evening (5:01:22 PM ET) entry was Hexagram 22, Pi (pronounced "bee"). The Chinese term pi may be translated in various ways… As ornament, as adornment, or as in a German web page:
| I-Ching 22 | Pi | Der Schmuck |
The Wilhelm translation of pi is "grace." This suggests we examine yesterday's evening lottery number in the State of Grace, Pennsylvania:
408.
As kabbalists know, there are many ways of interpreting numbers. In keeping with the viewpoint of Ecclesiastes — "time and chance happeneth" — let us interpret this instance of chance as an instance of time… namely, 4/08. Striving for consistency in our meditations, let us examine the lessons for…
4/08 2003 — Death's Dream Kingdom —
and 4/08 2004 — Triple Crown.
From the former:
"When smashing monuments, save the pedestals; they always come in handy."
From the latter:
"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."
In keeping with the above, from
this year's Log24.net
Rosh Hashanah service…
A Minimalist
Pedestal:
|
|
For a poetic interpretation
of this symbol, see
Hexagram 20,
Contemplation (View).
Comments Off on Monday September 20, 2004
Friday, September 17, 2004
Friday September 17, 2004
3:57:09…
Time is a Weapon
In memory of rock star and NRA member Johnny Ramone, who died on Wednesday, Sept. 15:
“You’ve got to ask yourself a question.”
— Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry
“At the end, when the agent pumps Neo full of lead, the agent is using a .357 Magnum. That gun only holds 9 bullets, but the agent shoots 10 shots at Neo. I don’t know where he got that gun.”
— Jesse Baumann,
The Matrix: The Magic Bullet
Manufacturer:
Ta’as Israel Industries,
Ramat Hasharon, Israel
|
Fearful Meditation
“The Max D. Barnes-penned title track, with its stark-reality lyrics, is nothing short of haunting: ‘Time is a weapon, it’s cold and it’s cruel; It knows no religion and plays by no rules; Time has no conscience when it’s all said and done; Like a beast in the jungle that devours its young.’ That’s so good, it hurts! Price’s still-amazing vocals are simply the chilling icing on the cake.” — Lisa Berg, NashvilleCountry.com O fearful meditation! — Shakespeare, Sonnet 65 Clue: click here. This in turn leads to my March 4 entry Fearful Symmetry, which contains the following: “Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery….” — Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game “How strange the change from major to minor….” — Cole Porter, “Every Time We Say Goodbye“ |
Comments Off on Friday September 17, 2004
Wednesday, September 15, 2004
Wednesday September 15, 2004
High Holy
Hexagram
7:11:20 PM
|
|
For a poetic interpretation
of this symbol, see
Hexagram 20,
Contemplation (View).
For a religious interpretation
suited to the High Holy Days,
see the film
.
“The truth is that man’s capacity for symbol-mongering in general and language in particular is so intimately part and parcel of his being human, of his perceiving and knowing, of his very consciousness itself, that it is all but impossible for him to focus on the magic prism through which he sees everything else.”
— Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle
Comments Off on Wednesday September 15, 2004
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
Wednesday August 11, 2004
Battle of Gods and Giants,
Part II:
Wonders of the Invisible World
Yesterday at about 5 PM I added a section titled "Invariants" to the 3:01 PM entry Battle of Gods and Giants. Within this added section was the sentence
"This sort of mathematics illustrates the invisible 'form' or 'idea' behind the visible two-color pattern."
Now, at about 5 AM, I see in today's New York Times a review of a book titled The Invisible Century, by Richard Panek. The reviewer, David Gelernter, says the "invisible" of the title refers to
"science that is done not by studying what you can see…. but by repairing instead to the privacy of your own mind, with the shades drawn and the lights off: the inner sanctum of intellectual history."
The book concerns the research of Einstein and Freud. Gelernter says
"As Mr. Panek usefully notes, Einstein himself first called his work an 'invariant theory,' not a 'relativity theory.' Einstein does not say 'everything is relative,' or anything remotely like it."
The reader who clicks on the word "invariants" in Battle of Gods and Giants will receive the same information.
Gelernter's conclusion:
"The Invisible Century is a complex book about a complex topic. Mr. Panek's own topic is not so much invisibility, it seems to me, as a different kind of visibility, centering on mind-pictures revealed by introspection, which are just as sharp and clear as (for example) the mind-music Beethoven heard when he was deaf.
Inner visibility is a fascinating topic…."
As is synchronicity, a topic in the work of a greater man than Freud– Carl Jung. The above remarks may be viewed as "synchronicity made visible."
All of this was, of course, foreshadowed in my web page "A Mathematician's Aesthetics" of August 2000:
|
C. G. Jung on Archetypes "All the most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes. This is particularly true of religious ideas, but the central concepts of science, philosophy, and ethics are no exception to this rule. In their present form they are variants of archetypal ideas, created by consciously applying and adapting these ideas to reality. For it is the function of consciousness not only to recognize and assimilate the external world through the gateway of the senses, but to translate into visible reality the world within us." — Carl Gustav Jung, "The Structure of the Psyche" (1927), in Collected Works Vol. 8, Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, P. 342 Paul Klee on Visible Reality: "Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible…. My aim is always to get hold of the magic of reality and to transfer this reality into painting– to make the invisible visible through reality. It may sound paradoxical, but it is, in fact, reality which forms the mystery of our existence." — Paul Klee, "Creative Credo" from The Inward Vision: Watercolors, Drawings, Writings. Abrams, not dated; published c. 1958.
Wallace Stevens on
"These forms are visible
— Wallace Stevens, "The Owl in the Sarcophagus," (first publ. 1950) in |
Comments Off on Wednesday August 11, 2004
Monday, July 12, 2004
Monday July 12, 2004
Small World
In memory of
Laurance Rockefeller,
who died yesterday at 94
"J. S. Bach's 'Goldberg Variations' is a self-contained world, immersion in which is transformative….
At the end of Variation 30, Bach writes simply 'Aria da capo.' I have written it out for the convenience of the players. This recurrence of the Aria, after its long journey through thirty variations and especially coming immediately after the exuberant Quodlibet (Variation 30), is magical. It is the same Aria, yet subtly different: transformed."
Comments Off on Monday July 12, 2004
Tuesday, June 29, 2004
Tuesday June 29, 2004
|
When? Going to dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc's auk's egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler. Where?
— Ulysses, conclusion of Ch. 17 |
Part II: Badcoc
A Visual Meditation for
the Feast of St. Peter
For further details on this structure, see
Magic Squares, Finite Planes,
and Points of Inflection
on Elliptic Curves,
by Ezra Brown, and
Visualizing GL(2, p)
by Steven H. Cullinane.
For a more literary approach
to this structure, see
Balanchine's Birthday (Jan. 9, 2003),
Art Theory for Yom Kippur (Oct. 5, 2003),
A Form (May 22, 2004),
Ineluctable (May 27, 2004),
A Form, continued (June 5, 2004),
Parallelisms (June 6, 2004),
Deep Game (June 26, 2004), and
Gameplayers of Zen (June 27, 2004).
To appreciate fully this last entry
on Gameplayers,
one must understand
the concept of "suicide"
in the game of Go
and be reminded
by the fatuous phrase of the
Institute of Contemporary Art
quoted in Gameplayers —
"encompassed by 'nothing' " —
of John 1:5.
Comments Off on Tuesday June 29, 2004
Sunday, June 6, 2004
Sunday June 6, 2004
Parallelisms
“I confess I do not believe in time.
I like to fold my magic carpet,
after use, in such a way
as to superimpose
one part of the pattern
upon another.”
“I confess I do not believe in time.
I like to fold my magic carpet,
after use, in such a way
as to superimpose
one part of the pattern
upon another.”
From a review of On the Composition of Images, Signs & Ideas, by Giordano Bruno:
|
Proteus in the House of Mnemosyne (which is the fifth chapter of the Third Book) relies entirely on familiarity with Vergil’s Aeneid (even when the text shifts from verse to prose). The statement, “Proteus is, absolutely, that one and the same subject matter which is transformable into all images and resemblances, by means of which we can immediately and continually constitute order, resume and explain everything,” reads less clear than the immediate analogy, “Just as from one and the same wax we awaken all shapes and images of sensate things, which become thereafter the signs of all things that are intelligible.” |
From an interview with Vladimir Nabokov published in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, vol. VIII, no. 2, Spring 1967:
|
When I was your student, you never mentioned the Homeric parallels in discussing Joyce’s Ulysses But you did supply “special information” in introducing many of the masterpieces: a map of Dublin for Ulysses…. Would you be able to suggest some equivalent for your own readers? Joyce himself very soon realized with dismay that the harping on those essentially easy and vulgar “Homeric parallelisms” would only distract one’s attention from the real beauty of his book. He soon dropped these pretentious chapter titles which already were “explaining” the book to non-readers. In my lectures I tried to give factual data only. A map of three country estates with a winding river and a figure of the butterfly Parnassius mnemosyne for a cartographic cherub will be the endpaper in my revised edition of Speak, Memory. |
Comments Off on Sunday June 6, 2004
Tuesday, April 20, 2004
Tuesday April 20, 2004
Rhetorical Question
Yesterday's Cartesian theatre continues….
Robert Osserman, a professor emeritus of mathematics at Stanford University, is special-projects director at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, in Berkeley, Calif.
Osserman at aldaily.com today:
"The past decade has been an exciting one in the world of mathematics and a fabulous one (in the literal sense) for mathematicians, who saw themselves transformed from the frogs of fairy tales — regarded with a who-would-want-to-kiss-that aversion, when they were noticed at all — into fascinating royalty, portrayed on stage and screen….
Who bestowed the magic kiss on the mathematical frog?"
Answer:
William Randolph Hearst III.
"Trained as a mathematician at Harvard, he now likes to hang out with Ken Ribet and the other gurus at the University of California, Berkeley's prestigious Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. Two years ago, he moderated a panel of math professors discussing Princeton professor Andrew Wiles's historic proof of Fermat's Last Theorem."
See also
Hearst Gift Spurs Math Center Expansion and
Review of Rational Points on Elliptic Curves by Joseph H. Silverman and John T. Tate (pdf), Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.) 30 (1994), no. 2, 248–252,
by William Randolph Hearst III
and Kenneth A. Ribet.
"And that's the secret of frog kissin', and you can do it too if you'll just listen.
Just slow down, turn around, bend down and kiss you a frog! Ribet! Ribet!"
Comments Off on Tuesday April 20, 2004
Thursday, April 8, 2004
Thursday April 8, 2004
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.”
________________
From Hans Reichenbach‘s
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
Comments Off on Thursday April 8, 2004