(See Nietzsche references in this journal.)
|
March 24, 2023 08:00 PM SANTA CLARA, Calif. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — Intel and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation announced today that company co-founder Gordon Moore has passed away at the age of 94. The foundation reported he died peacefully on Friday, March 24, 2023, surrounded by family at his home in Hawaii. (Moore link added.) |
Related surrealistic robot drama from The New York Times —
Bad Cinderella and the Orgy Dome Cleanup Crew
See also Shangri-La and “At the Back of the North Wind .”
Update from the Times —
“Some things that happen for the first time….” — Song lyric
The previous post’s search for Turing + Dyson yielded a
quotation from Kierkegaard on possibility and necessity.
Further details —
See also . . .
Jim Holt in tomorrow’s New York Times—
“Allow me to quote Nietzsche
(although I know that will be considered
by some to be in bad taste):
‘As the circle of science grows larger,
it touches paradox at more places.'”
A possible source for this misquotation—
Harvard University Press—
A more accurate quotation—
Anyone who has ever experienced the pleasure of Socratic insight and felt how, spreading in ever-widening circles, it seeks to embrace the whole world of appearances, will never again find any stimulus toward existence more violent than the craving to complete this conquest and to weave the net impenetrably tight. To one who feels that way, the Platonic Socrates will appear as the teacher of an altogether new form of “Greek cheerfulness” and blissful affirmation of existence that seeks to discharge itself in actions— most often in maieutic and educational influences on noble youths, with a view to eventually producing a genius.
But science, spurred by its powerful illusion, speeds irresistibly towards its limits where its optimism, concealed in the essence of logic, suffers shipwreck. For the periphery of the circle of science has an infinite number of points; and while there is no telling how this circle could ever be surveyed completely, noble and gifted men nevertheless reach, e’er half their time and inevitably, such boundary points on the periphery from which one gazes into what defies illumination. When they see to their horror how logic coils up at these boundaries and finally bites its own tail— suddenly the new form of insight breaks through, tragic insight which, merely to be endured, needs art as a protection and remedy.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy , translated by Walter Kaufmann (Modern Library)
|
Harold Bloom "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 Valéry'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:
Valéry'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 Valéry'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.'" |
"…at the still point, there the dance is…." — T. S. Eliot
St. Bridget's Still Point … June 25, 2020 —
Roots!
More recently . . .
A Nietzschean Transvaluation —
↑ "Story continues below advertisement" . . .
What if the story is the advertisement?
This journal on the above dies natalis :
* See also the previous post, "Language Drill."
"Nietzsche in Basel studied the deep pool
Of these discolorations, mastering
The moving and the moving of their forms
In the much-mottled motion of blank time."
— Wallace Stevens, "Description Without Place"
Also in Basel, a mathematics professor contemplated the Lo Shu —
An essay from . . .
The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design Wittgenstein’s Architecture The universe of texts can be seen as a landscape. In it one can make out mountains and valleys, rivers and lakes, castles, farmyards and inner-city slums. On the horizon of the scene visualized in this way, the Bible and Homer appear as gigantic ice-covered mountains. The vast, tranquil lake of Aristotle’s texts, where fishermen idly throw their nets and philologists row their boats, occupies a part of the valley bottom. There, the tumbling waterfall of Nietzsche is captured by the broad river of modern pragmatism. Towering above everything, the Gothic cathedral of St Thomas Aquinas’s Summae dominates the cathedral square of the city, in which the roofs and gables of Baroque speculations jostle one another. In the suburbs of this city, one catches sight of the Romantic, Realist and Modernist housing-blocks and factories of more recent litera¬ ture; somewhat apart from all these stands a small, apparently insignificant house resembling scaffolding more than a finished building: Wittgenstein’s building. This little house is called the Tractatus. This name isn’t the product of a one-track mind. For when one enters the house, one notices immediately that this is not a place that has lost track of things. Quite the opposite: It is a place of mirror- images. The house stands on six foundation pillars which support one another by means of cross-beams organized in a hierarchy. In the middle, however, there rises a seventh pillar whose function it is to cut through the building and free it from the ground. So the house with all its corners, angles and joints is protected, armoured and impregnable. And yet, and for that very reason, it is threatened with collapse and disappearance without trace – condemned in advance and from the outset. The building is set out: It consists of propositions. Every proposition presupposes all the preceding ones and is itself the 76 presupposition of all the following propositions. Proposition by proposition, anyone who enters progresses through the prescribed rooms, and his step is supported by consistencies. Suddenly, with one proposition, one single proposition, the ground gives way beneath his feet. He falls head first into the abyss. Wittgenstein’s house is situated in a suburb of that city whose cathedral square is dominated by the towers of Thomas Aquinas’s cathedral. The small, modest pillars of Wittgenstein’s house support one another according to the same logico- philosophical method as the pillars of the cathedral support one another. But there appears to be a world of difference between the cathedral and the little house: The cathedral is a ship pointing in the direction of heaven, and the little house is a trap-door pointing in the direction of a bottomless abyss. But be careful: May Thomas Aquinas not have been right in saying after his revelation that everything he had written before was like straw? May not the heaven above the cathedral be the same black hole as the abyss beneath the little house? May not Wittgenstein’s little house be the cathedral of today? And those mirrors whose images simultaneously mirror one another, may they not be our equivalent of stained-glass windows? The landscape portrayed in this essay, it goes without saying, is a metaphor. Is it possible to identify it as Vienna? And is it possible for anyone entering Wittgenstein’s little house in that unlikely place to make out a hint of the unsayable? What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence. 77 |
Click the above image to enlarge.
See as well . . .
Update of 2:40 AM May 7, 2022 —
Flusser's seven "pillars" appear to be the main sections of the Tractatus
— numbered 1 through 7, with many intermediate numbered passages.
For a more geometric meditation on "the shape of things," see other
posts tagged "Shape Constant" in this journal.
*Byron Gogol is a tech magnate in the HBO series "Made for Love."
The "branding" part of this post's title and tag —
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The scene went from bad to worse. The camerlengo’s torn cassock, having been only laid over his chest by Chartrand, began to slip lower. For a moment, Langdon thought the garment might hold, but that moment passed. The cassock let go, sliding off his shoulders down around his waist. The gasp that went up from the crowd seemed to travel around the globe and back in an instant. Cameras rolled, flashbulbs exploded. On media screens everywhere, the image of the camerlengo’s branded chest was projected, towering and in grisly detail. Some screens were even freezing the image and rotating it 180 degrees. The ultimate Illuminati victory. Langdon stared at the brand on the screens. Although it was the imprint of the square brand he had held earlier, the symbol now made sense. Perfect sense. The marking’s awesome power hit Langdon like a train. Orientation. Langdon had forgotten the first rule of symbology. When is a square not a square? He had also forgotten that iron brands, just like rubber stamps, never looked like their imprints. They were in reverse. Langdon had been looking at the brand’s negative ! As the chaos grew, an old Illuminati quote echoed with new meaning: ‘A flawless diamond, born of the ancient elements with such perfection that all those who saw it could only stare in wonder.’ Langdon knew now the myth was true. Earth, Air, Fire, Water. The Illuminati Diamond. — Dan Brown, Angels & Demons |
I prefer Modal Nietzsche.
A scene for Nietzsche's Sils Maria —
A midrash for Freud, from Kate Beckinsale tonight —
Risin' Up to the Challenge of Her Rival
From thinking-machines.online/ —
“Online lecture series on artificial intelligence, summer 2021. . . .
The series will be jointly hosted by
the Research Institute for the History of Science and Technology, Deutsches Museum,
as part of their traditional »Montagskolloquium«,
the STS group at the European New School of Digital Studies, EUV,
Munich Center for Technology in Society (MCTS), TUM, and
the Philosophy of Computing group, ICFO, Warsaw University of Technology.”
From thinking-machines.online/dick/ —
“… it is urgent to unpack what is at stake….”
See as well the phrase “possible, necessary, and urgent”
in the April 10 post Bond.
And then there is Foreigner . . . .
 |
(For the “possible, necessary” part, see Modal Nietzsche.)
The previous post, on a Joyce symposium in
Utrecht on June 15-20, 2014, suggests a review
of this journal in June 2014. From June 21
of that year —
"Without the possibility that
an origin can be lost, forgotten,
or alienated into what springs
forth from it, an origin could
not be an origin. The possibility
of inscription is thus a necessary
possibility, one that must always
be possible."
— Page 157 of The Tain of the Mirror:
Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection ,
by Rodolphe Gasché, Harvard U. Press, 1986
Related art suggested by the above modal logic —
“This is not the Hartshorne you’re looking for.”
“Reality as a Social Process (1953) developed the ideas
that becoming, or process, is fundamental throughout
reality, and that all the things that become are interrelated.”
— From American National Biography
Related material —
The New York Times obituary of Madeline Faith Kripke
and Nietzsche on “becoming, or process.”
"This interplay of necessity and contingency
produces our anxious— and highly pleasurable—
speculation about the future path of the story."
— Michel Chaouli in "How Interactive Can Fiction Be?"
(Critical Inquiry 31, Spring 2005, page 613.)
See also . . .
Continuing previous Modal Diamond Box posts:
(Continued from the previous post.)
|
In-Between "Spacing" and the "Chôra " (Ch. 2 in Henk Oosterling & Ewa Plonowska Ziarek (Eds.), Intermedialities: Philosophy, Arts, Politics , Lexington Books, October 14, 2010) "The term 'spacing' ('espacement ') is absolutely central to Derrida's entire corpus, where it is indissociable from those of différance (characterized, in the text from 1968 bearing this name, as '[at once] spacing [and] temporizing' 1), writing (of which 'spacing' is said to be 'the fundamental property' 2) and deconstruction (with one of Derrida's last major texts, Le Toucher: Jean-Luc Nancy , specifying 'spacing ' to be 'the first word of any deconstruction' 3)." 1 Jacques Derrida, “La Différance,” in Marges – de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), p. 14. Henceforth cited as D . 2 Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” trans. A. Bass, in Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 217. Henceforth cited as FSW . 3 Jacques Derrida, Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 2000), p. 207. . . . . "… a particularly interesting point is made in this respect by the French philosopher, Michel Haar. After remarking that the force Derrida attributes to différance consists simply of the series of its effects, and is, for this reason, 'an indefinite process of substitutions or permutations,' Haar specifies that, for this process to be something other than a simple 'actualisation' lacking any real power of effectivity, it would need “a soubassement porteur ' – let’s say a 'conducting underlay' or 'conducting medium' which would not, however, be an absolute base, nor an 'origin' or 'cause.' If then, as Haar concludes, différance and spacing show themselves to belong to 'a pure Apollonism' 'haunted by the groundless ground,' which they lack and deprive themselves of,16 we can better understand both the threat posed by the 'figures' of space and the mother in the Timaeus and, as a result, Derrida’s insistent attempts to disqualify them. So great, it would seem, is the menace to différance that Derrida must, in a 'properly' apotropaic gesture, ward off these 'figures' of an archaic, chthonic, spatial matrix in any and all ways possible…." 16 Michel Haar, “Le jeu de Nietzsche dans Derrida,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’Etranger 2 (1990): 207-227. . . . . … "The conclusion to be drawn from Democritus' conception of rhuthmos , as well as from Plato's conception of the chôra , is not, therefore, as Derrida would have it, that a differential field understood as an originary site of inscription would 'produce' the spatiality of space but, on the contrary, that 'differentiation in general' depends upon a certain 'spatial milieu' – what Haar would name a 'groundless ground' – revealed as such to be an 'in-between' more 'originary' than the play of differences it in-forms. As such, this conclusion obviously extends beyond Derrida's conception of 'spacing,' encompassing contemporary philosophy's continual privileging of temporization in its elaboration of a pre-ontological 'opening' – or, shall we say, 'in-between.' |
For permutations and a possible "groundless ground," see
the eightfold cube and group actions both on a set of eight
building blocks arranged in a cube (a "conducting base") and
on the set of seven natural interstices (espacements ) between
the blocks. Such group actions provide an elementary picture of
the isomorphism between the groups PSL(2,7) (acting on the
eight blocks) and GL(3,2) (acting on the seven interstices).
Espacements
For the Church of Synchronology —
See also, from the reported publication date of the above book
Intermedialities , the Log24 post Synchronicity.
"Christmas in February!" — SNL cold open, Feb. 9
Detail, online New York Times front page,
Saint Bridget's Day (Feb. 1), 2013 —
See also Nietzsche and modal logic.
"The walls in the back of the room show geometric shapes
that remind us of the logos on a space shuttle. "
— Web page on an Oslo art installation by Josefine Lyche.
See also Subway Art posts.
The translation above was obtained via Google.
The Norwegian original —
"På veggene bakerst i rommer vises geometriske former
som kan minne om logoene på en romferge."
Related logos — Modal Diamond Box in this journal:
Logos for Philosophers
(Suggested by Modal Logic) —
Suggested by a Diamond Sutra webpage, by a recent Log24 post . . .
Logos for Philosophers
(Suggested by Modal Logic) —
. . . and by the Google Play Store logo —
For further details, see . . .
"Denn die Welt braucht ewig die Wahrheit,
also braucht sie ewig Heraklit:
obschon er ihrer nicht bedarf.
Was geht ihn sein Ruhm an?
Der Ruhm bei »immer fortfließenden Sterblichen!«,
wie er höhnisch ausruft.
Sein Ruhm geht die Menschen etwas an, nicht ihn,
die Unsterblichkeit der Menschheit braucht ihn,
nicht er die Unsterblichkeit des Menschen Heraklit.
Das, was er schaute, die Lehre vom Gesetz im Werden
und vom Spiel in der Notwendigkeit , muß von jetzt
ab ewig geschaut werden: er hat von diesem größten
Schauspiel den Vorhang aufgezogen."
Logos for Philosophers
(Suggested by Modal Logic) —
From University of Chicago Press in 1984:
"Drawing on Hegel, Nietzsche, Derrida,
and others, Mark Taylor extends—and
goes well beyond—pioneering efforts. . . . "
—G. Douglas Atkins,
Philosophy and Literature
Update at noon on May 16 —
"Follow the Blood Arroyo to the place
where the snake lays its eggs."
— Westworld, Season 1, Episode 2,
air date October 9, 2016
This suggests a review of Derrida + Serpent
in this journal.
Suggested by the previous post, The Crimson Abyss —
“Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei
zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst,
blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.”
“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself
does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss,
the abyss also gazes into you.”
— Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil , Aphorism 146
From the Internet Abyss on Red October Day, October 25, 2010 —
An image reproduced in this journal on that same day —
From the New York Times philosophy column "The Stone"
yesterday morning —
"Our knowledge of the universe and ourselves expands
like a ripple surrounding a pebble dropped in a pool.
As we move away from the center of the spreading circle,
its area, representing our secure knowledge, grows.
But so does its circumference, representing the border
where knowledge blurs into uncertainty and speculation,
and methodological confusion returns. Philosophy patrols
the border, trying to understand how we got there and to
conceptualize our next move. Its job is unending."
— Scott Soames, "Philosophy's True Home"
Related ripples —
From the previous Log24 post:
From a passage by Nietzsche quoted here on June 9, 2012:
For Soames's "unending" job of philosophy and Nietzsche's
"maieutic and educational influences on noble youths,"
consult the lyrics played over the end credits of "Monster" —
"Oh, the movie never ends
It goes on, and on, and on, and on"
"Bostrom has a reinvented man’s sense of lost time.
An only child, he grew up—as Niklas Boström—in
Helsingborg, on the southern coast of Sweden.
Like many exceptionally bright children, he hated
school, and as a teen-ager he developed a listless,
romantic persona. In 1989, he wandered into a library
and stumbled onto an anthology of nineteenth-century
German philosophy, containing works by Nietzsche
and Schopenhauer. He read it in a nearby forest, in
a clearing that he often visited to think and to write
poetry, and experienced a euphoric insight into the
possibilities of learning and achievement. 'It’s hard to
convey in words what that was like,' Bostrom told me…."
— Raffi Khatchadourian
"Only in the dance do I know how to tell
the parable of the highest things."
— Nietzsche
Nian Hu in The Harvard Crimson this morning, Oct. 16:
"Hey Harvard, it’s Friday and it’s the weekend again–
though sadly, not another three-day one. On this day
in 1844, Friedrich Nietzsche was born. Remember
his wise words 'That which does not kill us, makes us
stronger' when prepping for midterms this weekend."
A fact check shows that Nietzsche was born yesterday .
A source check shows that the Nietzsche quote is from a book
with alternative title "How to Philosophize with a Hammer."
Click on the image below for related materal.
"Visibilities are not forms of objects, nor even forms
that would show up under light, but rather forms of
luminosity which are created by the light itself and
allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash, sparkle
or shimmer."
— Deleuze, Foucault
Clap if you believe in Plotnitsky .
From his "Teaching" page —
| Capitalism and Paranoia, Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Foucault, Deleuze, and Modernist Novel. The course offers a comprehensive examination of the works of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, and of the relationships between their ideas and the culture of modernity and, then, postmodernity, as the culture of capitalism. The course also considers, through the optics of Foucault's and Deleuze's work, how this culture is reflected in modernist and postmodernist novels of the twentieth century, and in the genre of the novel itself, which has been the dominant and indeed defining literary genre of this culture, from early to late capitalism. While Foucault's and Deleuze's work may be seen as a radical philosophical critique of modernity and capitalism by the philosophical means, the novel enacts an analogous and often equally radical literary critique. The works to be discussed include selections from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud; Foucault's The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish, History of Sexuality, vol.1, and selected essays; and substantive selections from such works by Deleuze (and Deleuze and Guattari) as Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus, and Foucault, as well as several shorter essays. Among the works of fiction to be considered are Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Kafka's The Trial; Woolf's Orlando; and Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. |
The title is a phrase from yesterday's post.
An example of harrowing cuteness:
Charlize Theron in "Young Adult" (2011) —
Related material for older adults: Ravenna and Nietzsche.
Yesterday's 11 AM post was a requiem for a brutalist architect.
Today's LA Times has a related obituary:
"Architectural historian Alan Hess, who has written several books on
Mid-Century Modern design, said Meyer didn't have a signature style,
'which is one reason he is not as well-known as some other architects
of the period. But whatever style he was working in, he brought a real
sense of quality to his buildings.'
A notable example is another bank building, at South Beverly Drive
and Pico Boulevard, with massive concrete columns, a hallmark of
the New Brutalism style. 'This is a really good example of it,' Hess said."
— David Colker, 5:43 PM LA time, Aug. 28, 2014
A related search, suggested by this morning's post Source of the Finite:
(Click to enlarge.)
"Die Unendlichkeit ist die uranfängliche Tatsache: es wäre nur
zu erklären, woher das Endliche stamme…."
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Das Philosophenbuch/Le livre du philosophe
(Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1969), fragment 120, p. 118
Cited as above, and translated as "Infinity is the original fact;
what has to be explained is the source of the finite…." in
The Production of Space , by Henri Lefebvre. (Oxford: Blackwell,
1991 (1974)), p. 181.
This quotation was suggested by the Bauhaus-related phrase
"the laws of cubical space" (see yesterday's Schau der Gestalt )
and by the laws of cubical space discussed in the webpage
Cube Space, 1984-2003.
For a less rigorous approach to space at the Harvard Graduate
School of Design, see earlier references to Lefebvre in this journal.
This journal on the morning of January 27, 2010,
the day of J. D. Salinger’s death, had a post on
Nietzsche and Heraclitus titled “To Apollo.”
Related material:
“… the wind was noisy the way it is in spooky movies
on the night the old slob with the will gets murdered.”
— From the opening sentence of the first Holden Caulfield
story, published in the Collier’s of December 22, 1945
See also Peter Matthiessen on Zen, Salinger and Vedanta,
and Heraclitus in this journal. Some background—
A quotation from Nietzsche…
(Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden (KSA).
Herausgegeben von Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari.
Berlin: De Gruyter, 1980):
“Nietzsche wrote:
‘Seeing the world as a divine game and beyond good and evil:
in this both the Vedanta and Heraclitus are my predecessors.'”
— KSA vol. 11, page 26, as quoted by André van der Braak
in a chapter from his 2011 book Nietzsche and Zen
(Darin, dass die Welt ein göttliches Spiel sei
und jenseits von Gut und Böse —
habe ich die Vedanta-Philosophie
und Heraklit zum Vorgänger.)
"In August 1884, he wrote to Resa von Schirnhofer:
'Here one can live well, in this strong, bright atmosphere,
here where nature is amazingly mild and solemn
and mysterious all at once— in fact, there is no place
that I like better than Sils-Maria.'"
For more about Resa, see another weblog's post
of April 30, 2013.
A remark on Nietzsche from the epigraph of that weblog:
"His life's work was devoted to finding one's 'style'
within the chaos of existence. The trick, obviously,
is not to lose your mind in the process."
A remark from this weblog on the above date —
Walpurgisnacht 2013 —
Finite projective geometry explains
the surprising symmetry properties
of some simple graphic designs—
found, for instance, in quilts.
The story thus summarized is perhaps not
destined for movie greatness.
As opposed to, say, Chloe Grace Moretz —
Remarks on Wallace Stevens's poem "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction"
from Michael Bryson—
|
The question of the eighth canto, "What am I to believe?", leads the way back from the heightened mysticism of the previous cantos toward a renewed consideration of the particular, the immanent, the local. Men and birds are considered in their activities, in their "Mere repetitions," and these repetitions (as well the repeating figures, the men and birds themselves) are each considered as "A thing final in itself and, therefore, good: / One of the vast repetitions final in / Themselves and, therefore, good". The poem comes to a Nietzschean affirmation of recurrence with its "merely going round is a final good," and its suggestion that the "man-hero" is "he that of repetition is most master". |
Or the woman-hero…
From a Log24 post on June 1, 2004—
“A tongue-in-cheek comment by programmers is worth thinking about: ‘Sometimes you have a programming problem and it seems like the best solution is to use regular expressions; now you have two problems.’ Regular expressions are amazingly powerful and deeply expressive. That is the very reason writing them is just as error-prone as writing any other complex programming code.”
Happy birthday to the late Willard Van Orman Quine.
Lee Marvin in the 1983 film Gorky Park
For related material, see yesterday's post on Nietzsche's
Birth of Tragedy and a May 27, 2010, post— Masks .
The link to the Masks post was suggested by four things:
* The title is in memory of business writer Mike Hammer.
The Dreidel Is Cast
The Nietzschean phrase "ruling and Caesarian spirits" occurred in yesterday morning's post "Novel Ending."
That post was followed yesterday morning by a post marking, instead, a beginning— that of Hanukkah 2010. That Jewish holiday, whose name means "dedication," commemorates the (re)dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem in 165 BC.
The holiday is celebrated with, among other things, the Jewish version of a die— the dreidel . Note the similarity of the dreidel to an illustration of The Stone* on the cover of the 2001 Eerdmans edition of Charles Williams's 1931 novel Many Dimensions—
For mathematics related to the dreidel , see Ivars Peterson's column on this date fourteen years ago.
For mathematics related (if only poetically) to The Stone , see "Solomon's Cube" in this journal.
Here is the opening of Many Dimensions—
For a fanciful linkage of the dreidel 's concept of chance to The Stone 's concept of invariant law, note that the New York Lottery yesterday evening (the beginning of Hanukkah) was 840. See also the number 840 in the final post (July 20, 2002) of the "Solomon's Cube" search.
Some further holiday meditations on a beginning—
Today, on the first full day of Hanukkah, we may or may not choose to mark another beginning— that of George Frederick James Temple, who was born in London on this date in 1901. Temple, a mathematician, was President of the London Mathematical Society in 1951-1953. From his MacTutor biography—
"In 1981 (at the age of 80) he published a book on the history of mathematics. This book 100 years of mathematics (1981) took him ten years to write and deals with, in his own words:-
those branches of mathematics in which I had been personally involved.
He declared that it was his last mathematics book, and entered the Benedictine Order as a monk. He was ordained in 1983 and entered Quarr Abbey on the Isle of Wight. However he could not stop doing mathematics and when he died he left a manuscript on the foundations of mathematics. He claims:-
The purpose of this investigation is to carry out the primary part of Hilbert's programme, i.e. to establish the consistency of set theory, abstract arithmetic and propositional logic and the method used is to construct a new and fundamental theory from which these theories can be deduced."
For a brief review of Temple's last work, see the note by Martin Hyland in "Fundamental Mathematical Theories," by George Temple, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, A, Vol. 354, No. 1714 (Aug. 15, 1996), pp. 1941-1967.
The following remarks by Hyland are of more general interest—
"… one might crudely distinguish between philosophical and mathematical motivation. In the first case one tries to convince with a telling conceptual story; in the second one relies more on the elegance of some emergent mathematical structure. If there is a tradition in logic it favours the former, but I have a sneaking affection for the latter. Of course the distinction is not so clear cut. Elegant mathematics will of itself tell a tale, and one with the merit of simplicity. This may carry philosophical weight. But that cannot be guaranteed: in the end one cannot escape the need to form a judgement of significance."
— J. M. E. Hyland. "Proof Theory in the Abstract." (pdf)
Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 114, 2002, 43-78.
Here Hyland appears to be discussing semantic ("philosophical," or conceptual) and syntactic ("mathematical," or structural) approaches to proof theory. Some other remarks along these lines, from the late Gian-Carlo Rota—
See also "Galois Connections" at alpheccar.org and "The Galois Connection Between Syntax and Semantics" at logicmatters.net.
* Williams's novel says the letters of The Stone are those of the Tetragrammaton— i.e., Yod, He, Vau, He (cf. p. 26 of the 2001 Eerdmans edition). But the letters on the 2001 edition's cover Stone include the three-pronged letter Shin , also found on the dreidel . What esoteric religious meaning is implied by this, I do not know.
November was National Novel Writing Month.
Yesterday, at the end of that month, the New York Lottery numbers were—
Related material—
Wagner star Peter Hofmann died yesterday, November 30. The above obituary,
together with the NY Lottery numbers for the end of November and
the remarks on Nietzsche in this journal Sunday morning, suggest
the following readings from Nietzsche's The Will to Power—
Introduction (for National Novel Writing Month)—
"He [Nietzsche's "great man"] would rather lie than tell the truth,
because lying requires more spirit and will."
Details (according to the lottery numbers)—
For deeper background, see the life of the Will to Power translator, Anthony Ludovici.
A counterbalance to this morning's New York Times story (see previous post) on a leftist Columbia University seminar might be C.S. Lewis's famous quote "It's all in Plato." Unfortunately, a search for discussions of this quote yields, as the top result, a typically shoddy Christian polemic.
From a Christian professor at Seattle Pacific University—
"Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) can serve us well as a negative example. Nietzsche's 'new morality' was 'mere innovation,' according to [C.S.] Lewis [Christian Reflections ]. Nietzsche announced through Zarathustra (and numerous other ways) the relativity of all values and moralities, saying that each people had adhered to a different scheme of values worked out solely in connection with local conditions. 'Nothing is true, everything is permitted,' states Nietzsche, quoting one of Dostoevsky's characters."
No source is given for either the Nietzsche quote or the alleged Dostoevky quote.
This is from a web page titled "In Defense of the Permanent Things." The Christian professor is, according to a far better scholar, permanently wrong. See Note 8 on pages 586-587 of Walter Kaufmann's Basic Writings of Nietzsche (Random House, November 28, 2000).
One hopes that a more capable scholar, such as Lewis himself* was, might at some point attack the Columbia University leftist nonsense— and Nietzsche— by quoting a more damning passage, such as
" 'Everything is false! Everything is permitted!' "
(from Kaufmann's edition of The Will to Power , Random House, 1968, page 326)
This version of the "Everything is permitted" quote is much more directly related to Nietzsche's relativism, as seen in this image of Kaufmann's edition—
* Or Steven Michels of Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, CT.
See his "Nietzsche, Nihilism, and the Virtue of Nature"— in particular, note 29.
… twó flocks, twó folds—black, white; ' right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind
But thése two; wáre of a wórld where bút these ' twó tell, each off the óther….
— "Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves," by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Related material:
Max Black — "Beginners are taught that a set having three members is a single thing, wholly constituted by its members but distinct from them. After this, the theological doctrine of the Trinity as 'three in one' should be child's play." ("The Elusiveness of Sets," Review of Metaphysics, June 1971, p. 615– as quoted by Bill Vallicella)
Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XXI —
Gibbon, discussing the theology of the Trinity, defines perichoresis as
“… the internal connection and spiritual penetration which indissolubly unites the divine persons59 ….
59 … The
or ‘circumincessio,’ is perhaps the deepest and darkest corner of the whole theological abyss.”
”Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, section 146, translated by Walter Kaufmann
William Lubtchansky, a cinematographer, was born on October 26, 1937, and died on May 4, 2010.
Yesterday's post included an illustration from this journal on the date of his death.
Here is a Log24 entry from last year on the date of his birth—
| Monday, October 26, 2009 The Keys Enigma
Related material: |
Clicking on the Shift Lock key leads to the following page—
—The Philosopher's Gaze,
by David Michael Levin,
University of California Press, 1999
Related images—
Detail from May 4 image:
Holocaust Museum, Washington, DC:
(http://www.scrapbookpages.com/USHMM/Exterior.html)
See also Lubtchansky's Duelle and
Art Wars for Trotsky's Birthday, 2003.
Sybil on the Beach
"I was waiting for you," said the young man. "What's new?"
"What?" said Sybil.
"What's new? What's on the program?"
Yesterday's post may, if one likes, be regarded
as a nod to Dionysus, god of tragedy.
Here is a complementary passage:
Related material:
Jung and the Imago Dei
A Google search for "Das Scheinen," a very rough translation into Heidegger's German of "The Shining," leads to a song. A search for the English version of the song leads to a site with a sidebar advertising Pearl Jam's new (Sept. 20) album "Backspacer."
Happy birthday,
Stephen King.
Background:
Yesterday's entries
and the plot of
L'Engle's classic
A Wrinkle in Time.
(See this journal's entries
for March 2008.)
The Pearl Jam album cover art
is of particular interest in light
of King's story "Apt Pupil" and
of Katherine Neville's remark
"Nine is a very powerful
Nordic number."
Those who prefer more sophisticated
aesthetic theory may click on the
following keys:
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.
From the Curriculum Vitae
of Patrick McGee:
“Theory and the Common
from Marx to Badiou
(Palgrave 2009, scheduled for
March 31 publication)”
Thanks for the warning.
From the publisher:
About the AuthorPatrick McGee is McElveen Professor of English at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge.
Table of ContentsRelated CategoriesFound in: Cultural Theory, Literary Theory & Criticism, Ethics |
“I would not know what the spirit
of a philosopher might wish more
to be than a good dancer.
For the dance is his ideal,
also his art, and finally also his
only piety, his ‘service of God.'”
Charles Taylor, winner
of this year’s Kyoto Prize
in arts and philosophy:
“… the object sets up
a kind of frame or space or field
within which there can be epiphany.”
“My little baby sister
can do it with ease.
It’s easier to learn
than those ABC’s.”
“A labyrinthine man never seeks
the truth, but always, only, his Ariadne….
Who besides myself knows what Ariadne is?”
— Nietzsche,
epigraph to Ariadne’s Lives,
by Nina daVinci Nichols
(See yesterday’s entry.)
Related material:
Entries of Feb. 13
and Feb. 19 at Log24
and the entry of Feb. 13 at
Ariachne’s Broken Woof 
Troilus and Cressida in Act 5, Scene 2:
“And yet the spacious breadth of this division
Admits no orifex for a point as subtle
As Ariachne’s broken woof to enter.
Instance, O instance! strong as Pluto’s gates;
Cressid is mine, tied with the bonds of heaven:
Instance, O instance! strong as heaven itself;
The bonds of heaven are slipp’d, dissolved, and loosed….”
Susan Sontag,
“Against Interpretation“
“perhaps the deepest and darkest corner of the whole theological abyss”
Friedrich Nietzsche on the abyss:
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”
Frank Sinatra on narrative:
“You gotta be true to your code.”
this year goes to the author
of The Golden Notebook
and The Cleft.
Related material:
The Golden Obituary
and Cleavage —
Log24, Oct. 9, 2007 —
Wheel
Quoted by physics writer
Heinz Pagels at the end of
The Cosmic Code:
“For the essence and the end
Of his labor is beauty… one beauty,
the rhythm of that Wheel….”
— Robinson Jeffers
|
“The Ferris wheel came into view again, just the top, silently burning high on the hill, almost directly in front of him, then the trees rose up over it. The road, which was terrible and full of potholes, went steeply downhill here; he was approaching the little bridge over the barranca, the deep ravine. Halfway across the bridge he stopped; he lit a new cigarette from the one he’d been smoking, and leaned over the parapet, looking down. It was too dark to see the bottom, but: here was finality indeed, and cleavage! Quauhnahuac was like the times in this respect, wherever you turned the abyss was waiting for you round the corner. Dormitory for vultures and city of Moloch! When Christ was being crucified, so ran the sea-borne, hieratic legend, the earth had opened all through this country…” — Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, 1947. (Harper & Row reissue, 1984, p. 15) Comment by Stephen Spender: “There is a suggestion of Christ descending into the abyss for the harrowing of Hell. But it is the Consul whom we think of here, rather than of Christ. The Consul is hurled into this abyss at the end of the novel.” — Introduction to Under the Volcano Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XXI — Gibbon, discussing the theology of the Trinity, defines perichoresis as “… the internal connection and spiritual penetration which indissolubly unites the divine persons59 ….
William Golding: “Simon’s head was tilted slightly up. His eyes could not break away and the Lord of the Flies hung in space before him. ‘What are you doing out here all alone? Aren’t you afraid of me?’ Simon shook. ‘There isn’t anyone to help you. Only me. And I’m the Beast.’ Simon’s mouth labored, brought forth audible words. ‘Pig’s head on a stick.’ ‘Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!’ said the head. For a moment or two the forest and all the other dimly appreciated places echoed with the parody of laughter. ‘You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close!’ “ “Thought of the day: — Alice Woodrome, Good Friday, 2004 Anne Francis,
“Here was finality indeed, — Under the Volcano |
For further details of
the wheel metaphor, see
Rock of Ages
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"
Prime Blue
“To the two gods of art, Apollo and Dionysus, we owe our recognition that… there is a tremendous opposition, as regards both origins and aims, between the Apolline art of the sculptor and the non-visual, Dionysiac art of music.”
— The Birth of Tragedy,
by Friedrich Nietzsche,
Penguin, 1993, page 14.
Quoted in “A Mass for Lucero.”
Half the Answer:
Commentary by spookytruth
from Log24, 2/22/2005:
“I mean, come on, Hunter, a stupid bullet through the head??? how creative, you brain-addled simpleton… if you take the assignment, if you are going to hook up your afterlife keyboard and transmit back and tell us about what it is REALLY like out there, if you decided to let your electric-shock fingers hot wire us the truth of the afterlife… if you really planned to tell us the answer to our ultimate, emotional question…… ‘does God prefer beer, wine, or a shot of whiskey.’ well, if that is what you decided to do well then, for God’s sake, don’t forget (oh, wait, yeah, you already DID FORGET, you half-baked, half brained, half witted, half-a-loaf, half pint pin head, you forgot, THE JOURNEY IS HALF THE ANSWER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
On Dionysus:
“For wine, he loves to view
his altars stain,
But prime blue ruin*–
goes against the grain.”
— page 69, Jack Randall’s Diary
*name “given by
the modern Greeks to gin“
— page 4, Jack Randall’s Diary
May '68 Revisited
"At his final Paris campaign rally… Mr. Sarkozy declared himself the candidate of the 'silent majority,' tired of a 'moral crisis in France not seen since the time of Joan of Arc.'
'I want to turn the page on May 1968,' he said of the student protests cum social revolution that rocked France almost four decades ago.
'The heirs of May '68 have imposed the idea that everything has the same worth, that there is no difference between good and evil, no difference between the true and the false, between the beautiful and the ugly and that the victim counts for less than the delinquent.'
Denouncing the eradication of 'values and hierarchy,' Mr. Sarkozy accused the Left of being the true heirs and perpetuators of the ideology of 1968."
— Emma-Kate Symons, Paris, May 1, 2007, in The Australian
Related material:
From the translator's introduction to Dissemination, by Jacques Derrida, translated by Barbara Johnson, University of Chicago Press, 1981, page xxxi —
"Both Numbers and 'Dissemination' are attempts to enact rather than simply state the theoretical upheavals produced in the course of a radical reevaluation of the nature and function of writing undertaken by Derrida, Sollers, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva and other contributors to the journal Tel Quel in the late 1960s. Ideological and political as well as literary and critical, the Tel Quel program attempted to push to their utmost limits the theoretical revolutions wrought by Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Mallarme, Levi-Strauss, Saussure, and Heidegger."
This is the same Barbara Johnson who has served as the Frederic Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard.
Johnson has attacked "the very essence of Logic"–
"… the logic of binary opposition, the principle of non-contradiction, often thought of as the very essence of Logic as such….
Now, my understanding of what is most radical in deconstruction is precisely that it questions this basic logic of binary opposition….
Instead of a simple 'either/or' structure, deconstruction attempts to elaborate a discourse that says neither 'either/or', nor 'both/and' nor even 'neither/nor', while at the same time not totally abandoning these logics either."
— "Nothing Fails Like Success," SCE Reports 8, 1980
Such contempt for logic has resulted, for instance, in the following passage, quoted approvingly on page 342 of Johnson's translation of Dissemination, from Philippe Sollers's Nombres (1966):
"The minimum number of rows– lines or columns– that contain all the zeros in a matrix is equal to the maximum number of zeros located in any individual line or column."
For a correction of Sollers's Johnson's damned nonsense, click here.
Update of May 29, 2014:
The error, as noted above, was not Sollers's, but Johnson's.
See also the post of May 29, 2014 titled 'Lost in Translation.'
From James A. Michener‘s The Source:
“Trouble started in a quarter that neither Uriel nor Zadok could have foreseen. For many generations the wiser men of Zadok’s clan had worshipped El-Shaddai with the understanding that whereas Canaanites and Egyptians could see their gods directly, El-Shaddai was invisible and inhabited no specific place. Unequivocally the Hebrew patriarchs had preached this concept and the sager men of the clans accepted it, but to the average Hebrew who was not a philosopher the theory of a god who lived nowhere, who did not even exist in corporeal form, was not easy to comprehend. Such people were willing to agree with Zadok that their god did not live on this mountain– the one directly ahead– but they suspected that he did live on some mountain nearby, and when they said this they pictured an elderly man with a white beard who lived in a proper tent and whom they might one day see and touch. If questioned, they would have said that they expected El-Shaddai to look much like their father Zadok, but with a longer beard, a stronger voice, and more penetrating eyes.
Now, as these simpler-minded Hebrews settled down outside the walls of Makor, they began to see Canaanite processions leave the main gate and climb the mountain to the north, seeking the high place where Baal lived, and they witnessed the joy which men experienced when visiting their god, and the Hebrews began in subtle ways and easy steps to evolve the idea that Baal, who obviously lived in a mountain, and El-Shaddai, who was reported to do so, must have much in common. Furtively at first, and then openly, they began to climb the footpath to the place of Baal, where they found a monolith rising from the highest point of rock. Here was a tangible thing they could comprehend, and after much searching along the face of the mountain, a group of Hebrew men found a straight rock of size equal to the one accorded Baal, and with much effort they dragged it one starless night to the mountain top, where they installed it not far from the home of Baal….”
The above monolith is perhaps more
closely related to El-Shaddai than to
Madonna, Grammy Night, and Baal.
It reflects my own interests
(Mathematics and Narrative)
and those of Martin Buber
(Jews on Fiction):
|
From A Mass for Lucero:
“To the two gods of art, Apollo and Dionysus, we owe our recognition that… there is a tremendous opposition, as regards both origins and aims, between the Apolline art of the sculptor and the non-visual, Dionysiac art of music.”
— The Birth of Tragedy, by Friedrich Nietzsche, Penguin, 1993, page 14
“Melody, then, is both primary and universal.” (Author’s italics)
— Nietzsche, op. cit., page 33
“…in so far as he interprets music in images, he himself lies amidst the peaceful waves of Apolline contemplation….”
— Nietzsche, op. cit., page 35
From The Miracle of the Bells, by Russell Janney, Prentice-Hall, 1946, page 333–
“He was singing softly:
‘A pretty girl–
is like a melody—- !‘
But that was always
Bill Dunnigan’s
Song of Victory….
Thus thought the…
press agent for
‘The Garden of the Soul.'”
|
Representing truth:
Rebecca Goldstein |
Representing bullshit:
Apostolos Doxiadis |
| Goldstein’s truth:
Gödel was a Platonist who believed in objective truth. See Rothstein’s review of Goldstein’s new book Incompleteness. |
Doxiadis’s bullshit:
Gödel, along with Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Einstein, and Heisenberg, destroyed a tradition of certainty that began with Plato and Euclid. |
“Examples are the stained-glass
windows of knowledge.” — Nabokov
The Last Enemy
(See April 30)
"I was also impressed… by the intensity of Continental modes of literary-critical thought….
On the Continent, studies of Hölderlin and Rousseau, of Poe, Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Rilke, of Rabelais, Nietzsche, Kafka, and Joyce, challenged not only received ideas on the unity of the work of art but many aspects of western thought itself. Derrida, at the same time, who for nearly a decade found a home in Yale's Comparative Literature Department, expanded the concept of textuality to the point where nothing could be demarcated as 'hors d'œuvre' and escape the literary-critical eye. It was uncanny to feel hierarchic boundaries waver until the commentary entered the text—not literally, of course, but in the sense that the over-objectified work became a reflection on its own status, its stability as an object of cognition. The well-wrought urn contained mortal ashes."
— Geoffrey Hartman, A Life of Learning
In memory of
Jacques Derrida and James Chace,
both of whom died in Paris on
Friday, Oct. 8, 2004… continued…
(See previous three entries.)
Orson Welles |
Mate in 2 |
"The last enemy
that shall be destroyed is death."
— Saul of Tarsus, 1 Cor. 15:26
Knight move,
courtesy of V. Nabokov:
Nfe5 mate
Knight:
Sir John Falstaff
(See Chimes at Midnight.)
Harrowing
“The Ferris wheel came into view again, just the top, silently burning high on the hill, almost directly in front of him, then the trees rose up over it. The road, which was terrible and full of potholes, went steeply downhill here; he was approaching the little bridge over the barranca, the deep ravine. Halfway across the bridge he stopped; he lit a new cigarette from the one he’d been smoking, and leaned over the parapet, looking down. It was too dark to see the bottom, but: here was finality indeed, and cleavage! Quauhnahuac was like the times in this respect, wherever you turned the abyss was waiting for you round the corner. Dormitory for vultures and city of Moloch! When Christ was being crucified, so ran the sea-borne, hieratic legend, the earth had opened all through this country …”
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, 1947. (Harper & Row reissue, 1984, p. 15)
Comment by Stephen Spender:
“There is a suggestion of Christ descending into the abyss for the harrowing of Hell. But it is the Consul whom we think of here, rather than of Christ. The Consul is hurled into this abyss at the end of the novel.”
— Introduction to Under the Volcano
Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XXI —
Gibbon, discussing the theology of the Trinity, defines perichoresis as
“… the internal connection and spiritual penetration which indissolubly unites the divine persons59 ….
59 … The
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”
William Golding:
“Simon’s head was tilted slightly up. His eyes could not break away and the Lord of the Flies hung in space before him.
‘What are you doing out here all alone? Aren’t you afraid of me?’
Simon shook.
‘There isn’t anyone to help you. Only me. And I’m the Beast.’
Simon’s mouth labored, brought forth audible words.
‘Pig’s head on a stick.’
‘Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!’ said the head. For a moment or two the forest and all the other dimly appreciated places echoed with the parody of laughter. ‘You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close!’ “
“Thought of the day:
You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar… if you’re into catchin’ flies.”
— Alice Woodrome, Good Friday, 2004
Anne Francis,
also known as
Honey West:
“Here was finality indeed,
and cleavage!”
— Under the Volcano
From the official
Anne Francis Web Site:
Come into my parlor….
For some background,
see the use of the word
“spider” in Under the Volcano:
by Patrick A. McCarthy.
See, too, Why Me?
Perichoresis, or Coinherence
Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XXI —
Gibbon, discussing the theology of the Trinity, defines perichoresis as
“… the internal connection and spiritual penetration which indissolubly unites the divine persons59 ….
59 … The
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”
Perichoresis does NOT mean “dancing around” ….
From a mailing list message:
If [a correspondent] will but open a lexicon, she will see that perichoresis (with a long o, omega) has nothing to do with “the Greek word for dance,” which is spelt with a short o (omicron). As a technical term in trinitarian theology, perichoresis means “interpenetration.”
Interpenetration in Arthur Machen
Interpenetration in T. S. Eliot:
“Between two worlds
become much like each other….”
On the Novels of Charles Williams
Coinherence in Charles Williams
The Per Speculum link is to a discussion of coinherence and the four last films of Kieslowski —
La Double Vie de Veronique (1991),
Trois Couleurs: Bleu (1993),
Trois Couleurs: Blanc (1993), and
Trois Couleurs: Rouge (1994).
See, too, previous log24 entries related to Kieslowski’s work and to coinherence:
Moulin Bleu (12/16/03),
Quarter to Three (12/20/03), and
White, Geometric, and Eternal (12/20/03).
The One Culture
Today’s birthdays:
Friedrich Nietzsche and C. P. Snow.
Recommended reading–
The Two Cultures Today, by Roger Kimball, which begins with a quotation from Nietzsche:
“It is not a question of annihilating science, but of controlling it.”
Da Capo
“The story bent and climbed and went into weird areas. For instance, at one time Simon Peter was a cave-dweller; at another, he only appeared in other characters’ dreams….”
— Keri Hulme on The Bone People
“Words are events.”
In East Asian traditions, “Rocks are seen as events–rather slow-moving events–but as events….”
— Graham Parkes, professor of philosophy at the University of Hawaii
Parkes is working on a translation of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra and is the author of “The Overflowing Soul: Images of Transformation in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.”
He is also the translator, with David Pellauer, of Nietzsche and Music, by Georges Liébert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
Mental Health Month:
Springtime for Wagner
“And now what you’ve all been waiting for…
— Colin Hay as Zac in the film “Cosi“
“When I sought those who would sympathize with my plans, I had only you, the friends of my particular art, my most personal work and creation, to turn to.”
— Wagner’s address at the ceremony for the laying of the foundation stone of the Festival Theater in Bayreuth, May 22 (Wagner’s birthday), 1872
“The new computer package DISCRETA which was created in Bayreuth is in the process of permanent development.”
— “A Computer Approach to the Enumeration of Block Designs Which Are Invariant With Respect to a Prescribed Permutation Group”
The above is a preprint from Dresden.
See, too, the work of Bierbrauer, who received his doctorate at Mainz in 1977 and taught at Heidelberg from 1977 to 1994. Bierbrauer’s lecture notes give a particularly good background for the concepts involved in my Diamond Theory, in the tradition of Witt and Artin. See
Introduction to Group Theory
and Applications,
by Jürgen Bierbrauer, 138 pp., PostScript
ART WARS:
Apollo and Dionysus
From the New York Times of October 9, 2002:
Daniel Deverell Perry, a Long Island architect who created the marble temple of art housing the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., died Oct. 2 in Woodstock, N.Y…. He was 97.
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From The Birth of Tragedy, by Friedrich Nietzsche (tr. by Shaun Whiteside):
Chapter 1….
To the two gods of art, Apollo and Dionysus, we owe our recognition that in the Greek world there is a tremendous opposition, as regards both origins and aims, between the Apolline art of the sculptor and the non-visual, Dionysiac art of music.
Chapter 25….
From the foundation of all existence, the Dionysiac substratum of the world, no more can enter the consciousness of the human individual than can be overcome once more by that Apolline power of transfiguration, so that both of these artistic impulses are forced to unfold in strict proportion to one another, according to the law of eternal justice. Where the Dionysiac powers have risen as impetuously as we now experience them, Apollo, enveloped in a cloud, must also have descended to us; some future generation will behold his most luxuriant effects of beauty.
Notes:
“When it opened in 1955, overlooking 140 acres of fields and ponds, Arts News celebrated its elegant galleries as the ‘best organized and most highly functional museum erected anywhere.'”
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