* See some related images from this journal.
Thursday, August 16, 2018
Wednesday, October 9, 2024
Basque Country Stories
|
A Story That Works
|
The above Leiber remarks appeared here on December 14, 2005.
They are reposted in memory of the author known as Trevanian,
who reportedly died on that date. He wrote about, and for a time
lived in, the Basque Country.
See also the Basque Country in this journal.
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Sunday, April 23, 2023
Muse Variations
The logo of MUSE, the band —
A logo I prefer . . .
Related material from a post of October 2020 —
Related material from a post on the above Reddit date —
|
A Story That Works
“There is the dark, eternally silent, unknown universe;
and lastly, there is lonely, story-telling, wonder-questing, – Fritz Leiber in “The Button Molder“ |
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Wednesday, May 11, 2022
A Story for the TENET Director
|
A Story That Works
“There is the dark, eternally silent, unknown universe;
and lastly, there is lonely, story-telling, wonder-questing, – Fritz Leiber in “The Button Molder“ |
♫ "Will the record be unbroken . . . ?"
— Adapted song lyric
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Wednesday, October 21, 2020
The Chemicals
From a page linked to yesterday in The Newton Methods —
A related fiction —
|
From one of the best books of the 20th century:
by Richard Brautigan “The Chemicals that resided in the jar were a combination of hundreds of things from all over the world. Some of The Chemicals were ancient and very difficult to obtain. There were a few drops of something from an Egyptian pyramid dating from the year 3000 B.C. There were distillates from the jungles of South America and drops of things from plants that grew near the snowline in the Himalayas. Ancient China, Rome and Greece had contributed things, too, that had found their way into the jar. Witchcraft and modern science, the latest of discoveries, had also contributed to the contents of the jar. There was even something that was reputed to have come all the way from Atlantis…. … they did not know that the monster was an illusion created by a mutated light in The Chemicals. a light that had the power to work its will upon mind and matter and change the very nature of reality to fit its mischievous mind.” |
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Monday, June 1, 2020
The Gefter Boundary
“The message was clear: having a finite frame of reference
creates the illusion of a world, but even the reference frame itself
is an illusion. Observers create reality, but observers aren’t real.
There is nothing ontologically distinct about an observer, because
you can always find a frame in which that observer disappears:
the frame of the frame itself, the boundary of the boundary.”
— Amanda Gefter in 2014, quoted here on Mayday 2020.
See as well the previous post.
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Sunday, May 31, 2020
Flashback
Related material —
“The message was clear: having a finite frame of reference
creates the illusion of a world, but even the reference frame itself
is an illusion. Observers create reality, but observers aren’t real.
There is nothing ontologically distinct about an observer, because
you can always find a frame in which that observer disappears:
the frame of the frame itself, the boundary of the boundary.”
— Amanda Gefter in 2014, quoted here on Mayday 2020.
See as well, in a post from the date of Hunter Thompson’s death :
“Today, February 20, is the 19th anniversary of my note
The Relativity Problem in Finite Geometry.”
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Friday, May 1, 2020
Bullshit Studies
The following passage is from Amanda Gefter’s Trespassing
on Einstein’s Lawn (Bantam Books, 2014).
| “You know the story of Plato’s cave?” my father asked. “All the prisoners are chained up in the cave and they can’t see the real world outside, only the shadows on the wall? That’s supposed to be a negative thing, like they’ll never know reality. But the truth is, you have to be stuck inside a limited reference frame for there to be any reality at all! If you weren’t chained to your light cone, you’d see nothing. The H-state.”
I nodded. “You’d have no information. You need the broken symmetry, the shadow, to have information and information gives rise to the world. It from bit.” I couldn’t help but grin with excitement. The message was clear: having a finite frame of reference creates the illusion of a world, but even the reference frame itself is an illusion. Observers create reality, but observers aren’t real. There is nothing ontologically distinct about an observer, because you can always find a frame in which that observer disappears: the frame of the frame itself, the boundary of the boundary. “If physicists discover an invariant someday, the game will be up,” my father mused. “That would rule out the hypothesis that the universe is really nothing.” That was true. But so far, at least, every last invariant had gone the way of space and time, rendered relative and observer-dependent. Spacetime, gravity, electromagnetism, the nuclear forces, mass, energy, momentum, angular momentum, charge, dimensions, particles, fields, the vacuum, strings, the universe, the multiverse, the speed of light— one by one they had been downgraded to illusion. As the surface appearance of reality fell away, only one thing remained. Nothing. |
My path to Gefter’s father’s musing led from a quotation attributed,
probably falsely, to John Archibald Wheeler on page 52 of Octavio
Paz’s Claude Lévi-Strauss: An Introduction (Cornell, 1970) —
“There is a point at which
‘something is nothing and nothing is something.’ “
The quote may actually be by AP writer John Barbour reporting
on a 1967 American Physical Society talk by Wheeler, “The End
of Time.”
Gefter mentions Wheeler 369 times:
See as well Introduction to Quantum Woo.
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Friday, August 31, 2018
Perception of Number
Review of yesterday's post Perception of Space —
From Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997),
republished as "… and the Sorcerer's Stone ," Kindle edition:
In a print edition from Bloomsbury (2004), and perhaps in the
earliest editions, the above word "movements" is the first word
on page 168:
Click the above ellipse for some Log24 posts on the eightfold cube,
the source of the 168 automorphisms ("movements") of the Fano plane.
"Refined interpretation requires that you know that
someone once said the offspring of reality and illusion
is only a staggering confusion."
— Poem, "The Game of Roles," by Mary Jo Bang
Related material on reality and illusion —
an ad on the back cover of the current New Yorker —
"Hey, the stars might lie, but the numbers never do." — Song lyric
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Saturday, October 21, 2017
Shift Lock
"As many philosophers have noted, in the German language,
the word Schein bears three distinct meanings:
(i) shining, radiance, luminosity
(ii) manifesting, phenomenal appearing, showing itself, coming to light
(iii) illusion, deception, semblance, 'mere' appearance
In the Greek language of Plato's thought, the first two meanings were
bound together by their etymology. But Plato's metaphysics, drawing
a line of irreconcilable separation between the reality of a higher realm
of pure Ideas and the illusoriness of a lower realm consisting of sensuous
appearances, exhibits a logic that he saw connecting inextricably all three
of these seemingly unconnected meanings."
— Levin, David Michael. The Philosopher's Gaze:
Modernity in the Shadows of Enlightenment .
Part III, Section 10: "Where the Beauty of Truth Lies."
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
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Wednesday, August 2, 2017
Verhexung
"Refined interpretation requires that you know that
someone once said the offspring of reality and illusion
is only a staggering confusion."
— Poem, "The Game of Roles," by Mary Jo Bang
Related material for those perplexed by such Verhexung —
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Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Simple Skill
But with good Will
To show our simple skill…
( Continued from Midsummer Eve, 1993 )
The "Black Diamond" search from Holy Cross Day
leads to Talk Amongst Yourselves, which in turn
leads to PyrE in the Book, with Alfred Bester's
version of "Will and Idea."
This phrase may be regarded as a version of
Schopenhauer's "Will and Representation."
Related material—
"Schopenhauer's notion of the will comes from the Kantian thing-in-itself, which Kant believed to be the fundamental reality behind the representation that provided the matter of perception, but lacked form. Kant believed that space, time, causation, and many other similar phenomena belonged properly to the form imposed on the world by the human mind in order to create the representation, and these factors were absent from the thing-in-itself. Schopenhauer pointed out that anything outside of time and space could not be differentiated, so the thing-in-itself must be one and all things that exist, including human beings, must be part of this fundamental unity. Our inner-experience must be a manifestation of the noumenal realm and the will is the inner kernel* of every being. All knowledge gained of objects is seen as self-referential, as we recognize the same will in other things as is inside us." —Wikipedia
* "Die Schrecken des Todes beruhen großentheils auf dem falschen Schein, daß jetzt das Ich verschwinde, und die Welt bleibe, Vielmehr aber ist das Gegentheil wahr: die Welt verschwindet; hingegen der innerste Kern des Ich, der Träger und Hervorbringer jenes Subjekts, in dessen Vorstellung allein die Welt ihr Daseyn hatte, beharrt."
— Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung , Kapitel 41
Added Nov. 16, 2012, a translation by E. F. J. Payne—
"The terrors of death rest for the most part on the false illusion that then the I or ego vanishes, and the world remains. But rather is the opposite true, namely that the world vanishes; on the other hand, the innermost kernel of the ego endures, the bearer and producer of that subject in whose representation alone the world had its existence."
— THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION
by Arthur Schopenhauer
Translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne
In two volumes
© 1969 Dover Publications, Inc.
© 1958 by The Falcon's Wing Press
Volume Two: Supplements to the Fourth Book,
XLI. On Death and Its Relation to the Indestructibility of Our Inner Nature
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Monday, July 9, 2012
Taps for Fatso
A Story That Works
“There is the dark, eternally silent, unknown universe;
and lastly, there is lonely, story-telling, wonder-questing, – Fritz Leiber in “The Button Molder“ |
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Wednesday, December 1, 2010
A Geometric Merkabah*
For Hanukkah (which starts this evening)—
Part I — The Stella Octangula (see also Monday's ART WARS post)—
Part II — A different view of the Stella —
Click images for some mathematical background.
For some philosophical background on illusion and reality, see Graham Priest in the Sunday, Nov. 28, New York Times column "The Stone" and in a work of fiction he published in the Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic (Vol. 38, No. 4) in 1997.
* See Google Images for pictures that are less academically respectable.
For some related religious lore, see Merkabah at Wikipedia.
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Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Tuesday August 18, 2009
Prima Materia
(Background: Art Humor: Sein Feld (March 11, 2009) and Ides of March Sermon, 2009)
From Cardinal Manning's review of Kirkman's Philosophy Without Assumptions—
"And here I must confess… that between something and nothing I can find no intermediate except potentia, which does not mean force but possibility."
— Contemporary Review, Vol. 28 (June-November, 1876), page 1017
Furthermore….
Cardinal Manning, Contemporary Review, Vol. 28, pages 1026-1027:
The following will be, I believe, a correct statement of the Scholastic teaching:–
1. By strict process of reason we demonstrate a First Existence, a First Cause, a First Mover; and that this Existence, Cause, and Mover is Intelligence and Power.
2. This Power is eternal, and from all eternity has been in its fullest amplitude; nothing in it is latent, dormant, or in germ: but its whole existence is in actu, that is, in actual perfection, and in complete expansion or actuality. In other words God is Actus Purus, in whose being nothing is potential, in potentia, but in Him all things potentially exist.
3. In the power of God, therefore, exists the original matter (prima materia) of all things; but that prima materia is pura potentia, a nihilo distincta, a mere potentiality or possibility; nevertheless, it is not a nothing, but a possible existence. When it is said that the prima materia of all things exists in the power of God, it does not mean that it is of the existence of God, which would involve Pantheism, but that its actual existence is possible.
4. Of things possible by the power of God, some come into actual existence, and their existence is determined by the impression of a form upon this materia prima. The form is the first act which determines the existence and the species of each, and this act is wrought by the will and power of God. By this union of form with the materia prima, the materia secunda or the materia signata is constituted.
5. This form is called forma substantialis because it determines the being of each existence, and is the root of all its properties and the cause of all its operations.
6. And yet the materia prima has no actual existence before the form is impressed. They come into existence simultaneously;
[p. 1027 begins]
as the voice and articulation, to use St. Augustine's illustration, are simultaneous in speech.
7. In all existing things there are, therefore, two principles; the one active, which is the form– the other passive, which is the matter; but when united, they have a unity which determines the existence of the species. The form is that by which each is what it is.
8. It is the form that gives to each its unity of cohesion, its law, and its specific nature.*
When, therefore, we are asked whether matter exists or no, we answer, It is as certain that matter exists as that form exists; but all the phenomena which fall under sense prove the existence of the unity, cohesion, species, that is, of the form of each, and this is a proof that what was once in mere possibility is now in actual existence. It is, and that is both form and matter.
When we are further asked what is matter, we answer readily, It is not God, nor the substance of God; nor the presence of God arrayed in phenomena; nor the uncreated will of God veiled in a world of illusions, deluding us with shadows into the belief of substance: much less is it catter [pejorative term in the book under review], and still less is it nothing. It is a reality, the physical kind or nature of which is as unknown in its quiddity or quality as its existence is certainly known to the reason of man.
* "… its specific nature"
(Click to enlarge) —
The Catholic physics expounded by Cardinal Manning above is the physics of Aristotle.
For a more modern treatment of these topics, see Werner Heisenberg's Physics and Philosophy. For instance:
"The probability wave of Bohr, Kramers, Slater, however, meant… a tendency for something. It was a quantitative version of the old concept of 'potentia' in Aristotelian philosophy. It introduced something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality."
Compare to Cardinal Manning's statement above:
"… between something and nothing I can find no intermediate except potentia…"
To the mathematician, the cardinal's statement suggests the set of real numbers between 1 and 0, inclusive, by which probabilities are measured. Mappings of purely physical events to this set of numbers are perhaps better described by applied mathematicians and physicists than by philosophers, theologians, or storytellers. (Cf. Voltaire's mockery of possible-worlds philosophy and, more recently, The Onion's mockery of the fictional storyteller Fournier's quantum flux. See also Mathematics and Narrative.)
Regarding events that are not purely physical– those that have meaning for mankind, and perhaps for God– events affecting conception, birth, life, and death– the remarks of applied mathematicians and physicists are often ignorant and obnoxious, and very often do more harm than good. For such meaningful events, the philosophers, theologians, and storytellers are better guides. See, for instance, the works of Jung and those of his school. Meaningful events sometimes (perhaps, to God, always) exhibit striking correspondences. For the study of such correspondences, the compact topological space [0, 1] discussed above is perhaps less helpful than the finite Galois field GF(64)– in its guise as the I Ching. Those who insist on dragging God into the picture may consult St. Augustine's Day, 2006, and Hitler's Still Point.
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Tuesday, December 5, 2006
Tuesday December 5, 2006
Today in History
(via The Associated Press)
|
On this date (Dec. 5): In 1776, the first scholastic fraternity in America, Phi Beta Kappa, was organized at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va. In 1791, composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in Vienna, Austria, at age 35. In 2006, author Joan Didion is 72. |
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live….
We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.”
An Alternate History
(based on entries of
the past three days):
“A FAMOUS HISTORIAN:
England, 932 A.D. —
A kingdom divided….”
|
A Story That Works
|
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Sunday, July 16, 2006
Sunday July 16, 2006
Mathematics and Narrative
continued…
“Now, at the urging of the UC Berkeley cognitive linguist George Lakoff, liberal America’s guru of the moment, progressive Democrats are practicing to get their own reluctant mouths around some magical new vocabulary, in the hope of surviving and eventually overcoming the age of Bush.”
— Marc Cooper in The Atlantic Monthly, April 2005, “Thinking of Jackasses: The Grand Delusions of the Democratic Party”
Cooper’s “now” is apparently still valid. In today’s New York Times, the leftist Stanley Fish reviews Talking Right, by leftist Geoffrey Nunberg:
“… the right’s language is now the default language for everyone.
On the way to proposing a counterstrategy (it never really arrives), Nunberg pauses to engage in a polite disagreement with his fellow linguist George Lakoff, who has provided a rival account of the conservative ascendancy. Lakoff argues that Republicans have articulated– first for themselves and then for others– a conceptual framework that allows them to unite apparently disparate issues in a single coherent worldview … woven together not in a philosophically consistent framework but in a narrative ‘that creates an illusion of coherence.’
Once again, the Republicans have such a narrative– ‘declining patriotism and moral standards, the out-of-touch media and the self-righteous liberal elite … minorities demanding special privileges … disrespect for religious faith, a swollen government’– but ‘Democrats and liberals have not offered compelling narratives that could compete’ with it. Eighty pages later he is still saying the same thing. ‘The Democrats need a compelling narrative of their own.'”
Lakoff is the co-author of a book on the philosophy of mathematics, Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being. From Wikipedia’s article on Lakoff:
“According to Lakoff, even mathematics itself is subjective to the human species and its cultures: thus ‘any question of math’s being inherent in physical reality is moot, since there is no way to know whether or not it is.’ Lakoff and Rafael E. Nunez (2000) argue at length that mathematical and philosophical ideas are best understood in light of the embodied mind. The philosophy of mathematics ought therefore to look to the current scientific understanding of the human body as a foundation ontology, and abandon self-referential attempts to ground the operational components of mathematics in anything other than ‘meat.'”
For a long list of related leftist philosophy, see The Thinking Meat Project.
Democrats seeking narratives may also consult The Carlin Code and The Prime Cut Gospel.
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Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Wednesday December 14, 2005
From Here
to Eternity
to Eternity
For Loomis Dean
See also
For Rita Moreno
on Her Birthday
(Dec. 11, 2005)
|
Los Angeles Times
Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2005
OBITUARIES 
LOOMIS DEAN Loomis Dean, 88; By Jon Thurber, Times Staff Writer
Loomis Dean, a Life magazine photographer who made memorable pictures of the royalty of both Europe and Hollywood, has died. He was 88.
Dean died Wednesday [December 7, 2005] at Sonoma Valley Hospital in Sonoma, Calif., of complications from a stroke, according to his son, Christopher. In a photographic career spanning six decades, Dean's leading images included shirtless Hollywood mogul Darryl F. Zanuck trying a one-handed chin-up on a trapeze bar, the ocean liner Andrea Doria listing in the Atlantic and writer Ernest Hemingway in Spain the year before he committed suicide. One of his most memorable photographs for Life was of cosmopolitan British playwright and composer Noel Coward in the unlikely setting of the Nevada desert. Dean shot 52 covers for Life, either as a freelance photographer or during his two stretches as a staffer with the magazine, 1947-61 and 1966-69. After leaving the magazine, Dean found steady freelance work in magazines and as a still photographer on film sets, including several of the early James Bond movies starring Sean Connery. Born in Monticello, Fla., Dean was the son of a grocer and a schoolteacher. When the Dean family's business failed during the Depression, they moved to Sarasota, Fla., where Dean's father worked as a curator and guide at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art. Dean studied engineering at the University of Florida but became fascinated with photography after watching a friend develop film in a darkroom. He went off to what is now the Rochester Institute of Technology, which was known for its photography school. After earning his degree, Dean went to work for the Ringling circus as a junior press agent and, according to his son, cultivated a side job photographing Ringling's vast array of performers and workers. He worked briefly as one of Parade magazine's first photographers but left after receiving an Army Air Forces commission during World War II. During the war, he worked in aerial reconnaissance in the Pacific and was along on a number of air raids over Japan. His first assignment for Life in 1946 took him back to the circus: His photograph of clown Lou Jacobs with a giraffe looking over his shoulder made the magazine's cover and earned Dean a staff job. In the era before television, Life magazine photographers had some of the most glamorous work in journalism. Life assigned him to cover Hollywood. In 1954, the magazine published one of his most memorable photos, the shot of Coward dressed for a night on the town in New York but standing alone in the stark Nevada desert. Dean had the idea of asking Coward, who was then doing a summer engagement at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, to pose in the desert to illustrate his song "Mad Dogs and Englishmen Go Out in the Midday Sun." As Dean recalled in an interview with John Loengard for the book "Life Photographers: What They Saw," Coward wasn't about to partake of the midday sun. "Oh, dear boy, I don't get up until 4 o'clock in the afternoon," Dean recalled him saying. But Dean pressed on anyway. As he related to Loengard, he rented a Cadillac limousine and filled the back seat with a tub loaded with liquor, tonic and ice cubes — and Coward. The temperature that day reached 119 as Coward relaxed in his underwear during the drive to a spot about 15 miles from Las Vegas. According to Dean, Coward's dresser helped him into his tuxedo, resulting in the image of the elegant Coward with a cigarette holder in his mouth against his shadow on the dry lake bed. "Splendid! Splendid! What an idea! If we only had a piano," Coward said of the shoot before hopping back in the car and stripping down to his underwear for the ride back to Las Vegas. In 1956, Life assigned Dean to Paris. While sailing to Europe on the Ile de France, he was awakened with the news that the Andrea Doria had collided with another liner, the Stockholm. The accident occurred close enough to Dean's liner that survivors were being brought aboard. His photographs of the shaken voyagers and the sinking Andrea Doria were some of the first on the accident published in a U.S. magazine. During his years in Europe, Dean photographed communist riots and fashion shows in Paris, royal weddings throughout Europe and noted authors including James Jones and William S. Burroughs. He spent three weeks with Hemingway in Spain in 1960 for an assignment on bullfighting. In 1989, Dean published "Hemingway's Spain," about his experiences with the great writer. In 1965, Dean won first prize in a Vatican photography contest for a picture of Pope Paul VI. The prize included an audience with the pope and $750. According to his son, it was Dean's favorite honor. In addition to his son, he is survived by a daughter, Deborah, and two grandsons. Instead of flowers, donations may be made to the American Child Photographer's Charity Guild (www.acpcg.com) or the Make-A-Wish Foundation. |
Related material:
The Big Time
(Log 24, July 29, 2003):
|
A Story That Works
|
Comments Off on Wednesday December 14, 2005
Thursday, November 17, 2005
Thursday November 17, 2005
All the King’s Men
(See also Time and
All the King’s Horses.)
LEAR:
Now you better do some thinkin’
then you’ll find
You got the only daddy
that’ll walk the line.
FOOL:
I’ve always been different
with one foot over the line….
I’ve always been crazy
but it’s kept me from going insane.
For related material, see
and last night’s winner of
the National Book Award
for nonfiction, i.e.,
“all hard facts, all reality, with
no illusions and no fantasy.”
|
A Story That Works
|
Comments Off on Thursday November 17, 2005
Friday, May 27, 2005
Friday May 27, 2005
Drama of the Diagonal,
Part Deux
Part Deux
Wednesday’s entry The Turning discussed a work by Roger Cooke. Cooke presents a
“fanciful story (based on Plato’s dialogue Meno).”
The History of Mathematics is the title of the Cooke book.
Associated Press thought for today:
“History is not, of course, a cookbook offering pretested recipes. It teaches by analogy, not by maxims. It can illuminate the consequences of actions in comparable situations, yet each generation must discover for itself what situations are in fact comparable.”
— Henry Kissinger (whose birthday is today)
For Henry Kissinger on his birthday:
a link to Geometry for Jews.
a link to Geometry for Jews.
This link suggests a search for material
on the art of Sol LeWitt, which leads to
an article by Barry Cipra,
The “Sol LeWitt” Puzzle:
A Problem in 16 Squares (ps),
a discussion of a 4×4 array
of square linear designs.
Cipra says that
“If you like, there are three symmetry groups lurking within the LeWitt puzzle: the rotation/reflection group of order 8, a toroidal group of order 16, and an ‘existential’* group of order 16. The first group is the most obvious. The third, once you see it, is also obvious.”
* Jean-Paul Sartre,
Being and Nothingness,
Philosophical Library, 1956
[reference by Cipra]
For another famous group lurking near, if not within, a 4×4 array, click on Kissinger’s birthday link above.
Kissinger’s remark (above) on analogy suggests the following analogy to the previous entry’s (Drama of the Diagonal) figure:
Logos Alogos II:
Horizon
This figure in turn, together with Cipra’s reference to Sartre, suggests the following excerpts (via Amazon.com)–
From Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, translated by Hazel E. Barnes, 1993 Washington Square Press reprint edition:
| 1. | on Page 51: |
| “He makes himself known to himself from the other side of the world and he looks from the horizon toward himself to recover his inner being. Man is ‘a being of distances.'” | |
| 2. | on Page 154: |
| “… impossible, for the for-itself attained by the realization of the Possible will make itself be as for-itself–that is, with another horizon of possibilities. Hence the constant disappointment which accompanies repletion, the famous: ‘Is it only this?’….” | |
| 3. | on Page 155: |
| “… end of the desires. But the possible repletion appears as a non-positional correlate of the non-thetic self-consciousness on the horizon of the glass-in-the-midst-of-the-world.” | |
| 4. | on Page 158: |
| “… it is in time that my possibilities appear on the horizon of the world which they make mine. If, then, human reality is itself apprehended as temporal….” | |
| 5. | on Page 180: |
| “… else time is an illusion and chronology disguises a strictly logical order of deducibility. If the future is pre-outlined on the horizon of the world, this can be only by a being which is its own future; that is, which is to come….” | |
| 6. | on Page 186: |
| “… It appears on the horizon to announce to me what I am from the standpoint of what I shall be.” | |
| 7. | on Page 332: |
| “… the boat or the yacht to be overtaken, and the entire world (spectators, performance, etc.) which is profiled on the horizon. It is on the common ground of this co-existence that the abrupt revelation of my ‘being-unto-death’….” | |
| 8. | on Page 359: |
| “… eyes as objects which manifest the look. The Other can not even be the object aimed at emptily at the horizon of my being for the Other.” | |
| 9. | on Page 392: |
| “… defending and against which he was leaning as against a wail, suddenly opens fan-wise and becomes the foreground, the welcoming horizon toward which he is fleeing for refuge.” | |
| 10. | on Page 502: |
| “… desires her in so far as this sleep appears on the ground of consciousness. Consciousness therefore remains always at the horizon of the desired body; it makes the meaning and the unity of the body.” |
| 11. | on Page 506: |
| “… itself body in order to appropriate the Other’s body apprehended as an organic totality in situation with consciousness on the horizon— what then is the meaning of desire?” | |
| 12. | on Page 661: |
| “I was already outlining an interpretation of his reply; I transported myself already to the four corners of the horizon, ready to return from there to Pierre in order to understand him.” | |
| 13. | on Page 754: |
| “Thus to the extent that I appear to myself as creating objects by the sole relation of appropriation, these objects are myself. The pen and the pipe, the clothing, the desk, the house– are myself. The totality of my possessions reflects the totality of my being. I am what I have. It is I myself which I touch in this cup, in this trinket. This mountain which I climb is myself to the extent that I conquer it; and when I am at its summit, which I have ‘achieved’ at the cost of this same effort, when I attain this magnificent view of the valley and the surrounding peaks, then I am the view; the panorama is myself dilated to the horizon, for it exists only through me, only for me.” |
|
Illustration of the
last horizon remark: |
For more on the horizon, being, and nothingness, see
Comments Off on Friday May 27, 2005
Sunday, January 9, 2005
Sunday January 9, 2005
Light at Bologna
“Others say it is a stone that posseses mysterious powers…. often depicted as a dazzling light. It’s a symbol representing power, a source of immense energy. It nourishes, heals, wounds, blinds, strikes down…. Some have thought of it as the philosopher’s stone of the alchemists….”
— Foucault’s Pendulum
by Umberto Eco,
Professor of Semiotics at
Europe’s oldest university,
the University of Bologna.
The Club Dumasby Arturo Perez-Reverte
|
Eclogues: Eight Stories
by Guy Davenport
Johns Hopkins paperback, 1993, page 127 —
Lo Splendore della Luce a Bologna, VI:
“In 1603, at Monte Paderno, outside Bologna, an alchemist (by day a cobbler) named Vicenzo Cascariolo discovered the Philosopher’s Stone, catalyst in the transformation of base metals into gold, focus of the imagination, talisman for abstruse thought. Silver in some lights, white in others, it glowed blue in darkness, awesome to behold.”
The Discovery of Luminescence:
The Bolognian Stone
Bologna, 16th Century
“For the University of Bologna hosting an International Conference on Bioluminescence and Chemiluminescence has a very special significance. Indeed, it is in our fair City that modern scientific research on these phenomena has its earliest roots….
‘After submitting the stone
to much preparation, it was not
the Pluto of Aristophanes
that resulted; instead, it was
the Luciferous Stone’ ”
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From one of the best books
of the 20th century: The Hawkline Monsterby Richard Brautigan
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Thursday, July 31, 2003
Thursday July 31, 2003
Killer Radio
"See the girl with the diamond ring?
She knows how to shake that thing."
— Jerry Lee "Killer" Lewis on
KHYI 95.3 FM, Plano, Texas,
at about 5:12 PM EDT 7/31/03,
introduced by DJ Allen Peck Sr.
"And on this point I pass the same judgment as those who say that geometricians give them nothing new by these rules, because they possessed them in reality, but confounded with a multitude of others, either useless or false, from which they could not discriminate them, as those who, seeking a diamond of great price amidst a number of false ones, but from which they know not how to distinguish it, should boast, in holding them all together, of possessing the true one equally with him who without pausing at this mass of rubbish lays his hand upon the costly stone which they are seeking and for which they do not throw away the rest."
— Blaise Pascal, De l'Esprit Géométrique
"When the light came she was sitting on the bed beside an open suitcase, toying with her diamond rings. She saw the light first in the depths of the largest stone."
— Paul Preuss, Broken Symmetries,
scene at Diamond Head, Oahu, Hawaii
Now playing (6:41 PM EDT) on Killer Radio:
"Jack of Diamonds, that's
a hard card to find."
"This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond…."
— Gerard Manley Hopkins, Society of Jesus
Perhaps Sam Phillips was twanged by a Hawaiian guitar. (See previous two entries.)
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The Big Time
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See also "Top Ten Most Overheard Comments by new KHYI listeners" at Miss Lana's Anything Page, entry for
Comments Off on Thursday July 31, 2003
Tuesday, July 29, 2003
Tuesday July 29, 2003
The Big Time
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“The place outside the cosmos where I and my pals do our nursing job I simply call the Place. A lot of my nursing consists of amusing and humanizing Soldiers fresh back from raids into time. In fact, my formal title is Entertainer….” — The Big Time, |
A Story That Works
- “There is the dark, eternally silent, unknown universe;
- there are the friend-enemy minds shouting and whispering their tales and always seeking the three miracles —
- that minds should really touch, or
- that the silent universe should speak, tell minds a story, or (perhaps the same thing)
- that there should be a story that works, that is all hard facts, all reality, with no illusions and no fantasy;
- and lastly, there is lonely, story-telling, wonder-questing, mortal me.”
— Fritz Leiber in “The Button Molder“
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Tuesday, April 8, 2003
Tuesday April 8, 2003
Death's Dream Kingdom
April 7, 2003, Baghdad – A US tank blew a huge statue of President Saddam Hussein off its pedestal in central Baghdad on Monday with a single shell, a US officer said…. "One shot, one kill."
"When smashing monuments, save the pedestals; they always come in handy."
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"In death's dream kingdom….
Between the idea — T. S. Eliot, Harvard 1910, The Hollow Men
"A light check in the shadow — Edward H. Adelson, Yale 1974, Illusions and Demos
"point A / In a perspective that begins again / At B" — Wallace Stevens, Harvard 1901, "The Rock" See also |
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Monday, December 9, 2002
Monday December 9, 2002
ART WARS:
A Metaphysical State
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Diane Keaton |
Frank Sinatra |
“Heaven is a state, a sort of metaphysical state.”
— John O’Hara, Hope of Heaven, 1938
“I’ve always been enthralled by the notion that Time is an illusion, a trick our minds play in an attempt to keep things separate, without any reality of its own. My experience suggests that this is literally true, but not the kind of truth that can be acted upon….
I’m always sad and always happy. As someone says in Diane Keaton’s film ‘Heaven,’ ‘It’s kind of a lost cause, but it’s a great experience.'”
— Charles Small, Harvard ’64 25th Anniv. Report, 1989
“As a child she would wait out her naptime like a prison sentence. She would lie in bed and stare at the wallpaper pattern and wonder what would happen if there were no heaven. She thought the universe would probably go on and on, spilling all over everything. Heaven was kind of a hat on the universe, a lid that kept everything underneath it where it belonged.”
— Carrie Fisher, Postcards from the Edge, 1987
Today’s site music illustrates
the above philosophical remarks.
Friday, November 22, 2002
Friday November 22, 2002
In memory of Arthur T. Winfree:
Time, Eternity, and Grace
Professor Arthur T. Winfree died on November 5, 2002.
He was the author of “The Geometry of Biological Time.”
- Charles Small (see the earlier entry “Hope of Heaven,” November 21):
“I’ve always been enthralled by the notion that Time is an illusion, a trick our minds play in an attempt to keep things separate, without any reality of its own. My experience suggests that this is literally true….”
- Kylie Minogue in my November 5 entry:
“Time disappears with Tequila.
It goes elastic, then vanishes.”
- Octavio Paz on his childhood in Mexico
(Nobel Prize lecture):
“All time, past or future, real or imaginary, was pure presence.”
- A colleague on Professor Winfree:
“He just wanted to get to the truth.”
- Octavio Paz, condensed and translated
“Gracias.”
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Thursday, November 21, 2002
Thursday November 21, 2002
Hope of Heaven
This title is taken from a John O’Hara novel I like very much. It seems appropriate because today is the birthday of three admirable public figures:
- Eleanor Powell, dancer,
- Coleman Hawkins, saxophonist, and
- Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (Q), teacher.
“No one can top Eleanor Powell – not even Fred Astaire.” — A fellow professional. Reportedly, “Astaire himself said she was better than him.”
That’s as good as it gets.
Let us hope that Powell, Hawkins, and Q are enjoying a place that Q, quoting Plato’s Phaedrus, described as follows:
“a fair resting-place, full of summer sounds and scents!”
This is a rather different, and more pleasant, approach to the Phaedrus than the one most familiar to later generations — that of Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance. Both approaches, however, display what Pirsig calls “Quality.”
One of my own generation’s closest approaches to Quality is found in the 25th Anniversary Report of the Harvard Class of 1964. Charles Small remarks,
“A lot of other stuff has gone down the drain since 1964, of course, besides my giving up being a mathematician and settling into my first retirement. My love-hate relationship with the language has intensified, and my despair with words as instruments of communion is often near total. I read a little, but not systematically. I’ve always been enthralled by the notion that Time is an illusion, a trick our minds play in an attempt to keep things separate, without any reality of its own. My experience suggests that this is literally true, but not the kind of truth that can be acted upon….
I’m always sad and always happy. As someone says in Diane Keaton’s film ‘Heaven,’ ‘It’s kind of a lost cause, but it’s a great experience.'”
I agree. Here are two links to some work of what is apparently this same Charles Small:
- Arithmetic of Finite Fields and
- Manontroppo Music — Arrangements, especially for string quartet