Today's NY Times  "Stone Links" to philosophy include
a link to a review of a collection of Hilary Putnam's papers.

Related material, from Putnam's "What is Mathematical
Truth?" (Historia Mathematica  2 (1975): 529-543)—

"In this paper I argue that mathematics should be interpreted realistically – that is, that mathematics makes assertions that are objectively true or false, independently of the human mind, and that something answers to such mathematical notions as ‘set’ and ‘function’. This is not to say that reality is somehow bifurcated – that there is one reality of material things, and then, over and above it, a second reality of ‘mathematical things’. A set of objects, for example, depends for its existence on those objects: if they are destroyed, then there is no longer such a set. (Of course, we may say that the set exists ‘tenselessly’, but we may also say the objects exist ‘tenselessly’: this is just to say that in pure mathematics we can sometimes ignore the important difference between ‘exists now’ and ‘did exist, exists now, or will exist’.) Not only are the ‘objects’ of pure mathematics conditional upon material objects; they are, in a sense, merely abstract possibilities. Studying how mathematical objects behave might better be described as studying what structures are abstractly possible and what structures are not abstractly possible."

See also Wittgenstein's Diamond and Plato's Diamond.

For less rigorous remarks, search Log24 for Modal Diamond Box.

Related material for comedians —

See as well . . .

Damonizing Your Opponent

The Rowberry date appears to be, specifically, 8  June 2011:

A Kinbote note — See also this  journal on 8 June 2011.

Update of 3:03 PM ET the same day —

In keeping with Kinbote’s character as an unreliable narrator . . .
Rowberry’s Eindhoven slides  indicate he spoke on 9  June 2011.

See as well the Log24 post  “Historical Fiction” from 9  June 2011.

From a post this morning  by Peter J. Cameron
in memory of John Horton Conway —

Flashback —

A sequel to New Year's Greeting from Franz Kafka:

In memory of David Rumelhart, who "explored the possibility of formulating a formal grammar to capture the structure of stories." (Wikipedia)

Rumelhart died on Sunday, March 13, 2011.*

So set 'em up, Joe…

I've got a little schema you oughta know….

So make it one for my baby and one more for the road.

* From that date: The Counter and Twenty-Four.

From the preface to the inaugural issue of Tympanum: A Journal of Comparative Literary Studies—

Regarding the choice of name for this journal, tympan or tympanum is a word that designates several objects at once. Tympan is perhaps first of all a typographical term: as a printer's term in early book production, a tympan designated "the iron frame covered with parchment on which the paper was placed." Taken as an anatomical term, the word tympanum is another term for the eardrum, the oblique stretching of tissue between the auditory canal and the middle ear that allows one to hear: to hear others, to hear music, or even to hear oneself speak. The tympanum is a partition of the ear that separates inside from outside, translating various tones and punctuations, a liminal membrane traversed by hearing others speak. In this instance, the tympanum is a tissue, a weave or web  that mediates hearing. It is by extension the term for the diaphragm of a tele-phone, that technological figure of the spatialization of the voice. As an architectural term tympanum names the pediment that sits atop the cornice or frieze of a building. And to this heterogeneous list one might add that in ancient Greece a tympanum, like the stoa or colonnades, was a gathering space for the discussion of philosophy. All these meanings could be enlisted to indicate the interests of this new journal.

By its very nature, a world wide web site would be a site of a mediation of or meditation on the problematic of space and place (in short: of "site" itself), and of their dislocation. In this way the web opens the possibility for a journal concerned with the problem of a mediated or textualized hearing.

Several of the articles contained in this first issue of Tympanum  share a thematic of location and of reading and hearing….

Deborah Levitt's essay on Heidegger and theatre, in its exploration of the problem of space and place, implicitly touches on the very medium of the web: the perpetual dislocation of place from space. Levitt couples several of Heidegger's writings together with Artaud's on her Freiburg-Paris Express. Levitt's meditation on theory and theatre is at once incisive and innovative, and locates its opening problematic in the substitution of a metaphysics of sight by site, a move which she says opens a spatiality. In a recent issue of Assemblage,  Sam Weber makes some remarks on the metaphysics of site that could indeed be used as a succinct introduction to the problems that Levitt's essay, Heidegger and the Theatre of Truth, engages:

If what we call "space" is, like the Platonic chora, on the one hand always already caught up in the process of making room  for that determinate other  of space that can be called place  or site,  and if, on the other hand, this process of making room  remains distinct from the particular places and sites it makes way for, then the emergence of the latter from the former will inevitably appear as a more or less violent event.  Violent, because the staking out of territory and the assignment of positions and posts can never simply legitimate itself in terms of preexisting borders. It cannot do this, since there is no original order to which such a process of partition might appeal without equivocation. In place  of such an origin, there is chora: the process of partition and repartition as such,  except that "as such" here is impossible to distinguish from: "as other." Such partition and repartition constitute the law,  the nomos,  of chora…³

³ Samuel Weber, "The Parallax View: Place and Space in Plato and Benjamin," Assemblage  20, MIT Press: 1993: 88.

The Tympanum  preface (1998) is by Peter Woodruff.

Wallace Stevens—

"The pediment
Lifts up its heavy scowl before them."

Scowl courtesy of Samuel Weber—

• Author of "The Parallax View"
• Assemblage, No. 20, Violence, Space
  (Apr., 1993), pp. 88-89
  (article consists of 2 pages)
• Published by: The MIT Press

"Heidegger suggests that we experience the saying of language as a shining forth:

'It lets what is coming to presence shine forth, lets what is withdrawing into absence vanish.  The saying is by no means the supplemental linguistic expression of what shines forth; rather, all shining and fading depend on the saying that shows.' (pp. 413-414).

But what is the basis and origin of this possibility of saying?  The happening of saying in the clearing, its allowing things to shine forth, can also be called an 'owning.' Owning is the event of a thing’s coming into its own, of its showing itself as itself. Heidegger also calls it 'propriating,' 'en-owning,' or Ereignis:

'Propriation gathers the rift-design of the saying and unfolds it in such a way that it becomes the well-joined structure of a manifold showing. (p. 415)'"

— "Heidegger: On the Way to Language," by Paul Livingston

Page references are apparently to Heidegger's Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell, HarperCollins paperback, 1993.

See also Shining Forth.

BOOKS OF THE TIMES

A Talent for Writing, and Falling Into Things

(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/07/books/07book.html)

The above headline from this morning's New York Times  is a rather strong reminder of a post linked to here last night—  a post from April 10, 2004 (Holy Saturday), titled "Harrowing."

The book under review is a biography of William Golding, also quoted here in "Harrowing."

From that post—

“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.”

– Stephen Spender, introduction to Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano

Related material:

Two definitions–

"In Dante's Inferno  the Harrowing of Hell is mentioned in Canto IV by the pilgrim's guide Virgil." —Wikipedia

"The Easter Vigil…. is held in the hours of darkness between sunset on Holy Saturday and sunrise on Easter Day." —Wikipedia

Two more, of acronyms coined by Philip Rieff—

"Rieff is critical of the present 'pop' culture that glories in the 'primacies of possibility' and prefers 'both/and' to 'either/or.' … the 'via'— the 'vertical in authority'—… teaches us our place as we assent to and ascend on via’s ladder." —Philip Manning

Related material:

VIA CRUCIS

The infinity symbol, as sketched in a touching
attempt at scholarship by the late
"both/and" novelist David Foster Wallace—

The Cartesian cross—

The lemniscate—

Lemniscate with Cartesian cross—

“In chapters 19 and 20 of LILA there is a discussion about the possibility of making Zen and the Art into a movie. It opens with a scene where Robert Redford, who ‘really would like to have the film rights,’ comes to meet and negotiate with Phaedrus in his New York City hotel room. Phaedrus tells the famous actor that he can have the rights to the book, but maybe that’s just because he’s star-struck and doesn’t like to haggle. Under his excitement, Phaedrus has a bad feeling about it. He tells us that he’s been warned by several different people not to allow such a film to be made. Even Redford warned him not to do it. So what’s the problem? As it’s put at the end of that discussion, ‘Films are social media; his book was largely intellectual. That was the center of the problem.'”

— David Buchanan at robertpirsig.org

“The insight is constituted precisely by ‘seeing’ the idea in the image, the intelligible in the sensible, the universal in the particular, the abstract in the concrete.”

— Fr. Brian Cronin‘s Foundations of Philosophy, Ch. 2, “Identifying Direct Insights,” quoted in Ideas and Art

See also Smiles of a Summer Evening, the current issue of TIME, the time of this entry (7:20:11 PM ET), and Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star.

See the Dickinson poem quoted here on May 15 (the date, as it happens, of Dickinson’s death) in the entry “A Flag for Sunrise.”  See also Zen and Language Games and a discussion of a detail in a Robert Stone novel.

(Rosh Hashanah began at sundown September 22; Yom Kippur begins at sundown October 1.  —holidays.net)

Mark Finkelstein today:
 

"Today comes more evidence of the left's painful struggle to deal with its diminished standing and repeated rejection at the polls. In the subscription-required Why Voters Like Values, [New York] Times columnist Judith Warner claims that "the Christian right's ability to stir voter passions is based not on values, but on psychology." Warner describes having bravely gone inside the belly of the conservative beast, recently attending a Values Voters Summit in DC, and declaring it "imbued with so much intolerance and hate." This is presumably in contrast with liberal love-ins, where Bush & Co. are regularly depicted as liars, murderers, Hitlers, etc.

She later describes a schadenfreude-provoking scene of the day after Kerry's 2004 defeat, picking through the rubble with Harvard psychology professor emeritus, Jerome Kagan, who tried to console Warner and presumably himself. As she describes it:

"Our conversation drifted to the Republicans' 'values' [note scare quotes] agenda, and Kagan's belief that values sell because they're an antidote to the endemic mental health problem of our time: depression.

"'Humans demand that there be a clear right and wrong,' he said. 'You've got to believe that the track you've taken is the right track. You get depressed if you're not certain as to what it is you're supposed to be doing or what's right and wrong in the world."

"People need to divide the world into good and evil, us and them, Kagan continued. To do otherwise– to entertain the possibility that life is not black and white, but variously shaded in gray– is perhaps more honest, rational and decent. But it's also, psychically, a recipe for disaster."

Got it? Liberalism is "more honest, rational and decent" than conservativism, but that's just not what the benighted public wants. They're looking for political Prozac, a Manichean worldview they can cling to, and that's what conservatism cunningly offers.

Less controversial values are provided by yesterday evening's Pennsylvania lottery— namely, the values 4, 5, and 6.

For a discussion of these values under the guise of musical intervals, see Professor Kagan again, in a paper (pdf) he wrote with Marcel R. Zentner, "Infants' Perception of Consonance and Dissonance in Music" (Infant Behavior & Development, Vol. 21, No. 3, 1998):

Adults judge as most consonant either the octave (difference of 12 semitones) [or the unison, difference of 0 semitones], the fifth (7 semitones), or the major third (4 semitones).

Illustration (see also yesterday evening):

Notes and frequency ratios

The paper discusses consonant intervals
as an example of alleged
"perceptual universals."

Related material on universals
suitable for today, the Feast of
St. Michael and All Angels:

Shining Forth and
Midsummer Eve's Dream.

The material in Shining Forth
is also related, tangentially, to the
following presentation of the
Warner "values" essay
in today's online New York Times:

The above three Times items,
taken together, suggest that
those in search of "values"
should consult Betty Suarez:

Click on picture for further details.

Exhibit A:
A science vulgarizer in today’s New York Times–

In the Quest for Coolness, Science Could Really Use a Vito Corleone

“Somewhere out there, more elusive than a snow leopard, more vaunted in its imagined cultural oomph than an Oprah book blurb, is the Science Movie.

You know, the film that finally does for science and scientists what ‘The Godfather’ did for crime and what ‘The West Wing’ did for politics, accurately reproducing the grandeur and grit of science while ushering its practitioners into the ranks of coolness.”

— Dennis Overbye

Exhibit B:
John Updike’s review in the May 22 New Yorker of a new novel by Michel Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island—

“Nor is Houellebecq…. entirely without literary virtue.  His four novels– Whatever (1994), The Elementary Particles (1998), and Platform (2001) are the three others– display a grasp of science and mathematics beyond that of all but a few non-genre novelists.”

A character in the new novel– “a lengthy exercise in futuristic science fiction”– writes that

“The dream of all men is to meet little sluts who are innocent but ready for all forms of depravity– which is what, more or less, all teenage girls are.”

Exhibit C:
A mathematician hopes for more exciting vulgarizations of his subject–

“I would hope that clever writers might point out how mathematics is altering our lifestyles and do it in a manner that would not lead Garfield the Cat to say ‘ho hum.'”

— Philip J. Davis, “The Media and Mathematics Look at Each Other” (pdf), Notices of the American Mathematical Society, March 2006

Exhibit D:
Today’s Garfield—

Exhibit E:
Log24 entry of May 18, a parody of “Contact,” a 1997 film that vulgarized science–

Exhibit F:
Gilbert and Sullivan, “The Mikado“–

“(With great effort) How de do, little girls, how de do? (Aside) Oh, my protoplasmal ancestor!”

Coda

“It might be asking too much
to make us cool.”
— Science vulgarizer   
Dennis Overbye

Robert De Niro as the
young Vito Corleone

Catholic Schools Sermon

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

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

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

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

New Page for Harvard’s President

From today’s Harvard Crimson:

“University President Lawrence H. Summers said yesterday that he will marry his longtime partner, Professor of English Elisa New.”

“I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose”

— Emily Dickinson, quoted in
    The Regenerate Lyric:
    Theology and Innovation
    in American Poetry, by
    Elisa New, page 162

Related material:
Log24 entries for Jan. 24 and 25, 2005.

Dance

Yesterday’s AP “Thought for Today”–

“In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.” – J. Robert Oppenheimer, American physicist (1904-1967).

From Log24 on Dec. 17, 2002:

The Dancing Wu Li Masters,
by Gary Zukav, Harvard ’64:

“The Wu Li Masters know that physicists are doing more than ‘discovering the endless diversity of nature.’ They are dancing with Kali [or Durga], the Divine Mother of Hindu mythology.”

“Eastern religions have nothing to say about physics, but they have a great deal to say about human experience. In Hindu mythology, Kali, the Divine Mother, is the symbol for the infinite diversity of experience. Kali represents the entire physical plane. She is the drama, tragedy, humor, and sorrow of life. She is the brother, father, sister, mother, lover, and friend. She is the fiend, monster, beast, and brute. She is the sun and the ocean. She is the grass and the dew. She is our sense of accomplishment and our sense of doing worthwhile. Our thrill of discovery is a pendant on her bracelet. Our gratification is a spot of color on her cheek. Our sense of importance is the bell on her toe.

This full and seductive, terrible and wonderful earth mother always has something to offer. Hindus know the impossibility of seducing her or conquering her and the futility of loving her or hating her; so they do the only thing that they can do. They simply honor her.”

How could I dance with another….?

— John Lennon and Paul McCartney, 1962-1963  

Intersections

1. Blue Ridge meets Black Mountain,

2. Vertical meets horizontal in music,

3. The timeless meets time in religion.

Details:

1. Blue Ridge, Black Mountain

“Montreat College is located in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina…. The Black Mountain Campus is… three miles from the main campus in the historic town of Black Mountain.”

Black Mountain College was “established on the Blue Ridge Assembly grounds outside the town of Black Mountain in North Carolina in the fall of 1933.”

USA Today, May 15, 2005, on Billy Graham:

“MONTREAT, N.C. — … It’s here at his… homestead, where the Blue Ridge meets the Black Mountain range east of Asheville, that Graham gave a rare personal interview.”

See also the following from June 24:

“No bridge reaches God, except one…
God’s Bridge: The Cross.”

— Billy Graham Evangelistic Association,
according to messiahpage.com

For some remarks more in the spirit of Black Mountain than of the Blue Ridge, see today’s earlier entry on pianist Grete Sultan and composer Tui St. George Tucker.

2. Vertical, Horizontal in Music

Richard Neuhaus on George Steiner’s
Grammars of Creation:

 “… the facts of the world are not and will never be ‘the end of the matter.’ Music joins grammar in pointing to the possibility, the reality, of more. He thinks Schopenhauer was on to something when he said music will continue after the world ends.

‘The capacity of music to operate simultaneously along horizontal and vertical axes, to proceed simultaneously in opposite directions (as in inverse canons), may well constitute the nearest that men and women can come to absolute freedom.  Music does “keep time” for itself and for us.'”

3. Timeless, Time

A Trinity Sunday sermon quotes T. S. Eliot:

“… to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint.”

See also The Diamond Project.

Moral Hazard —
The Devil and Wallace Stevens,
continued from May 1-2 entries:

Law Day,
Readings for Law Day,
Fallen from Heaven, and
The Script  

University of Southern California, Department of Economics — Industrial Organization ECN 680 – Autumn 2002 — Introduction to Contract and Organization Theory —

Professor Jean-Jacques Laffont
(September 4 – October 21):

“The purpose of this course is to introduce the student to modern contract and organization theory. Part 1 of the course focuses upon models with moral hazard and adverse selection.”

From the insurance page at 

http://ingrimayne.saintjoe.edu/:

“The size of the insurance industry indicates that people are eager to pay to avoid risk. They pay and get nothing if fortune smiles on them, whereas if misfortune strikes, they break even because the insurance should just pay back the value lost in the misfortune.

Sometimes, however, people do better than break even when misfortune strikes, and this possibility has greatly interested economists. If, for example, the misfortune costs a person $1000, but insurance will pay $2000, the insured person has no incentive to avoid the misfortune and may act to bring it on. This tendency of insurance to change behavior is called moral hazard.

Sometimes moral hazard is dramatic….

People who know that they face large risks are more likely to buy insurance than people who face small risks. Insurance companies try to minimize the problem that only the people with big risks will buy their product, which is the problem of adverse selection ….”

From today’s New York Times:

“Jean-Jacques Laffont, an economist known for developing mathematical models to estimate what something is worth in situations of deep uncertainty, died on May 1 in Toulouse, France. He was 57….

…Jerry R. Green of Harvard said he was ‘an architect of systems’ and ‘a very original figure.’

Eric Maskin, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., called Dr. Laffont ‘simply one of the major figures of our time.’

‘Many people would say he was the leading economist in Europe,’ he added, ‘and that wouldn’t be an unfair judgment.’

Although Dr. Laffont’s models were abstruse enough to satisfy the most theoretical economists, Dr. Green said they were adapted for practical purposes by companies, as well as by public television for scheduling programs.”

Hermes and Folded Time

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

From Daniel Chandler’s Semiotics for Beginners:

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

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

Related material:

From Michalinos Zembylas on Michel Serres:

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

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

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

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

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

Death of a Holy Man

Part I:  An American Religion

Hiroshima Mayor Says
US Worships Nukes

“HIROSHIMA — Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba warned that the world is moving toward war and accused Washington of ‘worshipping’ nuclear weapons during Wednesday’s ceremony marking the 58th anniversary of the atomic bombing of the city….

… the Hiroshima mayor blamed the United States for making the world a more uncertain place through its policy of undermining the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

‘A world without nuclear weapons and war that the victims of the atomic bomb have long sought for is slipping into the shadows of growing black clouds that could turn into mushroom clouds at any moment,’ Akiba said. ‘The chief cause of this is the United States’ nuclear policy which, by openly declaring the possibility of a pre-emptive nuclear strike and by starting research into small ‘useable’ nuclear weapons, appears to worship nuclear weapons as God.’ “

— Mainichi Shimbun, Aug. 6, 2003

Part II: Holy Men and
             Sons of Bitches

“I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.”

— Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer,
    Director of Los Alamos

John Steinbeck describing Cannery Row in Monterey:

“Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing.”  

“Now we are all sons of bitches.”

— Dr. Kenneth Bainbridge,
    Director of Trinity Test

Part III: Death of a Holy Man

From a review of The Atomic Scientists:

“… the authors try to add a personal element that can excite the reader about science.”

For more excitement, see Timequake, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

The sequel to
“Every Boy Has a Daddy“:

Hepburn’s Mass
at Heaven’s Gate

Katharine Hepburn died at 2:50 PM EDT
on the Feast of St. Peter. 

“The Consecration and Sacrifice effected by the priest (standing in the place of Christ) is, then, the visible manifestation of an eternal and timeless act. After the Consecration, as Gueranger says in The Liturgical Year, ‘the divine Lamb is lying on our altar!’ Thus we see that the Mass is the visible reality, here and now, of the timeless eternal Mass of Heaven, described in the Apocalypse. Through it we participate in the Celestial Liturgy; through it the gates of Heaven are opened to us and the possibility of eternal life is made available to us.”

The Source:

The Church Militant recommends
Defense of the Inquisitions.

For a different viewpoint,
see my May 12 entries.

Hall of Shame

“You belong with the cowards and ideologues in a hall of infamy and shame.”

— Actor Tim Robbins, who played pitcher Nuke LaLoosh in “Bull Durham,” in a letter to baseball Hall of Fame president Dale Petroskey.  Petroskey cancelled a scheduled April 26-27 Hall of Fame celebration of the Bull film due to the possibility of political remarks.

In further remarks at the National Press Club on April 15, Robbins said

“Sportswriters across the country reacted with such overwhelming fury at the Hall of Fame that the president of the Hall admitted he made a mistake and Major League Baseball disavowed any connection to the actions of the Hall’s president. A bully can be stopped, and so can a mob. It takes one person with the courage and a resolute voice.”

Durga

Today's site music* is in honor of a memorable date.   *© 1963 Northern Songs. Quiet may be restored by using the midi control box at the top right of this page.  Please let me know if your browser is not showing this control box.

Veronica

From a June/July 1997
Hadassah Magazine article:

"Plato is obviously Jewish."

— Rebecca Goldstein

Readings on the Dark Lady  

From a July 27, 1997
New York Times article
by Holland Cotter:

"The single most important and sustained model for Khmer culture was India, from which Cambodia inherited two religions, Buddhism and Hinduism, and an immensely sophisticated art. This influence announces itself early in this exhibition in a spectacular seventh-century figure of the Hindu goddess Durga, whose hip-slung pose and voluptuous torso, as plush and taut as ripe fruit, combine the naturalism and idealism of the very finest Indian work."

From The Dancing Wu Li Masters,
by Gary Zukav, Harvard '64:

"The Wu Li Masters know that physicists are doing more than 'discovering the endless diversity of nature.' They are dancing with Kali [or Durga], the Divine Mother of Hindu mythology."

"Eastern religions have nothing to say about physics, but they have a great deal to say about human experience. In Hindu mythology, Kali, the Divine Mother, is the symbol for the infinite diversity of experience. Kali represents the entire physical plane. She is the drama, tragedy, humor, and sorrow of life. She is the brother, father, sister, mother, lover, and friend. She is the fiend, monster, beast, and brute. She is the sun and the ocean. She is the grass and the dew. She is our sense of accomplishment and our sense of doing worthwhile. Our thrill of discovery is a pendant on her bracelet. Our gratification is a spot of color on her cheek. Our sense of importance is the bell on her toe.

This full and seductive, terrible and wonderful earth mother always has something to offer. Hindus know the impossibility of seducing her or conquering her and the futility of loving her or hating her; so they do the only thing that they can do. They simply honor her."

How could I dance with another….?

— John Lennon and Paul McCartney, 1962-1963  

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:

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:

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:

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:

New from Miracle Pictures
– IF IT’S A HIT, IT’S A MIRACLE! –

Pi in the Sky
for Michaelmas 2002

“Fear not, maiden, your prayer is heard.
Michael am I, guardian of the highest Word.”

— A Michaelmas Play

Contact, by Carl Sagan:

Chapter 1 – Transcendental Numbers

  In the seventh grade they were studying “pi.” It was a Greek letter that looked like the architecture at Stonehenge, in England: two vertical pillars with a crossbar at the top. If you measured the circumference of a circle and then divided it by the diameter of the circle, that was pi. At home, Ellie took the top of a mayonnaise jar, wrapped a string around it, straightened the string out, and with a ruler measured the circle’s circumference. She did the same with the diameter, and by long division divided the one number by the other. She got 3.21. That seemed simple enough.

  No one had ever called Ellie stupid before and she found herself bursting into tears….

  After school she bicycled to the library at the nearby college to look through books on mathematics. As nearly as she could figure out from what she read, her question wasn’t all that stupid. According to the Bible, the ancient Hebrews had apparently thought that pi was exactly equal to three. The Greeks and Romans, who knew lots of things about mathematics, had no idea that the digits in pi went on forever without repeating. It was a fact that had been discovered only about 250 years ago. How was she expected to know if she couldn’t ask questions? But Mr. Weisbrod had been right about the first few digits. Pi wasn’t 3.21. Maybe the mayonnaise lid had been a little squashed, not a perfect circle. Or maybe she’d been sloppy in measuring the string. Even if she’d been much more careful, though, they couldn’t expect her to measure an infinite number of decimals.

  There was another possibility, though. You could calculate pi as accurately as you wanted. If you knew something called calculus, you could prove formulas for pi that would let you calculate it to as many decimals as you had time for. The book listed formulas for pi divided by four. Some of them she couldn’t understand at all. But there were some that dazzled her: pi/4, the book said, was the same as 1 – 1/3 + 1/5 – 1/7 + …, with the fractions continuing on forever. Quickly she tried to work it out, adding and subtracting the fractions alternately. The sum would bounce from being bigger than pi/4 to being smaller than pi/4, but after a while you could see that this series of numbers was on a beeline for the right answer. You could never get there exactly, but you could get as close as you wanted if you were very patient. It seemed to her

a miracle

 Cartoon by S.Harris

that the shape of every circle in the world was connected with this series of fractions. How could circles know about fractions? She was determined to learn

calculus.

  She had caught a glimpse of something majestic.

Chapter 24 – The Artist’s Signature

  The anomaly showed up most starkly in Base 2 arithmetic, where it could be written out entirely as zeros and ones. Her program reassembled the digits into a square raster, an equal number across and down. Hiding in the alternating patterns of digits, deep inside the transcendental number, was a perfect circle, its form traced out by unities in a field of noughts.

  The universe was made on purpose, the circle said. In whatever galaxy you happen to find yourself, you take the circumference of a circle, divide it by its diameter, measure closely enough, and uncover

a miracle

— another circle, drawn kilometers downstream of the decimal point. There would be richer messages farther in. It doesn’t matter what you look like, or what you’re made of, or where you come from. As long as you live in this universe, and have a modest talent for mathematics, sooner or later you’ll find it. It’s already here. It’s inside everything. You don’t have to leave your planet to find it. In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist’s signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons… there is an intelligence that antedates the universe. The circle had closed. She found what she had been searching for.

Song lyric not in Sagan’s book:

Will the circle be unbroken
by and by, Lord, by and by?
Is a better home a-waitin’
in the sky, Lord, in the sky?

“Contact,” the film: