See as well . . .
Fans of hallucinatory fiction might recall a saying of Philip Pullman:
"The meaning of a story emerges in the meeting
between the words on the page
and the thoughts in the reader's mind.
So when people ask me what I meant by this story,
or what was the message I was trying to convey in that one,
I have to explain that I'm not going to explain.
Anyway, I'm not in the message business;
I'm in the 'Once upon a time' business."
"The bride hath paced into the hall,
Red as a rose is she;
Nodding their heads before her goes
The merry minstrelsy."
For Pullman, see previous instances of "wilde abyss" in this journal.
For a less fictional approach to the abyss, see the following.
|
From T. S. Eliot and the Dynamic Imagination
Chapter 7
Would you have me – Shakespeare, Coriolanus, III.ii. [Link added.] . . . .
Eliot describes the creative germ as the The phrase echoes Milton’s Paradise Lost :
Into this wilde Abyss,
Eliot’s creative logic retains an aspect of the divine |
"The phrase echoes Milton's Paradise Lost" —
In describing his abyss, Milton invokes not "psychic material" but
rather the classical view of Nature as composed of the four elements
Water, Earth, Air and Fire.
Note that one source* of the "psychic material" phrase in Eliot's work
gives a rather different picture . . .
"And now I should like to return for a moment to Gottfried Benn
and his unknown, dark psychic material —
we might say, the octopus or angel with which the poet struggles."
* "The Three Voices of Poetry," by T. S. Eliot, The Atlantic, April 1954.
Related entertainment . . .
The Big White Hashtag:
* I.e., for Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials .
Those who prefer fiction to reality may consult
a Baja-related search in this journal for "Sea of Cortez."
That search in turn suggests a Fandom webpage related
to yesterday's post "Perspective" —
https://davidmitchell.fandom.com/wiki/Luisa_Rey.
"Luisa Rey is played by Halle Berry in the Wachowski siblings'
2012 adaptation of Cloud Atlas . . . . Her name is based on
The Bridge of San Luis Rey . . . ."
Good question. From Philip Pullman's recent HBO version of
"His Dark Materials," The University of Oxford’s St. Peter’s College:
Red and black are accountants' colors. Blue, as in the above text
highlight, suggests Henry Miller and the keyhole of Opus Pistorum.
… And then there is Pullman, with his "Dust." Perhaps the most
appropriate color for Pullman's account is white , as in the following
photo annotation —
Some painters, not inkers, may enjoy studio background
music from Dusty Springfield's album "White Heat."
The New York Times reports the death yesterday, January 30, 2024,
of the wife of Beach Boys co-founder Brian Wilson.
According to the Catholic Church, therefore, yesterday was her
dies natalis — day of birth into heaven.
According to the Times, her secular dies natalis was Oct. 3 (10/03) —
"Melinda Kae Ledbetter was born on Oct. 3, 1946, in Pueblo, Colo."
According to this journal, yesterday's significant "10 03" was a time —
Fans of hallucinatory fiction might recall a saying of Philip Pullman:
"The meaning of a story emerges in the meeting
between the words on the page
and the thoughts in the reader's mind.
So when people ask me what I meant by this story,
or what was the message I was trying to convey in that one,
I have to explain that I'm not going to explain.
Anyway, I'm not in the message business;
I'm in the 'Once upon a time' business."
Words that are somewhat less hallucinatory —
Leonard F. Wheat, Harvard Ph.D. 1958,
is said to have died at 82 on May 12, 2014.
Look upon his works, ye Mighty, and despair.
Also on Wheat's date of death —
Related art —
|
From Savage Logic— Sunday, March 15, 2009 5:24 PM The Origin of Change
A note on the figure
"Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
— Wallace Stevens, |
"In the digital cafeteria where AI chatbots mingle,
Perplexity AI is the scrawny new kid ready to
stand up to ChatGPT, which has so far run roughshod
over the AI landscape. With impressive lineage, a wide
array of features, and a dedicated mobile app, this
newcomer hopes to make the competition eat its dust."
— Jason Nelson at decrypt.co, April 12, 2023
Not unlike, in the literary cafeteria, Pullman vs. Tolkien?
ChatGPT seems to have the advantage for lovers of
fiction and fantasy, Perplexity AI for lovers of truth.
Pullman links in this journal —
http://m759.net/wordpress/?s=wsu.edu .
Specifically . . .
<a href="http://www.wsu.edu:8080/%7Edee/GLOSSARY/SHUCHUNG.HTM"
target="_new" rel="noopener noreferrer">
<strong><em>Shu</em>: Reciprocity</strong></a>
and
<a href="http://www.wsu.edu/%7Edee/GREECE/HERAC.HTM"
target="_new"><font size="6"><b>Logos</b></font></a>
Those links no longer work. See instead . . .
https://web.archive.org/web/20011224032243/
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/GLOSSARY/SHUCHUNG.HTM
and
https://web.archive.org/web/20011129072406/
http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/GREECE/HERAC.HTM .
Logo from these links:
"The book I came back to
George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I couldn’t cope with it
as a student; it wasn’t until I was grown up, and married,
and a parent, and trying to teach it myself, that I realised
its majestic scope and depth." — Philip Pullman in
The Guardian, Fri 23 Dec 2022 05.00 EST
Another instance of scope and depth —
"The Amber Spyglass" Log24 post of Wednesday.
See also other references here to Middlemarch.
(See earlier posts referring to that theory.)
Catching up to Pullman's Oct. 3 remark . . .
See Log24 posts now tagged October 1-2-3.
Midrash from Philip Pullman . . .
"The 1929 Einstein-Carmichael Expedition"
I prefer the 1929 Emch-Carmichael expedition —
This is from . . .
“By far the most important structure in design theory
is the Steiner system S(5, 8, 24).”
— “Block Designs,” by Andries E. Brouwer
(Ch. 14 (pp. 693-746) of Handbook of Combinatorics,
Vol. I, MIT Press, 1995, edited by Ronald L. Graham,
Martin Grötschel, and László Lovász, Section 16 (p. 716))
In memory of Ed Wood:
"Such a brilliant director, a fucking powerhouse…."
— Recent Instagram comment
"Twilight was theatrically released on November 21, 2008;
it grossed over US$393 million worldwide. It was released
on DVD March 21, 2009 and became the most purchased
DVD of the year." — Wikipedia
See also November 21, 2008, in posts tagged Olaf Gate.
Related material —
As inquisitions go, I prefer the Holy Office of Philip Pullman.
Before thir eyes in sudden view appear The secrets of the hoarie deep, a dark Illimitable Ocean without bound, Without dimension, where length, breadth, and highth, And time and place are lost; where eldest Night And Chaos, Ancestors of Nature, hold Eternal Anarchie, amidst the noise Of endless warrs and by confusion stand. For hot, cold, moist, and dry, four Champions fierce Strive here for Maistrie, and to Battel bring amidst the noise Thir embryon Atoms.... ... Into this wilde Abyss, The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave, Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire, But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight, Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain His dark materials to create more Worlds, Into this wilde Abyss the warie fiend Stood on the brink of Hell and look'd a while, Pondering his Voyage.... -- John Milton, Paradise Lost , Book II
Note of 10:44 AM ET, Friday, June 25, 2021 —
"Stephen Elliot Dunn was born on June 24,
1939, in Forest Hills, Queens . . . ."
— https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/
books/stephen-dunn-poet-dead.html
Update of 11:07 AM ET the same day —
From Dunn's obituary —
|
Whether writing about matters small or large,
“Even your most serious problem,” he said,
— By Neil Genzlinger, New York Times , |
"We have much to discover." — Saying attributed to
Christopher Marlowe in a TV series. See posts now tagged 4X.
Midrash for Doctorow —
Scholium for Pullman —
"We need a multiplicity of viewpoints."
— Philip Pullman in a New Yorker interview
published yesterday
See as well Pullman's "Golden Compass"
in posts tagged
"And were all my perceptions removed by death,
and could I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love,
nor hate, after the dissolution of my body, I should
be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is
further requisite to make me a perfect nonentity."
— Book I, Part IV, Section vi of
A Treatise of Human Nature
— Detail from the ending of Philip Pullman's
graphic novel "Mystery of the Ghost Ship"
Log24 ten years ago today —
"Here, in a strategy of simple erasure,
the Subject masks his singularity . . . ."
— Jacques Derrida
See also the previous post and . . .
— Detail from the ending of Philip Pullman's new
graphic novel "Mystery of the Ghost Ship"
Peter Galison, a Harvard professor, is a defender of
the Vienna Circle and the religion of Scientism.
From Galison's “Structure of Crystal, Bucket of Dust,” in
Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative ,
edited by Apostolos Doxiadis and Barry Mazur, pp. 52-78
(Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 2012) …
Galison's final paragraph —
"Perhaps, then, it should not surprise us too much if,
as Wheeler approaches the beginning-end of all things,
there is a bucket of Borelian dust. Out of this filth,
through the proposition machine of quantum mechanics
comes pregeometry; pregeometry makes geometry;
geometry gives rise to matter and the physical laws
and constants of the universe. At once close to and far
from the crystalline story that Bourbaki invoked,
Wheeler’s genesis puts one in mind of Genesis 3:19:
'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou
return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken:
for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.' "
For fans of Scientism who prefer more colorful narratives —
"Dust is a fictional elementary particle that is of
fundamental importance within the story."
— Wikipedia on Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy
A review of posts tagged Kabbalah yields —
|
"If all that 'matters' are fundamentally mathematical relationships, then there ceases to be any important difference between the actual and the possible. (Even if you aren't a mathematical Platonist, you can always find some collection of particles of dust to fit any required pattern. In Permutation City this is called the 'logic of the dust' theory.)….
— Danny Yee, review of Permutation City , |
See also in this journal a search for Dark Matter.
(Title of a New Yorker
essay dated June 2, 2008)
In his honor, we may perhaps be justified in temporarily ignoring the wise saying "never assume."
From a defense of the dogma of the Assumption:
"On another level, the Assumption epitomizes the reconciliation of the material and spiritual world, as the human Mary enters 'body and soul to heavenly glory.' Carl Jung, the transpersonal psychologist, concluded that the doctrine of the Assumption reflected an acceptance of the physical world."
For other such reconciliations, see
But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt
Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more Worlds….
Thanks for a reference
to this story go to
Robert Bringhurst,
in his own way a
Cleric of the Grammaton.
Apocatastasis Now
I give you the end of a golden string,
Only wind it into a ball:
It will lead you in at Heavens gate,
Built in Jerusalems wall.
— WILLIAM BLAKE
"In 'Apocatastasis Now: A Very Condensed Reading of William Blake's Jerusalem' (
— The Year's Work in English Studies, 2003: Vol. 82, No. 1, pp. 493-547
| Thriller |
|
From the website of Philip Pullman, president of The Blake Society:
"I must create a System…"
|
God was apparently not
available this week;
record producer Joel Dorn,
who died on Monday,
will have to do.
"… when you get the feel of it, and the record actually transports you back to that time, then it's a real explanation of what's going on… of what went on. And here I think you can– it's one thing to get the music, it's another thing to get the place and the people and the interaction. When it's really right, the audience is the fifth member of a quartet." —Joel Dorn
"Philosophers ponder the idea
of identity: what it is to
give something a name
on Monday and have it
respond to that name
on Friday."
—Bernard Holland in
The New York Times,
Monday, May 20, 1996
"Daddy's like
an old knight."
–Allison in "Meet Joe Black"
For Joe Black himself,
see the previous entry.
The Ring of Gyges
10:31:32 AM ET
Commentary by Richard Wilhelm
on I Ching Hexagram 32:
“Duration is… not a state of rest, for mere standstill is regression.
Duration is rather the self-contained and therefore self-renewing
movement of an organized, firmly integrated whole, taking place in
accordance with immutable laws and beginning anew at every ending.”
Related material
Jung and the Imago Dei
| Log24 on June 10, 2007:
WHAT MAKES IAGO EVIL? some people ask. I never ask. —Joan Didion Iago states that he is not who he is. —Mark F. Frisch |
“Not Being There,”
by Christopher Caldwell,
from next Sunday’s
New York Times Magazine:
| “The chance to try on fresh identities was the great boon that life online was supposed to afford us. Multiuser role-playing games and discussion groups would be venues for living out fantasies. Shielded by anonymity, everyone could now pass a ‘second life’ online as Thor the Motorcycle Sex God or the Sage of Wherever. Some warned, though, that there were other possibilities. The Stanford Internet expert Lawrence Lessig likened online anonymity to the ring of invisibility that surrounds the shepherd Gyges in one of Plato’s dialogues. Under such circumstances, Plato feared, no one is ‘of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice.’Time, along with a string of sock-puppet scandals, has proved Lessig and Plato right.” |
“The Boy Who Lived,”
by Christopher Hitchens,
from next Sunday’s
New York Times Book Review:
| On the conclusion of the Harry Potter series:”The toys have been put firmly back in the box, the wand has been folded up, and the conjuror is discreetly accepting payment while the children clamor for fresh entertainments. (I recommend that they graduate to Philip Pullman, whose daemon scheme is finer than any patronus.)” |
I, on the other hand,
recommend Tolkien…
or, for those who are
already familiar with
Tolkien, Plato– to whom
“The Ring of Gyges” may
serve as an introduction.
“It’s all in Plato, all in Plato:
bless me, what do they
teach them at these schools!”
— C. S. Lewis
Conversations in Hell
Part I: Locating Hell
"Noi siam venuti al loco ov' i' t'ho detto
che tu vedrai le genti dolorose
c'hanno perduto il ben de l'intelletto."
"We have come to where I warned you
we would find
Those wretched souls who no longer have
The intellectual benefits of the mind."
From a Harvard student's weblog:
Heard in Mather I hope you get gingivitis You want me to get oral cancer?! Goodnight fartface Turd. Turd. Turd. Turd. Turd. Make your own waffles!! Blah blah blah starcraft blah blah starcraft blah starcraft. It's da email da email. And some blue hair! Oohoohoo Izod! 10 gigs! Yeah it smells really bad. Only in the stairs though. Starcraft blah blah Starcraft fartface. Yeah it's hard. You have to get a bunch of battle cruisers. 40 kills! So good! Oh ho ho grunt grunt squeal. I'm getting sick again. You have a final tomorrow? In What?! Um I don't even know. Next year we're draggin him there and sticking the needle in ourselves.
" … one more line / unravelling from the dark design / spun by God and Cotton Mather"
— Robert Lowell
Part II: The Call of Stories
From a website on college fund-raising:
• “The people who come to us bring their stories. They hope they tell them well enough so that we understand the truth of their lives.”—Robert Coles, Harvard professor, The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination
• “If there’s anything worth calling theology, it is listening to people’s stories, listening to them and cherishing them.”—Mary Pellauer, quoted in Kathleen Norris’ Dakota: A Spiritual Geography
From a website on "The West Wing":
THE LONG GOODBYE
9pm 2003-01-15
In a special episode guest written by playwright Jon Robin Baitz, C.J. (Allison Janney) reluctantly returns to Dayton, Ohio, to speak at her 20th high school class reunion…"
From a website illustrating language in Catholic religious stories:
"Headquartered in Dayton, Ohio, the Sisters of the Precious Blood is a Catholic religious congregation…"
From a Catholic religious story by J. R. R. Tolkien:
"It shone now as if verily it was
wrought of living fire.
'Precious, precious, precious!' Gollum cried.
'My Precious! O my Precious!'"
From a website on Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials:
"'Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories, we wouldn't be human beings at all."
From the same website, a short story:
"Philip Pullman was born in Norwich on
19th October 1946."
Part III: My Story
For a different story, see my weblog of
19th October 2002:
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Saturday, October 19, 2002
What is Truth? |
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