The title is a phrase by Wallace Stevens.
See Staats-Oper , a post of Thursday, June 3.
See as well posts of 9/11, 2014 . . . a date suggested by the song lyric
"Oh, moon of Alabama" in one of those posts. The song lyric was in turn
suggested by a New York Times obituary this evening.
For other suggestive remarks, see Bowie in this journal.
Recent posts now tagged Black Fire suggest some context . . .
Meditations on the Portals of the Imagination
by Grace Dane Mazur, A K Peters/CRC Press;
first edition November 8, 2010
Interviewer's questions to the author (Feb. 4, 2011) —
"This book fuses together literature, art, science, history,
certainly the underworld–so many different points of obsession
for you, and you move so swiftly among them. It feels like a
magnum opus in that way. Where do you go from here?
After the hinges of hell, what comes next?"
The reviews?
"Transformations , Anne Sexton’s 1971 collection of poems, is a portal."
— "A Poisonous Antidote," by Nick Ripatrazone, at themillions.com
at noon on October 22, 2015
"You see, opening dimensional portals is a tricky business."
— The librarian in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," season 1, episode 2
See also Transformers in this journal.
Synchronology —
"Objective Quality" in this journal on the date of the above review,
October 22, 2015, at 2:26 AM ET.
"According to Thelemic legend, in 1918 Aleister Crowley
came into contact with a interdimensional entity
named Lam, who by the way is a dead ringer for
the popular conception of the 'alien grey '
depicted on the cover of Whitley Strieber's Communion ."
Related material —
"Robert Langdon stood mesmerized at the glass portal,
absorbing the power of the landscape below him."
Also …
"Ting-a-ling." — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The phrase "binary opposition" in the previous post suggests
a review of some binary-related concepts —
From a post on St. Finbarr's Day 2015 —
From http://www.chosentwo.com/buffy/quotes/harvest.php —
|
Buffy: So, Giles! Got anything that can make this day any worse?
Giles: This is what we know. Some sixty years ago, a very old, very powerful vampire came to this shore, not just to feed. |
For the late Boruch Alan Bermowitz (June 23, 1938 – July 16, 2016).
From this journal at 11 pm ET yesterday, the day Bermowitz died —
A detail from this morning's 6 AM post —
|
An Ordinary Evening in New Haven, XXII
Professor Eucalyptus said, “The search
For an interior made exterior
With the Inhalations of original cold
Not the predicate of bright origin.
The cold and earliness and bright origin
That it is wholly an inner light, that it shines — Wallace Stevens |
See also Bloomsday 2007, "Obituaries in the News."
This morning's 6 AM post linked to a more recent obituary in the news —
"… while Jules and Judy were still living in Brooklyn Heights …
Jules collaborated with his former roommate, Norton Juster,
by illustrating what was to become the children’s classic
The Phantom Tollbooth . Neither author or illustrator had
a clue as to how to get this unlikely work published, and it
was Judy’s idea to take it to a mutual friend . . . ."
|
"At CERN the LHC has reached design luminosity,
— Peter Woit, Thursday, June 30, 2016, |
Another sort of design luminosity —
|
"At CERN the LHC has reached design luminosity,
— Peter Woit, Thursday, June 30, 2016, |
See as well The Onion yesterday (Friday, July 1) —
"At CERN the LHC has reached design luminosity,* and is
breaking records with a fast pace of new collisions. This may
have something to do with the report that the LHC is also
about to tear open a portal to another dimension."
See also the following figure from the Log24 Bion posts —
— and Greg Egan's short story "Luminous":
"The theory was, we’d located part of the boundary
between two incompatible systems of mathematics –
both of which were physically true, in their respective
domains. Any sequence of deductions which stayed
entirely on one side of the defect – whether it was the
'near side', where conventional arithmetic applied, or
the 'far side', where the alternative took over – would
be free from contradictions. But any sequence which
crossed the border would give rise to absurdities –
hence S could lead to not-S."
— Greg Egan, Luminous
(Kindle Locations 1284-1288).
* See a definition.
An image from yesterday afternoon's post Portal:
Related material:
A search today for Edward Frenkel's phrase
"portals into the magic world of modern math"
leads to a reprint of his March 2 LA Times opinion piece
in The Salem News —
To hell with Picasso, I'll take Tom Sawyer.
Bright Star
From the website of Karey Lea Perkins:
“The truth is that man’s capacity for symbol-mongering in general and language in particular is…intimately part and parcel of his being human, of his perceiving and knowing, of his very consciousness…”
— Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1975
Today’s New York Times story on Richard Helms, together with my reminiscences in the entry that follows it below, suggest the following possibility for symbol-mongering:
| Compare the 16-point star of the C.I.A. |
|
| with the classic 8-point star of Venus: |
|
This comparison is suggested by the Spanish word “Lucero” (the name, which means “Bright Star,” of the girl in Cuernavaca mentioned two entries down) and by the following passage from Robert A. Heinlein‘s classic novel, Glory Road:
|
“I have many names. What would you like to call me?” “Is one of them ‘Helen’?” She smiled like sunshine and I learned that she had dimples. She looked sixteen and in her first party dress. “You are very gracious. No, she’s not even a relative. That was many, many years ago.” Her face turned thoughtful. “Would you like to call me ‘Ettarre’?” “Is that one of your names?” “It is much like one of them, allowing for different spelling and accent. Or it could be ‘Esther’ just as closely. Or ‘Aster.’ Or even ‘Estrellita.’ ” ” ‘Aster,’ ” I repeated. “Star. Lucky Star!” |
The C.I.A. star above is from that organization’s own site. The star of Venus (alias Aster, alias Ishtar) is from Symbols.com, an excellent site that has the following variations on the Bright Star theme:
| Ideogram for light | Alchemical sign |
| Greek “Aster” | Babylonian Ishtar |
| Phoenician Astarte | Octagram of Venus |
| Phaistos Symbol | Fortress Octagram |
See also my notes The Still Point and the Wheel and Midsummer Eve’s Dream. Both notes quote Robinson Jeffers:
“For the essence and the end
Of his labor is beauty…
one beauty, the rhythm of that Wheel,
and who can behold it is happy
and will praise it to the people.”
— Robinson Jeffers, “Point Pinos and Point Lobos,”
quoted at the end of The Cosmic Code,
by Heinz Pagels, Simon & Schuster, 1982
Place the eightfold star in a circle, and you have the Buddhist Wheel of Life:
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