For an authority on Japanese art —
Text Tiles*
Compare to and contrast with …
Remarks on art, contemplation. and Puritanism
from a recent Princeton University Press book —
“Lucy Lippard distinguished Asian art
(ego-less and contemplative)
from New York Minimalism
(moralistic and puritanical).”
— Mathematics and Art ,
Princeton U. Press, Fall 2015
* Update of Aug. 24, 2016 — See also Nov. 2, 2014.
From AP News in The Derrick , Oil City, PA, today —
"Banks lived part of the year in Florida, and for a time
had a home in Jamaica, but he was essentially a man
of the North, with an old Puritan’s sense of consequences.
Snow fell often in his fiction . . . ." — Hillel Italie
Update of 3:33 PM ET —
From a link target in this journal on April 4, 2004 —
"Puzzle begun I write in the day's space . . . ."
The title is a phrase by Kyle Smith, who writes with
considerable taste and little envy.
Then there is Rebecca Newberger Goldstein . . .
See as well Heidegger at Davos.
David Brooks in The New York Times today —
"We once had a unifying national story, celebrated each Thanksgiving.
It was an Exodus story. Americans are the people who escaped oppression,
crossed a wilderness and are building a promised land. The Puritans brought
this story with them. Each wave of immigrants saw themselves in this story.
The civil rights movement embraced this story.
But we have to admit that many today do not resonate with this story. . . .
Today, we have no common national narrative, no shared way
of interpreting the flow of events. Without a common story,
we don’t know what our national purpose is. We have no
common set of goals or ideals.
We need a new national narrative."
From a post of August 15, 2010 —
For some background, see Java Jive and Today's Theology.
Related readings —
From 1928:
From the previous post:
"Thus, instead of Propp's chronological scheme,
in which the order of succession of events
is a feature of the structure . . .
another scheme should be adopted, which would present
a structural model defined as the group of transformations
of a small number of elements. This scheme would appear
as a matrix . . . ."
— Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1960
From "Why Was New Haven Divided into Nine Squares?"
"Of note on the Wadsworth Map of 1748 are…
the Grammar School, the 'Goal' or jail…."
Related material: Puritan in this journal.
Non-Puritans may prefer the following image—
Source: Yale English Department banner
Related material from June 3, 2008 …
On Faith:
“God is the original conspiracy theory….
Among the varieties of Christian monotheism,
none is more totalitarian, none lodges more radical
claims for God’s omnipotence, than Calvinism—
and within America, the chief analogue of Calvinist
theology, Puritanism. According to Calvin every
particle of dust, every act, every thought, every
creature is governed by the will of God, and yields
clues to the divine plan.”
– Scott Sanders, “Pynchon’s Paranoid History“
The "New Books" link in today's Arts & Letters Daily leads to a review of Andrew Delbanco's College: What it Was, Is, and Should
Some, like Delbanco, remind us what the word ‘professor’ once meant: ‘A person who professes a faith, as in the Puritan churches, where the profession was made before the congregation as a kind of public initiation.’
I am not now, nor have I ever been, a professor.
I did, however, once profess the following:
This 1988 letter advocated viewing pure mathematics as one of the liberal arts. Twenty-four years later, that position still seems worth defending.
Arithmetic (i.e., number theory) and geometry are, by the way, two of the seven traditional liberal arts.
“When New Haven was founded, the city was laid out into a grid of nine squares surrounded by a great wilderness.
Last year [2000] History of Art Professor Emeritus Vincent Scully said the original town plan reflected a feeling that the new city should be sacred.
Scully said the colony’s founders thought of their new Puritan settlement as a ‘nine-square paradise on Earth, heaven on earth, New Haven, New Jerusalem.'”
— Yale Daily News, Jan. 11, 2001
“Real and unreal are two in one:
New Haven
Before and after one arrives….”
— Wallace Stevens,
“An Ordinary Evening
in New Haven,” XXVIII
See also Art and Man at Yale.
“… while some are elected,
others not elect are
passed by….”
— A commentary on the
Calvinist doctrine of preterition
| Gravity’s Rainbow, Penguin Classics, 1995, page 742:
“… knowing his Tarot, we would expect to look among the Humility, among the gray and preterite souls, to look for him adrift in the hostile light of the sky, the darkness of the sea…. Now there’s only a long cat’s-eye of bleak sunset left over the plain tonight, bright gray against a purple ceiling of clouds, with an iris of 742″ |
“God is the original
conspiracy theory.”
“We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.”
— President Obama yesterday
It is not entirely clear what these “childish things” are. Perhaps the young nation’s “childish things” that the new President refers to are part of what Robert Stone memorably called “our secret culture.” Stone was referring to Puritanism, which some advocates of the new religion of Scientism might call “childish.” I do not. Lunatic, perhaps, but not childish.
Related meditations:
A year ago yesterday, on Sunday, Jan. 20, 2008, the mid-day lottery for New York State was 605.
A midrash in the Judeo-Christian tradition of paranoia a year ago today suggested that 605 might be a veiled reference to “God, the Devil, and a Bridge,” a weblog entry on mathematician André Weil.
Continuing in this vein a year later, we are confronted with the mid-day New York lottery for yesterday:
Taking a hint from another
entry on Weil, this may be
regarded as a reference to
The Oxford Book of
English Verse (1919 edition):
Selection 742 in that book
comports well with this
jounal’s recent meditations
on death and Brooklyn:
| “Let me glide noiselessly forth; | |
| With the key of softness unlock the locks….” — Walt Whitman |
Applying this method of
exegesis to last year’s
lottery, we have
| “And all that did then attend and follow, |
|
| Were silent with love, as you now, Apollo, |
|
| With envy of my sweet pipings.” |
— Pan: God of Shepherds, Flocks, and Fornication
Hymn 605 thus supplies a reference to the devil mentioned by Weil in the entry of 6/05.
“… thus far, I have not heard any priests of Apollo, nor of any other God, issuing any auguries.”
Neither have I, but hearing is only one of the senses.
“Heard melodies are sweet,
but those unheard
Are sweeter.”— John Keats
Among the varieties of Christian monotheism, none is more totalitarian, none lodges more radical claims for God's omnipotence, than Calvinism– and within America, the chief analogue of Calvinist theology, Puritanism. According to Calvin every particle of dust, every act, every thought, every creature is governed by the will of God, and yields clues to the divine plan."
On Doubt:
"a Puritan reflex of seeking other orders beyond the visible, also known as paranoia"
— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (Penguin Classics, 1995), p. 188
On Art:
I suggest that faith and doubt are best reconciled by art– as in A Contrapuntal Theme and in the magazine's current online podcast of Mary Gaitskill reading a 1948 New Yorker story by Vladimir Nabokov.
For the text of the story, see "Signs and Symbols." For an excellent discussion of Nabokov's art, see "The Signs and Symbols in Nabokov's 'Signs and Symbols,'" by Alexander Dolinin.
Born today: Laurence Fishburne
Yale Daily News, Jan. 11, 2001:
“When New Haven was founded, the city was laid out into a grid of nine squares surrounded by a great wilderness.
Last year History of Art Professor Emeritus Vincent Scully said the original town plan reflected a feeling that the new city should be sacred.
Scully said the colony’s founders thought of their new Puritan settlement as a ‘nine-square paradise on Earth, heaven on earth, New Haven, New Jerusalem.'”
“Real and unreal are two in one:
New Haven
Before and after one arrives….”
— Wallace Stevens,
“An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,’ XXVIII
God is in…
The Details
From an entry for Aug. 19, 2003 on
conciseness, simplicity, and objectivity:
Above: Dr. Harrison Pope, Harvard professor of psychiatry, demonstrates the use of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale "block design" subtest. Another Harvard psychiatrist, Armand Nicholi, is in the news lately with his book The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life.
For the meaning of the Old-Testament logos above, see the remarks of Plato on the immortality of the soul at For the meaning of the New-Testament logos above, see the remarks of R. P. Langlands at |
On Harvard and psychiatry: see
The Crimson Passion:
A Drama at Mardi Gras
(February 24, 2004)
This is a reductio ad absurdum of the Harvard philosophy so eloquently described by Alston Chase in his study of Harvard and the making of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. Kaczynski's time at Harvard overlapped slightly with mine, so I may have seen him in Cambridge at some point. Chase writes that at Harvard, the Unabomber "absorbed the message of positivism, which demanded value-neutral reasoning and preached that (as Kaczynski would later express it in his journal) 'there is no logical justification for morality.'" I was less impressed by Harvard positivism, although I did benefit from a course in symbolic logic from Quine. At that time– the early 60's– little remained at Harvard of what Robert Stone has called "our secret culture," that of the founding Puritans– exemplified by Cotton and Increase Mather.
From Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise:
"Our secret culture is as frivolous as a willow on a tombstone. It's a wonderful thing– or it was. It was strong and dreadful, it was majestic and ruthless. It was a stranger to pity. And it's not for sale, ladies and gentlemen."
Some traces of that culture:
|
A web page
|
A contemporary
Click on pictures for details. |
A more appealing view of faith was offered by PBS on Wednesday night, the beginning of this year's High Holy Days:
|
Armand Nicholi: But how can you believe something that you don't think is true, I mean, certainly, an intelligent person can't embrace something that they don't think is true — that there's something about us that would object to that.
Jeremy Fraiberg: Well, the answer is, they probably do believe it's true. Armand Nicholi: But how do they get there? See, that's why both Freud and Lewis was very interested in that one basic question. Is there an intelligence beyond the universe? And how do we answer that question? And how do we arrive at the answer of that question? Michael Shermer: Well, in a way this is an empirical question, right? Either there is or there isn't. Armand Nicholi: Exactly. Michael Shermer: And either we can figure it out or we can't, and therefore, you just take the leap of faith or you don't. Armand Nicholi: Yeah, now how can we figure it out? Winifred Gallagher: I think something that was perhaps not as common in their day as is common now — this idea that we're acting as if belief and unbelief were two really radically black and white different things, and I think for most people, there's a very — it's a very fuzzy line, so that — Margaret Klenck: It's always a struggle. Winifred Gallagher: Rather than — I think there's some days I believe, and some days I don't believe so much, or maybe some days I don't believe at all. Doug Holladay: Some hours. Winifred Gallagher: It's a, it's a process. And I think for me the big developmental step in my spiritual life was that — in some way that I can't understand or explain that God is right here right now all the time, everywhere. Armand Nicholi: How do you experience that? Winifred Gallagher: I experience it through a glass darkly, I experience it in little bursts. I think my understanding of it is that it's, it's always true, and sometimes I can see it and sometimes I can't. Or sometimes I remember that it's true, and then everything is in Technicolor. And then most of the time it's not, and I have to go on faith until the next time I can perhaps see it again. I think of a divine reality, an ultimate reality, uh, would be my definition of God. |
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Gallagher seemed to be the only participant in the PBS discussion that came close to the Montessori ideals of conciseness, simplicity, and objectivity. Dr. Montessori intended these as ideals for teachers, but they seem also to be excellent religious values. Just as the willow-tombstone seems suited to Geoffrey Hill's style, the Pythagorean sangaku pictured above seems appropriate to the admirable Gallagher.
August 6: Feast of the Metamorphosis
Adapted from Brief Exhortations:
Geneva Bible:
Romans 12:2 2 And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed [metamorphosized] by the renewing of your f mind, that ye may prove what [is] that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.
The word “transformed” is from the Greek word ” metamorphe,” (to transform or change) and is found only in the above verse, in Matthew 17:2 …
Geneva Bible:
Matthew 17:2 And was b transfigured [metamorphosized] before them: and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light.
and in Mark 9:2 …
Geneva Bible:
Mark 9:2 1 And after six days Jesus taketh [with him] Peter, and James, and John, and leadeth them up into an high mountain apart by themselves: and he was transfigured [metamorphosized] before them.
where it is used of the transfiguration of Jesus. It is used in biology with reference to the change of the worm to the butterfly.
Note by S. H. Cullinane, August 6, 2002:
For more on the Geneva (Shakespeare’s) Bible, see Michael Brown’s Introduction.
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